February 3, 2021 Inside the Issue The Deep Corner By Edward Hirsch Edward Hirsch with his father before a football game at Grinnell College, 1971. Courtesy of Edward Hirsch. It has been nearly fifty years since I played college football, but sometimes I still wake up on Saturday with the old feeling. It’s fall, there’s a certain chill in the air, and suddenly I am catapulted back into the bruised light of my dorm room in the early morning, a brisk day dawning in rural Iowa, football weather. I can feel the tingle of anticipation as soon as I open my eyes—a day for running routes and catching passes, blocking down on tackles, hitting, and getting hit. I was a pass receiver. All night I ran the patterns in my mind until they seemed like second nature: the quick pass over the middle, the sideline or down-and-out, the buttonhook, the post pattern, the fly. The key was getting off the line, feinting the defender—I was quick but not fast and so needed the finesse—cutting on a dime, turning for the ball to come into your hands, holding on afterward. If you touched it, you should catch it—that was the motto I was taught, what I believed. I caught it falling down or stepping out of bounds, I caught it with a linebacker’s helmet planted in my back, I caught it over my left shoulder. I reeled it in with one hand. But I dropped it because I heard footsteps, I dropped it because I took my eye off the ball and looked upfield, I dropped it because I was stretched out and creamed as soon as I touched it. The key was to stay in the moment, to read the defender and keep a Zen-like concentration, run your route with precision. Soft hands. The ball on a string from the quarterback. Keep your head up for the broken play and then improvise, turn, and race down the field while the quarterback looks as if he is going to get sacked. Every now and then he ducks out of it and finds you—you’re floating free. You can see the ball lofting in the air, there is no one else around. Do not take your eyes off it. It takes thirty or forty minutes to come down … Read More
February 2, 2021 Look Gordon Parks’s America By The Paris Review Kansas, Alabama, Illinois, New York—wherever Gordon Parks (1912–2006) traveled, he captured with striking composition the lives of Black Americans in the twentieth century. From his first portraits for the Farm Security Administration in the early forties to his essential documentation of the civil rights movement for Life magazine, he produced an astonishing range of work. In his photographs we see protests and inequality and pain but also love, joy, boredom, traffic in Harlem, skinny-dips at the watering hole, idle days passed on porches, summer afternoons spent baking in the Southern sun. With “Half and the Whole,” on view through February 20, Jack Shainman Gallery presents a trove of Parks’s photographs, many of which have rarely been exhibited. A selection of images from the show appears below. Gordon Parks, Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, archival pigment print, 34 x 34″ (print). Edition L5 of 7, with 2APs Inventory. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Gordon Parks, Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1957, archival pigment print, 30 x 40″ (print). Edition 1 of 7, with 2APs Inventory. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Read More
February 2, 2021 Redux Redux: A Window like a Well 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. John Hall Wheelock. Photo: Rowland Scherman. This week at The Paris Review, we’re peering through windows. Read on for John Hall Wheelock’s Art of Poetry interview, an excerpt from Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts, and Forough Farrokhzad’s poem “Window.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new monogrammed notebook for only $69 (plus free shipping!). John Hall Wheelock, The Art of Poetry No. 21 Issue no. 67 (Fall 1976) One reason I know it was not my line is I consulted a dictionary to find out that an oriel was a window in a balcony that you could look down from. I had sensed that it was some kind of window, but I didn’t know. I looked it up, afraid that it might be the wrong kind of window and wouldn’t fit into the poem. Now I have taken that line on as my own, yet no one can convince me that I didn’t hear it. Read More
February 1, 2021 Arts & Culture Cavafy’s Bed By André Aciman Aerial view of Alexandria, ca. 1929. Photo: Walter Mittelholzer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. It’s my first Palm Sunday in Rome. The year is 1966. I am fifteen, and my parents, my brother and I, and my aunt have decided to visit the Spanish Steps. On that day the Steps are filled with people but also with so many flowerpots that one has to squeeze through the crowd of tourists and of Romans carrying palm fronds. I have pictures of that day. I know I am happy, partly because my father is staying with us on a short visit from Paris and we seem to be a family again, and partly because the weather is absolutely stunning. I am wearing a blue wool blazer, a leather tie, a long-sleeved white polo shirt, and gray flannel trousers. I am boiling on this first day of spring and dying to take off my clothes and jump into the Roman fountain—the Barcaccia—at the bottom of the Steps. This should have been a beach day, and perhaps this is why the day resonates with me so much. Two years before, in 1964, we were probably celebrating Sham el Nessim, the Alexandrian spring holiday, which for many of us usually marked the first giddy swim of the year. But in Rome at the time I am not thinking of Alexandria at all. I’m not even aware that there might be a connection between Rome, this eruption of beach fever, and Alexandria. The yearning to jump into a body of water and drink it whole, and always that search for shaded areas, away from the blazing sun—these are what my body wants, now that the wool I’m wearing is unbearable. Read More
January 29, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gardens, Glasgow, and Graves By The Paris Review Still from Kentucky Route Zero. Kentucky Route Zero is haunted in the same way America is haunted. In this five-act play of a video game, the characters Conway and Shannon and their bizarre companions amble back and forth, around and through the real and unreal roads and rivers of rural Kentucky. Everyone has a goal of some sort—delivering one last antique, finding a new workshop, reaching another gig—but all of it folds into the layers of this dreamscape underworld. Just as so many Latin American writers took inspiration from Faulkner, the Southern Gothic of Kentucky Route Zero takes inspiration right back from the magic realism of García Márquez and the pointed political artistry of Neruda. The hopeful folk songs of miners punctuate Kentucky’s caves and forests as their ghosts come out to perform again, long past their deaths at the hands of corporate greed and negligence. Artists and blue-collar workers alike become trapped by exploitative debts that never stop following them. At the heart of Kentucky Route Zero is the mounting fear that these specters are not from the past or even the present but exist eternally. There never were good old days because America’s been stuck in the same cycle since its inception. Any memory of this land is phantom-ridden and cyclical; as Conway says at one point, “I can’t look at anything without remembering something else, and then that reminds me of something else, and—I’m buried in it.” In another scene, a minor character asks, as they’re digging a grave: “Just what are we burying here, anyway? Is it them, or us? Or some mix of both.” Kentucky Route Zero argues that in a sense, we all haunt America. Our debts, fears, and memories hang over others and this nation as much as they hang over us. No single change will exorcise the land, but perhaps by seeking out little slices of beauty where we can find them—little slices of togetherness—we can learn to live with the ghosts and respect them, for they are no different from us. —Carlos Zayas-Pons Read More
January 29, 2021 Arts & Culture The Conundrum of “Conundrum” By Stephanie Burt Stephanie Burt on how to remember Jan Morris’s trans memoir Conundrum. Jan Morris died in November of 2020, and you can read a remembrance of her by her colleagues here. JAN MORRIS Before the actor Elliot Page and the model Janet Mock and the legislator Danica Roem and the TV star Nicole Maines were born, before Against Me! and Anohni and Cavetown had sung a note, before Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Eddie Izzard’s Definite Article, twenty years before the first recorded appearance of the word cisgender, and three years after I was born, in 1974, the Anglo-Welsh travel writer and veteran Jan Morris published a short and beautiful book called Conundrum. Morris was already famous as the first journalist up Mount Everest, part of Edmund Hillary’s expedition: she would go on to publish dozens more books and a flurry of essays (some in The Paris Review) before her death in 2020, but Conundrum remains her best known. Not the first modern trans memoir, but perhaps the first with literary ambitions, Conundrum helped establish one way of thinking about what it means to be trans. It’s an early example of the “wrong body” narrative (the phrase shows up on the first page), the story by which the truly trans person always knew she was a woman (if assigned male at birth) or a man (if assigned female). It’s also the kind of now-obsolescent narrative by which genital surgery, and only genital surgery, confirms trans women as really and only true women: Morris’s longed-for operation, in Morocco, becomes “the climax of my life.” Her preface to the 2001 reissue called the volume “a period piece.” Between the lead-up to surgery, the wrong-body story, and the occasional nostalgia for Empire, Morris’s memoir might now seem so dated as to provide no help for the present—except that it does, and not just for its rich style. Conundrum remains a sympathetic guide, not so much to present-day transgender struggles as to trans joy. Read More