December 12, 2016 Look Out in Left Field By Dan Piepenbring Nine paintings by Nicholas Krushenick are on display at Garth Greenan Gallery through January 7, 2017. Krushenick, who died in 1999, favored a bright, bold style, commingling pop art with abstract expressionism, minimalism, and any other number of -isms. He relished the chance to defy categorization: “They don’t know where to place me. Like I’m out in left field all by myself. And that’s just where I want to stay.” In 1965, he contributed to The Paris Review’s print series. Nicholas Krushenick, United Color Kit, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 40″. Read More
December 12, 2016 On Music Quiet Fire By Adam Shatz On Frank Kimbrough’s album Solstice and the late Paul Bley. From the cover of Paul Bley’s Open, to Love. As a journalist, I have often had to explain to an English-speaking audience the rise of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant prejudices in France. But on election night, I found myself in the temporary offices of the radio show France Culture in midtown Manhattan, explaining to a French audience the triumph of the same prejudices in my own country. Struck by (though far from relishing) this irony, I was reminded of a novel I’d reviewed for the London Review of Books last year, Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian Submission, in which a demoralized France elects an Islamist presidential candidate backed by the Gulf states. In the final pages, the hero, a pathetic white male academic named François, converts to Islam because he fears being deprived of a future in a country where darker-skinned worshippers of Allah have taken over. Our president-elect is a Muslim hater, not a Muslim, but he, too, was catapulted to power with help from influential friends abroad, and his millions of supporters were driven by related fears of finding themselves without a place in an increasingly multicultural society—victims of what the French fascist theorist Renaud Camus has called “the Great Replacement.” Read More
December 12, 2016 At Work Becoming Invisible: An Interview with Mary Ruefle By Caitlin Youngquist Mary Ruefle in 2011. (photo © Matt Valentine.) When I spoke with Mary Ruefle on the phone recently, she’d just moved into a new house and had spent the morning putting screws into the back of a mirror. “I had my toolbox out and one of the screws was deficient,” she told me, “so I had to find another and it was just endless … You need two people for this sort of thing, but I did it myself.” It’s a statement akin to many in her new collection, My Private Property, a mélange of essays, stories, and prose poems, in which small objects often become vehicles for profound reflection. Ruefle, best known for her poetry, begins much of her work this way—she muses on ordinary things like keys or clouds, yellow scarves or golf pencils, until those descriptions unfurl and beget larger, existential meditations on sadness and boredom, on language and lullabies and autonomy in old age. Our conversation was like that, too, always unraveling toward some arresting observation. To work with Ruefle is to enjoy the pleasures of another age; she rarely uses a computer. I mailed her the transcript of our interview, and she returned it with scrawls of red ink and typewriter marks. The last page had been touched by a lit cigarette, leaving a small orbicular burn in the right margin with a stale, nimbus-like ring around it—punctuating, with great finality, the end of our conversation. INTERVIEWER In your poem “A Half-Sketched Head,” you wrote, “If we were thermometers, no one would want to be thirty; everyone would want to be seventy-eight.” My Private Property returns to this theme of getting older and embracing old age. Take “Pause,” your essay on menopause. You write about a feeling most women experience as they age, the feeling of becoming invisible, of becoming more and more like a ghost because we’re no longer noticed in the same way we once were. But you settle on this, that “being invisible is the biggest secret on earth, the most wondrous gift that anyone could ever have given you.” What do you mean? RUEFLE Well, thematically, aging and death become one in the same for writers, and very often you lose young readership because you’re no longer interested in the things young people are interested in. The time for exuberance, energy, endless curiosity, endless activity within a body of work, that drops away and everything becomes bittersweet. But this becoming invisible—all women talk about it. There’s a period of transition that’s so disorienting that you’re confused and horrified by it, you can’t get a grip on it, but it does pass. You endure it, and you are patient, and it falls away. And then you come into a new kind of autonomy that you simply didn’t have when you were young. You didn’t have it when your parents were alive, you didn’t have it back when you were once a woman to be seen. It’s total autonomy and freedom, and you become a much stronger person. You’re not answerable to anyone anymore. For me, it was a journey of shedding the sense of needing to please someone—parents, children, partners. Men don’t become invisible in the same way. There’s a difference in power between men and women, and I know I’m using an archaic formula but I do belong to another century. For the longest time, male power was posited in the accumulation of wealth or experience, and experience was something every man could have. And a woman’s power was always posited on physical attractiveness, the ability to have children. So as a man ages, he gains power, and as a woman ages, she loses it, or feels as though she does. If you go back to this paradox, which I understand people may find antiquated, you find there are still shards and shreds of it everywhere. Read More
December 12, 2016 On the Shelf Self-Care Ain’t What It Used to Be, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jean-Léon Gérôme, La grande piscine de Brousse, 1885. It’s always a good time to suck the marrow out of language. Just ask advertisers: in recent years they’ve laid claim to the word minimalism, evacuating its political-aesthetic lineage and rebranding it to sell sleek, Instagrammable housewares. And now they’ve captured self-care, which, as Marisa Meltzer writes, has seen a spike in usage that divorces it from its original radicalism, binding it forevermore to conspicuous consumption: “The current usage is often traced back to the self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ Audre Lorde, who wrote in an essay published in her 1988 book, A Burst of Light, that ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’ … Gabrielle Moss, author of the Goop parody book, Glop, thinks that self-care is starting to (surprise, surprise) lose its meaning and become a marketing tool. ‘Things that get branded as self-care now have nothing to do with taking care of yourself, like detoxes and juice fasts,’ Ms. Moss said. ‘I do them because I hate myself, not because I’m taking care of myself. It’s poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.’ ” If you want to read something about Russia that doesn’t contain the words hacking, Putin, or clandestine plan to undermine American democracy by propping up demagoguery, you might try this, by Adam Weiner—it’s about Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, a work of far-fetched political fiction from which Ayn Rand, of all people, borrowed liberally (or libertarianally): “The novel, once published, did not merely arouse spasms of sarcastic mirth; it also established a bizarre new paradigm of behavior in Russia. Rational egoism, though actually built on an immovable foundation of determinism, indulged its followers with the idea of endless personal freedom, depicting again and again an almost miraculous process of transformation by which socially inept people became like aristocrats, prostitutes became honest workers, hack writers became literary giants. For decades after the novel’s publication, in imitation of Chernyshevsky’s fictional heroes, young men would enter into fictitious marriages with young women in order to liberate them from their oppressive families. The nominal husband and wife would obey Chernyshevsky’s rules of communal living, with private rooms for man and wife. In imitation of the sewing cooperative in Chernyshevsky’s novel, communes began sprouting all over the place. As an example, the famous revolutionary Vera Zasulich was, within two years of the publications the novel, working for a communal book bindery, while her sisters and mother joined a sewing cooperative—all of this directly caused by What Is to Be Done?.” Read More
December 9, 2016 From the Archive Herzog in the Jungle By Caitlin Love Still from Fitzcarraldo. 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. Read More
December 9, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tests, Tongues, Tinfoil Orbs By The Paris Review Rorschach psychodiagnostics. From the first chapter of The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing, out in February, it seems incredible that no one before Damion Searls has ever written a biography of Rorschach. Born in extreme poverty in the Swiss countryside, in 1884, Rorschach spent most of his professional life in obscurity, working as a psychiatrist in a remote, understaffed insane asylum. It was there that he invented his “psychodiagnostics,” a series of symmetrical multicolored forms (they weren’t really inkblots) that could reveal hidden aspects of the mind. One year later, Rorschach was dead, at thirty-seven, of a ruptured appendix. His early death may have deterred other would-be biographers, but Searls sails past it with style: the second half of his book traces the fortunes of Rorschach’s famous test, which became a household word in America after World War II, when the U.S. Army used it on draftees. Searls uses this unlikely-seeming artifact to illuminate two histories, one scientific, the other cultural, both full of surprises. —Lorin Stein I have a galley of Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection but have put off digging into it partly because it doesn’t come out until March. Given the events at Standing Rock earlier this week, it seemed the ideal moment to read the long, multipart poem Whereas, Long Soldier’s response to President Obama’s signing and delivery, in 2009, of the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Or rather, his lack of delivery: he never read it aloud publicly. Is an apology really an apology if you only write it down and file it away? Long Solider begins sentences, paragraphs, and sections with whereas, the hedging of government-speak that she counters with lines about her childhood, her parents, her tribe, and her daughter. She interweaves these with thoughts of language’s limitations, which she faces again and again, and her weariness—bodily, psychically, culturally—infects the poem: “How much must I labor // to signify what’s real … Really, I climb the back of languages, ride them into exhaustion—maybe pull the reins when I mean go … Stuck, I want off. Let loose from the impulse to note: Beware, a horse isn’t a reference to my heritage.” The personal is political here, and vice versa, and Long Soldier isn’t giving up. “The root of reparation,” she writes, “is repair.” —Nicole Rudick Read More