May 1, 2019 Look Old Ghosts By The Paris Review Advances in technology, despite their benefits, often coincide with spikes in fear, paranoia, and doubt. Just as the internet has fertilized the rich soil of conspiracy theory, the advent of photography and the birth of modern spiritualism in the nineteenth century are inextricable. Purported paranormal encounters, previously the subject of rumors and candlelit retellings, could now be reproduced and circulated in so-called spirit photographs. Emboldened by new forms of communication, such as the electric telegraph, more and more people sought to commune with the beyond; séances experienced a boom in popularity. In the midst of all this excitement about lost souls, scientists stayed committed to their constant mission: pinning down how the world works. The magician and psychologist Matthew L. Tompkins’s new book, The Spectacle of Illusion, chronicles the struggles of the scientific community to understand—and sometimes debunk—the illusions and mysteries that have so captivated the general public since the eighteenth century. A selection of archival photographs and illustrations from the book appears below. William S. Marriott seems lost in deep thought as a trio of mysterious spirit forms approach him. The magician worked tirelessly to expose the tricks that mediums used to exploit credulous individuals, who may well have been seeking contact from recently deceased loved ones. Marriott and Three Ominous Materializations, 1910. Image from The Spectacle of Illusion, published by D.A.P. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Read More
May 1, 2019 Arts & Culture How Not to Be Forgotten By Lauren Kane On the legacy of Esphyr Slobodkina, one of America’s first abstract artists. There is no biography of Esphyr Slobodkina at the New York Public Library. There is, however, an eleven-hundred-page typewritten manuscript self-published by Slobodkina in the eighties, titled Notes for a Biographer. The manuscript is intended to be raw material—“I wrote Notes for a Biographer so that somebody can pick it up where I have left it and put it into more usable form,” Slobodkina told the now-defunct Long Island Journal in 1999. However, though she was an influential avant-garde artist in the thirties and forties, and a founder of the American abstract art movement, interest in Slobodkina’s work and life has yet to materialize. If you scribble out the call number on a carbon-paper slip at the New York Public Library, you’ll receive the manuscript in five volumes, bound in hardcover. Reproductions of personal photographs on sturdy card stock are pasted onto pages. You can’t check Notes out of the library, and you can’t buy any copies anywhere. Contained within the physical immensity of these pages was a project of legacy making, coping with the author’s acute dread of obscurity. At a storage facility on Long Island, in a corner unit nested inside a quiet labyrinth of sickly-yellow walls, Ann Marie Sayers, the person closest to Slobodkina at the end of her life, pulled the Bubble Wrap off painting after painting. “I feel like I’m in a candy store. I don’t know what to show you next,” she said. The plastic popped as she revealed Slobodkina’s bright, confectionary-colored abstract paintings. Some were finished pieces, five by five feet, and others were small studies, on canvases the size of printer paper. There were boxes of sculptures made from typewriter parts and boxes of handmade clothes and handbags. A dress mannequin stood in the corner. More boxes, with labels like “polychrome books” and “Hindu embroidery,” were stacked high, beside shelves of the children’s books Slobodkina had written and illustrated—most famously Caps for Sale. The variety and abundance of objects made the storage unit thrum with energy. “She never gave thought to her age, except for what she had to get done. But never frantic, always meticulous,” Sayers said. “She was always engaged in a project, almost how you are if you feel you’re going to run out of time.” Read More
April 30, 2019 Redux Redux: April in Paris 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. Sketch by Ivy Nicholson, 1956. This week, we’re listening to that old jazz standard “April in Paris” and reading Françoise Sagan’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Zygmunt Haupt’s short story “In Paris and in Arcadia” and Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Parisian Dream.” 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. Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15 Issue no. 14 (Autumn 1956) I had read a lot of stories. It seemed to me impossible not to want to write one. Instead of leaving for Chile with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That seems to me the great adventure. Read More
April 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be Australian? By Nam Le David Malouf. Photo: Conrad Del Villar. © Conrad Del Villar. There he is, in his fat golden tie, accepting the honor of his lifetime (so far). In his steady, high-pitched voice, David Malouf delivers his Neustadt Lecture at the University of Oklahoma, under the aegis of World Literature Today. He speaks of “the power of language as a means of structuring, interpreting, remaking experience; the need to remap the world so that wherever you happen to be is the center.” Later, he describes himself as “a writer whose immediate world and material happen to be Australian.” Happen to be. In the precise, lapidarian chiselings of Malouf’s prose, this repetition takes on special significance. Happen, as in deed, but also as in happenstance. Something occurs and something is. This is the accepted order. What occurs—in this instance—is Australianness. And here, at this point of deep concurrence, Malouf and I most meaningfully part ways. * Concurrence first. For his Complete Stories, a collection that gathers up at least three decades of work in the short form, Malouf picks his epigraph from Pascal’s Pensées: When I consider the brevity of my life, swallowed up as it is in the eternity that precedes and will follow it, the tiny space I occupy and what is visible to me, cast as I am into a vast infinity of spaces that I know nothing of and which know nothing of me, I take fright, I am stunned to find myself here rather than elsewhere, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, and now rather than then. There is, in Malouf’s work, an innate awareness of the arbitrariness of things. An awareness that each of us—and what art we might make—is a product of chance and random concatenation. That against the questions of why here and not there, now and not then—there is no reason. This is the first, and prerequisite, principle of moral awareness. For first-worlders, especially, it slows us from thinking we deserve what we’ve merely happened into: our bodies and brains, with what faculties they possess; our genealogical, cultural, and linguistic inheritances; our situation in place and time, with its appurtenant advantages in health, education, and technology; our array of advantages themselves. Read More
April 30, 2019 Arts & Culture The Siege of Clarice Lispector By Mike Broida In 1949, Clarice Lispector found herself in a bit of a funk, despite the effusive acclaim surrounding her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, six years earlier. After the difficulty she’d faced getting her second novel, The Chandelier, published in 1946, her attempt to find a publisher for her third novel, The Besieged City, was proving no easier. The publisher of The Chandelier had rejected it, and so had many of Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious publishing houses. How was it that an author who had revolutionized Portuguese writing several years earlier, whose debut novel was praised as “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language” suddenly couldn’t get her name in print? The Besieged City’s translation into English would be even more arduous—it is only arriving now, in 2019, seventy years after its initial publication and forty-two years after its author’s death. Read More
April 29, 2019 Arts & Culture Adonis’s Poems of Ruin and Renewal By Robyn Creswell Adonis. Photo: Mariusz Kubik (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). Adonis’s Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is the central book of poems in modern Arabic literature. Published in 1961, its status in Arabic is comparable to The Waste Land in English or Duino Elegies in German. (Adonis collaborated on a translation of Eliot’s long poem while writing Mihyar). Like those works of European high modernism, Adonis’s collection is poetry of large and explicit ambitions. It evokes classical, Koranic, and Biblical sources on almost every page, even when announcing its own originality. It is a work of visionary exultation and powerful melancholy. It imagines a world of blight and barrenness and picks through the ruins for hints of resurrection. At the heart of Adonis’s book is the grandly inscrutable figure of Mihyar. “He has no ancestors, his roots are in his footsteps,” intones the opening “Psalm.” The myth of a hero who emerges from his own self-conception is central to Mihyar’s persona, but no literary figure can escape precursors. Many critics have noted Mihyar’s resemblance to the eleventh-century poet, Mihyar al-Daylami, a Zoroastrian convert to Shiism whose poems were celebrated and censored for their extravagant metaphors (extravagant even by the standards of classical Arabic). Others have pointed to Nietzsche’s immoralist prophet, Zarathustra, who preached the death of God, the coming of the superman, and the eternal return of the same. Mihyar is certainly a figure of extravagance. “He is the physics of things, he knows them and gives them names he does not divulge.” And Mihyar is clearly a heretical prophet. He rejects the very premise of monotheism and is as likely to spurn his flock as to give it counsel. When he does speak, he doesn’t offer parables or warnings, but rather fragments of apocalyptic lyricism: Tomorrow, tomorrow in fire and spring You’ll know I’m the slayer of flocks, You’ll know I’m the sower of seeds, Tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll see me with your own two eyes. (“Your Eyes Didn’t See Me”) Read More