March 7, 2019 Look R. Crumb’s Portraits of Aline and Others By The Paris Review Whatever one thinks of his subject matter, it’s difficult to deny R. Crumb’s prodigiousness with the pencil. He’s a master of crosshatching, and his illustrations and comics boil over with ideas, all sketched in his distinctive style: controlled yet frenzied, obsessed with proportion, often lewd and also oddly sweet. In his Art of Comics interview, Crumb hints at the birth of this style when he discusses how dropping acid for the first time fundamentally altered his work—and his view of the world. “I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality,” he says. “It didn’t seem real to me anymore. Seemed completely fake, only a paper-moon kind of world.” In lieu of the real world, Crumb created his own realm, some twisted amalgam of past, present, and subconscious. A new show at David Zwirner, “Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb,” gives us a glimpse into Crumb’s mind through comics tear sheets and rarely shown pages from his private sketchbooks. Perhaps most striking among the sketchbook selections are his portraits of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his longtime creative partner and wife. Lost in thought, she stares out from the page. She relaxes on the couch with her eyes half closed. She reads in the sunshine, her “ass getting sunburned while posing.” In a body of work notable for its horniness, these pictures of Aline stand out for their care and tenderness. No matter how lost Crumb gets in his own world (the introduction to his Art of Comics interview notes that as he worked on The Book of Genesis, “he pursued his vision in a desolate shelter in the mountains outside town, working for weeks without human contact”), he can always return to Aline to get his bearings, to find his way through this cardboard reality. Images from the David Zwirner exhibition—including a few of the Aline pages—appear below. Page from R. Crumb, Sketchbook, 1979–1981. © Robert Crumb, 1979–1981. Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner. Read More
March 7, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Suddenly Something Snaps By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, It’s been a long road of broken partnerships. Now, at the ripe age of sixty, I finally see the thread that ran through my disappointing and hurtful romantic choices. I had always found the wounded and the angry ones exciting. Oh my, the endless compromises. Today, I have found myself with a happy man. So simple, so drama-free, and so damn exciting. I would love a poem that addressed the journey that can lead to companionship and the love that can come when lives have been lived and time seems to be palpably limited. Xo, Wallowing in Love Read More
March 7, 2019 Arts & Culture James Tate’s Last, Last Poems By Matthew Zapruder JAMES TATE, CA. 1965. PHOTOGRAPH BY ELSA DORFMAN When James Tate died on July 8, 2015, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind more than twenty collections of poetry and prose, including Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, published right around the time of his death. Most of us assumed that this was his final book. But it turned out there were more poems, which have been assembled into a truly final volume, The Government Lake, to be published by Ecco in July of 2019. One of those poems, “Elvis Has Left the House,” appears in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue. Over the course of his career, Tate won every imaginable award available to American poets, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He was revered by poets of virtually every aesthetic persuasion, from stern formalists to wild experimentalists. He had a legion of poor imitators, whom my friends and I called “lost pilots” after the legendary, eponymous poem of Tate’s first book, which won the most prestigious prize for young poets of its time, the 1967 Yale Series of Younger Poets award. When he wrote that book, he was only twenty-two, a kid from a deeply religious Pentecostal family in Kansas City, who somehow found his way to poetry and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The legend goes that he just showed up, showed them his poems, and was admitted on the spot by the director of the program, Donald Justice. If that story’s not true, I don’t want to know. Read More
March 6, 2019 Bulletin Kelli Jo Ford Wins 2019 Plimpton Prize; Benjamin Nugent Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is less than a month away—tickets are still available here—and the editorial committee of our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2019 honorees, Kelli Jo Ford and Benjamin Nugent. Winners of the Plimpton Prize include Isabella Hammad, Alexia Arthurs, Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, and Yiyun Li; Southern Prize winners include David Sedaris, Vanessa Davis, Chris Bachelder, Mark Leyner, Ben Lerner, and Elif Batuman. The Review began awarding prizes to its contributors in 1956; here’s a full list of past recipients, including Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Christina Stead, Denis Johnson, Frank Bidart, and Annie Proulx. Read More
March 6, 2019 Arts & Culture When Mario Vargas Llosa Punched Gabriel García Márquez By Silvana Paternostro In 1976, Mario Vargas Llosa hit Gabriel García Márquez with a right hook and promptly ended their friendship. Below, Gabo’s friends recall the incident and its aftermath. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa photo: Arild Vågen. RODRIGO MOYA It was about eleven or twelve in the morning and I was in my house in Colonia Nápoles, where I had an office, a big house with an editorial office in one part, and in the other part I lived with my girlfriend and my two children. There’s a knock at the door and it’s Gabo and Mercedes. I was very happy and very surprised to see him. Gabo was already a friend of mine, but there are hierarchies in friendships. It was a friendship of guarded proportions. I was a newspaper photographer and he was what he is. Back then I didn’t presume to call him Gabo. Calling him Gabito was for me like calling Cervantes “Miguelito.” For me, he’s Gabriel García Márquez. They came for the photographs. He told me, “I want you to take some pictures of my black eye.” They came to my house because they trust me. He wore a jacket. It wasn’t the plaid one. It was another one. And she was in black with large sunglasses. And I said to him, “What happened?” He made a joke, like, “I was boxing and I lost.” The one who spoke up was Mercedes. She said that Vargas Llosa had sucker punched him. “And why was that?” “I don’t know. I went up to him with my arms wide open to greet him. We hadn’t seen each other for some time.” I already knew they had been very good friends in Barcelona and everything, and the two couples got along because he had talked about that with our mutual friend Guillermo Angulo. I mean, it was something everybody knew; when I found out it was Mario Vargas Llosa who had hit him, I was very surprised. They sat down in the living room and began to talk to me. Read More
March 6, 2019 Arts & Culture How I Began to Write By Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel García Márquez delivered the following speech at the Athenaeum of Caracas, in Venezuela, on May 3, 1970. Gabriel García Márquez. Photo: Patrick Curry. First of all, forgive me for speaking to you seated, but the truth is that if I stand, I run the risk of collapsing with fear. Really. I always thought I was fated to spend the most terrible five minutes of my life on a plane, before twenty or thirty people, and not like this, before two hundred friends. Fortunately, what is happening to me right now allows me to begin to speak about my literature, since I was thinking that I began to be a writer in the same way I climbed up on this platform: I was coerced. I confess I did all I could not to attend this assembly: I tried to get sick, I attempted to catch pneumonia, I went to the barber, hoping he’d slit my throat, and, finally, it occurred to me to come here without a jacket and tie so they wouldn’t let me into a meeting as serious as this one, but I forgot I was in Venezuela, where you can go anywhere in shirtsleeves. The result: here I am, and I don’t know where to start. But I can tell you, for example, how I began to write. It had never occurred to me that I could be a writer, but in my student days Eduardo Zalamea Borda, editor of the literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, published a note in which he said that the younger generation of writers had nothing to offer, that a new short-story writer, a new novelist, could not be seen anywhere. And he concluded by declaring that he was often reproached because his paper published only the very well-known names of old writers and nothing by the young, whereas the truth, he said, was that no young people were writing. Then a feeling of solidarity with my generational companions arose in me, and I resolved to write a story simply to shut the mouth of Eduardo Zalamea Borda, who was my great friend or, at least, became my great friend later. I sat down, wrote the story, and sent it to El Espectador. I had my second shock the following Sunday when I opened the paper and there was my full-page story with a note in which Eduardo Zalamea Borda acknowledged that he had been wrong, because obviously with “that story the genius of Colombian literature had emerged,” or something along those lines. Read More