May 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Soviet Anthology of “Negro Poetry” By Jennifer Wilson Years before he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the attorney Loren Miller spent the summer of 1932 in Moscow helping edit a Soviet anthology of “Negro poetry.” Miller had arrived that June with a group of twenty-two African Americans (including his good friend Langston Hughes) to shoot a Soviet agitprop film about racial tensions and labor disputes in the American South. When the project fell through, Miller and many of his compatriots stayed in Moscow to pursue creative opportunities that would have been largely foreclosed to black artists in the United States: the aspiring actor Wayland Rudd found work with the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; the painter Mildred Jones apprenticed with the Soviet artist and graphic designer Aleksandr Deineka. For others, the backdrop of Moscow provided fresh creative inspiration: Dorothy West, a voracious reader of Dostoyevsky, rushed at the chance to visit Russia and write about life there, eventually penning short stories like “A Room in Red Square”; Langston Hughes, fascinated with the nearby socialist republics Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which he referred to as the “Soviet South” for their burgeoning cotton industries, published travel essays and reportage out of Samarkand and Tashkent. But for Miller, life among Moscow’s creative class offered first and foremost an opportunity to engage in the day-to-day work of building communism by doing what he knew best: writing, editing, and getting his radical poet friends paid. In August 1932, a dispatch from a Moscow correspondent of the Associated Negro Press appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier (at that time one of the country’s most widely circulated black newspapers) announcing the publication of an anthology of “Negro poetry.” “The Russians,” it read, “take the widest interest in anything pertaining to Negroes” and were “anxious to read and hear anything concerning Negro life.” According to the article, the Soviets hoped the anthology would teach their own authors “to write social poetry.” Read More
May 14, 2018 Our Correspondents The Last Pawnshop Treasure By Jane Stern There is a pawnshop in Danbury, Connecticut, that I frequent. Like most pawnshops, it is at once depressing and intriguing. I often check out pawnshops out of a foolhardy belief that I will find treasure. I used to scour flea markets with that same optimism, certain I would find a genuine Tiffany lamp amongst the macramé owls and tube socks. The lamp would be five dollars because the seller had no idea what it was really worth. Of course eBay, Storage Wars, and Antique Roadshow have quashed my dreams. Now everyone knows the exact market value of what they own; you can spend a lifetime going to consignment stores, estate sales, and pawnshops and never find anything that anyone would consider a “treasure”—unless, of course, you have a strange unshared addiction to slightly beaten up Barbie Dreamhouses. Read More
May 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Mad or Bad? Magritte’s Artistic Rebellion By Abigail Solomon-Godeau René Magritte, La moisson (The Harvest), 1943. Long considered aberrations in his artistic career, René Magritte’s sunlit surrealist and vache pictures have recently been reassessed by art historians and critics not only on their own terms but also in relation to the notion of “bad painting.” The two bodies of work have often been discussed separately, since they are stylistically dissimilar and the latter was produced specifically for Magritte’s first solo exhibition in Paris, in 1948. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think of them as related. Both series are almost unrecognizable as “Magrittes,” and one followed directly after the other, together spanning World War II and the immediate postwar period. Far more than a neutral background, historical events may have helped shape, if not determine, the nature and terms of these works more than has until now been presumed. Read More
May 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Gertrude Stein’s Mutual Portraiture Society By Anne Diebel Portraits of Gertrude Stein by Picabia, Picasso, and Valleton. Between 1908 and her death, in 1946, Gertrude Stein created over a hundred prose portraits, which she called “word paintings.” Most of her portraits were of her friends: Alice B. Toklas, Matisse, Picasso, Sherwood Anderson, Erik Satie, Hemingway, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Jane Heap, Carl Van Vechten, Virgil Thomson, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others. In some cases, she was returning the favor of a friend having made a portrait of her in another medium. Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein was followed by Stein’s “Pablo Picasso,” which appeared in a special issue of Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz. (The issue also featured Stein’s Henri Matisse and reproductions of works by Picasso and Matisse.) Stein would then write a prose portrait of Stieglitz, too. There’s something precious and annoying about these artists’ mutual admiration, but also something admirably transactional—you do me, I’ll do you, and we’ll both benefit. This mutual portrait project reached a new level of absurdity in 1923, when Stein’s “A Portrait of Jo Davidson” was published in Vanity Fair. Stein’s piece was accompanied by three photos: a photo by Man Ray of Davidson working on his recently completed sculpture of Stein (a bronze casting based on Davidson’s model now sits in Bryant Park); a photo of Jacques Lipchitz’s 1920 bronze bust of Stein; and a photo of Picasso’s 1907 painting. Read More
May 11, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked contributors from our Spring issue to write about what they’re reading, looking at, and listening to this month. Still from Hereditary, 2018. For months now, I have been waiting anxiously for the movie Hereditary to come out. It’s supposed to be out on June 8, but I keep hoping that this is a publicity joke and that it will come out sooner. Like everyone else, I found out about the movie back in January, when they showed it at the Sundance Film Festival, and the audience lost their minds and reported back to the Internet. Everyone who has seen it has said that it is some sort of love child between Rosemary’s Baby (excuse the pun) and The Shining, maybe with some of The Exorcist thrown in. I don’t know how this could even be possible, but please count me in. As the weather grows warmer, the flowers bloom, and the date grows nearer and nearer to its release, I get even more lovesick and pathetic with longing to see it. I watch its trailers every day, sometimes many times, and have even watched the horror-fan YouTube videos people have made doing close readings of the trailers. I have theories about the movie I have written in several notebooks, and then crossed out most of them. I have visited the Etsy site the movie’s production company has made with beautifully odd dolls that one of the main characters, a supernatural child named Charlie, has made, a hundred times, hoping that they will list more for sale (the dolls sold out immediately). I wait and wait until June 8, begging most people I know to go see the movie with me, but knowing I will probably end up going alone, crying in the dark. Why am I so excited? It’s such an awful time right now. And I get so sick of things—books, movies, poems—that are hailed as great but have no source of catharsis. I want to burn and feel better. I really hope Hereditary lives up to the hype. I don’t know. I have faith. —Dorothea Lasky Lately, I can’t stop writing love poems. I write a short story—it’s a love poem. I start a new novel—long love poem. Sonnet, sestina, triolet: love poem, love poem, love poem. Maybe this is why “It’s Raining in Love” by Richard Brautigan keeps playing in my mind. I think I accidentally memorized it twenty years ago. It’s a kicky, self-conscious poem right from its opening stanza (“I don’t know what it is / but I distrust myself / when I start to like a girl / a lot”), and I adore the speaker for how cooly he winces at his crushing (“It makes me nervous,” he declares). All that’s A+, but then Brautigan goes on to discuss how crucial inconsequential questions become when you’re in love. Everything is code, sign, weather—even the weather, especially rain: If I say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” and she says, “I don’t know,” I start thinking : Does she really like me? Rain, the speaker asides, shouldn’t be so weighty; it happies slugs, it’s a means of “programming flowers.” “Programming flowers”—! Did Brautigan proactively reclaim the word “programming”? I adore that. So affectedly casual elsewhere, when Brautigan starts “programming flowers,” he slides into rhapsody, reminding me how, enthralled by a lover, we all might become so programmed to bloom. —JoAnna Novak Read More
May 11, 2018 First Person All I Want for Mother’s Day Is a Goddamn Drink By Lauren Elkin A tipsy Klimt This Mother’s Day, I’d like to raise a mocktail to all the mothers-to-be, to all of us united in suffering the joys and the indignities of pregnancy, stone-cold sober. As my own mother tells it, she knew she was pregnant with me, her firstborn, when she got disproportionately sick from one gin and tonic. When I, in turn, pushed away a glass of Côte de Beaune at the dinner table, I knew something was up. Now, twenty-one weeks in, I wish I could go back to that night, back when it still didn’t count, and finish my glass of chardonnay. What was I thinking? I just wasn’t thinking. Read More