March 9, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Taking Inventory By Sadie Stein False advertising, yes. But still. At the ninety-nine-cent store, I looked in vain for a bathtub stopper. “Can I help you?” asked a woman, presumably the owner. When I told her what I was looking for, she flew to a seemingly random shelf and began to scan it with a gimlet eye. She tried to give me a drain catch and then one of those flat rubber pads that covers everything, but I really wanted the sort with a chain. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I can just go to the hardware store … ” At which moment she gave a triumphant cry and pointed to the stopper that was, indeed, hanging some six feet over our heads. Employing an impressive combination of hook, broomstick, and step stool, she managed to retrieve it as I looked on anxiously. “Hardware store, she says!” she crowed. I’d never actually heard anyone use that construction in modern life. Read More
March 9, 2016 On the Shelf The Thunder Runs Again, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Bristol Old Vic’s thunder run. Photo courtesy Bristol Old Vic Today in the gender binary: using data collected from e-book readers, a start-up called Jellybooks (inspires confidence, no?) has decreed that “men decide much faster than women if they like a story or not.” The company’s founder, Andrew Rhomberg, spoke to the Guardian: “If an author wants to hold on to a male reader, they have ‘only twenty to fifty pages to capture their attention,’ according to the research. ‘No room for rambling introductions … The author needs to get to the point quickly, build suspense or otherwise capture the male reader, or he is gone, gone, gone.” (I didn’t make it to the end of the article.) On her mother’s side, Alex Mar is descended from Juan Ponce de León: yes, Mr. Fountain of Youth himself, conquistador extraordinaire, slaughterer of innocents. Mar has taken a hard look at her ancestor: “The currency of his name, I guess, has made him the only distant ancestor who warrants mention. I’ve heard him spoken of in two registers: in the Grimms’-fairy-tales voice reserved for children, a tone that says, Oh yes, it’s all true and isn’t it incredible?; and in that faux-modest way of adults, that way of deliberately sounding lighthearted about a thing that makes you proud—a thing you’re convinced gives you an edge … Most historians seem to agree that Juan Ponce de León is one of the more humane of these European settlers, treating the locals he absorbs into his enterprise more like indentured servants than slaves. But what does that mean? How thinly do we have to slice these moral distinctions to see the difference? … Do we inherit darkness, even at a few centuries’ remove?” At the Guggenheim, Francine Prose looks at the work of the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, whose mural How to Work Better you may have seen at the corner of Houston and Mott Streets in New York: “The kind of humor captured in the How to Work Better mural—simultaneously playful and sincere, mingling the banal and the profound, attentive to the contradictions, ironies, and accidental beauties of the world—pervades the Guggenheim show … The two- and three-dimensional works, videos, and films manage to be rebellious without being strident, to be witty and cerebral without ever seeming pretentious or coy, to challenge traditional notions of what art is and can do, and to comment on the society in which we live without making us feel that their principal focus is provocation or attacking our politics and social order.” The Bristol Old Vic, a British theater, dates to 1766, and it has the special-effects technology to match. To summon the sound of thunder, for instance, they roll a bunch of wooden balls down a pine-pitch chute built into the rafters. This “thunder run” had been out of commission since 1942—but now it’s back: “Theater historian David Wilmore was enlisted to carry out test runs, and over three days the Bristol Old Vic technical team learned how to use the old-fashioned sound device … Most thunder runs disappeared with the advance of new technology, and other theaters used less cumbersome methods from the start, like metal thunder sheets rattled offstage. These were often joined by rain boxes, which consisted of dried peas rolling through a long structure with ledges nailed inside, and a wind machine, featuring a rotating cylinder of wooden slats covered with fabric.” What if critics dropped the whole burdensome critical apparatus—the long ledes, the cool authority, the markers of taste—and told us about their dreams? Reviewing Rebekah Rutkoff’s The Irresponsible Magician, one critic sees a way of casting off the constrictions of the book review: “I dream, sometimes, that I am reading—just reading—and as I approach the lower pages of a long PDF, my computer’s battery flashes an urgent red. My more exciting dreams lead me on quests to find some precious object or escape some nefarious force. It’s the normal sort of dream-stuff, but for one crucial thing: my dreams always unfold in cavernous and deserted buildings. In my dreams I navigate endless corridors, traverse indoor gardens, and paddle through underground canals. The landscapes I dream up resemble nothing more than malls. Rundown, or even abandoned malls … Commerce snakes its way into each dream-mind’s working—snakes in, loops round fragments of sensation and assembles them as sense. It urges us—as do family, society, language, and law—toward an inner consensus.”
March 8, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Great Books By Sadie Stein Gunnar Asplund, View of Interior for Paris Exhibition 1925, Bookcase Wall Elevation. There’s something profoundly sad about being surrounded by books and unable to find anything to read. It feels like a failure: yours, society’s, the universe’s. It can happen in a poorly stocked library branch, a failing bookstore, an airport newsstand. And it’s a horrible feeling. Read More
March 8, 2016 Correspondence The Entrepreneurial Kafka By Reiner Stach These two excerpts from Reiner Stach’s Is That Kafka? 99 Finds reveal a new side to Kafka—and new shades of meaning for the Kafkaesque. Is that Kafka? How Kafka and Brod Almost Became Millionaires During a trip that they took together in August and September of 1911, traveling to Paris via Lugano and Milan, Kafka and Max Brod hit on the idea of creating a new type of travel guide. “It would be called Billig (On the Cheap),” Brod remembered. “Franz was tireless and got a childlike pleasure out of elaborating all the principles down to the nest detail for this new type of guide, which was supposed to make us millionaires, and above all wrest us away from our awful office work. Then I engaged in a very serious correspondence with publishers about our ‘Reform of Guidebooks.’ The negotiations failed because we didn’t want to disclose our precious secret without an enormous advance.” Read More
March 8, 2016 The Revel David Szalay Wins Plimpton Prize; Chris Bachelder Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review Every April, at our Spring Revel—you have your ticket, don’t you?—the board of The Paris Review awards two prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2016 honorees, David Szalay and Chris Bachelder. David Szalay. The Plimpton Prize for Fiction is a $10,000 award given to a new voice from our last four issues. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates his zeal for discovering new writers. This year’s Plimpton Prize will be presented by Rachel Kushner to David Szalay for his novellas Youth, from issue 213, and Lascia Amor e siegui Marte, from issue 215. Chris Bachelder. The Terry Southern Prize is a $5,000 award honoring “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” in work from either The Paris Review or the Daily. It’s named for Terry Southern, a satirical novelist and pioneering New Journalist perhaps best known as the screenwriter behind Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. Southern was a driving force behind the early Paris Review, as is amply demonstrated in his correspondence. This year’s Southern Prize will be presented by the playwright John Guare to Chris Bachelder for his comic masterpiece The Throwback Special, a novel serialized in our past four issues. Recent winners of the Plimpton Prize include Wells Tower, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Emma Cline; Elif Batuman, Mark Leyner, and Ben Lerner have received the Southern Prize. The Review began awarding prizes to its contributors in 1956. Click here for a full list of past winners, including Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Christina Stead, Denis Johnson, and Annie Proulx. Congratulations to Chris and David from all of us at the Review! We look forward to seeing you at this year’s Revel, on April 5 at Cipriani 42nd Street.
March 8, 2016 On the Shelf Give a Warm Welcome to Mr. Darcy’s Shirt, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hunk alert. Today in dripping-wet Regency heartthrobs: this is not a drill, people. Mr. Darcy’s soaked white shirt is bound for these shores. You know the one: it doesn’t exist in the pages of Pride and Prejudice, but Colin Firth made it famous in the 1995 BBC adaptation. And now: “The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington confirmed that it has secured a loan of the billowing white shirt worn by Mr. Firth in an indelible scene in the 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice … In the scene, Mr. Firth, playing the aloof Mr. Darcy, dives into a pond and emerges with the garment molded to his strapping physique … A half-serious proposal to keep the shirt wet and molded to its display dummy by using misters like those in the produce sections of grocery stores was deemed ‘curatorially unsound’ … But outside the protective glass case, the library is bracing for a humid reaction.” Has the rise of the M.F.A. left a mark on American literature? Not really, according to two professors who have, as is their professorial wont, crunched the numbers, using “computational text analysis” to compare novels by writers within and without M.F.A. programs. They found “no real distinctions at the level of language, themes, or even syntax. When we went further to test whether the way writers constructed their characters was any different, once again nothing significant showed up. It was extremely difficult to separate the M.F.A. and non-M.F.A. writing groups in any meaningful way … The M.F.A. promises to make the distinction of race come alive, take on literary heft, through learning how to write and the work of writing. But we have no evidence that M.F.A. authors are any better at this than their less educated non-M.F.A. peers. If there’s a quality that distinguishes a writer as Asian American or black, we could not find it.” The French writer Serge Brussolo has published more than 150 books—sometimes as many as three a year—zero of which are available in English. That will change with The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, a 1992 novel about “a gang of metaphysical burglars who enter a dreaming mind and pull daring heists to retrieve its treasures.” (Christopher Nolan’s Inception borrows liberally from the concept.) As Tim Martin writes, “The anarchic surrealism at work in Brussolo’s novel is such that it can never quite be reduced to a parable about the artist and society. Like Burroughs in his cut-up fictions, or Ballard in the mad Californian dreamscapes of his Vermilion Sands stories, he is coolly at home in the deranged landscape he creates, in which hypnotists whisper cryptically to security cameras, dead dreams lie frozen in special vaults lest they explode when they thaw and flowers sprout wildly in cityscapes of the mind as the dreamers’ bodies decay.” Christine Smallwood on The Paris Review’s anthology of new writing, The Unprofessionals: “There are more relationship problems here, treated in isolation; more people alone, talking to themselves, remembering. This is not an accident, but an aesthetic … We continue reading not to see what will happen, but to find out how the narrator will think about whatever happens to happen. Though characters wake up in beds, walk around city streets, or drive in trucks, they do not really live anywhere except their own minds. They sense place as one might sense a phantom limb … Dislocation is not synonymous with disembodiment. A strong attention to bodily experience runs through The Unprofessionals.” Today in facades: Jean Stein’s West of Eden: An American Place is an oral history of Hollywood and Los Angeles that deploys, as Andrew O’Hagan writes, “a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality.” He summarizes a story in the book about Jennifer Jones: “In later life Jones went to bed in full make-up and hair—it took four hours every day—just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but below it she was tearing her napkin into shreds. This was not in the script.’ ”