April 28, 2017 From the Archive Straight from the Horse’s Mouth By Dan Piepenbring Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, wood, ramp, and speaker, 2.5′ x 22′ x 30′. Photo: Ealan Wingate and Bernadette Mayer The artist and poet Vito Acconci has died at seventy-seven. Acconci is best known for his performance pieces, which shocked audiences in the early seventies—especially Seedbed, which a New York Times profile last summer described with admirable concision: “he constructed an angled false floor at the Sonnebend Gallery in SoHo and hid himself beneath it with a microphone, speaking luridly to the people who walked above him, masturbating as he spoke.” Before he became an artist, Acconci was a writer, and in this line, too, he excelled at provocation. The Paris Review published a pair of eyebrow-raising poems by him in our Summer 1968 issue. At that time, Acconci would’ve been fresh out of his M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa, where, as the Times tells it, one of his short stories “provoked a minor riot.” It featured a dismembered man who became a living sculpture, and it started like this: Read More
April 24, 2017 From the Archive Bob Bats .100 By Jeffery Gleaves © The New Yorker. Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. You can also sign up for a free ten-day trial period. A couple of years before The New Yorker’s longtime art editor, and brief cartoon editor, Lee Lorenz left the magazine, George Plimpton asked for his help assembling a portfolio of cartoons—and descriptions of the thought processes behind them—for The Paris Review’s unofficial humor issue (no. 136, Fall 1995). Among the younger cartoonists Lorenz suggested for “The Birth of a Notion: Cartoonists Have Their Say” was a fellow named Bob Mankoff, who contributed the cartoon above. Two years after the issue was published, Mankoff was made the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, a position from which he’ll soon be stepping down. Below, is Mankoff’s take on the practice of cartooning: Read More
April 20, 2017 From the Archive A Dip in Foley’s Pond By Caitlin Love Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. You can also sign up for a free ten-day trial period. In Peter Orner’s three Paris Review stories—“Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” “The Vac-Haul,” and “Foley’s Pond”—three outrageously morbid things happen: a boy’s younger sister drowns in a pond of toxic sludge; a man is murdered with a bike spoke (“His stomach was so ripped apart the police had to collect him up in a bucket”); and a woman walks into a classroom and starts shooting and taking hostages. They’re bite-size stories, under fifteen-hundred words, and the violence rushes in like a flash flood, though it doesn’t cleanse anything. Rather, it leaves you with an aftertaste like when you eat yogurt off an unpolished silver spoon. I devoured them. I think what propelled me through these three upsetting stories is that the violence doesn’t actually happen to the people in the stories’ centers. “Foley’s Pond,” for instance, is narrated by a classmate of Nate Zamost, the boy who’s two-year-old sister is fished out of the pond; in “Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” the narrator hears about the man who was killed by a bike spoke from a friend at a boarding school in South Africa. The remove is greatest in “The Vac-Haul”: the narrator only hears about the shooter on the radio, while he bides time with his job for the sewer company. Read More
April 6, 2017 From the Archive Getting Out Alive By Elaine Blair Rethinking the end of Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” What is “Goodbye, Columbus”? A story of a summer romance, a satirical sketch of suburban arriviste Jews in the fifties—sure. But when I stumbled on Philip Roth’s first book on the shelf of my high school library, “Goodbye, Columbus” seemed to me above all a brief against marriage. The story’s point—or so I thought of it—unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain. In the story, Neil Klugman, recently out of Rutgers and the army, works behind the desk at the Newark Library. His summer girlfriend is Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from tony Short Hills, New Jersey. “We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she tells Neil—that is, before the Patimkins’ social climb. For Neil, Brenda’s allure is tangled up with his fascination of her prosperous world, and the closer the two of them get, the closer Neil comes to signing up for the whole Patimkin package: a fancy wedding, a lifetime management job at her father’s factory (Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks), a country-club membership, a house in Short Hills, and, inevitably, babies. It’s cushy, but Neil isn’t sure he wants that life, while Brenda seems to consider no other. Read More
March 30, 2017 From the Archive Joanne Kyger in the Review By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Elsa Dorfman. We were sad to learn that Joanne Kyger, whom the San Francisco Gate calls “a leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a rare female voice of the male-dominated Beat generation,” died last week at eighty-two. In an illuminating 2014 interview with The Conversant, Kyger discussed her process and, memorably, the role of psychedelics in her work: I participated in several peyote ceremonies and in February of 1959, while taking it with some friends, I had a quite unpleasant experience of massed black energy intercut with animal faces. The fact that I was unwisely taking this trip in my apartment, which was over a bar in North Beach, and was not feeling well, added to a very unstable sense of “reality.” This “black energy” resembled an animal, which I later named, hoping to focus it. A wild animal, which I paid attention to whenever I saw it or saw mention of it. For years I was afraid of stepping over some edge into a loss of self or schizophrenic duality. Living in Japan and seeing the guardian warriors outside the temple doors with their fierce animal-like expressions, I finally realized they were protectors. Fear creates a wall one can be afraid to pass by. If they scared you off, you didn’t have enough courage or knowledge to enter further. I think I was fearful of the energy of the animal self, whatever I thought that was. The Review published Kyger’s poems in the late sixties and early seventies; digital subscribers should check out her work in our Spring 1966, Summer 1970, and Spring 1973 issues. Below is my favorite, “June 7 … ” Read More
March 23, 2017 From the Archive Low Tide on “The Brown Coast” By Daniel Johnson Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. If you ask me, there’s nothing funnier than a man seeing all that he’s created—built, grown, accrued, whatever—brought to ruin by the simple, ruthless, infuriating existence of his hapless neighbors. Such is the fate of Bob Munroe, the tragic hero in Wells Towers’s short story, “The Brown Coast,” from our Spring 2002 issue. Bob wakes up on his face in his uncle Randall’s shack along the muddy beaches in Florida, where he’s been granted quarter while he works things out with his wife, on the condition that he fix the place up. Walking the beach one day, he finds a wondrous tide pool tucked at the reaches of a jetty. At low tide, it’s teeming with exotic sea creatures, which Bob—destitute and in need of beautiful things—collects and deposits in an aquarium in Randall’s shack. Read More