{"id":108262,"date":"2017-03-01T09:24:42","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T14:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108262"},"modified":"2017-03-01T10:29:47","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T15:29:47","slug":"bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Bunny Ears in Saigon, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_108263\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-108263\" class=\"wp-image-108263\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"694\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun.jpg 1491w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun-300x208.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun-768x533.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun-1024x711.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-108263\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Playboy Club, Chu Lai, Vietnam, 1969. Photo: The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, via the\u00a0<em>New York Times<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Remember when the magazine industry had real cultural currency? Me either\u2014by the time I turned eighteen the Internet was \u201ca thing\u201d and you couldn\u2019t even find <em>Reader\u2019s Digest<\/em> stacked beside the toilet anymore. But Amber Batura has a story from magazines\u2019 heyday that\u2019s no mere nostalgia exercise: looking at how <em>Playboy <\/em>came like manna from heaven to the soldiers in the Vietnam War, she\u2019s found one of those rare historical moments where the media really did broaden readers\u2019 horizons. And no, I\u2019m not just winking about soft-core porn here. Batura writes, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/28\/opinion\/how-playboy-explains-vietnam.html\" target=\"_blank\">The <em>Washington Post<\/em> reported that American prisoners of war were \u2018taken aback\u2019 by the nudity in a smuggled <em>Playboy<\/em> found on their flight home in 1973<\/a>. The nudity, sexuality and diversity portrayed in the pictorials represented more permissive attitudes about sex and beauty that the soldiers had missed during their years in captivity. <em>Playboy<\/em>\u2019s appeal to the G.I. in Vietnam extended beyond the centerfold. The men really did read it for the articles. The magazine provided regular features, editorials, columns and ads that focused on men\u2019s lifestyle and entertainment, including high fashion, foreign travel, modern architecture, the latest technology and luxury cars. The publication set itself up as a how-to guide for those men hoping to achieve Mr. Hefner\u2019s vision of the good life, regardless of whether they were in San Diego or Saigon \u2026 Service in Vietnam put many soldiers in direct contact with diverse races and cultures, and <em>Playboy <\/em>presented them new ideas and arguments regarding those social and cultural issues.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>I just want to say: hooray, vans. Hooray Econoline; hooray Sprinter; hooray Ford Transit. Justine Kurland sings a love song to vans everywhere, with their distinct claim to the open road: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cabinetmagazine.org\/issues\/61\/kurland.php\" target=\"_blank\">The enclosure of a van is security to some and a threat to others<\/a>. It\u2019s a space that seems to exist outside law and convention. I took pride in its wildness, in how feral I became when I traveled in my van. I didn\u2019t need anybody or anything; in my van, I was self-sufficient. If I stayed with a friend, my van was my bed. I could leave at any time of the night without waking anybody up \u2026 When I drew up the plans for my van and outfitted it with the things I would need, I felt complete in a way that\u2019s hard to quantify. Yes, I do happen to have a Phillips-head screwdriver, a pee jar, a cast-iron pan, a copy of\u00a0<em>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>, tampons, the Rand McNally road atlas, peanut butter, and a memory-foam mattress pad. But it\u2019s more than that, more like the love a turtle has for the color, rather than the usefulness, of her shell.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Christian Lorentzen searches for a literary-historical backbone to the Trump administration\u2019s lies: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intelligencer\/2017\/02\/how-kellyanne-conway-and-sean-spicer-get-away-with-lying.html\" target=\"_blank\">It would be exciting to be able to trace a lineage for the language of the Trump administration from the modernists through deconstruction\u2019s destabilizing of the text, but the truth is, Conway &amp; Co. engage so much in the simple act of lying that there are simpler models at hand, like Jonathan Swift\u2019s \u2018The Art of Political Lying\u2019 or Herman Melville\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Confidence-Man<\/em><\/a>. As the administration grinds into its second month, Trump\u2019s flacks have made increasing use of a variation of Bartleby\u2019s \u2018I would prefer not to\u2019: \u2018I can\u2019t speak to that.\u2019 Or, as I like to translate it, \u2018I haven\u2019t prepared any lies to respond to that question.\u2019 The irony of Flynn\u2019s termination is that he was fired for lying while working in a house full of liars. Among Swift\u2019s requirements of a good political liar are that \u2018he ought to have but a short memory,\u2019 that he be ready and willing to swear to \u2018both sides of a contradiction,\u2019 and that he never consider \u2018whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it.\u2019 The listener, faced with such a liar, is best served by abandoning any effort at verification or interpretation or sorting the true from the false: \u2018[T]he only remedy is to suppose that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all.\u2019 Unfortunately, that doesn\u2019t work on Twitter.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Someday, I hope, we\u2019ll all look back on this Yale episode and ask why it took so long to get John C. Calhoun\u2019s name out of there (and why so many mistakenly conflate the elimination of a name from a building\u00a0with wholesale ejection from the annals of history). As Joshua Jelly-Schapiro writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/02\/27\/yale-the-history-we-cant-erase-calhoun\/\" target=\"_blank\">It mattered that Calhoun was widely recognized, in his own day, as not merely a defender of slavery but a fierce advocate for it, whose central legacy is as a man whose hateful ideas shaped history<\/a> \u2026 There are countless examples of changes like the one\u00a0Yale is now making\u2014Stalingrad was renamed, though it\u00a0retains many symbols of people who endured or even shaped that leader\u2019s era. We have long made distinctions, in building monuments or changing them, between history\u2019s chief advocates of cruelty and compliant followers. There\u2019s a reason we don\u2019t cross squares or gaze at monuments named for Goebbels in Berlin. And in this regard, it\u2019s hard not to credit the rigor of the process behind Calhoun\u2019s removal at Yale.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>A\u00a0hundred years ago, an ensemble called \u201cthe Original Dixieland Jass Band\u201d laid down what\u2019s regarded as the first-ever jazz recording: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smithsonian-institution\/was-first-jazz-recording-made-group-white-guys-180962246\/\" target=\"_blank\">Besides the novel animal effects, the music was unprecedented in its lively tempo, noisy humor, brash energy\u00a0and overall impertinence<\/a>. Its musical subversiveness challenged established conventions. The band reveled in outlandish stage antics\u2014such as playing the trombone with the foot. And it employed a fun and audacious slogan: \u2018Untuneful Harmonists Playing Peppery Melodies.\u2019 Leader Nick LaRocca piqued the press with statements like \u2018Jazz is the assassination of the melody, it\u2019s the slaying of syncopation.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: how Playboy shaped soldiers\u2019 minds in Saigon; literary antecedents for Trump\u2019s lies; loving vans; 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":[15177,12526,27590,330,27588,2634,7216,7931,269,17016,46,9295,16667,53,4244,21245,176,183,27589],"class_list":["post-108262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-americana","tag-driving","tag-jass","tag-jazz","tag-john-c-calhoun","tag-jonathan-swift","tag-lies","tag-lying","tag-magazines","tag-monuments","tag-music","tag-names","tag-playboy","tag-reading","tag-soldiers","tag-vans","tag-vietnam","tag-war","tag-yale-university"],"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>Reading Playboy in Vietnam (For the Articles, of Course)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: how Playboy shaped soldiers\u2019 minds in Saigon; literary antecedents for Trump\u2019s lies; loving vans; and more.\" \/>\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\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bunny Ears in Saigon, and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 1, 2017 \u2013 In today\u2019s roundup: how Playboy shaped soldiers\u2019 minds in Saigon; literary antecedents for Trump\u2019s lies; loving vans; and more.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-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=\"2017-03-01T14:24:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-03-01T15:29:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1491\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1035\" \/>\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=\"5 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\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Bunny Ears in Saigon, and Other News\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-03-01T14:24:42+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-03-01T15:29:47+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news\/\"},\"wordCount\":1040,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/01\/bunny-ears-in-saigon-and-other-news\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/playboyclun.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Americana\",\"Driving\",\"jass\",\"jazz\",\"John C. 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