July 6, 2015 Inside the Issue Five Questions for Ishion Hutchinson By Jake Orbison Ishion Hutchinson. Ishion Hutchinson’s poem “The Difference” appears in our Summer issue. Hutchinson, who was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, teaches at Cornell University. In “The Difference,” the speaker bridges a divide between the reader and the “they,” the poem’s unspecified subjects. Can you talk a little about the genesis of the poem? Do you often see the role of a speaker as a kind of mediator? The poem’s opening contains its genesis. I overheard two men, it could have been more, talking one early winter morning in a café. Their words weren’t clear but, to my ears, there was a doomsday tone about them, very grave. I had been reading Halldór Laxness’s great novel, Independent People, too, a very masculine book, full of scenes of men gathering in winter to talk iron, as it were, and I think that permeated the poem. I do not see the role of a speaker as a kind of mediator at all, perhaps only to the extent that the speaker is listening to voices, yes, but the speaker’s motive is to speak for and to himself. Read More
July 6, 2015 On the Shelf Silly Love Songs, and Other News By Jeffery Gleaves Frans Hals, Buffoon playing a lute (detail), 1623. George Plimpton, our founding editor, held the unofficial title of fireworks commissioner of New York City for some thirty years, but he hosted the hottest fireworks parties at his place in the Hamptons. When he died, in 2003, “his son, Taylor, following his father’s wishes, packed his ashes into a firework with the help of Phil Grucci and launched him into the sky.” What’s wrong with loving love songs? Nothing. Studying them for “subversive” moments may be disingenuous though, like “scanning a nursery for ugly babies. The interesting question about babies is what makes them so cute.” There’s nothing wrong with sentiment. Enjoy it. This week in stereotypes: in effort to attract a more divers readership, comic-book publishers are incorporating more gay characters and story lines—like Kevin, the gay character introduced into the Archie series in 2010. DC Comics, though, has a new gay superhero named Midnighter, who “likes to fight and is promiscuous.” Some things never change, which is to say art is still irrelevant. Looking at the fiscal health of the fine arts can buoy your spirits, but challenge anyone on the street to “identify the architect of the Freedom Tower or name a single winner of the Tate Prize,” and you may be disappointed. Even your last trip to the museum was probably “for the sake of sensation and spectacle.” Dune looks good at fifty, maybe better than it ever has: the science fiction’s concerns—human potential, environmental anxiety, revolution, and altered states of consciousness—have more geopolitical echoes than they did in 1965. “If The Lord of the Rings is about the rise of fascism and the trauma of the second world war,” then, “Dune is the paradigmatic fantasy of the Age of Aquarius.”
July 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Ornate Rhetorick By Sadie Stein Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House, William Holland, 1789. There is a coffee shop in my neighborhood called the Sensuous Bean. This is obviously a great name, and perhaps one key to the store’s longevity; it’s one of the few small businesses in the area to have lasted over thirty years. I think it’s tops. No precious nonsense here, but the smell of roasting beans and the clutter of brewing paraphernalia is like a comforting hug. I’ve always hoped that their name was one of the few accurate Miltonian uses of the word sensuous in modern signage. After all, Milton came up with sensuous specifically to evoke a sensory experience innocent of leers and winks. And it didn’t really take. As Oxford Dictionaries would have it: The words sensual and sensuous are frequently used interchangeably to mean “gratifying the senses,” especially in a sexual sense. Strictly speaking, this goes against a traditional distinction, by which sensuous is a more neutral term, meaning “relating to the senses rather than the intellect” (swimming is a beautiful, sensuous experience), while sensual relates to gratification of the senses, especially sexually (a sensual massage). In fact, the word sensuous is thought to have been invented by John Milton (1641) in a deliberate attempt to avoid the sexual overtones of sensual. In practice, the connotations are such that it is difficult to use sensuous in Milton’s sense. While traditionalists struggle to maintain a distinction, the evidence suggests that the neutral use of sensuous is rare in modern English. If a neutral use is intended, it is advisable to use alternative wording. Read More
July 2, 2015 Look Letter from Cuba By Shona Sanzgiri Will Americans “ruin” Havana? All photographs by Shona Sanzgiri. Ten minutes after I’ve entered Havana’s Almacenes de San José, an indoor marketplace on the southern end of Old Havana offering kitschy souvenirs and erotic art, my expression has hardened. A dozen women, seated on stools, shout “hola!” from every direction, hoping to draw my attention to one of their many wares: Che Guevara ashtrays, wooden ocarinas, Havana Club T-shirts, leather engravings of Hatuey, the Taíno chief who was burned at the stake for resisting the Spanish. I stop and look at a miniature sculpture of Hatuey. Even though he’s roughly nine inches tall in this rendition, he is heroically muscular, with proud, high cheekbones and defiant eyes. This is a familiar, orientalist interpretation of Native Americans, one that perpetuates the myth of the “noble savage.” Or—given the physicality of their real lives—maybe the Taínos were truly ripped. Read More
July 2, 2015 Contests #ReadEverywhere Returns By The Paris Review Last year’s winning entry, by David Lasry. You’ve probably heard about our joint subscription deal with the London Review of Books—this summer, you can get a year of both magazines for the low price of $70 U.S. We’re also bringing back last summer’s #ReadEverywhere contest. From now through August 31, post a photo of yourself reading The Paris Review or the London Review of Books on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest—use the #ReadEverywhere hashtag and one of our magazines’ handles. The grand prize is an Astrohaus Freewrite, the hotly anticipated smart typewriter that lets you write virtually anywhere. Have a look at last year’s winners if you need inspiration—if the beekeepers, pelicans, elephants, and fireworks don’t convince you of the fierce competition, the modernist Swedish architecture assuredly will. The contest kicks off today. Get yourself a joint subscription, and ready your shutter finger.
July 2, 2015 Big, Bent Ears Cy Twombly, the JACK, and the Morgan Library By Nicole Rudick On November 24, 2014, the JACK Quartet performed Matthias Pintscher’s Studies for Treatise on the Veil in a gallery at the Morgan Library, in New York, before a thirty-three-foot-long painting by Cy Twombly called Treatise on the Veil (Second Version). Pintscher’s score was written in response to Twombly’s painting; Twombly’s painting was composed in response to music, that of French composer Pierre Henry, a pioneer of musique concrète. Members of the JACK were, in turn, influenced that evening by their very proximity to Twombly’s painting: “The music requires so much concentration,” said violist and director John Pickford Richards, “and I felt that the painting was giving me concentration while we were playing.” Chapter six of our series “Big, Bent Ears” details this curious network of connections, which Richards calls a “daisy chain of beautiful responses.” Here’s another one: Before the Morgan exhibition, Twombly’s painting hadn’t hung in New York since 1985, and Pintscher’s composition had never been performed alongside the painting. And no one had ever filmed a concert at the Morgan Library. Rock Fish Stew’s video of that evening, which is part of chapter six, is witness to this extraordinary confluence and is itself an element of it. Twombly called his Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) “a time line without time,” which is rather like a story without a beginning, middle, and end. Or, as the “Big, Bent Ears” team likes to think of it, serializing uncertainty and reveling in digressions.