November 23, 2021 Redux Redux: Chance Progression By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Margaret Drabble photographed by Nancy Crampton. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about family bonds, in anticipation of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Read on for an Art of Fiction interview with Margaret Drabble, Tama Janowitz’s short story “American Dad,” Jeffrey Yang’s poem “Ancestors,” and a portfolio of photographs, “Iranian Family Portraits,” by Mohsen Rastani. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Margaret Drabble, The Art of Fiction No. 70 Issue no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978) My sister and I are very similar. She’s a novelist and our lives have been parallel in many ways. She has been an important part of my life. One’s relationship with one’s siblings and parents is something that you’re going to write about again and again, in different forms. Read More
November 23, 2021 Arts & Culture New, Tender, Quick: A Visit to the Elizabeth Bishop House By Henri Cole I’ve come to Great Village, Nova Scotia, to visit Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home and the landscape shown in her great-uncle George Wylie Hutchinson’s untitled, undated little painting on Masonite. This painting is the subject of Bishop’s radiant poem titled, humbly, “Poem,” which appeared in The New Yorker on November 11, 1972. Waking early, I hear chirping northern birds I do not recognize. The elms were long ago dismantled and replaced by sugar maples whose dense crowns offer ample shade. The church bell is silent. The pump organ gathers dust. I see no geese or cows in the village. I picture Bishop’s maternal grandparents, the Bulmers (the l is silent; it’s sometimes spelled Boomer), lying one hundred years ago in the front bedroom under the sloping walls where I sleep now. There are no National Geographics on the shelves. No sewing machine chatters in the kitchen. No odor of coal gas lingers in the much-too-steep stairwell. No caged canary tweets out of loneliness. It is August and delicious blueberries are in season. Local fields are full of ripe corn, the rows of tall stalks running down to the edge of the reddish-brown Cobequid Bay, “home of the long tides / where the bay leaves the sea / twice a day,” long and deep. As I search for sugar in the pantry, cars whiz past the front of the house. Surely Miss Bishop liked sugar in her coffee. Read More
November 22, 2021 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Looking for Trouble by Virginia Cowles By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. In March 1937, eight months into the Spanish Civil War, Virginia Cowles, a twenty-seven-year-old freelance journalist from Vermont who specialized in society gossip, put a bold proposal to her editor at Hearst newspapers: she wanted to go to Spain to report on both sides of the hostilities. Despite the fact that Cowles’s only qualification for combat reporting was her self-confessed “curiosity,” rather astonishingly, her editor agreed. “I knew no one in Spain and hadn’t the least idea how one went about such an assignment,” she explains innocently in the opening pages of Looking for Trouble, the bestselling memoir she published in 1941. She set off for Europe regardless. Read More
November 22, 2021 Bulletin Nancy with the Laughing Face By The Paris Review Lauren Williams, Amanda Gersten, Olivia Kan-Sperling, and Lauren Kane, members of the Review’s editorial staff, on the office fire escape. Photos: Elias Altman The writer and artist Joe Brainard, who once put together an exhibition of 1,500 tiny collages, knew the importance of the little things in life: seashells, matches, expensive sweaters that are, as he put it in “The Outer Banks,” a poem first published in the Review in 1981, “the kind of plain you pay for.” His relationship with the magazine began in 1966, when he and his partner, the New York School poet and editor Kenward Elmslie, coauthored the comic “The Power Plant Sestina,” published in issue no. 38. Brainard’s contributions to the Review also include the cover art, “Pansy,” for issue no. 61 (Spring 1975) and the portfolio “Amazing But True,” in issue no. 53. In one of our most beloved house ads, he dressed Ernie Bushmiller’s comics character Nancy—who graced more than a hundred of Brainard’s works between 1963 and 1978—in a Paris Review tee. Read More
November 19, 2021 The Review’s Review En Garde By The Paris Review Umar Rashid, F Anon Is Me (Fanonisme as an answer to the scourge of colonialism) However, sometimes it is difficult to get to the ringleaders atop the pyramid and one must be satisfied by dispatching proxies. Ultimately, a wasted effort. Or, red woman on a horse, 2021. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 72 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches. Photo: Josh Schaedel For the past few months, I’ve been avoiding museums. Even the smallest among them overwhelms me, a side effect, I assume, of the simultaneous overstimulation and sensory deprivation of life (my life) during the pandemic. It’s not their fault, really, and galleries are hardly the solution, but when I visited En Garde / On God, Umar Rashid’s first solo show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles earlier this week, I felt the exhibition to be a kind of relief. In a series of large-scale paintings (and one sculpture), Rashid meticulously documents artifacts belonging to the fictitious Frenglish Empire (1658–1880), a portmanteau ushered in by the consolidation of French and English colonial powers. Together, the works read as something of an oblique but determining taxonomy, like the consequential false memories of a bad dream. Missionaries take the form of conversion therapists, white Jesus and black Jesus share the same lowrider, and everyone seems as if they might be on the verge of losing their heads. The show is up until December 18, and images of Rashid’s older works, belonging to the same narrative, are archived online. —Maya Binyam Read More
November 19, 2021 The Moon in Full Beaver Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Not long ago at the big museum across the river, a little lost, I ended up in the Egyptian realm. I entered a closet-size space, its high limestone walls carved with hieroglyphs. Vultures, tall dogs, fish, bare feet with high arches, serpents, urns, owls, half-moons, eyes. These symbols, familiar and unfamiliar at once, arising, like all symbols, all myths, all language, out of our confusion and our fear, our grasping for sense and pattern, our wonder. “Wonder is ignorance that is aware of itself as ignorance,” Robert P. Harrison writes in an essay called “Toward a Philosophy of Nature.” Standing in the museum, I felt the charge, the fluttering, stirring hush that certain places bring when you can sense a long-gone presence—not ghosts, exactly, but some residue of human energy and effort. I felt the hands with their chisels, the dust and pressure, and line by line the shapes coming into being. Rising up those walls, the signs of our inexhaustible efforts to understand and make ourselves understood. Read More