June 25, 2012 Arts & Culture Dance to the Music of Time: Tacita Dean at the New Museum By Joanne McNeil Merce Cunningham in "Five Americans." Several times a week, I sneak downstairs to watch dancers rehearse with Merce Cunningham. I work at a nonprofit located in the New Museum and its current Tacita Dean exhibition includes Craneway Event, a 108-minute film of the choreographer at work in an enormous former assembly plant outside San Francisco. A postcard vista of the bay glistens in the background. As the sun creeps in, it warms the reflective surface of the floor to a bluish-gray so that in some shots water seems to ripple beneath the dancers’ feet. Architect Albert Kahn originally designed the plant for maximum natural light. Stripped of furnishing and ornament, it looks porous rather than cavernous. There feels something almost prescriptively calming about looking at a space that size while living in a city as densely populated as New York; as if just by looking at it, I reclaim my proper wingspan after weeks in shoebox-sized studio apartments and subway cars sitting elbow-to-elbow with other passengers. My sense of time is similarly unreined. Nothing rushed, no antics, and absent of narrative; the film offers rather than requests my patience. The term “time-based art” seems especially apt when discussing Tacita Dean’s work. In interviews, she talks of her delight in the period between shooting footage and processing it, as it allows her to revisit a film in progress with a new perspective. Her subjects might be defined broadly as the history slipping through our fingers: fleeting moments, obsolescing technology, the wisdom of an old master (Cunningham died a year after Craneway Event was made,) things just about to disappear. Read More
June 25, 2012 Video & Multimedia Watch: Issue 201 in Action! By Noah Wunsch To celebrate the release of The Paris Review’s Summer issue, we put together a little video that takes you inside the pages of 201. In case you’ve forgotten, the issue features Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn on the art of theater; new fiction from Sam Lipsyte and Ann Beattie; nonfiction by Davy Rothbart, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Rich Cohen, and J.D. Daniels; a portfolio curated by Waris Ahluwalia; and poetry by Sophie Cabot Black, Roberto Bolaño, Raúl Zurita, John Ashbery, Octavio Paz, Lucie Brock-Broido, and David Ferry. Subscribe now!
June 25, 2012 Books Five in the Colonies: Enid Blyton’s Sri Lankan Adventures By Randy Boyagoda Most mornings this past winter—the Boyagoda household already running late—I discovered my oldest daughter reading at the kitchen table: one boot on, gloves, hat, knapsack, and other boot nowhere to be found. So immersed was she, so indifferent to my pleas and threats, that finally I had to pull the book from her grasping hands just to make her finish dressing for the cold walk to school. This experience has made me more sympathetic to my mother, who once spanked me in a grocery store because I wouldn’t stop reading a book. It was by Enid Blyton, the British children’s writer who wrote some 400 nursery, fantasy, and adventure series titles that have sold more than six hundred million copies worldwide, mostly in Britain and the former colonies, including Sri Lanka—where as a girl my mother herself first encountered Blyton. I recently bought one of Blyton’s books for my own daughter. But before passing it on, I decided to reread it. The book seemed innocuous enough. As with all of Blyton’s adventure stories, it was about boys and girls drawn into mysterious doings while on summer holiday. Bickering but loyal, they best adults who are either distracted and dismissive, or criminals capable of outsmarting everybody but the kids. Working this premise for decades and dozens of stories, Blyton enjoyed great success—at the time of her death, a book club devoted to her work had some 200,000 members in Britain alone. But because that success depended upon such patterned writing, she was also accused by librarians, teachers, and academics of relentlessly dulling the imaginations of her young readers, and of unjustly encouraging those who were reading her from abroad to make identifications that race, geography, history, and politics preemptively denied them. This certainly seems to have been the case for the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; in a 2006 interview with The Times, she explained that her development as a writer was stunted by her early reading: “When I started to write, I was writing Enid Blyton stories, even though I had never been to England. I didn’t think it was possible for people like me to be in books.” Similar notions affect the eponymous protagonists of Jamaica Kincaid’s novels Lucy and Annie John, who both declare they wish they were named Enid, after their favorite author. For both the young Adichie’s and Kincaid’s characters, mimicry and the desire for renaming aren’t simple expressions of literary admiration; they’re also rejections of the children’s African and Caribbean worlds, which have been diminished by their very immersion in Blyton’s books. The Blyton reading experience likewise impacts a colonial child’s maturation in Rohinton Mistry’s novel Family Matters, in which an intelligent Indian boy grows up reading her books and from this develops a dismissive attitude towards the foods and places and names that figure in his Bombay life. When self-loathing and alienation begin to build, he stops reading her; later, noticing her books on his shelves, he admits, “I can’t bear to even open them. I wonder what it was that so fascinated me. They seem like a waste of time now.” Read More
June 24, 2012 Ask The Paris Review What Books Should I Read to Impress a Guy? By Margaux Williamson Margaux Williamson. After a week of guest-editing, I leave you with this piece of advice from Canadian extraordinaire Margaux Williamson. À la prochaine mes Parisiens! —Thessaly Dear Paris Review, Sadie Stein recently answered this question in your advice column. And now I’m wondering: what books impress a guy? What should I read to seem cool, sexy, and effortlessly smart? Seriously. Sincerely, Needing to Impress The answer to this question all depends on how long you need to seem cool, sexy, and effortlessly smart for. If it’s for a one night stand, or for a decent favor, don’t waste your time on reading (that’s not cool!), just go ahead and lie about what you’re reading. If you see some dumb, over-praised book on said guy’s top shelf, you can ask what they think about it and then say, Oh yeah, totally. You can put that book on your imaginary top shelf too or imagine that you regret putting it on your imaginary top shelf. Lying can be real if you imagine successfully. This lie can be a kind of empathetic gesture, an openness, a pose you can hold to see if you like something new. But this kind of lie is only advised for the short-term—don’t forget that it is only a trick! Can you imagine having to carry on with someone else’s interests for a whole week? Or longer?! Imagine having to pretend forever that you care—or even worse, forgetting that your interests didn’t start off as your own?—growing all sorts of wrong trees in your soul. Read More
June 22, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Monkey Minds, the Singing Butler, and Rum Cookies By The Paris Review Last night Daniel Smith taught me the word anxiolytics. It means “anxiety reducers.” (Dan is the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, so he should know.) His favorite nonchemical anxiolytic is Singin’ in the Rain. Mine, for now, is “Jesus Dropped the Charges,” by the O’Neal Twins. —Lorin Stein The 1935 Silly Symphony cartoon “Cookie Carnival” raises so many questions, but most pressing: What is a rum cookie? The highly enlightening Wikipedia article informs us that the animated short, in which various varieties of baked good compete for the title of Cookie Queen, is a take on the Atlantic City bathing-beauty contests of the day, precursors to Miss America pageants. (Incidentally, the gingerbread hobo is voiced by the same actor who immortalized Goofy.) As a friend of mine commented, “Misses Licorice and Coconut were robbed.” And it’s true: Sugar Cookie’s easy victory (after she dons a blonde taffy wig, that is) is a testament to how little standards of beauty have changed, however much baked goods have. —Sadie Stein Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, which comes out in early July, needs to be on everyone’s bookshelf this summer. Or, more fittingly, in the pool house. And the latest Vanity Fair has a fun article about the origins of that hideously romantic painting The Singing Butler, which I’m sure you’ll recognize once you see it. —Thessaly La Force “Helpless,” by Poindexter. I heard this song playing in a store downtown and was convinced it was a new track by French electro band Phoenix. Poindexter gets it right with well-placed cymbal crashes and the type of moody synth that sound tracks an eighties teenage tryst on a foggy night. You can buy “Helpless” off fashion’s jack of all trades (Kitsune) album Kitsune America. SO DO IT. —Noah Wunsch Read More
June 22, 2012 First Person Transatlantic By Maggie Shipstead In this day and age, the decision to cross the Atlantic on a ship instead of in a plane requires explanation. I did it—in April, aboard the Queen Mary 2—because I wanted to sit for a week and stare at three-thousand nautical miles of saltwater nothingness. I’d been away from the States for a long time. I spent a month in Bali, made a quick stop home for Christmas, then did three months in Paris and one in Edinburgh. My friends wanted to know if I was Eat Pray Love–ing. I didn’t quite have an answer. No job, no school, no relationship was pulling me to any one place, and if I was going to spend most of my time typing on my computer, I might as well see Bali or Paris when I looked up. “Maybe you go for a walk today,” suggested my landlady’s Balinese housekeeper as she watched me type. “Maybe you come back next year and bring friends.” “Probably not,” I said, smiling. Smiling is de rigueur in Bali. I was relieved to get to Paris, where it is not. Mostly I was alone in Europe, unnoticed by the Parisians and Edinburghians, existing in a state of pleasant adriftness, burdened only by the sometimes exhausting freedom of deciding what to do with each and every second of day upon day. When I boarded the QM2 in Southampton, I was starting a long, slow journey back to my parents’ empty house in San Diego to dog-sit while they went off on a Eurail trip like a couple of teenage backpackers. I was ready to go home, to have more of a social life and smaller phone bills, but I sensed an idyll was ending. It was only an inkling, but it was correct: I was returning to a month of anxiety dreams and catatonic TV-watching while I waited for my first novel to come out. The QM2 was at the end of a world voyage when I boarded, and there was a small contingent of hardliners who had been at sea for a hundred days. I have a theory that some people have repurposed the ship as an expensive nursing home and so cross the Atlantic only as an indifferently endured side effect, a consequence of existing in comfortable, perpetual transit: Cape Town appearing out the buffet windows one day, Osaka another, Dubai another, separated by days and days of empty water. George H.W. and Barbara Bush were aboard, George in a motorized wheelchair and Barbara looking so spry and unchanged since 1987 that I suspect she might be immortal, preserved by a dark, Bushian enchantment. In the mornings, she and her Secret Service guy power walked laps around the deck. One day, a journalist onboard as a guest lecturer gave a talk about Air Force One, projecting slides of presidents and first ladies onto the ship’s movie screen. Barbara appeared, waving from the plane’s staircase thirty years ago in a tweed suit and white blouse with a floppy bow at the neck. Barbara, in the audience, regarded herself with a faint frown. Read More