September 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Late Art By Anna Ostoya and Ben Lerner In the winter of 2015, Ben Lerner wrote a short story, “The Polish Rider,” incorporating fictionalized elements of the life and work of the artist Anna Ostoya, who had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. As the narrator of the story helps the artist search for the missing canvases, he fantasizes about “recuperating the lost paintings through prose,” about how the verbal might take the place of the visual. After the story was published in The New Yorker, Ostoya painted the painting Lerner had invented based on her earlier work, transforming the fiction without changing any of the words. Ostoya went on to produce a series of compositions that respond to the story she’d helped inspire. In the essay below, Lerner describes how Ostoya’s actual body of work catalyzed the fiction. View of “Slaying,” Anna Ostoya, 2016, Bortolami Gallery, New York. That winter, a small pneumonia bloomed in his left lung. He’d embarked on a second course of antibiotics, the first having proved insufficient. He was getting better but was weak, and by about eight o’clock each night, profoundly so. Still, he wanted to see Anna and her opening in Chelsea. They made a plan to meet for an early drink downtown; they could catch up a little, then head to the opening together in a cab. He would look quickly around the gallery and rush back to bed in Brooklyn—another cab. (As long as he had an infection in his lung, it seemed, he could pay for private transportation without guilt. Taxis were on his mind; maybe he wouldn’t have otherwise written “The Polish Rider.”) But he’d take the B train into Manhattan. Stepping out of his apartment was like stepping out of a darkened theater; he had that feeling of supersensitivity that attends a reemergence into public after a period of seclusion, streetlights startlingly bright, a nearby siren startlingly loud. Would he have written the story if he hadn’t met Anna in that condition? Over his soda water and her wine, he asked Anna how the installation of her show had gone, how she’d ultimately decided to hang the sequence of paintings she’d composed based on Artemisia Gentileschi’s monumental Judith Slaying Holofernes. He’d seen a few early versions of these paintings in her apartment (and studio) at 203 Rivington, on the Lower East Side. (The first few times he visited Anna’s place, he had a sense of déjà vu; finally he remembered that he and his wife had spent a couple nights at 203 Rivington—in a friend of a friend’s apartment, whose layout was identical to Anna’s—some years before. If not for this coincidence, he might not have, et cetera). Read More
September 13, 2018 Inside the Issue In Tribute to Joyce Carol Oates By Nell Freudenberger Still from Smooth Talk, the film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” When Joyce Carol Oates’s canonical story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was made into a film in 1985, the author mostly approved. Of its lead actor, Oates says, “Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as ‘my’ Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.” Oates writes this in the New York Times in 1986, but I didn’t read it until this year, after I’d written my own story modeled on “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” “Rabbits,” which appears in the Fall 2018 issue of The Paris Review. As Oates observes, writers writing about why they wrote something are not especially reliable. The original story was based on a Life magazine article about the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” a psychopath who seduced and sometimes killed his teenage female victims; his story later inspired two novels and four more films. Oates says she never read the complete article about the killer because she didn’t want to be distracted by the real-life details: “I forget his name, but his specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teenage girls.” This casual statement gets at what is so dazzling about Oates herself as a writer: the ability to treat graphic and even lurid material in a way that is not at all graphic or lurid. She doesn’t attempt to conceal violent or perverse behavior—on the contrary, she often emphasizes it—but she is interested in those details only for their potential to reveal surprising human truths. In an Oates story, there is no contempt for people who are down and out, nor is there any false lionizing of struggle (that flip side of contempt). If Oates has scorn for any class of people, it’s for the judgmental mainstream—those “who fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions.” “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” made a huge impression on me when I first read it as a teenager, and I suspect it still has that effect on high school students today. I’ve read the story several times since then, but like Oates (probably like most writers), I didn’t reread my source material before starting to write. I knew I wanted my story to begin with an older man, dressed as a younger one, approaching a teenage girl in a playground, and that the tension between his appeal and the pull of the girl’s family would be what propelled the story. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Read More
September 12, 2018 Arts & Culture To Be At Home Everywhere By Drew Bratcher On Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home. What Novalis says about philosophy—that in reality, it is a homesickness—is true also of country music, though philosophers and country singers have different ideas about what home is. In philosophy, home is a state of perfect understanding. Philosophers, Novalis writes, long to “be at home everywhere.” Country singers, on the other hand, long not so much for the outside world—or, for that matter, the world to come—but rather for the world as they once knew it, typically in childhood. The philosopher hopes for a home she’s never seen while the country singer mourns for the home she may never see again. Of all the homesick country albums by all the homesick country singers, few explore homesickness more searchingly than Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home. In eleven bittersweet songs, lasting a little over thirty-three minutes total, Dolly revisits the fraught days after she first moved to Nashville, when the future was a stranger, the past a dear friend, and the present a disorienting swirl of memories and dreams. The circumstances surrounding the making of My Tennessee Mountain Home are worth noting. The album was Dolly’s eleventh solo release, and yet it was sort of a second debut. In the six years since the first, 1967’s Hello, I’m Dolly, she had become best known not as a soloist but as Porter Wagoner’s duet partner and deferential sidekick on the popular syndicated TV program The Porter Wagoner Show. Read More
September 12, 2018 Eat Your Words What David Foster Wallace Ate By Valerie Stivers The writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) didn’t really eat food. When I met him, in 1996, when I was twenty-three years old, I really couldn’t cook, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider this something we had in common. Wallace, who died by suicide on September 12, 2008, ten years ago today, burst into fame in the late eighties with experimental metafictions that took on the modern junk culture of advertising, celebrity, addiction, and alienation through technology. He struggled with those entities himself and was famous among his acquaintances for living mainly on packaged foods. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the excellent Wallace biography by D. T. Max, is littered with information like “he lived on chocolate pop tarts and soda” and “he had a love of showering, Diet Dr Pepper and blondies” and “there were only blondies and mustard in the fridge.” In 1995, the journalist David Streitfeld saw a kitchen with little more in it than a case of Dinty Moore beef stew and elicited the confidence from Wallace that “what’s really sick is I like to eat it cold.” Read More
September 12, 2018 Arts & Culture James Joyce’s Baby Talk (and Swift’s and Lear’s) By Anthony Madrid I don’t know that much about what babies actually say. I don’t have any. The ones I’ve seen in people’s apartments didn’t say anything. In one of my poems, I call babies “the crying people.” Heard plenty of that. The ones who said things were a bit older. The tiny ones gurgle. It doesn’t matter. When we talk about baby talk, we’re almost never talking about what comes out of the mouths of infants. We’re talking about the stuff we do that bears an important resemblance to what comes out of the mouths of infants. It’s all about (a) saying a lot more than you’re saying and (b) cute-ing it up. Everybody remembers the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Read More
September 11, 2018 Redux Redux: Such Is the Way with Monumental Things 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. This week, to celebrate his work as the guest poetry editor of the Fall issue, we bring you selections of work by Henri Cole: his 2014 Art of Poetry interview, in which he outlines what he requires from a good poem; “West Point Remembered,” from the Fall 1988 issue, Cole’s first appearance in our pages; and the poem “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop.” Henri Cole, The Art of Poetry No. 98 Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) I think it would be rather narrow—and moralistic—to say that poetry must comfort us and point to what is good. I don’t think that is the function of art, though sometimes it is a happy result. In any case, a sentimental, moralizing poem is not what I want to write. I don’t want the reader to experience comfort—I want the opposite. Read More