Showing posts with label Dan Piepenbring. Show all posts

Saturday, July 7, 2018

PH Newby / An Exhilarating Head Trip

P. H. NEWBY; DATE UNKNOWN. PHOTO VIA PHNEWBY.NET

PH Newby

An Exhilarating

Head Trip

By Dan Piepenbring

June 25, 2014

The old girl kept writing and complaining about the police. It was enough to start Townrow on a sequence of dreams. Night after night he floated in the sunset-flushed, marine city. He could smell the salt and the jasmine. He dreamed that Mrs Khoury, Mr Khoury and he were all sailing out of the harbor in a boat that slowly filled with water. He dreamed he was in a hot, dark room with a lot of men who argued and shouted. It must have been in the Greek Sailing Club because when a door opened there were oars and polished skiffs; and opposite, high over Simon Artz’s, of the other side of the Canal, was Johnnie Walker with his cane and his top hat setting off for Suez. Or was it the Med.?

Denis the Pirate, and Other News

Denis the Pirate,

and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring

May 26, 2017

ON THE SHELF

DENIS JOHNSON IN 2014. PHOTO: CINDY JOHNSON.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux has confirmed that Denis Johnson is dead at sixty-seven. We’ll celebrate Johnson’s life and work in the days to come. For now, can I recommend a deep cut? It’s “Denis the Pirate,” a kind of children’s story from our Fall 2003 issue in which Johnson imagines “the most bloodthirsty and terrible pirate ever to sail the Caribbean Sea … my own great-great-great-great grandfather, Denis the Pirate. In the early 1700s no man lived who did not fear his name.” In a short foreword, Johnson explained, “I wrote this story for my goddaughter Josephine Messer many years ago, while we were visiting the island of Bequia in the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She was about five at the time, and I hoped the misadventures of my great-great-great-great-grandfather would amuse her. I changed the location to match our surroundings, but in every other respect the details of my ancestor’s unsavory career are absolutely accurate.”

Meanwhile, Jason Horowitz is in Taormina, a hilltop town on the coast of Sicily, where soon President Trump will arrive—and where characters out of Denis Johnson stories seem to be in abundance: “Taormina’s postcard panoramas, its exaggerated Epcot Italian-ness and its reputation as the sun-drenched pleasure dome for reality TV stars, aging playboys and affluent Russians remain intact. It is a spot that is both exclusive and a little hokey … ‘That’s the room Trump will stay in,’ said Dino Papale, a sixty-nine-year-old Sicilian lawyer, promoter and all around bon vivant, as he leaned around his courtyard’s wall and pointed at the adjacent Belmond Grand Hotel Timeo. Mr. Papale, who pulled a red ‘Make America Great Again’ cap over his wavy gray hair, said he met Mr. Trump several years ago and was invited to his inauguration. ‘I’m the president of Trump’s Sicilian fan club,’ said Mr. Papale, who is also first among the many Taormina types for whom the president is a kindred spirit.”

Why do we love pessimistic literature? Tim Parks tries to put his finger on it: “Modern society, as a whole, tends toward a sort of institutional optimism, espousing Hegelian notions of history as progress and encouraging us to believe happiness is at least potentially available for all, if only we would pull together in a reasonable manner. Hence the kind of truth pessimists tell us will always be a subversive truth … rebuttals of the pieties we were brought up on: that knowledge is a vital acquisition, that we must work to help and save each other, that it is positive to be industrious and healthy, that freedom is supremely important, and so on. Such a radical deconstruction may be alarming, yet when carried out with panache, zest, and sparkle, it nevertheless creates a moment’s exhilaration, and with it, crucially, a feeling of liberty. Reading Leopardi or Cioran or Beckett, one is being freed from the social obligation to be happy.”

And Andrew O’Hagan mulls over the media abyss that is Britain’s Daily Mail: “Americans treat the National Enquirer as if it was a made-up scandal-rag intended for dummies, but the Daily Mail, weirdly, manages to hold its position as a respected newspaper in touch with the main currents of British life. In fact, its sales are down by one million since 2003, and its audience today is drawn mainly to the sleazy accounts of celebrity breakups, wardrobe malfunctions and hidden cellulite that make up its notorious ‘sidebar of shame’ on the web. Politicians have to cozy up to survive its will to defame, and all Tories feel they have to take it seriously as a guide to the instincts of ‘Middle England,’ even though its own staff feel it to be a virus more than a news outfit, a whole universe of rotten, in which a group of bullies get to miscall the world for money. In my weeks of reading the Mail in the wake of [Adrian] Addison’s book, I found no real humor but many hundreds of sneers, which is what passes for humor in that whispery world of frightened men who don’t know how to talk to women and wish they knew bigger words.”

And last, because I know you look to this space for trend watching and fashion scouting, I’ve got some advice on what you should wear this Memorial Day weekend: camping gear. It’s called gorpcore, and it doesn’t care what you think of it. It is the rising tide. There’s no stopping it, do not attempt to stop it, simply let it carry you away. Jason Chen explains, “Where normcore idealized the Mall, indiscriminately incorporating bland stylistic totems across suburban categories—athletic wear as much as grunge as much as skate as much as prep—this new aesthetic worships the Woods, strictly defining itself by the idioms of hiking/camping/outdoor apparel. It telegraphs an enlightenment beyond urban, bourgeois concerns: I can survive perfectly fine outside of the city—and in style, thank you … Unlike Fashion Week facsimiles, the clothes have the cred of true outdoor gear; what makes them cooler, of course, is that they’re not trying to be cool. Their aesthetic is auxiliary to, well, survival.”

THE PARIS REVIEW

Monday, March 3, 2014

Mavis Gallant / Hungry for Details

Mavis Gallant

IN MEMORIAM

Hungry for Details

Remembering Mavis Gallant

BIOGRAPHY

by Dan Piepenbring
February 18, 2014

Mavis Gallant, known for her prolific and trenchant short fiction, has died, at ninety-one. Born in Montreal in 1922, she had a brief career as a journalist, but soon after The New Yorker accepted her first short story, in 1950, she embarked for Paris, where she lived most of her life. As theTimes notes, she took as her primary subjects “the dislocated and the dispossessed”: neglected children, failed parents, anyone living alone.
In her 1999 interview with The Paris Review, she gave as eloquent and persuasive an argument for the necessity of fiction as any I’ve ever encountered:

A journalism student in Germany once told me she was bothered by the fact that the most plain and simple and ordinary news stories could conceal an important falsehood. She gave me an example, say, a couple celebrating their seventieth wedding anniversary. They will sit holding hands for the photographer and they’ve had their ups and downs over the years, but the marriage has been a happy one. The reporter can only repeat what they say. But what if the truth is that they positively hate each other? In that case the whole interview is a lie. I told her that if she wanted to publish the lie perceived behind the interview, she had to write fiction. (She became a critic, by the way.)

That ironic aside, deceptively casual, is characteristic of her work. In addition to this interview, the magazine published an excerpt from her diaries in our Fall 2003 issue (The Paris Review). The portion below—in which Gallant reacts to the death of her neighbor, the French actress Alice Sapritch—captures her matter-of-factness, her careful eye, her seemingly effortless powers of perception, and her black but empathetic humor. It reminds us what a talent we’ve lost.

Sunday 25 March 1990
People I know who had no great use for Alice S. as an actress seem hungry for details. The house, and her shuttered windows, appear on TV like a celebrity. Strangers collect in the street as if visiting a shrine. She was an eccentric, a deliberate, a calculated oddity, with her wide-brimmed garden party hats and long cigarette holder, the butt of male comedians and imitators on chat shows. Once a few years ago when we were both standing in the street, waiting for taxis, I asked her why she put up with it—just like that. She said in a normal, not an affected, voice that I didn’t understand her career, that it was important to be recognized and talked about. When the car came for her it wasn’t a taxi but an open car with two young men in it, one in the backseat. The driver leaned over to open the door from the inside but when he saw me staring changed his mind and got out and came round to usher her in. His face and manner were supremely insolent: he was playing it for the fellow in the backseat and for a total stranger. Meanwhile she swept in, holding her hat. Did she have on long gloves? I mustn’t add props to the scene. Impossible not to think of Gloria Swanson, and Sunset Boulevard, except that Alice S. was in a real world every minute, every second, playing the idea of an actress, a grande dame, amonstre sacrée. I’d like to take it one further and say she knew it was a joke, but I can’t be sure.
Mme B., the concierge, tells me what happened yesterday. (Some of the friends who called me this morning kept asking if Alice S. had really died; there were contradictory stories going about.) Friends or relatives had arrived before the firemen, who were supposed to be giving first aid. The friends or relatives wouldn’t let them in. They kept issuing statement, “A.S. is alive and under intensive care.” Meanwhile the captain of the fire brigade—pronounced caption by Mme B.—sent for the police. That was how conflicting stories occurred. The capitan told Mme B. that her loved ones would not accept the truth, and that she was “dead, dead, dead.”

THE PARIS REVIEW