The Paris Review's Blog, page 863

Ancient Manuscripts, Now Online

Google is working with the Israel Antiquities Authority to put a number of ancient manuscripts online. Texts available at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library include the earliest known copies of the book of Deuteronomy and part of the book of Genesis.

Genesis fragment: creation of the world.

Ten Commandments fragment

The Book of War, fragment

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Digital Silence

Eli Horowitz is not particularly tech savvy, but he’s spent a lot of time thinking about what consumer technology can do. Until a few months ago, long after most of his friends and colleagues had bought iPhones, the former McSweeney’s editor and publisher was still taking their calls (and text messages) on a frayed LG flip-phone that was too worn down to snap closed completely; he had started to think of it as “more like a flap-phone.” By the time he upgraded, however, he’d already been long at work on The Silent History, a digital, serialized novel containing stories that, with the help of GPS, can only be read at the physical locations where they are set. “We came up with the very clunky shorthand description of a serialized exploratory novel for iPhone. Which just rolls off the tongue,” said Matt Derby, one of the novel’s authors, on a recent weekend on the Lower East Side. Read More »

GoT Beer, and Other News

British children’s magazine Puffin Post is folding after forty years.
“#bromance goes sour when 2 friends, Prince Harry and Falstaff, are all #yolo #rkoi #dom until Harry inherits the crown and a conscience.” Yup, Twitter Shakespeare.
The (inevitable?) Game of Thrones beer.
An inventory of Emily Dickinson’s family artifacts.
Indiana Jones journal mystery solved!

 

 

 

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David Opdyke

David Opdyke’s studio is, at the moment, mostly emptied of his intricate, deceptively beautiful sculptures, though it is filled with neatly organized boxes, helpfully labeled with the names of the particular bit of flotsam (“Sand,” “Seaweed”) each contains. The artworks are on display at Bryce Walkowitz Gallery in Chelsea, where Opdyke’s PVC-pipes-cum-cherry-blossom-trees (the petals are tiny pink toilets!) bloom in the gallery’s picture window. The piece is part of Opdyke’s first solo show at the gallery, which is entitled Accumulated Afterthoughts.

I met Opdyke at the gallery on a May afternoon, so he could describe the making of his intricate pieces, painstakingly assembled in a process at once “zen” and “after a point, frustrating.” Later that afternoon, I visited his studio. Part of the loft where he currently lives with his wife and two children, it is located right by the Williamsburg Bridge. (When I asked whether the noise of bridge traffic ever bothers him, Opdyke observed that the late-night drunken cell-phone conversations of nearby restaurant patrons are the far greater menace.)

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Freedom and Light

I saw Ravi Shankar at Carnegie Hall in 1966 or 1967. Because of the Beatles, of course. And I learned so much about music from that one concert. Not that the lesson stayed with me; it wasn’t like that. But it set me up for hearing music in a different way than I was used to (that is, as pop songs on the radio, as 45s on my record player, as the songs we sang at camp about the cat coming back or your heart going where the wild goose goes, or, worse, much worse, as the moth-eaten songs from musicals on Broadway).

The first half of the concert was endless and dull, nothing but a couple of notes played over and over, like a foreign cuckoo clock gone mad. And then, an hour in, it all changed. And time stopped. The notes began to form a pattern, and the pattern grew more and more beautiful, like a house materializing from thin air, rising out of nothing into the most glorious vista, a home and a garden and hope and love and time, spread out before me. Read More »

How to Get into College, Indiana Jones Edition

When the University of Chicago admissions committee received a package addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.,” they were confused; there is no one by that name on the faculty. Then the penny dropped: the package was for fictional alum Indiana Jones, often said to be based on one of two U of C professors, Robert Braidwood and James Henry Breasted. The package was revealed to contain a detailed replica of Professor Abner Ravenwood’s journal, as seen in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The admissions committee has put out a call for the identity of the sender. “If you’re an applicant and sent this to us: Why? How? Did you make it?” And, most importantly, “Why so awesome?”

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Apocalyptic Reads, and Other News

If the end of the world is nigh, here’s a reading list.
The scholarship of paperwork.
Brick Pollitt, Ben-Hur, Pussy Galore: Gay characters who were turned straight in the film version.
Smuggling braille across the border.
The library book bed bug scare: overblown?

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Water and Wonder

Three times George Bailey enters the water fully clothed, and each time it scrambles his world. The first dive occurs when he rescues his little brother Harry from a crack in the ice. He falls ill and loses hearing in his left ear, which will later prevent him from fighting in World War II. Then when George is twenty-one, he meets his future wife Mary at a high school dance and the two are so enamored of each other that they jitterbug their way into the gym pool.

And thirdly, of course, George leaps off a Bedford Falls bridge on Christmas Eve, trying to save the angel that will eventually renew his lost faith in himself. Read More »

“Marley Was Dead: to Begin With.”

This Saturday, December 15, join Housing Works for the third annual A Christmas Carol marathon reading. Readers include John Hodgman, Eileen Myles, David Wayne, our own dear Lorin Stein, and many other terrific people. See you there!

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What We’re Loving: Prohibition, Bourbon, Coffee

When I asked my college advisor how I could learn to write dialogue like Raymond Carver, he told me to study a real master: John O’Hara. Naturally this kept me from reading O’Hara's novels for twenty years. Then last week I picked up Butterfield 8, the 1935 story of a young woman who steals a fur coat after a one-night stand. Rarely has such a good book had such a bad ending. If not for the last ten pages, you’d have to call it a great book, with an unforgettable heroine, frank insights into sex and sexual abuse, a vivid picture of New York during Prohibition, and panning shots that prefigure William Gaddis. (Yes, great dialogue too.) —Lorin Stein

At a library sale, I found a box set of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy in pristine condition. The spines weren’t even broken on the slim, stiff paperbacks, and I wondered whether the previous owner had even read them. But that’s all I’ve been doing the past week, and I’m ready to cast aside familial obligations, work responsibilities, holiday demands, and whatnot if they come between me and these books. —Nicole Rudick

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