November 7, 2018 Arts & Culture New Morals for Aesop’s Fables By Anthony Madrid Illustration from a 1912 edition of Aesop’s Fables Aesop’s fables. How many do you know? Probably between five and ten. The tortoise and the hare, the grasshopper and the ants. Good. Squeeze for a minute, you’ll come up with more. The lion who spares the mouse and then she helps him later. The goose who lays the golden omelets. Go ahead and recite a couple, right now. Do your heart some good. But wait. Go back a second. When you recited ’em, did you forget to add the morals? I bet you did. It’s not as easy to remember to put the moral in there. Try again. There was a grasshopper (in the original Greek, it’s never a grasshopper; it’s a cicada or a cricket or a scarab beetle, but never mind). This grasshopper diddled around, all summer, while the ants were sweating. Then, winter came. It always does. Uh-oh! Grasshopper didn’t have anything to eat. The ants all gathered ’round and said, Ah-hah, you are justly served for being such a lazybones! Now starve, shithead. And the moral of the story is … See, you’re kinda forced to invent it spontaneously. The moral of the story is: Instead of sitting around, getting high all the time, how ’bout you get a job? The moral of the story is: All play and no work means you fail out of community college. The moral of the story is … But there are other ways of looking at it, y’know. The lesson could be: People wouldn’t mind starving so much if they didn’t have to listen to others telling ’em they deserve it. The grasshopper just made a mistake, y’all. It’s not like it’s an unalterable fact that he needs to be punished. Indeed, the moral could be: People who have evaded a calamity inevitably enjoy tormenting those who must bear the calamity’s brunt. Read More
November 7, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Smell of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the third installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce Charlie Stackhouse: early bird. Andrew Cinnamon: night owl. The two men, founders of the creative agency Cinnamon Projects, spent a year collecting images—drawings and photographs from books and online—and assigned each image a set of tags according to composition, emotional response, and time. When they filtered the results according to time of day, they found the patterns and themes that presented themselves were particularly compelling. So they designed a series of scents, perfumes and incense, that are “chaptered by the hour.” The perfumes are based on the hours of 8 A.M., 10 A.M., 2 P.M., 9 P.M., and 11 P.M. What does 11 P.M. smell like? Like white, thick-petaled flowers growing on vines, blooming at night. They climb up the gutter of a stone house that you pass on a night walk and the flowers glow like the moon glows and give off a moist smell, something like fur coats, an adult smell from the mind of a child. According to their description, it’s “deep, sophisticated, mystifying” with “amber, clove, carnation, patchouli.” Read More
November 6, 2018 Redux Redux: You Only Vote Once in a While 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. Arthur Miller. This week, we bring you Arthur Miller’s 1966 Art of Theater interview, Wang Meng’s short story “The Stubborn Porridge,” and Martha Hollander’s poem “Election Night.” 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. Arthur Miller, The Art of Theater No. 2 Issue no. 38 (Summer 1966) I always drew a lot of inspiration from politics, from one or another kind of national struggle. You live in the world even though you only vote once in a while. It determines the extensions of your personality. I lived through the McCarthy time, when one saw personalities shifting and changing before one’s eyes, as a direct, obvious result of a political situation. And had it gone on, we would have gotten a whole new American personality—which in part we have … Such a pall of fright was laid upon us that it truly deflected the American mind. It’s part of a paranoia which we haven’t escaped yet. Good God, people still give their lives for it; look what we’re doing in the Pacific. Read More
November 6, 2018 Department of Sex Ed Ted Cruz Erotica By Sylvie McNamara Earlier this fall, I bought an erotic political novel meant as propaganda for a Ted Cruz presidency. Or, at least, that’s how the book was packaged. A Cruzmas Carol is Lacey Noonan’s 2015 reimagining of A Christmas Carol, in which the “Bathroom Attendants of Constitutionality Past, Present, and Future” take Cruz on a madcap night of lewd hallucinations to convince him to run for president and save American democracy. “He’s got it all,” the novel’s Amazon description reads. “The stunning good looks, the six-pack abs … the perfect record as a hard-balling, take-no-guff U.S. Senator. So why won’t he run for president? … Why’s he being such a Tedbenezer Scruz?” Read More
November 6, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Kamala Markandaya By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. In 1956, the then-famous Indian novelist Kamala Markandaya was asked if she might set a book in England, where she lived with her British husband. “No,” she responded, “I don’t know England well enough, and don’t think a static society—that is to say a society which has solved its problems in a mild and satisfactory way—can prod me into writing about it. I regret to say I have to be infuriated about something before I write.” A decade and a half later Markandaya’s greater familiarity with English society, and its increasing volatility, resulted in her seventh novel, The Nowhere Man. Her favorite of her own works, it belongs alongside such classics of diaspora disenchantment fiction as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs. Yet The Nowhere Man was all but ignored on its publication and, despite being reissued by Penguin India in 2012, remains little known today. Read More
November 6, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Sound of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the second installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce May 28, 2018, Ghent, NY. 4:17 A.M. The silence is total. Pencil across graph paper. Like the sound of a small bird making a nest in the rafters above the ceiling. Thatchy, gentle. Straw noise. Wheat noise. It’s too dark to see the letters. Just the scratching in the dim. Leg against sheets under blanket, friction of cotton and flesh. Breath paused. Heart thud. Whoom whoom whoom of blood. Don’t like to hear it. Don’t want it to stop. Whoom whoom whoom, the blood-rush pulse of the body at work. Read More