May 9, 2019 One Word One Word: Bitch By Danez Smith In our column One Word, writers expound on a single word of their choosing. For this iteration, we asked Danez Smith to write about the word that underpins their poem “my bitch!” in our Spring 2019 issue. I can tell who’s calling me from across the room by the pitch of their bitch. Fati goes up on the i so that it’s almost a shriek. Hieu gets a little gravelly, dark and full, bitch as precursor to some good gossip. Blaire says it flat, matter-of-fact, like a name. Franny says it like a bell, a sweet call to fellowship. I love my bitches. I love being bitched by them. It’s an insult we’ve spun into coin. The femmes and queers I have known have saved my life. The deep wells of care from femmes; the ingenuity of queer love. Bitch is the passport to that nation. Or maybe it’s the national anthem, how we sing our love to each other. Maybe it’s our language. When I am bitched by the homies, there is no threat on my life. There is no car following me as I hightail it home, bitch flung out the window, faggot close behind. There is no accusation like back in high school when bitch was a charge made by a fellow boy who could smell the girl in you, or a boy who loved/hated your girl-body or a boy whose only tongue was violence. I used to be scared of coming off bitch-made. You know: scary, sissy, punk, femme. All those words that I now wear as crowns lurked in the corners of boys’ mouths. I was terrified, trying to exact my walk and perfect a boy-tongue, scared someone would see through my act and spot the bitch in me. Read More
May 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Killing Time By Anna Funder Heinrich Böll. Photo: Marcel Antonisse / Anefo (CC0). In 1998, I came home to find my mother, at that time very ill, turning around from a white cardboard shoebox—the box she stuffed our family photos into—with a felt pen in her hand. The sun was behind her, and her turban looked jaunty, terrifying. She had written her initials on the box, and below them: 1941 — ? It does not matter how close we get to that question mark; it is still unthinkable. The question mark remains a question mark until we have passed that date and gone into the zone of unthinkability ourselves. We cannot imagine the date of our demise. Our minds balk. On the one hand, it’s too grim. And on the other, we tempt fate if we count on a certain period as rightfully ours, when the outrageous end can come out of a clear blue sky like a fridge, a bomb, a car crash. Or a rare cancer. It is the terror of imagining the date of our death, a thought that goes against all our human hardwiring, that is the propulsive power of Heinrich Böll’s 1949 novel The Train Was on Time. The novel incarnates and then inhabits this taboo space, which makes the work function—once you’ve swallowed it—like an inoculation against despair. Read More
May 8, 2019 Inside the Issue How to Buy a Rock By Jessi Jezewska Stevens George Plimpton, illustrious patrician multi-hyphenate and longtime editor of The Paris Review, helped establish the genre of “Participatory Journalism.” In terms he almost certainly would have disapproved of, that means “doing stuff just to write about it.” Plimpton stepped into the ring with a professional boxer, played triangle for the New York Philharmonic, swung from a circus trapeze, and far more, resulting in essays that shaped the landscape of nonfiction for decades to come. In keeping with this legacy, we’ve invited contributors from our Spring 2019 issue to live the experiences they depicted in their fiction. In J. Jezewska Stevens’s story “Honeymoon,” the narrator works behind a jewelry counter. “In my line of work you get a sense for the truth,” she writes. “The jewelry nook is a confessional, a place of transience and vulnerability, where what you’re vulnerable to is yourself.” For this assignment, Stevens headed to New York’s Diamond District to explore those long-standing confessionals. There’s a self-contained atmosphere, a throwback sense of endurance, on West Forty-Seventh Street. It’s an attitude that fewer and fewer Midtown streets can claim; most of Manhattan seems to be converging on the sterile luxury of Hudson Yards. But on this modest one-block stretch, bookended by Fifth and Sixth, there are no experience spaces, whitewashed cafés, or glassy high-rises that double as malls. The storefronts are cramped, indifferent, tinged with elbow grease. The famous arcades, where narrow aisles maximize the number of jeweler’s booths, are brassy but austere—at least in comparison to the corporate mansions of Tiffany’s and Cartier. On Forty-Seventh, the whole street buzzes with the modest energy of the hustle, which only serves to heighten the intrigue of the diamonds on display. Read More
May 8, 2019 Inside the Issue A Night With a Bouncer By Nick Fuller Googins George Plimpton, illustrious patrician multi-hyphenate and long-time editor of The Paris Review, helped establish the genre of “Participatory Journalism.” In terms he almost certainly would have disapproved of, that means “doing stuff just to write about it.” Plimpton stepped into the ring with a professional boxer, played triangle for the New York Philharmonic, swung from a circus trapeze, and far more, resulting in essays that shaped the landscape of nonfiction for decades to come. In keeping with this legacy, we’ve invited contributors from our Spring 2019 issue to live the experiences they depicted in their fiction. In Nick Fuller Googins’s story “The Doors,” a city’s doormen go on strike. “We demand set schedules,” Googins writes. “Reimbursement for our protein powders our gym memberships. An emergency fund for those stabbed on the job. We are the doormen of the city. The guardians against Nightworld. Yet the nightclub owners they reject our demands every one of them.” For this assignment, Fuller Googins headed to the Venice Beach boardwalk to shadow a doorman for an evening. Venice Beach, LA It’s Friday evening on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, and we can hold three truths to be self-evident: The breeze shall be skunky with the scent of mostly legal cannabis. A stupidly gorgeous sunset shall band the horizon in pink. Tony shall be working the door at the Sidewalk Cafe. For the past six years, Tony Wingo, age fifty-five, has worked at the Sidewalk, an indoor/outdoor spot where tourists eat and locals drink. Tonight I am working the door with Tony, which means I am standing next to Tony, shadowing Tony, and trying to stay out of Tony’s way. In case you cannot tell us apart, please allow me to help: Tony is the big guy wearing the Lakers hat and black hoodie. I am the not-big guy wearing the green thrift-store flannel and Dickie’s shorts. Tony, you may have guessed, is a professional bouncer. I am not. Read More
May 7, 2019 Redux Redux: I Fell In Love with the Florist 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 celebrating that April’s showers have turned into May’s flowers. Read our Art of Fiction interview with Iris Murdoch, as well as Ira Sadoff’s short story “Seven Romances” and Dorothea Lasky’s poem “The Orange Flower.” 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. Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117 Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990) You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming. Every choice you make will exclude another choice, so that it’s rather important what happens then, what state of mind you’re in and what you think matters. Read More
May 7, 2019 One Word One Word: Understand By Chia-Chia Lin In our column One Word, writers expound on a single word of their choosing. 1947 production of Romeo and Juliet (photo: Angus Mcbean) On an international flight many years ago, I sat beside an old Eastern European man who spoke no English. He occupied the aisle seat and communicated with me by tapping my shoulder when the attendant came by, or by extending an open palm to pass my trash to her. We were eating a meal silently and, I thought, companionably in the near-dark, hunched over our trays, when he reached over and took my dinner roll. He didn’t make eye contact with me. He simply unwrapped my roll, took a bite, and then went on to eat the whole thing. There was nothing ambiguous about it. The dinner roll was on my tray, and he’d already finished his own. Had he assumed I was done with my meal? But I’d had a fork in hand. At least half of my pasta remained. It would be easy to riff on the idea that he took my bread because he was a man, or white, or because I was Asian and a woman. That it had to do with entitlement, with a pattern of taking. But that wouldn’t feel true, not in this case. It would feel only like the sort of thing I was supposed to say. Read More