May 2, 2018 Hue's Hue Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death By Katy Kelleher Spray of artificial flowers, 1898–1935. According to folklore, one of the nineteen riddles the queen of Sheba posed to Solomon had to do with flowers. The queen brought garlands of cloth flowers or bouquets of wax blossoms—stories differ—and asked Solomon to pick the true flower hidden among the faux. Solomon couldn’t do it by sight alone (they were good fakes), and so he asked the queen whether he could throw open the windows and let some fresh air into the palace—to help him think, he said. As though he had been invited, a fat, drowsy pollinator came inside, and he was pulled, by instinct and hunger, to the true flower. And where the bee flew, so did Solomon’s finger point. “That one,” he told her. “That one is the real flower. The rest are facsimiles.” This story isn’t in the Bible, though the Old Testament does allude to the episode. There’s a moral here (something about every animal having something to contribute), but I’m not interested in morals. Like the queen of Sheba herself, I’m interested in fake flowers and their equally fake foliage. Read More
May 1, 2018 Redux Redux: The Story of the Story 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. This week, we bring you Lorrie Moore’s Art of Fiction interview, Rachel Kushner’s story “Blanks,” and Kevin Young’s poem “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.” Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167 Issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001) If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure. Certainly literature has been written about and taught in this manner for a long time; it’s not new. It is sometimes, however, like so many things that are natural, unfortunate. Read More
May 1, 2018 Look May ’68: Posters of the Revolution By The Paris Review In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, Richard Nixon was elected president, the war in Vietnam intensified, and black Americans and anti-war activists were persecuted by the FBI. Anti-war demonstrators chanted, The whole world is watching, as police beat and teargassed them. On the other side of the Atlantic, a revolution brewed in Paris. “Be realistic! Demand the impossible!” was one of the slogans of the uprising that May. “No replastering, the structure is rotten!” and “Neither god nor master!” In the aftermath of the bloody Algerian war, and following increasingly fervent labor strikes, the students united with the factory workers. They formed barricades in the street, led massive strikes, and occupied the universities. The protests brought the city to a standstill, and for a brief month in spring, it seemed as if a more liberated, equitable reality was possible. But the goals of the revolution were vague: a desire to speak, to be free, to be united, to be young and alive. The new world order the revolutionaries vowed to never stop fighting for failed, and still fails, to materialize. Fifty years later, many French people question what exactly May ’68, for all its earnest hope and idealism, achieved. Some argue it has done little more than infuse politics with empty impractical rhetoric. Others argue it left a permanent positive spirit of freedom. One thing is easily agreed upon: the posters were beautiful. They carry a simple iconography—the raised fist of the revolutionary, the spiked silhouette of the factory, blocky silhouettes that strive to represent a universal figure. Most of these were created by a collective of radical artists based at the occupied art school dubbed the Atelier Populaire. (“Populaire,” used in this sense, translates roughly to “communal” or “classless.”) Whatever the legacy of that fevered month of May, these posters have a lasting power. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
May 1, 2018 History May ’68: A Great Lyrical Community By Mitch Abidor Fifty years later, we look back at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since. May 1968, Paris. Photo: Bruno Barbey. The events of May 1968 in France emerged seemingly out of nowhere, yet they brought the country to a halt. High schools and universities in all corners of the country were occupied by students, and millions of workers went on strike. Although some have maintained that the uprising was actually an outgrowth of the strike movements that had swept the country in the previous year, May ’68 was not the result of worker discontent: they only joined the fray ten days after the students set it off. The movement emerged from the students. Its premonitory signs appeared at the new University of Nanterre in late 1967 and early 1968 with protests over the right for boys to visit girls’ dorms and vice versa and in defense of the students who were threatened with expulsion for their participation in an anti–Vietnam War demonstration. What would become known as the May events began when students gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris and threw stones at police occupying the courtyard. Why, in the midst of the trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of postwar prosperity, did France suddenly find itself in a revolutionary crisis? The issues that directly set off the uprising hardly seem to be enough to detonate a revolution. In my book May Made Me, an oral history of the events, I interviewed those involved in the moment in an attempt to understand. Jean-Michel Rabaté, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania but then a student in Bordeaux preparing his entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, offered his explanation for May. “De Gaulle lied. He lied to everyone … There were so many lies, so many lies about our heroic past. France needed more truth, and that was the effect of May ’68: May ’68 allowed for greater truth.” For Jean-Michel, the goals of the movement were difficult to inscribe on a banner: “May was, We’re going to be more true, and that was the case. We came closer to the truth.” Read More
May 1, 2018 History May ’68: What Legacy? By Agnès Poirier Fifty years later, the time has come to take a measured look at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since. Student riots in Paris, May 1968. Of the hundreds of books and essays published about the events of May 1968 in Paris, one of my favorite remains the philosopher Raymond Aron’s La révolution introuvable, written as the events unraveled in July 1968. In this book, whose title translates to The Nowhere-to-Be-Found Revolution, the events are described as a tragicomedy in which “a verbal delirium with no casualties” placed bourgeois students with a “utopian negation of reality” and workers with authentic and legitimate demands on France’s center stage. Raymond Aron was critical of the student protest; however, he was also critical of the centralized Gaullist government, which had failed to anticipate the aspirations of a whole society. A fellow graduate of Jean-Paul Sartre at Ecole normale supérieure in the late twenties, Raymond Aron joined General de Gaulle in London as early as June 1940 and enrolled in the Free French forces. Aron and Sartre were often caught on opposite sides of arguments. Sartre was the committed, politically engaged intellectual of the Left, while Aron was the philosopher of the Right who preferred to observe events at a distance. Though Aron had more accurately predicted the course of Eastern Europe in the fifties through the eighties, it was nonetheless fashionable among French intellectuals to say, “Better be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.” Sartre was more exciting company. He was a magnet for generations of thinkers, he had the sparkle of the perpetually angry man, while Aron had the calm of a pessimistic humanist. Today, however, it is clear that Raymond Aron’s quiet yet acute dissection of les evénements of May ’68 offers the best entry point into a critique of ’68’s legacy. Many argue, like Aron, that May ’68 and its heritage are still nowhere to be found, impossible to define even fifty years later. Read More
April 30, 2018 Arts & Culture On Beyoncé, Beychella, and Hairography By Lauren Michele Jackson Hair is a large part of the wonderment—and objection—Beyoncé courts each time she holds a mic. As the critic madison moore writes of her “haircrobatics” in 2014, hairography is “the special genius of Beyoncé’s stagecraft” and “punctuates everything else happening on stage: the lights, the dance moves, the glitter, the sequins, the music.” Hair for black cultures at large is often a vehicle for small acts of daring, for everyday articulations. But the newest iteration of the natural-hair movement does not welcome all black hair equally. The natural-hair revolution, a public-facing campaign corroborated by name-brand moisture treatments, the YouTube “hair journey,” and op-eds in the New York Times, embraces the kinky, the nappy, and all manners of patterns and styles still dubbed “unruly” by the nonblack population—or so natural-hair enthusiasts claim. But the natural-hair movement puts forth a false consensus of what black representation should look like that accommodates the standards of nonblack bystanders. Andre Walker’s trademarked typing system, the taxonomy of four hair types upon which the natural-hair movement relies, has failed to yield textural egalitarianism—as my fellow lowly type-4 girls can attest. There is a tendency to map our hair on a spectrum from weave to Afro as a stand-in for anti- to pro-black politics. If she, he, or they wear their hair straight, they are lost, some say. If it is long, this person is lost—unless of course it is natural and long, in which case it is revered above the teeny-weeny Afro. No matter if Miss Thing takes their black behind to a black-ass beauty shop in a black-ass neighborhood to hand over their black-ass bottom dollar to a black hairdresser who, like a chemist, wields oil, water, paste, and heat to transformative results—if they walk out with something pressed, bumped, sewn, or curled, they are lost. Read More