November 27, 2019 Bulletin Behind the Scenes of ‘The Paris Review Podcast’ By The Paris Review The second season of our celebrated podcast is here to carry you away from all the troublesome sounds of Thanksgiving squabbles. And if you’d like to know how something so excruciatingly exquisite gets made, read on for a behind-the-scenes interview with executive producer John DeLore. He is a senior editor and tenured audio engineer at Stitcher’s NYC studio. In addition to The Paris Review Podcast, he has worked on Stranglers, Beautiful/Anonymous, The Longest Shortest Time, Couric, Clear + Vivid with Alan Alda, Fake the Nation, The Sporkful, and Household Name. He answered some questions from our engagement editor, Rhian Sasseen, about his preferred microphones, the differences between Season 1 and Season 2, and how to respect both the language and the listener. INTERVIEWER In the spirit of the many times “pencil versus pen?” has been asked in The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interviews, what’s your preferred setup for recording? JOHN DELORE Most of the process is not a solitary craft. And while a lot of recording happens in our studio where we’ve got our preferred tools and our studio vibe, a lot of it is happening out in the world, or “in the field,” as they say. And for me, I’m sort of always “in the field.” I’ve had the same silver Zoom H2 portable recorder for almost ten years, and I carry it just about everywhere I go. And these days I’ve been using the iPhone VoiceMemo app. It’s like a butterfly net. I hear something in the world, like a train on an elevated track, or a nice bird, or a thunderstorm, and I capture it. I label it and throw it in this massive folder of random sounds. Read More
November 26, 2019 Redux Redux: One Empty Seat 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. Jack Kerouac, ca. 1956. Photo: Tom Palumbo. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about travel—by train, plane, car, or bus. Read on for Jack Kerouac’s Art of Fiction interview, W. S. Merwin’s essay “Flight Home,” and Paulé Bártón’s poem “The Sleep Bus.” 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. Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41 Issue no. 43 (Summer 1968) I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings. Read More
November 26, 2019 Arts & Culture Redefining the Black Mountain Poets By Jonathan C. Creasy Drawing of project for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Architectural design by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. Photo of original work taken in Harvard Art Museums. Via Wikimedia Commons. Grouping writers into “schools” has always been problematic. The so-called Black Mountain poets never identified themselves as such, but the facts of their union spring from a remarkable instance of artistic community: Black Mountain College and the web of interactions the place occasioned. Founded in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1933 and closed by 1956, the college was one of the most significant experiments in arts and education of the twentieth century. In recent years, a number of international exhibitions and publications have showcased the range of artwork produced at the college’s two campuses, the first situated in the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, and the second at Lake Eden in the Swannanoa Valley. The list of famous names associated with Black Mountain is as impressive as it is unlikely, given that the college never housed more than a hundred students and faculty at a time, often far fewer. Difficult questions persist in attempting to define a “Black Mountain” school of poets. Do we look to the physical and historical circumstances of Black Mountain College, or the complex pattern of friendships, influence, correspondence, publication, and collaboration that constitute the broader notion of this artistic coterie? Read More
November 26, 2019 Brush Strokes On Desolation: Vija Celmins’s Gray By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1973. Collection of Aaron I. Fleischman © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery Open sea water seen from above. Star-filled skies. Stones. Gray after gray: from the graphite of pencils, charcoal on paper and its erasure, oil paint in layer after layer of deep, smooth near-black. Forays into ochre and midnight blues, the earthen tones of sand and stone, then returning seemingly always to gray. Before seeing the objects, works on paper, and paintings gathered together at the Met Breuer for the immense Vija Celmins’s retrospective, “To Fix the Image in Memory,” I had previously witnessed the gnostic perfection of the later paintings of ocean waves and night skies. The Breuer exhibition was the first time I was able to trace in person the artist’s development from the early paintings of objects and appliances in her studio (a hot plate, a fan, a lamp) to her distinctive late work. What I didn’t anticipate from this exhibition was the suggestion of utter desolation. I should say that Vija Celmins paintings are not about this sense of foreboding. The artist has said, “I am not interested in telling stories.” And yet art exhibitions, career retrospectives in particular, do engage in storytelling. What is an exhibition but an essay written with objects in three dimensional space? Celmins’s biography and the sequence and development of her work proceed in an ordered and coherent fashion across two floors of the Breuer. Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, two years before the Soviet occupation. A decade after her birth, her family moved to the United States where they settled in Indiana. Clemens drew animals in her notebook in the back of the classroom while the teacher spoke in a still-unfamiliar foreign language, English. After earning her B.F.A. in Indiana, she headed to California as an art student in the M.F.A. program at University of California, Los Angeles, where she would find a studio near the beach outside of downtown Venice. Here the studio interior itself became her object of study, particularly the functional objects within it. The resulting paintings read more like portraits of inanimate objects than still lives. A lamp stares back at the viewer with its two bulbs, the orange coils of the heater and hot plate in two separate paintings glow with an almost palpable animal heat from their gray perches on the floor and a shelf respectively. Read More
November 25, 2019 Arts & Culture The Whole Fucking Paradigm By Andre Perry © paul / Adobe Stock. “Nigger music,” he said. He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “That sounds fascinating. I’ve got to come see that sometime.” San Francisco hipsters filled the corners of the dark apartment. Outside, a light rain came down around the city. Conversations oscillated between fashion and music. I could have talked to so many people but I had chosen this skinny musician who had tried to French kiss me earlier. In that moment, he seemed like a true artist to me—someone who created, revised, destroyed, and rebuilt in an effort to understand the world. And, he played nigger music. Was it a travesty or a triumph that this skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed white guy had so comfortably described his band’s style of music to me, a skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed black guy, as none other than “nigger music”? He apparently didn’t know what else to call it. He said that his rock band, Mutilated Mannequins, constructed lyrical diatribes on racism, pairing them with gripping art-rock freak-outs. He was so sincere, calm, and honest. His eyes honed in on me, his confidence unwavering. His philosophies unfolded: “We are doing important shit, man. Rethinking the whole world. The whole fucking paradigm.” He went on describing his music. After some time his words echoed listlessly like the distant pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill. I thought about punching him in the neck. I was in a state of existential shock. Lifting up from my body I considered that I needed to spend fewer nights like this: twenty-six years old, going to work, making music, barely sleeping, and then going out just to hear someone talk about nigger music. The age-old question lingered: Would it ever be possible for a nonblack person to throw around the word nigger in a nonmalicious sense? Does the weight of such a word truly vary with context or is it a shotgun shell whenever it gets fired into the air? And, damn, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out how they’re shooting. Former NAACP representative Julian Bond said that the second civil rights movement will be harder because the WHITES ONLY signs have been taken down. Yet their shadows remain firmly placed to doorways and water fountains. How do you challenge a ghost when you can’t even touch it? Read More
November 25, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse By Joanna Scutts Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts. Mary Heaton Vorse. Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel I’ve Come To Stay calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s “blue serge lining”—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world. The lining stands for the inevitable conformity of class, getting, if not quite under the wearer’s skin, then next to it, holding her upright, constraining her imagination and her freedom. Camilla is constantly on the run from it. She embraces the pretensions of bohemian Greenwich Village—anarchist friends, artistic aspirations, a Polish violinist lover, and nights spent in smoky bars. She repeatedly rejects her neighbor and suitor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, out of fear that he will wrap her up in blue serge once again, and strangle her with it. Subtitled A Love Comedy of Bohemia, the novel is more of an archaeological find than a timeless classic. Yet its ironic depiction of young people caught between ambition and gender-based expectation dramatizes the central conflict of its author’s life, and that of her generation of American “New Women.” Mary Heaton was born rich and rebellious in 1874, and spent most of her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, a place that was, by contrast, rural and religious. She was close to her bookish father and idolized her distant mother, Ellen, who paid more attention to her five older children from her first marriage. Mary watched her intelligent, energetic mother struggle to fill her days with meaningful activity. Other women of her era and class threw themselves into social reform and the fight for women’s suffrage, but Ellen believed too many people already had the vote, and that a woman’s place was in the home. This did not preclude plenty of European travel and culture to burnish her daughters’ marriage prospects, and Mary had a rich, if haphazard education, bolstered by voracious private reading. Although she belonged to a generation of women who were breaking down the doors to academia and the professions, she had no interest in submitting to the rules of a women’s college. She longed for a greater freedom, and begged to go to Paris to study art. Read More