May 13, 2020 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Clarissa By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik ILLUSTRATIONS © JENNY KROIK There is a sound made by a room full of people at a party. It’s a radio between stations with a stretch and pop and one voice coming into focus and certain stories turning up like bingo balls from the collective burble. I love this sound. I throw parties for The Paris Review. That’s not what it says on my business card, and I certainly have other duties, but this is one of them. There are equations for judging provisions for a party. The average person drinks x number of drinks, times x number of people divided by glasses in a bottle, bottles in a case, et cetera, et cetera. I sometimes use these equations. I sometimes consult my old receipts, my faithful notes, but there is no keener pleasure or sharper anxiety than standing at the wine shop, bottles of merlot, burgundy, Côtes du Rhône, and Beaujolais in every direction, while trying to picture the crowd, the party, the temperature that day, and the humidity, what they will be wearing, the news that might buoy or sadden them—the mood of three hundred people who, not all at once, but over the course of the night, will be drinking this wine and think—no—feel, the two cases of white (the Sancerre), two of red (the Médoc), a half case of the crémant. I have grocery lists, too, of course. It would be easy to send an intern to the shop with a list—they are as a rule very capable, too bright for easy errands and yet cheerful when sent on them. But how could I know in advance to tell them to get just a few of those stupidly expensive oranges straight from Italy, still packed in their leaves, which I did not know would be there until I saw them, and which will light up the windowsill and tempt the photographer to take a picture before the density of the crowd makes such a shot impossible. In other words, I get the flowers myself. I always do. Read More
May 11, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The U.S.A. Trilogy By Jennifer Schaffer Our flat in London has five windows and two skylights. Like most renters in this city, we have no yard, no balcony, no fire escape. Four floors up from the street, the windows offer our allotment of open space; the sky forms our personal outdoors. Over the past weeks, since our early self-quarantine bled into the UK’s nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, I have studied the way patches of light move through this flat like I’m a geographer of warmth. I follow it in arches as the hours pass, as though I’m a dot floating across a time-lapse heat map. Cooped up in a few hundred square feet, I have learned that my sanity depends on putting myself in that path of light, again and again and again. It begins in our bedroom, which faces southeast: early in the morning, a rectangle of light hits the wall at the foot of our bed, bisected by the windowpane’s even cross. At midday the skylight creates a square foot of heat in the hallway; the dog and I sit there, sharing it. By early afternoon the sun has moved to the other side of the flat; a corner of the dining table is flooded with light, illuminating every pock and scratch in the wood. If I sit there until evening, the sun leaves my cheeks pink. I’m light-chasing in my mind, too: trying to hop from one safe, warm spot of focus (the potted mint thriving in the window; the thin-sliced meat dry-curing in the oven; the dog nuzzled against my side) to the next (an untouched tray of watercolor paints; a fresh set of mismatched sheets on the bed; a bath at midday). The shadows of dread spread beneath my conscious thoughts. I look away as long-laid plans crack and rot. Fear has become ambient, the way you stop hearing the speeding train’s rattle when you live next door to the tracks. Like all those who have built lives in a country that is not their own, where one’s right to exist is granted only in brief, expensive, and uncertain installments, I found myself caught between risks: the risk of staying in London and the risk of returning to America, the risk of distance and the risk of infection, the risk of being within and the risk of being without. Time made the decision for me. Read More
May 7, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Jake Skeets By The Paris Review In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Horses, Which Do Not Exist” by Alberto Ríos Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986) The strong horseshoe shape of a horse’s mouth Of his teeth, set that way of a suitcase handle And the way a bit, in just that way, pulls him: Come here to where it is I say. Like that A horse’s mouth, and so his manner, broken Those horses no longer running along the far Distance visible from a Tucson highway thirsty Stopping for water, making one of those paintings Living rooms wear as pendants. Those paintings Too unreal, laughed at and finger-poked And so these horses too must be unreal, A bad painting of nine, A pond of browning water. Birds, two kinds. Grass too green—spring has come this year, And water—mountains too blue, too many shades, In the distance. And so they are, this all is‚ As children say, like a dream, Laughing hard at how good it seemed at the moment. Winner of a 2020 Whiting Award for Poetry, Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019), a National Poetry Series–winning collection of poems. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
May 7, 2020 Happily Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over. By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Hänsel and Gretel, by Darstellung von Alexander Zick In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered. I am brought to campus for a three-day interview. I am shown the library I’ll never have access to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black-and-white dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even belong in universities. I meet with another dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The Babies, actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I think I say. I am hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours.” On the third day of the interview, the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said as I made my body gently vanish. “They shouldn’t exist at all.” Instead I say yes, and pull a beautiful, made-up reason from the air and offer it to him as a gift. Gold for your dust, sir. Pearls for your pigs. “Who is watching your sons right now?” he asks. “Their father,” I answer. What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go? Read More
May 6, 2020 Inside Story The ‘Lord of the Flies’ Family Book Club By Darin Strauss In the column Inside Story, parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. It’s unnerving how books mutate. You look up from your life—from these weeks of homey terror—and find a cherished old novel transformed into a bulletin from the front. * I have twin sons. They’re twelve years old and identical. When the crisis started, their school hadn’t done enough; my wife and I needed to fill the day, an Ozarks of empty time. We’d start a family book club. My own seventy-five-ish mother—a lady you might see lugging Judith Krantz paperbacks from an exurban library—agreed to join. That made five of us. Different ages, tastes, places to shelter in. I pushed for Orwell. Or David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green; the boys came back with Lord of the Flies. This may be hard to believe, but the pick didn’t seem so fraught then. A bookshelf is a photoshopped self-portrait. The novels people exhibit are there to portray us as we hope to be seen. Hip, smart, wide ranging. All I’ve got are books I’ve loved or books I think I will. And books I incorrectly remember having loved. But such memories can be the prosthetic noses and spirit gum of the reading racket. As soon as I pulled down Lord of the Flies I realized I’d forgotten it. “Oh yeah,” I’d said when we made the choice, “good novel.” Now my earlier opinions flowed back; in junior high I’d kind of hated the thing. My sons’ complaints were echoes, I realized, of my own: The book never says what happened to the adults. It’s very coincidental that it is only kids who survived. The crash is too expedient. All this seemed like a flaw, at first. Read More
May 5, 2020 Dice Roll The Fascinating Origins of Greyhound Racing By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. ©Ellis Rosen In the late nineteenth century, at least according to legend, a fight to the death between a greyhound and a timber wolf was the most popular sport on the Native American reservations of South Dakota. Greyhounds had been brought to the region to help white settlers eradicate crop-eating jackrabbits, and it was said that the farmers would pit their animals against wolves captured by the local indigenous people. Hobbling Homeward was the white man’s champion, a sixty-pound greyhound descended from a famous Irish hound named Master McGrath, whose heart was allegedly twice the size of a normal dog’s. “The Indians couldn’t believe the smaller animal could kill the fierce timber wolf,” it was said, and yet fight after fight, Hobbling Homeward prevailed. One day, the men from the reservation claimed to have finally found a wolf who could defeat him. They staked $1,000, and “whites and Indians came for miles to see the fight,” including a young sports promoter named Owen Patrick Smith. When the wolf’s cage opened, a hideous, eighty-pound beast, “growling and snapping savagely,” leaped into the ring. A frenzy of gore ensued, “both animals scoring with their knifelike teeth,” but Hobbling Homeward managed to evade the wolf’s death-grip jaws and tore into his belly. “In less than two minutes,” the author wrote, “the great wolf lay in the arena gasping his last breath.” The greyhound was triumphant. The settlers roared. The story, written by a sportswriter at the Miami Daily News some fifty years after the supposed event, has all the trappings of mythological etiology, like the Aeneid: the clash of civilizations, the triumph of the “civilized” bred animal, with his pristine bloodline, over the wild native—and the founding of an empire. By placing Owen Patrick Smith in the crowd that day, the author joined the writhing wolf and the blood-drenched dog to the origin of a multi-billion-dollar gambling phenomenon: greyhound racing. Read More