April 13, 2015 On the Shelf “The Inventiveness of the Writer,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Günter Grass in 2010. Günter Grass, best known for his novel The Tin Drum, has died at eighty-seven. “Grass learned a lot from Rabelais and Celine and was influential in development of ‘magic realism’ and Marquez,” Orhan Pamuk said about him. “He taught us to base the story on the inventiveness of the writer no matter how cruel, harsh, and political the story is.” Joseph Mitchell was on staff at The New Yorker for decades—and yet the magazine has suspiciously few of his bylines. What was he doing all that time? “Mitchell had no idea he was embarking on one of the most celebrated writer’s blocks in American letters. In fact, at the time he was juggling a variety of ideas, hoping—assuming—that in his reporting one of them would logically emerge as his next New Yorker piece.” Distracted? Of course you are—this is 2015. It’s in the nature of contemporary society “to manipulate our attention and to profit others … repetitive pseudo-actions create patterns of satisfaction that progressively disconnect us from the world.” And for this preponderance of pseudo-actions we can blame one Immanuel Kant, whose “insistence on autonomy … reads as a denial of mutual entanglement.” Toby Barlow on Derek Walcott and Star Trek: “If any other show had as many scenes in an elevator as Star Trek did, we would have talked about it, complained about it.” On the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which dubs itself “America’s last newspaper” and reads like “Our Town on bad Mendo meth, a Norman Rockwell scene painted in the midst of a weed-wine binge and given a makeover by Hunter S. Thompson.”
April 10, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Self-regard, Strokes of Color, Stchoopidity By The Paris Review Friedel Dzubas, Procession, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 9′ 6″ x 24′ 6″. “ ‘Don’t be stchoopid. It was just a one-night stand. We’re not in love or anything!’ ” Remember when people used to talk that way? Neither do I, which is one reason I’m grateful to Ben Lerner for making me read Helen Garner’s novella The Children’s Bach, about a marital crisis in early-eighties Melbourne—at that giddy moment when sexual liberation and women’s lib were still inextricably part of the same deal. —Lorin Stein In 1975, Friedel Dzubas made a monumental painting for the Shawmut Bank in Boston. Crossing was fifty-seven feet long and thirteen feet tall and was executed on a single canvas. It hung in the bank’s lobby for some twenty years, until the bank closed and the painting disappeared. There is no record of its sale. A study for Crossing is on view at Loretta Howard Gallery, in New York, as part of their centennial exhibition of Dzubas’s work, and it’s a lovely thing in and of itself. On a long orange rectangle, Dzubas made dozens of variously sized, wide black marks that could be a kind of writing were it not for a pair of human figures penciled in at the side of the sketch, for a rough sense of scale (the figures are, in fact, too tall in relation to the enormous painting). The German-born Dzubas once studied with Paul Klee and was the summer roommate, in 1948, of Clement Greenberg; he falls into the Color Field camp with artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. His paintings on view at the gallery are all from the seventies and are great examples of his big, loose strokes of color that seem, despite their girth, to race across the canvas with Futuristic velocity. Art, for Dzubas, was about moving outside of ourselves and experiencing something larger and being affected by that experience—a feeling, he thought, that was “almost as good as making love.” —Nicole Rudick You’ve found me at AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs: a fine place to discover new magazines, but also to witness every possible form of literose peacocking. (Panels, to give you some idea, include “Microaggressions in the Workshop,” “Melancholy and the Literary Uses of Sadness,” and “I Am We As You Are Me: Exploring Pronouns in Experimental Poetry.”) Amid the rampant self-promotion and nine-dollar gyros, I’ve dipped into Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books, which offers a much-needed corrective. For the past few years, Parks has contributed regular columns on writing and reading to the New York Review of Books, carefully rebutting the notion that there’s anything ennobling about life as a writer. Taken as a collection, these pieces amount to a fortifying reassessment of literature’s place in the culture. “Perhaps in the end it’s just ridiculous,” he writes, “the high opinion we have of books, of literature. Perhaps it’s just a collective spell of self-regard, self-congratulation … we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
April 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A New Coat By Sadie Stein Lanpher Furs ad, 1906. At what age does one outgrow the belief that a new coat will change one’s life? The belief that somehow, the you who wears this costume will grow worthy of it, will stride around a rosy future with a different sound track entirely? Plenty of garments can acquire this magical allure, but because a coat is something one wears every day—something everyone sees, something that has to serve a function and therefore has moral fiber as well as fabric—gives it extra importance. And they’re expensive. Read More
April 10, 2015 On Design Anatomy of a Cover: The Complete Works of Flannery O’Connor By J. C. Gabel At the time of her death, at age thirty-nine, Flannery O’Connor had published only two novels, thirty-one short stories, and a small book’s worth of literary criticism and critical essays. “In most English classes,” she once wrote, “the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected.” O’Connor, of course, was referring to her readers experiencing the work, not picking it apart in a writers’ workshop. That same principle drove Charlotte Strick and June Glasson in their recent redesign of the covers of O’Connor’s five books. Strick, the former art director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and current coprinciple of the design firm Strick&Williams (as well as the art editor of The Paris Review), approached Glasson, an illustrator, about the project in 2013. Four of the five redesigned jackets have been released, with the last coming next month. Glasson and Strick met through happenstance—a journey that began at a doctor’s office. “Years ago,” Strick says, “while absentmindedly flipping through a magazine in my doctor’s waiting room, I serendipitously stumbled upon a piece about June. I thought her work had a strange, seductive and unique beauty all its own.” In 2012, Strick commissioned Glasson to create illustrations to accompany an essay by author Rich Cohen about French-American pirate Jean Lafitte and 1800s piracy in New Orleans, which appeared in The Paris Review no. 201. This collaboration triggered Strick’s art-director instinct, and she returned to Glasson when it came time to reenvision O’Connor’s works. “June is capable of imbuing her paintings with a curious maleficence,” Strick told me. “She seemed up for the task of tackling O’Connor.” Read More
April 10, 2015 Listen “People and Rooms”: An Interview with Gail Godwin By Dan Piepenbring At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordings of these interviews available at 92Y’s Poetry Center Online and here at The Paris Review. Consider them deleted scenes from our Writers at Work interviews, or directors’ cuts, or surprisingly lifelike radio adaptations. This week we’re rolling out the four latest editions to the collection: Horton Foote, Gail Godwin, Reynolds Price, and Tony Kushner. All are Southerners, and as coincidence would have it, we’re just in time for the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House and the end of the Civil War, on April 9. Read More
April 10, 2015 On the Shelf The Picasso of Golf Course Designers, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Juan Gris, Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1912. On James Merrill, whose work “exists in part to reverse our bias against trivia”: “His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an ‘Atari dragonfly’ on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker … And Ouija boards: Merrill made the most ambitious American poem of the past fifty years, seventeen thousand lines long, in consultation with one.” “I am writing to you because I noticed that you did exceptionally well last semester … and I would encourage you to consider English as a major (or a second major) … flexible enough to fit in easily with your other academic pursuits.” Giving the hard sell to prospective students of literature. “A busting of the bucolic, a puncturing of the pastoral”: young writers are reckoning with the English landscape in unconventional ways, seeking its absences, its eeriness, “the terror in the terroir.” We’ve been Photoshopping images for twenty-five years. How did we dupe and retouch before that? Double exposure, montage, stage-setting; we’ve been manipulating photographs since nearly the moment they were invented. Picasso, in his posthumous life, is more than a mere painter—he’s a barometer of unassailable excellence in any and every field. Thus, I present to you “The Picasso of LEGO Bricks,” “The Picasso of Low-temperature Geochemistry,” and “The Picasso of Anal-Pleasuring Toys.”