December 26, 2016 Best of 2016 Fashion Regained By Madison Mainwaring We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! The Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe. Looking for Proust’s muse in Paris. After making a careful study of contemporary fashion plates, Baudelaire came to the conclusion that one couldn’t examine clothes apart from the individual wearing them. “You might as well admire the tattered rags hung up as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomeu,” he wrote in his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics.” In order to “recover the light and movement of life,” clothes needed to be animated by a living body, and it was only on this living body that they were to be understood. One wonders what he would’ve made of the nascent trend of the fashion exhibition, in which the fashions of yesteryear appear on mannequins, those motionless abstractions of the human figure. “La Mode retrouvée,” now at the Musée de la Mode in Paris, and coming in September to New York, uses clothes as a sort of Pompeiian ash in order to sketch the person who once filled them out. In this case, it’s the Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe (1860–1952), who was by reputation the most fashionable woman of her time. At her salon on the Rue d’Astorg, an integral part of the political and artistic milieux, she arranged for what was thought to be the impossible Russian-Franco alliance, as well as the reception of Fauré, Wagner, Isadora Duncan, and the Ballets Russes in Paris. Historians of the era have argued that no patron did more for music than she. And this at a time when, no matter the fact that she was married into wealth and rank, she had neither rights nor property as her own, as was the case for all women under the civil code of the Third Republic. Read More >>
December 26, 2016 Best of 2016 Dying on the Toilet By Max Porter We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Francis Bacon, Triptych May–June 1973, 1973, oil on canvas, 6’6″ x 4’10”. Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Max Porter revisits Francis Bacon’s painting Triptych May–June 1973. What happens to Ben Lerner, or Ben Lerner’s character in Leaving the Atocha Station, when he has a profound experience of art cannot happen to a person too many times, or it stops being profound. I do not fall in love all the time, and I distrust the cultural vocabulary that insists I should. I’ve looked at a lot of art, and thought deeply about what I’m looking at, how I’m looking at it, and I think only two or three times has it been profound. This might be a failing on my part, and I could strive, like the ecstatic saints, to prolong the jouissance, the sweet heightened encounter. But for now, here is one of those times: I was seventeen. I was preoccupied with death, with sex and flesh. I was darkly interested, for various reasons, in people who die on the loo, who end their days alone on a cold plastic seat, mid-shit. The death on the toilet is fantastically banal. It is not humiliating because it is gloriously normal, and you are dead. Let your final act be a flinging of limbs, a spreading of waste, a painterly use of the small space, a bravado arrangement of body parts, plumbing parts, white porcelain and red blood. Someone will find you. Someone will deal with your mess. None of it matters to the dead. We are all meat. Read More >>
December 26, 2016 Best of 2016 What Kind of Name Is That? By Tony Tulathimutte We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Characters in need of names. How to name your fictional characters. To me the most embarrassing part of writing fiction, aside from telling people about it, is naming your characters. Of course, even “real” names are made up, but in life our names are things we can alter only with a great deal of paperwork; in fiction, writers can line up names and identities as they please, dropping or trading them on a whim. Contriving a name for a contrived person seems terribly precious to me, akin to naming a doll. You want your characters to have names that aren’t too convenient but still memorable and meaningful, which isn’t easy. I spent about a year with a manuscript populated by memorable characters like [[ROOMMATE]] and ???????’s dad, swapping dozens of potential monikers in pursuit of the perfectly natural, unforced, graceful name. After rupturing a few blood vessels that way, I tried to figure out what other writers were doing. The question of what names mean, what they’re for, has been around in the West since at least 500 B.C., when the Pythagoreans developed a few rules of onomancy to divine human traits from things like the number of vowels in one’s name. (Even numbers signaled an imperfection in the left side of the body.) One of the earliest discussions about naming comes from Plato’s dialogue “Cratylus,” in which Socrates oversees a debate about whether a name is “an instrument of teaching and distinguishing natures” or whether it’s just a matter of “convention and agreement.” More recently, psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Stekel and Carl Jung posited that the “compulsion of the name” not only reflects but determines one’s future: that we’re all engaged, from birth, in a nominative determinism. (Anyone quick to dismiss this as Freudian bunk should look at the abundance of Shaquilles now entering professional sports.) Read More >>
December 26, 2016 Best of 2016 Here Comes the Moon By Martin Herbert We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! From Soft City. The hopeful dystopia of Pushwagner’s Soft City. Where does art begin? In the case of Soft City, the straightforward answer is this: it began in Fredrikstad, Norway, in 1969, in a sea captain’s house converted into a writer’s retreat by the novelist Axel Jensen, after Pushwagner had ingested Sandoz LSD. He doodled a man in a car, whom he intuited was called “Mr. Soft”—five years before Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel would have a hit song of that name—and, along with Jensen, envisioned a day-in-the-life narrative structure for the character, along the lines of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and James Joyce’s Ulysses. And then? A hiatus of some three years (hardly the only sharp left turn in Pushwagner’s tumultuous life), during which time he lived on virtually nothing in London (subsisting by selling drawings on trains for pennies) and Oslo, went back to his mother’s, was arrested for trying to board a flight to Madeira on his hands and knees, was institutionalized, walked back to Fredrikstad, escaped a hotel in Paris, sojourned in Lisbon, returned to London, and became a father. After these adventures, he once again began Soft City, with, he’s said, his beloved baby daughter, Elizabeth, on his lap, and with thoughts of the future in mind. Mr. Soft now had a family of his own, and a fearful projected dystopia to live in. Pushwagner finished the book, or rather the 269 bleak yet blackly comic ink drawings that would comprise it, in 1975; and then, after a few luminaries of the London music world had admired it (including Pete Townshend and Steve Winwood), he lost it. Read More >>
December 22, 2016 Best of 2016 Staff Picks: Our Favorite Reads of 2016 By The Paris Review From Gone with the Mind. So many of our contributors brought out new books this year—Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Peter Cole, Rachel Cusk, Kristin Dombek, Garth Greenwell, Benjamin Hale, Fanny Howe, Ishion Hutchinson, Alexandra Kleeman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, April Ayers Lawson, Nathalie Léger, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Leyner, Sarah Manguso, Luke Mogelson, Mary Ruefle, David Salle, Brenda Shaughnessy, Zadie Smith, Karen Solie, David Szalay … I worry I’m forgetting some, but these are the ones on my shelf. After these, my favorite new books of 2016 were probably a couple of reissues from New York Review Classics. First there was Henry Green’s masterpiece, Loving, about servants on an Irish estate during World War II; then there was Sybille Bedford’s multigenerational saga, A Legacy. First published in 1956, this is the story of two German families—one, rich Berlin Jews; the other, country aristocrats—whose fates intertwine in the years before World War I. If you like any two of the following—The Radetzky March, The Hare With Amber Eyes, or Love in a Cold Climate—then A Legacy should be on your short list. Things get a tiny bit slow at the very end, only because Bedford seems to lose interest in the plot. What she cares about is scenes, character, and atmosphere. She is also very good at food: “The sea-urchins came heaped in a great armorial pile, sable and violet, tiered on their burnished quills, like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background, exposing now inside each severed shell the pattern of a tender sea-star.” And that’s just the first course. —Lorin Stein With such wildness going on around us, it’s beginning to feel like an even more difficult task than usual to make writing equal to the gargantuan thing we keep melancholically calling reality. The essays by Mark Greif in Against Everything are a rare example of patient, complicated clarity; while I hope someone is translating Nous by the French novelist and philosopher Tristan Garcia, a book that brilliantly examines what we mean when we use that pernicious and inescapable word we. I guess in the end it just comes down to some kind of accuracy of voice, like the disillusioned, festive thinking on display, in very different ways, in Frederick Seidel’s Widening Income Inequality and Maureen McLane’s Mz N: the Serial. Or maybe there’s no need to expect the contemporary to be equal to the contemporary … The woozy inventions on display in Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (I know it came out last year, but still …) seem more and more alarming and persuasive. —Adam Thirlwell Read More
December 21, 2016 Best of 2016 Our Contributors Pick Their Favorite Books of the Year By The Paris Review From Society of the Spectacle. This was a year of path-breaking books of poems—the taut intensity of Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons, the striking diction and bitter tenderness of Monica Youn’s Blackacre. It was also a year of culminating ones—John Koethe’s wise, prescient The Swimmer and John Kinsella’s Drowning in Wheat, which gathers thirty years of his work. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees jolted my sense of the forest and the trees—and parts and wholes everywhere. Finally, Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm, a meditation on species plenitude and extinction, sent me back to Audubon on passenger pigeons, “obscuring the light of noon as by an eclipse.” Chased by a single hawk, “they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.” —Susan Stewart (“Channel”) Some stories are simply imagined. Others are birthed. Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Another Brooklyn has been birthed from fragments of memory of what it feels like to grow up “Girl,” not just in Brooklyn, not just in brown skin, but in bodies that betray us and make us vulnerable, even as we are young and magical, powerful and fierce. Set against a backdrop of loss, death, war, and the constant threat of physical violence—for these things will always be the background music to becoming a woman—this book is both heartbreaking and beautiful, and it is especially meaningful and necessary in today’s current climate. I wish every woman would read this book: the young women who have just embarked upon their pilgrimage of becoming unapologetically themselves, and the older women who may have forgotten they were ever searching. —Christine Lincoln (“What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story”) Read More