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
March 4, 2017 In Memoriam Paula Fox, 1923–2017 By Sylvie McNamara There’s a kind of poetic mind that sees connections between things. I think that ability to make connections is part of the open secret of what a writer does. Everything on that side table there has a certain connection: Family pictures … An eighteenth-century Japanese bowl. But there’s a kind of theme that holds all those things together. The thing is to discover what that theme is. Everything on that table has a certain benevolence. That’s not the table I mostly write about, because there are other chords, that are not benevolent, that I tend to strike. —Paula Fox, The Art of Fiction No. 181, 2004 Paula Fox died this week in Brooklyn at ninety-three, a loss felt deeply here at The Paris Review. Over the years, we have published her fiction, interviewed her for our Writers at Work series, and, in 2013, honored her with our Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Read More
March 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Enigma, Exile, Elongation By The Paris Review Raymond Pettibon. I roamed around the New Museum last weekend in awe of the eight hundred or so works on display as part of Raymond Pettibon’s retrospective, “A Pen of All Work,” a name lifted from Byron’s poem “The Vision of Judgment.” The exhibition is stellar: vibrant colors drench the walls; morsels of enigmatic, sometimes illegible prose are, in typical Pettibon fashion, tucked into nearly every work. The show comprises everything from the artist’s self-published zines of the seventies (with titles like Short Teats, Bloody Milk and Tripping Corpse 5) to his iconic drawings of political nimrods (Trump makes an appearance). Pettibon’s work, with its accentuated comic-book style and literary prowess, is a thing of grandeur; walking through, I felt I was being pummeled by it over and over. As Pettibon has said of his drawings, “Even to look at them can be an ordeal, like reading Milton at a sitting.” (NB: for a peek at his work, take a look at our Summer 2014 issue: his dog, Boo, graces the cover, and a portfolio of his work is featured inside.) —Caitlin Youngquist Jaume Plensa is perhaps best known for his monumental public installations: you may remember the fifty-foot-tall LED screens of his Crown Fountain, which once stood in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Familiar with Plensa’s scale, I was intrigued by “Silence,” his exhibition at Galerie Lelong. Featuring roughly seven busts in one room, Plensa perches his sculptures along beams of the same salvaged wood from which they were made. The heads—all women—are unevenly burned black, brown, and ochre. Their eyes are closed, their faces slack. Wooden rings pattern their elongated faces. Like the morbid beauty of L’Inconnue de la Seine, they emanate a sense of timelessness; but they’re modeled on individual women from all over the world, and so they buzz with political relevance. I perceived “Silence” as a diasporic space invested in the gaps and overlaps of history—and allowing for reflective respite from the competing rhetoric surrounding immigration and feminism. —Madeline Medeiros Pereira Read More