November 4, 2019 First Person Spilt Milk By Courtney Zoffness I am four months a mother, a fact proclaimed by my son’s age. We will be forever tethered to each other by time, two hands on a clock. I don’t think much about this until after birth. I am four months a mother and have returned to work and need to pump every few hours. This is not only to have milk the babysitter can bottle-feed to Oliver, not only to relieve pain in my chest or avoid clogged ducts and infection. I need to pump because without a baby constantly at my breast, my supply will dry up and I won’t be able to feed my son at all. My blind body accepts that the robotic suction is a hungry baby’s mouth. I am four months a mother when I call my mother for help. I work as a college application essay specialist in the suburban county where I grew up, an hour away from where I live with my husband and son. It is the community in which my father teaches, though he now lives with a new partner in Manhattan. It is the community in which my divorced, single mother still resides. I have called my mother because I can’t figure out how to be a professional while breastfeeding. Where to pump? I tell her I had an academic job interview in New Jersey two weeks before and didn’t feel comfortable asking my would-be boss if there was a place to relieve full breasts and so wound up in the bathroom of a pizzeria by the train station. Pumping sessions take at least twenty minutes and I tell her how the customers knocked and then banged on the door, and that I emerged into a cluster of disapproving eye-rolls and head wags. Last week, I say, I pumped in my parked car, but it turns out that disrobing in daylight and affixing plastic shields and tubes to your breasts while your nipples are visibly tugged and squeezed unnerves passersby. I have four clients on Tuesday afternoon, I say, and each session is an hour long, and my body will need relief. I have nowhere to go. Read More
November 4, 2019 Bulletin Richard Ford Will Receive Our 2020 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Richard Ford. Photo: Kristina Ford. Each April, The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is an occasion for literary celebration. Over the course of the evening, several prizes are bestowed; the most august is the Hadada, the magazine’s lifetime achievement award. This year, the Paris Review board of directors’ editorial committee has selected Richard Ford to receive the Hadada. The award will be presented by Bruce Springsteen. The Hadada will be the latest of many accolades for Ford. His fourth novel, Independence Day (1995), was the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Also in 1995, he was honored with the Rea Award for the Short Story; in 2019, he was recognized with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Ford’s celebrated novels include The Sportswriter (1986), which introduced readers to the unforgettable Frank Bascombe; Wildlife (1990), which was adapted into an acclaimed film in 2018; and Canada (2012). Ford is also a prolific author of short stories, with collections spanning 1987’s Rock Springs to the forthcoming Sorry for Your Trouble. A memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, was published in 2017. His writing has been commended for its “linguistic mastery … rivaled by few, if any” and for the “terse poetry” he brings to his prose. Ford’s ties to The Paris Review date back to 1975, when the story “Shooting the Rest Area” appeared in issue no. 62. Forty-four years later, his short fiction appeared again in the magazine; the artful story “Nothing to Declare” was published in issue no. 229. In 1996, he was interviewed for the Review’s Writers at Work series. His description then of “the exhilaration of writing” remains a powerful encapsulation of the purpose and magic of fiction: “The chance to make something new, which might be good and beautiful, and which somebody else could use… Put more succinctly, to write for readers.” We are delighted to have Bruce Springsteen, another American icon who once described Ford’s work as “poignant and hilarious,” present the Hadada. The Hadada has been awarded since 2003, when the Review gave the inaugural prize to the legendary publisher Barney Rosset. Since then, literary greats such as Joan Didion, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Robert Silvers, and Paula Fox have received the honor. Last year, The Paris Review presented the award to the singular story writer Deborah Eisenberg. At the Revel, glasses are raised and memories made. Buy a ticket today to join The Paris Review in April in honoring Richard Ford and sixty-seven years of this leading literary quarterly.
November 1, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tigers, Transliteration, and Truth By The Paris Review Zeb Bangash performing on Coke Studio. Photo courtesy of Coke Studio Pakistan. There are many things I love about Coke Studio. One of them is the show’s commitment to lyrics and subtitles; on most songs, such as this season’s “Roshe,” they are presented four times: in the original language, transliterated into roman, translated into Urdu, and translated into English. In a country as diverse as Pakistan, who else is making the effort to render a Kashmiri song comprehensible to those who don’t speak Kashmiri? (And yes, in an ideal world you would be able to find those lyrics in Sindhi and Seraiki and Ormuri and Brahui and Kalasha-mun and Domaaki, too; baby steps.) But more than that, I think the show is special because at a moment obsessed with purity, it is so resolutely and inherently the opposite. It has its own homogeneity, that Coke Studio sound, but its most successful songs aren’t necessarily those that could be considered objectively “the best” (that will always be Abida Parveen, solo, by herself, no questions). Instead, the greatest Coke Studio moments emerge from the most daring experiments: Season 3’s “Alif Allah,” performed by the entirely unexpected duo of Meesha Shafi and Arif Lohar; the mixed-up “Ghoom charakhra” by Ali Azmat and Abida in Season 11. So far, Season 12 hasn’t delivered anything living up to that mark, but we are only two episodes in—I’d suggest you keep watching, and remember that purity is to be aspired to only in fabrics. With such fertile ground, why wouldn’t you want to see all the kinds of flowers that can grow? —Hasan Altaf Read More
November 1, 2019 Arts & Culture Letting Go of Othello By Fred Moten Chris Ofili, Jealousy (detail), from Othello, 2018. © Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Though it is not usually characterized as such, Shakespeare’s Othello is a “problem play,” one doubly so. There’s just enough carnival to render its status as tragedy troubling, despite the emphatic announcement of its full title, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. In the final chapter of his Shakespeare’s Festive World, François Laroque excavates the festivity and festivities that undergird and undermine Othello’s darkness, showing how even the lyric richness of Othello’s speech has an air of pestilent farce, just as the depth of his pain is rooted in and by Iago’s brutal comic energy. Moreover, that Othello is a moor of Venice means that the problem of the color line, which W. E. B. Du Bois locates in the twentieth century at its outset, is a problem of the centuries, whether we are talking about the seventeenth, twentieth, or twenty-first. And it’s not so much that Shakespeare has given an early articulation of the Negro Problem; it’s that, instead, he has given Negroes a problem. There’s some shit we have to deal with in the wake of this play, a toxic atmosphere with which we must contend. The greatness of the play is not lessened by its being thus problematic; and this is because, rather than in spite, of how that greatness is bound up with the intense and gorgeous flatulence the play produces and gives off and plays with, its author slyly glancing at someone or other of us, asking, Did you cut that one? Often, as if in payment for the dis/honor of being so addressed, because look how good and how horrific it is to be addressed at all, we’ve taken responsibility for Shakespeare’s ill wind, embracing it like a sail, or riding it like a wing, in the interest of some outward or upward mobility—which is to say, nobility—that it can only seize, not send. So that the terribly beautiful, evilly compounded genius of it is that what we are constrained to do with Othello when we enact him is act like him. Read More
November 1, 2019 The Last Year All Our Leavings 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. It’s late October, and the leaves of the tree outside the door to our apartment in Texas cling to their branches, green and full. Late last night, a surprise rain. My seventeen-year-old daughter and I rushed out to the deluge in bare feet, our T-shirts darkening with each drop. We raised our arms, spinning on the walkway and laughing until lightning seared the sky. I pointed to the tree’s thick arms, thinking about the way they stretch as if waving. We huddled under the light on the porch while rivers swelled against the curbs of the parking lot. When I told her we’ve been running into the rain since she was little, she grinned and nodded, her long blonde hair matted on her shoulders and against her neck. Lately, every moment like this trembles with one idea: our last year. It has rained less than five inches since July, not a drop in September. We need this release. We are weary from the stubborn heat. But more than that, we are weary from staying here for so long. Indie was born in Colorado in 2002, in February, when snow shawled the trees. By July, her father was gone, slipped out the door on a Saturday morning before she stirred. I could not know then that she and I would never see him again, the same way I couldn’t know our lives, mine and hers, would become a collection of long roads, Uboxes, and change-of-address cards. Read More
October 31, 2019 Arts & Culture In Russia, the Ultimate Scary Story is about Losing Your Coat By Jennifer Wilson Vintage Russian postcard I am often complimented on how warm my coats look: “You look so bundled up!” It is praise I accept not for myself, but on behalf of the country where I bought them: Russia. I spent a total of two winters there, in Moscow, and each time, I approached the matter of buying a coat with an almost superstitious seriousness, as if the Russian winter were a spirit that watched me as I shopped, waiting to punish me if I made the wrong choice of down, or underestimated the need for moisture-wicking fabric. I was not wrong; I swear, that first winter, the wind felt like a ghost slapping me in the face, chiding me for getting the hood that buttoned rather than zipped. Perhaps that is why, every Halloween, as ghost stories make their return, my mind often wanders to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Published in 1842, it tells the story of a vengeful ghost, who in life had his overcoat stolen and now in death haunts the city of St. Petersburg, pulling coats off the backs of innocent passersby. Gogol’s story, at its heart, is a frightening tale of poverty and social isolation. It is also a testament to the power of hauntings that take place on a larger scale, where ghosts seek to collect debts not for individual transgressions but for the failings of an entire society. Read More