May 30, 2018 Arts & Culture How Much Should the Met Cost You? By Daniel Penny It will soon be three months since the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituted its new admissions policy: pay what you wish for New Yorkers and tristate students, a discount for the elderly and groups, and twenty-five dollars for everybody else. From 1970 to 2018, the Met’s policy had been a more beneficent one—admission fees were up to the discretion of each guest, and the museum was, as Alexandra Schwartz recently wrote for The New Yorker, “as open to the public as Central Park.” When the Met announced the new fee, commentators envisioned an apocalypse on Fifth Avenue—“The Met Should Be Open to All. The New Pay Policy Is a Mistake,” “The Metropolitan Museum’s New Admission Policy Sticks It to Tourists.” In its press release, the Met made clear that it “will accept a variety of other documents that demonstrate New York residency,” and suggested that virtually no underprivileged guests have actually been turned away. However, this change affects more than just access to the Temple of Dendur. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is arguably the world’s most influential museum, with many ambitions besides serving its visitors. It maintains one of the best conservation labs in the world, sponsors architectural excavations, and funds the research of expert scholars. These are all valuable endeavors, yet the Met’s decision to curtail pay-what-you-wish signals to museums everywhere that when the budget demands, the public should take a backseat to other priorities and stakeholders. Since its inception, the Met has grappled with how to fulfill its civic and educational missions while catering to wealthy donors and preserving the world’s treasures, many of them ill-gotten. Facing a budgetary crisis of its own making, the museum’s decision to scrap its most symbolically open-hearted policy once again brings that conflict out of storage and into the light. Read More
May 29, 2018 Redux Redux: Philip Roth (1933–2018) By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Philip Roth, a longtime friend and an early contributor to the magazine, died last week at age eighty-five. Roth’s influence on American letters is staggering, and it didn’t take long for the remembrances, appreciations, and obituaries to pour in from every publication imaginable. This week, to honor Roth, we bring you his Art of Fiction interview, from our Fall 1984 issue; his novella Goodbye, Columbus, from our Autumn–Winter 1958–1959 issue; and a special bonus episode of our podcast, where we share a recording of Roth’s speech from our 2010 Revel, when he was given the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement. Read More
May 29, 2018 Video & Multimedia The Premiere of Four Women Artists By William Ferris Pecolia Warner, 1975. Something shapes people. It’s the world in which they act that makes their experience, that furnishes the economic background that he grows up in and the folkways and the stories that come down to him and his family. It’s the fountainhead of his knowledge and experience. One of the reasons Southerners have this to talk about is that they don’t have much else to talk about—it’s their source of entertainment, besides their source of knowledge. You’ve got the family tales to wile away a long winter evening, and that’s what they have to drawn on, especially in the little hamlets where people sit on the store porch and talk in the evenings. All they have to talk about is each other and what they’ve seen during the day and what happened to so-and-so and also encourages our sense of exaggeration and the comic, I think. Because tales get taller as they go along. It is a pleasure but it’s also something of deep significance to people. Eudora Welty’s introductory dialogue in the 1977 documentary film Four Women Artists, by William Ferris, is also a metacommentary on the filmmaker himself. Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1942, grew up on a farm outside town, and began documenting his friends and community at an early age. Between the fifties and the late seventies, he captured—in photographs and on tape and film—the stories, the songs and music, and the spirit of Southern culture during Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights: among his subjects are musicians James “Son Ford” Thomas, Sonny Boy Watson, Lovey Williams, and Fannie Bell Chapman, and the writers Barry Hannah, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Robert Penn Warren. Best known as a folklorist, Ferris founded, with the filmmaker Judy Peiser, the Center for Southern Folklore, in Memphis, in 1972; in 1979, he became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he taught for nearly two decades. In 1989, he coedited the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and, in 1997, was named chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities. Read More
May 29, 2018 Arts & Culture Helen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World By Andrew Martin Helen DeWitt. Photo: Zora Sicher. The literary world is small. Once you’ve worked a few jobs in or around the publishing industry—I’ve been an intern at a trade magazine, an editorial assistant at an old-school book review, a publicist for a university press, a freelancer for more publications than I can easily count, and a fiction writer—it can begin to feel, only somewhat inaccurately, as though you’ve met everyone who works with books. One of my fellow former assistants just replaced another one of our former colleagues as the reviews editor for a prestigious literary magazine. While feeling especially awkward at a New York party a couple years ago, I struck up a conversation with the woman standing next to me. She was my agent’s assistant; she’d just read my manuscript. She had some notes. As someone who has spent the majority of the past five years writing fiction, this familiarity has had limited professional utility (my “friends” have too much “integrity” to shuffle my work into print-on-demand), and it also presents challenges for the work itself. For one, cynicism is an unattractive quality in a fiction writer, and smirking knowingness can kill a work of fiction as surely as it can kill a conversation. More prosaically, it renders large swaths of one’s social knowledge off-limits in one’s writing, or at least subject to extreme vetting. Most editors and publishers can take a joke, of course (or can pretend to), and recent books by Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Cusk, and many more take the egotistical denizens of the self-regarding literary scene as their subject. But a more dangerous and difficult task is showing up the still-prevalent notion (at least in marketing materials) of the writer as heroic individual by revealing the process through which a work is transformed—and sometimes even created wholesale—as it moves through the machinery of the publishing world. That is the bold project Helen DeWitt has been taking up for years in the stories now compiled in the book Some Trick. Read More
May 25, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sharp Women and Humble Turtles By The Paris Review Michelle Dean. What I like most about Michelle Dean’s book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is its cumulative effect. It’s not a biography of one or two or even three brilliant intellectuals, but ten: ten women writers (all are referred to by their last names alone, comme des garçons) who are variously funny, acerbic, insightful, opinionated, and complex. Together, they make a sisterhood, even though, Dean explains, most would likely balk at that notion. All were persistent in their rejection of ever-evolving accusations of aggression, vindictiveness, unseriousness, and facileness. In fact, the number and variety of stories in Dean’s book also illustrate how hard it is for women to find the “right” tone among male-dominated ideologies. (Dean’s primary subjects are white; a book about women of color would evoke other, unique difficulties.) Of Pauline Kael, Dean writes, “It’s plain she was hoping the brilliance of her work would be enough, as it would be for a man in her position.” Such a small desire, and still so fresh. —Nicole Rudick All happy gardens are alike, except that they’re not, not at all, a truth rendered in Penelope Lively’s thoroughly charming forthcoming nonfiction Life in the Garden. As with all successful nature writing, reading this book is like being taught a new way to see. What previously registered as a vague, general whole now registers as an abundance of individual parts, each worthy of their own attention. Lively’s nimble book is a captivating kind of memoir balanced on pillars of social history and art criticism, examining the role of the garden as a mainstay of modern culture (and as such, subject to the influence of waxing and waning trends and styles) and its significance in selections of literature and art (my personal favorite being the cameo of Mr. Noakes from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia). As a card-holding member of the New York Botanical Garden, I recognize that the color of my personal fascination with gardens is as an American, born and raised in a country where the garden is less an integral part of the cultural fiber than it is in Lively’s Britain. But Lively herself asserts that there is a magnetism to the garden that transcends nationality, hooking into themes of time, transience, and memory. —Lauren Kane Read More
May 25, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Pather Panchali By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Bengali novel Pather Panchali, Song of the Road is best known in the West as a Satyajit Ray film but the 1929s classic is also one of the most popular titles from prolific Indian author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894–1950). It chronicles the lives of two poor children in rural India. The great animating spirit of this beloved book is that, despite their poverty, the children’s experience is one of abundance. Every path in the village is beloved to Durga, the elder sister, “she had known them all her life, so naturally and intimately that they had become a part of her…they were her own dear friends, her lifelong companions.” Though Durga and her brother Opu are often hungry, their lives are a paradise of guava and mangosteen and custard apple trees, simple but delicious dinners made by mummy, and festival treats and feasts. On a day when Durga makes a picnic of dal, rice and eggplant snuck from her mother’s stores, Opu reflects, “To think that they were out together sitting under a date-palm tree with leaves from a custard apple tree lying like a carpet all around them, and that it was real rice and real vegetables that they were eating! How wonderful it all was!” Every bite these two take seems to be bursting with flavor, and small things like the quest for ingredients to make “a mango pickle” with oil, salt and chili become major plot points. Read More