March 15, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Colette By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Any writer who has recently been the subject of a film starring Keira Knightley can be said to be having a moment, and this is especially true of Colette (1873–1954), a star of the belle epoque Parisian literary scene whose life lends itself well to the themes of our own time. Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, was a gender nonconformist more than a hundred years ago who adopted her surname as a one-word moniker. She was born to prosperous parents in the French village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, and at twenty years old, with a “little pointed face,” a “well-made body,” and braids that touched her calves like “whips” or “reins,” she made an improbable love marriage to “Willy” (Henry Gauthier-Villars), a wealthy thirty-four-year-old Parisian aristocrat and publishing impresario. Willy was the ultimate networker, a critic, society hound, and a provocateur who ran a workshop where impecunious young writers pumped out popular novels under his name. He brought his countrified young bride to Paris and was disowned for the ensuing scandal. Colette quickly went to work for him, and the series of semierotic autobiographical novels she wrote as “Willy,” which begins with Claudine at School, was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest” success stories in French literature, according to a contemporary. Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman even credits her with having invented the teenage girl. Later Claudine books reveal the queer and genderqueer ferment in Parisian society at the time (Proust was a contemporary); Colette’s affairs with women, including Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, a woman who dressed as a man and went by “Missy”; and Colette and Willy’s open marriage, which could be considered an early attempt at polyamory. The approach of the Keira Knightley movie is to portray Colette’s struggles to leave Willy, regain the rights to her work, and begin writing under her own name as a feminist parable. As a person allergic to orthodoxies, I never want to like the writer who is having a moment, especially when the reasons are ideological (even when the ideologies are ones I mostly share). I’d been resisting Colette until cracking a spine and discovering, like most of Paris did once before me, that she’s irresistible. Read More
March 14, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: There Are Enough Ballrooms in You By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am in love, and yesterday I helped the man I love pack all of his belongings and board a bus bound for a city far, far from me. That was his plan before we met six months ago. I am so, so happy for him and the fresh start he has made for himself. But I am also grieving the loss of him and of us, because even though I will visit in a few months, after that, everything is very unsure. Our lives were always headed in different directions and this was likely the only time our paths would or could cross. I am grateful for the time I had with him and how easy it was to feel much more for him than I had ever planned. I am also grateful for the friendship that we plan to carry between us into the future, but the sadness right now is heavy. I’m hoping there is a poem that might speak to this feeling of loss and joy and grief and gratitude. I know I could certainly use something like that. Best, In Love and Out of Time Read More
March 14, 2019 Look Nudes By The Paris Review Innumerable nudes are scattered across millennia of art history, but none look like Alice Neel’s. With radical frankness, she painted bodies outside the scope of most visual art: those of pregnant women, of children, of a blissfully domestic couple peeing in a bathroom. There’s a touch of the surreal to her demonic reds and sickly greens—and, as often accompanies the surreal, there’s also a touch of the uncomfortably alive. The subjects stare out from the canvas and feel uncannily real. But Neel rejected traditional realism. Of her style, she once said: “I hate equating a person and a room and a chair. Compositionally, a room, a chair, a table, and a person are all the same for me, but a person is human and psychological.” Instead of the omnipresent male gaze, here the gaze is Neel’s, in which nakedness is not explicitly sexual and body parts can assume proportions untethered from the purely representational. A mother’s breasts sling out like red-tipped yams. A penis, thin and long, slithers like an enoki mushroom. A child’s hands clutch and creep like opera gloves filled with hay. Through April 13, David Zwirner will host “Alice Neel: Freedom,” a new exhibition of significant paintings and works on paper from Neel’s six-decade career. Below, we present a selection of the glorious nudes for which she’s known. Alice Neel, Bronx Bacchus, 1929. The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Read More
March 14, 2019 Arts & Culture The World Association of Ugly People By Rebecca Brill This year’s contestants at the Festival of the Ugly (Photo: Rebecca Brill) In order to become a member of the World Association of Ugly People, you need to be assessed. In the clubhouse of the Association, known by locals as Club dei Brutti, the president, a stocky man named Gianni with a lopsided goatee, produces a card featuring the official Club dei Brutti ugliness rating system: non definita (undefined), insufficiente (insufficient), mediocre, buona (good), ottima (great), straordinaria (extraordinary). Gianni examines my face and body quickly but thoroughly. Then, on a membership card on which he has written my name, he checks off the box marked “insufficiente.” At first, I’m confused by this designation and the ranking system as a whole. I can’t tell whether insufficiente means I am insufficiently attractive (and therefore ugly) or insufficiently ugly (and therefore not eligible to join the organization). As it turns out it’s the latter. Gianni signs my card anyway, thereby designating me the 31,310 member of Club dei Brutti. “Time makes us all ugly,” he explains. I have not really come to Piobbico, a small village between two mountains in central Italy, to join the organization. Rather, I’m here for Club dei Brutti’s annual Festival of the Ugly, where thousands of self-identified ugly people gather in the town square to celebrate ugliness and cast their votes for the club’s president. But it is hard to observe life in Piobbico, whose ties to the hundred-and-fifty-year-old organization are inextricable, without inadvertently becoming a participant. This is in part because Piobbico is small, in terms of both its geography and its population of just under two thousand. But the more time I spend here, the more I attribute this feeling of inherent involvement to something else about the village: a panoptic sense of being watched. The people in Piobbico look at each other: women hanging laundry call out to passersby from flung-open windows; men sit in front of bars in long rows rather than circles, ogling local women as they smoke; children shout “Ciao!” from their bicycles to people they appear not to know. (I realize that all of this sounds too picturesque to be true, but indeed, Piobbico feels like something straight out of an Elena Ferrante novel.) There is nowhere to hide here; no action goes unseen. To be in Piobbico is to be on display, to perform, to be known. I wonder how anyone stands it. Read More
March 13, 2019 The Big Picture You’ll Never Know Yourself: Bonnard and the Color of Memory By Cody Delistraty Pierre Bonnard’s revolutionary and controversial use of color became a means toward unlocking his past and the truths of his own self. But what if, ultimately, there was nothing to find? Pierre Bonnard, The Bath, 1925 For years, Pierre Bonnard juggled the love of two of his models. The women were Marthe de Méligny, who would eventually become the artist’s wife, and Renée Monchaty, who would kill herself in spurned grief. In Young Women in the Garden, Bonnard painted them both. They are in a bourgeois backyard garden, like something out of a Renoir or Manet, at a large table adorned with a basket of fruit. Monchaty is the focal point of the scene. She sits in a chair, turned toward the viewer; her head rests innocently in her hand. She appears contented, at ease. In the bottom corner of the scene, looking not at the viewer but toward Monchaty, de Méligny looks quietly bemused, her profile nearly cut out of the frame. Bonnard ultimately left Monchaty for de Méligny. Sensing that his marriage to de Méligny was imminent, and that his affections were fading, Monchaty fatally shot herself on her bed. More sensationally, another version has it that Monchaty slit her wrists in the bath so that Bonnard would arrive to find her dead. Whatever the case, Monchaty’s suicide was one of the central definers, tragedies, and regrets of Bonnard’s life. Read More
March 13, 2019 Arts & Culture A Poet’s Complaints Against Fiction By Anthony Madrid Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation. 1892 First, a word about the traditional feud between poets and fiction writers. I wish to acknowledge, up front, that that feud does not exist. Not traditionally. Conditions in the wild are very unfavorable to it. To witness episodes of this feud, you have to visit a special kind of mismanaged zoo called an M.F.A. program. Perhaps I needn’t add that it is not my object to prosecute any such feud here. Let me be explicit: I revere the great novelists as much as I revere the great poets. I do not see poetry as the higher form of writing. I do not think poets are better people. If anything, I’m sick to death of poets and poetry in a way I could never be sick of fiction and fiction writers. Poets are my family—with all the opprobrium that implies. Whereas, fiction writers strike me as delightfully removed from any familiar mode of being. They have houses and lifestyles. And they traffic in plots, an inherently good idea. Still, I do “have somewhat against thee,” fiction writers. There are certain abuses, rare enough in poetry, that are commonplace in works of fiction. A person who reads and writes poetry all the time will perhaps see these abuses more clearly than the practitioner of fiction, who is naturally and understandably accustomed to them. Take a moment to reflect on the memorable metaphor that Niccolò Machiavelli deploys on the dedication page (as it were) of Il principe. He says there that a painter, in order to paint the lowlands, must of course go up into the mountains, and in order to paint a mountain, must head to the valley. Analogously, in order to really understand the nature of common citizenship, one must be a prince, and in order to know the real deal regarding princes, one must be an ordinary person like Machiavelli himself. That’s why it’s okay for him to tell you how to rule your kingdom, O Prince. And perhaps it is the same, I am suggesting, with fiction writers and poets. The theory’s a good one. Think of the many times nonpoets have laid down memorable and all-but-devastating criticisms of poetry. Think of the recently dead V. S. Naipaul on poetry: Read More