December 13, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Loveless Triangles and Hopeless Indecision By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, What’s the cure for hopeless indecision (from big life decisions to what to do on a Thursday evening to whether you should buy nail polish in that shade of Cabernet)? Possibilities are dizzying—sometimes a little too dizzying. Even when I make pro/con lists, flip coins, and ask fate, I still hesitate and second guess all the decisions I do make. How do I choose and be happy with what I choose? Sincerely, Yes/No/Maybe So Dear YNMS, The tangle is this: it’s not that you are indecisive, it’s that you have strong-willed warring parts of yourself that show up to argue whenever you make a move forward. My guess is that whenever you are about to make a decision, it’s like a sudden fist fight in your head and then a yelling at yourself all the way home in the car after the decision. It’s awful. It would be interesting to see if you can identify these selves, see who wants what. Try pretending you are someone else: a friend, someone you know well who has no problem being decisive in that particular situation. Or—for a wilder experience, just pretend you are an asshole with no doubts about anything. Imitate that posture and facial expression. Fight to sustain the illusion long enough to just give in and order the fucking onion rings. Sincerely, Lynda B. Read More
December 13, 2017 Arts & Culture How A Godless Democrat Fell in Love With Cowboy Poetry By Carson Vaughan Image altered from: Frederic Remington, The Cowboy. 1902 You might call me smitten by the whole affair. By the cowboys, of course: their hats, their vests, their boots. Their wry smiles and fat handshakes. By the elderly couples lining up to thank the poets for their verse, to whisper you’re our favorite, to request a John Hancock from a man virtually unheard of outside the room. By the sun punching through ashen clouds above the snow-packed Ruby Mountains. By the crunch of rock salt underfoot. By the volunteer shuttle driver, retired from the gold mines, reclining behind the wheel and waiting for the next show to end. By the casino meals and the spilt whiskey and the faces red with laughter. By singer-songwriter Don Edwards yodeling “And they go hoo yip hoo yip hoo hoo di hoo di yip … ” By calloused hands worn smooth through nostalgia. By the cries of winter at the barroom doors. By the glowing tip of a cigarette in the crystal night sky. By the deluge of doggerel and the fat golden nuggets of a poem that shine long after I’ve left the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I had dipped my toe in the waters of cowboy poetry for a New Yorker story in 2016. And then I fell in. My friends wonder what happened. Sometimes I do, too. I earned a graduate degree in creative writing. I like good books—I pretend to, anyway. Erin Belieu and John Berendt currently grace my nightstand. Though I dress from the Target clearance rack, Gay Talese is my style icon. I subscribe to Poem-a-Day. I’m not sure about God. I’m a Democrat. Read More
December 12, 2017 Redux Eureka Moment: Ernest Hemingway, Sam Lipsyte, James Wright 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 our 1958 interview with Ernest Hemingway and highlights from the fourth episode of our podcast: Sam Lipsyte’s short story “The Worm in Philly” and James Wright’s famous poem “Lying in a Hammock at a Friend’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” In the podcast, you can also hear George Plimpton recall a boxing match in Hemingway’s dining room; plus, special guests Marc Maron and Robert Pattinson. Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21 Issue no. 18 (Spring 1958) The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard. “The Worm in Philly,” by Sam Lipsyte Issue no. 194 (Fall 2010) Classic American story: I was out of money and people I could ask for money. Then I got what the Greeks, or even the Greek Americans, call a eureka moment. I would write a book for children about the great middleweight Marvelous Marvin Hagler. My father had been a sportswriter before he started forgetting things, like the fact he had been a sportswriter, so the idea did not seem crazy. Probably it’s like when your father is president. You think: if that fuck could do it. “Lying in a Hammock at a Friend’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” by James Wright Issue no. 26 (Summer–Fall 1961) Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind Duffy’s empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken-hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. If you like what you read, why not become a subscriber? You’ll get instant access to our entire sixty-four-year archive, not to mention four issues of new interviews, poetry, and fiction. A subscription to The Paris Review, plus a copy of Women at Work, also makes a great gift.
December 12, 2017 Comics Book Ideas from the Bottom of the Barrel By Liana Finck © Liana Finck Liana Finck’s cartoons appear in The New Yorker, The Awl, and on her Instagram feed. Her graphic novel, A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York, was published by Ecco Press in 2014.
December 12, 2017 Arts & Culture Why Write Fiction in 2017? By Joe Fassler Constantin Alajalov, cover for The Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1949 Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wireless router. The plug pulls away from the wall with a soft, satisfying sound, and on the plastic box a row of twinkling green lights blinks out. I’ve learned I have to do this. Otherwise, in the morning, I’ll succumb to temptation: I’ll rise, open my laptop, and start reading the news. I know that that decision will feel innocuous, even necessary, in the moment. But I also know I want to spend my morning writing as much as I can—and that a working Wi-Fi signal has the power to derail me. Even fifteen minutes of headline-scanning Twitter—if I can limit it to that—leaves me feeling overloaded, angry, panicked, worn out, weirdly high. So instead of flooding my mind with other voices, I back away. My work begins then with an act of disconnection, this physical severing I perform each night before I go to sleep. As much as we carp about the increasing digitization of our lives, this isn’t really a new problem. Writing required cord-cutting long before the computer. It’s an act of refusal, of relinquishment, and of retreat, a decision to turn away from the world and its noise of possibilities, to chase instead a signal down the quiet of a page. That work—the deep, sustained kind that yields poems and essays and fiction—can only happen in solitude, and in silence. And that’s the trouble. Read More
December 11, 2017 Look Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Anarchist Bikers Who Came to Help By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. Molly Crabapple, Bennie, 2017. On November 4, a little over a month after the hurricane, five bike punks arrived at La Loma, the hilltop community center in Mariana, the barrio where my friend Christine Nieves lives. They hung their hammocks between the beams of the ruined playground, lit some cigarettes, and got to work. Cooze, Greg, Angie, Jerry, and Bennie had come from Charlotte, North Carolina. A decade ago, they founded Ride or Destroy, a bike club known for its tricked out cycles and death-courting stunts—they refer to it as a gang, tongue half in cheek. The anarchism came later. In 2016, members took part in the anti-police-violence protests that broke out in Charlotte after police officers killed Keith L. Scott, a forty-three-year-old black man. After Maria hit, the friends formed DABS, or Direct Action Bike Squad, then crowdfunded money to come to Puerto Rico in order to distribute supplies to mountain barrios. They first spent a week in Luquillo looking for work that needed doing, then, through a facebook page run by a network of Puerto Rican mutual aid centers, they found the mutual aid project started by the community in Mariana. Read More