April 20, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Kendrick, Cardi Covers, and Cautionary Tales By The Paris Review Photo: Elise Swain, The Intercept. I thought radio plays went the way of rabbit-ear antennae, but this week I listened to an audio drama of Evening at the Talk House, adapted from Wallace Shawn’s 2015 stage play. The Intercept is presenting it as part of their podcast, in three thirty-some-minute episodes. The play opens as a group of actors and writers gather on the tenth anniversary of a play on which most worked; the setting is the Talk House, a once popular, now failing watering hole for the theater set. In the intervening decade, individual fortunes have shifted, in some cases radically. But as the conversation unfolds, we come to understand that the time in which the play is set is not quite our own: there is talk of everyday citizens, these players included, “targeting” foreign individuals who “would like to harm us”—that is, a government-sponsored program of murdering strangers because there is the vague possibility they don’t like us. Much more is revealed about this fascist state of affairs, but I don’t want to spoil it. In his review of the 2017 Broadway staging, Ben Brantley lamented that as a group portrait and in its clubby atmosphere, the play allowed the audience some distance from the “grim, all-implicating ironies.” But listening to the characters expose massive moral and ethical failings and then seek to relieve their guilt by implicating each other collapsed any distance between the players and me; I was overhearing a disturbing conversation to which I could offer no rejoinder. And my silence felt like complicity. —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 20, 2018 On Writing Leaves of Grass: Writing Under the Influence By The Paris Review To celebrate today’s holiday, we bring you an excerpt from our latest Paris Review Editions book, The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from “The Paris Review” Interviews. These quotes are pulled from the chapter “Do You Write Under the Influence?” Enjoy. —Jeffery Gleaves “I’ve found that there’s only one thing that I can’t work on and that’s marijuana. Even acid I could work with. The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Either you function or you don’t. Functionally insane? If you get paid for being crazy, if you can get paid for running amok and writing about it … I call that sane.” —Hunter S. Thompson “I’ve tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it. With luck, someone might have a fragmentary Kubla Khan vision. But with no meaning. And with the steady destruction of the observing and remembering mind.” —Conrad Aiken “The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers—the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions—vision—at all and very few dreams.” —William S. Burroughs Read More
April 20, 2018 On Politics Keeping Tabs on the ’Loids By Sylvie McNamara This week, as the media explored the unholy alliance between politics and sensationalist right-wing journalism, I took it on as my civic responsibility to consume bottom-of-the-barrel tabloids. On Wednesday, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal settled her lawsuit against American Media Inc. (AMI), the parent company of an array of tawdry tabloids. To recap for those of you who follow neither tabloids nor broadsheets, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the National Enquirer bought the exclusive rights to McDougal’s story of her affair with Trump, then buried it to protect him. (Trump is a personal friend of the company’s CEO.) Another of this week’s news events: Maggie Haberman, a veteran of the New York tabloids and a current White House correspondent for the Times, won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the president. “It’s no coincidence,” her colleague Glenn Thrush wrote during the campaign, “that one of the best reporters covering the president-elect this cycle happens to be the one who best understands the tabloid-Trump nexus.” While the New York tabloids and AMI’s supermarket rags are of different journalistic quality, Trump is a president both packaged for and propelled by sensationalist coverage. In recognition of that—and in honor of Haberman’s Pulitzer and McDougal’s new freedom to tell her story—I went to Rite Aid (welcome to the Trump era, when Rite Aid is my bookstore) and bought the current issues of three of AMI’s most popular publications. I’ll walk you through their insights now—for, you know, civic reasons. Read More
April 20, 2018 On Music Twenty Years Later: On Massive Attack and Mezzanine By Michael A. Gonzales In 1998, when I was a writer for Vibe magazine (which was the leading black culture journal), I went to London to interview the trip-hop kings Massive Attack. They were preparing to release their third album, the beautifully complex and brooding Mezzanine. Although they collaborated with other singers and musicians, the core Massive trio consisted of Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, Andy “Mushroom” Vowles, and Robert “3D” Del Naja. Del Naja penned most of the Dadaistic lyrics on Mezzanine and thought of its title. As a pop journalist, I had already covered their contemporaries Portishead and Tricky, so of course I felt it was my duty and destiny to fly to London to cover Mezannine. I had to beg the cornball editor in chief to send me, and in the end, the story was never published. But I never forgot the experience of sitting with Massive, trying to refrain from being too much of a fanboy. The year before, when I’d visited Paris, I’d taken Blue Lines along to serve as my soundtrack of the city. Me and my beautiful homegirl Wendy Washington rode out to the Palace of Versailles as Massive’s remake of the soul classic “Be Thankful for What You Got” blared from the speakers. “Mezzanine is that place in between, when you’re not sure if it’s yesterday or today,” Del Naja told me at Olympic Studios in London. “That little space where it’s quite scary and erotic.” Also known as an excellent graffitist and painter (inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat) and rumored to be the mysterious street artist Banksy (a claim he denied), Del Naja had seemingly become the leader of the group. He was its resident auteur, and his Francis Bacon view of the world was visible in the band’s videos, album designs, and stage lighting. The band first came together in their hometown of Bristol. Though Del Naja was shorter than the lanky Daddy G or the equally tall Mushroom, who were both somewhat reserved, his presence towered over the group, and it caused an earthquake break between the brotherhood. “When we got together to record, we realized the amount of creative friction between us,” Mushroom would confess later. “In fact, we wound up recording in separate studios.” The producer Neil Davidge later described the process as “messy,” but from that angst, tension, and messiness, Massive Attack delivered a masterpiece. Read More
April 19, 2018 On Music Seven and a Half Short Notes on Sandy Denny By Brian Cullman Sandy Denny (January 6, 1947–April 21, 1978) 1) I just finished the recent Sandy Denny biography. I was very disappointed by it. In the end, she dies. In the bio that I want to read, she’s now living in a cottage in Wales and drinking only on Thursdays. 2) In 1968, Sandy Denny joined Fairport Convention, a new British band modeled on the sound of the Byrds and on American folk rock. She was twenty-one and had spent time at university and worked briefly as a nurse but was happier staying out all night at folk clubs. Fairport had already recorded an album and were modestly successful, but Sandy upped their game exponentially, not just with a voice that could stop time with a whisper but with original songs as rich and strong as the traditional ballads the band were exploring. The three albums she recorded with them in 1968 and 1969 are breathtakingly beautiful and mysterious, digging deep into British traditions and dragging them into an ecstatic and electric future. When she left to go off on her own in late 1969, first with her own group, Fotheringay, then solo, she was at the top of her game and was lost. Read More
April 19, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Will Love Again the Stranger Who Was Your Self By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © original illustration by Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I was betrayed this past year by someone I deeply loved and trusted, and whom I thought loved and trusted me. The experience felt almost surgically, cruelly precise in the way it mapped onto my history of trauma, and so I have been triggered while also overwhelmed with loss. This betrayal has been deeply unsettling to my sense of myself, my ability to trust others, and my belief in the possibility of love and partnership in the future. I am struggling to find myself again. Do you have a poem for me? Sincerely, Lost at Sea Dear Lost at Sea, I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this painful and destabilizing betrayal. As Kaveh crucially reminded us, a poem alone is insufficient support as we work through our histories of trauma. Not as a remedy, then, but as resource in what I hope is a vast constellation of support, I offer you Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love.” The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Revel in the declarative stability of that affirmation: “You will love again the stranger who was your self.” It’s a missive from the other side of this wreckage. Read it aloud to yourself. Hear the truth in your own voice, and forge an opening toward that future. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. I love these first two imperatives. They are sufficiently pointed to penetrate the haze of grief, and yet allusive enough for the holy and eternal ritual practice that is self-love. That third imperative, though, feels a bit trickier. At first, “who knows you by heart” seems perhaps to refer to the other to whom you ceded parts of yourself. Read differently, it is “the stranger who has loved you // all your life … who knows you by heart.” Even when your attention was turned toward your relationship, you were there all along. You do know yourself by heart, Lost at Sea, even in those moments when you feel most at bay. Now, give the care you were giving away back to yourself. Move from the sacrifice and sustenance of bread and wine to the poem’s opulent final directive: “Sit. Feast on your life.” —CS Read More