July 18, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Forgive Me, Open Wounds By Sarah Kay 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 week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am writing to you for some clarity or company. At thirty, I have found myself in some kind of threshold state. I’m grappling with the tragic loss of a person I loved, mourning a future that got lost in the past, and also celebrating the births of so many of my peers’ new babies. I have been at the hospital witnessing—or on the other side of the phone hearing about—these big ends and big beginnings. I feel like I’m spinning: a compass who doesn’t know whether to point toward the exits or the entrances. Are the exits and entrances are the same? Babies come out of the holes in our bodies, surgical or anatomical, and loss feels the same way: I feel like she was torn from my body somehow, leaving an emptiness, a wound. I guess I don’t really have a question, except to say, does this seem familiar to you? Are you spinning, too? Thank you, Caught in A twirl Dear Caught in A Twirl, So much of your letter does indeed sound familiar. During a bout of despair I once asked my mother whether growing older was just one wound piled upon another until we are just a collection of hurt, and she answered, unironically, “No, sometimes someone gets married or has a baby!” At the time I probably rolled my eyes or laughed at her stubborn optimism, but I have since grown to take her answer quite genuinely. My best friends are also having babies or getting married, big beginnings I am grateful to witness. And at thirty we are both already starting to encounter some big endings, too. I am very sorry for your loss. I want to share with you Robin Beth Schaer’s poem “Holdfast” which begins, Read More
July 18, 2019 Conspiracy How Stanley Kubrick Staged the Moon Landing By Rich Cohen In his new monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. 2001: A Space Odyssey Have you ever met a person who’s been on the moon? There are only four of them left. Within a decade or so, the last will be dead and that astonishing feat will pass from living memory into history, which, sooner or later, is always questioned and turned into fable. It will not be exactly like the moment the last conquistador died, but will lean in that direction. The story of the moon landing will become a little harder to believe. I’ve met three of the twelve men who walked on the moon. They had one important thing in common when I looked into their eyes: they were all bonkers. Buzz Aldrin, who was the second off the ladder during the first landing on July 20, 1969, almost exactly fifty years ago—he must have stared with envy at Neil Armstrong’s crinkly space-suit ass all the way down—has run hot from the moment he returned to earth. When questioned about the reality of the landing—he was asked to swear to it on a Bible—he slugged the questioner. When I sat down with Edgar Mitchell, who made his landing in the winter of 1971, he had that same look in his eyes. I asked about the space program, but he talked only about UFOs. He said he’d been wrapped in a warm consciousness his entire time in space. Many astronauts came back with a belief in alien life. Maybe it was simply the truth: maybe they had been touched by something. Or maybe the experience of going to the moon—standing and walking and driving that buggy and hitting that weightless golf ball—would make anyone crazy. It’s a radical shift in perspective, to see the earth from the outside, fragile and small, a rock in a sea of nothing. It wasn’t just the astronauts: everyone who saw the images and watched the broadcast got a little dizzy. July 20 1969, 3:17 P.M. E.S.T. The moment is an unacknowledged hinge in human history, unacknowledged because it seemed to lead nowhere. Where are the moon hotels and moon amusement parks and moon shuttles we grew up expecting? But it did lead to something: a new kind of mind. It’s not the birth of the space age we should be acknowledging on this fiftieth anniversary, but the birth of the paranoia that defines us. Because a man on the moon was too fantastic to accept, some people just didn’t accept it, or deal with its implications—that sea of darkness. Instead, they tried to prove it never happened, convince themselves it had all been faked. Having learned the habit of conspiracy spotting, these same people came to question everything else, too. History itself began to read like a fraud, a book filled with lies. To understand America, you can start with Apollo 11 and all that is counterfactual that’s grown around it; that’s when the culture of conspiracy, which is the culture of Donald Trump and fake news, was born. Read More
July 17, 2019 Arts & Culture Crying in the Library By Shannon Reed Still from Mary Pickford’s 1911 film Their First Misunderstanding. I’m a crier by nature, but as I have aged, my reasons for tearing up have become more elusive, even to me. Where once I could predict a crying spell, like spotting an East Texas thunderstorm moving across the landscape, now they arrive fast and sharp, like hail in New England on a March day. More and more frequently, I find myself wiping away tears while asking with plaintive frustration, “Wait, why am I crying right now?” I had one of those spells this morning while I holding a very old book in the rare books room of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Pittsburgh. Our group of visiting scholars had been warned not to lick or cough or sneeze on the old books, a warning that I had impressed on my soul, as I do with all advice from all librarians. Thus, the arrival of unexpected tears—one moment I was paging carefully through the book, scanning, not terribly attentive, the next I was sobbing—mostly triggered my consternation at producing forbidden fluid. “I didn’t know I was going to cry!” I wanted to yell, as I grabbed a tissue from the librarian’s desk, keeping my face averted from anything old. “I did not deliberately get bodily fluids on your books!” Of course, no one was paying me the least bit of attention, intent as they all were on their own research in their own old books. The librarian didn’t notice me either, thankfully, as she passed around cloth gloves to scholars who wanted to touch very, very old books. So I wiped away my tears, resanitized my hands, and went back to the book I had been looking at to figure out what had made me cry. Read More
July 17, 2019 Arts & Culture The Soviet Children Who Survived World War II By Svetlana Alexievich Over the course of her career, the Nobel Prize–winning writer Svetlana Alexievich has tirelessly chronicled some of the most monumental events of the twentieth century, including World War II, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each of her “documentary novels,” as she calls them, is the result of hundreds of interviews with ordinary people, whose accounts she meticulously synthesizes and weaves into sweeping, coherent narratives. “It all forms a sort of small encyclopedia, the encyclopedia of my generation, of the people I came to meet,” Alexievich has said. “How did they live? What did they believe in? How did they die and how did they kill? And how hard did they pursue happiness, and did they fail to catch it?” Last Witnesses, Alexievich’s 1985 collection of memories from Soviets who were children during World War II, has just been translated into English for the first time by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A selection of stories from the book appears below. Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of World War II. Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #137811 / Yaroslavtsev / CC-BY-SA 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons. ZHENYA BELKEVICH SIX YEARS OLD. NOW A WORKER. June 1941 … I remember it. I was very little, but I remember everything … The last thing I remember from the peaceful life was a fairy tale that mama read us at bedtime. My favorite one—about the Golden Fish. I also always asked something from the Golden Fish: “Golden Fish … Dear Golden Fish … ” My sister asked, too. She asked differently: “By order of the pike, by my like … ” We wanted to go to our grandmother for the summer and have papa come with us. He was so much fun. In the morning I woke up from fear. From some unfamiliar sounds … Mama and papa thought we were asleep, but I lay next to my sister pretending to sleep. I saw papa kiss mama for a long time, kiss her face and hands, and I kept wondering: he’s never kissed her like that before. They went outside, they were holding hands, I ran to the window—mama hung on my father’s neck and wouldn’t let him go. He tore free of her and ran, she caught up with him and again held him and shouted something. Then I also shouted: “Papa! Papa!” My little sister and brother Vasya woke up, my sister saw me crying, and she, too, shouted: “Papa!” We all ran out to the porch: “Papa!” Father saw us and, I remember it like today, covered his head with his hands and walked off, even ran. He was afraid to look back. Read More
July 17, 2019 Arts & Culture A Refusal to Defend or Even Stick Up for the Art of the Short Story By Peter Orner A silent rant in answer to a friend. Because why the fuck should I? Seriously, why the fuck should I? I should leave it right there but this is a rant, and isn’t the thing about rants that they lurch onward unnecessarily after what needed to be said has been said? A rant by its nature says more than it needs to, which makes it, already, antithetical to the short story but in any case I’m not going to do it, defend the short story again, I’m tired of it, half-drunk as I am on this plane that amid heavy turbulence is flopping over Omaha as we speak. I refuse to grovel, to attempt to put into words what will always be unsayable, which is to say that what makes certain stories reach into your chest cavity and rip out what is left of your heart needs not be discussed. It is itself all the justification a story will ever need. The best offense being no defense at all. And so: none offered. And you, my friend, recently said to me, “You’re lucky you write stories. I mean the form is an ideal forum for today’s uber-distracted society. Don’t you think?” And because I love and respect you, in spite of the pain in my soul the question inflicted, here I am answering by not answering which has been my MO for much of life. No I do not think. Ah, screw it: the short story is, with the glorious exception of poetry, absolutely the least ideal mode of expression for our distracted society because it takes a certain kind of intense concentration. Compassionate concentration? To appreciate. To grasp. To love. I’m talking about a reading a story, a good story. What’s a good story? How am I defining— You tell me. Because you know. This is personal. To you and to me. And anyway, I refuse to even— See where this going? Nowhere it is going nowhere. And yet. There’s an Isaac Babel story called “Guy de Maupassant.” You know it? I love this story beyond all rational measure. It’s eight and a half pages. In it a guy in wartime Saint Petersburg gets a gig as a translator of Maupassant. Because this is what people need in the middle of rampant bloodshed. A new edition of Maupassant stories. Right? I don’t have the story in front of me. I’m drunk on American Airlines, seven dollars for a little bottle of warm white wine, I’ve had two, that’s fourteen bucks I’ll die short of, where was I? In the story, the Babel character reports for translation duty at the house of a rich couple. The husband, a banker, I think, is bankrolling the Maupassant project. I should have made this clearer. The Babel character is hired to assist the banker’s wife with her translations. Kind of like a translator’s helper. The wife whose name I seem to remember is Raisa (or am I for no reason at all thinking of Gorbachev’s wife? Is she dead, Raisa Gorbachev?) is a terrible translator. Her versions of Maupassant’s stories are god-awful. Stiff, flat nothings. The Babel character takes them home with him and makes them sing. Sing as any Maupassant story must sing, sing with such simplicity you hardly even notice, because this is what makes them so singular, even in translation they must read like that whacked Frenchman is whispering, singing softly in your and only your— Read More
July 16, 2019 Redux Redux: The Rapturous Monotony of Metal, Water, Stone 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. Simone de Beauvoir. In honor of Bastille Day this past Sunday, The Paris Review is returning to its expatriate roots by highlighting some of the many French authors whose work resides within the archive. Read on for Simone de Beauvoir’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Baudelaire’s poem “Parisian Dream” and Andre de Mandiargues’s brief story “The Bath of Madame Mauriac.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 Issue no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1965) When one has an existentialist view of the world, like mine, the paradox of human life is precisely that one tries to be and, in the long run, merely exists. It’s because of this discrepancy that when you’ve laid your stake on being—and, in a way you always do when you make plans, even if you actually know that you can’t succeed in being—when you turn around and look back on your life, you see that you’ve simply existed. Read More