February 11, 2025 First Person Briefly a Hawk By Sam McPhee Photograph by Sam McPhee. I live with my family in the mountains of western Montana, near the small railroad town of Alberton. A week ago I found a dead hawk on my front porch. Flight feathers and bristle had been torn from the body, and scatters of down were fluttering in place or tumbling away, light as ash. But there was no blood anywhere, not even on the carcass. My five-year-old daughter, June, was there with me. We were on our way out to the car, on our way to school. The morning sunlight was rich and cold. Then I saw a tiny down feather dabbed to the pane of one of our front windows. A point of impact. How sad, June said. Yes. It’s rare to see a hawk up close, I told her. We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects. When I returned home an hour later, the hawk was still there on the porch. No scavenger had come for it. I called a taxidermist in Frenchtown. He was driving when he answered my call, and his truck was full of wind. He shouted his hello. I asked him if he did birds, and he said, Yeah, laughing to himself, I do birds. But when I told him the bird was a hawk, he said, Let me stop you right there. I can’t touch that bird. You can’t touch it, either. I told him that it flew into my window. The hawk will just go to waste, I said. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, I would love to do it for you, and his voice was different now, almost mournful. But I can’t touch a hawk. Read More
January 20, 2025 First Person My Cat Mii By Mayumi Inaba Photograph by Revolution will, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny-tiny baby kitten. Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck inside the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y. neighborhood of Fuchū City in western Tokyo. In which direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I’d followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first, I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot. The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life. She had sharp, pointy ears, innocent glistening eyes, and a pink slit of a mouth, and she was puffing her body up as much as she could to stop herself from falling, looking down at me fearfully. It was obvious that she hadn’t dropped there out of nowhere or climbed up by herself, but had been put there deliberately, out of malice or mischief. “Come with me …” Read More
December 18, 2024 First Person Learning to Ice-Skate By Virginia Higa William Charles Anthony Frerichs, Ice Skating (1869), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. In Stockholm it didn’t snow on Christmas or New Year’s Eve or at the beginning of January. The days were gray and, in the afternoon, just before it got completely dark, there was often a dank glow that turned the sky brown. That December, we bought some cheap skates and went one night—in midwinter it’s most accurate to use the term one night even when describing something done during the day—to skate in Vasaparken, where they flood the grass pitches with water, turning them into a huge floodlit rink that never closes. I’d skated only a couple of times in my life and so many years ago that I’d lost any muscle memory my body might have had. Read More
December 16, 2024 First Person A Sex Memoir By Edmund White From Interiors, a portfolio by Claudia Keep in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. In my novels and memoirs I have written quite a bit about sex, even very outré sex. I’ve always insisted that I’ve approached sex as a realist, not as a pornographer. That is, I like to represent what goes through someone’s mind while having sex—the idle thoughts, the resentful thoughts, the comic aspects of the body failing to meet the acrobatic ambitions of the imagination—and the sometimes enriching, sometimes embarrassing or dull, often distracting or irrelevant or wonderfully intimate and tender moments of lovemaking. I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me it would be thousands of sex partners. There is still a prudishness about sex, not only in America but everywhere. Sex and comedy are the two subjects that are never taken seriously, though we think about sex constantly—and about comedy periodically, if we’re lucky, if only in the form of self-satire. I suppose prudishness guarantees paternity, so crucial in keeping bloodlines pure. Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now that they are getting married and fathering offspring. Paternity is not the problem for them so much as respectability. Internet anonymity has facilitated new possibilities of “cheating” and hypocrisy. It may seem absurd for an octogenarian to be writing a sex memoir, but it could be argued that he has decades of experience to draw on and an unimpeachable point of view, even if the horse he has in the race may have become feeble and hobbled. Because I am in my eighties, have most of my marbles, have been a practicing gay since age thirteen, and lived through the oppression of the fifties, the post-Stonewall exaltation of the seventies and the wipeout after the advent of AIDS in the eighties, the discovery of the lifesaving therapies of the nineties, the granting of gay marriage equal rights in the States in 2015 and the parallel right to adopt children, the brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labeled “woke” (trans people, drag, books, puberty-delaying drugs)—because I’ve witnessed all this drama and melodrama—I’m perfectly situated to view how we got here. The following piece is adapted from one of the chapters of my forthcoming memoir, The Loves of My Life. The thing about gay life is that you have countless mini-adventures, which years later leave only the faintest grooves on your cortex. The handsome big blond with the sweetest smile and strongest Boston accent I’d ever heard, who wanted to get fucked only and moved out to San Diego, where he caught the eye of many a sailor, got infected with AIDS, and died. The young Kennedy-style gay politician whom I invited to dinner after yet another bad affair, on the principle that I should shoot high and aim for the top. He came to dinner more than once, we had “sophisticated” (i.e., cold) sex, and he got AIDS and died. Read More
December 9, 2024 First Person Rouen’s Municipal Library, 1959–1964 (or, The Formative Years) By Annie Ernaux Rouen. Photograph by Jorge Láscar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. In France, the public library is a revolutionary inheritance in quite a literal sense. At the end of the eighteenth century, thousands of books and manuscripts were seized from nobles, convents, and monasteries, and they needed a place to be housed. The municipal library of Rouen, France, inaugurated on July 4, 1809, formed part of this history of democratized access to knowledge. Initially, however, it was open to the public only from ten to two, and not on Sundays—the only day working-class people had off. As a result, for a long time its patrons comprised a largely elite and intellectual milieu. Gustave Flaubert, for instance, spent many hours there. It was in Rouen’s municipal library that he took notes on ancient Carthage for Salammbô; it was where he read up on eighteenth-century philosophy, magnetism, Celtic monuments, and other topics for his unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet. A century later, having moved down the street to a belle epoque building that also houses Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, the library played a significant part in Annie Ernaux’s intellectual development, too. As she explores in this short essay, first published in French in 2021, to Ernaux the library represented the emancipatory possibilities of literature, though also the more opaque and oppressive codes of bourgeois culture. Class conflict, shame, ambition, hunger, imagination, the politics of knowledge—the kindling that fuels Ernaux’s writings—were all ignited by her early encounters at the public library of Rouen. —Victoria Baena If it hadn’t been for a philosophy classmate at the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc, I never would have entered the municipal library. I wouldn’t have dared. I vaguely assumed it was open only to university students and professors. Not at all, my classmate told me, everyone’s allowed in, you can even settle down and work there. It was winter. When I would return after class to my closet-size room in the Catholic girls’ dorm, I found it gloomy and awfully chilly. Going to a café was out of the question, I didn’t have any money. The thought of working on my philosophy essays, surrounded by books, somewhere that was surely well heated, was an appealing prospect. The first time I entered the municipal library, at once shy and determined, I suppose, I was struck by the silence, by the sight of people reading or writing as they sat at long rows of tables pushed together and overhung by lamps. I was struck by its hushed and studious atmosphere, which had something religious about it. There was that very particular smell—a little like incense—which I would rediscover later, elsewhere, in other venerable libraries. A sanctuary that required treading cautiously, almost on tiptoe: the opposite of the commotion and confusion of the lycée. An impressive and severe world of knowledge. I didn’t know its rituals, which I had to learn: how to consult the card catalogue, separated into “Authors” and “Subjects”; how to record the call numbers accurately; how to deposit the card into a basket, before waiting, occasionally a long time, sometimes shorter, for the requested book. I got into the habit of coming to the library regularly and writing my philosophy essays there. In the age of the internet, one can no longer imagine the pleasure of opening a drawer, handling dozens of index cards, deciphering them—some were handwritten—and rifling through the titles before taking a risk on one of them. Then, finally, the surprise of encountering the book I had requested, with its particular shape and cover. To tackle the immortality of the soul, I took out the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Its large bound volumes dated to the prewar years and might not have been opened since then. It was exhilarating. Seated among readers whom I identified as professors or experienced students, I was sometimes seized with a feeling of illegitimacy, even if this quickly ebbed. With a certain measure of pride, I felt myself becoming an “intellectual.” Read More
December 3, 2024 First Person Close Formation: My Friendship with James Salter By William Benton James Salter, at left, and William Benton in Paris, 1985. Photograph courtesy of Kay Eldredge. Life passes into pages if it passes into anything. —James Salter I glanced up from my desk as an attractive couple came into the gallery. We exchanged greetings. They made a cursory tour of the space. I’d seen only a postage-stamp headshot on the back of a book, but thought I recognized him. “Are you James Salter?” “Yes.” That monosyllable was worth recording. Uttered almost as an abrupt sigh. “I’m a great fan of yours,” I said. The conversation moved quickly beyond pleasantries (who and what I was: a poet, running an art gallery) to a level of reciprocal energies in both Jim—as he had introduced himself—and Kay, his partner, all underscored by my exuberance in meeting them. They’d driven down to Santa Fe from Aspen and had been in town for a day and a half. “We’re staying at La Fonda,” Jim said. “Come over and have a drink with us when you finish up here.” I’d read A Sport and a Pastime when it came out in 1967; then the two earlier novels, The Hunters and The Arm of Flesh—lesser, but with glittering veins of what he was to become—as well as a few brilliant short stories. My wife and I had read Light Years, his most recent book, almost to each other. It was a portrait of a marriage and in a certain way had followed us to Mexico, Santa Barbara, Key West, and, finally, Santa Fe, in the erratic trajectory of our own unraveling lives and eventual separation. It was now 1978—I’d been there for a year. La Fonda was three blocks from my gallery, at one corner of the plaza. Jim had given me their room number. I crossed the dark lobby with its ancient tiles and climbed the stairs to the third floor. “What would you like to drink?” Jim said. “What have you got?” “Everything.” Read More