September 23, 2022 The Review’s Review Michelle de Kretser and David Orr Recommend; Our Editors Remember Hilary Mantel By The Paris Review Gabriel Mälesskircher, Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we remember Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), and bring you recommendations from two of our issue no. 241 contributors. On holiday in France, I went to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in the Musée Unterlinden. Afterward, wandering through the museum’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art, I came across a small oil painting: part of an altarpiece attributed to Gabriel Mälesskircher, a fifteenth-century German artist from Colmar. Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man has clear, singing colors, predominantly reds and greens. While Saint Guy looks on, the possessed man in question is being restrained by three other men. His head is thrown back, and the expelled demon, a tiny black humanoid, has just flown out of his gaping mouth. I thought at once of Mavis Gallant’s story “In the Tunnel,” which ends with the protagonist, Sarah, writing a jokey, flirtatious invitation to dinner on the back of a postcard that shows a miniature human figure cast out from a man’s body: “This person must have eaten my cooking.” I remembered that another of Gallant’s stories, “Virus X,” is set partly in Colmar, and I felt certain that she knew Mälesskircher’s painting. I imagined her looking at it, taking in its detail as I was, and the thrill of connection ran through me like bright wire. Read More
September 22, 2022 Rereading Nobody Writes Like Nancy Lemann By Susan Minot Photograph by David Wipf. Spanish moss, City Park, New Orleans, June 1958, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Nancy Lemann’s work is deceptive in its meandering. She is thinking deeply even when it seems as if her thoughts are floating. Her laser powers slice into idiocy (and dice it) while they also beam sympathetically onto, as she would call it, the folly of the human condition. Her work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it. But she is observing the human being of today. One of her passions is history, with particular attention to architectural preservation and travel. Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages. Read More
September 20, 2022 Diaries Has Henry James Put Me in This Mood? By Donna Dennis A collage by Dennis, reflecting her interest in how interior spaces relate to feminism. Made in 1971 in her loft on Grand Street. Courtesy of Donna Dennis. Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work. Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. Ted stayed with me for a number of weekends that summer, and he proposed that we undertake a collaborative book. As I remember, I began the collaboration by making drawings with empty word balloons. I’m pretty sure Ted provided the project’s title at the outset. Ted would take the drawings—I think I made them in batches of four or five—back to Buffalo, where he began to fill in the words. We went back and forth this way, sometimes in person, sometimes by mail. I had forgotten all about this collaboration by the time Ted Berrigan’s youngest son, Eddie, contacted me in the summer of 2018. He wanted to bring me something his father and I had done together, which had recently turned up. As I looked at sixteen pages of my drawings and Ted’s handwritten words, the memories came back. These diaries describe some of them, along with the artistic milieu I was in in New York at that time—which included the painter Martha Diamond and the poets Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman, and John Giorno. Read More
September 19, 2022 Listen Terrance Hayes’s Soundtracks for Most Any Occasion By Terrance Hayes Photograph by Jem Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. When we asked Terrance Hayes to make a playlist for you, our readers, he wrote us a poem. Of course he did. As Hayes told Hilton Als in his Art of Poetry interview in our new Fall issue, formal constraints offer him “a way to get free.” Many of Hayes’s poems derive their titles from song names and lyrics; others are influenced by the mood of a particular album or track. Music, he tells Als, “changes the air in the room.” This particular playlist-poem has a track for almost any kind of air—or room—you might find yourself in this week. Read and listen to “Occasional Soundtracks” below. Soundtrack for almost any morning: “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” by James Ray Soundtrack for twelve minutes in the bathroom: “Mind Power” by James Brown Soundtrack for grooming: “Look” by Leikeli47 Soundtrack for any occasion: “Your Sweet Love” by Lee Hazlewood Soundtrack for a Friday night: “If It Wasn’t True” By Shamir Soundtrack for a carefree, slightly bittersweet day: “Free” by Deniece Williams Soundtrack for internet surfing: “Expensive Shit” by Fela Kuti Read More
September 16, 2022 The Review’s Review Helen Garner, Daniel Halpern, and Keith Hollaman Recommend By The Paris Review Marilyn Monroe’s hand and footprints outside the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Photo by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241 contributors. Twenty-two years late I picked up Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates’s enormous novel about Marilyn Monroe. At first it jolted me with its jangling, sick vulgarity. My pulse rate shot up. I was trembling. I wanted to throw it across the room. But I also had to acknowledge immediately that it was brilliant. Three days later I dragged myself out the other end, shaken by a sort of angst and awestruck by Oates’s manic power, her huge imagination, her ability to command great cataracts of material—to convey a soul mortally wounded in childhood, laboring in its squalor to recreate itself. —Helen Garner, interviewed in “The Art of Fiction No. 255” Read More
September 15, 2022 Rereading The Entangled Life: On Nancy Lemann By Krithika Varagur Photograph by Sophie Haigney. In our new Fall issue, no. 241, we published Nancy Lemann’s “Diary of Remorse.” To mark the occasion, we asked writers to reflect on Lemann’s remarkable literary career. I picked up Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints from a sidewalk pile in Greenpoint in October 2020, just a few minutes before it started raining in sheets. I read the novel in one sitting when I got home. The next day, I lent it to a friend with whom I was crashing for a few weeks. She returned it twenty-two months later, at the beach. Before we even left Fort Tilden I found myself lending it out to another friend. I’m not very generous with books, to be honest, but for some reason, this novel, like an early-aughts chain email, demands to be forwarded. It is a short book, which makes it a good loan to a friend, because you can jointly anticipate a sense of accomplishment. And it may then become a field guide to certain shared experiences of Youth—allowing you both to observe, for instance, on a summer night when everyone around you is having Breakdowns, that this is exactly like Lives of the Saints. Read More