May 26, 2020 At Work Unflinching Honesty: An Interview with Meredith Talusan By RL Goldberg Though I have never met Meredith Talusan in person, she seemed, one Tuesday in late April over Zoom, familiar to me, like we’d been in conversation already for a long time. Perhaps it’s because I’d just recently finished reading Fairest, her memoir. Perhaps it’s because Fairest is written with that kind of wrenching honesty and unflinching self-evaluation—often just embryonic or gestural in most other memoirs—that engenders a feeling of quiet intimacy with the writer. Perhaps it’s because her account of queer desire and trans longing felt adjacent to my own, as I am, like Talusan, a trans person who medically transitioned after graduating from Harvard. Her description of walking home, after a party, to her dorm down Mt. Auburn Street—wearing a dress in public for the first time—was a vertiginous aide-mémoire, returning me to the first time I wore boxers and a binder and a horrible pleather jacket, walking down Mt. Auburn Street, heading home by the same streets, a little more than a decade after Meredith did. Fairest tracks transitions that aren’t visually perceptible, but are narratively indelible: transitioning from a boy to a nonbinary trans-feminine person; moving from a small village in the Philippines to Harvard; being mistakenly perceived as white because she is albino; unlearning overvaluations of whiteness and the desire to be perceived as white. Over a quiet afternoon, we spoke about the tropes of trans memoir, recursive fantasy, the ethics of autobiographical representation, shame and narrative revision, and queer cruising. INTERVIEWER Your memoir felt radically different from any other trans memoir I’ve encountered. Why did you choose the Proust epigraph about being imprisoned in the wrong body, which is a longstanding trope of these memoirs? TALUSAN I was primarily interested in thinking about precedents, windows of existence around work that I’ve read before, with the understanding that different eras have had really different conceptions of gender. I was actually much more influenced, in certain ways, by James Baldwin, so I was looking for a Baldwin epigraph from Giovanni’s Room, but his work is even worse when it comes to portraying trans people. I felt that contextualizing the work of the present within the understanding of how people have seen gender in the past was important. Especially in Sodom and Gomorrah, how tortured that relationship to gender is, how during that period of time there was a much greater overlap in peoples’ conceptions of gender and sexuality. Where I come from, the Philippines, gender is contextualized in certain similar, though significantly less, phobic ways. INTERVIEWER As soon as I asked that question I thought, well, you’re also working with familiar language, there’s rhetorical continuity in your work with mid- and late-century American trans-feminine memoir. I’m thinking of books like Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography and Reneé Richards’s Second Serve, where language like “no longer a son,” or “the man I used to be” was used. I don’t see that anywhere now in contemporary memoir, other than in your book. What’s at stake for you in that move? Read More
May 26, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 10 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “It’s getting warmer—for real this time—and since the world has sort of skipped spring, here at The Paris Review, we’re skipping ahead, too. The Summer 2020 issue, no. 233, will hit mailboxes shortly, and the season pretty much starts right after Memorial Day for publishing, so here we are. I know there’s a lot about this summer that will be far from ideal, and I hope some of the unlocked pieces below will help you grieve those things. But we will be able to get outside more and enjoy the weather (and find more excuses to unglue our eyes from screens). The days will be longer (a mixed blessing, I realize, for those with kids), and there will be more time to read, even if not on the beach—at least you won’t grease up your books with suntan lotion. So let us help you get a head start on summer. Meanwhile, please keep staying safe, and we wish you many stunning sunsets, from wherever you view the glorious summer sky.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Alan Fears, Every Man Is an Island, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 30″. Image courtesy of Alan Fears. Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview might not be the most obvious choice when it comes to the idea of summer, but for me, her novels and the coming season are one and the same. Summer reading demands a really good plot, something that will stand up to the heat-induced torpor; one of my most vivid summer memories is first reading The Days of Abandonment one long July day six years ago. In her interview, Ferrante has the same idea: “In the case of The Days of Abandonment,” she says, “the writing freed the story in a short time, over one summer.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor Read More
May 22, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Slapstick, Stanzas, and Stuff By The Paris Review Michael Rips. Photo: Ric Ocasek. Cooped up at home, many of us are now being kept company by our stuff, that antifunctional classification of belongings that rarely move from their spots on side tables and shelves, displaying little immediate value to anyone but their owners. The stories of how these things came to be, or how they came to be possessed by us, measure their worth, and those with a special sensitivity to that worth become collectors. Two writers have recently captured the singular vocational pull of the collector, and in doing so, they show us the whimsical and strange roots that run deep beneath stuff. Michael Rips’s memoir The Golden Flea chronicles both the author’s lifelong pursuit of oddities and the disappearance of New York’s flea subculture into the anecdotal past (the Chelsea flea market on Twenty-Fifth Street, the last bastion of the once-glorious economy described in The Golden Flea, closed this year). Allan Gurganus’s recent story in The New Yorker, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” is a nested narrative, a story of an old portrait as told by a junk-shop owner to a graduate student whose academic specialty is collecting. The narratives of the painting’s subject and the student’s bid to possess the painting unspool alongside each another. As the modern person’s general interest in stuff wanes, both Rips and Gurganus are invaluable shopkeepers, telling us the story of something old in hopes we may pick it up and take it home. —Lauren Kane Read More
May 22, 2020 Bulletin The Winners of 92Y’s 2020 Discovery Poetry Contest By The Paris Review For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations. The 2020 competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Diana Marie Delgado and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Jericho Brown, Paisley Rekdal, and Wendy Xu awarded this year’s prizes to Asa Drake, Luther Hughes, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, and Daniella Toosie-Watson. The runners-up were Amrita Chakraborty, Katherine Indermaur, J. Estanislao Lopez, and Jeremy Voigt. The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center this fall. We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More
May 22, 2020 Detroit Archives Ladies of the Good Dead By Aisha Sabatini Sloan In her column “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. Kerry James Marshall, 7am Sunday Morning, 2003 (Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago) My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard. Cora Mae has a bawdy sense of humor. Most of the time when she speaks, it’s to crack a joke that would make most people blush. She wears leopard print and prefers for her hair to be dyed bright red. I have tried to imagine her in the hospital, attempting to make sense of the suited, masked figures gesticulating at her. She doesn’t know about the pandemic. She doesn’t know why we’ve stopped visiting. All she knows is that she has been kidnapped by what must appear to be astronauts. The film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, begins with a little black girl gazing up into the face of a white man wearing a hazmat suit. A street preacher standing on a small box asks: “Why do they have on these suits and we don’t?” He refers to the hazmat men as “George Jetson rejects.” It feels wild to watch the film right now, as governors begin to take their states out of lockdown knowing that black and brown residents will continue to die at unprecedented rates, taking a calculated risk that will look, from the vantage point of history, a lot like genocide. The film’s street preacher sounds obscenely prophetic. “You can’t Google what’s going on right now,” he shouts. “They got plans for us.” Read More
May 21, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Saskia Hamilton By Saskia Hamilton In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting 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 the distances. “From the ‘Aeneid,’ Book VI” by Virgil, translated by David Ferry Issue no. 201 (Summer 2012) Read More