March 15, 2018 At Work I’m the Marmalade: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum By Ben Shields In the fall of last year, I found myself in Tenth Avenue’s 192 Books, chatting with a stranger. The man (whose enviable green coat had temporarily distracted me from his visage) was thumbing through a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. This volume was, we quickly learned, a shared obsession. I was about to ask the man’s name when I suddenly realized there was no need: it was the critic, poet, novelist, performer, and academic Wayne Koestenbaum. A few weeks later, I traveled to Koestenbaum’s nearby apartment to sort through manuscripts, long-forgotten first drafts, personal notebooks, and correspondence as far back as his undergraduate years at Harvard. I had begun cataloguing a daunting portion of his collected works—from academic journal articles to Vogue magazine columns—into a comprehensive bibliography. (The bibliography was the distillation of Koestenbaum’s literary archive, purchased last year by Yale University.) To handle a writer’s work in this way puts one in the privileged position of speaking with the writer about it. The release of Koestenbaum’s new poetry collection, Camp Marmalade, which was published last week, provided another occasion for us to talk of his work. This excellent book is the second volume in a trilogy of what the author calls “trance writing”; the first is The Pink Trance Notebooks. Put simply, the approach allows language to move freely through Koestenbaum as he improvisationally explores subjects dear to his heart and intellect, including stars, sex, and Susan Sontag. The language that appears does not often adhere to expected thematic, syntactic, or logical patterns. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the book’s eccentric aesthetic, as well as subjects ranging from Agnes Moorehead to the theories of Donald Winnicott. Though the interview took place virtually (Koestenbaum in New York, me in Tel Aviv), our sensibilities jibed the same as ever. Read More
March 14, 2018 Comics Phoning Home By Barry Blitt © Barry Blitt Barry Blitt is a cartoonist and illustrator. He is the creator of hundreds of New Yorker covers and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and Vanity Fair.
March 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Where to Score: Classified Ads from Haight-Ashbury By The Paris Review From September 1966 to February 1969, the Oracle of the City San Francisco—better known as the San Francisco Oracle—published twelve issues of poetry, mysticism, and psychedelic art. Produced in Haight-Ashbury, with contributions by Bruce Conner, Rick Griffin, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, the underground newspaper became exceedingly popular among counterculture communities. Its back-of-the-book classified section was full of sexual propositions and pleas. But it was also populated by ads from parents who begged, longingly, that their kids come home, or at least pick up the phone. In Where to Score, a pocket-size paperback coming out later this month, Jason Fulford and Jordan Stein collect the best of these classifieds and present them anew. Here is a selection. Read More
March 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Slap the Wave: Online Therapy as Performance Art By Ross Simonini Last month, I made an appointment to get “wrixled.” I knew little about the practice except that it was a new service available only online. Wrixling.com describes its product with language that is simultaneously straightforward and frustratingly opaque: it’s an “abstract therapy” that draws upon LARP (Live Action Role Playing) and attempts to “rescale” the “self.” Wrixling is a “one-on-one online participatory-psychic scrambling” and “word surgery,” which, to me, suggested that the experience would be invasive, entertaining, uncomfortable, and perhaps therapeutic. Read More
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