December 21, 2020 Winter Solstice Burn Something Today By Nina MacLaughlin This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s column Winter Solstice. It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. The rattling newspaper delivery truck has not yet been by, the morning news not yet tossed on stoops. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year. Wasn’t it just summer? Or was summer a thousand years ago? Was summer? Now it’s now. Here we are. The Winter Solstice. The close of the year, the opening of a season—welcome, winter—the longest night, and light gets born again. Today is tied with its twin in the summer for the most powerful day of the year. Light a fire. Light a fire on this day. Let something burn. That is what the solstices are for. Summer flames say, Keep the light alive (it’s never worked, not once). In winter, a more urgent message: Bring light back to life (it’s worked every time so far). The summer solstice scene is loose and dewy, flower-crowned crowds in debauch around the bonfires. People leaped over flames and the tongues of flame licked up high into the night. In winter: private fires. Home hearths. These fires “have such power over our memory that the ancient lives slumbering beyond our oldest recollections awaken with us …revealing the deepest regions of our secret souls,” writes Henri Bosco in Malicroix. The Yule log didn’t start as a cocoa confection with meringue mushrooms on the top. It was oak burned on the night of the solstice. Depending where one lived, the ashes of the solstice fire were then spread on fields over the following days to up the yield of next season’s crop, or fed to cattle to up fatness and fertility of the herd, or placed under beds to protect against thunder, or sometimes worn in a vial around the neck. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves. Read More
December 21, 2020 Best of 2020 The Second Mrs. de Winter By CJ Hauser We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday! Illustration for a Rebecca paper doll by Jenny Kroik for The Paris Review “The sexiness of [Rebecca] is maybe the most unsettling part, since it centers on the narrator’s being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the memory and the mystery of her new husband’s dead wife.” —Emily Alford, Jezebel NB: This essay contains all of the spoilers for Rebecca. Rebecca had good taste—or maybe she just had the same taste as me, and that’s why I thought it was good. She loved a particular shade of vintage minty turquoise. The kitchen cabinets were all this color. As were the plates inside. The cups and bowls were white with dainty black dots on them. Not polka dots—a smaller, more charming print. I loved them. I might have picked them out myself. It made me feel sick that I loved them. I imagined Rebecca had picked out these cups and plates when she moved into this house, but the cupboards I was investigating, and the very lovely dishes inside them, now belonged to her ex-husband, my boyfriend. Rebecca lived fifteen minutes away. Of course, her name wasn’t really Rebecca. But grant me a theme. We’ll call him Maxim. Read more >>
December 18, 2020 Best of 2020 The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2020 By The Paris Review Don Mee Choi. Photo: © SONG Got. Courtesy of Wave Books. It’s a cliché to say that reading transports you, but in a year in which I spent most of my days indoors, shuffling between my bedroom and my living room, the books I read really were a lifeline, a portal to an outside world. In the weeks before New York shut down, I luxuriated in my subway reading, laughing aloud at Alma Mahler’s antics in turn-of-the-century Vienna in Cate Haste’s biography Passionate Spirit, savoring the deceptively calm sentences of Amina Cain’s fabular Indelicacy, and texting photos of paragraphs from Abdellah Taïa’s sharp exploration of immigration, colonialism, and sexuality, A Country for Dying (translated by Emma Ramadan), to everyone I knew. I spent an exhilarating week attending a retrospective of the films of Angela Schanelec, a director whose work frequently features writers, including her early short I Stayed in Berlin All Summer, which contains a defense of fragmentation, of not making sense, that became something of a personal manifesto for my 2020. Nothing about my life or my country made sense once March hit, and I stayed indoors reading Annie Ernaux’s painful memoir about adolescence and abandonment, A Girl’s Story (translated by Alison Strayer); Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (edited by Qin Xiaoyu and translated by Eleanor Goodman), which should be required reading for anyone who owns an Apple product or a fast-fashion clothing item; and Marlen Haushofer’s peculiarly relevant dystopia, The Wall (translated by Shaun Whiteside). Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts, which follows her narrator’s attempts to finish writing a novel, mirrored my own quarantined state of fitfulness, boredom, and bouts of obsession. As the weather grew warmer, I kept thinking about the title story of Ho Sok Fong’s Lake Like a Mirror (translated by Natascha Bruce) and the precision with which it portrays contemporary Malaysian politics. Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini (translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig) electrified me, while Lyonel Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps (translated by Linda Coverdale) proved haunting. Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection The Unreality of Memory sent me down a thousand Wikipedia rabbit holes. And I was delighted to read an early novel of Marie NDiaye’s, That Time of Year (translated by Jordan Stump), with its questions of surveillance and insiders versus outsiders. Autumn came, and in my insomnia leading up to the November election, I turned to Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (translated by Robin Moger), with its meditative look at sleep, revolution, and writing, and Elfriede Jelinek’s incisive Trump-themed play, On the Royal Road: The Burgher King (translated by Gitta Honegger). The poems collected in Choi Seungja’s Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me (translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong) shook me up with their raw criticisms of consumerism and love, as did the essays on publishing and immigration in Dubravka Ugresic’s The Age of Skin (translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać). Don Mee Choi’s poetry collection DMZ Colony stayed with me long after it was over. And now it is somehow winter; now it is almost time to flip the calendar forward. In a year marked by a pandemic, nothing made sense to me, least of all the passing of time. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
December 17, 2020 First Person Fear Is a Three-Thousand-Pound Bell By Nicolette Polek A series of small elevators takes me up the Gloria in Excelsis Tower of the National Cathedral, where balconies overlook the highest views in Washington, D.C. To one side is Sugarloaf Mountain; to the other is the Washington Monument. People kiss in the Bishop’s Garden below and I dangle my arms above them. I peer over the stone balcony while several women behind me ring the bells in patterns I don’t understand. They tell me there’s a six-month learning curve before I could play. From the ceiling, ten ropes hang above a circular platform on which the ringers stand. The ceiling protects our hearing; above it are the bells. The rest of the ringing chamber is filled with odd end things—a chalkboard for writing out methods, a miniature model bell, novelty clocks, and a drawer filled with copies of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, a British novel that features stolen emeralds and the world of change ringing. * Change ringing is an intellectual sport. It involves a set of ringers, one per bell, taking turns to together perform a series of memorized patterns. The result isn’t melodic, like carillon bells, but something far more transfixing, like a pulsing code, the slow collapse of a bridge, marbles being dropped down the face of K2. Ringers mark weddings, funerals, federal holidays, and crises, or sometimes do what’s called a “peal attempt,” which involves ringing thousands of possible permutations on a set of bells, and can take hours without pause. I heard about change ringing from a friend, whose parents met and fell in love at a tower in college. They’ve been ringing together for decades. The friend described change ringing as “religious adjacent”—historically, those who didn’t care for Sunday mass would ascend the tower to ring and drink. Contemporary ringers come from varying professions but often have backgrounds in math or music. Famous ringers include Sir John Betjeman, poet and defender of Victorian architecture; Jon Shanklin, discoverer of the hole in the ozone; Kate Barker, economist; John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress; Paul Revere, silversmith. My curiosity in the bells was immediate and inextinguishable, as though I’d found a possible sound that could make up for all my silences. Read More
December 17, 2020 Arts & Culture Variations on a Few Sentences by Can Xue By Scholastique Mukasonga The following is Scholastique Mukasonga’s foreword to Can Xue’s Purple Perilla, the latest from isolarii, a series of “island books” released every two months by subscription. Rather than an author’s biography, isolarii forewords provide entry points to the world of the work, emotional tools, and generative reactions. Using three excerpts from the text as inspiration, Mukasonga places Purple Perilla within the current context of digital labor, isolation, and the climate crisis. Can Xue. I (Fay) received a love letter: she didn’t know who had sent it. This love letter wasn’t much like a love letter. This morning, like every other morning, I don’t expect any letters. No use running to the mailbox, there won’t be any letters, no love letters, not even one love letter, one anonymous love letter. No one writes me letters, no one these days writes letters, not even anonymous letters, especially not a love letter. I stay in front of my computer. I’m leaning over my computer screen, I press a key: the emails scroll by, from bottom to top. That’s all emails do, scroll from bottom to top, scroll endlessly, nothing can stop them. A love email, a billet-doux, a declaration of passionate love, the pain of love, mad love, impossible over email, it will immediately wind up in the spam folder, in spam hell mixed in with the horrific spam, pornographic, pedophilic, evangelical, satanist nudist conspiracy-theorist Islamist love spams burn in the deepest circle of spam hell. I’m overtaken with sudden rage. Brusquely I shut the computer. The eye of light goes out. I am completely alone without emails. Read More
December 17, 2020 Off Menu The First Christmas Meal By Edward White Edward White’s column, Off Menu, serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. David Teniers the Younger, The Twelve Days of Christmas No. 8, 1634-40 These days, British and American Christmases are by and large the same hodgepodge of tradition, with relatively minor variations. This Christmas Eve, for example, when millions of American kids put out cookies and milk for Santa, children in Britain will lay out the more adult combination of mince pies and brandy for the old man many of them know as Father Christmas. For the last hundred years or so, Father Christmas has been indistinguishable from the American character of Santa Claus; two interchangeable names for the same white-bearded pensioner garbed in Coca-Cola red, delivering presents in the dead of night. But the two characters have very different roots. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, was given his role of nocturnal gift-giver in medieval Netherlands. Father Christmas, however, was no holy man, but a personification of Dionysian fun: dancing, eating, late-night drinking—and the subversion of societal norms. The earliest recognizable iteration of Father Christmas probably came in 1616 when, referring to himself as “Captain Christmas,” he appeared as the main character in Ben Jonson’s Christmas, His Masque, performed at the royal court that festive season. Nattily dressed and rotund from indulgence, he embodied Christmas as an openhearted festival of feasts and frolics. But by the time he appeared on the front cover of John Taylor’s pamphlet The Vindication of Christmas, in 1652, Father Christmas had grown skinny, mournful, and lonely, depressed by the grim fate that had befallen the most magical time of year. The days of carol singing and merrymaking were over; for the past several years Christmas across Britain had been officially canceled. The island was living through a so-called Puritan Revolution, in which the most radical changes to daily life were being attempted. Even the institution of monarchy had been discarded. As a ballad of the time put it, this was “the world turned upside down.” The prohibitions on Christmas dining would have particularly aggrieved Robert May. One of the most skilled chefs in the land, the English-born, French-trained chef cooked Christmas dinners fit for a king—a doubly unwelcome skill in a time of republicanism and puritanism. May connected the medieval traditions of English country cooking with the early innovations of urban French gastronomy, and was at the height of his powers when the Puritan Revolution took effect. During those years, he compiled The Accomplisht Cook, an English cookbook of distinction and importance that was eventually published in 1660. In more than a thousand recipes, May recorded not only the tastes and textures of a culinary tradition, but a cultural world that he feared was being obliterated—including the Christmas dinner, an evocative sensory experience that links the holiday of four centuries ago with that of today. Read More