April 4, 2018 Hue's Hue Jonquil, the Light Yellow of Early Flowers, Mad Painters, and Dust Bowl–Era Pottery By Katy Kelleher John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903. Here are two yellow fables: In the first story, a man sits next to a pool of water. It gleams silver in the moonlight, and the surface is untroubled by leaves or raindrops. He can see his own reflection, and he admires the tender sweep of his brow. He looks for so long that he no longer wants food. Even though he sits near water, he feels no thirst. Eventually, his body, his beloved physicality, withers, and he dies. Where he once sat, a slender-stalked flower appears. The nymph, who had watched the man’s demise from the cover of the trees, names it for him. Every year, in that same spot, a narcissus opens its butter-yellow petals to reveal a diminutive golden trumpet, a floral echo of his lost beauty. Read More
April 3, 2018 Redux Redux: On Rising from the Dead 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. This week, we bring we bring you Blaise Cendrars’s Art of Fiction interview, in which he remembers the Easter Sunday he wrote Les Pâques à New-York, one of the founding texts of modern poetry; Leonard Gardner’s story of summer’s promise, “Christ Has Returned to Earth and Preaches Here Nightly”; and Carolyn Kizer’s poem “On Rising from the Dead.” Read More
April 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Between Me and My Real Self: On Vernon Lee By Dylan Kenny There is in one’s own jottings something curiously unique; and after a lifetime spent in working on my own notes, I still sometimes catch myself feeling as if such manipulation of them came between me and my real self. —Vernon Lee Vernon Lee was the nom de plume of Violet Paget (1856–1935), a writer of astonishing range and audacity whose published works include historical studies of art and music, dense treatises on aesthetic psychology, acclaimed travel essays, meditations on gardens, pacifist and feminist pamphlets, and supernatural tales. Her versatility is difficult for us to comprehend, which is one reason why she is not as widely read now as she deserves. Already in her later years, she presented the avatar of a bygone intellectual moment. In a 1920 review of her political-philosophical allegory Satan, the Waster, Bernard Shaw (in fact also born in 1856) saluted her as a figure of “the old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan intellectualism.” Lee’s cosmopolitanism was not restricted to her intellect. Born to English parents in France, she had a nomadic childhood, living all over France, Germany, and Switzerland before finally settling in a villa in Florence, which would remain her home for the rest of her life. She drew intellectual collaborators and adversaries from across Europe, and though she commanded widespread respect, this did not always imply fondness. Henry James warned his brother William that Lee was “as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent, which is saying a great deal.” Perhaps even to her contemporaries, Lee remained too various to grasp. Read More
April 3, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Sloane Crosley By Sloane Crosley In our new series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. You are catching my fridge on a well-stocked day, and it still looks like where hope goes to die. Starting at the top, you’ll see the shelf is being colonized by sweaters. This is because all the cedar balls in the world won’t rid me of the pesky moth problem that came with my apartment. A few years ago, the Internet told me the only solution was to store my sweaters in the freezer. This I have done … but there’s some spillover to the fridge. If I was a bigger garlic person, this might be a problem. But you’ll be relieved to know I smell okay. To the left are, quite obviously, eggs. And to the left of those … I don’t know what that is. “Can you keep a secret? So can I!” says the take-out box. Read More
April 2, 2018 On Television A Reckoning with Reality (TV) By Lucas Mann Lucas Mann’s love letter to his wife—and to the jacked-up emotions of reality TV. When we were first getting into The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the husband of one of the show’s stars, who had seemed to be a real asshole (like potentially abusive) on-screen, hanged himself. The following season, his widow was back, shocked yet resilient, weepy but still game. At the height of The Real Housewives of New Jersey (your favorite), Teresa went to jail for the mail, wire, and bank fraud that had funded the lifestyle she so proudly flaunted for the cameras. Her special return-home episode airs next month. In the middle of our Here Comes Honey Boo Boo obsession, Honey Boo Boo’s mother’s boyfriend got arrested for rape, child molestation, aggravated child molestation, and aggravated sexual assault battery against Honey Boo Boo’s sister. The show got canceled, but Honey Boo Boo did appear in a special obesity episode of The Doctors, and now her mother is on Marriage Boot Camp. After we watched the first three seasons of 19 Kids and Counting, the scandal broke about the oldest of the nineteen molesting his sisters and avoiding prosecution by being sent to some backward-ass Christian labor camp. Jim Bob, the patriarch, vowed they’d be back soon, putting complete confidence in God’s plan. I’m not really sure what to do with all this; I’m just getting a list going. The obvious question to bring up here is: Are we complicit? “We” meaning you and me but also, in that awful think-piecey way, standing in for the culture. Read More
April 2, 2018 In Memoriam Drue Heinz, 1915–2018 By The Paris Review We were sad to learn that Drue Heinz, who served as the publisher of The Paris Review from 1993 to 2007, died last Friday, in Lasswade, Scotland. She was 103. Heinz was a lifelong patron of the literary arts, cofounding Ecco Press and serving as an active board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the American Academy in Rome, and the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Read More