November 4, 2016 Our Correspondents Carved in Wood By Merritt Tierce Our newest correspondent, Merritt Tierce, is writing about “the varieties of obscurity.” First up: a fateful trip to Greece leads her to the Museum of Wooden Sculptures. Giorgis Koutantos, The Combing. I lost my wallet last week. I’d been out having drinks, wearing jeans into which I could have forced something no wider than a penny; at the train station I sat down in a chair on the platform, slid my ticket into my wallet, and wedged my wallet under my thigh. The train arrived and I stood up and boarded, leaving my wallet there on the platform. I discovered the loss when I started looking for my ticket as the ticket checker approached. I was immediately distressed, of course, though not by the loss of the wallet itself, or my debit cards or my ID, but at the most likely permanent disappearance of a piece of paper with an address written on it, the handwritten address of the Greek wood sculptor Giorgis Koutantos. Read More
November 4, 2016 On the Shelf All Roads Lead to Death, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Manchester by the Sea. After the trials of Margaret—a brilliant movie written in 2003, filmed in ’05, released in compromised form in 2011, and rereleased in less compromised form in 2012—Kenneth Lonergan is back with a new film, Manchester by the Sea. Rebecca Mead spoke with him, and boy, is he looking on the bright side: “It’s good to have a forward-thinking attitude—and I wish I had more of one—but I don’t think it’s so bad that some people can’t. ‘Oh, well, my mom’s dead. She was nice, that’s O.K.’—it just makes me sick … ‘It’s fine, I’m dying.’ ‘It’s fine, your mother’s dying, it’s no problem, it’s just life. It’s just a circle of life.’ What fucking circle of life? It all goes in one direction—toward death.” … Or does it? Wang Deshun, an eighty-year-old runway model known as “China’s hottest grandpa,” has such vim and vitality that he seems, on the catwalk, to defy death itself: “Determined to avoid mental and physical stagnation, Mr. Wang has explored new skills and ideas while devoting ample time to daily exercise. Last year, he walked the runway for the first time, his physique causing a national sensation. He takes obvious joy in subverting China’s image of what it means to be old … Mr. Wang has not escaped being called grandpa—he has two children and a two-year-old granddaughter—but the honorific is accompanied by accolades for his vigor and his embrace of the new.” Read More
November 3, 2016 From the Archive On Tour By Richard Howard Earlier today, we announced that Richard Howard will receive The Paris Review’s 2017 Hadada Award. To celebrate, we’re sharing “On Tour,” a poem by Howard from our Summer 1956 issue. Read More
November 3, 2016 Bulletin Richard Howard Will Receive Our 2017 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Save the date: The Paris Review’s annual gala, the Spring Revel, will be Tuesday, April 4, 2017, at Cipriani 42nd Street. We’ll honor Richard Howard with our Hadada Award. Read More
November 3, 2016 Our Correspondents Taking the Train to Charlottesville By Wei Tchou Amtrak’s Great Dome car. Every year, I take a Northeast Regional southbound to Charlottesville to visit two dear friends and their pair of gorgeous, sweetly neurotic German shepherds. I went once in the spring after moving to New York, but two years in the city had made me susceptible to Virginia pollen, teary-eyed and wheezing every time I went outdoors. So now I visit in autumn when the air is crisp and the leaves have just turned. It’s a seven-hour train ride through the changing colors of the Delaware River and the Shenandoah Valley—just enough time to read the paper and shake myself of my daily accumulations. Last weekend, I sprawled out across two seats, fanning out a collection of fresh magazines and books that might have looked pretty on Instagram had I bothered to pull the cell phone out of my bag. Instead, I let its periodic, muffled pings blend into the low hum of wheels turning. I spent most of my time staring out of the window anyway, watching buildings grow smaller until they were just slight, white homes punctuating long stretches of green. You get dreamy on long train rides—you don’t waste time as much as you drift on it. Read More
November 3, 2016 On the Shelf You Can See Through Windows, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Caspar David Friedrich, Window Looking Over the Park, 1810–11. When I wrote a few days ago about baby boomers who want to spend eternity in concrete caskets at the bottom of the ocean, I thought it was a shoo-in for the biggest funeral innovation of the week. Not so. You could also have your ashes scattered at the Metropolitan Opera—though, be warned, people will get all huffy about it, for some reason. A Dallas man named Roger Kaiser has apologized for sprinkling a “white powdery substance” on the Met’s floors during a performance this week. That powder was all that remained of his friend Terry Turner, and he wanted Turner to stay there for good: “I told Terry that if he would like, I would take some of his ashes to opera houses that I visited in the future,” he wrote in his apology. “Trying to lighten the mood, I jokingly told Terry they would never be able to vacuum all of him up. He would be there forever enjoying all the beautiful music.” Here is a brutal reality about windows: they’re transparent. It’s such an obvious statement, and yet, as Edwin Heathcote writes, fewer and fewer people seem to understand it: “You can have a panoramic window, but there will also be a view back in. It is a condition highlighted in recent complaints by residents in the Neo Bankside apartments that visitors to neighboring Tate Modern’s new viewing gallery were using it to look right into their apartments. There have been letters. Sir Nicholas Serota, the outgoing director of the Tate, probably didn’t help when he suggested the residents put up net curtains. Yet the flippant (and also rather brilliant) comment did highlight a contemporary condition … The difficulty stems from a confusion at the heart of contemporary architecture—that is, the difference between a window and a wall.” Read More