March 18, 2014 Listen John Ashbery Reads “A Boy” By Dan Piepenbring Today the composer Christopher Tignor releases a new record, Thunder Lay Down in the Heart, whose title track is a twenty-minute work for string orchestra, electronics, and drums. The composition is named after a line from John Ashbery’s 1956 poem, “A Boy,” and it begins with a haunting new recording of Ashbery reading the poem in his Chelsea apartment, which Tignor has graciously allowed us to feature here. Tignor says: “A Boy” rang out to me while I was writing “Thunder Lay Down in the Heart.” My song titles usually come in response to the music, and I often find myself looking through books of poetry to turn my mind on in that way. When I was a student at Bard, I studied poetry with Ashbery—he was my advisor—and when I read this poem, I responded right away to the conflict between the protagonist and the visceral narrative tension of the storm: the sound, like thunder, of falling “from shelf to shelf of someone’s rage,” the rain at night against the box cars, the inevitable flood. It’s precisely that kind of unfolding I hoped to embody in my musical work, with its own flooded lines, dry fields of lightning, and cabbage roses. A reviewer recently described the work as its own “vast electrical disturbance.” Hard to disagree.
March 5, 2014 Listen Welcome to Paradise By Ann Beattie The sounds of Key West. Pause Play Play Prev | Next What do writers want? (Forget whether they’re women or men, Uncle Sigmund. Forget money and fame.) They want quiet. Where do they go? They gather in Key West, Florida. Sure, the subtlest sounds—the personally groaned sounds—begin with deep sighs, as other people discuss pools being dredged by the jackhammering of coral next door, leaf blowers switched on at eight a.m., drunks on the sidewalk talking to themselves even more animatedly as the police car pulls to the curb. Last night I hung over my balcony to hear a staggering gentleman informing the officer that he did have a destination. He was “gonna shuffle off to Buffalo.” In the background, birds express opinions from people’s shoulders on late-night walks (“Pretty but what else?”—a bird clearly meant to call one’s life into question). All around the island cell phones go off, their ring tones arias from operas or a hip-hop version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Dogs bark, cats hiss, and the bird on the shoulder of the guy in the trilby continues to wonder aloud what to expect after “pretty.” Maybe the fire truck, or the ambulance that makes just a few high-pitched noises, as if the vehicle itself is dying. As it races away, it’s sure to set off a car alarm. Read More
November 4, 2013 Listen Unconscious By Sadie Stein On this day in 1899, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) was first published. Sales were initially dismal, but the rest, of course, is psychoanalytical history. In honor of its birthday, we bring you the only known audio recording of Sigmund Freud, made by the BBC near the end of his life, in Hampstead, London.
August 30, 2013 Listen Frederick Seidel’s “Widening Income Inequality” By Hailey Gates Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (based on a WPA photo by John E. Allen) At our last issue launch party, Frederick Seidel, looking over a throng of people, turned to me and asked, “What do you make of all this?” There were summer thunderstorms that night, which kept people from going home and in turn encouraged a sort of athletic drinking. Before I could answer him (not that I would have even had the gall to answer), a stranger embraced me in a very sudden, shapeless goodbye. I turned back to Mr. Seidel, who scoffed, “There you go like all the ‘other girls,’ sticking your butt out as you hug a poor fellow, god forbid your pelvises touch!” “But that’s what I make of it, Seidel! All of my goodbyes are hinged at the waist.” Strangely enough, Frederick Seidel is what brought me to The Paris Review. I was asked to do a reading of his poems in honor of Bastille Day, which I am sure he found too crass of an idea to actually attend. I was told it would be a “big deal” because they were all “debuts,” as Seidel never reads his poetry out loud. Of course, I reveled in the bawdy reality of a young girl reading the poems of Fred Seidel. I still do. This may seem like I am campaigning to become Frederick Seidel’s exclusive reader; make no mistake, that is exactly what I am doing. So here I am, Fred, hinging at the waist, bawdily reading your poem. What do you make of all of that?
August 9, 2013 Listen Emma Cline’s “Marion” By Lorin Stein In the first three years that I edited The Paris Review—a reader pointed out last spring—we never published a short story from a child’s point of view. This wasn’t a matter of principle. I just like stories in which the narrator knows as much as possible. I like to see a writer stretch to represent a consciousness as big, as clued-in, as grown-up as the reader’s own mind. What’s called dramatic irony—where the writer and reader sort of conspire together over the narrator’s head—doesn’t interest me. Except every once in a while, when it does. From the first sentence of “Marion”—“Cars the color of melons and tangerines sizzled in cul-de-sac driveways”—Emma Cline takes us inside the thoughts of an eleven-year-old girl who does not always understand the adults around her, or the sexual desires of her older best friend, but who intensely feels their heat. The language is so vivid, Cline registers her confusion so exactly, that she creates the same confusion in the reader. Part of us knows what’s going on between these girls, part of us is lost and needs the story to take us by the hand. Which it brilliantly does, as you will hear in this excerpt read by Cline herself. Read the full story in our Summer 2013 issue.
July 26, 2013 Listen Kristin Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg” By Lorin Stein Il Pordenone, The Holy Trinity This essay may sound strange, read by a man—it is very specifically a woman’s essay. But Dombek’s voice is so powerful, every time I read “Letter from Williamsburg,” I hear it in my head. It’s like a song I want to sing along to. In fact, I remember reading the first two paragraphs to our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, over the phone, before the rest of the essay was written. I wanted him to hear how beautifully Dombek modulates her tone from the sublime to the mundane. I only wish I could do justice to the music on the page. Read the full essay in our Summer 2013 issue.