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
November 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Eternal Friendship: An Unlikely Cold War Connection By Anouk Durand Excerpt from Anouck Durand: Eternal Friendship (Siglio Press, 2017). All rights reserved. French artist-writer Anouk Durand’s photo-novel, Eternal Friendship, is collaged from photographic archives, personal letters and propaganda magazines interspersed with text. It tells the true story of a friendship between two photographers forged in the crucible of war. It begins in Albania during World War II, stops in China during the Cold War, and ends in Israel as Communism is crumbling. Below, we have reprinted Eliot Weinberger’s introduction, followed by a short excerpt from the book. The Albanian language has a tense for surprise. That is, the verb-ending changes if one says “You speak Albanian” or “You speak Albanian!” The physical landscape of the country is punctuated with periods: 200,000 tiny dome-shaped concrete bunkers, scattered everywhere, meant to hold one or two snipers each, and built by Enver Hoxha in the delusion that it would repel an imagined Soviet invasion. But, even more, the psychic landscape is a forest of exclamation marks entangled with question marks: surprise and bewilderment. Albanian did not have its own written language until the 20th century, and 95% of the women couldn’t read it. Fishermen on the coast, farmers in the hills, shepherds in the mountains, the blood feuds of continually warring clans: Albania was always an agricultural colony or the backwater of an empire or occupied territory on the way to somewhere else for the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Italo-Normans, the Serbs, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Ottomans, the Italian Fascists, the Nazis. In its first years after World War II, the new People’s Republic of Albania under Hoxha—who was prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister, and the commander-in-chief of the army—became a client state of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Breaking with Yugoslavia, it became a client state of Stalin’s Soviet Union, copying the Stalinist economic system of state enterprise and collectivized farming and the Stalinist political system of mass imprisonments and executions. The penalization of “enemies of the people” extended to their grandchildren. Read More
November 13, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part One 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 first installment, Nabokov dreams about eating rare soil samples. Three days later, the soil samples appear in a documentary he’s watching on TV. 17 Oct. 1964—8.30 am (see Oct. 20) 4. Sitting at round table in the office of the director of a small provincial museum. He (a stranger, a colorless administrator, neutral features, crewcut) is explaining something about the collections. I suddenly realize that all the while he was speaking I was absent-mindedly eating exhibits on the table—bricks of crumbly stuff which I had apparently taken for some kind of dusty insipid pastry but which were actually samples of rare soils in the compartments (of which most are now empty) of a tray-like wooden affair in which <verso> geological specimens are kept. Although he had pointed at the tray while speaking, the director has not noticed yet anything wrong. I am now wondering not so much about the effects upon me of those (very slightly sugary) samples of soils but about the method of restoring them and what exactly they were—perhaps very precious, hard to procure, long kept in the museum (the labels on the empty compartments are reproachful but dim). The director is called to the telephone and <new card> [17 Oct. cont.] abruptly leaves the room. I am now talking to his assistant (German, wears glasses, youngish) who is very hard on the doctor who had been looking after me before I came to this clinic (ex-museum). In fact, that doctor’s treatment (rather than the exhibits I have just consumed—which surely must aggravate my condition) has resulted in the possibility of an “iron-infection”. He says I will be threatened by it at least during a whole year, will “live under the menace.” <verso> He mispronounces this word as “mans” and turns apologetically and questioningly to the director of the clinic (who has now returned to his place at the table). The director whose native language is English nods and says “yes, there will be a mans.” I correct him: menace, and am aware I have offended him. (Quite recently—the day before yesterday—I had read of edible mushrooms, dry samples of which were offered, to be handled and sniffed at, to the visitors[1] to an exhibition. And last year we had been highly critical of one of D’s doctors).[2] Read More