August 12, 2022 The Review’s Review Returning to Salman Rushdie’s Haroun By The Paris Review Justine Kurland, Georgia O’Keeffe, 2020. Courtesy of Higher Pictures Generation. After hearing the horrifying news about the attack on Salman Rushdie earlier today, I turned to the first book of his I’d read—or rather, the book he read, on audiocassette, to my family on long car journeys. “Just do one thing for me,” Haroun called to his father. “Just this one thing. Think of the happiest times you can remember. Think of the view of the Valley of Κ we saw when we came through the Tunnel of I. Think about your wedding day. Please.” —Emily Stokes, editor Read More
August 5, 2022 The Review’s Review Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica and the Choreography of Chicken Soup By The Paris Review National Photo Company Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The seventies and eighties were a high point in American dance, and consequently, dance on television. As video technologies advanced, one-off performances inaccessible to most could be seamlessly captured and broadcast to the masses. Like all art forms, dance at this time was also influenced aesthetically by this new medium, as cinematic techniques permeated the choreographic (and vice versa). Today, many of these dance films are archived on YouTube. My favorite is a recording of avant-garde choreographer Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup, a one-woman monologue in dance that aired in 1988 on a TV program called Alive from Off Center. The piece is set to a minimalist score Cummings composed with Brian Eno and Meredith Monk. Over the music, a soft feminine voice narrates: “Coming through the open-window kitchen, all summer they drank iced coffee. With milk in it.” Cummings repeats a series of gestures: sipping coffee, threading a needle, and rocking a child. She glances with an exaggerated tilt of the head at an imaginary companion and mouths small talk—what Glenn Phillips of the Getty Museum calls her signature “facial choreography.” Her movements are sharp and distinct, creating the illusion that she is under a strobe light, or caught on slowly projected 35 mm film. She sways back and forth like a metronome, keeping time with her gestures. This particular performance placed Cummings in a detailed set evocative of a fifties household. But when she performed Chicken Soup onstage, accompanied solely by piano music, there was no set at all aside from a wooden chair. In this recording, for example, of a 1989 live performance at Jacob’s Pillow, her movements themselves seem endowed with greater importance, and the barrier between storyteller and audience feels gauze thin. Chicken Soup is an invitation inside, into a conversation that is both private and familiar. “They sat in their flower-print housedresses at the white enameled kitchen table,” the voiceover continues, “endlessly talking about childhood friends. Operations. And abortions.” The work premiered in 1973, the year the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade, but Cummings’s kitchen could be any woman’s—anytime, anywhere. —Elinor Hitt, reader Read More
July 29, 2022 The Review’s Review Ghosts, the Grateful Dead, and Earth Room By The Paris Review “The Ghost in the Stereoscope,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. When my wife was giving birth to our child, she saw—waiting at the door of the delivery room—her grandmother, my grandmother, and the grandmother of our sperm donor. In daily life all three of these women are dead. In the delivery room my wife’s grandmother was a reassuring presence, my grandmother—and here my wife is likely influenced by my own childhood reports—held herself at some distance, and our donor’s grandmother held a sign in the style of the airport pickup, welcoming our child. Never before had my wife felt the presence of the dead, but in the months of our baby’s babyhood they have been a recurring presence: a tiny man dressed in rags, muttering Latin by our baby’s bed; a man rocking in our nursing chair whom she first identified as my grandfather, then my father. I am scared of the dark and do not take the pleasure she takes in these appearances. But if there is satisfaction to be had from her morning announcements, it is the way they keep present, alongside the dead, David Ferry’s poem “Resemblance,” from his 2012 collection, Bewilderment. In the poem, the speaker describes seeing his dead father in a restaurant in Orange, New Jersey: It was the eerie persistence of his not Seeming to recognize that I was there, Watching him from my table across the room; It was also the sense of his being included In the conversation around him, and yet not, Though this in life had been familiar to me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where were we, in that restaurant that day? Had I gone down into the world of the dead? Were those other people really Shades of the Dead? We expect that, if they came back, they would come back To impart some knowledge of what it was they had learned Except for the man muttering Latin, none of the dead speak to my wife. She knows what she needs to know from their presence, from the fact that they’ve come to be near our child. Where she feels clarity and reassurance, I feel, as I do about most things, bewildered. “Unable to know is a condition I’ve lived in / All my life,” Ferry writes in the poem. Earlier in the book he quotes a letter Goethe wrote a friend whose son had died: “It’s still, alas, the same old story: to live / Long is to outlive many; and after all, // We don’t even know, then, what it was all about.” —Harriet Clark, author of “Descent” Read More
July 22, 2022 The Review’s Review Speculative Tax Fraud: Reading John Hersey’s White Lotus By Matthew Shen Goodman Rison Thumboor from Thrissur, India, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m defeatist when it comes to taxes (meaning: I don’t understand deductions and pay whatever TurboTax tells me to), but I’m fascinated by those who aren’t. In 2001, for example, eighty thousand Black Americans filed for reparations with the IRS. Some made this their actual business. For $500, you could pay a self-taught financial advisor named Vernon James to apply on your behalf for a “Black Investment Tax Credit,” as he did for more than three hundred clients. James, who is Black, had a capacious “yes, and” attitude that bound together the case for reparations with workaday “Taxation is theft” libertarianism. Speaking to CBS in 2002, James asserted that Americans, whether Black or white, didn’t have to pay up come April. “The IRS took money from slaves. They are taking money from Americans. That is an investment. They have a right to get it back.” The IRS cut a number of claimants their requested checks, ranging from $40,000 to $100,000 per return and totaling more than $1 million. On realizing what had happened, the agency swiftly demanded their money back. James was sent to prison for six and a half years for tax fraud. Read More
July 15, 2022 The Review’s Review Balenciaga, Light Verse, and Dancing on Command By The Paris Review Look 7 in Demna Gvesalia’s 2022 Balenciaga haute couture show. For someone who spends most of life reading and writing, dance is a miracle. Literature twists language to get at truth, but dance circumvents it altogether. Of course, this is only true at the moment of performance; the work of dance is full of language–often commands, usually unheard by the audience. Milka Djordjevich’s CORPS, which I saw at NY Live Arts a couple of weeks ago, invites us to consider the interplay of communication and labor in dance. It opens with a two-word command, “Snaps, go,” spoken by one of six dancers in drab gym uniforms as they march into view, fingers obediently snapping. When another says “no-head, go,” they begin to shake their heads, still snapping. This continues, with about forty moves in different combinations—from sources including military drill, ballet, and cheerleading—for the first half of the piece. (My personal favorite was “pointers,” a raffish shaking of double finger-guns that I plan to try at my cousin’s wedding). It’s a strangely anarchic, nonhierarchical performance of command-giving: any dancer can call the next move, and the official vocabulary is interspersed with chatty asides. Controlling their own collective fate, they still end up doing things that none of them seem to want—like jumping up and down for what feels like ten minutes, breathless, awaiting instruction. Anyone who has had a job, or a family, will recognize the inertia of the group project. In the second half, the drill team, now in gold-spangled, softly jingling, not-quite-matching costumes, begins a magnificent disintegration, each dancer interpreting the moves from the first sequence in their own ways, then getting weirder, ultimately collapsing into a pile on the floor. There they chat, all speaking at once, repeating everyday phrases until they morph into new ones (“in or out/in and out/In-N-Out/have you been to In-N-Out?/best burgers…”). This psychedelic segment is a bit more exciting than the flawed austerity that precedes it, but you can’t choose a favorite—each half relies on the other for meaning. —Jane Breakell, development director Read More
July 8, 2022 The Review’s Review More Summer Issue Poets Recommend By The Paris Review Aerial view of Agios Nikolaos Beach in Hydra, Greece. Photograph by dronepicr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. This week, we bring you reviews from two of our issue no. 240 contributors. If you enjoy these, why not read recommendations from four more of our Summer issue poets? I was watching the sunset on the Greek island of Hydra with my best friend when I suddenly said, “I think I hate Henry Miller.” I’d just raced through The Colossus of Maroussi and then Tropic of Cancer. So, as my friend and I perched on rough stones by the sea, I forced her to listen to my least favorite passages from Tropic of Cancer. Miller brags about his penis—“a bone in my prick six inches long”! He catalogs what seems like “every cunt I grab hold of.” At a bar, he ejaculates on a stranger’s dress. (She’s “sore as hell.”) In 1934, when Tropic was published, this ecstatic obscenity could have been appealing; in 2022, reading it reminds me of being trapped in the bathroom queue at a party next to a coked-up man with a PhD and a browser tab permanently open to PornHub. The book feels, in Miller’s words, like “a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters.” “I think I hate Henry Miller.” I think. Why did I qualify? Well, there is Tropic’s bravura opening. And despite the ethnographic gaze that saturates The Colossus of Maroussi, certain episodes of hilarity delighted me: the saga of Miller’s diarrhea during his visit to Crete, for example, in which he shits his pants, then shits at “the bottom of a moat near a dead horse swarming with bottle flies” and embarks on an oft-frustrated quest for “soggy rice with a little lemon juice in it” to quiet his bowels, all while touring ruins and being plied with victuals that are decidedly disquieting to his bowels. There are also passages of arresting beauty, where the writing has the feeling not of mania but of deep dreaming. Miller’s first approach to the island of Poros can only be quoted in full; it is perfect. Read More