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Our Nation’s Poets Wallow in Tomatoes, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Trout,_Grouse,_Tomatoes_(Boston_Public_Library)

Robert Wilkie, Trout, Grouse, Tomatoes (detail), 1877.

  • “I see The Paris Review as much as an ‘object’ as I do a venerable and essential literary quarterly. The look and feel is both so important to the readers’ experience … The logo we now use was scanned from a midcentury back issue, and it has all the character of the original lead type that created it.” Talking shop with our art editor, Charlotte Strick.
  • On Henry James’s mommy issues: though the author was close with his mother, “he did not write much about mothers in his fiction. In fact, many of his best novels have no mothers at all. They are safe spaces for orphans, or semi-orphans … James loved his mother and he also wanted to get away from her. It is as though those desires were oddly close to each other, both sides of a coin, or nudged each other gently.”
  • Juan Felipe Herrera, our new poet laureate, has at last revealed the fetish that drives the creative class: tomatoes. “We are hermits, that is true. We live in tiny rooms, and we stay in those rooms hours upon hours … But we also like to walk around and throw ourselves into big crates of tomatoes, and roll around in them, and then get up all tomato-stained.”
  • In 1983, the philosopher Vilém Flusser published Towards a Philosophy of Photography, which took an entirely technical view of the medium—and in the age of social media, the book’s arguments about technology read as eerily prescient. “Flusser claimed that the camera was the ancestor of apparatuses, which are in the process of ‘robotizing all aspects of our lives, from one’s most public acts to one’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.’ And when we look at social media—from blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, and to Instagram—we can see he was correct. The Twitter game is like Wittgenstein’s language games; we must learn the rules in order to play.”
  • “Bring an excitement form wise—not just word-wise excitement but the twist of the hip—even the way we walk will be put in the poem—it gets that basic. Should if we let it. Thus those damn readers get their money’s worth. They meet us. Watch us dance.” Letters from John Wieners to Robert Greene and James Schuyler.