Skip to main content

Zola Is Not Impressed, and Other News

London was not the town for him.

 

  • One nice thing about exile is the novelty. Oh, the places you’ll go, the people you’ll meet … as you’re forced out of your way of life and into a strange, foreign land! In 1898, amid the Dreyfus Affair and that famous J’accuse fiasco, Émile Zola thought it might be wise to leave Paris for a while. So he exiled himself to London, where he found many wondrous new things to complain about: “At the age of fifty-seven, equipped only with a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper, Zola made his way to the coast and boarded a boat to England … ​[he] devoted himself to brooding on all the elements of English life that mystified and upset him. Shirts were ‘too short.’ Roads weren’t ‘as good as French ones.’ Houses were disgracefully lacking in shutters and featured windows that didn’t close properly. Food got ‘more and more revolting’ by the day. English women were guilty of ‘carelessness’ (witness the number of hairpins to be found on the city’s streets); of spending too much time cycling; and of being insufficiently enthusiastic about breastfeeding (‘that is hardly my conception of a mother’s duty towards her infant, whatever be her station in life’).”
  • If you’re going to put yourself through the technocratic hell that is the Consumer Electronics Show, you should at least make sure you’re not compos mentis beforehand. Erin Gloria Ryan found this the perfect occasion to try LSD for the first time: “Five or six androids on tiny wheels, maybe three feet tall, turned and blinked in unison on a smooth white surface. On their chests were screens displaying a cartoon heart, like a child’s drawing of a heart. The hearts were beating. Shitty pop music thrummed. One robot, separated from the dance crew, turned and blinked alone. I felt strongly that the robot on the outside was ostracized because she was too fat, or because she’d hit on one of the dance team robot’s boyfriends. Either way, she was not sitting with the cool robots at lunch. I felt really bad for her. I couldn’t look her in the plastic eyes.”

  • Our London editor, Adam Thirlwell, on the films of Raúl Ruiz: “The basic rule, in a Ruiz movie, is that different stories co-exist, either nested within one another or side by side. Perhaps the most exuberant example of this is Three Crowns of the Sailor, from 1983. It begins with a student who has just murdered his professor in Warsaw. Fleeing through the streets at night, he meets a sailor, who offers him a way out of the country on a boat. In a bar, the sailor names his price: that the student must listen to the story of his adventures, and pay him three crowns. The film then tells the picaresque story of the sailor’s adventures on board the Fuchalense, a ghost ship docking around the world—so that the movie’s structure resembles the great story novels, like Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found at Saragossa…”
  • Janen Ganesh is on the lookout for the true “citizen of nowhere,” that icon, often postulated but seldom seen, of the globalized international elite: “How many atomized individuals are there, really? Even in London, the world headquarters of Deracinated Man, of Theresa May’s deplored ‘citizens of nowhere.’ Or in New York, home to the heathen ‘values’ that make Ted Cruz shiver. It cannot be more than a sect within a cult within a groupuscule of the overall population who live for transient pleasures and submit to nothing greater than themselves. The people you think might—hipsters, the liberal rich—generally do not, at least not far beyond the age of thirty.”
  • It’s Monday, so before you get too involved in the affairs of your week, you should remember that there are “meat clowns” out there: cold-cuts with faces printed on them. “They’re also called billy sausage and purzelwurst and gesichtswurst, which appears to quite sensibly mean ‘face sausage’ … I always wondered whether they, these clammy looking meat logs with unsettling clown or animal faces were real. Seems like they are … I’m fascinated by cold cuts and raw meat, perhaps because I see and handle it so rarely, perhaps because of the faint terror of seeing skinned flesh. That slightly metallic smell of raw blood which, going by last summer’s corpse flower, is the smell of fresh death.”


from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2jl1bbw

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more