October 17, 2017 Redux Redux: Grace Paley (and Our New Book) 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 our 1992 interview with Grace Paley. It is one of the twelve interviews we’ve chosen for our new collection, Women at Work. Introduced by Ottessa Moshfegh, with illustrations by Joana Avillez, Women at Work spans the history of the Review, comprising our original interviews with Dorothy Parker, Isak Dinesen, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Elizabeth Bishop, Margaret Atwood, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Jan Morris, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, and Claudia Rankine. Women at Work is available only from The Paris Review, with all proceeds going to support the magazine. Today, October 17, is the last day to preorder the book for 50% off the cover price—just $10. Order yours now! Read More
October 17, 2017 On Film A Trailer for Jem Cohen’s Chuck-will’s-widow By The Paris Review A still from Chuck-will’s-widow. Jem Cohen is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, in the way that, say, James Salter and Grace Paley are writers’ writers. He has made more than fifty films in little more than thirty years. Mention his name to anyone with knowledge of the movie industry and the responses are almost always sighs of admiration for his visual poetry and documentary essays and for his trademark independence and artistic integrity, demonstrated in films like Instrument (1999), a film ten years in the making about the band Fugazi; Benjamin Smoke (2000), also a decade in filming, on the titular singer-songwriter; and Museum Hours (2012), a drama about a museum visitor and a security guard, set in the Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. At National Sawdust next week, as part of our celebration of Sam Stephenson’s new biography, Gene Smith’s Sink, we will premiere Cohen’s new short film, Chuck-will’s-widow, based on a chapter in Stephenson’s book. It’s September 1961, and W. Eugene Smith has recorded, with the myriad reel-to-reel tape machines set up in the “jazz loft,” a mysterious mimic of a Southern swamp bird, whistled five stories down on the sidewalk of Sixth Avenue’s desolate flower district in the middle of the night. “There’s a chuck-will’s-widow out there,” murmurs Smith. Read More
October 17, 2017 Arts & Culture Happy Accidents By Eileen Myles On the pleasures of stumbling upon books in the wrong places. Jean Stafford, in 1945. I found Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion at a thrift in Marfa. I thought, I ought to read some Western fiction, you know? It just seemed like, The Mountain Lion—who could be interested in that? I almost bought it as a joke. I don’t like reading logically. I love having a library of lots of odd books around me, and whenever I’m staying somewhere for a while, I buy a ton of books; I like to reproduce a kind of mini used-bookstore experience wherever I am. So I picked this book up on a whim. Right away, I could see what a fine stylist she was, though there were so many things that were of the period, including amazing racism, just casual racism. But as the book proceeded I began to see a doubleness there—Stafford’s speaking truthfully about her era without being simply of it. I started to realize that this is an astonishing writer. Read More
October 17, 2017 Arts & Culture At the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations By Aysegul Savas While her father lies on an operating table in Ankara, Aysegul Savas unravels eight thousand years of history. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations We arrive at the hospital at seven in the morning. It is still dark, and the air is heavy with exhaust. Patches of muddy snow dot the streets, which branch out without a discernible plan. The taxi ride from the hotel has taken less than five minutes, and yet once we step out of the car, it is impossible to tell which direction we came from in the midst of overpasses and underpasses and the highway warping the hospital. “Shit-town Ankara,” my brother says. We take the elevator to the ninth floor and walk down a hallway, deserted except for an old man in pajamas and a woolen vest, who stands holding onto his serum pole, staring out the window. Up ahead on a hill is Atatürk’s pillared mausoleum, rising high above the city. Our father is still sleeping. We stand uncertainly at the threshold, without turning on the lights. He raises his head sulkily. Read More
October 16, 2017 Fashion & Style The Macaron That Tastes Like Marina Abramovic By Hannah Foster Raphaël Castoriano, Marina Abramovic’s Taste, 2017, from the series “Pastry Portrait.” Stepping into the small office suite in midtown Manhattan, I half expected to find gurgling pots filled with caramelizing crystals, molds crusted with chocolate, and white powder dusting the doorway. Instead, in the headquarters of the sugar/art company Kreëmart, I found a cluster of normal-looking rooms with a small kitchen. The company’s director and founder, Raphael Castoriano, offered me a cup of tea and a variety of sweeteners, saying, “Pick your poison.” The bottle he held must have contained simple syrup, but, feeling suspicious, I opted for unsweetened tea instead. I sat down with Castoriano and his programs manager Simone Sutnick to discuss Kreëmart’s newest edible endeavor. Castoriano explained that sugar is an ideal medium for art because both sugar and art are “not necessities—they are luxuries.” His first foray into the sugar medium was in 2009, at the American Patrons of Tate Modern show. He teamed up with pastry chefs at the Milanese pasticceria and confetteria Sant Ambroeus and the artists Teresita Fernández, Ghada Amer, and Vik Muniz. The artists were no strangers to molding and sculpting, though perhaps not in material as frangible as frangipane. The evening’s most memorable reveal was two cakes crafted into the shapes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Amer decimated the cake politicians’ heads with a hammer, exposing the simulacrums’ respective strawberry and raspberry guts. Read More
October 16, 2017 On Writing Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and the Benefits of Jealous Friends By Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield We consider ourselves fortunate to have become friends during our early twenties, back when we were at the very start of our literary journeys. We were both English teachers living in rural Japan, and we had both been writing in secret in between lessons, but it took us almost a year to pluck up the courage to “come out” to each other as aspiring authors. We made our mutual confession over bowls of spaghetti in an eccentric, garlic-themed restaurant. Our delight at discovering a friend with the same dream eclipsed any prospect of possible rivalry. From that moment on, although our lives took us geographically in different directions, we trod a joint path as writers. After returning home to the UK, we lived many miles apart but helped each other from afar, reassured by the knowledge that our friend was also eschewing a well-paid profession and making do in the pokiest of apartments to buy some time to write. We shared and critiqued drafts of stories, passed on news of writing courses and contests, and soon confided in each other about our ideas for books. Sweetest to us during these years were what we termed our “writing weekends.” On these occasions, we’d travel across country by train to hole ourselves away in one another’s homes. We spent hours engrossed in our separate worlds on the page but came together to discuss our chapters in cramped kitchenettes—one of us slicing vegetables, the other toasting spices, both of us sipping from large glasses of wine. Together, we’d celebrate any successes: an acceptance on a master’s program, a place on a competition shortlist, signing with a literary agent. As time wore on, however, we’d more frequently find ourselves commiserating over the receipt of yet another publisher’s rejection slip. Read More