February 22, 2016 From the Archive How to Travel with a Salmon By Umberto Eco From the cover of How to Travel with a Salmon. Umberto Eco’s essay “How to Travel with a Salmon” first appeared in our Summer 1994 issue; it was later the title piece in a collection of Eco’s essays. Eco died last Friday at his home in Milan. He was eighty-four. In an interview with The Paris Review in 2008, he said, “I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing.” According to the newspapers, there are two chief problems that beset the modern world: the invasion of the computer, and the alarming extension of the Third World. The newspapers are right, and I know it. My recent journey was brief: one day in Stockholm and three in London. In Stockholm, taking advantage of a free hour, I bought a smoked salmon, an enormous one, dirt cheap. It was carefully packaged in plastic, but I was told that, if I was traveling, I would be well-advised to keep it refrigerated. Just try. Read More
February 22, 2016 On the Shelf Remember to Authenticate Your Falcon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Humphrey Bogart with the elusive (and presumably genuine) Maltese Falcon. Zadie Smith is thinking about The Polar Express 4–D Experience and Anomalisa and, of course, Schopenhauer: “One way of dealing with the boredom of our own needs might be to complicate them unnecessarily, so as always to have something new to desire. Human needs, Schopenhauer thought, are not in their essence complex. On the contrary, their ‘basis is very narrow: it consists of health, food, protection from heat and cold, and sexual gratification; or the lack of these things.’ Yet on this narrow strip we build the extraordinary edifice of pleasure and pain, of hope and disappointment! Not just salmon, but wild-caught Copper River Alaskan salmon almandine! And all to achieve exactly the same result in the end; health, food, covering, and so on … ” Today in late authors and real-estate envy: turns out Harper Lee had a place on the Upper East Side all these years, and she paid less than a thousand bucks a month for it. Early in the morning, you could spot her not at Starbucks but at the local butcher’s: “She was a regular at Ottomanelli Bros. butcher shop on York Avenue, visiting twice a day, first at 7:30 A.M. for a cup of black coffee and a raisin scone, said co-owner Nicolas ‘Uncle Nic’ Ottomanelli. She would go back in the late afternoon for a chicken, a lamb chop ‘trimmed real neat’ or the first cut of Delmonico steak.” Advice for biographers—if you want to earn the respect of your subject’s forebears, hide the dirty laundry. Henry James’s first biographer, Leon Edel, won the trust of the James estate in part because of his suspicious willingness to conceal aspects of the author’s sexuality: “Slowly, Edel became a trusted servant of the James estate as well as James’s biographer. He informed the family when a scholar he met at a conference expressed an interest in James’s homoerotic correspondence. He was assured by the Houghton Library that ‘she is certainly not going to see anything she’s not supposed to see.’ Edel’s job was to keep all insinuations about James’s sexuality at bay … Since Edel knew he would have to deal with James’s sexuality in his later volumes, he hoped that some other writer would spill the beans first so that it would, as he wrote, ‘relieve me of the onus of “breaking” the story.’ ” Advice for crime writers—put girl in your book’s title, make a little money. “I have talked to other crime writers that have been urged by various professional people in their life to put the world girl in their title,” Megan Abbott told NPR. “It’s not necessarily an issue with the content of the book itself, but there’s this sort of shorthand that if it has girl in the title, then I know what to expect.” Advice for movie-memorabilia collectors—if you’re going to shell out $4.1 million for the black statuette from The Maltese Falcon, make sure it’s the genuine article first. Ask Hank Risan, who owns two of them and has gone to great lengths to discover their provenance: “Mysteriously, there was an identical marking near the base on each of Risan’s Falcons. It appeared to be two numbers: a 7 with a crossbar and a 5, each followed by a period. Could it be a ‘7.5.,’ referring to the 1975 film? … Risan managed to make an appointment with Edward Baer, an assistant manager in the property department, who had been at the studio for thirty-seven years … When they showed him one of Risan’s Falcons, Baer said it was nothing like those he had designed. Baer explained that he had made the 1975 Falcons from the original 1941 mold, which he had fished out of a Warner Bros. warehouse. But the mold had deteriorated, so after using it to make a single replica out of resin, he destroyed the mold, then used the resin Falcon to make a new mold. The replicas made from this mold were scrunched forward and a little lopsided—sad cousins of the original.”
February 19, 2016 Poetry “Le Pont Mirabeau” by Guillaume Apollinaire By Sadie Stein In 1912, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire published “Le Pont Mirabeau” in the journal Les Soirées de Paris; a year later the poem appeared in his collection Alcools. Even in Apollinaire’s lifetime, the melancholy piece—which uses the image of the ornate bridge spanning the flowing Seine to explore love and the passage of time—was one of his best known. In the years since, its fame has only grown: it was set to music in a much-covered 1953 song by Léo Ferré, made into a choral arrangement by Lionel Daunais, and later interpreted by the Pogues. A plaque bearing the last lines can be found on the bridge’s foot. In a rare recording, you can hear Apollinaire himself read “Le Pont Mirabeau”: In issue 202, the Paris Review staff contributed unsigned translations of ten Apollinaire poems. The following translation of “Le Pont Mirabeau” is by Frederick Seidel. Le Pont Mirabeau Under Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at Saint Louis Flows the Seine And our past loves. Do I really have to remember all that again And remember Joy came only after so much pain? Hand in hand, face to face, Let the belfry softly bong the late hour. Nights go by. Days go by. I’m alive. I’m here. I’m in flower. The days go by. But I’m still here. In full flower. Let night come. Let the hour chime on the mantel. Love goes away the way this river flows away. How violently flowers fade. How awfully slow life is. How violently a flower fades. How violent our hopes are. The days pass and the weeks pass. The past does not return, nor do past loves. Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine. Hand in hand, standing face to face, Under the arch of the bridge our outstretched arms make Flows our appetite for life away from us downstream, And our dream Of getting back our love of life again. Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
February 19, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Puzzle Deadline Extended on Grounds of Extreme Difficulty! By Dylan Hicks Bernhard Sprute, Painting Bienenbild, 2010. Ed. Note: Perhaps you’ve noticed that we did not, in fact, announce winners yesterday. Noon came and went, and no announcement! It has been brought to our attention that the conditions, as they stand, are too harsh: the puzzles are really, really hard! So we’re modifying the rules—namely, just do as many as you can. Twenty? Great! Ten? Send ’em along. You have until Monday. Good luck! Read More
February 19, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Chicago, Dublin, The House of Fiction By The Paris Review I watched Spike Lee’s new film, Chi-Raq, last weekend, and although I agree with some reviewers that it’s an occasionally messy affair—one that pushes beyond the bounds of its source material, Aristophanes’s rowdy comedy Lysistrata—the film aims both to be capacious in subject and to speak to a wide audience, so how could it be anything but fulsome and exuberant? Lee and his cowriter Kevin Willmott set the stage in gangland Chicago and address gun and police violence, institutional racism, poverty, masculinity, and sexuality. If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Lee wants to show how these elements are inextricably linked, and he spares no one in indicting America’s self-perpetuating culture of violence. There is a lot to like about this film, not least its hopeful ending (fantastic but not naive) and its fully realized depiction of women as intellectual and sexual beings. (Really, the female characters are incredible. Pay attention, Hollywood.) —Nicole Rudick I’ve spent the last weeks under the spell of the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane. Readers of the Review will get to sample Murnane’s newest work in our Summer issue; in the meantime, I recommend his 2014 novel/treatise/manifesto A Million Windows, which comes to the U.S. this spring. Inspired by Henry James’s remark that “the house of fiction has not one window, but a million,” Murnane leads us through a rambling country estate where various narrators struggle to uncover the “true fiction” that underpins their existence. They also debate the legacy of previous tenants—James, Hardy, Proust, Woolf, Carver, et al—and spin fragmentary stories within stories, all the while elaborating a subtle and passionate argument about what fiction is and ought to be. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. Murnane is a writer of such precision and irony that one hesitates to describe A Million Windows except to say that it will fascinate (and amuse and provoke) anyone who has driven past that house “of two, or perhaps three, storeys,” and wondered what exactly was going on inside. —Lorin Stein Read More
February 19, 2016 On the Shelf Naming Miss Rumphius, and Other News By Sadie Stein A detail of the cover of Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney. This account of Georg Eberhard Rumpf, a seventeenth-century botanist, is fascinating enough. But can we talk about the fact that he was manifestly the inspiration for one of the greatest characters in all picture-book literature, Barbara Cooney’s Lupine Lady? Rumpf, Atlas Obscura tells us, “preferred to go by Rumphius, the Latinate spelling of his name.” Miss Rumphius, which won the National Book Award for Children’s Picture Books in 1983, is about a woman who adds beauty to the world by sowing lupines far and wide. Other stealth children’s-lit news: FURIOUS GEORGE, reads the headline. Seeing the Year of the Monkey in with a bang, a capuchin of Paraíba, Brazil, quaffed some cachaça in a bar and chased patrons around with a knife. “It was a bar staff oversight that ended with the monkey drinking some rum and taking the knife,” said fire-department Lieutenant Colonel Saul Laurentino. So they put him in a nature preserve. But George was furious! Narrates Laurentino, “We had to recapture him because he was causing problems and threatening children living near the reserve.” In other news, he punched the Man with the Yellow Hat and robbed an armored car. In which The New Yorker applies its famously rigorous copyediting process to Donald Trump’s statement on the Pope. As fans of Soul Mining and proud bearers of the word the—it’s in all Paris Review e-mail addresses—we have complicated feelings about the Metropolitan Museum of Arts’s new logo. Primarily among them: this does nothing to elucidate the age-old confusion between the museum and the opera. Vulture has not hesitated to term the bold, new design a “graphic misfire,” but, while some of us may mourn the passing of the art-nouveau M that graced their buttons for decades, it’s always good to see the humble article getting its due. Andreas Huyssen defines the written miniature for the LA Review of Books: “Modernist miniatures are short prose texts written for little magazines or newspaper feuilletons (arts supplements) by major German, French, and Austrian modernists. Always published in groups, they reflect on the fleeting experiences of modern city life, especially as it was shaped by the arrival of photography and early cinema. As such, they register the resulting historical transformation in perceptions of time and space in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. These feuilleton texts, which we now read in book form—for example, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris or Benjamin’s One-Way Street—sought to capture the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression, social conflict, and cultural upheaval that defined urban existence. In their focus on dream images, ghostly appearances, surreal memories, and urban phantasmagorias, they largely shunned the realistic description, typical of older urban sketches like those of Louis Sébastien Mercier in the 18th century. The miniature did not merely imitate visual media — it absorbed them, condensing objective and subjective perceptions into the very structure of language and text and asserting the aesthetic specificity of literary language and its own power to capture visual experience. In their compressed form, miniatures also accommodate the short attention spans of urban readers, but in their conceptual ambition and complexity, they sit like foreign bodies in the feuilleton, a section of the newspaper mainly geared toward easy consumption.”