November 23, 2017 On Food Hale and Hearty By Robin Bellinger The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! Among the many things for which I will give thanks this Thursday, foremost is the fact that I am not in charge of Thanksgiving dinner. Instead I’ll be helping my mother in her kitchen, as she helped me in mine last year. It isn’t that I dislike cooking, or even that I feed a real crowd; I cook every day, usually with pleasure, and we don’t pull many extra chairs up to the table for the holiday. But sometime after the second pie has been baked and the turkey is in the oven and half the vegetables are ready but there is still so much to make, and the table not even set, I just want to sneak away without finishing up. How great a disappointment I would have been to Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who led the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. When Hale was thirty-four and the year was 1822, her husband died, leaving her with five children. Did she allow despair to overcome her stout Yankee heart? Never! She supported her family with that reliable moneymaker, poesy, before publishing a best-selling novel, and eventually going on to become the editor of the most influential women’s magazine in America. Read More >>
November 23, 2017 First Person The Nexus of All Despair By Jane Stern The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! Frances Brundage, Thanksgiving Day Greetings (detail), ca. 1913. I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, based solely on the fact that I adore turkey. But if I were to remove turkey from the equation, I would probably realize that this holiday, for me, has been nothing but one hideous thing after another. Why Thanksgiving is the nexus of all despair is a mystery. But to prove that it is, here’s a short list of some of the things I remember. 1956, New Haven, Connecticut The table is beautifully set in the dining room of the gracious colonial house on Trumbull Street, where my aunt and uncle live. I am ten years old, and my older cousins—Eric, seventeen, and his sister, Willa, thirteen—are my teen idols. After the family takes a few snapshots of all of us smiling, the food is spread out on the table and the shit hits the fan. Uncle Henry makes a snide remark about Elvis Presley, who has just been on The Ed Sullivan Show, and cousin Willa flings herself from the table in a histrionic fit. The whole table erupts into a pro- and anti-Elvis fight. The dinner is ruined, no one is hungry, and the gravy curdles as “All Shook Up” blasts from the phonograph in Willa’s room behind the slammed door. Read More >>
November 22, 2017 On Books The Questionable Category of “Native American Literature” By Ben Pfeiffer “The object is beautiful in itself, worthy of appreciation as a whole and for its own sake.” … “And the single deep voice of the singers lay upon the dance, lay even upon the valley and the earth, whole and inscrutable, everlasting.” —N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn Dividing what’s indivisible leads to heartache. That’s true for people, and it’s true for books. At their best, categories in literature function as identities authors appreciate, as badges of honor they’re seeking or creating, or as marketing tools for publishers. But at their worst, they’re shorthand for critical dismissal, dog whistles used to hold a work apart from white ideas about “the universal human experience,” or instruments of systemic oppression and cultural fetishism. However you see them, categories, including terms used in literary criticism, are never impartial. That’s not to say they’re bad. But they’re not neutral. They complicate rather than clarify. Read More
November 22, 2017 Novemberance All This Blood and Love By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fourth installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. Jennie Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914. The field where I played soccer before I had breasts was called Metacomet Park. A nylon net full of balls would be spilled on the field for drills, and we ate orange wedges at halftime. Metacomet, known otherwise as Metacom or King Philip, was a Wampanoag chief, and in 1676, fifty-six years after the Pilgrims dropped anchor in Plymouth, he was assassinated in a swamp. The Puritans dismembered him, tore apart his limbs, hung his body parts in trees. The man who shot him got his hand as a trophy. For over twenty years, his head was displayed on a stake in Plymouth. Around the time that I played soccer at Metacomet, I also took walks with my mother in the fields near our house. Now those fields are no longer fields; they’re a subdivision where houses rise out of the land like crops, lined and alike, and the driveways arc at the same angles and the cars in the driveways are large and the bushes are tidy and round and all is neat and safe and lobotomizing. When my mother and I walked in the fields, no road or roof in sight, I thought about arriving on a land with no houses, with no streets or sockets or sinks, with no supermarkets to buy Fruit Roll-Ups or grapes. I imagined myself stepping onto the sand, seeing trees and high grass at sway in the wind. Now what? You’d have to be brave, I thought, facing that space. How do you just create a whole new world? I learned later that wasn’t the right question. A world had already been created in that place. How do you steal a world? How do you destroy it? How do you rewrite the story so it sounds so uncomplicated? Read More
November 22, 2017 Arts & Culture On “Oh! Susanna” By Anthony Madrid Regarding “Oh! Susanna,” there is little point in discussing the verses nobody knows. Let us confine ourselves to the verses everybody knows: Well, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee I’m gwine to Louisiana · my true love for to see It rained all night, the day I left the weather, it was dry the sun so hot, I froze to death Susanna, don’t you cry Oh! Susanna! · oh, don’t you cry for me I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee The piece is not, as I assumed all my life, an anonymous folk song. It was written by Stephen Foster in 1847, published in 1848. He also wrote “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”—and pretty much every other song ever used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Read More
November 21, 2017 Redux Redux: Jack Kerouac, Shelly Oria, Erica Ehrenberg 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 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac, Shelly Oria’s story “My Wife, in Converse,” and Erica Ehrenberg’s poem “Pause at the Edge of the Country.” You can also listen to all three in the second episode of our new podcast! Bring them on the road, in the air, or in the quiet car while you travel home for Thanksgiving this week. Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41 Issue no. 43 (Summer 1968) The original Buddha wouldn’t even walk on young grass so that he wouldn’t destroy it. He was born in Gorakhpur, the son of the consul of the invading Persian hordes. And he was called Sage of the Warriors, and he had seventeen thousand broads dancing for him all night, holding out flowers, saying, “You want to smell it, my lord?” But by the time he was thirty-one years old he got sick and tired … his father was protecting him from what was going on outside the town. And so he went out on a horse, against his father’s orders and he saw a woman dying—a man being burnt on a ghat. And he said, “What is all this death and decay?” The servant said,” That is the way things go on. Your father was hiding you from the way things go on.” “My Wife, in Converse,” by Shelly Oria Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) My wife and I took a cooking class recently. My wife and I take classes. It is a passion of my wife’s, taking classes. My wife is good at most things one could take classes in, which, when you think about it—and I’ve thought about it—means my wife excels in all things. And I believe that is in fact true. I believe my wife excels in all things. I am not blinded by love when I say this—we have been together eight years. They say after seven, whatever blindness you had is gone. “Pause at the Edge of the Country,” by Erica Ehrenberg Issue no. 216 (Spring 2016) He gets back in the car, resting a plastic tray of nachos on his jeans. I smell the salt, the corn, the nacho cheese, its under-smell of plastic, the way his hair smells when he hasn’t washed it in a few days, gasoline. Tune in for free—and while you’re at it, subscribe to The Paris Review for instant access to everything we’ve published since 1953. Order now and you’ll get a copy of our new anthology, Women at Work, for only $10 more.