March 2, 2017 Look Berlin Living Rooms By Dominique Nabokov & Darryl Pinckney Christian Boros (German advertising maestro) and Karen Lohmann Boros (art historian). Berlin Mitte, 2015. When I lived in West Berlin during the last days of the wall, the historical image of the Berlin apartment had for me two facets, both familiar from literature, film, and art. The working-class apartment was part of the story of suffering in the German capital. “A Berlin apartment can kill,” Heinrich Zille reported in the 1920s. And then there was the apartment of the bourgeoisie, which in art seemed to become immediately a setting, not the subject. But in the divided city, housing was no longer so much a question of whether it was intended for the poor or for the rich as one of whether it was a new building or an old one. We were all young then and wanted romantic spaces—the prewar architecture of the city, a city that in those days still showed blank spaces, areas of the not yet reclaimed. In the time of the Berlin Wall, the city’s medieval remains, its eighteenth-century charms, most of Schinkel’s glorious neoclassicism, and its echoes in Frankfurter Allee were in East Berlin. So, too, were the mistakes, public and domestic, of the Soviet style. West Berlin had its early and late concrete monuments to modernist values. And both sides tried to distract from the wall by constructing city centers some distance from the former center of town. East Berlin had Alexanderplatz; West Berlin had Europa Center—in both cases modernism’s unattractive utilitarian descendants. But the Berlin that the twentieth century would one cold November night come to an end in gave the feeling of being in general a late nineteenth century creation—solid, sturdy, ample. One dominant apartment house-design unified the city. Many addresses were front and rear buildings separated by a cobblestone courtyard. The hinterhof struck me as utterly German. It was what set Berlin apart from the way the British lived in London or the French in their capital. It captured that sense of Berlin as being secretly cozy, in spite of the city’s reputation to the contrary. Read More
March 2, 2017 On the Shelf The Mystery of Garfield’s Gender, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The ungendered, unreal feline. Photo: Antomoro In the third century B.C., Alexandria had one hell of a library—the finest center of learning in the ancient world, an iconic metaphor for humanity’s quest for knowledge, et cetera. Then it was burned. After that, the city lacked a decent library for, oh, several centuries … then several more … then a few more after that … until, in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened, restoring the promise of antiquity. That library sprung from the efforts of Mostafa A. H. el-Abbadi, an Egyptian historian who died last month at eighty-eight. Jonathan Guyer writes, “Professor Abbadi’s dream of a new library—a modern version of the magnificent center of learning of ancient times—could be traced to 1972 … ‘If we want to justify our claim to be connected spiritually with the ancient tradition, we must follow the ancient example by starting a great universal library’ … When Nixon visited Egypt in 1974, he and President Anwar el-Sadat rode by train to Alexandria’s ancient ruins to observe their faded grandeur. When Nixon asked about the ancient library’s location and history, no one in the Egyptian entourage had an answer. [Professor Abbadi realized] how deeply the ancient library resonated, not only with Egyptians but also with many around the world who shared his scholarly thirst.” But who needs libraries when we’ve got Wikipedia, right? Yes, the future of knowledge is radically decentralized, completely free … and, now, engaged in a knockdown, drag-out war over the gender identity of a lasagna-loving cartoon cat. Avi Selk and Michael Cavna explain, “Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a sixty-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next. ‘He may have been a boy in 1981, but he’s not now,’ one editor argued … ‘Every character (including Garfield himself!) constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male, and always using male pronouns,’ one editor wrote—listing nearly three dozen comic strips across nearly four decades … Garfield’s gender swapped twenty times over two-and-a-half days (during which his religion was briefly listed as Shiite Muslim for some reason) before an administrator was forced to step in.” Read More
March 1, 2017 At Work Quantum Wall: An Interview with Jack Whitten By Yevgeniya Traps Jack Whitten. Photo: John Berens. Jack Whitten’s art—canvasses built up with what he calls “tesserae” of acrylic paint, at once minimalist and ornate—is an excellent analog for his manner. He speaks in units: measured, often deliberately repeated phrases that build to constellations, opaque and revealing, abstract and grounded. With influences and interests ranging from astrophysics to sports—missing matter and Muhammad Ali are equally compelling as eponymous subjects of recent paintings—Whitten is a gregarious conversationalist. At seventy-seven, he’s sprightly and regal, full of wonder and enthusiasm. In a conversation that touched on octopuses (“they are so good to eat!”) and on “modern technological society,” he displayed the restless curiosity and joie de vivre that have made his work—painting, drawing, and sculpture, the latter now showing in New York for the first time—such a marvel. Born in Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten came to New York City in 1962. “I was one of the first artists in Tribeca,” he said, though, after forty years in the neighborhood, he’s decamped to the quiets of Woodside, Queens. He studied at Cooper Union and metabolized downtown and uptown currents to create a distinct vision that speaks to art history even as he transcends it. Early in February, Whitten walked me around his first show at Hauser & Wirth’s space on West Twenty-second Street. “The space was just made for these paintings,” he observed with obvious pleasure. He spoke of the lasting legacy of his time as a pre-med student at Tuskegee Institute, the importance of materials, and the joys of spending the summer “sculpture season” on Crete. Read More
March 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Rumi, Machado, and Co. By Anthony Madrid A guide to “getting” Rumi. A number of my poetry-loving friends have asked me over the years what Rumi’s poetry is really like. They’re all coming from the same place: they want to know if his stuff is as New Agey in Persian as it is in the translated quotations they’ve seen on the Internet. Is Rumi really such a sweetheart. Is he funny. Would he really use a construction like “I caught the happy virus.” It’s easy enough to answer the question as to whether Rumi is funny.—No.— Or, I would say … he’s about as funny as the protagonist of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. (Perhaps someone with superior gifts, both of ingenuity and of defiance, would be able to wring some measure of hijinks out of both Rumi and Jesus, but the rest of us muggles have to content ourselves with conventional sublime holiness.) As for “the happy virus,” what can I say. I doubt it. On the other hand, Rumi really was a sweetheart, and his poetry does have a certain self-help aura. He loves to traffic in homely metaphors, and he definitely does have “designs on your understanding” (or whatever it was that Keats said was preeminently resistible to him). At the same time, he’s friendly and encouraging. He does not get up in your face. He is seldom grumpy. Read More
March 1, 2017 On the Shelf Bunny Ears in Saigon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Playboy Club, Chu Lai, Vietnam, 1969. Photo: The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, via the New York Times Remember when the magazine industry had real cultural currency? Me either—by the time I turned eighteen the Internet was “a thing” and you couldn’t even find Reader’s Digest stacked beside the toilet anymore. But Amber Batura has a story from magazines’ heyday that’s no mere nostalgia exercise: looking at how Playboy came like manna from heaven to the soldiers in the Vietnam War, she’s found one of those rare historical moments where the media really did broaden readers’ horizons. And no, I’m not just winking about soft-core porn here. Batura writes, “The Washington Post reported that American prisoners of war were ‘taken aback’ by the nudity in a smuggled Playboy found on their flight home in 1973. The nudity, sexuality and diversity portrayed in the pictorials represented more permissive attitudes about sex and beauty that the soldiers had missed during their years in captivity. Playboy’s appeal to the G.I. in Vietnam extended beyond the centerfold. The men really did read it for the articles. The magazine provided regular features, editorials, columns and ads that focused on men’s lifestyle and entertainment, including high fashion, foreign travel, modern architecture, the latest technology and luxury cars. The publication set itself up as a how-to guide for those men hoping to achieve Mr. Hefner’s vision of the good life, regardless of whether they were in San Diego or Saigon … Service in Vietnam put many soldiers in direct contact with diverse races and cultures, and Playboy presented them new ideas and arguments regarding those social and cultural issues.” I just want to say: hooray, vans. Hooray Econoline; hooray Sprinter; hooray Ford Transit. Justine Kurland sings a love song to vans everywhere, with their distinct claim to the open road: “The enclosure of a van is security to some and a threat to others. It’s a space that seems to exist outside law and convention. I took pride in its wildness, in how feral I became when I traveled in my van. I didn’t need anybody or anything; in my van, I was self-sufficient. If I stayed with a friend, my van was my bed. I could leave at any time of the night without waking anybody up … When I drew up the plans for my van and outfitted it with the things I would need, I felt complete in a way that’s hard to quantify. Yes, I do happen to have a Phillips-head screwdriver, a pee jar, a cast-iron pan, a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, tampons, the Rand McNally road atlas, peanut butter, and a memory-foam mattress pad. But it’s more than that, more like the love a turtle has for the color, rather than the usefulness, of her shell.” Read More
February 28, 2017 From the Archive Talking Out of School By Dan Piepenbring Stephen Spender. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Stephen Spender, born on this day in 1909, was interviewed for our Art of Poetry series in 1980. It’s a gossipy, unrestrained interview, with asides about Yeats, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, and Auden, among others. But maybe Spender was running his mouth too much; the interview occasioned a pair of heated responses from Martha Gellhorn and Laura Riding Jackson, both of whom disputed the facts he’d relayed to his interviewer. Their letters were so long, and so full-throated in their denunciations, that we published them in their entirety in our Spring 1981 issue, allowing Spender to respond to both. Read More