April 9, 2020 Arts & Culture All Love, All Beauty By Kay Ryan Kay Ryan examines a favorite Philip Larkin poem. Philip Larkin. Dublinesque Down stucco sidestreets, Where light is pewter And afternoon mist Brings lights on in shops Above race-guides and rosaries, A funeral passes. The hearse is ahead, But after there follows A troop of streetwalkers In wide flowered hats, Leg-of-mutton sleeves, And ankle-length dresses. There is an air of great friendliness, As if they were honouring One they were fond of; Some caper a few steps, Skirts held skilfully (Someone claps time), And of great sadness also. As they wend away A voice is heard singing Of Kitty, or Katy, As if the name meant once All love, all beauty. —Philip Larkin This poem sends feeling down a narrow channel, and you don’t even know it’s feeling until it explodes in a delicious mist at the end. It looks like a lot of scenery, local Dublin color, first the “sidestreets” with their “pewter” light from the “afternoon mist” that causes the lights to be on in the poky shops of a particularly stock-Irish description “above race-guides and rosaries.” Larkin’s art is on intensely quiet display: so much atmosphere is generated in so few words. It’s gray, it’s low, it’s mean, it’s tight, and something is coming. Nice to start with that preposition, “Down stucco sidestreets.” Each element moves into the next: street>light>mist>light bulbs hanging over “race-guides and rosaries.” It feels cozy, damped down, dim. A channel, but for what? Larkin is so good at creating motion in a poem. Read More
April 9, 2020 At Work Chosen Family: An Interview with Rowan Hisayo Buchanan By Spencer Quong The first moments in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days are quiet. Mina, a thirty-two-year-old classicist, is walking along the George Washington Bridge on a humid summer evening. She feels the bridge shudder in the wind. She looks past Manhattan’s skyscrapers and imagines her husband, Oscar, working at home in Brooklyn. It’s not apparent to the reader why she’s here—perhaps Mina herself is uncertain—but then she looks at the river, and remembers what people say about jumping: “When a body fell onto water from this height, it was like hitting a sidewalk.” She gently tosses one of her flip-flops over the edge, before a policeman interrupts the scene. From these first careful sentences, Buchanan sets the tone of the novel, the proximity of its narration. Starling Days is as immediate, changeable, and surprising as real life. Mina and Oscar are young, recently married, and coping with an intensification of Mina’s depression. Alternating between their points of view, Buchanan maps their attempt to find the key to Mina’s suffering. But despite their intimate knowledge of each other, their shared histories and identities, and their most tender efforts to bring about change (they temporarily move to London early on in the story) many of Mina’s emotions remain impenetrable. When Mina is hospitalized after an overdose attempt, Oscar attends to her: “For the whole visiting hour, his face was twisted with confusion. ‘Why did you do this?’ he’d asked. But she couldn’t point and go, There, that. That’s what’s wrong with me.” The dynamic of this scene replicates itself throughout the novel—the effort to make sense of the inexplicable, the ensuing confusion, the twisted face. In the darkest moments of this cycle, Starling Days is heartbreaking to read, and yet, most days, I closed the book with immense gratitude for its refusal to pathologize family history or identity. It feels rare—in both literature and in our world—to sit with sadness and allow it to be unruly. Buchanan proves that to recognize that some sadness is unalterable is not necessarily a melodramatic plunge into despair. Strange, enduring sadness has a mirror: small, repeated gestures of survival. In the hospital, Oscar is still looking at Mina, and inviting her to try. Rowan and I first spoke via Skype, but our conversation spilled into emails and messages in the weeks that followed. We spoke about choosing to hold on, and about the literature that helps us do so. INTERVIEWER Where did Starling Days begin? HISAYO BUCHANAN Maybe books are the record of everything I’ve been fascinated with for several years. I could say Starling Days began in several places and they would all be true. As a writer, I’m often thinking about how much language we have. In contemporary culture, there are so many words we can use to describe our identity. I could tell you that that I’m mixed race, that I’m dyslexic, that I’m bisexual, on and on. Each word describes something true and important about me. At the same time, no words quite describe the feeling I get when I see a bird take off from a tree that I previously thought was empty. It’s odd to be simultaneously overwhelmed by language and also to find it inadequate. As I tried to find ways to talk about mental health, often the language around it felt like a way of silencing the experience. A particular phrase stuck out to me: “You have to love yourself, before you ask someone else to love you.” It felt both true and very untrue. It’s extremely hard to conduct a relationship—romantic or otherwise—with someone consumed by their suffering, and yet it’s unfair to expect someone to feel able to love themselves if they’re not receiving any love. Novels and fiction are a way of examining something I don’t fully understand, so I wanted to write about a couple where one person is struggling with their mental health, and show both sides of the relationship. Although the things that happen to Oscar and Mina are not the things that happened to me, I have loved and cared about people who’ve experienced severe mental health challenges and, when I was a teenager, I experienced very serious depression. I felt able to think about both sides, and invested in thinking about both sides. Read More
April 8, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Monica Youn By Monica Youn 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
April 8, 2020 Arts & Culture How Pandemics Seep into Literature By Elizabeth Outka Influenza victims crowd into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. In October of 1918, a delirious Katherine Anne Porter experienced what she termed “the beatific vision.” Close to death from the novel influenza virus that would kill 50–100 million people, Porter felt transported to a paradisal landscape, one free of the pain and fear that had overtaken her body. To the surprise of all, she survived her illness, and later transformed the experience into her powerful novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” That story is one of the few literary works directly about the pandemic that killed more people in the United States than the country lost in all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, combined. The experience, Porter said, “simply divided my life … and after I was in some strange way altered … it took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.” Read More
April 7, 2020 Redux Redux: Nothing to Grind 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. Fran Lebowitz, ca. 2011. Photo: Christopher Macsurak. This week at The Paris Review, we’re getting easily distracted, writing slowly, and leaving our desks. Read on for some literature that shares these same concerns: a 1993 interview with Fran Lebowitz, Sigrid Nunez’s short story “The Blind,” and Gevorg Emin’s poem “The Block.” 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. A Humorist at Work: Fran Lebowitz Issue no. 127 (Summer 1993) INTERVIEWER What did you do during those five years before you started writing the book? LEBOWITZ I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. So is not writing. I only realized that when I did start writing. When I started getting real work done, I realized how much easier it is to write than not to write. Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It’s very psychically wearing not to write—I mean if you’re supposed to be writing. Read More
April 7, 2020 Dice Roll The Black Gambling King of Chicago By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration © Ellis Rosen If you could trace the fate of just one dollar that passed through the hands of John “Mushmouth” Johnson, where would it lead? It probably came to his hands off a craps table or from an office of his policy syndicate, and more likely than not, it would go on to be slipped into the pocket of some crooked cop or double-dealing politician. But if Johnson, whom local papers called “the Negro Gambling King of Chicago,” managed to hold on to it, that dollar might end up supporting a hub of black music in the twenties, or the first black-owned bank in Chicago, or a poetic precursor of the Harlem Renaissance. It would grant Johnson, in death, a respectability he was denied in life. Johnson’s life was characterized by a constant tension between philanthropy and corruption. Born to the nurse of Mary Todd Lincoln in 1857, Johnson moved from his native Saint Louis to Chicago at an early age. Some said his nickname, Mushmouth, referred to how much he cursed. Others said it was because of a “thick utterance he had in his speech when a boy.” Either way, the name signals how Johnson’s mode of expression, coupled with his lack of formal education, cut him off from genteel society. “I didn’t exactly do much book learning,” he recalled, many years later. “I went out to see where the money grew. Some of those who know me say that I found it.” In 1882, Johnson got a job as a porter in a white-owned gambling house. He studied the business closely, and soon opened his own nickel-gambling joint on Clark Street. Johnson had a keen eye for real estate, and quickly managed to flip that location. In 1890, he took the proceeds and purchased a saloon at 464 South State Street. He called it the Emporium. It would be the seat of his gambling empire for nearly twenty years. Decked out in Gay Nineties style, with rococo chandeliers and a bar of Honduran mahogany, the Emporium offered three stories of action: billiards on the first floor, craps and roulette on the second, and poker on the third. In order of popularity, the bar served whiskey, gin, and beer. Scorning the day’s more flamboyant scarves, Johnson presided over the Emporium in a neat black four-in-hand knot, with a pin set with a small stone. As for that stone, one gambler said, “You can bet it’s the goods.” Read More