{"id":107907,"date":"2017-02-21T08:51:19","date_gmt":"2017-02-21T13:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107907"},"modified":"2017-02-21T10:24:11","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T15:24:11","slug":"cameras-arent-magic-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/21\/cameras-arent-magic-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Cameras Aren\u2019t Magic, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_107909\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cumming2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-107909\" class=\"wp-image-107909\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cumming2.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"648\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cumming2.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cumming2-300x194.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cumming2-768x498.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/cumming2-1024x663.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-107909\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Robert Cumming, <i>Quick Shift of the Head Leaves Glowing Stool Afterimage Posited on the Pedestal<\/i>, 1978.\u00a0Image via <em>Aperture<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>So you want to learn how to write well: you\u2019re in luck! There are hundreds, maybe thousands of books designed to teach you just that. They\u2019re called \u201cusage guides,\u201d but they\u2019re sometimes not as boring as that designation would suggest.\u00a0They\u2019ll teach you how to wrangle subordinate clauses, where to put the best commas, how to wield participial phrases with style and grace. They\u2019ll inveigh against weasel words; they\u2019ll deplore indirection. They\u2019ll tell you who\u2019s hot, who not, who rock, who sell out in the stores, tell you who flopped, who copped the blue drop. And they will do all of this with authority and conviction. But how far, Nat Segnit asks, will that get you? More to the point, he writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/harpers.org\/archive\/2017\/03\/good-plain-english\/?single=1\" target=\"_blank\">What are these books for? In attempting to straddle the how-to guide and the critical study, they instead fall into the chasm between them, neither offering much in the way of practicable advice nor subjecting the writers they cite to worthwhile textual analysis<\/a> \u2026 Literary style is the difference between a cricket bat and a lump of wood. It is the unapologetic authorial sensibility\u2014\u2018an absolute way of seeing things,\u2019 in Flaubert\u2019s phrase\u2014rendered in language that matches it as precisely as language ever can. When that sensibility is fine, humane, and receptive, and its owner\u2019s ear sufficiently attuned not to deaden or distort it too greatly \u2026 a gifted writer\u2019s style is as irreducible and arbitrarily conferred as any talent; amenable to practice and refinement, sure, but at base as God-given and inimitable as Federer\u2019s touch or Picasso\u2019s hand. Here lies the existential challenge faced by the style guide or writer\u2019s manual: beyond the nuts and bolts of usage and basic writerly manners, they are attempting to teach the unteachable.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In an interview with Caille Millner, Rachel Cusk <em>outlines<\/em> (thank you) her revised approach to fiction, opening up the novel\u2019s \u201cVictorian construct\u201d and urging it toward reality: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fsgworkinprogress.com\/2017\/02\/without-prior-knowledge\/\" target=\"_blank\">I\u2019ve never treated fiction as a veil or as a thing to hide behind, which perhaps was, not a mistake exactly, but a sort of risky way to live<\/a>. And I guess I thought about other people\u2019s processes and how even though they constructed something that said \u2018this isn\u2019t real,\u2019 you know perhaps they smuggled their reality into this sort of imagined structure\u2014which is something I\u2019ve never done. I always sort of thought that the memoir, the thing that says \u2018this is real,\u2019 even if it\u2019s as constructed as a novel, seems to me to do something for the reader that\u2019s very different from a novel. But in the end it is an exhausting enterprise, and you\u2019ll be criticized too much for it, and the criticism is personal even if the writing of it is not personal at all. So I guess it was that, of thinking, okay, maybe I\u2019m going to reexamine the novel as something that can be made to soften the concept of reality, to find something halfway, I suppose, between \u2018I\u2019 and \u2018Not I.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In the seventies, the photographer Robert Cumming would browse Hollywood memorabilia shops, amazed at the degree of artifice on display: so much fakery went into making a movie look real. His experience led him, in his own work, to dissect what Sarah Bay Gachot calls \u201cthe mechanics of photographic perception,\u201d building elaborate sets and photographing them to emphasize their illusions: \u201cThe <a href=\"http:\/\/aperture.org\/blog\/robert-cumming-invents-photograph\/\" target=\"_blank\">French philosopher Hubert Damisch mandated in his 1963 essay \u2018Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image\u2019 that a true artist should never fall prey to the artificiality of photographic illusion<\/a>. According to Damisch, photographs were not really \u2018invented\u2019 in the early nineteenth century; the camera obscura had existed for centuries, and the lens even longer. It was the desire to\u00a0fix the image that was new\u2014a latent image was revealed, developed, and preserved; it wasn\u2019t magic: lenses and cameras complied to a spatial system dependent on distance and curvature of glass. Cumming was highly sensitive to these mechanics\u2014for instance, the ability to transform a three-dimensional object with heft and depth into a flat representation. He celebrated this as a skill to be learned and exploited, rather than subverted as opaque\u2014to simultaneously maintain and destroy illusion and quirks of vision with photography.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In which Daniel Wenger and his love interest listen not so casually to some Romantic-era German music, with less-than-stellar results:\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/nplusonemag.com\/online-only\/online-only\/neighbors\/\" target=\"_blank\">One night, I made R\u00a0listen to a song cycle by Robert Schumann called\u00a0<em>Dichterliebe<\/em>, which means, coincidentally, \u2018poet\u2019s love.\u2019<\/a> I learned to sing it in high school, and wanted him to enjoy the image to which it corresponded: me, a fat but not too acned sophomore, sitting on a stool in the choir room of the Unitarian church on Middlefield Road, trying to make an <em>ew<\/em>\u00a0sound while holding my lips in an O\u00a0shape\u2014one of many derangements essential to the correct pronunciation of German. By the seventh song, the disingenuous \u2018Ich grolle nicht\u2019 (\u2018I do not chide you\u2019), the singer is frothing, as I felt myself to be frothing at R, trying to show him how cosmopolitan, musical, knowledgeable I was. Not only that, but how singular also, how my love for the songs indicated a unique confluence of passions and memories in me. R\u00a0pulled a Warhol monograph off his bookcase and began pointing things out; I nodded absently and turned the music up. In the morning,\u00a0we agreed that we\u2019d see less of each other.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Rereading Chekhov\u2019s story \u201cGooseberries,\u201d George Saunders lauds its ambiguous attitude toward happiness: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/entertainment\/archive\/2017\/02\/george-saunders-on-chekhovs-different-visions-of-happiness\/516798\/\" target=\"_blank\">Fiction can allow us a really brief residence in the land of true ambiguity, where we really don\u2019t know what the hell to think<\/a>. We can\u2019t stay there very long. It\u2019s not in our nature. You can be truly confused by something and then ten minutes later you\u2019re grasping for your opinions like somebody going for a life jacket. But that brief exposure to the land of ambiguity is really, really good for us. To be genuinely confused about something for even a few seconds is good because it opens us up to the idea that that which we know right now is not complete. Just to know that for ten minutes a day is unbelievable.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: Robert Cumming takes pictures of illusions, George Saunders cheers on ambiguity, and more.<\/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":[12659,664,71,970,27370,6158,635,125,100,12043,27369,27371,27367,27368],"class_list":["post-107907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-ambiguity","tag-dating","tag-fiction","tag-george-saunders","tag-illusion","tag-magic","tag-memoir","tag-new-york-city","tag-photography","tag-rachel-cusk","tag-robert-cumming","tag-robert-schumann","tag-usage-guides","tag-writing-books"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast 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