August 16, 2016 Our Correspondents Porn Poetry By Anthony Madrid Raja Ravi Varma, painting of a scene from Kālidāsa’s play Abhijñānaśākuntalam. If “porn poetry” is defined as poetry that’s supposed to turn people on, then we have no tradition of porn poetry in English. What we have instead is a bunch of what might be called “exhilarating nastiness”: poetry that’s basically a revenge against sex, a way of processing anxiety. Don’t get me wrong. The material I seem to be dismissing is my favorite stuff in the world. Rochester, Swift, Seidel: they are disgusting and great. I have no real complaints about these guys. They speak to my concerns. Still, these days, I’ve become interested in expanding my borders beyond what I call “therapeutic art.” My anxieties ain’t going nowhere; they’ll be here when I get back. How about some poetry that comes straight out of delight and high spirits? Poetry that never heard of revenge or consolation. Read More
August 16, 2016 On the Shelf Haring’s Kingdom of Cocks, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Keith Haring’s Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks. Image via Hyperallergic If you live in New York, you have to make your peace with Keith Haring—his public works are all over town. But the city’s murals rarely, if ever, showcase Haring’s once-in-a-generation gift for drawing cocks. To see that, you must turn to Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, a new book of Haring’s dicks that “envisions the city as a kingdom of phalluses”: “he transforms Manhattan’s churches, skyscrapers, and fire hydrants into architectural penises. The Twin Towers become twin penises. There are penises drawn in front of Tiffany’s, in front of the Museum of Modern Art, while ‘waiting for a yam.’ There are minimalist penises, composed of as few lines as possible. There are also Gucci penises, alphabet penises, flying torpedo penises, optical illusion penises, deconstructed penises, ‘actual size’ tracings of penises, and clusters of penises on the subway at rush hour.” Here’s one way museums have found to make money: they’ll let you watch the varnish dry. It’s not quite as lively as watching the actual paint dry, no, but for people with a new interest in the art of conservation, it’ll do. At the Musée d’Orsay, Doreen Carvajal reports, “the once mysterious craft is increasingly turning into a high-end reality show—long-running spectacles that appeal to donors who lavish money on makeovers, but trouble some conservators accustomed to quiet and absolute concentration … In the slow-moving drama of restoration, fishbone cracks vanish, figures that were muddy sepia become radiantly blush, and yellow clouds, thick with old varnish, transform into white gauze tinged with rose. The results are a publicity bonanza for museums; they tell a before-and-after narrative that attracts media attention and appeals to crowdfunding campaigns and companies that have never donated to art projects before.” In 1938, Gertrude Stein published The World Is Round, a book for children. Let her never be accused of condescending to kids—she dumbs nothing down. In fact, the manuscript sounds pretty much the same as her works for adults do: “Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals … Rose was her name and would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose … Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words. If you have any trouble, read faster and faster until you don’t.” It’s important to have a contingency plan. If life on Earth takes a turn for the apocalyptic, you won’t find me huddled around some garbage fire eating another man’s thigh, no, sir. I’ll be on the moon. The Atlantic has taught me how to claim land there: “You could launch a small rover—like China’s Jade Rabbit, which just ceased operations—to set up a research station at one of the moon’s more resource-rich areas, probably the poles. The rover would set down a copper wire, trundle a few meters away and unspool more wire. This length of wire is now a low-frequency radio antenna. Think of the rabbit-ear dipole antenna on an ancient TV set … Under the Outer Space Treaty, you would have to allow other countries and entities to inspect your new solar observatory. But the treaty also says that inspections cannot get in the way of your normal operations, and any inspection would likely interfere with your radio observations. So for practical purposes, nobody else can ever come to your mountaintop. You have become the de facto owner of that piece of lunar real estate.” Thomas Mann’s story “Mario and the Magician” skewered Mussolini as a man with “very ugly hair” and “small hard eyes, with flabby pouches beneath them”—a man who “talked without stopping—but only in vague, boastful, self-advertising phrases.” You see where this is going, don’t you? How this fascistic asshole might resemble another, more contemporary fascistic asshole? Don’t make me spell it out. Colin Campbell writes of Mann’s story, “The magician’s name is Cipolla, and his show is preceded by a flurry of cheap publicity. When Cipolla himself appears on stage, he spouts a lot of blather about his grand reputation and, after ingratiating himself and reading a few minds, he makes it clear that he leads and commands, while others willingly follow and obey. But could he make a gentleman who challenged him dance foolishly even against his will? ‘ “Even against your will,” answered Cipolla, in unforgettable accents.’ ”
August 15, 2016 The Print Series Boston: See Our Prints at Harvard Square By The Paris Review Since 1964, The Paris Review has commissioned a series of prints and posters by major contemporary artists. Contributors have included Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and William Bailey. Each print is published in an edition of sixty to two hundred, most of them signed and numbered by the artist. All have been made especially and exclusively for The Paris Review. Many are still available for purchase. Proceeds go to The Paris Review Foundation, established in 2000 to support The Paris Review. Through September 15, our readers in Boston and Cambridge can head to Aesop Harvard Square, at 49 Brattle Street, where seven of our favorite prints are on display: Andy Warhol, 1965, silkscreen Robert Motherwell, 1965, silkscreen Christo, 1982, lithograph poster (available for purchase) Sol LeWitt, 1983, silkscreen, signed (available for purchase) Aram Saroyan, 1989, silkscreen (available for purchase) Alex Katz, 1991, silkscreen, signed (available for purchase) Louise Bourgeois, 1994, intaglio Aesop consultants will be available to provide tours. Read more here. Andy Warhol, 1965, silkscreen.
August 15, 2016 My First Time Akhil Sharma on An Obedient Father By Caitlin Love Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Today, Akhil Sharma discusses his first novel, An Obedient Father, which he started when he was a student at Stanford: “I got [to school] about a month before classes started, and I didn’t know how to write or how to begin writing a book. And I thought, I’ll begin writing five pages a day and in two months I’ll be done with a novel. I didn’t know how to come up with plot, I didn’t know how to do anything … Still I don’t know how you get through all those years of being lost.” Read More
August 15, 2016 On the Shelf Hemingway’s Antlers Returned, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A photo posted by aspentimes (@aspentimes) on Aug 10, 2016 at 11:51am PDT Try to stay calm, everyone, but I have some very exciting news: it’s about Hemingway’s antlers. Back in 1964, Hunter S. Thompson stole a set of elk antlers right off the guy’s wall, only three years after he’d shot himself … Thompson felt bad about it and meant to return the antlers promptly, but you know how it is, the decades go by, stuff piles up in your garage, and you just sort of forget that you have these priceless antlers sitting around, and then it’s 2005 and you’re dead, too. So it fell to Thompson’s widow, Anita, to return the property to the Hemingways last week: “They were warm and kind of tickled … They were so open and grateful, there was no weirdness … Still, it’s something that was stolen from the home. They were grateful to have them back. They had heard rumors. Sean Hemingway, the grandson, was the first family member that I’d heard from. He spoke with other Hemingway family members and he said that everyone agreed that he should have them. He lives in New York, where he curates a museum. So now that I’m back from Ketchum we’re actually shipping them to Sean.” Finally, New York’s newspaper of record has taken it upon itself that humblest of tasks: defining punk. Since 1976, the punk-rock spirit has been noxious, amorphous, and utterly unreconstructed. That was okay, but isn’t it better to have the Gray Lady trotting out a bunch of musician types to tell you what it’s really all about? One twenty-five-year-old says that punk as “like a massive piece of denim, and with that denim you can make something really cool. You can make a jacket, you can make some cool jeans, or you can make a cushion or a cover. There’s nothing that’s wrong or right about it, it’s just a thing that gives anything you want to do some backing.” Walter Benjamin wrote of the age of the mechanical reproduction—how quaint! In 2016, a good 3-D scanner-printer combo can do what mere mechanics never could; we have arrived, as Noah Charney writes, in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction. “When we speak of scanned and printed works of art, copies made by computers and a fabrication mechanism rather than a human hand, it is a different story altogether. It might look good, but what about Benjamin’s ‘aura’? … A danger arises when amateurs and bogus experts aren’t able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s reproduced. Worse, they might see the digital copy and decide that it is not worth the effort to see the original. They might not think that the work is better, but it is unarguably more convenient to access.” Two new books, American Girls and Girls and Sex, see a kind of crisis in young women today, and of course social media is to blame—these girls’ parents didn’t grow up with Instagram, so Instagram can only be the enemy. Zoe Heller raises an eyebrow: “To be sure, certain kinds of sexism have been amplified—or perhaps transmitted more efficiently—in the Internet era, and girls are now under pressure to present themselves as pliable sexual creatures at a much earlier age than they have been in the past. But even in the far-off 1970s and 1980s, young women experienced their share of exploitation, abuse, and unsatisfactory sex … If the good old days were never as good as both writers are wont to imply, the dark days of our present era are not quite as unremittingly desperate either.” Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book of atypically intimate interviews between the two filmmakers, turns fifty this year, and it’s still “one of the sharpest, most enthralling studies of creative thought” in print, Nathan Heller says: “As Truffaut presses Hitchcock on decision after decision, in film after film, an elaborate, reasoned logic rises to the fore—a point that both directors, similarly inclined toward meticulous visual formalism, were keen to drive home. Hitchcock is occasionally self-dismissive in a way that seems self-blind. My first destination, on paging through, was the discussion of Rear Window, from 1954, which to me seems Hitchcock’s greatest … Yet the director’s account extends from indifference to dissatisfaction. He dismisses the Franz Waxman score—whose weaving through a wash of overlapping urban sounds is striking even today—as disappointing. Not even the most deterministic director in the movies, it would seem, could see a clear path to his full achievement.”