March 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Memoirs of an Ass: Part 2 By Anthony Madrid A recap for those who missed part 1 (which is available here): Second century A.D., a strange and gigantically influential Latin text was written and passed around: Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. It’s a kind of first-person picaresque romance, ’bout two hundred pages long, where a guy, “Lucius,” is just too darn curious about magic and winds up transformed into a hee-hawing, much-listening donkey for most of the book. He has various adventures, he overhears a couple dozen stories, and at the end he becomes a human being again. The book is ramjam with sneaky-pete authorial maneuvers. Apuleius teases; he tips the wink; he lets you in on the joke; he locks you out. That, and the fact that there are dirty parts, has ensured the work’s continuing vitality for eighteen hundred years—’specially since the Renaissance. I, Anthony Madrid, am obsessed with this book. What follows is a jumble of short entries, notebook-like, to help whip up interest in the thing. There are a lot of people out there in Paris Review land who would love it if they would only give it a try. Read More
March 13, 2018 Redux Redux: John Edgar Wideman, Gail Godwin, Jascha Kessler 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. John Edgar Wideman For daylight saving time, we bring you some inspiration for rising early from John Edgar Wideman, a story about timelessness by Gail Godwin, and, to remind you that you’re not the only one, Jascha Kessler’s poem “On Forgetting to Set My Alarm Clock.” Read More
March 13, 2018 Arts & Culture On Finally Reading Joseph McElroy’s Lost Magnum Opus By Adam Dalva Obsession had brought me to Joseph McElroy’s apartment building. I was vibrating from too much caffeine. I had been up late with his 1,200-page novel, Women and Men, suffering the long-forgotten nervousness of cramming for a difficult final. The elevator opened directly into his apartment—a surprise. I hadn’t prepared my facial expression. McElroy, in a purple checked shirt tucked neatly into neutral pants, greeted me cautiously. As he led me through a maze of books, I noted the strength of his voice and the way, at eighty-seven, he walked with only the faintest hint of caution. I sat in his study beneath a large printed photo of McElroy himself staring angrily down at me. For the past decade, every time I’d entered a used bookstore, it was with the hope of finally finding a copy of Women and Men. Now I was interviewing its author, something that I’d had no desire to do. My interest in the novel began with Jonathan Franzen’s “Mr. Difficult,” a takedown of William Gaddis. I wasn’t yet aware of the phenomenon of big-game hunting, the youngish critic making a case for their own fiction by taking down a writer who is either too lofty or too dead (ideally both) to punch back. Franzen’s argument relied on a binary: there was the “Status model” of evaluating novels—artistic greatness regardless of the novel’s popular success—and the “Contract model”—a friendly egalitarian compact between writer and reader. While Franzen allows that certain novels like House of Mirth can be appreciated in both modes, the categories diverge over challenging works. For a contract reader, difficulty is an impediment. I took note when he identified a status canon of “intellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers … Pynchon, DeLillo, Heller, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs, Barth, Barthelme, Hannah, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin.” I had never heard of Joseph McElroy, whose 1987 book regularly sells for more than three hundred dollars on eBay. The one volume in the New York Public Library system is impossible to secure, there is no e-book, and I grew fascinated with the elusiveness of Women and Men. I wasn’t alone. Most online discussions of the book are tips on finding it. The novel was notorious, eleven years of labor that quickly vanished from cultural consciousness. Many books go out of print because they are unremarkable, but few acquire the cult status of Women and Men. We who hadn’t read it all had the same questions: Why was it so long? And was it good? And why, despite its failure, did it still fascinate so many? Read More
March 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Duncan Hannah’s Seventies New York By M. H. Miller Duncan Hannah in his studio and apartment in Brooklyn. Photo by David Coggins. In the last decade, a cottage industry has sprung up around wistful recollections of New York in the seventies, from memoirs authored by people who lived through it, like Richard Hell (2013’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp) and Patti Smith (Just Kids, which won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction), to novels by people too young to have been there (Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire) to television series that gleefully depict the city when it was near bankruptcy and had a harder edge (The Get Down, about the burgeoning hip-hop scene, and The Deuce, about the golden age of pornographic theaters in Times Square). Some of these works are endearing pieces of art, but all of them inevitably look back with a glimmer of sentimentality—and perhaps envy—at a time when it was still possible to live comfortably as an artist in New York without a trust fund. Twentieth-Century Boy, by the painter Duncan Hannah, a collection of the artist’s notebooks from the seventies, has none of the retroactive fondness afforded by distance. Beginning at age seventeen, Hannah meticulously documented his conservative upbringing in Minnesota (against which he rebelled with a combination of alcohol, LSD, and a part-time job as an usher at the Guthrie Theatre, where he got to live out his hero-worship of figures like Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin) through his art education at Bard College in Upstate New York and his move, in 1973, to the city to attend Parsons and try to make it as an artist. Read More
March 12, 2018 Arts & Culture UFO Drawings from the National Archives By David Clarke The National Archives AIR 2/18961. Painting of a UFO spotted on 18 January 1975, near Birmingham. Later identified as satellites Zond 4 and Cosmos 460. With its origins in the aftermath of World War II, belief in extraterrestrial visitations has grown into one of the most widespread and persistent of modern mysteries. As one measure of its impact on British society, a 1998 opinion survey for the Daily Mail found that one third of the UK’s population believed that “extraterrestrial life has already visited Earth.” Of these, 2 percent (1.26 million people) claim to have seen a UFO or had direct experience of alien visitation. In conspiracy culture, stories circulate telling of UFO crashes, government cover-ups, and secret agreements between the U.S. military and alien intelligences. In the UK some believe the Ministry of Defense (MoD) operate a “secret army against the aliens” and employ special agents—the legendary Men in Black or MIB—to silence witnesses and remove hard evidence of UFO visitations. But in 2007, after decades of stonewalling questions about its UFO investigations, the MoD announced that it had decided to proactively release all its surviving files. This was, it said, to counter “the maze of rumor and frequently ill-informed speculation” that surrounded their role in this subject. In recognition of the fact that there was public interest in the content of their archives, thousands of pages of formerly secret documents were scanned and uploaded to the Internet. Only a small amount of information was “redacted” to remove names and addresses of people who had reported sightings and, occasionally, secret information that might harm national security if released. These are some examples of what was contained in those files, sent in by citizens to report their sightings. Read More
March 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Tennessee Williams in Four Objects By Margaret Bradham Thornton Left: Tennessee Williams, Self-portrait, undated, oil on canvas. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Right: Autograph manuscript notebook, 1943 March 12 to September 26 and undated entry dated “Late Tuesday Night” [24 March 1943]. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University. Tennessee Williams papers, 1932–1983, Ms Thr 397 (1355). In the decade I spent editing and annotating the notebooks of Tennessee Williams, I learned that one cannot find nor, as my editor Jonathan Brent noted, tell the story of anyone’s life in a linear way, certainly not Williams’s. As I endeavored to track down individuals with only their first names as guide and find and identify unpublished manuscripts referred to only in the most generic ways, my efforts, at times, took more the form of a scavenger hunt, even a flea-market trawl. Along the way, I unearthed several lost notebooks and unknown manuscripts, including a one-act play. Encouraged by the British Museum’s ability to tell the history of the world across a span of two million years with one hundred objects, I have chosen, from Williams’s archives, four objects from four categories—an unpublished poem, a passage from a journal, an unknown one-act play, and a letter—to give insight into his ambition, his psyche, his creative process, and, finally, his sense of humanity. Read More