March 8, 2021 Melting Clocks Oh, Heaven By Eloghosa Osunde In Eloghosa Osunde’s column Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses. Naudline Pierre, Lead Me Gently Home, 2019, oil on canvas, 96 x 120″. Photo: Paul Takeuchi. When I say the name Heaven, someone I love answers me through two realms and a time machine. It doesn’t matter where our bodies are in the world, what distance separates us, or what headlines are going on about, I say that name and we appear elsewhere. When we rechristened each other recently, we gave and received three names each. They call me [redacted] or [redacted] or [redacted] and the world stops. I call them Heaven or [redacted] or [redacted] and the Earth’s core shifts. All six of our names have different emotional hefts for me, but I suppose Heaven carries a particular weight. There were borders between us when I chose the name, so they didn’t see the choice in real time, but they know my why. They cried, too, when they first heard it, because they know what this word means to me. There was a time when I was obsessed with staying saved and helping loved ones get on the road to heaven. I called that love. That level of conviction gave me something to live for, but after I released it, I realized the obsession added indelible bass to my anxiety. Sometimes, when I get still enough, I can still feel the reverb thudding through me. When people die now, though, I don’t see them facing a heated binary, standing before a white light: Heaven or Hell? Instead, I close my eyes and support their spirit in what it believed. I wish for them what they wished for themselves. And beyond that: I imagine with them what they imagined for themselves, or what their spirit would have dreamed of if they weren’t afraid. It’s been this way for years: I see dead people deciding, because a sure thing I know is that every person has a spirit—whether they are awake to it or not—and our spirits have agency, so that we can cocreate our own realities with God. But I suppose if you’re vanilla about life, the way I think and talk about death in person—openly, vocally, quasi-casually—would be considered morbid. It’s both big and small talk to me, and I do both. Even then, I (still) find myself holding back more than I would if I wasn’t scared of scaring the people I love. Now largely unplugged from religious imaginations of The Afterlife, I know what I am working toward instead. There are implications for what I see as possible beyond death, and those implications double as instructions coded onto my spirit. I accept the challenge without flailing. To get to that thing, that place—my own personal heaven—there’s work I have to do in this lifetime; there are things I have to allow to change me, because when I die, I don’t want to be wished into an eternity I did not conceive, an everlastingness I did not imagine, a heaven that cannot hold me. My loved ones know what I have agreed with God instead. I’m at peace with that. Read More
March 5, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Raisins, Rhythm, and Reality By The Paris Review Allan Gurganus. Photo: © Roger Haile. Courtesy of W. W. Norton. In his Art of Fiction interview, Allan Gurganus preaches the power of the sentence. But for me, the real satisfaction to be had from the newly released Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus comes from the layers: a shrewd grad student’s thrifting trip becomes the story of a portrait, which is actually the story of a tragic moment in a small town’s history; a local news report becomes a firsthand account of the incident told by a police officer to his tape recorder. (In fact, local news reporters are more than once a way of getting into a story; they act as a kind of chorus for small-town America.) Gurganus’s Uncollected Stories is lean, nine extended narratives often broken up by Roman numerals. He is unafraid of the darkness deep inside his characters. These are tales that left me feeling unsettled and newly aware of strangers I encountered, the likely mysteries in their lives—and yes, in awe of excellent sentences. —Lauren Kane Read More
March 5, 2021 Look The Fabric of Memory By The Paris Review In Paul Anthony Smith’s Untitled (Dead Yard), a figure stands with arms outstretched in the midst of a haze of ghostly breeze-blocks. The physical appears to commune with the spiritual; unreality encroaches on the real. It’s a startling effect, one that persists throughout Smith’s second solo show with Jack Shainman Gallery, “Tradewinds” (on view through April 3). Using a needled wooden tool, Smith painstakingly works over his photographic prints, puncturing the surface and chipping away at the ink. Each stipple, each architectural flourish laces the images with the fabric of memory. This is not reality; this is the world in recollection, the white noise of time and distance always threatening to drown out the past. A selection of images from “Tradewinds” appears below. Paul Anthony Smith, Breeze off yu soul, 2020–2021, unique picotage with spray paint on inkjet print, mounted on museum board and Sintra, 40 x 54″. © Paul Anthony Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Paul Anthony Smith, Dog an Duppy Drink Rum, 2020–2021, unique picotage, spray paint, and acrylic paint on inkjet print, mounted on museum board and Sintra, 72 x 104″. © Paul Anthony Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Read More
March 4, 2021 Inside the Issue Sheri Benning’s “Winter Sleep” By The Paris Review The Spring 2021 issue, which went live earlier this week, features three poems by Sheri Benning. One of these poems, “Winter Sleep,” serves as the basis for a short film of the same name. Shot in the Rural Municipality of Wolverine Creek in Saskatchewan, the project is a collaboration between Sheri and her sister, the visual artist Heather Benning, along with the filmmaker Chad Galloway.
March 4, 2021 Happily ~Hope.docx By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. An illustration from Jack and the Beanstalk, Elizabeth Colborne I am cleaning my house when I receive a Facebook message from the manager of Project Safe that a volunteer has found my plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor. The baseboards are thick with dust. I spray a mix of vinegar and lavender, and run a rag across them. The plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor, has been put aside in the office for me. I write back, “Oh! oh! I hope it’s him.” The rag is black. I am on my hands and knees. “I hope it’s your doll!” writes the manager. “Fingers crossed,” I write back. “It has to be him,” I say to no one. “It just has to be.” I text my mother, “I’m cleaning the gustroom.” I notice the mistake before I hit send, but I send it anyway. She calls. I pick up. “Shouldn’t you be writing?” she asks. I should. “I can’t move,” says my mother. She received her second dose of the vaccine yesterday and now she’s having a reaction. I tell her I’m writing about hope. I tell her the reaction means the vaccine is working. “I feel like I’ve been hearing about this essay on hope for weeks,” she says. She’s impatient. “I can’t lift my arm,” she says. I tell her I’ve read every version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” I could find because I thought if I followed the hunger and the despair and the cow traded for a pocketful of magic beans and the beanstalk that grows overnight through the clouds and the boy named Jack who climbs the beanstalk and robs a giant of his harp and hen so he and his mother could live happily ever after I could make a beautiful map of hope because isn’t that what we need right now? “Isn’t what what we need right now?” “Hope,” I say again. “A map of hope,” I say again. “Hope?” says my mother, like it’s the name of a country she’d never pay money to visit. “What we need is a hell of a lot more than hope,” she says. We’re both quiet for a minute. “How’s the essay going?” asks my mother. “Terribly,” I say. “No surprise,” she says. I tell her the manager of Project Safe just messaged me that a volunteer thinks she might’ve found my plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor. “Here we go again,” says my mother, “with the plague doctor.” I lost him months ago, and now he’s coming home. “Why couldn’t she just send you a photo?” I was wondering that, too, but I don’t admit it. If it’s not my plague doctor I want to at least postpone the time in between the darkness and the figure who emerges. “There’s no way it’s your plague doctor,” says my mother. “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” I say. “What?” she says. “I said ‘feel better,’ ” I say. In some versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” each time Jack climbs the beanstalk his mother grows sicker and sicker. And in other versions, each time Jack climbs back down and shows his mother his gold and tells her he was right about the beans after all, his mother grows quieter and quieter until it’s impossible to know if she’s even there anymore. I go to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website. I click on the IF YOU PLANT THEM OVERNIGHT BY MORNING THEY GROW RIGHT UP TO THE SKY link. I want a vaccine, but what I want even more are magic beans I can plant in my arm that will grow into a beanstalk my sons can climb if they ever run out of hope. I click on the link but it just leads me to a page on “adjusting mitigation strategies.” I try to click back, but I can’t. My computer freezes. I have to restart, and when my computer turns back on, and I return to this essay on hope, I realize it wasn’t properly saved. Most of it is lost. Only a few old notes, like branches, are scattered across the page. I start to cry, and tell my husband I’m giving up writing forever, and then I kick the air, and then I watch tutorials on recovering documents that advise me to search for “hope” with a “~” in front of it. What is that called? A tilde? It looks like a downed beanstalk. Read More
March 3, 2021 Bulletin A Message from the Board of Directors By The Paris Review The Paris Review, a literary quarterly based in New York, announced that its editor, Emily Nemens, has resigned to pursue work on her second novel. In her statement, published today on The Paris Review’s website, Nemens said, “The Paris Review’s mission has always been a dual one: to provide a platform for great literature, and to inspire readers with ambitious new writing. I’m proud that we’ve been able to accomplish both during my time at the Review, and I would like to thank the writers, readers, and colleagues on staff and the board who have collaborated with me toward these objectives.” The Paris Review, founded in 1953, features original fiction and nonfiction, art, and in-depth interviews with notable writers about their creative processes. Under Nemens’s leadership, the quarterly won awards and attained a record number of subscribers. The Review also has an active digital presence with a large following, and has recently produced two seasons of podcasts featuring readings, interviews, and archival material. At the time of Nemens’s departure, issue no. 236 has just appeared, and Nemens’s editorial work on the Summer 2021 issue, no. 237, has been completed. The Paris Review is undertaking an active search for her successor. “While we will miss Emily,” said co-presidents Matt Holt and Akash Shah, “we have a wonderful staff, and the magazine has never been in better shape financially. We are all very excited about the next chapter.” “We are grateful for Emily Nemens’s editorial stewardship of The Paris Review during the past three years,” said publisher Mona Simpson. “In particular, we thank Emily for her leadership guiding the staff through the anxieties and sorrows of the pandemic. We are excited for her new work and wish her every happiness.” Read a letter from Emily Nemens.