July 28, 2016 On the Shelf TV Is Better Without People, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from How It’s Made. James Alan McPherson, the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has died at seventy-two. An obituary in the New York Times quotes his memoir, Going Up to Atlanta, in which he writes about reading comics at the library in Savannah, Georgia: “At first the words, without pictures, were a mystery … But then, suddenly, they all began to march across the page. They gave up their secret meanings, spoke of other worlds, made me know that pain was a part of other peoples’ lives. After a while, I could read faster and faster and faster. After a while, I no longer believed in the world in which I lived.” If we watch TV mainly as an exercise in escapism, then a show devoid of people—or even trace elements of the anthropomorphic—would offer the greatest escape of all. We’re in luck, because there’s How It’s Made, a half-hour paean to manufacturing that is, as Alexandra Kleeman writes, closer to full-on post-human than anything on television: “The show begins to take on a post-apocalyptic flavor. Its images of manufacturing, you realize, are oddly depopulated … Humans are so scarce, in fact, in this world of throbbing, gleaming machines that when part of one comes into view, the first reaction is not recognition but confusion. ‘What is that pink thing?’ you might ask yourself, before realizing that it is a hand. Against the swift exactitude and raw power of machinery, the human anatomy—with its soft, squishy shapes and nerve-riddled interior—looks vulnerable at best.” And why not surrender to the conveyer belts? There is much to escape from in this world, especially as an enclave of elite technocrats begin to rebuild it from the ground up, finding ever more novel ways of infantilizing us in their quest to monetize. “I have been obsessed with figuring out why I hate the Seamless ads in the New York City subway,” Jesse Barron writes. “ ‘Welcome to New York,’ one reads. ‘The role of your mom will be played by us’ … We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness. One explanation would be geopolitical: when the perception of instability is elevated, we seek the safety of naptime aesthetics … We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun, too.” Maybe you’d been hoping that literature could offer some solace from all this. Should you attempt to write in your effort to flee from despair, proceed with extreme caution: there is only more suffering ahead. Robert Fay writes, “One occasionally glimpses the true existential cost of the so-called ‘writer’s life,’ where writing is both an act of self-abnegation—with all of its consequent anxieties—as well as a struggle against such a personalized nihilism … The daily act of sitting alone for hours and purposely conjuring up emotions and disturbing memories—precisely the kinds of things people use Percocet, vodka, food, and Netflix to forget—serves as the ideal petri dish for anxiety.” Might as well bookend this one with obituaries. The cartoonist Jack Davis—known for the defining style he brought MAD Magazine, where he was one of “the Usual Gang of Idiots”—has died at ninety-one. “Davis’s final cover for the magazine came in 1995—a picture of magazine-mascot Neuman plunging radio-presenter Howard Stern in a toilet bowl, which the spokesman said ‘remains a MAD classic.’ ”
July 27, 2016 At Work The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif By Zinzi Clemmons In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read “Look,” the title poem from her debut collection. Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between lovers, refashioning hollow, bureaucratic language from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with a human touch. (Even the collection’s title has an alternate military meaning: per the Department of Defense, a look means “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.”) At a time when the U.S. automates acts of murder, Sharif insists that war is still personal—perhaps today more than ever. In one of its most quoted passages, she writes, “Daily I sit / with the language / they’ve made / of our language / to NEUTRALIZE / the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS / like you.” “By simply placing words from the Defense dictionary in small caps, and deploying them in scenes of intimacy,” John Freeman wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Sharif has begun the process of renaturing them, putting them in the readers’ hands for examination.” Look confirms what I’ve known since 2014: Sharif is poised to influence not only literature but larger conversations about America, war, and the Middle East. I spoke with her about her influences, the role of the poet in today’s world, and the stories behind Look. INTERVIEWER In an essay you wrote for the Kenyon Review, you said, “When I am asked to describe my poetry on airplane flights, at dinner parties, I describe it first as ‘political.’ Then, ‘documentary.’ And these two things seem to, for some, preclude aesthetic rigor.” There’s a popular conception that overtly political can’t have aesthetic value—that a political message degrades the aesthetics. Is your work a deliberate effort to rebut this notion? Read More
July 27, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles The Game of the Name 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 Monday, August 1, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! The answers to this month’s puzzle are surnames composed, either plainly or fancifully, of two words. Lots of people, of course, such as the installation artist Jessica Stockholder and the bandleader Benny Goodman, have phrasal surnames, but we’ve generally avoided names that are themselves compound words or common pairings. Several of the answers, then, form sensible if unusual phrases; others are of the word-salad type. The answers are simply the surnames, though each is attached to a notable figure, including two fictional characters. The clues consist of a parenthetical, usually just naming the field in which the person became most famous, followed by a two-word phrase roughly synonymous with the phrasal surname. (One clue uses an established hyphenated compound word, but that seems in keeping with the two-word rule.) So, if we had used one of the above rejects, the clue might go as follows: (Clarinetist) Decent fellow The answer would be “Goodman.” If you want to throw in a first name, feel free, but you won’t get extra points. Read More
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.