May 16, 2018 Arts & Culture The Birds at Rikers Island By Violaine Huisman In order to get to Rikers Island, you must cross a bridge that rises steeply, hiding the other side from view. A sign in brightly colored cursive reads: HAVE A NICE TOUR! At the top of a wooden staircase, you present your ID in exchange for a numbered badge. The exchange evokes travel: ferry ticket counters, border-patrol booths. I expect to smell the ocean. Instead, there is a pungent odor of sewage, for which Tommy Demenkoff, who runs arts education programs for the department of corrections, apologizes. It’s not usually like that. Tommy drives our group—Nikos Karathanos, ten company members performing in The Birds at St Ann’s Warehouse, and me—to the island in a white and blue corrections van. On the way over, to our right, a peninsula shoots into the East River: LaGuardia’s runway. The bridge affords the city’s best view of planes taking flight. Read More
May 15, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, 1930–2018 By The Paris Review Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to the first American astronauts. And then, having revolutionized journalism with his kaleidoscopic yet rigorous reportage, he decided it was time to write novels. As he said in his Art of Fiction interview, “Practically everyone my age who wanted to write somehow got the impression in college that there was only one thing to write, which was a novel and that if you went into journalism, this was only a cup of coffee on the road to the final triumph. At some point you would move into a shack—it was always a shack for some reason—and write a novel. This would be your real métier.” With The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe wrote a sprawling, quintessential magnum opus of New York in the eighties. His first two novels were runaway best sellers, and his success won him the bitter envy of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, among others. “Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” writes Norman Mailer, in a 1994 review of A Man in Full. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers—he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.” Although Wolfe’s later two novels, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood, won him more accolades from The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award than anything else, his cutting portrayals of America earned him a lasting and well-deserved place in literature. In his 1975 book of art criticism, The Painted Word, Wolfe describes the “Art Mating Ritual” in a way that still feels perfectly current: the artist must perform what Wolfe dubs the “BoHo Dance.” She must move to Lower Manhattan and perform her bohemian disdain of wealth. In short, she must get close enough to the people uptown—“the Museum of Modern Art, certain painters, certain collectors”—to spit on them. When George Plimpton sat down with Wolfe for his Art of Fiction interview in 1994, at Wolfe’s favorite Italian restaurant, Isle of Capri on the Upper East Side (still open—and still relatively highly reviewed on Yelp), “the author arrived wearing the white ensemble he is noted for—a white modified homburg, a chalk-white overcoat—but to the surprise of regular customers looking up from their tables, he removed the coat to disclose a light-brown suit set off by a pale lilac tie. Questioned about the light-brown suit, he replied: ‘Shows that I’m versatile.’ ” Although Wolfe’s wide-ranging interests and stylistic leaps were indeed versatile, he did have a singular focus: our hypocrisy, our greed, and our status-obsessed culture. His is an incisive voice we would have been grateful for in 2018 and beyond. Below, read some of our favorite moments from his interview, which subscribers can enjoy in full. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
May 15, 2018 Redux Redux: Reading About Mom 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. Happy Mother’s Day! This week, read Nadine Gordimer’s Art of Fiction interview to learn why her mother would say, “Now, take it slowly, remember your heart”; Lorrie Moore’s story “Terrific Mother,” about a woman who is too often told she would be one; and Paul Carroll’s poem “Mother.” Read More
May 15, 2018 On History The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints By Chantel Tattoli Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can’t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can’t fingerprint yourself, the sites of the bureau-approved, USA-based channelers stated. Perhaps, I thought, I would gather my smirches—all those wasted on laptop screens, medicine cabinets, and eyeglasses—and dump them on a bureaucrat’s desk, like payment rendered in coin. Instead, I fell on a National Fingerprint Collecting Clearinghouse technician named Eve Humrich. She has built a career on the fingertips of expats. I met her at her office on a mezzanine inside a squash club in Montmartre (though she travels between Paris, London, and Brussels for her clients). “I need to see your ID,” Humrich said. I showed my passport—using one type of identification to badge me into the realm of another. Humrich kissed each digit to a lubricious black pad, then onto an official paper card. With a small magnifying lens, she inspected the results: “These are nice and clear.” On the walk home, while the sky pissed rain, I slipped the cards under my sweater. It occurred to me that I knew approximately zilch about how an identity could be apportioned in ten parts, each the size of a petal. Thumb marks were used as personal seals to close business in Babylonia, and, in 1303, a Persian vizier recounted the use of fingerprints as signatures during the Qin and Han Dynasties, noting, “Experience has shown that no two individuals have fingers precisely alike.” The Chinese had realized that before anyone: a Qin dynasty document from the third-century B.C.E, titled “The Volume of Crime Scene Investigation—Burglary,” pointed up fingerprints as a means of evincing whodunnit. Read More
May 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Soviet Anthology of “Negro Poetry” By Jennifer Wilson Years before he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the attorney Loren Miller spent the summer of 1932 in Moscow helping edit a Soviet anthology of “Negro poetry.” Miller had arrived that June with a group of twenty-two African Americans (including his good friend Langston Hughes) to shoot a Soviet agitprop film about racial tensions and labor disputes in the American South. When the project fell through, Miller and many of his compatriots stayed in Moscow to pursue creative opportunities that would have been largely foreclosed to black artists in the United States: the aspiring actor Wayland Rudd found work with the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; the painter Mildred Jones apprenticed with the Soviet artist and graphic designer Aleksandr Deineka. For others, the backdrop of Moscow provided fresh creative inspiration: Dorothy West, a voracious reader of Dostoyevsky, rushed at the chance to visit Russia and write about life there, eventually penning short stories like “A Room in Red Square”; Langston Hughes, fascinated with the nearby socialist republics Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which he referred to as the “Soviet South” for their burgeoning cotton industries, published travel essays and reportage out of Samarkand and Tashkent. But for Miller, life among Moscow’s creative class offered first and foremost an opportunity to engage in the day-to-day work of building communism by doing what he knew best: writing, editing, and getting his radical poet friends paid. In August 1932, a dispatch from a Moscow correspondent of the Associated Negro Press appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier (at that time one of the country’s most widely circulated black newspapers) announcing the publication of an anthology of “Negro poetry.” “The Russians,” it read, “take the widest interest in anything pertaining to Negroes” and were “anxious to read and hear anything concerning Negro life.” According to the article, the Soviets hoped the anthology would teach their own authors “to write social poetry.” Read More
May 14, 2018 Our Correspondents The Last Pawnshop Treasure By Jane Stern There is a pawnshop in Danbury, Connecticut, that I frequent. Like most pawnshops, it is at once depressing and intriguing. I often check out pawnshops out of a foolhardy belief that I will find treasure. I used to scour flea markets with that same optimism, certain I would find a genuine Tiffany lamp amongst the macramé owls and tube socks. The lamp would be five dollars because the seller had no idea what it was really worth. Of course eBay, Storage Wars, and Antique Roadshow have quashed my dreams. Now everyone knows the exact market value of what they own; you can spend a lifetime going to consignment stores, estate sales, and pawnshops and never find anything that anyone would consider a “treasure”—unless, of course, you have a strange unshared addiction to slightly beaten up Barbie Dreamhouses. Read More