December 16, 2020 First Person The World’s Greatest By Anna DeForest I spent the first surge worried I would kill my husband. I am a doctor and he has bad lungs. He does also have his own exposures, even works in the hospital—spiritual care. Suddenly the grieving were also infectious. Some nights, over the drinks we started to always have, we would wonder out loud which of us was the hero of the story of our lives. The hero is the one who will survive this. Back then, when one of us had worked in emergency or consulted on the COVID-19 wards, we would sleep in separate rooms. Now we do that work every day, and we don’t always want to be alone. I feel in my body that this grief will be permanent, although the doctors who run my residency program speak only of resilience, when they speak of the pandemic at all. They show a bored sort of disbelief in their trainees’ new and universal disinterest in anything educational. Why become a doctor if you can’t handle all this death? Far from the bedside, the men in charge get stars in their eyes when they describe this historic time. Online, the crowds are less inspired. “Do your job,” say the comments under firsthand accounts of working COVID-19 units in U.S. hospitals. Hero or not, I am someone who never outgrew a child’s world view, cast centrally in the drama of all human life. Survivors of abuse often get stuck in this place, in the permanent self-centeredness of having a weak sense of self. Raised in a setting of neglect and violence, I carry the loaded diagnosis of complex PTSD. Now that I am also, somehow, a medical doctor, I tend toward stubborn self-importance, and I do not suffer well. My husband, in contrast, as a hospital chaplain, is a certified calming presence, friend to the sick, broken, and alone, a professional beast of burden. Neither disposition, I can tell you now, rises better than the other to this particular moment, though it may be useful to have been traumatized in advance. Read More
December 15, 2020 Redux Redux: Morning Full of Voices 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. Stephen Sondheim. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, The Paris Review is humming a little tune. Read on for Stephen Sondheim’s Art of the Musical interview, Sigrid Nunez’s “The Blind” (the first chapter of her novel The Friend), and Eamon Grennan’s poem “Musical Interlude.” 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 TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Stephen Sondheim, The Art of the Musical Issue no. 142, Spring 1997 Some lyrics read well because they’re conversational lyrics. Oscar’s do not read very well because they’re colloquial but not conversational. Without music, they sound simplistic and written. Yet it’s precisely the hypersimplicity of the language that gives them such force. If you listen to “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’ ” from Carousel, you’ll see what I mean. Read More
December 14, 2020 Winter Solstice In Winter We Get inside Each Other By Nina MacLaughlin Nina MacLaughlin’s column, Winter Solstice, will have its final installment next Monday, December 21, on the solstice. Paul Cezanne, Leda and the Swan, c. 1882 The sledding hill in the town I grew up in was on the grounds of an institution for the criminally insane. Hospital Hill, we called it. Or Mental Mountain. It was a great place to sled. A huge hill, a real wallomping mound of earth, a sledder’s heaven, there at the southern edge of the asylum, steep, long, with a stretch of flat at the bottom long enough that your ride could run its course without crashing into the barrier of brush and trees, or out into traffic on Route 27 beyond. At the top, asylum to our backs, we took our running starts then flung ourselves, belly flopping onto our inflated snow tubes, and whished down the hill. Or sometimes sitting upright on the tube, someone behind you, parent or pal, put their hands at your shoulder blades, started running, pushing, building speed, until gravity took over and the hill pulled faster than the push, and hands disappeared from your back, and you were released, hovering over the snow, cold air in your ears, tang of blood on the tongue from a chapped lip, mittens gripping the handles, the high-pitched purr of rubber on snow, snow that had been packed by ride after ride, it was you and the movement, and it never felt crazy to cry out, there by yourself, going faster and faster, in your own private moment of fear and glee. Is that what made the lunatics yell inside their white-walled cells? Some same combination of soaring down a mountainside unstoppable, I’m happy, I’m afraid, I feel too much, I have to let it out? So we surrender. “This is the Hour of Lead—” writes Emily Dickinson: Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go— The walk back up the hill took a while, we’d be panting, ready to shed a layer, and the brick buildings of the hospital loomed into view near the top, bars on all the windows. The hospital was closed in 2003, all the windows boarded up with wood painted red. I can feel right now the hands disappearing from my shoulder blades. And I can hear the sound of the alarm when someone escaped from the hospital. Not the blaring tin of a car alarm or wheeeuuuu whirl of an ambulance or clattering clang of grade school fire drill. More foghorn, deep, soul-stilling moan, as though the bulkhead door to the basement of Hell was being pried open again and again. Read More
December 14, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 37 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 selections below. “ ’Tis the season of gift giving. Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, something else, or nothing in particular, you’re probably finding yourself engaged this month in the process of wrapping and unwrapping presents. For some, gift wrapping is an exercise in achievable perfection—neat corners, perfect creases, tasteful bits of tape in all the right places, a gorgeously appointed bow to top it off. For others (I include myself in this group), it is torture, a comedy of errors that begins with forgetting to measure before cutting the wrapping paper and ends with a finished gift that looks like a lumpy quilt sewn by a baby. But it’s the thought that counts, right? Below, you will find many such thoughts in a series of stories and poems that touch upon the gift-giving season. Read on for fantastical presents, perfect presents, and wrapping disasters. These are gifts that keep on giving, and there is something, I hope, for everyone. Speaking of the gift that keeps on giving, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that a subscription to The Paris Review (for yourself or someone else) and TPR merchandise also make great gifts, and while it may be too late to deliver them by Christmas, we have this elegant gift card that you can print out and put under the tree—or wherever you lay your gifts. Happy holidays, happy reading, and stay safe.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Photo: Tomasz Sienicki. CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Joel Stein’s poem “A Gift for You” offers some things that everyone needs but that are very difficult to give. Read More
December 11, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Monsters, Monarchs, and Mutinies By The Paris Review Still from Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection. There’s a gently anarchic spirit to William Greaves’s 1968 experimental documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which follows Greaves and his crew as they attempt to film two actors staging a breakup scene in Central Park. This description barely scratches the surface of what’s really going on: Greaves himself is playing a role, that of the bumbling director—but he’s the only one in on it. The script is melodramatic; the actors—mostly a middle-class white couple, but other actors of different ages, backgrounds, and races are swapped in and out—overact; the crew—instructed to always have three cameras going, on the scene, the crew, and the park itself—stages a mutiny. Unbeknownst to Greaves, they film their grievances and critiques and present them to him once it’s all over (these make up three major sections of the movie). As one crew member remarks, this is a movie about power. But as it turns out, that was the conceit all along: at one point, Greaves explains that he was hoping they’d call him out on the bad script and provide some lines of their own. (The edits suggested by one crew member are equally terrible, to my ears, but in a kind of charmingly sixties way clearly born out of the sexual revolution.) Toward the end, they stumble across a man who claims to be homeless and living in the park; the last vestiges of an old New York bohemianism, he gives a flamboyant speech about all that’s wrong with the world. As I watched the crew wander again through the park while the credits rolled, something reminded me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a merry band of revelers, role reversals, the breakdown of hierarchies, that summertime feeling of possibility. Immediately, I queued up Greaves’s 2005 follow-up: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
December 11, 2020 Arts & Culture The Politics of Louise Fitzhugh By Leslie Brody In the autumn of 1974, one month shy of the publication of her new novel, Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change, Louise Fitzhugh pulled the emergency brake. Authors rarely invoke such a costly and disruptive eleventh-hour freeze, but Fitzhugh persuaded her publishers at Farrar, Straus and Giroux that her book about a Black family in New York City was incomplete. Stopping the presses is a rare request for any author, but for Fitzhugh, the forty-six-year-old writer of the wildly popular children’s book Harriet the Spy, it was a radical measure entirely in keeping with her practice of telling the truth about children. When Fitzhugh said that she wrote for kids in order to do something good in “this lousy world,” she meant, this misogynist, racist, and homophobic one. As a writer of books for young readers, Fitzhugh wasn’t interested in fairy tales. Nor did she want her newest novel to simply reflect reality, she wanted her readers to be confronted and shocked by the undiluted fact that children were murdered by the police because they were Black in America. Eighteen months earlier, in April 1973, Fitzhugh had been drafting a version of Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change when she read on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times that Clifford Glover, a ten-year-old Black child, had been shot in the back by a plainclothes police officer in Jamaica, Queens. Fitzhugh saw such incidents of unchecked police brutality as a nauseating throwback to the systemic racial violence of her youth in segregated Memphis, Tennessee. Born to a wealthy family in 1928, Fitzhugh would come to repudiate the white supremacist world of her childhood. By 1950, she’d settled in Greenwich Village. As a young lesbian artist, her first response to just about any assertion of supremacy—white, male, heterosexual, abstract expressionist, or just garden-variety pomposity—was typically to oppose it. Read More