August 30, 2016 On the Shelf Raising Poets from the Dead, and Other News By Jonathon Sturgeon Ouija board. Photo: Dave Winer. Given our newfangled penchant for the darker arts, it’s probably time for a James Merrill revival. I do not mean this literally: we should not raise James Merrill from the dead. Still, we might commune with him. To aid our spiritual discourse, Dwight Garner points out, we should turn to the Ouija board, the supposedly harmless instrument Merrill used to write The Changing Light at Sandover. As it happens, Merrill’s own biographer, Langdon Hammer, recently dusted off his Ouija, although he was too ravaged by paradox to contact the poet: “We didn’t try [to commune with Merrill]. I guess it seemed beside the point. Who had invited us to the table and sat us down at the board if not James Merrill? We were already in contact … Looking back now, I think the board had a point to make. Using it puts you in touch with the soul. But it’s not the soul as we normally think of it—something singular and deep inside you. According to the Ouija board, it takes two people to create the soul, and it exists out there, between and beyond them.” Read More
August 29, 2016 Bulletin #ReadEverywhere, Even When You Can’t Breathe By The Paris Review It’s your last chance, folks: you have two more days to get a joint subscription to The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. (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.) We’re also closing the third edition of our popular #ReadEverywhere contest. The rules: post a photo or video of yourself (or your friends, children, or pets) reading The Paris Review or the London Review of Books on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest and use the #ReadEverywhere hashtag and one of our magazines’ handles. Clearly, it’s possible to read in absolutely any environment, even one in which you’re deprived of oxygen. The winner of the contest will receive a wide selection of Aēsop products. For inspiration, take a look at last year’s winners or see what this year’s competition has cooked up. Now get yourself a joint subscription, head outdoors, and hashtag your way to victory. Time is almost up.
August 29, 2016 Our Correspondents Father Daniel Berrigan: Poet, Priest, Prophet By Nathan Gelgud Read More
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