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
March 3, 2017 Our Correspondents Golden Cicada By Wei Tchou Drinking at Jersey City’s baijiu bar. Photo by Dave Cook, 2011. When my date suggested grabbing a drink Sunday night at the Golden Cicada in Jersey City, I thought that I’d discovered a kindred spirit. But as we scurried from the PATH train down the blowy, open sidewalk, I became less confident. It was only a second date, and when I told him I’d moved to New York City “to follow my dreams,” he asked if my dream was to ride the PATH train to a bar in Jersey City. I laughed. “My dream,” I said, pulling up the hood of my coat against the wind, “was to ride the PATH to a baijiu bar in Jersey City.” We paused at a crosswalk. “Wait, it’s a baijiu bar?” he said. “You didn’t know?” I asked, pulling my hood down to look at his face. “I just Googled the address after you mentioned it the other day,” he admitted. We started walking again. It was too late to make new plans. Read More
March 3, 2017 The Lives of Others Cooking for the Pope By Edward White Bartolomeo Scappi, the Renaissance’s most innovative chef, revolutionized the culinary arts. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (detail), 1590–1591, oil on panel, 28″ x 23″. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Daniele da Volterra’s most lasting mark on the world was a commission of dubious honor: retouching—or defacing, depending on one’s point of view—a fresco inside the Sistine Chapel created by his late mentor, Michelangelo. Artists had hailed The Last Judgment on its unveiling in 1541, but its depictions of a beardless Christ and wingless angels, all of them nude, outraged papal officials, who ordered that Biblical modesty be upheld by the addition of loincloths. Daniele was in his late fifties, with an illustrious career behind him; it would surely have pained him to know that four and a half centuries later he would still be known as Il Braghettone—“the trouser-maker”—the man whose job it had been to splodge moralizing graffiti over his friend’s masterpiece. Read More
March 3, 2017 On the Shelf Now It’s Your Turn to Live Here, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Grey Gardens. “I can’t stand being in this house,” Little Edie says in Grey Gardens. “In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I’m scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes, I’m absolutely terrified.” And now, reader, you can own that house—for just twenty million dollars! Sally Quinn, the D.C. doyenne who restored the East Hampton home and threw many a lavish party there, is putting it on the market, with a glass menagerie of Little Edie’s kitten figurines still intact. Katie Rogers writes, “The home was long ago restored to its old Hamptons charm, and cleared of all cat smells—unless, Ms. Quinn said, you happen to stick your nose into a particular corner of the foyer after a rainstorm that lasts days. The house is decorated in soft blues and floral wallpaper and is dotted with plenty of fat-leaf potted plants. It is vibrant even in winter … Whoever buys Grey Gardens will be taking on a home with a nearly mythic history. Completed in 1897, the home became infamous under the care (or lack thereof) of Little Edie and her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, the first cousin and aunt of Mrs. Onassis. Their plight generated headlines when the Suffolk County health department raided the house in 1971; the authorities cited every known housing code violation … ‘This home will not be attractive to a Russian oligarch,’ Ms. Quinn said dryly.” Writing about other people is torture—not for the writer, but for the written. Emmanuel Carrère says to Wyatt Mason, “To write about others is an enormous problem. The sincerity that you can exhibit with yourself, you have no right to inflict on anyone else … It makes me think of a sentence, something absolutely horrible … It was fifteen or twenty years ago, in an interview with General Massu of the French Army, who had been accused of torturing men in Algeria … In the interview, Massu said, of la gégène—torture with electric prods from a generator—‘Listen. Don’t exaggerate. The prods? I tried them on myself. It hurts, but not worse than that.’ The nonsense of that statement! … I have used the generator on people other than myself. And that bothers me. I don’t like that idea. I’m not a good man, unfortunately. I would like to be a good man. I admire goodness and virtue most. But I am not very good.” Read More