May 8, 2018 On Television A Gentler Reality Television By Lucas Mann A few weeks ago, my wife and I sat down to watch the reboot of Queer Eye. We were a bit skeptical. After all, the original debuted fifteen years ago, at the beginning of the reality-TV boom and also at a time when any queer representation on TV could be seen as edgy, fun, uncomplicatedly moving in the right direction. Now we’re thinking harder about the underlying messages in our popular culture, and crucially, the phrase reality TV has evolved in what it conveys—what was once novelty became a tired formula and has now become a ready-made explanation for everything that is wrong with American social and political culture. As reality-TV fans who consider ourselves to be thoughtful, politically progressive people, it’s become harder for us to like the shows we used to like. The pleasure is overridden by the angst about deriving pleasure from that. The constant manipulations, the hypersimplified worldview, the arbitrary episodic contests that end in someone’s spectacular fall from grace, the distracting appeal of gossipy intrigue—it all seems to have conspired to turn a reality-TV star into the world’s most powerful person. When Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker about how The Apprentice shaped the Trump character that played so explosively in the 2016 election, how could it not feel horrifying to be the kind of person susceptible to the characterization techniques of the genre? When Jennifer Weiner took to the New York Times to swear off The Bachelor now that the nasty distortions of reality TV were infecting actual reality, she was describing a lot of people’s inner turmoil. Read More
May 8, 2018 The Big Picture Inheriting a Legacy By Cody Delistraty In our new monthly column, The Big Picture, Cody Delistraty will travel across Europe—from Copenhagen to Dublin to Berlin to London—searching out essential artworks and exhibitions that speak to a wider cultural context, such as our desire for wanderlust or the complexities of artistic romances. In this first segment, he explores the complex burden placed upon the lovers, close friends, and heirs of famous artists after they die. Joan Punyet Miró, a grandson of the late artist Joan Miró. Photo: Kika Triay for Ultima Hora During a recent retrospective of Cy Twombly, Nicola del Roscio walked through the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, looking at “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000), a ten-panel series that depicts the ancient Egyptian myth of the sun’s movement from morning to night. The series is a mélange of disparate marks, Expressionist painting, and poetic quotes that begins with frenzied childlike scratch marks before ending on a somber, more formalist tableau that suggests a reflection on death. Del Roscio wore a green sweater with a dark, many-buttoned petticoat, and his hands were pushed deep into his pockets. He was quiet as he regarded the birth-to-death work of the man he’s spent his entire adult life assisting and advising, and—after the artist died in 2011 and del Roscio became the president of the Cy Twombly Foundation—celebrating and protecting. Del Roscio has small bags under his eyes, but his smile is genuine and his charm and vulnerability are that of someone much younger than his seventy-three years. “There’s something magic about Nicola,” said David Baum, the Cy Twombly Foundation’s secretary. “You want to pick him up and put him in your pocket.” And yet, charming as he is, del Roscio is a keeper of secrets. Twombly was a cipher even to close friends, but to del Roscio he was a confidant and an intimate. Read More
May 7, 2018 Department of Tomfoolery How Well Do You Know These Writers’ Lives? By Matt B. Weir The five anonymous minibiographies below are drawn from the lives of writers in our interview archives. Be among the first to correctly identify all five and you could win a copy of The Paris Review’s newest book, The Writer’s Chapbook. Winners will be drawn on Wednesday, May 10, and contacted via email. These anonymous biographies are part of a larger ongoing series by Matt B. Weir. Loading… Matt B. Weir is a writer living in New York.
May 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Contraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon By Autumn Womack Zora Neale Hurston’s previously unpublished anthropological text Barracoon will be released on May 8, 2018. Zora Neale Hurston, Kossula: Last of the Takoi Slaves, stills from a black-and-white film in 16mm, 5 minutes. © The Margaret Mead Collection. Arrangement by Josh Begley. On May 10, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter to Alain Locke, the self-professed dean of the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston’s longtime collaborator, frequent pen pal, and sometimes mentor. She reports the arrival of her diploma from Barnard College, where she studied anthropology; commiserates with Locke about the drudgery of teaching; and begs for a visit—Hurston includes a detailed description of the “sea animal graveyards” that she’s discovered in the phosphate mines at Mulberry, Florida. Hurston enclosed within the envelope a few objects: “two vertebrae of pre-historic sea animals” excavated from the “deep depressions” of the seafloor and a small piece of wood. “The bit of wood,” she writes, “is from the ship in Mobile Bay. (Cudjoe Lewis).” In May 1859, Cudjoe Lewis, along with 116 other Africans, was captured from Dahomey, in what is today Benin, and sold to Captain Foster. Foster was traveling at the behest of the Mehear brothers, three American slave traders who were originally from Maine but had relocated to Alabama where they operated a shipyard. Three months later, the slave ship Clotilde docked in Mobile Bay, where the newly enslaved were sold. Because the transatlantic slave trade was abolished some fifty years earlier, once the Mehears landed on U.S. soil, the ship was “scuttled and fired.” Its remains were left to sink to the bottom of Mobile Bay, where, like Hurston’s fish vertebrae, it would await discovery. Read More
May 7, 2018 Correspondence Tchaikovsky’s Cure for All That Ails (the Stomach) By Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov, Pjotr I. Tschaikowski (detail), 1893, oil on canvas. Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893, at age fifty-three, after having been discovered by his younger brother, Modest, in bed and suffering from diarrhea and abdominal pains. He had taken cod liver oil in an attempt to ease his stomach. In this letter, recently translated into English for The Tchaikovsky Papers: Unlocking the Family Archive, Tchaikovsky offers Modest his rules for healthy living. TO MODEST ILICH TCHAIKOVSKY [After 1877] [missing text] Remarkably enough, the symptoms you have described to me are the very ones I’ve been experiencing myself recently. Irregular heartbeats, attacks of nerves, depression, heaviness in the chest area, shortness of breath, the urge to cough up whatever it is that’s causing this pressure on my chest. I’ve been experiencing all these symptoms for some time now. The only difference is that you have been seeing doctors, but as for me I simply can’t stand them and all that [missing text] I should tell you that the real culprit in all this is the intolerable stomach which, in the case of some nervous systems like ours is incredibly erratic and capricious in doing its job. If you would like to be rid of your ailment once and for all without any help from doctors, then take the following measures. Read More
May 4, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Morgues, Mysteries, and Monster Meat By The Paris Review Kiki Smith, Spinners (detail), 2014. Stricken suddenly with a midspring virus on Wednesday, I had all my usual grouchiness about sick days delayed during the four blissful hours I found myself in bed with The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns. I’m not the first Reviewer to discover my love for Comyns—Sadie Stein has written the foreword—but I nevertheless felt like I was charting new territory. When I picked it up, I wasn’t familiar with the Grimms’ tale of the same name, though the epigraph gives any reader a grisly hint. Never before have I read anything like Comyns’s fabulously readable, diary-like prose, which makes the most of simple meals and little pleasures. For example: the magnolia sapling that was a little more expensive than our heroine could manage; the sponge that maintained its shape when so many others sag in the middle; the Italian teacup, still intact. The book has an uncanny kinship to Helen Oyeyemi’s bewitching Boy, Snow, Bird. In fact, Oyeyemi’s blurb on the book’s jacket is a cunning little key to her own work as well as Comyns’s. I wish I had a whole week to make sense of the relationship of both novels to race and fairy tales. —Julia Berick Read More