May 23, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Licorice Fields at Pontefract By Sadie Stein … Yum? Today I happened to pass one of my favorite spots, Myzel’s Chocolates—a small, idiosyncratic shop in midtown Manhattan, with a world of confections. For the licorice lover—that strange, fierce, embattled tribe—the store is a must. Myzel’s has the best licorice selection in the city: salty, sweet, terrier-shaped, boat-shaped, cute, creepy, hard, soft. “Licorice of the world,” they advertise. “Over a hundred different kinds.” And today a sign in front of the door read: NATIONAL LICORICE WEEK. Read More
May 23, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Thirty Malapropisms By Dylan Hicks Ed. Note: 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 and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. (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 Thursday, May 26, at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! Mrs. Malaprop is the pompous aunt in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy, The Rivals, and the eponym for the word malapropism. As one of her relations puts it in the play, she’s known for her use of “words so ingeniously misapplied, without being mispronounced.” Repeatedly and obliviously, she reaches for a high-flown word but comes out with a similar sounding, contextually nonsensical or ludicrous one—appellation, for example, becomes compilation; alligator morphs into allegory. Each sentence in this month’s puzzle contains a malapropism. Your task is to identify the misapplied and intended words. As in The Rivals, the confused words are occasionally out-and-out rhymes, but most are more subtly alike in sound. For illustration, we’ll quote two of Mrs. Malaprop’s lines: But the point we would request of you is, that you will promise to forget this fellow—to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory. He is the very pine-apple of politeness. Were those quotations part of our puzzle, correct answers would read something like this: Illiterate should be obliterate. Pine-apple should be pinnacle. Or you might right “illiterate = obliterate,” or “Not ‘pine-apple, you silly, ‘pinnacle!’ ”—unlike Alex Trebek, we’re not sticklers about how you phrase your answers, though you do need to include both words in each answer. As always, the first person to submit a complete set of correct answers—or, in the event that no one achieves that, the person who submits the most correct answers—wins a free Paris Review conscription. Read More
May 23, 2016 On the Shelf The Nostalgia of Constipation, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a vintage Dulcolax ad. On the streets of English, adverbs are the knockoff Rolex salesmen lurking in the shadows, always ready to sell you something shiny and fake. Christian Lorentzen urges you to stay away: “The adverbs easiest to hate are the so-called sentence adverbs—also known as conjunctive adverbs. Writers who lean on the crutches of moreover, accordingly, consequently, and likewise are declaring a lack of confidence in the sequence of their own logic or a lack of faith in their readers’ ability to follow it. Deploying indeed is tantamount to saying, ‘I’ve just had a thought and, indeed, I’ve just had another.’ Next time you come across the word meanwhile, ask yourself when else all this could have been happening. What is the adverbial phrase of course but a smug duo dropped in to congratulate writer and reader for already agreeing with each other. Nevertheless, nonetheless, and the atrocious however are symptoms of an anxiety over a proliferation of the word but. But you can never have too many helpings of but, and sound thinking will make hay of contradictions.” Today in bowel movements: they’re never as good as they used to be. As Maggie Koerth-Baker writes, “Since at least the Renaissance, Western cultures have fretted about their own bowels while looking back to an imagined past where mankind pooped in peace and harmony. According to James Whorton, professor emeritus of medical history and ethics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, modern life has long been considered the ultimate cause of constipation. Take, for instance, a bit of doggerel poetry from mid-1600s England: ‘And for to make us emulate, / The good old Father doth relate / The vigour of our Ancestors, / Whose shiting far exceeded ours’ … More than just nostalgia, though, the belief that modern lifestyles caused constipation was viewed as a medical emergency, on the scale of what we think of the obesity epidemic today.” Most historical fiction aspires to verisimilitude—the author hopes to convince readers that she’s conjured an accurate version of the past. But “a handful of recent works of fiction,” Lucy Ives writes, “have taken up history on radically different terms. Rather than presenting a single, definitive story—an ostensibly objective chronicle of events—these books offer a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices. They are not so much historical as archival: instead of giving us the imagined experience of an event, they offer the ambiguous traces that such events leave behind. These fictions do not focus on fact but on fact’s record, the media by which we have any historical knowledge at all. In so doing, such books call the reader’s attention to both the problems and the pleasures of history’s linguistic remains … restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.” When I pass by a beautiful woman, the first thing I think is, God, I hope she doesn’t get tuberculosis. Then I think, She probably already has tuberculosis. I’m especially inclined to believe this if the woman is dressed in a high Victorian style—in the nineteenth century, I have learned, “one of the ways people judged a woman’s predisposition to tuberculosis was by her attractiveness, [historian Carol] Day says. ‘That’s because tuberculosis enhances those things that are already established as beautiful in women,’ she explains, such as the thinness and pale skin that result from weight loss and the lack of appetite caused by the disease. [A 1909 book] confirms this notion, with the authors noting: ‘A considerable number of patients have, and have had for years previous to their sickness, a delicate, transparent skin, as well as fine, silky hair.’ Sparkling or dilated eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips were also common in tuberculosis patients—characteristics now known to be caused by frequent low-grade fever.” Pity the Emily Dickinson biographers, for theirs is a life of mystery and suffering: “In the twenty-first century, Emily Dickinson has become very much about our selves, an interpretation that has been allowed to flourish partly because of her anonymity: The bulk of her poems, of course, were published after she died, and she lived with her parents all her life, unmarried and leaving letters that only hint at possible lovers, hardly ever leaving her home. During the last thirty years, it has been many writers’ impulse to try her on, explore the ‘masks,’ as [Jerome] Charyn calls them, that she wore in her poems, and give motive to her writings through more expressive means.”
May 20, 2016 Arts & Culture Max de Radiguès and the Difficult Age By Robert Pranzatelli When Max de Radiguès began making comics, he had never taken drawing lessons. “I loved to draw but wasn’t especially good at it,” he explains. “I quickly stopped trying to draw in a realistic way and went for an efficient one.” He wanted the reader to understand instantly what he was trying to convey, and as he pursued this goal, his drawings became simpler and simpler. Now, after more than a decade, and with a rapidly growing list of published works, he has begun, he says, “putting in more details and more backgrounds”—though nothing too elaborate; he still wants readers to be caught up in the stories rather than in intricately rendered, virtuosic panels. Here one begins to see the vital connection between his personal and formal modesty: the absence of ego that, in freeing an artist from the impulse to show off, can lead to subtler choices. In a Radiguès work, an economy of line carries, but never competes with, an abundance of empathy. His stories center on adolescents (often boys, often in balanced or opposing pairs) with a warmth, humor, and humane sensibility that occasionally sets the reader up for an unexpected jolt when harsher aspects of reality creep in. Read More
May 20, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Light, Lust, LiveJournal By The Paris Review Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent [251b], ca. 1923, black-and-white photograph flush-mounted on card, mounted to board, 4 9/16″ x 3 9/16″. In 1925, Alfred Stieglitz began a series of moody, diminutive photographs of cloud patterns (abstracted, they resembled curls and skeins of smoke); he called it Songs of the Sky, before later changing it to Equivalents. He showed the images to his friend, the composer Ernest Bloch, who, according to Stieglitz, declared it to be music. Partly in response to his friend’s photographs, Bloch composed “Poems of the Sea.” A show at Bruce Silverstein Gallery takes its name from Stieglitz’s series and presents five pairings of art and music, including Stieglitz/Bloch. The idea is to listen to a piece of music while looking at artworks that were inspired either by that composition, that composer, or by music more generally. Though it’s not always convincing, the idea of having two mediums respond and react to and provoke one another is intriguing. I love Frederick Sommer’s ink drawings of musical notation (they’re hieroglyphs and also stacked Futurist cityscapes), but his coupling with Chris Washburne is too on the nose. The obliqueness of Lisette Model’s photographs of people’s shadows resonates well with Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal Pierrot lunaire. My favorite, though, may be Aaron Siskind’s black-and-white photographs of male bodies tumbling through space set to a string-quartet arrangement of John Cage’s delicate, gorgeous Cheap Imitation: neither transcends its medium, but instead seems more acutely, more exquisitely itself. —Nicole Rudick I spent some time this week on websafe2k16.com, an Internet project dedicated to cataloging memories of the early web. Built by three artists—Ben Sisto, Josephine Livingstone, and Joe Bernardi—the “literary/graphic” project asks writers to draw inspiration from one of the 216 web-safe color codes, such as the offending #66FF33 or the wistful #0099CC, writing personal recollections in 216 words. I scrolled through Web Safe’s rainbow grid, reading lyric memories about the conversant gargle of dial-up (Andrew Blevins, #CC6600), multiplayer computer games (Adrian Chen, #33CC00), LiveJournal (Anna Weiner, #003366), and other relics of the early web. Colors in the palette regularly inspire memories of braces and prom, group chats and forums. I wondered, reading about MySpace and MSN, what the colors of the early Internet trigger for me. Maybe Ask Jeeves, the first man in my life to whom I never could ask the right questions. Or Xanga, where I lurked on blogs written by my classmates. Or maybe Machu Picchu, an obscure nineties computer game I’ve lost nearly all memory of and haven’t ever found again. All that’s left is the name, and the bellow of nostalgia. —Caitlin Love Read More
May 20, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent In-Flight Entertainment By Sadie Stein From a vintage in-flight magazine. I’m not afraid of flying, but I’m deathly afraid of flying underprepared. I’m a light packer when it comes to clothes, but my carry-on is unwieldy and absurd. Any trip demands at least two books—one fun, one serious—and a couple of magazines—worthy and trashy—because the idea of being stranded in the air without sufficient reading material is terrifying. The variety is crucial. Who knows, after all, what you might crave in the world of the air? You might be a different person. Read More