August 20, 2019 Redux Redux: Another Joke-Legend 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. Arthur Miller. This week, we’re perusing our summer-vacation reads. Read on for Arthur Miller’s Art of Theater interview, J. Jezewska Stevens’s short story “Honeymoon,” and Jacqueline Osherow’s poem “Eight Months Pregnant in July, High Noon, Segesta.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Read More
August 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Yukio Mishima in Ichigaya By Anna Sherman Yukio Mishima delivers a speech shortly before his death. Via Wikimedia Commons. A city always keeps part of itself back. If Tokyo were a clock, then the hours between ten and midnight—the arc running from Shinjuku through Ikebukuro to Tabata—and I were strangers. These are the northern wards, in what was the old High City. The gardens of Rikugi-en and Koishikawa. Remnants of the great estates owned by temples and the nobility: now university enclaves and “soaplands”—red-light districts—and apartment blocks for salarymen. In Ichigaya, I passed concrete office block after drab office block—Sumitomo Insurance, Snow Brand Milk, the Salvation Army, the Vogue Building—when suddenly the landscape cracked open. I came to a halt on Yasukuni dōri and rocked backward, as if I had almost tripped at the edge of an abyss. A natural amphitheater. A circle that drew the sky down and threw the earth upward. A place for performances, for high theater, for cinema. What it was, I didn’t know, and my map was blank, showing only a few scattered rectangles and unnamed roads that looped into each other and out again. Read More
August 20, 2019 Notes on Pop On Breakups By Hanif Abdurraqib Hanif Abdurraqib’s monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. Read more here. Still from HAIM’s “Want You Back” During my craft talk about poems and sound, I play small parts of songs or music videos. I’m giving away the secret here, but it’s to distract from the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or, I do know what I’m talking about, but I can’t articulate it in any way that makes sense outside of the hamster wheel of my own brain. In some spaces, there is the assumption that anyone who writes poems wants to talk about the writing of them in front of people, and is equipped to do so. But some of us are just fumbling around dark rooms, occasionally lucky enough to find a light switch. And so, to not give away my fumbling, when I give a craft talk, I play songs. I play spirituals and gospel, and I play the rap songs that have sampled the spirituals and gospel. To talk about the magic trick of pace—of suggesting a big moment only to later reveal an even bigger moment—I play the iconic video of the Who performing “Baba O’Riley.” The one you’ve maybe seen, where the intro swells and swells until it feels like it could fill an entire stadium, and you might think, How can we ever climb atop this? But then Pete Townshend tosses his tambourine, steps back from the microphone, and windmills his arm around his guitar and shakes his ass in white pants while Roger Daltrey holds a microphone to the heavens with both hands. But first, I play HAIM’s “Want You Back.” A specific part, around the 2:20 mark. All of the instruments drop out for about fifteen seconds and all that remains is the layering of voices, singing out “just know / that I want you / back” before the drums enter and the song rebuilds itself from the vocals up. In the talk, the point is about silence, I think. Or the point I’m trying to make is about how the voice itself isn’t the instrument. That language is the instrument and voice is just the vehicle, like a speaker or an amplifier. The point is about silence and the things we deem as percussion. How, along the landscape of silence, any sound that interrupts can be percussive. I make the point by pulling up a poem that has one word drowning in the otherwise white space of a page. That’s percussion, I say. In the poem “Katy,” Frank O’Hara writes, “I am never quiet / I mean silent,” and I assume people who have been lonely enough or isolated enough know the difference. Percussion can be even the gentlest interruption. Here’s a concrete example I give: two people on the telephone, near the end of a conversation, when the line between them falls into the depths of soundlessness. Even one person saying the words “I love you” is percussive. All our affections, coming on the backs of drums. Read More
August 19, 2019 Department of Tomfoolery Mistranslated Book Titles Contest By The Paris Review Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s widow, was once in a bookstore in Yokohama. Unable to parse the Japanese alphabet, she asked the owner if he had any books by her late husband. He thought for a moment, then said, yes, he had The Angry Raisins. This anecdote so amused us here at The Paris Review that we began to mistranslate other titles, challenging each other to decipher them. Can you guess the correct titles for Tiny Ladies or Interminable Funnies? Sign up with your email below, and see how many you can solve. Winners will be entered to receive our brand new (and, if we do say so, very stylish) Paris Review bag. a Rafflecopter giveaway
August 19, 2019 The Big Picture Fra Angelico’s Divine Emotion By Cody Delistraty The fifteenth-century Italian artist Fra Angelico invented emotional interiority in art; laid the stylistic groundwork for Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mark Rothko; and theorized a utopian world, one in which everything and everyone is ultimately linked. Fra Angelico, The Crucifixion with Saints, 1441 In the summer of 1873, Henry James visited a former monastery on Piazza San Marco in Florence. Surrounded by a scattering of low-slung, washed-out government buildings and conical Tuscan cypresses, the church and convent were in what is still the city’s center. When James first entered the convent, he saw Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion with Saints in the chapter room. A brightly colored, semicircle fresco about thirty feet wide, Crucifixion depicts Christ and the two thieves on either side of him, nailed to their crosses, as saints and witnesses grieve below. “I looked long,” James wrote. “One can hardly do otherwise.” As the author moved throughout what had then just become a museum, he felt a spiritual urge, even though he had rejected his Christian upbringing. “You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” he wrote in Italian Hours. “You yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.” Even Angelico’s colors, he added, seem divinely infinite, “dissolved in tears that drop and drop, however softly, through all time.” Earlier this summer, I visited the convent-museum. It is not difficult to get to—there’s a city bus stop in front—but tourists tend to leave it off their itineraries in favor of better-known cultural attractions like the Uffizi and the Duomo. In part, my reason for going was unrelated to art: a person of particular specialness to me went last summer, and I regretted not having gone with her. I wanted to see what she had seen, to stand where she had stood. Read More
August 16, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cranberries, Canzones, and Catharsis By The Paris Review Téa Obreht. Photo: Ilan Harel. Many things will be said about Inland, Téa Obreht’s second novel. I can only hope to settle my tent with the believers. A Western as far as the eye can see, Inland starts with lickins and bounties and ends with them, too, teasing your sense of exploration like you’re home alone with the radio tuned to The Lone Ranger. But this is not The Lone Ranger; there are no heroes or, blessedly, “complexly wrought antiheroes.” Instead, reading Inland feels like a rare chance to read about people, history, and myth all at once without any part canceling out the others. The book is a marriage between some sort of Howard Zinn history lesson, E. L. Doctorow at his best, and the kind of murkily beautiful folktale that is so vivid in Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. I stayed up very late with Lurie, an outlaw with an improbable, unforgettable camel companion, and Nora, a homesteader with all the plagues, and felt the deep possibility of the impossible. It is a trick of the light that allows Obreht to introduce the sweet, downy Goatie (“Nobody could prove she was really a goat, and nobody could prove she was really a sheep”) while asking broad questions about American settlement, belonging, race, and undying denial of water scarcity. There are newspaper fights and gunfights and ghosts and romance, and I wish they’d all appeared earlier in the summer so I could tell the world THIS IS YOUR SUMMER READ. But in Inland, the past is present and will continue to be so into the fall and the next and the next. —Julia Berick Read More