February 2, 2017 From the Archive The Engraver’s Delicate Hammer By Dan Piepenbring 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. James Dickey, who would be ninety-four today, contributed a handful of poems to the Review throughout his career. In our Fall 1985 issue, he also published, most anomalously, a remembrance of Truman Capote, whom he’d only met once. “Indeed,” the editors wrote then, “his only firm recollection was a chance meeting in New York’s Gotham Book Mart at which—as Southerners tend to do—the two talked about relatives: Capote had an aunt ‘up ’round Buford way.’ ” Read More
February 2, 2017 Our Correspondents Finding the Light By Wei Tchou How studying the Enneagram can expand one’s empathy. Sufi Enneagram. Last month, right after the New Year, on a day I was feeling distracted and listless at work, my friend Ella mentioned a personality-typing system known as the Enneagram over G-chat. She described it as Myers-Briggs but better, and though I was skeptical, I clicked around the Internet until I discovered a test at the Enneagram Institute that would produce my “full personality profile.” It had been independently scientifically validated in El Paso, Texas. I didn’t take the test because it costs twelve dollars and consists of 140 questions. (It felt too early in the year for impulsive wastefulness.) But I became absorbed in learning about this theory of self-discovery anyway. I read the website, then I borrowed a book from Ella, then I gave in and ordered The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types, via overnight mail. Read More
February 2, 2017 Inside the Issue Angels and Administration: An Interview with Alexander Kluge By Ben Lerner Our Winter issue features fiction by Alexander Kluge: “In Medieval Angelology, There Are Nine Orders of Snow,” twenty-two stories on some lines from Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. Kluge made a rare trip to New York a few months ago, appearing in conversation with Lerner at the Goethe-Institut and at Princeton. Afterward, they talked over sushi. The interview below is excerpted from their conversation. They continue to send poems and prose back and forth to each other. LERNER The current issue of The Paris Review includes stories you wrote in response to The Lichtenberg Figures, my first book of poems. How did you encounter the book? KLUGE A coworker found the bilingual German translation. He said, Here’s a book you cannot buy anymore. The title is The Lichtenberg Figures. He knew that I was very interested in Lichtenberg, particularly The Waste Books. Your book costs seventy-eight euros because it’s out of print. German publishing houses always prefer fiction to poetry. Lyrics are concentrated forms. It’s a much better way to express yourself. In all these deserts of information we need some oasis, and that’s what the lyric is. LERNER And so how do you think about your short prose forms in relation to lyric poetry? KLUGE My language is not as beautiful as lyrics. This is something that you have to know how to do. Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds—I am a good archaeologist. Read More
February 2, 2017 On the Shelf Puppets Are Doing Just Fine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Look at ’em go! One fun thing you can do with art is: use it to tell people what assholes they are. This is easy to try, but hard to master. Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German writer, has the knack for it; his “YOLOCAUST” project publically shames anyone who’s ignorant enough to take a selfie at the Holocaust memorial. Alicia Eler writes, “He simply manipulated the original selfies at the memorial to include actual photos of Nazi crimes, which range from piles of dead bodies to pictures of starving people jailed in concentration camp bunks. The seamless Photoshopping job was what really made this project click. Upon visiting Yolocaust.de, which launched mid-January, you’d find various people’s selfies at the Holocaust memorial. However, if you moved your mouse over them, the once-joyful images transformed into the Photoshopped ones of Nazi death camps. Within one week of launching, the page was visited by 2.5 million people, and all twelve people Shapira featured in the project had taken their photos off of social media and also apologized … The artist invited the people in the pictures to contact him asking that he take their pictures down, simply by e-mailing [email protected].” So many once-thriving art forms are headed for obscurity; so many robust traditions have been lost to the sands of time. But not puppetry. Puppetry is doing great. Laura Collins-Hughes writes, “It’s not so much that puppetry is having an evanescent moment as that it has reached critical mass and settled in, cherished by grown-up audiences raised on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show who have had their hunger stoked by landmark puppet productions on Broadway … Cheryl Henson—a daughter of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson, and the president of the Jim Henson Foundation, a major force in contemporary puppet theater—said that American puppeteers had caught up to the European standard of the craft.” (Or the Russian standard, if we’re talking about Putin the puppeteer—am I right? Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Hold your applause.) Read More
February 1, 2017 In Memoriam One Fundred Dollars By Dan Piepenbring The artist J. S. G. Boggs died last week at sixty-two. As the New York Times’s obit headline put it, HE MADE MONEY. LITERALLY. Boggs, who argued that every banknote was a work of art, drew counterfeit bills with an intricate attention to detail. His craftsmanship was only somewhat undermined by the fact that his fakes were one-sided, and that they contained jokes like ONE FUNDRED DOLLARS or DO YOU HEAR ANYTHING BEING SAID HERE, OR AM I EMPTY NOW? IS ANYBODY HOME? HELLO? For many artists, mere imitation would be enough—as I write this, for instance, Mike Bouchet has an exhibition at Marlborough Gallery that features nothing but the smell of money—but Boggs was determined to turn theory into praxis. He liked to spend his fakes out in the world, to watch people squirm when he pressed them to accept his “Boggs bills” as “real” money. The art wasn’t in the drawing; it was in unlocking the door to a shadow dimension, one where all of us are made to feel the chilly emptiness at the center of the almighty dollar. Read More
February 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Whitman, Stevens, & Co. By Anthony Madrid I haven’t checked, but I’m confident someone before me will have remarked on the similarity between the beginnings of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.” Exhibit A: Read More