March 24, 2022 Correspondence Conversations to the Tune of Air-Raid Sirens: Odesa Writers on Literature in Wartime By Ilya Kaminsky Odesa Monument to the Duke de Richelieu. Photograph by Anna Golubovsky. This story begins more than thirty years ago, in the late eighties. There are poets working at the Odesa newspapers, many of which are faltering. A publisher visits my school classroom. “Who would like to write for a newspaper?” A room full of hands. “Who would like to write for a newspaper for free?” One hand goes up—mine. I am twelve. Read More
March 23, 2022 Poetry Remembrance Day By Spencer Matheson Illustration by Alex Merto. Spencer Matheson is a novelist and poet. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions. He lives in Paris, and teaches at the École normale supérieure.
March 23, 2022 Fashion & Style How to Choose Your Perfume: A Conversation with Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh By Jude Stewart Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh, and Jude Stewart try perfumes. Photograph by Seth Brodsky. Even after writing a whole book about smell, I still resisted finding “my” perfume. Perfume has always seemed gimmicky, too expensive, anti-feminist. But researching my book got me rethinking these objections. I wanted to get to yes with perfume but do so honestly. I mentioned this to my friends Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh, who both really like perfumes. Sianne is a professor of English at the University of Chicago and specializes in aesthetics and affect theory in a Marxist context. She has written books about the “ugly feelings” of envy and irritation; contemporary aesthetic categories like “cute,” “zany,” and “interesting”; and, most recently, a theory of the gimmick. Anna is a professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and specializes in formalism, Marxism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Sianne, Anna, and I are middle-aged women who admire each other, loudly and often. Our sensibilities overlap but also diverge in intriguing ways. We met for this conversation in September at Sianne’s high-rise apartment in Chicago’s South Loop. It’s an airy, glassed-in space with views of Lake Michigan and the South Side in many directions. The day was unseasonably warm, so we’d brought our bathing suits to swim in her building’s rooftop pool. But first we spread out tiny bottles of perfume on her kitchen table, and sprayed and sniffed for a good long while. SIANNE NGAI Let me start by asking, Why a perfume? Why not several? A lot of people have perfume wardrobes. You can have a depersonalized relationship to perfume and just ask, How do I want to smell, in a performative way? I like perfume. I got really sucked into it and then I had to pull away because I had a dog whose nose was very sensitive. The irony is I ended up with a boyfriend who’s so romantic that he gets upset when I wear anything other than the scent I wore when we met. When I first got into perfumes I thought about it all wrong. It was very conceptual, like, I bet I’ll be someone who likes citrus. I was reifying my identity, thinking of myself as a certain kind of person. It turns out I don’t like citrus at all in perfume. I don’t like florals either, especially jasmine or rose. I do like earthy, woody smells. When I leaned into what felt good at the level of sense, it became easier. Read More
March 22, 2022 On Photography Objective Correlatives By Stephen Shore In compiling the following list of influences and inspirations for my memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, I had a certain, specific range of aesthetic experiences in mind. What I was looking for in this list were particular individuals, works, or bodies of work that engendered in me a deep aesthetic experience that expanded and altered my understanding of art, of myself, and of the world. In some cases these were specific experiences that have stayed with me for decades. CIDOC In 1971, I attended a month of seminars, talks, and workshops at CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. CIDOC was an institute founded by the radical educator Ivan Illich, whose book Deschooling Society was published that same year. Most of the major progressive educational theorists in North America were present that month. Particularly memorable was a one-week workshop I attended that was conducted by George Dennison: “Organic versus Arbitrary Order.” James R. Roberts, Ivan Illich leading seminar at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971. Courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives. The workshop met for a few hours each day, for five days. We sat spread out on a lawn at CIDOC. Instead of being a theoretical discussion of organic versus arbitrary order, the workshop was, itself, a demonstration of organic order—the order that grows outward from the relationship of the essential elements of a situation. Dennison let the discussion go wherever it seemed to flow. He was a person of wide-ranging interests and experience. There were several participants who became frustrated with the free-form nature of the workshop. The “arbitrary order”—the order imposed onto a situation—is what they brought to it. Dennison’s workshop sensitized me to the structural issues at the heart of how a photographer translates the world into a photograph. Read More
March 22, 2022 Redux Redux: Which Voice Is Mine By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. PHOTOGRAPH BY NANCY CRAMPTON. “Among the greatest pleasures of the Review’s Writers at Work series,” as our editor, Emily Stokes, wrote this week in a note introducing the Spring issue, “is the opportunity to eavesdrop on a revered author speaking intimately.” That sense that you’re eavesdropping is likewise often crucial to literature’s appeal. This week, we slip back into the archives to listen in on John Cheever’s 1976 Art of Fiction interview, in which he describes reading certain books as “finding myself at the receiving end of our most intimate and acute means of communication”; reencounter the young amateur spies of Joy Williams’s “A Story About Friends”; tune in to Laurance Wieder’s poem “The Seismographic Ear”; and rifle through Kathy Acker’s papers. If you enjoyed these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 62 John Cheever INTERVIEWER One almost has a feeling of eavesdropping on your family in that book. CHEEVER The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother’s death. An aunt (who does not appear in the book) said, “I would never speak to him again if I didn’t know him to be a split personality.” From issue no. 67 (Fall 1976) Read More
March 21, 2022 On Painting Painting Backward: A Conversation with Andrew Cranston By Na Kim Andrew Cranston’s studio. Photograph courtesy of the artist. Andrew Cranston, whose painting A Room That Echoes appears on the cover of the Review’s new Spring issue, did not intend to become a painter. He grew up in Hawick, a small industrial town in Scotland, and planned to become a joiner. For a time he was in a band, and he eventually started sketching. In 1996, he completed his M.A. in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. He now lives in Glasgow with his partner, Lorna Robertson, who is also an artist and works in the studio next to his. When I first saw Cranston’s show “Waiting for the Bell” at Karma Gallery last summer, I was delighted. His paintings, tinged with humor and a sense of longing, invite the viewer into what feels like another person’s dream. I called Cranston from New York while he was in Scotland, preparing for his next show in London. We planned to briefly discuss his work, but ended up speaking for two hours about books, golf, and monkeys. INTERVIEWER How did you start to paint on book surfaces? CRANSTON I ran out of things to paint on, and I found some books in the studio, so I started working on them. They instantly seemed full of potential—they linked the work to a kind of narrative storytelling and literary interest quite explicitly. And a book, as opposed to a blank canvas or piece of paper, has a particular color and shape, a particular size. You’re destroying the book in some way but making something else with it. Read More