June 2, 2022 At Work Writing Is a Monstrous Act: A Conversation with Hernan Diaz By Rhian Sasseen Novelist Hernan Diaz. Photograph by Pascal Perich. Money talks—so goes the truism—but rarely is it the subject of fiction. “Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much,” Hernan Diaz observed during a conversation in early spring about the impetus behind his latest novel, Trust. Taking the mechanics of capital as its inspiration, Trust seeks to fill this gap. The novel features a New York financier and his wife, moving between genres (a novel, a memoir, a diary) and time periods (the Gilded Age, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the eighties) while exploring the fabular nature of capitalism. As one character declares halfway through, “Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support.” Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, published in 2017, also reimagines America’s particular illusions. The novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a Swedish immigrant during the California Gold Rush. Born in Argentina, raised in Sweden, and now living in Brooklyn, Diaz is erudite and energetic both on the screen—our conversation began as a Zoom call when Diaz was on a fellowship in Italy—and on the page, in the email back-and-forth that followed. As he would go on to explain toward the end of that initial call, “Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else.” Read More
April 28, 2022 At Work The Secret Glue: A Conversation with Will Arbery By Hannah Gold Will Arbery. Photo by Zack DeZon. Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, continued to work on me long after I’d emerged from the theatre into the megawatted midtown Manhattan night. The play’s world—much like the white, rightwing, Catholic, intellectual milieu of Arbery’s upbringing in Bush-era Dallas—wasn’t something I’d seen onstage before. We meet Arbery’s cast of five characters seven years out from an education of Plato and archery at an ultra-strict religious college. They hunger for passion, touch, reason, the pain and vitality of others, and for one another. They are characters to be reckoned with, if kept at a careful distance. Arbery’s latest work, Corsicana, an excerpt of which appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, is a different kind of play, one that invites you in rather than takes you over. It is about gifts, the making of art, and, more poignantly, the sharing of it. Named for the town in Texas where the play is set, Corsicana opens in the home of Ginny, a woman in her midthirties with Down syndrome, and her slightly younger half brother, Christopher, who are grieving the recent death of their mother. Ginny has been feeling sad, depressed maybe, and Justice, a godmother figure to the siblings, introduces them to Lot, a musician and artist who uses discarded materials to create sculptures that he rarely shows anyone. Lot got a graduate degree in experimental mathematics, and, as he tells Christopher, succeeded in proving the existence of God, although he threw the proof away. “Art’s a better delivery system,” he says. Arbery’s dialogue has an unnerving way of being at once caustically funny and prophetic; perhaps it’s no surprise that he is much in demand as a writer for television and film. Earlier this month, I called him in London, where he was working as a consultant on season four of Succession, a series that I, from my sofa in Brooklyn, was struggling, without much success, to resist rewatching. INTERVIEWER You’ve recently picked up quite a bit of TV work. Are you eager to make your return to the theater? ARBERY I’m writing for film and TV a lot more than I did before the pandemic. Heroes of the Fourth Turning closed in November of 2019, and I went to Los Angeles and got some film and TV work lined up. I worked as a consultant on season three of Succession. Then the world stopped. But luckily, I was able to line up enough film and TV writing to keep me going during the pandemic. It ended up being three TV projects and three feature films. That’s way too much for one person to handle. I wouldn’t do it quite that way again. But I spent my twenties hustling in the theater and barely scraping by financially and having monthly panic attacks about making rent. So I thought, I’m going to take these opportunities because they might not come up again. Read More
April 25, 2022 At Work Stealing It Back: A Conversation with Frida Orupabo By Maya Binyam Frida Orupabo, Last Night’s Party, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Frida Orupabo, an artist and former social worker, was born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway. Like most millennials, she can remember a life without the internet—she bought her first computer when she began attending the University of Oslo, but still didn’t have access to Wi-Fi. She started scanning old family photographs, making them into collages and eventually sending them to a printer, who bound them into books. The altered photos allowed Orupabo to imagine a new version of her relationship with her parents—she was, in other words, devising an alternate history of the present, and that same flair for fantasy characterizes the larger collages she is now known for. Since those early days, Orupabo has moved away from using personal ephemera as source material. Instead, drawing images from eBay, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and online colonial archives, she stitches seemingly disparate worlds together like a rogue seamstress. In the resulting works, things are usually a little bit off: a winged head may be without a body, or a body in repose may be interrupted by a disembodied head. Most of her subjects are Black women, and nowadays they quite literally take up space. After the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa noticed her work in 2013 on Instagram, where she was curating series of images, film, and audio loops under the handle @Nemiepeba, he asked her to participate in “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions,” his 2017 show at the Serpentine Galleries in London—and so she began printing out her images, fashioning life-size works whose various parts she held together with clothing pins. Now, Orupabo lives among these paper women. Her Oslo studio, from which she spoke to me on Zoom this spring, is also her apartment, and so when she eats, she watches them, and when she sleeps, they watch her, too. INTERVIEWER You initially made collages using family photos. Do you locate the genesis of your artmaking in how you grew up? ORUPABO I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties, in an old industrial city an hour’s drive from Oslo. At that time, there were not many people there who were not white. My sister is like me, but my mom is white, and my father went back to Nigeria very early in my life, so I grew up in a family that was predominantly white. As a child, I used to paint and draw, but I started to work in the way that people would now recognize when I was nineteen, twenty. I bought a scanner that could digitize film photos and used it to save family slides on my computer. I started to manipulate them using Microsoft Paint, of all things, and through that process I began to create my own narrative of my family history. I was using photos of my mom, my father, my sister, and me, trying to work through feelings that were attached to that family unit. Collaging was a way of reworking emotions and also reworking things that had happened, that continue to happen. So it was really linked to my identity, a crisis in my identity, and, finally, a healing process. When I got access to the internet around two years later, I started to use found material. Since then, I’ve never gone back and worked with my own face or with my mother’s face. The collages I make are very attached to who I am, what I want to say, and how I feel, but I speak through other faces now. Read More
April 4, 2022 At Work How Do We Stop Repeating Ourselves?: A Conversation with Caren Beilin By Sheila Heti Photograph by Jean-Paul Cauvin. Caren Beilin’s slim novels are marked by a distinctive dizzying logic—as if she had invented her own variation on realism—that allows the narrators’ imaginations, feelings, locations on earth, and personal symbologies to stretch and twist the plot. In The University of Pennsylvania (2014) and Spain (2018), she emphasizes the ways we are trapped within our own realities, but also suggests that these realities can be wondrous and huge. Beilin makes the experience of living seem private, wild, abysmal, and buoyant, and implies that we need other people because without them our inner landscapes would become too overwhelming—they would keep expanding and devour everything. Her new novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat (out this month from Dorothy, a publishing project) follows Iris—a creative-writing professor much like Beilin herself—from her receipt of a package of hurtful old letters from her father (detailing criticisms he had of her, ways he blamed her for the family’s problems) through her eventual attempt to escape from her life by portraying a cowherd at an experimental art museum. I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing—so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves. Read More
February 4, 2022 At Work If There’s a Rip in It: A Conversation with Scott Covert By Jay Graham Scott Covert in 1981. The artist Scott Covert is easy to spot in a crowd by his thick-framed glasses and mop of blond hair. I met him at a party at the Review’s Chelsea office, where I noticed him slipping behind the makeshift bar to swipe a slice from a tower of pizza boxes piled in the corner. “I’m thinking of moving to Paris,” he later told me, “because I don’t speak the language.” Born in 1954 in Edison, New Jersey, he began making after-school trips to New York City at the age of thirteen, catching the bus or stealing unattended cars to get there. After a couple of studio courses at Indiana University and a semester at San Francisco Art Institute, Covert dropped out of school and taught himself to paint. In the late seventies and eighties, he became a fixture of the East Village arts scene that came to be known as “Downtown,” cofounding Playhouse 57 with the theater artist Andy Rees, at the storied performance venue and nightclub Club 57 at 57 Saint Marks Place. Covert had his first solo show, curated by Keith Haring, there in 1979. He has since exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris; his work appears in collections around the globe. Covert leads a peripatetic life. For some four decades he has crisscrossed the country in his car and flown across hemispheres in search of the graves of composers, rock stars, poets, serial killers, and other cultural totems. From their headstones, he makes on-site rubbings with oil wax crayons, using myriad pigments and varying amounts of pressure. The canvases that make up the Monument Paintings, an ongoing series, are laden with text—layers of names, birth and death dates, epitaphs, and fleur-de-lis—and topped with scribbles and swaths of color. Covert renders some celebrity names nearly indecipherable through the sheer density of their replication; others appear alone in the limelight of the canvas. The paintings showcase his acute sense for depth and texture, as well as his attunement to death’s magnetism and absurdity. His work has taken him to Detroit, Montparnasse, Moscow, Luxor, Cairo, and Geneva. Soon, he intends to visit the Trinity nuclear testing site in New Mexico dubbed ground zero: “I’m hoping the government will give me some help. Get some soldiers out there to lift things for me.” INTERVIEWER When you were a teenager growing up in Edison, were you already hoping to pursue visual art? COVERT No, I was more of a dancer. I took classical ballet, jazz, tap. I got to meet faggots because they were all there. And then I realized it was all goofy, and I ran to New York. Read More
January 28, 2022 At Work A Formal Feeling: A Conversation with Claudia Durastanti By Mia Colleran Photo by Sarah Lucas Agutoli. Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. in 1984 to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, a region in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood—and the corresponding impulse to fill in those lacunae via the imagination—can be felt in her work as a writer, and as a translator determined to leave some room for “poetic imprecision.” Durastanti translated the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby and is also the translator for Donna Haraway, Joshua Cohen, and Ocean Vuong—which might give you a sense of her range. Her own fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. La Straniera, her fourth novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, and its English translation by Elizabeth Harris, Strangers I Know, received a PEN award. Read More