August 3, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Buchi Emecheta By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Nigerian expatriate writer Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) in her own words was a “sort of” successful novelist in the London of the 1970s and 1980s. Her books are juicy and plot-gripping, more fun to read than titles like Second Class Citizen, The Slave Girl and The Bride Price might imply. Emecheta’s topic is a difficult one—the grim fate of women in Nigerian and Nigerian emigré society, and the worsening of their already fragile social rights caused by urbanization—but the effect is often oddly consoling. There’s inspiration in her sense of injustice, in her insistence that her character’s lives should be better. Emecheta’s personal story is also inspiring. Many of her books are set in the Ibuza of her youth, but Second Class Citizen in particular is semi-autobiographical, and tells the story of Adah, a young woman who schemes to get an education and— despite being forced into marriage at sixteen years old manages to emigrate to London. Eventually she leaves her husband—single-parenting five small children in conditions of desperate poverty—and becomes a writer. Read More
August 3, 2018 At Work A Conversation Between Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman By Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman Left: photo by John Emerson; Right: photo by Craig Mod Lynne Tillman and Nell Painter can’t remember how they first met. Tillman believes they were introduced at a history conference, while Painter is sure that their first encounter was here, at the Paris Review offices, upon the conduction of this interview. In any case, last spring they convened—either again or for the first time—to discuss their respective new books. Men and Apparitions, Tillman’s sixth novel, tells the story of Zeke, a thirty-eight-year-old cultural anthropologist who belongs to a generation of “new men” and soon becomes the subject of his own research. Old in Art School, Painter’s eighth book of non-fiction, chronicles her decision to leave the world of academic research in pursuit of a B.A. and M.F.A. in visual art. Together they discussed professionalism, the art market, and the personal self-fashioning of writers. Read More
August 2, 2018 Weird Book Room Paradise for Bookworms By Ted Widmer The first and only edition of an extensive monograph on the silkworm by Emilio Cornalia. Bugs are not great from the booklover’s point of view. They eat paper, devouring precious words in the process. They nestle audaciously inside expensive bindings. Without too much difficulty, an entrepreneurial insect can chew through an entire chapter of a well-developed argument. But a recent catalogue from Asher Rare Books in the Netherlands shows that books about insects can be works of great beauty. Stunning close-ups fuse dazzling color with impressive technical achievement in the art of printing. It’s a reminder of just how important the microscope was to the Enlightenment, when writers of natural history were drawn to the study of these tiny coinhabitants of our world. Read More
August 2, 2018 On Sports The Spectacle of Women’s Wrestling By Mairead Small Staid Vintage newspaper photograph of women wrestlers. “The virtue of wrestling is to be a spectacle of excess,” Roland Barthes begins—but we are wary of excess in women, wary of too much flesh, too much blood, too much lust or power. Too much knowledge: Eve was tossed out of the garden, over the ropes. Too much beauty: Helen slaughtered two nations. Too much faith: Joan was burned at the stake. Excess in women is criminal, and the punishment is debasement or death. What becomes of wrestling’s virtue, then, when the wrestlers are women? The art itself risks diminishment, limited not by the action nor its performers but by the world outside the ring. The expectations of the audience play as great a role as the action itself; our participation is not optional. “A light without shadow elaborates an emotion without secrets,” Barthes says of the ring’s floodlights, but we aren’t used to seeing the emotions of women so bared. We think we are—the woman hysterical, the woman scorned—but such displays are the wave, the crest and the trough, and the ocean goes on below. Read More
August 2, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Listen I Love You Joy Is Coming By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I’m in the closet for the sake of my parents. We come from a society where it’s impossible to be gay or queer. They have already faced a lot of disappointment, and though I feel alienated from them at times, I want to spare them any further heartache. They probably wouldn’t disown me, but I know they could never be happy. You might say I have a duty to myself to pursue my own happiness, but I feel as if any happiness I could get would still be bitter and pale. Unlike in Hollywood, there’s no tearful reconciliation to be had here, just endless recriminations and seeing them beaten and bewildered. Do you have a poem for this thorny feeling? Call it love or filial obligation or resentment or pity for my poor, flawed, all-too-human parents. Yours, A Wayward Son Read More
August 1, 2018 Look Images from Louisiana’s Black Trail-Riding Clubs By Jeremiah Ariaz Black trail-riding clubs have their roots in Creole culture, formed in South Louisiana in the eighteenth century. Today trail rides are an opportunity for generations of people to gather, celebrate, and ride horseback. The riders form a distinctive yet little-known subculture in Southwest Louisiana, one that exists in stark contrast to most depictions of cowboys and serves as a reminder that black equestrian culture stems from a time when the Louisiana Territory was in fact the American West. In addition to sharing an important aspect of Louisiana’s cultural heritage, these photographs assert a counternarrative to historic representations of the cowboy and prevailing images of despair in black America. I embarked on this project around the fiftieth anniversary of many of the achievements of the civil rights era, and in the wake of the murder of Alton Sterling in 2016. In the context of this national backdrop, my photographs depict joy, pride, and familial intimacy, particularly between fathers and sons who are taught to care for and ride horses from an early age. The photographs reflect the Creole culture and the celebratory spirit of the rides while sharing one of the many histories in the American story that have largely remained untold. An exhibition of the photographs is currently on view at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and runs through September 22. Louisiana Trail Riders is available for preorder and will be released on August 28 from UL Press. Read More