August 28, 2019 First Person I Was Dilapidated By Mary-Kay Wilmers Émile Bernard, Mother and Child, 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain. “What did you have?” “A boy.” “Congratulations.” If your first child is a girl I’m told people say: “How nice.” How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also—embarrassingly—slightly proud that he’s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don’t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be “a good mother” according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in his most recent outburst against “art, thought and life in our time,” warns that it is a failure in mothering that produces intellectuals and other pornographers: it’s less easy to steer a clear course through all the varied strictures of the psychoanalysts themselves. Worse still, it’s by no means adequate to try to behave like a good mother, because that involves an act of will: goodness itself is supposed to emerge. Before Bowlby, you had only to keep your children clean and set a decent moral example. Now ordinary selfishness is thought somehow to be expelled in the moment of delivery, or sooner: it’s selfish, you’re told by the masked figures gathered expectantly around you, if you can’t manage without forceps. Better mothers don’t need them. Read More
August 28, 2019 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Rebecca By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik illustrations © Jenny Kroik You see her sometimes on the way to work. On the train, or on line at the coffee shop where, though you are late, you have stopped for coffee. She is wearing what you ought to have chosen that morning: something much more cool or much more practical or much more elegant than you. Her bag is from a shop you’ve heard about but haven’t gotten to yet or can’t afford. She is in Boston or San Francisco or Atlanta or L.A., but she is perhaps most indigenous to New York City. She is real and she is also a figment of your imagination. As I carried a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca into a coffee shop recently, a woman stopped me to say it was one of her “favourites.” We spoke about it in a way that caught the attention of another woman in line, and the second woman explained the plot to the third. She told her that the book was about a lot of things, but that it was really about a house. As someone who has worked as a bookseller, I have gotten good at describing books I’ve read, and those I haven’t, to customers in four to nine words (which is as long as a person is willing to spend hearing about a book they probably aren’t going to read). To say that Rebecca was about a house seemed like the kind of stretch it would be to say Hamlet is about a marriage, and yet it is. It is about inhabiting a role you can’t quite play—the more I think about and read about Rebecca, the more I think this woman was right. It is about a house, only the house is a metaphor for a woman. Really, it’s a book about imposter syndrome. Read More
August 27, 2019 Redux Redux: A Heat That Hung Like Rain 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. Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photo: Thousandrobots. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating that most late-August phenomenon: humidity, and the ensuing sweat. Read on for Don DeLillo’s Art of Fiction interview, Sheila Kohler’s short story “Cracks,” and Andrew Klavan’s poem “The Pond.” 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. Read More
August 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Natalia Ginzburg’s Broken Mirror By Tim Parks Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni, 1841, oil on canvas, 46″ x 36″. Public domain. The Manzoni Family is a meeting between two authors who at first glance could hardly seem more different. Alessandro Manzoni is simply the most celebrated figure in modern Italian literature. His great novel The Betrothed, published in quite different editions in 1827 and 1840, is the first modern novel in Italian, the later edition marking a milestone in the consolidation of Tuscan Italian as the language for a potentially united Italy. Profoundly Catholic in inspiration, the book was placed at the core of the Italian school syllabus after the country achieved unification in 1861 and still offers a linguistic and moral example to generation after generation of Italian children. Natalia Ginzburg, on the other hand, was a Jewish novelist and a Communist, whose husband Leone Ginzburg died in a Fascist prison during World War II. While Manzoni’s prose now seems elaborate, sometimes magniloquent, Ginzburg’s is as spare, droll, and laconic as Italian writing ever gets. While he narrated grandiose drama in one eight-hundred-page tome, she chronicled the intimacy of the humdrum in eight rather slender novels and novellas. He was a lifelong phobic who suffered frequent panic attacks and found it impossible to leave the house without company and protection. She showed great courage and initiative during the war, saving her children and herself from the Nazi round-ups of the Jews in Rome after her husband’s death. But perhaps most of all, Manzoni was a profoundly religious man whose faith is very much at the center of his writing. Ginzburg was not religious at all and had nothing to say on the matter. Read More
August 27, 2019 At Work Dark Thread: An Interview with Kimberly King Parsons By Lauren Kane Kimberly King Parsons is a writer who lives in the wilderness. When we spoke on the phone, we were interrupted by the cawing of a large bird outside the window of her Oregon home, which sits on a hill surrounded by a forest populated with “loud squirrels, loud birds, and voles.” She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with generations of ancestors rooted in the nearby cities of Quitaque and Turkey, where unsettled land stretches endlessly. She would pass the time by walking miles in any direction. Wildness is in her fiction as well; the story “Fiddlebacks” begins with three children shaking out their shoes before putting them on, expelling poisonous insects hidden in the toes. There is also something untamed in her deeply flawed characters, who are constantly caught between reining themselves in and indulging their feral darkness. However, Parsons’s true gift is couching the savage in the great beauty of her prose. Her story “Foxes” appears in The Paris Review’s Summer 2019 issue, and her debut collection, Black Light, was published this month. Our conversation revealed her to be an exacting craftswoman, someone for whom the articulation of each sentence is an act of listening to the character and knowing just when to leave a story. INTERVIEWER Have you always known you would be a writer? PARSONS I grew up an only child, so I used to really love going to birthday parties or hanging out with groups, and at a certain point my role became designated scary-story teller. I don’t know why they chose me, but I loved it. There’s something about having a captive audience and having a room full of terrified people listening to you. I remember knowing that I wanted to be a storyteller or a writer in some way. INTERVIEWER Do you remember some of the scary stories you used to tell? Read More
August 26, 2019 Conspiracy More UFOs Than Ever Before By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. This month, he explores the sudden rise in UFO sightings after World War II. America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America? Dreamers have seen things in the heavens since time out of mind. You can go back to 228 B.C., when the Roman historian Livy recognized portents of doom in the “phantom ships” he saw “gleaming in the sky.” Or when Pliny the Elder, an ancient scribe, recorded something that sounds like a Steven Spielberg UFO: a spark that “fell from a star and grew as it descended until it appeared to be the size of the Moon.” Such visions, which usually came in times of stress, were taken as a sign from God. Ezekiel’s fiery wheel, witnessed on the road to Babylon, was possibly a flying saucer. People have always had visions, but the language changed. In the religious age, it was angels and demons. In the scientific age, it’s intergalactic dream machines, hot rods cooked up by gearheads from across the inky vacuum. As the holy book says, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” The Germans put the first jet plane in the air in 1939. The first rocket that could touch space went up in 1942. Called the V2, its target was not space but London. Chuck Yeager, flying the bullet-shaped Bell X-1, broke the speed of sound (767 mph) in October 1947. Ten years later, the Soviet’s launched the first artificial satellite. That was followed by the first man in space, the first man in orbit, the first man on the moon. One result of the aerospace boom was UFO mania. If we could do it, it was only logical to think aliens could do it, too. Roswell, New Mexico, where the air force was said to have recovered a flying saucer and a crew of dead aliens in 1946, was just the most famous encounter—there were hundreds of others during the Cold War. In 1949, government officials were said to have captured the crew of an alien craft that set down, in the cool of a desert evening, on a plateau in Aztec, New Mexico. What explains this sudden intergalactic traffic? Read More