March 23, 2023 At Work On Paper: An Interview with Thomas Demand By Olivia Kan-Sperling Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK. The Review has long been a fan of Thomas Demand’s work; our Spring 2015 issue featured a portfolio of his paper sculptures of cherry blossoms. His series The Dailies recreates quotidian objects and images: a coffee cup, a tray of cigarette butts. Only tiny flaws (pencil markings, tape) reveal them as constructions; otherwise his compositions are stripped of everything but their form. But paper isn’t just a blank canvas; it also carries meaning, even if these associations are subtle: it’s the medium of office workers, receipts, menus, greeting cards, origami, newspapers—and, of course, of The Paris Review. To accompany a selection of images from The Dailies, we talked to Demand about paper, literature, and the home. INTERVIEWER What does paper mean in your work? THOMAS DEMAND Paper is a formidable, malleable material that everyone touches on a daily basis. We all share this experience—we know its haptic and aesthetic possibilities more than perhaps anything else. We mostly use paper for temporary purposes—napkins, newspaper, coffee cups, the Amazon box, and so on. We make notes on it and throw it away, wrap our gifts in it and rip it to receive them. I find that important to consider, if I look at the more commonplace iconography in my work, like in The Dailies. I’m also interested in paper’s relations to information, model-making, and geometry. Read More
March 23, 2023 Writers' Houses At William Faulkner’s House By Benjamin Nugent Photograph by Gary Bridgman. courtesy of wikimedia commons, licensed under CCO 2.5. “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” There came a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wanted to see what he was talking about. If the tendency of things in Mississippi was to hang on too long, as Faulkner claimed, maybe the populace and the landscape would be more or less the same as they’d been when he wrote those lines in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours. Read More
March 22, 2023 Home Improvements Bedbugs By Sophie Kemp Photograph by Sophie Kemp. I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made a movement that seemed to say: Ouch. I scanned the bed: there was a constellation of ink-colored droplets. The bedbug summer was in 2019. I had just turned twenty-three. I was working at Vogue as an assistant. I was making very little money. I thought I was punk because I would often show up to work with a gin hangover, plug in a pair of headphones, and play YouTube videos where various artists performed industrial music. I thought I was punk because all of my clothes were from the garbage or had been gifted to me by people who also worked at Vogue (okay, I did buy stuff, like the bra). I thought I was punk because I was dating a former child jazz prodigy who lived in a DIY venue in Gowanus with no shower, no kitchen, but massive windows, hardwood floors. A posh nightclub had opened up next door and I sometimes went there to pee because I liked the soap. It all made me feel very cool even though in reality it was pathetic. My boyfriend slept on a twin-sized cot inside of what was functionally an electrical closet. He was the first person I called about the bedbugs. That evening he took me to the nightclub and bought me a cocktail. He had a freckle inside his eyelid and it looked like a wet pebble. I was totally in love with him. Read More
March 21, 2023 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Seventieth-Anniversary Issue By Emily Stokes A few days before the Review’s new Spring issue went to print, the poet Rita Dove called me from her Charlottesville home to set a few facts straight. She and her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, are night owls—emails from Dove often land around 9 A.M., just before bedtime—and they had just spent several long nights poring over her interview, which was conducted by Kevin Young and which spans Dove’s childhood in Akron, Ohio, where her father was the first Black chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; her adventures with the German language; her experience as poet laureate of the United States, between 1993 and 1995; and her love of ballroom dancing and of sewing, during which she might “find the solution for an enjambment” halfway through stitching a seam. Working their way through the conversation, she and Viebahn had confirmed or emended the kinds of small but crucial details that are also the material of Dove’s poems: the number of siblings in her father’s family, the color of the book that inspired the poem “Parsley,” the name of the German lettering in which her childhood copy of Friedrich Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke was printed (not Sütterlin, it transpired, but Fraktur). We talked through her corrections, and then Dove produced a final fact that caught me by surprise. Two decades ago, she said, she had been preparing to be interviewed for The Paris Review by George Plimpton. He’d called to set a date for their first conversation, and the next day, she said, came the shocking news that he had died. Read More
March 21, 2023 Letters Ordinary Notes By Christina Sharpe Note 19 Letters to the Editor: ‘Slips of the Tongue,’ Week after Week April 19, 1967 Courtesy of Christina Sharpe. Read More
March 20, 2023 Conversations Porn By Polly Barton Ryan McGinley, Fawn (Fuchsia), 2012. From Waris Ahluwalia’s portfolio in issue no. 201 (Summer 2012). Well into my thirties, I was lucky enough to have friends with whom I could talk about anything. Anything—except the subjects of porn and masturbation. It had always been that way for me, outside of a few explosive arguments with ex-partners. The rest of the time we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to, because everyone was cool with it—or so our silence seemed to be saying. Except I was fairly clear that beneath this facade, I wasn’t cool with it—I’d almost never had conversations about porn, and because I hadn’t worked out my feelings and thoughts, I felt terrified to even begin. This seemed to indicate that I needed to bite the bullet and talk about it, and I imagined that other people probably did too. So, over the course of 2020, when many of us were at home, I began to speak with friends and acquaintances on the topic of porn, recording and transcribing our conversations. Initially, I thought that if I published the chats at all, I would somehow incorporate them into essays—a safer and more literary and urbane strategy. Over time, I came to understand that these were conversations that needed to be presented as they were—in part to convince other people of the benefits of speaking about porn, and to give an insight into what those conversations could actually look like in practice. What follows are extracts from three of the nineteen porn chats I had. ONE A gay man in his early thirties. He lives in the United States, and is currently single. What is good porn for you? Good porn is no longer than twenty minutes long. Not to be overly virtuous, but I think that a lot of the porn I watched in the past—and probably the porn a lot of people consume—is pretty crappy and unethical. I’ve been interested in the idea of finding more ethical porn, less problematic porn. There’s more ethical stuff for straight people, a few sites. I’ve found a lot fewer for queer stuff, weirdly. What would ethical porn look like? Porn that’s less about cum, more about intimacy. Less about these “sexual scripts” that seem to be a really tried-and-tested formula for what sex looks like when visualized. I’m less comfortable watching some of the stuff I used to watch because I feel like it’s programming me or it has programmed me and will continue to program me if I continue to consume it. Read More