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
December 3, 2020 Look Venus and the Devata By The Paris Review Shahzia Sikander’s first New York solo exhibition in more than a decade showcases an astonishing range of work: paintings, mosaics, animations, and her inaugural foray into freestanding sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies, a stunning monument to desire that depicts both a Greco-Roman goddess and an Indian devata. Sikander is an artist whose talents and ambitions threaten to outstrip the materials available to her; the works featured here confront the climate crisis, religion, migration, war, memory, and much more. But despite the daunting abundance of ideas and mediums, careful attention reveals that the show itself is a sort of mosaic, the pieces all slotting into place to form a portrait of the artist over the past few years of her practice. The works on paper inform the animations; the animations inform the individual mosaics (in part, Sikander credits her experiments with the latter form to “the dynamism of the pixel that emerged in my mind as a parallel to the unit of a mosaic”). “Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues” will be on view at Sean Kelly Gallery through December 19, 2020. A selection of images from the show appears below. Shahzia Sikander, Double Sight, 2018, glass mosaic with patinated brass frame, 63 1/4 x 44 1/4″. © Shahzia Sikander Photo: Jason Wyche. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York Shahzia Sikander, Arose, 2019–2020, ink and gouache on paper, 76 x 51″. © Shahzia Sikander. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York. Read More
December 2, 2020 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Cassandra By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik Join us this evening, Wednesday, December 2, at 6 P.M. on Zoom, to meet Jenny Kroik and Julia Berick and draw a paper doll of your own. It’s a June afternoon in 1963 when Cassandra at the Wedding gets on the road in a Riley convertible. The sun is setting on California’s Central Valley. Cassandra Edwards is on her way home to a citrus ranch I imagine to be near Terra Bella where the novel’s author, Dorothy Baker, lived and died shortly after the novel’s completion. Cassandra stops at a bar for a lemon squash, tugs off her driving gloves to use an emergency phone, sluices off dust with an irrigation pipe, and then arrives home in the moth-laced dark. There are glowing lights on the brass wet bar, polished terra-cotta tiles, and herringbone wood ceilings. This isn’t actually how the book starts. It begins with Cassandra, alone in her Berkeley apartment, wishing she wasn’t. She considers suicide. She considers the futility of academia: “It was such busywork, this whole thing of writing a thesis so that I could become a teacher instead of a writer … I’d really have preferred it the other way around.” She considers her “unsuitable” and unsatisfactory love life. There is the strong suggestion that, while Cassandra feels it’s okay to have flings with other young women at the university, anyone else willing to do so is an inferior sort of person. Cassandra doesn’t want to be part of any club big enough to be a club. She’s got her standards to keep her warm. But, it wasn’t always so lonely for Cassandra. Her twin was always with her. Even apart, they were together. Until they weren’t. The twins’ paths diverged when Judith went off to Juilliard in New York to see about music and perhaps about individualism. While her sister was falling apart in Berkeley, Judith fell for, and got engaged to, a nice young man, an almost cardboard young doctor. The sisters reconvene at the family ranch for the first time in nine months for the wedding—or in Cassandra’s case, to prevent the wedding. It isn’t something as simple as taste or money that sets people apart for Cassandra. I felt personally familiar with all her slippery superiority, and I’m not alone. The book has something of a cult following. For Cassandra, a damn fine way to see who’s who is to look at their belongings, every one of which is a “tell.” Cassandra has a Bösendorfer piano. She has a Riley, a beloved make of British racing and touring car, which should tell you everything else you need to know. Deborah Eisenberg, in her illuminating afterword to the NYRB Classics edition, points out that as opposed to all the critique of the American dream in contemporary sixties literature, “the Edwards’ materialism, in contrast—it isn’t one bit empty—the family derives substantial pleasure from their fresh orange juice, the views from their house …” I spend no small part of my life not only thinking about material objects, but attempting to justify my desires. How easy it is to say “in late capitalism” before one says “I think about those shoes six times a day and I fully believe they will complete my life.” I tried no small number of tactics and therapies—grad school among them—before I hit on a truth that about myself and things. It’s a lifelong love affair. This is also a writer’s problem. We’re looking out for character notes, always. We don’t know much about Vera Mercer, Cassandra’s analyst. She has a “rather handsome piece of luggage—black canvas bound in tan leather, not particularly large but not exactly overnight either.” Mercer is suddenly vivid. She travels alone. Her confidence and tendency to slightly overcommit are her calling cards. A superior person, for Cassandra and for me, is a person who tells an interesting story before you’ve heard them say a word. I am constantly trying to pass my own self on the street. What character am I performing? How complete is the portrait? How clear is the impression? Read More
December 1, 2020 First Person Tokyo Reeks of Gasoline By Yi Sang Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a painter, architect, poet, and writer in early-twentieth-century Korea, when the Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. Yi Sang wrote and published in both Korean and Japanese until his early death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven, after imprisonment by Japanese police for thought crimes in Tokyo. His work shows innovative engagement with European Modernism, especially that of surrealism and Dada. He is considered one of the most experimental writers of Korean Modernism. The following essay, published after Yi Sang’s death and translated into English by Jack Jung for Yi Sang: Selected Works, details his impressions of Tokyo. The Shinjuku district of Tokyo, ca. 1933. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Before I saw the real Marunouchi Building, nicknamed Marubiru, it was at least four times bigger and far more amazing in my mind. Will I also be disillusioned like this when I see New York’s Broadway? Anyways, my first impression of Tokyo: “This city reeks of gasoline!” People with barely functioning lungs like myself have no right to live in this city. The smell of gasoline seeps into my body though I keep my mouth closed; I taste it whenever I try to eat something. The citizens of Tokyo will all eventually smell like automobiles. No one lives around the Marunouchi Building except other buildings. Automobiles are pedestrians’ shoes. The few who force themselves to walk in this city are the holy philosophers, contemptuously glaring at capitalism and the ending of a century. Everybody else simply puts on their automobiles to go out for a walk. Ridiculously enough, I had already walked in this neighborhood for five minutes when I wised up and got a taxi—inside the taxi, I studied the title of the twentieth century. The moat of the imperial palace passed outside the taxi’s window, and innumerable automobiles busily tried to maintain the twentieth century’s profitability. My personal ethos smells of the stale nineteenth century, and it is a very dignified thing: it cannot comprehend how there can be so many automobiles. Read More
December 1, 2020 Redux Redux: A Little Bedtime Story 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. Samuel R. Delany. Photo: Samuel R. Delany. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. This week, The Paris Review is feeling leisurely and lethargic and embracing the idea of daydreams. Read on for Samuel R. Delany’s Art of Fiction interview, Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s short story “Honeymoon,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Q Is the Quick.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210 Issue no. 197, Summer 2011 DELANY Today I’m a five-o’clock-in-the-morning riser. Although I do stare at the wall a lot. INTERVIEWER Stare at the wall? DELANY I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently. My daughter, who recently graduated from medical school, once told me, “Dad, I’ve never known anyone who works as hard as you. You’re up at four, five o’clock in the morning, you work all day, then you collapse. At nine o’clock, you’re in bed, then you’re up the next morning at four to start all over again.” Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that’s how people perceive me, they have to say I’m prolific. But I don’t find that either complimentary or accurate. Read More