February 1, 2018 Arts & Culture A Darker Canvas: Tattoos and the Black Body By Bryan Washington One time in New Orleans, during an annual music festival organized by Essence magazine, a lady flagged me down from her car. I was walking through the French Quarter. The air was sufficiently drenched. In a neighborhood that has been steadily losing black folks, the block was suddenly full of us—glowing in bright clothes, and laughing entirely too loud. But this woman was pretty pissed. When I reached her window, she gave me another nod. She squinted at my tattoos, and asked where the nearest parlor was. “But one for us,” she said. “I’ve already been to four today.” I pointed her to a guy I knew, up the road and around the corner. When she asked if he was black, I winced, because he was not. “He’s good though,” I said. “I mean it. He’s done me twice.” The lady looked deeply skeptical. But then she said, “Okay.” “Listen,” she continued. “I don’t know about that. But I’m going to trust you.” Read More
January 31, 2018 Look Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in Conversation By Katie Hanson Left: detail from Two Studies for a Skeleton by Gustave Klimt; Right: detail from The Pacer by Egon Schiele The year 2018 marks the centenary of the deaths of the Austrian artists Gustav Klimt (born in 1862) and Egon Schiele (born in 1890). Even after a hundred years, their drawings have a compelling immediacy, a sense of energy and presence, of searching and questioning, that still feels fresh. Both artists welcomed deep engagement with their art, a kind of looking that encompassed feeling and seeking. Klimt was nearly thirty years Schiele’s senior, and the younger artist looked up to him, but their admiration and recognition of artistic skill were mutual. When Schiele asked Klimt if he was talented, Klimt replied, “Talented? Much too much.” Schiele proposed an exchange of drawings, offering several of his own sheets for one by Klimt, to which Klimt responded, “Why do you want to exchange with me? You draw better than I do.” Schiele was proud when his work was exhibited opposite Klimt’s in Berlin in 1916. Just a couple years later, upon Klimt’s death, Schiele wrote, “An unbelievably accomplished artist—a man of rare depth—his work a sanctuary.” Read More
January 31, 2018 Department of Tomfoolery Paris, Reviewed By Rosa Rankin-Gee Real life reviews from the City of Light, compiled from TripAdvisor.com Musee d’Orsay MUSÉE D’ORSAY Not worth unless you are into art Only go if you are interested in art history. I love history, but I couldn’t stay here for more than an hour, as its pictures doesn’t make sense to me. EIFFEL TOWER Very not good! We expect from the Eiffel Tower something romantic. But we got—very not good and not clean around the Eiffel Tower! At night you can’t see the city of Paris because there is not enough lighting!!! After visiting the Eiffel Tower, NO body helped us to find the way to go down!!! Read More
January 31, 2018 Arts & Culture The Baby, the Book, and the Bathwater By Heather Abel On female ambition and what gets thrown out. Robert Louis Stevenson’s baby book. Around halfway through writing my novel, I read a book that nearly derailed me. As any writer knows, reading while writing is always a risky pursuit. Cadences are easily stolen; we find ourselves singing a lullaby we don’t remember being sung to us. But there’s something worse than a book that turns us into magpies and mimics: one that squelches our very desire to write. The book that had this censoring effect on me was called, both innocuously and officially, The Baby Book. It was the first book I read after giving birth for the first time, as sleep-deprived and receptive as any cult joiner. I had not read about baby care during my first pregnancy, which ended after eleven weeks, or during the second. Due to an autoimmune illness that could compromise my ability to carry a baby to term, as well as my family’s Judeo-magical thinking that links stillbirths to positive thoughts, I refused to imagine anything beyond the birth. But once my own child emerged, gorgeous and awake, a heart beating beneath her thin skin, I was at a loss. I turned to the book all my friends recommended. Read More
January 30, 2018 Redux Redux: Benjamin Nugent, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Kristin Dombek 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 you Benjamin Nugent’s story “God,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem “Kingdom Come,” and Kristin Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to all three in the ninth episode of our podcast, “God, Etc.” And if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts by subscribing on iTunes. While you’re there, tell us in the comments how much you love the show. “God,” by Benjamin Nugent Issue no. 206 (Fall 2013) We called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends. Read More
January 30, 2018 Look Mirtha Dermisache and the Limits of Language By Will Fenstermaker An excerpt from Mirtha Dermisache’s Libro No. 1 (1972). No importa lo que pasa en la hoja de papel, lo importante es lo que pasa dentro nuestro. (“It’s not important what happens on a sheet of paper, the important thing is what happens within us.”) —Mirtha Dermisache Despots, from those who composed the efficiently murderous junta that ruled Argentina to the petty kakistocracy that runs the United States today, curb the written word because they fear its expressive power. They haven’t learned that what they should fear is not written language but, instead, the very impulse to write. It is more prevailing than literature, capable of surviving where art cannot. The writings and artistic practice of Mirtha Dermisache are a testament to this. Her work, which she created while living under the junta in Argentina, is lasting and subversive even though she barely penned a legible word. One could argue that writing is a state of being in conflict—with oneself, with one’s subject, with one’s government, or with one’s community. But the unconscious impulse to write comes before the word, and it does not always take the form of language. Everything that follows—in how we traditionally conceive of writing—is an attempt to capture that compulsion, to make approximate marks that convey our thoughts to others. This is what John Berger referred to when he wrote, “The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience.” Prose, he came to believe, expressed something that was far from truth because it was too artificial and too trusting; it did not “speak to the immediate wound.” Read More