December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 Overdrafts of Pleasure By Max Nelson We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! John Cleland wrote his (very) erotic novel, Fanny Hill, in prison. What did he mean by it? John Cleland’s sentences often resemble the sexual encounters he imagined in his best-known book—a two-volume novel called Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, published when he was in debtor’s prison between 1748 and 1749, reissued in a censored edition the following year, and presented in both cases as an autobiographical letter by a former courtesan named Fanny Hill. A typical Cleland sentence goes on past any moderate end point, “wedging [itself] up to the utmost extremity.” It makes unexpected, spasmodic, sometimes baffling detours, “exalted by the charm of their novelty and surprise.” It drifts so far into the ridiculous that sometimes it seems “that on earth”—as Cleland’s heroine comments in one passage about the “women of quality” she and her colleagues once wanted to resemble—“there cannot subsist anything more silly, more flat, more insipid and worthless.” But then it keeps going, escalating until it seems to have been “driven forcibly out of the power of using any art.” Read More >>
December 28, 2016 From the Archive The Subtractionist By Sam Lipsyte 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. In the famous Mary Robison story “Yours,” an elderly man and his young wife carve pumpkins on their porch for Halloween. Hers are messy and mediocre, while the husband, a retired doctor and “Sunday watercolorist,” creates inventive, expressive faces. Later, after a startling turn in this very short story, the old man wishes he could tell his wife his truth, “that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little.” It’s a fascinating idea to consider in relation to Robison, one of the enormous talents (and great practitioners) of the short story in America. Maybe it speaks to her deep knowledge of the various ways life tears at us, that there are monstrous crushings—death, abandonment—and then there are constant abrasions. Most people learn to live with both. Most people, Robison’s people, also, while maybe waiting around for the pain to subside, or at least turn briefly amusing, laugh, console each other, make dinner, sit on a bench, and try new tricks for better candlelight. Read More
December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 Nauseating, Violent, and Ours By Chris Bachelder We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! An illustration by Jason Novak for The Paris Review’s serialized edition of The Throwback Special. Why do we still watch sports? When my ten-year-old daughter overheard me telling a friend that The Throwback Special is about a group of men that convenes each November to reenact the play in which Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann suffered his gruesome leg injury, she had a question. “Dad,” she said, looking serious and perplexed. “I have a question.” “What is it?” I said. “Isn’t that mean?” Read More >>
December 27, 2016 Best of 2016 A Quiet, Meditative Place By Sarah Cowan We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Photo: Andrew Lampert Joe Gibbons on his drawings from Rikers Island. Over a forty-year career, Joe Gibbons has become a legend in the world of experimental film. His work so thoroughly wrinkles the cloth woven by art and life that the question of which imitates which becomes moot. In his 1985 film Living in the World, he stars as a working stiff named Joe Gibbons, just trying to make it through the eight-hour day with his dignity intact. Existentially bereft, he laments, “I read the paper and there’s so much going on that I have nothing to do with.” He quits his job and turns to crime to make ends meet. When the real Gibbons made headlines last year in an unlikely heist story, that same voice was quoted in the papers as evidence of his moral degeneracy and criminal intent. FORMER MIT PROFESSOR “ROBS” BANK, FILMS “HEIST,” the New York Post said. And, later, in the New York Times: FILMMAKER JOE GIBBONS GETS A YEAR IN PRISON FOR A ROBBERY HE CALLED PERFORMANCE ART. Read More >>
December 27, 2016 Best of 2016 The Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner By Michael Clune We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! What do we want from poetry? To read a poem is, on some level, to loathe it—both poem and poet aspire to fulfill a set of impossible expectations from the culture. In his new book, The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner argues that a disdain for poetry is inextricable from the art form itself. Earlier this month, Michael Clune spoke to Lerner at Greenlight Books, in Brooklyn. The exchange below is an edited version of that conversation. —Ed. INTERVIEWER One of the most striking things you do in The Hatred of Poetry is to reorient our sense of value. Your canon is “the terrible poets, the great poets, and the silent poets,” as opposed to the merely good or the mediocre. You write about the worst poet in history, McGonagall, and his horrific masterpiece, or antimasterpiece, “The Tay Bridge Disaster”: Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last sabbath day of 1879 Which will be remembered for a very long time. LERNER Wikipedia says that he’s widely considered the worst poet ever. Read More >>
December 27, 2016 Best of 2016 The Book of Life By Shelley Salamensky We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Aunt Rose, right, et al., 1942. In her book Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood recounts how she faked her own death, staging a car crash in the Philippines. My great-aunt Rose did something of that nature—if, admittedly, in the less dramatic mode of an aged Jewish lady with used tissues tucked into her sleeve and sagging, off-color support hose. Rose’s ride to a wedding in Newark from Paterson showed up as planned, and as confirmed by her the week before. Somebody’s nephew. Rang, rang the bell. —No answer. —Upturned an ashcan in the alley, climbed and, clutching at the window ledge, peered in. Aunt Rose was gone. Read More >>