October 18, 2021 On Photography Eavesdropping in the Archives: Six Artist Portraits By Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Lester Sloan The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for Newsweek, where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha’s questions and prompts to her father appear in bold. Lester’s thoughts are set in a lighter typeface. BALLET LESSONS Hoop dreams. You know where this picture was taken? Around the corner from my mother’s house, I think. No—across the street. The house that used to be across the street from my mother’s house. Where Mr. Ringo’s house used to be. Mr. Ringo was the guy who lived across the street from us, and I used to cut his grass and help clean up his house for extra money, and I always enjoyed that because he had a magazine I’d never seen before. He got National Geographic delivered to his door, and he also had other magazines like Life and Look. But he was a reader of magazines and books. This is such a colorful picture. It is. Think about the control you have to have to dribble a ball, pick it up, jump up, pull your arms up as far as you can to overreach the guy trying to block your shot, put the right arch on it so it’ll go over his fingertips and into the ring of the basket. It didn’t surprise me later on when a few basketball players started taking ballet lessons because they discovered that the body control you need to be a great dancer is the same body control you need to develop as a ballplayer. You look at this and realize it’s possible for a kid from the hood to be Nureyev. Read More
October 14, 2021 The Review’s Review Nocturne Vibes By The Paris Review Added to “Gen X Soft Club” Are.na channel by Evan Collins. I love this time of year. It takes a little while to adjust to the shorter days, but soon I settle into and relish the long dark hours. Some evenings I turn out the lamps, except for the dim reddish one, lie on the sofa, and listen to terrifying music. I love to feel my heart pound, my stomach drop, my blood move backward. I remember as a child encasing my head in my dad’s enormous leather headphones and listening to his Hawkwind, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart records in the dark. The padded headphones were a helmet and the spooky eccentric sounds they emitted conjured a nocturnal universe that I soared and tumbled through alone, so alone. Over the years my repertoire of spine-chilling night music has grown and includes Scott Walker, Krzysztof Penderecki, Pan Daijing, Pauline Oliveros, Swans, and Aïsha Devi. A few years ago I splashed out on a ticket for Only the Sound Remains at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Inspired by Noh theater and based on translated texts by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, this musical work by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho was unlike any performance I’ve ever seen. So still, so minimal, so slow, and the auditorium was dark, so dark; cell by cell I was slowly blotted out. It was intensely unnerving yet weirdly consoling at the same time. Last night, after gnawing on some leftover sticky chicken and poking at eye-wateringly astringent red cabbage, I lay down and communed with the spectral sounds of Lichtbogen and Petals (performed here by the unsurpassable Imke Frank) and within moments I was overcome with the same feelings of terror, exhilaration, curiosity, and willful independence that swarmed around me as a small child. Bliss. —Claire-Louise Bennett (Read Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with Lauren Elkin here.) Read More
October 13, 2021 At Work Never Prosthetic: An Interview with Chi Ta-wei By Chris Littlewood Author photo by Tang-mo Tan. By 2100, as feared, the earth is scorched. The ocean is a second sky: humanity has migrated to the sea floor, leaving combat cyborgs to play out war games on the surface. After a childhood spent in quarantine due to a deadly virus, Momo now lives mostly in isolation in New Taiwan’s T City, lit by the glow of her screen. In the tightened grip of capitalism, Microsoft has been supplanted by MegaHard; Momo, a renowned aesthetician, applies a transparent, protective layer to her clients called “M skin,” which, unbeknownst to them, surveils their movements and transcribes their sensations, from the nip of a mosquito bite to the “$#@” of an orgasm. Even though the world of Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes is almost solely populated by women, and queer love is the norm, this is evidently no utopia—the author told me he had no interest in writing feel-good representations of queer life. “I was and am simply too cynical.” Chi’s extraordinary novella was first published in Taiwan a quarter of a century ago, and is at last available in English in a brilliant translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich. At just 134 pages, its scope is dazzling. Now, from the vantage point of the future, its playful and unsettling insights into digital saturation, the traps of consciousness and labor, and the fugitive fabulations of identity and the self, have only grown more profound. Read More
October 12, 2021 Redux Redux: The Storm before the Calm 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. KENZABURO OE IN 2002. This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting work from some of the more than thirty Nobel laureates in our archive, in honor of the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement last Thursday. Read on for Kenzaburo Oe’s Art of Fiction interview, Alice Munro’s short story “Spaceships Have Landed,” an excerpt from Naguib Mahfouz’s novel The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, and Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Negative.” Interview Kenzaburo Oe, The Art of Fiction no. 195 Issue no. 183 (Winter 2007) The Nobel Prize is almost meaningless to one’s literary work, but it raises one’s profile, one’s status as a social figure. One earns a kind of currency that one can use in a much wider realm. But for the author, nothing changes. My opinion of myself didn’t change. There are only a few writers who have gone on to produce good work after winning the Nobel Prize. Thomas Mann is one. Faulkner also. Read More
October 12, 2021 At Work Alternative Routes: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin By Claire-Louise Bennett Photo by Lauren Elkin. Lauren Elkin’s new book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, is composed of short diaristic notes that she made on her phone while traveling twice weekly to her university teaching post in Paris between 2014 and 2015. The idea that they might be collected in a volume and published did not occur to Elkin at the time of writing; the purpose of her project then was a personal one. It encouraged her to “observe the world through the screen of my phone, rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world,” she writes in the book’s introduction. At the core of Elkin’s work is a commitment to noticing, paying attention to the everyday and the communal places we share and move through. Inspired by the cataloguing methodology of Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux’s journal keeping, No. 91/92 is a thrillingly intimate work. In a recent interview, Elkin describes it as a “hinge book,” since writing it facilitated a shift in how she brought together external influence and direct personal experience, bringing about “a transition from feeling like a secondary source, to feeling like I could be a primary source.” Elkin is an incisive, playful, sensitive, and deeply curious thinker. We exchanged emails regularly over just a few weeks, a period of time that saw us both visiting friends and family as the world was beginning to open up again. It seemed apt that we were discussing the origins and significance of a book written in transit while we were both on the move, and I felt fortunate to have such a smart and fun traveling companion to help me navigate back into public space as a writer, as a woman, as a body. Read More
October 8, 2021 The Review’s Review Quiet Magic By The Paris Review We Work Again includes the only known footage of the Negro Theatre Unit’s 1936 production of Macbeth, staged by Orson Welles through the Federal Theatre Project. Above, a photograph of the production: Charles Collins and Maurice Ellis in act III, scene 4 of the play. I am a lover of old things. I could spend hours strolling through vintage furniture stores or flipping through clothing catalogs from the past, but my favorite is undeniably archival video. Recently, I discovered a treasure trove of streaming links: The Black Film Archive. The site, which aggregates lists of comedies, westerns, dramas, and documentaries made between 1915 and 1979, is updated each month, and accepts submissions from the public. It’s free, and equal parts educational and entertaining. This week, I watched We Work Again, a video commissioned by a New Deal–era public works project, in which a narrator describes an idealized version of segregation in the United States over videos of Black life in the thirties. It was moving footage that I likely would have never come across otherwise. This weekend, I think I’ll watch Two-Gun Man from Harlem, a musical western about a deacon who becomes a cowboy. —Lauren Williams Read More