October 2, 2017 Arts & Culture Art from Guantánamo By Erin Thompson Muhammad Ansi (released from Guantánamo in 2017), Untitled (Alan Kurdi), 2016. I’m looking at an image of a beach. Deserted, framed by distant headlands, with unsullied sands and clear waters. It is rendered in delicate strokes of watercolor. I’m thinking, as I have every time I have looked at the painting, about how much I would like to go there. But I can’t. No one can, not even the artist. This beach exists only in his mind. Although he has lived only yards away from the Caribbean Sea for fifteen years, he has rarely seen the water. He is a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp. Last year, a lawyer, a friend of a friend, asked if I would curate an exhibition of paintings made by her client, a Guantánamo detainee. When I said yes, word spread among the lawyers who volunteer to help detainees, and then among the detainees themselves. Soon, my office in Manhattan filled with the tang of acrylic from hundreds of paintings, and the floor was crowded with model ships, sails made from old T-shirts, and rigging unraveled from the lining of prayer caps. Read More
September 29, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fat Ladies, Flowers, and Faraway Lands By The Paris Review From The Paper-Flower Tree by Jacqueline Ayer. The Paper-Flower Tree is a tale from Thailand for children, but I bought it for my adult self last month. A young girl without much to her name encounters a peddler. The man doesn’t have too much either, but he does have a tree of mesmerizing paper flowers. The man plucks her a “seed” to plant so that she can grow her own paper-flower tree. The girl tends to it, but it doesn’t grow. When the paper-flower man reappears with a group of actors, she confronts him. He reminds her that he never promised it would grow. But as this is a children’s book, and happy endings are required, the girl wakes up the next morning to find a fully flowering tree. To an adult, or the kind of cynical child who knew early on there was no Santa, the story is about the ways in which magic is a pact between adults, children, and a suspension of disbelief. The book is also a testament to the graceful talents of the author, Jacqueline Ayer. The child of Jamaican immigrants to the United States, Ayer produced illustrations for Bonwit Teller and Vogue before moving to Paris and then Thailand with her husband. Ayer’s story, like that of her tale, is both satisfying and complicated. Her books, after a brief flowering, fell out of print. Enchanted Lion, a uniquely wonderful children’s-book publisher, has brought them back. And so after some patient tending, Ayer’s work is again getting the attention it deserves, including a show at the House of Illustration in London. Maybe you think you’re too old to enjoy a children’s book. Suspend your disbelief. —Julia Berick Read More
September 29, 2017 On Travel A Packing List for Writers By Ann Beattie Today, I wrote a friend for advice about packing. I’ll be going from Virginia to Nashville to New York City, after which I’ll be flying to Rome for three weeks. My friend mentioned that his wife takes up more than her share of their suitcase, because she believes men don’t need as many clothes. I wouldn’t consider sharing a suitcase with my husband. It’s disappointing enough to see your Jockey sports bra in another country—it looks so sad in hotel rooms abroad (bad pun!). How much sadder, then, to find it entangled amid chargers, extension cords, computer cords, unwound dental floss (how would I know how that happened? Big hello, though, to my dental hygienist), earphones, noise-canceling headphones, dangling cords, and bungee cords (you never can tell). I’d be hugely foiled trying to extract my underwear. Who wants to deal with a bunch of cords doing the kudzu around a bra when Caravaggio beckons? Though it seems to be common knowledge, I just discovered that it’s best to roll everything. Ankle boots are all-purpose, and you can roll delicate stuff into them with your socks. It’s the packing version of making a jelly roll (okay, you wouldn’t plunge a jelly roll into your boot). When you remove the boots, empty them right away. Santa spoiler alert: the next morning you might find (rolled up) twenty dollars in the toe! Read More
September 29, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Gogol By Valerie Stivers This is the first installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1830s, peasant style was fashionable, literature was becoming more democratic, and, somewhat weirdly, the poet of human baseness, Nikolai Gogol, was producing some of the best food writing to be found in the Russian canon. His eerie and baroque first collection of short stories, Village Evenings Near Dikanka, is a series of narrations by a beekeeper to the folks gathered in his cottage at night as they’re served snacks: “Delicious beyond description! … Pies you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams: they melt in your mouth! And the butter—it just runs down your lips when you bite into them.” Every time I read Gogol, I want to cook like the Ukrainian housewives in his stories. In this post, I try to re-create a spread from the 1959 edition of Gogol’s collected works. Read More
September 28, 2017 Arts & Culture I Read Playboy for the Comix By Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman for Playboy, ca. 1981 In the late seventies and early eighties, I was a proud contributor to Playboy Funnies, an ongoing section in Playboy that tried to recuperate underground comix: they sanitized the movement while also acknowledging it. Hefner had once aspired to become a cartoonist and had an eye for the form. Tho as he once said in an interview—I’m paraphrasing—“I see how cartoonists live and how I live and I have no regrets.” I first convinced my clueless refugee parents to subscribe to the magazine when I was fourteen—“so I could study the cartoons.” A couple years later my father and I had a “heart to heart” talk. He told me I’d have to take the centerfolds off my wall since my mother was too embarrassed to come in and clean my room. Read More
September 28, 2017 Nostalgia George Plimpton on Playboy After Dark By The Paris Review To mark the passing of Hugh Hefner, we take a moment to remember when George Plimpton, a founding editor of The Paris Review, appeared on the television show Playboy After Dark in 1968 and was deemed “very successful with the ladies” by Hef himself. Clips courtesy the 2012 documentary Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself. (The title card that reads “TWO MONTHS LATER” is less confusing when the documentary is viewed in full.)