May 25, 2021 Redux Redux: A Good Reading Night 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. Richard Powers. This week at The Paris Review, we’re counting the weekdays. Read on for Richard Powers’s Art of Fiction interview, Gish Jen’s short story “Amaryllis,” and Wayne Miller’s poem “Reading Sonnevi on a Tuesday Night.” 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. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Richard Powers, The Art of Fiction No. 175 Issue no. 164 (Winter 2002–2003) In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. If you got there before noon on Saturdays, you could get into the museum for nothing. One weekend, they were having this exhibition of a German photographer I’d never heard of, who was August Sander. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I have a visceral memory of coming in the doorway, banking to the left, turning up, and seeing the first picture there. It was called Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers. Read More
May 25, 2021 The Moon in Full Flower Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten, 1907, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 43 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. An afternoon at the end of May, I stood on a porch in another state, and the day went staticky and dark. The sky purpled and every blade of grass on the hill was pricked by the electricity in the air, a field of green antennae buzzing with the signal. The purple that took hold: not a soporific lavender but the threatening plum of storm, a night come sudden and gone wrong. Said someone on the porch whose third language was English, “It is an eclipse?” It was not, but it felt like one, or how I imagine one to feel, time getting bent by light, the boundary breaking between day and night, one bleeding into the other, destabilizing in the way that certain incomprehensibilities can be, when the messages the senses bring to the brain outpace the brain’s ability to make sense of them. Sound went weird as well. In the pond at the bottom of the hill, the peeper frogs, which otherwise started their song at nightfall, were tricked by the sudden dark and began a berserk and feverish peepage. Each night these mud-colored squishers ballooned their throats in seductive celebration, engaged in the springtime pursuit of keeping their creaturehood around. Fertile vernal peeping fever. You could hear messages, words, rhythms in their high-pitched love songs. Peak peak peak. Complete complete complete. Seek seek seek. That afternoon, a thunderstorm moved through, the sun reappeared, and, like that, the frogs returned to their daytime silence. They saw night where there was none, and made what meaning they could from it. We heard words where there were none, the same way we make a face on the full moon’s surface: a perceptual inclination called pareidolia, in which our minds impose patterns or meaning where they might not exist. You’ve glimpsed a turtle riding a motorcycle in a cloud? Seen a demon in the nubbled texture of your ceiling? Heard syllables sloshing from the dishwasher? Pareidolia. It used to be considered a symptom of psychosis. Now it’s known as just another route to making meaning. “Look at walls splashed with a number of stains,” advised Leonardo da Vinci. “You can see the resemblance to a number of landscapes … vicious battles … lively postures of strange figures.” We can see “monstrous things” and we’re better for it: “by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.” We make sense where there is no sense, out of the half-seen and overheard, out of all the indistinct; the big truths don’t reveal themselves when we look at them directly. Tonight, the full moon is the closest it will be to earth all year, a big fat full supermoon. What will you see on its round white wall? Read More
May 24, 2021 Arts & Culture The Magic of Simplicity By Fernanda Melchor Photo: Octavio Nava / Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México from México. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. For decades, José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert has been one of the most widely read novels in Mexico. Since its original 1980 serialization in the weekend cultural supplement Sábado and its subsequent publication, a year later, by the iconic Ediciones Era, this story of impossible love between a boy and his best friend’s mother has established itself as one of the most important novellas in Mexican literature, which boasts such gems in this genre as Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, José Revueltas’s The Hole, and Salvador Elizondo’s Elsinore: un cuaderno (Elsinore: a notebook), to name just a few. The considerable reach of this novella is in large part thanks to its readers’ word-of-mouth recommendations over the years and the fact that, since its second edition, it became part of standard middle school and high school curricula throughout the country, especially in the capital, Mexico City, awakening among students of successive generations the kind of interest and awe that very few “required” or “compulsory” texts ever generate among adolescents. Cementing the widespread love for Battles in the Desert isn’t only its detailed portrait of bygone days, its appealing brevity and intimate, confessional tone, but also its glowing emotional credibility, so strong that many readers believe the story to be autobiographical, to the amusement and astonishment of its author. Read More
May 21, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Miners, Mauretania, and Melancholy By The Paris Review Chris Reynolds. Photo: Chez Blundy. Courtesy of New York Review Books. Mauretania is a mood. Spend some time with Chris Reynolds’s The New World: Comics from Mauretania and you’ll feel it. Stark illustrations will envelop you in their contrasts—the blanket blacks of the foreground, the impossible star-bright skies—and you’ll find yourself thumbing anxiously for the uncertain medium of shadows. The characters will elude you—transient, distant, largely muted in their emotions—and their struggles will become your own as you search for meaning in an increasingly mysterious world. We tend to use the terms creepy or uncanny to describe such a mood. I’ve always liked the German word unheimlich. But that describes only a piece of the feeling that permeates these comics. For those moments when life is relatively fine and yet you can’t seem to shake the unease that manifests in everything from the building across the street to the sunlight that “roars across the fields” to the nearly programmable behaviors of the people around you, when you can’t remember why you entered a room, or when you’ve finished solving a problem only to realize you are just as confused as when you began, I propose the word Mauretania. An example: My local grocer no longer requires customers to wear masks, and the CDC says it’s all right, but it still feels a bit Mauretania in there. Things somehow feel Mauretania more and more. —Christopher Notarnicola Read More
May 21, 2021 Look The Amateur Photographers of Midcentury São Paulo By The Paris Review Outside of Brazil, the achievements of the São Paulo–based amateur photography group Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante have long been overlooked. Its ranks included biologists, accountants, lawyers, journalists, and engineers, all of whom were united in their passion for the art form. To encourage innovation, the club held monthly contests, which often resulted in photos that look unreal from today’s vantage point: crisp shadows of circus goers roosting on bleachers, nightmarish skyscrapers slurring across the frame, pedestrians wandering among the streetcar rails like planets locked in lonely orbit. Presenting the group’s work for the first time internationally, “Fotoclubismo” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art through September 26. A selection of images from the show appears below. André Carneiro, Rails (Trilhos), 1951, gelatin silver print, 11 5/8 × 15 5/8″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of José Olympio da Veiga Pereira through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund. © 2020 Estate of André Carneiro. Thomaz Farkas, Ministry of Education (Ministério da Educação) [Rio de Janeiro], ca. 1945, gelatin silver print, 12 7/8 × 11 3/4″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. Read More
May 20, 2021 Arts & Culture The Voice of ACT UP Culture By Sarah Schulman Sarah Schulman’s new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 is the culmination of twenty years of research, interviews, and writing on the history of American AIDS activism and the grassroots organization ACT UP. In the excerpt below, Schulman describes the impact of OutWeek, the first major national publication to call itself a lesbian and gay magazine, through some of its founding members. The first and last covers of OutWeek magazine, published weekly from June 26, 1989, until July 3, 1991. Images from the OutWeek Internet Archive and courtesy of Gabriel Rotello. Photo credit to Jim Fouratt and Michael Wakefield, respectively. In the eighties and nineties, queer people were excluded from authentic representation in corporate television and film, both news and entertainment, and most lesbians as well as queer people of color could not get serious stage time for plays from their points of view. As a result, print was the most important venue for community communication. Queer and feminist bookstores were all over the country. In 1992, I was able to do a book tour that stopped in each gay bookstore in the U.S. South. Every big city had a least one gay and/or feminist newspaper, and some, like San Francisco, had more than three. Most heterosexuals, whether civilians, scientists, civic/political leaders, or cultural gatekeepers, did not read the queer or women’s press because, frankly, they didn’t know it existed. The walls between countercultural queer life and the official mainstream were thick and invisible. The queer press was made for queer people, and it both reflected and created the countercultural bonds that built community. * ANDREW MILLER Andrew Miller grew up a “squirrelly, hypersmart, bookish, musical, isolated kid,” who was also gay, and he was afraid early on because he lived through a time when lots of his friends died. But the cataclysm crept in through a kind of slow unraveling of the fabric of our community, “through lack of information, and fear, and not having answers, and being sick, and not knowing what to do, or having somebody else be sick, and not knowing how to fix it, and not knowing if you were gonna get it, and not having anybody that you could ask about it, or not wanting anybody to know … not being able to tell anybody else.” Andrew remembered rushing out to get his passport, because there was a six- or nine-month period when President George H. W. Bush and Congress were considering making an HIV test a requirement for getting one. Andrew joined the ACT UP Actions Committee and the Coordinating Committee while working as a stringer for out-of-town gay weeklies. He was writing for the Bay Area Reporter (San Francisco) and Windy City Times (Chicago) and, most of all, Gay Community News (Boston). At this time, around 1988, the situation in New York with the gay press was dismal. Read More