March 29, 2017 The Revel An Oral History of Richard Howard By Daniel Johnson Richard Howard. This Tuesday, at our annual Spring Revel, The Paris Review will honor Richard Howard with our lifetime-achievement award, the Hadada, for a strong and unique contribution to literature. Long esteemed among poets for his verve and intellect, Howard received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award seven times. His translations from the French helped introduce contemporary masters, such as Roland Barthes and Michel Leiris, to American readers and breathed new life into classics like The Charterhouse of Parma; his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal won the 1983 National Book Award. He’s the author of sixteen collections and three books of essays; his translations number in the dozens. But Howard has also had a distinguished career as a nurturer of young poets. From 1989 to 2011, he was the poetry editor of the Western Humanities Review, during which time he also held the same station at The Paris Review, from 1992 to 2005. As a teacher, he’s influenced several generations of poets. We invited friends of the Review to share their stories of Howard—of working with him, learning from him, and, in several cases, surveying his elaborately decorated bathroom, adorned with the photos of dozens of poets. A portrait began to emerge: of a curious, polymathic reader; a generous mentor; and a zealous, sure-footed practitioner of his form. Read More
March 29, 2017 On the Shelf Painting Is the New Shouting, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from a painting by Kaya Mar reprinted in Satire Magazine. We live in a golden age for clever protest signs. As bodies in the streets have proliferated, so, too, have canny shows of devastating wit. (Also, pussy hats.) If you go to a protest with an unfunny sign, or just kind of a meh sign, or a small index card with potential slogan ideas that you focus group on the fly, you could end up the laughingstock of the resistance. Kaya Mar will never suffer such a fate. He carries around stately protest paintings—elaborate political cartoons in oil on canvas. And the effort he puts into them functions as a kind of megaphone: people are too impressed not to take pictures. Sam Kinchin-Smith spoke with Mar, who lives in England: “The trick, he explained, is to ‘get your disappointment, anger, rage onto the canvas’ with a quick and simple story. ‘Everybody has to recognize what I’m trying to say, not just in England, all over the world … When you try to force meaning, you lose the plot. When you are tribal, you censor yourself, and you won’t produce something good’ … Mar finds out that rallies are taking place because photo agencies call to ask if they can stage some shots with him and his paintings: ‘Normally they give me two days’ notice, because they like to have me there. I have every one of my pictures on Getty.’ This isn’t a sham; it’s a strategy. Protests ‘haven’t changed anything in all the time I’ve lived here,’ Mar said. ‘Politicians love them because they are a valve. But to have your voice heard, you need television and print media.’ And Mar has infiltrated those more effectively than any other satirist I can think of, by feeding the agencies that fuel so much of the media’s output. He can paint whatever he likes, however weird or angry, and Alamy and Shutterstock, the PA and the AP, will guarantee it gets the national platform denied to the protesters he stands alongside.” Fan fiction is great, but who has the time? Sarah Engeler-Young has married the art of fanfic to the art of compression; an aficionado of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she “writes fiction that retells Spike-centric episodes via haiku. She calls them Spaiku.” And she says: “Buffy’s is a hero’s journey for the ages, and it has been a wonderful show to watch again and again with my daughter as she navigates adolescence … My desire to interact with other people who love Buffy eventually led me to a very supportive online community at LiveJournal. I read (and commented on) tons of fan fiction, made fabulous new friends, and wished that I could contribute something as well. Alas, the plotting requirements of long fiction are completely beyond me. I thought, ‘Well, maybe if I made something very small … ’ ” Read More
March 28, 2017 At Work Dream a Little Dream of Me: An Interview with Pénélope Bagieu By Meg Lemke All images from California Dreamin’ by Pénélope Baigu. “I could live at MoPOP,” the French cartoonist Pénélope Bagieu tells me. She has just returned from Seattle, where she debuted her new biography, California Dreamin’, at the Emerald City Comicon. While there, she took in the Museum of Pop Culture: “My fascination is triggered by all the relationship drama, the rock ’n’ roll anecdotes where everyone takes the stage angry, fighting behind the curtains.” As a child, in Paris, she and her sister drew comics about Freddie Mercury, her “childhood icon,” hand-making dozens of booklets about the members of Queen living in a fantasy communal house. Mike Dawson got to Mercury first—his graphic memoir, Freddie and Me, was published in 2008—but there’s something of a recent trend of French comic books about dead American musicians, with Nicolas Otero’s broody vision of Cobain, Mezzo and J. M. Dupont’s woodcut rendering of Robert Johnson, Philippe Chanoinat and Fabrice Le Henanff’s ode to Elvis, and now Bagieu’s energetic portrait of Cass Elliot. In California Dreamin’, Cass is imagined in her formative years, as Ellen Cohen, before she became Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas (who really did live in a communal house and were consumed by intergroup romance and betrayal). The book closes before the birth of the daughter or her untimely death. I offer Bagieu my notion of Cass as yet another “tragic figure” of rock fame, but she dismisses it. Her Cass is unapologetic; the book is bursting with her talent, ambition, and drive—and her unrequited loves, which help propel the plot. The book is also very much a celebration of Cass’s beauty and her music, which often intertwine visually by way of Bagieu’s curlicue lines and handwritten text, as when the familiar lyrics “Allll the leaves are brown … ” swirl together with cigarette smoke. Bagieu’s drawings are superlative: soft pencil lines that convey detail without constraining her figures and that animate the characters’ exuberant facial expressions. She is popular in France for her comics series “Les Culottées” in the newspaper Le Monde, charming portraits of women throughout history—Mae Jemison, Peggy Guggenheim, Hedy Lamarr, to name a few—whose accomplishments have been obscured. Cass Elliot’s story, Bagieu declares, likewise “needed to be told.” Read More
March 28, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 7: Zonies By Mike Powell This is Mike Powell’s final column about living in Arizona. Read the rest of “Zonies” here. Josef Hoflehner, Cactus, Phoenix, Arizona, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta. In July 1986, a DJ in San Diego named Randy Miller debuted a novelty song he had written called “Zoners.” The song, sung to the tune of “Rumors,” by the Timex Social Club, documented the peculiar habits of one of San Diego’s least-loved populations: tourists from Arizona. “Look at all these Zoners / surround me every day / They come up here from Phoenix and sometimes they want to stay,” Miller sings. “Look at all these Zoners / I can’t take it no more / They’re on the beach, two towels each / Stealing sand from shore.” The connection is well established. About 10 percent of San Diego’s tourism comes from Arizona; the longtime Arizona senator John McCain has joked that visiting San Diego gives him a great opportunity to connect with Arizona voters. And yet the Zonie—or the Zoner, or the Zona—is, to both the Arizonan and the San Diegan, strictly second class. Like a secret girlfriend into whose window one shamefully crawls under anonymous night, Arizona is necessary to the San Diegan’s machinery but expendable to its identity. Want plays no part—they need us. Read More
March 28, 2017 On the Shelf Steal This Coin, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I bet you can pick it up all by yourself. Hey, are you busy tonight? I want to run something by you: I think we should steal the world’s largest gold coin. Yes, it is 221 pounds. Yes, it is Canadian, and unfortunately known as the “Big Maple Leaf.” And yes, it was just stolen—like, two nights ago—from a museum in Berlin. But don’t you see? This makes our work even easier. The original thieves already took care of the hard part. All we have to do is find them, neutralize them, and abscond with our booty in a very large, very stable cart. Here’s Melissa Eddy with some background: “The coin is about twenty-one inches in diameter and over an inch thick. It has the head of Queen Elizabeth II on one side and a maple leaf on the other. Its face value is 1 million Canadian dollars, or about $750,000, but by gold content alone, it is worth as much as $4.5 million at current market prices. And though it weighs about as much as a refrigerator, somehow thieves apparently managed to lug it through the museum and up at least one floor to get it out of a window at the back of the building. The police are still trying to figure out exactly how they did it … Their theory for now is that the thieves dragged the coin through the museum, out the window and then along the railway track, possibly reaching a park on the opposite bank of the river near the Hackescher Markt, a public square in Berlin that is home to a number of late-night bars and cafes.” (This is where we’ll begin our quest.) Dora Zhang reminds us not to confuse our love of literature with a generic, feel-good love of books—and not to allow the exploitation of literature: “If it seems natural today that we can and do love literature, a popular strain of bibliophilia predicates that love precisely on its utility—in particular its capacity to make us better people. This is evident from the moral uplift of Oprah’s Book Club to Alain de Botton’s project of rewriting the Western literary canon in the genre of self-help. His London-based School of Life organizes retreats in sumptuous country estates, promising discussions about how books can change us and individual consultations with ‘bibliotherapists’ who can make personalized recommendations. (One can only imagine the prescriptions—for greater stoicism, one dose of Hemingway; for better friendships, a splash of Montaigne; for cheerful optimism, avoid Beckett at all costs.) There’s little doubt that books can transform us. But transformation isn’t always comfortable—‘a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,’ Kafka said. When literature is at once luxury commodity and magic pill, the change we seek from it is unlikely to be the kind that comes from being alienated, devastated, or having the ground under us whisked away.” Read More
March 27, 2017 On Music Blues to Come By Adam Shatz Harriet Tubman’s new album Araminta has a joyous aura of creative destruction. Harriet Tubman In 1967, Thelonious Monk wrote his only waltz: a slow, sweet, faintly melancholy tune he called “Ugly Beauty,” which appears on his album Underground. The title is probably Monk’s translation of jolie laide, a French expression for a woman whose less pleasing features somehow make her more attractive—though I suspect that Monk had more gnomic intentions in deploying the phrase. The idea that beauty might arise out of asymmetry—out of irregularities, imperfections, and apparent flaws—would no doubt have appealed to the composer of “Off Minor,” with his predilection for dissonant intervals, altered chords and rhythmic displacement. Monk’s music was a world of ugly beauty. The story of musical modernism could also be told as a story of ugly beauty—of the steady triumph, in the face of critical resistance, of deviation, dissonance, and rupture. Many of the sounds we now consider beautiful were at first experienced as strange, unsettling, even frightening. In the feverish rhythms of The Rite of Spring, Adorno detected a fascist call for obedience. Philip Larkin accused John Coltrane of trying to be “ugly on purpose” with his severe, probing improvisations. Some American supporters of the war in Vietnam are said to have heard sacrilege, if not treason, in Jimi Hendrix’s electrical rewiring of the national anthem at Woodstock. The reasons for such resistance are as much political as aesthetic. As the philosopher Jacques Attali put it, “noise is violence: it disturbs.” The struggle to create new sounds, Attali argues in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, is usually received as a “simulacrum of murder” because it challenges the existing musical order. Read More