August 22, 2017 Contests #ReadEverywhere Photo Contest By The Paris Review Two handsome reviews on the shores of Rydal Water, in the UK. Our dual-subscription deal with the London Review of Books is in its final days, but don’t worry—there’s still time to sign up! Act quickly and you can get a one-year subscription to both The Paris Review and the London Review of Books, along with access to our digital archives, all for just $80. (Already a Paris Review subscriber? Great—we’ll extend your subscription for another year, and your LRB subscription will begin immediately.) Every summer, in conjunction with the deal, we hold a photo contest, asking our readers one question, “Where are you reading?” Subscribers, readers, and friends are invited to post a photo of someone reading the London Review of Books or The Paris Review anywhere in the world for a chance to win a selection of prizes from our partners at Aesop. To participate, simply enter your photo on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram using #readeverywhere (and please remember to tag us! @LRB or @ParisReview). The contest expires at the end of August. Happy posting. Here are some of this year’s best entries so far: Read More
August 22, 2017 Notes from a Biographer Littoral Madness: On Kathy Acker By Chris Kraus Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death. Kaucyila Brooke, Untitled #94 from Kathy Acker’s Clothes, 1998/2005, color photograph. From the cover of After Kathy Acker. Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen years ago. But on January 23, 1998, which was a Friday, friends of the late writer Kathy Acker drove from San Francisco to Fort Funston, about twenty-five minutes away, to scatter her ashes. She’d died two months earlier at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, where she received palliative care for late-stage, metastasized cancer. The ash scattering—like the wake at Bob Glück’s house on December 13 and the memorial reading at Slim’s Bar where Michelle Handelman was booed off the stage for no reason she can recall—devolved into a kind of black comedy, the way these things often do. I remember Cookie Mueller at Jackie Curtis’s memorial, standing up on the stage of La MaMa halfway through an evening of readings and monologues, blinking back tears as she faced the dark auditorium. She had no speech prepared. “I thought this was supposed to be a funeral,” she said to the room. “Not a variety show.” Speaking to Sylvère Lotringer, the artist Steve Brown recalled how the elegantly planned Nembutal suicide of Danceteria emcee Haoui Montaug among a small group of friends ended with a plastic bag over his head. He was a large man, in the late stages of AIDS, and whoever arranged for the pills had underestimated the dose. Before time accelerated, deaths among friends in the art world were like salt to a sting, bringing unresolved feuds to the surface. Now we care less, or are nicer. Read More
August 22, 2017 Our Correspondents Camouflage Is the New Black By Jane Stern I have always loved shopping: in real life, online, even from a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, courtesy of SkyMall. I buy clothes, handbags, makeup, perfume, kitchen items—nothing that any other woman would find strange. But if you click the history tab on my computer, you’ll now see long lists of military tactical gear heading my way via UPS and Amazon Prime. With the jaw-dropping exploits of the Special Operation Forces (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, American Snipers, and Lone Survivors) brought to our attention by movies, books, and video games, a new breed of groupies has made its presence (and buying power) known. You no longer need to join the armed forces to look the part. I have a friend named Mike Ritland who is a former Navy SEAL. Last month, during a visit to Texas, I tagged along as he made a call to ITS Tactical near Dallas. ITS stands for “Imminent Threat Solutions” and is a very successful online business. This might have been a classic “thanks, but I’ll wait in the car” moment for me. I assumed ITS was not up on designer hair-care products or sexy bras, little did I know I was walking into my newest obsession. Read More
August 21, 2017 At Work There Are No Small Fascisms: An Interview with Dasa Drndic By Dustin Illingworth Dasa Drndic. The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past—and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us—is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic. “I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences,” one character says in Trieste, Drndic’s most acclaimed novel to date. “I have dug up all the graves of imagination and longing … I have rummaged through a stored series of certainties without finding a trace of logic.” Drndic adorns her novels—ostensible fictions encircling the Holocaust—with rich archival materials: photographs, biographical sketches, transcripts, testimonies, making a kind of blackened garland of twentieth-century history. It is as if, for Drndic, the atrocities of the recent past overwhelm the capacities of both fiction and fact, that only in braiding the two can our proximity to such horror be countenanced. Her most recent novel, Belladonna, is forthcoming in English from New Directions. A ferocious book, it follows the life of Andreas Ban, an elderly psychologist, as he sifts through the remnants of his life—clinical research, books, his failing body, and the complicities of Central Europe—looking for “a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which yesterday is buried.” Though she speaks English beautifully—in fact, she studied English Literature at the University of Belgrade—it is not her mother tongue. This was in no way a hindrance as Drndic adeptly answered my questions about the monstrous repetition of history, the mantle of “documentary fiction,” and the moral gravity of bearing witness. Drndic corresponded with me from Rovinj, a Croatian port on the Istrian peninsula. Read More
August 21, 2017 Fiction A Very Brief History of Gouged-Out Eyes By Daša Drndić Workshop of Perugino, Study of the Head of a Youth Gazing Upward, late fifteenth–early sixteenth century. Throughout history, people have often gouged out each other’s eyes, and they still do, only in secret. Through history, the plucking out of eyes then moves from life into literature and painting, where it still lives. As with Dante’s harpies, those winged monsters with the head and torso of a woman, and the tail and talons of a bird of prey, which feed on the leaves of oak trees where suicides crouch, where one such tree preserves the body of the jurist and diplomat Pietro della Vigna (1190–1249), who did kill himself by beating his head against the walls of his prison, but only after the Emperor Frederick II had ordered, Gouge his eyes out. Read More