March 7, 2018 Bulletin Isabella Hammad Wins 2018 Plimpton Prize; David Sedaris Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is a month away—tickets are available here—and the editorial committee of our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2018 honorees, Isabella Hammad and David Sedaris. Read More
March 6, 2018 Redux Redux: Luisa Valenzuela, Gordon Lish, Thomas Healy 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, to celebrate the publication of The Writer’s Chapbook, the second volume from Paris Review Editions, we bring you a sampling of writers on writing. Read More
March 6, 2018 Hue's Hue Marian Blue, the Color of Angels, Virgins, and Other Untouchable Things By Katy Kelleher Still from Lady Shanghai Blue, by David Lynch. In a strip mall, next to a CVS Pharmacy, and tucked behind a Burger King, I learned about my angel. While I waited for a prescription to be filled, I wandered into the only New Age store in this small northeastern city. A woman with long gray hair led me into a back room—I suspect it was a repurposed broom closet—for a fifteen-minute psychic reading. The walls were covered with Turkey-red-calico fabric and faded yellow-ditsy floral tablecloths hanging from a constellation of multicolored thumbtacks. We sat together on a set of metal folding chairs, and she held my cold hands in her warm wrinkled ones. She told me in hushed tones that I had an angel, a ball of light that beamed out from behind my left shoulder. My angel, she said, was with me always, glowing steadily like a frosty star, invisible to everyone but her. She had always been able to see angels, she explained, and they were always the lightest, purest, sweetest baby blue. Read More
March 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Mean Streets: The Life and Afterlife of Berlin Alexanderplatz By Dustin Illingworth George Grosz, Panorama (detail), 1919. The German artist George Grosz emerged from the decadence of Weimar culture as an unlikely moralist. His grotesque paintings of Berlin street life—seething, ugly, claustrophobic, often thick with malice—skewered the city’s lurid postwar demimonde. Though today Grosz is best remembered as a gifted caricaturist, his contemporary Hannah Arendt considered him a documentarian: “[his] cartoons seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage,” she wrote. Within the crucible of the metropolis, Arendt suggests, one must be prepared to enlarge one’s conception of the real. One of Grosz’s works, Panorama (Down with Leibneicht), adorns the cover of a new edition of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, published by New York Review Books and translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann. Dense, death-haunted, bleakly erotic, Panorama pairs perfectly with Döblin’s immense and splendidly gritty novel, on whose shoulders rests, as Hofmann has it in his afterword, “the literary name and fame of the city of Berlin, if not the idea of modern city literature altogether.” The book follows the petty criminal Franz Biberkopf—“transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer”—as he attempts to go straight after a stint in Tegel, a Berlin prison, for beating his girlfriend to death. His fate, as relayed through dozens of slangily titled episodes (“Reunion on the Alex, Bitching Cold”), unspools with the sensational power of tabloid melodrama. While Biberkopf regains his bearings in the city, he vows to lead the life of a respectable man, selling newspapers and tie holders in the proletarian Alexanderplatz district. But after a friend’s betrayal upsets this delicate stasis, he returns to a life of crime, falling in with a band of con men, and eventually losing an arm after a failed heist. Following a period of convalescence, he meets and falls in love with Mitzi, a prostitute, who is then murdered by the devious, predatory Reinhold, a criminal associate. Biberkopf, distraught, opens fire in a crowded bar, and wounds a policeman. While in custody, he starves himself and enters a self-induced catatonic state. After a climactic confrontation with the figure of death, he returns to his senses and finds a stable but much diminished life as a menial laborer. Ground beneath the boot of rude, rapacious Berlin, Biberkopf, in lieu of love or purpose, is left “sniffing the air, sniffing the streets, to see if … they will still accept him.” The final chapter concludes with bitterly humbled wisdom: “We know what we know, we had to pay dearly enough for it.” Read More
March 5, 2018 On Music The Soundtrack of ‘Phantom Thread’ Will Outlive the Oscars By Paul Grimstad Still from Phantom Thread. Not often does a film score stand out as a work of art independent of the movie it embellishes, but there are the rare exceptions. Everyone remembers the zither tune in The Third Man, Howard Shore’s ominous counterpoint clocks in After Hours, or Stanley Kubrick’s counterintuitive needle drops in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other scores meet the film on a plane in which the photography and music cannot be disentangled: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s title cue for The Last Emperor; Jerry Goldsmith’s recurring, melancholy muted-trumpet line in Chinatown; Philip Glass’s winding synth fractals heard over a time-lapsed New York City in Koyaanisqatsi. Jonny Greenwood’s score to Phantom Thread—Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about a maniacally fussy dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock—is of the latter type. The music has a sinewy, ductile curvature that folds itself into the piles of fabric, weaving its way into the lining as the cloth becomes a dress. The main theme is a tense piece played by a string section in its upper register, where things cease to sound sweet and become eerie and diaphanous. Other cues are full of wide, warm major-ninth chords that flutter around like pastel ribbons. There are voicings that remind one of Bill Evans at his most fragile; instrumental color that brings to mind the Ballet Russes; airy chromaticism à la Miles Davis circa Nefertiti. Solo piano lines pick out patterns in the music like animate glowing lace. All of it is impeccably recorded. It is perverse that it didn’t win the Oscar for best score this year. Read More
March 5, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Doorway By Amit Chaudhuri Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1806. My mother often told me how much I’d looked forward to my first day of school. Although I find the thought extraordinary—I loathed school—it’s plausible. I was an exuberant boy. The deceptively effervescent nursery, which no longer exists, was located in an old house on Nepean Sea Road in Bombay. My mother dropped me there but lingered, to look out for me (she was very protective) but also to spectate. From afar, she watched me push a boy—a gesture of friendliness, she’d later insist. At this, the teacher apparently smacked me. I took great umbrage and began to cry. My mother swooped down and plucked me from the crowd of children. She believed the teacher had punished me because the boy I’d pushed was European. I went home but did not stop crying. In the evening, I got a fever. I didn’t want to go to school the next day. The honeymoon period was over. After that first experience, my parents struggled to put me into a series of kindergartens. I finally found myself attending a school called Sunny Side, a seven-minute walk from the flat we then lived in on Malabar Hill. Once, when my father dropped me off on the way to the office, I refused to get out of the car. I remember him opening the door on the left, then the right, as I moved sideways each time to the opposite direction. Occasionally, I resigned myself to mornings in Sunny Side School. My favored spot was the doorway, where I said goodbye to my mother, watched her walk home, studied her as she turned to wave, and instructed her, with a gesture of my hand, to come back soon. Read More