November 21, 2018 Arts & Culture No One Has a Monopoly on Death By Inger Christensen Peder Severin Krøyer, Copenhagen: Roofs under the Snow, 1870–1900, oil on canvas, 7 x 9 in. January 1981 It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life. It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world. So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing. We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow. We see what’s happening, and we’re happy about what’s not happening. We compare what’s terrifying with what’s even more terrifying. We compare limited nuclear war with total nuclear war, and the comparison deprives us of the last remnant of our natural horror. We see thousands of dead birds, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, thousands of death wishes and their violent expressions, but as long as we see all this annihilation in all its well-known forms, at least we’re seeing something, and as long as we see something, total annihilation hasn’t happened yet. Read More
November 21, 2018 Arts & Culture The Moral of the Story By Anthony Madrid This is the second part of a two-part thing on Aesop’s fables. Part 1 can be found here, but you don’t have to read part 1 to understand part 2. Illustration from The Fables of Aesop (Jacobs) Were you told, as a child, that fables are stupid? I think I was explicitly told that. Look at these two quotes: (a) “Fables are literature before literature was even a baby. Fables are four-celled literature.” (b) “Fables are like the children for whom they are composed: primitive, annoying, and brutal.” Items (a) and (b) are not things that were said to me when I was a child. Those quotations are me, when I was first teaching literature, twenty-five years ago. I was distilling what I’d been told. I felt I must warn the young as I had been warned: “Lessons are bad. Talking animals are bad. Anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is bad.” Today I think the opposite, straight down the line. Lessons are good; talking animals, hell yes. And anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is probably my only reason for getting up in the morning. Read More
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