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Arts & Culture Contraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon By Autumn Womack Zora Neale Hurston’s previously unpublished anthropological text Barracoon will be released on May 8, 2018.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
May 4, 2018 At Work Sound Tracks: An Interview with Simone Forti By Barbara Browning Simone Forti, 2012. “Someone must have handed me a piece of flexible tubing from the hardware store and shown me that I could play it, the pitch rising and falling according to how hard I’d blow through it. It was around 1970. I tied a red kerchief to this horn and called it my molimo, after the instrument the Mbuti Pygmies play to wake up their mother, the forest … They claim that the molimo is the sound, not the object.” (From the notes in Al Di Là.) Photo: Jason Underhill Simone Forti is primarily known as a central figure in American postmodern dance, but her work in movement has always been interdisciplinary. The foundational pieces she called Dance Constructions, for instance (first performed at the Reuben Gallery in 1960, and, the following year, in Yoko Ono’s loft), were, as the name implies, sculptural as well as choreographic.Lesser known are the soundscapes she’s created, both alone and with others, throughout her career. The first time her sonic experiments received serious attention was in a 2012 gallery show, “Sounding,” at the Box Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured recordings of her soundscapes alongside projections and images of original performances; the gallery included areas with benches, carpeting, and earphones where visitors could, presumably, close their eyes and pay focused attention to those sounds. A piece titled “Bottom” (1968) is composed of four five-minute “blocks” of sound: monotonous drumming, three voices holding a chord, a vacuum cleaner, and Forti whistling. Another, “Censor” (1961), involves loud singing accompanied by the noisy shaking of a pan full of nails. Today, Forti is releasing Al Di Là, her first full-length collection of recordings: nine tracks, compiled with the assistance of the composer Tashi Wada. The Italian title of the album is a slight alteration of the title of one of the tracks, “Dal Di Là” (1972). The former might be translated as “toward the beyond,” the latter “from the beyond.” Forti’s own translation of the song’s lyrics, which she sings in a haunting a cappella, is “I’m awaiting a song from afar, from afar, a song of goodbye from afar. For now I’ve seen the game I was playing, slowly leaving the earth and drifting far among the stars.” Read More
May 4, 2018 On Photography Forging Intimacy By Ariel Lewiton © Marie Hyld My friend sent me an article about a young Danish photographer, Marie Hyld, who takes photos of herself with strangers she meets on Tinder, attractive men and women approximately her own age. Each photograph is staged to look like a candid moment of intimacy caught within an established romantic relationship and, as with many long-term relationships, reflects a range of shifting moods: sexy, playful, sleepy, bored. At first, I was drawn to one of the sexy ones—Hyld and her partner standing in a green-tiled shower, embracing under the spray. Although the man’s face is partially concealed by Hyld’s head, her cheek pressed into the curve of his neck, from what I could discern of his profile and body, he so closely resembles a former lover of mine that for a few minutes I was nearly certain it was him. That man was an aesthete; he was handsome and vain and seemed to love feeling desired, but avoided attachments. It was not difficult to imagine him volunteering for a project like Hyld’s, an artistic inquiry into make-believe intimacy. (This was before I learned that the photographer finds her collaborators in Denmark, a place I’ve never been.) The resemblance also probably had to do with the photograph being staged in the shower. The man I knew would get up in the morning and take lengthy luxuriant showers while I lay in bed, showers that went on so long I’d sometimes wonder if he’d passed out or left the building with the water still running. Invariably, I’d grow bored and climb out of bed to wander through his rooms, taking inventory of his things: his books and paintings, his soft dark sweaters folded on the shelf, his pile of boots behind the bedroom door, his stacks of mail and his blender and the bowl of tangerines on the kitchen counter. I never touched anything, except once his phone, to check what time it was and also to see if other women had called him in the night. But mostly to check the time. I would’ve liked to shower with him, but he never invited me, and I was too shy to ask. I thought it might be time and space he needed for himself. I’d picture him in there, raking his fingers through his wet hair, with his eyes closed as steam lifted off his skin. I wondered if he ever thought of me while he was in the shower—the woman he’d left in bed, now creeping around his apartment in her underwear. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t. Read More