April 14, 2020 First Person Nobody’s Fault By Emerson Whitney © Vladimir Liverts/Adobe Stock. Mom would give us bowl cuts with a breakfast bowl over our heads, I’d catch pieces of hair in my toes. There were sheets all over the furniture. I don’t know why there were sheets. When it was quiet, I’d pick at the skin around my nails. I’d stand behind doors listening for the consonants of my name. Mom would rip at Hank’s shirt so that buttons would roll off and toward me. You’re a piece of fucking shit, she’d say, and yank his shirt like she was ringing a bell. When Hank learned that Charmian died, he struck up a conversation with her family. It was decided that we’d move over there, pay a lot less in rent. We’re moving, Hank had said, taking Mom by the shoulders. She was wiping something yellow off of Gunner’s forehead. Where are we supposed to fucking go, Hank? she said, not looking, her back to him. Next door, Charmian’s, he said, gesturing all around. It’s so fucking cheap. Mom wiped her eye with the back of her hand. Read More
April 14, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Secret Garden By James Frankie Thomas In this series, writers present the books getting them through these strange times. I can’t be the only one who’s been having trouble focusing on books lately. Everything feels either depressingly dark or depressingly light; I don’t want to be reminded of the news, but how can I care about anything else? I’ve tossed aside several novels in the last week. Only The Secret Garden has held my attention. Only The Secret Garden takes place in a universe I recognize. When I was a teenager and my little cousin Anya was a toddler, I indoctrinated her into loving Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film adaptation. I dusted off my beloved videotape (it came with a free locket necklace) and played it for her. Then I played it again, and again and again and again, until the two of us could act it out from memory. Anya was always the heroine, Mary Lennox; I played all the other characters, Peter Sellers–style. One perk of having a cousin twelve years younger than you: it gives you an extra window of time—long after you’re supposedly too old—to play make-believe. My little cousin Anya is not little anymore; she was about to graduate from college before, you know, all this. Now she’s staying with family in Connecticut. She’s just a half hour drive from my New Haven apartment, but of course we can’t visit each other. We’ve been texting a lot. Yesterday I awoke to this text from her: Going to get through this by going back to doing Secret Garden re-enactments. Honestly, it’s a parallel situation—I have to leave home because of a contagious illness and live out in the country, finding hope and new life as spring blooms—only issue is I wouldn’t be able to hang out w Dickon because of social distancing [plant emoji] As a substitute for the hug I wish I could give her, I’ve decided to reread The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is available for free on Project Gutenberg, so you can read it, too. I should warn you that it may not take your mind off things. As Anya correctly recalled, the plot is set in motion by an epidemic. The 1993 film changes it to an earthquake, which is more cinematic but (I now think) less harrowing than the novel’s opening chapter, titled “There Is No One Left”: The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies…. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows. During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours. …When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. Read More
April 13, 2020 Arts & Culture Return, Investment, Return By Leah Naomi Green Cross section of plant stem under the microscope [adobe stock] “I was wakened from my dream of the ruined world by the sound of rain falling slowly onto the dry earth of my place in time.” —Wendell Berry Spring has no reverence for pandemic. The world is all at once shutting down and opening up, the velocity of change in opposite directions creating a vacuum for each of us. Last night my nephew was born, and I can’t help but think that he opened into the middle of history. Nine days before, my cousin Daniel’s body shut down. He had struggled for much of the last decade with addiction and depression. I had been an emotional support for him, perhaps since childhood; we were close our whole lives. He was thirty-three. My partner and I, and our two young daughters, grow most of our food for the year in the garden, and raise chickens and trout. We heat with wood from the forest in which we live, half an hour from the nearest small town, and have no internet at home. Before this week, we might have taken the phrase “shelter in place” as spiritual instruction. Last week, just before gatherings were prohibited, we traveled to a metropolis for the funeral where, to prevent further disaster, we tried our hardest not to hug Daniel’s parents and sister. My life decisions, like those of many, are attempts at joy. Some of the choices my partner and I have been able to make are motivated by the desire to disentangle ourselves from systems whose interconnections rely on hidden suffering. But my hope, and I think the greater truth, is that our decisions are also motivated toward interconnection, toward joy. Each of us who pooled our tears at the funeral last week is now in an isolated cell. Each of us in the United States now is in a cell, and countless of us the world over. Prisoners live in cells, but so do monastics. So does all of biological life, isolated and interconnected into the formation of organisms: apple, deer, human being. Cells are discrete but they are not separate; there is the larger body. Read More
April 13, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Shane McCrae Reads Lucie Brock-Broido By Shane McCrae 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. “Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements” by Lucie Brock-Broido Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000) for Harry Ford I was not ready for your form to be cold Ever. Even in life You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form, But a mind of Rarer liquid element. It had not occurred to me You would take Leave and it will be winter from now on, not only Here, in the ordinary, But there too, in the extraordinary elegance Of calcium and finery And loss. Keep me Tethered here, breathtakingly awkward and alive. If you had a psyche it was not known to me. If you had a figure it would be heavy ivory. If you were a man, you would be An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves From sycamore; trees, Not scattering. I was not ready for such Eanhward and unease. Good-bye to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold As God and the great Glassed castle in which I’ve lived, simply Now a house. A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a vial of ether Thrown on fire—just A little jump of flame, like grief, or, Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing Off, it then is gone. Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block and Sometimes I Never Suffered, both of which are published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
April 10, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Angels, IUDs, and Books in Threes By The Paris Review John Prine. The first line of John Prine’s song “Angel from Montgomery” is a sentence that captures the listener with its simple introduction: “I am an old woman named after my mother.” The song played many times during the Louisville-based radio station WFPK’s all-day tribute to Prine, who died Tuesday at age seventy-three. During this airwave vigil, strangers’ voices would speak through the warm fuzz of their cell or landline connection, often to share a memory alongside their song request. One man had been the sound guy at a Prine show in the eighties, meeting him for a moment backstage, just long enough to clock how stoned he was. Another had met him briefly while standing one urinal over in the bathroom at the Bluebird Café in Nashville. A man remembered his daughter calling late one Saturday night during her freshman year of college, tipsy and in tears because nobody at the party she had gone to wanted to listen to her music and she missed home—he stayed up and listened to Prine’s albums with her, letting the music connect them across the miles. I let the station play, and the songs unspooled in randomness. I probably could have opened Spotify, pressed shuffle play on the artist page for Prine, and achieved much the same effect. But this wasn’t the algorithm steering. It was a chorus of stories befitting the man it paid tribute to. —Lauren Kane Read More
April 10, 2020 Inside the Issue A Story in One Sentence By The Paris Review To showcase the variety of the short stories published in the Spring issue, we asked the six writers to select a single sentence that marked the moment they first knew what story they were writing. All but one played ball: Jesse Ball could not choose one. Luckily for Jesse, Andrew Martin highlighted two sentences. Read on for discussions of narrative slipperiness, places of disjuncture, and happy things. This story was stuck in my head for months, so by the time I started writing it, I felt like I knew more about it than anyone needs to know about anything. Drafting is often a sweaty, anxious process for me, but there are always surprises that make it worthwhile. I wanted the story to have a slippery quality to it, but nailing down the narrative voice was a series of small discoveries. Writing the opening, and writing this sentence in particular, is maybe the moment when the story and its somewhat capricious voice slid into proper focus for me. —Senaa Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead” Read More