November 23, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 35 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. “Thanksgiving will feel different this year. With so many of us unable to gather around tables with friends and family, I thought it might be nice to spend some time with literature that brings us together for memorable meals: sumptuous dinners, rollicking celebrations, and even some awkward dining room discussions. May we vicariously sit at these crowded tables, even as there may be empty seats at our own. Sam White’s poem ‘Memo’ captures what I hope these stories, poems, and interviews can offer during this strange week. The poem, which starts with a demolition, ends with a holiday meal. The closing lines: ‘Come sit by me. Before it gets cold. / Here is something. / You’d better start.’ And while fewer of us will be taking planes, trains, and automobiles this week, I cannot forget Frederick Seidel’s memorable Thanksgiving journey: the time he took a bus to see Ezra Pound. Read that story and many others in Seidel’s Art of Poetry interview. Dig in, dear readers. This year I’m grateful for writers and readers and how literature has helped carry us through. Have a happy, healthy holiday.” —EN When I think of raucous meals among friends, I don’t know who would win the cook-off: the epic brunch in Deborah Eisenberg’s “Taj Mahal” or the Russian banquet in Andrew Martin’s “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.” Read More
November 20, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mammoths, Magazines, and Mysterious Marks By The Paris Review João Gilberto Noll. Photo courtesy of Nectar Literary. This past week, when my roommate asked me about the plot of the João Gilberto Noll novel I was reading, Harmada, I struggled to even begin. “A man wakes up in the muck and encounters a child. He spits on the child’s wound to cure it, then walks away, eventually happening upon a play featuring two actresses. Then he has a threesome with the actresses, which eventually turns into a foursome with the company’s director, and by the way, one of the actresses is a single mother and has a baby, don’t forget. Then the man is in some kind of asylum or halfway house, remembering his life before, when he was a director and his wife abandoned him after he proved to be infertile. Then this baby, who’s now a teenage girl, is also there, and he helps her become the most famous actress in the city of Harmada. Eventually there’s a celebration, and I think this all might be a metaphor for the creative process and also Brazil, but maybe not … ” I’m still not entirely sure, but what I do know is that Harmada, translated from the Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, made me laugh out loud as much as it perplexed me, its boisterous absurdity and dreamlike logic making for a delightful way to spend an afternoon. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
November 20, 2020 Arts & Culture Cakes and Ale By Aysegul Savas Read Ayşegül Savaş’s story “Layover” in our Fall issue. The club has six members. Maks and I bring the cake. Beth brings drinks. Talia sets out chairs in front of the bookshop. Penelope carries the metal grill and turns the shop sign to CLOSED. Follie, the black dog, goes wild. She jumps and licks and runs in circles. Then she goes in search of an empty bookshelf to curl into. We have a joke about Follie reading all the books inside while the club congregates on the shop terrace, across from the gates to the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s really not that funny. But somehow at a gathering, it can become hysterical. The club is called Cakes and Ale. That might be my favorite of Maugham’s books, though it’s Penelope who came up with the name. She’s been a bookseller for thirty-five years, which means that she’s a master punner. She is also a master judge of character. It seems too obvious that a bookshop owner named Penelope, with her long hair and wool cardigans, should also be an eccentric. I’ll say, then, that she’s like a favorite childhood book: with unexpected turns and wicked humor, a meandering narrative that nevertheless knows where it’s headed. Maks is best among us at keeping Penelope on track when she tells stories. Not long ago, as Penelope told us a long story about Bach, a jazz pianist, and a brunch gone awry, Beth and Maks shouted in chorus: “Penelope get to the point!” So Penelope delivered: “She died.” Ours isn’t a book club. It’s not even a friends’ club, exactly, given how little we know about one another, far less than we do about friends with whom we have long and deep conversations, building constantly toward an unshakeable alliance: to share everything, to hold the same values, to have the same orientation in life. This one, if anything, is a humble pandemic club: we are, simply, neighbors. Before, we’d share a drink whenever we stayed past the shop’s closing time. Sometimes, feeling bad about our constant lingering, we’d come with a bottle and snacks. But now we have room for routine and we make no objection to sitting outdoors in the cold, on stools. It’s an old-fashioned gathering we wouldn’t have maintained in the old world, with travels and appointments and engagements, all the different groups we’d like to be a part of, the constant tailoring of our social circle to our own tastes and likeness. Read More
November 19, 2020 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Forough Farrokhzad By Joanna Scutts Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Read Forough Farrokhzad’s poems “After You” and “Window” in our Summer 2020 issue. Forough Farrokhzad in 1965 (wikimedia commons) In 1954, a nineteen-year-old poet walked unannounced into the office of the literary editor of Roshanfekr (The Intellectual), one of Iran’s most prestigious magazines. Her fingers were stained with green ink, and she trembled with nerves as she handed over three poems. One of them, the twelve-line “Sin,” described in explicit detail her affair with the magazine’s editor in chief. Different translations give different nuances to the opening of the poem: “I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace” (Sholeh Wolpé), or “I have sinned, a delectable sin, / In an embrace which was ardent, like fire” (Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée) or “I sinned / it was a most lustful sin / I sinned in arms sturdy as iron, / hot like fire and vengeful” (Farzaneh Milani). Across these variations, there are a few scandalous constants: the heat, the embrace, the pleasure, and the boldly unashamed I. The speaker declares herself as a sinner, but there is no repentance in the poem, no punishment. She is not her lover’s victim, but a joyous coconspirator, exhilarated by her power to arouse him: “Lust enflamed his eyes, / red wine trembled in the cup, / my body, naked and drunk, / quivered softly on his breast” (Wolpé). The magazine printed the poem. At a time when many Iranian poets wrote under pseudonyms, the author of “Sin” not only used her real name, but her poem appeared alongside her photograph and a short biography, which revealed her to be a married mother of a two-year-old son. It also described her physical appearance, in sexualized terms, drawing attention to her “disheveled hair” and “penetrating eyes.” Here was a young woman confessing to a sexual awakening in the arms of a man who was not her husband, a deliberate “reversal of a thousand years of Persian literature” written by men about their lovers, at a time when autobiographical writing by women was nonexistent in Iran. The biography collapsed any distance between the loving wife and the libidinous poet, implying that this was not a work of imagination, but a report on experience—making readers wonder what their own wives might be getting up to. Read More
November 19, 2020 Arts & Culture Long Live Work! By Dubravka Ugresic Photo: Dragiša Modrinjak. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Factories demand Workers must command —Primer, 1957 A Bulgarian grocery store opened for business in my Amsterdam neighborhood. On the inside of the plate-glass window they hung a Bulgarian flag, making the store highly visible from the outside, but dark inside. They sell overpriced Bulgarian groceries. And the same can be said of almost all the ethnic markets. First come the migrants, and after them—the markets. After a time the ethnic food markets disappear, but the migrants? Do they stick around? The number of Bulgarians in the Netherlands is clearly on the rise; two Bulgarian markets have opened recently in my neighborhood alone. And as to those with a “Balkan tooth,” they have famously deep pockets as far as food is concerned; they’ll happily shell out a euro or two extra to satisfy gourmandish nostalgia. The markets sell Bulgarian wine, frozen kebapcheta and meat patties, cheese pastries (banitsas), pickled peppers and cucumbers, kyopolou, pindjur, lyutenitsa, and sweets that look as if they’ve come from a package for aid to the malnourished: they are all beyond their shelf dates. The store is poorly tended and a mess, customers are always tripping over cardboard boxes. Next to the cash register sits a young man who doesn’t budge, more dead than alive, it’s as if he has sworn on his patron saint that nobody will ever extract a word from him. The young woman at the cash register is teen-magazine cute. She has a short skirt, long straight blond hair, a good tan. Her tan comes from her liquid foundation; her cunning radiates like the liquid powder. She files her nails, and next to her stands a small bottle of bright red nail polish. The scene fills me with joy. She grins slyly. I buy lyutenitsa, Bulgarian (Turkish, Greek, Macedonian, Serbian) cheese, and three large-size Bulgarian tomatoes. Dovizhdane. Довиждане. I know that every European right-wing heart warms to this description. True, the “Easterners,” the Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, not only steal, drink, and lie, but they bring with them their own pickles, their own swill. They can hardly wait to milk our welfare system, move into our subsidized housing, which they then sublet to others while they go back to their houses and lounge and laze around with the money they’ve ripped off from us taxpayers. Of course the Bulgarians, Romanians, and Poles think the same of their Roma; and until recently the Bulgarians thought likewise of their Turks. Ever since educated Bulgarian women have been rushing off to Turkey in droves, however, to earn a little pocket money as housekeepers, the constellation of products and the erosion of stereotypes has shifted to the advantage of the Turks. * The division into those who work and those who do not—the hardworking and the indolent, the diligent and the ne’er-do-wells, the earnest and the couch potatoes—is hardly new, but over the last few years it has become the basic media-ideological matrix around which revolve the freethinkers of the general public. Joining the category of the indolent, ne’er-do-wells, and malingerers are the ranks of the jobless (for whom the employed claim they are simply incompetents and bumblers), along with the grumblers, indignants, and the groups defined by their country, geography, and ethnicity (Greeks, Spaniards, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians—all shiftless riffraff!), anticapitalistic elements, hooligans, vandals, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists. In response to the question of how to become a multimillionaire, one of the wealthiest Russian oligarchs replied, “Don’t you forget, I work seventeen hours a day!” The very same answer is given by criminals, thieves, politicians, porn stars, war profiteers, celebs, mass murderers, and other similar deplorables. They all say seventeen hours a day, my career, and my job with such brash confidence, not a twitch to be seen. On Meet the Russians, a TV show broadcast by Fox, young, prosperous Russians, many of them born, themselves, into money, fashion models, fashion and entertainment industry moguls, pop stars, club owners, and the like, all use the following phrases: I deserve this; everything I have, I’ve earned; my time is money; I work 24/7; I never give up. Read More
November 18, 2020 Look (Dead) Birds of America By The Paris Review “I’ve always had a thing with birds,” said the artist Ida Applebroog in a 2016 interview. A few years ago, inspired by John James Audubon’s ornithological paintings, she began a series of works that foreground her longtime fascination with all things feathered. Unlike Audubon’s birds, which were brought beautifully to life on paper after being shot, eviscerated, and splinted into position by the naturalist himself, Applebroog’s birds don’t hide their mortality. A bluebird lies belly up, its ruddy breast exposed. An owl sprawls out with its eyes closed. A pair of gray woodpeckers dip their heads back, beaks pointed toward a sky to which they’ll never return. “Applebroog Birds,” a new show devoted to the artist’s avian works, will be on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location through December 19, 2020. A selection of images appears below. Ida Applebroog, Cardinal, 2018, ultrachrome ink on mylar, 52 1/2 x 40″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole. Ida Applebroog, Bluebird, 2018, ultrachrome ink and gel on mylar, 22 5/8 x 42 1/2″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole. Read More