January 13, 2022 Arts & Culture Rhetoric and Rhyme: On Rap By Daniel Levin Becker I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love So come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed. 50 Cent, “In Da Club” (2003) Is there any couplet in the English language that so concisely spans the dizzying sweep of poetic possibility, the subtle gradations of sense illuminated in a few short words and the abyss of nonsense toward which we are ever drawn by carelessness and entropy? You don’t have to answer that. The answer is “yes, many.” I was making a point. You’ve probably heard the stately bounce of “In Da Club,” at least ambiently. It was 50 Cent’s mainstream breakout single, and he mostly spends it surveying the fixtures of his nightlife: drinks and drugs, cars and jewelry, prospective lovers and pissy haters. If we’re meant to take anything away from the song, though, it’s that 50 is twenty-five percent hedonist and seventy-five percent hustler. So he puts the song to work for him, makes it tell us what he’s about, what he’s been through, who his friends are, how he moves through the world. After fifteen years of career ups and downs, flops and feuds, fluctuating wealth and implausibly diverse investments, it remains an indelible sketch of 50 at his fiftiest. Read More
January 11, 2022 Redux Redux: You Don’t Know You’ve Remembered 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. What were you up to in the seventies? Were you serving popcorn at Westland Twins cinema in LA, like Gary Indiana? Studying history at Dartmouth, like Annette Gordon-Reed? Hanging out at Club 57 on Saint Mark’s Place, like Scott Covert? Here at the Review, we’re looking back to the decade: a pivotal period for some of our recent contributors and the source of aesthetic inspiration for our redesign. To get into the mood, we’re unlocking a piece of experimental fiction by Pati Hill, Eudora Welty’s classic Art of Fiction interview, Paulé Bártón’s poem “The Sleep Bus,” and a series of drawings by the sculptor Claude Lalanne. 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 Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47 Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972) Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you’re tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized—if you can think of your ears as magnets. Read More
January 7, 2022 The Review’s Review Wives and Daughters; Love and Light By The Paris Review Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK. Photo by Michael D Beckwith, with permission of the administration. Agnès Varda’s 1967 Uncle Yanco is the earliest—and, at under twenty minutes long, the shortest—of her “California films.” Through greetings, dinners, interviews, and house tours, which she stages and reenacts for the camera as they occur in real time, the short documents the director’s first encounter with a distant relative, the painter Jean Varda, whose nickname titles the project. Jean lives on a houseboat in the endlessly quirky “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, where he paints, sails, naps, muses on love and light, receives his mail in the mouth of a jack-o’-lantern, and hosts a community of young, suntanned, bamboo-flute-playing hippies. The film is just as concerned with place as it is with person, and what makes Jean Varda’s home more stunning and fantastical than any movie set is that it actually exists, or existed. Read More
January 7, 2022 In Memoriam Flip It: A Tribute to bell hooks By Niela Orr Books on Orr’s bed, her “second desk.” Photo: Niela Orr. bell hooks died last month of kidney failure at age sixty-nine; she was, according to her niece, surrounded by her loved ones when she passed. Small towns in Kentucky were the bookends of hooks’s life: She was born and raised in Hopkinsville, and departed this plane seventy miles east, in Berea, home of Berea College, where she’d taught since 2004 as a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, and where she had founded a research center, the bell hooks Institute, in 2014. In a chapter called “Kentucky is My Fate,” from her 2008 book Belonging: A Culture of Place, hooks writes: If one has chosen to live mindfully, then choosing a place to die is as vital as choosing a place to live. Choosing to return to the land and landscape of my childhood, the world of my Kentucky upbringing, I am comforted by the knowledge that I could die here. This is how I imagine “the end”: I close my eyes and see hands holding a Chinese red lacquer bowl, walking to the top of the Kentucky hill I call my own, scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash, a burnt offering on solid ground vulnerable to the wind and rain—all that is left of my body gone, my being shifted, passed away, moving forward on and into eternity. I imagine this farewell scene and it solaces me; Kentucky hills were where my life began. Read More
January 5, 2022 Document Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death By Elias Canetti Photo of Elias Canetti courtesy of the Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO). Collage Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. 1942 There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. — Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. Read More
January 5, 2022 Redux Redux: Great Blinding Flashes 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. Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons It’s the very first week of 2022, so you can probably guess the theme of this Redux. Whether you spent New Year’s Eve setting off fireworks or having a road to Damascus moment, we hope you gave 2021 a good kick in the shins. Unlocked for you to read in these first days of the year: our interview with Octavio Paz, an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s Transit, a poem by Catherine Davis, and party snapshots by Andy Warhol. 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 Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42 Issue no. 119 (Summer 1991) I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico. To celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, other religious festivals, and at New Year’s, they made the fireworks for the town. I remember how they made the church façade look like a fiery waterfall. It was marvelous. Mixoac was alive with a kind of life that doesn’t exist anymore in big cities. Read More