March 23, 2017 On the Shelf We’ll Always Have Barf Bags, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The barf bag: a comforting cultural constant. These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got an old friend kicking around—the barf bag. In these uncertain times, Hollywood’s horror filmmakers still turn to sick bags as a primo promotional gag. For there is still vomit in this realm, and still a need to contain it in the face of extreme spectacle. Cara Buckley writes: “After a moviegoer apparently vomited during a Los Angeles screening of the French coming-of-age cannibal flick, Raw, the theater began handing out barf bags … The move is a vintage publicity stunt going back some fifty years. Among the standout bags in movie history: The keepsake vomit bag from the 1963 splatter film Blood Feast came with an encouragement, ‘Spill your guts out!’ ‘Guaranteed to upset your stomach!’ proclaimed the bag from the 1981 Italian film Cannibal Ferox. The bag for The Beyond (1981) came with the thoughtfully worded warning, ‘Individuals with sensitive constitutions may experience stomach distress,’ and advised that the bag be used only once and not overfilled.” For a while, Marianne Moore taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a dubious institution in Pennsylvania that aimed to “assimilate” Native American youth basically by flogging their culture out of them. This was not, as one might imagine, a bright spot for Moore’s career. Siobhan Phillips notes that “even at the time Moore taught there, the school’s obvious wrongs were noticed and decried. Moore knew of ‘cruel neglect and abuse,’ as her mother put it in a letter included in [Linda] Leavell’s biography. Moore did not protest. In 1914, federal investigators examined conditions at CIIS and dismissed the superintendent … Congress found financial corruption and mismanagement as well as incidents of wrongful expulsion and physical harm. A student in Moore’s department organized the petition requesting the investigation, which 276 students signed. Moore was accused of supporting insurrection, but she sidestepped the charge, as she reports in a letter to her brother: ‘I crush out disrespect and rancor whenever I see it, and I give the students as thorough a training in political honor as I can.’ When inspectors came to Carlisle, she dodged them. Her brother advised her not to say anything definitive or particular. She took his advice.” Read More
March 22, 2017 Whiting Awards 2017 Say Hello to the 2017 Whiting Honorees By Dan Piepenbring Honorees clockwise from top left: Phillip B. Williams, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lisa Halliday, Simone White, Clarence Coo, Clare Barron, Francisco Cantú, James Ijames, Jen Beagin, Tony Tulathimutte. For the third consecutive year, The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the ten winners of the annual Whiting Awards. Drum roll, please—they are: Clare Barron, drama Jen Beagin, fiction Francisco Cantú, nonfiction Clarence Coo, drama Kaitlyn Greenidge, fiction Lisa Halliday, fiction James Ijames, drama Tony Tulathimutte, fiction Simone White, poetry Phillip B. Williams, poetry We’re proud to have selected writing from all the Whiting honorees, too. Click each name above to read on—you’ll discover work by some of the best writers of their generation, astonishing in its breadth and depth. If you need further evidence of their creativity, here’s a random profusion of the nouns they use: blue cheese, lotion, pantslessness, dark desert nights, the subjunctive, spoiled-milk breath, “Q-TIPS!!!”, infrastructure, pepperoni-size ear gauges, black-ass tumbleweed, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and one Mr. Disgusting. This Thursday, March 23, New Yorkers can hear all of these wonders firsthand, as the honorees read at McNally Jackson, introduced by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Whiting 2013). If you’re wondering what all this “Whiting” is: Founded in 1985, the Whiting Awards, of fifty thousand dollars each, are based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The program has awarded more than six million dollars to some 320 writers and poets, including Colson Whitehead, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice McDermott, Akhil Sharma, David Foster Wallace, August Wilson, Tracy K. Smith, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Paris Review’s own Mona Simpson and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here for a list of all the previous honorees. Congratulations to this year’s honorees! For more great writing from past recipients, check out our collections from 2015 and 2016 winners.
March 22, 2017 Look Portraits, Celestial Bodies, and Fairy Tales By Dan Piepenbring “Portraits, Celestial Bodies, and Fairy Tales,” an exhibition of Kiki Smith’s prints from 1990 to the present, is at Mary Ryan Gallery through April 8. Smith, best known for her sculptures, told BOMB in 1994, “Everyone’s figured out all the technology, how to combine different kinds of material together—you don’t have to make anything up. You just have to pay attention to what’s discarded, or disregarded … I like looking, seeing everything that everybody already knows and using it. Or you start making things, and then they start explaining to you while you’re making them, telling you more and more what it is that you’re doing.” Kiki Smith, Come Away from Her (After Lewis Carroll), 2003, aquatint, drypoint, etching, and sanding with watercolor additions, 50 1/2″ x 74″. Read More
March 22, 2017 Arts & Culture The Little Peach By Edmund Gordon Angela Carter’s travels in America. In the U.S., Angela Carter was astonished to find so much advertising for burgers. Edmund Gordon will discuss his book The Invention of Angela Carter, from which the below is excerpted, tonight at McNally Jackson with Christian Lorentzen. Angela Carter and her husband, Paul, flew to New York on July 29, 1969. They arrived in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, when the city was fractious and twitchy in the midsummer heat. A few weeks earlier, the first American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam (an outcome Angela thought was “in human terms … the single most glorious event since the abolition of slavery”), but in August the headlines were dominated by gun battles between Black Panthers and police, the bombing of the Marine Midland building on Broadway by a radical left-wing activist, and the gruesome murders perpetrated by the Manson family in Los Angeles and the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco. Angela felt that the status quo “couldn’t hold on much longer. The war had been brought home.” She found Manhattan “a very, very strange and disturbing and unpleasant and violent and terrifying place … The number of people who offered to do me violence was extraordinary.” The trip was the basis for the Expressionist portrait of New York in her novel The Passion of New Eve—it’s depicted as a society in the last stages of moral and economic collapse—which she described as “only a very slightly exaggerated picture, not of how it was in New York but of how it felt that summer.” She met one of the models for Tristessa—the novel’s transvestite leading lady—in Max’s Kansas City, the legendary nightclub in the East Village where the house band was the Velvet Underground,and the clientele was composed largely of artists, writers and musicians, including such luminaries as Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Patti Smith. Angela and Paul spent three days in the city before traveling by Greyhound bus through Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Angela wrote to her friend Carole Roffe: Read More
March 22, 2017 On the Shelf We’re a Nation of Smirking Persons, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Walt Whitman, famously unsmirking American. Here’s the problem with America, as Walt Whitman saw it: we’re “a nation of smirking persons” when we should be one “of sane and cleanfleshed men.” For this, we may blame the restive, costive decadence of city life, which has produced “a set of sickly milk-and-water men” who “bloat themselves with quantities of trash.” This was true in 1858, when, under a pseudonym, Whitman wrote a series of columns on “Manly Health.” And it’s still true now, friends. Just last night, I bloated myself with quantities of trash, and I plan to do it again immediately. But fear not. There are a few things we can do, Whitman says, to reclaim our vigor: grow a beard, eat exclusively beef, sleep with the window open. His advice, as I’ve written elsewhere, isn’t always stirring, but it’s hard to look away from the spectacle of masculine insecurity he presents: “Where Leaves of Grass celebrates a man sublimely comfortable in his own skin, Manly Health is more likely to warn that skin is ‘one of the great inlets of disease.’ Whitman’s column warns against potatoes, prostitutes, overthinking, hot beverages, and between-meal snacking, to name a few of his prohibitions. As for condiments: forget about them. Real men abjure catsup.” Christopher Benfey, writing on the German author Paul Scheerbart, has an important reminder: whatever you’re building, build it out of glass. What, you think you’re too good for glass? Get a clue! “To bring our culture to a higher level, Scheerbart argued in Glass Architecture (1914), his marvelous utopian novel in the form of an aesthetic manifesto, the heavy Wilhelmine buildings of brick and stone needed to be replaced with glass, ‘which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of colored glass.’ One of his rhyming aphorisms might be translated: ‘Without a palace of glass / Life is a pain in the ass.’ ” Read More
March 21, 2017 On Music Mr. Berry and Mrs. Blavatsky By Brian Cullman From the cover of Chuck Berry in Memphis, 1967. My first girlfriend grew up in Saint Louis and, as a young girl, would sneak over to Chuck Berry’s house and sit by his guitar-shaped swimming pool. There were always a few little blonde nymphets lounging by his pool, and if you were clever, you could get there by slipping around one of the hedges—you never had to go near the main house, which was, so I hear, out of bounds. But the pool was open, and this would’ve been in the late sixties, back when his songs were part of our national currency but no longer on the radio: before “My Ding-a-Ling” became a number one record, swelling his bank account but degrading his currency precipitously, turning a national treasure into a dirty joke. Imagine if the Beatles’ biggest hit was “Octopus’s Garden.” It’s worse than that. “Look, I ain’t no big shit, all right,” Berry told Rolling Stone in 2001: Read More