September 20, 2022 Diaries Has Henry James Put Me in This Mood? By Donna Dennis A collage by Dennis, reflecting her interest in how interior spaces relate to feminism. Made in 1971 in her loft on Grand Street. Courtesy of Donna Dennis. Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work. Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. Ted stayed with me for a number of weekends that summer, and he proposed that we undertake a collaborative book. As I remember, I began the collaboration by making drawings with empty word balloons. I’m pretty sure Ted provided the project’s title at the outset. Ted would take the drawings—I think I made them in batches of four or five—back to Buffalo, where he began to fill in the words. We went back and forth this way, sometimes in person, sometimes by mail. I had forgotten all about this collaboration by the time Ted Berrigan’s youngest son, Eddie, contacted me in the summer of 2018. He wanted to bring me something his father and I had done together, which had recently turned up. As I looked at sixteen pages of my drawings and Ted’s handwritten words, the memories came back. These diaries describe some of them, along with the artistic milieu I was in in New York at that time—which included the painter Martha Diamond and the poets Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman, and John Giorno. Read More
September 19, 2022 Listen Terrance Hayes’s Soundtracks for Most Any Occasion By Terrance Hayes Photograph by Jem Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. When we asked Terrance Hayes to make a playlist for you, our readers, he wrote us a poem. Of course he did. As Hayes told Hilton Als in his Art of Poetry interview in our new Fall issue, formal constraints offer him “a way to get free.” Many of Hayes’s poems derive their titles from song names and lyrics; others are influenced by the mood of a particular album or track. Music, he tells Als, “changes the air in the room.” This particular playlist-poem has a track for almost any kind of air—or room—you might find yourself in this week. Read and listen to “Occasional Soundtracks” below. Soundtrack for almost any morning: “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” by James Ray Soundtrack for twelve minutes in the bathroom: “Mind Power” by James Brown Soundtrack for grooming: “Look” by Leikeli47 Soundtrack for any occasion: “Your Sweet Love” by Lee Hazlewood Soundtrack for a Friday night: “If It Wasn’t True” By Shamir Soundtrack for a carefree, slightly bittersweet day: “Free” by Deniece Williams Soundtrack for internet surfing: “Expensive Shit” by Fela Kuti Read More
September 16, 2022 The Review’s Review Helen Garner, Daniel Halpern, and Keith Hollaman Recommend By The Paris Review Marilyn Monroe’s hand and footprints outside the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Photo by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241 contributors. Twenty-two years late I picked up Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates’s enormous novel about Marilyn Monroe. At first it jolted me with its jangling, sick vulgarity. My pulse rate shot up. I was trembling. I wanted to throw it across the room. But I also had to acknowledge immediately that it was brilliant. Three days later I dragged myself out the other end, shaken by a sort of angst and awestruck by Oates’s manic power, her huge imagination, her ability to command great cataracts of material—to convey a soul mortally wounded in childhood, laboring in its squalor to recreate itself. —Helen Garner, interviewed in “The Art of Fiction No. 255” Read More
September 15, 2022 Rereading The Entangled Life: On Nancy Lemann By Krithika Varagur Photograph by Sophie Haigney. In our new Fall issue, no. 241, we published Nancy Lemann’s “Diary of Remorse.” To mark the occasion, we asked writers to reflect on Lemann’s remarkable literary career. I picked up Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints from a sidewalk pile in Greenpoint in October 2020, just a few minutes before it started raining in sheets. I read the novel in one sitting when I got home. The next day, I lent it to a friend with whom I was crashing for a few weeks. She returned it twenty-two months later, at the beach. Before we even left Fort Tilden I found myself lending it out to another friend. I’m not very generous with books, to be honest, but for some reason, this novel, like an early-aughts chain email, demands to be forwarded. It is a short book, which makes it a good loan to a friend, because you can jointly anticipate a sense of accomplishment. And it may then become a field guide to certain shared experiences of Youth—allowing you both to observe, for instance, on a summer night when everyone around you is having Breakdowns, that this is exactly like Lives of the Saints. Read More
September 14, 2022 Letters The Pleasure of a Petty Thief: Letters, 1982–83 By Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya Hans Georg Berger, Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, 1984. Courtesy of Semiotext(e). In 1977, the writers Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya began exchanging letters. Though the two rarely met, Guibert became increasingly obsessed with Savitzkaya as they continued writing to each other over the course of a decade. This selection of their messages is the first in our new series featuring correspondence, Letters. Paris March 11, 1982 Eugène a belgian stamp sticks out of my mailbox, what if it’s a letter from Eugène, and anyone could have taken it, between the moment when the mailman delivered it and the moment I return home, cluttered with files and folders and newspapers and a flan that will be delicious but yes it is a letter from Eugène, and it, it risks not being delicious, I ready myself for anything: a letter full of insults, or even worse, a letter that mocks me (yesterday on the telephone I heard the voice of a girl who asked me for a photo of Eugène and I clearly sensed in her sugary and whispering tone a caricature of my affection, my own expectation), first off, the letter is quite thin, and maybe there’s nothing at all inside the envelope, and if someone has stolen the letter that will cause yet another misunderstanding, but delicious your letter is still closed, and that’s why I wait to open it, I even crack open the flan first, and start this beginning of a reply, in case some polite or distant words end up cutting my desire to write you off at the knees, do you realize what’s happening right now, on my end? I’m missing an interlocutor, and I’ve chosen you, perhaps wrongly, to be one … Enough, I open the letter, shielding my eyes. But no, look, your letter is sweet, so sweet, even if the warnings about your twisted character would like to make me question what you say. I’d love to see you in April when you come, and to take you to Bernard Faucon’s, I told him about you and he’s expecting us, I hope it will be a fun evening. Don’t feel at all obliged to respond to this letter, I am a bit more confident now, and I’ll wait for you to give a sign that alerts me of your arrival. Je t’embrasse: hervé Read More
September 13, 2022 First Person Other People’s Partings By Peter Orner Fall River, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. So many accounts of Chekhov’s death, many of them exaggerated, some outright bogus. The only indisputable thing is that he died at forty-four. That’s etched in stone in Moscow. I like to read them anyway. I’m not alone. Chekhov death fanatics abound. His last sip of champagne. The whole thing about the popping of the cork, I forget what exactly. The enigmatic words he likely never said: Has the sailor left? But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had said them? What sailor? Where’d he go? His wife, the actress Olga Knipper, wrote that a huge black moth careened around the room crashing into light bulbs as he took his final breaths. Olga was present in the room, of course, but I don’t think she was above creating myths, either. They had only so little time together, less than five years. In 2018, a team of scientists examined the proteins in the bloodstains on Chekhov’s nightshirt, in an effort to determine the precise cause of death. The shirt had been preserved as a relic. Read More