July 30, 2020 In Memoriam A Keeper of Jewels: Remembering Brad Watson By M.O. Walsh Brad Watson. Photo: © Nell Hanley. I met Brad Watson in 2004. He was starting a one-year stint as the Grisham Visiting Writer at Ole Miss, where I was an M.F.A. student, and I’d signed up for his workshop. The week before the semester began, I saw him at a bar in town, newly arrived and sitting on a stool by himself. I went up and introduced myself and he looked me over and grinned. His eyes had this way of shining when he found something funny. “You the one who wrote that weird story with the mannequin?” he asked me. “I am,” I confessed. “I enjoyed it,” he said, and picked up his drink. “I like sort of oddball stuff.” At that point in my life, my glorious and unpublished twenties, I knew only that I wanted to be a good writer, not that I could be. So, this exchange gave me a suspicious confidence. I liked Brad from the start. Read More
July 29, 2020 First Person Be Good By Destiny O. Birdsong © Hamdan / Adobe Stock. The eighty-four days I spent in a relationship with my rapist were days filled with music. We met in a nightclub, Schoolboy Q pulsing around us as he held my waist and I yelled my name into his ear. After our first date, I let an awards show replay in the background as I squealed into the phone with a friend. Earlier that evening, he kissed me deeply as he dropped me off at my car. “I shouldn’t let you leave,” he whispered before parting my lips with his tongue. I recounted these details as Beyoncé belted “Drunk in Love” in a performance taped only a few weeks after her self-titled album’s release, when the world was abuzz with her fuller, post-baby body, her unapologetically sex-positive lyrics. My rapist made me feel the way Beyoncé looked on that stage, her heavy thighs peeking through glittery fishnets as she reclined backward on a chair with the microphone so close to her lips, she could have licked it. One night, my rapist asked if I’d heard of Gregory Porter. “There’s a song of his that reminds me of you,” he said, and that was the first time I heard “Be Good (Lion’s Song).” It’s about a couple, except the man is a lion, and the woman has trapped him in a cage because he can’t be trusted to roam freely. In the first verse, when they meet, the lion is brushing his mane; by the second, he has trimmed his claws and cut his hair, and the woman has already told him that lions are meant to be caged; if they’re left to walk around, “they might just bite.” The woman’s name is Be Good, a phrase she also repeats to him, though it is he who sings that refrain to us. He is both her amanuensis and her accuser. “Does she know what she does / when she dances around my cage?” he asks again and again, each time more plaintive than the last. My rapist compared me to Be Good because the tenor of our relationship had changed. I had become a difficult woman where I had been so simple before, wanting only his body—nothing more. We had a lot of sex, and my rapist had few inhibitions and even less predictability. In one moment, he could be gentle, almost tearful. In another, rough, commanding, and I liked it. I’d spent much of my life doing the things I believed people expected me to do. Sometimes, I was successful in pleasing them. Other times, I failed miserably, and I thought of those failures constantly. It was nice to let someone else be responsible for making decisions. Read More
July 29, 2020 Sky Gazing What Shape Is the Sky? By Nina MacLaughlin This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky. Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857. I walked to a high place and slept at the top. The air there was thin. Someone sleeping in the space adjacent was ill. Coughs punched through the wall in the night. But wall is not the accurate word for the thin sheets of particle board that divided the space. A quilt hung by clothespins would’ve caught the sound better, baseball into mitt as opposed to baseball through wax paper. “Altitude sickness” had been whispered in the courtyard in the evening as the sun did a better and better job hiding itself behind the mountains, sending megaphones of cold light toward whispers of clouds. In bed, I worried as the sounds of the sickness graveled and percussed their way to my ears. Tunnel of throat, dark cavity of lung. Breath yolky and frothed. Go down, I urged the person in my mind. Go down. Get lower where your lungs and blood can feed on the oxygen they need. I wanted them to stop coughing and I did not want them to stop coughing because I feared that a stopped cough meant dead. I lay in bed that night—a plywood platform on which I spread my sleeping bag—wearing double the regular amount of pants, four layers of shirts, a down vest, a wool hat. I pulled the hood of the bag over my head to muffle the coughs. I did not fear contagion, but the sickness in the next room meant the sickness was possible in my room, too. And by room I mean my body. I was far away, higher than I’d ever been on earth. I was afraid. I did not want to die. And it seemed so lonely to die so far away from everyone I loved. Read More
July 28, 2020 Redux Redux: A Aries, T Taurus, G Gemini 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. Kay Ryan. Photo: Jennifer Loring. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons. This week at The Paris Review, we’re feeling esoteric. In the cards are Kay Ryan’s Art of Poetry interview, Fernanda Melchor’s “They Called Her the Witch,” and Charles Bernstein’s “Twelve-Year Universal Horoscope.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a 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. Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94 Issue no. 187 (Winter 2008) I’d bought a tarot deck—this was the seventies—a standard one with a little accompanying book that explained how to read the cards, lay them out, shuffle them—all those things. But I’m not a student and was totally impatient with learning anything about the cards. I thought they were just interesting to look at. But I did use the book’s shuffling method, which was very elaborate, and in the morning I’d turn one card over and whatever that card was I would write a poem about it. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again and some I’d never see. That gave me range. I always understood that to write poetry was to be totally exposed. But in the seventies I only had models of ripping off your clothes, and I couldn’t do that. My brain could be naked, but I didn’t want to be naked. Nor was I interested in the heart, or love. The tarot helped me see that I could write about anything—even love if required—and retain the illusion of not being exposed. If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. But at the same time, one has to feel thoroughly masked or protected. Read More
July 28, 2020 First Person The Landscape That Made Me By Melissa Faliveno Photo: Corey Coyle. CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons. In the summer of ’89, it barely rained. More than fifty days passed without a drop. The corn dried up. The crops didn’t yield. Acres of farmland turned brown in the sun. Neighbors and livestock died in the heat; wildfires tore across the plains. But we were too young to worry, to know what the word drought could mean to a small Midwestern town like ours, or the miles of farmland that surrounded it. We spent our days in the fields and woods, the sun high and bright through the leaves. We traveled in packs; we wandered alone. We were great in number; we were two at a time. We scuffed up our jeans, scraped up our knees, tore holes in shirts that got snagged on branches. We climbed the trees and yelled into the wind, and no one heard but us. We ran for miles, the dry summer grasses nicking our shins, trying to find the place where land met sky. We hiked through the goldenrod, up to our waists, our eyes swelling and legs itching, and laid down to watch the clouds move east. And then we walked back the way we came, outlines of our bodies on the ground behind us, bright-yellow dust on our skin. We were people of the prairie. We were people of the trees. We were the maple and birch, the oak and elm. We were corn and wheat and soy, we were the black earth that grew it. We were bluestem and switchgrass, we were rivers and lakes. And out past the horizon of hardwood and pine, we were mountains. We were girls. We were boys. We were neither and both. We were small. We were nothing. We were taller than the trees. Read More
July 28, 2020 Arts & Culture Apprehending the Light By Scott O’Connor Photo: Scott O’Connor. On a mild evening at the end of May, the day after the official U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached a hundred thousand, I drove thirty miles from Los Angeles to see a work of art. I’d first visited James Turrell’s Dividing the Light seven years before with my wife and son. We shared a night of quiet beauty in the outdoor installation on the campus of Pomona College. That experience stayed with me, a moment of meditative calm to remember when things were hectic or difficult. But the feeling had faded over time. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, I hoped that by returning to the site I could recapture some of that peace. I listened to the news as I drove, discussions of the number dead. I tried to wrap my head around what it meant that the lives of a hundred thousand people in this country, and so many more around the world, had ended in just the last few months. But after a while I turned off the radio. The enormity of the tally made it impossible to comprehend the individual lives lost. The number was a shapeless whole that consumed its separate parts. Dividing the Light is one of Turrell’s Skyspaces. Once inside, the Minimalist architecture blocks a visitor’s view of the vastness above, except for an aperture cut into a wall or ceiling, which focuses attention on that single circle or square of sky. The Pomona College piece is an unassuming metal pavilion nestled into a courtyard between academic buildings. There’s a sixteen-foot square opening in the center of the pavilion; a shallow reflecting pool of the same dimensions sits directly below. A low wall of granite benches rings the perimeter, coral-colored, like the light one often sees in the west at the end of a Southern California day. It was just before sunset when I reached the empty pavilion. I stood and looked at the opening above, the whitish-blue square of sky that seemed removed from the rest, as if it had been cut out and set apart. My mind wouldn’t stop racing, though, cycling between the U.S. death toll, the even larger worldwide number, and the staggering numbers yet to come. Read More