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.”
July 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Sunshine Day By Sadie Stein A bank note of the Chung Hwa Republic. Since moving to a neighborhood with a rapidly aging population, it has been my observation that old people enjoy going to the bank. While banking is, for most of us, a necessary ordeal, it’s also easy to see the appeal for someone isolated: you get time and contact and attention—all while conducting some sort of business. Plus, the air-conditioning is generally glacial. The employees of my local branch are a patient bunch. On a recent visit, an old man in a baseball cap burst into the office where I was sitting, arranging a trip and enjoying the air-conditioning. “Where’s Melissa?” he demanded querulously. “I want to see Melissa!” “Melissa isn’t here anymore,” said her replacement. The old man looked bewildered and sad. Then he gathered himself up and said in my general direction, “Don’t expect any service around here!” and left. Read More
July 13, 2015 Correspondence That Swaggering, Bouncing Pronoun By Dan Piepenbring The only known photograph of John Clare, taken by W. W. Law in 1862. From John Clare’s letter to Eliza Emmerson, March 1830. Clare, born on this day in 1793, came from poverty and is sometimes dubbed “the peasant poet”; he’s known for his expansive poems on rural life and for his eventual turn toward insanity. By the end of his life, Clare had escaped from an asylum, and sometimes claimed to be Shakespeare, Lord Byron, or a prizefighter. This note, a polemic against the egotism of the first-person pronoun, was written in the midst of a deep depression seven years before he was hospitalized. By “points,” Clare means punctuation, which he disdained, thinking it an unnecessary hindrance to expression. Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Read More