August 3, 2017 First Person Meeting Sam Shepard at a Friend’s House on Eighth Avenue By Brian Cullman © Universal City Studios, 1979. The violin was psychedelic green, green as a shamrock, green as Kermit the Frog, a take-no-prisoners green. I bought it for thirty dollars at a yard sale in Providence. “The violin’s free,” the owner told me, though he counted the money more than once: four fives and a ten. “I’m just charging you for the case and the bow.” His girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, had painted it with acrylic paint one night when she was high, and then she’d painted it again. It was green to stay. Even when it was in the case, he could see it glowing in the dark. He’d wrapped it in newspaper and kept it at the back of the closet along with ice-skates and the broken Crock-Pot. He was selling those, too. I had no need for a violin, green or otherwise, but it seemed like a good investment. When I brought it back to the dormitory, my roommate grabbed it, tuned it and was playing along with a Taj Mahal record within the hour. A week later, I still hadn’t figured out how to hold the bow. Read More
August 3, 2017 First Person Fantasy and Reality By Sheila Kohler Ironically, one of the questions a writer of fiction hears most often is, How much of the story is true? It is a slightly annoying question. One is prompted to ask whether the story does not stand on its own. Yet it is an understandable query. What is being asked is, How did you do it? Where does it come from? These are questions we all wish to ask but can rarely answer. Behind them lies all the mystery of art. Sometimes, though, the answer is straightforward. In the case of a story I wrote some years ago, “The Transitional Object,” fiction enabled me to reverse what had happened in reality, with impunity, to make my protagonist active—always more satisfying in fiction—when I had actually been passive. It was my passivity, my inability to defend myself, that galled particularly over the years. In order to do this, I made my protagonist younger than I was, a psychology student at the Institut Catholique, in Paris, who goes to her professor to discuss the paper she is writing. When the student rejects her professor’s sexual advances, he gives her a low grade so that she’ll lose her scholarship. Having no other means of support or protection, she goes hungry. All of this prepares for and makes possible a dramatic act of revenge. Read More
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