February 17, 2016 In Memoriam All Is Vanity: Part 1 By Alex Abramovich and Emily Barton Denise Matthews—aka Vanity—died this week, at the age of fifty-seven. In memoriam, we’re sharing this ’06 exchange from the late, lamented Moistworks, the music blog founded by James Morris and more or less edited by Alex Abramovich. From: Alex AbramovichTo: Emily BartonDate: 6/1/2006Subject: Hello, Nasty Read More
January 14, 2016 In Memoriam C. D. Wright, 1949–2016 By Dan Piepenbring C. D. Wright. Photo via Copper Canyon Press The poet C. D. Wright died unexpectedly this week at the age of sixty-seven, in Providence, Rhode Island. “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free,” Wright once said, “and declare them so”; poetry was “the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine.” Over the course of more than a dozen books, she “found a way,” as The New Yorker put it, “to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle.” Wright’s poem “Our Dust,” which might double as a kind of eulogy—“I made / simple music / out of sticks and string … I / agreed to be the poet of one life, / one death alone”—appeared in the Winter 1988 issue of The Paris Review, and is reprinted in full below. It was later collected in her book Steal Away. You can watch her read it aloud here. Read More
January 11, 2016 In Memoriam Queen Bitch By Alex Abramovich A still from the “Blackstar” video. Two days ago, Ben Greenman got a post up on The New Yorker’s Web site: THE BEAUTIFUL MEANINGLESSNESS OF DAVID BOWIE, the headline read. “His new album, Blackstar, embraces nonsense, and that makes it prime Bowie.” That was on Saturday. This morning, the meaning snapped into place like a bear trap: released on Friday—Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday—Blackstar is a threnody, composed by the artist himself. Read More
December 1, 2015 In Memoriam Christopher Middleton, 1926–2015 By Dan Piepenbring Christopher Middleton We’ve received word that the poet Christopher Middleton has passed away at eighty-nine. Guy Davenport called him “an incomparable stylist, a wry ironist, a philosopher of words. The only category in which he fits justly,” he added, “is that of poet.” The Review published Middleton throughout his career, beginning in our Summer–Fall 1960 issue, from which the poem below, “Edward Lear in February,” is taken. Read More
September 21, 2015 In Memoriam C. K. Williams, 1936–2015 By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Selected Poems. C. K. Williams, the poet known for his “long, unraveled lines,” died yesterday at seventy-eight. Williams realized, he told the New York Times, “that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.” The Paris Review published three of Williams’s poems in the eighties; this one, “From My Window,” is from our Fall 1981 issue. Read More
September 14, 2015 In Memoriam Bill Becker, 1927–2015 By Dan Piepenbring Becker in 1995. We were saddened to learn that Bill Becker, a longtime friend of The Paris Review, died this weekend at eighty-eight. As today’s obituary in the New York Times explains, Bill was “a theater critic and financier who acquired Janus Films with a partner in 1965, expanded its catalog of art-house and Hollywood classics and broadened their distribution to university audiences and home viewers.” A cineaste and a shrewd businessman, he was instrumental in bringing works by Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, Truffaut, and dozens of other filmmakers to new American audiences, a legacy his son Peter carries on as president of the Criterion Collection. We knew Bill as a familiar face at our annual Spring Revel, and a generous, loyal benefactor. A close friend of George Plimpton’s, he was quick to champion the writers he admired—James Salter credited him with bringing A Sport and a Pastime to Plimpton’s attention. After George died, Mr. Becker continued to support the Review under each of its new editors. We join his colleagues at Janus Films and the Criterion Collection in offering our condolences and our gratitude.