May 3, 2016 On the Shelf Marisol’s Marathon Silences, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Marisol, in 1963. Marisol, the mononymic pop-art sculptor known for her carved wood figures and legendarily long silences, has died at eighty-five. “Marisol was a star of the New York art scene in the 1960s, breaking through with a 1962 solo show at the Stable Gallery that featured her bright, boxy sculptures of people representing a range of American life—everyone from the Kennedys to a dust-bowl farm family to the artist herself. The works, which combined painted and minimally carved wooden figures with found objects like shoes and doors, were funny but incisive, simple-looking but expertly made. They helped launch a career that included great artistic success and stardom, followed by decades of obscurity and, more recently, a revival and renewed appreciation of her exceptional work.” (Marisol designed a print for The Paris Review in 1965.) While we’re on sculptors: Liene Bosquê works in souvenirs. As Sarah Gerard recalls, “I first saw her work in the MoMA PS1 show ‘Greater New York,’ where she was showing a piece called Recollection, comprising dozens of hand-sized souvenirs from her travels, laid out on a plain, wooden table in a grid pattern resembling Manhattan’s. Though the souvenirs are found objects, she also uses them to make molds for other small sculptures in clay or plastic. With a background in architecture and an interest in history’s relationship to memory, Bosquê gives equal consideration to mathematical precision and sensory stimulation in her pieces—she has a rule that all of the souvenirs she uses in her work must be hand-sized, small enough to carry in her pocket as she picked them up on her travels over fifteen years. ‘Something that’s close to you,’ she explains.” Hold the phone, everybody. Paul Simon’s dancing again. He’s dancing and using cuss words. He’s limbering up. “In June,” Kelefa Sanneh writes, “Simon will release his thirteenth solo album, Stranger to Stranger, which is friskier and funnier than its recent predecessors—his most danceable music in decades. He meets his old nemesis near the end, in a song called “Cool Papa Bell,” named for the great Negro League center fielder. ‘Motherfucker,’ Simon mutters … Simon doesn’t apologize for his conviction that music should be easy on the ears. He has shown little interest in the grit and grunge that often signal rock-and-roll authenticity, and even now, at seventy-four, he sings in a voice that is boyish and clear. More than any other musician of his age and stature … he seems unburdened by the years, and by his own reputation. He has managed to become neither a wizened oracle nor an oldies act, and his best songs convey the appealing sensation of listening to a guy who is still trying to figure out what he’s doing … Not long after Simon’s fiftieth birthday, on an episode of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head, Beavis referred to him as ‘that dude from Africa that used to be in the Beatles.’ ” You know that old saying, “It’s always the inveterate masturbators who try to censor the mail”? Well, that’s true. It’s true now, and it was true in the 1870s, when Anthony Comstock, an intrepid dry-goods salesman whose diaries reveal that he liked to jerk off a lot, began his crusade to suppress erotic materials through the postal service. “As Comstock told it, a fellow employee at the dry-goods store became afflicted with a sexually transmitted disease after developing an interest in erotic literature. Comstock went to the bookstore where his friend made his purchases, bought some illicit reading material, and returned with a police captain who arrested the dealer … In February 1873, Comstock asked [Morris] Jesup to send him to Washington to plead for a more stringent federal postal law. Jesup bought him a ticket and Comstock boarded the train with an assortment of offensive items from his trove … Republican leaders gave Comstock an enthusiastic welcome. [Schuyler] Colfax allowed Comstock to set up an exhibit of his unspeakable wares in his Senate office.” In closing, let us meditate, as we are wont to do, on the role of hedgehogs in Slavic folktales: “These adorable animals are predominantly found in Russian movies and fairy stories but they appear, also, in tales from neighboring countries. The Bulgarians have two particularly interesting accounts of the hedgehog, both of which point to his wisdom. In one tale, he advises God on how to use the sky to cover the earth, while in another he is the only animal not to attend the wedding of the Sun and the Moon. When asked for the reason, he says that he’s busy learning to eat rocks, for if the union takes place and the Sun has lots of little sun children, all the plants in the world will dry up … In the Soviet animated film Ezhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Hedgehog is the bridge between the conscious and the dream world, evoking sympathy from the audience as they watch him lost in a thick mist, chasing after the mirage of a white horse in the clouds.”
May 2, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Anagramming the News: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Child’s play. Ed. Note: last week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Daria Mikolajczak, who gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Daria! Below, the solution to Dylan’s puzzle. Read More
May 2, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fabric of Our Lives, Part 2 By Sadie Stein Karl Herbsthoffer, Junge Dame im Boudoir, 1829. Last Friday I wrote about an encounter with the platinum card–carrying elite. But this is a two-part story, you see. For many years later, long after that glimpse into the lives of the rarefied, I found myself at the local flea market. This is a sort of addiction in my family: even when houses are being sold and divested or apartments are bursting at their meager seams or neighbors have called the city to complain about the sheds on our property (depending on the generation), we are incapable of curbing our need for “bargains.” We brake for thrift shops; we brake hard for furniture on the curb; we scour the local papers for tag, yard, or garage sales. Read More
May 2, 2016 Bulletin It’s Back: The Paris Review Commencement Gift Box By Dan Piepenbring Rumor has it that our founding editor George Plimpton was once called upon to give a commencement speech at Bennington College. Instead of bringing an armful of platitudes about inspiration and the future, he brought an armful of fireworks—maybe more like a truckload of fireworks, actually. There was one for each graduate, each carefully labeled. Rather than intoning from behind a podium, Plimpton set off the fireworks one by one, shouting each graduate’s name just before the rockets went screaming into the sky. If you want a gift for your graduate that isn’t highly flammable and illegal in most states, try our Commencement Gift Box. It includes a one-year subscription to The Paris Review; a copy of The Unprofessionals, our new anthology, featuring the best young writers at work today; and two archival issues of the magazine—200 and 214—in which James Salter, Eileen Myles, Robert Caro, Jane Smiley, and Luc Sante share their memories of starting out as writers, with plenty of good advice for the graduate in your life. The boxes are available from now through the end of June. You’ll find all the details here—order now. It’s the next best thing to lighting something on fire.
May 2, 2016 At Work The Art of War Reporting: An Interview with Janine di Giovanni By Susannah Hunnewell Photo: Rannjan Joawn I met the war reporter Janine di Giovanni more than a decade ago, when I was a new expatriate in Paris. Her bohemian apartment, half a block from the Tuilerie Gardens, was filled with journalists, writers, newspaper editors, and members of NGOs from places I had only read about. On the table were large bowls of pasta drenched in butter and truffles—she’s from a large Italian American family from New Jersey—and an inviting assortment of open bottles of red wine. Our children, both a year old, became best friends in the way only children can, and remain so to this day. Janine remains the only person I know who’s canceled a playdate with the excuse that she had “to go to Syria on Thursday.” Known for her wrenching and immediate dispatches from Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and Syria for the London Times, Janine took an unusual road to war reporting. She went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction and completed a master’s degrees in comparative literature at the University of London. Her conversion to war reporting came, she says, when she saw a photograph of an Israeli soldier burying a Palestinian teen alive with a bulldozer full of sand. “It disturbed me horribly—so I went. I met a human-rights lawyer who took me to the refugee camps and said, If you have the ability to write about people who have no voice, then you have an obligation. And that was that.” Giovanni is currently the Middle East editor of Newsweek. Her books include Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love; The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge; Against the Stranger, about the effect of occupations during the first intifada on both Palestinians and Israelis; and The Quick and The Dead, about the siege of Sarajevo. Her latest, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, is out this week. I spoke with her reporter-style by Skype—I reached her in Paris, where she still lives. The stories you tell are steeped in tragedy—the death of a child, the violent torture of a prisoner of war. How do you conceive of your reader, who is, after all, not a war reporter and isn’t used to this? My attitude is, I hope readers are upset by this. That’s what I want to do, shock them out of their complacency. But I’m not doing it deliberately. Some reviews of my latest book would say, There’s no holds barred, she tells these bitter stories incredibly graphically. But I just told my readers what my reporting had told me. I didn’t exaggerate, I didn’t add to anything. I didn’t have to. Read More
May 2, 2016 On the Shelf I Feel Like Chicken Tonight, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Who doesn’t? In 1858, Walt Whitman made an impassioned contribution to a series called Manly Health and Training, a kind of precursor to the self-help movement. In the piece, newly rediscovered, he implores the young men of his day to pursue lives of fervid activity, and to avoid indigestion. “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice,” he says. “Up!” As the New York Times notes, “Whitman’s first installment strikes a vatic, exclamatory note: ‘Manly health! Is there not a kind of charm—a fascinating magic in the words?’ he writes, before outlining the path to ‘a perfect body, a perfect blood.’ That torrent of advice that follows touches on sex, war, climate, bathing, gymnastics, baseball, footwear, depression, alcohol, shaving, and the perils of ‘too much brain action and fretting,’ in sometimes rambling prose.” While we’re on dead white male writers: Is it time to release Rudyard Kipling from detention? True, he was a racist, colonialist naïf who had the gall to speak of the white man’s burden, but The Jungle Book isn’t as bad as all that, Malcolm Jones writes: “The Jungle Book stories were not written by Colonel Blimp. They are not propaganda. They have no agenda. And they are not, in fact, even very optimistic at heart. If anything, Kipling’s tales quietly but inescapably leave their readers with a chilly view of life—nasty, poor, brutish, and short (except for elephants, who live practically forever). First and last, the Mowgli stories condemn all humans as foolish, superstitious, mean-spirited, and full of hubris, specifically for our propensity to assume superiority over the animal kingdom … The truth is, Kipling wrote a lot of ill-conceived garbage and he wrote a lot of truly wonderful fiction as well, and it’s usually not at all hard to tell the difference. Even when it is, the effort is justified. Pondering how a writer so good could occasionally go so wrong forces us to contemplate how all of us, even the most enlightened, can be swayed and deluded by the assumptions and beliefs that hold sway in the times in which we live.” There was a time, roughly a quarter century ago, when one would hear the phrase “I feel like” only in catchy ads for Chicken Tonight. But now the phrase is everywhere, leaving our discourse awash in subjectivity. As Molly Worthen writes, “ ‘I feel like’ masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too—but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks … The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction—and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction—between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.” If your goal is to shake the education system to its bedrock, upending the very notion of a curriculum and doing away with universities as we know them … you’re gonna need some convincing posters. When Maurice Stein and Larry Miller wrote the Blueprint for Counter Education, they were sure to spruce up all that talk of Eldridge Cleaver and Jean-Luc Godard with some impressive visuals, now collected in a new edition of the book. “Surrounded by charts, the participant will be confronted by ideas and issues that compel him to interact with everything going on around him—from movies, to riots, to political campaigns,” the introduction reads. “There is no text book, no syllabus, no final exam … THE REVOLUTION BEGINS HERE.” Reading Joseph Brodsky’s poem “On Love,” Kathryn Harrison was struck by the line “For darkness restores what the light cannot repair”: “The line also defines writing, at least writing the way I experience it. For me, writing is a process that demands cerebral effort, but it’s also one informed by the unconscious. My work is directed by the needs of my unconscious. And through that dark, opaque process, I can restore what might otherwise be lost … I teach writing, and before I taught I never would guessed the thing I say most often is: ‘Please stop thinking.’ But people really write better without thinking, by which I mean without self-consciousness.”