January 20, 2016 Look Janet Fish: Glass & Plastic By Dan Piepenbring Janet Fish, Untitled, 1984, lithograph poster, 26” x 33”, edition of 250, signed and numbered Janet Fish’s “Glass & Plastic: The Early Years, 1968–78” is at DC Moore Gallery through February 13, featuring an impressive array of her trademark still lifes and her work with light. “The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on light, and the glass held the light,” Fish said in 1968. She said of her approach to still life, “It’s really as much painting life as anything else … because it’s not dead. Things aren’t dead. The light is through everything and energy through everything.” In 1964, The Paris Review launched a series of prints by major contemporary artists. Underwritten by Drue Heinz, the series was designed to encourage works in the print medium and to publicize the magazine. Largely through the efforts of Jane Wilson, who was chosen by George Plimpton to direct the program, dozens of artists donated signed and limited editions of original work. The print above, by Janet Fish, was completed in 1984; it’s still available from our online store. Below, four works from the DC Moore exhibition. Read More
January 20, 2016 On the Shelf Inside Incubabula, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Mikro-photographien nach botanischen Präparaten, an 1878 German text on plant anatomy. Congratulations to Review contributors Garth Greenwell and Ottessa Moshfegh. The former received a rave review of his debut, What Belongs to You, in the New York Times: “Greenwell writes long sentences, pinned at the joints by semicolons, that push forward like confidently searching vines. There’s suppleness and mastery in his voice. He seems to have an inborn ability to cast a spell.” And the latter has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel Eileen. In the 1840s, before photomechanical printing processes came along, illustrated books were adorned by hand with “real” photographs. “Photography incubabula,” as such projects are known, were time-consuming to produce, requiring a complicated development process and elaborate pasting. You can have a look at some of them in the Getty, whose photography incubabula collection “spans a vast array of topics, from a 1878 publication filled with beautiful microscopic images of plant anatomy to an exceptionally rare 1844 edition of H. Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature—considered the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs showing the potential of the medium.” Is a young person in your life beginning the college application process? Tell her not to apply to Tolstoy College—yes, it has a prestigious name, but it’s been closed since the eighties. When it was open, though, what a place it was! As Jennifer Wilson tells it, the college, based in Buffalo, was an anarchist paradise: “the college tried to model equal and shared governance and collective decision-making in the running of the school as well. Initially, there was no official policy on grading, but the administration stepped in and imposed limits on the number of A’s that could be given out in a class. Professors then let students decide collectively who would get which grades, using the Marxist rubric of ‘each according to his ability, each according to his need.’ In practice, this meant that one student might say, ‘I need the A; I’m going to law school,’ in the hope of convincing other students that he was truly needy. Faculty salaries were collectively determined, too, and based on the respective household expenses of each staff member.” Paul Lisicky on Flannery O’Connor’s story “Revelation” and the torrent of disgraces she rains on her characters: “People, no matter how inert they seem to be, contain the capacity to surprise us, to change … Yes, O’Connor destroys some of her characters—subjects them to humiliation, degradation, violence. But maybe that’s because she understands human stubbornness, how we cling to our limitations until events of great force alter us … A narrative, when it’s really alive, will always disturb you when you’re there to seek comfort, and sing in two contrary voices when you just want to hear a single, pure melody.” Turning off your cell phone for a little “off-the-grid” time is a voguish way to announce your awareness of technology’s ills—but is it a mental-health exercise or just another signal of privilege? “The next big fashionable purging movement looks set to be the Wi-Fi detox; a bit like colonic irrigation for the mind, flushing out all the unnecessary gunge … What better proof that you’re just too cool and creative to be ‘on’ all the time; that you need to be free to think great thoughts? … Going off grid is all about suggesting you’re so hotly in demand that you need to stand back from the craziness—but also crucially that you can afford to do so.”
January 19, 2016 Bulletin Give Your Valentine Our Special Box Set By The Paris Review Valentine’s Day is less than a month away. Started that love letter yet? You could be forgiven for putting it off: even Roland Barthes felt that “to try to write love is to confront the muck of language.” Luckily, The Paris Review’s archive is full of writers—more than sixty years’ worth—who have already gotten their hands dirty. That’s why we’re offering a special Valentine’s Day box set: it features two vintage issues from our archive (you choose from five), a T-shirt, and a copy of our new anthology, The Unprofessionals—all packaged in a handsome gift box, including a card featuring William Pène du Bois’s 1953 sketch of the Place de la Concorde. (You may have seen it on the title page of the quarterly.) Your significant other will also receive a one-year subscription, starting with our Winter issue. We’ve been given to know that this box set yields results. Just ask this satisfied customer: Last year @amicob sent me a @parisreview Valentine’s boxed set and we fell in love. True story. So buy one: https://t.co/TOshUrrdXq — Catherine Campbell (@TheCatCampbell) January 19, 2016 You can order your box set here—purchase your gift by February 8 to guarantee delivery before Valentine’s Day.
January 19, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Acquisition, Part I By Sadie Stein From the cover of Victoria Gordon’s Everywhere Man, Harlequin Romance #2438. It was so cold that most of the flea market’s usual vendors hadn’t shown up. The blacktop playground was bare. Customers were so scarce that one seller chased us down the street offering ever-lower prices on a painting. We said no thank you. We didn’t need it. Then, indoors, after flirting with a wide velveteen belt and a souvenir spoon, I came across a stall selling books. I picked up a copy of the Little Golden Book Pantaloon. “You’re not old enough to have read that,” said the seller, who was wearing a woolen cap. “I can guarantee that.” Read More
January 19, 2016 At Work Bodies in Space: An Interview with Garth Greenwell By Nicole Rudick Photo: Ricardo Moutinho Ferreira Garth Greenwell’s “Gospodar,” which appeared in our Summer 2014 issue, is a slow-simmering story of unease, humiliation, and eroticism—it concerns a man’s experience with sadomasochistic sex in Sofia, Bulgaria. Greenwell, also a poet, is exacting in the language he uses to describe the encounter; the result is an intimate and intense intermingling of desire and trepidation. Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, out today, dilates those same concerns: over three sections, the book’s unnamed narrator plumbs the feelings of exploitation, loneliness, and overwhelming desire that are produced by his complicated, compulsive affair with a bewitching male prostitute named Mitko. The first section is a revised version of a novella, Mitko, which won the Miami University Press Novella Prize in 2011 and marked Greenwell’s first foray into fiction. It follows the young American teacher, new to Bulgaria, as he engages Mitko for sex in the bathrooms under Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. The second section comprises a single unbroken paragraph that reflects back to the narrator’s childhood, and the third returns to his troubled relationship with Mitko. I met with Greenwell last November after eagerly reading an early copy of the novel. He spoke easily and at length about growing up gay in Kentucky, erotic freedom, and the many faces of desire. I thought we would start by talking about sex. Great. That’s my favorite thing. The novel is concerned with sex and desire, and often we think of those two things as being intertwined, but they’re largely kept separate in this story. Sex and desire are sometimes linked, but they’re also independent entities. Maybe that’s tied up with the experience of growing up queer in the eighties and early nineties in Kentucky. I remember very clearly thinking about sex all the time when I was twelve or thirteen and feeling an intense desire that I was pretty sure I would never be able to act on. I remember asking myself, Will I ever be able to do any of these things? Will I ever find anyone with whom to do these things? It really did seem possible that the world would never accommodate my desires. And so in that way, desire was separated from sex. And then when I did finally have sex, I found that the world accommodated those desires in these weird marginal spaces, where sex wasn’t exactly analogous with desire—places like cruising bathrooms and parks—and where there can be a circulation of bodies that, if it’s about desire, it’s about a kind of desire that can be detached from specific people. Read More
January 19, 2016 On the Shelf Slayer Is Sad, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Slayer’s Reign in Blood, 1986. Norman Rush on “the savage fictions” of Horacio Castellanos Moya and the archetype of the “superfluous man”: “The literary woods are of course as full of superfluous men as they are of unreliable narrators and, these days, really rebarbative antiheroes. Superfluous men make up an illustrious lineage: Goncharov’s Oblomov, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Melville’s Bartleby, Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, all the way down through Sartre’s Roquentin and the hero of Ben Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. Superfluous men respond with disaffection, dysfunction, or withdrawal when they are unhorsed or irritated by the changing fortunes that the social machine spits out. It can be anything—plunging status, national disgrace, political or religious disillusion, extreme boredom … It’s always interesting to pick at the question of why these guys are the way they are. Sometimes the answer is on the surface and sometimes it’s complex and not on the surface at all. First of all, it’s fun to read about superfluous men. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe they offer to overworked and overbooked readers a dream of letting go, enjoying regression. There is learning and pleasure to be got from reading about them.” Remember the whole debacle over A Million Little Pieces? That was ten years ago now. On one hand, not much has changed since then: readers still thirst for true stories, outrageous revelation, harrowing redemption. On the other hand, the memoir form has never had more to compete with, William Giraldi writes: “In the decade since the James Frey fiasco, social media has turned untold people into hourly memoirists in miniature. We live now in a culture of incessant confession … The absurdly named ‘confessional poets’ of the mid-twentieth century—Lowell and Berryman, Sexton and Roethke—look a touch constipated compared to your average Facebooker. How eagerly lives become doggerelized. What does it mean for the memoir as a form now that everyone, at any time, can instantaneously advertise his life to everyone else? Mailer never dreamed of such advertisements for the self … In this new ethos of endless self-advertisement, the memoir assumes a renewed responsibility, one that exceeds confessionalism.” As music-streaming services come to dictate our listening habits and, to an increasing degree, our taste, we risk losing sight of the enormous emotional variance across genres. What makes sad songs sad, for instance, and how do songwriters from very different molds—Adele, Slayer, Nick Drake, Mozart—inflect their songs with sadness? Ben Ratliff investigates: “What is sadness in sound per se? Nothing. It doesn’t exist. There is no note or kind of note that in and of itself is sad and only sad … The construct of sadness, and the attendant contract that it helps build between musician and listener, has to do with how we might recognize it person-to-person: through silence and dissonant long tones, or through agitation and mania; through closed systems of harmony or phrasing, or through unnervingly open and dark ones. We hear it through voices and through instruments. And as listeners agree to play by the official rules of sadness, so do most musicians, and so do most singers, imitating the sound of instruments … There is a culture around any music, and how you understand that culture influences how you hear. Listening is augmented hearing, hearing through certain layers.” “I love you madly … There is never a moment in which I do not adore you.” “I live and exist only to love you—adoring you is my only consolation.” Are these the words of friends or lovers? Hard to say when their authors are from the eighteenth century. These quotations are drawn from letters between Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen, the Swedish Count with whom she’s suspected to have had an affair. But with emphasis on that “suspected”—historians have yet to find conclusive evidence of their tryst. If you’re bored and looking for your next big project, maybe it’s time to rethink space. All of it, and your relation to it. As George Musser writes, “In the past twenty years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality … Over and over, I heard some variant of: ‘Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal’ … Instead of saying that space brings order to the world, you can say that the world is ordered and space is a convenient notion for describing that order. We perceive that things affect one another in a certain way and, from that, we assign them locations in space.”