May 15, 2018 Redux Redux: Reading About Mom 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. Happy Mother’s Day! This week, read Nadine Gordimer’s Art of Fiction interview to learn why her mother would say, “Now, take it slowly, remember your heart”; Lorrie Moore’s story “Terrific Mother,” about a woman who is too often told she would be one; and Paul Carroll’s poem “Mother.” Read More
May 15, 2018 On History The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints By Chantel Tattoli Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can’t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can’t fingerprint yourself, the sites of the bureau-approved, USA-based channelers stated. Perhaps, I thought, I would gather my smirches—all those wasted on laptop screens, medicine cabinets, and eyeglasses—and dump them on a bureaucrat’s desk, like payment rendered in coin. Instead, I fell on a National Fingerprint Collecting Clearinghouse technician named Eve Humrich. She has built a career on the fingertips of expats. I met her at her office on a mezzanine inside a squash club in Montmartre (though she travels between Paris, London, and Brussels for her clients). “I need to see your ID,” Humrich said. I showed my passport—using one type of identification to badge me into the realm of another. Humrich kissed each digit to a lubricious black pad, then onto an official paper card. With a small magnifying lens, she inspected the results: “These are nice and clear.” On the walk home, while the sky pissed rain, I slipped the cards under my sweater. It occurred to me that I knew approximately zilch about how an identity could be apportioned in ten parts, each the size of a petal. Thumb marks were used as personal seals to close business in Babylonia, and, in 1303, a Persian vizier recounted the use of fingerprints as signatures during the Qin and Han Dynasties, noting, “Experience has shown that no two individuals have fingers precisely alike.” The Chinese had realized that before anyone: a Qin dynasty document from the third-century B.C.E, titled “The Volume of Crime Scene Investigation—Burglary,” pointed up fingerprints as a means of evincing whodunnit. Read More
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