January 28, 2020 Redux Redux: I Lost the Time of Day about Three Weeks Ago 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. Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about the art of losing. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Hebe Uhart’s short story “Coordination,” and Terry Stokes’s poem “Losing the Time of Day.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast. Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27 Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981) INTERVIEWER Have you ever had any poems that were gifts? Poems that seemed to write themselves? BISHOP Oh, yes. Once in a while it happens. I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I’d start them but for some reason I never could finish them. And one day I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter. Read More
January 28, 2020 Look The Artist’s Hypothesis By The Paris Review The artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018, approached his practice with the curiosity of a scientist and the playfulness of a jazz musician. Many of his paintings are the result of a careful aesthetic hypothesis unleashed upon the canvas and then transformed by improvisation. The works at the center of “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.” (on view at Hauser & Wirth through April 4) display a delightful agnosticism regarding medium and material. In one, he splashes a paper collage with calligrapher’s ink and acrylic paint; in another, he seems to conjure the farthest reaches of space on a single sheet of blotter. A selection of images from the show appears below. Jack Whitten, Space Flower #9, 2006, acrylic, pastel, and powdered Mylar on rice paper, 7 1/4 x 8 1/4″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Read More
January 28, 2020 Procrastination Confessional A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Make Money from Again By Jenn Shapland It began with a simple longing, born in the humid 105 degree Austin summer: I just want to wear clothes that do not touch my body. Like most desires, it was transgressive. I had been watching a lot of Project Runway in the afternoons, when my dissertation writing abilities abandoned me to the air conditioned dim. The designers and judges were all about “showcasing a woman’s figure,” or “showing off her curves,” which were usually close to nonexistent. These were the hallmarks of good clothing design for women in the early 2000s and 2010s, and for the most part they still are. I wanted the exact opposite: a large simple shape to swim around in. Something that could catch a gust of air beneath it like a personal parachute. Something that breathed for me when I couldn’t catch my breath. I was by no means the only writer, nor the only grad student, to be soothed by the show. Its emphasis on criticism was cathartic, sequestered as I was in literary criticism, in the critiques of my advisers—my own panel of judges. And I was trying to figure out my own writing apart from grad school, essays and research that didn’t fit the pattern of the academic article. Tim Gunn’s presence in my life that year was a godsend. He wasn’t my mentor, he was my guardian angel. Read More
January 27, 2020 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Sula By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik Illustrations © Jenny Kroik When I was a girl, I had a friend. Some years I used honorifics and some years she was my only friend and there was no need. There was a high school classmate of ours who, for a while, thought we were the same person, and there was another who thought we were lovers. I’ve told the story of the end of that friendship so many times that it has almost lost meaning. At first, telling the story stretched out all the space between us that hadn’t been there before. Then, it just began to collapse it. One time, our senior year, I told the story to another girl in the winter darkness of my suburban street. Her car was sporty. The parking brake was a pedal by her feet. When I told the story she lifted one long leg and smashed that parking break to the floor. The parking brake and the totality of being a teenager made me think it was a good story—a high school band put it in a song. From time to time, in the fifteen or so years since, I’ve taken that story out again and held it up to the light. Frances Ha appeared on the scene, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Lady Bird, Conversations with Friends, all stories about female friendship and its fucking sharp points. I recognized elements of myself in each of them, and it quieted all that teenage rage. I was not the only girl to have her heart broken by her best friend. But I hadn’t yet read Sula. Read More
January 24, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dolls, Dakar, and Doomsday Preppers By The Paris Review Francis Bacon’s studio at the Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland. Photo: antomoro (FAL or FAL). At this magazine, we like to think we know a thing or two about interviewing. But to read Interviews with Francis Bacon, the art critic David Sylvester’s book-length dialogue with the painter, is to find a proudly messy rejoinder to our own tidy conversations. Sylvester chronologically presents nine sessions with Bacon over two decades, condensed for length but never edited for clarity or precision. Over the years, in a kind of psychological time-lapse video, the two return to the same topics again and again, and Bacon’s philosophies mutate and crystallize. His interest in the narrative quality of triptych painting evolves to include plans to construct sculptures that can be adjusted and moved. His hedonistic lifestyle becomes a way of thinking about his all-consuming attitude about his work. His desire for realism gives way to a resignation to the artifice of creation. The result is a portrait in dialogue, as warped and fascinating as Bacon’s own depictions of twisted faces and writhing bodies. —Lauren Kane Read More
January 24, 2020 Look Playwright, Puppeteer, Artist, Cyclist By The Paris Review For the avant-garde playwright, puppeteer, critic, novelist, artist, and cyclist Alfred Jarry, life was a series of artful acts. Perhaps best known in his day for the controversial play Ubu Roi, Jarry is often credited with helping spark the fires of surrealism, Dada, and futurism. “Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being” (on view at the Morgan Library and Museum through May 10) is the first major U.S. museum exhibition of his work; it demonstrates the breadth of his artistic practice. A selection of images from the show—including photographs of Jarry’s experiments with typography and woodblocks—appears below. Alfred Jarry, Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. Photo: Janny Chiu. Read More