August 8, 2016 Bulletin #ReadEverywhere, Even Upside-Down By Caitlin Love Just three weeks left, folks: until the end of August, we’re offering 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 in the thick 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. There are no wrong ways to read, as the two young readers above demonstrate. 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 already cooked up. Now get yourself a joint subscription, head outdoors, and hashtag your way to victory.
August 8, 2016 Our Correspondents How Do I Live? I Live. By Alison Kinney La bohème, live at Attica State Correctional Facility. The mess hall at Attica Correctional Facility, 1977. Photo (c) Karl R. Josker. Used with permission. Opera audiences are all the same. There are always two bald guys seated in the third row, whispering a phrase-by-phrase critique. Someone cups his ear, frustrated by the hall’s faulty acoustics. Everyone looks daggers at the miscreant whose phone interrupts an aria. And some listeners sit with their hands folded under their chins, eyes half-closed in reverie. One man perches literally on the edge of his seat, listening with his whole body; his chest seems to swell with the singers’ every breath. Afterward, I’m not surprised when he says that, before today, “I didn’t know that Latinos do opera,” but “for a brief fifteen minutes, I was up there, I was singing.” On August 2, performers from the Glimmerglass Festival, the summer opera festival based in upstate Cooperstown, New York, hit the road for a one-hour matinee of excerpts from Giacomo Puccini’s lush, popular opera about Parisian artists, friends, and lovers, La bohème (1896). The cast waited onstage, in costume, while an audience numbering about 150 took their seats: emerging from the cellblocks, they’d walked, in double rows, in groups of no more than forty, through several barred gates into the hall. Officers armed with batons ringed their seats, forming a standing-room only section. At the conclusion of the concert, when inmates leapt to their feet for a standing ovation, two officers shifted closer together, eyeing them: the ones who’d risen sat down immediately. We were at Attica State Correctional Facility. Read More
August 8, 2016 In Memoriam Mahasweta Devi, 1926–2016 By Shivani Radhakrishnan Mahasweta Devi. “Please don’t write more books. I can’t read so many books,” a little girl once said to Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate. The little girl was Mahasweta Devi, who grew up to be one of India’s best-known writers and activists. When Mahasweta died, on July 28—Devi is an honorific—she left behind no small collection herself: she had written more than a hundred books, including fiction and nonfiction about India’s tribal communities, Maoist insurgents, and women. Read More
August 8, 2016 On the Shelf There’s Always Disco, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover to Patrick Cowley’s Muscle Up. Hey, you! Egghead! Ponce! Academic intellectual hippie freak! Get a real job! You don’t know shit about real people! You wouldn’t know a working man if he put a gun in your mouth! “People who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies,” Michael Lind reminds us. “They—we—are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.” Patrick Cowley died of an AIDS-related illness in the early eighties, but his music—a lubricious, synth-driven, incorrigibly uptempo variant of disco that came to be known as hi-NRG—survives him. A recent spate of reissues has found him getting overdue posthumous credit: “Cowley’s influence as a producer was cited by new romantic acts such as Pet Shop Boys and New Order; the critic Peter Shapiro recognized his work with Sylvester for ‘pretty much [summing] up the entire disco experience.’ And in recent years, his profile has assumed a new dimension as listeners and scholars excavate disco’s intersection with gay liberation … [His early output] captures Mr. Cowley’s affinity for synthesizers’ potential not to replicate sounds but to forge new ones. Tracks murmur and thrum or surge and palpitate, flush with bleary murk and melodic curlicues reminiscent of earthen atmosphere and galactic ascent alike. The duality evokes the carnal grit and transformative, escapist role-play that characterized sexual scenarios available to intrepid San Franciscans.” In which Amie Barrodale searches for the elusive sources of her fiction: “My work comes from my life. But after my first collection of stories, I made a vow to myself: no more of that. I began to think about writing a novel about a pedophile who undergoes some kind of elective treatment, some kind of brain surgery, some kind of stimulation of his illness that forces him to basically go through the hell of his own mind, his own sickness, to come out cured. I began to read about pedophiles. But on the side, as I worked, another story emerged, about a miscarriage, a miscarriage I had last year. What I mean is that for me, for better or for worse, my life presents itself as a story sometimes … One thing I would like to do, one day, is be able to describe what is happening in my mind. Sometimes I just make strange sounds in my head, I notice. One day I’d like to know what happens in there.” Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novels Pamela and Clarissa have plenty to say about victimhood and agency—even as they defy contemporary standards of morality. As Amy Gentry writes, Pamela is “a prolonged tale of sexual harassment in which, for several hundred pages, the hired servant Pamela fights off her employer Mr. B.’s unwanted advances … Together, Pamela and Clarissa represent Richardson’s fundamental misunderstanding of rape culture. He mistook women for human beings at a time when it was illegal for them to be. That’s an endearing mistake you won’t catch Austen making — not out loud, anyway — not so the men can hear. But Richardson’s mistake was a fertile one. Out of his strenuous attempts to give us a sense of Clarissa as a human being with agency who nevertheless had no control over her own violation came one of the greatest triumphs of literature in English — Clarissa’s very soul — the agency she exerts from inside the depths of powerlessness and madness simply by continuing to write.” Mary Wellesley takes a trip to Alexander Pope’s grotto, recalling its extensive history: “Over time the grotto’s purpose changed. In 1739, Pope took the waters of Hotwells Spa in Bristol, and was transfixed by the geology of the Avon Gorge. After that, the grotto became a shrine to the majesty of geology. Pope was influenced by his friend William Borlase, an antiquarian, who espoused ‘physico-theological’ ideas about geology as evidence of the work of God. Pope decorated his grotto with crystals, shells, ores and spars, ordering shipments of material from distant parts of the country. After a spat with his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she described it as ‘a palace beneath the muddy road’, which was ‘Adorn’d within with Shells of small expense/Emblems of tinsel Rhyme and trifling sense.’ ”
August 5, 2016 The Lives of Others Boon Companion By Edward White Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname is one of history’s greatest travelogues. Evliya Çelebi painting (c) Sermin Ciddi Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. According to his own recollection, Evliya Çelebi, the seventeenth-century Turkish writer and traveler, experienced a life-changing epiphany on the night of his twentieth birthday. He was visited in a dream by the Prophet Muhammad, dressed nattily in a yellow woollen shawl and yellow boots, a toothpick stuck into his twelve-band turban. Muhammad announced that Allah had a special plan, one that required Evliya to abandon his prospects at the imperial court, become “a world traveler,” and “compose a marvelous work” based on his adventures. As religious missions go, it was a pretty sweet deal—and for Evliya it came at the perfect moment. His feet itched to travel and his fingers to write, but he could never find a way of telling his parents that the life they had proudly mapped out for him—a stellar career, a virtuous wife, and a brood of smiling children—played no part in his vision of a meaningful existence. Muhammad’s intervention, whether an act of providence or not, spurred three decades of globetrotting indulgence. Evliya took in Anatolia, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Cairo, Athens, Corinth, Sudan, and swathes of Europe from Crimea to—supposedly—the Low Countries. His path crossed Buddhists and crusading warriors, the Bedouin and Venetian sailors, ambassadors, monks, sorcerers, and snake charmers. Along the way he wrote the Seyahatname (“Book of Travels”), a magnificent ten-volume sprawl of fantasy, biography, and reportage that is utterly unique in the canon of travel literature, and which confirms Evliya as one of the great storytellers of the seventeenth century. Read More
August 5, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Constellations, Cartography, Costanza By The Paris Review Exhibition of the Laughing Gas, a wood engraving, ca. 1840. We’ve been closing the Fall issue of the magazine this week, so I haven’t had much of an opportunity for outside reading (there are a couple long poems in the issue I’m particularly keen on). No matter what, though, I’ve spent an hour each night watching the new Netflix show Stranger Things. Set in eighties Indiana, the smart and thrilling eight-part series is indebted to much of what was great in eighties horror and youthful sci-fi and fantasy—Poltergeist, E.T., Stephen King novels, D&D—and shows its influences appreciatively, without seeming imitative or derivative. The tautly drawn plot centers on three adventuresome boys, dorks of the Goonies variety, who lose a friend to a monster-populated parallel world and who befriend a telekinetic girl, named Eleven, to help bring him back. It manages to combine everything I want from my science-fiction entertainment: it’s funny and frightening, doesn’t take the science for granted, and is as much about how people relate to one another as it is about supernatural doings. And of course, John Carpenter–style synths. —Nicole Rudick A few years ago, Benjamin Breen wrote for the Daily about the literature of laughing gas, focusing on the psychedelic poetic yield of William James’s encounters with the drug. (“Agreement—disagreement!!,” James wrote. “Emotion—motion!!!”) Now the Public Domain Review has put out Oh Excellent Air Bag, an eye-opening compilation of writing about, on, or under the influence of nitrous oxide: an enthralling look at the range of responses laughing gas brought about before the culture began to dictate our reaction to it. Beginning in 1799, when Humphry Davy embarked on a systemic effort to chronicle the effects of the gas, the book goes all the way up an unsigned piece from 1920, in which the writer’s routine tooth extraction sends him on a voyage to the edges of consciousness: “I drifted out among star-ways, and a galaxy of saffron constellations whirled about my head. In some outer void of space I took my station on a base of infinite nothingness … Eventually there was to come, in the wake of all, a world white and lucent, gleaming like the plumage of an angel’s wing.” Something to keep in mind before your next root canal. —Dan Piepenbring Read More