December 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Restoring a Family Ghost By Yevgeniya Traps Some months ago, I came across a smattering of random family photographs at my parents’ house. The house had experienced some flooding during Hurricane Sandy, and the pictures, having been rather unsentimentally stored in the garage, were damaged—not terribly, but enough to make them brittle, to make them seem older than they were, to make them somehow strange, like daguerreotypes sold at flea markets. In the pile I found a very old group photo: my tiny maternal grandfather plopped on his mother’s lap, surrounded by people who must have been family but whose identities now seemed irrevocably lost. My mother held the fraying sepia image and lamented not knowing, the family history mostly a blank she could not fill in, the details lost to war and displacement, to evacuation and emigration, to the banalities of everyday life that make it impossible to keep track of the everyday banalities that eventually become history. But history, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so we make do; we make up. We plot against the blank spaces. Frail Sister, Karen Green’s genre-transcendent new book, is just this sort of plotting against: a collage-memoir-epistolary found object willed into the story of a life otherwise lost. Virginia Woolf famously invented Judith Shakespeare, doomed sister of William and a woman of equal talents and missing opportunities, who—abandoned, pregnant, fallen—dies by suicide. Green reanimates her Aunt Constance, a ghost in the family archive. Working with old photos, vintage postcards, stationary, sheet music, newspaper clippings, faded cocktail menus, ration books, military documents, and aerial maps, Green combines and reworks, adding text in snippets and bursts, until—imperceptibly—a story coalesces. In an interview with Art in America, Green describes the book as “an old-fashioned mystery,” hidden in a graphic novel, a memoir, an art book, a biography—though she is adamant that Frail Sister is none of these. I came to think of the work as an immersion, a piece of participatory theater, a way of getting lost among the artifacts of a civilization that eventually shows itself to have been ours all along. Read More
December 18, 2018 Redux Redux: Brushfire at Christmas 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, we bring you Jim Crace’s 2003 Art of Fiction interview, Andrew Martin’s short story “With the Christopher Kids,” and Judy Longley’s poem “Brushfire at Christmas.” 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. Read More
December 18, 2018 First Person Stuck on You: An Ode to the Second Person By Nell Stevens I’m not going to write my second-person essay in the second person versus you’re not going to write your second-person essay in the second person. You tell yourself you’ll change it later. You’ll get a first draft done this way, because it’s easy, it feels right, flows better like this. Then I’ll change it back. She’ll change it back. You will. Or maybe no one will. Recently it seems I can’t write anything that isn’t second person. It has caught my voice and won’t relinquish it; I begin everything with the gorgeous vagueness of you and then go back over it, painstakingly switching the you to she, or I, or whatever. And the fact that it could be whatever is what makes the you so alluring. You don’t have to make up your mind, or announce that you’ve made up your mind, with a you. It’s what writing can do that film cannot: introduce a character purely in terms of action, without giving them a face or body or gender. Even a bodiless voice-over in film has a gender. In writing, you can exist for pages, saying things, doing things, changing things, and nobody has any clue who you is. Sometimes that’s useful and sometimes it’s an easy way out of doing the hard work of creating character. Either way and both ways, I’m stuck on it. Read More
December 18, 2018 Arts & Culture The Endurance of A Christmas Carol By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Illustration by John Leech. Public domain. On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care: My Dear Sirs, I determined not to thank you for the Turkey until it was quite gone, in order that you might have a becoming idea of its astonishing capabilities. The last remnant of that blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday—the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two. It is a generous letter, fully in keeping with the generosity of the people he is addressing. Still, like many people who write to express their thanks for unexpected or unwanted Christmas gifts, it seems that Dickens could not resist poking gentle fun at the purchasers’ taste, not least by hinting that sending him a turkey the size of a small child was perhaps being generous to a fault. Is there a note of reproach in “My Dear Sirs”? There is certainly more than one sense in which a turkey that hangs around for a week might be thought of as “that blessed bird,” as is clear from Dickens’s decision to pump up “turkey” into “Turkey,” the double insistence on its final reappearance “yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday,” and the drawn-out sentence that describes the many attempts made by the Dickens household to finish it off (“seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two”), like a chorus of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which partridges in pear trees and swans a-swimming have been usurped by this one “blessed bird.” Even the reference to the turkey’s “astonishing capabilities” seems suspended between wonder and worry, as if a turkey that produced so many leftovers came close to being a real-life version of those enchanted objects and creatures—pots overflowing with porridge, or geese laying limitless supplies of golden eggs—that throng the pages of fairy tales. Four years later, Dickens had written something that possessed still more “astonishing capabilities.” A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was first published just before Christmas in 1843, and since then it has never been out of print. Originally written as a tract for the times, this cautionary tale about the ongoing tussle between greed and goodness has been thought of as timely whenever it has been read. Enjoyed by its first readers as a modern expression of the spirit of Christmas—as modern as Christmas cards, which were sent for the first time in the same year as the Carol’s publication—it has since become popular for quite different reasons: the sense of tradition it is thought to embody, a reminder of the simple pleasures that seem to have been lost sight of in the seasonal scrum of shoppers, an annual invitation to the pleasures of nostalgia. Reproduced so often, and in so many different forms, it has become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies or turkey, with the key difference that, as Martin Heidegger argued was true of all classic works, it has never been “used up.” There have been dozens of films, starring everyone from Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson to Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse, operas and ballets, an all-black musical (Comin’ Uptown, which opened on Broadway in 1979), Benjamin Britten’s 1947 Men of Goodwill: Variations on ‘A Christmas Carol,’ even a BBC mime version in 1973 starring Marcel Marceau. So regular are the annual returns of the Carol to our stages and screens, in fact, that it has become something like a secular ritual, an alternative Christmas story to its more obviously religious rival, in which the three wise men are replaced by three instructive spirits, and the pilgrimage to a child in a manger is replaced by a visit to the house of Tiny Tim. Even people who have never read the Carol know the story of Scrooge, the miserable old skinflint who repents after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. So widely and deeply has this story entered the popular imagination that phrases such as Bah! Humbug! have floated free of their original context and acquired the force of common proverbs, while Scrooge himself has entered the language as a piece of cultural shorthand “used allusively to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy” (OED, “Scrooge”). Read More
December 17, 2018 Hue's Hue Chartreuse, the Color of Elixirs, Flappers, and Alternate Realities By Katy Kelleher F. X. Leyendecker, The Flapper. 1922 Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir, and then later became a fashionable green: a color for flappers and Oscars-goers. Some time later, in the minds of many, it mistakenly became red—a deep maroon, the dark color of dried blood. Let me tell you about chartreuse. But first, pour yourself a glass and watch as the liquid, green as the fresh growth on spring trees, drips from the bottle. It doesn’t matter whether you like the taste. You’re not drinking it for that reason. Chartreuse, like other herbal liqueurs, is an elixir of life. A cure-all, good for digestion and headaches, for sleeping like an infant and living until you’re ninety. Even if you haven’t had Chartreuse, you’ve probably tasted something similar. Italy has Fernet (a favorite of American bartenders for sipping on the clock, or so I’ve heard), Poland has Krupnik, Portugal has Beirão, and Hungary has Unicum (syrupy thick, black and bitter—my personal favorite). These strange drinks still taste of strong magic; it’s easy to imagine that Chartreuse could cure you. It’s no absinthe. There’s no sexy fairy on the bottle, no Mucha girl grabbing your arm and asking you to dance. There’s only a sickly acid-green liquid and a monastic stamp. Read More
December 17, 2018 First Person One Missing Piece By Jill Talbot Some places call us back. This past summer, my daughter and I returned to Canton, New York, where we lived five years ago, approximately twenty miles south of the Canadian border. It was her choice—her favorite of all the places we’ve lived. And while she deserved to go where she wanted after our devastating year and a half, I worried how we would feel when we saw the house again, and how I might experience those spots I now associate with absence, with loss. But I knew we needed to get away before another year began, a year neither one of us was ready to face. * Years come and go, regardless. This much we had learned quickly. * We flew from Dallas to Syracuse and drove the hours north through memory—those two lanes bordered by trees—a green tunnel, a secret path, a shadow. After thirty miles on I-81, I pointed out the Pulaski exit and pulled into the parking lot of the motel we had stayed in five years ago. It had been our last stop on a cross-country move from Oklahoma to New York, during which we spent nights in large hotels in Indiana, Ohio, and Buffalo—but up here the motels spread rather than rise. They are quaint and quiet, small, with one car parked in front of a door over here, another over there. We were not here to stay, only to revisit. It was early August 2013 when I checked us into the one-story motel in Pulaski, a bell on the counter in the lobby (ring once!). We had been living in Oklahoma for four years, the longest we had lived anywhere. I was trading one visiting professor position for another, but instead of teaching four sections of composition at a state university, I would be teaching only three classes each semester, and all of them creative writing workshops at a private liberal arts institution. I remember how my parents, having both lived in Texas their whole lives, feared they’d never see us again when I told them where we were moving. Before checkout the next afternoon, my daughter and I swam in the pool out front, the one with a floor of tiny tiles, a bright-blue mosaic. I knew I wasn’t ready to get back on the road and drive us to our new life. I wanted to linger, to stare into the sunny sky, to stay between, so when my daughter noticed a pizza place across the highway before jumping into the water, I pulled a T-shirt over my suit and headed across the parking lot toward the lobby. I rang the bell. Paid for another night. Read More