January 27, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Concentric Circles, Carpenters, Coffee House By The Paris Review From the cover of Alma Thomas, by Ian Berry. “Vincent is a waiter at Coffee House. It’s called just that—Coffee House. The name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, even if the business has.” From its opening lines, Ghachar Ghochar—Vivek Shanbhag’s novella about the secrets of a nouveau riche family in present-day Bangalore—exudes such a sly, ironic charm that it’s easy to forget you’re reading a translation. Ghachar Ghochar introduces us to a master. I can’t wait for his translator, Srinath Perur, to show us more. —Lorin Stein Among the many, many, many reasons to miss the Obamas is their smart and wide-ranging taste in art. They chose three Alma Thomas paintings for the White House, one of which, Resurrection, was placed in the Old Family Dining Room, making it the first work by an African American woman to hang in a public area of the White House. Thomas made Resurrection in 1968, only eight years after retiring, at age sixty-eight, from teaching junior-high art in Washington, D.C., and devoting herself to painting. Resurrection consists of concentric circles of paint daubs, her signature “Alma Stripes,” radiating outward in rainbow colors that are electric with possibility. All of her early works are of a piece—brightly hued and joyous, like oversize pointillist versions of Sister Corita Kent posters. The Studio Museum in Harlem gave Thomas a show last year, which I missed, but a gorgeous catalogue is now available (which makes me doubly sad I missed the show). Alongside NASA’s Apollo missions, Thomas made her Space series, which, though formally similar to the earlier work, seems tempered in mood. Snoopy Sees Sunrise on Earth, from 1971, depicts a globe of color stripes floating on a pale blue-green field: I sense her awe of the cosmic scene, but also perhaps its fragility. “I began to think about what I would see if I were in an airplane,” she explained of the series. “You look down on things. You streak through the clouds so fast you don’t know whether the flower below is a violet or what. You see only streaks of color.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 27, 2017 On Sports Are You Experienced? By Rowan Ricardo Phillips On the 2017 Australian Open. Nadal defeated Dimitrov this morning in Melbourne. It’s slightly past dawn and I’m up. The sky is a dull, file-cabinet gray, the thick cold scouring down on the thin morning light. A few people hurry by under umbrellas, a few others loiter on corners up and down the street, bareheaded, waiting for a car or a bus, newspapers tucked under their arms. Listen closely and you can hear Manhattan’s equivalent to cricket song: the floating sound of traffic when there’s no traffic in sight. It’s that time of year when winter is stretched so thin it becomes sheer, translucent, you can almost see through it. It’s January and already 2017 is weird and tragic and beautiful. The book 1984 is flying off shelves, real and virtual. American politics has taken the form of prime-time programming, trolling for clicks, vituperative heat checks on Twitter … And here I am, groggy as hell, keeping up with news about tennis from sixteen hours in the future. Read More
January 27, 2017 On the Shelf A Sip of This Cream, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Frognall Dibdin. Nonalternative fact: our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, is also an accomplished translator. In a new interview with Jessie Chaffee, he offers some of his favorite metaphors for translation: “A translator with only one metaphor is lost—he or she needs three, four, dozens! One of the great things about Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’—a thrillingly unfathomable essay for me—is the number of metaphors he gives us for translation, without settling on any one of them. He says translation is like a royal robe that amply enfolds the original; or else it is a series of vessel fragments which one pieces together with those of the original; or else it is like a tangent line that touches the sense of the original fleetingly at one point (which makes all the difference). He also says it’s like a transparency that lets the light of pure language shine upon the original. All of these analogies have appealed to me at one time or another and I don’t feel compelled to decide between them. Translation is most fun when it is ad hoc. I use whatever I have to hand. Sometimes a royal robe, sometimes a transparency.” Looking for the roots of bibliophilia—a tragic condition wherein otherwise sane people start to say shit like “I just love the smell of old books!”—Lorraine Berry looks back to Thomas Frognall Dibdin, a nineteenth-century English cleric who “was obsessed with the physical aspects of books, and in his descriptions paid an intense attention to the details of their bindings and printings (rather than the content) that betrayed his own love … Men who collected books were often portrayed as effeminate. In 1834, the British literary magazine the Athenaeum published an anonymous attack implying that one of the prominent members of Dibdin’s club was homosexual. Dibdin’s language, which has been noted for its sensuality, is full of double entendres and descriptions of book collecting in sexualised language; from his Bibliographical Decameron, some characteristic dialogue: ‘Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream?’ ‘Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it.’ ” Read More
January 26, 2017 From the Archive A Comic Masterpiece from the Seventies By Dan Piepenbring From Carcanet’s edition of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. 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. Harry Mathews, who died yesterday at eighty-six, was a prolific contributor to the Review. His fifth book, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, was the first novel this magazine ever serialized; it ran in four installments, starting with our Spring 1971 issue. Mathews claimed he was rejected twenty-five times before he found a publisher for it. Reviewing it for the New York Times in 1975, Edmund White called it “a comic masterpiece, as funny as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, as intricate as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire … [Mathews] has created a seamless fabric, as tense, light, and strong as stretched silk.” The truth in that assessment is clear from the novel’s opening paragraphs. It opens midsentence: Read More
January 26, 2017 Our Correspondents White-Lady Tears By Amy Gentry This is the last entry in a series about domestic thrillers. Still from Obsessed. Obsessed, as they are, with both the trappings and traps of the middle class, most domestic thrillers are invested in interior decoration to a degree that would make Nancy Meyers blush. Part of the joy of watching these films lies in decoding their object fetishes, which tend to come to a head in the final reel, as improvised weapons define each film’s understanding of the terms of domesticity at stake. Consider the menacing household objects that come into play in the films I’ve covered in this series: the shovel in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (fertility!), the nail gun in Pacific Heights (home improvement!), those perfectly straightened cans and towels in Sleeping with the Enemy (housework!). Which is why, on watching Obsessed, the 2009 film starring Idris Elba, Beyoncé Knowles, and Ali Larter, I was at first nonplussed by the aggressive blankness of its sets. What, if anything, is Obsessed obsessed with? This is an important question, because the future of the domestic thriller is black (or at least nonwhite). While Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, both glossy, self-conscious literary adaptations about downward white mobility, did well, they’ve barely nudged Hollywood’s focus away from teenage-boy-friendly, big-budget action franchises. Meanwhile, Screen Gems, Sony’s small-budget genre subsidiary, has released a black-fronted thriller every September since 2014: No Good Deed, The Perfect Guy, and When the Bough Breaks. Critically reviled, these films nevertheless make healthy returns on their modest budgets while giving actors like Regina Hall, Morris Chestnut, Sanaa Lathan, and Taraji P. Henson something to do that doesn’t involve being a cop, a maid, or someone’s black best friend. Read More
January 26, 2017 Look Hothouse By Yevgeniya Traps Louise Bourgeois’s holograms at Cheim and Read. Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (detail), 1998–2014, suite of eight holograms, each about 11” x 14”. Holography is a curious technology: at once of the past and of the future, charmingly quaint but also coldly precise, marked by old sci-fi dreaming about the aesthetics of tomorrow. Equal parts kitschy and surreal, it’s sometimes eerily beautiful, seeming to deconstruct itself in its present absence. From the Greek holos (“whole”) and gramma (“message”), the hologram is like a private communiqué, delivered across space and time while respecting the conventions of neither. Unlike a photograph, which records only intensities of light, a hologram produces a three-dimensional view of an object by re-creating, through diffraction, the original light field. (In this way, a hologram is perhaps more like a sound recording than like a photographed image.) Because they require precise lighting conditions and the viewer’s active complicity to achieve their full effect, holograms have a kind of romance to them—the same intimacy borne of circling an object at dusk or twilight and emerging with a memory that isn’t quite yours. Read More