November 15, 2017 Novemberance The Alchemy of November By Nina MacLaughlin This is the third installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. Anselm Kiefer, Nigredo, 1984, oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on photograph and woodcut, mounted on canvas. Three uncarved pumpkins the size of candlepin bowling balls stud the mulch in the front garden of a neighbor’s house on the short street where I live. City creatures—squirrels, raccoons, rats—have chewed coin-size circles through the tough outer rind and into the stringy pale flesh below. These sections of gnaw are now ringed with black. The black of rot, a black that looks at once dusty, as though charred by the flame of time, and slick, like the vegetal squelch of something long forgotten in a drawer of the fridge. It is a definitive black, the black of something making slow return to a different state. Along the river, the milkweed pods have split and pour forth their seeded snow-white silk. I walk south along the river when the sun is in the final stages of its work, and scramble down the banks to look. Off tall stalks, desiccated pods spill a thrilling and climactic white. White like rabbit fur, like pearl, white that holds rainbows when the light hits right. The leaves of the young gingko trees that grow out of the sidewalk fell all at once. A few days ago, the fan-shaped leaves with their crenulated margins glowed gold from the branches and fluttered with nonchalance. The following morning, I gasped to see it: branches all but bare and the trees seemed to grow out of puddles of gold. At the cemetery nearby, a twisting Japanese maple is aflame, its feathery leaves a deep red, a bodily red, a red that blazes between wine and blood. Those leaves will grip the branches much deeper into the month than most of the trees around it, almost tauntingly, in a flare of lingering crimson. Read More
November 15, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Three By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this third installment, Nabokov tries to console a girl, with sympathy that is “genuine” but “not free from desire,” and contemplates Dobuzhinsky’s autobiography. Nov. 13, 1964 6.30 am 31. Poignant bitter-sweet dream permeated with tenderness and hopelessness. Short girl, rather dumpy, slatternly dressed, bare-necked, face very attractive but not flawlessly pretty, broadish jaws, flattish nose, wonderful complexion, smooth, warmly colored skin, pale-blue eyes, bedraggled fair hair. Am trying in vain to console her: she has been badly hurt by faithless heartless young husband, a shadowy gay-dog figure in the background. I am doing my best to make her understand how dreadfully sorry I am for her, but she is completely wrapped up <new card> in her taciturn grief, is absolutely impenetrable no matter how I strain to “reach her,” «пробиться к ней»,[1] as I tell her in Russian—but all in vain, she looks up at me with apprehensive hunted gaze, ready to stiffen, bothered, resenting my sympathy which is quite genuine but not free from desire. (The young man is—a very obscure feeling—related to me—perhaps Dm.?!) Read More
November 14, 2017 Redux Redux: Maya Angelou, Denis Johnson, and James Schuyler 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 our 1990 interview with Maya Angelou, Denis Johnson’s story “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking,” and James Schuyler’s poem “In earliest morning.” What do these have in common? They’re all in the first episode of our new podcast! Tune in for free—and while you’re at it, subscribe to The Paris Review for instant access to everything we’ve published since 1953. Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119 Issue no. 116 (Fall 1990) There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Read More
November 14, 2017 Look Inside Paul Cézanne’s Studio By Joel Meyerowitz A few years ago, during a visit to Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, I experienced a flash of insight about the artist that I saw as intrinsic to his becoming the father of modern painting. Once having seen it, it inspired me to move in a new direction in my own work. Cézanne painted his studio walls a dark gray with a hint of green. Every object in the studio, illuminated by a vast north window, seemed to be absorbed into the gray of this background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects to separate them from the background itself, as there would have been had the wall been painted white. Therefore, I could see how Cézanne, making his small, patch-like brush marks, might have moved his gaze from object to background, and back again to the objects, without the familiar intervention of the illusion of space. Cézanne’s was the first voice of “flatness,” the first statement of the modern idea that a painting was simply paint on a flat canvas, nothing more, and the environment he made served this idea. The play of light on this particular tone of gray was a precisely keyed background hum that allowed a new exchange between, say, the red of an apple and the equal value of the gray background. It was a proposal of tonal nearness that welcomed the idea of flatness. Read More
November 14, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Two By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this second installment, Nabokov dreams about his childhood tantrums after rereading Speak, Memory. 18. Oct. 31—8.00 am Among several dreams was a really stunning recollection of early childhood. I was again immersed in these dreadful tantrums, those storms of tears with which my mother had to cope when I was 4–5 years of age and we were abroad. The dream beautifully brought back the sensation of utter disaster when letting myself completely go I simultaneously realized that I was removing further and further, with every sob, and howl a reconciliation with my helpless, distraught mother. In to-night’s dream, I was <new card> already in such a tempest as I rushed from my and S.’s[1] bedroom in a hotel into the white corridor and endeavored to break into mother’s room. She would not let me in—cried out abruptly and jarringly that she was trying on something. I dashed into a water closet and next moment was oddly standing on the lid and hugging the whitewashed pipe that went upward to a basin-like affair in which I plunged my face (the dream rather eccentrically gave the measure <new card> of my height by means of this position which apparently had no other purpose or meaning). My mother with bright eyes and flushed face opened the door at the end of a kind of vestibule leading to the place where I sobbed. There I let myself go completely. Unfortunately at this moment my brother S. whom the English governess was dressing heard my sobbing and joined in. This double performance spoilt the matter and M.[2] instead of consoling me broke into tears herself. Had been rereading (Oct. 29) the Russian version of Speak, Memory.[3] [1]. Here the initial stands for Sergey Nabokov, VN’s younger brother (1900–1945). See p. 27, note 27. [2]. Elena Nabokov, née Rukavishnikov, Nabokov’s mother (1876–1939). [3]. In 1954 Nabokov revised and translated into Russian his autobiography (Speak, Memory, originally Conclusive Evidence, 1951) under the title Drugie berega (Other Shores). Excerpted from Insomnia Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov. Compiled, edited, and with commentary by Gennady Barabtarlo. Copyright © 2018 by the Estate of Dmitri Nabokov. Compilation, preface, parts 1 and 5, notes, and other editorial material copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
November 13, 2017 Arts & Culture The Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google By Alfie Bown Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault, and even Derrida abound as potential solutions to the social, cultural, and economic problems plaguing the planet, Barthes rarely pops his head outside of the undergraduate classroom. As a serious political conversation piece, love, too, has gone out of fashion. While the hippie movement of Barthes’s own generation united love with countercultural politics, today such attempts seem disengaged and out of touch. A data-pull from Google Scholar articles shows that academic work on love has halved in the past five years. The more pressing our political struggles become, the more love recedes into the background. Read More