September 30, 2015 From the Archive Aunt Alma By Dan Piepenbring Judith Mason, Self Portrait Age Ninety (detail), 1985. “Aunt Alma,” a poem by W. S. Merwin from our Spring 1958 issue. Merwin is eighty-eight today. Read More
September 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent And So Say All of Us By Sadie Stein A birthday from Mr. Belvedere, one of TV’s many disquieting alternate universes. Television Land (not to be confused with the ever-sadder TV Land) is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The residents get very excited about fast food. Dads are childish buffoons and moms are smug scolds. All kids are bratty smart alecks. Police witnesses are strangely insolent and really busy. And everyone who uses online dating services is beautiful, chic, and well adjusted. But perhaps the strangest thing about this parallel universe is that in lieu of “Happy Birthday,” they sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Read More
September 30, 2015 On Translation That Old Goat! By Damion Searls Robert Walser’s scrupulous art of translation. Robert Walser Today is International Translation Day, an occasion of particular piety among the few who observe it. Translation, that glorious service to culture and human understanding! There are failures, too, though. Some are of the sort that plague most any endeavor in this vale of tears: inadequacy, incompetence, ineptitude. A New Yorker cartoon, beloved in translator circles, shows someone approaching a horror-stricken writer and saying, “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the book of you?” Read More
September 30, 2015 On the Shelf Mourning the Striped Pig, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Time was you could find this fella on newsstands, getting sloshed. Fact: the American newspapers and gazettes of the nineteenth century had names that absolutely trounced their present-day counterparts where liveliness and creativity are concerned (with the exception of the Modesto Bee, which remains a truly great paper title). In simpler times, you could spend your mornings over the Horseneck Truth Teller and Gossip Journal, Estabrook’s Great Public Chowder, Steven H. Branch’s Alligator, and the Striped Pig, among others. For a different kind of nostalgia, contemplate MacGyver, which hit the airwaves thirty years ago and has left in its wake a mess of nerdy white-male heroics and misplaced, quasi-racist adventure: “MacGyver embraces its own insistent loneliness to an absurd degree. And that, in turn, makes the whole show feel distinctly retrograde … MacGyver sags under the weight of its old-school definition of heroism. It glorifies the single man—the single mullet—while treating other people as victims and saps.” Not dissimilarly: in a new book, Lions in the Balance, Craig Packer attempts to careen between the MacGyver-esque machismo of those who hunt lions in the Serengheti and the “communal emotionalism” that so often animates conservation movements. “It is his position, as the story begins, that the lions of the Serengeti need sport hunters to survive; that Cecils must die if prides are to endure … In his quest to restructure incentives, in his willingness to take the long view, in his commitment to numbers over narrative, Packer deems himself ‘ultimately alone.’ ” Trying to build a brand of one? Of course you are! This is the age of the brandividual. Let me tell you a few things you already knew, though: it’s a futile project, authenticity is a myth, and branding strategists are working to make our society a waking nightmare of empty professionalism. “I don’t think it’s possible to appeal to everyone and still be authentic, let alone unique. When [my branding strategist] declared my web-site font ‘almost hippie-dippy,’ I couldn’t help but get a bit defensive. So what if it is? My truest self does not use ‘impact as a verb.’ My truest self likes to be catty about former employers that have done me wrong, not write pleasant summaries of what I was able to achieve while working there. My truest self is sending GIFs to my friends, not cheerfully influencing strangers’ thoughts.” Today in new and novel uses for the black crayon: Richard Serra’s strangely affecting “Ramble Drawings” are seventy-four works on paper, all “variations on Malevich’s square, stretched out and pressed with black lithographic crayons to achieve different textures: oily, streaky, pocked, solid. The pictures, stacked like rows of large, incongruous industrial cement bricks across the gallery walls, are anything but monotonous, however. Black never looked so colorful.”
September 29, 2015 Bulletin 2015 MacArthur Fellows in The Paris Review By Dan Piepenbring Nicole Eisenman, Black Pepper Marlboro, ca. 1993, ink and mixed media on paper, 22″ x 30″. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. © Nicole Eisenman. Congratulations to the MacArthur Foundation’s Class of 2015, four of whom you can find in the pages of The Paris Review and here on the Daily. Read More
September 29, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Bad Moon on the Rise By Sadie Stein Photo: Patrick Murtha In the hours before the lunar eclipse, my husband and I were in one of those nightmarish, mammoth craft stores—shopping for some vellum, as one does—and I began to sing along with Dion’s cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” I sing a lot, and with great gusto. And if you’re doing Dion, well, you have no choice but to go full falsetto on the wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder part. I mean, anything worth doing, et cetera. My husband looked slightly self-conscious. After a moment, he said, “It makes me feel funny sometimes when you sing along like that in public.” Read More