TOBI'S DESK

William N. Copley (1919–1996), known by his signature name CPLY (pronounced “see-ply”), was a painter, writer, gallerist, art patron, publisher, and art entrepreneur. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum, and many more. Copley is now seen as a singular personage of postwar painting and an important link between European surrealism and American Pop art. In this excerpt from a new collection of Copley’s writings , he remembers the artist Joseph Cornell. Exhibition view, “Objects by Joseph Cornell,” Copley Galleries, September 28–October 18, 1948. I knew Joseph Cornell just a little bit and saw him only a few times. To Julien Levy must go the credit for having discovered him as an artist. I can only take credit for having responded to him with a bang as early as about 1947. As I remember, I met him as he was coming off an elevator and I was leaving the old Hugo Gallery...

In March,  The Paris Review  launched  The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of   the magazine , quarantine-appropriate writing on the  Daily , resources from our peer organizations,  and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter  here , and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Last week I wrote about the relative calm of the dog days of summer in NYC. But these same days of languor are hardly that elsewhere around the country and the globe. Wednesday I was rooting for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season at the International Booker Prizes while Hurricane Laura bore down on Louisiana and Texas—a disconcerting coincidence, to say the least. The storm dissipated more quickly than expected, but that did not make its landfall in southwest Louisiana any less destructive. Earlier this month I felt an eerie prescience welcoming the publication of Shruti Swamy’s debut collection, A ...

In honor of Women in Translation Month, Jennifer Croft discusses why translation is like swimming, how every language holds its own mystery, and what it was like to translate Olga Tokarczuk. I first encountered the work of writer and translator Jennifer Croft through her translation of the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s novel  Flights , which would go on to win the 2018 Man Booker International (Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for that same year). The book was like nothing I had read before, a fragmentary novel that bridged history, fiction, and essay in writing that was at once wry, meditative, and yet somehow elusive. I had to know more, both about the writer and the translator who had introduced her work to the English-speaking world. Croft grew up monolingual in Oklahoma, a place that she notes, “didn’t really feel my own.” Studying Russian—and later Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, and other languages—brought her to the University of Iowa’s MFA program in tra...

Jenny Erpenbeck. Photo: Nina Subin. The subtitle of Not a Novel , by the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck , is A Memoir in Pieces , but I think maybe the word shards would be more accurate—the texts collected here come from many eras and many moments and seem to fall around the reader like bits of glass, catching the light at different angles, complete in themselves but tied to one another to create a whole that is provisional and temporary and full of cracks. There is no trail of bread crumbs in this book, but somehow that makes it feel, as a memoir, even more real. The texts themselves share this tendency—“Open Bookkeeping,” which talks about her mother’s death, becomes a list of items inherited and lost, costs incurred and paid (a tax adviser tells Erpenbeck that her mother is due a refund of five euros); “On ‘The Old Child’ ” includes memories of its own earlier drafts and becomes a story about the imperatives and impossibilities of writing as a means of communication (“It isn’t a...

Jill Talbot’s column,  The Last Year , traced in real time the moments before her daughter, Indie, left for college. The column ran every Friday in November, January, March. It returned in August as Jill and Indie took one last cross-country road trip together to drop her off at the dorms. This is the final installment.  Every time I leave for a trip, I imagine its ending. After zipping up my suitcase and rolling it to the door, I turn to look at the empty rooms. The closed blinds, the couch pillows, the dark kitchen. I close the door, picturing the day I’ll come back and turn the key, set my suitcase inside, and flip on the kitchen light. How ordinary those moments of return always feel. * Endings come suddenly when you don’t let yourself think about them. Like a train pulling away from a station, picking up speed faster than you can bear. * On Move-In Day, parents weren’t allowed inside the dorms because of COVID -19 precautions, and each student was given a fifteen-mi...

Allen Ginsberg in Cherry Valley, New York, 1972. Photo: Peter Orlovksy. Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Estate. In 1965, Bob Dylan gifted Allen Ginsberg with a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, which Ginsberg was to use to record his thoughts and observations as he traveled throughout the United States. Ginsberg, already heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac’s methods of spontaneous composition, felt the taping was an ideal way to pursue his own spontaneous work. He began planning a volume of poems, a literary documentary examining contemporary America, not unlike what Kerouac had done in On the Road , or what Robert Frank had accomplished in his photographs in The Americans . He would add one important element: the violence, destruction, and inhumanity of the escalating war in Vietnam—an edgy contrast to what he was witnessing in his travels, particularly his country’s natural beauty. The public’s polarized dialogue over Vietnam—and, earlier in the decade, the civil rights movement—conv...

Ben Nugent sends a postcard from the fraternity scene.  Last week, I drove to my hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, to see if the frat boys were following the university’s social distancing rules. It was a breezy Thursday evening, cool enough that you could sit out on a porch without pouring sweat. In a normal year, on a mild, late-August night like this one, I would have seen dense crowds of hundreds of UMass Greeks, happy to be reunited, milling through the streets surrounding the Alpha Sig fraternity and the Iota Gamma Epsilon sorority. I would have seen them scream greetings and profanities at each other, spill down the steps of the wooden porticos, stumble to the ground, sip from Solo cups, and dance to music blasted from weatherproof speakers, while cops monitored the scene from their cruisers, blue lights spinning as the mob flowed around them. It’s a harvest-season ritual familiar to anyone who grew up here, a marker of the end of summer. This year is different, of cour...

Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The property they [developers] built on had been farmland, overlooked by a big rickety-looking wood frame house,” the science fiction writer William Gibson tells me of his time living in a Charlotte, North Carolina, suburb (“on Blackberry Circle, where all the homes seem to have been built in 1954”) that today is called Collingwood. “I once referred to it [the farmer’s home] as a poor people’s house, and my father corrected me, saying that they [the farmer who owned the land] had lots more money than we did, because they’d sold the rest of their land to the company he worked for, which had built the development,” he recalls of the property the homes were built on. Gibson once described living in that suburb as “like living on Mars,” with no grass and orange clay all around. I remember reading that and thinking about how much his suburban experience sounded like an old sci-fi story. In the eighties, Gibs...

The balloon seemed to come not so much from another place, but another time. Out of the past, or maybe the future. From a different summer anyway, one with birthday and graduation parties, a summer we’d seen before or one yet to come. It fell slowly, floating toward the field during the bottom of the eighth inning of Opening Night of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, a game under the lights at Dodger Stadium, where the Dodgers were hosting the Giants. A square, multicolored foil balloon, the kind everyone professes to hate because they get caught in power lines and take a million years to decompose, but which remain a staple of celebratory gatherings. Celebrate! was, in fact, printed across the front. In this pandemic summer of isolation and distance, where there wasn’t much to celebrate, the balloon seemed lost. On the ESPN broadcast, play-by-play announcer Karl Ravech sounded incredulous. “How does that happen,” he asked, “with nobody in the stands to blow up balloons?” The ...