December 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Opera in a Post-Weinstein World By Daniel Foster From the Welsh National Opera’s staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. These days, we hear soloists, ensembles, and choruses of women singing out against abusers. But the courage expressed by these female choirs has made me question my enjoyment of another kind of music. I’m talking, of course, about opera. In this modern moment, it’s difficult not to hear opera as the highly aestheticized echo of our deeply sordid reality, a harmonization of voices wrung from women’s suffering. Louder and clearer than ever, I’m hearing opera as critics like Catherine Clément long have: as the undoing of women by men. From an early age, my daughter (let’s call her O. to protect her privacy until she’s ready to tell her own story in the way she wants to) also recognized that there was something seriously wrong going on between men and women in opera. Carmen is her favorite opera. It used to serenade us on our daily commute to her nursery. She especially loved the children’s chorus—“Taratata, taratata!”—as they imitated the marching soldiers bugling and fifing out the old guard for the new. We even watched Francesco Rosi’s cinematic montage of bullfighting and lust in the dust of Seville. Then, one day, she asked me, “If Don Jose loves Carmen so much, why does he kill her?” Read More
December 5, 2017 Bulletin Joy Williams Will Receive Our 2018 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Joy Williams, 1990. Photo by Reg Innell Save the date: The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. Williams is the author of five short-story collections, four novels, a book of essays, and a guidebook to the Florida Keys (which Condé Nast Traveler described as “one of the best guidebooks ever written”). Williams’s writing first appeared in our Fall 1968 issue with the short story “The Retreat.” In 1973, George Plimpton decided to published her first novel, State of Grace, under the Paris Review Editions imprint; the novel was nominated for the National Book Award when Williams was only thirty. Over the decades, the Review has published nine of her stories (and will publish a tenth this spring). In our Summer 2014 issue, we interviewed Williams for the Art of Fiction series. Her interviewer, Paul Winner, noted that Williams used a flip phone, typed postcards in lieu of email, had never owned a computer, and wore prescription sunglasses, indoors and out, night and day. She told him that she didn’t have a TV or Internet or air-conditioning at her home in Arizona, and that she owned seven Smith Corona portable typewriters for writing while traveling. She is particularly noted for her writing on the environment. As she said, “Cultural diversity can never replace biodiversity, though we’re being prompted to think it can. We live and spawn and want—always there is this ghastly wanting—and we have done irredeemable harm to so much. Perhaps the novel will die and even the short story because we’ll become so damn sick of talking about ourselves.” We, however, refuse to be sick of talking about Joy Williams. Her work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. We’re thrilled to add the Hadada to that list: it’s presented annually to a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature. Last year’s honoree was Richard Howard; previous recipients are John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton (posthumously), Barney Rosset, Philip Roth, Norman Rush, James Salter, Frederick Seidel, Robert Silvers, and William Styron. John Waters—writer, director, “counterculture demigod” (the New York Times)—will present the award. Please join us in April to celebrate Williams’s extraordinary career.
December 4, 2017 Look Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Artists with the Shovels By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. Molly Crabapple, Bridge, 2017. Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi has lost track of how many times he’s been to Barrio Paloma Abajo since the hurricane hit. As he drove up the vertiginous roads of the Cordillera Central, he ticked off what he and his colleagues at Defend PR have accomplished so far. They were working with an architect to rebuild houses wrecked by Maria. They brought seeds and water filters and set up a solar-powered cinema. Solar lights, mosquito nets, batteries, bug spray, rat traps. They drove kids to a local comedy show. They installed tarps on roofs and brought chain saws to cut down the dangling tree branches and shoveled debris from the broken bridge. They organized themselves into brigades to clean wrecked farms. Jacobs-Fantauzzi rolled up his sleeve and showed me a trail of red welts. Ants, he suspected. Read More
December 4, 2017 On Language On Making Oneself Less Unreadable By Hernan Diaz A photograph of H. W. Fowler in sporting attire from his biography The Warden of English. Grammar enthusiasts either love Henry Watson Fowler or they have yet to encounter his work. It is possible to read his Dictionary of Modern Usage (1926) from cover to cover as a weird, wonderful essay; it is impossible to do so without laughing out loud. A few entries from the second edition, revised by Ernest Gowers: avoidance of the obvious is very well, provided that it is not itself obvious; but, if it is, all is spoilt. [If the reader believes] that you are attitudinizing as an epicure of words for whom nothing but the rare is good enough, or, worse still, that you are painfully endeavouring to impart some much needed unfamiliarity to a platitude, his feelings towards you will be something that is not admiration. The obvious is better than obvious avoidance of it … Frankenstein. … A sentence written by the creatress of the creator of the creature may save some of those whose acquaintance with all three is indirect from betraying the fact: “Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation; but on this point he was impenetrable” (Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley). Frankenstein is the creator-victim; the creature-despot and fatal creation is Frankenstein’s monster … The blunder is very common indeed—almost, but surely not quite, sanctioned by custom: If they went on strengthening this power they would create a F. they could not resist … if and when. Any writer who uses this formula lays himself open to entirely reasonable suspicions on the part of his readers. There is the suspicion that he is a mere parrot, who cannot say part of what he has often heard without saying the rest also. There is the suspicion that he likes verbiage for its own sake. There is the suspicion that he is a timid swordsman who thinks he will be safer with a second sword in his left hand. There is the suspicion that he has merely been too lazy to make up his mind between if and when … soccer, -cker. Soccer did not deserve its victory in the competition between these alternative spellings … Read More
December 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Reimagining Female Identity in a Ukrainian Orphanage By Rebecca Bengal From the book Internat, Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos More than a decade ago, on a Fulbright fellowship in Ukraine, the artist Carolyn Drake found herself outside Ternopil, a small city on the banks of the Seret River. Her hosts led her to a forest on the edge of a suburb, where a large, half-century-old building stood bearing a small nondescript sign, which translated to “Petrykhiv Children’s Home,” or Internat, the title of her just-published photo book. Away from society at large, among a staff of women and one male director, the orphaned girls who lived there formed their own community, an all-female family engaged in the routine of daily life and chores, and an instinctive, if naive, curiosity about the outside world. In the intervening decade, Drake traveled to Central Asia for her project Two Rivers, and to the western frontier of China to make the photographs, drawings, and embroidery that comprise Wild Pigeons. When she returned to Ukraine, in 2014, she expected that the girls she had met would have left the orphanage. But they were still there, suddenly grown up. “They were little bouncy energetic girls and then they were private, snarky, opinionated, complicated adults. I started thinking a lot about change,” Drake told me recently. “I was interested in how girls develop in an environment void of men, especially in Ukraine, where women seemed to me a lot of times to be defined either as objects of the male gaze or through their purity.” Over a series of visits from 2014 to 2016, she took photographs with the Internat residents that compose a subversive fairy tale—a story of modern cloistering, of isolation and escapism, and an evocative reimagining of what it means to be female. Read More
December 1, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Nerds, Necromancers, and New Wave Poetry By The Paris Review From the cover of American Nerd. In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Benjamin Nugent weaves a web of surprising cultural connections—from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to nativism, to the use and abuse of Morse code—to explain the advent of the nerd in the late twentieth century. As the subtitle suggests, Nugent also reports firsthand on the connections that hold nerds together: “It was no coincidence, I think, that we generally came to D&D from home lives that tended toward the unpredictable and confounding … In the fantasies we made together, you weren’t always king, but you could always point to him.” Ten years after it was first published, American Nerd remains absorbing, touching, entertaining and, to this reader, enlightening even at its most offhand (e.g., “A pretty good definition of sci-fi … is fiction that focuses exclusively on monumental events: plagues, comets, interspecies wars, the return of the dinosaurs.”) Highly recommended for fans of Stranger Things. —Lorin Stein Ah, yes. It’s that time of year once again. Say it with me now: it’s black-metal season. When the sky is gray and the cold claws at my flesh, I bundle myself in layers of distortion. Ash Borer’s self-titled album, which thunders and howls, is my go-to November music. Nothing better reflects this miserable, wonderful weather. —Brian Ransom Read More