April 29, 2016 Bulletin Last Chance: The Paris Review & Lucky Peach By The Paris Review Attention, shoppers: This is your last chance to get a dual subscription to The Paris Review and Lucky Peach, our favorite food journal. That’s one year of the best in literature and the best in food writing for only $50. The deal ends on April 30, so if you’ve been waiting to subscribe until, say, you’re a little hungrier, you should reconsider. You’re probably hungry enough right now. Subscribe here.
April 29, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fabric of Our Lives By Sadie Stein It’s not as if I could afford it. I could never have afforded a nightgown that expensive, and in that moment of my life—marginally employed, tenuously housed, financially and otherwise insecure—I could afford it even less than usual. The week before, a piece of my tooth had fallen out, a jagged shard, its edges brown with decay. I kept it in a dish by my bed. It had become an object of some fascination, but I really needed to go to the dentist. But I wanted that nightgown so much. I craved it as I hadn’t craved a thing since childhood. It was, in fact, the sort of thing I hadn’t wanted since childhood—feminine and pretty and frivolous. A whisper-thin slip of cotton so fine, so precious, that it transcended price and moved into the realm of the divine. Read More
April 29, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Blackass, Academic Robes, Floppy Disks By The Paris Review Photo: Anil Dash There’s a scene in The Producers in which Max Bialystock finds Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a script and rejects after reading the first line; “It’s too good,” he complains. I thought of this as I began reading A. Igoni Barrett’s novel Blackass, which takes Gregor Samsa’s experience as its starting point: Furo Wariboko wakes to discover that he has metamorphosed from a black Nigerian to a white Nigerian, which is a sort of person who doesn’t really exist. It’s hard to improve on Kafka’s original, but, luckily, that isn’t Barrett’s aim. Furo’s transformation into an impossible creature puts him in a unique position: he is white, and so has a natural power over his black countrymen, and he can speak Nigerian pidgin, which gives him influence with that same group; he is feared and respected. In Furo’s navigation from one of Lagos’s many struggling unemployed young people to a man of privilege and agency, Barrett deftly transmutes him from metaphor into full-fledged character. Barrett also employs a handful of secondary characters who metamorphose in other, less spectacular ways that are likewise tied to issues of race, gender, money, and status. (I thought, too, of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, another novel that mixes reality and the fantastical to great effect.) The freedom that reinvention engenders proves intoxicating. As one character marvels, “I was whoever I wanted me to be.” —Nicole Rudick I trust you weren’t expecting me to discuss anyone or anything other than Prince this week. I’d like to share three of the many remembrances that have moved me to tears. First is the story of a floppy disk that Prince distributed to the press in 1993, when he’d changed his name to the unpronounceable Love Symbol: the disk contained a font allowing journalists to type the glyph in place of his name. (“It just seemed like a logical thing to do,” his graphic designer said.) Second is an interview with his personal chef, Ray Roberts, who reveals Prince’s favorite desserts; while Ray was cooking, he often overheard Prince in diligent rehearsal. (“The kitchen was adjacent to the sound studio, so the biggest treat of all for Ray was hearing the music, every day, loud and clear in the kitchen … He says Prince would regularly play three seconds of a song, dozens of times in a row, to get it right.”) And the third is D’Angelo’s performance of “Sometimes It Snows in April” from the Tonight Show this week, which reduced me to a puddle. Sometimes I feel so bad, so bad … —Dan Piepenbring Read More
April 29, 2016 In Memoriam Jenny Diski, 1947–2016 By Robert P. Baird Jenny Diski died yesterday. You might have discovered that fact if you happened to visit the London Review of Books, where Diski published essays, reviews, and blog posts for nearly twenty-five years. Or maybe, like me, you learned it on Twitter, where, hours before the obituaries arrived, old tweets of Diski’s, some of them years out of date, started swirling back into circulation. They joined a tumble of appreciative links and quotations, an accumulation whose size quickly disqualified the possibility of happy coincidence. This is how death announces itself now, at least for the artists who don’t rate a breaking-news alert on our phones: a surge of mentions on social media, a collective attempt to plug up the vacuum of absence with digital abundance. For a moment you think you’ve lucked into an outpouring of spontaneous enthusiasm. Finally! you tell yourself. We’re talking about her now! But then quickly enough the rational brain reasserts itself and begins working down the checklist: Are they handing out Nobels today? A genius grant, maybe? Was someone quoted by Beyoncé? No? Oh. Oh, no. Read More
April 29, 2016 Books A Maker of Mirrors By Robert Cohen Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me turns fifty. Mimi and Richard Fariña, at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. Photo: David Gahr I am gazing, as I write, at a black-and-white photograph of Richard Fariña with his wife, Mimi (née Baez) Fariña, taken backstage at the Newport Folk Festival nine months before his death—fifty years ago this week—at the age of twenty-nine. To call the photo romantic would be an understatement. Mimi, her face a dark flower offered to an invisible sun, appears to be literally bursting out of her flip-flops as she executes some twirling, Isadora Duncan-y ballet step; while Richard, swarthy and black-haired, his eyes fondly delta’d (the Ray-Bans in his hand having apparently proven useless against all this brightness), looks like he can’t quite believe his luck, to have aligned his future with this lovely, exuberant sprite, a princess in folk’s royal family. He’s having a pretty good run of it for a guy who plays the dulcimer. And technically he doesn’t even play it that well. Read More
April 29, 2016 On the Shelf Cattle Rustlers Still Roam These Hills, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Looking for cattle rustlers. Bill Clinton is widely credited with having turned the cigar into an erotic emblem, but Charlotte Brontë got there first, in Villette: “Her heroine, a plain-faced and seemingly colorless 23-year-old school teacher named Lucy Snowe finds herself falling in love with her choleric Belgian colleague. Unsurprisingly, Paul Emanuel is a dark-haired, blue-eyed cigar smoker … One evening, Lucy steals softly into a deserted classroom to discover Emanuel immersed in her desk. ‘His olive hand held my desk open, his nose was lost to view amongst my papers.’ The reader is startled at the brazen snooping, but Lucy is unperturbed. She has known all along ‘that that hand of M. Emanuel’s was on the most intimate terms with my desk; that it raised and lowered the lid, ransacked and arranged the contents, almost as familiarly as my own … they smelt of cigars.’ ” Today in cattle rustling: it’s still a thing. Matt Wolfe knows. He went to Texas and rode along with the cow police: “Lawmen and rustlers now find themselves reenacting a centuries-old drama, one central to the creation myth of the American frontier. If the cowboy was the great American folk hero, the cattle rustler was his villainous twin … In Texas, when a cow or bull is reported stolen, the case is assigned to one of twenty-seven men, the employees of a trade group called the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association … ‘These days, we got more rustlers than you can say grace over,’ [Ranger Wayne] Goodman told me. ‘It used to be you didn’t catch a rustler that didn’t know cattle, or at least have some kind of agriculture in their background. Now, what with the drought, it doesn’t take much skill. Cows are so thirsty you can lead them into a trailer with just a bucket of water.’ ” A collection of smutty engravings from the late eighteenth century reveals that people fornicated then in much the same way they do now. Sad. You’d think we’d have made some minor advancements since then. In fact, these engravings are based on engravings from the fourteenth century, so we’ve been in a rut for even longer. At least the book has a good long title: L’Arétin d’Augustin Carrache ou Recueil de Postures Érotiques, d’Après les Gravures à l’Eau-Forte par cet Artiste Célèbre, Avec le Texte Explicatif des Sujets (The ‘Aretino’ of Agostino Carracci, or a collection of erotic poses, after Carracci’s engravings, by this famous artist, with the explicit texts on the subject). There’s not much to look forward to in this life, but we can take solace, at least, in the mini-golf courses of tomorrow. Coming soon to Trafalgar Square: “As part of the London Design Festival, which runs September 17 through 25, a number of international designers and architects have submitted plans for a nine-hole mini-golf course … London-based architecture practice Ordinary Architecture have designed a large cross-section of a pigeon that reveals its anatomy to illustrate how the bird’s digestive system works; players aim golf balls through its mouth and watch as they roll through its guts before popping out through its butt. The rendering by Hat Projects and Tim Hunkin is also pretty fun: envisioned as a high-rise building under construction (the future will include no sky!), the towering course will deposit poorly aimed balls into containers with labels such as ‘Affordable Housing,’ ‘Bankruptcy,’ and ‘Abandoned Dreams.’ On the other hand, if your aim is true, a contraption will pour you a glass of whiskey.” While we’re in London: it’s a great place to walk around at night. “In the darkness,” Matthew Beaumont writes, “above all perhaps in familiar or routine places, everything acquires a subtly different form or volume. Even the ground beneath one’s feet feels slightly different. Ford Madox Ford lamented in The Soul of London (1905) that, ‘little by little, the Londoner comes to forget that his London is built upon real earth: he forgets that under the pavements there are hills, forgotten water courses, springs, and marshlands’. It is not the same in the dead of night. At two A.M., in the empty streets, no longer fighting against the traffic of cars and commuters, the solitary pedestrian’s feet begin to recall the ‘real earth’ … The nighttime self, moreover, is another self. In ‘Street Haunting’ (1930), Virginia Woolf quietly celebrated ‘the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’. ‘We are no longer quite ourselves’, she observed.”