November 7, 2019 Arts & Culture How to Stop Crying By Heather Christle José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Saudade (Longing) (detail), 1899, oil on canvas, 77 1/2″ x 40″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. A kitchen is the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears. A bedroom is too easy, a bathroom too private, a living room too formal. If someone falls to pieces in the kitchen, in the space of work and nourishment, they must be truly coming undone. The bright lights offer no comfort, only illuminate. The floor should be vinyl and cold. * Charlotte Perkins Gilman—feminist, writer, sufferer of postpartum and other depressions—proposed in 1898 that private kitchens be abolished, as the work they demanded of women left them with no time for any other activities. “The cleaning required in each house would be much reduced,” she argues, “by the removal of the two chief elements of household dirt,—grease and ashes.” She does not mention a corresponding reduction in tears. * Some churches have designated “crying rooms,” soundproofed spaces to which parents of wailing infants can retreat if they are concerned about bothering their fellow parishioners. Often the room will have a large window, so that its inhabitants can still look out upon the nave and chancel, as well as speakers, so they can hear the sound of the sermon and hymns. People unfamiliar with the practice—guests, for instance, at a wedding or funeral—sometimes, understandably, mistake its purpose. The poets I know who have made this mistake are without exception very taken with the idea. Read More
November 6, 2019 Comics You Used to Tell Stories By Lynda Barry “There was a time when drawing and writing were not separated for you. In fact, our ability to write could only come from our willingness and inclination to draw.” So begins Making Comics, the latest book from the artist and writer Lynda Barry, who’s spent the past few years acting as a sort of patron saint of creativity. The creative impulse, Barry argues, is intrinsic to our humanity; her popular classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are open to students from all departments. If you’re envious of these lucky pupils, fear not: Making Comics is stuffed to the gills with Barry’s friendly wisdom, characteristic doodles, and mind-expanding exercises. An excerpt appears below. Read More
November 6, 2019 Arts & Culture Fanny Burney, Grandmother of the English Novel By Anthony Madrid Here is the grandmother of the English novel, Fanny Burney: Looks young in the picture, right? Well, that’s ’bout how young she was when her first novel came out, in 1778. She was twenty-five. That novel (Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World) made her famous. I’m reading it right now. It’s nothing like what I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be comic; it’s realistic and intense. She wrote only four novels: three hits and one dud, or so I’ve been told a hundred times. Very few people read any of ’em, unless you’re psycho for the history of the novel. Then you have to read all of ’em. I think her name puts people off sometimes. It’s like her name is “Kimmy Peanut.” How can these books be any good if they were written by somebody named Kimmy Peanut. Plus, just from that engraving, you can see how all these white-wigged literary guys (Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, et al.) would be dying to pat her on the head. Which basically gives you another excuse for skipping the books. (She must be overrated, right?) I wasn’t gonna read her novels either. I just wanted to look at her journals and letters. I’d seen ’em quoted from time to time, and it looked to me like she had an eye for the telling detail. She was clearly witty and down to earth, and she knew everybody, including King George III. Read More
November 5, 2019 Redux Redux: More Interesting as a Scorpio 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. Margaret Atwood. This week at The Paris Review, we’re looking to the stars and featuring works about or written by Scorpios. Read on for Margaret Atwood’s Art of Fiction interview, Tom Disch’s “The Joycelin Shrager Story,” and Anne Sexton’s poem “The Poet of Ignorance.” 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 also subscribe to The Paris Review Podcast—a new episode comes out every Wednesday! Margaret Atwood, The Art of Fiction No. 121 Issue no. 117 (Winter 1990) When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical—one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float. Read More
November 5, 2019 First Person The Code of Hammurabi By Jenny Slate The Code of Hammurabi, ca. 1771 B.C.. Photo: Louvre Museum (CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)), via Wikimedia Commons. I am sitting in the room in my house where I’ve put the television in a big wicker cabinet so that I don’t ever have to see the television. I enjoy watching the TV, but also I think that it is an ugly object. I cringe when I see the TV loitering like a dumbass, incorrect in its placement next to my books and tender hanging plants and thoughtfully chosen textiles. But here I am, sitting in front of it. I am watching a documentary that anyone can find and watch. I have not dug deep into a subculture to find it. It was right here when I turned on the thing and clicked on the other thing. And the world is certainly scary because suddenly everything is computer and computers and internet stuff, but there is still some good to extract from it, like this documentary I am watching. I have Thai food that is so spicy that I start to sweat and breathe in and out like how ladies do Lamaze breathing while having a baby in a movie in the 1980s. I ordered it with the vague notion that it might be really nice to just blow my colon out once and for all. It might be nice to live life as a big empty whistling network of inner caves. But now I see that I am just bloating myself with salt and fusing my insides together with oils that I am not genetically inclined to process. Read More
November 5, 2019 At Work Fantasy Is the Ultimate Queer Cliché: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado By Noor Qasim Late one evening early in October, I struggled to fall asleep. The sheets scratched, the cats in the empty lot next door screeched. These small irritations distracted me from sleep just long enough for all the big, looming concerns to descend. The presidency, the planet. Those who have wronged me and those whom I have wronged. Nothing, it seemed, could put my mind at rest. Carmen Maria Machado might seem a strange companion for such a night. Her debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties, conveyed the horrors of living in the world and inhabiting a body so vividly that it made her a finalist for the National Book Award. She is not a writer who will sing you to sleep. When I picked up her new book, In the Dream House, I was hoping, instead, for someone to sit with me in the dark of the night. I turned the final page just as the birds outside my window began to chirp. In the Dream House is billed as a memoir, but the word hardly captures the variety within its pages. The book is centered around the narrative of an abusive relationship, and each chapter offers a new, illuminating metaphor: “Dream House as Omen,” “Dream House as Lost in Translation,” “Dream House as Exercise in Style.” These riveting fragments weave together folklore, fiction, and scholarship on queer domestic abuse. This book is bold yet nuanced, expansive yet specific. And perhaps most of all, it is an utterance that emerges from within deafening silence. That tells a story which has yet to be heard. Machado and I spoke over the phone a few weeks ago. Even after a long day of teaching, she was a lively and generous interlocutor. Her frank speech carries a sort of bracing wakefulness, similar to how I felt that early morning—eager for the light of yet another perilous day. INTERVIEWER You write in the prologue about Saidiya Hartman’s concept of archival silence, how some stories are “missing from our collective histories.” What is it like to write from within this silence? To tell a story that has a history, but which has not been entered into the collective archive because it is a queer history? MACHADO It’s very lonely. It’s lonely and strange and special. I wish I had a more exciting answer. It’s really hard. Of course, I worry about what I missed and I worry about how the book has failed and it gives me a lot of anxiety. It’s a very stressful place to be in. INTERVIEWER I imagine. If you fear you failed at something, what is it that you were hoping to achieve? I’d love, also, to hear more about your research process. MACHADO When I first sold the book to Graywolf, it was mostly just the memoir pieces. I knew I wanted to do a heavy research element, but I didn’t know what exactly. And when I began my rewrites, I was looking for the history of the way we’ve talked about queer domestic violence. I was also looking for places where this conversation existed, but where it wouldn’t necessarily have been called that. The former part was a little easier. I managed to trace, as you saw in the book, this timeline of the way that the conversation evolved and devolved and moved in interesting ways within the community in the eighties and nineties, and into today. But the latter part was much harder. I found myself researching a lot of woman-on-woman violence. As I was researching, it seemed people would really notice only when the violence was really salacious, like when one girl killed another and people would say: Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness, what is that all about? I kept thinking about how many things happen behind closed doors. Domestic violence almost by definition happens in the home, and so you’re always reading between the lines. I’m not a professional historian, so it was difficult. This is not my area of expertise. But I wanted to create some context because just saying, This happened to me, wasn’t good enough. I wanted to try and figure out the framework around this thing that happened to me. How can I understand it as not just a thing that happened to me, a discrete thing, but also in the context of history and in queer history, and in the history of gender? Read More