January 12, 2018 From the Archive Celebrating Shithole Literature By Brian Ransom In my enviable role as social-media manager, I get to pick through old issues of The Paris Review to find interesting, overlooked pieces to surface. Nestled in issue no. 78 (Summer 1980), among Bobby Anderson’s “Edie Sedgwick: A Reminiscence” and Mallarmé’s poem “A Tomb for Anatole,” I discovered three folks tales by Paulé Bártón, a writer from what the president vulgarly referred to yesterday as a “shithole” country. Little information about Bártón is available, but according to the issue’s contributor’s note, he was born in Haiti in 1916 and spent most of his life as a goatherd. He was imprisoned in Fort Dimanche under the Duvalier regime and subsequently exiled. I stumbled upon this trio of narrative pearls when I was an intern here last summer. The writing is immediate and compact, stunning in its musicality and plick-plock rhythm. Reading “The Woe Shirt” for the first time—not having any idea what it was, where it came from, or how to find more of it—I nearly wept at my desk. Today, we’ve unlocked it from our archives in celebration of writers from shithole countries the world over. “The Woe Shirt” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick. Then he rode to buy a woe shirt. He saw Mari then, standing. She said, “You going to buy that shirt, I know! You’ll go buy that beggar shirt Bélem, I know. Oh it will cost you all your little money all your goats and old friend parrot to get it! I tell you clearly, look at what you do! Spend everything on a beggar shirt, no sense!” but Mari saw that Bélem felt the shirt on him already, too late, “O.K. then, say good-bye twice to your parrot,” she said. Subscribers can also read two more of Bártón’s short stories in our archives: “The Broom Is Busy” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Boki was watching Álse Odjo with a twig broom sweep the floor. The twig-ends were breaking off and Álse Odjo kept sweeping them up. “You losing broom all over the floor!” Boki said, “I see that broom creating its own work!” “Just like everyone on this island!” Álse Odjo said back, “That’s the island way,” she didn’t laugh, “This broom born and raised here, you know.” “Emile Plead Choose One Egg” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem he says, “The salt sea will find this wound on me, it always does when I swim in it, always clean my wound.” But Emilie knew the wound of confusion and no-choice was too deep inside for the salt sea to sting it clean for Bélem right now. Brian Ransom is the social-media manager for The Paris Review.
August 29, 2017 From the Archive A Party in the Archive (Food-Storage Lovers Only) By Toniann Fernandez A 1950s Tupperware party. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this very important product from our archive: Tupperware. Late last December, a friend announced that her New Year’s resolution was to replace all of her plastic Tupperware with Tupperware of glass. She was glowing. She already had an IRA, she had learned all of the moves from Gloria Estefan’s “Bad Boys” video, and now she would no longer tote her butternut-squash soup in a polycarbonate container that threatened to leach bisphenol A into her blood stream. In that moment, I wanted her to run for president. Read More
August 15, 2017 From the Archive The Sneaky Brilliance of Geoff Dyer’s “Into the Zone” By Matt Levin Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I recently fell asleep in a movie theater. I think the movie is a masterpiece. An hour in, the three main characters, on an expedition into mysterious territory called simply the Zone, have just emerged from a slog through an aqueduct, shouting over the sound of crashing water. They each lie down, exhausted, on the brown-green moss that blankets the water’s edge. The characters speak with each other about where they are going, and for what. It is a late-night road-motel talk—fatigued, but searching. A character called Writer begins a monologue about fame, the future, technology, and soon it doesn’t matter, because he is talking to himself, in the shorthand that exists only in each individual head, using big, meaningless, opaquely personal words like “Life” and “Art.” What matters is the tone of his voice—soft and drifting and stretched seemingly over one long yawn. He is talking himself to sleep. A guitar drone intensifies. And as he went on, I found myself becoming heavily tired, too, and I slumped over. I had a dream that I cannot remember, except that it feels like a kernel lodged under my tongue, and involved a river. I woke up only when a tall man sitting next to me gently tousled my hair and told me in a stage whisper that I had spilled popcorn all over my lap. The characters are sitting up, awake now, listening to a voice telling them about his dream. In my memory of the film, there is a blank. The movie was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, recently remastered and finishing its months-long run at the IFC Center. Geoff Dyer wrote about the film and his relationship with it for our Fall 2011 issue, in “Into the Zone,” an excerpt from his full-length book Zona. “Into the Zone” is, as much as an essay can be like a movie, an imitation of Stalker. The essay proceeds by summarizing each scene of the movie chronologically. Each scene summary takes on the pace and tone of the scene being described. When the pace picks up, so does Dyer’s prose, and his thoughts come quick and abbreviated. When the movie slows to a pan, or arrests on a static shot, so does Dyer, and he takes the placid moments to tell us things he knows, stories, about Tarkovsky: about Tarkovsky and his relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni, about the fights Tarkovsky had with Mosfilm over the meditative pace of Stalker, about Flaubert and style, inventories of films shown in other films, about time as it exists and is manipulated by movies, about his desire for a drink when he sees characters drinking, and finally, during the scene Dyer calls “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema”—the long, seemingly unbroken shot of the trolley ride into the Zone itself—about himself and things he wants and can’t have. “Into the Zone” is Dyer’s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker. This is the only narrow path to Stalker—a film that is both direct and maddeningly slippery. Read More
August 8, 2017 From the Archive Purfect Prose: An Appreciation of Kitty Litterature By Jeffery Gleaves From the cover of issue no. 136 (Fall 1995) of The Paris Review. It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. In fact, lots of novelists are into cats. Hilary Mantel included a photo of her cat in her Art of Fiction interview. So did Ali Smith. Hemingway’s home is famous for its clowder of six-toed cats; Capote, Chandler, and Kerouac all kept the five-toed variety. Read More
August 2, 2017 From the Archive Deborah Turbeville’s Anti-Fashion Magazine By Caitlin Love Deborah Turbeville. Spreads from The Paris Review, issue no. 70 (Summer 1977). Earlier this summer, Staley-Wise Gallery presented an exhibition of Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photographs, including her photos of famously “anti-fashion” Comme des Garçons clothing, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum’s Rei Kawakubo retrospective. In 1977, we published Turbeville’s “ideal fashion magazine,” where women are vulnerable, perhaps a little fallen, and oddly not fashionable. In the left-hand corner of the second spread of “Maquillage,” there’s a handwritten note that reads, in part: “I feel that New York is a house of Death—people shatter there so easily—evil gets into the bloodstream—unhappiness is more catching than laughter … ” In the duplicate images underneath, we see three women in white, their faces obscured: one is standing with her foot on a stool, looking out of a large, bright window; another sits facing the camera; a third rests behind the sitting woman—we can only see her elbow, which stabs out from her side like a lance (her hand is on her hip). Her foot rests next to her, delicately slipping out of a shoe. Their clothes are in shadow, but the light from the windows is blinding. They are women in a dream. Read More
July 18, 2017 From the Archive It Was a Year of Pirates By Lorin Stein We’re going down! A couple of weeks ago, before the president attacked the show on Twitter, I was asked to appear on Morning Joe. This surprised me. I was under the impression that Morning Joe was a political program. It seemed to me the producers had made a mistake. Maybe they’d mixed us up with the New York Review? With the London Review? Or, could it be … the Partisan Review? After I found the studio in Rockefeller Center and was deposited in the empty green room, my anxiety continued to mount. Howard Dean bounded in, looking for a piece of fruit among the battered doughnut boxes, and bounded out. In the corridor outside, I heard producers discussing the Senate health bill. As I was led onto the set, the previous guest, Al Franken, gave me a vague, encouraging pat. I must have looked as nervous as I felt. Not just nervous—disoriented, as if I’d wandered into somebody else’s dream. The hosts nodded hello, then, just before the commercial ended and we went on air, Joe Scarborough mentioned a poem, one we’d published in the Review. “You know when you read something that makes you want to drop what you’re doing and run upstairs and find a highlighter?” he asked the others. “That’s how I felt when I read that poem that begins with the pirates.” So the penny dropped. I had been invited as the editor who’d published “Historically Speaking,” by Stephen Dunn, the same poem that haunted me all through the election—and the opening piece in our Winter issue. It was a better reason than any I could have dreamt up. It was a year of pirates in speedboats, anonymous bullies spreading privacies on the Internet, and the worst of them doing worse than that and wishing to be known for what they’d done, their perfidy an advertisement for a cause … Subscribe now to read the whole poem—and everything else we’ve published over sixty-four years of grappling with piracy, anonymous bullies, and other current events.