January 4, 2017 On Music Miami 2017 By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Turnstiles, on which “Miami 2017” appears. Something I’ve noticed about the years: each one has a number, and the numbers are consecutive. It’s a reasonable enough system, I guess, but it has its drawbacks. When you’re keeping count, every new year marches in with an aura of grim inevitability. Hardly anyone was surprised when 2017 came along. We’d suspected it would show up eventually—very likely after 2016. It’s a fact that some years are just catchier than others. Like brand-name drugs, their numbers vibrate with potential energy, the hale assurance that big things are in store. Think of 2020: what a sleek, hard oval of a year, summoning perfect vision, effortless duplication. You can chant 2020. You could found a religion around it. Or 2000, the perennial favorite—always and forever the year of the future, of slimming jumpsuits in flame-retardant synthetic fibers. Read More
January 4, 2017 Our Correspondents Pavese’s English By Anthony Madrid Cesare Pavese. A great many of the writers whom I admire were supposedly fluent in several languages. I say “supposedly.” I have my doubts. Fluent is a big word. In my own life, when I meet Americans who “speak French” or “speak Spanish,” I like to put up at least a little bit of resistance. “Okay, so what’s the word for belt buckle?” I admit I am partly animated by a mean desire to expose as a sham any accomplishment to which I myself can lay no claim. Such vileness of temperament is commonly appeased by recourse to mutterings. My own bad character prefers a show trial, in which any single piece of prejudicial evidence is sufficient for instantaneous sentencing. If you do know the word for belt buckle, I will find some word you don’t know. Oarlock, fidgeting, the shoulder of the highway … Read More
January 4, 2017 On the Shelf Celebration’s Invalidation, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Oh, god, run away, run away… It’s a new, new year, and in the face of such rampant newness, the poets are feeling a little insecure. Who can blame them? They ply a very old trade, one that most readers don’t much care for. People are always raising their eyebrows at the poets, shooing them from their porches with brooms, cutting in front of them at the bank. But the poets have nothing to fear, Daniel Halpern writes: “A question I often ask myself is why so many people (and we’re now talking about millions of people) turn to poetry for all important rites of passage—weddings, funerals, toasts, tragedies, eulogies, birthdays … Why? Because the language of poetry avoids the quotidian—but the best poetry simultaneously celebrates the quotidian. Language that’s focused in such a way that true meaning and emotion is redolent in the air … So to the question at hand: Why support poetry? Those of us who engage in the publication and sustenance of the written word do so to insure that language for our future generations remains intact, powerful and ultimately renewed, capable of its role during times of crisis and celebration.” In the fifties, George Plimpton interviewed Ernest Hemingway for this magazine, which was then known as an “apolitical” alternative to critical organs like The Partisan Review. In Cuba, Hemingway donated to the Communist Party and even kissed the Cuban flag—but his Paris Review interview is strikingly silent where politics are concerned. Joel Whitney argues that the Hemingway interview was implicated in a CIA plan to spread anti-Soviet propaganda: “More than a year before it was published, the interview was sought for syndication by at least four CIA magazines … Did Plimpton realize that he was making the defiantly leftist Hemingway into a U.S. propaganda tool, even vaguely? … Did Hemingway know? Though many of the letters between Plimpton and Hemingway are archived, suggesting a near-complete collection of their editorial correspondence, there is no hint in them that Plimpton ever told Hemingway that his interview would be reprinted in covert state lit mags. Amid all their friendly back and forth, in which recreational and editorial endeavors merged, Plimpton never dropped a word that the interview they had worked so hard on together, over which Hemingway toiled against his pain—rewriting it again and again despite health concerns and depression, fighting for time against his paying work in order to finish—could appear in the European and Asian magazines of the CCF.” Read More
January 3, 2017 In Memoriam John Berger, 1926–2017 By Sarah Cowan “Every artist’s work changes when he dies,” John Berger wrote in his essay on Alberto Giacometti. “Finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive … [His work] will have become evidence from the past, instead of being … a possible preparation for something to come.” Berger died yesterday at age ninety. A painter who traded his brush for a pen, he became an art critic for the people, telling stories with a revolutionary spirit. The “evidence” of his tireless work will be his published writing, including more than fifty books: criticism, novels, poetry, and screenplays. In his final years, fans and disciples could seek him out in the small French Alpine town of Quincy, where he’d lived since 1974, having left a robust public life to lend his labor to “peasants”—his favored word for the villagers—so he could “write about them in this way—to understand their experience of their world.” From those who made the pilgrimage, we have gotten intimate interviews with the aging writer, full of retrospection. Berger had ample time to prepare his legacy. He donated his archives to the British Library in 2009; Verso Books has recently published two collections of his writing, Landscapes and Portraits; a documentary about his life in France, The Seasons in Quincy, was released last year; and a new book by writers indebted to Berger has now become a posthumous honor. Read More
January 3, 2017 On Film The Source Material By J. W. McCormack Dipping into the thousands of ephemeral films in the Prelinger Archives. Still from Design for Dreaming. There’s a scene in Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic of the director of Glen or Glenda, that has always struck me as profound. The young Wood, played by Johnny Depp, is doing thankless work as a stagehand on a Hollywood-studio lot where he kills time watching stock footage of bomb detonations and rampaging bison. Visibly rapt, he asks what’s to become of these clips, only to be told by the kindly clerk, “Probably file it away and never see it again.” He replies, “If I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what’s causing them, but it’s scaring all the buffalo!” Since 1982, the archivist, filmmaker, and open-access advocate Rick Prelinger has curated the Prelinger Archives, which comprises upward of sixty thousand sponsored, ephemeral, and industrial films. Some six thousand of these are available for free viewing on the Internet Archive. Like Ed Wood, I can while away hours watching these movies, many of which were originally made to be shown before feature films, as part of expos, or in classrooms. I am so grateful for the opportunity to take a journey by cable car in “A Trip Down Market Street” (1906), which captured downtown San Francisco just before the fire and earthquake reshaped the city; or to observe the industrial constructivism of the Chevrolet-produced “Master Hands,” (1936) where the toil of autoworkers converts the assembly of machine parts into a kind of proletariat ballet. Read More
January 3, 2017 From the Archive Guy Davenport’s Elusive Prose By Norman Rush London Tower Bridge, 1901. 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. Below, Norman Rush recommends a story from our Summer 1996 issue by Guy Davenport. The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport. In my scan, I included masters in every specialty—poetry, the essay, plays, short and long fictions. It still came out Davenport. And it was Davenport because of his achievements in fiction. I mean his latter-day fictions. He tried, and then abandoned, the conventional narrative-driven change-of-consciousness short story early in his career while distinguishing himself in poetry, translation, and criticism. Twenty years elapsed, and then he emerged, utterly remade, as a creator of experimental prose works. his stories are unique constructs. They are put together with elegant skill and power and tend toward the unclassifiable. In fact, scrutinous readers may change their minds more than once in the matter of what exactly it is that they are reading: Are these essentially armatures for Davenport’s aphorisms and philosophical asides? Are they primarily demonstrations of the possibilities in the interpenetration of poetic and prose forms (and visual—he sometimes illustrated his pieces). Are they freestanding baubles? In his “inhabiting,” in his writing, of the minds of iconic figures in the history of Western art and thought, is he being obscurely didactic? Is he subtly deconstructing the inner lives of culture heroes like Picasso and Diogenes?—What? Read More