August 17, 2016 On the Shelf Oops, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This is what happens when you touch the art. Guess what, people? Your garden-variety, Norman Mailer–style, chest-thumping, self-aggrandizing narcissist is obsolete. This is the twenty-first century, and we have newer, more sophisticated, and more popular models for self-love. Kristin Dombek writes, “The narcissist is, according to the Internet, empty. Normal, healthy people are full of self, a kind of substance like a soul or personhood that, if you have it, emanates warmly from inside of you toward the outside of you. No one knows what it is, but everyone agrees that narcissists do not have it. Disturbingly, however, they are often better than anyone else at seeming to have it. Because what they have inside is empty space, they have had to make a study of the selves of others in order to invent something that looks and sounds like one. Narcissists are imitators par excellence. And they do not copy the small, boring parts of selves. They take what they think are the biggest, most impressive parts of other selves, and devise a hologram of self that seems superpowered. Let’s call it ‘selfiness,’ this simulacrum of a superpowered self.” Say you’re in this band—let’s call it, say Metallica—and you release four earth-shatteringly seminal thrash-metal albums in the late eighties. And then you start to suck. And you persist in sucking. For decades. This is not, by ordinary standards, a sound business strategy—but what if, as Drew Millard suggests, Metallica is playing a very long game, profiting from toying with its fans’ emotions? “I get the sense that Metallica fans wouldn’t view the band’s early material with such reverence if the band hadn’t started systematically alienating the people who got them to the top. When it comes to fandom at least, hate is a far stronger emotion than love, and it seems like the further Metallica has drifted from its roots, the more incredulous the world has become that this group of sell-outs and lame-os could have once made such perfect, untouchable music. This relationship works in reverse as well: if the first four Metallica albums hadn’t been so great, it wouldn’t be so fun to hate on every move the band has made since then.” You’re not supposed to touch things in museums, which means it’s very fun to touch them. A rash of recent accidents—a kind of museum crime blotter, if you will—makes the allure of touching very apparent. There’s the guy “who wanted to take a photo of himself with a sculpture in the foreground and a painting in the background. The visitor could not frame the photo to his liking, so he wrapped his arms around the abstract sculpture, which was the size of a person, and turned it on its pedestal to get the best angle.” Or the boy who “smashed a giant Lego sculpture of Nick from Zootopia at an expo in Ningbo, China. The artist had spent days piecing it together, reports said.” Governments have attempted to neuter the appeal of cigarettes by doing away with their branding, insisting on generic packages in place of subtle marketing. But this misplaces some of the allure of addiction, as Rob Horning writes: “It seems more plausible that addiction generates its own rationalizations, its own myths, its own ideology. We need to experience a physical grounding for our ideological beliefs, and we need to have ideological excuses for our physical addictions, so they tend to work in tandem, symbiotically … Brands can seem like a way to add a phony value to an otherwise undifferentiated commodity. But they also mark the entry point for consumers into some vicarious fantasy, some idea tangential to consumption. The potential value of a brand rests in the conflation of compulsion and the desire to believe. It must make you feel as though you are choosing and also have no choice.” Today in fiction as prognostication: Did Daphne du Maurier’s 1972 novel, Rule Britannia, predict Brexit? “In Du Maurier’s imagined referendum the government has ‘backtracked’ on its original support for the Common Market and now opposes British membership. If this contrasts with the Conservative government’s support for the Remain campaign this year, the book still has clear parallels with political events, according to Professor Helen Taylor, of Exeter University. She cites one section of the novel, in which the prime minister bemoans the political and financial repercussions of the leave vote, saying it ‘brought great economic difficulties, as I feared would be the case and as I warned you at the time, and our political autonomy and military supremacy were also endangered.’ ”
August 16, 2016 Bulletin #ReadEverywhere, Even As You Slide By The Paris Review You have just two more weeks 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 nearing the end of 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. Should you choose to read on a fast-paced conveyance, as the subscriber above did, please be sure to take the necessary precautions: hold the magazine in front of your face, so it will protect your head in the event of a collision. 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.
August 16, 2016 Arts & Culture The Big I By Oliver Lee Bateman Chasing Amy and the toxic “nerd masculinity” of the nineties. Still from Chasing Amy, 1997. Kevin Smith’s romantic comedy Chasing Amy, now almost two decades old, was a big deal for my generation of nerds. Back in 1997, all of our dorky interests, from comic books to video games, remained hidden, far from the prying eyes of the American mainstream. To us, the unapologetic fanboy Smith had emerged as something of a nerd culture Shakespeare—the best of us, a man who captured our hopes and dreams in his character’s lengthy, pop culture–laced monologues. Chasing Amy, which concerned sensitive-yet-sleazy Ben Affleck’s pursuit of the bisexual comic-book artist Joey Lauren Adams, constituted Smith’s first serious attempt to tell a meaningful dramatic story against the backdrop of the geek demimonde he’d explored in his previous slacker comedies Clerks and Mallrats. We were supposed to identify with (or at least pity) Affleck’s comic-book penciler Holden McNeil as he tried to come to terms with Adams’ sexual history, which involved group sex and gay sex and all sorts of other activities alien to his own heteronormative experience. Chasing Amy was always an uncomfortable movie, a film that encapsulated the worst aspects of narcissistic nerd entitlement at its late-nineties peak, but twenty years later I couldn’t even bring myself to finish rewatching it. When it was released, I begged my father to drive me to Raleigh’s Rialto Theatre and left that first showing enraptured, believing that some aspect of my privileged nerdy male “struggle” had been set to film. Kevin Smith was the first director whose scripts I had ever read; before I’d encountered his work, I hadn’t ever considered the form. It helped that Smith was such a dreadful cinematographer, a fact he admits without shame, because it meant his movies were the equivalent of ninety-minute script readings. Yet why, in the course of dreaming about becoming a “Hollywood writer”—whatever that meant—had I lingered over this material? How had it ever resonated with anyone at all, myself included? The answer was simple but painful: I was one of those stereotypical “guys who liked movies,” and I was stupid. Read More
August 16, 2016 Our Correspondents Porn Poetry By Anthony Madrid Raja Ravi Varma, painting of a scene from Kālidāsa’s play Abhijñānaśākuntalam. If “porn poetry” is defined as poetry that’s supposed to turn people on, then we have no tradition of porn poetry in English. What we have instead is a bunch of what might be called “exhilarating nastiness”: poetry that’s basically a revenge against sex, a way of processing anxiety. Don’t get me wrong. The material I seem to be dismissing is my favorite stuff in the world. Rochester, Swift, Seidel: they are disgusting and great. I have no real complaints about these guys. They speak to my concerns. Still, these days, I’ve become interested in expanding my borders beyond what I call “therapeutic art.” My anxieties ain’t going nowhere; they’ll be here when I get back. How about some poetry that comes straight out of delight and high spirits? Poetry that never heard of revenge or consolation. Read More
August 16, 2016 On the Shelf Haring’s Kingdom of Cocks, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Keith Haring’s Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks. Image via Hyperallergic If you live in New York, you have to make your peace with Keith Haring—his public works are all over town. But the city’s murals rarely, if ever, showcase Haring’s once-in-a-generation gift for drawing cocks. To see that, you must turn to Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, a new book of Haring’s dicks that “envisions the city as a kingdom of phalluses”: “he transforms Manhattan’s churches, skyscrapers, and fire hydrants into architectural penises. The Twin Towers become twin penises. There are penises drawn in front of Tiffany’s, in front of the Museum of Modern Art, while ‘waiting for a yam.’ There are minimalist penises, composed of as few lines as possible. There are also Gucci penises, alphabet penises, flying torpedo penises, optical illusion penises, deconstructed penises, ‘actual size’ tracings of penises, and clusters of penises on the subway at rush hour.” Here’s one way museums have found to make money: they’ll let you watch the varnish dry. It’s not quite as lively as watching the actual paint dry, no, but for people with a new interest in the art of conservation, it’ll do. At the Musée d’Orsay, Doreen Carvajal reports, “the once mysterious craft is increasingly turning into a high-end reality show—long-running spectacles that appeal to donors who lavish money on makeovers, but trouble some conservators accustomed to quiet and absolute concentration … In the slow-moving drama of restoration, fishbone cracks vanish, figures that were muddy sepia become radiantly blush, and yellow clouds, thick with old varnish, transform into white gauze tinged with rose. The results are a publicity bonanza for museums; they tell a before-and-after narrative that attracts media attention and appeals to crowdfunding campaigns and companies that have never donated to art projects before.” In 1938, Gertrude Stein published The World Is Round, a book for children. Let her never be accused of condescending to kids—she dumbs nothing down. In fact, the manuscript sounds pretty much the same as her works for adults do: “Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals … Rose was her name and would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose … Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words. If you have any trouble, read faster and faster until you don’t.” It’s important to have a contingency plan. If life on Earth takes a turn for the apocalyptic, you won’t find me huddled around some garbage fire eating another man’s thigh, no, sir. I’ll be on the moon. The Atlantic has taught me how to claim land there: “You could launch a small rover—like China’s Jade Rabbit, which just ceased operations—to set up a research station at one of the moon’s more resource-rich areas, probably the poles. The rover would set down a copper wire, trundle a few meters away and unspool more wire. This length of wire is now a low-frequency radio antenna. Think of the rabbit-ear dipole antenna on an ancient TV set … Under the Outer Space Treaty, you would have to allow other countries and entities to inspect your new solar observatory. But the treaty also says that inspections cannot get in the way of your normal operations, and any inspection would likely interfere with your radio observations. So for practical purposes, nobody else can ever come to your mountaintop. You have become the de facto owner of that piece of lunar real estate.” Thomas Mann’s story “Mario and the Magician” skewered Mussolini as a man with “very ugly hair” and “small hard eyes, with flabby pouches beneath them”—a man who “talked without stopping—but only in vague, boastful, self-advertising phrases.” You see where this is going, don’t you? How this fascistic asshole might resemble another, more contemporary fascistic asshole? Don’t make me spell it out. Colin Campbell writes of Mann’s story, “The magician’s name is Cipolla, and his show is preceded by a flurry of cheap publicity. When Cipolla himself appears on stage, he spouts a lot of blather about his grand reputation and, after ingratiating himself and reading a few minds, he makes it clear that he leads and commands, while others willingly follow and obey. But could he make a gentleman who challenged him dance foolishly even against his will? ‘ “Even against your will,” answered Cipolla, in unforgettable accents.’ ”
August 15, 2016 The Print Series Boston: See Our Prints at Harvard Square By The Paris Review Since 1964, The Paris Review has commissioned a series of prints and posters by major contemporary artists. Contributors have included Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and William Bailey. Each print is published in an edition of sixty to two hundred, most of them signed and numbered by the artist. All have been made especially and exclusively for The Paris Review. Many are still available for purchase. Proceeds go to The Paris Review Foundation, established in 2000 to support The Paris Review. Through September 15, our readers in Boston and Cambridge can head to Aesop Harvard Square, at 49 Brattle Street, where seven of our favorite prints are on display: Andy Warhol, 1965, silkscreen Robert Motherwell, 1965, silkscreen Christo, 1982, lithograph poster (available for purchase) Sol LeWitt, 1983, silkscreen, signed (available for purchase) Aram Saroyan, 1989, silkscreen (available for purchase) Alex Katz, 1991, silkscreen, signed (available for purchase) Louise Bourgeois, 1994, intaglio Aesop consultants will be available to provide tours. Read more here. Andy Warhol, 1965, silkscreen.