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
June 13, 2017 On the Shelf Prog Rock Will Not Save Your Soul, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The gatefold cover of King Crimson’s LP In the Court of the Crimson King. Why prog? Of all the varieties of music that can or could exist, what made progressive rock come slithering out of the human mind and into the historical record? These questions haunt everyone but certain British and American men, who regard prog as their birthright: in the glittering virtuosity and nonsense mythology of bands like King Crimson and Yes, they hear the drumbeat of some distant utopia. Critics have tried and tried again to figure out why certain white men enjoy prog while the rest of us back away slowly from it. Reviewing David Weigel’s new book on prog, The Show That Never Ends, Kelefa Sanneh samples a few compelling explanations: “In 1997, a musician and scholar named Edward Macan published Rocking the Classics … Noting that this artsy music seemed to attract ‘a greater proportion of blue-collar listeners’ in the U.S. than it had in Britain, he proposed that the genre’s Britishness ‘provided a kind of surrogate ethnic identity to its young white audience’: white music for white people, at a time of growing white anxiety. [The philosophy professor] Bill Martin, the quasi-Marxist, found Macan’s argument ‘troubling.’ In his view, the kids in the bleachers were revolutionaries, drawn to the music because its sensibility, based on ‘radical spiritual traditions,’ offered an alternative to ‘Western politics, economics, religion, and culture.’ ” Here’s some cocktail-party humiliation that’s sure to land with a splash. Ask a fellow partygoer, Which Cyril Connolly book have you been reading? If they answer at all, they very probably will not say The Unquiet Grave—and when they fail to say it, you can laugh at them mercilessly and then cite this Brian Dillon piece, which argues for The Unquiet Grave as an interesting flop: “If his friends are to be believed, Cyril Connolly was a monster of sloth and self-regard. And yet, what an endearing figure he cuts—if that’s the verb, with Connolly—through their letters and memoirs: maundering over failed affairs of heart or wallet, brimming with excuses for his books unwritten, ever ready to start afresh with the bubbles when the night wore on. Connolly’s narrow reputation now rests largely on the mixture of memoir and high literary journalism in Enemies of Promise (1938), and not on his single novel The Rock Pool (1936), or the several collections of reviews he later packaged in lieu of proper books. Fewer still today are references to The Unquiet Grave: the odd, fragmentary ‘word cycle’ he published under the pen name Palinurus in the autumn of 1944. But this is the book—an essay, an anthology, a complaint—in which the contradictions in Connolly’s talent and personality fail to resolve with the strangest, most seductive results. Here he anatomizes his worst traits: laziness, nostalgia, gluttony, hypochondria, some essential frivolity of mind that means his writing will always be summed up as ‘brilliant—that is, not worth doing.’ ” Read More
June 12, 2017 First Person Proud, Prouder, Proudest By Bryan Washington New Orleans during Pride Week, 2016. Photo: Tony Webster It was Pride Week in New Orleans. The parade had just ended. I spent the evening getting blitzed under a balcony, stepping through polyrhythms in tandem with seventy thousand other men and women. Afterward, the audience broke off, in various stages of undress, to porches and curbsides throughout the French Quarter, until the road was strewn with beads and condoms and go-cups. It happens every year. New Orleans has a ton of queer households on the census. It’s a pretty colorful city. And inevitably, those colors deepen in June, when Pride Week comes around: the clubs host parties funded by globalized sex apps, tiny drunken congregations bloom all over the Quarter, and the week climaxes with a march the final evening. And then brunch, or, depending on your persuasion, maybe a little more. But even if the city moonlights as a Babylon of the South, it can also be a dangerous place to go out. Loads of murders go unsolved annually in New Orleans. At least two this year have involved transgender women of color. Assaults in the loop of gay bars by Bourbon Street are hardly unheard of, and the city isn’t at all removed from the South’s virulent thread of hatred. But when the parade turned the corner of Conti Street, those facts hardly diminished its tremors; and, in a town that isn’t terribly diverse, you were suddenly as likely to find yourself grinding on some Canadian kid as a flock of Iranian bears. Read More