May 28, 2019 Redux Redux: Blue in the Evenings 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. Walter Mosley. This week at The Paris Review, we’re excited for the lazy, hazy days of summer that are about to begin. Read Walter Mosley’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Susan Minot’s short story “House of Women” and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Memorial Day 1950.” 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. Walter Mosley, The Art of Fiction No. 234 Issue no. 220 (Spring 2017) People ask me if I write even when I’m on vacation. And I say, Man, do you take a shit on vacation? Read More
May 28, 2019 Arts & Culture What Makes a Poet Difficult? By Stephanie Burt Benjamin Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn, 1842, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. T. S. Eliot announced portentously in 1921 that “poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult,” because modern life was confusing and difficult, too. The idea that new poems should be harder to read than prose, that serious poems pose a challenge to most readers, may seem like it began in the twentieth century, with the writers called high modernists (Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein), who distanced themselves from prose sense in new ways. And yet some poems have seemed hard to read for a while. Eliot made his announcement in the course of his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” about John Donne and the contemporaries of Donne. Lord Byron complained in 1819 that William Wordsworth had grown incomprehensible: Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion” …….(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages), Has given a sample from the vasty version …….Of his new system to perplex the sages; ’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion, …….And may appear so when the dog-star rages— And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel. Most readers who try The Excursion do find it hard going; almost all think it’s too long. The earlier, more influential Wordsworth—the one who liked daffodils—can be a challenge, too. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) consisted mostly of poems about peasants and rural scenes; its plain language seemed groundbreaking—or disturbing—for its apparent simplicity, like a Chuck Berry single on a playlist full of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. It might have seemed, even, literally revolutionary: Wordsworth’s new ways of writing about peasants and other low-status people came out of his sympathies with the French Revolution, which he and his friends first supported, then came to oppose. Read More
May 28, 2019 Mess With a Classic Proust and the Joy of Suffering By Elisa Gabbert In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general). Marcel Proust. Hulton Archive/Stringer. One recent Monday evening, I scanned through our bookshelves for an unread classic—I had one last piece to write in this series on revisiting the canon. I considered writing about Moby-Dick, but did not seriously consider reading Moby-Dick. I want to, very much in fact, but I rarely read long books, and moreover feel that I’m saving Moby-Dick for an unclear future experience, some contained and isolating context it deserves—a long sea voyage, my deathbed. Perhaps I could write about not reading Moby-Dick. Then I thought about In Search of Lost Time, another novel people, especially writers, almost brag about not having read, as though admitting you haven’t read Proust suggests you’ve read everything else. I pulled Swann’s Way off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking—it was not just good. It was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust. Over the next couple of nights I read the “Overture” chapter. I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was “reading Proust,” having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre. When friends asked what I was reading, I said, “I’m reading Proust, actually,” acknowledging the improbability. “Wow,” said my friend Kathleen, who knows me well. “Do you think you’ll finish it?” “I highly doubt it,” I said. It was more readable than I’d expected, but it wasn’t exactly light reading. That first paragraph was deceptive, in part by virtue of being a paragraph. Later I read that Proust hadn’t wanted In Search of Lost Time to have paragraphs at all. He wanted it to appear as one volume, with no sections, chapters, or even margins. It’s as though he wanted it to be unreadable, more a gesture than a text. Read More
May 24, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Satire, Suzi Wu, and Starling Days By The Paris Review Ma Jian. Photo: Flora Drew. © Flora Drew. Ma Jian’s China Dream, translated by Flora Drew and published earlier this month by Counterpoint Press, is a short, sharp-toothed satire of Xi Jinping’s China. The novel depicts a corrupt bureaucrat’s attempts to implement a new government initiative to overwrite people’s dreams. Ma, a dissident writer who lives in exile in London, portrays a contemporary China in which consumerism goes hand in hand with totalitarianism, and memories of the Cultural Revolution surface at the most inopportune events. China Dream is funny in a kind of hopeless way—the title itself comes from a slogan popularized by the Chinese government in 2013, and a Red Guard–themed orgy scene halfway through reads like a nightmare—and it raises questions about political violence and the suppression of memory that stay with you long after the book has ended. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
May 24, 2019 Arts & Culture In Praise of Travel, Particularly on Horseback By Antoine Compagnon Carolus-Duran, Equestrian portrait of Mademoiselle Croizette, 1873, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Michel de Montaigne is best imagined on horseback; firstly, because that was how he traveled around his own lands and between his estate and Bordeaux, as well as elsewhere in France—to Paris, Rouen, or Blois, and even farther afield (during his great journey in 1580 he traveled through Switzerland and Germany all the way to Rome). But he should also be pictured this way because he never felt more comfortable anywhere than in the saddle; it was here that he found his equilibrium, his seat: Travel is in my opinion a very profitable exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein, neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am, without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together. First of all, traveling enables us to experience the world’s diversity, and Montaigne insists that there is no better education. Traveling shows us the richness of nature, proves the relativity of customs and beliefs, and shakes up our certainties; in short, it teaches us skepticism, which was Montaigne’s fundamental doctrine. Read More
May 24, 2019 Look Tim Rollins and K.O.S. By Angel Abreu TIM ROLLINS and K.O.S., On the Origin of Species – Instinct (after Darwin), 2015 (Courtesy Studio K.O.S., Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein) “Today we make history.” This was the constant refrain from Tim Rollins, as a group of teenagers filed into the South Bronx studio every afternoon after school. The group had named itself Kids of Survival and the lofty idea of making history became ingrained in the fabric of our collective consciousness. Our aim was to change our lives and become immortal through the creation of art. Today, Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival, the longest running art collective in history, is included in over 120 museum and public collections. Since its inception in a junior high school classroom in the Bronx, it has exhibited hundreds of times at major galleries and institutions worldwide I was fortunate to have grown up in the South Bronx in eighties. Yes, there was violence. No, it wasn’t necessarily the safest neighborhood. Drug dealing and prostitution were rampant at the time, and the AIDS epidemic hit our neighborhood especially hard, but there was an energy ignited by music, fashion, and the visual arts. The South Bronx was the epicenter of hip-hop and its effect on the community was palpable. Despite the abject appearance of the abandoned buildings and vacant lots, there was a certain defiance born from genuine pride in the community. If you had some sort of special talent, like drawing for instance, you garnered respect, including respect from drug dealers and other rough entities. They left this nerdy kid alone. In ways both physical and metaphorical, the making of art provided me safety. Read More