June 17, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dads, Doublemint, Dumplingette By The Paris Review A still from Cosmos. Nineteen cheers to New Directions for reissuing Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, first published in 1987 and hard to find since then. In this tiny volume, Weinberg examines nineteen different translations of a classic four-line poem by the eighth-century poet Wang Wei. The result is the best primer on translation I’ve ever read, also the funniest and most impatient. (E.g.: “to me this sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD.”) The new edition, out in October, includes ten new attempts, most of them clearly influenced by the original Nineteen Ways. —Lorin Stein The Polish director Andrzej Żuławski died in February, leaving us with Cosmos, his final film, adapted from Witold Gombrowicz’s 1965 novel of the same name. The plot, if that’s what this tangle of surreal set pieces should be called, follows a vampirically handsome law student on holiday at a French bed-and-breakfast, where he finds a worrisome succession of dead animals hanging in the woods. Nominally, we’re watching Cosmos to discover who’s responsible for these cruelties; really, though, we’re watching because its ensemble excels at depicting various lunacies, and it’s always fun to watch lunatics. A bloviating patriarch uses a toothpick to pick up spilled peas one by one; a mute priest unzips his fly to reveal a phalanx of bees; someone is dressed inexplicably like Tintin. The movie is an intoxicating pageant of life’s confusions—some violent, some sexual, and some just metaphysical. If you like Resnais, Buñuel, or people who do really good Donald Duck impressions, you will be moved. If not, you’ll at least leave with a new favorite term of endearment: “my dumplingette.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
June 17, 2016 Look Extraordinary Rendition By Tom Overton Edmund Clark, The building at Antaviliai, erected on the site of the paddock of the former riding school. © Edmund Clark, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery In 1968, the CIA set out to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific. For the sake of discretion, the work was subcontracted to Global Marine (Glomar), a private company that specialized in ocean-floor drilling. When the journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi tried to find out more under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA would “neither confirm nor deny” that there were documents about the ship used, the Glomar Explorer, or documents about their censorship. No information passed into the public sphere, but a new term did: “The Glomar Response.” It lives on, underpinning everything in Crofton Black and Edmund Clark’s book on more recent CIA activities, Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition. Read More
June 17, 2016 On the Shelf With Some Help from My Invisible Friends, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Georgiana Houghton, Glory be to God, ca. 1868. Today in really, really, really, really depressing things that Silicon Valley people say with casual authority: Nicola Mendelsohn, a Facebook exec, gave a presentation in London where she claimed “that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech … ‘The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,’ Mendelsohn said. ‘It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.’ In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: ‘You’ll have to write for the video.’ ” In 1871, Georgiana Houghton debuted her “spirit drawings,” a set of abstract watercolors that she made with the encouragement of her “invisible friends.” People were scared: “What she put on display was unlike anything any Western artist had made, or any member of the British public had ever seen. The watercolor drawings, a little larger than A4, were intricately detailed abstract compositions filled with sinuous spirals, frenetic dots, and sweeping lines. Yellows, greens, blues, and reds battled with each other for space on the paper. The densely layered images appeared to have no form, and no beginning or end. There was no traditional perspective to enjoy. There was no mythological subject to interpret; no moral narrative to read, and no hint of portraiture or landscape to scrutinize.” It’s been a while since we thought about how worthless most literary depictions of sex are, so let’s think about that some more: “Literature about sex, no matter who has written it, is almost always terrible, and everybody knows it … In writing my own book full of sex, there was almost no one I could turn to for inspiration. There wasn’t a single book I looked to and thought, ‘What I’m trying to do is write sex like she did or like he did.’ There weren’t even movies and TV shows I felt had handled it the way I wanted to see it done. You know what movies and TV shows are really brilliant at capturing? Bad sex. They’re great at doing awkward, depressing, uncomfortable sex scenes where everyone is sort of strangled in the sheets … The other thing that movies and TV shows are good at nailing down is the kind of phonily intense sex scene in which the involved parties are grabbing fistfuls of hair and grunting and slamming each other around because their passion, their chemistry, is so overpowering it can’t be softened by courtesy, affection, or fear of causing actual physical harm.” To read the medieval poem “Pearl” requires a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the New Testament. But just go ahead and read it anyway. You will still like it, as Josephine Livingstone explains: “There is something about the very strangeness of the poem that magnifies its emotional power. When we look at a Byzantine mosaic, for instance, we may not grasp the precise meaning of its images without scholarly help—but that remoteness lends such artworks the marvelousness of something just beyond our understanding. In his new translation of ‘Pearl,’ Simon Armitage, who is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry, conveys that feeling of the almost-but-not-quite comprehensible, the feeling that can make medieval art at once eerie and wonderful.” On Jacques Audiard’s new film Dheepan, which depicts a Sri Lankan family escaping to the Paris ghetto: “The Parisian fields are a motley sort of place, self-governing—if you can call checkpoints controlled by the local drug don a form of self-government—inhabited by a mix of north African Arabs, Cameroonians, and Armenians. But not, however, Sri Lankans—who have contributed relatively little to France’s migrant waves, and are little known there. Between the main characters and their adoptive home there is no flicker of recognition, no colonial history to interpose even a reassuring mutual dislike. Plonked somewhere in the girdle of mongrel Frenchness on the outskirts of modern Paris, oblivious to the snippets of Arabic around them, they are recognized as vaguely Indian. Dheepan, who has refashioned himself as an odd-job man, is known simply as ‘Mowgli.’ ”
June 16, 2016 In Memoriam Bill Berkson, 1939–2016 By Dan Piepenbring We were sorry to learn that the poet Bill Berkson has died at seventy-six. Berkson’s poems appeared in two issues of The Paris Review, from Winter 1968 and Fall 1970; he was also an accomplished art critic, contributing regularly to Artforum and Art in America. In a column for Harriet in 2013, he wrote of “poetry’s sensational impact”: Read More
June 16, 2016 From the Archive Dentist Poem By Daisy Friedman From The True Philosopher and Other Cat Tales, 1919. Daisy Friedman’s “Dentist Poem” appeared in our Winter 1997–98 issue. She is a writer and teacher in New York. i I love candy, anything really chewy and so full of sugar it stings like a Sugar Daddy. No matter how much I twist and pull, the long caramel tongue lasts me the full Sunday matinee at Radio City Music Hall, but just in case, I’ve also stored in my pea coat pocket a quarter pound of Swedish Fish. When the magician is pulling a rabbit out of his hat, I bite the head off one of my yellow fish. Tomorrow I have an appointment with Dr. Shapiro, my dentist. When I get home tonight, I will find my dental floss, which is stored somewhere under the bathroom sink. I’ll pull the white waxed cord all up and down and in between my teeth. I will brush before and after dinner. Dr. Shapiro knows I like candy and if my checkup isn’t good, even if I have cavities, he will still give me a lollipop. The only time Dr. Shapiro didn’t give me a lollipop was the time I bit him. He hurt me so I bit his finger. That was many appointments ago. I hope he’s forgiven me. Read More
June 16, 2016 Brushes with Greatness In the Restroom at the Walter Reade Theater By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Sofia Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola. In 2014, the magazine In Touch broke what is still, to my mind, one of our era’s most quintessential gossip stories. The weekly claimed that Lindsay Lohan was holding court at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, in an apparent attempt to impress her retinue, wrote out the names of three dozen of her sexual conquests—most of them A-list Hollywood celebrities such as Justin Timberlake, Colin Farrell, and Zac Efron—then tossed the list aside. A mistake, obviously, since that was likely when one of the entourage pounced, retrieving the sheet and eventually getting it into the hands of an In Touch staffer. The magazine reproduced the list in Lohan’s all-caps, American-middle-school-girl handwriting. Read More