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The Daily

June 16, 2020
Redux

Redux: In the Latter Days

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.

Allen Ginsberg, ca. 1979. Photo: Michiel Hendryckx.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting three archive pieces written by contributors to our new issue. Read on for Allen Ginsberg’s Art of Poetry interview, José Saramago’s “The Tale of the Unknown Island” (as translated by Margaret Jull Costa, subject of the Summer issue’s The Art of Translation No. 7), and Lucille Clifton’s poem “shadows.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No. 8
Issue no. 37 (Spring 1966)

INTERVIEWER

Has there been a time when fear of censorship or similar trouble has made your own expression difficult?

GINSBERG

This is so complicated a matter. The beginning of the fear with me was, you know, what would my father say to something that I would write. At the time, writing “Howl”—for instance like I assumed when writing it that it was something that could not be published because I wouldn’t want my daddy to see what was in there. About my sex life, being fucked in the ass, imagine your father reading a thing like that, was what I thought. Though that disappeared as soon as the thing was real, or as soon as I manifested my … you know, it didn’t make that much importance finally. That was sort of a help for writing, because I assumed that it wouldn’t be published, therefore I could say anything that I wanted. So literally just for myself or anybody that I knew personally well, writers who would be willing to appreciate it with a breadth of tolerance—in a piece of work like Howl. Who wouldn’t be judging from a moralistic viewpoint but looking for evidences of humanity or secret thought or just actual truthfulness.

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June 16, 2020
Arts & Culture

Machado’s Catalogue of Failures

By Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis had already published four novels when he wrote The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which was serialized in 1880 and appeared in book form in 1881. It received mixed reviews, some readers feeling that it lacked plot, that the characters were uninteresting, that it was more a philosophical treatise than a novel. This is a criticism already foreseen by Brás Cubas, who apologizes to those readers who “love direct, sustained narrative, a regular, fluid style.”

… whereas this book and my style are like a pair of drunkards: they stagger left and right, start and stop, mumble, yell, roar with laughter, shake their fists at the heavens, then stumble and fall …

The first English translation, by William L. Grossman, did not appear until 1953, which was not surprising in view of the fact that Machado was virtually unknown in Europe and North America until after World War II. And it was only some years later, primarily in the sixties and seventies, that critics inside and outside Brazil began to recognize the novel as a work of extraordinary originality. Read More

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June 16, 2020
First Person

The Origin of My Laugh

By Danielle Geller

When my mother died, her best friend Heidi called and told me, “What I’ll miss most is her laugh.”

*

When my mother called me on the phone before she died, she rarely laughed but often cried.

*

My mother had four daughters, and I am the oldest. My mother did not raise us. We had all been adopted: the first of us, by our paternal grandmother; the third, by my mother’s friend; the fourth, by a family in Virginia shortly after she was born. My youngest sister is almost twenty years younger than me—she was eight years old the first time we met. I found a card her family had sent my mother with a still-working cell phone number printed inside, and we set up a meeting while I was in town for a conference. As we walked across the parking lot toward their car, her adoptive mother made an off-hand comment that startled me into laughter. She tripped over nothing and gasped, “You have your mother’s laugh.”

*

When I was in middle school, I fell in love with a friend’s laugh. It sounded like cute, high-pitched hiccups. I practiced her laugh alone in my room—as if my laugh could be something smaller, something else. Grandma always said she could pick my laugh out of a crowd.

*

A bat biologist once described my laugh as the sound a crow makes when it sees something really shiny.

*

A few years ago, a friend I knew only through voice chat and video games visited me in Boston. More accurately, he visited Boston for a video game convention, but I had invited him and the rest of our guild to my apartment for a dinner of homemade pulled-pork sandwiches, corn bread, and macaroni and cheese. On the train ride down, his phone’s battery died, and he found himself wandering my street in the dark because he couldn’t remember the number of my building. He was about to head back to his hotel when he heard it, my laughter, erupting from the open living room window. “I knew that laugh!” he yelled when I opened the door.

*

My mother did not want her daughters to return to the Navajo reservation. She kept us from her family to protect us, she thought. But after she died, I reconnected with my aunt, and the first time we talked on the phone, I recognized it, my mother’s laugh, carried hundreds of miles from the land she once called home.

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June 15, 2020
The Art of Distance

The Art of Distance No. 13

By The Paris Review

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“In this thirteenth Art of Distance newsletter, we’re continuing to share the work of great Black writers from our archive. Unlocked this week is everything the Review has published by Hilton Als, who is a TPR advisory editor, a person of letters with a wildly capacious sensibility, and a wearer of many hats. Ostensibly, Als writes nonfiction, but that term is far too limiting to classify all that he does. He is a voracious consumer and assimilator of culture, churning the books, music, theater, and people he loves into visions and versions of his own unfolding story. His essays are like rigorous dreamscapes, vitally alive and wide open to everything the world has to share—Als turns nothing away. Als has not only contributed writing to the Review: he has also conducted several penetrating and joyful Writers at Work interviews, and has been featured across the past decade on the Daily. Enmeshed in his reevaluations of the culture of the past century is a stark look at the struggles that have brought us to this moment in Black, queer, and American history.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Hilton Als in a London photo booth, 2014. Courtesy of the writer.

“I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world,” Als tells Lisa Cohen in his Art of the Essay interview, which covers everything from mentors to trauma to queer life in New York to Thelonious Monk, Jane Fonda, and writing sentences that are “natural to who I am.” Read More

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June 15, 2020
Arts & Culture

Painted Ladies

By Camille Dungy

The painted lady larvae came in a small, clear plastic cup with a half inch of growth medium on the bottom. Tiny holes in the lid for air. The day they arrived, each was no longer nor thicker than an individual, mascara-plumped eyelash. There were six living larvae in the cup. You could find them if you looked, squirming across the medium or edging up the sides, but you had to look.

I never thought much about eyelashes until I started shopping for them. Now they’re the first thing I notice on a woman. My daughter is a dancer. She’s only nine, but her dance school requires she wear false lashes for all performances. I’ve always been afraid of glue-on lashes. The ripping off part scares me the most. I’m afraid the adhesive will take with it something that matters. Instead, I found a company that makes magnetic lashes. A thick coat of eyeliner, and they stay right on. They are endless, the things I discover so my girl can do what she loves.

*

We’d tried to grow painted lady butterflies at home before, but we traveled too much that summer. They are easy to care for during their larval stage, but once they build their chrysalides, you have to keep a careful watch. After they have hardened—but not so long after that you disturb the unseen process happening inside—you must transfer the chrysalides to the netted cage that will be the emerged butterfly’s home. You must set inside the cage a bowl of sugar water filled with little wads of sweet-water-soaked paper towels, also at just the right time, remembering to change the water and towel wads every other day. Stay near. You must be present at the moment when the butterflies emerge. We missed the good parts last time. We had to take the net cage to my parents’ house. The painted ladies emerged there, without fanfare, living most of their brief, final days while we were away.

*

The magnetic lashes were advertised in several lengths and degrees of thickness, each named after a city: Nashville, Dallas, Portland, Chicago. Portland was the least conspicuous, then Seattle. The Chicago lashes were more densely packed. The Los Angeles style was longer and crosshatched in a way that made you want to look at them closely. They resembled Madonna’s $10,000 mink lashes, but without diamonds at the base. We bought Seattle. When they arrived and we’d gotten them applied I asked, “What would Dallas have looked like on you!?” I couldn’t even begin to imagine Vegas on my child’s eyes.

*

I thought it would be a positive learning experience to watch something tiny and plain as those larvae grow into creatures as beautiful, as magical, as butterflies.

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June 12, 2020
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Billboards, Bookstores, and Butler

By The Paris Review

Octavia E. Butler. Photo: Ching-Ming Cheung.

When the pandemic hit and we were suddenly living in a world I had never quite imagined, I turned to Octavia E. Butler to lose myself in a world she had. I read her Xenogenesis trilogy, collected in the single-volume edition Lilith’s Brood (please try to unsee the cover—whatever fool decided that these masterworks of speculative literature should be dressed up like romance novels is working in the wrong design department). Butler imagines a postapocalyptic Earth where almost all humans have perished in a nuclear disaster except for a handful who were saved and genetically reengineered by aliens. These aliens, called the Oankali, make it their business to visit broken worlds and “trade” genes with other species in hopes of mutual upgrade. In recent weeks, during the uprising following the murder of George Floyd, I have been grateful again for this trilogy. Butler was, unsurprisingly, ahead of her time in many ways. The Oankali have three genders, one of which is neither female nor male, and they view human racism and hatred with great confusion, as their whole MO is accepting and learning from difference. Of course, Butler’s epic also reveals much of the worst of human nature, and she’s helped me think about that, too—about what needs to change and how we might change it. —Craig Morgan Teicher Read More

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