September 27, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Biopics, Blades, and Balloons By The Paris Review Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams. David Ferry’s poem “At Lake Hopatcong” has its narrator considering a family portrait taken a year before he was born. He knows everyone in the photo, and yet it is “of no country I know.” Over and over again, I tried to picture the lakefront in Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life—I who toured endless college campuses, lived on several, visited friends on still more, I who am white and have lived in majority-white communities for deep decades at a time. In the descriptions of this life with which I am so familiar, I both recognized and didn’t recognize the world displayed, so fresh and frank are Taylor’s observations of the daily hurts of being Other. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is a bright, lovable biochemistry Ph.D. candidate at an upper-Midwestern university who as a queer black man is repeatedly made to feel he is neither bright nor lovable—I kept thinking of Waugh’s line “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise.” He feels the felted insularity of specialized academic life: complaints muted, seasons distorted. Everything is endless semesters and claustrophobic cohorts, which both bring him closer to that community and highlight his distance from it. Real Life asks questions many of us shy from: Who is entitled to pain? How useful is an apology? Can sharing our feelings free us from them? How much is empathy? Taylor is a student of the Master, and at times fire catches the taut laces of dinner-table talk as in any Jamesian parlor. Taylor isn’t above a bit of play: a life preserver becomes an erotic harness, nacho cheese becomes sexual effluvia—or does it? If there was as much attention paid to good writing about sex as there is to bad sex writing, Taylor would sweep the top prize. Amid the flurry of new novels drifting down like so many balloons, Real Life is the one weighted with confetti, each flake moving at half speed, a silicon membrane away from free fall. —Julia Berick Read More
September 26, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: The Fucking Reticence By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am at a point in my life where I have very little structure, where every day is full of small decisions and every move feels like a long shot. I am in the process of beating an addiction (I hope), but this means that I am fully sober, grounded, and often a very raw kind of awake for every long minute of the day, however brilliant, brutal, or just plain boring it is. Do you have a poem that could quiet my mind or offer me clarity? Thanks, Actively Awake Dear AA, I remember so clearly the early days of sobriety. I’d stare at my watch willing the time to pass faster, only to see, like in those old high school movies, the second hand seemingly move backward. When your whole life is predicated on feeding your addiction, and then you remove that addiction entirely, you’re suddenly faced with a lot of life. A lot of hours, minutes, seconds. It’s one of the reasons I got so into poetry; it was literally just a place to put myself. I could read a book of poems and not worry about what to do with my body or my mind for an hour, two hours. I could write a poem and somehow make four or six or eight hours just fly by. Read More
September 26, 2019 The Big Picture The Intelligence of Plants By Cody Delistraty What if plants are smarter than we think—a lot smarter? Miguel Rio Branco, Untitled, Tokyo, 2008 © Miguel Rio Branco A few years ago, Monica Gagliano, an associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia, began dropping potted Mimosa pudicas. She used a sliding steel rail that guided them to six inches above a cushioned surface, then let them fall. The plant, which is leafy and green with pink-purple flower heads, is commonly known as a “shameplant” or a “touch-me-not” because its leaves fold inward when it’s disturbed. In theory, it would defend itself against any attack, indiscriminately perceiving any touch or drop as an offense and closing itself up. The first time Gagliano dropped the plants—fifty-six of them—from the measured height, they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them sixty times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued like this for twenty-eight days, but none of them ever closed up again. It was only when she bothered them differently—such as by grabbing them—that they reverted to their usual defense mechanism. Gagliano concluded, in a study published in a 2014 edition of Oecologia, that the shameplants had “remembered” that their being dropped from such a low height wasn’t actually a danger and realized they didn’t need to defend themselves. She believed that her experiment helped prove that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning.” The plants, she reasoned, were learning. The plants, she believed, were remembering. Bees, for instance, forget what they’ve learned after just a few days. These shameplants had remembered for nearly a month. Read More
September 25, 2019 Arts & Culture A Letter to My Sons By Imani Perry Imani Perry photo: Sameer Khan. Sons— You have been running away from lies since you were born. But the truth is we do not simply run away from something; we run to something. I do not think you fully believe me, but I am not a mother who yearns for you to be a president or captain of industry. I will not brag about your famous friends or fancy cars, and I will not hang my head in shame if you possess neither. I am practical, to a certain extent. I want you to be able to eat, to keep a roof over your head, to have some leisure time, to not struggle to survive. I want you to be appreciated for your labors and gifts. But what I hope for you is nothing as small as prestige. I hope for a living passion, profound human intimacy and connection, beauty and excellence. The greatness that you achieve, the hope I have for it, for you, is a historic sort, not measured in prominence. It is a kind rooted in the imagination. Imagination has always been our gift. That is what makes formulations like “Black people are naturally good at dancing” so offensive. Years of discipline that turn into improvisation, a mastery of grammar and an idea that turns into a movement that hadn’t been precisely like that before—that is imagination, not instinct. Imagination doesn’t erase nightmares, but it can repurpose them with an elaborate sense-making or troublemaking. This is what I take to be the point of the idea in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Flight is a way of transcending the material given in favor of the heretofore unseen. Here is a confession: Recently, I have wondered if white people are irredeemable. Again, I have to issue a caveat for the sensitive. No, I do not mean individuals. Individuals are the precious bulwark against total desperation—in them we find the persistence of possibility. Of course a single person can be someone’s hell. But a single person can be a heaven, too. Or a friend. Read More
September 25, 2019 Arts & Culture The Interior Decorators of Bloomsbury By Emma Garman Omega chairs in the Dining Room at Charleston. © The Charleston Trust Penelope Fewster In the summer of 1913, at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, the ornate Georgian house where the Pre-Raphaelites once gathered became the venue for another visionary artistic enterprise. Founded by the Bloomsbury painter and art critic Roger Fry, the Omega Workshops Ltd. was an interior decor and furniture company that sought to provide struggling artists with a regular income. “There is a certain social-class feeling, a vague idea that a man can still remain a gentleman if he paints bad pictures,” Fry observed, “but must forfeit the conventional right to his Esquire, if he makes good pots or serviceable furniture.” At the Omega, the distinction between fine and applied arts was dismissed. In the upstairs studio, fine artists designed colorful and original furniture, ceramics, textiles, and rugs, while downstairs two showrooms were open to the public, who could browse and purchase the wares. Fry, who coined the term post-Impressionism, wanted to energize fusty British homes with the French art movement’s vibrancy and brio. “It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics,” he declared. “We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.” Read More
September 24, 2019 Redux Redux: Gold-Leaf from the Trees 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. Ali Smith, with Leo, in Cambridge, 2003. This week at The Paris Review, we’re in an autumnal mood. Read on for Ali Smith’s Art of Fiction interview, the second part of Katharine Kilalea’s novel in serial OK, Mr. Field, and Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Autumn.” 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. Ali Smith, The Art of Fiction No. 236 Issue no. 221 (Summer 2017) INTERVIEWER Were you pleased to see Autumn referred to as “the first serious Brexit novel”? SMITH Indifferent. What’s the point of art, of any art, if it doesn’t let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are? All the way through this book I’ve used the step-back motion, which I’ve borrowed from Dickens—the way that famous first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities creates space by being its own opposite—to allow readers the space we need to see what space we’re in. Read More