May 22, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Slapstick, Stanzas, and Stuff By The Paris Review Michael Rips. Photo: Ric Ocasek. Cooped up at home, many of us are now being kept company by our stuff, that antifunctional classification of belongings that rarely move from their spots on side tables and shelves, displaying little immediate value to anyone but their owners. The stories of how these things came to be, or how they came to be possessed by us, measure their worth, and those with a special sensitivity to that worth become collectors. Two writers have recently captured the singular vocational pull of the collector, and in doing so, they show us the whimsical and strange roots that run deep beneath stuff. Michael Rips’s memoir The Golden Flea chronicles both the author’s lifelong pursuit of oddities and the disappearance of New York’s flea subculture into the anecdotal past (the Chelsea flea market on Twenty-Fifth Street, the last bastion of the once-glorious economy described in The Golden Flea, closed this year). Allan Gurganus’s recent story in The New Yorker, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” is a nested narrative, a story of an old portrait as told by a junk-shop owner to a graduate student whose academic specialty is collecting. The narratives of the painting’s subject and the student’s bid to possess the painting unspool alongside each another. As the modern person’s general interest in stuff wanes, both Rips and Gurganus are invaluable shopkeepers, telling us the story of something old in hopes we may pick it up and take it home. —Lauren Kane Read More
May 22, 2020 Bulletin The Winners of 92Y’s 2020 Discovery Poetry Contest By The Paris Review 92Y’s 2020 Discovery Poetry Contest winners. For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations. The 2020 competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Diana Marie Delgado and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Jericho Brown, Paisley Rekdal, and Wendy Xu awarded this year’s prizes to Asa Drake, Luther Hughes, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, and Daniella Toosie-Watson. The runners-up were Amrita Chakraborty, Katherine Indermaur, J. Estanislao Lopez, and Jeremy Voigt. The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center this fall. We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More
May 22, 2020 Detroit Archives Ladies of the Good Dead By Aisha Sabatini Sloan In her column “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. Kerry James Marshall, 7am Sunday Morning, 2003 (Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago) My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard. Cora Mae has a bawdy sense of humor. Most of the time when she speaks, it’s to crack a joke that would make most people blush. She wears leopard print and prefers for her hair to be dyed bright red. I have tried to imagine her in the hospital, attempting to make sense of the suited, masked figures gesticulating at her. She doesn’t know about the pandemic. She doesn’t know why we’ve stopped visiting. All she knows is that she has been kidnapped by what must appear to be astronauts. The film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, begins with a little black girl gazing up into the face of a white man wearing a hazmat suit. A street preacher standing on a small box asks: “Why do they have on these suits and we don’t?” He refers to the hazmat men as “George Jetson rejects.” It feels wild to watch the film right now, as governors begin to take their states out of lockdown knowing that black and brown residents will continue to die at unprecedented rates, taking a calculated risk that will look, from the vantage point of history, a lot like genocide. The film’s street preacher sounds obscenely prophetic. “You can’t Google what’s going on right now,” he shouts. “They got plans for us.” Read More
May 21, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Saskia Hamilton By Saskia Hamilton In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “From the ‘Aeneid,’ Book VI” by Virgil, translated by David Ferry Issue no. 201 (Summer 2012) Read More
May 21, 2020 Arts & Culture The Land Empty, the World Empty By Jean Giono In the following excerpt from Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal, the prolific and fiercely imaginative novelist documents his life in Provence during the Nazi occupation of France. He writes of the weather, his family, the desire to flee, the rumors he hears from the surrounding villages, and his struggles to create “incontestably beautiful work” in the midst of crisis. Paul Cézanne, Landscape in Provence, 1895–1900, pencil and watercolor on paper, 12″ x 19″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Sunday, June 4, 1944 Ten o’clock in the morning, the alert sounds. Immediately followed by violent rumbling at the far end of town, then silence. We’re listening. The most beautiful possible weather. Sun, powder blue sky, a little cool, light wind. Since the other day when ten bombs fell a hundred meters from Margotte, the hens have laid only small eggs, hardly bigger than quail eggs; they have no yolks. Imagine the panic there must be in Marseille now. All is quiet for the moment. * Tuesday, June 6, 1944 Charles returns from town with news. First, the Germans are said to have arrived. He didn’t see a single one, but someone told him that they had commandeered a villa on Boulevard Saint-Lazare. Then, the landing has supposedly begun. Where, when, how, no one knows. There’s no trace of it, no indication, but it has begun, no doubt about it. A collective hallucination? Anyone declaring in the empty city today that the Germans haven’t arrived and the landing hasn’t taken place would be torn to pieces. Cool weather, clouds, overcast sky, crosswinds, still no rain. Yesterday Mme. X. arrived. For at least three months she’s left me in perfect peace. “If I don’t come anymore,” she said, “it’s because I’m afraid of becoming attached to you.” She makes stupid faces. I answer dryly, “There’s no danger of that.” She protests. I move on and consider how to drive her away. Began working on Deux cavaliers again. Serious money worries. Still nothing from Paris, no letters. Wrote to Dambournet, L’Argus du Livre, to propose selling three manuscripts to him, Batailles dans la montagne, Le Poids du ciel, Les Vraies richesses. A difficult period to get through morally. What I would need is to succeed at some incontestably beautiful work. What I’m writing doesn’t satisfy me. Not enough real work even though I stay shut up in my office the whole day. Irritated by difficulties that I can’t seem to overcome. I’ve hardly written more than a few pages for weeks. And even those aren’t as good as the ones I was writing three months ago. Read More
May 21, 2020 Off Menu America’s First Connoisseur By Edward White Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Seth Gilliam as James Hemings in Jefferson in Paris (1995) Among his many claims to distinction, Thomas Jefferson can be regarded as America’s first connoisseur. The term and the concept emerged among the philosophes of eighteenth-century Paris, where Jefferson lived between 1784 and 1789. As minister to France he gorged on French culture. In five years, he bought more than sixty oil paintings, and many more objets d’art. He attended countless operas, plays, recitals, and masquerade balls. He researched the latest discoveries in botany, zoology and horticulture, and read inveterately—poetry, history, philosophy. In every inch of Paris he found something to stir his senses and cultivate his expertise. “Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music,” he wrote a friend back in America, “I should want words.” Ultimately, he poured all these influences into Monticello, the plantation he inherited from his father, which Jefferson redesigned into a palace of his own refined tastes. More than in its domed ceilings, its gardens, or its galleries, it was in Monticello’s dining room that Jefferson the connoisseur reigned. Here, he shared with his guests recipes, produce, and ideas that continue to have a sizable effect on how and what Americans eat. In keeping with his republican ideals, Jefferson eschewed lavish banquets in favor of small, informal dinners where conversation flowed as freely as the Château Haut-Brion. According to his own account, the famous dinner table bargain of June 1790 was just such an event. Preparing the menu for the “room where it happened” that night was James Hemings, arguably the most accomplished chef in the United States. He was Jefferson’s trusted protégé, his brother-in-law—and his slave. Read More