May 22, 2018 Redux Redux: Tom Wolfe, Barbara Grossman, and Gwyneth Lewis 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. Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011 Tom Wolfe died last week, at eighty-eight. So today, we bring you his Art of Fiction interview. We also bring you Barbara Grossman’s tale about a young man and his house plants, “My Vegetable Love,” and Gwyneth Lewis’s poem about Florida titled “Pentecost.” Read More
May 22, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Carmen Maria Machado By Carmen Maria Machado In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. What remains: dilly beans, which remain my greatest pleasure, pickled garlic cloves and capers and olives and artichokes and hearts of palm and roasted red peppers, Bloody Mary mix and assorted gourmet shrubs I bought in a book-induced panic, grapefruits for my grandma-style breakfast, asparagus and raspberries and jalapeños and bell peppers and arugula that’s going bad, Worcestershire sauce, champagne for the summer’s spritzers, hummus, beer, eggs, premixed margaritas, simple syrup, tonic, stock bouillon, half-and-half, butter, assorted Tupperware with half a lime, half a lemon, and half a can of chickpeas. Read More
May 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Speaks Freely?: Art, Race, and Protest By Aruna D'Souza One year after protests and counterprotests erupted around the exhibition of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial, Aruna D’Souza investigates the fraught history of artists, curators, and institutions invoking free-speech discourse in the interest of entrenching whiteness. Parker Bright, Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018, mixed media on paper, 19 in. x 24 in. Courtesy the artist. To say that I watched the protests around Dana Schutz’s Open Casket with interest would be an understatement. The decision by the curators of the 2017 Whitney Biennial to include a painting by a white artist depicting the brutally beaten body of the young Emmett Till in his coffin set off debates on social media and in real life, and I watched my Facebook feed fill with both angry condemnations and passionate defenses of Schutz, as well as thoughtful analysis, hilarious and problematic memes, and knee-jerk “get off my lawn you whippersnappers”–style screeds. It was messy, loud, and at times hugely illuminating. What to many seemed a cut-and-dried argument over artistic freedom and free speech was anything but; in fact, if anything, the controversy revealed quite starkly that such values, far from universal, are doled out unequally and provisionally. Especially when the free speech in question comes in the form of protest. For many of the (largely, but not exclusively) young African American artists, writers, and art historians who first raised the alarm around the painting, the issue was whether it was appropriate for a white artist who had never before grappled with issues of racism in her work to suddenly take up an image that loomed so large in black American experience, and which was also a signal event in the civil rights struggle. What did it mean for Schutz to paint Emmett Till and for the curators to include her work in one of the most-watched exhibitions in the U.S.—especially at a moment when black people are still subject to extrajudicial violence, meted out not only by vigilante mobs operating with the tacit approval of law enforcement, as they did in Till’s day, but also and increasingly by law enforcement itself? Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Light Effects: On Miyoko Ito’s Abstract Inventions By Dan Nadel Center Stage, 1980, oil on canvas. In the fifties, when she was in her early thirties, Miyoko Ito was “called an old lady painter, passe.” She recalled the slight when she was sixty and nearing the end of her life, yet still decades away from recognition. Now, thirty-five years after her death, her work looks positively avant-garde for any time. Paintings from her most inventive period, the seventies and early eighties, were recently the subject of “Heart of Hearts” at Artists Space in New York, curated by Jordan Stein. (The show originated at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.) Ito’s work is brilliantly sui generis: it touches on the familiar styles of surrealism, minimal abstraction, and synthetic cubism to create meditative color spaces of intermingling forms that allude to landscapes, sexual organs, and urban architecture. For decades, Ito, who spent her adult life in Chicago, has been a kind of cult figure for certain painters and critics (myself included). She was an outlier: Ito made abstract paintings at a time when her adopted city was mostly interested in figuration, and unlike many of her younger peers, she did not exhibit with a consistent group of artists. She also made her finest work at a time when painting as a medium and surrealism as a mode had been critically discredited. Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be “Brooklyn Born”? By Naima Coster I am looking for a place to live. I’ll be moving this summer, and in my wildest fantasies, I’m headed somewhere I can afford both a mortgage and my steep student-loan payments. I know New York City isn’t that place, but I continue kicking around the idea of a return—Brooklyn, in particular, haunts me because it once felt like home and then didn’t anymore. Perhaps I wrote my first novel, Halsey Street, about gentrified Bed-Stuy, because I wanted to have a kind of ownership of Brooklyn on the page, if not in deed. For the last few years, I’ve been in Durham, North Carolina. This city is undergoing its own gentrification. I’ve seen all the telltale signs: new breweries and hotel bars, the influx of money and affluent patrons. One café downtown even sells “Brooklyn drip,” four dollars for a large. In Durham, I’m aware of the renewal and displacement, but I spend far less time thinking of how I fit in. When I run into New Yorkers who fled the city for North Carolina, we wind up talking about Brooklyn or the Bronx, the difficulties of life there. Maybe it’s because for us, Durham is still affordable compared to New York, or else because it’s easiest to mourn the displacement that displaced you. It’s been unsettling to notice in myself the same kind of relative apathy and self-interest that, in my novel, I wrote into the characters who move from the West Village to Bed-Stuy. Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Why Are We So Fascinated by Cults? By Kirstin Allio Still from Wild Wild Country. In March, I sent an announcement around to friends and colleagues: watch out for my new novel, Buddhism for Western Children. It’s a spiraling story of a powerful, manipulative guru versus a boy who must escape to recover his will, I wrote, and it profiles Western lust for Eastern spiritual mystique and tradition. I got a lot of wonderful goodwill in response, and also quite a few, Wait—is this like Wild Wild Country? What was Wild Wild Country? I don’t watch TV, a habit left over from my antiworldly, culty childhood, on which my novel is loosely based, but now, obligated, I turned on Netflix. Like so many others, I was hooked, and I began to wonder anew why accounts of cults—novels, movies, docudramas—titillate and resonate time and again. Read More