September 1, 2016 Arts & Culture Beauty Marks By Emma Garman On Pre-Raphaelite muse Jane Morris. A photograph of Jane Morris by John Robert Parsons, 1868. “Defining British Art,” part of this summer’s 250th anniversary sale at London auctioneer Christie’s, included two lots by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Ligeia Siren (1873), a nude of an unknown model, and Portrait of Jane Morris, bust-length (ca. 1870), a chalk drawing of the legendary Pre-Raphaelite muse—née Jane Burden and known as Janey to her friends—who, despite being married to trailblazing designer William Morris for thirty-seven years, was the love of Rossetti’s life. Only the second work sold (for the tidy sum of £602,500), from which we might infer that Janey’s strange beauty, more than a century after her death, entices at least as much as Rossetti’s signature. A few years ago, his chalk drawing of Janey as Proserpine, goddess of spring and empress of Hades, sold at Sotheby’s for nearly £3.3 million—double the presale estimate. Rossetti would be gratified indeed. Proserpine, which he reworked in at least eight versions, was his favorite creation, the fullest realization of an artistic drive fueled, above all, by his passion for Janey. A. S. Byatt, in pondering Rossetti’s painterly addiction to Janey in her new book, Peacock and Vine: Fortuny and Morris in Life and at Work, also sees this particular image as the culmination of Rossetti’s entwined artistic and erotic fixations. Byatt, however, is disquieted by it. “There is something appalling,” she writes, “in looking at a whole series of Rossetti’s images, more and more obsessive yet essentially all the same, brooding, dangerous, sexually greedy, too much. The best, and therefore the worst, is Proserpine.” Read More
September 1, 2016 On the Shelf The Final Jane Austen Rewrite, and Other News By Jonathon Sturgeon Still from Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. It may surprise you that literary history could frown upon Seth Grahame-Smith, the “mash-up novelist” famous for his Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Grahame-Smith is now being sued by Hachette, his publisher, for breach of contract. Alison Flood explains the case at the Guardian: “The complaint says the Grahame-Smith delivered the second manuscript in June 2016, but alleges that the work was ‘not original to Smith, but instead is in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work,’ that it ‘materially varies from the 80,000–100,000 word limit’ agreed on, and that it ‘is not comparable in style and quality to Smith’s wholly original best seller Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.’ ” Maybe this will put an end to Jane Austen rewrites not penned by Whit Stillman. Read More
August 31, 2016 From the Archive The Book of Sediments By Madeline DeFrees Madeline DeFrees’s poem “The Book of Sediments” appeared in our Fall 1983 issue. Her last collection, Spectral Waves, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2006; DeFrees passed away last year. Read More
August 31, 2016 Our Correspondents I Was Somebody Else By Lucy Sante Its authorship mistakenly attributed to its copy editor and issued in a single edition of five hundred by a suburban publisher of quickie romances, the posthumous memoirs of the celebrated French poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1933) must count among the more obscure byways of literary marginalia. Having faked his death in 1891 to escape mounting debts and increasingly credible threats of violence from rival traders in the Gulf of Aden, Rimbaud lay low for more than four decades. While his former friends and colleagues were elevating his poetic works and mysterious youth into a cult, he kept his distance. He stayed busy, variously occupied as a beachcomber on the Côte d’Azur, a croupier at Monte Carlo, a phony “fakir” in a traveling carnival, a roving photographer with donkey on the Belgian coast, a promoter of spurious miracle sites in the Borinage, and finally twenty years as “Beauraind,” an intermittently successful music-hall ventriloquist. Read More
August 31, 2016 Bulletin Last Chance for Our Summer Deal By The Paris Review The countdown is on: at midnight tonight, we’re closing the gate on our joint subscription deal with the London Review of Books. For the third consecutive summer, we’re offering a year’s subscription to both magazines for just $70 U.S. That’s the best in imaginative writing and the best in essays and commentary: two Reviews in one fell swoop. (Already a Paris Review subscriber? Not a problem: we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for another year, and your LRB subscription will begin immediately.) So sign up today—there’s no time to lose.
August 31, 2016 On Language Truly Trending: An Interview on Intensifiers By Peter Nowogrodzki William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer. Sali Tagliamonte is a linguist at the University of Toronto, where she studies language variation and change. Her latest book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents, was published in June. I called Tagliamonte because I’d noticed more and more people using the word truly. All of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere: in work e-mails and movie reviews, in headlines, on Twitter, on Twitter, and on Twitter. “It truly is up to us,” Hilary Clinton said this summer in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. A week prior, in Cleveland, Trump had remembered his “truly great mother.” Is truly trending? I couldn’t tell—Liane Moriarty’s book, Truly Madly Guilty, had just published. There had been that Savage Garden song in the nineties, and the Lionel Richie one in the eighties. I wanted to find out more, so I did what anyone with a linguistics question would do: I e-mailed Noam Chomsky. To my surprise, he wrote back within half an hour, suggesting I ask “an outstanding sociolinguist like William Labov.” So I did. Labov told me, “The person who has done the most work on intensifiers like truly is Prof. Sali Tagliamonte.” Read More