June 16, 2020 First Person The Origin of My Laugh By Danielle Geller When my mother died, her best friend Heidi called and told me, “What I’ll miss most is her laugh.” * When my mother called me on the phone before she died, she rarely laughed but often cried. * My mother had four daughters, and I am the oldest. My mother did not raise us. We had all been adopted: the first of us, by our paternal grandmother; the third, by my mother’s friend; the fourth, by a family in Virginia shortly after she was born. My youngest sister is almost twenty years younger than me—she was eight years old the first time we met. I found a card her family had sent my mother with a still-working cell phone number printed inside, and we set up a meeting while I was in town for a conference. As we walked across the parking lot toward their car, her adoptive mother made an off-hand comment that startled me into laughter. She tripped over nothing and gasped, “You have your mother’s laugh.” * When I was in middle school, I fell in love with a friend’s laugh. It sounded like cute, high-pitched hiccups. I practiced her laugh alone in my room—as if my laugh could be something smaller, something else. Grandma always said she could pick my laugh out of a crowd. * A bat biologist once described my laugh as the sound a crow makes when it sees something really shiny. * A few years ago, a friend I knew only through voice chat and video games visited me in Boston. More accurately, he visited Boston for a video game convention, but I had invited him and the rest of our guild to my apartment for a dinner of homemade pulled-pork sandwiches, corn bread, and macaroni and cheese. On the train ride down, his phone’s battery died, and he found himself wandering my street in the dark because he couldn’t remember the number of my building. He was about to head back to his hotel when he heard it, my laughter, erupting from the open living room window. “I knew that laugh!” he yelled when I opened the door. * My mother did not want her daughters to return to the Navajo reservation. She kept us from her family to protect us, she thought. But after she died, I reconnected with my aunt, and the first time we talked on the phone, I recognized it, my mother’s laugh, carried hundreds of miles from the land she once called home. Read More
June 15, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 13 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. “In this thirteenth Art of Distance newsletter, we’re continuing to share the work of great Black writers from our archive. Unlocked this week is everything the Review has published by Hilton Als, who is a TPR advisory editor, a person of letters with a wildly capacious sensibility, and a wearer of many hats. Ostensibly, Als writes nonfiction, but that term is far too limiting to classify all that he does. He is a voracious consumer and assimilator of culture, churning the books, music, theater, and people he loves into visions and versions of his own unfolding story. His essays are like rigorous dreamscapes, vitally alive and wide open to everything the world has to share—Als turns nothing away. Als has not only contributed writing to the Review: he has also conducted several penetrating and joyful Writers at Work interviews, and has been featured across the past decade on the Daily. Enmeshed in his reevaluations of the culture of the past century is a stark look at the struggles that have brought us to this moment in Black, queer, and American history.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Hilton Als in a London photo booth, 2014. Courtesy of the writer. “I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world,” Als tells Lisa Cohen in his Art of the Essay interview, which covers everything from mentors to trauma to queer life in New York to Thelonious Monk, Jane Fonda, and writing sentences that are “natural to who I am.” Read More
June 15, 2020 Arts & Culture Painted Ladies By Camille Dungy The painted lady larvae came in a small, clear plastic cup with a half inch of growth medium on the bottom. Tiny holes in the lid for air. The day they arrived, each was no longer nor thicker than an individual, mascara-plumped eyelash. There were six living larvae in the cup. You could find them if you looked, squirming across the medium or edging up the sides, but you had to look. I never thought much about eyelashes until I started shopping for them. Now they’re the first thing I notice on a woman. My daughter is a dancer. She’s only nine, but her dance school requires she wear false lashes for all performances. I’ve always been afraid of glue-on lashes. The ripping off part scares me the most. I’m afraid the adhesive will take with it something that matters. Instead, I found a company that makes magnetic lashes. A thick coat of eyeliner, and they stay right on. They are endless, the things I discover so my girl can do what she loves. * We’d tried to grow painted lady butterflies at home before, but we traveled too much that summer. They are easy to care for during their larval stage, but once they build their chrysalides, you have to keep a careful watch. After they have hardened—but not so long after that you disturb the unseen process happening inside—you must transfer the chrysalides to the netted cage that will be the emerged butterfly’s home. You must set inside the cage a bowl of sugar water filled with little wads of sweet-water-soaked paper towels, also at just the right time, remembering to change the water and towel wads every other day. Stay near. You must be present at the moment when the butterflies emerge. We missed the good parts last time. We had to take the net cage to my parents’ house. The painted ladies emerged there, without fanfare, living most of their brief, final days while we were away. * The magnetic lashes were advertised in several lengths and degrees of thickness, each named after a city: Nashville, Dallas, Portland, Chicago. Portland was the least conspicuous, then Seattle. The Chicago lashes were more densely packed. The Los Angeles style was longer and crosshatched in a way that made you want to look at them closely. They resembled Madonna’s $10,000 mink lashes, but without diamonds at the base. We bought Seattle. When they arrived and we’d gotten them applied I asked, “What would Dallas have looked like on you!?” I couldn’t even begin to imagine Vegas on my child’s eyes. * I thought it would be a positive learning experience to watch something tiny and plain as those larvae grow into creatures as beautiful, as magical, as butterflies. Read More
June 12, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Billboards, Bookstores, and Butler By The Paris Review Octavia E. Butler. Photo: Ching-Ming Cheung. When the pandemic hit and we were suddenly living in a world I had never quite imagined, I turned to Octavia E. Butler to lose myself in a world she had. I read her Xenogenesis trilogy, collected in the single-volume edition Lilith’s Brood (please try to unsee the cover—whatever fool decided that these masterworks of speculative literature should be dressed up like romance novels is working in the wrong design department). Butler imagines a postapocalyptic Earth where almost all humans have perished in a nuclear disaster except for a handful who were saved and genetically reengineered by aliens. These aliens, called the Oankali, make it their business to visit broken worlds and “trade” genes with other species in hopes of mutual upgrade. In recent weeks, during the uprising following the murder of George Floyd, I have been grateful again for this trilogy. Butler was, unsurprisingly, ahead of her time in many ways. The Oankali have three genders, one of which is neither female nor male, and they view human racism and hatred with great confusion, as their whole MO is accepting and learning from difference. Of course, Butler’s epic also reveals much of the worst of human nature, and she’s helped me think about that, too—about what needs to change and how we might change it. —Craig Morgan Teicher Read More
June 12, 2020 Arts & Culture The Wicked Candor of Wanda Coleman By Terrance Hayes Wanda Coleman. Photo: Rod Bradley. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a sterling, one-of-a-kind record of what it meant to be the late, great poet Wanda Coleman. I will offer a few comments, but let it be said, in life and in poetry, Wanda Coleman always preferred to speak for herself. In Wanda’s introduction to her chapbook Greatest Hits 1966–2003, published by Pudding House Press in 2004, she wrote: Eager to make my mark on the literary landscape, I got busy finding the mentors who would teach me in lieu of the college education I could not afford. As a result, I have developed a style composed of styles sometimes waxing traditional, harking to the neoformalists, but most of my poems are written in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical free verse, dotted with literary, musical, and cinematic allusions, accented with smatterings of German, Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish, and neologisms, and rife with various cants and jargons, as they capture my interest, from the corporate roundtables to the streets. First of all: the syntax of that second sentence is breathtaking. Second of all: what could I say to follow that!? Maybe something about my own true introduction to her? In the summer of 2001, I shared the stage with Wanda at the Schomburg Center for Black Research’s 75th Anniversary Heritage Festival. The reading, “A Nation of Poets: Wordsmiths for a New Millennium,” included Wanda and me, along with Amiri Baraka, Staceyann Chin, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith. It’s not a very detailed memory. I was too awed to truly pay attention to anybody’s poems (my own included). I mostly only remember the “frenetic, sometimes lyrical” (Neologismic? Languafied?) sound of Wanda’s voice, her towering hair and bangles, her patterned fabrics and big glasses and big wicked laugh. I don’t remember what she read, though I know she was writing some of her best work at the time and finally receiving some long overdue attention. Mercurochrome, the book she published that year, would be a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry, and 1998’s Bathwater Wine had received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. But Wanda was still announcing her presence and suspicions. Read More
June 11, 2020 Arts & Culture Solace By Megan Giddings On joy, cultural empathy, and the K-drama Crash Landing on You. Still from Crash Landing on You In April, I was suicidal for the first time in over a decade. Even before lockdown, my mental health had been poor. The dreams I was having in April—back when I was actually sleeping—were anxiety-based and vivid. One recurring dream I had, both before and during the pandemic: I was walking in a grocery store where everyone but me was white. They would put their hands on my wrist or back or hair as I walked by. If I said anything in my dream, if I reacted, someone would say, “You’re taking this too seriously.” Wide awake at three in the morning, I didn’t wake my husband. I needed to make a decision for me, not for him—I called a hotline. After the call, I made two lists. One was the things I had to do to stay alive. The other was a list of things to accomplish in my hopefully long life. Even writing this now, I still feel the eviscerating embarrassment I felt while scrawling out ambitions and ideas and small beloved things: walk down the street again eating a lemon ice cream; write another book; visit my friend in Sweden. When solace is dramatized, it tends to be portrayed as therapy visits, ones where you cry yourself empty, meals spent with friends or family, or the character in the short story who, in the last few paragraphs, looks at something beautiful in nature and, somehow, that peony dripped with rain opens a locked door inside him. My solace is a K-drama on Netflix: Crash Landing on You. The premise is this: an obscenely wealthy young businesswoman has a paragliding accent and ends up in the demilitarized zone. This woman, Yoon Se-ri, runs into members of a North Korean military unit, including her future love interest, Captain Ri Jeong-hyeok. Making a poor choice, Se-ri disregards the directions Ri Jeong-hyeok gives her and goes the wrong way. She runs through a field laden with land mines, finds a conveniently fallen tree that has smashed into the electric fence, and parkours over it into North Korea. We live in a world where anything feels possible. Why should I ask television to behave rationally? Read More