April 22, 2020 Inside Story Inside Story: What Spot? By Jenny Boully In our new column, “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. Like many things I love, What Spot? entered my life through happenstance: my son just happened to pick it out of the pile of books in his preschool classroom; my son just happened to have the one teacher who sent books home each week; he just happened to secure a last-minute spot at this preschool. If it were not for this seemingly fateful chain of events, I do not think I would have ever come across this charming tale of wonder and fear and empathy. All of these emotions feel re-created on the book’s cover, which magnifies and directs your attention to the period of the question mark, which appears target-like, a red dot encircled by other circles. Written by Crosby Bonsall for the “I Can Read!” series, which Harper Collins launched in 1957 with the publication of the now-classic Little Bear, by Elsa Holmelund Minarik, What Spot? is now out of print. Rather than trust that my son would be able to choose the same book each week, I bought a used copy. It arrived well-loved, with damaged pages, signs of its former life. I delighted in seeing my son pretend to read the book aloud on his own, so simple was its two-syllable, incredulous refrain, punctuated by a question mark that seems conjoined to an invisible exclamation point. Two days before we entered the stay-at-home phase of our lives, my son went on a field trip to see a production of The Princess and the Pea. His teacher sent us a PDF that explained to children how to prevent coming into contact with the coronavirus. She told us she read the poster to the children to reassure them. She also reassured us, saying that she would have the children wipe down their theater seats and wash their hands. Time was once less abstract, more palpable. I once could ask how school was. I could say tell me about the play. I could let my children know what they would need for school the next day. I could pack lunches and backpacks. I could check my work email after sending them off. I could have a day, a day that was measured and complete, one that I did, indeed, measure out with coffee spoons. Now, my children and I dream the dizzy dreams that manifest in between reality and a life once lived. Read More
April 21, 2020 Redux Redux: Suspension of Disparate Particles 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. Marilynne Robinson. This week at The Paris Review, we’re embracing hermitism. Read on for Marilynne Robinson’s Art of Fiction interview, Rick Bass’s short story “The Hermit’s Story,” and Karen Solie’s poem “A Hermit.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new 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. Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198 Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008) INTERVIEWER When you were little, what did you think you’d be when you grew up? ROBINSON Oh, a hermit? My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work. There we were in this tiny town in Idaho, and he was like Alexander dividing up the world: I’ll be the painter, you’ll be the poet. Read More
April 21, 2020 Arts & Culture Out of the Cradle Endlessly Revising By Mark Doty Walt Whitman in 1891. Photo: Samuel Murray. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention. One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other. The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. Read More
April 21, 2020 Off Menu The Celebrity Chef of Victorian England By Edward White Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Alexis Soyer, artist unknown (courtesy Alexis-Soyer.com) When the potato blight arrived in Ireland in September 1845, many of those in power downplayed the threat it posed. The disease had already blackened potato crops across the Americas and Western Europe, but dire predictions about the damage it could wreak on Ireland’s staple food were dismissed as irresponsible scaremongering, “deluding the public with a false alarm,” in the words of the mayor of Liverpool. That line didn’t last long. By October it was obvious that the lives of millions were at risk. In response, the British government offered half measures, unwavering in its determination that the solution should not be worse than the problem. To break economic orthodoxy by providing direct aid to those in need would be tyrannical, it was argued, and create a culture of dependency and deception. Charles Trevelyan, the government official leading the relief effort, put it bluntly: “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” 1847 was the nadir of the crisis. Countless people died of starvation and disease, others fled in droves. The mayor of Liverpool could no longer contest the reality of the crisis; so many destitute refugees came to his city that it was described by the registrar general as “the cemetery of Ireland.” Into the bleakness stepped Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef in London, a man who had made a fortune from catering to the outsize appetites of sybarites and playboys, and about as unlikely a savior of the famished as it’s possible to imagine. A peacocking, Rabelaisian embodiment of modern London, Soyer was as adept at self-promotion as he was at creating the extravagant high-society banquets for which he was famed. Nevertheless, in Dublin on April 5, 1847, he unveiled his plan to end the suffering of the Irish people: a specially designed soup kitchen, combining the traditional craft of French cooking with the efficiency of modern science. The launch was attended not only by thousands of famine victims, but by representatives of the press, and hundreds of well-to-do observers, including the Duke of Cambridge and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. As the hungry stood behind metal railings outside, VIPs were given a first look inside the kitchen, where they sampled for themselves what the famous Soyer had rustled up with food aid rations. “The contrast was sudden and striking,” reported the Dublin Evening Post the following day. “A moment before, and the lovely faces which lighted up the pavilion, smiled their approval of every thing they saw; a moment after, their places became filled by the poor, upon whose persons famine and misery and time had seemed to have done their worst.” As laudable as it was unsettling, Soyer’s soup kitchen experiment was a precursor of the awkward union of celebrity and humanitarianism so familiar to our own times. But it was also the emblematic moment of Soyer’s unique culinary life, lived at extremes—poverty and wealth, toil and glamor, feast and famine. Read More
April 20, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 5 By The Paris Review A month ago, 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. “Love letters, fan mail, business correspondence, even missives to a future self: letters can bring us together across time and space. The connection they offer feels particularly welcome in our disjointed moment. There’s something special about letters between friends, diary entries, and even appeals sent into the unknown—see this week’s pieces from the Paris Review archive to prove my point. Pen to paper does still create some alchemy.” —EN With little to do these days but sit inside and look out the window, I’m very aware of my neighbors, for better (the kid in the high-rise across the street airing her stuffed animals by letting them down from the window on strings) and for worse (the man downstairs playing music that shakes my floor). Mavis Gallant is, too, only she makes her Paris neighbors immortal characters of a tiny, finely wrought serial. Her “Diaries” remind me that to set down observations of the world honestly, precisely, and completely—however physically small that world might be—is to find the inevitable story in it. —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer Read More
April 20, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Carl Phillips By Carl Phillips 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. Read More