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
April 10, 2020 Comics I Want You By Blutch Originally serialized between 1996 and 1999, Blutch’s comic Mitchum plays host to the legendary French cartoonist’s virtuosic range. Modulating from harried pen work on one page to lush, blocky tableaux on the next, he sorts through the surreal stew of his subconscious in dreamlike episodes, mixing in bits of American pop culture along the way—including, at one point, a sinister, lascivious Jimmy Stewart lurking in the shroud of a detective’s trench coat. “Mitchum was my laboratory at a certain point,” Blutch said in a 2016 interview with the journalist Paul Gravett. “Every kind of experiment was permitted. Their success or failure were secondary.” This week, New York Review Comics released the first complete English translation of Mitchum. An excerpt appears below. Read More
April 10, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Timothy Donnelly By Timothy Donnelly 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. “Rain Moving In” by John Ashbery Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983) The blackboard is erased in the attic And the wind turns up the light of the stars, Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know. And if somewhere in this great planet The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun, It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse. Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don’t you see It’s all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial had been set And that’s ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about. Timothy Donnelly’s most recent publications include The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently director of poetry in the writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.