May 23, 2017 From the Archive Another Passionless Day By Dan Piepenbring Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. “The mere has always been a useful category,” Donald Barthelme said in his 1981 Art of Fiction interview. And he’s right. I love the mere. To be merely this, merely that, merely the other—this is the mark of someone who eschews the limelight, who moves in the margins, who rejects the all-consuming ethos of fullness. To be mere is very close to being entirely irrelevant, and that’s the grand prize. And yet there are days, and this may well be one of them, when we find ourselves afflicted by all that’s mere in the world: when constellations of objects conspire to trip you up. When current events draw you into the mire. When something is as good as anything. Between skimming the headlines and making phlegmatic trips to the refrigerator for more seltzer, I’ve been admiring Sidney Wade’s poem “Another Passionless Day,” from our Summer 1998 issue, which nails the sensation of “mereness”; in lines that are somehow full of momentum, Wade describes exactly how it feels not to have any. And as her nouns begin to accrue (in that stochastic way that is the hallmark of the mere; find another poem that has hockey pucks, clarinets, and giant pastries within spitting distance of one another), Wade puts her finger on what’s always been to me the scariest part of apathy, and the hardest to shake: the sense that it will settle over everything you see like a fine layer of dust, that it is contagious and terminal. I won’t spoil the second half—which I haven’t included here; the idea is to get you to pay for it, see—except to say that it won’t turn on you. That is, it won’t swerve to offer some undeserved, bullshit, inspirational pick-me-up in the end. This is, after all, a mere poem. And I say that as the highest praise. Read More
May 1, 2017 From the Archive The First of May (with a Daffodildo) By Jeffery Gleaves Daffodils—or daffodildos? May Swenson’s “Daffodildo,” from our Summer 1993 issue, is an erotic-nature-poem-cum-tribute to Emily Dickinson, whom she intimately refers to as “Emily.” The poem, conveniently set on May 1, finds the narrator touring Dickinson’s home and visiting her grave. It takes a hard look at the distance between a person and a persona, while subtly teasing out a latent eroticism in Dickinson and the objects she’s left behind. In an elegiac homage of sorts, Swenson channels her best Dickinsonian slant rhyme and cadences, as evidenced in the first few lines: Read More
April 28, 2017 From the Archive Straight from the Horse’s Mouth By Dan Piepenbring Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, wood, ramp, and speaker, 2.5′ x 22′ x 30′. Photo: Ealan Wingate and Bernadette Mayer The artist and poet Vito Acconci has died at seventy-seven. Acconci is best known for his performance pieces, which shocked audiences in the early seventies—especially Seedbed, which a New York Times profile last summer described with admirable concision: “he constructed an angled false floor at the Sonnebend Gallery in SoHo and hid himself beneath it with a microphone, speaking luridly to the people who walked above him, masturbating as he spoke.” Before he became an artist, Acconci was a writer, and in this line, too, he excelled at provocation. The Paris Review published a pair of eyebrow-raising poems by him in our Summer 1968 issue. At that time, Acconci would’ve been fresh out of his M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa, where, as the Times tells it, one of his short stories “provoked a minor riot.” It featured a dismembered man who became a living sculpture, and it started like this: Read More
April 24, 2017 From the Archive Bob Bats .100 By Jeffery Gleaves © The New Yorker. Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. You can also sign up for a free ten-day trial period. A couple of years before The New Yorker’s longtime art editor, and brief cartoon editor, Lee Lorenz left the magazine, George Plimpton asked for his help assembling a portfolio of cartoons—and descriptions of the thought processes behind them—for The Paris Review’s unofficial humor issue (no. 136, Fall 1995). Among the younger cartoonists Lorenz suggested for “The Birth of a Notion: Cartoonists Have Their Say” was a fellow named Bob Mankoff, who contributed the cartoon above. Two years after the issue was published, Mankoff was made the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, a position from which he’ll soon be stepping down. Below, is Mankoff’s take on the practice of cartooning: Read More
April 20, 2017 From the Archive A Dip in Foley’s Pond By Caitlin Love Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. You can also sign up for a free ten-day trial period. In Peter Orner’s three Paris Review stories—“Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” “The Vac-Haul,” and “Foley’s Pond”—three outrageously morbid things happen: a boy’s younger sister drowns in a pond of toxic sludge; a man is murdered with a bike spoke (“His stomach was so ripped apart the police had to collect him up in a bucket”); and a woman walks into a classroom and starts shooting and taking hostages. They’re bite-size stories, under fifteen-hundred words, and the violence rushes in like a flash flood, though it doesn’t cleanse anything. Rather, it leaves you with an aftertaste like when you eat yogurt off an unpolished silver spoon. I devoured them. I think what propelled me through these three upsetting stories is that the violence doesn’t actually happen to the people in the stories’ centers. “Foley’s Pond,” for instance, is narrated by a classmate of Nate Zamost, the boy who’s two-year-old sister is fished out of the pond; in “Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” the narrator hears about the man who was killed by a bike spoke from a friend at a boarding school in South Africa. The remove is greatest in “The Vac-Haul”: the narrator only hears about the shooter on the radio, while he bides time with his job for the sewer company. Read More
April 6, 2017 From the Archive Getting Out Alive By Elaine Blair Rethinking the end of Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” What is “Goodbye, Columbus”? A story of a summer romance, a satirical sketch of suburban arriviste Jews in the fifties—sure. But when I stumbled on Philip Roth’s first book on the shelf of my high school library, “Goodbye, Columbus” seemed to me above all a brief against marriage. The story’s point—or so I thought of it—unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain. In the story, Neil Klugman, recently out of Rutgers and the army, works behind the desk at the Newark Library. His summer girlfriend is Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from tony Short Hills, New Jersey. “We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she tells Neil—that is, before the Patimkins’ social climb. For Neil, Brenda’s allure is tangled up with his fascination of her prosperous world, and the closer the two of them get, the closer Neil comes to signing up for the whole Patimkin package: a fancy wedding, a lifetime management job at her father’s factory (Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks), a country-club membership, a house in Short Hills, and, inevitably, babies. It’s cushy, but Neil isn’t sure he wants that life, while Brenda seems to consider no other. Read More