August 1, 2019 Arts & Culture Eldorado, Illinois By Chris Dennis I am in a barn-red house on a hill. In my room there is a bookshelf, a desk for me to write at, a soft bed covered by a blue quilt, a wooden crucifix on the wall that opens to reveal the items necessary for administering last rites. Where I am now, there are peacocks, a rust-colored mule named Lulu, and hundred-foot-tall pine trees. Where I am now, I have my own bedroom. Here are some of the places I slept last year: Under a bush in front of a high school in Evansville, Indiana. In the stairwell of an apartment building in St. Louis, Missouri. In a car-wash stall in Kentucky. In an open field behind a McDonald’s in Illinois. In a booth at that same McDonald’s. In a laundromat. In the backseat of an abandoned car. In a stranger’s garage. In a chair at the public library. In a toolshed. In a burned-out mobile home. In a drug dealer’s backyard. On a drug dealer’s living room floor. On a drug dealer’s couch. In a drug dealer’s bed. On more than one occasion I’ve woken up on a total stranger’s front porch with no memory of how I got there. Last year, I was arrested three times for possession of methamphetamine, charged each time with having a single loaded syringe in my pocket. In Illinois, any paraphernalia containing residue of a controlled substance is considered possession, a Class III felony, carrying a sentence of two to five years in prison. The last time I was arrested I spent over six months in jail before my grandmother agreed to post bond. The rest of my family would hardly speak to me. I have yet to be tried. Nine years ago, I had just finished a master’s degree in writing at Washington University in St. Louis, was awarded a postgraduate fellowship, and had my very first short story published in Granta magazine. It was the tale of a young addict jailed on drug charges, titled “Here Is What You Do.” When I wrote the story, I had never been to jail. I had never injected drugs. I was clean, working as a college instructor, taking care of my son, spending a few hours every day working on other stories I wanted to include in the manuscript I was about to send to agents. Read More
August 1, 2019 Bulletin Announcing Our New Poetry Editor, Vijay Seshadri By The Paris Review Vijay Seshadri. The Paris Review is thrilled to announce Vijay Seshadri as the twelfth poetry editor in the magazine’s sixty-six-year history. Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and moved to the U.S. at the age of five. He is the author of the poetry books Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, and 3 Sections, as well as many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. Over the course of his career, his work has been widely published, anthologized, and recognized with many honors, most recently the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 3 Sections and a 2015 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was educated at Oberlin College and Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. “It is a wonderful and unique privilege to join the distinguished line of Paris Review poetry editors,” Seshadri said. “It is also an exciting privilege. All the questions that can be asked about poetry—about its form, purpose, scope—are more bristling and pressing now in America than they have been since the sixties. Anyone who loves the art should love the opportunity that the Paris Review poetry editorship offers to mediate the conversations between individual poets and the culture at large, especially in this watershed historical moment.” Read More
August 1, 2019 Arts & Culture The Birth of the Semicolon By Cecelia Watson Illustration by Anthony Russo. The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts. One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by the Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers. Read More