December 9, 2016 On the Shelf Giraffes, Despair, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Alfred Edmund Brehm, Giraffes, 1893. The British monarchy is one of those institutions whose endurance serves as its justification—like NASCAR or mall Santas, it’s so deeply entrenched that you can sometimes go for whole years without realizing how ridiculous it is. But Tanya Gold, wandering Buckingham Palace (“There is something pathetic about a fiercely vacuumed throne room”) knows full well what an asinine spectacle the queen is: “She does not make mistakes. We are applauding an absence of something. It is very British to salute a void. Everyone can agree on its merits … The Queen walks a slender line between monotony and the sublime. She has managed this contortion by remaining largely silent for eighty-nine years—a good mirror will grant a reflection to anyone who walks past—and, more important, by giving the impression that she does not want the job … This, though, is the central pillar of Elizabeth II’s myth: the Queen as victim. You can get away with anything if people think you are doing it for their sakes.” In promoting Swing Time, Zadie Smith has found she gets one question over and over: “In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?” Her answer: “I believe in human limitation, not out of any sense of fatalism but out of a learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history. We will never be perfect: that is our limitation. But we can have, and have had, moments in which we can take genuine pride. I took pride in my neighborhood, in my childhood, back in 1999. It was not perfect but it was filled with possibility. If the clouds have rolled in over my fiction it is not because what was perfect has been proved empty but because what was becoming possible—and is still experienced as possible by millions—is now denied as if it never did and never could exist.” Read More
December 8, 2016 From the Archive What’s Inspiration, Anyway? By Dan Piepenbring Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
December 8, 2016 Our Correspondents Reporting from the Front By Jeff Seroy Alejandro Aravena’s entry hall. A woman in housedress and slippers, scarf wound round her head, stands on a ladder staring at the desert. This arresting image, a photograph taken by Bruce Chatwin, was chosen by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena to represent the themes of this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, which closed November 27. The woman, whom Chatwin encountered in southern Peru, was a German archeologist. She was there to study the Nazca lines, which look like random gravel from the ground but from a small elevation take shape as geoglyphs, or man-made images of animals and plants. The point? A slight shift in perspective achieved by modest means can alter our experience of the world. More than sixty countries were represented in the Biennale’s two locations, the Gardens and the Arsenale. At both sites, Aravena, who recently received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, constructed compelling entry halls from over ninety tons of scrap material left over from previous Biennales. Out of plasterboard and the metal posts it attaches to, he formed cavernous spaces with textured walls and sculptural ceilings. The boards were cut with ragged edges and stacked like tiles, leaving small ledges here and there, or tiny gaps for windows, while lengths of torqued aluminum stalactites hung just above our heads. The spaces felt like primitive shelter: cave, hut, igloo, ger. Read More
December 8, 2016 In Memoriam My Step Is South By Drew Bratcher Discovering William Christenberry. William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1994. One of my first days in Washington, having just arrived from Tennessee, I wandered into the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I found myself surrounded by Kodak Brownie photographs of barns, country stores, Baptist churches, metal signs, family graveyards—striking reminders of the Southern landscape I’d left behind. Starting in the 1970s, the artist William Christenberry had photographed the same places in rural Alabama year after year. In one picture, a shack with false brick siding commanded the landscape; two decades later, kudzu had swallowed it whole. Their continuity gave these images a neurotic but documentary quality. There was loss in them. There was deep and complicated love. Read More
December 8, 2016 On the Shelf This Guy Needs a Lot of Surgery, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A textbook Medieval Wound Man. Image: Wellcome Library, via Public Domain Review. Imagine being a successful writer. Like, one who actually makes enough money to have a large disposable income; one who has so many passionate readers that one’s personal life comes under scrutiny. It’s hard to picture it, isn’t it? If it actually happened to you, would you even know how to spend the money? Or would you do what Sara Gruen, the author of Water for Elephants, did, and buy a bunch of Hatchimals on eBay? Michael Schaub writes, “The writer purchased 156 of the in-demand toys at an average price of $151—spending more than $23,000—with the goal of reselling them at a further marked-up price. She intends to use the proceeds to help fund the defense of a man she says is serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Her plan backfired, though, when eBay wouldn’t let her resell the toys, she wrote in a Facebook post that drew some harsh criticism from readers. One called her move ‘Christmas greed,’ while another wrote, ‘Exploiting families whose children want these toys for Christmas is awful.’ She did have supporters, however, such as the woman who wrote, “Don’t let the haters stop you from doing what you believe is right! (((HUGS)))” Tony Tulathimutte has had it up to here with this whole notion of the “voice of a generation” novel—so don’t ask him if he’s at work on one: “The idea of a one-size-fits-all masterpiece runs squarely against the novel form. Novels can certainly cover plenty of ground, containing hundreds of characters in diverse settings, but they’re still all about specificity. To a novelist, the lowest common denominator of affectations, fashions and consumption patterns evoked by the generational tag are seldom any character’s most interesting qualities, except in novels that are about superficiality itself, like American Psycho. The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality.” Read More
December 7, 2016 Look Wave Phenomena By Dan Piepenbring A recent group of Ara Peterson’s interlaced relief paintings are on display at Derek Eller Gallery through December 23. The paintings, according to the gallery, evoke “the elegance of New England transcendentalism, the overwhelming geographies of H. P. Lovecraft, the crisp sonic landscapes of Steely Dan, and the vertiginous feeling of swimming out to sea … Peterson begins his process with a lengthy period of development rooted in the visualization of wave phenomena. For each work, he plots the relationships between color, mood, scale, weight, surface tension, and directional flow.” Ara Peterson, Untitled, 2015, acrylic on wood, 18.5″ x 45″ x 2″. Read More