March 22, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent But Is It Reading? By Sadie Stein Photo: Herman Turnip. Via Flickr. Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported that the prolific James Patterson is starting a new venture: a series of exciting, novella-length books called BookShots. Says the story: Mr. Patterson said the books would be aimed at readers who might not want to invest their time in a 300- or 400-page novel. And he hopes they might even appeal to people who do not normally read at all. If it works, it could open up a big new market: According to a Pew Research Center survey released last fall, 27 percent of American adults said they had not read a book in the past year. “You can race through these—they’re like reading movies,” he said during a recent interview in New York. “It gives people some alternative ways to read.” Read More
March 22, 2016 On the Shelf A Huntsman of Ogres, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of a new collection of Broodthaers’s poetry by Siglio Press. At a moment when Syria, in the Western imagination, is synonymous with violence and war, an anonymous Syrian film collective called Abounaddara “provides a strikingly different picture of Syrians and their country,” as our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, writes: “The members of Abounaddara, an Arabic phrase meaning ‘the man with glasses,’ began making films in 2010, but it was Syria’s version of the Arab Spring that gave them an urgent sense of purpose. For the past five years, they have posted a new documentary film every week, resulting in an archive of nearly four hundred shorts that can be watched for free on Vimeo … These films, whose subjects include soccer players for the Syrian national team, bereaved parents, former prisoners of ISIS, intellectuals, and refugees, are powerful portraits of individual Syrians, yet they can also be hard to read, in part because we’re told so little about the subjects and settings. This withholding of information is clearly by design. The films often begin and end in medias res, leaving the viewer to puzzle out their significance. They require one to think as well as to look.” The set designer Es Devlin has a CV that includes everyone from Shakespeare to Verdi to Miley Cyrus: “Devlin argues that there is something in between pictorial realism and complete abstraction. Though she borrows elements from every period, her approach is thoroughly contemporary. She’s not interested in straight realism, or in traditional production design … She is theatre’s postmodern expert, and has an instinctive sense of how Shakespeare and opera and fashion and pop concerts might draw from the same dark web of psychological information. Each of her designs is an attack on the notion that a set is merely scenery. She is in demand because she can enter the psychic ether of each production and make it glow with significance. She told me, ‘A stage setting is not a background, it is an environment’—something that directors and actors can respond to. ‘Sometimes what these people want is a liberator, someone who might encourage them to defy gravity.’ ” A new biography of Wallace Stevens, The Whole Harmonium, reminds us of the vast chasm between artist and art: “He never left North America. He was casually racist and anti-Semitic. A Hoover Republican, he distrusted labor unions. He drank too much at parties, to overcome his natural shyness, and later had to apologize for his boorishness. In the depths of the Depression, he made $20,000 a year, the equivalent of $350,000 today … ‘Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming,’ Marianne Moore wrote, comparing him to a person with ‘a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose.’ But the secret would out, and in his poems Stevens revealed it: The bluff American executive had a soul as baroque and fantastical as an aesthete’s, as profound and brooding as a philosopher’s.” Before he found renown as a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, collector, and God knows what else, Marcel Broodthaers was a poet. And his poems pursued (among other subjects) ogres: “The world of these poems is far removed from modern life. My Ogre Book in particular, a self-described ‘suite of poetic tales,’ unfolds across a medieval-ish neverland of forests, mad kings, storm-swept landscapes, and those ogres invoked in the title. Its fairy-tale idiom is vivid but generalized, the animal and human figures serving as emblems that are never far distant from elemental strife: ‘Lost in solitude / I have always been prey,’ reflects the speaker of ‘The Donkey-Drummer’; ‘The toads devour themselves / at the heart of diamonds,’ runs the full text of one of the brief untitled poems interlarded throughout the book; in ‘A Drama of Solitude’ a ‘huntsman of ogres’ turns on his loyal dog and kills him, preferring ‘to be alone in the Great North.’ Broodthaers’s archaism, which according to his translator extends to his use of anachronistic phrasing in the original French, was also deeply personal, providing him with a means to map his inner geography in ways both distanced and intimate.” Today in nomenclature and direct democracy: just when you’re coming around to the idea of the Internet as a tool to empower the masses, something like this happens … and you’re more convinced of its awesome potential than ever before. “A proposal by a British government agency to let the Internet suggest a name for a $287 million polar research ship probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, the agency is the latest group to see what happens when web users are asked to unleash their creative energy: R.S. Boaty McBoatface is a clear front-runner … Alison Robinson, a spokeswoman, said in an email that the group was ‘delighted by the enthusiasm and creativity’ of people vying for names like Boaty McBoatface. The ship is scheduled to set sail in 2019.”
March 21, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Paris Match By Dylan Hicks A cut-and-paste puzzle. Ed. Note: our puzzle correspondent, Dylan Hicks, is back at it again. As usual, the first correct answer will win a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, March 24, at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! This latest puzzle takes the form of a collage story, “Castling,” composed of thirty-three numbered sentences lifted from disparate sources: novels, poems, histories, liner notes, yellowed magazine articles, packaging, what have you. The story’s structure and pacing wouldn’t escape pointed critique in the more cutthroat writing workshops. Please make contextual allowances. Below the story are its thirty-three jumbled-but-lettered (and in seven cases, double-lettered) sources. Your task is to match each sentence with its correct source. So, if the sources weren’t jumbled, your answer form would look like this: Read More
March 21, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Character Limit By Sadie Stein From an Olivetti ad by Studio 44 Advertising, 1956. There’s an expression called “using too many points.” It refers to those moments when a novelist (or any storyteller, really) strains credulity by using too many coincidences or easy plot twists or intersecting plotlines. It’s when the reader, or viewer, loses faith—the jump-the-shark moment, in essence. In some ways, it seems like God is using too many points, making Twitter’s tenth anniversary coincide with World Poetry Day. In some ways, indeed, we have not seen such a luridly obvious contrast since SantaCon coincided with New York’s massive Millions March demonstration. Read More
March 21, 2016 On Poetry That Inescapable Animal By Craig Morgan Teicher On Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.” Delmore Schwartz, date unknown. “the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me,A manifold honey to smear his face,Clumsy and lumbering here and there,The central ton of every place,The hungry beating brutish oneIn love with candy, anger, and sleep,Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,Climbs the building, kicks the football,Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,That heavy bear who sleeps with me,Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,Howls in his sleep because the tight-ropeTrembles and shows the darkness beneath.—The strutting show-off is terrified,Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,Trembles to think that his quivering meatMust finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me,Has followed me since the black womb held,Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,A caricature, a swollen shadow,A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,The secret life of belly and bone,Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,Stretches to embrace the very dearWith whom I would walk without him near,Touches her grossly, although a wordWould bare my heart and make me clear,Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fedDragging me with him in his mouthing care,Amid the hundred million of his kind,The scrimmage of appetite everywhere. Read More
March 21, 2016 On the Shelf Beware the Mean Beach Attendant, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Ferrante’s The Beach at Night. Our basketball columnist, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, has stepped over to The New Yorker to bid farewell to Kobe Bryant. And he’s a defender of Bryant’s poem-cum-retirement-announcement: “ ‘Dear Basketball’ was mocked by some, but it has more going on in it, from a literary perspective, than may be immediately clear. Not only is the narrative circular, with a changed perspective at the end, it’s also both an epistle and an apostrophe—a form of rhetoric in which the speaker addresses an inanimate object as though it’s a living thing. As both a basketball player and a personality, Bryant has always put extraordinary emphasis on the importance of craft. He has also always owed a debt to Michael Jordan, and this was the case here as well: Jordan, too, published an open letter to basketball in order to say goodbye to the game. But his was in prose.” Today in parenting, Ferrante style: next year you can lull your sons and daughters to sleep with The Beach at Night, Ferrante’s new book, aimed at readers six to ten. It’s a sunny, feel-good story, suffused with light and hope: “The Beach at Night is a spinoff of The Lost Daughter, one of the author’s lesser-known early novels, in which a teacher goes on vacation in a coastal town and steals a doll from a child. In The Beach at Night, the doll isn’t stolen. Instead, she is abandoned by her young owner to face nighttime terrors such as the Mean Beach Attendant of Sunset and his friend, the Big Rake … ‘A Beach Attendant arrives, I don’t like his eyes,’ the doll says, according to a sample translation … ‘He folds up the big beach umbrellas, the chaises. I see the hairs of his mustache moving over his lips like lizards’ tails.’ ” Geoffrey H. Hartman, whose Criticism in the Wilderness took criticism perhaps farther afield than anything before it, has died at eighty-six. “In Criticism in the Wilderness, he argued that criticism should not only stand on an equal footing with literature but also be literature … In elevating criticism to the status of literature, Professor Hartman did not mean merely that it should be well written. What he also meant was that criticism should function for criticism’s sake alone. ‘The spectacle of the critic’s mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some ‘wild surmise’ about the text and struggling to adjust—is not that one of the interests critical writing has for us?’” Reminder: art and commerce don’t really “intersect” anymore. They’re running parallel toward the horizon, forever. Want to go the other way? You can’t. Just ask young artists: “A few years ago … if you were a creatively minded person, you might have become a sculptor or a painter. Now you are equally likely to become the founder of a tech startup, channeling your creative ideas and risk into what is, ultimately, a business … A lot of young startup people are viewing their companies as an artwork … I think the creativity involved in painting, say, and that of tech are getting closer. The incredible risk—with vision and values—that artists once represented is now embodied in these tech companies. That has a real resonance for me. People can make a beautiful business or a beautiful venture.” What compels a writer to abandon one language for another? Beckett, Conrad, and Nabokov all traded one tongue for another: “Some do it because they are intoxicated by the possibilities offered in a new language—the words and turns of phrase for which their own language doesn’t have any equivalents, the strange new rhythms and patterns of sound … Yet the adoption of a foreign language isn’t just about looking for a fresh perspective. It can signal a vexed relationship with the original language; the psychological burdens of a writer’s previous texts, his literary reputation in that language, the entire tradition in which he is working … Writers rejuvenate themselves by fleeing to foreign tongues. They escape all the psychic associations that gather around a language and a literary tradition. In a sense, it’s an extreme cure for writer’s block.”