May 13, 2021 Arts & Culture Know Thyself By Meghan O’Gieblyn Frank Markham Skipworth, The Mirror, 1911. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I was first beginning to teach, in graduate school, a friend of mine with more experience in the classroom told me about a study she’d come across. I can’t say whether this study actually exists. I’ve never looked for it, and it strikes me now as one of those well-traveled anecdotes that’s been passed from hand to hand, accumulating more baggage along the way, like blockchain. The study, she told me, found that students who were asked to evaluate their instructor five seconds into the first class of the semester gave more or less the same rating as they did at the end of the term. The instructor who was liked upon entering the room was still liked three months later. The instructor who appeared severe had not managed to change any minds. Despite its implicit fatalism, my friend claimed that she found the study’s conclusion solacing. Once you accepted that your character was immediately transparent, there was no pressure to keep up appearances. If I felt nervous about how I was coming off throughout the semester, she advised, I should remember that the students’ minds were already made up. They’d had me figured out before I’d placed my supplies on the desk the first day, and nothing I could do would change it. This is among the more deranged bits of advice I have received in my life. More than once, her words have popped into my head as I’ve approached a lectern or shaken someone’s hand for the first time. What is it that others discern so conclusively in those five seconds? It seemed to me a parable about the limits of self-knowledge. We spend our lives trying to figure out what kind of person we are, but others can understand us, in our entirety, at a glance. Read More
May 12, 2021 Re-Covered More Pain Than Anyone Should Be Expected to Bear By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. I first came across the poet and short story writer Frances Bellerby’s fiction when I was working on my Ph.D. My subject was sibling relationships in mid-twentieth-century British literature, and some dusty avenue of research led me to Bellerby—a name I had not come across before and haven’t since, bar this article on the treasure trove that is the Neglected Books website—quite a few of whose short stories feature brother-and-sister pairs. Ultimately, I didn’t reference her work in my finished thesis, but neither did I forget some of the haunting images therein. Two children in the gloaming, the descending darkness bringing with it a premonition of war. The strange out-of-body experience of a child—a reaction to witnessing a horrible accident—that momentarily renders her unable to identify the scratched and bloody hand in front of her as her own, caught on blackberry brambles. Or simply the tableau of a cozy drawing room on a winter’s evening, seen through the eyes of a child for whom it’s usually out of bounds, a fire roaring in the grate, the heavy curtains drawn against the cold night outside, and a striking blue vase filled with brilliant bronze chrysanthemums. Returning to Bellerby’s stories this year, I was relieved to discover that they’re every bit as remarkable as I’d remembered. All the more so, in fact, when I learned how the death of her beloved brother, Jack—killed, age eighteen, in World War I—influenced much of what she wrote. Sadly, Jack’s death was only the first in a series of tragedies that blighted a life marked by considerably more pain and suffering—both physical and psychological—than anyone should be expected to bear, let alone spin into accomplished, poignant writing. As fellow poet Charles Causley wrote on the occasion of Bellerby’s death, in 1975, she was “a true original.” Read More
May 11, 2021 Redux Redux: Have No Mercy, Gardener 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. Penelope Lively. This week at The Paris Review, we’re out in the garden. Read on for Penelope Lively’s Art of Fiction interview, Diane Williams’s short story “Garden Magic,” and Allison Funk’s poem “On Pruning.” 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. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Penelope Lively, The Art of Fiction No. 241 Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018) If I hadn’t got a book on the go, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Even during the times I’m not actually writing, I’m going over it in my mind, when I’m gardening or the like, wondering whether I’m getting such-and-such a character right or whether there’s a problem here or there. Read More
May 11, 2021 Comics The Joys and Sorrows of Aunthood By Lee Lai In Lee Lai’s debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, a queer couple navigates personal and familial struggles between joyful and imaginative playdates with their six-year-old niece, Nessie. Through black-and-gray illustrations, Lai captures the complex emotional tenor of Bron and Ray’s relationship with Nessie, their respective sisters, and each other. In the excerpt below, an afternoon with Nessie’s fun aunts is cut short by a phone call. Read More
May 10, 2021 Comics Climbing Desolation Peak By Alison Bechdel Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, follows the artist through a lifetime of fitness and exercise. These memories and musings are interspersed with transcendentalists, Romantics, Eastern philosophers, and other literary figures who shed light on our obsession with transformation and transcendence. In the excerpt below, Bechdel follows in Jack Kerouac’s footsteps up the Matterhorn, only to find the hike to be far more difficult than expected, and with surprising lessons in store. Read More
May 7, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mothers, Grandmothers, and Gardens By The Paris Review Tove Jansson, 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My grandmother will be ninety-six this September. Lately she has taken to expressing herself with an almost childlike wonder, finishing television shows or simple meals or songs on the radio with jaw-dropping admiration, claiming them the best she has seen or eaten or heard in all her days. Thinking about this sometimes apt and more often comical appreciation for life’s otherwise ordinary details puts me in mind of another fanciful grandmother and her adventures around a small Finnish island on the heels of her six-year-old granddaughter, the spritely Sophia, in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. In the twenty-two vignettes that make up the book, told in the third person and translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, the narrative focus is shared between the main characters, often drifting subtly over the course of a story, illustrating the delicate overlap between the two, one’s perspective mirroring or adding to the outlook of the other. In “The Tent,” Sophia learns to observe the outdoors anew, having “really listened for the first time in her life,” and her relation of that strange new experience helps Grandmother relive her own childhood experiences as “new images came back to her, more and more of them.” Youth and age, awe and understanding, innocence and experience—what beautiful complements they can make. To my grandmother, who now seems as much the seasoned matriarch as she is the imaginative girl, and to her youngest daughter, my incomparable mother, who has taken expert care of us both—happy Mother’s Day. —Christopher Notarnicola Read More