September 3, 2015 From the Archive How to Name Your Baby By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Elmar Ersch Whenever anyone frowns upon the Daily for publishing work they find obscene, frivolous, or otherwise undeserving of the prestigious Paris Review name, I want to direct their attention to our seventies issues. Readers who think we’ve published sixty-two years of Hemingway interviews and gentle sestinas will be surprised by the magazine’s irreverence. The Review of the seventies was, if the archive is any indication, a relaxed, profligate, and singularly fun place to work. It published some great literature. It also published, in the Summer 1976 issue, fourteen pages of silly names. John Train’s “How to Name Your Baby,” republished in full below, is one of my all-time favorite finds from the archive. Referring to the work of a certain Office of Nomenclature Stabilization—an office that has since lapsed into obsolescence, I regret to learn from Google—it’s gloriously inessential, though I guess you could argue that it predicted the rise of the listicle. Train, who is eighty-seven now, cofounded the magazine and was its first managing editor; this piece only burnishes his legacy, and in the eighties he turned it into a line of books, including John Train’s Remarkable Names, Even More Remarkable Names, and Remarkable Names of Real People. Read More
September 3, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Waiting Game By Sadie Stein The first release of “September Song.” One of my “parlor tricks,” if such you can call it, used to be performing the Kurt Weill standard “September Song” in the voice of Lotte Lenya. I can’t pretend anyone ever requested this, per se, but from the ages of fifteen to about twenty-one, I broke into it on the slightest pretext. Among other things, the rendition was very loud. No record exists of my performances: small mercies, et cetera. “September Song” was famously written for Walter Huston’s limited vocal range, and his initial rendition—as an elderly Peter Stuyvesant in 1938’s Knickerbocker Holiday—remains, for many, the most poignant. (To anyone who would laugh at the thought of a seventeenth-century Dutch colonist singing one of musical theater’s great laments on aging, I would merely point out that “Memory” is performed by an anguished cat.) My grandfather always talked about first hearing the song when Walter Huston visited the radio program for which he was a writer in 1938. He cried, he said. When he died, it was sung at his funeral. Read More
September 3, 2015 On the Shelf Demolishing the Literary Gynaeceum, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of The Story of the Lost Child. Elena Ferrante would like to remind you, now that her novel The Story of the Lost Child is out, that she is not a man, and that if you think she might be a man, you’re part of the problem: “Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man, ‘It’s really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women?’ Due to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for it is betrayed immediately by its ‘weakness’ … even the publishing industry and the media are convinced of this commonplace; both tend to shut women who write away in a literary gynaeceum … we’re dealing with a new tradition of women writers who are becoming more competent, more effective, are growing tired of the literary gynaeceum and are on furlough from gender stereotypes.” We often praise fiction for its ambiguity, which is counterintuitive—normally we admire good writing for its clarity, and more confusingly still it seems that the best fiction is at once clear and ambiguous: so what do we mean when we celebrate ambiguous fiction? “Ambiguity, uncertainty, multiplicity are positive in literature in so far as they act as a corrective against a dominant and potentially harmful manipulative hubris … the novelist has to be truly open to the world he describes; it is the multiplicity he then inevitably lets into the text that overwhelms the petty habit of knowing better… Nothing is less attractive, in a poem or novel, than the feeling that ‘ambiguity’ has simply been constructed or contrived.” There’s a rich ambiguity about the nose, at least insofar as it figures in literature. Gogol’s story “The Nose” “was but one part of a larger body of literature improbably concerned with, of all things, the human nose … The history of the written nose is rich, varied, and wildly unpredictable, marshaled for a host of potential uses and meanings from slapstick gag to moral emblem to racial signifier.” Stephen King recently wrote an Op-Ed defending novelists who publish (very) regularly, including himself and Joyce Carol Oates. But it’s time to take a stand against prolificacy: “King concludes his op-ed by saying that he’s glad Ms. Oates continues to write new books ‘because,’ he says, ‘I want to read them.’ I wonder if he really has. If anyone has read them all. Or truly does anxiously await the next one’s arrival … When considering huge bodies of work, there’s still the uncertainty about where to enter and where to go next once you’ve found a way in.” The tremendous resurgence of so-called “nature writing” reveals the inadequacy of the term: “ ‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse … The best of the recent writing is ethically alert, theoretically literate and wary of the seductions and corruptions of the pastoral. It is sensitive to the dark histories of landscapes and to the structures of ownership and capital that organize—though do not wholly produce—our relations with the natural world … Some of this writing is kick-up-the-arse furious, some is elegiac, some is about disease and dispossession, some is about dignity and the deepening of knowledge. Across its range, moral engagement and hope are consistently in evidence.”
September 2, 2015 Correspondence Driveling Idiots from All Over Europe By Dan Piepenbring Joseph Roth, potentially exercised. Part of a letter from Joseph Roth to Blanche Gidon, his French translator, sent October 11, 1932. Roth, born on this day in 1894, used his letters to vent his spleen, often about money and politics; in this note he rails against French publishing. (“Une heure avec” refers to a regular interview feature in the literary weekly Les Nouvelles Littéraires.) “His actual molten, sun-spotted core,” writes his English translator Michael Hofmann, “flares nakedly in these letters.” Hofmann’s Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters was published in 2012. Read More
September 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent One Shade of Grey By Sadie Stein Photo: Bookfoolery “A 1907 page-turner about American heiresses marrying impoverished, effete English aristocrats,” reads the description affixed to the shelf below The Shuttle. Obviously, I want to read it. And obviously, this is the work of Persephone Books. You don’t need to go to their shop in London to read Persephone, of course. Their Web site lists all their titles, and many can be found at bookstores around the English-speaking world. Their catalog makes for good reading, too—and it’s lovely to look at, with the same attention to color and pattern that enlivens the flyleaves of the entire gray-jacketed Persephone library. Read More
September 2, 2015 On Translation The Age of Udge By Damion Searls Learning a word from John Ashbery. From Edward Burtynsky’s Oil, 2012, color photograph. It started, as things sometimes do, with an Ashbery poem: “Staffage,” from his book A Wave. The poem is more than thirty years old now, and it’s remarkable how well it captures the generation then just being born: “I am one of a new breed / Of inquisitive pest” (the poem makes clear-ish that this is a pest from the perspective of the older speaker, not in the eyes of the poet himself) “in love with the idea / Of our integrity, programming us over dark seas / Into small offices, where we sit and compete / With you, on your own time.” It’s a kind of prophecy Ashbery can still pull off, for instance with the artisanal children of today in a poem from 2015’s Breezeway called “Seven-Year-Old Auroch Likes This”: “Will research tell us tomorrow / of normal morals? Take a Brooklyn family / in fracture mode, vivid, / energizing, throbs to the earlobes … Exeunt the Kardashians.” I predict this poem will make perfect sense in thirty years. Read More