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
February 28, 2017 First Person Letter from Kiev By M. G. Zimeta Ukraine’s ultranationalist uprising has brought together two disparate groups: neo-Nazis and ethnic minorities. Kiev in January 2015. Photo: Sergey Galyonkin The crisis in Ukraine turns three this month. From its outset, I was struck by how clichéd the news reports of the war were, in structure and in tone; European journalists seemed to be reporting on Ukraine as if it were an African country, and, mortifyingly, as if Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa” had never happened. I wondered what would happen if the roles were reversed—if I, an Ethiopian woman, covered this European war. The conflict was said to have unleashed ultranationalist violence: as part of my preparation I hung out on Stormfront, the white-supremacist Internet forum, where I seemed to be welcome because they couldn’t tell that I’m a black intellectual. I decided that the safest way to report on these men would be to try and pass as one of them: to go in disguise as a neo-Nazi fighter. I acquired a kind of camouflage—a big coat to conceal the shape of my body, the fullest balaclava I could buy, and a wide woolly scarf to hide any skin still visible. As disguises go, it wouldn’t pass much scrutiny, but I calculated that the strength of my cover was the situation itself: they wouldn’t be expecting me. Its simplicity was its strength, and its strength was its simplicity. I set off for Ukraine in the run-up to Minsk II, when the fighting in the east was at its worst. It was late January 2015, a couple of weeks before the doomed ceasefire deal was agreed. There had been reports of neo-Nazi battalions from the front at Donbass holding rallies in city centers. Some of these gatherings were to mark the January birthday of Stepan Bandera, a controversial World War II–era hero who’d led Ukraine’s nationalist independence movement in the 1930s, and who had spent time as a Nazi prisoner of war before being released to fight against Russia under the banner of the SS. “Be careful of any protests,” a regional security analyst had advised me, “especially if they have a right-wing slant.” Be careful. Read More
February 28, 2017 Inside the Issue Through My Eyes: An Interview with Christine Lincoln By Caitlin Youngquist Christine Lincoln (left) and Christine Dickler at our Winter launch party. Christine Lincoln’s story in our Winter issue, “What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story,” comprises no more than fifteen hundred words, but its length belies its breadth. Braiding enchantment with sorrow and hope, it begins inside a dream, with a man carrying a small woman in his mouth—“a grown woman not much bigger than a bullet”—running from a dark-skinned girl thought to be coming after them. From there, it unfurls into an agonizing, tender portrait of the nameless dreamer, once an abusive partner, who spends the rest of the story musing over the love he ruined years ago. Lincoln, born in the sixties, hails from Baltimore; having endured a period of addiction that briefly left her suicidal, she turned to fiction, which was, she told me, what she needed to save herself. She went on to pursue an M.F.A. and currently lives in York, Pennsylvania, where she is poet laureate emeritus. I spoke with Lincoln over the phone, her voice gentle and heartening, about “What’s Necessary”; about her debut collection of short stories, Sap Rising; and about her thoughts on race and literature in America, both today and as it was for her growing up one of the only black children in her school. Every so often, she’d pause midsentence—near tears, she’d say, because she hadn’t shared this with anyone before. Read More