August 14, 2018 Redux Redux: Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover 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. Blast into The Paris Review’s archive with Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 Art of Poetry interview, where he recounts his spacey hallucinations; Robert Olen Butler’s story “ ‘Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover’ ”; and Cynthia Zarin’s poem “Saturn.” Read More
August 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Mothers as Makers of Death By Claudia Dey Stages in pregnancy as illustrated in the nineteenth-century medical text Nouvelles démonstrations d’accouchemens. I wrote the first draft of my novel Heartbreaker in a ten-day mania in August 2015 with a fist-size bandage over my left ear; beneath it, a track of dark-blue stitches. The smallest bone in the human body, my stapes bone, which is charged with conducting sound in the middle ear, had stopped working. I now had a thin hook of titanium fluttering in my head, and in the on-switch manner of miracles, my hearing returned. My husband had taken our two young sons on a road trip to a small cabin on the east coast of Canada. I could not lift anything heavy. I had to keep my heart rate low. I could not wash my hair and wore it in a knot shined with grease on top of my head. I turned off my cell phone, unplugged our landline, and disconnected from the Internet. This was my plan: to be unreachable. Didn’t Jonathan Franzen pour cement into his USB port and work in some kind of carpeted hell-mouth of a rental office to finish—which one was it now? Ah yes, Freedom? My husband could see I had a novel inside me, and it was a commotion, and the only way to settle it was to write it, and the only way to write it was to be alone. I had not been alone in a decade. I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space. I finally had my hearing checked when, pregnant with my second child, I could no longer hear my first son’s dear earliest words. (I would soon learn that my disease, the same one that befell Beethoven and Howard Hughes, was exacerbated by pregnancy.) I entered the testing booth, a grim room of knobs and wires, closed the heavy door behind me, sat down, and put on the too-tight headset. My audience of one, the audiologist, looked at me through the thick glass, her face evangelist heavy with makeup. As I had been instructed, I pressed the button on the remote whenever I heard a tone or a word. I could tell there were serious gaps between my pressings; a vast amount of life occurred outside of my experience of it. The clock on the wall counted down. I pictured the execution chambers of inmates. For many years of my life, it had been as if sound lived on the other side of a fast-moving river. In my exchanges with others, I got very good at signaling, Oh, I know exactly what you mean. This seemed to be signal enough. Read More
August 14, 2018 At Work Satirizing Identity Politics: An Interview with Lexi Freiman By Alexandra Kleeman Lexi Freiman. I first encountered Lexi Freiman’s work in a workshop at Columbia University. She had written a short story about a woman in a shifting, phantasmagoric relationship with a man whom the narration treated at some times as a nemesis and at others as a luminous object of desire. One scene from that story, where the female protagonist tends to her lover’s clogged pores while cycling through states of adoration and fear, will stick in my mind until the day my mind ends. Though I’m not even sure that Lexi remembers that story or my visceral, enthusiastic reaction to it, the piece is a perfect example of what I find most interesting about her work: its creativity, its dextrous and controlled use of surprise, its willingness to peer deeply into the realm of the improper. In her debut novel, Inappropriation, Lexi tells the story of Ziggy, a misfit teen at a swanky Australian private school whose search for identity leads her to New Agey communes and right-wing chat rooms and a series of increasingly problematic decisions. We sat down recently—at separate computers in separate places—to discuss, over email, cyborgs and teenagers and the risky rewards of satire. INTERVIEWER One thing that really stands out about your novel is its sense of humor, its willingness to poke fun. These days, it’s common to say that our political moment is so outlandish that it’s impossible to satirize—at times it feels like there’s an entirely new genre of think piece focused on the difficulties of comedians and comedy writers trying to take on the Trump administration. And yet your book succeeds at being both tremendously contemporary and savagely funny, a bit of fresh air. What moved you to write a satirical novel? What do we gain when we view our world through a humorous lens? FREIMAN I actually started writing the book just before politics got really absurd, during the end of Obama’s presidency. I’ve always been drawn to satire—to framing things in a way that makes their inherent absurdity visible—and identity politics was emerging then as a dominant ideology on the Left. The way social media distorted identity politics made the whole cultural moment feel ripe for satire in the conventional sense—as a critique of power. Of course, this sounds counterintuitive, as identity politics is all about giving voice and agency to the marginalized. And in a sense, that’s what interested me about it—that there was this powerful political movement seemingly beyond critique and allergic to humor, and it felt as if questioning any aspect of it was somehow immoral. I wanted to examine the problems of a sacrosanct ideology and of identity itself. Even once Trump was elected, the project remained satirically viable, especially as the Left controls culture and the arts. Read More
August 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Historical Future of Trans Literature By RL Goldberg Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us. —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi wouldn’t have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappae mundi weren’t intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, Jerusalem, at the very center of this map, was the moral center of the medieval world. The map’s graphic histories were organized chronologically, with the outermost strata of the circular map representing the deepest, most sedimented layers of recorded history and theology. Bounding Africa, due east of the Nile, was a corridor of oddities, a single-file parade of queer embodiments and types: the Blemmyae and Troglodytes, Himantopodes, Cynocephali, Amazons, Marmini, and Monocoli. These foreign, “abnormal” people, marginally situated in this uniquely “African” space (though it was erroneously labeled Europe), were characterized by the peculiar adaptive technologies of their bodies: the Blemmyae were depicted as having mouths and eyes lodged in their breasts; the Sciopods were distinguished by their giant foot, which grew out of a trunk-like leg at the center of their body and which shielded them from the sun. Particularly interesting among these foreign peoples is the figure identified as “hermaphrodite”; unlike the other figures represented—the race that exclusively ate food through straws, the hirsute peoples that walked on all fours—the hermaphrodite was not a cultural or site-specific identity. If every other form could be understood, from the cartographer’s European vantage, as a foreign but intelligible adaptation to the world’s varied topography, the hermaphrodite’s difference was ambiguous, a maladaptive representation of corporeal strangeness and sexual illegibility. Though most of these “monstrous races” were rendered naked, thereby signaling their non-European primitivity, the hermaphrodite was unique insofar as their uncanniness was solely a matter of their genitals. That is, if each other example of a monstrously raced person was monstrous for their general strangeness, the hermaphrodite was monstrous for genital strangeness. Read More
August 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Holy Disobedience: On Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal By Patti Smith In the first stirring lines of The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet bares his youthful aspirations, his doctrine as a poet, and his tenets as a man. He offers a single sentence—“Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white”—then embarks on a paragraph of Proustian proportions, where straightaway the reader is hurled into the inner sanctum of the convict, privy to his gestures, sounds, and scents, his unspoken codes. We view the swagger of muscular gods, outfitted in the striped colors of a child’s party dress or a faded candy cane—colors most likely chosen to mock the wearers, the most hardened criminals of France. Yet Genet has imbued this mockery with grandeur; these are the colors of his chosen university, colors he believes he will one day wear on his own back, graduating from foundling to criminal to convict. Thus achieved, he will earn the privilege of joining his chosen comrades as they are transported by ship from the Breton port of Brest to the Salvation Islands, off the coast of a barely colonized French Guiana. He imagines himself among them, chained at the ankles, treading the muddied path to the prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where the most feared will be ferried across the piranha-infested Maroni River to rot in the hell of Devil’s Island. Read More
August 10, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Film Forum, Fallout Shelters, and Fermentation By The Paris Review If you recently found yourself wandering West Houston and Sixth, did you notice the soft sounds of film reels spinning and popcorn popping? If you didn’t, then you weren’t listening hard enough, because Film Forum is reopened for business after its renovation hiatus. Among some of the films stretching the legs of the new theaters are Nico, 1988 (which you can read about on the Daily) and a long schedule of films by the French director Jacques Becker. On Saturday night, I saw Rendezvous in July (Rendez-vous de juillet), a 1949 comedy of jazz-loving, Bohemian-lite young Parisians. Lucien is in love with Christine and wants to go abroad to make a documentary film; Roger is a brooding, brass-playing musician in love with the actress Therese, who will be starring alongside Christine in a hot new play. When these bright young things aren’t dancing in jazz clubs or having dinner parties, they’re navigating their lives away from the strictures of their bourgeois parents’ generation and forward into a new world after the war. At its heart, Rendezvous in July is a wonderful, quick-witted movie about young people, about Paris, about art and love. This was the first film I’d seen by Becker, and I hope to see another. However, if Rendezvous in July doesn’t pique your interest, I’m sure any of the embarrassment of film riches once more available would be reason enough to walk through Film Forum’s recently reopened doors. —Lauren Kane Read More