July 31, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cardboard Cities, Choral Singing, and Cross-Stitch By The Paris Review Alanna Reeves. Photo: Alanna Reeves. Alanna Reeves, a visual artist and writer from Washington, D.C., is an emerging voice in contemporary American art. When Reeves and I went to school together growing up, everyone wanted to model their handwriting after hers. But it was in art class with the printmaker Percy B. Martin that it became clear she was much more than her fastidious script, that she was the real deal. Five years after receiving her B.F.A. in illustration and art history from the Rhode Island School of Design, Reeves has indeed made her mark. Last week, she partook in a virtual conversation hosted by Strathmore, offering an overview of her recent work and the theory behind it. The first piece discussed, Límon, was perhaps the most striking: a black-and-white photograph of her paternal grandfather overlaid with yellow embroidery floss in a design inspired by cross-stitch patterns. In much of her work, Reeves reexamines her girlhood pastimes, such as cross-stitch and paper dolls—activities with sets of prescribed patterns and rules. One audience member observed that the stitching looked almost like a chain-link fence, barring uninhibited access to the subject yet inviting the viewer to peer through nonetheless. Reeves agreed, noting that she purposefully left his eyes untouched. Only the corner and lid of one eye are embroidered, delicately stitched in a freehand that deviates from the otherwise geometric pattern. Now Reeves has been doing more printmaking, which, to me, recalls the early influence of Martin. The pandemic has not stopped her momentum, and she will be exhibiting work with D.C. Arts Center in the fall and Strathmore in January. In the meantime, you can keep up with her work on Instagram. —Elinor Hitt Read More
July 31, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with D. H. Lawrence By Valerie Stivers Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, August 28, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, click here, or scroll to the bottom of the page. I crusted the gamekeeper’s “simple chop” with mushrooms—not what Lawrence intended but I’ve made the recipe (from his fellow Briton Mary Berry) half a dozen times since. Few people could have been more off-grid than the English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) during his sojourn at a cabin eighteen miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife, Frieda, lived without electricity, kept chickens, built an outdoor oven, made adobe bricks and “a meat safe to hang from a tree branch,” evicted nests of rats, and traveled two miles on horseback for their milk and mail, their butter and eggs. The time Lawrence spent at this place—called “punishingly remote” by the biographer John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider—was relatively short, a span of months in 1924 and 1925, but he considered it home, and after his death, Frieda returned there to live until she died in 1956. It’s a lonely moment for me and an off-grid moment for many of us, so it seems time to pay a visit to Lawrence, his work, and his food—and to ask what can be learned from literature’s most notorious outcast. Read More
July 30, 2020 Look Masks at Twilight By The Paris Review In the final years of his life, Paul Klee’s productivity skyrocketed. Fearing suppression by the Nazi party, the beloved Bauhaus instructor had fled Germany and returned to his home city of Bern, Switzerland, where he struggled with an autoimmune disease and watched Europe backslide into another war. “Late Klee,” on view by appointment at David Zwirner’s London gallery through July 31, focuses on his output from this period. Abstract yet immediately striking, these late works display Klee’s continued experiments with line and his interrogations of mortality—both the world’s and his own. A selection of images from the show appears below. Paul Klee, pathetische Lösung (Pathetic solution) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner. Paul Klee, Schema eines Kampfes (Diagram of a fight) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner. Read More
July 30, 2020 In Memoriam A Keeper of Jewels: Remembering Brad Watson By M.O. Walsh Brad Watson. Photo: © Nell Hanley. I met Brad Watson in 2004. He was starting a one-year stint as the Grisham Visiting Writer at Ole Miss, where I was an M.F.A. student, and I’d signed up for his workshop. The week before the semester began, I saw him at a bar in town, newly arrived and sitting on a stool by himself. I went up and introduced myself and he looked me over and grinned. His eyes had this way of shining when he found something funny. “You the one who wrote that weird story with the mannequin?” he asked me. “I am,” I confessed. “I enjoyed it,” he said, and picked up his drink. “I like sort of oddball stuff.” At that point in my life, my glorious and unpublished twenties, I knew only that I wanted to be a good writer, not that I could be. So, this exchange gave me a suspicious confidence. I liked Brad from the start. Read More
July 29, 2020 First Person Be Good By Destiny O. Birdsong © Hamdan / Adobe Stock. The eighty-four days I spent in a relationship with my rapist were days filled with music. We met in a nightclub, Schoolboy Q pulsing around us as he held my waist and I yelled my name into his ear. After our first date, I let an awards show replay in the background as I squealed into the phone with a friend. Earlier that evening, he kissed me deeply as he dropped me off at my car. “I shouldn’t let you leave,” he whispered before parting my lips with his tongue. I recounted these details as Beyoncé belted “Drunk in Love” in a performance taped only a few weeks after her self-titled album’s release, when the world was abuzz with her fuller, post-baby body, her unapologetically sex-positive lyrics. My rapist made me feel the way Beyoncé looked on that stage, her heavy thighs peeking through glittery fishnets as she reclined backward on a chair with the microphone so close to her lips, she could have licked it. One night, my rapist asked if I’d heard of Gregory Porter. “There’s a song of his that reminds me of you,” he said, and that was the first time I heard “Be Good (Lion’s Song).” It’s about a couple, except the man is a lion, and the woman has trapped him in a cage because he can’t be trusted to roam freely. In the first verse, when they meet, the lion is brushing his mane; by the second, he has trimmed his claws and cut his hair, and the woman has already told him that lions are meant to be caged; if they’re left to walk around, “they might just bite.” The woman’s name is Be Good, a phrase she also repeats to him, though it is he who sings that refrain to us. He is both her amanuensis and her accuser. “Does she know what she does / when she dances around my cage?” he asks again and again, each time more plaintive than the last. My rapist compared me to Be Good because the tenor of our relationship had changed. I had become a difficult woman where I had been so simple before, wanting only his body—nothing more. We had a lot of sex, and my rapist had few inhibitions and even less predictability. In one moment, he could be gentle, almost tearful. In another, rough, commanding, and I liked it. I’d spent much of my life doing the things I believed people expected me to do. Sometimes, I was successful in pleasing them. Other times, I failed miserably, and I thought of those failures constantly. It was nice to let someone else be responsible for making decisions. Read More
July 29, 2020 Sky Gazing What Shape Is the Sky? By Nina MacLaughlin This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky. Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857. I walked to a high place and slept at the top. The air there was thin. Someone sleeping in the space adjacent was ill. Coughs punched through the wall in the night. But wall is not the accurate word for the thin sheets of particle board that divided the space. A quilt hung by clothespins would’ve caught the sound better, baseball into mitt as opposed to baseball through wax paper. “Altitude sickness” had been whispered in the courtyard in the evening as the sun did a better and better job hiding itself behind the mountains, sending megaphones of cold light toward whispers of clouds. In bed, I worried as the sounds of the sickness graveled and percussed their way to my ears. Tunnel of throat, dark cavity of lung. Breath yolky and frothed. Go down, I urged the person in my mind. Go down. Get lower where your lungs and blood can feed on the oxygen they need. I wanted them to stop coughing and I did not want them to stop coughing because I feared that a stopped cough meant dead. I lay in bed that night—a plywood platform on which I spread my sleeping bag—wearing double the regular amount of pants, four layers of shirts, a down vest, a wool hat. I pulled the hood of the bag over my head to muffle the coughs. I did not fear contagion, but the sickness in the next room meant the sickness was possible in my room, too. And by room I mean my body. I was far away, higher than I’d ever been on earth. I was afraid. I did not want to die. And it seemed so lonely to die so far away from everyone I loved. Read More