November 29, 2021 History White Gods By Anna Della Subin Jose Chávez Morado mosaic mural El Retorno de Quetzalcóatl, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico of Mexico City. Photo by Eva Leticia Ortiz. “We were superior to the god who had created us,” Adam recalled not long before he died, age seven hundred. According to The Apocalypse of Adam, a Coptic text from the late first century CE, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945, Adam told his son Seth that he and Eve had moved as a single magnificent being: “I went about with her in glory.” The fall was a plunge from unity into human difference. “God angrily divided us,” Adam recounted. “And after that we grew dim in our minds…” Paradise was a lost sense of self, and it was also a place that would appear on maps, wistfully imagined by generations of Adam’s descendants. In the fifteenth century, European charts located Eden to the east, where the sun rises—an island ringed by a wall of fire. With the coordinates in their minds, Europe’s explorers could envisage a return to wholeness, to transcendence, to the godhood that had once belonged to man. Read More
November 28, 2021 Rereading “Daddy Was a Number Runner” By Deesha Philyaw Twelve-year-old Francie Coffin is going to be late getting back to school, again. Chatty Mrs. Mackey is delaying her with talk of dreams they both had the night before, dreams about fish. Madame Zora’s dream book gives the number 514 for fish dreams. This is important because Francie has come to collect Mrs. Mackey’s wager on the day’s number. Francie, Mrs. Mackey, and their Harlem neighbors all pin their hopes on “the numbers,” a type of daily underground lottery. Francie collects Mrs. Mackey’s number slip and money on behalf of her father, a neighborhood number runner. As Francie observes, “A number runner is something like Santa Claus and any day you hit the number is Christmas.” Before Francie can make it home to the railroad flat apartment where her mother serves her a dreaded potted-meat sandwich and a weak cup of tea for lunch, she’s chased by Sukie, a bully who also happens to be her best friend. Sukie threatens to “beat the shit out of” Francie yet again. Sukie is evil, light-skinned, and pretty. Francie, who laments being “skinny and black and bad looking,” envies Sukie. Sukie isn’t the only danger lurking around Francie’s tenement. There’s also the bald white man in the doorway to the roof of the building—the same man who had recently followed Francie into a movie theater and gave her a dime before fumbling beneath her skirt. Read More
November 24, 2021 Eat Your Words Thanksgiving with John Ehle By Valerie Stivers PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN The Land Breakers, by John Ehle (1925–2018), the first in the author’s “Mountain Novels” series, is a story of America’s founding, set in the mountains of Appalachia and full of the hardscrabble food of the early settlements—wild turkey hen, deer meat, corn pone. These dishes are historically accurate, like Ehle’s work, but diverge from those traditionally associated with the early American table, at least those represented on holidays like Thanksgiving. Ehle’s novels depart from our traditional patriotic fare in more ways than one: they’re mythic, like all origin stories, but hold a broad view of who should take part in them, and honor the country’s origin without diminishing its moral complexity. To me his food suggested an opportunity for a better Thanksgiving, a project which also allowed me to make cornbread in a skillet, serve an entrée in a gourd, and offer an authentic recipe for buckeye cookies found nowhere else on the Internet. Read More
November 23, 2021 Bulletin Episode 23: “A Strange Way to Live” By The Paris Review Episode 23, our Season 3 finale, opens with “The Trick Is to Pretend,” a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, read by the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers: “I climb knowing the only way down / is by falling.” The actor Jessica Hecht plays Joan Didion in a reenactment of her classic Art of Fiction interview with Linda Kuehl. Jericho Brown reads his poem “Hero”: “my brothers and I grew up fighting / Over our mother’s mind.” The actor, comedian, and podcaster Connor Ratliff reads Bud Smith’s story “Violets,” about a couple who makes a suicide pact but then turns to arson instead. The episode closes with Bridgers performing “Garden Song.” To celebrate this last episode of the season, we asked Bud Smith if there’s a passage from a book that he returns to more than any other. He chose the first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Early on, the narrator describes the late-night, drunken phone calls he makes to old friends. He asks the operator to connect him to a long lost sweetheart, but the operator cannot find the right listing and the call never goes through. It’s as if he has to settle for us instead. He has something very painful to talk about that he can’t get to directly. He gives us all these diversions: limericks about Yon Yonson from Wisconsin, anecdotes about taxi drivers, an elevator fatality in Chicago. And there’s that brief recounting of a journey with his young daughter, Nanny, and her friend, Allison Mitchell; they stop at the Hudson River and look at carp as big as “atomic submarines.” The plot of the novel still hasn’t started, we don’t know the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, or his dilemma, that he has come unstuck in time. The first time I read the book, I didn’t get that the narrator was showing us his search for a way to write about the atrocities of the Second World War, that he was adopting this casual, digressive style for his protection, and ours. What attracts me most is Vonnegut’s willingness, as an artist, to let the air out of the tires of what he had good reason to believe would be his masterpiece. On page two, the narrator calls the novel his “lousy little book.” Who is this guy? I thought. Why is he trashing his own book before I’ve even read it? Is this an author’s note I could have skipped? No, it says right here, it’s Chapter One. “I would hate to tell you,” he writes, “what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” These are my favorite twenty-something pages written in our language. The man, “an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown,” saying that he is a failure, and his greatest accomplishment is a failure. Vonnegut had to open his masterpiece with a bit of self-sabotage. I can understand that. Linda Kuehl’s 1978 Art of Fiction interview with Joan Didion, also featured in this episode, begins as follows: INTERVIEWER You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. JOAN DIDION It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. INTERVIEWER Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you? DIDION Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself. Listen now at theparisreview.org/podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All five episodes of Season 3 are now available for your listening pleasure. We hope you’ll download all three seasons before your holiday travels. The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.
November 23, 2021 Redux Redux: Chance Progression By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Margaret Drabble photographed by Nancy Crampton. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about family bonds, in anticipation of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Read on for an Art of Fiction interview with Margaret Drabble, Tama Janowitz’s short story “American Dad,” Jeffrey Yang’s poem “Ancestors,” and a portfolio of photographs, “Iranian Family Portraits,” by Mohsen Rastani. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Margaret Drabble, The Art of Fiction No. 70 Issue no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978) My sister and I are very similar. She’s a novelist and our lives have been parallel in many ways. She has been an important part of my life. One’s relationship with one’s siblings and parents is something that you’re going to write about again and again, in different forms. Read More
November 23, 2021 Arts & Culture New, Tender, Quick: A Visit to the Elizabeth Bishop House By Henri Cole I’ve come to Great Village, Nova Scotia, to visit Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home and the landscape shown in her great-uncle George Wylie Hutchinson’s untitled, undated little painting on Masonite. This painting is the subject of Bishop’s radiant poem titled, humbly, “Poem,” which appeared in The New Yorker on November 11, 1972. Waking early, I hear chirping northern birds I do not recognize. The elms were long ago dismantled and replaced by sugar maples whose dense crowns offer ample shade. The church bell is silent. The pump organ gathers dust. I see no geese or cows in the village. I picture Bishop’s maternal grandparents, the Bulmers (the l is silent; it’s sometimes spelled Boomer), lying one hundred years ago in the front bedroom under the sloping walls where I sleep now. There are no National Geographics on the shelves. No sewing machine chatters in the kitchen. No odor of coal gas lingers in the much-too-steep stairwell. No caged canary tweets out of loneliness. It is August and delicious blueberries are in season. Local fields are full of ripe corn, the rows of tall stalks running down to the edge of the reddish-brown Cobequid Bay, “home of the long tides / where the bay leaves the sea / twice a day,” long and deep. As I search for sugar in the pantry, cars whiz past the front of the house. Surely Miss Bishop liked sugar in her coffee. Read More