March 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Nothing Is Like Anything Else: On Amy Hempel By Alice Blackhurst This week marks the release of Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, her first book in over a decade. In the first story I submitted to a writing workshop, I included, in my naive twenty-something state, a scene in which a male and female character get close following a party. The manuscript was a mess of overly florid metaphors, and it included the following sentence: “He touched her arm lightly.” The class’s teacher, the short-fiction writer Amy Hempel, gave it back to me swimming in black ink and annotations. “Touching isn’t cheap,” she offered gently, in response to my clunky familiarities. On the question of the metaphors she was bolder: “Nothing’s like anything else,” she suggested to the group. Nothing’s like anything else. Hempel’s prose is so blanched of needless embellishment that it can take on the corrosive sting of disinfectant. It refuses to accommodate comfort, or the familiar narratives we use to buffer our existences—“the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.” And yet, not cold, it brims with earthy, prosaic humor. Hempel’s comedy is the kind derived from finding typos on hospital menus or taking detours to IKEA stores. Read More
March 27, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: Mars By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. Mars is an impossible planet: waterless, desolate, barren. Its atmosphere is drenched in UV radiation and contains only trace amounts of oxygen. Temperatures in the winter are comparable to Antarctica’s, and in the summer there are dust storms that stir up the toxic soil and blot out the sun for weeks at a time. Any reasonable person knows that humans will never consent to live there. This is why Mars is the ultimate utopia: a planet where no real future is imaginable is a planet where any future is imaginable. The writer Wladislaw Lach-Szyrma, who coined the noun Martian, wrote his utopian novel Aleriel (1883) to remind readers here on earth that “there may be brighter worlds than this, and a happier existence than we can have here.” Mars is red, the color of roses and revolution. The Bolsheviks imagined socialist uprisings succeeding there even as their own were being repressed. (The “red star” of communist iconography was inspired by a 1907 Russian science fiction novel of that title, set on Mars.) On earth, movements fail, rights are revoked and denied, injustices of all kinds prevail. But on Mars, it’s possible to envision—as two nineteenth-century Iowan feminists did—a world in which gender roles are reversed. In Unveiling a Parallel (1893), by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, female Martians vote, control the levers of power, and unabashedly solicit the company of male prostitutes, while males are relegated to the errands of the domestic sphere. In a world with forty percent gravity, a planet unburdened by the weight of history, such things can happen. Read More
March 26, 2019 Arts & Culture At Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Hundredth Birthday Party By Nina Sparling Read our Art of Poetry interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in our current issue. City Lights Bookstore I hear the party at City Lights Books before I see it. The Beats, and their twenty-first-century torchbearers, are neither quiet nor sober. The bookstore is celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday in an event open to all of San Francisco. A man with shoulder-length gray hair sits cross-legged on Columbus Avenue drinking Squirt and reading Mark Twain to himself. People step around him. Men with glasses sport boots that will never be polished. The air is thick with a blend of smoke from cigarettes and joints—there are no e-cigarettes, no vape pens in sight. Poet Guillermo Gómez-Peña tells the assembled crowd that the hijos y nietos de Ferlinghetti have gathered to celebrate his century-old cumpleaños. The artist recounts first meeting Ferlinghetti, who was wearing huaraches and a bolo tie, in Mexico City. “It was 1975, mas o menos, and it was Mexico City, capital of the continental crisis,” Gómez-Peña says. In the following speeches we learn that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was everywhere: Nagasaki in ‘45, Havana in ‘59, Paris in May ‘68, and San Francisco before, during, and after. He stayed home on the first annual Ferlinghetti Day in San Francisco, but the streets filled in his honor. Tucked between the stacks in the fiction section a graying gentleman in round glasses drinks from a flask. A layer of dust covers his fedora and a thin book of poems peeks out from the pocket of his army-green jacket. He snaps his fingers as Gómez-Peña reads: “Poetry is news / from the frontiers of consciousness.” It’s a rare crisp and sunny San Francisco afternoon and City Lights has brought the Beats back to North Beach. The celebration meanders. Inside, the audience crowds together as poets read favorite Ferlinghetti poems. The PA system crackles. The poets stand on the mezzanine level; the people wind among the stacks. The crowd bends their necks trying to see the poets’ mouths move. The microphone fries Ishmael Reed’s baritone as he reads from “Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower.” Read More
March 26, 2019 Redux Redux: Desire Is Curled 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. In this week’s Redux, we’re remembering the work of the late W. S. Merwin and Linda Gregg with Merwin’s 1987 Art of Poetry interview and Gregg’s 1986 poem “After the Beginning.” 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. W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry No. 38 Issue no. 102 (Spring 1987) INTERVIEWER Do you see a connection between poetry and prayer? MERWIN I guess the simple answer is yes, if only because I think of poetry as an attempt to use language as completely as possible. And if you want to do that, obviously you’re not concerned with language as decoration, or language as amusement, although you certainly want language to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of the completeness. I think of poetry as having to do with the completeness of life, and the completeness of relation with one’s experience, completing one’s experience, articulating it, making sense of it. Read More
March 26, 2019 Arts & Culture On Cussing By Katherine Dunn So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash. I like to say shooty-pooty, which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity, which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit. This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration. It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn, gosh for God. They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves. Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive stimulus of pleasure or awe or humor. Cuss words and phrases, whatever they may be in our individual vocabularies, are the most potent words we have for expressing emotion. However, as writers, we now face a loss of power in the classic obscenities—the draining of shock value, the depletion of such terms’ ability to offend. Our challenge is to revive the language with vivid reinvention. Case in point: I was out on my balcony a while ago as two young men walked by on the sidewalk and one of them was telling a story in which every other word was fucking. It went along the lines of, “So I fucking told the fucking guy that it wasn’t my fucking beer, I’m just fucking here for fucking apples… ” And so on. Now this made me sad. Here is this potent word being drained of all its juice and snap by overuse. We often call such cuss words expletives. Technically an expletive is any word or phrase that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence. A few years ago, for instance, TV reporters took to sticking in the phrase “if you will” in the most inane way. That was a smarmy, Uriah Heep–style expletive. For the guy under the balcony, the word fuck was an expletive. It had no more weight or meaning than like for the proverbial Valley Girl or um for the tongue-tied. It’s superfluous filler. It isn’t shocking. It isn’t vivid or engaging. It’s simply monotonous. He was boring and his story was unintelligible. Read More
March 25, 2019 In Memoriam Letters From W. S. Merwin By Grace Schulman Grace Schulman shares snippets from a lifetime of correspondence and friendship with the poet W. S. Merwin, who died on March 15, 2019. A young W. S. Merwin. (Credit: Estate of W. S. Merwin) “We must not vanish all at once; it’s too hard on the survivors,” W. S. Merwin wrote in a letter to me late in his life, referring obliquely to the passing of his contemporaries, John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell. In the dark hours following Merwin’s own vanishing on March 15, I thought of how he first appeared in my life. Our friendship began in 1972, during my first week as poetry editor of The Nation. Inside a box of submissions was his packet of poems with the usual stamped self-addressed envelope. Besides my predilection for his poetry, I’d known that he’d held my job at The Nation in 1962, and that he’d written for them an eloquent plea for the containment of nuclear power. His poetry came on October 14, 1972, a date I remember because exactly two years before, during the Vietnam War, he had famously refused to sign a loyalty oath before a reading at the State University of Buffalo (SUNY), and went home refusing his badly needed check. Still, knowing what I did, I was unprepared for the lines I read: I have to trust what was given to me if I am to trust anything it led the stars over the shadowless mountain what does it not remember in its night and silence what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time Over the din of office typewriters, I heard the music and silence of those lines, the surprise of faith in one who is accustomed to doubt, the rhetorical questions suggesting all memory, all hope. He’d sent that poem, “The Gift,” along with others from his forthcoming book, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, hoping that The Nation might feature them before the book appeared in 1973. It had been The Nation’s practice to print one poem at a time, often as filler. I asked the publisher, James Storrow, Jr., for space to print not just one but the cluster Merwin sent, and when he looked askance, I read him the closing lines of “The Gift,” Read More