September 25, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tall and Thin, Tortoises, Tennis Sweaters By The Paris Review A 2014 photograph by Cedric Nunn, from Unsettled, now at David Krut Projects. Ntabakandoda monument, built by Sebe of the Ciskei Bantustan government as a homage to the Xhosa Chiefs who fought the British. Ndoda was a Khoi Chief who was killed in battle by Rharrabe. A few pages into Barbara Pym’s 1944 comedy of manners Crampton Hodnet, I turned to Sadie in confusion. What’s with the descriptions? On page sixteen, “He was dark and thin, just a little taller than she was”; on seventeen, “He was a tall, distinguished-looking man with a thin, sensitive face”; and on twenty, “He was a short, jolly-looking man, while Mrs Wardell was tall and thin.” As Sadie explained, Pym never saw fit to publish Crampton Hodnet in her lifetime, so it’s possible that all these height measurements are a sign of inexperience and haste. On the other hand, the novel is such a sharp send-up of romantic conventions (handsome new vicar meets long-suffering lady’s companion) that they may be part of the joke. In any case, the book is addictive, with scenes as funny and impatient as anything in her later work. —Lorin Stein The Greek tragedies were written for and performed by soldiers. Sophocles, a retired general, wrote his plays—many of them postwar tragedies, PTSD tragedies—between two major Athenian wars, and because they were performed during citywide festivals, they seem to have been a part of the civic war mechanism: a way for the citizenry to cope, understand, and grieve together. Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project, which I first read about in Harper’s, stages readings of ancient Greek tragedies for service members and veterans in an effort to remind them that they’re “not alone across time.” Doerries’s new book is about his readings of the plays—and how he gained support from the U.S. military for his project—but it’s also a study of the therapeutic values of art. Many of us lamely suffer from PTSD headline fatigue: it’s always in the news but rarely makes the front page anymore, not for lack of persistence but because there aren’t many new ways of thinking about it. Doerries’s book implicates everyone when it says that the most useful healing is public rather than private. It’s hopeful, in a way, to consider that we can learn through catastrophe: that this is not a new idea, and that it’s best done together. —Jeffery Gleaves “All the more elegant forms of cruelty, I’m told, begin / with patience.” That’s the first line in Carl Phillips’s newest collection, Reconnaissance. The book is thin, no more than forty-eight pages, and though you could easily read it in an afternoon, I’d recommend sitting with it awhile longer. Raw and unafraid, Phillips’s poems sift through the cruelties of the heart; he writes of the old lovers that “rise as one before you …/ like perennials you’d forgotten to expect again”; of betrayal, “the kind of betrayal … I’ve been waiting for, / all my life”; of mistakes, “the ones that sweetly rot beneath me.” He left me so mesmerized that I reread the collection as soon as I’d finished it. A few favorite (devastating) lines from “The Strong by Their Stillness”: “You can love a man / more than he’ll ever love back or be able to, you can confuse / your understanding of that / with a thing like acceptance or, / worse, all you’ve ever deserved.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
September 25, 2015 On the Shelf Lost in This Masquerade, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Masquerade. Our new issue features Ben Lerner interviewing Eileen Myles. If you’re of the try-before-you-buy mind-set, you can read a new, long excerpt: “There’s a whole female industry engaged in materially supporting the illusion that the artist doesn’t work directly on his legacy, his immediate success. He’s just a beautiful stoner boy or an intellectual … We should let the writing world and its ways of distributing awards be part of fiction. We should expose the very cultural apparatus that is affecting the reception of the book you’re reading. What’s dirty is that we’re not supposed to talk about how it has sex and reproduces.” And if you’ve been seeing Myles’s name a lot lately, that’s because she is, after nineteen books, getting some belated recognition, especially from younger readers, who envy the way “she seems to have gotten away with precisely the kind of New York life that doesn’t seem possible anymore—living cheaply, maintaining only glancing alliances with major academic institutions, and earning a living by making art pretty much the way she wants. ‘It helps that I was queer, it helps that I grew up working class,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t afraid of being poor. I didn’t want to live in a big house. I’m the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.’ ” In 1979, a puzzle book called Masquerade, by Kit Williams, landed on shelves in the UK. It went on to sell two million copies, and not because of good storytelling or any such hogwash—it promised to lead its most perceptive readers to buried treasure. “Within Masquerade’s covers were clues that pointed the way … an intricately worked golden hare, also made by Williams, in his typically perfect first attempt at goldsmithing. The prize was somewhere in England and the directions to find it encoded in the book, and that was all anyone knew … ” Not to get all clickbaity on you, but you’ll never believe what they found! In a previously unpublished piece, Robert Walser imagines what the rules of seduction were in the days before heating, petroleum lamps, and railroads ruined the game: “Calling someone up on the telephone did not, at the time, occur to anyone, and even the most dignified and important persons in all the land received no telegrams. Upon the seas—this much he knew—sailing ships circulated. India and America were somewhere or other. At the theater, Italian actors put on works that were sometimes operas, sometimes dramas or comedies—he’d only seen one so far. He had no doubt already done a fair bit of kissing, for he was handsome, and the attractive have little difficulty initiating pleasant ensnarements … ” Yogi Berra (pour one out) was renowned and ridiculed for his malapropisms—“You can observe a lot by watching,” “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” and the like—but let’s not send this man into the next life without acknowledging the full scope of his verbal talents. “Some of his best-known quotes go a long way to showing just how well language may be used … And many of them are not mistakes at all.”
September 24, 2015 Contests The Winners of Our 2015 #ReadEverywhere Competition By Dan Piepenbring Remember this summer’s #ReadEverywhere contest, the one we went on and on about? It was a great success. We asked readers to submit pictures of themselves reading The Paris Review or the London Review of Books around the world, and you did, by the hundreds, from far and wide. Now the time has come to announce the winners, selected in an elaborate ritual not unlike the papal conclave. (Have the rolling timpani in your head commence … now.) Read More
September 24, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Reality By Sadie Stein A still life by Ernest Blaikley, 1916. Last week, we finally took the jacket and the boots to be repaired. I bought the jacket and the boots about ten years ago, and they were already a good thirty years old by then. For a long time now, the lining of the jacket has been so tattered it’s hard to get your arm in the sleeve for the web of fraying nylon. And the boots are infirm: bowed and unsteady, with a distinct wiggle to the heel. “Let’s get those repaired,” said my husband. “Oh, I will,” I said vaguely, knowing I would never do anything of the kind. Read More
September 24, 2015 Books Will They or Won’t They? By Margaret Eby The not-quite-romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald. Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. Some friendships hover between romantic and platonic, anchored to the latter by circumstance or fate. It’s a sitcom trope: the will-they-or-won’t-they couple, always teetering at the edge of love. But though TV demands a tidy resolution—the answer is almost always that they will, and do—in life such friendships often remain in limbo indefinitely, stretching on for years, even decades. Such was the case for Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. By the time they became acquainted, in 1970, both were well established in their fields—Welty in that nebulous genre called Southern literature, and Macdonald in hard-boiled detective fiction. Welty’s stories and novels captured the voice of small towns in Mississippi; Macdonald, the pen name for Ken Millar, set his novels in Southern California, where he and his wife, Margaret, had settled. His books explored, through his Philip Marlowe–equivalent Lew Archer, the ways in which the dream of suburbia could turn twisted and nightmarish. Welty was an avid reader of crime fiction, so much so that the now-defunct Choctaw Books in Jackson used to keep a pile of paperbacks on hand for when she stopped by. Though she went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, the only award Welty publicly displayed in her house was the Mystery Writers of America’s Raven Award, which she received in 1985 for being the Reader of the Year. She and Millar, by all accounts, had admired each other’s writing from afar for many years, but never connected. Then Welty published her novel Losing Battles, and Millar, using his real name, wrote her a brief, appreciative note. Read More
September 24, 2015 On the Shelf French Frame Frenzy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via J. Paul Getty Museum / Hyperallergic We’re in the midst of serializing Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special—a book about middle-aged men who meet annually to reenact the 1985 NFL game in which Joe Theismann fractured his leg on live TV—whose whole gestalt I’ve tried in vain to describe to people. Fortunately, in a new interview Bachelder does my work for me: “The play is just five seconds long, but it has extraordinary density and power. It’s like some kind of astronomical event … Even if you know nothing about Lawrence Taylor or Theismann or the NFC East or the 1985 season or what quarter it was or what the score was, you still have this visceral reaction to this gruesome injury. You can still feel the terrible randomness and chaos. It opens up the awful possibility in our minds that any single play—or any single plan or design—could end up like this. All of this interests me, and the play is useful to me as a writer because it’s so contained and discrete. It’s not like trying to write about an entire game or an entire season … So the play itself is circumscribed and dramatic, but the novel is primarily concerned with it as a locus of nostalgia for these middle-aged men. There is something almost primitively spiritual about their desire to reenact this disastrous play.” Real talk from across the pond: “I was the head of the Piers Gaveston Society, which is the society that David Cameron allegedly stuck his dick in a pig for. I never did that … No one, as far as I know, fucked a pig’s head. But if they had it wouldn’t have mattered (provided it was consensual). Fucking a pig’s head is not what makes David Cameron a rubbish prime minister.” In LA, a new opera called Hopscotch is testing the limits of the genre—it’s set in cars, and the audience has to climb into a limousine to start: “Attendees will be told to show up at their start time at an address along one of three colored routes. Once inside the limo, they will be driven, along with a handful of musicians, for about ten minutes. Throughout this approximately ten-minute ‘scene,’ which, yes, takes place inside a car, a vocalist may sing along with a prerecorded track playing on the car’s stereo, or there could be two singers and an alto saxophone, or the car may drive by a quartet on the street and the sound will be piped into the limousine as it passes … The car will arrive at a location where the group will disembark to witness the next scene, which will take place in a public space. Once that concludes, the group will be ushered into a different limousine, inside which the next scene will unfold.” Today in thoughtful remarks on largely forgotten Portuguese modernist classics about existential despair: pause to remember Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which is “much more philosophical quandary than it is a novel, and retroactively engineered at that, where various editors and translators arranged the hundreds of fragments and diary-type entries. As a result, no two editions are truly the same in order or content (my edition by the British publisher Serpent Tail Classics was on the slender side, only 272 pages, whereas the Penguin edition is 544 pages). Throughout the course of the ‘novel,’ Soares documents his days as a bookkeeper on Rua Douradores and the heavy ontological and existential musings that weigh down his hours, particularly the disconnect between the vivid world of the mind and the monotony of a daily, work-driven existence.” Art history’s all well and good, but what’s really instructive is the history of the French frame: “Louis XIII was fond of an Italian influence in his frames, while Louis XIV, being ostentatious in all corners of life, preferred the gilding and carving to be as elaborate as possible. Later Louis XV honed it down for more stately, but still very sculptural shapes, and finally Louis XVI favored an even more subdued aesthetic, although it all came crashing down with the French Revolution. Nevertheless, this frenzy for frames had an impact on the exhibition of art across the continent.”