August 2, 2017 From the Archive Deborah Turbeville’s Anti-Fashion Magazine By Caitlin Love Deborah Turbeville. Spreads from The Paris Review, issue no. 70 (Summer 1977). Earlier this summer, Staley-Wise Gallery presented an exhibition of Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photographs, including her photos of famously “anti-fashion” Comme des Garçons clothing, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum’s Rei Kawakubo retrospective. In 1977, we published Turbeville’s “ideal fashion magazine,” where women are vulnerable, perhaps a little fallen, and oddly not fashionable. In the left-hand corner of the second spread of “Maquillage,” there’s a handwritten note that reads, in part: “I feel that New York is a house of Death—people shatter there so easily—evil gets into the bloodstream—unhappiness is more catching than laughter … ” In the duplicate images underneath, we see three women in white, their faces obscured: one is standing with her foot on a stool, looking out of a large, bright window; another sits facing the camera; a third rests behind the sitting woman—we can only see her elbow, which stabs out from her side like a lance (her hand is on her hip). Her foot rests next to her, delicately slipping out of a shoe. Their clothes are in shadow, but the light from the windows is blinding. They are women in a dream. Read More
July 18, 2017 From the Archive It Was a Year of Pirates By Lorin Stein We’re going down! A couple of weeks ago, before the president attacked the show on Twitter, I was asked to appear on Morning Joe. This surprised me. I was under the impression that Morning Joe was a political program. It seemed to me the producers had made a mistake. Maybe they’d mixed us up with the New York Review? With the London Review? Or, could it be … the Partisan Review? After I found the studio in Rockefeller Center and was deposited in the empty green room, my anxiety continued to mount. Howard Dean bounded in, looking for a piece of fruit among the battered doughnut boxes, and bounded out. In the corridor outside, I heard producers discussing the Senate health bill. As I was led onto the set, the previous guest, Al Franken, gave me a vague, encouraging pat. I must have looked as nervous as I felt. Not just nervous—disoriented, as if I’d wandered into somebody else’s dream. The hosts nodded hello, then, just before the commercial ended and we went on air, Joe Scarborough mentioned a poem, one we’d published in the Review. “You know when you read something that makes you want to drop what you’re doing and run upstairs and find a highlighter?” he asked the others. “That’s how I felt when I read that poem that begins with the pirates.” So the penny dropped. I had been invited as the editor who’d published “Historically Speaking,” by Stephen Dunn, the same poem that haunted me all through the election—and the opening piece in our Winter issue. It was a better reason than any I could have dreamt up. It was a year of pirates in speedboats, anonymous bullies spreading privacies on the Internet, and the worst of them doing worse than that and wishing to be known for what they’d done, their perfidy an advertisement for a cause … Subscribe now to read the whole poem—and everything else we’ve published over sixty-four years of grappling with piracy, anonymous bullies, and other current events.
July 13, 2017 From the Archive Aux Armes, Citoyens By Dan Piepenbring Robert Delauney, Tour Eiffel, 1911. The magazine’s called The Paris Review, so you’d think our archive would be lousy with poems about Bastille Day. Like, you couldn’t pluck a back issue from the shelves and point to a random page without coming across some rousing commemoration of quartorze juillet and the indomitable French spirit. Well, you’d be wrong. There are zero poems about Bastille Day in our archive. Not even a stray mention. We’ve failed in our duties as Francophiles. Read More
June 21, 2017 From the Archive Who But the Sun? By Dan Piepenbring Ladies and gentlemen, the sun. You may have heard: today is the summer solstice. That big ole sun out there is going nowhere fast. It’ll be hanging in the sky for hours yet. You want nightfall? Fuck your nightfall! Put a blanket over your head and leave the sun alone! As for the rest of you: if you’re looking for something to kick off your pagan celebrations, I dug through our archives in search of some verse to suit today‘s heliophilia vibes. Here’s what I’ve got: Baudelaire. In our Winter 1981 issue we ran nineteen poems by him—translated by Richard Howard, who won our Hadada Award this year. One of these, “The Sun,” is as moving a tribute to that fiery ball of gas as has ever been written. A quick sample: Who but the sun persuades the lame to dance as if their canes were maypoles, governing the resurrection of the harrowed fields, and for the secret harvest of the heart commands immortal wheat to grow again! When, with a poet’s will, the sun descends into the cities like a king incognito, impartially visiting palace and hospital, the fate of all things vile is glorified. Subscribers can read the full poem here. Nonsubscribers should subscribe now, at which time they, too, can read the whole poem, or recite it to the sun itself, or print it out and use a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays on it until it bursts into flames—a fitting way to celebrate the solstice.
June 16, 2017 From the Archive Dads Behaving Badly By Dan Piepenbring Short stories about bad dads from our archive. Happy Father’s Day to one of the best! When you’re living in a patriarchy, every day is Father’s Day. For millennia fathers got by without such a day, looting and pillaging and reigning with such impunity in their workaday dad lives that to set aside a special occasion for it seemed like gilding the lily. But the powerful never tire of celebrating themselves, and when the dads saw that mothers had a day of their own, they became angry. (Angrier, I should say—dads, as a class, have always been hotheads.) Feeling unappreciated, they began to abuse their already capacious tendencies for pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. They would traipse around their homes with their potbellies hanging out of ill-fitting WORLD’S #1 DAD T-shirts, hoping to be noticed. To appease the dads and curb the worst impulses of their droit du seigneur, greeting-card companies some years ago brokered a “Father’s Day,” on which the dads consented to have their rings kissed by family members and to delight in an array of fun new gadgets and scotches presented to them at beery ceremonial barbecues. In exchange, the dads agreed to try to take an active interest in their children’s lives every once and a while, and to keep the drinking to weekends. They now pretend not to notice their cultural senescence, and chuckle agreeably when commercials depict them as primitive morons. A little-known Father’s Day bylaw, legal scholars have argued, makes it possible for you to give your father something he does not actually want—he is powerless to protest, since by obligation he has to “enjoy” his “special day.” Short fiction is one such thing, generally. Dads are not so keen on it. (There are exceptions, of course, but these tend to be the same dads who say they don’t want “a big to-do” on Father’s Day.) If you want to knock your old man around a little bit, try reading him one of these short stories in lieu of giving him an Apple Watch or whatever. He might just blow his stack! Read More
June 6, 2017 From the Archive O Majestic Poet By Dan Piepenbring Hölderin, as painted by Franz Karl Hiemer. Look at that fresh-faced man. That’s Friedrich Hölderlin, baby. Poet, idealist, quintessential German romantic. Suffering from schizophrenia, he spent thirty-six years—about half his life—living in a carpenter’s tower on the river in Tübingen. People would stop in to visit him, hear him read a few poems or play a brief tune on the piano, maybe collect his autograph. Scholars have come to call this his “Tower Period.” Every poet should have one. Hölderlin died on June 7, 1843. You may not have carved out any time to mourn the 174th anniversary of his passing—you may think you have more important affairs to attend to. He did write, after all, that “he who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive,” which would seem to preclude loving a long-dead man. Still. If you’d like to pause and remember the great poet, Rilke will help. Read More