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
May 7, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: Gambling on the High Seas By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen Earl Warren watched the raid through binoculars. Stationed at a Santa Monica beach club, the Attorney General of California—and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—saw the fleet he’d assembled pushing out into the bay. It was August 1, 1939, a day Warren had planned in greatest secrecy. He hadn’t even told the two hundred and fifty officers now skipping over the waves about their mission until minutes before it began. He’d likely been fantasizing about his triumph for a long time, ever since the airplanes wrote those diabolical letters in the sky: R-E-X. It seemed it would be easy. Officers boarded the first ship, the Texas, whose crew surrendered at once. Warren’s men took axes to its equipment, smashing craps tables and roulette wheels, and dumping slot machines into the bay. Soon, word arrived that simultaneous raids on the ships off Long Beach—the Tango and Mt. Baker—had gone just as smoothly. That left the crown jewel of the gambling fleet—the Rex. But Warren should’ve known that this one would be different. When officers tried boarding the ship, a steel door slammed across the gangway. Fire hoses gushed from the upper decks, driving off the invaders. Sound travels far over water, and from the shore Warren might’ve heard a man cry out, “I won’t give up my ship!” It was Tony Cornero, “commodore of the gambling fleet” and bane of Warren’s existence. He’d just initiated an eight-day standoff that would come to be known as the Battle of Santa Monica Bay. Read More
May 6, 2019 Arts & Culture A Space for Bette Howland By Honor Moore Bette Howland. Photo courtesy of Howland’s estate. In nice chairs, on a stage, sit five North American writers born in the thirties—three are dead, but only one was lost: Bette Howland, born in 1937. They’re seated younger to older, which has Howland next to Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, both born in 1938, and further down, Margaret Atwood and Toni Cade Bambara, born in 1939. Neither of the two others dead is as out of print as Bette Howland has been until the publication tomorrow of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. I love the very literary story: In 2015, Brigid Hughes, editor of the magazine A Public Space, finds W-3, Howland’s 1974 memoir, in a sale bin at a used bookstore, reads everything she wrote, and plans for Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage as a result. A press is founded, A Public Space Books. Publication of W-3 will be next—placing Howland next to Maxine Hong Kingston and Vivian Gornick as progenitors of the resurgence of memoir. Wherever you position Bette Howland’s absence, the vacancy is glaring—she has the kind of large presence on the page that reconfigures the literary history of its moment, as, for instance, the revival of Jean Rhys did in the sixties. Both were mentored by an A-list great male novelist—Rhys by Ford Madox Ford; Howland by Saul Bellow, whom she met at a writers’ conference on Staten Island in the early sixties. Like Rhys and Ford, Howland and Bellow were “lovers for a time.” He continued as her friend until the end of his life, giving her advice that’s solid gold for a blocked, often depressed writer lacking in self-confidence: “I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.” That Howland is being revived now makes her a member of a cohort who have benefited from the forty-year gap between the end of a woman’s youth and beauty when, at say forty, one’s reputation goes dark, until eighty or so, when one becomes a discovery. Think Marie Ponsot, American poet, the above-mentioned Rhys, or the recently deceased Diana Athill, “discovered” in her late nineties. When Howland came into this company, she was some years into dementia and multiple sclerosis; but the likenesses reproduced were of a sixties babe in bathing suit and sunglasses, a seventies beauty in a fedora. Not recognizing her in the photos, I was drawn to that exhausting formulaic epithet, “a lost woman writer”—then I saw the name. So it’s finally happened, I said to myself, I actually knew one of them. Read More