May 22, 2019 Look The Art of Doodling By The Paris Review “Everyone is a collector in one way or another,” the English-teacher-turned-art-dealer David Schulson would tell his children. “Everyone has the impulse to collect.” What Schulson didn’t say is that the impulse to collect often contains within it another: the drive to keep, to hoard, to hold on. Schulson spent his weekends trolling New York’s flea markets for oddities, searching for the stories behind strange objects, and though he often sold what he found, he couldn’t bring himself to part with some of his most treasured discoveries. Over the course of his career, he amassed arguably the most impressive private collection of drawings, scribbles, and autographs in the world. The book Scrawl: An A to Z of Famous Doodles showcases this trove of miscellany for the first time. A selection from Schulson’s collection—including Queen Victoria’s donkey doodles, Stephen King’s spookily jubilant stick figure, and an erotic painting by Tennessee Williams—appears below. Tennessee Williams Courtesy of Schulson Autographs. Tennessee Williams, one of the twentieth century’s most important American playwrights, also painted with oils and pastels. On the back of an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph, he painted two male figures with thick brushstrokes. Near his initials, he writes, “Frankenste[in] Monster,” and between the two figures, framed in orange, he titles the drawing World of Morrissey. This is likely a reference to the director Paul Morrissey’s 1973 horror film Flesh for Frankenstein, also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. The figure labeled “Joe D.” must therefore be Joe Dallesandro, who played a starring role in the film. Williams’s paintings tended to express his homosexuality, which was largely absent from his plays. Read More
May 22, 2019 Archive of Longing Daša Drndić’s ‘EEG’ and the Joys of Pessimism By Dustin Illingworth Daša Drndić The most convincing literary pessimists are superior stylists. They smooth their nihilistic impulses into pleasing shapes. Despair is largely inimical to art, while melancholy—its pensive, perfumed cousin—makes of the void something paradoxically seductive. I think of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I with its horizon of bats and comets, its alchemical implements and carpenter’s tools laid in disarray. This extends, perhaps extends especially, to literary art. If the negative radiance of Giacomo Leopardi or Fernando Pessoa arises from a certain nihilism—that existence is evil, say, or without meaning—that message is nonetheless palliated by the intrinsic beauty of their craft. This is a kind of strategic enticement. If we are to follow the pessimistic artist into his annihilating vision, a little poetry goes a long way. The Croatian novelist Daša Drndić, who died of lung cancer last June, gives her readers no such poetry. She would have us take our medicine straight. “Les belles lettres is a heavily outdated term,” Drndić told me in a 2017 Paris Review interview, “therefore today a concept with hardly any weight. Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue, be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.” Her novels, several of which have been translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, orbit the criminal violence of European authoritarianism. An archival impulse animates much of the work. Trieste—the best-known of her books—features a forty-four-page list of some nine thousand Jews who were killed in Italy between 1943 and 1945. (The names, stacked four-wide across each page, are tragic in how little they ask of us.) Whatever she rescues from obscurity—photographs, courtroom testimony, case files, maps, scraps of song—achieves an uncanny wavering quality, as if already at home in the immaterial. Like those of W. G. Sebald, to whom she has been favorably compared, Drndić’s fictions creak beneath the weight of their own reclamation. They are load-bearing structures whose formal wonder is how such a painfully burdened edifice could remain standing upright in the first place. Read More
May 22, 2019 Arts & Culture A Trip to Bohemia By Adam Ehrlich Sachs Prague Karlovy Vary—Plzeň—Český Krumlov—Prague In August 2017 my family and I traveled to the Czech region of Bohemia, my mother’s homeland and the setting of my new novel, The Organs of Sense. At the airport in Prague we rented a car and drove directly to Karlovy Vary, the birthplace of my grandfather, who had died the year before; then we swung southeast through Plzeň and Český Krumlov before returning north toward Prague. It was meant to be a tour of our heritage, but it would also, I hoped—though the melding of my familial obligations with my artistic ambitions gave me a twinge of guilt—provide material for the novel of which I was then in the middle. Karlovy Vary In the spa town where, a century earlier, my grandfather was born, a local genealogist I’d found online and to whom I’d sent a pdf of my grandfather’s death certificate took us first to the spot where once stood the dress shop of Felix and Elsa, names he uttered in a tone of such hushed revelation, as though he had taken us to a site that would obviously mean a great deal to us, that my mother did not dare ask him in what way the people who bore them were related to us. From the dress shop of Felix and Elsa we walked to the apartment building in which Helene and Max lived shortly before the First World War, and from there we climbed a steep staircase to the villa on the hill where the twin sisters Frieda and Clara (both murdered by the Nazis) grew up. Then we drove to the abandoned porcelain factory once run by Frieda’s husband, Julius. At each stop my mother’s mood grew bleaker; she reproached herself for her estrangement from this world; these names meant nothing to her, and the fact that it was now too late (but only just) to ask her father who they were and what they were like caused her—this was clear—exquisite pain, which, however, she kept to herself. Only upon returning to our hotel and locating some online reviews he’d managed to suppress did I learn that the genealogist, driven presumably by compulsions of his own, was notorious for taking foreign tourists to the former residences and workplaces of his own dead relatives, every day the same sites. My mother, whom I had never known to give online feedback, later left him a three-star review. Read More
May 21, 2019 Redux Redux: Summer Surprised Us 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. Donald Hall. This week at The Paris Review, we’re preparing for our summer softball season and thinking about baseball and the great outdoors. Read Donald Hall’s Art of Poetry interview, as well as Tony Sanders’s poem “The Warning Track” and Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “Hybrid Vigor.” 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. Donald Hall, The Art of Poetry No. 43 Issue no. 120 (Fall 1991) I was bearded and weighed about two hundred fifty pounds when I tried out for second base with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Willie Randolph and Rennie Stennett both beat me out. (I was cut for not being able to bend over, which wasn’t fair; Richie Hebner made the team at third base and he couldn’t bend over either.) The players had nicknames for me, like Abraham and Poet, and they treated me like a mascot. When I took batting practice, the whole team stopped whatever it was doing to watch—the comedy act of the decade. The players looked at me as some sort of respite from their ordinary chores; they were curious, and they were kind enough as they teased me. Mostly, athletes are quick-witted and funny, with maybe a ten-second attention span. Read More
May 21, 2019 At Work Queerness, Cyborgs, and Cephalopods: An Interview with Franny Choi By Spencer Quong Franny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering AI ideas she wished she could have addressed in her poems. Reckoning with the mythology of a “finished product,” Choi is coming to terms with having a book that is both out in the world and still in progress. The process isn’t easy: as one of Choi’s cyborgs says, questioning reality makes her feel “a / little insecure / a little embarrassed haha.” But to be insecure, or still in progress, should never be mistaken for being incomplete. Soft Science asks what it means to live as a queer Asian American femme, someone “made a technology for other people’s desire.” How do we distinguish between the constructed pieces that have been imposed on us versus the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen? Are they always distinct? The voice of Soft Science is often corrupting: Choi inhabits colonized language and uses it to her own ends. In the poem “The Cyborg Wants To Make Sure She heard You Right,” Choi runs negative comments directed at her on Twitter back and forth through Google Translate until the language is transformed into something new. By repurposing language, Choi offers up a record of what is happening to our bodies and minds under whiteness and capitalism, and the beginnings of a way forward. Choi is the co-host of the podcast VS, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and will begin teaching this fall at Williams College. Soft Science is Choi’s second full-length collection, following Floating, Brilliant, Gone and her chapbook, Death by Sex Machine. Her poem, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula” also features in our spring issue. Read More
May 21, 2019 Arts & Culture Somehow I Became Respectable By John Waters John Waters. Illustration by Ken Ingels. Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened? I used to be despised but now I’m asked to give commencement addresses at prestigious colleges, attend career retrospectives at both the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute, and I even got a medal from the French government for “furthering the arts in France.” This cockeyed maturity is driving me crazy! Suddenly the worst thing that can happen to a creative person has happened to me. I am accepted. How can I “struggle” when my onetime underground movies are now easily available? Even Multiple Maniacs was rehabilitated music-rights-wise and is back in theatrical release from Janus Films, the original distributor of Godard and Truffaut movies, for God’s sake. Pink Flamingos has played on television! How can I whine about my films being hard to see when Warner Bros. now handles many of my titles and Criterion, the classiest of all DVD distributors, is restoring some of my rudest celluloid atrocities? Even the Museum of Modern Art now has in their collection the elements of my earliest 8mm movies that have never been formally released, and, jeez, seven of the books I’ve written are still in print and two of them became New York Times best sellers. How could that be? How? Read More