October 11, 2016 At Work The Uncanny I: An Interview with Kristin Dombek By Robert Polito Photo: Amy Touchett. Readers of The Paris Review will remember Kristin Dombek’s essay “Letter from Williamsburg,” one of our perennial favorites. In August, Dombek published her first book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, a diagnosis of our attention-starved culture and its fixation on self-absorption. The book covers everything from Bram Stoker to My Super Sweet 16; the New York Times calls it “sharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny cultural criticism.” Dombek spoke to Robert Polito, the poet, biographer, and critic, about “the mysteries of ethos, when and why we trust and distrust who we do, in life and in writing.” —The Editors INTERVIEWER When I talk to fellow nonfiction writers, I’m always interested in how they locate themselves along the prose or argument continuum. When you sit down to write an essay, are you primarily thinking prose—sentences, words, tone—or are you thinking argument, what you might wish to say about a subject? And are you the sort of nonfiction writer who plans, or even outlines, or is the writing more improvisatory and about discovery for you ? DOMBEK Usually an essay begins with an argument, for me. Not a linear argument, in the sense of a line of reasoning, but an argument as in two people or groups shouting at each other, but in my head. The dumber the disagreement, the more I want to kind of explode it and discover what it covers up, find better language for what life is really like. In this case, the disagreement was narcissism is the opposite of human—i.e., a total lack of warmth, empathy, “human” feeling—versus narcissism is everybody. Usually, what’s next is scene, where the language of the essay gets discovered, and the idea. Often an editor helps to lay bare the structure that will let the idea happen, rather than being told to the reader. But in this book, at least in its final version, I wasn’t working in scenes but rather channeling kinds of Internet and academic language that aren’t really my own, and kind of sculpting that language like material. So there is so much telling, summary, which is painful for me to read. There wasn’t a reasonable progression of ideas, but on one axis, a progression of kinds of language, and then on the other, a slow panning out from the trapped, limited perspective of fearful, solitary, listicle-fueled diagnosis to a broader view, and poetry. Read More
October 11, 2016 On History Night Doctors By Colin Dickey Nineteenth-century medical schools plundered the graves of African Americans. “I remember a colored lady was going to work early in the morning, about half past five o’clock. She was standing at Twelfth and Market Streets when an automobile came up. A man in the automobile spoke to her, ‘Mary, which way are you going? I’ll take you where you want to go in a hurry. The trolleys are all blocked.’ But the lady wouldn’t get in the automobile.” The story, collected in Tristram Potter Coffin and Henning Cohen’s 1966 Folklore in America, begins with a fair degree of menace but is otherwise unremarkable: a single woman harassed by a stranger in a car, the kind of danger women everywhere in America face. Only at the end does it become strange. “The man kept on insisting,” the unnamed respondent continues, “and the woman became frightened. Just then a colored man across the way saw her and started towards her. At that the man in the automobile left. He was a night doctor and was going to take the lady to the hospital.” Shadowy, elusive, terrifying—for well over a century after the Civil War the night doctors moved through the cities and through American folklore, looking for their victims. Read More
October 11, 2016 On the Shelf Bringing Back Brutalism, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: (c) Roberto Conte, www.robertoconte.net It’s back! The architectural movement you’ve been craving—with the ethics you can’t live without! It’s social democracy in building form! It’s an expression of the human desire to achieve! It’s Brutalism! Nikil Saval writes, “Despite two generations of abuse (and perhaps a little because of it), an enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings beyond the febrile, narrow precincts of architecture criticism has begun to take hold. Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness. For an aesthetic once praised for its ‘ruthless logic’ and ‘bloody-mindedness’—in the much-quoted phrasing of critic Reyner Banham—it is a surprising turn of events … In countries still reeling from the worldwide financial crisis, it’s a solace to look back to an era of muscular, public-minded development.” Henry Green’s novels are being reissued, and you should read them as soon as you can. Don’t even finish reading this post. Just get up and go buy them and read them. I’ll be here. If you’re not inclined to do what I tell you just because I told you to do it, Leo Robson can convince you more elegantly: “Green believed that well-groomed, well-behaved English was an obstacle to expression. But his style wasn’t a merely negative exercise, a winnowing or clearing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-bodied alternative. The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.” Read More
October 10, 2016 Look In the Pines By Dan Piepenbring “In the Pines,” an exhibition of paintings, ceramics, and works on paper by Rebecca Morgan, is at Asya Geisberg Gallery through October 29. Morgan grew up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania; her work plays with stereotypes and caricatures of hillbillies and country people. The woods suggest a coarse and hedonistic culture: it is the scene of bonfires, hunting, sex, drunken revelry, camaraderie, fights, and perversion. Morgan said in an interview with TOH Magazine. “I navigate my reverence and aversion to the place that has rejected yet charmed me. I operate in modes of frustration, cynicism, and reclamation.” Rebecca Morgan, Family Reunion, 2016, oil and graphite on panel, 24″ x 30″. Read More
October 10, 2016 First Person The Book of Life By Shelley Salamensky Aunt Rose, right, et al., 1942. In her book Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood recounts how she faked her own death, staging a car crash in the Philippines. My great-aunt Rose did something of that nature—if, admittedly, in the less dramatic mode of an aged Jewish lady with used tissues tucked into her sleeve and sagging, off-color support hose. Rose’s ride to a wedding in Newark from Paterson showed up as planned, and as confirmed by her the week before. Somebody’s nephew. Rang, rang the bell. —No answer. —Upturned an ashcan in the alley, climbed and, clutching at the window ledge, peered in. Aunt Rose was gone. Read More
October 10, 2016 Books Being a Bumpkin By Oliver Lee Bateman Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity. From the cover of Hillbilly Elegy. Scan the headlines and you’ll find that everyone’s talking about how the white trash have made their presence felt. The white trash support Trump; the white trash are losing ground; the white trash should be honored by the government for their hard work and sacrifices; the white trash are continuing to redirect their aggression at other racial minorities instead of the robber barons who exploit them. But who exactly are these people, these trashy whites who have found themselves, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, “without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power?” Read More