November 22, 2016 First Person His Frown By Adam Valen Levinson The Yale Institute of Charts. The other day, an Uber driver asked me to come join his church. I told him I was relatively busy being a nonpracticing Jew but that I’d think about it. He said, You don’t need to do anything. You just need faith. And my first thought was, Well, that sounds pretty swell. And then I thought, Hold on, WTF? Read More
November 22, 2016 Books Mariette in Ecstasy By Nick Ripatrazone Revisiting Ron Hansen’s outré, erotic Catholic novel, twenty-five years later. From the cover of Mariette in Ecstasy. In 1906, Mariette Baptiste, a seventeen-year-old postulant, is the talk of the Sisters of the Crucifixion convent. Although their days are scheduled down to the minute—silence, recitation, meditation, prayer, work, meals—the sisters can’t help but talk about the new, rich teenager in their midst. Why did she join them? What’s her secret? Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen’s prose-poetic novel, was published twenty-five years ago, and its strangeness hasn’t withered. The rare book lauded by both The Village Voice and diocesan newspapers, Hansen’s novel is written in gorgeous sentences that combine meticulous material specificity with ambiguous emotion. (Mariette’s room in the convent is described as a “cell” where a “holy water stoup is next to the doorjamb, and just a few feet above Mariette’s pillow is a hideous Spanish cross and a painted Christ that is all red meat and agony.”) A quarter-century after its publication, no other novel has quite captured its marriage of the sacred and the sexual, the pious and the secular. Read More
November 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Oh! You Tony By Elena Passarello The Daily’s newest correspondent is Elena Passarello, who will be writing about famous animals from history. This week’s beast is the silent-film star Tony the Wonder Horse. Design by Kristen Radtke. Tom Mix and Tony at their best! Rip snortin’ action!—break neck horsemanship! A thrill for everybody! —Destry Rides Again promo poster, 1932. When they were about to do a difficult scene, Tom would pat Tony on his nose and say, “Now, look, Tony, here’s the way we’re going to do this.” And then that was the way they did it. —Olive Mix, 1957. Tom once told a newspaperman that I liked to show off. Well, I’ll tell you something. He likes to show off too. Do you think he would do all those difficult and dangerous tricks if he thought nobody would see them? —“Tony’s Story Told By Tony Himself,” 1923. Read More
November 22, 2016 On the Shelf We Don’t Really Know Anything About Anything, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Girl with a Book, ca. 1875. William Trevor, an Irish writer who saw the short-story form as a chance to perfect “the art of the glimpse,” has died at eighty-eight. “His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate. In ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ one of his most famous stories, a young woman caring for her crippled father looks for love in a dance hall but settles, week after week, for a few drunken kisses from a local bachelor. The hero of ‘The Day We Got Drunk on Cake’ repeatedly phones a young woman he admires in between drinking sessions at a series of pubs. The relationship deepens and, during a final call in the wee hours, takes a sudden, unexpected turn.” Let’s put some things in perspective about human knowledge. Sure, there are plenty of things we know as facts (New York thin crust is superior to Chicago deep dish) and others we can be basically sure of (Donald Trump prowls the outer boroughs at night in a latex superhero costume, torturing stray cats and hyperventilating into a paper bag), but many even more basic matters remain mysterious to us. Consciousness, for instance. We don’t know shit about consciousness. In a new series, Tim Parks asks the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti to take him into the riddle: “Why doesn’t our behavior simply happen, taking its course the way the planets follow their orbits? We don’t know. Just as cosmologists don’t know what dark matter is. All we know is that there is something that doesn’t add up and very likely points to some profound error in our assumptions about reality … The truth is that we just don’t know a priori the nature of physical reality. This is a point Bertrand Russell made very strongly back in the 1920s. The more we investigate the physical, the more varied and complex it appears.” Read More
November 21, 2016 Contests Win Free Tickets to 92Y’s Celebration of Albert Murray By The Paris Review On Monday, November 28, 92Y will host Renata Adler, Paul Devlin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Wynton Marsalis, and Ayana Mathis for a celebration of Albert Murray, the critic, novelist, essayist, and biographer, who died in 2013. The Library of America has just published Murray’s Collected Essays and Memoirs. “His writing about racism can prickle your skin,” Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times. “To paraphrase Murray’s praise of Ellison’s Invisible Man, reading this book is like watching someone take a twelve-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra.” You can enter here to win two free tickets to Monday’s event from The Paris Review and 92Y. We’ll notify the winners this Friday, November 25. Thanks and good luck!
November 21, 2016 Look No Work Today By Dan Piepenbring “No Work Today,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the Dutch artist Parra, is on display at Joshua Liner Gallery through December 17. Parra is, to my knowledge, the only professional artist who has also been a professional skateboarder. Parra, No Work Today, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 55″ x 39″. Read More