July 27, 2016 Bulletin Subscribe to The Paris Review with Your Book Club for 25 Percent Off By The Paris Review Book clubs make life better. They strengthen friendships. They broaden horizons. They provide an airtight excuse for wine and cheese. And ideally they lead to unforgettable conversations. The one trouble with book clubs—in our experience—is finding stuff that interests everyone, and that none of the group has read. We can help with that. If your book club reads fiction, sign up now and receive a 25 percent discount on subscriptions to The Paris Review. We have the newest and best in fiction. In just the past few years we’ve published writers like Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, Ben Lerner, Angela Flournoy, Rachel Kushner, Rachel Cusk—before they were best sellers or critics’ picks. The stories in every issue are ripe for discussion: up to the moment, provocative, and fraught with questions of intimacy, family, morality, aging, and generally just living life in the early twenty-first century. (And that’s not even taking our interviews into consideration.) As Kirkus put it, there’s “a searing reality present” in The Paris Review “that feels wholly different from the kind of writing we all consume on a daily basis.” If you’re in a book club with six readers or more, you can get your discount today. Here’s how: Have everyone in your group send an e-mail to [email protected] with the same subject line. (The name of your town, the title of the last book you read—whatever.) We’ll send you and your friends a custom promotion code; you can all use it at our online store to redeem your discounted subscriptions. (Teachers: if you’d like to have your students read and discuss The Paris Review in your classroom, send a note to [email protected] and we’ll help you set up a discounted bulk order.)
July 27, 2016 On the Shelf Not That New York Review, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring One of the underground papers from the exhibition “Realize Your Desires.” Congratulations to The Paris Review’s contributors David Means, Ottessa Moshfegh, and David Szalay, all of whom have been long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. (Paul Beatty, interviewed last year on the Daily, is nominated, too.) To all the rich folks shopping for Common Projects sneakers and neon signs: your “minimalist” aesthetic isn’t the latest iteration of an artistic philosophy. It’s just consumer culture. As Kyle Chayka writes, “Despite its connotations of absence, ‘minimalism’ has been popping up everywhere lately, like a bright algae bloom in the murk of postrecession America … So long as it’s stylishly austere, it seems, it’s minimalist. Part pop philosophy and part aesthetic, minimalism presents a cure-all for a certain sense of capitalist overindulgence. Maybe we have a hangover from pre-recession excess—McMansions, S.U.V.s, neon cocktails, fusion cuisine—and minimalism is the salutary tonic. Or perhaps it’s a method of coping with recession-induced austerity, a collective spiritual and cultural cleanse because we’ve been forced to consume less anyway. But as an outgrowth of a peculiarly American (that is to say, paradoxical and self-defeating) brand of Puritanical asceticism, this new minimalist lifestyle always seems to end in enabling new modes of consumption, a veritable excess of less. It’s not really minimal at all.” From Melville to Wallace, most of your prototypical “office novelists” are dudes, and their takes on bureaucracy are concerned less with work than with minute social shifts in hierarchy and class. Office novels by women have a different agenda, Lydia Kiesling writes: “The last two decades have seen a boom in workplace novels written by and mostly marketed to women … These books provide mapping, contextualizing, and rich illustration of women’s working lives. They form a kind of counter-tradition of office literature, dealing with the same bureaucracies and white-collar doldrums that have inspired male novelists but reflecting the particular challenges and preoccupations of women in the workforce … These novels often arrive at the same place: a woman who can’t cope with the demands of family and modern work finds a more flexible arrangement, usually capitalizing on her latent creative or entrepreneurial spirit.” Today in news about Bertolt Brecht’s son: Bertold Brecht’s son (Stefan) kept a really enormous collection of underground newspapers in his attic, and now they are yours for the seeing. A new exhibition, “Realize Your Desires,” chronicles Brecht’s collection and in the broader context of the underground press: “The Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), the overriding body of the underground press, began in 1966 with a humble assembly of five newspapers: the East Village Other (NYC), the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, the Fifth Estate (Detroit), and the Paper (Michigan). Only six years later, Tom Forcade, leader of the UPS, claimed three hundred papers and twenty million readers.” The Chilean writer Roberto Merino remembers his early experiences with television: “A Sunday session of Tugar, tugar, the dance program which Baila domingo later replaced, was a protracted sexual torment. Ah, what ochre sundowns were whiled away in fantasies of oneself waiting outside the Manuel Plaza gymnasium for the most ravishing of the contestants before sauntering off with a careless arm around her, drinking in that longed-for blend of odors: the scent my mother would have disdained as ‘cheap,’ the sweat, the cigarette smoke infused into the denim jacket, the fading sweetness of Adams or Bazooka chewing gum in the brazen kisses.”
July 26, 2016 Contests #ReadEverywhere, Even in the Trees By The Paris Review Insert “literary magazines don’t grow on trees” gag here. For the third consecutive summer, 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 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. Swing from vines with our magazines. Ascend to jungle canopies with our magazines. Skin your knees clambering up the old oak tree with our magazines. 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.
July 26, 2016 Arts & Culture The Last Days of Foamhenge By Eileen Townsend Photo: Brett Hanover. If you’ve ever taken I-81 north through Virginia, you’ve passed the town of Natural Bridge, in Rockbridge County—home to a ninety-foot limestone arch that extends over a gorge, a geological anomaly probably formed by an ancient underground river. Natural Bridge is an anachronism from the Route 66 era of highway travel, a place where you can pay twenty dollars to look at a rock, eat a rock-themed lunch, and then buy a shot glass illustrated with a picture of that same rock. As any respectable tourist trap must, the town hosts a constellation of other attractions: a petting zoo, a dinosaur/Civil War theme park, and the Natural Bridge Wax Museum (now closed, and former home to a ghoulish Obama tribute). Best of all is the featherlight, faux prehistoric monument known as Foamhenge. As its name suggests, Foamhenge is a one-to-one scale replica of Stonehenge, made of foam. It is identical to the original, save the flecked gray paint, the accompanying statue of a deadhead-ish Merlin, and the fact that it was erected several millennia later. For the past twelve years, the henge has been the most public of Natural Bridge’s draws, garnering a steady stream of visitors and enough press to be mentioned in the same breath as the area’s actual ancient rocks. Its creator, an artist named Mark Cline, calls it his “foam-nomenon”: the unlikely culmination of his career as a sculptor of roadside attractions. Read More
July 26, 2016 Our Correspondents Summer Hours, Part 2 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1 of Vanessa Davis’s new column. Read More
July 26, 2016 On the Shelf Steer Clear of the Hotel Know-It-All, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s this easy! I’m tired all the time, which is why I’m so popular. Reviewing Anna Katharina Schaffner’s new Exhaustion: A History, Hannah Rosefield unpacks the durable notion of exhaustion as a status symbol: “Many critics, even as they call for a cure, frame exhaustion as a mark of distinction. This idea dates back at least to Aristotle. ‘Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?’ he wonders in Problemata … The associations of exhaustion with prestige have crystallized in the form of burnout. First used in the 1970s to describe exhaustion suffered by workers in the social sector, burnout was characterized by increased cynicism and apathy, and a decreased sense of personal accomplishment. Since then, its application has widened to include all worn down, overburdened workers, especially in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, where burnout is a subject of regular media debate. Burnout, caused by workplace conditions rather than by a worker’s mental and physical composition, is depression’s more palatable, more prestigious cousin.” I’d long assumed that one could never enter one’s average house cat in a pageant. Only the purebreds could know the thrill of the blue ribbon, I thought. The calicos and tabbies of this earth were doomed to the mundane. But I was wrong, as Omar Mouallem taught me: “I got over the stench of piss at the Edmonton Cat Show pretty quickly. It’s not so much my nostrils that adjusted but my eyes, to rows and rows of beautiful creatures. Plump British shorthairs smiled in their sleep and regal sphynxes owned their ugly … [The International Cat Association] has been showing and awarding titles to non-purebred domestic cats—even the maligned black ones—since its 1973 beginnings. It’s a stark contrast to the practices of the 110-year-old Cat Fanciers’ Association, which for decades didn’t even bother hosting the category. The association now emphasizes it like TICA, and in the last three years finally started giving non-purebred cats Grand Championship titles equal to pedigrees. The hope is that it will curb the cat fancy world’s declining entries and revenues.” There’s a plaque at 14 West Twenty-Third Street, where Edith Wharton grew up. Otherwise, don’t expect to recognize the place. This is New York, people! What’d you want us to do, preserve the joint? Rachael Revesz notes that “in such an old city, there are surprisingly few relics that remain as they were during the prolific novelist’s time, and nothing, beyond a small red plaque at her childhood home, to commemorate the most iconic New York writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century … Her house has been altered so many times in the last century that it cannot be delegated as a protected building. It is now a Starbucks on the ground floor, where her father’s extensive study used to be … Although the corporate exterior of the building might cause some to groan, few people might know that Starbucks was named after a character in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, a distant cousin of Edith’s.” Today in old advice that’s still good advice: If you, an aspiring artist, want to take the road to success, don’t stop off at the Hotel Know It All, the Mutual Admiration Society, or the Always Right Club. Tunnel through Lack of Preparation Mountain and for God’s sake watch your step around the Holes of Illiteracy and Conceit. A 1913 allegorical map called the Road to Success “turns the figurative journey towards artistic triumph into a cartographic depiction of an actual climb towards victory … Taking shortcuts won’t get you anywhere except to the bottom of the River of Failure, which threatens to sweep away anyone who’s not up to the challenge of putting in hard work. And don’t just blow hot air, or you’ll end up in the clouds.” Here’s the time-tested way to gin up your crummy sci-fi flick: pretend it’s a western. In Star Trek Beyond, writes Richard Brody, “the words Republic and Federation are intoned like mantras to position the mission in quasi-American terms; the name Yorktown links the space combat of Star Trek Beyond to the existential, the primordial, and the revolutionary—the fight to retain independence in the face of a force that would snap it back in, engulf it in a dictatorial order, and milk it as a mere source of sustenance … The self-celebration of a legacy property’s sequel has rarely been framed in such starkly civic terms: the link between the historical continuity of the American federation and the personal continuity of family is the cultural continuity of Star Trek and pop music—and, for that matter, of classic Hollywood. Buy a ticket, keep America safe and free.”