February 9, 2022 On Books A Dew-Lined Web: On Sula By Namwali Serpell Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It’s the name. Sula. That’s what always strikes a space between my breasts whenever I think of Toni Morrison’s second novel, published in 1973, and my favorite of her oeuvre. There are other proper names in Morrison’s titles—Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved—but they do not wear their allegory so lightly. Sula always seems to me to name a person, not an idea. She is, of course, a type, but she is the type of person who exceeds typology. She’s the kind of woman about whom you start to say “she’s the kind of woman…” even though you know any words that follow will twist like winter leaves before they hit the air, will fall to the ground, dry and dead wrong. Read More
February 8, 2022 On Architecture Structure Is a Design in Light: The Notebooks of Louis I. Kahn By Louis I. Kahn Louis I. Khan, 1956 study for center city Philadelphia, ink on tracing paper. A selection from the architect’s notebooks and drawings, including sketches from his European travels as well as early drafts and finished renderings of his buildings. One day, as a small boy, I was copying the portrait of Napoleon. His left eye was giving me trouble. Already I had erased the drawing of it several times. My father leaned over and lovingly corrected my work. I threw the paper and pencil across the room, saying “now it is your drawing, not mine.” Two cannot make a single drawing. I am sure the most skillful imitation can be detected by the originator. The sheer delight in the act of drawing has its way in the drawing and that also is a quality that the imitator can’t imitate. The personal abstraction, the rapport between subject and the thought also are unimitatable. Read More
February 8, 2022 Redux Redux: An Ordinary Word 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. The writer and translator Claudia Durastanti was born in the U.S. to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her to sign. She spent much of her young life shuttling between Brooklyn and Basilicata, and between the two countries’ native tongues. “When I write in English,” she told the Daily last week, “I’m making the reverse journey from the one I’m used to—English to Italian—so I’m obsessed with correctness. But then I don’t think it’s good writing. Usually, when you allow yourself impurities, the writing is actually stronger.” Read on for more from contributors to our archives who have journeyed between languages and nations: Dany Laferrière—the first Haitian and the first Quebecois to join the Académie française—on the nuances of the French dictionary; Beth Nguyen on her fractured relationship with her mother, who was left behind when the rest of the family immigrated to the U.S.; a wry poem by the hard-of-hearing, multilingual poet Ilya Kaminsky; and the Iranian-born Swiss photographer Shirana Shahbazi’s portraits of goftare nik (good words). If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237 Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017) If a word that was used by Flaubert or Césaire falls into desuetude, if it becomes passé, we still keep it in the dictionary because it was used by an important writer. The dictionary strives to recognize the creative usage of writers. Our commission not long ago tackled the word sexe. So we looked at how writers use a word like sexe—all the different notions, phrases, and implications that have come up over the years. The Marquis de Sade doesn’t have the same thoughts on the matter as, say, the Marquise de Sévigné. An ordinary word can take up half a page in the dictionary. A word like sexe can run to six or seven pages. Read More
February 4, 2022 The Review’s Review Out of Time By The Paris Review TGV 9576 // Munich – Strasbourg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For years, John Edgar Wideman has been dropping simple words from his sentences. Here’s the opening line from “Nat Turner Confesses,” featured in his collection American Histories: “Nat Turner no stranger to me.” Why not “Nat Turner is no stranger to me”? Various answers to that question. Wideman’s prose has long had a breathless, out-of-time quality to it, which becomes more pronounced as he gets older. Wideman, a Pittsburgh-raised writer as versatile and openly ambitious as his late friend, the underappreciated Chicago author Leon Forrest, is now eighty years old. He has published four books with Scribner in the last six years: Writing to Save a Life and three short story collections featuring old and new work—American Histories, You Made Me Love You, and Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone. Read More
February 4, 2022 At Work If There’s a Rip in It: A Conversation with Scott Covert By Jay Graham Scott Covert in 1981. The artist Scott Covert is easy to spot in a crowd by his thick-framed glasses and mop of blond hair. I met him at a party at the Review’s Chelsea office, where I noticed him slipping behind the makeshift bar to swipe a slice from a tower of pizza boxes piled in the corner. “I’m thinking of moving to Paris,” he later told me, “because I don’t speak the language.” Born in 1954 in Edison, New Jersey, he began making after-school trips to New York City at the age of thirteen, catching the bus or stealing unattended cars to get there. After a couple of studio courses at Indiana University and a semester at San Francisco Art Institute, Covert dropped out of school and taught himself to paint. In the late seventies and eighties, he became a fixture of the East Village arts scene that came to be known as “Downtown,” cofounding Playhouse 57 with the theater artist Andy Rees, at the storied performance venue and nightclub Club 57 at 57 Saint Marks Place. Covert had his first solo show, curated by Keith Haring, there in 1979. He has since exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris; his work appears in collections around the globe. Covert leads a peripatetic life. For some four decades he has crisscrossed the country in his car and flown across hemispheres in search of the graves of composers, rock stars, poets, serial killers, and other cultural totems. From their headstones, he makes on-site rubbings with oil wax crayons, using myriad pigments and varying amounts of pressure. The canvases that make up the Monument Paintings, an ongoing series, are laden with text—layers of names, birth and death dates, epitaphs, and fleur-de-lis—and topped with scribbles and swaths of color. Covert renders some celebrity names nearly indecipherable through the sheer density of their replication; others appear alone in the limelight of the canvas. The paintings showcase his acute sense for depth and texture, as well as his attunement to death’s magnetism and absurdity. His work has taken him to Detroit, Montparnasse, Moscow, Luxor, Cairo, and Geneva. Soon, he intends to visit the Trinity nuclear testing site in New Mexico dubbed ground zero: “I’m hoping the government will give me some help. Get some soldiers out there to lift things for me.” INTERVIEWER When you were a teenager growing up in Edison, were you already hoping to pursue visual art? COVERT No, I was more of a dancer. I took classical ballet, jazz, tap. I got to meet faggots because they were all there. And then I realized it was all goofy, and I ran to New York. Read More
February 3, 2022 Eat Your Words Cooking with Virginia Woolf By Valerie Stivers Photos by Erica Maclean. The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive. Read More