September 5, 2017 In Memoriam “America the Lovely” By John Ashbery John Ashbery. Photo: Lynn Davis This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More
September 5, 2017 Arts & Culture A Visit to the Musée d’Edith Piaf By Nadja Spiegelman Musée Edith Piaf. When Edith Piaf died in 1963, at the age of forty-seven, she was the most famous singer in France. But Bernard Marchois, founder and docent of the Musée d’Edith Piaf, was afraid the petite songstress, whose extraordinary voice elevated her from the street corners of working-class Belleville to the stages of the world’s largest music halls, would fall into oblivion after her death. “Her public will never forget her, but the media can. Piaf must not die a second death,” he told me, in French, sitting on an ornate Victorian couch once owned by Piaf herself. Paris is filled with strange museums—from the museum of absinthe to the museum of carnival equipment—but the Musée d’Edith Piaf is among the strangest. Marchois has kept the same hours since its founding fifty years ago, in 1967: Monday through Wednesday, one P.M. to six P.M., strictly by appointment only. He pointedly speaks no English (“Juste une,” he corrected a prospective American visitor, “Une, pas un, parce que vous êtes une jeune femme.”) To those who call, he dictates the address and door codes to a residential building in Belleville. The museum occupies two small rooms of a fourth-floor apartment that adjoins Marchois’s own. Read More
September 5, 2017 Bulletin Announcing Our Fall Issue By The Paris Review In our Fall issue, Malcolm Gladwell discusses his years as an illegal immigrant (and failed right-wing provocateur); Michael Lewis explains how he writes by his family motto (“Do as little as possible”); and David Sedaris weighs the pros and cons of communication with the dead. Also: our longtime Paris editor Maxine Groffsky—who brought John Ashbery and so many others into the pages of the Review–remembers the sixties, with cameos by John Ashbery, Brigitte Bardot, Harry Mathews, George Plimpton, Niki de Saint Phalle, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (“If we’d been getting money [from the CIA], I would have splurged on typewriter ribbons.”) Plus: fiction by Ann Beattie, Antonio Di Benedetto, Isabella Hammad, and Sigrid Nunez; poems by Peter Gizzi, Patrick Mackie, Ange Mlinko, D. Nurkse, Ezra Pound, Jana Prikryl, Philip Schultz, Frederick Seidel, and Donna Stonecipher; an Art of Fiction interview with Dany Laferrière; and the teenage diaries of Duncan Hannah, high school Casanova. Subscribe now.
September 3, 2017 In Memoriam John Ashbery, 1927–2017 By The Paris Review John Ashbery. Photo by Lynn Davis. We are very sorry to hear of the loss of our admired and beloved contributor John Ashbery. I don’t know what the poet that I am is, very much. I was rather an outsider as a child—I didn’t have many friends. We lived out in the country on a farm. I had a younger brother whom I didn’t get along with—we were always fighting the way kids do—and he died at the age of nine. I felt guilty because I had been so nasty to him, so that was a terrible shock. These are experiences which have been important to me. I don’t know quite how they may have fed into my poetry. My ambition was to be a painter, so I took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester from the age of about eleven until fifteen or sixteen. I fell deeply in love with a girl who was in the class but who wouldn’t have anything to do with me. So I went to this weekly class knowing that I would see this girl, and somehow this being involved with art may have something to do with my poetry. Also, my grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester, and I lived with them as a small child and went to kindergarten and first grade in the city. I always loved his house; there were lots of kids around, and I missed all this terribly when I went back to live with my parents. Then going back there each week for art class was a returning to things I had thought were lost, and gave me a curious combination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. —John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No. 33
September 1, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Degradation, Demolition, Disillusion By The Paris Review Brianna McCarthy, Garden of Lost Things. From the cover of Electric Arches. Eve Ewing is a sociologist of education, so it’s no wonder my favorite poem in her first collection, Electric Arches, observes the small, curious eddies of interaction in an elementary school. In “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then,” she writes in the style of Greek epic poetry about invisible, individually insignificant moments—about the science teacher, for instance, watching fourth-grader Javonte Stevens telling the gym coach “that Miss Kaizer will be sending over three kids / who did not bring in their field trip money / and cannot go to the aquarium / is that okay”—that accumulate, by poem’s end, into an enthralling, powerful narrative. Elsewhere in the book, which also contains visual art and prose, Ewing writes trenchantly and tenderly of the demolition of a hospital (“the dynamite never says ‘but my uncle died / here … and I still smell the ammonia / and see the misshapen pound cake’ ”) and of her childhood neighborhood in Chicago (“once you got to about Albany and Fullerton you could see / every place my brother had ever been, if you knew where to look”). Her language is conversational, her verse lulling the reader into territory that feels immediately familiar, even when it isn’t—into a world of “Kool cigarette green,” “lime popsicles,” and “promised light.” —Nicole Rudick This week, I’ve been reading the first-ever English translation of Guido Morselli’s The Communist, a political coming-of-age novel about Walter Ferranini, a Communist party member and deputy in the Italian parliament. If that’s not the kind of escapism you’re looking for these days, trust me when I say that Ferranini is William Stoner reincarnated as Communist politician in 1950s Italy. Ferranini hates parliamentary proceedings; he finds them boring. He can’t seem to reconcile his political career, a reward for his years spent as a labor organizer, with his beliefs: he is having—has had, for most of his life—an existential crisis. The novel goes on like this, grumpy and disillusioned, sometimes funny and often sad. Morselli shot himself in the head in 1973, apparently out of despair that not a single publisher had accepted any of his manuscripts. Shortly after his death, all seven of his novels were published. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More