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
June 12, 2017 Look Fun with Textiles By Dan Piepenbring “Inside-Out,” an exhibition of woven paintings by Samantha Bittman, is at Morgan Lehman Gallery through June 17. Bittman uses a loom to make complexly patterned textiles, which she then overlays with acrylic paint. Her practice derives from a fascination with the timelessness of weaving: “the basics of the over and under warp and weft interlacements has remained unchanged,” she said in an interview with New American Paintings: “I feel like it is evolutionarily locked in our brains somewhere … I am more engaged with the aspects of weaving that are rooted in mathematics and numbers, as well as the accumulative nature of the weaving process … My work typically has an underlying invented logic, either apparent or slightly hidden.” Samantha Bittman, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on handwoven textile, 24″ x 20″. Read More
June 12, 2017 Literary Architecture Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. This is the final installment of a series dedicated to his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. We’re used to seeing skyscrapers towering over cities. We’re used to imagining the fabric of a city as the footprint of solids over voids. The protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights is, as he himself tells us, a dreamer. A lonely man, with no friends or acquaintances, who only knows the look and soul of the physical places around his city, Saint Petersburg. Hiding from the sunlight, he wanders the city at nighttime, animating each street corner with character—filling its voids. Read More