September 22, 2017 Revisited Merce Cunningham’s Legacy Plan By Eugene Lim Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Eugene Lim revisits the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final performance. Photo: © Daniel Arkham CONAN: How do you obliterate space and time? Mr. JONES: Well, you know, sometimes, when I’ve had one tequila too many and I’m lying on the floor, I feel pretty obliterated in space and time. No, but I don’t think that’s what [Merce] meant. —Bill T. Jones remembering Merce Cunningham, on NPR. On the few last nights of 2011, I saw a series of performances that so moved and changed me that I thought to myself, This is the greatest experience of art I’ve ever had! And yet because I didn’t have the training or the critical terms to note the details of what I’d seen—and even if I’d had them I’m not sure the soft muscles of my memory would have retained them—I have only emotional and murky impressions. A dance performance I know I once felt was a pinnacle of experience I now can only vaguely hold in mind, like a summer in a foreign city where you carried out a painless and shimmering affair—that is, something idealized and maybe romantic but shrouded and perhaps no longer real. These were the final dance performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on the nights of December 29th, 30th, and 31st in 2011. Prior to his death, Merce Cunningham created a remarkably prescient and meticulous legacy plan which, after his passing, would send the company on a two-year world tour. It would culminate with final performances in New York. Then, the company would disband. Read More
September 22, 2017 Stolen Reading J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine in Fall By Barret Baumgart Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft. It was autumn and warm, late evening, and the shadows were as long as the hot busses that hissed and braked alongside the main library’s midwestern utilitarian grim, lifting trails of dead leaves like a breath of smoke in their wake as they rumbled toward the river. I read the dedication in J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, “To My Wife,” before dropping the book in my backpack and unlocking my bike. I found it somewhat cheering. At least this neglected author managed to find someone. But over the decades, many readers—I later learned—had come to debate this. They said he never had a wife. They said he lived alone; he was a librarian; he was sick when he wrote the book, hence the melancholy that colors his prose. Others said it was not prose but poetry, while others insisted it wasn’t nonfiction but a novel. Even certain filmmakers wanted to lay claim to the text. Werner Herzog told a Rio audience to quit film school. If they wanted to make a movie they had only to read one book: The Peregrine. Classic Herzogian hyperbole, I thought, pushing my bike uphill across the dried grass toward the old capital. Read More
September 21, 2017 Inside the Issue Why Write Limericks for John Ashbery By Patrick Mackie “For me, Ashbery was the sky.” I was with some poetry friends in a pub near Holborn, shooting the breeze before a reading two of us were participating in. The breeze was fairly dark on that day, for various reasons. It was the weekend following Donald Trump’s inauguration for one thing; it was January in London for another. Let us hope that it was genuine curiosity, at least as much as the need to keep the conversation going, that caused one friend to ask which poet I thought of as the main background presence for my own writing. He did not quite phrase the question in terms of influence. I did not have to think to know that the answer was John Ashbery. But for some reason, the name felt a little flat on my tongue, as if this was an important fact about myself that I had not been nourishing or had grown inattentive to. Further comment seemed called for, and what I found myself saying next was that, for me, Ashbery was the sky. It was true, and of course it remains so. The sky is not something that just goes and dies one day. Read More
September 21, 2017 On Language “Human Life Is Punishment,” and Other Pleasures of Studying Latin By James Frankie Thomas From the Cambridge Latin Course 4th Edition. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I am currently enrolled, doesn’t require you to do much of anything. Time is largely unstructured here; as long as your writing gets done, you barely have to get out of bed for two years. When I first realized this, I panicked, and then I registered for an undergraduate course in elementary Latin. I don’t even get academic credit for it. I just wanted something in my life, amidst the subjective muck of the creative process, that I could be objectively good at—the occasional dopamine rush of a check mark, an A grade, a scribbled Great job! from an authority figure—and I remembered being good at Latin. It had been almost two decades since I last looked at a Latin textbook, but I was optimistic that I’d retained a lot. My seventh-grade Latin textbook left a vivid impression on me. It followed the fictionalized adventures of a real-life Pompeian household (vocab words for the final chapter included volcano, to erupt, smoke, ashes, in despair), and to this day, I remember the whole cast of characters: Caecilius, a banker; Metella, his wife; Grumio, their cook; and Cerberus, the dog, who stays by his master’s side to the very end (RIP, little buddy). I’ll never forget the passage in which Melissa, a newly purchased slave girl, is first presented to the household: my translation was “Melissa pleases Caecilius. Melissa pleases Grumio. Uh-oh—Melissa does not please Metella!” It was pretty juicy material, by seventh-grade standards. (I just Googled these names, so I can tell you that the book was The Cambridge Latin Course: Book 1, and that it has a surprisingly robust fandom on Tumblr.) Read More
September 21, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Help! Infectious Boredom and Pee-Hoarding Roommates By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, When you get bored, and you’re so bored you don’t even want to do anything to break up the boredom—it’s that creeping, infectious boredom that’s kind of like an anger—how do you avoid drinking too much? Thanks, Tipsy in Texas Dear Tipsy, Boredom has a hard time letting go of the remote control, so the secret is to get your body out of range so it can’t reach you. The remote control that boredom holds is your phone. Leave it behind, and sneak calmly out the back way. Get a ride to a bar that is about ninety-minutes walk from your place then go in, (phoneless!) and order your favorite drink and pound it. Drink it really, really fast. Then have one more really, really fast. Tip your bartender and head out, thinking of a question that you’d love to know the answer to, big or small. As you begin to walk home (possibly getting a little lost along the way as you are buzzed and phoneless) tell yourself that you will encounter three clues to the answer to this question in the next ninety minutes. Read More
September 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Neil the Horse Rides Again By Trina Robbins The 1980s was the decade of the black-and-white comic boom—and the inevitable bust. The boom was started in part by three successful self-published comics: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest, and Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark. A comic-reading public that wanted something besides the same tired superhero formula or the sex-and-drugs heavy (and often misogynist) underground comics snapped them up. The black-and-white pages were cheaper to print than color, and soon new publishers with new titles were springing up like toadstools after a rainstorm. At first it seemed as though any black-and-white comic book would sell (and at first they did), and there were some pretty bizarre but briefly successful books with titles, like Cold Blooded Chameleon Commandos or The Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos, riding on the armored coattails of Ninja Turtles, but along with the silliness came some good comics that are still with us, like Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, Max Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Tree, and Joshua Quagmire’s Cutey Bunny, and some good comics that unfortunately didn’t last, like Bill Messner-Loebs’s Journey, and the subject of this essay. In the midst of the hysteria of the black-and-white boom, along came Neil the Horse, tap dancing his way into the hearts of America. (Well, mine, anyway, and enough others to keep the comic going for fifteen issues.) Five parts Donald Duck artist Carl Barks, five parts Fred Astaire, and a hundred percent Arn Saba, the banana-chomping, rubber-legged equine’s comics were a refreshing change from the dark, grim and gritty, ultraviolent mainstream comics that seemed almost de rigueur during the eighties. His Art Deco–looking characters sang and danced their way through some pretty wacky adventures: inspired by the manic adventures of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck, along with a healthy dose of surrealism à la Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, Neil got caught in a photocopier, producing hundreds of Neil clones; he met Mr. Coffee Nerves and consumed a gallon of the stuff, with expected rubber-legged results, and he and his cigar-chomping pal, Soapy the Cat, went to Hell (not as a result of drinking all that coffee!). Read More