July 1, 2016 Correspondence Dear Bill Cunningham By A. N. Devers At an auction in December 2010, I acquired a double-breasted men’s mink stroller coat owned by Edward Gorey. It was an unlikely purchase: I hadn’t intended to bid on anything, had never been to a proper auction before, and had very little money to my name. I was there to write something about the once-in-a-lifetime auction of Gorey’s personal hoard of fur coats—twenty-one in all. I was a Gorey fan, not, outside a first edition or two, a collector. But that morning, I had deposited a meager paycheck from adjunct professing, and I began to feel the emergence of a dream. I could own the coat. Why couldn’t I at least try? I could at least pretend to be that person who wins precious objects at auction. Read More
July 1, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Urine-colored Stains, Tortoiseshell Cats, Grimy Mirrors By The Paris Review From John Aubrey: My Own Life. When John Aubrey died in 1697, he left us with his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographies whose candor and color exploded the genre. As keen as his eye was, Aubrey seldom turned it on himself. Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, out last year in the UK and soon to cross the Atlantic, is an imaginative corrective: an autobiography assembled with care from remnants of Aubrey’s letters, manuscripts, and books. Against the turmoil of Restoration-era England, his sensitivities and proclivities make him an empathetic, surprisingly modern figure; unique for his time, he was fascinated with preservation, often pausing on horseback to sketch ruins or glasswork. Not infrequently, his writings find him distraught at how few of his countrymen appreciate the mundanities of their world. Scurr’s diary is a generous document of his life, and better still it demonstrates the easy beauty of his prose. “I am so bored, so alone,” he writes early on, yearning to leave rural life for Oxford or London. “My imagination is like a mirror of pure crystal water, which the least wind does disorder and unsmooth.” —Dan Piepenbring I’ve been meaning to read Jennifer Grotz’s new collection of poems, Window Left Open, for months; when I pulled it from the shelf last weekend I near expected to devour it whole. Instead, I read the first couple poems, then closed the book until the next morning, when I did the same. I’ve been like this all week, dipping in and out of Grotz’s poetry. But my pace is proof of how fond I am of it: Window Left Open is a trove of morose and arresting moments that begs its reader to linger over it, to steep in its quiet gloom—the lonesomeness and despondence of the everyday. Grotz is an impeccable observer, too. (“I myself was / the hungry lens,” she writes.) One narrator watches the “longsuffering” cows in the forest, steam coming from their nostrils; another notices a student’s stomped-out cigarette on the library’s steps, “excreting urine-colored stains into the snow”; another prays for the apples that cling to their branches before the wind takes them to the ground. Grotz laces even the most benign occasions with beautiful devastation. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
July 1, 2016 Uncategorized Forty (More) Hink Pinks: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Hink pink is a word game in which synonyms, circumlocution, and micronarratives provide clues for rhyming phrases. Check out Dylan Hicks’s forty hink-pink riddles here. Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Russell Jane Willoughby, who got out thirty-seven of forty really difficult hink pinks. She gets a free subscription to the Review and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. Congratulations, Russell! Below, the solutions. Read More
July 1, 2016 From the Archive Genesis By Geoffrey Hill Photo: Clara Molden. The English poet Geoffrey Hill—a lifelong contributor to The Paris Review—has died at eighty-four. His first poem for the magazine, the aptly named “Genesis,” appeared in our second issue (Summer 1953). In his memory, we’re republishing it today. Read More
July 1, 2016 On the Shelf Clouds Are the New Fireworks, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Marketing materials for Khmer Cloud Making Service. The poet Geoffrey Hill has died at eighty-four, “suddenly, and without pain or dread,” according to his wife. “The word accessible is fine in its place,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “That is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word. In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honor of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.” Scotty Moore, who played guitar in Elvis’s original band, died this week, too. Alex Abramovich writes: “He started out a country guitarist, a finger-picker in the mode of Chet Atkins. But slathered in echo, that country style translated remarkably well to a rockabilly/rock and roll context, while the context brought something extra—something ecstatic—to the style … Scotty Moore brought something different to the table. Not quite diffidence, but a perfectly worked out sense of proportion. Moore didn’t wail, or break from the pack: understated on stage and in person, he played to frame the frontman.” A certain founding editor of ours would have me fired for writing this, but: fuck fireworks. They’re loud, they’re volatile, they do violence to the sky. If you’d prefer a more peaceful Fourth, you should ditch America, catch a flight to Phnom Penh, and send some clouds into the sky instead: “This isn’t Bubble Machine BGSP #5 by the early Filipino conceptual artist David Medalla, it’s Khmer Cloud Making Service, a Phnom Penh business offering customizable foam-printing services for events … The company offers ephemeral works for events and corporate programs. They are most frequently hired to deploy cloud art at the openings of new businesses … Khmer Cloud Making Service currently employs four people, working near Boeung Keng Kang Market. You can rent out their services for $500 an afternoon.” Hilton Als tells the long, harrowing, ecstatic story behind Nan Goldin’s The Ballad: “The Ballad was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call ‘being.’ In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends. The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots, like Mann’s. What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to The Ballad’s operatic sweep.” From the makers of dirty realism, infrarealism, surrealism, and hyperrealism, it’s ultra-unrealism, China’s newest school of cultural thought: “The first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by chaohuan, which we are rendering in English as ‘ultra-unreal.’ The literal meaning of chaohuan is ‘surpassing the unreal’ or ‘surpassing the imaginary.’ It is a word that a friend and I made up about a year ago during a conversation about contemporary Chinese reality … The word ‘ultra-unreal’ is young; it’s a newborn baby. I confidently submit, however, that it is going to live a long, healthy life. China’s been pregnant with the word for at least 30 years. Maybe 50 years. Maybe even 100 years.”
June 30, 2016 From the Archive Babyland By Kathleen Ossip Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Marcelle Roulin, 1888. Kathleen Ossip’s poem “Babyland” appeared in our Summer 2002 issue. Her latest collection is The Do-Over. Read More