March 28, 2018 Arts & Culture Chinese Rhymes By Anthony Madrid Everybody who cares anything for old poetry in English knows how it feels—knows how awful it feels—when a poem is rhyming away and then suddenly the rhyme goes off the rails for a second because English pronunciation has changed since the time the poem was written. Take a look at this gallery of specimens. Exhibit A: Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove Millions of examples of that. Love rhymed with prove or move. Elizabethan poetry is rife with this. • Exhibit B: A winning wave, deserving note In the tempestuous petticoat; A careless shoestring in whose tie I see a wild civility. Tie used to be pronounced tee. Read it again and say tee where it says tie. Aha. • Exhibit C: Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What’s roundly smooth or languishingly slow. And praise the easy vigor of a line Where Denham’s strength and Waller’s sweetness join. I don’t know whether Pope pronounced line “loin,” or join “jine.” But it must have been one or the other. • Exhibit D: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Eye was pronounced ee. Read it again. Read More
March 28, 2018 Celebrating Joy Williams Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Illustrated: Part Three 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. An original illustration by Brad Holland. Read More
March 27, 2018 On Design Oliver Munday’s Graphic Design with a Conscience By Andrew Ridker Perhaps the most striking images in Oliver Munday’s new monograph, Don’t Sleep, appear just before the title page. On the left-facing page is a nineteenth-century map of the Senate floor. On the page opposite is an illustrated cross section of the hull of a slave ship, scaled to the same size as the Senate and in the exact same semicircle shape. This encapsulates Munday’s design work: arresting juxtapositions, an engagement with the political, and above all, a deliberate, understated presence. As heavy as the visuals are, Munday’s hand is light. The images speak for themselves. Don’t Sleep is a powerful survey of thirty-three-year-old Munday’s career thus far. The title, which asks readers to stay alert to the implicit and explicit messages of an image-saturated culture, also calls to mind “wokeness.” Though Munday is hesitant to call himself an activist, he readily acknowledges the role of design in various social movements, from May 1968 to Cold War Cuba. Munday’s editorial illustrations, posters, and book jackets draw attention to social-justice issues—and awareness is the first step in making change. He is after, as he says, “the thing that makes you stop and think for just one extra moment.” Read More
March 27, 2018 Redux Redux: A Mild Olfactory Hallucination 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 officially spring, right? This week, we help to hasten winter’s end with a story of knowing when to stop, from John Hall Wheelock’s interview; Ben Lerner’s appropriately named story “False Spring”; and, a staff favorite, Diane di Prima’s poem “Song for Spring Equinox,” in which we see the season’s “slightly boring” side. Read More
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