August 31, 2016 Bulletin Last Chance for Our Summer Deal By The Paris Review The countdown is on: at midnight tonight, we’re closing the gate on our joint subscription deal with the London Review of Books. For the third consecutive summer, we’re offering a year’s subscription to both magazines for just $70 U.S. That’s the best in imaginative writing and the best in essays and commentary: two Reviews in one fell swoop. (Already a Paris Review subscriber? Not a problem: we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for another year, and your LRB subscription will begin immediately.) So sign up today—there’s no time to lose.
August 31, 2016 On Language Truly Trending: An Interview on Intensifiers By Peter Nowogrodzki William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer. Sali Tagliamonte is a linguist at the University of Toronto, where she studies language variation and change. Her latest book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents, was published in June. I called Tagliamonte because I’d noticed more and more people using the word truly. All of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere: in work e-mails and movie reviews, in headlines, on Twitter, on Twitter, and on Twitter. “It truly is up to us,” Hilary Clinton said this summer in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. A week prior, in Cleveland, Trump had remembered his “truly great mother.” Is truly trending? I couldn’t tell—Liane Moriarty’s book, Truly Madly Guilty, had just published. There had been that Savage Garden song in the nineties, and the Lionel Richie one in the eighties. I wanted to find out more, so I did what anyone with a linguistics question would do: I e-mailed Noam Chomsky. To my surprise, he wrote back within half an hour, suggesting I ask “an outstanding sociolinguist like William Labov.” So I did. Labov told me, “The person who has done the most work on intensifiers like truly is Prof. Sali Tagliamonte.” Read More
August 31, 2016 On the Shelf The Hatred of Painting, and Other News By Jonathon Sturgeon Nicole Eisenman, The Session. Image via The Easel. Hatred, they say, loves company—especially the company of artists and writers. Well, it’s getting worse: before we know it, hatred may become the dominant critical school of the century! Consumed with hatred, by that time, you will fail to remember that it all began with The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner’s book-length essay. More recently, though, Lerner’s hatred has infected Hal Foster, respected critic and historian of visual art. The two spoke at Frieze New York, and the conversation has now been transcribed. Here is Foster reminiscing about his early years, when he hated painting and tried to kill it: “Well, I was part of a critical clique that, at an early point in the debate over postmodernism, wanted to put painting to death. There is a revolutionary rush to the declaration of any end. The history of modernism is punctuated by the thrill of the fini!” Read More
August 30, 2016 Look That’s Why We’re Running Away By Caitlin Love Sebastian Blanck’s new exhibition, “That’s Why We’re Running Away,” opened last week at Wetterling Gallery. Blanck, known for his intimate portraits of family and friends, has focused his latest work on landscape. The exhibition closes October 1. Sebastian Blanck, Blinding Light, 2016. Read More
August 30, 2016 Our Correspondents Godspeed, Sweet Intent By Anthony Madrid Hunting the sound stack in the rondels of D’Orléans. Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair (detail), oil on canvas, 1852–55. In the March 1915 issue of Poetry magazine (page 254), the following poem appeared for the first time in print: IMAGE FROM D’ORLEANS Young men riding in the street In the bright new season Spur without reason, Causing their steeds to leap. And at the pace they keep Their horses’ armored feet Strike sparks from the cobbled street In the bright new season. I first encountered it, seventy or seventy-five years later, in Personæ: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. I did not know at that time whether d’Orléans was a person or a place, nor did I look into it. I was charmed by the poem—more than I knew—but there were many pieces in Personæ that interested me more. By the time I turned thirty, I could recite at least two dozen of Pound’s shorter poems from memory. “Image from D’Orleans” was not one of them. Read More
August 30, 2016 At Work Women at Work: Irina Reyn and Emily Barton in Conversation By Irina Reyn and Emily Barton From left: Irina Reyn, Emily Barton. Last month, after her reading at the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock, New York, Irina Reyn sat down for an onstage conversation with the novelist Emily Barton. Reyn had read from her new novel, The Imperial Wife, in which two women—Catherine the Great in eighteenth-century Russia and Tanya in contemporary New York—negotiate marriage and ambition, on two very different registers. Barton’s third novel, The Book of Esther, was also published this summer. It imagines a nation of Turkic warrior Jews transposed from the Middle Ages to World War II–era Europe and follows one woman’s Joan of Arc–style quest to defend her people. Unsurprisingly, the conversation quickly became a lively discussion about the writing of both novels, gender and work, and the standing of women in the current political climate. —Ed. Read More