March 25, 2016 On the Shelf Bring on the Batemans, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in a still from American Psycho. John Jeremiah Sullivan on Shuffle Along, one of the first all-black musicals on Broadway: “The blacks-in-blackface tradition, which lasted more than a century in this country, strikes most people, on first hearing of its existence, as deeply bizarre, and it was. But it emerged from a single crude reality: African American people were not allowed to perform onstage for much of the nineteenth century. They could not, that is, appear as themselves … In Shuffle Along, two black people fell in love onstage, and [the journalist Les] Walton wanted to see how a white audience would handle this … What he expected to see was not rage or revolt but something more ambiguous, an occasional discomfort passing through the room, and perhaps at certain moments a holding-back too, on the part of the cast. ‘White audiences, for some reason,’ Walton wrote, ‘do not want colored people to indulge in too much lovemaking.’ ” Speaking of musicals: American Psycho is one now. When Bret Easton Ellis’s novel came out, in 1991, some bookstores refused to stock it. Times have changed. As Dwight Garner writes, “This novel was ahead of its time. The culture has shifted to make room for Bateman. We’ve developed a taste for barbaric libertines with twinkling eyes and some zing in their tortured souls … Reading Mr. Ellis’s novel today, the hysteria of 1991 is almost inexplicable to me. It’s apparent from the start that Patrick Bateman is a sendup of a blank Wall Street generation. He’s a male mannequin, the ultimate soulless product of a soulless time … Something has happened since 1991 to our response to violence, especially when it is seasoned with a shake of wet or, especially, dry humor. Increasingly inured to the mess, we’ve learned to savor the wit.” What about Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary? Was it, too, ahead of its time? Though its observations about youth and work have long been dismissed as pedestrian, the economy has made them radically prescient, as Daniel Wenger writes: “Two years before Sex and the City, Fielding offered a third-wave route around the battleground between love and power … Today, Bridget Jones needn’t be limited to the confines of its chick-lit designation. The notion that the equations of life do not add up is still a particular problem for women of all ages, but many young people, no matter their gender, will find some of Bridget’s story familiar. Within a couple of years of graduating college, Bridget would have found her job prospects threatened by the global recession of the late eighties and early nineties; even when we first meet her, she’s flitting from position to position. Millennials began joining the workforce in the wake of the Great Recession, and according to a 2014 Council of Economic Advisers report, the consequence is an almost epigenetic stain on professional lives.” Sometimes people talk about fiction and nonfiction, and I’m like, What’s really the difference, you know? And they sort of phumpher and mumble a bit before they throw their hands up. But a lot of us feel this way: “According to Geoff Dyer, who says his next book is ‘a mixture of both fiction and non- but will be published as non-,’ the strength of the distinction in anglophone culture has waxed and waned … The nonfiction novels of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer blurred the lines again in the 1960s, he continues, and the boundary is ‘perhaps going through another porous phase right now’ … ‘You’d have to go back to the early nineteenth century or earlier to a time when “literature” referred to fiction and nonfiction rather than to a particular, highly regarded form of imaginative writing,’ he adds. Dyer cites Raymond Williams, who suggested that ‘the special regard in which fiction comes to be held … is probably connected to romanticism and the emphasis put on the imagination—which is itself a response to the rise of industrialization: a very fact-based process as Dickens emphasizes later in Hard Times.’ ” But why stop there? Why knock down the walls between genres when you can mount an assault on the separation between language and culture? On Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal: “He argues that language, like everything else that matters to human beings, cannot be understood as a kind of semantic Lego, where we acquire individual words with firm, clear shapes and string them together to form sentences, paragraphs, essays, and books. Language is shaped by the culture that has produced it, which means that it, in turn, shapes those who go on to use it. Hence: ‘The basic thesis of this book is that language can only be understood if we understand its constitutive role in human life’ … He agrees that ‘speech is the expression of thought,’ but insists ‘it isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could exist independently.’ The broadly Wittgensteinian alternative he offers to this reductionism is a kind of holism, in which the meanings of words hang together in complex webs in which culture and semantics cannot be disentangled.”
March 24, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent How to Get Out of Bed By Sadie Stein Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1867, etching and aquatint on paper. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote, At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, If I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” —But it’s nicer here … So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort? Read More
March 24, 2016 From the Archive An Indulgence of Authors’ Self-Portraits By The Paris Review Philip Roth “An Indulgence of Authors’ Self-Portraits” appeared in our Fall 1976 issue, the same year Burt Britton’s book Self-Portraits—Book People Picture Themselves was published. Britton’s book displays his collection of self-doodles by famous authors, artist, athletes, actors, and musicians, much of which was sold at auction in 2009. “So what does Mr. Britton look like?” asked the New York Times in 2009. “He refused to be photographed.” —Jeffery Gleaves One evening fifteen years ago Burt Britton (now head of the Review department at the Strand Bookstore) and Norman Mailer were sitting together in the Village Vanguard where Britton then worked. On impulse, Britton asked Mailer for a self-portrait. Mailer complied—the first of a collection which began to fill the pages of a blank book in the Strand. These were done by friends—primarily writers—who entered their drawings and salutations when they visited the store. No one has refused him a self-portrait. When he remarked on James Jones’ generosity, Jones explained, “Burt, for Christ’s sake, I wouldn’t be left out of that book!” As his collection grew, Britton was approached by a number of publishers, but always refused publication on the grounds that the self-portraits were the property of his private mania. But recently Anais Nin and others have persuaded him to let others in on how writers view themselves. Random House will publish the entire collection this fall under the title, Self-Portraits—Book People Picture Themselves. Many of the portraits reproduced here are by writers who have been published and/or interviewed in this magazine. Read More
March 24, 2016 Arts & Culture The Borges Memorial Non-Lending Library of Imaginary Books By Seth Gannon A brief survey of fictional books. Erik Desmazières, Library of Babel. I’m soon to move across the country, and surveying my bookcases—the three in the living room and the three in the bedroom, plus the unshelved piles that crop up from any flat surface—fills me with dread. The only cure, I’ve found, is to let my thoughts wander to another, even larger literary collection, a kind of underworld reflection of the one all around me. The books in this second collection are not all fiction, but they are all fictional. I’m imagining a place the late Umberto Eco might appreciate: the Borges Memorial Non-Lending Library of Imaginary Books. Read More
March 24, 2016 On the Shelf Whither the Fog Machine? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Antje Naumann. What does Chris Bachelder’s new novel The Throwback Special have in common with Leonard Michaels’s 1981 book The Men’s Club? Both, as Miranda Popkey writes, are excavations of a certain kind of American white-dude frustration, and both have a chorus of male voices. But The Men’s Club was all sexual bluster and aggression, and The Throwback Special shows how masculinity has changed in the intervening decades: “Bachelder’s reliance on sub-rosa psychological churnings partly reflects his strengths as a novelist: he excels as an analyst of the anxieties that undergird social mores rather than as a dramatist of extravagant scenes. But it also reflects, I think, something about the lives and fears of a number of white American men, circa 2016. These men, Bachelder’s novel seems to argue, see themselves, relative to their forebears, as smaller and weaker and more cautious creatures; they shy away from the overblown tantrums, the explicitly dominant displays, that were once their due … Where The Men’s Club offers over-the-top operatics, The Throwback Special gives us hidden neuroses; as a result, the men of Bachelder’s novel can tend to look, in comparison, diminished.” All right, everyone, we’ve been putting it off for long enough. It’s time to have a good think about the physical properties of stage fog. “Stage fog is a delicate creature: whether as haze that hangs in the air, a thicker vapor, or the low-lying kind that the lighting designer Natasha Katz calls Brigadoon fog—the stuff that wafts like a cloud around the actors’ ankles when it’s kept really cold, and rises higher when it’s not … Often water- or oil-based, sometimes made with dry ice, fog is difficult to control and as evanescent as theater itself—especially the fast-dispersing variety. Actors’ Equity has a whole host of guidelines about using it safely … ‘Fog and its compatriot, low fog, the super-chilled stuff that hugs the floor—those two things eat up more tech time than anything else. You can go for a week and just keep tweaking.’ ” There exists a shadowy cabal hell-bent on overthrowing the modernist artistic tradition. These men loathe Picasso. They spit on Rauschenberg. Graffiti makes them weep. They gather at night … Wait, no, sorry, they gather at eight thirty in the morning in their efforts to restore classical painting to its lost glory. Jacob Collins is their leader. “The stories surrounding Jacob Collins all tend to go like this: a young artist, lonesome in a love for premodernist painting, stumbles upon Collins, who has built a life out of the premise that the twentieth century nearly ruined art … Collins doesn’t just want to revive premodern painting; he wants to live like a classical painter … Collins’s own rigorous studies—starting with classical fundamentals and working up to the live figure—form the basis of the pedagogy. In the first year, students dedicate mornings to cast drawing and cast sculpture, and afternoons go to master copies, block-ins, figure drawings, and perspective. The next year, students spend mornings on cast paintings and afternoons learning figure grisaille and anatomy. Year three involves figure painting in color and color theory, and year four focuses on figure painting in color, figure sculpture, and still life.” You could throw a rock out your window and hit a fan of Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Advocates for Between the Acts, Woolf’s last novel, are harder to come by. Why is it so often overlooked? “Despite the inherent comedy that its setting and action allows—the book describes a pageant staged in the grounds of a country house—it evokes and encompasses, as Woolf herself hoped it would, ‘all life, all art, all waifs, all strays.’ Its ambition and execution—complete with moments of fragmentation, passages of prose poetry and darting movements from one character’s consciousness to another—are strikingly original, daring and yet assured.” While we’re in the more esoteric section of Brit Lit: “Unless you are a scholar of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature you have probably never heard of John Taylor the Water Poet. Or for that matter Robert Greene, the bohemian university wit, or Richard Barnfield, the sodomitical sonneteer … They subvert our expectations of what we have come to consider canonical … We can take this ferryman Taylor, this self-declared ‘water poet,’ as representative of these marginal poets. Considering his conservatism, it may seem contradictory to argue that there is anything transgressive about him. Taylor, who liberally sprinkled his pamphlets with jokes at the expense of his wife, seemed almost achingly conventional … In his poetry, reportage, pamphlets, and reviews Taylor provided a voice so common that it was overlooked in his own time and sadly still often overlooked today.”
March 23, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 Introducing the Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards By Dan Piepenbring The 2016 Whiting honorees. Top row, from left: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Madeleine George, Layli Long Soldier, Safiya Sinclair, J. D. Daniels, Mitchell S. Jackson. Bottom row: Alice Sola Kim, Catherine Lacey, Ocean Vuong, Brian Blanchfield. We’re delighted to announce the ten winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards: Brian Blanchfield, nonfiction J. D. Daniels, nonfiction LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, poetry Madeleine George, drama Mitchell S. Jackson, fiction Alice Sola Kim, fiction Catherine Lacey, fiction Layli Long Soldier, poetry Safiya Sinclair, poetry Ocean Vuong, poetry For the second year, the Daily is proud to feature selected work from all the Whiting honorees. Click each name above to read on and learn more about them. You can also see them read tomorrow night (Thursday, March 24) at BookCourt—John Wray, himself a former Whiting recipient, will host the event. Founded in 1985, the Whiting Awards, of fifty thousand dollars each, are based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The program has awarded more than six million dollars to three hundred writers and poets, including Jonathan Franzen, Alice McDermott, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Paris Review’s own Mona Simpson and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here for a list of all the previous honorees. If you’re curious about last year’s winners, you can read some of their work here. Congratulations to this year’s honorees!