{"id":107714,"date":"2017-02-14T09:05:02","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T14:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107714"},"modified":"2017-02-14T12:04:26","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T17:04:26","slug":"hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"He\u2019s a Giant Gorilla, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_107715\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-107715\" class=\"wp-image-107715\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"856\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong-300x257.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong-768x657.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong-1024x876.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-107715\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nicholas Monro\u2019s <i>King Kong<\/i>, Manzoni Gardens, Birmingham, England, 1972. Photo: Arnolfini Archive at Bristol Record Office\/Courtesy the artist, via <em>NYRB<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Growing up near Baltimore, I remember when, in 2004, a massive aluminum sculpture called <em>Male\/Female <\/em>was installed outside the city\u2019s beautiful Beaux Arts train station. Passions were inflamed. I recall a pair of women walking by the sculpture and one saying to the other, I <em>hate<\/em> that fuckin\u2019 thing, and the other saying, Well, <em>duh<\/em>. What I\u2019m trying to say is, it\u2019s rough being a public sculpture. People shit on you. Birds shit on you. And it\u2019s always been rough: looking back to the seventies, Jon Day has revisited England\u2019s \u201cCity Sculpture Project,\u201d in which sixteen sculptors received grant money to liven up the nation\u2019s public space. One of the few surviving works is Michael Monro\u2019s <em>King Kong<\/em>, which is, you guessed it, a massive fiberglass gorilla first installed outside a brutalist shopping mall in Birmingham. Day writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/02\/12\/the-problem-of-public-sculpture\/\" target=\"_blank\">Monro thought obviousness was what the people wanted<\/a>. \u2018In this case they will like him won\u2019t they?\u2019 he said at the time. \u2018Because they can understand it and appreciate it. He\u2019s a giant gorilla\u2019 \u2026 Though children enjoyed playing on\u00a0<em>King Kong<\/em>, and a pair of disgruntled builders climbed it as part of a protest for better compensation and working conditions a few months after it was installed (placing a trowel in its hand and a hardhat on its head), the public didn\u2019t seem to warm to it particularly. At the end of the six months there was a half-hearted campaign and public collection to keep\u00a0<em>King Kong<\/em>\u00a0in Birmingham, but only one person, a crossing guard named Nellie Shannon, gave any money to the cause. Her \u00a31 donation was later returned.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Tim Parks got an e-mail from J. K. Rowling. Can you believe it? <em>The<\/em> J.\u00a0K. Rowling! She was full of stirring words about the value of a free and open society, and she told him, \u201cWe will not go quietly and we are Louder Together!\u201d But she\u2019d sent that e-mail to thousands of people through <small>PEN<\/small>; it was a plea for donations. And for Parks, it\u2019s the symptom of a confused culture, one that conflates the most honest art-making with the high dudgeon of political protest: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/08\/books\/review\/what-are-the-pitfalls-for-the-politically-engaged-writer.html\" target=\"_blank\">I have been drawn, almost against my will, to notice the intensifying politicization of the literary world and, hand in hand with that, a predilection for melodrama, for prose that stimulates extreme emotions\u2014in good causes of course<\/a>. The cause justifies the melodrama. The melodrama serves the cause \u2026 In the months ahead this debate will heat up. Both as readers and as writers, each of us will react in a way congenial to our temperament \u2026 My own position is this: Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A new collection of Hemingway\u2019s letters elaborates on the circumstances surrounding what might be his most forgettable book, a parody of Sherwood Anderson called <em>The Torrents of Spring<\/em>. Phillip Lopate writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-tls.co.uk\/articles\/public\/little-bit-of-poison-for-everyone\/\" target=\"_blank\">Anderson had been one of his staunchest supporters, and Hemingway had learned a lot from the older writer<\/a>. As he wrote to Owen Wister in March 1929: \u2018He wrote some stories that I thought were lovely\u2014all the time he was working as an advertising writer but he wrote simply and to me, anyway, very beautifully\u2014about people and the country and, it\u2019s true, best of all about adolescence\u2014he went to New York and a number of Jews\u2014Stieglitz, W. Frank, Paul Rosenfeld got hold of him and turned his head with praise.\u2019 Leave it to the Jews and New York to corrupt a pure adman\u2019s soul. Hemingway thought Anderson\u2019s 1925 novel\u00a0<em>Dark Laughter\u00a0<\/em>was mediocre, so he took it into his head to dash off a parody in a week \u2026 \u2018About the <em>Torrents<\/em>\u2014I never could figure out what happened to it\u2014I was very fond of it\u2014but nobody else seemed to like it \u2026 \u2019, Hemingway wrote to an admirer, perplexedly.\u00a0He sent Anderson a self-justifying letter when it came out. \u2018You see I feel that if among ourselves we have to pull our punches, if when a man like yourself who can write very great things writes something that seems to me (who have never written anything great but am anyway a fellow craftsman) rotten, I ought to tell you so.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Sasha Chapin is fully against bad lyrics, but much more in favor of stupid lyrics: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/hazlitt.net\/feature\/praise-stupid-song-lyrics\" target=\"_blank\">Stupid lyrics are an unexpected moment of eloquence from a concussed person. They\u2019re an emotionally resonant thought that\u2019s too dumb to say out loud<\/a>. They\u2019re the lyrical equivalent of sweet baby talk or despairing mumbles. Bob Dylan loves dumb lyrics: one of his main literary tricks, and it\u2019s a good one, is writing vivid images that turn into total applesauce. From \u2018Visions of Johanna\u2019: \u2018The fiddler, he now steps to the road \/ He writes everything\u2019s been returned which was owed \/ On the back of the fish truck that loads \/ While my conscience explodes.\u2019 The deliberate overextension of the rhyme and the goofy image of the fish truck transforms the scene into a bizarre metafictional Japanese game show.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>And last, some feel-good news about very old ceramics, which have taught us strange things about Earth\u2019s magnetic field: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tech\/elements\/earths-mysterious-magnetic-field-stored-in-a-jar\" target=\"_blank\">On Monday, in a study published in\u00a0<em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em>, a team of Israeli and American archeologists and geophysicists reports\u00a0the most detailed reconstruction yet of the magnetic field in pre-instrumental times, using a set of ceramic jars from Iron Age Judea<\/a>. The clay jars, which were likely everyday vessels for wine or olive oil, do not appear to have been made with particular care. Although they exist now as fragments, they can be dated with unusual confidence because of the royal insignias stamped on their handles; they were made between 750 and 150 <small>B.C.<\/small> The team\u2019s analysis suggests that for much of that time the magnetic field was relatively stable, and about forty per cent stronger than it is now. But the oldest jars reveal that, just before 700 <small>B.C.<\/small>, the field\u2019s strength briefly jumped by half, to almost twice its modern intensity, then fell rapidly in the next three decades. Today, such an event would cause catastrophic disruption of the electrical grid and satellite communications. It\u2019s unlikely that the Judeans even noticed it.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: a sculpture of King Kong goes unappreciated, Hemingway pisses off Sherwood Anderson, stupid lyrics are good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[3550,16791,88,571,1310,26079,13106,27271,27269,4328,2426,27268,13885,3891,27270,7014],"class_list":["post-107714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-birmingham","tag-ceramics","tag-england","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-j-k-rowling","tag-king-kong","tag-lyrics","tag-magnetic-field","tag-michael-monro","tag-pen","tag-politics","tag-public-sculpture","tag-sculptors","tag-sherwood-anderson","tag-the-torrents-of-spring","tag-tim-parks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The History of Public Sculpture Is a Long and Sad One<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news roundup: a sculpture of King Kong goes unappreciated, Hemingway pisses off Sherwood Anderson, stupid lyrics are good.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"He\u2019s a Giant Gorilla, and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 14, 2017 \u2013 In today\u2019s roundup: a sculpture of King Kong goes unappreciated, Hemingway pisses off Sherwood Anderson, stupid lyrics are good.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-02-14T14:05:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-02-14T17:04:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1369\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"He\u2019s a Giant Gorilla, and Other News\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-02-14T14:05:02+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-02-14T17:04:26+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/\"},\"wordCount\":1121,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/hes-a-giant-gorilla-and-other-news\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/city-sculptures-kingkong.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Birmingham\",\"ceramics\",\"England\",\"Ernest Hemingway\",\"J. 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