August 13, 2015 On the Shelf Zero at the Bone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, ca. 1848. Since David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, Infinite Jest has undergone a dramatic change in its cultural significance: once merely the mark of a curious reader, it’s become a totem for bros, who see in its massive size and brainy reputation a chance to show off their own massive size and brainy reputations—and who have no intention of really grappling with it. “How did poor David Foster Wallace go from dissecting the pretensions and shortcomings of mid-century men of letters to holding a central place in the pretensions of their heirs? … [Jest’s] irrefutable bigness is a dare … For these men, Wallace stands as a challenge to be confronted, just as the paperback brick of Infinite Jest stands as a challenge to the guy hauling it on the G train.” Alexandra Kleeman, whose debut short story “Fairy Tale” appeared in our Winter 2010 issue, discusses her new novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, and the altogether surreal experience of seeing ads on TV for the first time after a long break from the medium: “They’re these little pockets of weirdness … You get these characters who so fervently believe in the power of a certain product, they’re so fervently wanting to fix this one problem. You have these weird extreme emotions like jealousies and affections for things that no normal person would, so I find them really interesting and almost beautiful in that way, like surrealist films. You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they’ve got like a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products. I can feel myself taking on a desire for that thing, or at least like feeling the desire they want me to feel, when I see a beautifully done eye, or makeup, or the softness of some cotton fabric bouncing up and down.” And Lydia Davis looks at the life and work of Lucia Berlin, who died in 2004, and whose story “B.F. and Me” appears in our Summer issue: “We have, most of us, known at least some part of what she went through: children in trouble, or early molestation, or a rapturous love affair, struggles with addiction, a difficult illness or disability, an unexpected bond with a sibling, or a tedious job, difficult fellow workers, a demanding boss, or a deceitful friend, not to speak of awe in the presence of the natural world—Hereford cattle knee-deep in Indian paintbrush, a field of bluebonnets, a pink rocket flower growing in the alley behind a hospital. Because we have known some part of it, or something like it, we are right there with her as she takes us through it.” It’s time to make food a permanent part of the cultural canon: “We have traditionally regarded cuisines as pop or folk art at best—cherished but ephemeral, beginning as peasant food forged from the local landscape and naturally disappearing as people emigrated and landscapes changed … ‘There is a group of us who want to know the deep flavors of what has endured longest. Those ingredients that mattered for so long that they became “the taste” of the time, the points of reference against which all innovations were measured. For me, those ingredients constitute the canon, and the dishes of the time frame them.’ ” Step aside—Joyce Carol Oates is asking the big questions about inspiration and art. “Why do we write? What is the motive for metaphor? … Is inspiration a singular phenomenon, or does it take taxonomical forms? Indeed, is the uninspired life worth living? … ‘Inspiration’ is an elusive term. We all want to be ‘inspired’ if the consequence is something original and worthwhile; we would even consent to be ‘haunted’—‘obsessed’—if the consequence were significant. For all writers dread what Emily Dickinson calls ‘Zero at the Bone’—the dead zone from which inspiration has fled.”
August 12, 2015 From the Archive Last Days of Prospero By Dan Piepenbring Joseph Severn, A Scene from the Tempest, Prospero and Ariel (detail) “Last Days of Prospero,” a poem by Donald Justice from our Winter – Spring 1964 issue. Justice, born on August 12, 1925, is remembered for his formal mastery; he had a special fondness for sestinas. He died in 2004. Michael Hofmann has said that Justice “probably has few peers when it comes to the musical arrangement of words in a line.” In 2011, John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about his poem “There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings” for the Daily. The aging magician retired to his island. It was not so green as he remembered, Nor did the sea caress its headlands With the customary nuptial music. He did not mind. He would not mind, So long as the causeway to the mainland Were not repaired, so long as the gay Little tourist steamer never again Read More
August 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Here Are Ghosts By Sadie Stein Jose Bautista, Hotel Palace de Madrid, 2007 In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favorite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, “Here are lions.” Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, “Here are ghosts.”―W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore In a Boston hotel, I sit waiting for a glass of sherry. The hotel is old and historic, but it is not what I envisioned; a corporate renovation has done away with all but the most stubborn traces of the past. Conference attendees stream through, “Jesse’s Girl” is blasting overhead. The menu has gone dubiously fusion. But then, this is why I can afford it. No matter. I’m a master at ignoring the present. I find the reluctant concessions to history on that menu. I focus on the brass dial above the elevator, and the black-and-white photos in the lobby, and bury my nose in a book. The sherry is warm and sweet and awful, but that’s my fault. Read More
August 12, 2015 On Technology Don’t Be Evil By M. G. Zimeta Google, Alphabet, and Machiavelli. Santi di Tito, Niccolò Machiavelli, sixteenth century Yesterday, Google submitted an SEC filing announcing a major restructure. Larry Page, the cofounder and CEO of Google Inc, will become the CEO of a new corporation called Alphabet Inc; his fellow cofounder Sergey Brin will become Alphabet’s President. As an Alphabet subsidiary, Google will be responsible for around ninety percent of the umbrella company’s revenues; business analysts have praised the restructure for introducing financial transparency. In practical terms, Google will continue to operate as Google—business as usual for ordinary users. And yet. So far, the announcement of the Google’s reinvention has prompted many ordinary users to compare it to the One Ring, Skynet, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and Canary M Burns. I have not yet seen it hailed as the return of King Arthur, nor heralded as the advent of the Kingdom of Heaven, Shangri-La, Vaikuntha, or the New Galactic Republic. Perhaps it’s just me; perhaps I should read more, or develop a wider circle of friends. Or perhaps the eschatologists on social media tend to be the paranoid pessimistic ones, and all around the world there are non-Google employees tearfully, joyfully, celebrating the coming decades of peace and prosperity for all. Read More
August 12, 2015 Contests #ReadEverywhere: The Cats Edition By Dan Piepenbring A cat ruminating on Ben Lerner’s piece about disliking poetry. Our joint subscription deal is in its final weeks: through the end of August, get The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. (If you’re already a Paris Review subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for another year, and your LRB subscription will still begin immediately.) By now, you’ve gotten the gist of our contest, too: through August 31, post a photo of yourself reading The Paris Review or the London Review of Books on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, and use the #ReadEverywhere hashtag and one of our magazines’ handles. Our favorite photographer will win an Astrohaus Freewrite, the hotly anticipated smart typewriter that lets you write virtually anywhere. Need some inspiration? Pinterest users can get a glimpse of the competition here. Subscribe today! Okay, that’s enough of the hard sell. Here, in a shameless bid for virality, are photos of our magazines with cats. But this is no time for smug self-congratulation. You’ll note that the LRB is found far more often with felines than The Paris Review. What accounts for this disparity, we cannot say—we refuse on principle to believe, say, that cats prefer Žižek to Houellebecq. But we urge readers of the quarterly to place it in the vicinity of their cats early and often, so that we might attract a wider cat subscriber base before the summer’s out. Read More
August 12, 2015 On the Shelf As American as April in Arizona, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Nabokov in 1969. Photo: Giuseppe Pino For three years, Barton Swaim worked as a speechwriter for Mark Sanford, the maligned former governor of South Carolina. His book, The Speechwriter, suggests that Sanford’s grammar was as wanting as his ethics: “Nearly every page of this book is wet with the tears of a pedant. At their first meeting, Sanford interrupts Swaim to ask whether it is appropriate to begin a sentence with a preposition. Swaim suggests that he must mean a conjunction, in which case it is a silly non-rule that no good writer has ever observed. Sanford is unconvinced: ‘There’s a rule against beginning a sentence with a prepositions [sic]—conjunctions, whatever—and you can’t break rules.’ Determined to keep the boss happy, Swaim dutifully tries to remove ‘yet’ from a speech a few weeks later, only to be rebuffed by a colleague who assures him that Sanford ‘doesn’t know “yet” is a conjunction’.” When Nabokov came to America, his whole style underwent a transformation, and he took pains to emphasize his Americanness; he said once that he was “as American as April in Arizona.” “Nabokov turned himself into a more purely American writer than many others have so far acknowledged … But the questions remain. Where did Nabokov really develop what Kingsley Amis, in a brilliant review of Lolita in The Spectator, called his ‘Charles Atlas muscle-man’ style of writing? Was it in St Petersburg or on an American campus? On the family estate back home in Russia or in the lonely motel rooms he and Véra liked to stay in on their long summer tours of the Rockies and the Southern states? Are literary audacity and effrontery really echt American or are they the products of aristocratic disdain?” Somewhere deep in the annals of facial-hair scholarship you’ll find T. S. Gowing’s The Philosophy of Beards, a treatise from 1875 or thereabouts that makes a series of dubious aesthetic and functional arguments for bearding: “‘The beards of foreign smiths and masons,’ he remarks, ‘filter plaster dust and metal from the air, protecting the lungs.’ Bearded soldiers, he claims, are less likely to catch colds; and the ability of a moustache to warm the air is invaluable ‘in a consumption-breeding climate like ours.’” He also suggests that a shaved man resembles a monkey—contradicting more recent research that suggests that men grow beards expressly to indulge “simian displays of size and aggression.” Today in holography: Alkiviades David, a forty-seven-year-old billionaire and hologram impresario, thinks that “the hologram business is bigger than porn. It’s going to be as big as the movie market.” He imagines hologram performances so sophisticated that it would be possible to bring back Amy Winehouse. Or the Beatles. Or Jesus. But he seems to miss the fact that people have a limited appetite for novelties and imitations: “Ultimately, what is a hologram good for? … It’s entirely possible, even probable, that, at some point, David’s technology will be fully able to create and project a celebrity digital likeness that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, one that moves fluidly and organically and delivers unerringly consistent performances. But no matter how lifelike, a hologram still favors the second half of that adjective more than the first.” The French artist Bernar Venet has written conceptual poetry since 1967, when the phrase conceptual poetry inspired many fewer grunts of disdain than it does now. His focus is on “the rudimentary syntax of the list,” and his “list poems” comprise everything from “synonyms to acronyms to currency exchange rates to the most frequented tourist destinations in France.” His poem “Monostique” is literally a math problem. “Following French semiologist Jacques Bertin, he associates figurative representation with polysemy (which is open to multiple meanings) and abstraction with pansemy (which is open to any meaning). Mathematical symbols, on the other hand, convey only a single, fixed meaning, and for Venet, such unambiguity has not yet been explored in the history of art.”