December 8, 2020 Arts & Culture What We Know of Sappho By Judith Schalansky Fragment of parchment preserving parts of several poems by Sappho. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. As Nebuchadnezzar II is plundering Jerusalem, Solon ruling Athens, Phoenician seafarers circumnavigating the African continent for the first time, and Anaximander postulating that an indefinite primal matter is the origin of all things and that the soul is air-like in nature, Sappho writes: He seems to me equal to the gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close ….to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking ….is left in me no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming ….fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost ….I seem to me. But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty … Buddha and Confucius are not yet born, the idea of democracy and the word philosophy not yet conceived, but Eros—Aphrodite’s servant—already rules with an unyielding hand: as a god, one of the oldest and most powerful, but also as an illness with unclear symptoms that assails you out of the blue, a force of nature that descends on you, a storm that whips up the sea and uproots even oak trees, a wild, uncontrollable beast that suddenly pounces on you, unleashes unbridled pleasure, and causes unspeakable agonies—bittersweet, consuming passion. There are not many surviving literary works older than the songs of Sappho: the down-to-earth Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ethereal hymns of the Rigveda, the inexhaustible epic poems of Homer and the many-stranded myths of Hesiod, in which it is written that the Muses know everything. “They know all that has been, is, and will be.” Their father is Zeus, their mother Mnemosyne, a titaness, the goddess of memory. Read More
December 7, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 36 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive selections below. “As we revealed last week, the Winter 2020 issue of The Paris Review features the theater—an Art of Theater interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and excerpts of three new plays by David Adjmi, Kirk Lynn, and Claudia Rankine. Read more about the genesis of this special issue and the collaboration with guest theater editor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in my editor’s note. This week, we hope you pick up the new issue (it’s available online now and hitting newsstands Tuesday, December 8), but in the meantime I wanted to share some earlier theatrical content from the Review. Read on for unlocked pieces from issue no. 142, the last installment of the Review with a theatrical focus, but also from another touchstone issue—no. 39, which features conversations with twentieth-century theater titans Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. For another dose of theater, RSVP for our issue launch event on December 16 at 6 P.M. ET. It will feature a live table read from Kirk Lynn’s new play, The First Line of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ Until then, read well, stay healthy, and have a good week.” —EN Photo: Albarubescens. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Wendy Wasserstein’s Art of Theater interview includes a conversation about humor in the theater. “Humor masks a lot of anger, and it’s a means of breaking up others’ pretenses and of not being pretentious yourself.” Read More
December 7, 2020 Winter Solstice The Shadows below the Shadows By Nina MacLaughlin Nina MacLaughlin’s newest column, Winter Solstice, will run for four weeks, finishing on the solstice on December 21. Vintage Krampus Postcards December and Demeter is grieving again. Hades cracked the earth and snatched her daughter Persephone, tugged her down to the underworld to be his unconsenting bride. In response, Demeter ceased growth. Wilt, starvation, cold. No warmth, no fruit, no fat goats whose throats to slit in sacrifice. So Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone back. But Ascalaphus, Hades’s orchard minder, saw what Persephone had done, and told, rotten tattler. If you eat the food of the dead, you stay, and Persephone had swallowed six pomegranate seeds. The gardener held the fruit in his hand and the juice slipped down the private part of his wrist. Each seed, one month in Hades. She’s down there now. And we’re up here, buttoning our coats, eating carbohydrates, trying to remember to unclench our jaws. There’s something seductive about the below, the magnetic tug of the dark. Aren’t you curious? To see how dark it gets, to see what’s down here, a little lower, a little deeper, something might get revealed, something singular, something special, I’m getting close to something true. It’s risky. I have a friend who likes to press a knife blade to his wrist. “It makes me shiver,” he says, “I feel it in all my tips.” I wouldn’t call him crazy. He’s interested in the edge. “The descent to the Underworld is easy,” Virgil cautions in The Aeneid. “Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, / but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air— / there the struggle, there the labor lies.” Sinking down is easy. But to return? No guarantees. Read More
December 4, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mingus, Monologues, and Memes By The Paris Review Hannah Sullivan. Photo: Teresa Walton. As much as there are perfectly crafted lines of poetry I think about often, there are perfect titles, too, that I find myself thinking about as much as the poems themselves. Recently, variations of the title “You, Very Young in New York,” the first in Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems, have been at the front of my brain—looking at old photos from old summers, making future plans, bestowing this very young in New York phase of my life with the dynamic cadence of the phrase. Though corporeally I am still in a body that is still in New York, that cadence seems to belong to a past or future self that I sometimes feel I have to go back in search of or somehow move toward. Yet Sullivan’s poem dispels this notion. While it overflows with precise detail and indulges each of the senses spectacularly, the poem makes space for slowness, too. From the first page, the reader is invited to embody the second-person narrator—to hail their cabs, to wait for age to wear down a type of unwelcome innocence. Even then, “the senses, laxly fed, are self-replenishing, / Fresh as the first time, so even the eventual / Sameness has a savour for you,” which is a gorgeous comfort to imagine now. The sumptuousness of the poem, then—the vivid colors and tastes of huckleberry jam or overripe peaches “sitting with their bruises”—happens not despite the quiet moments but inside them. The second poem, “Repeat until Time,” lets the days stretch out even more. There, “days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity. / They wake us, and every day waking is an absurdity.” I’m learning from Sullivan how to thank the sameness for its savour, to wake to the absurdity as well as the sun. “‘You will know when it’s time, when the fair is over,’” says the opening stanza of the collection, and by the time the poem ends, it still isn’t over, but “through tears, you are laughing.” —Langa Chinyoka Read More
December 4, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with James Baldwin By Valerie Stivers Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, December 18, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article. Baldwin’s characters haunted French bistros, where oysters with mignonette are a staple. Photo: Erica MacLean. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So read the inspirational quote in the front window of my Brooklyn gourmet market the day I shopped for a meal celebrating the work and life of James Baldwin (1924–1987). These words, coincidentally but not surprisingly, are from Baldwin, who is the man of the moment again thanks to the extraordinary relevance of his writing to today’s America. Baldwin as a novelist is perhaps best known for Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, the former a gay man’s self-reckoning and the latter a brutal and tragic wrestling with being Black in America. He is known to a lesser extent for having lived most of his adult life abroad, first in Paris and then in the Provençal town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, though he always kept up his connection to the Harlem of his birth and was an active participant in the U.S. civil rights movement. Intense and multitalented, Baldwin was also a playwright—he loved actors and the theater—and a critic and essayist. His nonfiction collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time have predicted the future to an astonishing degree. Read More
December 3, 2020 Arts & Culture Authentic Gaddis By Samuel Rutter I once visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia with someone who was convinced that the entire place was filled with fake art: not forgeries or wrongly attributed masterpieces, but “museum quality” reproductions. The basis for this wild claim was a painting from Cézanne’s series The Card Players, of which there are two very similar versions, one in the Barnes, and the other in the Met. Not only was she sure she had seen this painting before, she was certain that at that very moment, the real version was hanging in its rightful place in New York, which meant that the Philadelphia version had to be a fake. The history and layout of the Barnes allowed this theory to quickly gather steam: one of the largest collections of Modernist and Impressionist art in America, it was originally housed in the billionaire philanthropist Albert C. Barnes’s mansion in Pennsylvania and arranged according to esoteric principles that came to be known as the Barnes Method. Rather than having all the Cézannes in one wing, you might see, for example, a peasant woman by Cézanne, with a girl in a pink bonnet by Renoir hanging above it, and a medieval door latch between them. The idea is to observe closely and forge your own metaphoric connections between object and image. But there were too many vaguely familiar Picassos, too many Van Goghs stuffed between rusty sconces, too many corners jammed with Restoration armoires. It was just the sort of thing, my companion said, that an American industrialist who made his fortune selling antiseptic creams would do: build a mansion in the middle of nowhere and fill it with copies of his favorite European things. (This dovetailed nicely with her initial impression that Philadelphia itself was a lesser copy of New York.) Apart from feeling momentarily insane, and at the same time realizing I would probably end up marrying this woman, it occurred to me that it’s not such a bonkers idea when you consider the Met Cloisters, the mishmash of actual convent buildings from Catalonia and southern France that were reassembled in Upper Manhattan by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and filled with an array of Old European Things like sarcophagi, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts. In any case, it’s a theory that would likely have interested William Gaddis, whose novel The Recognitions, reissued in November by NYRB Classics, is full to bursting with forgers, fakes, thieves, and liars, all in search of an authentic experience of art and life. Read More