November 20, 2018 Devil in the Details In Bed: The Mattress as Art By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s new monthly column, Devil in the Details, will focus on single objects throughout art history. In this installment, she looks at beds through the lens of Sarah Lucas’s exhibition “Au Naturel,” currently on view at the New Museum in New York City. Sarah Lucas, “Selfish in Bed II,” 2000. (© Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London) I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed lately—partly because I have been a little depressed; partly because I have been jet-lagged and therefore awake for every sunrise of the last four weeks; partly because all the beds I’ve found myself in lately are so big they seem to take up the entirety of the room, like a ship so large it becomes an island, and the rest of the map not worth exploring. There’s not much to do in bed, and yet you can do everything there. A bed can come to contain everything. Whenever I change my sheets, I am startled to encounter the ghost of me so deeply impressed on my mattress, where for five years I’ve only ever slept on one side. A me-size shadow of sweat, surrounded by little archipelagoes of period blood and chalky haloes of come. I can still recall a post that was popular in certain corners of sad-girl Tumblr, probably almost a decade ago; it was a photograph of a mattress, quilted and faded sateen, and spray-painted. It said PEOPLE FELL IN LOVE ON ME. Once, when an ex really missed me, he told me he wanted to send me a photo of the bloodstain I’d left on his mattress years earlier. When love is good, it’s like a Toulouse-Lautrec. You know the one—Le Lit. “In Bed.” All of life a haze of oil pastel. Everything thickly colored, rendered in tenderness, bright lines on toned paper. Two figures in bed, their shining faces turned toward each other in a warm room. When love is trying its best, it’s the Laura Owens rendering of the same drawing, from 2000, where the warm tones have been replaced with a stark wash of greenish blue, and the lovers’ heads peep out, barely defined—their eyelashes and mouths described with delicate lines. Read More
November 20, 2018 Redux Redux: The Old Juices Flowing 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. Barry Hannah. This week, we bring you Barry Hannah’s 2004 Art of Fiction interview, Hollis Summers’s short story “Mister Joseph Botts,” and John Ashbery’s poem “The Ritz Brothers on Moonlight Bay.” 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. Barry Hannah, The Art of Fiction No. 184 Issue no. 172 (Winter 2004) My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother’s sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely. Those were the days when it meant something to travel, when people were still grinning because you could drive a car over a hundred miles. So when they got together they really narrated. Children were supposed to be quiet, so we’d all go to bed, but I’d still hear these stories going into the night and people’s laughter. It was a delightful way to go to sleep on Christmas or Thanksgiving. Read More
November 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Ghost in the Dirt By Rowan Ricardo Phillips John Lavery, Tennis under the Orange Trees, Cannes, 1929, oil on canvas. The clay season is a ghost story. It always has been. There’s a ghost in the red dirt. He ran hotels for a living, and oddly enough, given how things have turned out in tennis, he was Swiss. You have never heard of him. And no judgments, but he was a bit of a hustler. His tremendous ambition coupled with his creative bookkeeping forced him into bankruptcy twice. His name was Georges Henri Gougoltz. He spent the last decades of his life as a hotel proprietor by name but in reality owing important men a considerable amount of money. After they took his hotel from him, he was obliged to run that gold mine he had developed from the private castle it once was as though nothing had changed—a figurehead to smile at and arrange things for the ever-rising number of foreign elites who wintered there seeking out the sun, their social peers, and the increasingly famous red clay courts of the Hôtel Beau-Site in Cannes, France. When I tell you that he killed himself on a January morning in 1903 by shooting himself in the head not once and not twice but three times—you probably won’t believe that he killed himself. And you probably shouldn’t. We’ll never know exactly what happened to him, but when, in 2017, Rafael Nadal lifted La Coupe des Mousquetaires ebulliently over his head for a tenth year, standing proudly on a makeshift podium at the center of that rectangle of brick red in the middle of Roland-Garros’s show court, Gougoltz’s crushed-ceramic sand courts—the ones that once graced the foot of the hill of the Beau-Site just past the lush and sloped sculptured courtyard, like a mirage of politely placed tonnage of light-red dust at the edge of a politely placed jungle of imported greenery—were with him there, inhuman and yet veritably part of him, a hundred-fifty-year-old first idea. Read More
November 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Pugilist at School By Mark Jude Poirier Thom Jones’s first collection of stories, The Pugilist at Rest, was published in 1993, when he was in his late forties. He died in October 2016, at the age of seventy-one. This October, Little, Brown and Company published Night Train: New and Selected Stories, a definitive posthumous collection of his work. Thom Jones (Via Little, Brown and Company) On the first manuscript I submitted for critique at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop back in the fall of ’95, Thom Jones, my professor, crossed out the word breasts and replaced it with sexy milk jugs. He didn’t offer much more advice, written or verbal; he let my classmates do all the work. A few days later, as I sat in his office, watching the eyes of his shiny black Kit-Cat clock roll back and forth, listening to him talk about his psychiatric meds, his father’s suicide, and how Sally Field’s publicist kept hounding him to meet with Sally, I was mildly entertained, but wondered whether we’d ever get around to discussing my story. We didn’t. I was cynical and miserable that first month of graduate school in Iowa City. I lived in one of two apartments above a drywall company, behind a soon-to-be-defunct Godfather’s Pizza, next to a vast lot of brand-new mobile homes. Beyond the mobile homes were a litter-filled swamp and the biggest Walmart I’d ever seen. My next-door neighbors were bikers, one of whom vomited in the washing machine we shared. They had very loud and very frequent sex that they narrated with porn clichés. I was grateful that I never heard them scream or moan the words sexy milk jugs. Most people in the workshop lived within walking distance of one another, and within stumbling distance of the Fox Head and George’s, two of our favorite watering holes. I lived three carless miles away on Highway 1 West, in what felt like the epicenter of everything that was wrong with America. Read More
November 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Starvation and Suffering Also Get You High By Eileen Myles Can Xue. “Have you always treated the whole world as your home, Fourth Uncle?” “Not the whole world—I’m always wandering nearby.” Books have lighting, I think. And I speak as a dedicated and conflicted reader lured hopelessly away from the page by television and the entire history of film available now on various sites—yet some books drop me nicely in the middle, right in between the modes of reading and watching, to live alongside me in the dilemma. Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium is lit a lot like Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The astronaut wanders through the weeds and trees of his dacha before he heads off on his voyage. Yet he is already gone. We are leaving the earth but that is the earth. It’s got this crazy nostalgic light. I mean, it’s not exactly that. Maybe it’s the light of uncanniness that follows our departure from a movie theater during the day, maybe that’s the version of lighting or reality that Can Xue’s book shares with film. I also think of Fellini’s Satyricon and its use of the ancient mode of storytelling in which a character begins to speak and the narrative darts swiftly after them down the rabbit hole of the story. In Can Xue’s Love, all the characters are connected to each other. There’s no one story I can tell. And they are laughing about it, too. At their own inconstancy, their changeability. At the outset, you meet Cuilan, a widow, so you think it’s about her. No … but it’s way more about her lover Wei Bo. Wei Bo appears at her door to say that something has come up and he can’t keep their date. Weeks pass and he never returns. Cuilan treks off mournfully to her ancestral home. Her relatives (who have all become mysteriously mangled and wizened since the last time she saw them) are hardly welcoming. Then they begin speaking about Wei Bo, which feels inside out, but the world already is. The countryside is destroyed. In the relatives’ house there’s an ambient, estranged type of hearing that’s become commonplace. People chattering out the window, there’s a banging upstairs even if there isn’t an upstairs. At night her relatives are in a tree fighting and laughing and one falls, hits the ground with a thud. She goes out to investigate and everything goes silent at once. Next day (while practically pushing her out the door) her cousin offers this, “Our daytime and nighttime are two completely different days. If you always lived here and never left you’d be able to sense this. It’s too bad you won’t have the chance.” Read More
November 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Singing, Sequins, and Slaughterhouses By The Paris Review Still from On Body and Soul. “I would like to sleep / with you, to enter / your sleep,” go a few lines from Margaret Atwood’s 1981 poem “Variations on the Word Sleep,” and I recently found myself repeating these to myself as I watched On Body and Soul, the 2017 drama written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. The film—which won the Golden Bear at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival and has recently been released on Netflix—centers on the intense, off-kilter romance between two slaughterhouse employees, Endre and Mária, who discover through a series of work-related mishaps that they in fact share the same dream every night, one in which they appear to each other as deer in the woods. What could have been a twee cinematic disaster—Mária, with her nervous tics, is the sort of female character a lesser director would portray as nothing more than quirky—is saved by the brutality with which Enyedi juxtaposes Endre and Mária’s interactions with cuts of animals being killed, dissected, and turned into something far more sterile than their original bodies. To sleep beside someone requires a certain level of trust, of intimacy, and by the film’s shockingly violent ending, Enyedi successfully explores the dissolution of the self essential to both dreaming and desire. —Rhian Sasseen Read More