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
January 31, 2022 Redux Redux: Another Drink 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. “A crush goes nowhere,” Kathryn Davis writes on the Daily this week, in a piece adapted from her forthcoming memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia. “It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible.” Still, who doesn’t love to nurture a crush every now and again? Flirtations, racing hearts, and fixations of all kinds certainly abound in our archive. Read on for Italo Calvino’s awkward habit of “falling in love with foreign words” as recalled by his translator William Weaver in an introduction to The Art of Fiction no. 130; dashed fantasies in “Rainbow Rainbow,” Lydia Conklin’s story of a teenage girl meeting her internet crush; Laurel Blossom’s sly poem “Plea to a Potential Lover”; and the photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta’s scenes of longing with accompanying text by Geoff Dyer. 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 Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130 Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992) Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have preferred to translate his books himself. In later years he liked to see the galleys of the translation; he would make changes—in his English. The changes were not necessarily corrections of the translation; more often they were revisions, alterations of his own text. Calvino’s English was more theoretical than idiomatic. He also had a way of falling in love with foreign words. With the Mr. Palomar translation he developed a crush on the word feedback. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like charisma and input and bottom line, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work. Read More
January 28, 2022 At Work A Formal Feeling: A Conversation with Claudia Durastanti By Mia Colleran Photo by Sarah Lucas Agutoli. Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. in 1984 to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, a region in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood—and the corresponding impulse to fill in those lacunae via the imagination—can be felt in her work as a writer, and as a translator determined to leave some room for “poetic imprecision.” Durastanti translated the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby and is also the translator for Donna Haraway, Joshua Cohen, and Ocean Vuong—which might give you a sense of her range. Her own fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. La Straniera, her fourth novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, and its English translation by Elizabeth Harris, Strangers I Know, received a PEN award. Read More
January 27, 2022 The Review’s Review Blue Geometries By The Paris Review Photo by Ken Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons. Early in the morning last week, in a funk of sleeplessness, I tuned in to the afternoon matches of Round Three at the Australian Open. The cool blue geometries of the courts in Melbourne—especially when the sound is off—are usually a balm to my mind. But there’s always a danger that the match will be exciting, and when the Spanish up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz fought through to a fourth set against Matteo “The Hammer” Berrettini, I gave up and made coffee. Then I reread (for the fourth or fifth time) the opening pages of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit, his account of the year 2017 in tennis—a year that witnessed the comebacks of Nadal and Federer, just when they seemed ready to pack it in—and a rival to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game for the best book out there on the sport. Phillips watches games the way we all do—on television—but he sees more, and more clearly, than the rest of us. Before I knew it, I had read half the book, Berrettini won in five sets, and I was ready to face the day. —Robyn Creswell Read More