August 24, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 23 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 pieces below. “It was early in the pandemic and our Art of Distance newsletters that I mentioned my daily ambulations through Alphabet City with my pooch, Willow. Then, daffodils were blooming along the East River, seemingly oblivious of the sirens racing up FDR Drive. These days, in that same stretch of park, we’re waiting for the trees that were uprooted in Isaias to be cleared, but we’ve also found a rogue clutch of sunflowers. The city is quieter, by dint of lower viral rates and a certain amount of road-tripping neighbors, and there are picnic blankets dotting the lawns of the park. I used to complain about August here: it was sweaty and stinky and felt like the city went on hold. Everyone who could quit New York did, leaving the rest of us to brave that particular funk of the subway platform when the tunnel temperature crept above 90. But this year, as we brace for the fall’s uncertainty, viral and political, the dog days of summer are particularly welcome. Willow and I are walking slower, longer, and trying to hold on to this pause, this small peace.” —Emily Nemens, Editor There have been few bright spots through the ordeal of COVID-19, but for the staff of The Paris Review, one of them has been welcoming some new wolves into the pack: two colleagues have acquired pandemic puppies (Cashew and Penny). In celebration of our canine companions, here are some selections from the archive: “The dog was not demanding, it was modest in its requirements, although it drank a lot of water; it liked its water. It could square itself off like a package in a chair, it could actually resemble a package.” In Joy Williams’s “Substance,” Louise is delivered an unexpected furry gift. Read More
August 24, 2020 Arts & Culture A Collision with the Divine By Helen Macdonald © Jana Behr / Adobe Stock. The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom. I’ve been told these particular beasts are fallow deer of the menil variety, which means their usual darker tones have been leached by genetics to soft cuttlefish and ivory, and they’re the descendants of a herd brought here in the sixteenth century as beasts of venery, creatures to be pursued and caught and cooked. The look of the estate hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still an extensive patchwork of pasture and forest—except now the M25 runs through it, six lanes of fast-moving traffic behind chain-link fence threaded with stripling trees. The mist thickens, the light falls, the deer appear and disappear, and the deep roar of the motorway burns inside my chest as I walk on to the bridge that spans it. This bridge is grassed along its length, and at dusk and dawn, I’ve been told, the deer use it as a thoroughfare from one side of the estate to the other. I know my presence will dissuade them from crossing so I don’t want to stay too long, but I linger a little while to watch the torrent of lights beneath me. For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots, and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail. Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is. Read More
August 21, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dictators, Deep Souls, and Doom By The Paris Review Lyonel Trouillot. Photo: Georges Seguin. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). A sense of unease pervades the Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, as does a sense of political hopelessness. The novel charts, over the course of a single night, a violent uprising in Port-au-Prince against the dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal, told from the perspectives of three characters: a taxi driver, a madam in a brothel, and a post office employee. Central to the story is the problem of how one should approach the subject of political violence in a work of art. In language that does nothing to prettify—in fact, the poetry of Trouillot’s sentences serves to better underscore the horrors he describes—the characters navigate lives lived in a moment of grim uncertainty. “How could we have made love,” the postal worker asks his lover, “when we were perhaps already dead, uncertain of our own existence, even incapable of imagining the point of existence? … What do such pretty phrases have to do with the paralysis of terrified flesh, already absent from its own desires?” These are salient questions, questions that have no answers. “In the silence,” he continues, “the dream flowered in her eyes. In some way or another, we had led the night to us.” —Rhian Sasseen Read More
August 21, 2020 The Last Year On Lasts By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November, January, and March. It returns for a final month this August, as Jill and Indie take one final road trip together to Indie’s campus. © Matthew Lee High Summer slips away, like so much else this year. It’s late August, midafternoon, and I’m sitting on a porch in upstate New York. This is the final week my daughter, Indie, and I have together on our cross-country trip to her new college. These days are the last ones before we say goodbye at her dorm, before we begin to unfold the pages of our separate lives. * Not long before we left Texas two weeks ago, I asked Indie if she’d like to take me on a tour of her favorite places in high school. She grabbed her keys and drove us to a doughnut store, to the turn she took so many times on Crescent Street, past her school parking space under a tree, to the restaurant where she had worked for over a year, to Sonic Drive-In, space 23, the one she and her best friend pulled into every time, and to the band practice field, telling me stories the whole way. At the Dairy Queen on University, she told me it had the slowest drive-through in town, but the best mint Oreo Blizzards. * At the final custody hearing in Boulder in 2003 (Indie was sixteen months old), the judge ordered the only visitation Indie’s father requested (five days every summer). He left the courtroom without a word. My parents had flown in from Texas, and together we watched him walk down the hallway and step into an elevator. As the doors closed, my father said, “Well, you’ll never see him again.” He was right. Read More
August 20, 2020 Arts & Culture The Waiting Game By Hannah Ewens Rolling Stones fans in Norway, 1964. Photo: National Archives of Norway. Via Wikimedia Commons. Teenage girls are yelping. It’s just after four in the morning and a huge rat—a heaving, greasy, small-dog-size thing—is dragging its weight along the pavement next to us. “Eurgh, fuck off!” yell fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, one pulling the cord of the hood of her sleeping bag tight so only her eyes are looking out. “You always see them this early, especially in London,” she says solemnly. We’re all sitting or lying outside London’s Brixton Academy, one night in March 2017. Every ten minutes or so, girls arrive in darkness to wait for the pop-punk show happening the following night. Two friends, fifteen-year-old Lauren and fourteen-year-old Jess from across town in Bethnal Green, were already there at its steps when I shuffled over at three. They greeted me like I was another teen fan, not a writer in her midtwenties. “Come and sit down.” “Are you excited?” Their immediate assumption was that I was there for the same reason. They’d had waffles and whipped cream one of their mothers had made at about one and had been dropped off in her car. Both showed me their supplies for the night, day, and evening. Out of duffels come blankets, a full-size pillow, doughnuts, hair ties, makeup, portable chargers, money, exercise books, marker pens, T-shirts, CDs (very odd), phones, digital cameras, disposable cameras; enough for a camping trip. They are, I thought, camping, just with one of the ugliest backdrops I’ve ever seen. “We’re going to wait until security get here and set up the barriers and then we’ll sleep,” Lauren says. Along the grimy beige pavement down the left of the building, multiple girls are already passed out in sleeping bags like a row of wood lice, some savvy enough to bring foam mats. “Our mums didn’t mind us being here because it’s the last day of term.” She shrugs. “We’ll just say we’re ill or something.” Read More
August 20, 2020 At Work Leaving It All Behind: A Conversation with Makenna Goodman By Alexander Chee I met Makenna Goodman last fall, after moving to a small town in Vermont near the college where I teach. When I say “small town” I mean it: we don’t have a stop light, there’s no restaurant or gas station, and no one really comes here unless they live here. Makenna is my new neighbor, across the road, and she threw me a welcome-to-the-neighborhood party that was the first anyone had ever thrown for me. It was also the last party I attended in someone’s house before quarantine. When Makenna asked me if I wanted to read her debut novel, I said yes, even though I feared the awkwardness that would ensue if I didn’t like it. Luckily, The Shame is startlingly original, the story of a young woman in Vermont who leaves her husband and children to drive off in the middle of the night for New York, to meet a woman she is obsessed with, a ceramicist she knows only through the internet. Part of its pleasure is in the construction—the recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make. The structure feels both assured and free—free of so many of the anxieties I’ve seen in so many debuts over the years. I’ve seen a few of the recent reviews address that the narrator is a mother, and say that this is somehow a novel about motherhood, but I think of it as a novel about art and anxiety, and the narrator is a mother. More importantly, this is a novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don’t matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter. How you will drive all night to meet someone you know only from the internet, but won’t sit down and make art. Most importantly, to my mind, it is a novel about the emotional labor of self-sacrifice, a portrait of how the white middle class eats itself, especially by devouring women, who are asked to prepare themselves like a dish to be served—and then to serve it too, as it were. Makenna’s novel isn’t particularly autobiographical, but it is a bit like talking to her—like her novel, she is blunt and funny, and moves in any direction she wants. It was a pleasure to speak to her about everything from authenticity to social media to “connection.” INTERVIEWER I’ve gleaned that you wrote this novel in secret. Is that an accurate statement? GOODMAN You make it sound so mysterious and exciting. Yes, I wrote it in secret. I was deep in my editing career, I hadn’t been trying to publish anything, I wasn’t a professional writer. So, writing felt like this thing that was just for me, and I didn’t need to tell anybody about it. At a certain point, after I had finished the first draft, I said to Sam, my husband, Oh yeah, I’ve been working on this thing. I don’t know if it’s any good, and he said, Let me read it. We read very different things and have different taste, so I thought, Well, he’s going to hate it and that’ll be good. Because then he’ll tell me he hates it and then it’ll all be over. But then he said I should send it to my agent, whom I hadn’t talked to in years. And I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. Okay. But I sent it to her and literally four days later, she wrote me back and she said, We’re sending this out. So, it was kind of traumatic. INTERVIEWER This is an interesting way to react. Traumatic? Read More