March 2, 2018 The Lives of Others The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus By Edmund White The history of the Byzantine Empire is threaded with dynastic clashes and family feuds. The Byzantines do not hold the same familiar spot in the Western imagination as their Roman forbears, but the narrative history of their scandals and intrigues is easily as compelling as the episodes Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio recorded of Caesar, Caligula, and Nero. For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison. Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political players, whether they were power-grabbing populists, slick backroom schemers, or principled reformers. It started with Empress Theodora, sometimes described as a kind of sixth-century Eva Perón, who interceded in a wave of riots that shook Constantinople, put an end to the fighting, won the adoration of the public, and saved her husband’s throne. Irene, an empress from the late eighth century, ruled for several years with a mixture of silky court diplomacy and unflinching ruthlessness—to maintain her grip on power, she ordered that her chief rival, who also happened to be her son, be blinded. The princess Anna Komnene was another of these influential women. To Edward Gibbon, who framed her reputation for modern audiences with his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she was a Lady Macbeth character who attempted to bump off her brother so she could rule the empire through her husband. The plot failed, and Anna was forced to flee to a monastery, where she spent the rest of her life stewing with resentment and thwarted ambition. Gibbon dismissed Anna as vain, vengeful, dissembling, and reckless, the embodiment of a particular type of unpleasant Byzantine woman. But to a generation of historians currently revisiting her reputation, Anna Komnene is not a lethal Machiavel but a sparkling litterateur, one of the great figures of her age who exhibited something that one might call distinctly, beguilingly Byzantine: a flair for disruptive innovation while, paradoxically, striving to keep centuries of tradition alive. Read More
March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Astrid Lindgren, the Gutsy Creator of Pippi Longstocking By Chantel Tattoli Original art by Ellis Rosen. In Jens Andersen’s biography, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking series, is a Walden-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. Lindgren, as Andersen notes, believed that we ought to learn to be solo artists at every stage of life. “If they’ve never learned to be alone, people develop only weak and fragile defenses against the ways life decides to hurt them,” she said. “It’s almost the most important thing of all.” Even love can barely renegotiate the fact of everyone’s self-containment, when it can at all. Lindgren writes in a letter to her best friend, “Suddenly, a person comes rushing up to you and says, ‘We’re kindred souls, we understand each other.’ And inside you hear a voice saying with painful clarity, ‘Like hell we do.’ ” Lindgren was the eldest, dance-crazy daughter of farmers in a small town in southern Sweden. By 1924, at sixteen, she was dressing in slacks, jackets, ties, and caps and scissoring her blonde hair to boy length like the radical bachelorette in Victor Margueritte’s La garçonne (a mode Scandinavian male columnists scorned as the “Apache cut”). Her instinct for storytelling—so evident to her teachers—landed young Lindgren a gig as a trainee journalist at a local paper. There, the tomboy geared into temptress. She was not yet eighteen when her romance with the fifty-year-old married editor in chief resulted in pregnancy. “I didn’t know a scrap about contraceptive methods, so I never realized how dreadfully irresponsibly you behaved toward me,” Lindgren wrote to him later. Elsewhere she explained, “I wanted the baby but not the father.” As her belly swelled, her hometown swirled with gossip, so Lindgren left for Stockholm. “I threw myself out!” she said. Read More
March 1, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Snowy Forests and Urgent Hearts By Sarah Kay In our new column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion (like “when you love someone so much you want to rip them apart and live inside them”) and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay inaugurates the series. A quick note on Poetry Rx: This is not meant to be an advice column in the traditional sense, in that we are wholly unqualified to offer you any solutions for the dilemmas in your life. Something Sarah says a lot is, “No, I don’t think that poetry will save us. And yet, and yet … ” The “and yet” is what this column is for. And yet, maybe we can find poems that vibrate at the same frequency that your heart is humming. And yet, maybe we can find a poem you can escape inside of for a few minutes. And yet, maybe you just needed an excuse to share the vulnerable parts of yourself, and what better way to honor that courage than to offer you the poems that carry us through our own vulnerable times. —Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz Read More
March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture What Would W. E. B. Du Bois Make of Black Panther? By Clint Smith Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o in Black Panther. “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” This is the question posed by W. E. B. Du Bois in his lecture “Criteria of Negro Art.” The remarks were made at the 1926 NAACP annual meeting in Chicago and later published as part of a multi-issue series titled “The Negro in Art” in The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine. Du Bois gave the speech at a ceremony honoring the contributions of the eminent author, editor, and historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had made it his life’s work to document the positive cultural, social, and political contributions black Americans had made to the development of the United States. He did so in an effort to combat the empty but popular rhetoric of those who suggested that black people had no history, no culture, and had nothing to add to the country beyond the labor of their bodies. That same year, Woodson developed Negro History Week, the precursor to what would eventually become Black History Month, an extension of his effort to illuminate black contributions to the American project. And while Du Bois sought to honor Woodson in his remarks, he also used the opportunity to espouse his own beliefs regarding the role and importance of black artists as America wrestled with the evolution of white supremacy only a generation after the end of slavery. I was thinking of Du Bois and the concerns he raised when I entered the theater to watch Black Panther. I was thinking of what he might make of the scene unfolding across the country: sold-out cinemas with lines snaking out the door and around the block; the intergenerational thrill experienced by families of every hue ornamented in African garb, an array of spectacular patterns and colors exploding across theater lobbies from Atlanta to Oakland. I imagine Du Bois and his distinctive handlebar mustache, its thick, curled edges accentuating his smile as he observes black children and adults dressed as a cast of characters too often unseen in a mainstream cultural production. Read More
March 1, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our Spring Issue By The Paris Review After months of germination, our Spring issue is out today! Shrug off the winter doldrums with the bright splashes of color on our cover, painted by the Lebanese artist Etel Adnan especially for the issue. Look between the covers for a portfolio of her color-infused landscapes, text-based works, and abstractions, curated by our interim editor Nicole Rudick. The issue features two Art of Fiction interviews. The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2013, discusses a career devoted to chronicling the experiences of women and the poor: My own deepest interest as a writer is in fiction but as I have learned, it is my work that is most socially engaged that is also the most valued by my readers … There is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it. And Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, describes the philosophical novel and writing about black America: I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen. Also: A new story by Joy Williams (“Sometimes I ride in the chthonic with the luggage, the boots and coats, the boxes of fruit and gin and books”), her tenth for the magazine. Williams will receive the Hadada, the Review’s lifetime-achievement award, at the Revel on April 3. Plus: fiction by Rachel Cusk, Kathleen Collins, Chia-Chia Lin, JoAnna Novak, Katherine Kilalea, and Danielle Dutton (you may notice a commonality in this list); and poems by Ishion Hutchinson, Dorothea Lasky, Mónica de la Torre, Alejandra Pizarnik, Major Jackson, Ange Mlinko, Nick Laird, Peter Cole, and Michael Hofmann. Subscribe now!
February 28, 2018 Look Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Portraits Bring the Dead Back to Life By The Paris Review Hiroshi Sugimoto, Norma Shearer, 1994. All photos courtesy of Damiani. Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent a career photographing fictions. When he moved to New York from Japan in 1974, by way of Los Angeles, he intended to find work as a wedding photographer. Instead, he took his camera to the Museum of Natural History, where he developed a lifelong fascination with dioramas. He photographed the taxidermy there, already frozen in their meticulously staged tableaux, and, as he writes, “I realized that I too could bring time to a stop. My camera could stop time in the dioramas—where time had already been halted once—for a second time.” This doubling of perspective, which has since become a signature of Sugimoto’s work, can produce unexpected and uncanny transformations: a 1976 photo from his “Dioramas” series, for example, shows a stuffed polar bear on a faux icescape, looming over a seal, its teeth bared, as though ready to strike. Twice removed from its natural setting, the scene unfreezes. It could easily be confused for a photo of a real bear, a real icescape. “My life as an artist began,” Sugimoto writes, “when I saw with my own eyes that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film.” Sugimoto achieves similar feats in his latest collection, “Portraits,” which will publish this month. For this series, Sugimoto traveled to the Madame Tussauds wax museums in London and Amsterdam, where he selected subjects that span some two thousand years of history. As in his Diorama series, the imposition of photographic distance has a kind of embalming effect on Sugimoto’s subjects, rendered somehow more lifelike in the act of preservation. “Photographs,” Susan Sontag once wrote, “are a way of imprisoning reality.” But in Portraits, Sugimoto uses his camera to opposite effect, creating counterfeit realities that give history back to the dead: “However fake the subject,” he writes, “once photographed, it’s as good as real.” —Spencer Bokat-Lindell Read More