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
June 3, 2015 On the Shelf Sold a Bill of 3-D Goods, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Bwana Devil (1952), the first color film to appear in 3-D. Jason Segel, who took on the role of David Foster Wallace in the new movie The End of the Tour, discusses how he studied for the role: he watched the Charlie Rose interview, read the collected nonfiction, and, yes, reckoned with Infinite Jest. And yet his grasp of Wallace’s themes feels superficial: “I felt like I was reading a man who was sending out sort of a distress beacon saying, ‘Does anyone else feel dissatisfied?’ ” Try reading Oblivion, Jason. Then we’ll talk. While we’re talking biopics: the old Tinsel Town rumor mill has it that James Ponsoldt may direct West of Sunset, an F. Scott Fitzgerald biopic based on Stewart O’Nan’s novel. “Replete with cameo appearances from such idols as Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and Humphrey Bogart, the source novel juxtaposed Fitzgerald’s last gasps in Hollywood with his golden years as a literary celebrity.” Douglas Coupland on Duane Hanson’s sculptures and their unlikely connection to drag-queen culture: “It was only later in life that I realized Hanson was going for realness, a term used by drag queens in competitions when portraying archetypes: rich white women dressed for lunch; high-school football-players getting their photos taken for the yearbook … Hanson’s pieces are right there, equal with you. In some ways, they even feel more authentic than you: they come from an era where authenticity was the default mode of being, an era when reality reigned, and where a word like realness was still only something in an artist’s or a drag queen’s magic bag of tricks.” Meet the newest, sharpest, shiniest tool in the State Propaganda Toolkit™: Internet trolling. A Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency—dig that ambiguity!—hired dozens of young people to disseminate pro-Kremlin remarks around the Web, sometimes even in English. One commenter called himself “I Am Ass”: “Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: ‘I’m scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!’ ” The new era of 3-D movies has supposedly revitalized a once scorned format—but is anyone really doing anything interesting with 3-D? Even Godard’s feted Goodbye to Language treats it as a kind of meta-gimmick. “I’ve been looking forward to the moment when 3-D emerges as a mode unto itself—not a gimmick or a money-making adjunct to the standard fare but an art form of its very own … With some notable exceptions, the new breed of uppity 3-D seems less like an exploration of the format than an exercise in camp appropriation—a way of punching up at corporate greed and spoofing Hollywood excess.”
June 2, 2015 Bulletin Chicagoans: See You at Printers Row By Dan Piepenbring The Paris Review has a booth at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest this Saturday and Sunday. Come find us in the Book Fort (not, to my knowledge, an actual fortress built of books) in Tent D, on South Dearborn between West Congress and West Harrison. The bookfair is free and open to the public from ten A.M. till six P.M. Stop by and say hello—we’ll have copies of our new Summer issue, recent back issues, and vintage issues from our archive; a special subscription deal; a few new, limited-edition totes; and ever-handy Paris Review pencils. (No. 2, suitable for the standardized test of your choice.)
June 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Fun, Games By Sadie Stein Unknown painter, Melancholia (detail), 1528. It’ll be just lovely for you to play—it’ll be so hard. And there’s so much more fun when it is hard! ―Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna As regular readers of this space know, I try to see the silver linings in things. The other day, I was Pollyanna-ing around, trying to Glad Game a fit of depression, as is my wont. What’s good about this experience? I thought. And on the face of it, that’s a tricky one: it’s hard to find much to love about those days when you wake up filled with a vague, enervating dread and simultaneously want not to exist and to wonder how anyone, anywhere, has ever had the energy to go on a self-destructive tear. When you are overcome with guilt and shame. When you know that the next days will be given over to wrestling your brain into some semblance of normalcy, and that the effort will take everything you have. And that there’s no bravery or triumph in overcoming it, because to do so is only to regain normalcy—and if you’ve done your job right, no one will know there was ever anything wrong. Read More
June 2, 2015 Correspondence The Spit of Recollection By Dan Piepenbring Philip Larkin. A letter from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym, July 18, 1971. The pair enjoyed a long, warm correspondence beginning in 1961; they met, at last, in 1975, at the Randolph in Oxford. “I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape if colder,” Pym wrote in advance. “I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect.” In 1977, Larkin helped Pym find a wider audience by choosing her as the most underrated writer of the century. Duke’s Head Hotel, King’s Lynn,Norfolk Dear Barbara, I have a theory that “holidays” evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kin of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life. You’re about to point out the essential fallacy in this, viz., that we aren’t h. & c. in our daily lives, but it’s too late now, the evolution has taken place, and we do the world’s will, not our own, as Jack Tanner says in Man & Superman. Anyway, every year I take my mother away for a week, & this is it. God knows why I chose this place—well, there are certain basic requirements—must be fairly near where she lives, must have single rooms with private bathrooms & lift, must for preference be near the sea … even so, one can make grave errors, & I rather think this is one of them. One forgets that nobody stays in hotels these days except businessmen & American tourists: the food is geared to the business lunch or the steak-platter trade: portion-control is rampant, and the materials cheap anyway (or so I guess: three lamb chops I had were three uncuttable unchewable unanswerable arguments for entry into EEC if—as I suspect—they had made the frozen journey from New Zealand). The presence of the hotel in the Good Food Guide is nothing short of farce. Of course it’s a Trust House, which guarantees a kind of depersonalized dullness. Never stay at a Trust House. Read More