December 19, 2019 At Work Now’s The Time: An Interview with David Amram By Gary Lippman Jennifer Hasegawa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. One of the highest compliments in my lexicon of praise is the term lebenskuntsler, German for “an artist of life”—and high in my pantheon of the lebenskuntslers I’ve known is the musician/composer/conductor David Amram. Still flourishing at age eighty-nine, Amram has an impressive resume. As the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence, for which he was chosen by Leonard Bernstein, he has created funky jazz numbers as well as classical symphonies and concertos. Then there is the rich music Amram has written for Arthur Miller’s plays, including After The Fall; for Joe Papp’s earliest Shakespeare in the Park productions; and for legendary films such as Elia Kazan’s Splendor In The Park and John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate. But Amram does far more than write scores (or “figure out which correct notes to choose and then write them down on each day’s new empty page,” as he puts it). He’s often on the road, teaching students of all ages, leading orchestras, “sitting in” with any musician who asks him to, and performing his own public concerts. These “Amram Jams” can last up to five hours, and feature Amram scat-singing improvised songs along with a diverse array of guest artists. Amram has jammed with local musicians from all over Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, becoming, according to the New York Times, “multicultural before multiculturalism existed.” True to the title of his seminal 1971 double album No More Walls, he has played Latin music to audiences in China, played Kenyan music in Latvia, and worked frequently with Native American artists. This last connection led, in 1977, to The Trail of Beauty, a piece for mezzo-soprano, oboe, and orchestra whose libretto featured traditional indigenous texts. Amram frequently plays the piano, the penny whistle, the French horn and the Spanish guitar, but he can also coax melodies from the shanai and the dumbeg and other instruments that few Americans have heard of, much less heard. During his daily life he even wears some of these instruments around his neck, along with amulets and other gifts he’s received. Over the decades, Amram has preserved his artistic adventures in three memoirs: Vibrations (1968), Offbeat: Collaborations with Kerouac (2002), and Upbeat: Seven Lives of a Musical Cat (2008). He’s currently working on the fourth, to be entitled “David Amram: The Next Eighty Years.” Born in Philadelphia in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family, Amram was raised on a dairy farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where, he says, his father was a major ethical influence and where he loved hearing “the old hog callers, who excelled in this special style of performing art,” he writes. “Whether or not they impressed any hogs, these farmers made me see that you can find music and beauty anywhere if you pay attention. They also made me see that you can transform anything into a form of expression all your own.” After studying history at George Washington University, serving as a soldier with the Seventh Army in Europe, and working as a busboy, a soda jerk, a janitor, a gym teacher, a moving man, and an amateur boxer, Amram wound up in postwar Paris, where he spent time in cafes with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen as they created The Paris Review. Back in New York, he joined Charles Mingus’s band. Around 1959, Amram acted alongside the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as the painter Larry Rivers, in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s groundbreaking short film Pull My Daisy (for which Amram also composed the soundtrack). This “promising young composer,” as he now waggishly describes himself, has made music with Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Johnny Depp, Willie Nelson, Thelonius Monk, John Prine, Frank McCourt, Dizzy Gillespie, Paddy Chayefsky, and Patti Smith. Apart from kunst, Amram is equally impressive with the leben part of the lebenskuntsler equation. He’s been an indefatigable social activist, a prodigious raconteur, and, as the critic Nat Hentoff aptly phrased it, “a ubiquitous deliverer of good cheer.” Recently I visited Amram at his home in Beacon, New York, which overflows with books, CDs, framed photos, DVDs, instruments and awards. We had a long and lively conversation, presented here in condensed and edited form. —Gary Lippman INTERVIEWER Are you surprised to find yourself nearing the age of ninety? AMRAM You bet! I never thought I’d make it to thirty. We came up in the “live fast, die young” era. But contrary to the old saw, turning eighty-nine didn’t happen quickly. Anyway, I don’t have time for old age to catch up with me. The title of Charlie Parker’s great 1945 anthem “Now’s The Time” remains my mantra. People are already planning celebrations for my ninetieth birthday in different cities around the world. So I am eating extra vitamins and trying to get at least one good night of sleep a week to be ready. Read More
December 18, 2019 Devil in the Details A Figure Model’s (Brief) Guide to Poses through Art History By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s column, Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. It paid $12.50 an hour with clothes on, $25 with clothes off. The choice, I figured, was obvious. My friend Gabriel had turned me on to the gig in college. We were always on the lookout for work that required minimal effort for maximal reward. And the job was easy, Gabriel assured me. All I needed was a robe, some slippers, and to shave, but only if I wanted to. The first class, I was nervous. I had scraped off all my body hair with a razor, praying that my period wouldn’t arrive in the middle of Introductory Drawing, surrounded by Yale freshmen—I imagined that seeing a naked woman in a curricular context would be traumatizing enough. I timed my shower for a few hours before class, enough time for my hair to dry but not enough, I hoped, for me to accumulate any malodorous sweat. My worst fear was of being too bodily, of grossing out my classmates. But after a week or two on the job, I realized, none of that mattered. All the students were focused on their drawing skills, not my errant pubes or pits or back-of-knee sweat. Some of the professors I worked with gave instruction, to varying degrees of specificity. There was the hot professor, for example, who asked for elbows akimbo, figure-four knees, poses with lots of negative space. There was the class that took place right before Halloween, so they dressed me up in a trash bag and put Gabriel in a plague-doctor mask. And then there was the professor who, long after costume party season had ended, handed me two wooden dowels and asked me to act like a dominatrix. For the most part, though, they all let me do I wanted, and I came to see myself—if I may be so bold—as a coteacher of sorts, guiding the class with each pose. I’d attended drawing classes myself, and knew how much more fun it was to work from a model who had a grasp of dynamic poses, how it isn’t the look of the model that matters but how the model moves. Conveniently, my education—what little of it I hadn’t squandered by frying my brain with party drugs—provided a repository for dynamic poses: the sculptures and statues of art history. Here, from a former figure model and art history major, is a brief guide to figurative sculpture through the ages, should you ever find yourself naked but for a robe, slippers, and in need of a shave—but only if you want to. Read More
December 18, 2019 Arts & Culture Moon Mothering By Katy Kelleher Albert Aublet, Selene, 1850 In most stories, the moon is a woman. Often, the sun is a man. Greek mythology has Apollo and Artemis, Roman mythology has Luna and Sol, Slavic mythology has Dazhbog and Jutrobog. In Bali, there’s Dewi Ratih, whose sexual rejection of the giant Kala Rau led to him becoming an immortal floating head that chases the moon across the sky, swallows her whole, and spits her out again. The Mayas thought the phases of the moon were associated with phases of a woman’s life. Chinese mythology includes tales of a lunar deity named Changxi, who gave birth to twelve beautiful daughters who became the twelve months. Although I’ve come across moon gods as well as moon goddesses, it’s clear to me that the moon is a woman. Her her-ness is right there in the word, full of round letters, soft as breasts and wombs. It sounds like a mother cooing to her baby. I do not believe womanhood is located in the body. I believe womanhood is a state that one can opt into and out of, that it is culturally coded and culturally enforced. And yet, my own experience of womanhood is tied to my breasts, my womb, my menstrual blood, my mother, and my motherhood. As my body changed from a girl’s to a woman’s, it softened and opened. For a long time, I resisted this—I wanted to be angular and sharp with elbows like arrows and collarbones that cut. I didn’t like the idea of being reduced. That’s what I believed my body was trying to do: reduce me to a biological statement about fertility and purpose. I didn’t know, until I experienced pregnancy myself, how much you can gain from your body, how much beauty and joy it can give. I didn’t know that I could be like the moon. I didn’t realize I could wax and wane. Read More
December 17, 2019 Redux Redux: A Smile Like Collapsed Piano Keys 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. Lydia Davis in Paris, 1973. This week, we’re reading pieces all about the art of the piano. Read on for Lydia Davis’s Art of Fiction interview, Julio Cortázar’s “Feuilletons from A Certain Lucas,” Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “Off–White,” and Sarah Manguso’s essay “Oceans.” 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! Lydia Davis, Art of Fiction No. 227 Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) INTERVIEWER I think of the narrator of your story “Glenn Gould,” who wonders whether there is a way of being selfish without hurting anyone. DAVIS By never marrying, and living alone and having long conversations in the middle of the night with a friend. And by never seeing that person. Read More
December 17, 2019 At Work God’s Wife: An Interview with Amanda Michalopoulou By Christopher Merrill The Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three collections of short stories, and more than a dozen children’s books. She studied French literature at the University of Athens, worked for many years as a columnist for Kathimerini, and now teaches creative writing at various Greek institutions. Her work has been translated into twenty languages; the first of her two novels to appear in English, I’d Like, won the National Endowment for the Arts International Literature Prize in 2008, and the second, Why I Killed My Best Friend, was short-listed for the 2015 National Translation Award. (Both books were translated by Karen Emmerich.) Her new novel God’s Wife, translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press. Michalopoulou spent this fall in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, where I had the good luck to continue a conversation with her begun long ago in Athens. But it was only after she departed for Greece that we embarked on this interview via email. INTERVIEWER The premise of God’s Wife is at once audacious and unsettling. Can you talk about the origin of your novel and the kinds of research you undertook to tell such an unlikely story? MICHALOPOULOU Certain books start with a disturbing question. My question here was, What if God had a wife? How would she be, what would she expect from him, and what would he expect from her in return? The Bible is full of submissive women who wished to have many children and either followed their husbands or became prostitutes. I read somewhere that these women speak 1.1% of the words in the Bible. In this patriarchal view, God’s wife would be an introverted human being, an acolyte. But what if she didn’t comply with this model of thought because of her education? I played around with this idea for some time and in 2012 I started reading philosophical and theological texts in a more focused way. What would a girl married to God have access to? What would she want to read, especially if her husband was mysterious and reserved? I wanted to write a bildungsroman about a female protagonist who changed her views on life and love because of the books she read. This is my romantic view about education. INTERVIEWER On the first page of God’s Wife, an epistolary novel written to an unnamed reader, the narrator declares, “Having lived for so long by the side of Him who created All from Nothing, I am finally creating something of my own. I am creating you.” How do you imagine your reader(s)? Read More
December 16, 2019 Arts & Culture The Provocation of a Good Meal By Maryse Condé © Jiri Hera / Adobe Stock. As the year 2011 drew to a close, while I was still teaching in New York, Mary Ann Caws asked me for four recipes, two cocktails without alcohol, and two desserts. Mary Ann Caws, a professor of French literature and modern art at the City University’s Graduate Center, is one of the most extraordinary women I have met. She is a brilliant speaker and can talk engagingly on André Breton, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Robert Desnos, and René Char. She uses the same talent to write about the novels of Virginia Woolf, literary manifestos, and Provençal cuisine. This time she was compiling a book of painters’ and writers’ recipes for an English publisher under the title Modern Art Cookbook. My first reaction was, Why me? She merely replied: “Because your cooking is one of the best I have ever tasted.” I was flattered to no end. But as days went by I felt sad that such a book was going to be published in America and England. Couldn’t we imagine a similar publication in France? I became so obsessed with the idea that once back in Paris, I discussed it with Otis Lebert, the owner of the restaurant Le Taxi Jaune, which sits opposite my apartment in the Marais district. By dint of comparing recipes, we had become friends. On my initiative, we decided to write a book of recipes together. After a series of long and heated discussions, we invited Laurent Laffont, my editor, for lunch in order to inform him of our project. I was convinced I could easily win his approval since our friendship dated back to the time when I published my first novels with Robert Laffont, his father. He had welcomed me with open arms when I indicated I would like to be on the authors list of the publishing house he had just taken over with his sister. To my great surprise, Laurent gave a categorical refusal to the recipe book. Not only did he have no interest in the project but mainly, according to him, cookbooks belonged to a specialized field of publishing and distribution. He was so adamant that there was no point insisting. Although Otis accepted the decision somewhat indifferently, I myself was so disappointed that it forced me to think about the meaningful role cooking had played throughout my life. Together with literature it had been my dominant passion for years. Read More