September 3, 2019 Redux Redux: Tautology, Tautology 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. This week at The Paris Review, we’re going back to school. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” and Melanie Rehak’s poem “Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts.” 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. Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27 Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981) The word creative drives me crazy. I don’t like to regard it as therapy … It’s true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures, but I think they should be discouraged. From everything I’ve read and heard, the number of students in English departments taking literature courses has been falling off enormously. But at the same time the number of people who want to get in the writing classes seems to get bigger and bigger. Read More
September 3, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Etgar Keret By Etgar Keret In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Nearly thirty years ago, when I moved out of my parents’ place, it took me no more than a week to feel at home at my new, tiny, rented apartment. The bed was comfortable, the shower water warm and friendly, and the ripped beanbag on the little balcony was just perfect for napping. The only thing that felt a little distant and cold was the fridge. My mom, who was the best cook ever, had been very protective of her kitchen and barely let my siblings or me enter it. This had made me develop a polite relationship with my parents’ fridge, formed on a strict need-a-beer basis. But my rented apartment’s old fridge wasn’t as nice as my parents’ and it took me only a few attempts to realize that it didn’t have any beers inside. Read More
September 3, 2019 Freeze Frame The Brief Idyll of Late-Nineties Wong Kar-Wai By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him. Still from Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together” In the summer of 1997 I was living in London, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’d left college and had been in the city for a year, trying, like so many other twentysomethings, to write a novel. I’d given myself a year, but as the chapters took shape so did a curious tension about the way my life was playing out. Part of me was exhilarated and determined: I was writing about a country and people—my people—that did not exist in the pages of formal literature; I was exploring sexual and emotional boundaries, forming relationships with people who seemed mostly wrong for me, but whose unsuitability seemed so right; I was starting, I thought, to untangle the various strands of my cultural identity: Chinese, Malaysian, and above all, what it meant to be foreign, an outsider. But the increasing clarity of all this was troubled by a growing unsettledness: I had imagined that the act of writing my country and people into existence would make me feel closer to them, but instead I felt more distant. The physical separation between me and my family in Malaysia, which had, up to then, been a source of liberation, now created a deep anxiety. All of a sudden I saw the huge gulf between the person I had been and the one I now was. In the space of just five or six years, university education had given me a different view of life, a different appreciation of its choices. My tastes had evolved, the way I used language had changed—not just in terms of syntax and grammar but the very fact that standard English was now my daily language, rather than the rich mixture of Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Malaysian slang that I had used exclusively until the age of eighteen. I was writing about the place I was from, about the people I loved (and hated), but felt a million miles from them. Read More
August 30, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Family, Fleece, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos By The Paris Review Michael Paterniti. Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. Earlier this month, I visited family on Cliff Island, off the coast of Portland, Maine. It’s a lovely place, with pebbled beaches and raspberry bushes. And it’s small. Very, very small. The whole island is about two miles from end to end; the total population, according to the most recent U.S. census, is sixty-one. There are no cars or restaurants or hotels. People get around on foot or bike, or with the occasional golf cart. But what Cliff Island does have is a library—and a great one. Run out of an old house and open for only a few hours a day, the Cliff Island Library contains a large and eclectic selection of books, many of which have been collected over the years by the island’s residents or else donated by tourists passing through. On my aunt’s recommendation, I picked up Love and Other Ways of Dying, a delightfully strange and sensitive essay collection by the journalist Michael Paterniti. Paterniti’s writing defies traditional categorization. Is it journalism? Is it poetry? At times it reads like both. At times it reads like something else entirely. In “The Man Who Sailed His House,” for instance, Paterniti embodies the voice of Hiromitsu Shinkawa, a Japanese man who was stranded on a piece of flotsam for three days following the 2011 tsunami. This is a so-called true story, but the empathetic imagination Paterniti brings to bear on it is all his own, drawing upon nearly unbelievable levels of detail—like the purple fleece the man wore, and the notes he scrawled in desperation on various pieces of garbage with a marker he fished from the sea—to conjure the fear and hope and loneliness of the situation. Near the close of the story, just before the man is saved, even the prose itself seems to reflect his condition, becoming somewhat ecstatic and dreamlike, as though Paterniti were right beside him on that plank of wood, lost in a hunger-induced hallucination. In the end, the reader is grateful for these liberties. They leave us with a feeling of expansiveness—a sense that, within the world of the book, anything is possible. —Cornelia Channing Read More
August 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Voicing Our Fears By Jorge Comensal Had I not been a writer, I would have liked to be a singer, a parrot, a spy, or a neurosurgeon. Unfortunately, the only singing I do is in the shower, I only ever fly in economy class, and the closest I’ve come to espionage or brain surgery was when I dressed up as a doctor back in my college days, to sneak into the National Medical Center. Donning a white coat I had bought on the black market, each Tuesday I greeted the hospital guards with Hippocratic aplomb, and made for the language therapy room, where treatment was offered to aphasia patients, whose brain injuries impaired their ability to speak. In those days I was more interested in neurons than people, but in that somber room, shielded by a white coat, I began to find my way back to literature. Not long ago, I discovered a striking coincidence: thirty years earlier, my father also dressed up as a doctor to sneak into the same hospital, with a different purpose—to visit his older brother who had lung cancer, and slip him prohibited foodstuffs outside of visiting hours. My uncle’s terminal illness became the nucleus of family stories of loss and misfortune, and meant I grew up in the shadow of a corpulent man felled in his prime by a rare carcinoma at the age of forty. In time, I realized this preoccupation with cancer wasn’t limited to my family, but that it distills most of our society’s fears and obsessions. Guilt, luck, karma, heredity, suffering, and mortality are just some of the coordinates that guide or mislead us when we face the emperor of all maladies, as Siddhartha Mukherjee calls it. My father loathes the word cancer, to which he attributes ominous powers. A taboo. On the other hand, many people overuse it, to refer not to the out-of-control proliferation of cells, but to politicians, corruption, and bad habits. Reggaetón is the cancer of our society, they say. A man recently wrote on Facebook that feminism is the cancer of our age. (If I didn’t object to the metaphor in general, I’d say guys like him are the cancer of our age.) Maybe we should all dress up as doctors to tame this word, so feared yet overused; to tame the word cancer in a cultural sense, and at the same time, through science, free ourselves from its fury. * Rather than singing ballads, salsas, or Italian arias as I would have liked, I spent my childhood shouting the word “kihap!”—“shout” in Korean, according to my tae kwon do teachers. “Shout! Shout! Shout!” I shouted over and over, kicking the air in my belted white uniform. (By virtue of sheer perseverance, the belt turned red then black). “Shout! Shout! Shout!” I shouted, for fifteen years, all because my parents thought it a good idea to counteract my innate idleness with this ancient far-eastern practice. “SHOUT!” I later learned that the word’s Korean roots refer to vital energy (ki) and to the exercise of channeling it into an action (hap), but alas, I didn’t know that when I spent six to twelve hours a week thinking I was shouting, “Shout!” Read More
August 29, 2019 First Person A Farewell to Summer By Jennifer Croft By the time I went to school, I knew the world was changeable the way people were changeable, especially people like parents, with their moods and regrets and sore shoulders. Over the winter holidays, the world was lit by little yellow bulbs on garlands. There was the peacefulness of surprises that would come and that would not be terribly surprising: our stockings always held one orange, one apple, and a pack of chewing gum, along with something else like stickers or brand-new socks. In the car, the world grew purposeful; at the dollar theater, where our dad could take us to see The Princess Bride on a Tuesday afternoon for fifty cents apiece, the world grew relaxed. Swimming pools turned the world glamorous. Every year my sister and I would look forward to the afternoon when Tulsa’s public pools would open. The pools hosted block parties with free sandwiches served in a long, perfect row, like the world’s biggest snake just lurking in the shadows, and even free cups of pop, which was prohibited at home. In high school, I would make friends whose parents owned their own pools, but back in elementary school, the swimming pool was still a gift the world would only give for a precious few months out of the year, and only when our parents could make the time to take us. We occasionally also stayed in motels on our way to see our grandparents in Kansas or on our annual family vacation in Nebraska, though these places rarely had pools. But when they did, then the world shot clear up to the tip-top of the peak of glamour, and my sister and I became princesses from Lichtenstein or maybe Switzerland who’d been kidnapped by the Oklahoma criminals who called themselves our parents, and accordingly, on those rare nights, we would not speak to them at all. Read More