The Paris Review's Blog, page 634

Jane Freilicher, 1924–2014

Jane Freilicher, Untitled, 1965.

Jane Freilicher died last week at ninety; the New York Times’s obituary called her “a stubbornly independent painter whose brushy, light-saturated still lifes and luminous landscapes set in the marshes of eastern Long Island made her one of the more anomalous figures to emerge from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists.”

In 1965, Freilicher designed the print above for The Paris Review—it was made in an edition of 150 that has long since sold out, unfortunately. The next year, for our Spring 1966 issue, she contributed a portfolio of recent drawings, three of which we’ve reproduced below. (Pardon the absence of details—none of these were published with titles or any kind of metadata. Different times, different production values.)

“Although the complex temperament of her painting prevent its being assigned to a single movement or group, she has been associated the so-called New York School,” the editors wrote then, “particularly with the ‘second generation’ of abstract expressionists”:

It should be pointed out that while abstractionism has entered her work to varying degrees and influenced many aspects of it, she has never at any point abandoned subject matter entirely. The subjects she most frequently chooses are the traditional ones of nude, still life and landscape. Their treatment in these drawings is especially interesting in its illumination of the graphic quality of her art, something from which, in her paintings, attention is apt to be distracted by their sumptuous and subtle deployment of color.

Fine Dining

Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, Refeição interrompida (Interrupted Meal), 1883.

There’s a human-interest story that’s been making the rounds on the “Weird But True” circuit lately. It concerns a restaurant in Chongqing, China, that gives diners discounts based on their weight. Upon entry, customers step onto a scale. As China Radio International reports, “The policy says, for male diners, the more they weigh, the more discounts they are entitled to. If a male customer weighs more than 140 kilograms, then the meal is free.” That’s 308 pounds. For a woman to eat free, however, she must weigh fewer than seventy-six pounds. In other words, the promotion applies to overweight men and very thin women. It’s what you might call the Anti–Jack Sprat Initiative. The exact thinking behind the marketing scheme is not explained.

My family did not eat out very often. When we did, it was most often at one of two places: Pizza and Brew or the Ground Round. (I always agitated for the sophistication of Red Lobster, but I rarely got my way.) Pizza and Brew’s appeal was obvious enough—pizza, and I guess brew—but we went to the Ground Round for one reason only: Pay What You Weigh Night.

If you remember the chain, which was found primarily in suburban strip malls, you’ll recall that it was a family restaurant with a sort-of movie theme; they played old cartoons and slapstick silents on screens around the dining room, you got popcorn instead of bread, and there were peanut shells on the floor. (Which actually doesn’t have much to do with movies. I guess the motif was just general old-timey anarchy.) Judging by the name, it was probably known for its hamburgers. Since I only ever ate what they offered on the—understandably low-overhead—Pay What You Weigh children’s menu, I can’t speak to that.

I do recall, clearly, the humiliation of the weighing-in. This was technically the one time where our incredible runtiness was an asset, at least from my parents’ perspective, but I have stinging memories of mounting the scale and having some teenager slap a sticker to my shirt with a number on it. We usually went with other families; although their kids were several years younger, their meals always cost more. Then we’d get to choose a fifty-cent grilled cheese, or a sixty-five-cent hot dog, and stare at Elmer Fudd doing something on-screen. There must have been some hidden costs in there. Right? At the time it was merely sort of undignified; now the whole practice strikes me as nightmarish. 

In an age of increasing childhood obesity, this doesn’t seem like a very sensitive proposition. But it’s moot: in 2004 the Ground Round filed for Chapter 11, and most of the branches closed. The few remaining franchises have abandoned the kid-friendly vibe, and the current iteration “markets to the adult dining and cocktails crowd.” Presumably they wouldn’t take kindly to being charged for drinks based on weight.

But who knows? The Chongqing gimmick has apparently inspired imitators. Now there’s a place in Shanghai where only tall people get discounts.

The Designed Landscape: An Interview with Carol Betsch

Carol Betsch, View from Mountain Avenue, below Washington Tower, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts, 2005.

“100 Years of Design on the Land,” a photography show opening here in New York this evening at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, explores ten historic American landscapes, from Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, created in 1831, to the Camden Public Library Amphitheatre in Maine, created in 1931. The show presents contemporary photographs by Carol Betsch and Andy Olenick that have been commissioned for books published by the Library of American Landscape History (LALH). Robin Karson, the executive director and founder of LALH, curated the exhibition. As she says in an introductory statement in the show’s catalogue, “each of these places was shaped by a deliberate design process, and each has an individual story to tell. Taken together, they tell a much larger story of a nation’s beliefs and aspirations—who we are, where we long to go or what we want to get back to.”

The Library of American Landscape History, based in Amherst, Massachusetts, is defining the field of landscape history through its books about significant American landscape practitioners and places. LALH also organizes exhibitions that reflect the subjects of its publications, and, in partnership with Hott Productions of Florentine Films, produces a series of short films, North America by Design. Carol Betsch’s photographs have appeared in eleven LALH books (two are forthcoming). For the 2013 title The Best Planned City in the World , the author Frank Kowsky worked with Andy Olenick, an architectural photographer based in Buffalo, to document the key elements of the park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for that city. This includes three large parks and a series of parkways to connect them, as well as Niagara Falls, which Olmsted helped to preserve from the destruction of local industries.

Andy Olenick, Delaware Park Meadow, Buffalo Parks, Buffalo, New York, 2013.

I first encountered Carol Betsch’s photographs at the exhibition “A Genius for Place,” at the PaineWebber Art Gallery in the fall of 2000. I was struck by the remarkable elegance and stateliness of her images. The landscapes pictured were stunning, with grand homes nestled among ancient trees, vast lawns, formal gardens, pools, ponds, and follies. I found the feeling of serenity in these places, the evocative light and space, tremendously appealing. Looking at these photographs felt like walking through these wonderful American landscapes and gardens, having just the right guide to take me to the best views, the most significant perspectives, and to create the opportunity for understanding some of the ideas behind the landscapes unfolding before me. The photographs looked like they could be the work of an artist from the late nineteenth century, but they had all been made during the last decade. Who was this photographer? And where were these places?

“A Genius for Place,” both the show and the book that followed, presented seven estates of the country-place era, roughly the 1890s to the 1930s, created by some of the most important landscape architects of the time. Written by Robin Karson, the chapters alternate between biographies of the practitioners and exploration of the places from the perspective of an art historian, looking at the landscape designs as works of art. Selecting the best of the sites that retained the integrity of the original design, and discussing them in chronological order, Karson reveals the trajectory and evolution of American landscape design, and the ways these designs expressed ideas in the larger culture.

In anticipation of this new show, I spoke with Betsch about her photography, and the process of working in these landscapes.

Has the landscape always been your primary subject?

Yes. I came to photography through studying nineteenth-century American landscape painting, particularly the Luminists, so landscape has always been my only interest.

What have been some of your other projects?

My first major commission was photographing the H. F. du Pont estate Winterthur for The Winterthur Garden. I lived on the estate for periods of time during the spring and summer of 1990, so I could photograph at all times of day. Years earlier, in 1985, I spent five months living and photographing on Dartmoor in England, a personal project.

Carol Betsch, Pond and ruins in early morning, Tower Grove Parks, St. Louis, Missouri, 2004.

Was A Genius for Place your first collaborative project?

I did work closely with the people at Winterthur in choosing the areas of du Pont’s gardens to shoot, but my collaboration with Robin on A Genius for Place was of a different order—much deeper.

How did you get started in photography?

I became interested in photography in college, when I encountered the American Luminist painters of the mid-nineteenth century and began thinking about how photography must have affected vision and sense of time. I first started photographing one summer while I was working on Nantucket—I borrowed an old Voigtländer camera. My parents gave me a Nikkormat for my birthday that year.

Carol Betsch, The Pogue, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Woodstock, Vermont, 2014.

What kinds of cameras do you work with?

I started using a Hasselblad in 1978, and continued also using a Nikon, but I loved working in a square and composing on a ground glass. When I began to photograph gardens, just before the Winterthur job, I bought a Toko 4x5 wood-field camera. Working with it brought me even closer to composing, slowing down. For several years now I’ve been using a Canon digital camera, since I’m photographing for magazine and book publication primarily.

Do you prefer shooting digital or film?

Film, though I discovered when I went back to it this summer to shoot a couple of the sites for “100 Years”—it’s far more anxiety-provoking. And expensive. But with film you can make much larger prints, so if you’re shooting for an exhibition, unless you have a hugely expensive high-end digital camera, you need film.

Carol Betsch, View across cut-flower garden, Reynolda Estate, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1998.

 

Carol Betsch, Greenway Terrace, Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, New York, 2001.

And what about black and white versus color? Or does it depend on the project?

Black and white, for sure. Although for some projects you need to work in color. That’s what—or one of the things that—made A Genius for Place and my collaboration with Robin so amazing. Because she saw it so clearly, that to express these landscapes, these spaces, and the spirit in them, it had to be black and white.

Are you also involved in printing your work?

Many years ago I printed my own black-and-white work, and I loved being in the darkroom. But I could only make up to 11" x 14" prints, so for the LALH exhibitions, we began working with professional printers. That was scary, but I was very fortunate to find a sympathetic spirit in Jacques Charlas, a photographer in New York City, who made the prints for “A Genius for Place.” I was again fortunate, years later, to find Paul Sneyd at Panopticon, who is also an artist in the darkroom, and if he doesn’t get it just right, understands what I want and can make it right.

Carol Betcsh, Taughannock Falls, Finger Lakes Region State Parks, Ulysses, New York, 2013.

How do you go about exploring a landscape and finding the places you want to photograph?

One of the gifts I’ve been given in this life is photographing for LALH projects—that has given meaning, purpose, to my photographing. Exploring the designed landscape is a layered experience. Robin and I explore them together, and part of the experience for me is learning about the design intention and process, the history. The creation of imagination and mind, nature and light and spirit. And then photographing what is and what is no longer there.

My time on Dartmoor was a personal pilgrimage. I wanted to be in and photograph this place that was so ancient. I had read that there were more megalithic sites on Dartmoor than anywhere else in the world. They’re not of the same scale as Stonehenge or Callanish, but the place is filled with spirit. Or was, thirty years ago. They were going to run a motorway across the northern edge of it.

A full-time job cuts down on my time and energy just to explore. I see photographs I want to make when I’m walking our dog. Most often in old farmland and meadows. I have hopes for my retirement …

What are some of the challenges with this kind of photography?

Being time-bound and dependent on the weather is stressful. But more, trying to express what was created that doesn’t exist anymore, just a remnant or a neglected, degraded place. Like a Manning wetland garden that’s been bisected by a highway and bordered by an industrial park. Negotiating the frequent despair at what’s been lost.

Carol Betsch, Informal border gardens, Oldfields, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2004.

Looking at the photographs, I don’t immediately think, This is late twentieth-century America—was it hard in some of these places avoiding evidence of the present day?

It’s extremely challenging. There aren’t too many places, especially public spaces—the park along the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg that Manning designed, for example—that don’t involve a fair amount of avoidance tactics. Trash cans, cars, debris, highways and high tension lines, a homeless person’s sleeping bag on the embankment. And then, when you think that many of the landscape architects were distraught themselves at the obliteration of the landscape—in 1910—it puts the challenges we face in 2014 in even more painful perspective. The places that have been preserved and stewarded, these are the exceptions. And they are the reason why this work is meaningful. Because these books, these exhibitions, have made a difference. When people know a place, feel connected to it, they care about it. When they understand what went into creating it, they can better understand how to care for it.

Carol Betsch, Silver Maples at meadow edge, Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, 1996.

 

Carol Betsch, Camden Amphitheatre, view to library. Camden, Main, 2014.

Jonathan Lippincott is the design manager at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the author of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s.

“100 Years of Design on the Land” will be on view from December 15, 2014, through March 5, 2015. The opening is from six to eight tonight; all are welcome.

“A Few Leaves Too Many,” and Other News

Paul Cézanne, The Bare Trees at Jas de Bouffan, 1885–86.

Paul Muldoon on Beckett’s collected letters: “The letters collected here come in the wake of the success, in 1955, of the English version of Waiting for Godot, the play in which, according to the critic Vivian Mercier, ‘nothing happens, twice.’ One of the few things that do happen is that the tree that’s barren in Act I develops some foliage in Act II. But, as the high priest of lessness writes to the director Jerzy Krecz­mar of the 1957 Warsaw production—‘The tree is perfect (perhaps a few leaves too many in the second act!)’—even that mustn’t be overstated.”
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is … . “When you put it next to another word it means something very different,” their editor at large said.
The science of mondegreens: Why do we mishear lyrics? (“You’re much more likely to mishear ‘Cry Me a River’ as ‘Crimean River’ if you’ve recently been discussing the situation in Ukraine.”)
“How can a writer make goodness interesting? George Eliot tried to do so by examining redemption in Silas Marner. The only problem is that the narrative jumps ahead, giving us the miserly misanthrope before and the radiant saint after he adopts a lost child … But where are the unheroic, sane, consistent, quiet goodnesses? As literature thrives on conflict, the idea of a sequestered, sanguine goodness might seem impossible.”
The language of food: a new book crunches the data on the descriptions of 650,000 dishes from 6,500 menus. “Satisfied customers can be remarkably price-sensitive, if unconsciously so. The pleasures of expensive food are equated with sex; foie gras is seared ‘seductively’ and apple tart is ‘orgasmic.’ Cheap food, by contrast, is compared to drugs. Reviewers demand a ‘fix’ of fried chicken and liken cupcakes to crack.”

Staff Picks: Ghost-Forsaken Plains, Apocalyptic Libertarians

An illustration by Darrel Rees

I know it’s jumping the gun, since the book doesn’t come out till April, but I’ve been enjoying Devin Johnston’s new poetry collection Far-Fetched. His imagery is often unexpected—“Her kiss? Sweet, / and hard enough / to crack your teeth”—or else so familiar and right that its perfection is surprising, as when he observes the fixed interval between a father’s age and his son’s, comparing that even space to “two ruts [that] incise this ghost-forsaken plain / and keep their track width, never to part or meet.” His playfulness is refreshing and smart—“One finds escape through Stephen King, / as through a window left ajar”—and I’m more than occasionally in awe of his linguistic pairings, especially the lines “Clouds purl / in a conch whorl.” —Nicole Rudick

The new issue of Harper’s has a terrifying dispatch from Sam Frank, who has dared to insinuate himself into a community of “apocalyptic libertarians” in Silicon Valley. These are people who conduct polyphasic-sleep experiments, who dream of a program that can simulate “eons of moral progress” to extrapolate “a complete human goal structure.” They’re all fixated on the idea that an artificial superintelligence will, in the next century, attempt to eradicate humanity. And they revere a kind of functionalism that treats our brains as mere processors. One of them, the pluperfectly named Blake Masters, lives by the motto, “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.” They are, in short, so cold and clinical that Ayn Rand looks like Oprah in comparison, and Frank captures them in moments of paranoia, hubris, and misogyny. Their rationalism isn’t contagious, but the underlying dread certainly is. By the time I finished reading, I felt that humankind was totally fucked. —Dan Piepenbring

“True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since.” So begins S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh, published in Hebrew in 1949, in the aftermath of the 1948 War and the Palestinian nakba. It is the story of a company of Jewish soldiers tasked with clearing a Palestinian village, called Khirbet Khizeh, in the closing months of the conflict. It is a war novel that refuses all the pieties of that genre and develops into an anguished—and unresolved—meditation on Jewish history and the meaning of exile. Almost every episode screams out its relevance for today. —Robyn Creswell

That same Harper’s piece introduced me to Darrel Rees, whose willfully tacky, nineties-style graphics collages add a whole dimension of smart anxiety to the essay. You can see more of his illustration work here—his is an aesthetic that feels fantastically out of sync with the crisp, clean, pure designs you see in so many magazines today. —DP

Flaubert’s Past Lives

A detail from an 1869 caricature of Flaubert.

From a letter Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand in October 1866:

I don’t experience, as you do, this feeling of a life which is beginning, the stupefaction of a newly commenced existence. It seems to me, on the contrary, that I have always lived! And I possess memories which go back to the Pharaohs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions and in many sorts of fortune. My present personality is the result of my lost personalities. I have been a boatman on the Nile, a leno in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek rhetorician in Subura where I was devoured by insects. I died during the Crusade from having eaten too many grapes on the Syrian shores, I have been a pirate, monk, mountebank and coachman. Perhaps also even emperor of the East?

Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy. For, since the elements which make a man are limited, should not the same combinations reproduce themselves? Thus heredity is a just principle which has been badly applied …

Oh! You think that because I pass my life trying to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have not my little judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them.

Most Wonderful Time

Santas overtake London, 2011. Photo: Garry Knight, via Flickr

Two winters ago, I accidentally found myself in the East Village on the day of SantaCon. For those fortunate enough to have been spared it, this is an annual holiday event in which punters in Santa costumes (mere hats won't cut it) pay an entry fee toward charity and then go on a daylong bar crawl. This happens in cities across the globe. My most vivid memory of that nightmarish evening is a single lewd elf stopping traffic as he squatted in the middle of Second Avenue and slowly, hypnotically, rotated his hips to music only he could hear. 

SantaCon is one of the easiest targets for snark, but it really is pretty awful. The NYC branch says it’s going legit this year—no public nuisances, no blocking traffic, no street urination or gutters running with vomit—and to this end the organizers have hired a prominent lawyer and posted rules of conduct to its site. (Exposing yourself in public is a sex offense, it reminds the Santas.) In further efforts to curb the charitable, drunken Santas’ behavior, various commuter trains, including the Long Island Railroad, have banned pre-gaming. 

This Saturday, grotesquely, SantaCon falls on the same date as a day of anger: Millions March NYC, in which activists will gather at Washington Square Park to protest the killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. They will probably not literally converge, if only because the East Village has wearied of SantaCon and fewer establishments are willing to participate. SantaCon organizers acknowledged the situation, stating on their site that “This is a stressful time for New York City, and we are in the midst of a protest that is spreading the NYPD thin. SantaCon has compassion for these civic organizations and is working with them to have a peaceful and joyful holiday celebration.” SantaCon NYC typically attracts upwards of 25,000 people, so this is a real issue of safety and resources.

(I thought this was the most terribly on-the-nose story of the week, but then I read that a TGI Friday’s in Brooklyn had obtained a drone to fly around with a sprig of mistletoe. When a New York Daily News stringer went to report on the festive robot, the drone hit her in the face and cut her nose.)

There are too many cheap jokes to be made here, like so many rejected SNL sketches. But what’s the point? In the immortal words of Doris Day’s Jan Morrow, “Some jokes are just too obvious to be funny.”

The Death Instinct

The autobiography of one of France’s most notorious criminals.

Mesrine’s mugshot, 1973.

On the morning of November 2, 1979, a gold BMW pulled up behind a blue truck stopped at a stoplight in Porte de Clignancourt, in northern Paris. After a moment, a tarp covering the back of the truck opened to reveal four men with rifles. They opened fire in unison, blasting holes into the windshield. The man driving the BMW was hit fifteen times; the woman in the passenger seat was blinded and crippled by the attack. Her pet poodle died, too. And that was the end of Jacques Mesrine, France’s public enemy number one.

For nearly twenty years, Mesrine had humiliated the country’s judicial system with repeated high-profile bank robberies, murders, and daring prison escapes. But now the police had caught up to him. His bloodied corpse laid limp in his car, left out for the paparazzi. One of the officers tossed Mesrine’s wig, riddled with bullets, onto the car hood like roadkill into a dumpster. That last detail comes from one of the many YouTube videos you can watch of the shooting’s aftermath, waiting to be compared with Jean-François Richet’s 2008 two-part film Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, both starring Vincent Cassel. And through the bullet holes of mythology, you can see in this tableau a bit of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and a little bit of Jean-Paul Belmondo dying on the pavement, calling Jean Seberg a bitch.

This was a fitting death—and has been a fitting afterlife—for Mesrine. He was France’s most famous criminal not only because of his crimes but for the way he hot-wired the machinery of fame. While he was on the most-wanted list, he gave interviews and was photographed for the cover of Paris Match. Two years before his assassination, Mesrine wrote his autobiography, The Death Instinct, while incarcerated in the inescapable La Santé Prison, from which he later escaped. It was 1977, a bleak time for culture and politics: in England, it was “God Save the Queen,” with Johnny Rotten whinnying “no future” into recorded oblivion; in Germany, it was the Red Army Faction, their crimes, and their deaths in Stammheim Prison. For many in France, a few decades out of existentialism, the late seventies were a time of startling political conservatism, a time when the hopes of ’68 were being actively erased. It was this regime of erasure that Mesrine fought against, and that killed him two years later.

When The Death Instinct (L’Instinct de Mort) was published in ’77, it presented Mesrine not just as a modern-day Robin Hood but as an articulate and politicized critic of the French government. He wasn’t quite Sartre’s Saint Genet, but he was close. His condemnations of the prison system led to the support of many leading intellectuals of the time, including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Jean-Paul Belmondo bought the movie rights, and the film was going to be produced by Gérard Lebovici, who ended up republishing the book in 1984. That same year, he was also assassinated in a still-unsolved gangland killing. Over the years, the book fell out of print while Mesrine’s legend remained alive, though sometimes only in the verses of French rap songs.

Thanks to the efforts of TamTam Books, a small indie press in Los Angeles that specializes in translation, The Death Instinct has now arrived to these shores. Translated by Catherine Texier and Robert Greene, the book is a barred window into a life and time that has gone by, but it’s also a prescient look at how images and narratives have the power to manipulate lives in today’s world.

After the few unfortunate pages of Mesrine’s belletristic jailhouse philosophizing that open the book, The Death Instinct begins in earnest with his birth in 1936 in suburban Paris, following his life up to the time of its writing. He spent his boyhood days waiting out the war with his cousins in rural France—playing soldiers, herding the cows to pasture—and then returned to Paris for an adolescence that brings to mind the exploits of young Antoine Doinel, at first. He soon trades his slingshot for brass knuckles and school days spent down by the Seine for school nights spent up in the red-light district of Pigalle, hookering it up. By the time his voice drops, Mesrine emerges as a charismatic (detractors say sociopathic) rogue.

There is no one Ur-crime, no cauterizing brand that marks him as belonging outside of society, although several compete. Early on, he witnesses a group of resistance fighters humiliating a woman accused of collaboration horizontale. As the soiree shapes up into a gang rape, young Jacques is led away, “devastated,” unable to understand this “desire to punish a woman.” A few years later he loses his virginity to a hooker, whose “perfectly shaped breasts reminded [him] of the woman the resistance fighters had undressed.” The collapsed heroics of the partisans, and that border, porous as lambskin, between tenderness and savagery, seem to preface Mesrine’s relationship with both authority and women.

He himself later enlisted and was sent to Algeria, where he allegedly worked on a torture squad. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t go into that detail of his military years, though it’s addressed elsewhere. The motive for the omission isn’t clear—perhaps he’d repressed this period in life, or perhaps it had never happened, or perhaps, by ’77, torturing Algerians had fallen out of vogue. Nevertheless, one would be tempted to posit either of these experiences as the basis for a life of crime.

They’re not, though, at least not in Mesrine’s eyes: a little later, in one of the autobiography’s more lucid passages, he accounts for his criminality simply by saying he didn’t want to lead a boring life. When he’d returned from Algeria, he was discouraged by what he saw in his fellow Parisians:

Sad faces, weary eyes … Human beings condemned to eternal mediocrity … Stomachs on legs, regular customers of the daily special and the small glass of red wine. Human beings already familiar with their future since they had none.

There’s really nothing here that differentiates his thoughts from an avant-garde firebrand, or an angst-ridden adolescent. He expands on his disdain for the bourgeoisie with an admission that it was he “who was socially maladjusted,” “lazy, a gambler, a lush … ” His “whole youth had been conditioned by the gangster films that [he] had watched.”

And sure enough, the book progresses from here like a gangster film. At first it’s in a rather lighthearted way, as when Mesrine and an associate, caught midburglary by the owners of the house, must pretend that they’re detectives who have only moments earlier arrived on the scene. Six months later, things get a little darker. In what amounts to the end of his apprentice days, Mesrine casually slaps a prostitute for being rude and then pistol-whips her pimp, who in return brutalizes the face of another prostitute, the one Mesrine had come to see in the first place. Mesrine gags and guts the pimp and buries him alive. By the end of the book, he admits—confesses would not be quite the right word—to thirty-nine killings.

If the plot of Mesrine’s life seems to have been ripped from film noir, at least he has a prose style to match: as a writer, he leans heavily on the bum leg of genre conventions, resulting in a slapstick wobble. Not a scene goes by without him stopping to remind us that something else is on its way. “It wouldn’t be the first time that … ” “I was far from imagining … ” The constant foreshadowing leaves much of the action, when it does arrive, overcast. And he’s always prattling on about keeping his word and settling scores, often with those who neglected to keep their words. This comes with crime-memoir territory, and it does little to obscure the realism seething through the book, especially as the garrote tightens with each passing escapade.

In the second act, Mesrine really gets going. He escapes France—where he was “wanted for murder, which involved a settling of scores, and armed robbery”—to Canada. With his girlfriend, he rents a posh apartment on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street, hoping to start anew. It doesn’t happen. He kidnaps, he robs, and he ends up escaping from an inhumane maximum-security prison only to try breaking back in to—what else?—settle a score with the warden and keep his words to his friends.

About midway through, one of Mesrine’s aperçus speaks to this book’s continued relevance. He’s just arrived in Canada with the potential for a fresh start on his mind, but he’s denied a visa because of his lengthy criminal record. Given ten days to leave the country, he says: “You can’t start a new life, it just goes on, with a past that is denied any future.”

This fit in with the nihilism of the day (cue Johnny Rotten), but it also spoke to me personally. Several years ago, attempting to fly to Shanghai by way of Toronto, I was told that because of a disorderly conduct charge leftover from a wild night in college, I wasn’t welcome in the country. How could they have known, let alone cared? Here, thirty-five years into a future that’s denied any separation from the past, it’s hard enough for people to start fresh, even if they haven’t been killing pimps and robbing banks. For a public bound in a flexible yet unbreakable web of credit scores, leaked e-mails, and naked photos, life on the outside of society doesn’t seem that bad.

Hunter Braithwaite was the founding editor of The Miami Rail. He has written for Art in America, The White Review, and The Virginian-Pilot. He lives in Memphis.

The Original Futurologists, and Other News

From a set of French nineteenth-century postcards depicting what we thought we'd be doing in the year 2000.

Isn’t it time for the New York Times to abandon its senselessly decorous policy on obscenity? “America’s newspaper of record has a habit of relying on euphemism to shield its subscribers’ delicate sensibilities, as if Times readers are all wealthy dowagers prone to fainting spells at the merest suggestion that human beings have sex or excrete waste … We’re all adults here. Reading a dirty word in the newspaper won’t scandalize anyone.”
The Victorians invented the future as we know it, insofar as it was only in the nineteenth century that we began to imagine a future that could be radically different from our present. “As new attitudes towards progress, shaped by the relationship between technology and society, started coming together … people started thinking about the future as a different place, or an undiscovered country—an idea that seems so familiar to us now that we often forget how peculiar it actually is.”
And the Victorians invented our concept of the biography, too; it could do with some shaking up. “Biography seems remarkably consistent. There is a deep similarity between those worthy (and often fascinating) nineteenth-century volumes … and the contemporary biographies … Why hasn’t biography been as daring as the novel?”
Peter Funch’s stunning photographs of Mount Baker re-create decades-old postcards, illustrating how the landscape has changed: “Although imperceptible, each photograph has a narrative.”
An interview with Laure Prouvost: “I know I’m never going to fully grasp life in my art. It’s never as good as having the sun on your face. Even if you film someone with the sun on their face it feels as if you’ve lost something.”

The Answers to Walter Benjamin’s Riddles

Last week, we published a transcript of one of Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children from 1932. It had thirty brainteasers in it. Here are the answers:

His equal.
If the barber were serious about his offer, he wouldn’t have made a permanent sign out of enamel, because “tomorrow,” when shaves are free, will never come.
The two rings are of equal width.

The pendulum passes through the middle twenty times.

The man was born on February 29.

Calculate: 999+1=1,000; 998+2=1,000; 997+3=1,000; there are 500 such pairs. Then all that’s left is 1,000 at the high end, and 0 at the low end; so adding 1,000 to 500,000 gives a total of 501,000. Using the same method, the numbers from 1 to 10 add up to 60. [Benjamin has made a mistake here. There are only 499 number pairs adding up to 1,000, giving a subtotal of 499,000. Adding the two remaining numbers, 1,000 and 500, gives a correct total of 500,500. Correspondingly, the sum of the numbers between 1 and 10 is 55. Benjamin’s mistake was corrected in a later broadcast.]
Three colors are needed: one for the country in the middle, one for the two countries above and below the one in the middle, and a third color for the two countries to the left and the right of the one in the middle.
Hay.
99 9/9.
B.
The flower that was not there overnight is the one with no dew on it.
The bookworm needs only a moment to get from the first page of the first book to the last page of the second, because in a properly arranged library, the first page of the first book is right up against the last page of the second.
Inserting the letters “du” into the middle of the German word for “money” [Geld] spells the German word for “patience” [Geduld]. 14. The first piece of cake, which he did not pay for, does not belong to him, so he should neither eat it nor exchange it for the second piece.
His equal.

And here’s the list of fifteen mistakes:

Heinz realizes that summer daylight saving has just begun and sets his watch back one hour. He should set it one hour forward.
If the barbershop is just around the corner and it would take him as long as three minutes to get there, it would be impossible for him to see it.
If Heinz is cut on his right side, the wound will be on the left side of his reflection.
Nineteen marks cannot be disbursed in five-mark notes.
Five groschen and twenty five-pfennig coins equals 1.50 marks. Heinz should have received only ninety pfennig in addition to the nineteen marks, because he gave the barber twenty marks for a shave that cost ten pfennig. [There were ten pfennig in one groschen, and 100 pfennig in one mark.]
If the barber, the pharmacist’s twin brother, is a young man, then the pharmacist cannot be an old man.
A window cannot be closed from the outside.
Even if he is dead, a man has only one skull, not two.
One could not yet take photographs in the time of Frederick the Great.
A bladeless knife missing its handle is simply not there.
Someone with a corner seat cannot have neighbors to the right and the left.
If Anton’s housekeeper is deaf and alone in the apartment, she wouldn’t know to open the door after Heinz rings the bell.
If someone lives on the sixth floor, a two-story building cannot block his view and he cannot see the faces of passersby.
If the train station clock reads 14:00, it’s 2 pm, not 4 pm.
The crescent of a waxing moon looks like the start of a German uppercase “A,” not “Z.”

Did you get all of them? Good on you! Pat yourself on the back—you’ve successfully passed a test designed for the German children of the 1930s!

These riddles appears in Radio Benjamin, available now. Reprinted with the permission of Verso Books.