July 14, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Detritus, Dreamin’, Dinos By The Paris Review From Paleoart. First published in 1966, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan, is still the standard biography of our most enduringly funny writer—or, at least, the earliest writer who makes me actually laugh. I avoided it till now because I knew Twain’s life got pretty dark. He outlived his wife and all of his children; he lost a fortune through crazy investments; as a writer, he lost his sense of humor. But what he achieved is incredible. On Kaplan’s telling, it’s not so much the individual books as the tone of voice—almost a new way of writing based on the spoken word. Like David Sedaris today, Twain polished his essays by performing them onstage. He spent much of his life on tour and sold his books by subscription, direct to consumers, largely bypassing the critical establishment. In fact, it wasn’t until Twain went to England—and was seriously praised by authors like Browning and Tennyson—that Americans started to grasp his originality. Details like these make the pleasure of Kaplan’s biography worth the pain. —Lorin Stein There really ought to be some kind of survey of artists’ and writers’ filing strategies. The writing spaces of Luc Sante and Marianne Fritz both have meticulously arranged shelves and file boxes, for instance. Who else? The artist Dieter Roth for one. A show of his book practice at Hauser and Wirth, which I saw this week, includes six hundred binders, each of which contains accumulations of everyday detritus (he called the project Flacher Abdall, or “Flat Waste”). The best part of the show is the installation of his actual studio from Basel, Switzerland, which he shared with his son. As one would expect, art supplies abound—a deeply pleasurable assortment of colors and brushes in jars and plastic buckets—but the studio, complete with tiny kitchen, also contains items that show the artists on temporary leave from the work at hand: a pair of Groucho glasses, a bottle-cap collection, slices of pie on pie-shaped rollerskates, models horses in a homemade cardboard stable. A long wooden table served as an informal canvas and displays scribbled lines like “yes or no or well I don’t know” and doodles of the sort you’d make while talking absentmindedly on the phone. The space is reminiscent, as my colleague Julia pointed out, of Donald Judd’s Spring Street building: a live/work space in which the most compelling details are the human ones. —Nicole Rudick Read More
July 7, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Candlelight, Cellmates, Cult Leaders By The Paris Review From the cover of The Book of Emma Reyes. Emma Reyes grew up in astonishing poverty in Colombia—illiterate, illegitimate, and abandoned. Remanded to a Catholic convent, where she endured a strange mix of manual labor, religious fear, and wonder, she escaped at age nineteen. This is where her memoir, The Book of Emma Reyes, leaves off, but as an adult, she became an artist and an intellectual and befriended a host of Latin American and European notables, including Frida Kahlo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guiseppe Ungaretti, and Alberto Moravia. Hers is an incredible biography by any measure, but the book’s most startling element is Reyes’s clear-sighted, unsentimental remembrance of her difficult childhood. The narrative comes in the form of twenty-three epistolary sketches written by Reyes between 1969 and 1997 to her friend, the critic and historian Germán Arciniegas. (He once showed them to García Márquez, who effused about them to Reyes herself; furious with Arciniegas’s breach of privacy, she didn’t write him another letter for some twenty years.) Reyes is gloriously unceremonious in her telling: the memoir begins in a garbage heap and ends with a dog sniffing another’s behind. —Nicole Rudick Fans of the Parisians, our softball team, know Tony Hatch as a power hitter and stalwart first baseman. I know him as Cousin Tony—a man of intense enthusiasms, most recently English literature of World War I. Which is how I was slipped a copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the follow-up to his slightly better known Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man. I was up reading it most of last night. And if your blood stirs to the grim pluck of young officers reading Thomas Hardy by candlelight, with trench mouth, in months before the Somme, it may keep you up reading, too. —Lorin Stein Read More
June 30, 2017 This Week’s Reading What Our Writers Are Reading This Summer By The Paris Review In place of our usual staff picks this week, we’ve asked five contributors from our new Summer issue to write about what they’re reading. From the cover of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs. Some books are like strange strong drinks: you know from the first sip if it’s your kind of thing. Elia Kazan’s memoir, A Life, is mine—relentless, bitterly funny, extremely unboring. Kazan, one of the most celebrated figures in midcentury filmmaking (he directed A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and more), was born in Turkey to Greek parents, and moved to New York as a child. A restless man, he maintained several sets of clothes and small bank accounts all over the world, into his seventies (when the book was written), in case he felt an urgent need to flee. He is a generous narrator and gossips freely about himself. On page six, he admits that, moments before a press conference for Splendor in the Grass, he received a cable, in code, reporting that he “had a new son by a woman not my wife.” A few dozen pages later, he writes, “I consider myself rigidly moral—moral enough, in fact, to admit this: There is one thing I’ve lied about consistently, and that is my relationships to women out of wedlock. I’ve again and again lied to my wives about this.” (Marilyn Monroe was one of his many girlfriends.) He gives himself extraordinary permission and somehow makes you feel it’s earned. He writes, “People have often accused me of being selfish and self-centered. They’re quite right. All artists are. They protect like all hell what’s most precious for them—the privilege to exploit the full range of their curiosity.” —Dana Goodyear (“In the Middle of My Life”) Peter Cole’s Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations cannot be recommended strongly enough. I’m working through it as slowly as I can stand to, which is not very slowly, because the poems—whether translated from sixth-century Arabic or twentieth-century Hebrew or written by Cole himself—burst with brilliance and vitality. One doesn’t read the poems so much as ride them as they soar across the ages and the spheres. Shmuel HaNagid (who lived in Spain in the eleventh century and served as vizier to the Berber king) is just one of many voices I was awestruck to discover: “On couches stretched out at the treasury, / where the guards’ vigilance knows no relief, / you fell asleep without fear by the window / and time came through like a thief.” Elsewhere, Cole’s own “Song of the Shattering Vessels” is a Kabbalist mystery made lucid: “Now the lovers’ mouths are open — / maybe the miracle’s about to start; / the world within us coming together, / because all around us it’s falling apart.” Am I the only one imagining this incanted by Leonard Cohen? Hymns and Qualms is a wise and radiant collection; we are lucky to have our path lit by the light it gives. —Justin Taylor (The Art of Fiction No. 235 with Percival Everett) Read More
June 23, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Banquets, Bootleggers, Bumbling Entrepreneurs By The Paris Review Ray Johnson, Untitled (Jasper Johns, James Dean with Coca-Cola), 1993, collage on board, 8 1/2″ x 18″. Image via Matthew Marks Gallery “For more than thirty years Garland Bunting has been engaged in capturing and prosecuting men and women in North Carolina who make and sell liquor illegally.” Such is the modest first sentence of Alec Wilkinson’s Moonshine, a book-length portrait of a backwoods law-enforcement genius. First published in 1985, this is old-fashioned New Yorker reporting at its best: funny, low-key, sneakily poignant—the kind of book that makes you want to read it aloud. In Garland, Wilkinson found a complex hero. He also found out a lot about the production and sale of moonshine, very little of it romantic, all of it intensely interesting. Somebody bring Moonshine back into print! —Lorin Stein This week, I caught the end of Matthew Marks Gallery’s Ray Johnson show, which closes Saturday. I’ve never seen so much of Johnson’s work in person—there are more than thirty collages on view, made from 1966 to 1994, the year before his death. He spent some three years at Black Mountain College in the mid forties and studied there with Lyonel Feininger, Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, Alvin Lustig, and Paul Rand. His education in painting, advertising art, and graphic design comes through in spades in these collages, which deal in an appealing combination of repeating forms—both abstract and figurative—that run counter to one another but are never at war, never unharmonious. Johnson mixes imagery from celebrity and popular culture, art history, and his own symbology in a proto-Pop, proto-conceptual style that is funny, bold, and demure all at the same time. That said, my favorite piece is punk rock meets avant-garde: a pair of black-and-white saddle shoes, from 1977, with JOHN and CAGE stenciled on the toes. —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 16, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gasps, Giant Cubes, Gay Bars By The Paris Review Toshio Matsumoto’s masterly 1969 debut about queer life in Toyko, Funeral Parade of Roses, has been playing in a beautiful new restoration this week at Quad Cinema; I walked down from our office just a few days ago to see it. Funeral Parade follows Eddie, a small-framed, sensual, nonconforming bar hostess, whose job at a gay bar is complicated by a troubling love triangle and traumatic memories she can’t forget. Late-night rousing with her pot-smoking leftist friends doesn’t alleviate her anxieties. Much of the movie leaves us in Eddie’s head as she relives a cluster of agonizing recollections from childhood: her mother laughing at her when Eddie asks about her father; Eddie finding her mother entangled with a lover on the floor; the first time her mother caught Eddie putting on lipstick (also the first time Eddie herself experimented with a woman’s mask). That these three memories focus on Eddie’s mother should alert you to the Oedipal themes that thunder throughout this heated and beautiful spectacle. Funeral Parade of Roses is, as BOMB says, a “gallery of masks, ones that people wear and occasionally let slip.” —Caitlin Love Early in his one-man show Secret, the English magician and mentalist Derren Brown tells the audience not to divulge any part of his act. I will only say that it was, literally, incredible—the first time I’ve heard a theater full of adults gasp in disbelief. Brown specializes in old-fashioned hypnotism and mind reading, including the oracle routine (magician puts sealed envelope to head, knows contents), but he weaves his tricks into a finale so complex, baffling, and surprising that one wouldn’t know how to describe it, even if it were allowed. —Lorin Stein Read More
June 9, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Society Wives, Siege Poems, Strippers By The Paris Review From the first edition of Two Serious Ladies. The other day in conversation, a friend compared Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories to the work of Jane Bowles, so out of curiosity I picked up Sadie’s old copy of Two Serious Ladies—and, for the first time, from the first page, felt utterly at home with Jane Bowles. Why had her fiction seemed so strange before? A phobic society wife gets dragged by her husband to Panama and ditches him for life in the red-light district; meanwhile, another rich eccentric drags her hangers-on to a crummy house on Staten Island, and starts haunting the docks … Maybe Moshfegh has opened my mind. Maybe we all go strange sooner or later. For whatever reason, a reason I can’t explain, it all makes perfect sense to me now. —Lorin Stein Late last year, Ugly Duckling Presse published Written in the Dark, a small volume of startling poetry, the first of its kind: a collection of verse written by five men from within the Siege of Leningrad, an event that can be counted among the great horrors of war. “My soul, / to defend itself, pretended / to be wooden. There was no light,” writes Dmitry Maksimov in the epigraph to one of his poems. These “Seige poems” were, with small exception, unknown and unpublished in their authors’ lifetimes: the imagery of “frozen mummies,” of “lying and living, / In the grave with my dead wife,” of eating “Rebecca the girl full of laughter” ran counter to the official history of patriotism, stoicism, and Soviet might. The book’s editor, the poet Polina Barskova, links the poets’ works to those of the OBERIU, to which some of the authors are directly connected. Their trauma verse becomes a modernist salvo, not poems “after or about the Siege,” writes the scholar Ilya Kukulin in his afterword, but “poems through the Siege.” —Nicole Rudick Read More