March 27, 2018 On Art News as Art in 2018 By Sophie Haigney Hans Haacke, News, 1969. Installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018. On the top floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a printer is printing the news. As the printer groans and stutters, long loops of paper gather on the gallery floor. It prints slowly, pausing every few minutes, as the paper grows into an endless ribbon over the course of a day. From a distance, it looks like a recycling heap. Close up, it looks like a Tara Donovan sculpture or the graceful curls of intricate origami. There are RSS feeds coming in from all over the world, in English: Reuters, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, Haaretz, Der Spiegel, Fox News, the Times of India, others. You’re invited to pick it up and read it. “Legendary Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker, 84, reveals he survived bite from poisonous spider.” “Anthea Hamilton review—gourds move in mysterious ways at Tate Britain.” “Detroit-area girl, 3, wounded after AK-47 accidentally fires.” “Lindsay Lohan named the new face of Lawyer.com.” This is the German artist Hans Haacke’s News, part of SFMOMA’s broadly conceived new show “Nothing Stable Under Heaven” (open until September 16), which deals with tech, surveillance, resistance, and instability of all kinds. “It’s Twitter!” a visitor joked on a recent afternoon, dropping the article he was reading back into the paper pile and walking away. Read More
March 27, 2018 Celebrating Joy Williams Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Illustrated: Part Two By Joy Williams On April 3, The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. One story and illustration will appear each morning this week. An original illustration by Brad Holland. Read More
March 26, 2018 First Person Farewell to Winter, Farewell to My Fingertip By Ben Shattuck I lost my fingertip in January while carrying a wooden boat across icy ground. When I slipped, the gunwale came down on my hands. About a half inch of my middle finger lay in the dead grass, which might not sound like a lot until you look at the geography of a hand—the cut went to the white crescent setting in the cuticle. I wish I could accurately describe the feeling of picking up the fingertip—how immediately protective I was, holding it in my palm, cupping it like I’d found a songbird egg; how I felt it was both numb and not numb because it was then an object, not part of my body anymore. It was of my left hand—my writing and painting hand. “We have to go,” I said to my friend carrying the other side of the boat. The surgeon couldn’t sew it back on. Before I was put under, he said if he couldn’t graft the skin from the lower part of the finger, he’d bend the finger and attach the open end to my palm, cleave it free later. I woke up to it not sewed to my palm but erect with a bulb of bandages, an aluminum plate apparently shoved under the nail bed. Read More
March 26, 2018 Arts & Culture What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance By Mark Eisner When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda’s social verse was an integral part of the humanity he expressed; even without pen in hand, he boldly inserted himself into direct action. I happened to finish the book—Neruda: The Poet’s Calling—at the end of Trump’s first hundred days in office. As a result, the questions that I’d been exploring for years suddenly took on new urgency. As resistance increasingly becomes the operative word in our current political reality, what can one of the most important and iconic resistance poets of the past century offer us? What might he give us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story? Some answers, or at least perspectives, can be found in the vivid details of Neruda’s life and work. Read More
March 26, 2018 Celebrating Joy Williams Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Illustrated: Part One By Joy Williams On April 3, The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. One story and illustration will appear each morning this week. An original illustration by Brad Holland. Read More
March 23, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Strip Clubs, Lightning Rods, and Extramarital Affairs By The Paris Review On Wednesday, Anne Boyer received a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. On the same day, shut in by the storm, with only my apartment’s clanging radiators for company, I dove into A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Boyer’s forthcoming book of essays from Ugly Duckling Presse. From the first paragraph of the first essay, simply titled “No,” I was thoroughly captivated by Boyer’s language. Her prose is lyric and smooth. There is nothing labored about her discourse, which is conversational but incisive and often accompanied by a satisfying dose of arch humor. Two examples of Boyer’s particular genius are “Click-Bait Thanatos” and “The Harm.” The former is speculative and considers the eerie technological landscape left behind in a world no longer populated by humans; the latter is a meditation on trauma and how it occupies a person’s consciousness and daily life. Boyer’s essays are best experienced alongside one another; I suggest doing so in the thick of a snowstorm, but I suspect their impact would be equally forceful in any weather. —Lauren Kane This past Tuesday, I sat in my lottery-won onstage seats at the Public Theater and tried not to trip the actors. I was watching the first preview of a new musical called Miss You Like Hell. It’s up until May 6, and if you like musicals (as everyone should), you’ll want to catch it in this intimate setting before it inevitably moves on to a huge Broadway stage. With book and lyrics by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes—whose previous works include In the Heights and Water by the Spoonful—Miss You Like Hell is at once heart-wrenching and joyous in the way only musicals can be. Beatriz, a woman on the verge of deportation, ropes her severely depressed sixteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, into a coast-to-coast road trip. The ensuing events address the subjects of policing, mental health, gay rights, the conservation movement, et cetera. But the play never becomes didactic and never loses its nuance—its beauty and power come from its graceful exploration of human relationships. It feels special to see a show like this at the beginning of its run, when the cast and crew are still finding their places. Miss You Like Hell brightened my snowy Tuesday, made me laugh, made me cry, made me call both my mom and my grandmom, and made me smile in my sleep. —Eleanor Pritchett Read More