February 7, 2019 Look Eleanor Ray’s Minimalist Memories By Kyle Chayka Eleanor Ray, Marfa Window, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York. In Marfa, Texas, three hours into the desert from El Paso, the artist Donald Judd installed a hundred geometric sculptures in two disused artillery sheds. Arrayed in a grid are boxes made of milled aluminum, all the same size but each uniquely composed with different patterns of segmented space. Through the sheds’ massive windows, sun and blue sky and yellowed scrub reflect on the aluminum at shifting angles. As you walk through the space, it becomes hard to tell whether you’re looking at a solid sheet of metal or only the illusion of one, created by light. Photography is banned in the Marfa installation; only a few sanctioned images exist. Photos could never capture the experience of being surrounded by the boxes because pictures flatten the experience, turning it into a shallow singular impression—the Instagram version—rather than the active process of perception that Judd sought. Instead of photos, the young Brooklyn-based artist Eleanor Ray has depicted the boxes in a series of hardcover-book-size paintings that preserve the ambiguity. In Ray’s luminous oils, the walls, windows, and metal alike dissolve into thin brushstrokes that hover between landscape and abstraction. It’s up to the viewer to decide what’s what. The Marfa paintings are part of Ray’s exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in SoHo, on view through February 10. Since 2012, Ray has been drawn to this kind of ekphrastic painting, representing works of art while also capturing the peculiar sensation of looking at an art object, part sensory and part intellectual. Over time, she’s gathered a specific canon of artists who have engaged with the act of seeing in space, some of them mid-century Minimalists and others much older. Ray has painted Judd’s loft in SoHo, Agnes Martin’s house in New Mexico, Piet Mondrian’s geometric canvases hanging in a geometric gallery, and the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico’s crisp frescoes in San Marco. Read More
February 6, 2019 At Work Fat City, Fifty Years Later: An Interview with Leonard Gardner By David Lida Fifty years ago, in 1969, a boxing novel unlike any other that has seen the light of day, before or since, was published. Fat City, by Leonard Gardner, upends the triumphalist clichés of boxing stories, in which a palooka from nowhere overcomes all obstacles through fierce dedication and hard work and wins the title. To say that Fat City is about boxing would be like saying that In Search of Lost Time is about parties in Paris or Moby-Dick is about whaling. Boxing is the setting, and it’s one that Gardner knows firsthand. But the novel is about hope, illusion, and love, and the corruption and self-deception that destroy those things. It’s a lean and sinewy novel, without a single surplus sentence. Considered a masterpiece—by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson, and Raymond Carver, among others—the book is still in print at New York Review Books. Fat City follows two would-be boxers—one, eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger, is on his way up, while the other, twenty-nine-year-old Billy Tully, is in a downward slide. No matter how hard they train, no matter how much they believe in themselves, no matter who they have in their corners, neither will ever get anywhere near a championship belt. The book is set in the city of Stockton, in California’s Central Valley, where Gardner grew up. Stockton is noted for its high crime rate and its low literacy level. It is the second-largest U.S. city to have ever filed for bankruptcy. Ernie and Billy frequent greasy, fleabag hotels; sweaty gymnasiums with flooded, blocked drains; blistering fields where boxers earn a day’s pay picking onions or tomatoes; and violent skid row bars where patrons nurse their cut-rate shots and beers. In 1972, Gardner wrote the screenplay to adapt Fat City into one of the saddest movies ever filmed, directed by John Huston. Gardner lives in Marin County, California, about a hundred miles from Stockton. He is now eighty-five, tall, lanky, and cordial, with a full head of hair more brown than gray. He is under contract for a second novel. I caught up with him in Berkeley to talk about the book, its film adaptation, and his life as a writer. Read More
February 6, 2019 Arts & Culture Stories That Reclaim the Future By Victor LaValle From Roger Dean’s album cover for Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. My father and I saw each other only three times before he died. The first was when I was about ten, the second was in my early twenties, and the last doesn’t matter right now. I want to tell you about the second time, when I went up to Syracuse to visit and he tried to make me join the GOP. Let me back up a little and explain that my mother is a black woman from Uganda and my dad was a white man from Syracuse, New York. He and my mother met in New York City in the late sixties, got married, had me, and promptly divorced. My mother and I stayed in Queens while my dad returned to Syracuse. He remarried quickly and had another son with my stepmother. Paul. When I finished college I enrolled in graduate school for writing. I’d paid for undergrad with loans and grants, and debt already loomed over me. I showed up at my dad’s place hoping he’d cosign for my grad-school loans. I felt he owed me since he hadn’t been in my life at all. Also, I felt like I’d been on an epic quest just to reach this point. I got into Cornell University, but boy did I hate being there. Long winters, far from New York City, and the kind of dog-eat-dog atmosphere that would make a Wall Street trader sweat. But I’d graduated. And now I wanted to go back to school. More than that, I wanted to become a writer. Couldn’t my dad see me as a marvel? Couldn’t he support me just this once? Nope. At the time I felt incensed. In hindsight, I see he was a married man with a wife and a teenager to support; he worked as a parole officer, made a decent salary, but the man had never been well-off even once in his life. He wasn’t cruel about it, but he would not help. Read More
February 5, 2019 Redux Redux: A Game of Touch Football in a Snowstorm 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. Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photo: Thousandrobots. This week, we bring you Don DeLillo’s 1993 Art of Fiction interview, the first installment of Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special, and Greg Kosmicki’s poem “Today.” 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. Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) There’s a zone I aspire to. Finding it is another question. It’s a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that’s at the center of a writer’s consciousness—this writer’s anyway. First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do. In End Zone, a number of characters play a game of touch football in a snowstorm. There’s nothing rapturous or magical about the writing. The writing is simple. But I wrote the passage, maybe five or six pages, in a state of pure momentum, without the slightest pause or deliberation. Read More
February 5, 2019 Archive of Longing Posthumous Bolaño By Dustin Illingworth In his new monthly column, Archive of Longing, Dustin Illingworth examines recently released books, with a focus on the small presses, the reissues, the esoteric, and the newly translated. Right image: stencil of Roberto Bolaño from Barcelona, 2012 The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño idolized Jorge Luis Borges. “I could live under a table reading Borges,” he once told an interviewer. In the Argentine metaphysician, Bolaño found a path through the Latin American Boom’s sticky, commercial aftermath. Borges, with his elegance, his recursiveness, his allegorical purity and erudition, may at first blush seem worlds apart from the violent, hard-boiled predilections that came to define Bolaño’s oeuvre. But to think so is to overlook Bolaño’s subtle comic chops and lifelong interest in pulp. One of the great gifts Bolaño bestows upon Borges in return is how, in essays and interviews, he dispels the aura of brainy sobriety that tends to rarify his hero into an abstraction. Bolaño absorbed the cosmopolitanism and menace of Borges’s lesser-known stories—he was especially fond of the detective potboilers Borges wrote, pseudonymously, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. But he also pursued something more corporeal, savage, and belatedly modern in his own work. To a remarkable degree, Bolaño’s characters—all of them poets or poets manqués, regardless of their stated profession—delineate the aches and appetites that moor the gentle madness of their art. They eat ham sandwiches, fuck in stairwells, fight, sob, ride motorcycles, drink coffee, and read until their eyes burn. They are often poor or hungry, morally benighted, naive, wretched with longing and a writer’s remote gratifications. “Literature is basically a dangerous calling,” Bolaño said during a 1999 acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and his work, like a slow mugging, poses a persistent, shiv-sharp question: What price would you pay for literature? Read More
February 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The Museum at Auschwitz By Sigrid Rausing A corridor at Auschwitz (Photograph: Sigrid Rausing) “And elsewhere other workers were tearing open the dead”—Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust How ordinary it seemed at first, a museum—the word is important—on the outskirts of the little industrial town of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz in German. Coaches and cars in a parking lot. A modest snack bar, some buildings. The driver showed us where to go. We joined the line of people for the airport-style security, though it felt more casual, pleasantly shabby. We were shepherded through, moved forward, took our headsets and receivers, found ourselves in a group of fifteen or so people, waited for our guide. We got a sticker for our coats, “English.” We could see the entrance; walked toward it and through it. How low it was, the terrible sign over the gate: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. The camp orchestra played there, by the side of one of the barracks. The scale of it is shocking, people say, but I was struck by how small it was, the original Auschwitz, or Auschwitz 1. Mordecai Lichtenstein, a survivor, called it a “show camp” in his testimony to the Jewish Central Information Office in May 1945, and perhaps it was, at one time: tidy rows of two-story brick Polish army barracks, built in the twenties and thirties. Tiled stoves in large rooms. Wooden floors. The prisoners slept on the floor, on straw and coarse canvas. Washrooms. Rows of toilets. The kapo, the block eldest, had his or her own room: a narrow single bed, a chair, a table. Read More