February 4 – April 8, 2023

February 17 – March 25, 2023

The Review has long been a fan of Thomas Demand’s work; our Spring 2015 issue featured a portfolio of his paper sculptures of cherry blossoms. His series The Dailies recreates quotidian objects and images: a coffee cup, a tray of cigarette butts. Only tiny flaws (pencil markings, tape) reveal them as constructions; otherwise his compositions are stripped of everything but their form. But paper isn’t just a blank canvas; it also carries meaning, even if these associations are subtle: it’s the medium of office workers, receipts, menus, greeting cards, origami, newspapers—and, of course, of The Paris Review. To accompany a selection of images from The Dailies, we talked to Demand about paper, literature, and the home.

INTERVIEWER

What does paper mean in your work?

THOMAS DEMAND

“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” There came a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wanted to see what he was talking about. If the tendency of things in Mississippi was to hang on too long, as Faulkner claimed, maybe the populace and the landscape would be more or less the same as they’d been when he wrote those lines in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours.

Five hours in, I made a pit stop at an abolitionist holy site: the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. John Brown’s raid on the armory, in October 1859, was one of the proximate causes of the Civil War. It enraged a plantation-owning class already frightened of northern agitators. “I want to free all the negroes in this state,” he said, referring to Virginia, where half a million people were enslaved. His plan was to seize guns and hand them out to men in the nearby fields, fomenting rebellion. With twenty-one followers, he stormed the armory and held parts of it for two days before U.S. marines flushed him out. All that’s left of the armory, mostly destroyed in the subsequent war, is the fire-engine house, which happened to be Brown’s final redoubt. He was captured there, and then taken to prison, tried, and hanged. I stood in the house; it’s the size of a two-car garage, dwarfed by the green, misty mountains that surround it. It drove home how tiny Brown’s force was, for it to have been able to fit inside such a small place—how inadequate to his stated task.

In Faulkner’s novella “The Bear,” John Brown appears without warning, in the middle of a stream of consciousness, and has a dialogue with God. He explains to Him that he, Brown, is unusual among men only in that he sees slavery for what it is, a “nightmare.” God asks, “Where are your Minutes, your Motions, your Parliamentary Procedures?” Brown responds, “I ain’t against them. They are all right I reckon for them that have the time.” Note that Faulkner makes God sound lame and officious, and gives Brown, an Ohioan, the locutions of a backwoods Mississippian. As a man of action, and as a person who acknowledges the true nature of things, Brown is a kind of honorary Southerner.

Faulkner called Lafayette County, his home, “the final blue and dying echo of the Appalachian mountains.” This is true. I followed the spine of the alpine chain southwest from the peaks of Harpers Ferry, where the weather was cool and pleasant, down through Tennessee, until the mountains dribbled away in the heat of northern Mississippi. Lafayette County was the last place where the hills were substantial. I drove an additional hour west to see the Delta, which was flat, consistent with its reputation. Then I turned around and drove to Oxford.

The Euros qualifiers are back! And ahead of tonight’s Euro 2020 re-run, Dotun, Andy and David talk all things Azzurri and explore why Roberto Mancini is bemoaning a lack of Italian players after a season of brilliant success in Europe for Serie A clubs. 

Elsewhere, we bid farewell to Mesut Özil, who tellingly didn’t bid farewell to Germany in his retirement announcement. And David and Andy ask: is El Clásico dead?!

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Andy heads to one of Europe’s most intimidating stadiums: the Estádio do Dragão. It’s a huge Champions League night and Porto have the chance to make it two Portuguese teams in the quarter-finals for the first time ever. 

Unsurprisingly, the atmosphere lived up to the occasion. Andy finds out how Sérgio Conceição has quietly (well, no, pretty loudly in his case actually) become one of Europe’s most impressive coaches and witnesses one of the most dramatic ends to a game you’ll ever hear! Plus, unexpected trivia about André Villas Boas’ grandmother.

Special thanks to New Balance Football for taking us to the wonderful city of Porto!

Where should Andy head to next? Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

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The controversial style of 'method acting' that divides the industry

February 24 – March 25, 2023

February 3 – March 25, 2023

I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made a movement that seemed to say: Ouch. I scanned the bed: there was a constellation of ink-colored droplets. 

The bedbug summer was in 2019. I had just turned twenty-three. I was working at Vogue as an assistant. I was making very little money. I thought I was punk because I would often show up to work with a gin hangover, plug in a pair of headphones, and play YouTube videos where various artists performed industrial music. I thought I was punk because all of my clothes were from the garbage or had been gifted to me by people who also worked at Vogue (okay, I did buy stuff, like the bra). I thought I was punk because I was dating a former child jazz prodigy who lived in a DIY venue in Gowanus with no shower, no kitchen, but massive windows, hardwood floors. A posh nightclub had opened up next door and I sometimes went there to pee because I liked the soap. It all made me feel very cool even though in reality it was pathetic. My boyfriend slept on a twin-sized cot inside of what was functionally an electrical closet. He was the first person I called about the bedbugs. That evening he took me to the nightclub and bought me a cocktail. He had a freckle inside his eyelid and it looked like a wet pebble. I was totally in love with him.

It was not a good situation. The next morning, there was a large man in my apartment. It was the Fourth of July. The man was wearing a hazmat suit. He was going to do what he called a radical intervention re: the bugs. It involved a breakthrough in technology. He had come from New Jersey in a Sprinter van. He met us at an ATM on Newkirk Avenue so we could pay him in cash. My roommate tried to blame the whole thing on me. And why wouldn’t she? She had a nice boyfriend in medical school who liked to cook her dinner. I told her that she was insane, to make me pay for the whole thing. This was New York City. Nefarious individuals could have come into our home during the night and sprinkled the bedbugs on our sheets. We had to at least get the landlord involved. The landlord called us gullible idiots and then said she’d split it three ways because the exterminator we picked was too expensive. The man left our house. I still was not itchy. On the internet it said not everyone was allergic to bedbugs. I liked this fact: I was some kind of biological miracle? I did not want to spend any more time in the bedbug apartment so I went to my boyfriend’s DIY venue and poured a bottle of Bailey’s into an XL Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup, and then we took the subway to Far Rockaway. 

After a few weeks, the bedbugs were physically gone, but I continued to see them everywhere. In my clothes. In my backpack, which I had taken to ironing at least twice a day just to be safe. I had given them to everyone at Vogue, probably. There was this thing where my boyfriend told me that a woman he used to fuck also had gotten bedbugs, not long before we started dating. I started flipping over the mattress on his cot to inspect it every time he went to the bathroom after sex. I would crawl around on the floor completely naked, aiming my iPhone flashlight at the ground, like a coal miner. I was subsisting on a lot of Cool Blue Gatorade and really cheap Thai food. Around this time I was attacked by a cat in a bodega. It became clear to me that my boyfriend was probably addicted to smoking marijuana. I had basically stopped letting people into my apartment, including myself.