The Paris Review's Blog, page 674

August 12, 2014

I’ve Got a Secret

Keeping mum in the age of spoilers.


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From one cover of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru...


For about four months I have kept a secret. Because few people knew that I had it, the difficulty wasn’t in resisting others’ demand to know but in quashing my own desire to tell. Still, the challenge was significant. The value of a secret seems to increase for the holder in proportion to the level of interest it will attract from its potential audience, and in this regard my secret seemed quite valuable.


In April, after several years writing reading-and-teaching guides for various publishers, I was hired to work on Knopf’s guide to the forthcoming English translation of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. A few weeks later, I found the galley at my doorstep. The only information I received about the book, other than its title, came in the form of a brief note of encouragement: The novel would be much shorter than 1Q84, the nine-hundred-something-page tome that preceded it. One other fact, recovered by way of a quick Google search: Colorless Tsukuru sold more than a million copies during its first week on sale abroad.


We often come to a book already knowing something about it—we’ve seen it mentioned online. My experience with the Murakami novel was entirely different. It was chosen for me; I knew nothing about it. No one I knew had read it or recommended it or tweeted about it. Because I was working from an early galley, there was neither cover art nor jacket copy to inspire any preconceptions or early opinions. Though it had been published internationally, there was, quite remarkably, little information to be found online. My copy of the novel was—fittingly, given its title—without color. There were only the black words on the white page and my thoughts about them. And so I read what will undoubtedly become a popular work as if it were obscure.


It wasn’t until after I completed and turned in the guide, when I mentioned casually in an e-mail that I might like to write an essay about the novel, that I received strict instructions from my editor to refrain from discussing or writing about the book before August. No explanations were provided, nor did I inquire further. In the ten years that I’ve written these types of guides—though I have received early copies of work by many high-profile writers—this was the first time I received instructions to keep everything about a book secret. And yet, I realize that, without having been asked, I’ve always played the role of secret keeper as if there were some unspoken contract, an acknowledgment that the information isn’t fair game until it is available publicly. To read something before it is accessible to all is both a privilege and an unfair advantage.


Though discussions about books are a part of my daily life, my thoughts about this book, for these months, remained—truly—private. The instructions not to write about the book in the months that followed made me self-conscious of the value of my private experience, and with this increase in awareness came a proportionate desire to tell.


Thousands of Murakami fans who would have loved to hear any information about this new book were only a keystroke away, and in my everyday life there were—there are—always people who want to talk about books. At panels and conferences, through weeks of workshops, master classes, and talks, I met hundreds of people who wanted to talk mostly about books. So we talked about books. We talked about them every day, at every meal, on every walk to and from a classroom. And while conversations such as these commonly turn to a discussion of books that one is reading or has recently read, I did not talk about the Murakami novel, though it would have been the natural thing to mention.


During this time—while I was keeping the secret—there was one book that happened to be with me wherever I went: Book One of Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical series My Struggle. I had picked it up because I had seen his name repeated online with such frequency that I began to wonder, like so many others, Who is this Knausgaard? Though I hadn’t yet made it past page fifty, I was aware that he was an author who had become famous for his thorough revelation—3,600 pages worth—of so many of his secrets and the secrets of others. Though I wanted to read the book without prejudices and preconceptions, it was impossible. Literary venues and social media sites are teeming with posts about Knausgaard: some feeling about his work or observation about his personage, some opinion about his worthiness as a writer, assessments of what he has done and predictions of what he will do next. Not only was I trying to avoid spoilers about Book One, but I was doing a desperate dance to avoid the ruination of Book Two and Three as well. The books’ success, meanwhile, seems to be fueled by both secret and spoiler—our desire to both reveal and receive the secret. It is, one could say, a series of books fueled by our love affair not just with secrets, but with secret-revealing.


A spoiler, even when disguised as a careless remark, is both the detritus of a secret soon to be expired and the proof that knowledge is a commodity. We are willing to give away closely held information in exchange for the chance to brag that we ever had it at all, and, more specifically, to exclaim that we had it first. Technology has made the revelation of the secret that much more glamorous—a confession can reach a wider audience. The pleasure of releasing a secret to a single person is multiplied.


But the secret is valuable long before it is spoiled. It allows us the time to think our own thoughts undiluted. Literary discourse—the public exchange—depends upon private experience for its worth.


The value of my secret has decreased as time has passed, is decreasing as I write this, and as of today—Murakami’s publication date—has become null. People have begun to talk about the book, to post their thoughts and opinions about it online. Reviewers and critics have already begun to weigh in. People are tweeting and posting. In a short time, millions will have read the same book that I have read. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking,” writes Murakami in Norwegian Wood.  Unless, it so happens, you’re able to read those books before anyone else.


Je Banach is a member of the residential faculty in fiction at the Yale Writers’ Conference. In 2013 she was awarded the Connecticut Artist Fellowship for Prose. She has written for GrantaEsquire, Guernica, Bookforum, KGB Bar Lit, L.A. Review of Books, PEN, and other venues.

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Published on August 12, 2014 14:52

Going Dark

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Detail from Vittorio Reggianini’s A Shocking Announcement


I have been trying for some time now to write this post, but it’s been very hard for me. Not emotionally, I mean—physically. My hands go funny, my vision blurs, my legs get weak, and I start to feel sick. In short, I get woozy. Allow me to explain.


Not that I really can explain; if I do, I’ll pass out. Just this morning, I started to read a review of a film that mentioned the protagonist’s “suicide attempt” and “bandaged wrists” and I felt shaky and had to immediately close the paper and, what is more, put it down the garbage chute so it couldn’t torment me. At least with books, you have some control over these things; to date I have fainted in The Virgin Suicides, Swing Kids, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Sunset Boulevard. With The Three Faces of Eve, Harold and Maude, and Little Miss Sunshine, I managed to get out in time. I also got woozy once in a college history class; we were discussing the death of Seneca.


It sounds funny, until you see it in action. It is never fun to see reason give way to blind panic, nor to have a friend pass out at your feet. Sometimes, before they understand, people will tease me, exploit my weakness—as a result, I usually try not to mention it. (Also, if I talk or think about it, I will get faint.) Like someone with an allergy, I am ever vigilant, but the vigilance has become second nature. I tend to avoid anything that I know for a fact contains a suicide, just in case they do it that way. If I sense one might be coming, I will page ahead or ask a sympathetic friend for a warning. Sometimes, I have to reread or re-watch something because I realize after the fact that my tension and apprehension ruined the experience for me.


I can’t tell you when this started, or why it’s so very specific. There’s the time I spent in the ER waiting room seated across from a girl with bandaged arms, my eyes desperately glued to the television screen on the wall; she must have been okay, but to this day I can’t watch Charles in Charge (not that I’m so wild to). If you want to get mystical about it, there are the generations of family suicide to contend with. I can’t talk to a shrink or a hypnotist about it; I’d faint. Writing this alone has taken me four tries, and a large, sugary iced tea; I’m doing it as a sort of aversion therapy.


Do other people have these sorts of neuroses and aversions? Do they impact your quality of life—and, especially, your ability to enjoy books and movies? I’d love to know how to better cope. For now, I’m going to have to lie down—I’m feeling distinctly faint.

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Published on August 12, 2014 14:01

Unpleasant Vibrators Need Not Apply

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A librarian at the card files at a senior high school in Minnesota, 1943. Photo: David Rees


From The Library Assistant’s Manual , a guide by Theodore Koch “issued on the occasion of the 61st annual meeting of the Michigan State Teachers’ Association, Ann Arbor, October 30–November 1, 1913.”


Qualities that unfit one for library work in general are physical weakness, deformity, poor memory, a discontented disposition, egotism, a lack of system in one’s method of work, and inability or unwillingness to take responsibilities, a tendency to theorize, criticize, or gossip, inability to mind one’s own business, fussiness, and long-windedness.


One librarian advocates listing the virtues and personal qualities of the staff and apprentices by having a questionnaire like the following filled out for each assistant:


Has she tact?
Has she enthusiasm?
Has she method and system?
Is she punctual?
Is she neat?
Is she kind?
Is she a good disciplinarian?
Is she sympathetic?
Is she quick?
Is she willing to wear rubber heels?
Is she a good worker?
Is she accurate?
Has she a pleasing personality?
Has she a sense of responsibility?
Is she patient?
Is she courteous?
Has she self control?
Is she cheerful?
Has she a knowledge of books?
Are her vibrations pleasant?
Has she executive ability?
Can she speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, Yiddish?
Has she social qualifications?
Can she keep a petty cash account?
What are her faults?


Mr. Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, gives the following advice to aspirants for library positions:


“First, secure the best possible general education, including, if possible, a college course or its equivalent; second, acquire a reading knowledge of at least French and German; third, add to this a training in a library school; fourth, if a choice must be made between the special training in a library school and a general course in a college, choose the general course, but make every effort to supplement this by the special course if only for a brief period; fifth, if an opportunity occurs for foreign travel, utilize it; sixth, if you have not been able to contrive either a thorough general education or special training, your best opportunities in library work will be in a small library where your personal characteristics may be such as to offset these other deficiencies; seventh, without at least a fair reading knowledge of French and German you cannot progress beyond the most subordinate positions in a large library.”

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Published on August 12, 2014 11:10

Throw the Book at Him, Ernie, and Other News

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Manhood not pictured.



Hemingway once slapped a critic in the face with a book. Here’s what that critic wrote: “Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man … ”
One of many bizarre real Victorian novel titles: The Egg, Or The Memoirs Of Gregory Giddy, Esq: With The Lucubrations Of Messrs. Francis Flimsy, Frederick Florid, And Ben Bombast. To Which Are Added, The Private Opinions Of Patty Pout, Lucy Luscious, And Priscilla Positive. Also The Memoirs Of A Right Honourable Puppy. Conceived By A Celebrated Hen, And Laid Before The Public By A Famous Cock-Feeder.
“What no one wants to accept—and no doubt there is an element of class prejudice at work here, too—is that there are many ways to live a full, responsible, and even wise life that do not pass through reading literary fiction. And that consequently those of us who do pursue this habit, who feel that it enriches and illuminates us, are not in possession of an essential tool for self-realization or the key to protecting civilization from decadence and collapse. We are just a bunch of folks who for reasons of history and social conditioning have been blessed with a wonderful pursuit.”
As Hollywood continues to reboot every franchise in sight instead of developing new concepts, one cultural critic has some strong advice: Keep up the good work! “Our cultural mythologies exist not to be venerated and preserved in amber, but to be played with, reconstituted, reconsidered, dismantled, dissected, and stripped for parts.”
Remembering Idris Muhammad, one of the greatest drummers in jazz, who died last week.
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Published on August 12, 2014 06:30

August 11, 2014

Taste It!


Menahem Golan, the B-Movie auteur, is dead at eighty-five, the Times reports. In the course of his prolific career, Golan—who directed more than forty films and produced more than two hundred—worked with Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Vanessa Redgrave; though he had a hand in several distinguished productions, he and his cohort trafficked in unabashedly debased material. The Golan milieu is one of superabundant corn-starch blood and suspenseful synthesizer sound tracks. As the Times has it, they “churned out movies about ninjas, cyborgs, chain saws, and the likes of Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde (1993).”


A bit of YouTube spelunking has led me to The Apple, a 1980 musical written, directed, and produced by Golan—perhaps one of the most gloriously catastrophic concepts ever committed to celluloid.


“A young couple enters the world of the music industry, but also the world of drugs,” the IMDB description reads, as if those worlds have ever been separate—and to that synopsis, allow me to add that the movie takes place in a dystopian future that’s very, very, very far away: it’s set in 1994. (“Life is nothing but show business / in 1994,” one song tells us, helpfully.)


In The Apple, Boogaloo International Music (BIM) controls the world—in the movie’s one prescient plot point, the citizenry is addicted to “the Worldvision Song Contest,” a talent show almost identical to American Idol or Eurovision. Any similarities to the actual future end there. BIM, headed by the nefarious Mr. Boogaloo, judges the success of its performers by counting the number of heartbeats in the crowd; when a sweet young couple threatens to overtake BIM’s pre-selected stars in the heartbeat rankings, Boogaloo throws the contest, invites the innocent couple to his swanky corporate HQ, and has his henchman drug the young woman. Things get progressively worse from there.


Above is a clip of the musical’s title track, “The Apple,” in which the entire cast is transported to Hell and the classic forbidden fruit is dangled before our unsuspecting heroes. “Juju Apple / Voodoo Apple,” sings a mildly hunky shirtless guy. “Take a little bite / Spend a splendid night / In our garden of delights.” 1994, man—it was wild!


If Menahem Golan is, as I write, in transit to some kind of afterlife, I hope it’s infinitely more pleasant than the one depicted in The Apple.

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Published on August 11, 2014 16:01

Common Misconception

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Peter Paul Rubens, Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism, 1618-20


I’m sorry to Godwin out on you, gang, but I have learned something that I need to share with you immediately: despite years of slanderous rumors to the contrary …


Hitler was not a vegetarian.


At any rate, so argues the “vegetarian historian” Rynn Berry in his highly persuasive book Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover.


To hear Berry tell it, the myth of Hitler’s herbivore proclivities are not mere exaggeration, but flat out blood libel! (Sorry.) Because in actual fact, says the book, the Führer chowed down, at least every now and again, on roast squab and liver dumplings. His vegetarianism? “One of the great myths of history.” In an article for “VegSource,” Rynn quotes Dione Lucas, a chef “who was an eyewitness to Hitler’s meat-eating.” “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,” she wrote in 1964, “but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often. Let us not hold that against a fine recipe, though.”


Clearly, Berry is invested in this cause, but he’s something of an authority on celebrity vegetarianism; he is, after all, also the author of Famous Vegetarians and Food of the Gods: Vegetarianism and the World’s Religions.


(On the other hand, Hitler’s late life is said to have derived from Wagner’s philosophy, and no one is questioning his commitment as a Wagnerite.)

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Published on August 11, 2014 14:28

They Put Him in the Freezer

Last call at the Blarney Cove.


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Photo: Gabriel Herrera


For a long time, when I came to the end of something—a walk across the bridge, an absence from the city—I would find myself inside the Blarney Cove, a hallway-sized Irish bar on Fourteenth Street between Avenues A and B. The place’s gravity came from its total disregard for the passage of time. Its drywall ceiling was never finished. Its walls, wood paneled with patches of green-and-white striped wallpaper, likely hadn’t been redone since the seventies. Outside, four or five customers perpetually gathered for a cigarette, tending to the drunken chain-smoker’s belief that tomorrow will never arrive. Among this crowd, you could always spot a straggler with a folded dollar between his fingers. “Can I buy a cigarette?” he’d ask the group, waving the bill he couldn’t afford to give away. “You can just have one,” someone would say. (As the straggler knew, at the Blarney Cove, no one ever took the dollar.) Once, I asked a regular from Harlem what it was about this odd and dreary bar that made him take the trip more than one hundred blocks downtown just for a drink. He paused, as if it had never before occurred to him to consider his commute, and then said, “It feels like home.”


There was no more lonesome jukebox in the five boroughs than that of the Blarney Cove. Over the years, I watched all sorts of people haunt the bar’s four square feet of danceable floor—a grizzly man in a cowboy hat, a college girl with big hoop earrings—each gyrating in solitary defiance of the sleepy night. Some nights, after the loafers took their positions along the bar, an older woman named Kiko would walk in and ask each of the men to dance with her, one by one; slumped over in thought and beer, they’d always decline. I watched her once as she swayed her hips to Lucinda Williams’s “Drunken Angel,” alone.


One dancer stands out above the others: In 2009, a white-haired woman named May asked me if I would do the jitterbug with her. I made an attempt. She moved like she was sixty but she looked older, as tended to be the condition of the Blarney Cove’s jukebox regulars. I had never done the jitterbug and so we danced only briefly, until my ignorance became an issue. Then we talked instead about Elvis, the origins of the song “The House of the Rising Sun,” and Junior Kimbrough, a Mississippi electric blues guitarist. She had never heard of Junior and suggested we listen to him back in her apartment across the street. “We can play the music as loud as we want,” she said. I declined, but gave her my e-mail address. She walked over to the jukebox, put on a song I’d never heard before, and danced by herself. The next morning, she sent me an e-mail telling me she had spent the evening listening to Junior’s music. She explained, too, that her husband had just died: “The only advantage in him not being here anymore is I PLAY MY MUSIC LOUD … WHEN HE WOULD NOT LET ME! I know he is shaking his head in heaven.”


I last found myself at the Blarney Cove in June 2013, a few days before it closed. It was very late, and time, as always, was the unacknowledged enemy. Around the barroom, dusty artifacts loitered in dark crannies, unconcerned with their bygone utility: a graffitied pay phone hung on the wall; two dispensers in the back of the bar offered handfuls of dusty pistachios for twenty-five cents; an arcade machine carried a warning that its poker games were to be “used for entertainment only”; a pornographic seek-and-find video game on the end of the bar displayed no such warning; and, most puzzlingly, a piece of wrinkled, white paper taped to the wall advertised mini-burgers, knishes, slices of pizza, and quesadillas. On it, someone had scribbled “Zagat rated.” In six years, I never saw anyone place an order.


That night, four or five old men were sitting along the bar, nursing mugs of beer; one leaned back on his stool, his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned. (On particularly hot days, patrons enjoyed the bar’s makeshift air-conditioning unit: a fan propped up on the back table by the pornographic seek-and-find, blowing directly at a dried-out air freshener cone.) Moving behind these men was a Nigerian priest I’ll call Derrick—he was passing out his business cards, promising to sacrifice a chicken at his next service. Like most of the men and women I’d met at the Blarney Cove, Derrick had been a customer for decades. He started coming as a boy. His father was a merchant marine who would bring him along on his trips down from Harlem to pick up his paychecks.


I introduced myself to a toothless old Irishman named George—well on his way, whiskey-wise—who interrupted me: “You don’t have this bar,” he insisted, punctuating each word, staccato style, with a tap of his finger. “This bar has a history, pal. You’re still young.” He’d been coming to the Blarney Cove for more than thirty years. When it opened, in 1977, the neighborhood was one of the poorest in the city. Back then, he said, the Irish and Italians didn’t get along. You’d walk out of the bar after a night of hard, lazy drinking and “no matter where you turned, somebody would try you on for size.” In the eighties, he continued, the bar had a lot of trouble with the heroin addicts outside, but some regular named Sonny eventually set them straight. As George spoke, I noticed he was seated beneath a framed collage titled The Mid-Day Gentlemen’s Club, which had sixteen portraits of customers taken a decade ago. Uncle Al, Billy B, Sonny, Paulie, Ray K, Angelo … “From the beginning, these guys were here,” George said. “A lot of guys had wakes in this bar, a lot of memories. The good, the bad, the ugly. That’s what they were.”


I had never seen George here before, but I took it this was his regular seat. I asked him where he thought he’d go when, in a few days, the Blarney Cove closed down. He sighed. “Home, I guess.” Shortly afterward, he pushed himself out from the bar, stood up, and wobbled away.


When George was out of earshot, the bartender, who looked to be in her early thirties, turned to me, her eyes large with sadness. “George had mouth cancer,” she said. She was afraid that, home alone in his house, he’d drink himself to death. Behind her was a line of rum bottles, and above them a carved wooden sign that read, in ersatz German, VE GET TOO SOON OLDT UNDT TOO LATE SCHMART.


Tommy, another regular, recounted an oft-told Blarney Cove legend. One evening, he said, a regular was sitting alone at the end of the bar, minding his business, enjoying his $1.50 mugs of beer with all the usual contentment of an old drinker on a young night. Suddenly, but without fuss, the man set down his mug, shut his eyes, slumped forward, and died right there in his chair. “They put him in the freezer,” Tommy said. And the next day his body was gone.


When Tommy finished the story, Derrick, the priest, turned to the bartender, as if to take stock of things. “Every real milestone, I’ve come in here to deal with it,” he said. “I’m happy this place is closing.”


She smiled. “Thank you.”


It occurred to me that nobody in a lifeboat is happy to be lost at sea.


A moment later the jukebox kicked on. It was George. The bar paused to take in the soft, synthesized melody coming through the speakers. Old guys squinted, obliged by age-old custom to make some effort, no matter how hopeless, to come up with the title of the song. They gave up, of course, and slowly, their curiosities lifted and chatter resumed. New faces shuffled in. The bartender filled mug after mug. George, meanwhile, stayed in front of the machine, rocking back and forth in its green-and-yellow light. He was playing Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.”


The Blarney Cove closed a few days later. In the year since, all the signs that once marked its spot at 519 East Fourteenth Street have been carried off—but even while it was open, the bar was easy to overlook. In daylight, its half-illuminated “Blarney Cove” sign never quite held its own against the Canal Jewelry awning looming next door. At night it was easier to see. For a long time, a neon sign that said DRINK STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE glowed in the window, sending a column of blue out to the street, through the smokers’ vigil. When Canal Jewelry closed, though, this sign disappeared—in its place was a more traditional neon Budweiser logo, hung perhaps to appease the block’s new gentry, who insisted, in their usual way, that shops dress in their Sunday best.


Today, the last trace of the bar’s thirty-six-year stand on Fourteenth Street is a small “R.I.P. Blarney Cove!” scribbled in permanent marker on the metal security gate that seals the barroom off from the street. The smokers have moved on, but I have seen, now and then, wedged into the gate, a crushed beer can reflecting sunlight in the early hours of the morning.


Joe Kloc is a reporter for Newsweek. He lives in New York.

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Published on August 11, 2014 12:41

The Mystery of the Plaster Plimpton

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Hailey Gates holding our plaster Plimpton, a donation from Duncan Sahner and Rodney Cook.


By the largesse of Duncan Sahner and Rodney Cook, The Paris Review has come to possess a handsome bust of our late founding editor, George Plimpton. Specifically, this is a plaster maquette—the sculptural equivalent of a draft or sketch—by George M. Kelly, a sculptor of some renown. When Sahner and Cook heard that Kelly was soon to be evicted from his studio in Astoria, they “put together a team of Monuments Men” to rescue some of his work. This maquette was among their bounty.


And yet so much of the story remains untold. For starters, how did Kelly and Plimpton know each other, and who prevailed on whom to have Plimpton sit as a subject? Furthermore, if our bust is only a preliminary model, then where’s the final version?


The Times offers tantalizing evidence of its existence. Back in 2003, on the occasion of Plimpton’s death, the paper reported that Elaine’s—the restaurant and New York City institution, shuttered in 2011 after more than forty-five years in business—had “ … on a shelf in the back room.” There’s even a photo of him standing beneath it. Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor, told the Times,



A couple of years ago a guy named Kelly did a bust of George in brass … The guy wanted a lot of money, $35,000. I don’t have that kind of—BLEEP!—money. So we ended up with the plaster cast.



That cast remained on display until the restaurant closed. Photographs suggest that it’s not the same cast presently in our office. Ours has a visible seam just behind the Plimp’s ear; the model in Elaine’s is a more polished affair. And if there are already two of these plaster Georges, might not there be others, too?


If you or your loved ones have any clues as to the whereabouts of the bronze Plimpton, or of any further plaster Plimptons, or perhaps even of a marble or Plasticine Plimpton, please let us know. In the meantime, we’re delighted to show off our plaster Plimp, who is, as you can see, eminently photogenic:


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Plaster Plimpton avails himself of a cab.


 


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Plaster Plimpton gazes approvingly at The Paris Review’s offices.

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Published on August 11, 2014 10:10

Levity in the Trenches, and Other News

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Got a man in the trenches? Show him you care—with roller skates.



An early manuscript of The Sun Also Rises finds Hemingway getting all metafictional: “Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly, and, in so doing, calls out the artifice implicit in the writing and reading of fiction. It is a wink at the marketplace—readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad—and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.” That’s so po-mo!
It took E. M. Forster eleven years to write A Passage to Indiawhy? Even his diary is cagey.
A wealthy Brazilian businessman wants to own and catalog every vinyl record in the world. (Don’t worry. He has interns.)
“During the First World War, advertisers seemed to be responding to people’s needs relatively quickly … In Country Life, one of the things I noticed, being a woman, was that there were a lot of ads for guard dogs. It’s things like that that start appearing throughout the war—obvious and terribly poignant things, such as identity bracelets—that start to be advertised very widely, as casualty lists mounted … Many of the manufacturers who produced the most eye-catching ads are still in business today. The ads worked.”
Seduce and Destroy: dissecting Tom Cruise’s potent performance in Magnolia, fifteen years later.
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Published on August 11, 2014 06:30

August 9, 2014

The Professor and the Siren

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s groundbreaking mermaid.


The-Mermaid

Howard Pyle, The Mermaid, 1910


By the side of the path around the circular, volcanic crater of Lake Pergusa, near the town of Enna in the center of Sicily, a carved stone marks the spot where Proserpina, the goddess of the spring, was seized and carried off by Pluto into the underworld. “Qui, in questo luogo,” proclaims the inscription. “Proserpina fù rapita.” This is the very place:



                                          ...that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs
Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis
Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.
(Milton, Paradise Lost, IV)



I was giving a lecture in Palermo in 2011 and asked to see the entrance to Hades. My hosts from the university kindly drove me; it was early summer, the lush undergrowth was starred with flowers, and the tapestry of orchids, campion, arum, acanthus, clover, wild hyacinth, thyme, and marjoram was still green, tender, and damp. Next to the monument I found another sign, which pointed beyond the chain-link fence toward “the cave from which the god issued forth in his chariot.” Again, the use of the past historic declared the event’s definite reality. In a tangle of bushes and fruit trees, some rocks were visible, but the mouth opening on the infernal regions now stands in private grounds.


Ovid tells us, in his Metamorphoses, that the young girls who were gathering flowers with Proserpina that fatal day were turned into the Sirens—the bird-bodied golden-feathered singers with female faces of the Homeric tradition—and then went wandering about over land and sea, crying out in search of their vanished playmate. In “The Professor and the Siren,” Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, picks up these echoes when he evokes a passionate love affair unfolding by the sea in the ferocious heat of the dog days in 1887. However, in this late story, which was written in January 1957, a few months before his death, Lampedusa gives his immortal heroine the body of a fish from the waist down; in this he is following the more familiar northern folklore tradition of fish-tailed mermaids; of Mélusine, seal women or selkies; and of water spirits, called undines by the alchemist and philosopher Paracelsus. But both species share the special charm of an irresistible voice. In the case of Lampedusa’s mermaid, hers is “a bit guttural, husky, resounding with countless harmonics; behind the words could be discerned the sluggish undertow of summer seas, the whisper of receding beach foam, the wind passing over lunar tides. The song of the Sirens ... does not exist; the music that cannot be escaped is their voice alone.” 


“The Professor and the Siren” is the only instance of fantastic fiction in Lampedusa’s scanty oeuvre, but enigmatic and brief as it is, it condenses many elements from both local and more distant folklore into a deeply strange, sometimes disturbing fable; in the manner of Giovanni Boccaccio and of The Thousand and One Nights, the tale encloses a visionary and magical adventure inside a naturalistic, quotidian frame story. In the outer frame, Paolo Corbera, a young journalist living a bit on the wild side, who comes from the same aristocratic Sicilian family—the Salina—as Don Fabrizio, the hero of Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, meets an aged fellow countryman in a dingy café in Turin in 1938. He discovers the old man is a renowned classicist and senator, Rosario La Ciura, a waspish misanthrope who is contemptuous of everything and everyone around him in the modern world. But the younger man is attracted by a quality of mystery and yearning beneath the spiky persona and grows attached to him; the feeling is mutual, though La Ciura does not let up on his withering remarks, bitter denunciations of contemporary society, and mockery of the imagined squalor of his young friend’s promiscuous adventures. Then one evening, over dinner at his house, on the eve of a sea voyage to a conference in Lisbon, La Ciura confides in Paolo the story of his first and only experience of love.


In that torrid summer of 1887, La Ciura tells Paolo, he retreated to a shack by the sea on the magnificent wild shore on the eastern side of Sicily, near the port of Augusta. One day, while he lay studying in a gently rocking boat in order to escape the ferocious heat on land, he felt the craft dip: “I turned and saw her: The smooth face of a sixteen-year-old emerged from the sea; two small hands gripped the gunwale. The adolescent smiled, a slight displacement of her pale lips that revealed small, sharp white teeth, like dogs.’ ” He pulls her into the boat and sees her lower body: “She was a Siren.”


The Siren announces herself: She is “Lighea, daughter of Calliope,” a name that lays a clue to the story’s deeper meaning, for Calliope is the muse of epic poetry who, in the Metamorphoses, tells the story of Proserpina, her abduction, and the transformation of her handmaidens. Through this account of her daughter’s irruption into La Ciura’s life, the overwhelming epiphany he undergoes through her love, and its lifelong aftershock, Lampedusa is placing himself as the heir of an imaginative literary legacy running back to the pagan past, when Christian repression and hypocrisy did not exercise their hold but instead life was bathed in a luminous intensity and heightened by guilt-free passion.


While the name Lighea (the original title of the story in Italian) echoes the heroine of Edgar Allan Poe’s early tale of erotic haunting “Ligeia,” the coincidence is not altogether helpful; La Ciura has remained spellbound all his life by his youthful love, but Lampedusa’s story does not raise uncanny specters or relish sickly memories. The Sicilian is writing against the morbid obsession of Poe; the passion at the core of his modern mythology conjures the possibility of an earthy, pastoral ecstasy, much closer to Dionysian erotica and its legacy (Mallarmé’s “L’Après-midi d’un faune”) than to creepy high Gothic; animality recurs in the tale as an ideal. In a startling passage, La Ciura even compares the bliss he experienced with his mermaid to Sicilian goatherds coupling with their animals.


Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), Lampedusa’s only novel, a Stendhalian historical reconstruction of Sicilian society in the tumult of the Garibaldian revolution, is one of those books that has such vivid energy of imagination it has replaced Sicilian reality in the minds of thousands. The book unfurls a fabric of luxuriantly worked detail, as encrusted and sumptuous as one of the island’s embroidered mantles of the Madonna, and its worldwide success with readers arose partly from this sensuous plenitude: Lampedusa piles on pleasurable, heady effects, as in the celebrated ball scene when he parades profiteroles, succulent Babas, and irresistible “Virgins’ cakes.” “The Professor and the Siren” likewise stimulates each of the senses—we are invited to smell and taste the siren, not just to see or touch her. The erotic avidity of the eminent, scornful professor startles his young friend, Paolo, just as it can take the reader by surprise, too. The old man wants to eat sea urchins:



“ ... they are the most beautiful thing you have down there, bloody and cartilaginous, the very image of the female sex, fragrant with salt and seaweed. Typhus, typhus! They’re dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. In Syracuse I demanded that Orsi order them immediately. What flavor! How divine in appearance! My most beautiful memory of the last fifty years!”


I was confused and fascinated: a man of such stature indulging in almost obscene metaphors, displaying an infantile appetite for the altogether mediocre pleasure of eating sea urchins!



Later, Paolo brings La Ciura some very fresh ones for supper and watches him eat them:



The urchins, split in half, revealed their wounded, blood-red, strangely compartmentalized flesh. I’d never paid attention before now, but after the senator’s bizarre comparisons they really did seem like cross sections of who knows what delicate female organs. He consumed them avidly but without cheer, with a meditative, almost sorrowful air.



The effect is a bit queasy, a collision of refinement with explicit fleshly delights. Earlier, La Ciura has quoted the opening line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 119: “What potions have I drunk of Siren tears?”


The original sonnet, however, continues in a dark Jacobean spirit, that these tears have been “Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within.” The reader may not carry libraries in his head like the author, but turning back to Shakespeare will find that the poet, overborne by “this madding fever” of his love, cries out against the clash between beauty and ugliness, desire and repulsion. La Ciura, idealizing a memory of bliss with one exceptional lover, while furiously denouncing all other women as sluts, or worse, recalls Lear who in his madness rains down curses on women’s organs: “Down from the waist they are Centaurs, / Though women all above; / But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness, / There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, / Stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!” (King Lear, IV, 6)


In Shakespeare’s imagination, the centaurs that Lear excoriates are—like mermaids, monsters, mythic hybrids of animal and human parts—close to nature and its bounty and violence, and brimful of classical associations with untamed passions. But La Ciura is taking issue with this dichotomy and its freight of sin and disgust. He declares, “I told you before, Corbera: She was a beast and at the same time an Immortal, and it’s a shame that we cannot continuously express this synthesis in speaking, the way she does, with absolute simplicity, in her own body.”


Lighea’s marvelous duality is reflected throughout the story. The old man and his young friend—the one celibate, the other libidinous—dramatize the traditional Greek antimony between reason and desire, the civilized and the wild. Yet, as with the mermaid’s form, Lampedusa aims to fashion a coincidentia oppositorum at many levels—supernatural and natural, unreal and material, monstrosity and beauty, animal and human, ideal love and lubricious delight—arraying his love story in language that’s enriched by his famously wide reading across the spectrum of genres, including Calliope’s sphere, epic poetry: The imagery of his siren’s peculiar anatomy owes something to Keats’s Lamia, as well as to Homer’s Scylla. With judicious wit, Lampedusa corrects misapprehensions among his forebears; for example, in canto XIX of Purgatorio, a passage familiar to Italian readers, Dante describes a dream of an ambiguous siren, beautiful and grotesque, and remembers how he woke sharply at the stench from her exposed belly. This is the sort of puritanical horror that Lampedusa rejects utterly. When La Ciura evokes the delicious aroma of his siren, he is pointedly redressing the wrong done to the species. Above all, La Ciura’s heroine declares, “Don’t believe the stories about us. We don’t kill anyone, we only love.”


A version of this essay appears as the introduction to The Professor and the Siren, © 2014 New York Review Books Classics.


Marina Warner’s studies of religion, mythology, and fairy tales include Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize; Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde, and No Go the Bogeyman. In 2013 she coedited Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights. A Fellow of the British Academy, she is also a professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford.

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Published on August 09, 2014 09:05

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