October 21, 2021 The Review’s Review Eternal Present By The Paris Review Still from Lil Peep’s “Gym Class” music video. Curtis Eggleston’s Hollow Nacelle, out last month from Expat Press, is, like reality, both weird and not at all so. His characters—bandmates—wanna blow up… Or at least have a girlfriend, or at least make art. This is a southern California dreamworld, only so, so gray. In prose that is wonderfully straight even when it muses and metaphorizes, Eggleston conjures up the terrifying banality of fantasy, the dumbness of miracles, and lays them flat on the page. Major miracles, as per usual: love, art, friendship. Plus—and without the corniness that sometimes comes with contemporaneity—there’s the (evil? stupid? neutral?) kinds of spells that, for better or for worse, enchant our late-modern world: an Uber-type driver who appears and disappears at will, the mystery of Instagram virality, a rock of black “goth” molly that turns “purple, lustrous” under the iPhone flashlight. Read More
October 21, 2021 On Poetry A Holy Terror Dancing with Light: On Jim Harrison By Joy Williams Jim Harrison named one of his hunting dogs Joy Williams or perhaps it was just Joy. She was named after me in any case. Jim was perhaps having a bit of fun, knowing my horror of the hunt. She might well have been a gay and avid associate, reveling in the tristesse of falling birds, but I prefer to think of her as reluctant, anguished about such an enterprise, failing to thrill to it. I prefer to think of her questioning the rightness of it, finding the whole bewildering activity loathsome. She adored Jim, of course, but saw the world differently, like Ahab’s whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head. I prefer to think of Jim taking the hunting dog Joy’s feelings into account, for he thought highly of dogs as well as ravens, loons, horses, bears, dolphins (“certainly as dear as people to themselves”), and all manner of creatures, and would dismiss any philosophy that found them unworthy of grace or our concern. It wasn’t until the sixth century that the Christians decided animals weren’t part of the kingdom of heaven. Hoof, wing, and paw can’t put money in the collection plate. These lunatic shit-brained fools excluded our beloved creatures. Who could possibly aspire to a heaven so bereft? Read More
October 20, 2021 Arts & Culture Illuminate I Could: On Lucille Clifton By Tracy K. Smith Caroline and son. Courtesy of the Clifton family. What is our relationship to history? Do we belong to it, or is it ours? Are we in it? Does it run through us, spilling out like water, or blood? I think the answers to those questions, at least in America, depend upon who you are—or rather, on who you’ve been taught to believe that you are. If the history you descend from has been mapped, adapted, mythologized, reenacted, and broadcast as though it is the central defining story of a continent, perhaps you can be forgiven (up to a point) for having succumbed to a collective distortion. But what if yours is a history the wider world once recorded not as lives and feats but as articles of inventory? Men, women, children listed according to their age and value as property? What if the largeness of those lives—what they endured, yes, but also what they carried, remembered, witnessed, and made—has been hushed up, negated, overwritten, or outright erased? What if the recovery of your full story sheds stark light on the lie of that other, louder story? Read More
October 19, 2021 Redux Redux: The Subway Back and Forth 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. Welty, ca. 1962, Wikimedia Commons This week at The Paris Review, we’re waiting for the bus and descending into the subway. Read on for Eudora Welty’s Art of Fiction interview, Gish Jen’s short story “Amaryllis,” and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Corresponding Foreignly,” paired with a portfolio of photographs by G. M. B. Akash. 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 Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47 Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972) Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. Read More
October 18, 2021 The Moon in Full Hunter’s 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. The Wild Hunt of Odin, by Peter Nicolai Arbo, Nasjonalmuseet Summer is dead. The last flames of its cremation heat the leaves across New England where I live. The rest of the fire-stained leaves will fall, ashy on the forest floors, ashy on the sidewalks. This is how ghosts speak, the sound of ashy leaves blown by wind or shuffled by feet, and October is when they speak the loudest. Ghosts are white in the imagination, pale blurs, small fogs of body. The moon is also white, but no one thinks it a ghost. For this haunted moment of the year: the Hunter’s Moon. Bare trees, bare fields—all the better, by moonlight, to spot the prey, take aim, drain blood, skin, sever limb from joint, and slice flesh to store for the cold months ahead. Me, I go to the grocery store; my meat has its skin peeled off before I bring it home. Have you sliced the throat of a mammal? Snapped the neck of a fowl? Put a bullet through the soft parts to stop the light in the eyes of a creature who leaps or flies? Do you know what it is to crouch in brush and wait, hoping the wind does not carry your human scent to the nostrils of whatever beast you’re trying to catch? I don’t. But something stirs in the blood this time of year regardless. Maybe you feel it, too. Maybe you’re able to detect things that normally elude our dulled and faulty senses. As if all of a sudden noses become more alert. May and June have their blooms, the dewy grassy floral scent of spring. Late fall smells earthier: mulch, ash, the turpentine tang of decay, worm chew, slowing sap, flinty night. Read More
October 18, 2021 On Photography Eavesdropping in the Archives: Six Artist Portraits By Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Lester Sloan The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for Newsweek, where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha’s questions and prompts to her father appear in bold. Lester’s thoughts are set in a lighter typeface. BALLET LESSONS Hoop dreams. You know where this picture was taken? Around the corner from my mother’s house, I think. No—across the street. The house that used to be across the street from my mother’s house. Where Mr. Ringo’s house used to be. Mr. Ringo was the guy who lived across the street from us, and I used to cut his grass and help clean up his house for extra money, and I always enjoyed that because he had a magazine I’d never seen before. He got National Geographic delivered to his door, and he also had other magazines like Life and Look. But he was a reader of magazines and books. This is such a colorful picture. It is. Think about the control you have to have to dribble a ball, pick it up, jump up, pull your arms up as far as you can to overreach the guy trying to block your shot, put the right arch on it so it’ll go over his fingertips and into the ring of the basket. It didn’t surprise me later on when a few basketball players started taking ballet lessons because they discovered that the body control you need to be a great dancer is the same body control you need to develop as a ballplayer. You look at this and realize it’s possible for a kid from the hood to be Nureyev. Read More