The Paris Review's Blog, page 686

Third Place

From a 1994 German postage stamp.

The arc of this World Cup nears its completion. Over prosperity and poverty, over cities and shores and jungles, over fair winter and fiery winter, it ascended, curved, and now looks to settle, in Rio’s Maracanã on Sunday.

But first, the midweek semifinals. Four teams remain, and four heavyweights at that—Argentina, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands. Two of these will paint the enduring portrait of this World Cup.

There’s hardly a World Cup whose final image hasn’t occurred in its final match. Think of Holland’s Nigel de Jong’s karate kick to Spain’s Xabi Alonso’s chest in 2010; or Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt in 2006; or Ronaldo, who’d sat out most of the past three seasons because of knee injuries, scoring the only two goals of the 2002 final against Germany; or Zidane’s two first-half goals against Brazil in the ’98 final, and the strange sight of Ronaldo, then at the height of his powers, seeming to struggle to stay on his feet; or the reigning FIFA World Player of the Year, Roberto Baggio, missing the decisive penalty against Brazil in Los Angeles in 1994; the euphoria of Paolo Rossi in ’82; the Dutch scoring in ’74 against West Germany in West Germany, within two minutes of kickoff, and with the Germans yet to touch the ball; and on, and on.

All eyes are on the finalists. The memory machine is ready to fire. And because finals happen in the absence of other games, the possibility of something great floats in the mind, waiting to be ruined. In a very real sense, the World Cup is already over, but for the comparatively minor business of settling which of these four teams will win and what lasting image the two finalists will leave us with.

And yet before Sunday’s final, there’s Saturday’s game, which for me carries the same weight—not for its importance, but for the window it provides into the people who play. This will be the third-place game, in which the losers of the two semifinals meet to decide who finishes third and who finishes fourth. Finals are dreamscapes, heavy shimmering things. The spectacle and competition make a final less about its players and more about the game itself; the players fill a void that’s been waiting for them, as even now such voids are waiting in the Moscow of 2018 and the Qatar of 2022. But that third-place game …

While the semifinalists of the World Cup prepare for their games with the taste of victory still fresh, the third-place game is a consolation for losers. Whether you lost 4-0 or to a last-second goal, there you are. There are times when national pride and/or a collective feeling of fleeting opportunity coaxes one final good performance out of a team. There are other occasions in which the semifinal loss still stings too much, a nation having expected much more than third from its team.

In urban planning, cultural studies, and sociology, there’s a concept called third place invented by Ray Oldenburg. If home is the first place and work is the second, the third place is an intermediary area to create and foster community—the setting where you hang out and become a regular among regulars—the barbershop or hair salon, the record store, the pub, the bowling alley. In a sense, the third-place game is similar. It’s a kind of setting, a place for the player who made that critical mistake in the semifinal, jumping for a ball with the opposing player who missed his penalty; for the substitute who hasn’t gotten a minute of playing time, and who now gets his chance to start; for the fans who can cheer for their team at this game because they’re still there, and so what else are you going to do? (Similarly, the players, perhaps for the first time in a long time, relax, because they’re still there, and so what else are they going to do?)

The results of the last seven third-places World Cup matches are 3-2, 4-2, 2-1, 4-0, 2-1, 3-2, and 3-1: there will be goals. But soon enough the players’ bodies will hold no sway; all will be images and language again. That must weigh on some of their minds. To lose a final is to be a runner-up, and some are legends; to finish third is to have won something, at least, even if only freedom from having finished fourth; and finishing fourth … what is fourth?

In the case of the World Cup, it may be the loneliest number of them all.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, will be published next year. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Read Everywhere, Part 2

Garth Greenwell, whose story “Gospodar” appears in our Summer issue, reads The Paris Review in Plaza del Angel, Madrid, on Coronation Day.

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Those Who Hope Not to Be Erased: An Interview with Carol Muske-Dukes

Photo: Carlos Puma.

A writer and poet whose verse recently appeared in the Spring issue of The Paris Review–Carol Muske-Dukes has long been interested and active in presenting a public face of poetry. A former poet laureate of California and a teacher for many years, she founded the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and began a writing program, in 1972, at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island in New York. On the heels of National Poetry Month, I spoke with Muske-Dukes at her home in Southern California about the many contemporary approaches to reading, writing, and thinking about the art of poetry, from hip-hop to “unoriginal genius” and how language matters.

What do you think the public face of poetry looks like?

Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that “there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” but we need education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel.”

A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry.

Is there a particular critical ideology you have in mind?

I’m thinking of the idea of “unoriginal genius,” though no one outside of the academy much cares about how some academic critics are now promoting it. “Unoriginal genius,” oxymoronic as it sounds, means simply that you can call yourself a genius in this age of technology if you’re savvy at editing, deleting, and erasing certain words from canonical poems and calling what remains proof of your genius. You also use collage and citation, à la Benjamin’s Arcade Project, and appropriation—as in borrowing the words of others—to promote your ability to use scissors and the delete key.

What do you think people are trying to accomplish by approaching poetry in that manner?

At a time when people appear to want poetry to make some sense, or maybe offer a bit of beauty and wisdom shaped from the chaos in which we live, or at least offer insight into the contradictory realities in which we live, it is particularly unfortunate that this retreat into obscurity and critical narcissism is the response by those who study poetry and think about it. Proponents of unoriginal genius would say that they are putting forward a version of interpretation and illumination of a technological age. But the fact is, this mirroring of disjunction represents no real speaking or reading or thinking population. What is being conflated is a salvation notion of technology as popularity—which ultimately, it is not. The struggle here, as it is with overly accessible, catchy poetry, is a struggle to be both popular and enlightening.

We live in a time when language matters. Not only because of the constant threat of misunderstanding in translation—in diplomacy, in wartime, in the university and literary life—but, as always, in individual human relations. So the abdication of accessible rhetoric and a turn toward so-called scholarship is an abdication of the human. The academy has opted for pointless experimentation in language compared to my mother’s generation—she’s ninety-eight—of well schooled, publicly educated students of poetry who know pages and pages of poetry by heart. Should anyone who believes in sense be ostracized from the ongoing conversation of literature?

What was this sense of poetry that your mother had, which she passed down to you?

Long ago, on a cold, snowy Minnesota afternoon, standing in line at the post office with my mother, I sighed in boredom and heard the quote, “They also serve, who only stand and wait.” This famous line would probably not be recognized now, not only because so few passionately read poetry, including those who write it. Few might recognize the author, fewer still that the observation is timeless—lightning outside of century or culture.

The line asks the listener or reader to consider something mysterious, profound, and marginalized—those who hope not to be erased! Readers still engaging with Milton know how to think aesthetically, how to feel tone. Do I find this ultimate line of Milton’s “On His Blindness”—or in fact, the entire sonnet—far more moving and challenging intellectually than a collage poem by conceptualists? Well, yes. I have nothing against the incorporation of great lines into ongoing contemporary poems, in the style of Susan Howe’s or Susan Wheeler’s successful poems. I’m not attacking unconventional inventiveness or types of homage or citation. I’m talking about the deadening of poetic sensibility—a version, I guess, of tone deafness.

So if the public face of poetry is a bit shadowed, it’s still visible. For every genius celebrating his or her unoriginality, there are those who still read and think, connected to the force of original thought—the art of consciousness.

Is “unoriginal genius” something that, in your experience, is confined to the academy, or have you encountered it in your time teaching?

I founded a Ph.D. program in creative writing/literature in a university setting, but I also established, years ago, a prison program at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, and we ended up offering writing workshops in poetry, fiction, and playwriting throughout all prisons in New York State. The writing was student-ish—often bad political verse or excessively romantic rhetoric or familiar memoir self-pity. If the inmates’ poetry struggled to breathe, so does the poetry of academia, so does the imprisoned spirit of misogynist rap. Writers “inside” responded to the prompt all poets need to hear—your voice still matters, but you must read everything, you must enter into the great conversation of literature and listen to the voices of the dead and honor them, talk to them, and then, and only then, write. Not one of the inmates—though they became great readers of literature—cared about erasures. Their whole lives were erasures. They would have said that those who erase memory, the past, an enduring aesthetic, only erase themselves as writers.

There is the idea that poetry is essential but that it’s divorced from ordinary life and ordinary experience.

If you took a survey of the U.S. population, it would seem that poetry is irrelevant. I’ve found that students and citizens of other countries have a stronger connection to poetry. If American poets still seek to reach a public or community—apart from poem excerpts on the subway—they have to return to what makes poetry both powerfully solo and yet connected to all living things.

In recent years, you’ve written novels and nonfiction, and those forms get more attention than poetry does.

Poetry is like mailing a letter to the void. But maybe this is as it should be. “I’m nobody / who are you?” But “the soul selects her own society” all the same. I write about this in a collection of essays of mine, Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood, which was just republished as an e-book. I haven’t given up on technology.

Why did you recently do a book signing at a Hudson News in the Los Angeles International Airport?

A USC colleague of mine, the splendid David Roman, was in the United Terminal at LAX, and as he was walking by Hudson News, he saw my name emblazoned on the bookstore marquee. He saw Melville and then this nobody, Carol Muske-Dukes, so he took a picture and sent it to me. Then I heard from somebody at that bookstore asking if I would come out and sign books. I signed both novels and poetry, but the novels were the ones people were most interested in.

Was there a good crowd?

Actually, it was pretty good. I mean talk about a captive audience! They’ve never heard of me but they’d buy a book because I was there. I had this idea—what if we had something called Air Poets? Give readings and sign books at various terminals all over the world. Now there’s a terrible idea!

You run the writing program at USC, and I’m curious if you think that writing programs specialize too much.

I don’t run it anymore, though I advise and participate. But I did found and launch the thing, on my own. I had to overcome resistance on the part of English department. Former friends, colleagues tried to deep-six the program, which they thought would be a threat to the status quo, plus it would “specialize too much”—a studio art in academia. I fought hard for it and won. Now the program is very successful and the naysayers adore it. I chose to start a Ph.D. program, rather than an M.F.A., partly because I felt that many M.F.A. programs weren’t emphasizing reading enough. It was all about writing aimlessly, that is to say, specializing—like majoring in shop without making a birdhouse—caught up in literary trends specific to a genre ghetto. You enter most programs as a poet or a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer and you stay in that club.

I’m fascinated by how many writers are uninterested in poetry.

Writers think there’s nothing in the art of poetry for them. They’re wrong. I’m a genre leaper. I don’t see much difference among types of writing, prose or poetry. Most writing students haven’t read poetry extensively, broadly, wildly. If poetry students don’t read broadly, why should anyone else? They read only their contemporaries, no interest in the past as present. Every writing program or conference should offer refresher zones—reading without writing for a brief or long while. Fill up the well if you want to be a writer. We live in an age where you can celebrify yourself instantly. You can pimp yourself in poetry or fiction overnight—anybody can publish anything now because of the Internet. With no critical standards and little reading, we aren’t talking about imaginative writing anymore. We’re talking about a cottage industry and the creation of artifacts and trinkets. The solitude of the writing experience—solitude that reads and converses with the great dead—seems an enemy of technology. Though, finally, I don’t believe this is true. There are poets of all ages who are not threatened by technology but do not have to use it as a club—in both senses of the word.

And just to bring it back to where we started, we’re talking about the public face of something that is largely created and experienced in solitude.

Wordsworth was right. That’s how he defined poetry—emotion recollected in solitude. Does that sound like a cliché? The reality is that we live in an age that works against poetry. Poetry is an act of attention and we’re in a time where having an attention deficit is the norm. We’re bombarded with images and information, but images and information are not knowledge—and they’re certainly not poetry.

Alex Dueben has written for The Poetry Foundation, The Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, Suicidegirls, and others. His interview with William Gibson was included in Conversations with William Gibson.

:) vs. :-), and Other News

No emotion required.

The world’s first rhyming dictionary: 1570’s Manipulus Vocabularum. (What rhymes with horseleach? Ouerreache.)
On writers and neologisms—how does a writer invent a good word? “Successful coinage, like happiness, may be more likely the less you aim directly at it. A writer who is obsessed with creating a popular new word is like a footballer who devotes all his energies to breaking the world record for keepy-uppy rather than playing well for his team. It’s a stunt rather than the real game. When composing Paradise Lost, John Milton probably wasn’t rubbing his hands at the thought of all the people in coming centuries who might borrow his invented term for the place where all the devils dwelt (pandemonium); he was just getting on with the job of writing an immortal poem.”
A linguist analyzes our use of emoji and emoticons: “He discovered a divide, for instance, between people who include a hyphen to represent a nose in smiley faces— :-) —and people who use the shorter version without the hyphen. ‘The nose is associated with conventionality’ … People using a nose also tend to ‘spell words out completely. They use fewer abbreviations.’”
The triumphant return of interactive fiction and “text adventures.”
The Reading Rainbow app is a sign of the times: “In the television version, a soothing voice read books to viewers as illustrations drifted across the screen like fish in an aquarium … The Reading Rainbow tablet app is busier.”

Night at the Museum

“The Camera in the Mirror”

Google is growing up. Its cameras have entered the mirror stage. Since 2011, the company has sent elaborate camera-mounted trolleys into museums as part of Google Art Project, which allows users to browse galleries around the globe, clicking through room by room to simulate the sense of space. Sheathed occasionally (and abstrusely) in shimmering Mylar blankets, Google’s cameras take photographs in 360 degrees; whenever the trolley passes a mirror, it takes an accidental self-portrait.

Now, just as Jon Rafman’s “9-Eyes” presents moments of incidental beauty and sublimity from Google Street View, a new tumblr by Mario Santamaría called “The Camera in the Mirror” captures Google’s cameras as they capture themselves: unsettlingly alone and caught in a kind of perpetual anachronism, surrounded by art and artifacts from centuries past.

If Lacan and Baudrillard somehow procreated, and their child ate some bad LSD, the hallucinations might resemble something from “The Camera in the Mirror.” There are no people in these photos—only an inert, mechanical totem pole seemingly obsessed with itself. It’s hard not to ascribe human motivations to the thing, in part because it resembles a sleek bipedal extraterrestrial and in part because it sits, with chilling deliberation, at the center of every frame. In certain shots it looks imperious, haughty; in others it becomes almost playful or curious. In only a few minutes it takes on a kind of personality, and so the whole project becomes tinged with the rhetoric of science fiction: What does the machine want? Where is it going? Is there any stopping it?

I thought of a few lines from Sartre’s Nausea and gave myself the willies: “People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”

And yet, as terrifyingly impenetrable as they seem, these photos are signs of fallible life from the Googleplex—they shatter the illusion of seamless museum-going, showing us the leering, error-prone business end of one of the world’s most ubiquitous and powerful corporations. They testify to Google’s mind-boggling wealth: among other niceties, these trolleys are mounted with the CLAUSS RODEON VR Head HD and CLAUSS VR Head ST, two panoramic cameras that take photos with about a thousand times more detail than the average digital camera. They cost upward of five thousand dollars apiece. Of course they want to look at themselves.

Speaking American

The varying temperaments of British and American storytelling.

Lower Basswood Falls, Superior National Forest, July 1961.

In 1890, a thirty-seven-year-old Scot named James F. Muirhead arrived in America with the intention of carrying out an extensive survey of the republic for the “Baedeker’s Handbook to the United States.” Muirhead spent the next three years traveling to almost every state and territory in the Union, approaching his vast subject matter with none of the condescension often expressed by Victorian Englishmen of the era. In 1898 he published The Land of Contrasts—A Briton’s View of His American Kin, which he considered to be a “tribute of admiration and gratitude.” His colorful chapter headings show the range of his interests: “An Appreciation of the American Woman,” “Sports and Amusements,” “American Journalism—A Mixed Blessing,” and “Some Literary Straws.”

In that last chapter, Muirhead attempts to throw some light upon the “respective literary tastes of the Englishman and the American.” While he notes the grammatical wrongness of the American idiom—at least to his ear—in phrases such as “a long ways off” or “In a voice neither could scare hear,” he is most interested in “the tone, the temper, the method, the ideals” of an American writer. He singles out William Dean Howells—who challenged American authors to choose American subjects—as “purely and exclusively American, in his style as in his subject, in his main themes as in his incidental illustrations, in his spirit, his temperament, his point of view.”

But what does it mean to have an American point of view? Muirhead keeps trying to put his finger on this elusive quality: “Mr. Howells … possesses a bonhomie, a geniality, a good-nature veiled by a slight mask of cynicism, that may be personal, but which strikes one as also a characteristic American trait.” And then: “To me Mr. Howells, even when in his most realistic and sordid vein, always suggests the ideal and the noble.”

More than a century on, the question of what marks literature as American is even more complicated. I’ve had cause to ponder this question from a very practical perspective, as a British journalist—albeit one who has lived in New York City for the past twenty years. My book Falling Through Clouds tells a very American story, about a young father from Minnesota who struggles in the wake of a private plane crash that killed his wife, badly injured his two daughters, and forced him into a legal battle with a major insurance company; to me, the very name of that company, Old Republic, conjures up vintage images of Jimmy Stewart–era capitalism.

Aside from the obvious vocabulary differences— “windscreen” to “windshield,” “trainers” to “sneakers”—I faced a bigger problem when I started reporting the book. My main character, Toby Pearson, narrated his story with such economy, with such a flat affect shorn of sentiment, that at first I wondered if I could ever capture the momentousness of what he’d suffered.

Consider how Toby related this dramatic scene to me when I asked how Grace, his four-year-old girl, recalled the plane crash: “She said that she did not remember mommy yelling or crying or anything. She only remembered that they were in the clouds and flying along and then a big jolt and suddenly they were on the ground. Then she undid her and Lily’s seatbelt and moved away from the fire. They did not know where Mommy and Charlie were and were scared.” It seems to me that these run-on sentences capture the inflection and thought process of a child, but this simplicity, this apparent artlessness, was how I first received the story. This is the raw material. Toby told me about going to the store with his youngest daughter, Lily, who’d had to wear a facial mask to help heal the scars from the burns she received in the crash. What was that like? “Lots of staring, heads turning, at the stores and anywhere we went. It was pretty tough for me to take since I think I noticed it more. Little kids would point and stare … Several times adults were very rude and one time in particular a guy said, ‘Oh my God, what happened to her? Why does she look like that?’ This was in the cereal aisle.”

I felt the urge, at first, to overwrite Toby’s experience with more superlatives, and heighten the rhetorical style. But this would have been dishonest. The brevity of his expression belied a powerful, emotional subtext. It wasn’t in the words exactly, but beneath them. The simple juxtaposition of the cruel comment with the cereal aisle, to me, already says enough. I realized that for my narrative to be truthful, I had to reflect the way Toby spoke—this wasn’t just a question of style, of changing words. It was tied up with the way Toby saw the world, and the way he survived. It was contained emotion. There was a virtue, a moral force even, in the brevity of his expression. Adjusting to this was almost like learning a new musical language. Maybe this is what Muirhead was getting at when he sensed, in Howells, “a good-nature veiled by a slight mask of cynicism.”

I was conscious that this language was American, or at least from a certain, central part of this American continent—the Midwest. I read and reread books, admittedly not all from the Midwest, that would help me understand and refine this voice, this way of seeing: Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But what did they all have in common?

Thematically, they all deal with a sudden death; they belong mostly to the small bibliography of grief. But something else drew me in, too, something to do with their tragic mode of regard and the way it is presented, often with a spare, sure sense of narrative, reflected in a colloquial voice, free of affectation or even excitement. “The story is sad, primal, deeply American. The writing is as clear and sharp as grain alcohol,” is how Daniel Menaker describes William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is set on a farm in rural Illinois. And although the book is fiction based on fact, the stripped-down style was the music I recognized. It seemed to match the way Toby spoke about his story.

I called Menaker to better understand what he meant by this phrase, and to see if he would elaborate further on the “grain alcohol” characteristic of American writing. He agreed that the Midwestern aspect seemed to him one of the crucial elements of this voice, which he identified in the work of Samuel Hynes, the Chicago-born writer who served as a Marine Corps pilot during and after World War II and later wrote two memoirs (The Soldiers’ Tale, and Flights of Passage)—“very clear and very direct, without being overwrought.”

“It’s as if you were looking through a clear sheet of ice at very hot water … the way to see it clearly is to retain control,” Menaker said. Thus, for example, in So Long, See You Tomorrow, Maxwell writes: “Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally.” To me, what lowers the temperature of this devastating insight is the “from time to time.” Another example with a similarly flat affect, from Maxwell: “My mother died two days late of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.”

Menaker said this kind of expression is not only lucid, but pellucid: “something just shines right through.” When asked how he achieved this effect, Maxwell likened the reality of what he wanted to express to “polished stones underneath the streams you can see from the surface. You don’t necessarily have to pick them up, but you can see some hard substance underneath the flowing water of the words.”

So a clean line of prose laid over a thought or a feeling was the Maxwell way. Is that the American way? Certainly Mark Twain has it; and Alice Munro’s work—although she’s Canadian—is often heartbreaking in its pellucidity.

Suddenly the geographical precision of my point is sprawling beyond Central Standard Time. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s the sensibility that counts, the tension that exists between the underlying reality and the cool, simple flow of the phrase. And it can be used for comic effect, too, as in Garrison Keillor’s weekly monologue about Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”; and as in the black comedy of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, in which the local police chief, Marge Gunderson, apprehends the homicidal Gaear Grimsrud and scolds him mildly for his kidnapping and killing spree: “So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there? And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper? And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little money. There’s more to life than a little money, don’t you know that?” It’s that tonal flatness, and Marge’s placidity in the face of such bloody events, that makes this funny, and very American. I found, during my reporting for Falling Through Clouds, a similarly black-comic moment when a reporter insisted on designating Toby Pearson the “Second Luckiest Person of the Year,” because his children, while badly injured, had survived a plane crash. First place went to a group of cooks who’d won the lottery.

* * *

An English writer’s relation to the geography of Britain feels familiar. It’s not exotic or particularly dangerous, unless you’re talking Heathcliff and the North Yorkshire Moors; there’s always the reassurance of a church, or a pub, or a field of daffodils just around the bend. But the vastness of the American landscape opens up possibilities, thrilling and threatening, for a writer. At the beginning of In Cold Blood, when Capote sets the scene for the murders in Holcomb, the land becomes mythical, overwhelming, fearsome: “But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles.” There’s a grandeur to the landscape that can’t be matched in Britain, a reminder of our contingent status in the larger scheme of things. (In England, we have the graveyard to remind us of this.) American writing often gives us a macro view of the land, the geospatial sense of endlessness. In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley spends considerable time describing the location of the Iowa farm where the action is to take place: “At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on Country Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road … Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant, at the southern edge of the farm.” Smiley is as precise as Google Maps—and we see that the landscape is going to surround this story.

When I came to write about Northern Minnesota, I travelled up the North Shore, by Lake Superior, and saw the vast iron-ore ships waiting to enter the harbor at Duluth. I was never more aware of American mythology when I drove up Old Highway 61—the road that runs from Bob Dylan’s home state to the Mississippi Delta—to the edge of the Superior National Forest, outside of Grand Marais. It was here that Toby Pearson and I kicked through the leaves to locate the crash site where the small plane went down, where his wife and brother-in-law died, and where his two girls were found alive. The forest is so vast—three million acres—that to be inside of it defies one’s ability to comprehend it. The pilot who spotted the wreckage of the aircraft from the air, against all the odds, told me he had no doubt that “going down in Superior National’s ocean of trees was just as bad as disappearing in the middle of the Atlantic.”

To me, it’s also this sense of scale that marks a book as American. I asked the British writer Piers Torday for his take on some of these differences. Torday’s inventive children’s adventure The Last Wild was recently published in the U.S.—this eco-thriller, as it’s been called, features a forest—“the ring of trees”— where the hero encounters animals that have survived a deadly disease. And yet, somehow this wild wood doesn’t feel like an American wild wood. Why is that? Torday suggests it has much to do with his childhood reading experiences—everything from Kenneth Graham to C. S. Lewis to Roald Dahl. “There’s a set of stylistic tropes in our children’s literature that feel instinctively British to me. The belief that there’s almost no misery or ailment on earth that can’t be remedied by a hot cup of tea—or supper set on a tray, buttered toast warmed by the fire, curtains drawn tight and small wooden doors firmly shut against the world—whether in Bag End or a beaver’s dam. A yearning for idealized Edwardian domesticity is still very powerful today, that suggests high adventure on a manageable domestic scale is a recurring characteristic.”

“Manageable domestic scale” seems to be the key difference here. Our woods often have people, or talking animals, living in them. I understand what Torday means, since I also grew up with these same books, in those same woods. But there’s another fundamental difference: the American predisposition to look forward to the future rather than back to the past. “I think British writing hovers in constant insecurity over its relation to the modern globalized world. This is part of its appeal and charm to the anxious—not least young children,” Torday said. “But perhaps we are too ready to draw on the balms of the past rather then seriously address the dilemmas of the future.”

In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik observed that “lucid writing is the sign of a moral state.” Hard truths, he argues, need to be spoken plainly. This makes sense. Humbert Humbert’s famous line in Lolita springs to mind: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Obfuscation is suspect. Strunk and White’s famous instruction to “omit needless words” isn’t just a journalistic mantra; it’s almost a moral code. I had this in the back of my mind when I wrote my story of the Midwest. I was writing in a different kind of English. It was morally incumbent on me to get it right.

Damian Fowler is the author of Falling Through Clouds: A Story of Survival, Love, and Liability .

O Jogo Bonito

“The Battle of Santiago”—Italy vs. Chile, 1962.

A little more than halfway through Brazil’s horrible, galling victory over Colombia last Friday, I began to wonder what type of foul might actually persuade the Spanish referee Carlos Velasco Carballo to issue a yellow card: A studs-up, two-footed, kung-fu fly-kick to the chest, like the one launched by Eric Cantona against a fan in the stands back in 1995? Any one of the number of egregious fouls, including punches to the head, committed by Italy against Chile, and then by Chile on Italy, in the infamous Battle of Santiago in World Cup 1962? Maybe multiple Suárez-type bites by a hyena pack of players on a prostrate Colombian felled by a scything tackle might have done the trick.

As it was, Thiago Silva eventually received a yellow card for stupidly impeding the Colombia goalkeeper David Ospina as he was about to drop-kick the ball upfield (hardly a big deal); Mario Yepes received one for a tackle no worse than countless that had preceded it; Júlio César received one for understandably wiping out Carlos Bacca on his way to a goal that resulted in a penalty for Colombia; and, cruelest of all, the superb James Rodríguez—who, throughout the tournament, embodied all the skill, verve, and fluidity that’s supposed to be the hallmark of Brazilian soccer, including the ability to smack the ball sweetly into the back of the net—received a yellow card for a tackle he had half pulled out of, his first offense. Then, from the ensuing free kick, David Luiz scored what turned out to be the winning goal for Brazil—an even greater injustice, as Rodríguez had been targeted and pummeled, mostly by Fernandinho, more or less from the opening whistle. As Sam Borden observed in an excellent article in the Times, it is all very well for Luiz Scolari, Brazil’s coach, to claim that Neymar had been “hunted” after Juan Camilo Zuniga had kneed his star player in the back and broken his vertebra—no yellow card—but it was his team, under his direction, that had set the tone. Brazil has lost its reputation and doesn’t look likely to recover it in a hurry.

Meanwhile, Louis van Gaal may soon be challenging Nate Silver for sure-thing statistical predictions. Aware that his reserve goalkeeper, Tim Krul, had a longer reach than his first-choice goalkeeper, Jasper Cillessen, he subbed in Krul with seconds to go in the 121st minute of the game against Costa Rica, and Krul dutifully stretched his arms to save two penalties in the ensuing shoot-out.

And so the last of the little guys have been eliminated from the competition: Belgium, the smallest country; Costa Rica, population 4.5 million; and Colombia, the perennial South American also-ran who had never reached a quarterfinal before. France went out, too, but they haven’t been the same since the Zidane head-butt. And what are we left with? Teams that rely significantly on bullies (Fernandinho et al, Brazil), on divers and fakers (Robben of Holland, Müller of Germany) or, grâce à Dieu, on the soccer genius of Lionel Messi (Argentina).

In the 1966 World Cup, Pele was infamously brutalized, and as a result Brazil didn’t make it out of the group stage; Maradona, on a Faustian journey to reactivate the skills that time had dulled, tarnished his reputation by removing himself from World Cup 1994 with an ephedrine cocktail. But somehow I don’t think that Messi, with his low center of gravity, will be kicked in the air by either Holland or Brazil—should the hosts reach the final—nor does he require a pick-me-up from the pharmacy. For the sake of all those who love the jogo bonito, may the golden boot go to Messi. There’s only been one hat trick ever scored in a World Cup final, by England’s Geoff Hurst in 1966; if whoever referees the final can locate his whistle and his cards, we might yet see something extraordinary on July 13.

Jonathan Wilson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. He is the author of eight books, including Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. He lives in Massachusetts.

Das Kapital Commodified, and Other News

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marx’s portrait appeared on banknotes of the highest value. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

On Thursday, just as the Dow Jones closed at an all-time high, a first edition of Marx’s Das Kapital sold for $40,000.
Searching for Orwell in Scotland: “I had come to Jura, a remote island on Scotland’s west coast, to find the solitude George Orwell had sought sixty-five years earlier to finish his classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four … [I] wanted to understand why a man so accustomed to city life had come to an inaccessible island of only 190 souls to find inspiration for a novel about totalitarianism in an urbanized state—why a writer at the peak of his celebrity ensconced himself in an austere farmhouse hidden in an inhospitable Scottish landscape.”
Paola Antonelli is “one of MoMA’s most prominent, and provocative, curators”: “Petite and energetic, she is prone to fanciful descriptions of the world and its things—a verbal extension, perhaps, of a kind of object-oriented synesthesia. Design, to her, is everywhere … She has said that she believes ‘the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture.’”
In commissioned books of portraits like Matthäus Schwarz’s, from the sixteenth century, we can trace the origins of “self-fashioning”: “Schwarz’s Trachtenbuch (Book of Clothes) was clearly designed for display, and on the whole it paints him in a good light … it announces Schwarz as a person of taste, a supporter of his city and family, a courtly lover, and a well-rounded Renaissance man. It is also, arguably, one of the first fashion books, a distant progenitor of a Vogue lookbook, as it were.”
John Wray profiles Nick Cave: “Cave’s public persona has been called ‘theatrical,’ but a more precise term might be cinematic. Like many self-mythologizers, charismatics and plain old eccentrics, he has always appeared to be performing in a movie only he himself could see.”

Happy Fourth of July from The Paris Review

I always thought it was the best day of the year. It was in the middle of the summer, to begin with, and when you got up in the morning someone would almost surely say, as they did in those times, that it was going to be a “true Fourth of July scorcher.” School had been out long enough so that one was conditioned for the great day. One’s feet were already leather-hard, so that striding barefoot across a gravel driveway could be done without wincing, and yet not so insensitive as to be unable to feel against one’s soles the luxurious wet wash of a dew-soaked lawn in the early morning. Of course, the best thing about the day was the anticipation of the fireworks—both from the paper bag of one’s own assortment, carefully picked from the catalogs, and then, after a day’s worth of the excitement of setting them off, there was always the tradition of getting in the car with the family and going off to the municipal show, or perhaps a Beach Club’s display … the barge out in the harbor, a dark hulk as evening fell, and the heart-pounding excitement of seeing the first glow of a flare out there across the water and knowing that the first shell was about to soar up into the sky.

—George Plimpton, Fireworks

What We’re Loving: Procrastination, Peacocks, Prince

Phil, a leucistic white peafowl from the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. Photo via Twitter.

It turns out that I was right last week (I love it when that happens) about the print version of Nautilus. It’s sharp, well-rounded, and just plain nice to look at. I could recommend any number of articles (such as Slava Gerovitch’s fascinating essay on Russian mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov), but one in particular made an impression: Alisa Opar’s short piece in the Spring 2014 issue on procrastination. I’m writing this, you see, up against the deadline that Dan Piepenbring sets for us each week. I did the same thing last week. Though I spend all week knowing I’ll write a few lines on what I’ve been reading, I wait, without fail, until the very last minute to sit down and write it. That’s because, according to Opar’s article, my future self is a stranger. That future version of me is the one who will have to deal with the consequences of my current procrastination (sucker!). Apparently, making a lengthy timeline that ends with me writing this should help me feel connected to my future self. It’s an interesting idea. I’ll get right on it tomorrow. —Nicole Rudick

Earlier this week, I took a coffee and a book to the Peace Garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where I found myself joined by a white-feathered peacock; Phil, a leucistic peafowl, is apparently a regular there. Always followed by his flowing white train, he creates a procession wherever he goes; you couldn’t ask for a more august companion. And with Phil’s distinguished mien in mind, I point to D. H. Lawrence’s short story “Wintry Peacock,” from his 1922 collection England, My England and Other Stories. It tells of secret lovers, purloined correspondence, and a protective peacock named Joey. The narrator finds himself the unwilling mediator of a young English country couple’s marital troubles, a task he meets with equal parts fascination and disgust. As he translates a letter from the husband’s French mistress, he suppresses a gag: “I vaguely realized that I was reading a man’s private correspondence. And yet, how could one consider these trivial, facile French phrases private? Nothing more trite and vulgar in the world than such a love-letter—no newspaper more obvious.” —Chantal McStay

A few weeks ago, I discovered Richard Prince’s Instagram account. Prince, for the uninitiated, is the guy who took images of the Marlboro Man from cigarette ads, blew them up, and called them his own work. Then they sold for a bajillion dollars at auction, and he was celebrated as a deity of conceptual appropriationism. His style of appropriation—photographing and re-photographing—is perfectly suited to Instagram. He takes screenshots of posts by celebrities, prints them out on a large scale, takes photos of them with his iPhone, and then reposts them. “It was like revisiting an older system that I was already familiar with,” he explained in a post on his website, except “the photo paper was an electronic page, the source material was Google, and the re-photography was a screen-save.” In the past year, he’s posted everything from copies of The Catcher in the Rye that credit him as the author to a completely nude ten-year-old Brooke Shields re-photographed from his 1983 work Spiritual America. (That got him temporarily banned from the site.) Prince has made room for his experiments in a medium known for food porn and social one-upsmanship—quite a feat. —Teddy Lasry

The Pitchfork Review, a new quarterly print counterpart to the music criticism site, may not win many converts—it’s very much “on brand,” though Pitchfork’s trademark decimal-point ratings are mercifully absent. Still, even if you’re inclined to write off the site as a hollow tastemaker, give the magazine a look; lavishly designed and thoughtfully composed, it will be of interest to anyone who yearns for the heyday of Spin, Rolling Stone, Downbeat, or The Village Voice. Its latest issue boasts a number of excellent diversions—I was particularly impressed with Gary Giddins’s piece on Stanley Kubrick’s scores, and with Lindsay Zoladz’s “Ghost Riding: The Story of the Performing Hologram,” which examines the burgeoning use of holography and its curious intersection with hip-hop culture. —Dan Piepenbring

You’ve found me in Coral Springs, Florida, where the last brick-and-mortar bookstore, a Borders, was turned into a Walgreens three years ago. This means the largest bookseller here is Walmart—which has advantages of a sort. In honor of the Fourth, for example, one could purchase a case of Bud, and a bundle of fireworks, and a copy of Rush Revere and the First Patriots: Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans, all from one convenient cathedral of commerce. —Andrew Jimenez

Schopenhauer is one of history’s most potent pessimists. According to him, we’re all doomed to live a life of misery: one’s body is a slave to one’s will; one’s will is a slave to desire; and desire is a pit of infinite, insatiable want that urges the will—and the body—forward. As he writes in The World as Will and Representation, “all willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.” Sunny. Still, World is a cerebral playground—Proust, for instance, was undoubtedly influenced by its metaphysics—and you may not be familiar with its less acerbic passages on art, which is, as Schopenhauer has it, the ultimate antidote: aesthetic contemplation “through the rumination of visual art” allows us to achieve a “pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.” Perhaps even more interestingly, Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers to regard music, rather than painting, as the highest and most powerful aesthetic form. Ruminate on that! —Caitlin Youngquist

Porochista Khakpour’s The Last Illusion is a kind of myth—Khakpour sets the novel in a rural Iranian village, where she tell the story of Zal, a boy born with such a pale complexion that his mother confines him to a birdcage. Zal has no connection to human society until he is freed from his cage and brought to New York by a behavioral analyst. The novel is a lyrical force of magical realism and cultural examinations, and it is, as Khakpour explained in The New Yorker, based on a short fable from “The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings”—a medieval poem regarded as the national epic of Iran and the Persian-speaking world. It, too, tells of a boy named Zal, also raised by a mythical bird. Khakpour expands the story to fit the modern scale, but she celebrates the legacy of centuries past—to read both works side by side is to marvel at the Persia of then and the Iran of now. —Yasmin Roshanian