April 16, 2021 Eat Your Words Cooking with Herman Melville By Valerie Stivers Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article. Photo: Erica MacLean. Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, “Whale steaks!” And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fact, as Perry Miller reports in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, Melville meant for Moby-Dick’s chapter on chowder to be a sardonic response to just such an ongoing foodie feud. (Many thanks to the novelist Caleb Crain for loaning me Miller’s book and writing two excellent essays on Melville, sexuality, and cannibalism, published in A Journal of Melville Studies and American Literature.) Moby-Dick, however, is a book in which pulling on a single thread can reveal a universe. I had some contact with it in my all-girls middle school—to my recollection, just enough to ask why this book had dick in the title and so many mentions of “sperm” in its pages—but it’s only as an adult that I’ve fallen madly in love. I understand it now as a “lifelong meditation on America,” as the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes in his introduction to the edition I own. So when I looked at the book’s two main food passages—one on chowder, the other on eating whale—I found a central theme: the question of what man (specifically gendered man) is doing here in America, what he’s cooking up, and how it nourishes him. In this system, eating chowder is on the side of our better nature, and eating whale is on the side of our worst, so I felt a little better about my dinner plans. Read More
April 15, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Brian Tierney Reads James Wright By Brian Tierney National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping 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 distances. “Heraclitus” By James Wright Issue no. 62, Summer 1975 My beautiful America, vast in its brutality, and brutal in its vastness. All the way from Paris to Vienna takes less time to find than all the way from New York to Pittsburgh, where Duquesne University had a beautiful football team when I was a boy. One evening beside the river, only its name. Only one river, the Ohio, that is the loneliest river in the world. Patsy di Franco sank down into the time of the river and stayed, Joe Bumbico jumped naked into the suck hole and dragged up Harry Schultz. I started to cry. A cop gouged his fists into Harry’s kidneys. He must have thought they were lungs. Harry couldn’t talk plain. Harry puked. I loved Harry, he was one of my best friends. Harry, Harry, Are you still alive? Who? Me? I ain’t not. I swam all the way across the Ohio River with my friends alone. Me and Junior and Elwood and Shamba and Crumb. We made it all the way across to West Virginia. I was only a boy. I swam all the way through a tear on a dead face. America is dead. And it is the only country I had. Harry. Harry, Are you still alive? Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the author of the forthcoming collection Rise and Float (Milkweed, 2022). His poem “You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With” appeared in our Winter 2020 issue.
April 14, 2021 Whiting Awards 2021 Xandria Phillips, Poetry By Xandria Phillips Xandria Phillips. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, where they are researching and composing a book of poems and paintings that explore Black feeling and materiality. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Hull, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book. They are working on a nonfiction manuscript titled Presenting as Blue/Aspiring to Green, about color theory, gender, and modes of making. * Two poems from HULL: “Elmina Castle” at first only the rivers and I wept for you in your journey, like the waters’ from tropical interiors, to the estuary slap of the ocean’s cupped hands and then your absence became religion as easily as creating meaning from loss of limb, you fell into crates that rustled from within to the tune of the wind’s phantom chorale Read More
April 14, 2021 Whiting Awards 2021 Ladan Osman, Poetry By Ladan Osman Ladan Osman. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press, 2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (codirected), Sam Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She was the writer for Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian emperor Mansa Musa. It was selected for inclusion in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s directorial debut, The Ascendants, is streaming now on TOPIC. She lives in New York. * A poem from Exiles of Eden: “Half-Life” Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story. —Solaris (1972) How can I fail outside and inside our home? I decay in our half-life. How can I fail with my body? How do I stay alone in this half-life? I started a ghazal about my hope’s stress fracture. I require rest from your unfocused eyes, my heat, which is becoming objective and observable. A friend asks, “What are you waiting for? The straw that breaks the camel’s back?” Maybe I am the straw. Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words: bray, flay, array. They relate to farms, decaying things, gray days, dismay. I am recently reckless about making a display of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it. Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?” You know I’m fraying. You don’t try to braid me together. You don’t notice a tomcat wiggling his hind legs, ready to gather all my fabric, his paws over my accidental tassels. I’ve learned how to be appropriate sitting on my hands on the couch, not allowed to touch you. “Sex?” you say, like I asked you to make a carcass our shelter. Read More
April 14, 2021 Whiting Awards 2021 Sylvia Khoury, Drama By Sylvia Khoury Sylvia Khoury. Photo: Yael Nov. Sylvia Khoury is a New York–born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater), and The Place Women Go. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Seattle Repertory Theater. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and Jay Harris Commission and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST/Youngblood and a previous member of the 2018–19 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop at the Lark and the 2016–18 WP Lab. Her plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Roundabout Theater Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST/Youngblood, and WP Theater. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the New School for Drama. She will obtain her M.D. from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in May 2021. * An excerpt from Selling Kabul: TAROON You don’t want me to go, is that it? You want me to stay? AFIYA Of course I want you to go. Don’t be stupid. You think I want you here? TAROON I can handle whatever they send, Afiya. Good, or bad, or nothing. AFIYA Nothing! Exactly. I hate it, seeing your hope when you check for messages. Watching it crack when there’s nothing. There’s always nothing. Read More
April 14, 2021 Whiting Awards 2021 Sarah Stewart Johnson, Nonfiction By Sarah Stewart Johnson Sarah Stewart Johnson. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Sarah Stewart Johnson grew up in Kentucky before becoming a planetary scientist. She now runs a research lab as a professor at Georgetown and works on NASA missions. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her book, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2020. * An excerpt from The Sirens of Mars: Mars, after all, is only our first step into the vast, dark night. New technologies are paving the way for life-detection missions to the far reaches of our solar system, to the moons of the outer planets, far from what we once considered the “habitable zone.” To worlds that hold stacks of oceans amidst shells of ice, floating like a layer cake. That spew out jets of briny water through cryovolcanoes. That have pale hills and dark rivers and hydrocarbon rain. And then there are also the planets around other stars. There could be as many as forty billion planets that could support life in the Milky Way alone, belted with moons and moonlets—potentially an entire solar system for every person on Earth. The idea of knowing these places intimately, of one day touching their surfaces, may seem ludicrous. The universe has a speed limit—it’s slow, and these worlds are very far away. What could we ever know about them, besides a few details about their orbits, perhaps some spectrographic measurements of their atmospheres? They are points of light and shadow at the very edge of our sight, far beyond our grasp. Then again, that is exactly how Mars seemed only a century ago. Read More