July 27, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 19 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 pieces below. “Founded a decade apart, The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books have had a long friendship. NYRB cofounder and longtime editor Robert Silvers was an early managing editor of TPR, and the two magazines have always shared contributors—the respective archives of both are populated by writers who sent their fiction and poetry to TPR, participated in Writers at Work interviews, and published essays, reviews, and opinion pieces in NYRB. Notable joint contributors include James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Zadie Smith. This summer, The Paris Review has teamed up with The New York Review of Books to offer a special subscription bundle—you can get a year of both magazines for one low price, plus complete digital archive access to both websites. To celebrate, this week’s The Art of Distance shares a few pairings—pieces by three writers who have written for both magazines, their voices tuned and modulated for these two different, but related, settings. May these essays and interviews ignite your imagination and stimulate your intellect.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director You’ll find these essays and interviews by Hilton Als, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag are unlocked on both sites this week. Here’s a little preview of each piece. The New York Review of Books published Hilton Als’s essay “Michael,” his uncategorizable homage to Michael Jackson and the phenomena of his fame, in 2009, shortly after Jackson’s death. Als writes, “Unlike Prince, his only rival in the black pop sweepstakes, Jackson couldn’t keep mining himself for material for fear of what it would require of him—a turning inward, which, though arguably not the job of a pop musician, is the job of the artist.” Read More
July 27, 2020 Arts & Culture A Little Fellow with a Big Head By Margaret Jull Costa Fernando Pessoa. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Fernando Pessoa’s life divides neatly into three periods. In a letter to the British Journal of Astrology dated February 8, 1918, he wrote that there were only two dates he remembered with absolute precision: July 13, 1893, the date of his father’s death from tuberculosis when Pessoa was only five; and December 30, 1895, the day his mother remarried, which meant that, shortly afterward, the family moved to Durban, where his new stepfather had been appointed Portuguese consul. In that same letter, Pessoa mentions a third date, too: August 20, 1905, the day he left South Africa and returned to Lisbon for good. That first brief period was marked by two losses: the deaths of his father and of a younger brother. And perhaps a third loss, too: that of his beloved Lisbon. During the second period, despite knowing only Portuguese when he arrived in Durban, Pessoa rapidly became fluent in English and in French. Read More
July 24, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sex Work, Cigarettes, and Systemic Change By The Paris Review Still from Life: Untitled. © Directors Box. Life: Untitled, the 2019 directorial debut from Kana Yamada, is a film that bristles. (It is based on Yamada’s stage play.) Focusing on a contemporary Tokyo escort service called Crazy Bunny, it follows Kano, a young woman who initially attempts to become a sex worker as a way to escape what she explains are the constant failures inherent in an ordinary life. She panics during her first appointment and is instead reassigned as an employee on the office side of the service, scheduling client appointments and buying toilet paper. It’s through her eyes that we get to know the other people working there and the indignities and joys that make up their daily lives. Yamada is unflinching in her criticisms of contemporary Japan’s gender dynamics and sexism, and she asks dark questions about what the commodification of sex means for her characters, from the always-smiling Mahiru—who frequently remarks that she’d like to burn the entire city down and eventually reveals a history of sexual trauma—to Hagio, a male employee who sleeps with older customers on the side and holds nothing back in an ugly, judgmental monologue to Kano. The film is currently available to stream online in the U.S. until July 30 as part of the Japan Society’s annual Japan Cuts film festival. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
July 24, 2020 Écuyères The Baudelarian Horsewoman By Susanna Forrest In Susanna Forrest’s Écuryères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, dressage at the circus, 1899 Jenny de Rahden lies on the bed, half raised on an elbow. A gray-haired man who shares her elegant, strong-nosed profile—her father—stands over her, and behind him the room becomes shadow. In the photograph, Jenny lies on a strange counterpane, so great that it conceals the bed itself. Its overspilling edges are frilled, and it is white with large, dark, irregular spots. It has a curly, straggling tail: a horse in the invalid’s bedroom. She is thirty and she is blind, lying on the hide of the Hungarian stallion Csárdás, who carried her when she made her circus debut as a haute école or dressage performer. One day, she writes in her memoir, they’ll wrap Csárdás’s rough coat, the crackling hide that covered his aging, dipping back, around her and place her in her coffin. She hopes it comes soon. Most of the écuyères or horsewomen of the nineteenth-century circus left no trace of their own thoughts behind. Jenny de Rahden wrote a book. Whether she did it because she needed money or needed to put down her own side of the story after years of being spoken for in the European press—or both—is unknowable but she called it a roman or novel. I can’t tell how much of it is genuine. Jenny lived in an era before fact-checking and though her life was undoubtedly tragic, her style is sometimes melodramatic. “Does life really throw up these bizarreries, of which novelists and playwrights seem to possess the only secret?” she asks at one point. Perhaps calling it a novel gave her freedom to rewrite a messier past and fit it into more conventional romantic feminine tropes, rejecting the saltier stories written about circus horsewomen by male writers of the period. She was, after all, writing in 1902 when the century had barely turned and respectability remained a stifling life vest for women. She’d known its constrictions and buoyancy since birth: Jenny was not circus-born and she had become an artiste to support her father when he bankrupted them by gambling on the stock exchange. As a performer, her reputation as a lady was constantly at risk, not least because she supported not one but two men with her earnings. This dance around sex, money, masculinity, and respectability deformed her whole life—and resulted in a murder in her name. Read More
July 23, 2020 Arts & Culture The Edge of the Map By Colin Dickey Olaus Magnus, Carta marina (detail), 1539. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In the collections of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, there’s a round ceramic disk, about the size and shape of a cobblestone, with the barest image of a face on it. Two eyes in a mushroom-shaped head, a mouth opened in a howl or scream of some kind. Radiocarbon dating puts its age at about seven hundred years old, which would make it one of the earliest known images of the Jersey Devil. The Lenape knew it as Mësingw, a spirit being vital to preserving the balance of the forest. Mësingw (“Living Solid Face,” “Masked Being,” or “Keeper of the Game”), according to Herbert C. Kraft, who devoted his life to researching and documenting Lenape culture, was of prime importance to the Lenape. Of all the manetuwàk (spirit beings whose job it was to care for and maintain the world that Kishelëmukòng had created), Mësingw had one of the most important jobs: looking after the animals of the forest and ensuring their health and safety. Mësingw could sometimes be seen riding through the forest on a large buck, covered in long, black hair from head to toe like a bear. The right side of his large, round face was colored bright red, the left side colored black. Alternately revered and feared, he ensured the prosperity and prevalence of vital game for the people but could also, if displeased, ruin a hunter’s luck, or “break his speech,” causing him to stammer uncontrollably, or scare him to death. Mësingw, for the Lenape, kept the forest in balance, mediating between humanity and animal life. When white settlers came to the land where the Lenape lived, they saw images and masks of a strange creature who, they were told, lived in the forbidding wilds of the Pine Barrens, the edge of the settled world. As they heard tales of Mësingw and saw the masks and effigies of the god, they saw him not as a figure of order but of terror. Read More
July 23, 2020 Corpus Cantilever By Jordan Kisner In her column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. For a while last year, back when such things were possible, I was clocking chins on the subway. Weak chin. Strong chin. Strong chin. In between. This started when an orthodontist explained to me how you can pull a person’s whole mouth back and rewrite their profile. She recommends the procedure for people who have a fulsome, protruding mouth, horse teeth if you want to be unkind about it, which is a consequence of large teeth in a small mouth. With nowhere for all your big, beautiful teeth to fit along your jaw, they fan out, reaching for daylight. The orthodontist fixes this by pulling four teeth, one each from the left and right side of both the upper and lower jaws, usually the first molar right behind the canines. Then, she uses braces and head gear to pull your remaining front eight teeth back into the holes. The whole mouth backs up, retracts, makes itself scarce. She showed me pictures. Mostly, the people looked better before, with their sweet excessive mouths, but one teenage girl was a stunner after. Her before picture shows a reasonably pretty girl with nice eyes and teeth so full that her lips are turning inside out a little, showing their slick undersides. Her after picture shows a teenager suddenly made exceptional. I was startled, looking at it. The first picture was of a girl who would not grow up to be remarkably ugly, and the second was of a girl who would grow up to be remarkably beautiful. I eyed this orthodontist with new respect and wariness. Read More