December 22, 2017 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Comic-Book Artist By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. ©Molly Crabapple Rosa Colón sat in the back room of El Local, a San Juan punk club whose walls crawled with hallucinogenic murals and whose main room had now been repurposed as a comedor social, or “collective kitchen.” El Local was Rosa’s place. For the past decade, she’d been a pillar of Puerto Rico’s indie comics scene. She drew comics, self-publishing her work through an imprint, Soda Pop Comics, that she ran with her partner, Carla. She made anthologies, organized art shows, and threw a yearly indie comic con to bring more attention to local art. As we lounged on El Local’s threadbare armchairs, a procession of tattooed young people in razor-altered black clothes shouted greetings in her direction. Read More
December 22, 2017 Best of 2017 Ten of Our Top Stories from 2017 By Nadja Spiegelman The Paris Review’s office. This year has certainly been a memorable one for The Paris Review, with more than a few moments that tried our resolve. But we prefer to remember it as a landmark year, measured out by four extraordinary issues that included Hilton Als’s imaginary biopic about James Baldwin and Nina Simone, the fiction debuts of J. M. Holmes and J. Jezewska Stevens, and an interview with Maxine Groffsky, one of the magazine’s first female editors, which reads like a page-turning feminist adventure story. This was the year we launched our podcast (there are six episodes to carry you into the new year, and many more to come) and reintroduced the Paris Review Editions imprint with the Women at Work interview anthology. As of this writing, the volume is sold out, but sign up for our newsletter: the next book is already underway. And here on the Daily, we’ve been publishing exciting new writing, well, daily. When I took over this post in September, I was nervous. My predecessor, Dan Piepenbring, had left big shoes to fill (as well as, it turned out, actual high-heeled shoes behind the desk, though he has denied ownership). Since the 2016 election, I have been filled with an existential dread that only seems to recede when I felt I was doing something worthwhile. Three months in, I can proclaim with absolute certainty that what we’re doing on the Daily and at The Paris Review is more than worthwhile—it’s essential. In a year of constant, terrifying news alerts, we have carved out a space for humor, for reflection, for going deep and going wide, and for capturing our moment not through its tweets but through its culture. It’s easy to get lost in despair. We want to make it easy, too, to get lost in writing that makes us feel reinvigorated, hopeful, and less alone. To get you started, I’ve selected ten pieces we’ve published online in 2017—starting with monstrous men and ending with good advice: Read More
December 21, 2017 Look The New Archive of Gabriel García Márquez By The Paris Review When Gabriel García Márquez died, in 2014, he left behind, among other legacies, an astoundingly detailed record of his life—some 27,500 images’ worth of detail, in fact. That collection—culled from his correspondence, his twenty-two personal scrapbooks and notebooks, his photographs, and material from both his published and unpublished works—was acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014, and became digitally available to the public this month. The Ransom archive gives us the author in full and scattered manuscript: yellowed pages of Colombian passports; first and second and third drafts of his Nobel Prize speech, historical dates and ranges penciled in the margin; candid snapshots of him fondling a statue with Pablo Neruda in Normandy or side-hugging a mirthful Fidel Castro in Havana. The images, in their multitudes, compose not so much a story as an entire life, refracted through film and paper. A small selection appears below: Unidentified photographer, Gabriel García Márquez with Emma Castro, 1957. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center. Read More
December 21, 2017 Life Sentence The Being of the Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro There are so many ways to pin a sentence down: the completeness of its thought, the correctness of its grammar; its rhetorical purpose, its narrative closure. Does any of them touch its being? Night after night this message returns, repeated in the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, the being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes to be without, alone and desperate. John Ashbery is a poet of sentences. No one writing since Milton has had quite so much syntax at his disposal. “Soonest Mended,” the poem from which this sentence is taken, is composed in lines, which make for another order of punctuation—and they make a difference, as you can see if you read the original. Here, though, I want to set the prosody aside in favor of the prose of Ashbery’s commas, and the way the wandering structure sounds the question of what, after all is said and done, a sentence is. After so many formal queries in this column, after trying out so many different frameworks and idioms, permit me a moment of existential free fall. Read More
December 21, 2017 On Food Cocktails for Toasting the End of Patriarchy By Merrily Grashin 1. The Feminine Mys-tiki Read More
December 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Close Readings of the Police Blotter By Sophie Haigney If you read police blotters enough, you start to notice the colors: Pink bike. A yellow color backpack. Silver four-door sedan. Heather-blue uniform pants. A black male wearing a black hat with white lettering, a navy blue coat, and blue jeans. You notice the colors mostly because there aren’t many other details. Place, time, incident description—color of suspect’s clothing or car. Often the color of his or her skin. * I read police blotters because I write about crime, but I also enjoy getting lost in them. I can spend hours scrolling through outdated lists of events that happened places I’ve never visited: Rutherford, New Jersey; Killeen, Texas; Eliot, Maine. Someone told me once—and I’m not sure how he would have known, but I chose to believe him—that police blotters are the most-read pages on local news websites. So perhaps I’m not alone. Blotters vary in content by region. In Lamoille County, Vermont, there were five incidents involving deer between November 13 and 19. Car vs. deer, the log read the first four times, noting the injuries to drivers and deer (the driver was always unharmed). Then, finally, the recording officer became overwhelmed by the casualties: Nov. 17, 6:38 pm, a bad night for deer. The blotters of cities tend to list fewer animals and more violent incidents. Sometimes, though, the suburbs are brutal, too: Wellesley, Massachusetts: Knife flashed in road incident, 4:59 p.m. Read More