August 3, 2017 On Poetry Satellites Are Spinning: Notes on a Sun Ra Poem By Paul Youngquist Sun Ra, taken during the filming of Space Is the Place. Courtesy the collection of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis. Sun Ra, the visionary leader of the jazz ensemble he called his “Arkestra,” once submitted a manuscript of poems to a commercial publisher, receiving it back with a curt editorial comment: they seemed written in an alien language. He took it as a compliment. Like most readers of his poetry, I encountered it first in a form other than book. I wish I could say I bought those old El Saturn records with poems printed on their jackets—that would make me so cool—but I came to Sun Ra late, after he’d left the planet (in common parlance, died) in 1993. I never saw him perform live, I bought only digital versions of the Arkestra’s recordings, and I confess I never bothered reading their microtype liner notes. Sun Ra’s poetry remained unknown to me until I heard it late one night. I was watching that glorious low-budget science-fiction blaxploitation docudrama, Space Is the Place (1974): The pulsating orange spaceship carrying Sun Ra and the Arkestra to planet Earth has just landed. Wearing a Pharaoh’s headdress, Sun Ra speaks quietly about music as “another kind of language,” not alien but concerned with other worlds. Cut to June Tyson, his favored vocalist, head wrapped in gold netting, eyes shaded by bronze aviators, mouth smiling as she sings, in silver tones, “The Satellites Are Spinning,” by Sun Ra: The satellites are spinning A new day is dawning The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening Oh we sing this song to A brave tomorrow. Oh we sing this song to Abolish sorrow. The satellites are spinning A better day is breaking The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening. Read More
August 3, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Help! My Friend Is a Vaper, and Other Questions By Lorin Stein Dear Paris Review, I’m suspicious of memoirs. I don’t think people remember things as well as the genre suggests they do, and life doesn’t play out so neatly. I love Vivian Gornick’s writing partly because her memoirs work according to different rules, but she seems to be doing something pretty unique. Are there others like her? Sincerely, Memoirphobic Dear Phobic, Or should I say, Dear Telepathic—I was just about to recommend Vivian Gornick to another advice seeker. (See below!) Nobody writes like her, but if you want to read an autobiography where the remembering sounds believable, try Pack My Bag, by Henry Green. I wouldn’t take it as fact, I would never trust a memoir in matters of fact: as you say, most people don’t remember things very exactly. And then, of course, writers often have good reasons to lie … Read More
August 2, 2017 Revisited Agnes Martin Finds the Light That Gets Lost By Larissa Pham Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1965. © Estate of Agnes Martin/DACS, London, 2015. Published in Agnes Martin, a monograph from Distributed Art Publishers. When I was very young, I heard somewhere that the blue of the sky is the hardest color to mix with paints. It made sense to me that there must be something humans are always chasing, and if that were the case, it would necessarily have to be the heavens. Years later, in a painting class, mixing oily cobalt blue straight from the tube with a little titanium white, I wondered what all the fuss was about. I’d made sky blue: I held it up to the window to compare, and yes, it was sky. I could add buttery strokes of titanium white, for clouds, and dapple on a warmer white, if I wanted to light them, and then there was a whole spectrum of pinks and peaches and oranges for sunset or sunrise. It was that easy. There is even a commercially produced shade, I discovered, called cerulean. Its name derives from the Latin word for the heavens. Years later, when I realized I wasn’t very good at painting, I considered that perhaps what I had heard about blue didn’t have more to do with expression than it had to do with replication; if what was difficult is trying to capture the size and depth of the sky: the distance that stretches between us and the rest of the universe. By that point, I’d studied painting long enough to know that there were many ways to make a surface look like something of the world—there were ways to paint oranges or glass bottles or slices of cake like Thiebaud—but that was only half the problem of art making. You could paint all sorts of things but it was harder to convey the feelings you had about them. When I tried to paint landscapes, I couldn’t capture that vast distance that was the sky, the blue that Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, describes as “the light that got lost”: The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us … This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. Painting a canvas blue wasn’t enough. It was like dropping a curtain. All along I knew the world went on and on beyond the surface of the thing. Read More
August 2, 2017 From the Archive Deborah Turbeville’s Anti-Fashion Magazine By Caitlin Love Deborah Turbeville. Spreads from The Paris Review, issue no. 70 (Summer 1977). Earlier this summer, Staley-Wise Gallery presented an exhibition of Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photographs, including her photos of famously “anti-fashion” Comme des Garçons clothing, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum’s Rei Kawakubo retrospective. In 1977, we published Turbeville’s “ideal fashion magazine,” where women are vulnerable, perhaps a little fallen, and oddly not fashionable. In the left-hand corner of the second spread of “Maquillage,” there’s a handwritten note that reads, in part: “I feel that New York is a house of Death—people shatter there so easily—evil gets into the bloodstream—unhappiness is more catching than laughter … ” In the duplicate images underneath, we see three women in white, their faces obscured: one is standing with her foot on a stool, looking out of a large, bright window; another sits facing the camera; a third rests behind the sitting woman—we can only see her elbow, which stabs out from her side like a lance (her hand is on her hip). Her foot rests next to her, delicately slipping out of a shoe. Their clothes are in shadow, but the light from the windows is blinding. They are women in a dream. Read More
August 2, 2017 Correspondence A Letter from Sam Shepard to Johnny Dark By Jeffery Gleaves Photos courtesy of the authors and The Wittliff Collection. From a September 4, 1990 letter from Sam Shepard, who died last week at the age of seventy-three, to Johnny Dark. Shepard and Dark’s forty-plus years of correspondence is collected in Two Prospectors, which was named after their unfinished, cowritten play. Dear John, Funny I should get your letter on the very same day I’m cleaning out one of my many neglected filing cabinets—full of old letters, manuscripts, notes—piles of papers & I came across your huge book of notes you sent me of our endless dialogues—other letters from you, dating clear back to England & a great black & white photo of the two of us destroying the front porch in Nova Scotia—me leaping off the steps with a hammer & you in the background with bushy black hair like the early Bob Dylan—we look like we’re in High School or something & I thought what a great friendship it was! Truly great. I miss the very same things—just riding around in the white Chevy talking about any old thing that floated into our demented imaginations & then, momentarily, actually becoming characters & acting them out as we wandered through grocery stores or the streets of San Francisco or San Rafael on a brisk stoned afternoon. Somehow, it always reminded me of drunken Irish characters from Flann O’Brien—stumbling from bar to bar, spouting poetry, singing ballads & making up outrageous stories—always in trouble with women & ultimately pathetically alone. I hope some way we can again strike up our own private dialogues—hysterically funny to us only—maybe as very old men on a bus stop or a park bench in some place like Lincoln, Nebraska where we’re equally lost. I, too, have been going through the same heart-wrenching stuff you describe—(maybe not the same but with the same results) & each time I come out the other end of it I think—aah, at last it’s over—I can get on with my life again but it keeps coming back. I’m convinced now it has nothing to do with women although I make myself believe I wouldn’t feel this way if it wasn’t for “her.” Writing is such a pain in the ass. I’d like to just talk & maybe walk that’s about it. I’m exhausted from it all. Hope we can find a way to meet up & have a good time one of these days. It would be great to see you. Love to Scarlett & my ex-wife if you see her. And tell my son to call me—I’ve left messages all over hell for him. I remember the last words my Dad ever wrote me in a letter—“See you in my dreams.” How ’bout that. Your on-going amigo, Sam From Two Prospectors. © 2013 by Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark; published by the University of Texas Press.
August 1, 2017 On Music Skiffle Craze: An Interview with Billy Bragg By Alex Abramovich Billy Bragg. Billy Bragg’s new book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, is a history of skiffle—an art form that was looked down upon when Bragg himself began to play music, in the 1970s. But as Bragg explained a few days ago, in a fascinating talk at the Library of Congress, skiffle was England’s first teenage subculture—a working-class, DIY youth cult that set the stage not only for the British Invasion but for punk. It’s ironic, if not especially odd, that Bragg, a member of the first generation of British rockers who owed little or nothing to the skiffle craze, should end up writing about its influence. “As pop became profound in the 60s, artists who had learned their chops playing skiffle tended to leave it out of their biographies,” Bragg writes in the book’s introduction. “If you wanted to be taken seriously, better to claim you were initially inspired by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly rather than Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey. Thus skiffle became a bit of an embarrassment for Britain’s sixties rock royalty, like an awkward photo from a school yearbook, a reminder of shabby realities of postwar, pre-rock Britain. Even when credit was given, skiffle often found itself edited out in the search for a snappier sound bite. Take George Harrison’s famous quote about how his band was influenced by the blues: ‘No Lead Belly, no Beatles.’ What Harrison actually said was: ‘If there were no Lead Belly there would have been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles.’ ” Among musicians who grew up with the music, Van Morrison has been one of the very few to give it its due. I watched Bragg’s talk the other night, then hopped over to Bragg’s website and saw that he was playing in New York City on Tuesday. Naturally, the show was sold out. But just before sound check, I walked over to Bragg’s hotel for a pot of tea (Earl Grey for me, mint for the author) and a chat about the book. This was a treat: I’ve been listening to Bragg’s music since I was a teenager, and spent much of the money I had then seeing him live. (I’m not the only one. The Paris Review’s editor, Lorin Stein, saw Bragg play the 9:30 Club, in Washington, D.C., on the Back to Basics tour. It was Lorin’s first rock show.) Bragg touched on a few of the stories he’d told at the Library of Congress. (The remarkable story of Ken Colyer, an English trumpeter who joined the Merchant Marine just to make it to New Orleans, only to find himself sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, on his way to Australia, was new to me.) But the conversation itself weaved in and out, going—as the best conversations tend to go—in any number of other directions. Read More