March 11, 2015 From the Archive A Very Normal Person By Dan Piepenbring Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Tokyo noir. From the cover of our Spring 2006 issue: detail from “My Darling Monkey.” Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who created a dark, noirish style of Japanese manga he called gekiga, meaning “dramatic pictures,” died last week at seventy-nine. We featured a portfolio of Tatsumi’s work in our Spring 2006 issue. “Tatsumi’s gekiga,” the editors wrote, is distinguished by its discordant placement of flat, almost crudely sketched ordinary characters within gritty, naturalistic backgrounds. The drawings alternate between impressions of mundane daily life and images of surprising violence and sex, conveying a sense of individual alienation within the rapidly changing throng of postwar Japanese society. […] In tone and style, Tatsumi’s gekiga shares an obvious kinship with the “alternative” or “literary” comics that began proliferating in North America in the mid-1980s—yet it predates that work by as much as three decades. The stories from which the images in these pages were selected are all set in Tokyo in the 1960s. […] When asked whether he wanted to say anything to English-language readers coming to his work for the first time, he said: “I myself am a very normal person. Please do not interpret these stories as representative of the author’s personality.” Below, in memory of Tatsumi, are a few excerpts from that portfolio. Read More
March 2, 2015 From the Archive The Art of Revelry By Dan Piepenbring We’re gearing up for our Spring Revel here at the Review. Variously described as “the best party in town” and “prom for New York intellectuals,” it’s a tradition that stretches back … well, tens of years. In that time, archival evidence suggests, it’s grown by leaps and bounds. The fifth revel, for example, in 1969, was held on the grounds of an abandoned church on Roosevelt Island (then known as Welfare Island). It did not go as planned. As George Plimpton later recounted, “Two pianos placed out in a grove of trees were destroyed in a late night rainstorm; almost all the profits from the revel were paid to a piano rental company. The final tally showed that proceeds turned over to the magazine amounted to fourteen dollars.” Thirty years ago, though, the revel finally became the serious, unmistakably sophisticated affair that it remains today. In our Spring 1985 issue, Plimpton et al enlisted Roz Chast to help dream up a few concepts that could really guarantee a once-in-a-lifetime Revel experience. They were riffing on the theme of “Great Moments in Literature.” Here are three of their proposals: Read More
February 19, 2015 From the Archive The Verb to Be By Dan Piepenbring André Breton in 1924. André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the evening on a terrace by the sea. It’s despair and not the return of a quantity of insignificant facts like seeds that leave one furrow for another at nightfall. It’s not the moss that forms on a rock or the foam that rocks in a glass. It’s a boat riddled with snow, if you will, like birds that fall and their blood doesn’t have the slightest thickness. I know the general outline of despair. A very small shape, defined by jewels worn in the hair. That’s despair. A pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found and whose existence can’t even hang by a thread. That’s despair for you. Let’s not go into the rest. Once we begin to despair we don’t stop. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan towards midnight, I despair of the cigarette smoked by men on death row. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no heart, my hand always touches breathless despair, the despair whose mirrors never tell us if it’s dead. I live on that despair which enchants me. I love that blue fly which hovers in the sky at the hour when the stars hum. I know the general outline of the despair with long slender surprises, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I get up every day like everyone else and I stretch my arms against a floral wallpaper. I don’t remember anything and it’s always in despair that I discover the beautiful uprooted trees of night. The air in the room is as beautiful as drumsticks. What weathery weather. I know the general outline of despair. It’s like the curtain’s wind that holds out a helping hand. Can you imagine such a despair? Fire! Ah they’re on their way … Help! Here they come falling down the stairs … And the ads in the newspaper, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, beat it, you dirty sandpile! In its general outline despair has no importance. It’s a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it’s a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it’s a squad of one-less-days that will eventually make up my life. Translated from the French by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow.
February 18, 2015 From the Archive Philip Levine’s “A Sign” By Dan Piepenbring Philip Levine in 1980. This week, we’re celebrating Philip Levine by posting some of his poems from our archives. This one, “A Sign,” comes from our Spring 1981 issue. The last words the sea spokebefore it died, the last sighof the great wind that blewbefore we were born, the lastlight that dawns on the hillof our dying, skull hill wewould call it. Read the whole poem here.
February 17, 2015 From the Archive Philip Levine’s “She’s Not Gone” By Dan Piepenbring Levine in 1980. As we mentioned over the weekend, we’ll be celebrating Philip Levine this week by posting some of his poems from our archives. This one, “She’s Not Gone,” comes from our Winter-Spring 1980 issue. To my knowledge, Levine never reprinted it in any of his collections. “You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine’s spare, ironic poems,” Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times on Sunday. “Come as you are, this important and emotionally committed poet told us.” Someone enters your lifeon a day you no longerremember. The years pass,and she becomes the motheryou never had, the oldersister smoking before breakfast,the first friend. Read the whole poem here.
January 22, 2015 From the Archive John Bayley on British Wit By Dan Piepenbring John Bayley with Iris Murdoch, 1980. The New York Times has reported that John Bayley died last week at eighty-nine. A literary critic and Oxford don, Bayley was best known for his vivid, searching memoir, Elegy for Iris, about his married life with Iris Murdoch, who in the late nineties had fallen deep into Alzheimer’s disease. “To feel oneself held and cherished and accompanied, and yet to be alone,” he wrote. “To be closely and physically entwined, and yet feel solitude’s friendly presence, as warm and undesolating as contiguity itself.” But Bayley was a keen critic, too. Remembering him in the Guardian, Richard Eyre writes, John was a brilliantly readable reviewer, often witty and sometimes waspish, but invariably bearing the authority of a man who could speak knowledgeably of all European cultures. He believed that the point of literature was to make sense of the world, and, although shy and unassertive, he was a blazingly confident guide to how and where to discover those truths. If I were looking for an epitaph for him it would be from Tolstoy: “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” In our Spring 1998 issue, The Paris Review asked thirteen British writers to answer questions about the state of the nation’s literature. Bayley was one of them—here, to remember him, are the two questions he answered. Read More