January 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Majesty of the Potato, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Charles Jones, Potato Majestic, nineteenth century. Image via the Clark Institute Oh, to own one of the first cameras—to approach photography without any preconception of what a photograph could or should do. To take the first portrait, the first landscape, the first dick pic—what a rollicking time that would be. Louis Menand, writing on the Clark Art Institute’s new exhibition “Photography and Discovery,” conjures the bumptious energy of the medium’s earliest days—and the unlikely corners into which the first cameras looked: “The albumen print, the collotype, the cyanotype, the daguerreotype, the Woodburytype, gelatin silver prints, gum dichromate prints, platinum prints, salt prints, halftones, photogravure: all these reproductive technologies are represented in the show, and each yields a different visual texture. The effects can be stunning … My favorite in the show is a picture of potatoes. The label explains that the photographer, Charles Jones, was a gardener who worked on major estates in nineteenth-century Britain, and who had a practice of making photographs of things he grew, arranged as still lifes. His photographs were discovered in 1981 in a suitcase in an antiques market. And there they are, six potatoes on a plate—nature’s most plebeian foodstuff looking as pleased with itself as any duke. And the best thing about the piece, in case you miss the point, is the title, Potato Majestic.” Jorie Graham, talking to Sarah Howe, elaborates on the difficulty of facing the blank page in times like these: “Increasingly now, it’s a matter of using poetry to try to find a way to keep the proportions right, to not be overwhelmed by grief, horror, fear, shame, rage; to use this precious medium I trust to guide me to find at least a way to ask the right questions, a way to hold ‘reality and justice in one thought’—as Yeats admonished me to do when I was a young poet … Our enemies are despicably small, but their actions are capable of destroying the earth now, not just civilization. So, like every poet writing today, what I ask of my poetic tools now feels more urgent than ever, what I ask of the blank page. Not just urgent, but baffling. I have never written so slowly—each poem an attempt both to try to understand how to reenter the current of existence with some understanding of what will suffice—what will permit one to go on as if there were a purpose—and to try to understand what poetry is for under these conditions.” Read More
January 23, 2017 In Memoriam Remembering Willa Kim By Stephen Hiltner Anyone who wades into The Paris Review’s files—particularly material from the early days in Paris, in the 1950s—enters a kind of historical haze. It’s difficult to separate the fact from the fiction, the magazine’s real history from its lore. Reliable records are hard to come by. Certain documents, contracts in particular, are nonexistent. The first time I met Willa Kim, she rescued me from such a haze. Read More
January 23, 2017 First Person The Trojan Horse of Pop By Megan Mayhew Bergman George Michael. I never minded being thought of as a pop star. People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music. —George Michael 1. Bubblegum It was no Alvin Ailey dance class. Several of us, with teeth in braces and hair pulled back into tight buns, lined up in the corner of the studio, with its splintered hardwoods and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The instructor put on Wham’s “I’m Your Man” and we cut across the space two by two, hoisting our legs on the beat in grand battements, compromising our posture and smacking gum. I’ll be your boy, I’ll be your man … I’ll be your friend, I’ll be your toy, George Michael urges at the end. Because I was young, naive, and lived in the Reagan-era South, I took these invitations into the world of heteronormative sex at face value. I missed any whiff of insistence, darkness, or double entendre. I readjusted my floral leotard, which had gathered somewhere unseemly, and high-kicked my way to the other side of the room. We came to the center of the studio for pelvic isolations, thrusting our hips side to side, then forward, trying not to laugh out loud as we caught one another’s eye. Read More
January 23, 2017 Literary Architecture Juan José Saer, The Witness By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. The unnamed narrator in Juan José Saer’s novel The Witness is an old man who, in the second half of the sixteenth century, decides to write the story of his life. His voice—intense, measured, meticulous in its details, analytical and strongly contemporary—takes the reader back some sixty years earlier, when, as a thirteen-year-old orphan, the narrator set sail as a cabin boy on one of the first-ever expeditions in search of a passage to India through the New World. Upon its arrival in the Americas and caressing its coastline, the expedition insinuates itself inland by slowly sailing up one of its muddy rivers. During a survey on the seemingly uninhabited mainland, the crew is suddenly attacked by a group of natives who, in a matter of seconds, kill everyone except the protagonist. Read More
January 23, 2017 On the Shelf Kaboom, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Stanisław Notariusz, Explosion, 1922. God, I fucking love profanity! Profanity: shit, yes! It sometimes seems to these jaded ears that oaths and cusses are all we have left, the only solace in this vale of fucking tears. Joan Acocella, reviewing two new books about swearing, writes, “The very sound of obscenities—forget their sense—seems to ring a bell in us, as is clear from the fact that many of them sound alike … Consonants sound sharper, more absolute, than vowels. (Compare piss with pee, cunt with pussy.) It may be this tough-talk quality that accounts for certain widely recognized benefits of swearwords. For example, they help us endure pain. In one widely cited experiment, subjects were instructed to plunge a hand into ice-cold water and keep it there as long as they could. Half were told that they could utter a swearword while doing this, if they wanted to; the other half were told to say some harmless word, such as wood. The swearing subjects were able to keep their hands in the water significantly longer than the pure-mouthed group.” Harold Pinter, who knew from obscenity, offered the London Review of Books a fairly salty bit of verse back in 1991, as the U.S. waged the first Gulf War. Inigo Thomas writes, “After the US A-10 tank-buster bombers known as Warthogs had finished off the Iraqi armored brigades on the Basra Road, Harold Pinter, disgusted by the gratuitous carnage, wrote a poem called ‘American Football.’ ” What struck the editors then as a mere novelty is now penetrating, even pungent. Here are the first few lines: Hallelujah! It works. We blew the shit out of them. We blew the shit right back up their own ass And out their fucking ears. Read More
January 20, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Blush, Babble, Barbed Wire By The Paris Review From the cover of Ardour. I’ve found much solace in poetry since November, and this week (long live the NEA), it fell on Nicole Brossard’s recent book of poems, Ardour, translated from the Quebecois by Angela Carr, to help give my feelings shape. The book’s koan-like epigraph, by Anne Carson—“think of your life without it”—is apt; the nearly hundred poems in Ardour appear as fragments, but their brevity belies their breadth. Brossard’s poems are often concerned with points or moments of transition (“nightfall” and the horizon appear frequently, as do shifts in light and weather) that, though subtly rendered, can signal profound change. “Dawn does not darken,” she writes, “it has upper-case letters / can elegantly juxtapose / vivid smiles / and wounds, if you like.” The poems are flecked with small violences—bites and barbed wire, a “blow of murmurs”—but I feel saved by their intimacy, partly owing to their diminutive size: they feel like whispered truths, or at least consolations. “Whirlwind i also love / the species knotted in dog days and l’intimité / the very depths of respiration / our ‘us’ enumerated flaming new.” —Nicole Rudick Last week, Giancarlo Di Trapano turned me on to Suicidal Realism, a short memoir by the Canadian painter Brad Phillips. It’s not exactly an edifying book. Phillips’s main themes are drugs and sex, in that order: “People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with.” But Phillips has a watchful intelligence and self-knowledge, and an impatient sincerity, that sneak up on you (or at least, snuck up on me). He doesn’t ask to be liked, even by his groupies, but he does want to communicate: “I’m not interested in the ones who are drawn to the creator of the work, I’m interested in the ones who are drawn to the content.” —Lorin Stein Read More