{"id":84913,"date":"2015-04-17T19:24:14","date_gmt":"2015-04-17T23:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84913"},"modified":"2015-04-18T11:58:42","modified_gmt":"2015-04-18T15:58:42","slug":"staff-picks-connoisseurs-contact-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/17\/staff-picks-connoisseurs-contact-cats\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Connoisseurs, Contact, Cats"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_84916\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/thenormalschool_spring_2015_page_001.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-84916\" class=\"wp-image-84916\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/thenormalschool_spring_2015_page_001.jpg\" alt=\"TheNormalSchool_Spring_2015_Page_001\" width=\"600\" height=\"481\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/thenormalschool_spring_2015_page_001.jpg 837w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/thenormalschool_spring_2015_page_001-300x241.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-84916\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From the cover of the Spring 2015 issue of <i>The Normal School<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/9780300149425.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-84917\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/9780300149425.jpg\" alt=\"9780300149425\" width=\"200\" height=\"303\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/9780300149425.jpg 396w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/9780300149425-198x300.jpg 198w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a>Like many gifted people, connoisseurs are often bad at explaining what they do. At the turn of the last century, Bernard Berenson was the most influential and successful connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. With a superhuman visual memory, an old-fashioned belief in beauty for its own sake, and rapacious personal charm, this son of working-class Jewish immigrants climbed to the top of robber-baron society. Yet Berenson considered himself a failure as an art theorist, and he went out of his way to sully his hands with shady business deals, blurring the line between worldly success and self-abasement. This is the story Rachel Cohen tells in her engrossing capsule biography <em><a href=\"http:\/\/yalepress.yale.edu\/book.asp?isbn=9780300149425\" target=\"_blank\">Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade<\/a><\/em>, a sympathetic portrait of a self-seeking but passionate lover of art. \u2014<strong>Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been exploring Periscope, a new app in which users live stream video and interact with their audience in real time. Its uses are variously creepy (\u201cIf I get 300 viewers, my wife takes her tits out\u201d), frivolous (\u201cDriving thru the car wash, check it!!\u201d), and fascinating (\u201cWatch me feed my ten-foot python\u201d)\u2014but at its best it seems to bring a new intimacy to social media. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/society\/2015\/apr\/01\/future-of-loneliness-internet-isolation\" target=\"_blank\">The Future of Loneliness<\/a>,\u201d Olivia Laing\u2019s new essay in the<em>\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, speaks to the fragility of that intimacy, and asks what networked life is doing to our ability to connect. I know: it\u2019s familiar territory. But Laing avoids both the alarmism and Pollyannaism that so often mark essays about technology. She identifies the unique double-bind of life online, which affords us unprecedented control over our image while making us ever more vulnerable. \u201cWe aren\u2019t as solid as we once thought,\u201d she writes. \u201cWe are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people\u2019s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control. We long for contact and it makes us afraid. But as long as we are still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.\u201d \u2014<strong>Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It would be hard for any book-lover to imagine a more idyllic scene: thirty-two thousand books housed among a slew of renovated buildings on an 1,800-acre ranch in the foothills of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mount_Silverheels\" target=\"_blank\">Mount Silverheels<\/a>. Lucky for us, it\u2019s a scene that\u2019s soon to become a reality. Ann Martin and Jeff Lee are the two Denver-based booksellers behind the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/landlibrary.wordpress.com\/about\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rocky Mountain Land Library<\/a>, an immensely ambitious project some twenty years in the making. The duo was profiled this week in the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/04\/17\/us\/envisioning-a-colorado-haven-for-readers-nestled-amid-mountains-of-books.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0after having found a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.auroragov.org\/LivingHere\/Water\/WaterSystem\/RecreationalOpportunities\/BuffaloPeaksRanch\/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\">home<\/a>, in 2013, for their ever-growing Western-themed collection. As far as this reader is concerned, the only thing that might sweeten the deal would be a\u00a0<em>Paris Review<\/em>\u00a0residency &#8230; \u2014<strong>Stephen Andrew Hiltner<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Having finally recovered from AWP, I\u2019m reading all the great lit mags I picked up there, one of which, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenormalschool.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Normal School<\/a><\/em>, is my second favorite of all time. (You can guess which comes first.) The latest issue\u2019s first essay, \u201cPig, Sea,\u201d by Timothy Denevi, begins on the shore of Galilee, where we promptly witness more than two thousand pigs\u2014\u201cenormous and low, the light shinning in a pink translucence through their ears\u201d\u2014dive from a cliff into the freshwater lake after being possessed by demons only recently exorcised from a local madman. Waterlogged swine corpses aside, the new issue also contains \u201cMarriage in the Movies,\u201d an essay by <a href=\"http:\/\/philliplopate.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Phillip Lopate<\/a>, who explains why he wasn\u2019t convinced by the marriage in <em>Gone Girl<\/em> by comparing it with more than twenty other marriages in film; and two poems by the late poet laureate <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/2512\/the-art-of-poetry-no-39-philip-levine\" target=\"_blank\">Philip Levine<\/a>, a longtime friend of the magazine. \u2014<strong>Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/website_large_cats.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-84914\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/website_large_cats.jpg\" alt=\"Website_large_cats\" width=\"200\" height=\"121\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/website_large_cats.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/website_large_cats-300x182.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a>A cat might be \u201cjust a cat,\u201d as\u00a0\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.japansociety.org\/event\/life-of-cats-selections-from-the-hiraki-ukiyo-e-collection\" target=\"_blank\">Life of Cats<\/a>\u201d\u00a0curator Miwako Tezuka\u00a0quips\u2014but her new exhibition of cat-related <em>ukiyo-e<\/em> (Japanese wood-block paintings) at the Japan Society in Midtown will have you thinking otherwise. Long before Hello Kitty and cute cat clips went viral on YouTube, cats were already substantial players in the Japanese daily routine. They infiltrated every area of life, assuming diverse roles and purposes, appearing everywhere from the patterns of warriors\u2019 kimonos to theatrical masks. There are anthropomorphized cat monsters and, yes, the lucky beckoning cat, Maneki-neko, found in Japanese restaurants around the world. With its colorful paintings,\u00a0\u201cLife of Cats\u201d\u00a0provides an accessible entry point, encouraging visitors to investigate the oddities of Japanese culture through the eyes of their most enduring, discreet witnesses. \u00a0\u2014<strong>Charlotte Groult<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like many gifted people, connoisseurs are often bad at explaining what they do. At the turn of the last century, Bernard Berenson was the most influential and successful connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. With a superhuman visual memory, an old-fashioned belief in beauty for its own sake, and rapacious personal charm, this son of working-class [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[17804,17800,8017,17805,17809,17802,17803,3199,17808,17801,17806,17807],"class_list":["post-84913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-ann-martin","tag-bernard-berenson","tag-cats","tag-jeff-lee","tag-miwako-tezuka","tag-olivia-laing","tag-periscope","tag-philip-levine","tag-philip-lopate","tag-rachel-cohen","tag-the-normal-school","tag-timothy-denevi"],"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>Staff Picks: Bernard Berenson, Olivia Laing, Timothy Denevi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of \u201cThe Paris Review\u201d is reading this week.\" \/>\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\/2015\/04\/17\/staff-picks-connoisseurs-contact-cats\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Connoisseurs, Contact, Cats by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 17, 2015 \u2013 Like many gifted people, connoisseurs are often bad at explaining what they do. 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