June 15, 2017 On the Shelf Long May Your Walrus Snooze, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Conrad Gesner’s Icones Animalium, 1560. Image via Public Domain Review. Ours is a sad era, for we have lost our ability to marvel at the walrus. We may chuckle at the walrus, sure, or name magazines after it, or claim that it is Paul McCartney. But just look at the walrus! Have you ever seen something so extraordinary? In the sixteenth century, a walrus marked the outer limits of exotica—to conceive of one was to dabble in a realm of chimera and myth. As Natalie Lawrence writes, Olaus Magnus’s seminal History of the Northern Peoples (1555) sought to portray the wonders of the far-off north—mostly by concocting them or stealing them from other old books—and one of these wonders was the walrus, or morse, a creature so inexorably magical that it was liable to fall asleep while clambering around and supping the dew from the wet grasses: “Magnus wanted to present the North as an impenetrable region of wonders and marvels—flesh-eating Scricfinns, magicians, vast whirlpools, and flaming volcanoes—at the very edge of the known world. Importantly, he wanted to portray wonders that were resonant to an audience in Catholic Southern Europe … To do so, he used practical, local information, but, ironically, also based much of his description on classical scholarship and Southern European perceptions of the north. He was reigniting images of the ‘septentrional lands’ rather than generating them: selling mythologies back to the traditions that had created them. The morse was one such arctic wonder. Magnus went on to relate how ‘using their tusks, these animals clamber right up to the cliff-tops, as if they were going up a ladder, in order to crop the sweet, dew-moistened grass, and then roll back down into the sea again, unless, in the meantime, they have been overcome with a heavy drowsiness and fall asleep as they cling to the rocks.’ Hunters would sneak up on the napping behemoths, tie ropes around their tails, and, from a safe distance, wake the animals with a hail of stones.” At an exhibition of diaries in London, John Mullan has chanced upon something sublime: “One of the weirdest diaries (if that is the right word) sampled here is one Peter Fletcher’s record of all his sneezes since July 2007. Each entry describes where he was and what he was doing when he sneezed. Not very interesting, you might think (perhaps not very trustworthy: Can he always be recording the circumstances before they are forgotten?). Yet Fletcher’s filmed commentary on his project is an absurdist version of what was once the religious self-discipline of diary-keeping. The point, he explains, is to cheat his own preconceptions about what is important in his life. Which is just what a true Christian was once trying to do.” Read More
June 14, 2017 Our Correspondents Interview with the Neanderthal By Anthony Madrid Jindřich Štyrský, The Cave, 1926, oil on canvas. THE NEANDERTHAL I’m already uncomfortable with this. INTERVIEWER Why? Are you worried people are going to misunderstand, or … ? THE NEANDERTHAL The whole thing is misleading. I’m not even a Neanderthal. INTERVIEWER Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. We can start the interview right there on that note. Go ahead and explain the situation. THE NEANDERTHAL It’s … I don’t even know where to begin. Read More
June 14, 2017 On Film The Best for the Most for the Least By Sarah Cowan Though best known for their furniture designs, Charles and Ray Eames made more than 125 films—striking attempts “to get across an idea.” Still from Powers of Ten. The movie theater is a gauge for datedness. From the darkened seats, insurrectionary giggles further distance the audience from the screen, which plays on foolishly. Last month, when Metrograph screened a selection of films by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, the image of a white woman in a starched A-line dress, batting her eyelashes while caressing a S-73 Sofa Compact, hit a ten on the theater’s laugh-o-meter; it hadn’t aged well since 1954. But it’s important to understand why the Eameses cast her and how her seductive touch becomes that of the camera’s eye, shifting the focus from woman to sofa and seeming to connect the two. Both are ready to endure spills, support children, and foster intimacy, signaling wholesomeness and modernity at once. “There is no predicting what may happen in the life of a sofa,” the narrator said in all seriousness, unaware that he was speaking to a theater of skeptics. Charles was trained as an architect and Ray as a painter. During World War II, they found recognition for the leg splints and aircraft parts they’d designed for the U.S. Navy. Their Case Study No. 8 house in Los Angeles has become an icon of midcentury design, but they’re best known for their furniture: the sofas, chairs, and tables of molded plywood and fiberglass that became fixtures of the sixties home and office. Lesser known are their toys and exhibitions, and more obscure still are their films, of which they made more than 125 between 1950 and 1982. Read More
June 14, 2017 On the Shelf Your Patron Is Holding You Back, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No place for decent people. If you’re buying a new home, avoid the intersection of Art and Commerce. It’s no place to raise a family. Out on the streets you’ll find foppish aesthetes and sturdy banker types in three-piece suits, variously copulating with and murdering one another at all hours of the night. The sidewalks are littered with cigar butts and paperbacks, many of them used. This week has seen an especially nasty accident there: Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled their funding from a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in which the emperor takes on a distinctly Trumpian tint. (Spoiler: he is stabbed.) As Justin Davidson argues, the takeaway here is not that the American public is too foolish to “get” Caesar or that corporations are lumbering, amoral agents of ignorance and destruction—we knew that already. Instead, the controversy illustrates just how vexed our expectations of corporation patronage have become: “Neither art nor money is a neutral force … To pretend that people who write checks have an abstract duty to fund an artistic enterprise without caring about the result is naïve. Most of the time the decision whether to fund a novel, a new piece of music, or an exhibition is made long before these works see the light of day. The Public’s Julius Caesar is a rare instance of a donor’s after-the-fact judgment, but that doesn’t make it outrageous … Corporations often fund the arts as a way of cleansing reputations they have sullied through their business practices or products, and money-hungry organizations have to decide how willing they are to play the game … Organizations slaver over big-ticket philanthropists who can jump-start a construction project, ensure a blockbuster exhibition, or pay for a production by writing a single check. Pursuing them usually means arguing that the work they’re paying for will exhilarate more people than it will anger. Dependence on donors, by its nature, nudges the arts toward traditionalism and conservatism.” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a portraitist with a devastating secret: none of her subjects are real. I, too, gasped. The impudence. The temerity! And yet, as Zadie Smith writes, it all works out: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don’t exist. In many of Yiadom-Boakye’s interviews, she is asked about the source of her images, and she tends to answer as a novelist would, citing a potent mix of found images, memory, sheer imagination, and spontaneous painterly improvisation (most of her canvases are, famously, completed in a single day). From a novelist’s point of view, both the speed and the clarity are humbling. Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative … Who is this? The answer is both literal and liberating: No one.” Read More
June 13, 2017 Bulletin A Note from Our Editor By Lorin Stein Seven years ago, we opened up the full archive of Paris Review interviews, the famous Writers at Work series, to the public. Since then, millions of readers have enjoyed these in-depth conversations. The New York Times called them “the best party in town.” Now we’re asking our readers to help keep the party going. For less than fifteen cents a day, you can subscribe and keep enjoying full access to our interviews—and to everything else we’ve published in the last sixty-four years. You’ll also get our print edition, containing the smartest, most original fiction, essays, poetry, and interviews of our moment. And by becoming a subscriber, you will help sustain the Review for another sixty-four years. Don’t want to subscribe? Sign up for a weekly selection of interviews, stories, and poems from our archive. Or just keep coming to The Paris Review Daily for independent, irreverent coverage of arts and culture—all of it free. Newsweek recently called The Paris Review “a reminder of the artist’s duty in times of national crisis.” We hope you’ll support the artists—interviewers, poets, novelists, story writers, illustrators, essayists, the whole crew—whose work you love, and who make the Review a vital force in literature today.
June 13, 2017 Bulletin Politics and The Paris Review: Announcing Our Summer Issue By Lorin Stein In the last six or seven months, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the importance of the arts. Maybe you have, too. In certain circles, it’s become a sort of refrain: we need the arts more than ever. In my experience, this has not been—in any obvious or immediate way—the case. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of news. My taste for fiction has narrowed. I’m more impatient. A certain kind of story went stale for me last November. When I read a contemporary writer, I want to be spoken to honestly and intelligently about the times we live in. I realize this is not a new complaint. As luck had it, my colleagues and I spent the election deep in the Paris Review archive. We were revamping our website, and it meant rereading and sorting through all our back issues, hundreds of stories and interviews, thousands of poems, many written in times of upheaval. The more I read, the more I saw them reflect the politics of their time. Read More