July 25, 2016 On the Shelf Photograph in C#, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, Photograph in C#, 48″ x 48″. Image via Nautilus Wherever there are Freudian dynamics afoot—whenever latent sexual tension and homosocial tendencies take the national stage—there you’ll find our country’s fan-fiction writers doing their best work. You can only imagine, then, the hay they’ve made of the 2016 election. Talia Lavin spoke to one especially fecund writer who goes by Chuck Tingle: “After the Brexit vote, Tingle published ‘Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union.’ Another recent Tingle story is about a character he calls Domald Tromp. In Tingle’s fictional universe, Tromp is the presumptive Republican nominee—although, unlike Donald J. Trump, Tromp has faked his birth certificate and is really a native of Scotland. More specifically, he is the Loch Ness monster in disguise. (‘There is something incredible about being taken by such a strong, patriotic beast, even if he is really from Scotland,’ the narrator, a twenty-two-year-old journalist, thinks at one point.)” In reality, though, the political scene is far less enchanting—though no less fantastical, as commentators on both sides have noted in the aftermath of the Republican National Convention: “When Trump’s speech had already leaked, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, whose adorable campaign to stop Trump has been going for months, bummed a cigarette off me. I told him I was heading to the Q after I’d read the speech. ‘I’ve read it,’ he said. ‘It’s like the plot of Batman.’ ” When politicians aren’t behaving like fictional characters or remaking the world in a kind of proto-fictional mold, they do, unfortunately, attempt to write nonfiction. Here, too, they are often thwarted. Take the case of Boris Johnson, Brexit architect and all-around turd—the Guardian reports that his “widely anticipated biography of Shakespeare is on ice, indefinitely. Originally scheduled for release this October—rather late for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death back in April—Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius ‘will not be published for the foreseeable future,’ says its publisher, Hodder & Stoughton … Among professional Shakespeareans—think the conspirators in Julius Caesar, only with sharper daggers—there has been a mixture of glee and remorse. On the one hand, many thought the biography wasn’t likely to be very good. On the other, everyone would have had a great deal of fun saying so. Even before the announcement, speculation was rife that not a word had actually been written, and that several prominent academics had been begged for last-minute assistance.” Now that I’ve got you in a pessimistic frame of mind: the early photos in a new survey at the Whitney Museum, “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” remind of all varieties of sociopolitical turmoil. As Max Nelson writes, “Lyon has always taken risks to earn the status of sympathetic insider in the communities he shoots. The photographs he took across the South in his early twenties were forceful enough visions of outrage and disgust—a group of young black women languishing in the Leesburg stockade; a protestor splayed out in midair as the object of a violent tug-of-war contest between an onlooker and a pack of riot police—that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) soon made Lyon their staff photographer … Lyon would never align himself so completely with another group’s mission and goals, but most of his subsequent projects have involved a similar degree of intense, life-consuming commitment. To make The Bikeriders (1968), the first book of photographs for which he had sole credit, he spent a year as a member of the Chicago Outlaws; for Conversations with the Dead (1971), his third book, he lived in Texas for still longer taking pictures in the state’s prisons.” Maybe the only solace is in art without people. Resonantia, a series of portraits last year by the artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, finds beauty in cymatics—the patterns produced by sound waves in physical objects. “Louviere was struck by the idea that each note produces a particular shape in liquid. To investigate these patterns, he rigged up a contraption involving a frequency generator on his laptop, a rebuilt amp with a speaker pointing upward into a plastic vitrine filled with ink-black water, and a guitar tuner. Louviere vibrated the water with the amp by adjusting the generator’s frequency … He used his tuner to seek out the frequency of each of the twelve notes—A, B, C through G, plus the five halftones. While Louviere dialed the knobs, Brown stood on a ladder above the contraption illuminating the water with a ring light, her camera in hand. When the tuner registered a note—reading 220 hertz, the frequency that produces an A, for instance—Louviere stopped adjusting. As each note’s unique vibration induced its characteristic pattern into the water, Brown captured it with her camera. The pair worked together to obtain a ‘portrait’ of each of the twelve notes.”
July 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Ad Me By Matthew St. Ville Hunte Growing up in the context of no context. A few years ago, my late friend D. G. Myers and I had a disagreement about the relationship between advertising and literary culture. Myers argued that the ads and articles in the Saturday Evening Post had a bearing on the stories F. Scott Fitzgerald initially published in the magazine, on the grounds that all three came out of the same cultural context. At the time, I was unpersuaded—the ads, I said, were just there to pay the bills—but I have come to see his point. Last week, I rewatched an episode of Reading Rainbow that I have long cherished. As the episode begins, LeVar Burton, the show’s host, appears alone on a smog-filled dock on Charleston Harbor. Wearing a trench coat and fedora in the style of a hard-boiled detective, Burton is on the trail of Big Mama Blue. Suddenly we hear someone singing opera, and Burton introduces Mystery on The Docks, by Thacher Hurd. The story, narrated by Raúl Juliá, is about an opera-loving short-order cook who saves a famous singer from gangsters. All the characters are rats. Read More
July 22, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fever Dreams, Tragic Spells, and In-betweens By The Paris Review Detail from the cover of Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why. Carole Firstman’s ambitiously titled debut, Origins of the Universe and What It All Means, is an essayistic memoir about her relationship with her estranged, eccentric (read: undiagnosed Asperger’s) scientist father, but it’s really a thumbed nose at binary argument and an objective romp through subjectivity’s headspace. Throughout the book, Firstman sets up oppositional arguments in order to force them apart and marinate in the liminal in-between. Is her chauvinistic, mostly absent father good or bad? Firstman thinks it’s hard to say, but it doesn’t stop her from examining the relationship through myriad philosophic and scientific lenses. (I doubt there has ever been a book about family in which one learns more about science and the history of thought.) Though the father does and says things that would make even the least feminist, or simply decent, among us cringe, Firstman’s characterization of family dynamics is pitch-perfect: her own impatience and frustrations with her father balance his foibles and thoughtlessness—and her humor softens the lot. This is a very endearing book, a summer read for the curious mind. —Jeffery Gleaves The Guggenheim’s recent exhibition “Photo-Poetics: An Anthology” made a huge impression on me; the show featured works by ten photographers—nine women, including Erica Baum—who all work closely, sometimes exclusively, with the printed page. So I was delighted to discover Dog Ear, a book of twenty-five exquisite photographs by Baum. For the series, she dog-eared pages in mass-market paperbacks, then photographed the intersection of words at each fold to create a text of her own. In each tiny piece, bits of sentences read horizontally (“skirts, bee-stung lips,” “It’s a funny thing”) and vertically (“made up her face,” “itchiest dresses”). Part photo, part poem, the results vary in tone, from longing to manic, minimal to marvelous. In “Bear,” which feels like a Tomi Ungerer picture book, where animals scheme and smoke cigars, a polar bear is drunk on schnapps and “pawing” “the birds.” A new, limited edition of Dog Ear comes courtesy of Ugly Duckling Presse. Fittingly, the book jacket doubles as a poster. —Jessica Calderon It may be based on a British procedural, but the new HBO series The Night Of is unmistakably shot in New York and, just as unmistakably, written by Richard Price. The premise: a studious Pakistani American kid sneaks out of the house with the keys to his father’s cab, then ill-advisedly picks up a passenger, a distraught beauty headed to the Upper West Side. It’s classic noir, with John Turturro as the boy’s schlubby but dedicated defense attorney; and because it’s a Richard Price script, even a desk sergeant (the excellent Ben Shenkman) can steal a scene. Two episodes in, it’s the best TV I’ve seen this summer. —Lorin Stein Read More
July 22, 2016 At Work You Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker By Alex Dueben Photo by Kwesi Abbensetts. Morgan Parker has a long résumé—she teaches and edits—that somehow hasn’t precluded a prolific career as a poet. Her first collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, came last year; her second, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, is due out in 2017. A few months ago, Parker’s poem “Hottentot Venus” appeared in the Spring issue of The Paris Review. Her use of famous names and long, playful titles (“Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin Wearing a T-Shirt of Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-Shirt of Macaulay Culkin”) suggests that she’s light of heart—but she is, as one reviewer put it,“as set on understanding the world as on changing it.” Race and femininism are central to her work, which explores ways to look at the present through the past, to examine ordinary life through pop culture, and to consider the events of her own life. We spoke recently about the joys of lengthy titles, how her many jobs intersect, and the process of crafting a personal mythology. Read More
July 22, 2016 On the Shelf A Big Glooby Blob of Sad Blufush, and Other News By Robert P. Baird Kerouac photographed by John Cohen, 1959. Image via The Spectator. Remember that time Henry James met Winston Churchill? The encounter took place in December, 1914, when Churchill was forty years old and James, his elder by three decades, was still a year from the stroke that would have him signing letters as Napoleon to arrange for “the decoration of certain apartments and palaces … of the Louvre and the Tuileries.” According to Louis Menand, “Churchill had no idea who James was, found him tedious, and behaved crudely.” After the event, James told his host, Violet Bonham Carter—a friend of Churchill, daughter of the prime minister, and grandmother of Helena—that the “interesting” experience had “brought home to me, very forcibly and vividly … the limitations by which men of genius … purchase their ascendancy … over mankind.” In 1931, during what he described as his wilderness years, Churchill launched an American speaking tour in an effort to make back the money he’d lost in the stock-market crash two years earlier. While crossing Fifth Avenue in New York, Churchill looked the wrong way for traffic and was hit by a taxi, an accident he later wrote up as “My New York Misadventure,” which essay he sold to the Daily Mail for twenty-five hundred dollars. (Yes: about forty thousand dollars in today’s money.) Earlier that year, some three hundred and fifty miles from the site of Churchill’s lucrative debilitation, the hard-bop jazz pianist Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark was born in a Pennsylvania coal patch. Clark’s career was often torturous, in no small part thanks to the heroin addiction that killed him in 1963. But he found a wide following in Japan, and, as Sam Stephenson wrote for the Daily in 2011, “no jazz pianist was more drenched in minor blues” than he was. Clark would have been eighty-five yesterday. Clark released Sonny’s Crib, with John Coltrane on the tenor saxophone, in 1957, the same year Jack Kerouac published On the Road. For Geoff Dyer, “there has never been a better-looking male writer. The Kerouac of the 1950s—athletic, muscular forearms emerging from plaid shirt, dark hair roughly quiffed—could step into a bar in Brooklyn today and he’d still look hip.” But Kerouac’s time at the top was brief: “From the moment his achievement was recognized his talent was in decline. He became imprisoned by the method of composition—spontaneous prose—that had liberated him. The breakthrough that enabled him to become a great writer condemned him to often being a pretty terrible one. Sinking into alcoholism, living with his mum in Florida and Massachusetts, he became ‘a big glooby blob of sad blufush.’ ” Kerouac’s father, a French Canadian printer, died of stomach cancer in 1946, the same year a former domestic servant from Scotland gave birth to the man who last night became the Republican Party’s official candidate for president of the United States. About that last fact you may read a word or two today, but in the midst of the frenzy let us not forget the welcome counsel of Julian Barnes, namely that “this has been a rich time to explore nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting.” A new show at the Fondation Custodia, in Paris, includes paintings by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, a Danish painter who studied under Jacques-Louis David. “The Paris show,” Barnes says, reveals Eckersberg “to be always securely himself, yet frequently on the move.”
July 21, 2016 From the Archive Zelda: A Worksheet By Zelda Fitzgerald In our Fall 1983 issue, The Paris Review published twenty years’ worth of Zelda Fitzgerald’s letters to her husband, Scott. This selection comprises her correspondence between the spring of 1919 and Easter Sunday, 1920, the day Zelda and Scott married. Zelda Fitzgerald was born this month in 1900. Note: Zelda was known for her quirks in punctuation (she was a particularly fond of the em dash), and these are retained in the text. As in the original printing, asterisks denote substantial editorial deletions and ellipses are used to indicate minor omissions. Each letter is addressed to Scott Fitzgerald. —C.L. Montgomery, 1919 Mrs. Francesca—who never heard of you—got a message from Ouija for me. Nobody’s hands were on it—but hers—and it told us to be married—that we were soul-mates. Theosophists think that two souls are incarnated together—not necessarily at the same time, but are mated—since the time when people were bisexual; so you see “soul-mate” isn’t exactly snappy-stylish; after all: I can’t get messages but it really worked for me last night—only it couldn’t say anything, but “dead,”—so, of course I got scared and quit. It’s really most remarkable, even if you do scoff. I wish you wouldn’t, it’s so easy, and believing is much more intelligent. Read More