May 22, 2019 Arts & Culture A Trip to Bohemia By Adam Ehrlich Sachs Prague Karlovy Vary—Plzeň—Český Krumlov—Prague In August 2017 my family and I traveled to the Czech region of Bohemia, my mother’s homeland and the setting of my new novel, The Organs of Sense. At the airport in Prague we rented a car and drove directly to Karlovy Vary, the birthplace of my grandfather, who had died the year before; then we swung southeast through Plzeň and Český Krumlov before returning north toward Prague. It was meant to be a tour of our heritage, but it would also, I hoped—though the melding of my familial obligations with my artistic ambitions gave me a twinge of guilt—provide material for the novel of which I was then in the middle. Karlovy Vary In the spa town where, a century earlier, my grandfather was born, a local genealogist I’d found online and to whom I’d sent a pdf of my grandfather’s death certificate took us first to the spot where once stood the dress shop of Felix and Elsa, names he uttered in a tone of such hushed revelation, as though he had taken us to a site that would obviously mean a great deal to us, that my mother did not dare ask him in what way the people who bore them were related to us. From the dress shop of Felix and Elsa we walked to the apartment building in which Helene and Max lived shortly before the First World War, and from there we climbed a steep staircase to the villa on the hill where the twin sisters Frieda and Clara (both murdered by the Nazis) grew up. Then we drove to the abandoned porcelain factory once run by Frieda’s husband, Julius. At each stop my mother’s mood grew bleaker; she reproached herself for her estrangement from this world; these names meant nothing to her, and the fact that it was now too late (but only just) to ask her father who they were and what they were like caused her—this was clear—exquisite pain, which, however, she kept to herself. Only upon returning to our hotel and locating some online reviews he’d managed to suppress did I learn that the genealogist, driven presumably by compulsions of his own, was notorious for taking foreign tourists to the former residences and workplaces of his own dead relatives, every day the same sites. My mother, whom I had never known to give online feedback, later left him a three-star review. Read More
May 21, 2019 Redux Redux: Summer Surprised Us 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. Donald Hall. This week at The Paris Review, we’re preparing for our summer softball season and thinking about baseball and the great outdoors. Read Donald Hall’s Art of Poetry interview, as well as Tony Sanders’s poem “The Warning Track” and Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “Hybrid Vigor.” 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. Donald Hall, The Art of Poetry No. 43 Issue no. 120 (Fall 1991) I was bearded and weighed about two hundred fifty pounds when I tried out for second base with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Willie Randolph and Rennie Stennett both beat me out. (I was cut for not being able to bend over, which wasn’t fair; Richie Hebner made the team at third base and he couldn’t bend over either.) The players had nicknames for me, like Abraham and Poet, and they treated me like a mascot. When I took batting practice, the whole team stopped whatever it was doing to watch—the comedy act of the decade. The players looked at me as some sort of respite from their ordinary chores; they were curious, and they were kind enough as they teased me. Mostly, athletes are quick-witted and funny, with maybe a ten-second attention span. Read More
May 21, 2019 At Work Queerness, Cyborgs, and Cephalopods: An Interview with Franny Choi By Spencer Quong Franny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering AI ideas she wished she could have addressed in her poems. Reckoning with the mythology of a “finished product,” Choi is coming to terms with having a book that is both out in the world and still in progress. The process isn’t easy: as one of Choi’s cyborgs says, questioning reality makes her feel “a / little insecure / a little embarrassed haha.” But to be insecure, or still in progress, should never be mistaken for being incomplete. Soft Science asks what it means to live as a queer Asian American femme, someone “made a technology for other people’s desire.” How do we distinguish between the constructed pieces that have been imposed on us versus the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen? Are they always distinct? The voice of Soft Science is often corrupting: Choi inhabits colonized language and uses it to her own ends. In the poem “The Cyborg Wants To Make Sure She heard You Right,” Choi runs negative comments directed at her on Twitter back and forth through Google Translate until the language is transformed into something new. By repurposing language, Choi offers up a record of what is happening to our bodies and minds under whiteness and capitalism, and the beginnings of a way forward. Choi is the co-host of the podcast VS, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and will begin teaching this fall at Williams College. Soft Science is Choi’s second full-length collection, following Floating, Brilliant, Gone and her chapbook, Death by Sex Machine. Her poem, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula” also features in our spring issue. Read More
May 21, 2019 Arts & Culture Somehow I Became Respectable By John Waters John Waters. Illustration by Ken Ingels. Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened? I used to be despised but now I’m asked to give commencement addresses at prestigious colleges, attend career retrospectives at both the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute, and I even got a medal from the French government for “furthering the arts in France.” This cockeyed maturity is driving me crazy! Suddenly the worst thing that can happen to a creative person has happened to me. I am accepted. How can I “struggle” when my onetime underground movies are now easily available? Even Multiple Maniacs was rehabilitated music-rights-wise and is back in theatrical release from Janus Films, the original distributor of Godard and Truffaut movies, for God’s sake. Pink Flamingos has played on television! How can I whine about my films being hard to see when Warner Bros. now handles many of my titles and Criterion, the classiest of all DVD distributors, is restoring some of my rudest celluloid atrocities? Even the Museum of Modern Art now has in their collection the elements of my earliest 8mm movies that have never been formally released, and, jeez, seven of the books I’ve written are still in print and two of them became New York Times best sellers. How could that be? How? Read More
May 20, 2019 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Franny By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik © Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author. I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk. Reopening Franny and Zooey in your thirties is just like opening the diary your mother thoughtfully mailed to you after she found it in the box she’s been trying to get out of the basement. You almost can’t bear to look, but you can’t bear not to look, either. My most love-worn of J.D. Salinger’s novels, Franny and Zooey, is a story in two chapters. The first chronicles Franny’s emotional breakdown as she visits her boyfriend, Lane Coutell, during the “big Yale game.” The second follows the efforts of one of Franny’s older brothers to bring her out of her depression, which, he believes, was brought on by the overly precious environment of the Glass household: seven children of two vaudeville actors who have spent their lives winning fame on a radio show and pursuing enlightenment. As fables for the twenty-first century go, Franny and Zooey has aged just fine. All over New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A., children are downing turmeric milk and meditation apps, buying salt lamps by the cave-full. But the difference is that Franny and Zooey was written in a moment when questioning the pursuit of the American dream was still novel and risqué, and there was no Buddhist mantra emanating from every set of AirPods. Salinger’s characters have died for their want of salvation and everyone’s apartment is prewar. Franny exists in the painful, beautiful first blush of adolescence. Read More
May 20, 2019 YA of Yore Francesca Lia Block and Nineties Nostalgia By James Frankie Thomas Has there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence than Weetzie Bat? Francesca Lia Block’s 1989 debut begins: The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. On the basis of that sentence alone—its stale familiarity, its clunky syntax (“the reason was because”), its pandering parents-just-don’t-understand gloss on adolescent alienation—you’d expect the most formulaic of young adult fiction. On the basis of that sentence alone, you probably wouldn’t keep reading. Certainly you would never guess what follows: They didn’t even realize where they were living. They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Grauman’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers. Surprise! Weetzie Bat is not a novel of teen angst but a novel of teen delight. It’s a novel whose heroine makes a wish to a magic genie to meet “my secret agent lover man” and pages later meets the love of her life—whose actual name, with no explanation, is My Secret Agent Lover Man. It’s a novel that, halfway through, contains this sentence: “And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.” Weetzie isn’t too cool for school, or too deep or too smart, but simply too happy. She’s bursting with joy to be alive, right here, right now. Even the English language can hardly contain her exuberance. Read More