October 4, 2011 Odd Jobs Fake Paintings; Perfume Tester By Chris Flynn Jean-Francois Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure (detail), 1855, oil on canvas. Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. M. J. Hyland: From the age of eighteen to twenty-one, I worked any job I could get my hands on. One of these jobs was selling fake paintings door-to-door. There were four of us in the crew. We were taken out each night in the company car—a white minivan—and dropped on suburban street corners with black folio bags. I’d been instructed to pretend I was the artist. My first night was the one I remember best. The suburb was a newly built estate, each house a mirror of its neighbor. The grass hadn’t grown on the front lawns yet, and there were cars in all the newly paved driveways—not flashy cars, but not beat-up Holdens either. I walked to the door of a house and knocked. “Sorry to bother you at teatime,” I said, “but my name’s Marcia Bradshaw and I’m an art student at university. I’m going from door to door to see if I can sell some of my work.” I unzipped the bag and took out a painting. “I need to raise some money so I can finish my degree,” I said. “My parents have no money and my scholarship only lasted two years.” Life is ruthless, and its bestowal of fortune arbitrary and capricious. I’d been born to morons and mine was a shabby life. I stood on this woman’s doorstep and told the lie about the paintings as easily as I did because, although it was a lie, it was also true. I believed my own lies and told them well. I wanted money, and, like my criminal father, I wanted it the easy way. Read More
October 4, 2011 At Work Shannon Ebner: The Continuous Present By Lauren O'Neill-Butler From left: XSYST, 2011, 63 x 48 in.; EKS, 2011, 63 x 39.16 in.; EKSIZ, 2011, 63 x 42 in.; XIS, 2011, 63 x 48 in. All works black-and-white photographs. Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, NY; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; kaufmann repetto, Milan. Shannon Ebner is a Los Angeles–based artist known for using handmade letters, symbols, signs, and other means of representation to call attention to the limits and loopholes of language. Photographs and sculptures from her new project, “The Electric Comma,” are featured in the 54th Venice Biennale and in a solo show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Two new public sculptures, both titled and, per se and, accompany these shows and are installed, respectively, on the Grand Canal in Venice and in Culver City. Audiences in L.A. can see the eight-foot-tall solar-powered work on the northeast corner of Centinela Avenue and Washington Boulevard until October 14. Ebner’s pictures of “anti-places” and “anti-landscapes” (for instance, dust from emergency road flares that appears to spell out a word) are on view at the Hammer until October 9. In the essay she wrote to accompany your exhibition at the Hammer, curator Anne Ellegood describes your work as “manifestly American.” How does American identity relate to your recent pictures, and how does landscape figure in? Robert Smithson once asked if Passaic, New Jersey had replaced Rome as the eternal city, with buildings that rise into ruin rather than fall. It makes me realize that my interest in landscape—for instance, in the work of an artist like Joe Deal, who made pictures from an elevated vantage point, with his camera high up on a bluff or hillside looking down at tract-housing neighborhoods—has to do with this idea of falling while rising. I think that there is a connection between Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Deal’s vantage point. It seems to say that there could be some redemption, some possibility that the kids of those tract-housing communities could be saved from being an American, from rising to fall or, I guess I should say, rising to fail. Read More
October 3, 2011 Bulletin Ask the Paris Review! (West Coast Edition) By Sadie Stein This week, The Paris Review heads west: specifically, to the Standard, Hollywood, in L.A., where we’ll be joined by West Coast friends including Ann Louise Bardach, David Kipen, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Lutz, Mona Simpson, and Michael Tolkin. Got a question on books, life, love, or anything else? Pose them below, and our panel will tackle them! We’ll reproduce the best answers on the Daily. And if you’re in Los Angeles, do stop by! When: Thursday, October 6 7:30–10 P.M. Where: Cactus LoungeThe Standard, Hollywood8300 Sunset BoulevardWest Hollywood, CA 90069 And thanks to our friends at PEN USA, our partners for the event.
October 3, 2011 Correspondence Document: Ernest Hemingway to Ursula Hemingway By Ernest Hemingway Read More
October 3, 2011 Books American Inferno By Margaret Eby Centralia, PA. Photograph by Eric Hart. Centralia, Pennsylvania, is a town that barely exists. It is a blip of a place, almost indistinguishable from the endless forest flanking state road 61 in the rambling northeast quarter of the state. There are no hulking ruins—not even a sign that alerts you when the town begins or ends. Though the population of Centralia peaked in the 1960s at more than two thousand people, now fewer than ten live here. After the nineties, road maps and atlases began leaving it off their indexes; the post office revoked its zip code in 2002. The reason is simple: Centralia has been on fire for almost fifty years. Read More
September 30, 2011 Events ‘DOC’ at Anthology Film Archives By Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn The weekend looks rainy, but Doc is prepared, and you can be, too. See the Paris Review founding editor in action this weekend in his daughter Immy’s documentary about his madcap life as a filmmaker, novelist, architect, and Renaissance man. DOC plays at the Anthology Film Archives on Saturday, October 1 at 7:30 P.M. and Sunday, October 2 at 6:00 P.M. and 8:45 P.M. (As a bonus, it will be shown with Don Drasin’s Sunday and excerpts from Humes’s own unfinished Don Peyote.) We’ll be there with t-shirts and other Paris Review goodies.