November 10, 2021 On Music Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich By Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman’s song “Roadrunner.” Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock ’n’ roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock ’n’ roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out. Read More
November 9, 2021 First Person Divorce Does Funny Things By Tabitha Lasley Benjamin Shaw, Aberdeen Quayside, 2003, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The man I was meeting worked on the Brent Field. He was a kind of Typhoid Mary, having worked on the site of several accidents, always escaping unscathed. He was staying in a large, anonymous hotel behind Holburn Junction. The lobby was a columnar space several floors high. Its windows were covered in a kind of mesh, which muted the daylight and cast everything in a cool, neutral gloom. I took a booth, upholstered the same indeterminate shade, and waited for him to appear. There was some splashy abstract art on the walls, and a long, curved reception desk at the back of the room. People were moving about in the shadowy recess behind it, like stagehands in the wings of a theater. No one showed any inclination to come out. Read More
November 9, 2021 Redux Redux: Plates Collapse 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. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of The Paris Review Podcast Season 3 and lowering the paywall on four pieces featured in the first two episodes. Read on for Robert Frost’s Art of Poetry interview, Yohanca Delgado’s short story “The Little Widow from the Capital,” Antonella Anedda’s poem “Historiae 2,” and Molly McCully Brown’s essay “If You Are Permanently Lost.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Robert Frost, The Art of Poetry No. 2 Issue no. 24, (Summer-Fall 1960) So often they ask me—I just been all around, you know, been out West, been all around—and so often they ask me, “What is a modern poet?” I dodge it often, but I said the other night, “A modern poet must be one that speaks to modern people no matter when he lived in the world. That would be one way of describing it. And it would make him more modern, perhaps, if he were alive and speaking to modern people.” Read More
November 4, 2021 The Review’s Review Spiky Washes By The Paris Review Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying. A Seattle Queer Film Festival screening of the documentary film No Straight Lines, which profiles five crucial queer cartoonists including Rupert Kinnard and Alison Bechdel, brought me back into the graphics circuit. After reluctantly reading the final panel of Dykes to Watch Out For last weekend, I’ve turned to Pretending Is Lying, a fractured graphic memoir from the Belgian artist Dominique Goblet and the first English translation of her work. Goblet is as invested in her own fraught filial relationships as she is in the work of memory, and the emotional texture she achieves with only graphite, charcoal, and a little ink is stunning—soft leaden shadows, aggressive gradient shading, expressions rendered in jagged lines, dialogue scrawled in restive script. Inaugurated in 1995 and ultimately published in 2007, the book became a kind of living artifact to Goblet’s L’Association editor: “This book smells of oil, grease pencil, humid wood, the disorder of the street market; it exhales twelve years of well-tempered promises, carefully untied and resolutely wrapped up.” —Jay Graham Read More
November 4, 2021 Baseball, On Sports A Philosophical Game: An Interview with Saul Steinberg By Lauren Kane Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1959, gouache, ink, pencil, and crayon on paper, 14 1/2 x 23″. Private collection. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. The artist Saul Steinberg, who immigrated to the United States in 1942, was deeply preoccupied with identifying the essential threads of American life. For him, baseball was rich material. In 1954, he traveled with the Milwaukee Braves, taking them as subjects for his deft, sharp linework. The sketches from that trip are some of Steinberg’s most recognizable work, and were published in LIFE magazine in 1955. Read More
November 3, 2021 Bulletin The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 20 By The Paris Review George Saunders photo by Chloe Aftel, courtesy of the author. Season 3 of our acclaimed podcast continues today with the release of episode 20, “A Gift for Burning.” We open with an excerpt from George Saunders’s Art of Fiction interview with Benjamin Nugent in which they discuss how Saunders’s teenage job delivering fast food prepared him to write fiction. Then poet Monica Youn reads her poem “Goldacre,” a disquisition on the Twinkie. Next, Molly McCully Brown reads her essay “If You Are Permanently Lost,” about spatial cognition and the power of not knowing where you are. We end with “Fam,” Venita Blackburn’s very short story about self-love and social media. Listen now and subscribe at theparisreview.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will arrive every Wednesday in November. And don’t forget to catch up on Season 1 and Season 2. <span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.