September 6, 2017 Arts & Culture The Ashbery Files By Lorin Stein John Ashbery was a prolific contributor to The Paris Review. Over the years, we published forty of his poems, plus two long prose pieces, a series of collages, and an Art of Poetry interview. From an early age, he started cropping up in other people’s interviews, too. Already in 1966, Allen Ginsberg was comparing Ashbery to Alexander Pope (“I was listening to him read The Skaters, and it sounded as inventive and exquisite, in all its parts, as The Rape of the Lock”). By the 1980s, Philip Larkin could use Ashbery as a stand-in for all that was hip and threatening in American poetry: “I’ve never been to America … And of course I’m so deaf now that I shouldn’t dare. Someone would say, What about Ashbery, and I’d say, I’d prefer strawberry, that kind of thing.” Whether we were interviewing Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Edmund White, Helen Vendler—it turned out to be impossible to discuss their work without at least mentioning his. And it is worth pointing out that this was post-edits. Often, at least in recent years, Ashbery’s influence or example seemed too obvious to discuss, so his name ended up on the cutting-room floor. Here, in no particular order, are some Ashbery sightings from the Writers at Work interviews: Read More
September 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Hélio Oiticica in New York By Elisa Wouk Almino Miguel Rio Branco, Babylonests, 1971, digital projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. The late fifties and early sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams. The arts were flourishing under the newly elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, who had promised to achieve “fifty years of progress in five.” Musicians were mixing samba with jazz and developing bossa nova, while visual artists experimented with abstraction and participatory sculpture. Modern architecture would revolutionize the face of the country in 1960 with the inauguration of the newly constructed capital, Brasília. Designed by the country’s greatest modern architect, Oscar Niemeyer, the capitol was a symbol of hope and transformation in a poor country that had been politically unstable for decades. But all that was swiftly overshadowed by the reactionary military regime, which overthrew the government in 1964. In response to the new government’s violent, nationalistic rhetoric, artists began drawing even more heavily from cultural trends abroad to create a new, anarchist cultural movement, Tropicália. Like the indigenous cannibals who ate their colonialist enemies to become stronger, these artists wanted to consume foreign culture and to outdo it. For musicians, such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, this often meant fusing psychedelic rock with Brazilian beats; visual artists such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape melded the handcraftsmanship of indigenous communities with modernist aesthetics. Hélio Oiticica, whose work is currently being celebrated in a massive retrospective, “To Organize Delirium,” at the Whitney Museum, was another actor at the center of this movement. Born into Brazil’s upper-middle class, he studied painting at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and became a vital part of the city’s art scene. Following the military coup, he began working with the marginal classes in the city’s favelas, where he developed many of his ideas of making art in public spaces and designed his famous “penetrables,” freestanding, colorful labyrinths that mimic the makeshift architecture of the favelas. In the best known of these, “Tropicália” (1967), two multicolor structures sit on an island of sand, a clichéd Brazilian setting; Oiticica wanted it to be “the cry of Brazil for the world.” Read More
September 5, 2017 Arts & Culture A Visit to the Musée d’Edith Piaf By Nadja Spiegelman Musée Edith Piaf. When Edith Piaf died in 1963, at the age of forty-seven, she was the most famous singer in France. But Bernard Marchois, founder and docent of the Musée d’Edith Piaf, was afraid the petite songstress, whose extraordinary voice elevated her from the street corners of working-class Belleville to the stages of the world’s largest music halls, would fall into oblivion after her death. “Her public will never forget her, but the media can. Piaf must not die a second death,” he told me, in French, sitting on an ornate Victorian couch once owned by Piaf herself. Paris is filled with strange museums—from the museum of absinthe to the museum of carnival equipment—but the Musée d’Edith Piaf is among the strangest. Marchois has kept the same hours since its founding fifty years ago, in 1967: Monday through Wednesday, one P.M. to six P.M., strictly by appointment only. He pointedly speaks no English (“Juste une,” he corrected a prospective American visitor, “Une, pas un, parce que vous êtes une jeune femme.”) To those who call, he dictates the address and door codes to a residential building in Belleville. The museum occupies two small rooms of a fourth-floor apartment that adjoins Marchois’s own. Read More
September 1, 2017 Arts & Culture What’s Better? By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. (The Idle Meditations of Shtyck-Junker Krokodilov) Both adults and children may go to pubs, but only children can go to school. Alcohol relaxes the metabolism, aids fat deposits, gladdens a man’s heart. School isn’t capable of all that. Lomonosov said: “Science nourishes youth, glee to elders grants.” But Vladimir the Great often said: “Drinking is the joy of Rus.” Which of the two to believe? Surely the older one. Tax revenues certainly don’t come from schools. Read More
August 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Two in One By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. Don’t trust those Judas Iscariots, those chameleons! In our day, faith is easier to lose than an old glove—and I’ve lost it! It was evening. I was taking the horsecar. It isn’t right that I, as a high-ranking official, take the horsecar, but on this occasion I wore a fur greatcoat and could conceal my face in its marten collar. It’s cheaper, you know … Despite the cold and late hour, the car was crammed full. Nobody recognized me. The marten collar allowed me to travel incognito. Riding, I dozed and studied the little ones … Read More
August 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Some Thoughts About the Soul By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. In the opinion of well-read governesses and educated governors’ wives, the soul is an indeterminable entity of psychological substance. I have no reason to disagree with this. One scholar writes: “To discover the soul, take a man just given a dressing-down by management and tie off his foot with a belt. Make an incision in the heel and you’ll find what’s sought.” I believe in the transmigration of souls … I’ve come to this belief through experience. My own soul, in all the time of my earthly suffering, has traversed many animals and plants, and endured all the stages and realms spoken of by the Buddha … I was a pup when I was born, and a goose when I entered public life. Starting in government service, I became small potatoes. My boss dubbed me a brick, friends—a jackass, freethinkers—a sheep. Traveling along the railroads, I was a rabbit; living in a village among peasants, I felt myself a leech. After one instance of embezzlement I was for some time a scapegoat. Marrying, I became horned cattle. Embarking, finally, on the one true path, I acquired a belly and became a triumphant swine.1 1. A reference to “The Triumphant Swine, or The Swine’s Conversation with the Truth,” an 1881 dramatic scene by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, in which the truth chats with a pig, and by the end gets eaten. Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter. Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Look for her translations of Chekhov sketches each day this week on the Daily.