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
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