September 26, 2018 Nineties Movies In the Nineties, Race Didn’t Exist By Nafkote Tamirat From the poster for Gattaca (1997) In the summer of 1997, when I had just turned eleven, my mother decided my sister and I knew nothing and that it was up to her to fix it. We took a train to Washington, D.C., left our bags at an uncle’s house, and began a five-day odyssey through what felt like all of the museums that could possibly exist in the world. I was given a composition notebook, with instructions to take notes. I’ve retained little from our frenzied speed walking through places like the U.S. Mint, the Washington Monument, the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Arlington National Cemetery, except for what I wrote in the capitalized block letters I’d adopted as my handwriting of the season. The single incident I’ve committed to memory took place in the Museum of American History, at an exhibition on Jim Crow. I was gazing up at large artistic renderings of black people sitting in the backs of buses, not being permitted entrance to swimming pools, drinking from water fountains below the word colored, when a white boy, younger than I was, and his father, drew closer. The father was earnestly explaining how long, long ago, those people couldn’t sit in the same part of the bus as these people. I was struck by how he never said “white” or “black”: in my family, when you mentioned a new acquaintance or friend, the first question was always “White, black, or Ethiopian?” and then judgments were made accordingly. Read More
September 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Guy Davenport’s Translation of Mao By Anthony Madrid Guy Davenport / Poem by Mao Zedong In 1979, Guy Davenport’s second book of “stories” appeared: Da Vinci’s Bicycle. He was fifty-one. I put quotation marks around the word stories because almost nothing happens in any of them. When they’re good, they’re good for other reasons. Davenport was a disciple of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and like everyone answering that description, he was a supreme crank. The main problem with all of these guys is that they vastly overestimate the value of literary allusion. And I know all about it, ’cuz I was ruined in my youth by these lizard-eating weirdos. Davenport certainly did his part. They were all brilliant. They could write sentences that stick with you forever. Most people never write even one; these guys could practically cut them off by the yard. Yet, none of ’em knew when to stop. They always, always got carried away. My hypothesis is that too much of their motivation for writing was to enshrine their crankitudes. They were always trying to get away with something. Zoom in on Davenport. Let me ask you: How much Chinese do you suppose he knew? I think the smart money is on “very little.” He probably knew about as much as I do—which is to say, as much as can be learned from one semester of study, augmented by the eager observation of one or two native speakers reciting a handful of classic poems. But a supreme crank knows how to exploit every little drop of whatever he or she knows. Davenport, who really did know all about poetic meter in English, must have listened very actively when he got somebody to recite Li Bai (or whomever) to him. Davenport knew what he was not hearing. Chinese meter was not about vowel quantity, nor stressed and unstressed syllables. What Chinese poetry almost certainly sounded like to him was clusters of five syllables, all of them stressed. That’s what mile after mile of Tang- and Song-Dynasty poetry sounds like to an English speaker. Read More
September 25, 2018 Redux Redux: The Wind Flakes Gold-Leaf from Trees 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. Embracing fall equinox, we bring you George Seferis’s 1970 Writers at Work interview, where he speaks to the roles of conscious and subconscious memory in poetic imagery; Edmund White’s short story “The Secret Order of Joy”; and Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Autumn.” George Seferis, The Art of Poetry No. 13 Issue no. 50 (Fall 1970) When autumn approached, when there would be a rather strong wind, and the fishing barges would have to sail through rough weather, we would always be glad when they were at last anchored, and my mother would say to someone among the fishermen who’d gone out: “Ah, bravo, you’ve come through rough weather”; and he would answer: “Madam, you know, we always sail with Charon at our side.” That’s moving to me. Perhaps when I wrote about Ulysses in “Upon a Foreign Verse”—perhaps I had in mind somebody like that fisherman. Those “certain old sailors from my childhood” who would recite the Erotokritos. Read More
September 25, 2018 Bulletin Honoring Deborah Eisenberg By The Paris Review Deborah Eisenberg, ca. 2009. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We are proud to announce that The Paris Review will honor Deborah Eisenberg with the 2019 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Selected by the editorial committee and presented each year at our Spring Revel, the Hadada is given to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” This is a high bar, but Deborah sails over it. A writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). All four collections were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published by Ecco today. Eisenberg, who only began publishing work around the age of forty, quickly established herself as a virtuoso of the short story, her primary medium. She first appeared in The Paris Review, fully formed, as a subject in our Writers at Work interview series, and her story “Taj Mahal” was published in the Fall 2015 issue. In her interview with Catherine Steindler, she explains: “When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don’t? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn’t see it when I looked in the mirror. I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something I approach casually.” We are delighted to bestow upon Deborah this magazine’s highest and holiest award. The Hadada has been awarded since 2003, when the Review gave the inaugural prize to the legendary publisher Barney Rosset. Since then, greats such as Joan Didion, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Robert Silvers, and Paula Fox have received the honor. Last year, The Paris Review presented the award to the incomparable Joy Williams. The Hadada is one of three prizes presented at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. Known to some as “prom for intellectuals,” the Revel is an evening of merriment, frippery, and fine prose. All proceeds from the Revel support the magazine, which has been a nonprofit since 2004. Claim your seat for April 2, 2019, when you can join us to support the Review and celebrate Deborah Eisenberg.
September 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Body and Blood By Brit Bennett Ten days after a white supremacist carried a gun into a black Charleston church, I was in Los Angeles, listening to a black minister preach about the end of the world. A coincidence of timing, maybe, although the message seemed apt. What could be more apocalyptically evil than a racist massacre within the hallowed walls of a church, an angry young man sitting through a Bible study before slaughtering the nine strangers who had invited him in to pray? Yet on that Sunday, when the pastor talked about the end, he did not mention Charleston or the seven black churches that had been burned throughout the South in the immediate aftermath. Instead, he spoke about fornication. “M-hm,” a woman behind me chimed in, “and gay marriage.” The ladies beside her murmured their assent. Just the day before, the Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage, a decision that seemed to disturb the congregation more than anything that had happened in Charleston. I didn’t understand it. How could marriage equality be a sign of the impending apocalypse, but not a church shooting? How could the evils of fornication be a more pressing topic than the wave of racial violence affecting the very congregation sitting in the pews? The Christian church has a problem with bodies, which is ironic, as sociologist Michael Eric Dyson notes in his 1982 essay, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply.” “After all, the Christian faith is grounded in the Incarnation, the belief that God took on flesh to redeem human beings,” he writes. “That belief is constantly being trumped by Christianity’s quarrels with the body. Its needs. Its desires. Its sheer materiality.” Within the black church, this quarrel with the body becomes even more complicated. What does it mean to be at war with your own flesh within a culture that already hates the black body? And what does this mean for black women, whose bodies are doubly despised? Read More
September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Tour of Diane Williams’s Art Collection By Zach Davidson, Madelaine Lucas and Liza St. James Diane Williams in her home, 2018 (All photos by Bill Hayward) Diane Williams is renowned for her short, distilled works of fiction. In addition to her work as a writer, she is also the founder and editor of NOON, a literary annual whose next edition will mark its twentieth anniversary. Diane’s curatorial vision extends beyond the pages of NOON, where we are the senior editors, to the walls of her apartment. Some of the treasures we have glimpsed during our staff meetings, which take place in her home: a portrait of a pangolin cross-stitched by her young niece; a watercolor by Henry Miller; original early ink drawings donated to NOON by Raymond Pettibon; as well as the many, often anonymous, artworks and other curios collected from roadside markets and the Outsider Art Fair. On a late August afternoon, over cakes and tea, we spoke with Diane about how her attention to art and to objects has informed her editorial sensibility and inspired her fictions. For the first time, we asked for a guided tour. Our tour lasted well over three hours, and a small fraction of it is reproduced here. In our conversation, as in her work, we began to notice a link between Diane’s penchant for living among sculptures made of broken dishes, stitching around stains in her clothing, and her editorial process at NOON where, she reminds us, all powerful sentences can be saved and made use of. When asked why a flaw or fracture can turn the familiar—in life, and language—into something more arresting, or frightening, or delightful, Diane responded: “We’re all walking around damaged, dirty, broken, and ashamed, and the challenge is—How do you live your life in this condition? It’s an important project to share this condition with others and thereby comfort them. Turning the wound into artwork—something that has magic in it, and extra life, is a very significant accomplishment.” Hubert Walters, “Walking the Dogs” (detail), date unknown I respond to almost everything that’s made by someone who has never been trained, but who is full of passion for what he or she is doing. It’s quite fortuitous if we can maintain what we are born with—a relation to objects that hasn’t been muddled up yet by any ideas about how we ought to see them. Walters was born in Jamaica and was a commercial fisherman and a boat builder for two decades. We bought this painting at The Outsider Art Fair in New York City from The Rising Folk Art Gallery in Tennessee. These are sinister, twinned white people with twin, energetic brown dogs. The yellow background seems to torpedo the bellies of these girls—women?—and the surround is murky and romantic. I will never come upon such a sight anywhere else and isn’t this what we’re on the look out for, too, at NOON?—surprise. Read More