July 15, 2015 First Person No Bad Things By Zach Sokol Growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Illustration: Thomas Tait From the ages of twelve to fifteen, I went through an obsessive-compulsive rigmarole before bed every night. The process demanded a minimum of two hours filled with concentrated touching, blinking, gulping, repetitive thinking, and chanting. If I botched any part of this strict routine, or if I was interrupted, I’d have to start the whole ordeal again, often tacking on an extra hour. When I finished, I’d tuck myself into a sleeping bag under my covers, even during the most humid summer nights. I did all this out of fear: if I didn’t adhere to my compulsions, I thought, I would be brutally murdered in the middle of the night by a nonspecific being, or snakes would slither up my bedpost from beneath the frame and bite the soft spots between my toes. I used the heatstroke-friendly sleeping bag to “protect” my vulnerable digits. Even then, I understood that my compulsions didn’t make sense. Many people with OCD are aware of the irrationality of their compulsions. But our behavior and our habits are governed by an internal system, a logic engineered to quell fear and anxiety so we can operate within our skulls and in the outside world. These rules, mind games, and habits are reinforced through practice. They become a way of life. Read More
July 15, 2015 On the Shelf Solve Your Problems with Symmetry, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Shaker Meetinghouse in New Lebanon, Columbia County, New York. Philosophers are always telling us what to do and why to do it—telling us, in essence, how to rescue ourselves from childhood, how to grow up. For Vivian Gornick, their advice is lacking in what a college counselor might call real-world experience: “The Hebrew philosopher Hillel urged that we do unto others as we would have others do unto us. Kant urged, similarly, that we not make instrumental use of one another. With all the good will in the world—and remarkable numbers of people have it—we have not been able to make these noble recommendations carry the day. Not because we are lazy or venal or incompetent but because most of us live in a state of inner conflict that makes purity of behavior an impossibility. Every day of our lives we transgress against our own longing to act well: our tempers are ungovernable, our humiliations unforgettable, our fantasies ever present … ” Today in ill-advised marketing campaigns: the Australian publisher of the new Lisbeth Salander novel has taken branding to a disturbingly literal level in its quest to find “a female fan prepared to ‘donate’ her back for three months. This would have involved being adorned with her very own Dragon Tattoo for advertising purposes.” The so-called tatvertising campaign sought to find someone who could “handle the pain, just like Lisbeth Salander.” The publisher has since canceled the promotion, but there’s nothing stopping true fans from pursuing masochism to please their corporate masters. Does the art market depress you? The answer should be a resounding yes—no one likes plundering plutocrats. But here’s a thought: you can probably just ignore the whole sordid commercial aspect of the thing. “Sensing that people will one day look back on this era as a freakish episode in cultural history, why not get a head start on viewing it that way? Detach and marvel. Meanwhile, art goes on making meaning for those who are rich only in the desire and leisure to engage with it … To expect the running-scared super-rich to behave benevolently, in regards to art, is plainly foolish.” So you’re conceiving a building in which the sexes are segregated—congratulations! The Shakers have just the kind of architectural design you need. The key is extreme symmetry, “in which one side meticulously mirrors the other, door for door, stair for stair, each fitting answering another … The control implicit in the design goes further. Men and women worked in different trades, so rarely encountered one another in the workplace … The Shakers perfected what they called a ‘living building’: a settlement that served their purposes while also reinforcing their separation from non-believing outsiders.” Critical thinking remains an integral part of an education in the liberal arts—and a vague, endlessly broad term, with no real applicability. What is it? How do we use it? For the answers to these and other unanswerable questions, all you have to do is go to college. But even there the term is on watch now. “One of my colleagues adamantly rejected the inclusion of an allegedly trendy catchphrase (‘experiential learning’) as part of our mission statement, and insisted that we use ‘critical thinking’ instead. My colleague was ostensibly rejecting the professionalization of college education, in favor of the more properly academic priority of intellect. This preference, however, struck me as curious, as it revealed that ‘critical thinking’—whatever cluster of ideas or intellectual ideals hide behind the phrase—had become something for which we felt nostalgia.”
July 14, 2015 Books Disagreeable Tales By Erik Morse In his fiction, Léon Bloy strove “to disclose the universal villainy of respectable people.” Bloy observed the vows of both poverty and suffering; he earned the nickname the Ungrateful Beggar. In his first homily as Pope Francis, in March 2013, the Pontiff included an obscured voice of the French fin de siècle. Restating one of the most entrenched principles of Catholic dogma, Francis declared, “When one does not profess Jesus Christ, I recall the phrase of Léon Bloy—‘Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.’ ” Though it may have struck religious scholars as unusual, the reference to Bloy indicated the Church’s cautionary role against the millennial idolatry of technology and humanism. Bloy, who wrote a series of pamphlets, novellas, and essays during the increasingly scientific climate of the Second Empire and the Belle Epoque, included himself among the cabal of symbolists and decadents who had taken Satan as the object of their literary obsessions—specifically, the resurgence of the devil in the popular French imagination. Read More
July 14, 2015 Contests #ReadEverywhere, All Summer Long By Dan Piepenbring A highly literate dog. If you haven’t heard, this summer we’re offering a joint subscription to The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. Everyone is excited about this deal—people, pets, pigeons. From now 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. The grand prize is 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. And good luck! Bertie Pigeon reads the LRB.
July 14, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Downward Spiral By Sadie Stein It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the Monday-through-Wednesday crossword world, ELO is the most listened-to band in history, Ava the most popular girls’ name, and time divides into eras and eons. Think of it as the blue-plate special, but with Ali instead of meat loaf. There are algorithms and programs that can predict the frequency of these usages. Of course there are. But for those of us who begin our day with the easy jog of a crossword, that’s of no interest. We don’t need to know; we know. It’s not that writing in the answer for “Architect Saarinen” or “Actress Thurman” makes us feel smart, it makes us feel safe. As Stephen Sondheim said, “The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.” Read More
July 14, 2015 On the Shelf Beware the Mineshaft of Books, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Susanna Hesselberg’s ominous library, in Denmark. From 1859 to 1870, Dickens edited All the Year Round, a literary magazine that declined to identify its contributors. But a newly discovered twenty-volume set teeming with Dickens’s annotations threatens to blow everyone’s cover: in pencil, Dickens has noted the authors in each issue, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll, and Eliza Lynn Linton. The Tale of Genji is a very long eleventh-century Japanese book by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, often cited as the world’s first novel. A new English translation suggests that its stories can still captivate many centuries later, even if those stories were hell to translate. “Every page is sprinkled with poems or phrases pointing to Chinese and Japanese literary sources that an eleventh-century aesthete might have been proud to notice but are lost on most Japanese today, let alone the reader of an English translation … A literal translation of Genji would be unreadable. And the vagueness, so poetic in Japanese, would simply be unintelligible to the Western reader.” Endurance lit—stories of extreme athletic feats in which one daring sportsman survives enormous hardship, et cetera to emerge on the other side a more thoughtful, ethical human being, et cetera—is a thriving subgenre, but what explains its appeal? “Here’s the most revealing facet of endurance lit: most of the best sellers in this genre are about self-imposed hardship. They are about sport, in its widest sense. True endurance is the kind shown by the sweatshop worker who arrives for her fourteen-hour shift, day after day, and is paid buttons … But books about sweatshop workers do not sell by the lorry load.” Public-service announcement: there are libraries and then there are “libraries,” which—watch out—will sometimes turn out to be never-ending pits lined with bookshelves, like this one. New York’s Brazenhead Books, a shop that’s more speakeasy than bookstore, faces an eviction notice, and its proprietor, Michael Seidenberg, is hoping for a billionaire donor. He may get his wish: since the threat of closure has begun to hover, “the secret store has become a ‘secret’ one, with much written about it. The New Yorker has a film crew documenting his exit, as the books begin to get boxed and moved, at least for now, in with his wife and dogs.”