November 13, 2019 Freeze Frame The Hypnotic Threat of Apichatpong’s “Tropical Malady” By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him. The story of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) seems simple enough at the outset: a handsome soldier stationed in a rural community on the edge of the forest in northern Thailand meets a young village man. Their lives are by and large carefree, filled with an innocence that feels entirely fitting with the peace and splendor of the countryside around them—the tawny deciduous jungle punctuated with lakes and rolling grassland, the mountains that stretch to Laos and Myanmar in the distance. They listen to pop music, stroll around the night market in the small local town, visit cave temples, spend quiet afternoons sheltering from rainstorms in a sala overlooking a tranquil pond. They fall in love. Though they never manage to articulate their emotions, we are left in little doubt as to how they feel about each other after an hour of slow-burn desire, during which Tong, the younger, more inexperienced of the two, begins to figure out that this new relationship is not quite the laddish one he expected it to be. Keng, the soldier, is much more direct, familiar with same-sex relationships and comfortable in his queer masculine identity. (In one of their outings to the local town, he flashes a knowing smile at the buff aerobics instructor conducting public classes in the main square, a brief half-second that carries the weight of a whole history of off-camera, off-script liaisons.) But even as he courts Tong in an almost old-fashioned, mostly nonsexual manner, it’s clear that he has never before been in such a position of vulnerability. His longing for Tong is new and unknown. At the end of one long dreamy evening together, they finally express their physical desire by kissing each other’s hands—in fact not just kissing but licking, gnawing, each almost eating the other man’s fist. As Keng rides home, the night seems magical and unending, filled with color and music. And then, the night is over. Read More
November 13, 2019 Arts & Culture Trending Trauma By Lauren Michele Jackson Homelessness is a crisis that, if you’re lucky, never happens to you. Many, however, live in a suspended state of perpetually tenuous living called houselessness. Houselessness is denoted not so much as a lack of roof over one’s head but rather looks like the problem of too many roofs. Houselessness means a vulnerable position that’s also invisible: the roof or sublet or room or couch or yeah, sure, just crash here for the weekend is a mask that keeps concern at bay. Strangers, employers, even relatives are short on empathy for those who they assume are at least meeting the physiological minimums in the famed hierarchy of needs. As a society we are bad enough to people who certainly aren’t. It isn’t a competition to be sure, for houselessness makes a poor consolation prize, more a transient condition punctuated by periods of homelessness, stability, houselessness, and back again. A delayed check, closed office, changed schedule, misread address, an administrative shutdown, an overlooked email—the frustrated reminders that slow still exists in a world where messages cross the ocean in less than a breath—might mean the difference between living or not. This is the usual. And, then, sometimes the circumstances that tip the scale are more divinely wrought: sometimes crisis begins in fire. On April 7, 2012, a fire broke out in an apartment complex in the Pennville neighborhood of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Though no serious injuries were reported, one woman—in whose home the fire started—was treated for smoke inhalation, and five units were damaged, displacing several families and depriving many more of electricity. KFOR-TV, an NBC affiliate, reported the story, which included a brief interview with one of the residents, Kimberly Wilkins, who ran for her life as the building burned. On camera, the light is enough to make out the smoke-stained wall behind her, yet it’s unclear how much time separates the witness exclusive from the event witnessed. Wilkins, shot from the shoulders up, her head nearly filling the frame, appears on camera with all the warmth of a ghost (ashy, as someone less sympathetic might say). Whether washed by fear, stress, or the spotlight, it’s also hard to tell. The pixie cut mostly hidden in a neatly knotted scarf might be wrapped for bed or ready for some fifteen seconds of fame. Read More
November 12, 2019 Redux Redux: A Cold, Wet November Morning 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. Alberto Moravia, 1954. This week at The Paris Review, we’re acknowledging that November has finally arrived. Read on for Alberto Moravia’s Art of Fiction interview, Amparo Dávila’s short story “Moses and Gaspar,” and Paul Jenkins’s poem “November.” 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 don’t forget to subscribe to The Paris Review Podcast—a new episode comes out every Wednesday! Alberto Moravia, The Art of Fiction No. 6 Issue no. 6 (Summer 1954) INTERVIEWER May we start at the beginning? ALBERTO MORAVIA At the beginning? INTERVIEWER You were born … MORAVIA Oh. I was born here. I was born in Rome on the twenty-eighth of November, 1907. Read More
November 12, 2019 Conspiracy The Hidden Origins of Mankind By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. There is a movie that came out decades ago. I saw it in a theater in Paris as part of a Robert Mitchum festival, which, as luck had it, was playing in a small theater across the street from my small hotel at the end of a small street during a small, lonely season of my life. Instead of going to museums, I passed the days in the dark watching Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter, Out of the Past, and Pursued, an obscure movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Martin Scorsese once described it to me as the only Freudian Western. It deals with repressed memory, signs and symbols, dreams and fantasies of uncovering the hidden origins of your existence. It’s about a cowboy. He lives in New Mexico with his mother, whom he loves; with his sister, whom he loves in a different way; and with his brother, whom he hates, though he doesn’t understand why. At night, he is haunted by a strange dream—in it, he sees dancing boots and spurs, and there is always laughter. In the last act, we learn the meaning of the boots and the laughter, a secret that explains the cowboy’s fear and distrust. The dream is more than a dream. It’s a memory of the day the man who’d been posing as Mitchum’s uncle killed Mitchum’s father, then danced over the body in spurred boots laughing as the woman Mitchum would accept as his mother scooped up the terrified child to be raised as her own. That movie has haunted me ever since. Its dancing spurs have become my dancing spurs, its story less a plot than a parable. It’s mankind reduced to symbols. It’s a secret encoded. It’s telling us that the truth about our past—as a species—has been hidden. It’s about the effort to keep it hidden, which constitutes a conspiracy. It’s a secret that remains just out of reach, though the existence of the secret is hinted at in all the ancient books. It’s in the Bible (Old Testament) and in its sequel (New Testament). It’s in Exodus when Moses climbs the trail to the peak of Sinai, the holy mountain, the Lord’s abode in the upside-down. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, then something else, a secret teaching, whispered in the left ear. Moses shared it with his nephews, who either passed it on or were not listening. Some of it may have been recorded in Jubilees, a noncanonical book of the Bible. It’s in the Gospels, too, most clearly in Mark, when Jesus, explaining why much of his teaching is given in the form of parables (in ancient Israel, a parable was like a riddle) says he does it to obscure as much as to reveal: You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables, for they look, but they don’t really see. They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand. For Jews, this method—teaching via seemingly pointless stories—will be familiar. All our old-timers prefer anecdotes to instructions, questions to answers. Think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain.” Or think of my pop who, when asked why he answered every question with another question, responded, “Why do you ask?” Read More
November 8, 2019 The Last Year Senior Night By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It will run every Friday this month, and then return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. Photo: Jill Talbot The stands at Bronco Field fill early tonight, and the countdown on the scoreboard clocks less than thirty minutes to kick off. On the far end of the field, the Broncos, white jerseys and purple numbers, run defense routes, while green jerseys line up secondary pass plays near the end zone. Four students in purple shirts stand at the edge of the field, each holding a poster-board above their head: FOOTBALL FILLIES CHEER BAND. We’re told to line up alphabetically with our children, so I make my way to the back of the band line. Two cheerleaders and several of the Fillies, in their fringed, drill-team uniforms with hats tied tight, are wearing sashes—SENIOR 2020—and small tiaras. Read More
November 7, 2019 At Work The Reckoning: An Interview with Reginald Dwayne Betts By Rachel Eliza Griffiths Reginald Dwayne Betts Triptych by Rachel Eliza Griffiths I first met Reginald Dwayne Betts at the Cave Canem Retreat in the summer of 2006. There, we received the sublime gift of studying with luminary black poets such as Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Smith, Kwame Dawes, and Cyrus Cassells. We stayed up each night with wonder, whiskey, and dancing, and still managed to turn in new, searing black poems each morning. I will always remember first seeing Betts clearly, the sound of his laughter, the bold light in his dark eyes, the shuffle of his Timberlands. He spoke expansively, across frequencies, bringing history, violence, humor, race, and love into uneasy and difficult tensions. This is what is at stake in Betts’s poetry—those unbearable transmissions of desire and fear. I recognized him as a brother I had known my entire life. Betts writes about black bodies, black masculinity, and America itself with an eye toward a devastating reckoning. Betts was himself incarcerated at age sixteen, and he confronts justice only to show us, and himself, that it is always both personal and political. Years ago, I photographed Betts for the cover of his first book, the memoir A Question of Freedom, but the most acute portrait of who he is exists, brutally and urgently, on the page. In Betts’s writing, no matter the form, his voice is electrifying. His poems are about the complicated relationships between black men, between black men and freedom, between black men and love, and about how those black men—loved, unloved, murdered, freed—risk their lives for one another by attempting to see one another. In his third poetry collection, Felon, Betts looks at cages literal and psychic, and at how imprisonment happens in the cages of love, family, and art. INTERVIEWER One of the first things I noticed about the book is the cover, which features the art of Titus Kaphar. You and Kaphar collaborated on “Redaction: A Project,” an exhibition at MoMA that draws on source material from lawsuits filed on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees. You have four poems in Felon that are erasures/redactions with specific titles (“In Alabama,” In Houston,” et cetera). They’re all mappable, yet the erasures show the systematic obliteration of black life. Could you speak about this? BETTS I’m trying to find ways to connect my identity as a lawyer with my identity as a poet. I’m on the board of the Civil Rights Corps, which deals with money bail. They are specifically trying to challenge the fact that many states incarcerate people and leave them incarcerated just because they can’t pay their bail or because they owe fines for traffic tickets or things like that, citations. Read More