March 28, 2016 Look Read and Worn By Dan Piepenbring Jeremy May’s book jewelry. Images via My Modern Met. If you’re like me, the walls of your home are obscured by hundreds, nay thousands, of thick, musty, outdated reference texts: The 1903 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. Things to Know About Boll Weevils. Urinalysis and You. A day ago, I would’ve told you the only way to get rid of these books was to burn them. But now I’ve learned that you can turn them into jewelry. It’s easy: Carefully tear out hundreds of pages and laminate them together. Using your hands and the same unalloyed will that led you to hoard these books in the first place, form the laminated paper into a ring, bracelet, pendant, or necklace of your choice. With your safety goggles on, take a power sander to your jewelry and buff it until you achieve a lustrous, glossy finish. Or just call Jeremy May. He does this for a living and is better at it than you are. May, an artist based in London, is showing his book jewelry—created using a vastly refined version of the process above—as part of a group exhibition called “Read and Worn: Jewelry from Books,” at New York’s RR Gallery through April 24. You can see more images below and at My Modern Met. Read More
March 28, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Worst. Kid. Song. Ever. By Sadie Stein The other day, my husband and I were talking about putting together a playlist for our nieces: a list of empowering, kid-appropriate songs in which women were treated with respect. We had fun thinking of titles: Aretha and All Hail the Queen and plenty of Dolly, for sure. But also Belle and Sebastian and sixties Brit pop. I started a Spotify station based on “I’m Into Something Good” because I’ve always thought the lines “So I asked to see her again / And she told me I could” were sweet. And then, from this place of idealism, came perhaps the most inappropriate song to place on a little girl’s playlist ever written. 1964’s “Little Children,” which was a number-one UK hit for Billy Jay Kramer and went on to chart at number seven Stateside. Read More
March 28, 2016 Correspondence Ever Affectionately Yours By Iris Murdoch Two letters from Iris Murdoch. Letter to Raymond Queneau, October 29, 1949, Text below. Click to enlarge. To Raymond Queneau. Read More
March 28, 2016 On the Shelf Malthusian Flotsam and Unspeakable Jetsam, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Kirk Crawford. Jim Harrison has died at seventy-eight. “You don’t write—an artist doesn’t create, or very rarely creates—good art in support of different causes,” he told The Paris Review in 1988. “And critics have an enormous difficulty separating the attitudes of your characters from your attitudes as a writer. You have to explain to them: I am not all the men in my novels. How could I be? I’m little Jimmy back here on the farm with my wife and two daughters, and, at one time, three female horses, three female cats, and three female dogs, and I’m quite a nice person.” Fact: you, too, can enjoy Aldous Huxley waxing lyrical about a controversial Los Angeles sewage treatment plant. “One day in 1939, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and two women walk along the shore south of Los Angeles. The weather is beautiful, the beach is empty, and Shakespeare is debated. Then the group realizes that something’s funny about the beach. As Huxley put it in the essay, ‘Like Hyperion to a Satyr,’ they are suddenly walking among ‘ten million emblems and mementos of Modern Love … Malthusian flotsam and unspeakable jetsam.’ The four had found themselves among a sea of used condoms that ejected by Los Angeles’s Hyperion sewage treatment plant. Huxley returned to those shores a few years later, after LA upgraded the plant in 1950. He was overjoyed with what he saw, and what he thought the vista suggested about the city: ‘Another torrent, this time about 99.95 percent pure, rushes down through the submarine outfall and mingles, a mile offshore, with the Pacific. The problem of keeping a great city clean without polluting a river or fouling the beaches, and without robbing the soil of its fertility, has been triumphantly solved.’ ” In America, Joseph Brodsky is often held up as “the poster boy for Soviet persecution,” as Cynthia Haven writes—but a new biography is trying to change that perception: “Ellendea Proffer Teasley, in her short new memoir, Brodskij sredi nas (Brodsky Among Us), offers a different view of the poet. It’s an iconoclastic and spellbinding portrait, some of it revelatory. Teasley’s Brodsky is both darker and brighter than the one we thought we knew, and he is the stronger for it … According to the leading critic Anna Narinskaya, writing in the newspaper Kommersant, Teasley’s memoir had been written ‘without teary-eyed ecstasy or vicious vengefulness, without petty settling of scores with the deceased—or the living—and at the same time demonstrating complete comprehension of the caliber and extreme singularity of her “hero” ’ … Even so, the book has yet to find a publisher in English, the language in which it was written.” Do you want Saul Bellow’s desk? He sat there, wrote some books. And it’s nice—a mahogany roll-top job dating to the Victorian era. A steal at ten thousand bucks. Please buy it. Please, please buy it. No one else is buying it, Bellow’s son told the Wall Street Journal: “I guess space is expensive on the Upper West Side. Nobody’s got room for a giant piece of furniture … I thought, well, this will provoke discussion. But it really didn’t … I’m moving to a smaller place and the desk just isn’t fitting into the plan.” Problem: a staging at the Park Avenue Armory of Louis Andriessen’s 1988 avant-garde opera, De Materie, calls for one hundred sheep. Solution: get the fucking sheep. “Simply getting hold of so many stage-ready sheep was an exceptionally difficult bit of opera casting … The bane of international opera stars is a visa system that can be difficult to navigate. For opera sheep, it is getting the right veterinary certificates, exhibiting permits, humane handling paperwork and the like … Then there was the question of where to house them. The ovine troupers could not sleep at the Armory; could not commute from Pennsylvania; and would not have been welcome at the hotels that usually cater to visiting sopranos. So accommodations were found at the Bronx Equestrian Center, which has stables in Pelham Bay Park. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which has jurisdiction over animals in performances, issued a permit to allow the project to go ahead … Then the Armory had to be readied. A backstage paddock was built and soundproofed … ”
March 25, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Stirrups, Stravinsky, Sink-feet By The Paris Review Meryl Meisler, Butterfly Bedroom Telephone, East Meadow, NY, June 1975, black-and-white photograph, 1975, 20″ x 14 1/2″. Image via Steven Kasher Gallery. Among the black-and-white photographs in Meryl Meisler’s show at Steven Kasher Gallery is a vitrine that houses ephemera from Meisler’s youth in Massapequa, Long Island. One piece, from 1969, is an invitation to a swingers’ party that asks attendees to rendezvous in the Island Discount parking lot and boasts that “Our Color Coded Computer Carefully Coordinates Closely Compatible Couples, (put that in your Funk & Wagnalls).” Group adultery aside, this sounds like a fun bunch. And Meisler’s photographs, which she began taking in her early twenties, bear out that notion. In one, an older woman lounges on a bed (whose butterfly spread matches the wallpaper that matches the curtains) while staring openmouthed and goggle-eyed at the camera. In another, a young man in a too-short terry bathrobe shaves while a woman brushes his hair, another man climbs onto the counter to stick his foot in the sink, and a third man, visible only in the mirror, views the scene over the top of the shower doors. The Meislers and their friends are like Tina Barney’s affluent subjects gone astray: kitchsy, boisterous, and lovin’ it. —Nicole Rudick A year ago, our director of advertising (read, “the person who sells our ads”) left the Review to host a TV show about fashion weeks around the world—Pakistan, China, the Gaza Strip, you name it. Since then, we haven’t seen much of Hailey Gates (though she did attend one Paris Review party via FaceTime from the Congo). So it was with delight and curiosity that we received the trailer for her show, “States of Undress.” It premieres next month on Viceland. We’re staying tuned … —Lorin Stein Read More
March 25, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Group Dynamics By Sadie Stein I’m currently observing a real-time courtesy lapse so blatant and so amazing that I must give voice to my electrified horror. The scene: a coffee shop, late morning. The players: assorted people drinking hot beverages and working on their computers, and a pair of German-speaking tourists in (I would wager) their midtwenties. Since the German couple came in, one of them, a woman, has been on a FaceTime call at top volume, with a shouting man. When it started, everyone looked up in irritation; it did not occur to anyone that it could go on very long. After five minutes of yelling, people started to look up pointedly, or resorted to the always-effective tactic of pursing their lips and raising their eyebrows. After ten minutes, the same people began to meet one another’s eyes and shake their heads gravely. Read More