February 20, 2019 Mess With a Classic Weird Time in Frankenstein By Elisa Gabbert In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general). In her short nonfiction book Ongoingness—a single long, fragmentary essay—Sarah Manguso writes a meditative exegesis on her own diary, a document nearing a million words that she has added to daily, obsessively, for twenty-five years. This practice felt like a necessity, a hedge against potential failures of memory, and a way to process the onslaught of time: “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” It started when she was a teenager. She went to an art opening with a dear friend, drank wine from a plastic cup, looked at paintings—“It was all too much,” the moment was “too full.” She wouldn’t have time to “recover” from the beauty of the day, she realized, since tomorrow would offer only more experience: “There should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days.” (I’ve often thought there should be a little buffer between months: a monthend.) When Manguso became a mother, this anxious relationship to time changed: In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. Read More
February 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Meet Your New Favorite Poet By Anthony Madrid James Thomson (1700–1748) I like to tell poetry students about pleasures that are “on reserve” for them—meaning pleasures they’re too little to have now, but which they will have, someday, if they just stick with it. Good example of this: owning other poets. How can you own a poet? Simple. You have to find a poet whom no one has read in a long time, a poet with no living fans. Then you have to sincerely love that poet’s work. That’s the hard part. But if you love the poet’s poems, and no one else has even read them, there’s your opportunity to plant your flag. That poet is now your private property. Your interpretation of that poet’s work is by definition correct. Your right to be there is indisputable. And why can’t beginners have this pleasure? That’s easy. ’Cuz they cannot bring themselves to read material that’s “not gonna be on the test.” And even if they do somehow read such material, they do not love it. They are beginners; they love each other. Everything else is homework. • James Thomson (1700–1748) is my private property. I keep him in my pocket and take him out and look at him sometimes. He always looks good. There are many James Thomson poems that I have never read. Consequently, those pieces do not exist. The ones I have read I have read many times. I’m talking about The Seasons, a 5,500-line poem that used to be approximately as famous as the Aeneid or whatever. It was translated into a bunch of different languages, Goethe revered it, it was imitated all over the place. People used to sit there, stunned or rocking back and forth, muttering “Oh man, oh man, oh man!” about The Seasons. These days, however—2019—the sun has quite gone down on this great poet. It’s not hard to see why. His stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be good, at all. Number one, it was written in the eighteenth century. Nobody likes that century’s poetry. Number two, it’s in twisted-up Miltonic blank verse. In other words, it’s hard. Number three, it’s 5,500 lines of nature imagery. There’s no plot, no characters—it’s nature imagery, floor to ceiling. Do not adjust your laptop. That sound you hear is fleeing multitudes. But! It’s one of the best and most moving poems I’ve ever read or ever hope to read. There are parts that cause me to rain tears.There are parts whose eloquence is right up there with Shakespeare and company. Let me show you a handful of passages. Exhibit A: This is just to give you an idea what kind of diction-syntax we’re talking about. This is really early 0n in the poem, and Thomson has been talking about how the coming of spring affects the air and the wind; now he draws your attention to the soil and leaves: Read More
February 19, 2019 Arts & Culture A Quaker Woman Writes about War By Lisa Gornick World War 2 propaganda poster, Treidler, c. 1943 What complicated times we live in: so many thorny issues need to be acknowledged before we can responsibly or sensitively begin a discussion. As Roxana Robinson—a Quaker who opposes war—told her audience in her 2014 address, “The Warrior and the Writer,” at the United States Air Force Academy shortly after the publication of her deeply researched and compassionately imagined novel Sparta, “You might be surprised that I wrote a book about a twenty-six year old Marine: I’m the wrong gender, the wrong generation, and the wrong religious genre.” Although she avoided the term “cultural appropriation,” it’s clear both from this address and from her other essays that she’s seriously grappled with this problem: the potential violence those of us with the resources to have our voices heard can do to those with less access to telling stories. Writer and activist Nikesh Shukla instructs that anyone “writing ‘the other’ ” should both do the research properly and “ask yourself: why am I telling this story?” In this regard, Robinson is a model citizen, but she never wavers in her conviction that it is the job of writers to be curious about and then “render precisely what it means to be alive.” We would not have Anna Karenina, Robinson writes, had Tolstoy not imagined the experience of a jilted young woman; we would not have Shakespeare’s plays had he not put himself in the shoes of kings and servants alike. “Empathy is the opposite of exploitation,” she says—and it’s with this belief that she approaches Sparta’s protagonist, Conrad. Read More
February 19, 2019 Redux Redux: Miles of Mostly Vacant Lots 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. Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photograph by Angela Radulescu. This week, we’re celebrating Toni Morrison’s birthday with her 1993 Art of Fiction interview, observing Presidents’ Day with Philip Levine’s poem “A Walk with Tom Jefferson,” and delving deep into the archive to retrieve Gisela Elsner’s short story “A Pastoral.” 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. Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) I don’t trust my writing that is not written, although I work very hard in subsequent revisions to remove the writerly-ness from it, to give it a combination of lyrical, standard, and colloquial language. To pull all these things together into something that I think is much more alive and representative. But I don’t trust something that occurs to me and then is spoken and transferred immediately to the page. Read More
February 19, 2019 YA of Yore Could The Baby-Sitters Club Have Been More Gay? By James Frankie Thomas In her monthly column YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. This is an allegory, but it’s also true: I grew up in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood that was, at the time, the center of gay life in New York. We moved there in 1989, when I was two. I was one of the only children in my neighborhood. There was a park right across the street from my building, but only grown men hung out in it, and I wasn’t allowed to play there. I was enchanted by the rainbow flags that hung from windows in the summertime, but I couldn’t get any adult to tell me what they were for. “Brotherhood,” my preschool teacher told me, and then refused to answer any follow-up questions. In elementary school we had an art teacher who was openly living with AIDS, and every Christmas he had us decorate paper gift bags to donate to a meal service for AIDS patients. When he died, in 1996, I was nine years old and had still never heard the term gay. I was in middle school when I first began to encounter it, but only from classmates, and only as an insult. I was thirteen when I was finally deemed old enough to be told who in our family was openly gay. (My late grandfather, for one. Long story.) I told my ten-year-old brother and got in trouble for upsetting him; he was too young, I was chided, to handle such things. Such was the cultural cognitive dissonance around homosexuality in the nineties. To say it was a transitional period does not begin to capture the weirdness of growing up internalizing the idea that gay people were deserving of rights, worthy of social acceptance, and outrageously inappropriate to discuss in front of children. This paradox is crystallized in the 1993 Seinfeld episode that gave us the catchphrase “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” That episode won a GLAAD award. So did the first season of Friends, in which every utterance of lesbian was met with uproarious canned laughter, as if the word itself were raunchy and daring—and it was, in 1995. Gay people were, of course, nonexistent in children’s entertainment. In the nineties, the Scholastic industrial complex would sooner have published a bomb-building manual than include an openly gay character. But the paradigm shifted so rapidly in the mid-2000s that even I am occasionally tempted to judge the books of my childhood by the standards of subsequent decades—hence my long-held, largely irrational grudge against Ann M. Martin. Read More
February 15, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Medusa, Magic, and Moshfegh By The Paris Review T Kira Madden. Photo: Jac Martinez. T Kira Madden is magic. In her forthcoming memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, she uses language new and strange but always devastatingly right. One of my favorite lines describes weather not unlike our recent New York squalls: “It’s a nickel-slapping kind of rain, a silver bounce to it. It is not cold enough to snow.” Such sentences, in their brevity and clarity, whirl the reader through this book. Whether in a loud coffee shop or our lively office, I found myself completely ensconced. Other books might possess similar powers—to steal a reader’s attention entirely—but I do think this memoir’s pull is uniquely sonic. “Nickel-slapping” and “silver bounce,” for instance, possess that ear-thrum of diving underwater. I’m thinking also of Madden’s dialogue: she captures that particular blend of impatience and tenderness unique to conversation among family. From a flippant “abso-fucking-lutely” to the most thudding words and exchanges, Madden reveals the taut vulnerability in everyday speech, the feeling that we always say either too much or too little—our fear, but speaking anyway. —Spencer Quong Read More