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 12, 2022 First Person Memory of a Difficult Summer By Clarice Lispector Clarice Lispector. Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente. In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years, she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son, Paulo Gurgel Valente, has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the second in a series. October 26, 1968 Bravado Z.M. felt life was slipping through her fingers. In her humility, she forgot that she herself was a source of life and creation. She went out very little, turned down any invitations. She wasn’t the kind of woman to notice when a man was interested in her unless he actually said so — then she would be surprised and welcome his interest. One afternoon — it was springtime, the first day of spring — she went to visit a female friend of hers who asked her bluntly: How could a grown woman like her be so very humble? How could she fail to notice that several men were in love with her? How could she not see that, out of respect for herself, she really ought to have an affair? She also said that she had once seen her enter a room full of acquaintances, none of whom were anywhere near as bright as her. And yet she had seen her almost creep in, as if she barely existed, like a doe with its head bowed. “You should walk with your head held high. You’re bound to suffer because you’re different, cosmically different, so just accept that the bourgeois life is not for you, and enter a room with your head held high.” “Go all alone into a room full of people?” “Yes. You don’t need to go with someone else, you’re fine on your own.” Read More
August 11, 2022 Culture Diaries Therapy without Professional Help: A Week in Los Angeles By Maya Binyam Photograph by Maya Binyam. July 24, 2022 I live in LA, but I’ve just flown in from New York after a month away, so I wake up early, too early, at 4 A.M., and read a book called Healing Back Pain. The author, John Sarno, is a doctor who argues that most back pain is psychological—the result of tension, which arises from repressed emotion. He makes his perspective sound like the most obvious thing in the world, and makes the common explanations, like sitting too much, sound completely idiotic. Most people have been taught to think of chronic back pain as arising out of an inciting incident and to think of the spine, especially the lower spine, as very fragile—even though, he explains, bodies are resilient and spines exceptionally strong. I want to believe him, because if I do believe him I’ll never feel back pain again, or if I do, I’ll have my delicate psychology to blame, as opposed to an innocent object like my chair. Sarno has a cult following; I google him, careful to read only the testimonials about how the book has changed people’s lives. Then I fall back to sleep. 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
August 5, 2022 At Work If Kim Novak Were to Die: A Conversation with Patrizia Cavalli By Annalena Benini Patrizia Cavalli. Photograph by Mario Martone. I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de’ Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: “Do not move! If you move anything, I’ll kill you.” Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli’s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet.” More than fifty years later, Cavalli’s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief—all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry. When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak—some of them her own. Read More
August 3, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2001 By Nell Zink June 5, 2001 When I wrote this, I was living full-time in an idyllic southwest German university town where I had been a familiar figure since the eighties, spending money saved up from fifteen years of menial work elsewhere while sharing a small apartment with two other women. My last job had involved documenting C++, so people were leaning on me to learn to code. Read More