December 21, 2022 On Sports Today I Have Very Strong Feelings By Jonathan Wilson Manuel C., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A month ago, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, made his now infamous “I am Spartacus” speech at the World Cup’s opening press conference. “Today I have very strong feelings, today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, before adding, “Of course, I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled. But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied.” Two days before Sunday’s final, he returned to the microphone to announce, a bit prematurely, that this had been the “best World Cup ever.” It pains me to say it, n terms of pure football, and especially given the galactically great final—a game that will remain, as everyone pretty much agrees, unsurpassed in the annals of football history—he was right on the money. At the beginning of England’s penalty shoot-out against France in the quarterfinals, English fans were back at the Battle of Agincourt, the whole country ready to channel Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh and “cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George,’” when the local penalty pathology kicked in. In the 1996 Euro, Gareth Southgate, currently England’s manager, had famously missed a vital penalty against Germany, weakly side-footing the ball toward the goal. The next day one of the tabloids ran the unforgiving headline “‘HE SHOULD HAVE BELTED IT’ SAYS SOUTHGATE’S MUM.” This time, Harry Kane did belt it. The result was the same. Kane’s ball went way over the bar, effectively ending his country’s chances of beating France in the quarterfinals. England had probably otherwise deserved the win, on the merit of its second-half performance and in the wake of some egregious decisions from the referee Wilton Sampaio, along with the mystery that is VAR (video assistant referee). All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears. Harry lifted the top of his shirt above his chin and bit down on it. Read More
December 19, 2022 Studio Visit LSD Snowfall: An Interview with Uman By Camille Jacobson Uman, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, 2016–2020 (detail). The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep. INTERVIEWER Have you always thought of yourself as an artist? UMAN I certainly drew as a kid. The earliest drawings I remember doing were on my actual schoolbooks. At school I ended up drawing on desks and lots of walls, sort of like tagging things—always female figures. I wanted to study fashion. In Kenya our TV channels were limited, but we had CNN, and on Saturdays I would watch Style with Elsa Klensch. I just remember being fascinated by fashion—drawing things, making things out of my imagination. And it felt really good. At one point, my parents were called to my school to pay for the damages I’d caused. I realized then that drawing wasn’t something I should be doing, so I became more secretive about my creativity. Read More
December 16, 2022 The Review’s Review What the Paris Review Staff Read in 2022 By The Paris Review From Mary Manning’s portfolio Ciao! in issue no. 242. The sadness of thinking about a year in reading is how little of it endures! As I try to recover lost time by rereading the terrible handwriting in my journal I find so many abandoned or forgotten books, and even the ones that remained in my memory are now reduced to an image or a sentence or a feeling—but maybe this is universal, and therefore not so sad. Read More
December 15, 2022 Poetry The Blackstairs Mountains By Colm Tóibín Illustration by Na Kim. In the new Winter issue of The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon interviews the writer Colm Tóibín, author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. Tóibín also writes poetry—“When I was twelve,” he tells McKeon, “I started writing poems every day, every evening. Not only that but I followed poetry as somebody else of that age might follow sport”—and we are pleased to publish one of his recent poems here. The Morris Minor cautiously took the turns And, behind us, the Morris 1000, driven by my aunt, Who never really learned to work a clutch. I remember the bleakness, the sheer rise, As though the incline had been Cut precisely and then polished clean, And also the whistle of the wind As I grudgingly climbed Mount Leinster. All of us, in fact, trudged most of the way up, With my uncle carrying a pair Of binoculars borrowed from Peter Hayes Who owned a pub in Court Street. Read More
December 14, 2022 Rereading “Security in the Void”: Rereading Ernst Jünger By Jessi Jezewska Stevens Ernst Jünger (second from right), via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. 1. Some people live more history than others: born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two world wars, fourteen flesh wounds, the death of his son (likely executed for treason by the SS), the partition of Germany, and its reunification, before his death at the remarkable age of 102. Perhaps no historical rupture had a greater influence on his thinking, however, than the rise of industrialized warfare across both world wars. A soldier as much as a writer, Jünger memorably declared in his diaries in 1943 that “ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” Articulating the consequences of this transformation became the central obsession of his work. Read More
December 13, 2022 A Letter from the Editor A Letter from the Review’s New Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy As a new member of the Review’s team, it gives me great pleasure to bring you several equally new contributors in our new Winter issue. Some are celebrated literary artists, some are emerging voices, and others fall somewhere in between. Perhaps the most lofty among them is William of Aquitaine, also known as the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and the Count of Poitou—the earliest troubadour whose work survives today. For all his lands and eleventh-century titles, there’s a slapstick vibe to this unwitting contributor’s bio that I can’t help but find endearing. Excommunicated not once but twice, and flagrant in his affairs and intrigues, William survived more ups and downs than most modern politicians could ever pull off, and in Lisa Robertson’s agile translation, he speaks to us from the end of his earthly tether: “I, William, have world-fatigue,” he sighs across the centuries. Read More