November 2, 2016 On the Shelf There’s Our Bernhard, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, 1970. Anne Carson prizes brevity, which means, in the abstract, that she should be perfectly suited to these distracted times of ours. And maybe she is, even if she seems permanently ill at ease. In a new interview to support her collection Float, her answers sometimes suggest—and I mean this as a compliment—that she could find lucrative work as a copywriter for Hot Topic T-shirts: “I feel perfectly at home underwater.” “I do not believe in art as therapy.” “Volcanoes are dead easy to paint.” “I never liked Mona Lisa.” But then, every writer, even the real assholes, must call a truce with the great ugly publicity machine. How else to explain why Thomas Bernhard, king of the assholes, consented to make a documentary about himself back in 1970? His books, as Andrew Katzenstein writes, are teeming with curmudgeons who heap vitriol on “hacks—artists who seem more interested in fame and accolades than in the creation of meaningful work.” But he worked productively (kind of) with the Austrian director Ferry Radax: “After Bernhard began to have doubts about the project and threatened to withdraw his participation, he and Radax eventually compromised on strict terms: over the course of three days, Radax would film Bernhard sitting on a park bench as he discussed how he became a writer and his views on writing … Bernhard offers grim assessments of the writing life, suggesting the fanaticism with which he approached his work. A book is ‘nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor’ that has already metastasized and infected the body before it is removed. Writing only intensifies the isolation that all humans suffer, and authors he admires are ‘opponents, or enemies’ who need to be subdued, not inspirations to be emulated.” Read More
November 1, 2016 Arts & Culture The Oblivion of Adam By Abdelfattah Kilito What if you could remember every poem in the next life? From the cover of The Tongue of Adam, available now from New Directions The dead play a sly trick on the living: in dying, they pass on the duty of interpreting what they thought, of arguing over what they said—or might have said, or even what they never said. This is how we get the fantasy, as stubborn as it is unrealizable, of interrogating the dead directly and without an interpreter. To meet them, just once, and to ask them to clarify what they’d said—or even, in certain cases, to ask if they said it at all. If only they would speak, all outstanding claims would be resolved, the contradictions smoothed over, the ambiguities explained. Confronted with the light of truth, all men would agree and no argument would be possible. This fantasy has produced an entire genre of literature: the dialogue with the dead. One example of the genre in Arabic is The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-ghufran) by the eleventh century poet al-Ma‘arri, which narrates a journey to the life. Following the Day of Judgment, the hero Ibn al-Qarih is admitted into paradise, where he meets the poets he most esteems, or those whose verses have especially provoked his philological curiosity. During a sojourn in hell, he’s also permitted to interview the poètes maudits. And finally, returning to paradise, he meets Adam. The Epistle of Forgiveness is a work of tremendous richness. My aim here is merely to examine what it says, directly or otherwise, about poetry and the forgetting of language. Read More
November 1, 2016 First Person Killing Dirk’s By Bryan Washington Photo: Houston Streetwise Since I moved to Louisiana, every few months I’ve met someone who’s spent time in Montrose. It’s this trendy suburb in Houston, the kind the South’s accused of lacking, and the folks who bring it up are usually bemoaning the neighborhood’s changes. They’re always white. Always a stone’s throw away from rich. Rocking flannel and Converse, or a leather jacket and boots, or a floral-print skirt just this side of tattered. One guy, a tattooed teacher, told me he missed the block’s grit: Montrose used to be this place where you never knew who’d beat the shit out of you. Now the notion’s less plausible, which really is a shame, or at least that’s what this guy said. That’s usually how those conversations go. But every now and again somebody brings up Dirk’s. It was this coffee shop on the corner, one that’s been closed for a minute. But it felt like the neighborhood’s nexus, the thesis of the place, and its phantom still hangs between West Main Street and Branard. Read More
November 1, 2016 Bulletin Early Voters’ Special By The Paris Review Get your election-free content here. More than twenty-two million people have already voted. Maybe you’re one of them: you’re cooling your heels, killing time till November 8, refreshing Twitter, and generally freaking out. If your “information diet” has got you down, our Fall issue is here for you. It’s full of the best new fiction, poetry, interviews, and art—and it contains precisely zero instances of the word election. That’s our guarantee. Subscribe now and enjoy a respite from the twenty-four-hour news cycle.
November 1, 2016 On the Shelf It’s Never Too Late to Mock Nixon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. “I do nothing professionally, I do everything for fun,” Prince’s character Christopher Tracy says in the serially overlooked Under the Cherry Moon. It’s a line that seems to unlock some of his mystique—his spontaneity, or, as Zadie Smith writes, the constant sense of mirage surrounding him onstage: “Prince’s moves, no matter how many times you may have observed them, have no firm inscription in memory; they never seem quite fixed or preserved. If someone asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the splits, if you’re able. But there won’t appear to be anything especially Prince-like about that. It’s mysterious. How can you dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like a secret only I know? (And isn’t it the case that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?) … His shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest thing you ever saw and yet its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.” When I’m feeling down, really down, about my potential as a shaggy creative type, I find it helps to make fun of Richard Nixon. It’s helped countless writers and artists, among them the Philips Guston and Roth, who met in Woodstock in the summer of ’71 and discovered a mutual muse in our esteemed thirty-seventh president. Charles McGrath writes, “The two men shared a love of books and of what Guston called ‘crapola’—billboards, diners, junk shops, burger joints—and Richard M. Nixon was soon added to the list … Mr. Roth began working on what became Our Gang, his book-length satire, which begins with the president, Trick E. Dixon, hoping to give the vote to the unborn and ends with him in hell, after being assassinated in a hospital where he had gone to have his sweat glands removed … Mr. Roth showed some early chapters to Guston, who in a mood of shared Nixon-loathing exuberance, responded with a flood of satirical drawings. In a couple of them Guston’s Nixon is a hooded Klansman conspiring with his cronies Spiro T. Agnew and John Mitchell, but in most he is a kind of walking gonad, his nose a penis that grows longer with every lie he tells.” Read More
October 31, 2016 Look Light and Dark By Dan Piepenbring Marcos Bontempo’s exhibition “Light and Dark” is at Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York through November 26. Bontempo lives and works in Andalusia; he paints on the floor using ink and salt on paper, which he prefers to canvas. “The shapes express the poor reality, the mutilation of an ill body that does not want to be forgotten by God,” he’s said of his abstracted human forms, often depicted in extremis. “I do not let them alone in their ordeal … I think I am a schizophrenic.” Marcos Bontempo, Untitled, 2016, ink and salt on paper, 25.5″ x 19.5″. Read More