August 29, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles What’s the Takeaway? By Dylan Hicks Every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks. The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.) Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, September 1, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! This month’s puzzle is composed of twenty three-part questions whose one-word answers get shorter by subtraction. A riddle by Roget provides a model for our answers, though not our questions: What is that which is under you?Take one letter from it and it is over you?Take two letters from it and it is round you? The answers are chair, hair, and air. Our answers rarely rhyme, but the form is pretty much in line with Roget’s. Letters are taken away—from any part of the word, not just the beginning—but never jumbled; left-to-right order is diminished but maintained. Croton could become croon but not Orton. As those examples illustrate, we’ve imposed no Scrabbly prohibitions on proper nouns. Abbreviations are welcome, too. Note also that letters, as they travel from word to word, might take on diacritical marks, be capitalized, or otherwise undergo modest transformation. Très, for example, might follow trees. In most cases, the answer words shrink by ones (bread leads to bead before heading to bed) but in some cases they decrease by twos (bonobo to Bono to no) threes, or fours. Tailgate wags discovered this classic of quadrimedial reduction (above). Read More
August 29, 2016 On the Shelf We Have Never Been Modern, and Other News By Jonathon Sturgeon Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768, oil on canvas. Whither the singularity? In a review of Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment, Adam Kirsch asks whether—in our era of perpetual “disruptions”—we’ve outgrown the questions posed by the radical philosophies of yesteryear. In short: we are not as modern as we think! Or, at least, we’re about as modern as we’ve been for a few hundred years: “But the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were one of those rare periods when a lot of people cared, because their sense of the world was decomposing so dramatically … If everything you thought you knew was wrong, how could you ever be confident that your knowledge was correct? Where does knowledge come from? What is matter made of? Is there a God, and, if so, what kind of being is he?” Read More
August 26, 2016 Correspondence The Poker Game We Play By Christopher Isherwood Bachardy, left, and Isherwood, soon after they met. Christopher Isherwood, born on this day in 1904, met a teenager on the beach in Santa Monica in the early 1950s. It was Don Bachardy, with whom Isherwood began one of the first openly gay relationships in Hollywood. In their love letters, the pair adopted pet names and, with them, exaggerated identities: Isherwood became “Dobbin” and Bachardy “Kitty.” Their correspondence is published in The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell. The excerpt below is from a March 1963 letter from Isherwood. Read More
August 26, 2016 Look Just Skating and Gettin’ High By Dan Piepenbring This month, Swiss Institute becomes Swiss In Situ, moving temporarily to a massive space at 102 Franklin Street in Tribeca. Their first exhibition, up through September 2, features a collection of artist-made zines from the independent Swiss publishing houses Nieves and Innen. Some of our favorites are below. Lawrence Weiner, Posters November 1965–April 1986, 2011. Read More
August 26, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Jaguars, Jim Beam, Japanese Divorce By The Paris Review From the cover of Gringos. Fifty-three years ago, James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time, on the experience of being black in America. The title comes from a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time.” This month, Jesmyn Ward published a compilation of essays called The Fire This Time. She wanted a book, as she writes in a brilliant introduction, “that would reckon with the fire of rage and despair and fierce, protective love currently sweeping through the streets and campuses of America … A book that a girl in rural Missouri could pick up at her local library and, while reading, encounter a voice that hushed her fears.” Ward has packed a multitude into a modest volume and fulfills, I think, her desire to provide a full and rich accounting of black life, one that is infrequently given voice. The lead piece is a sharply evocative prose poem by Kima Jones about a trip home to North Carolina for a funeral and time in the woods with her cousins, “with red cups, Black and Milds, Jim Beam, a blue lighter plucked from the card table.” Another favorite is Garnette Cadogan’s essay on walking, as a boy in Kingston and as a young man in the United States. The dissonance between the two is startling but not surprising: in the former, “I’d get lost in Mittyesque moments, my young mind imagining alternate futures,” and in the other, walking is “a pantomine undertaken to avoid the choreography of criminality.” —Nicole Rudick I often go back to Gringos, the 1991 novel by Charles Portis, when I find myself between books. Portis is a fount of comedy; his books brim with deliciously absurd characters. Gringos features a clique of eccentric expats idling in the Yucatán: there’s Rudy and Louise Kurle, a blond duo, in Mexico recording evidence of aliens; Doc Flandin, an aged historian and anthropologist whose life work comprises a comprehensive account of Mayan culture; Refugio Osorio, a native of Mérida who deals scraps from his land in the jungle (I’m fond of his pup, “Ramos, son of the late Chino, bravest dog in all Mexico”). Their comedy comes from the wry observations of Gringos’s hero and narrator Jimmy Burns, a fortysomething deliveryman and former hustler of pre-Columbian artifacts. Jimmy lives at the marvelously shabby Posada Fausto hotel in Mérida, taking hauling jobs to pay his rent. His life there “rocks along from day to day”—he drinks in bars and heads to the zoo “to look over the fine new jaguar”—until he finds himself caught up in violent hippie rituals at ancient ruins and adventure in the Yucatán. —Caitlin Love Read More
August 26, 2016 On the Shelf The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Drink up your propaganda, kids! Today in farts: there’s a new movie called Swiss Army Man, and it’s full of ‘em. Don’t write it off as stupid. Don’t pretend you’re not seduced by the fusillade of flatulence. There is life in those farts, Annie Julia Wyman writes: “The idea for Swiss Army Man began with a fart joke: a man trapped on a desert island feeds a corpse beans so that he can ride it back to civilization. But a fart joke—like every increment of comedy, however large or small—is a simple encapsulation of Swiss Army Man’s optimism and of the beneficence, the real miracle, which is art … Movies of this kind are highly wrought, spiritually advanced, super-durable versions of the space inhabited by children and old people, by beginners and artists and students, by those of us who are still learning and always will be: that is, by everyone, if they can let the farts in.” Read More