June 4, 2015 Big, Bent Ears Big, Bent Ears, Chapter 5: Alien Observers By Dan Piepenbring Liz Harris of Grouper. Photo: Richard Rothman The fifth chapter of “Big, Bent Ears,” Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” features the work of Richard Rothman, a photographer whose work demonstrates “depth, dedication, and skill in evoking the enigmatic relationship between natural and built environments.” Around the time of the Big Ears Festival, Rothman spent weeks exploring Knoxville and the surrounding Smoky Mountains for twelve to fifteen hours a day; the results are astonishing. He also went to the festival itself, where he photographed Liz Harris, who performs as Grouper. He says of her performance: It was as though she had placed a veil between herself and the audience, but one that only served to draw them in and give her a heightened level of attention. The lyrics she offered up were as illegible as tombstones polished by time and the elements. The words, or what could be made of them, seemed to be shrouded in shadows—just as she was—while filmy guitar loops decayed into richly modulated, shifting patterns that oscillated between the technological and the human. Read the latest chapter here, and catch up on the rest of the series: Chapter One, There Are No Words Chapter Two, Borderline Religious Chapter Three, Nazoranai, a Documentary Chapter Four, In Search of Lost Time in Knoxville Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.
June 4, 2015 At Work Haunting Houses: An Interview with Angela Flournoy By Jeffery Gleaves Photo © LaToya T. Duncan In Detroit, the Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for generations, and now their home is worth a mere tenth of its mortgage. Oh, and it’s haunted—it’s been that way for fifty years, since Cha-Cha, the oldest son of Francis and Viola Turner, was attacked by a haint one summer night. Angela Flournoy’s debut novel, The Turner House, set primarily in 2008, tells the Turner clan’s story as they tend to the elderly Viola and decide what to do with the family home. Flournoy hangs the family’s personal struggles on the political history of Detroit, tracing their move from Arkansas to the bright industrial promise of midcentury Motor City, the electric environment of the 1967 riots, and the city’s long decline. “Lelah,” an excerpt from the novel in the Spring 2015 issue of The Paris Review, focuses on the youngest Turner child, whose gambling addiction takes her to Motor City, where she loses the last of her money on a game of roulette. I met Flournoy near the Review’s offices in north Chelsea. I was late, and Flournoy, elegantly dressed and having just arrived from Detroit, had already enjoyed most of her coffee and was patiently talking on her cell phone. We discussed ghosts, gambling, and the blend of personal and political in her novel. Your novel is full of Detroit history. Did you hear stories about it from your family? I did a lot of research. One thing I remember hearing of the ’67 riot is that nobody knew what it was while it happened. Nobody knows that today is going to be the day a riot starts. A lot of people in Detroit actually called it an uprising. So I would apply the facts I learned in my research to a character’s life. Imagine you’re getting off work, or you’re at work, and things just feel weird. Then you hear that something’s happening across town, but no one knows what to call this thing, because no one knows how big it is. It’s more difficult for the individual to frame what’s going on as a whole, what’s happening outside of the details in the personal life. Read More
June 4, 2015 On the Shelf The Trollopian Dowagers of Beverly Hills, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Barney Rosset, the “the downtown pugnacious outré rebel” (read: publisher of provocative texts), spent his final years immersed in an artistic experiment—transforming one of the walls of his East Village apartment into an elaborate mural. Now there’s a movement to preserve this mural, even if it’s “an art critic’s worst nightmare. For an esteemed literary publisher to leave behind a final work so unpredictable—and so large—has understandably baffled those who survived him. David Rose, editor-in-chief of Lapham’s Quarterly, typifies most people’s reactions to the wall. ‘It’s the most unexpected thing I would have associated with Barney Rosset,’ he said. ‘Of course he would do this, because it makes no fucking sense whatsoever.’ ” The evolving (devolving?) art of songwriting in the streaming age: If everyone’s using Spotify to listen to music, and Spotify pays artists only after their songs have been streamed for thirty seconds … then why bother to write songs that are longer than thirty seconds? “Now that streaming has taken off, will song form react? Will it just be three choruses and nothing else? Is it the return of the ABAB song form, where the sections have a balanced weight and there are no sections dedicated to ‘setting up’ another section? … And bridges? Bridges to what, exactly? Who has time for a bridge? You’re either there or you’re not there. Why get stuck in transit from one section to another?” The Sketchbook Project is “a collection of crowdsourced sketchbooks that is, according to its staff, the largest in the world. The project was founded in 2006, when Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker, two art students living in Atlanta, began mailing blank Moleskines to anyone who wanted one for a small fee, and then archiving whatever came back.” The project, which now comprises some thirty-four thousand books, is currently mounting its final world tour. “Whenever you introduce a character, you don’t have to specify that they are wearing pants. Most readers will just assume that they are wearing pants unless you say otherwise.” Finally, some useful advice from your favorite established authors. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is many things, most of them reprehensible—but its fixation on capital and cosmetics is arguably instructive, and it has lofty origins. “There’s something weirdly High Tory about the Beverly Hills Housewife profile, more Trollopian dowager than spirited arriviste.”
June 3, 2015 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Elena Ferrante, Hilary Mantel, and Lydia Davis By Dan Piepenbring Before we commence with the dog and pony show for our brand spanking new Summer issue, you should know that the three interviews from our Spring issue are now available in full online. A page from the first draft of The Story of the Lost Child. These include the first-ever in-person interview with Elena Ferrante, who discusses her Neopolitan Novels, her reticence as a public figure, and her approach to her readership: I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones. Photo: Alwan Ezzidin And Mona Simpson’s interview with Hilary Mantel, who talks about her Cromwell books, the difference between historians and novelists, and the difference between the early and contemporary stages of her career: When I began writing I had a perfect belief that, although I might not know how to do many things, I did know how to write a novel. Other people might have disputed that, looking at my efforts, and no one was in a hurry to endorse my confidence, but I did know within myself that I could write a novel. The reason was I’d read so many that the pattern was internalized. I’ve always been an intensely ambitious individual and whatever I was going to do, I was not going to let go until I got where I thought I ought to be. It’s a question of, What will you sacrifice? What other things will you let go, to clear the space for your book? What develops later is something rather different, as you proceed from book to book, every book throwing up different demands, needing different techniques. Davis in Paris, 1972. Plus, in the Art of Fiction No. 227, Lydia Davis explores her approach to the short story, and to translations, and reflects on the influence her family life had on her process: We also left each other notes when there was a family conflict. I guess it was my mother’s idea that we should put it in writing, or that we should articulate it, because I can see our different handwriting going back and forth over this problem, whatever it was. I thought it was kind of a terrible thing that we did that in my family. Because it made writing … oh, the text became full of emotion. I still have some of the notes that my mother left for me. In fact, we did a little dialogue … I suppose that was part of the family training—Let’s try to figure this out. Here’s how I feel, you tell me how you feel. It is a way to work out some emotional situations, and certainly that went on in our house. It’s just that when I come across those long messages from my mother it fills me with sadness. For the latest in our Writers at Work series, subscribe to The Paris Review now—and be sure to check out what’s coming next in our Summer issue, which includes interviews on the Art of Translation with Peter Cole plus Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
June 3, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Recurring Characters By Sadie Stein Maruyama Ōkyo, Peacock and Peahen, 1781. I was settled with my papers, my coffee, and a cheese Danish at a bench on a Manhattan traffic island when someone sat down next to me. I glanced up and recognized a now-familiar face. It was the same elderly man I’d first seen in a local supermarket, berating a clerk; last week, I’d encountered him again on Amsterdam Avenue and attempted to buy him a pineapple. He was ubiquitous—or I was. I gave him a cautious nod of greeting. “Hello,” he said, smiling warmly. “It’s a beautiful day!” “Yes,” I agreed. He didn’t seem to recognize me. Read More
June 3, 2015 Look They’re Fucking Skulls By Sarah Cowan Leon Golub’s haunting “Riot” and the aloof politics of the art world. Leon Golub, Napalm I, 1969, acrylic on linen, 117 1/4″ x 213″. Wounded Warrior, 1968, acrylic on linen, 76 1/4″ x 111 1/4″. In a discussion at Hauser & Wirth, Hans-Ulrich Obrist told of the time he and Leon Golub were discussing a book of the artist’s collected writings; they discovered afterward that Clement Greenberg had died during the conversation. It’s a morbid art-world joke—but so are Golub’s canvases, which hang, as he referred to them, like “flayed skins” around the gallery. They complicate the sweet bedtime story of American postwar art, passed down for generations, in which power is an inner force wielded by artists, and art self-consciously demanded attention for its physical materials: paint and the square of the canvas. Written with Greenberg’s theory, this tale established art as an alternate reality, without mimetic or social context. Golub, who died in 2004, was a staunch and consistent critic of Abstract Expressionism, calling it “bad for the artist. These painters were essentially turning away from the world in their work,” he said, “giving up on the idea that an artist might have a social role.” As Pollock’s last drips dried on his studio floor, the country was pounding the pavement and bodies were hitting the ground. For the artists of that era, as of this one, the realities beyond canvas were merciless. Friends were being shipped off to shoot guns in Vietnam, police batons and dogs brutalized black protesters in bright, American daylight, and the dark of black-and-white newscasts too often signified blood. Read More