May 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent If I Should Die Before I Wake By Sadie Stein The Edison Talking Doll, prepared to shatter whatever fragments of inner peace you‘d once believed to be infrangible. Even doll partisans—those of us who defend doll life from slander and prejudice and unfair film portrayals—have to admit that they’re sometimes terrifying. Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that the Edison Talking Doll is one of the scariest things ever made by man or demon. You have been warned. The Edison Talking Doll is just what it sounds like: a doll, with a small phonograph in its body, mass-produced by Thomas Edison’s lab in the 1890s. Although it was a progenitor of Chatty Cathy and a hundred other loquacious toys, the Edison Doll didn’t catch on, for the simple reason that it opened a howling portal to hell. (Well, they claimed the relatively high price was a factor.) While we may assume that the poor sound quality is a result of wear and tear on the original wax cylinders, apparently that’s not the case; as the Thomas Edison National Historical Park’s site explains, “Even with a brand-new, unplayed record, the sound emitted by the talking doll was always distorted and unnatural.” That’s putting it kindly. The doll … shrieks. It’s like an unearthly Carol Kane screaming in a wind tunnel, trapped in the body of a lifeless totem. Listen at your own risk. Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.
May 6, 2015 On Music Behind the Music By Adam Fleming Petty The lost art of hidden tracks. Photo: D-Kuru/Wikimedia Commons Nearly everyone who came of age in the nineties remembers hidden tracks, those Easter eggs of the CD era. Artists embedded secret songs or demos after a disc’s final track; listeners combed through the silence to find them. For me, growing up in a small town with plenty of time to kill, sitting in silence and waiting for music to appear was an ideal way to spend an afternoon. The less patient among us, I know, would fast forward through the quiet. I didn’t. The hidden track was born of the LP age, with the Beatles’ “Her Majesty”—which appeared uncredited at the end of 1969’s Abbey Road, following fourteen seconds of silence—serving as a kind of urtext, though Paul McCartney has claimed its inclusion was an accident. In 1979, the Clash added “Train in Vain” to London Calling at the last minute, after the album’s packaging had been printed. When vinyl was music’s preeminent medium, though, there were analog clues to an album’s secrets: you could examine the surface of a record and watch the needle make its way through every groove. It was when the CD, that tesseract of a medium, flourished that hidden tracks did, too. Read More
May 6, 2015 On the Shelf The Rise of the Tablescape, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a display of outdoor patio furniture and table settings at Pereira & Luckman, Beverly Hills, California, 1953. Photo: Julius Shulman Tim Parks on reading and the senses: “We have a vested interest in supposing that we are capable of projecting a kind of continuous movie of the events in a novel … The problem is that upon close examination the reading experience is far more complex and far less visual than is commonly supposed … So what do we see when we read? First the page, of course, and the words printed on it. No ‘image’ we have of the characters or settings will ever be as concrete, as indisputably and continuously present, as the solid book … ” Pedro Martinez’s new autobiography reveals, at last, a field-tested secret to beating performance anxiety: “Early on, when I was in the minor leagues and measuring the opposing batter, I would conjure up a scene straight out of the most gruesome Hollywood blood-and-gore slasher flick: my mother, strapped tightly by ropes to a chair, her mouth gagged, her eyes clenched shut, too terrified to look down at the tip of a knife held to her throat by the leader of a gang of kidnappers.” Today, in pleas from academia: Can’t we stop conferring, already? Haven’t we had enough of this masquerade? “Conferences feel necessary, but their purpose is unclear. They have great potential to help revitalize the humanities, but have not yet lived up to this potential.” Other than perennial favorites—your John Dowells and Holden Caulfields, anyone from Joyce or Nabokov—who are the greatest unreliable narrators? Look to Henry James, for starters, and “give up pretending there weren’t unreliable narrators before 1940”: “The Sacred Fount is his least read major novel, and certainly his oddest. The narrator spends the entire book concocting elaborate deductions about fellow partygoers based on next to no evidence.” If “a dining table was once a simple, knockdown affair,” how did we end up with profligate place settings, glutted with silverware, centerpieces, and candelabras? A history of tablescapes finds that “improved manufacturing technologies led to a boom in utensils and flatware. Elite European tables have displayed silver dishware since the Middle Ages, but the variety of dishes for holding food continually increased, as they became more specific and more ornate. This trend peaked in the Victorian Era, when an abundance of silver, glass, and porcelain contributed to the table’s shiny new look, with about twenty pieces per place setting.”
May 5, 2015 Bulletin Available Now: The Paris Review Commencement Gift Box By The Paris Review “There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life,” David Foster Wallace said, “that nobody talks about in commencement speeches”—but too many graduation gifts hint at these parts. Real Simple, for instance, recommends a leather mousepad (succumb to carpal tunnel syndrome in style!); Esquire recommends booze. The best gifts are practical and inspirational. That’s why we’ve put together The Paris Review Commencement Gift Box, including a one-year subscription, a limited-edition Paris Review tote, and a trusty no. 2 Paris Review pencil. It also features two of the most inspiring issues from our archive—156 and 158—in which Hunter S. Thompson, Lorrie Moore, Rick Moody, George Saunders, and Dave Eggers discuss graduation, writing, and life beyond the classroom. The boxes are available from now through the end of June. They make a great present for aspiring writers, who should, in the words of William Kennedy, “read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.” You’ll find all the details here—order now.
May 5, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Word Games By Sadie Stein Simeon Solomon, A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies, 1870. My mother’s loathing for the word lady occupies a special place in her pantheon of negativity. To be specific, she doesn’t actually mind lady as a word or a title of the peerage—as seen in, say, Lady Day*, The Lady Vanishes, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s when the word appears in lyrics that she puts her foot down. (And even then, there’s a disclaimer: some lyrics are okay. “Luck Be a Lady,” “The Lady Is a Tramp”—these, among others, are acceptable.) Read More
May 5, 2015 First Person Mazzy Star Batman By Nick Courage Sun Ra, self discovery, and apocryphal Batmans. Sun Ra’s Batman and Robin album, released under the name the Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale. My friend Amy and I moved to New York at about the same time, for the same reason: to pursue careers and then to decide we didn’t like ourselves in those careers. It was fine, when we arrived, to tread water for a bit—fun, even, in the way that living off peanut butter can be when creative success feels inevitable. After a couple of years, though, my excitement at living in the city started to curdle. I’d lost my master’s diploma somewhere between Boston and Brooklyn, but had somehow failed to shake my credit cards and student loans. So—terrified, with no real prospect of making a living as an artist—I watched my day job in publishing turn into my life. It was a few months after the drudgery of fiscal responsibility kicked in that Amy introduced me to the joys of weekly comics. She’d set up a pull list at Midtown Comics, a twenty-dollar-a-week subscription that gave her something to be excited about on Wednesdays. Before she lent me her copies of the Batgirl reboot, I didn’t totally get it. Having read only occasional comics from the supermarkets of my childhood, I had never experienced a full narrative arc. I assumed that, like McDonald’s Monopoly™, there would always be a piece missing—what I might have jokingly called an objet petit a before my resentment of graduate school took over. That changed after I set up my own pull list, taking the R train up to Times Square on my lunch hours and sneaking back into the Flatiron building with issues of Swamp Thing and Hellblazer tucked under my arms in opaque black plastic bags, like top-shelf Hustlers. It started off as simple transgression: the thrill of spending time with back issues of Savage Wolverine instead of the novels I should have been reading, both for work and as a “good literary citizen.” Before long, though, I developed favorite artists and writers—even letterers. After having lost my love of literature to the daily grind, it felt like a homecoming, to be excited to read again. All it took was two-page spreads of Morlocks tunneling through the bowels of Manhattan. “Good” was boring, I decided, arranging the books on my desk so I wouldn’t have to face their author photos. Better to be a delinquent with adamantium claws. Read More