November 2, 2016 Books The Meaning of the Bones By Michael LaPointe Does Shakespeare really have “universal appeal”? From the U.K. cover of Shakespeare in Swahililand. “People frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man’s past,” the paleontologist Louis Leakey said in 1964. “The past shows clearly that we all of us have a common origin and that our differences in race and color and creed are only superficial.” Leakey sought to prove that humankind’s earliest ancestors evolved in East Africa’s Rift Valley, and in doing so, to invert the common Western idea that “Africa is always producing something new.” Rather than an endless fount of novelty, Leakey’s Africa held a promise of the immutable. He believed that excavating African earth could speak to the universal essence of humankind. Over the past few years, the literary critic Edward Wilson-Lee went searching in East Africa for his own evidence of a shared humanity. Wilson-Lee, a Kenyan-born son of British descent, sought “the Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies”—the key to the Bard’s “universal appeal.” His new book Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of a Global Poet asks whether Shakespeare’s plays, like Leakey’s specimens, can point toward an essential human quality. Read More
November 2, 2016 On the Shelf There’s Our Bernhard, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, 1970. Anne Carson prizes brevity, which means, in the abstract, that she should be perfectly suited to these distracted times of ours. And maybe she is, even if she seems permanently ill at ease. In a new interview to support her collection Float, her answers sometimes suggest—and I mean this as a compliment—that she could find lucrative work as a copywriter for Hot Topic T-shirts: “I feel perfectly at home underwater.” “I do not believe in art as therapy.” “Volcanoes are dead easy to paint.” “I never liked Mona Lisa.” But then, every writer, even the real assholes, must call a truce with the great ugly publicity machine. How else to explain why Thomas Bernhard, king of the assholes, consented to make a documentary about himself back in 1970? His books, as Andrew Katzenstein writes, are teeming with curmudgeons who heap vitriol on “hacks—artists who seem more interested in fame and accolades than in the creation of meaningful work.” But he worked productively (kind of) with the Austrian director Ferry Radax: “After Bernhard began to have doubts about the project and threatened to withdraw his participation, he and Radax eventually compromised on strict terms: over the course of three days, Radax would film Bernhard sitting on a park bench as he discussed how he became a writer and his views on writing … Bernhard offers grim assessments of the writing life, suggesting the fanaticism with which he approached his work. A book is ‘nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor’ that has already metastasized and infected the body before it is removed. Writing only intensifies the isolation that all humans suffer, and authors he admires are ‘opponents, or enemies’ who need to be subdued, not inspirations to be emulated.” Read More
November 1, 2016 Arts & Culture The Oblivion of Adam By Abdelfattah Kilito What if you could remember every poem in the next life? From the cover of The Tongue of Adam, available now from New Directions The dead play a sly trick on the living: in dying, they pass on the duty of interpreting what they thought, of arguing over what they said—or might have said, or even what they never said. This is how we get the fantasy, as stubborn as it is unrealizable, of interrogating the dead directly and without an interpreter. To meet them, just once, and to ask them to clarify what they’d said—or even, in certain cases, to ask if they said it at all. If only they would speak, all outstanding claims would be resolved, the contradictions smoothed over, the ambiguities explained. Confronted with the light of truth, all men would agree and no argument would be possible. This fantasy has produced an entire genre of literature: the dialogue with the dead. One example of the genre in Arabic is The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-ghufran) by the eleventh century poet al-Ma‘arri, which narrates a journey to the life. Following the Day of Judgment, the hero Ibn al-Qarih is admitted into paradise, where he meets the poets he most esteems, or those whose verses have especially provoked his philological curiosity. During a sojourn in hell, he’s also permitted to interview the poètes maudits. And finally, returning to paradise, he meets Adam. The Epistle of Forgiveness is a work of tremendous richness. My aim here is merely to examine what it says, directly or otherwise, about poetry and the forgetting of language. Read More
November 1, 2016 First Person Killing Dirk’s By Bryan Washington Photo: Houston Streetwise Since I moved to Louisiana, every few months I’ve met someone who’s spent time in Montrose. It’s this trendy suburb in Houston, the kind the South’s accused of lacking, and the folks who bring it up are usually bemoaning the neighborhood’s changes. They’re always white. Always a stone’s throw away from rich. Rocking flannel and Converse, or a leather jacket and boots, or a floral-print skirt just this side of tattered. One guy, a tattooed teacher, told me he missed the block’s grit: Montrose used to be this place where you never knew who’d beat the shit out of you. Now the notion’s less plausible, which really is a shame, or at least that’s what this guy said. That’s usually how those conversations go. But every now and again somebody brings up Dirk’s. It was this coffee shop on the corner, one that’s been closed for a minute. But it felt like the neighborhood’s nexus, the thesis of the place, and its phantom still hangs between West Main Street and Branard. Read More
November 1, 2016 Bulletin Early Voters’ Special By The Paris Review Get your election-free content here. More than twenty-two million people have already voted. Maybe you’re one of them: you’re cooling your heels, killing time till November 8, refreshing Twitter, and generally freaking out. If your “information diet” has got you down, our Fall issue is here for you. It’s full of the best new fiction, poetry, interviews, and art—and it contains precisely zero instances of the word election. That’s our guarantee. Subscribe now and enjoy a respite from the twenty-four-hour news cycle.