April 10, 2018 Redux Redux: A Poem Is a Suitcase 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. It’s National Poetry Month, so this week, we bring you … poetry: our 2008 Art of Poetry interview with Kay Ryan; Simon Worrall’s feature on literary forgery, “Emily Dickinson Goes to Las Vegas”; and Caroline Knox’s poem “Sleepers Wake.” Read More
April 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Not a Nice Girl: On Berenice Abbott By Julia Van Haaften Berenice Abbott, Self Portrait with Distortion, 1945. Photography is the most modern of the arts … It is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other … Photography born of this age of steel seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that must live in skyscrapers. —Alvin Langdon Coburn I like this picture so well because it re-creates for me some of the feeling I got from the original scene—and that is the real test of any picture. —Berenice Abbott, 1953 It’s twilight in late December 1932. Thousands of streetlights and office windows blaze in electrified concert for a scant half hour between the winter-solstice sunset and the lights-out, five o’clock end of the office workers’ day. Just weeks earlier, after three crushing years of the Great Depression, fear-defying FDR had won the presidency by a landslide. Optimism was in the air. High up in the northwest corner of the new Empire State Building, thirty-four-year-old Berenice Abbott aims her bulky wooden view camera at the exuberance below—the glittering, boundless cityscape of Midtown Manhattan, diffused just slightly by a sheltering glass window. She opens the shutter and begins a fifteen-minute exposure. Her triumphant photograph, Nightview, New York, will forever signal “modern metropolis”—as futuristic to us in the twenty-first century as it was to Berenice’s Depression-weary contemporaries. Read More
April 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Monsieur Bébé: The Brief, Strange Life of Raymond Radiguet By Emma Garman Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau. In the spring of 1923, the young married artists Jean and Valentine Hugo began inviting people to séances at their Paris apartment. A new mood of occultism, influenced by Freud and the early Surrealists, was in the air. And raising the dead was in Jean’s blood: while his great-grandfather, Victor Hugo, was in exile in the 1850s, he presided over frequent “table-rapping” sessions on the Channel Islands. As Victor Hugo recorded in four red notebooks, his “talking table” conducted conversations with such eager spirits as Jesus, Moses, Dante, and Shakespeare—the last of whom, obligingly, concurred with Hugo’s assessment of himself as the greatest writer of all time. Jean and Valentine’s gatherings, however, elicited messages so chilling that the group, spooked, abandoned the practice after only a few tries. It wasn’t an overreaction; before the year’s end, the omens they’d received in their séances were borne out. In a pink velvet-lined anteroom, the Hugos and their friends, including the artistic polymath Jean Cocteau and the avant-garde composer Georges Auric, encircled a wooden pedestal with a tripod base and tilting round top, a type of table reputed to encourage spiritual communion. Placing their hands on its surface, which was lacquered black and painted with flowers, they asked questions. The table tapped out answers on the floor (one tap meaning the letter a, and so on), which Jean Hugo wrote down. Over the course of these sittings, the clearest messages were intended for the youngest guest: the nineteen-year-old Raymond Radiguet, Cocteau’s protégé and lover, who had just published his scandalous debut novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh). “Uneasiness will grow with genius,” claimed the “spirit.” Radiguet, the spirit said, “should love me for he loves nothing.” It warned: “Fame does not replace love even in death and I am death.” The following week came death’s final declaration: “I want his youth.” Read More
April 9, 2018 In Memoriam Cecil Taylor (March 25, 1929–April 5, 2018) By Brian Cullman Cecil Taylor. One New Year’s Eve, long ago, I was wandering around with friends and noticed a small handwritten sign on the door of Saint Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue. I went to look—TEN THIRTY P.M.: CECIL TAYLOR FREE CONCERT. It was 10:15. We walked in. There were about thirteen, fourteen others there, a mix of jazz fans, retired postmen, and churchgoers, all spread out in various pews. There was a Steinway grand set up on the altar. At ten thirty sharp, Cecil Taylor appeared, sat down, and began playing with cheerful gravity. The music was so small at first that it seemed like it was in miniature, but slowly it grew until it filled the church to overflowing, and the joy was contagious. People were laughing, and the sound kept expanding until we could hardly stand it. A few minutes after midnight, Taylor stopped for a moment, took off his sunglasses, and bowed his head. “Happy New Year!” he said. “To all of us. Everyone. Happy New Year.” And then he continued playing.
April 9, 2018 Arts & Culture It Was or It Was Not: Femininity in Arabic Folktales By Inea Bushnaq The folktales in Pearls on a Branch, oral survivors from a preliterate era, resemble a quilt made with the fabrics of well-loved clothes. Just as patches of cloth in a quilt are arranged in different combinations to form a design, traditional folk motifs appear and reappear in a variety of settings and plots to shape the stories. One prince falls in love with the grocer’s daughter next door, another can’t take his eyes off the Bedouin girl he sees on his way to the hunt, all to the horror of the royal mothers. Here a golden anklet, and there a voice heard out of an open window, inspire obsessive love for their unknown owners. A songbird with green feathers reveals one crime and a speaking nightingale another. In the stories, love conquers all, but inevitably there are obstacles on the way to the happy ending. These are tales told by women to women so, not surprisingly, the main characters often are young women with remarkable courage, wit, and endurance. Whatever their unfortunate circumstances at the beginning, whether poverty or oppression, they are the heroines in the end. The thirty texts gathered in Pearls on a Branch have been chosen from a hundred tales, recorded and transcribed by Najla Jraissaty Khoury and published in Beirut in 2014. Captured on tape, these are verbatim renderings of the storytellers speaking. The translation, like the transcriptions, adheres word for word to the Arabic original. The aim is to allow the English reader to listen in as the storytellers, older women living in Lebanon in the last quarter of the twentieth century, pass on the stories they had heard in childhood. Only in the verses that ornament many of the stories does the English sometimes need a few added words to be comprehensible. Read More
April 9, 2018 On Writing On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness By Nafissa Thompson-Spires Google “stock images of women with excruciating menstrual cramps,” “women having nervous breakdowns,” “women on hospital gurneys.” Make several of the women black even though your Google search will not produce these results. String them together on a chic laundry line with clothespins and hang it on your mantle, or maybe paste them into a photo collage, digital or print. Splatter the collage with blood. Untwist the women’s ovaries and take them away. Sew up their vaginal openings so their private parts look like the deformed hermetic triangles of Barbie dolls. You now have a visual rendering of life with endometriosis. It is a poor approximation. Throw the collage in the trash. Maybe it is too ugly after all. In and out of invasive procedures to misdiagnose and then finally diagnose my symptoms—a colonoscopy, two upper endoscopies, a gastric emptying scan, an MRI, a vulvar biopsy, a dozen transvaginal ultrasounds, two mammograms before I was thirty-four, a laparoscopy, a laparotomy, a mosquito, a libido—I wrote a book. Several of its central characters are women suffering from chronic invisible illnesses, the kind of women in your collage. It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out. A chronic illness is a multilayered cruelty, especially when it is invisible. There are trips to the emergency room, to convenient care—which never ends up being as convenient as one might think—there is a lot of waiting around, and after all that waiting, there is a lot of “you’ll have to talk to your primary care physician during regular hours.” The emergency room is kept mausoleum cold. Read More