August 9, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Violette Leduc By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Violette Leduc. In the summer of 1956, Violette Leduc, the autofiction pioneer and protegée of Simone de Beauvoir, began inpatient psychiatric treatment. She was forty-nine and suicidal. Her first two novels, L’asphyxie (translated as In the Prison of Her Skin) and L’affamée (The starving woman), both published in the late forties, were read and admired by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. “She is an extraordinary woman,” Genet would tell people. “She is crazy, ugly, cheap, and poor, but she has a lot of talent.” Albert Camus, who had accepted L’asphyxie for his series at Éditions Gallimard, likewise considered Leduc a brilliant writer. But critics were underwhelmed, and the public all but ignored her work. “I don’t think of myself as not understood,” she writes. “I think of myself as nonexistent.” In 1954, her third book, Ravages, which had taken six years to complete, was deemed too shocking to be published in its entirety. The male reading committee for Gallimard characterized the opening section, an autobiographical portrayal of the passionate romance between schoolgirls named Thérèse and Isabelle, as “enormously and specifically obscene” and liable to “call down the thunderbolts of the law.” Summarily excised, the section wouldn’t be published for another forty-five years. Yet Leduc’s dreamy, metaphor-burnished rendering of adolescent desire, which conveys as much emotional as physical sensation, is erotic but neither graphic nor coarse. “I was reciting my body upon hers,” Thérèse narrates, “bathing my belly in the lilies of her belly, finding my way inside a cloud. She skimmed my hips, she shot strange arrows.” It’s difficult to imagine such lines corrupting twentieth-century sensibilities any more than, say, Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour (published by Gallimard in 1928) or Genet’s gay classic Lady of the Flowers (published by Gallimard in 1951, albeit with some of the more pornographic scenes cut). As the novelist and Leduc champion Deborah Levy has said, the publisher’s prudishness seemed to rest on the fact that Leduc’s narrative is driven by the female libido—almost unique in literature then and hardly more commonplace today. Read More
August 9, 2018 First Person The Sad Boys of Sadcore By Kristi Coulter Peter Milton Walsh performing with his band the Apartments. “I liked my shirt a few hours ago, but now I feel bad about it,” Mark Eitzel said from the tiny stage at (Le) Poisson Rouge. He was smiling but not joking. He’d been forgetting lyrics and false starting songs throughout the set, and I thought the fringed shirt might be the last straw—that he might flee and vanish into Bleecker Street, just one more shuffling man in a porkpie. Powers engage, I said and then unconsciously assumed the position: wineglass down, torso tilted ten degrees forward, my entire body utterly still. I turned all the life in me toward making Eitzel know there was love in the room—that from time to time, we all lose a word, trip on a cord, put on a cowboy shirt and bolo tie that we truly have no business wearing. He got through the song, then another. Once the crisis point passed, my body downshifted, but it didn’t fully clock out until after the encore—then I slumped like a B-movie medium after a séance that had gotten out of hand. Propping up collapsing men is one of my talents. In a business meeting, I can produce boring data to bolster whatever shady-sounding claim the man next to me makes. If a guy asks, Am I ready to do this job / kiss this girl / give this speech? I can smile slightly and say, in a way that makes him think he believes in himself: I think you already know the answer to that question. I’m so good that I can even work remotely: via email, text, sext, DM, IM, marginalia, playlist, or windshield Post-its. But I’m at my best in the darkness of a club, twenty feet from the locus of disintegration. Read More
August 8, 2018 Look Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire By The Paris Review I always imagined that I would have a life very different than the one imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt in order to make that life. —Leonor Fini Admirers of the Argentine Italian artist Leonor Fini have included Andy Warhol, Madonna, Kim Kardashian West, and more recently Maria Grazia Chiuri, the head of the fashion house Dior, whose spring 2018 collection was dedicated to the artist. Multitalented and fearlessly forward-thinking, Fini refused to be categorized in any way, especially through gender norms. Although Fini exhibited in major surrealist surveys throughout the thirties and forties and counted Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí as friends, she rejected the movement’s traditional view of woman as muse. Her art explores the masculine and feminine, dominance and submission, eroticism and humor. Fini’s practice went beyond the medium of painting to embrace theater, ballet, the illustrated book, and costume. Rejecting social convention, Fini insisted that identity, like artistic expression, is never fixed—it must constantly be open to inspiration and imagination. The powerful self-portraits she produced throughout her long career present woman as warrior, sphinx, dominatrix, and feline goddess, mastering landscapes and lovers alike. The first American survey of her work, “Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930–1990,” will open September 28 at the Museum of Sex and run through March 4, 2019. A selection of Fini’s work appears below. Leonor Fini in Arcachon, 1940. Photo: unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Estate of Leonor Fini. Read More
August 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less By Donald Hall Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. His Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 1991 issue. Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, an excerpt from which appears below. Donald Hall, 1977 When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn’t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams’s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize I haven’t finished reading a book in a year. An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty, he is slower but more canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment. In a Hollywood retirement home to meet a friend, I watched a handsome old woman in a wheelchair, unrecognizable, leap up in ecstasy when I walked toward her. “An interview!” she said. “An interview!” A writer usually works until late in life. When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of course I stayed to sign book after book and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded so much because they would never see me again. Read More
August 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Joan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill By Danielle A. Jackson Lauryn Hill. One recent midsummer afternoon, I trekked from Central Brooklyn to the South Bronx to meet the pioneering hip-hop journalist and feminist writer Joan Morgan, author of the new book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. We were to meet off the 5 train’s 138th Street stop, in an area some new shop owners and developers have taken to calling “SoBro.” This part of the Bronx feels industrial but also very much in flux. The highways are wide and noisy, and overpasses blot the skyline. On the same block, there are old, seemingly abandoned storefronts, low-level project buildings, and high-rise condos under construction. Morgan and I were meeting for drinks and dinner at Beatstro, a new restaurant on Alexander Avenue that serves as an homage to hip-hop—arguably the multicultural borough’s most well-known cultural export. Hand-painted murals and graffiti-inspired paintings adorn the walls; classic records from artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan and MC Lyte line the shelves by the entrance. Definitive books on the art form—Decoded, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, The Tao of Wu—lie out on the tables. Soft, textured, and deep-ruby, the lounge furniture comes from Bronx-area manufacturers. Read More
August 7, 2018 Redux Redux: Doing Battle with Your Successors 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, we bring you August Wilson’s 1999 Art of Theater interview, Ben Okri’s short story “The Dream-Vendor’s August,” and Joyce Carol Oates’s poem “Wild Bamboo, Late August.” Read More