March 7, 2017 On the Shelf Coercive Silkscreening, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The cover of the Amache Camp brochure, made by the silkscreen shop. Photo: Amache Preservation Society, via Atlas Obscura Colorado’s Camp Amache was one of many hastily constructed internment camps that opened in the early forties, built by American armed forces to house thousands of Japanese Americans. Its detainees were dragooned into all kinds of labor—including, in an unlikely turn, printmaking and silk-screening. As Cara Giaimo writes, those at the camp became de facto artists, producing posters and pamphlets for the U.S. military—the same military that had sent them to the camps in the first place, and that kept snipers posted at all hours of the day: “In the spring of 1943, Maida Campbell, a Red Cross nurse with an artistic background, was sent to Camp Amache to see whether it would be feasible to open a printing operation there. Campbell set up the shop in a recreation hall and began advertising in the Pioneer for employees. A month into their work, the Pioneer reported that the shop’s 25 artists had printed ‘some 185 large posters, 250 stickers, and 100 cards’ … Over the course of 1943, the shop printed at least 120,000 posters in dozens of designs, depicting everything from signal flags to principles of seamanship. Employees took on the entire process, from design and stenciling through color selection and printing … The pay topped out at 19 dollars per month, about half of what one could expect to receive for similar work outside. Despite Campbell’s evident respect for her employees, she, like other administrators, wrote frequently about how the shop provided ‘vocational training’ for them—never mind the fact that their detainment at the camp was preventing them from pursuing their actual vocations, hobbies, and lives.” Fashion, part 1: a few words on hair and baseball. Clint Frazier, a prospective outfielder for the Yankees, has a set of luscious, curly red locks vivid enough to catch eyes in the nosebleedingest reaches of the ballpark. But will the Yankees and their crypto-fascist grooming standards let this man shine? Beneath this cosmetic dispute, writes Billy Witz, lies a matter of philosophy: “In short, the Yankees do not do big hair (or beards), under a policy set years ago by George Steinbrenner and vigorously policed by his daughter Jennifer. Now there is a guessing game over whether the team will send Frazier to the barber before sending him to the plate. ‘I think people are making my hair bigger than my game,’ Frazier said. ‘I’m here to play baseball.’ He said he was getting so irritated by persistent questions about his locks that he might just get them sheared off … ‘It’s a balancing act,’ said Allen Adamson, the founder of Brand Simple consulting. ‘The Yankees have to balance their respect and embrace of tradition with accepting what’s new. What’s new is, the individuality of players is important in making a sports event engaging and interesting.’ ” Read More
March 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Remembering Paula Fox By Caitlin Love Paula Fox at The Paris Review’s 2013 Spring Revel. In memory of Paula Fox, who died last week at age ninety-three, we’re looking back at a series of essays published on the Daily in 2013, when Fox received The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize for lifetime achievement. First, Tom Bissell has the story of how, as a twenty-four-year-old editorial assistant, he brought Fox’s masterpiece, Desperate Characters, back into print: W. W. Norton, the house that employed me, had encouraged me to come up with “ideas” for the paperback committee, which at the time felt like a huge honor. Correction: it was a huge honor. I had a few ideas, most of which, I was gently informed, stank. But one didn’t. Read More
March 6, 2017 Events Tuesday Night: Nazis on Speed By Dan Piepenbring New York: This Tuesday night (March 7) at NeueHouse, I’m talking to Norman Ohler about his new book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, which reveals how drugs pervaded Nazi society from the front lines of the World War II all the way to the Führerbunker. Kirkus calls the book “a vivid, highly readable account of drug use run amok.” Our talk begins at 7 P.M.; entry is free, but space is limited, so please RSVP by e-mailing [email protected]. See you there. Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.
March 6, 2017 Revisited Vanishing Point By Cara Hoffman Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Cara Hoffman revisits Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas. I was fourteen when I first saw the evening sun setting an empty piazza aglow. This was in Vicenza, Italy. My older brother, who was stationed there during the Cold War, was getting married to an Italian woman who worked as a nurse, and my family had gone over to attend the wedding. The image is with me still: in a penumbra of orange, the clock tower cast a long shadow in the street as the high, darkened arches of the Basilica Palladiana breathed the cool power of a stone’s history into the fading light of the square. The beauty of it was utterly foreign to me. I had lived, up to that point, in a prison town full of strip malls near a narrow highway in a Sears kit house; the blunt suburban ugliness of the place was further darkened by Appalachian poverty. And the only refreshing things my eyes knew were the river by my backyard and the wooded trails that flanked it. Vicenza was the first landscape I recognized as human. Read More
March 6, 2017 Bulletin Alexia Arthurs Wins Plimpton Prize; Vanessa Davis Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is coming up—tickets are available here—and our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2017 honorees, Alexia Arthurs and Vanessa Davis. Read More
March 6, 2017 On the Shelf Reading in the Buff, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Anthony Gross, 1940. Let’s cut to the chase: I’m talking exposed peen. I’m talking gender-queering the Victorian classics. I’m talking nude men, reciting Jane Eyre, on stage, for you. It happens. Lara Williams, who attended a in London performance of Naked Boys Reading, writes, “Watching Naked Boys Reading is an experience akin to a hen do hijacked by a spoken word event: a unexpectedly cerebral night of nude performance art. ‘This is a male voice reading a female text written under a male name,’ says collective co-founder and self-styled ‘drag know-it-all’ Sharon Husbands, after his reading of the closing passages of Wuthering Heights. ‘It’s problematic.’ Husbands has a Ph.D. in gender and sexuality, and speaking with him before he gets on stage it becomes clear very quickly that Naked Boys Reading is an intellectually considered affair; not least when Husbands solemnly says things like: ‘The nudity provides two things: a new lens and modality for the texts, and the care-giving experience of being read to … We want to infantilize men in the same way women are infantilized,’ Husbands tells me. ‘We have to critique these structures.’ ” On the other end of the performance spectrum, there’s Sam Gold, the director mounting a revival of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, who aims for a remarkably unremarkable theatrical experience. Sasha Weiss writes, “At thirty-eight, Gold is one of the most celebrated theater directors in New York, a master at gently stripping both audience and actors of their expectations and creating a sense of collective interdependence. He does this by dispensing with theatrical conventions—showy sets and costumes, a clear separation between stage and audience, acting that titillates or entertains—so that the focus stays fixed on the bodies of the actors and their words. ‘I’m not very interested in pretend,’ Gold told me. ‘I’m interested in putting people onstage. I want people. And I want a world that reflects the real world.’ His pared-down worlds are, paradoxically, inviting: They corral everyone in the theater toward maximum receptivity. Once you learn the rules and submit to them, it’s as if you’ve been initiated into a family.” Read More