November 7, 2017 Redux Redux: Emily Wilson, Robert Fitzgerald, and Robert Fagles 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 salute Emily Wilson, whose new English-language translation of the Odyssey is (incredibly enough) the first ever published by a woman. We bring you the opening pages of her translation, plus interviews with two of her most famous modern precursors, Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles. Read More
November 7, 2017 Arts & Culture When Someone You Know Is Gay By James Frankie Thomas The author’s copy of When Someone You Know Is Gay. At the tail end of the Clinton administration, my school library had a miniature gay section hidden in a corner. It took up half a shelf and consisted of maybe four books—half a dozen, tops. As far as I know, no one else was aware of this; I never saw another soul in that section of the library. Perhaps it appeared, like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement, only to those who needed it. I needed it desperately. I was thirteen, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I liked girls in the way that I was expected to like boys. After a disastrous game of Truth or Dare, during which I committed the socially suicidal error of asking “Truth: Which girl in our class would you most like to kiss?”—“Ew, Frankie, that’s a gay question!”—I understood that these feelings were classifiable under (a) “ew” and (b) “gay.” It was the memory of that seventh-grade slumber party that primed me to notice, in the corner of the library, a bright turquoise hardcover titled When Someone You Know Is Gay. Read More
November 7, 2017 On Music Liner Notes: A Way into the Invisible By Renee Gladman Eric Dolphy in Copenhagen, 1961. Photo courtesy JP Jazz Archive/Redferns. In the midnineties, I was a jazz head. I was a poet and I was a jazz head. I loved to read and I loved listening to music. I collected vinyl but also CDs. I shopped at Amoeba Records on Haight Street in San Francisco and brought home records by the bandleaders Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, my favorite at the time, and others. And I read the covers of these albums as if they were books, lured in by the various frames commentators employed to situate a given recording, like Leonard Feather opening his notes for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else with “WHAT manner of album is this?” At the same time, as a graduate student in poetics, I was deeply immersed in the works of Henry James, Nathaniel Mackey, and Leslie Scalapino, and, although I didn’t know this then, or knew it only slightly, converging in the field between these producers and their various disciplines was a way of thinking about “the invisible” that would shape my life in music and language and art for the next two decades. As I think of it now, the invisible refers to all these inner energies, maps, and syntaxes I’m trying to make present in my drawings and in the unfolding of my sentences, but, in 1995, the idea of it had only just landed in me, and I had little language around it. I felt it most present when I witnessed forms crossing into other forms: sound into thought (in the case of jazz) and poetry into prose (in the case of the books I was reading). I was drawn to jazz because it felt like mind music to me. It was a way to experience thought without thinking (that is, to experience bodily the map of someone else’s thinking without needing to write my own story on top of it to comprehend it). I found atmospheres compelling. Similarly, to read a Henry James novel was to be in an atmosphere of manners, where action and emotional response were embedded in an elaborate orchestration of adjacency: to read was to wander next to. And to listen to jazz was to enter a space inside the space in which I was living, one that lifted the top off the day or stretched the day beyond itself. I wanted to know what was happening—how this was happening—so I often turned to the liner notes of my LPs for answers. I saw them as a sort of foyer to the music: preparatory time for listening, a way of sublimating. You had to drop down into something to hear jazz, to be there for it—not having it as your background music but rather as a force carving lines into your brain. Jazz asked something of me that was like writing. To listen was to write, I had at some point concluded, and for a few years I tried to figure out the nature of that relationship. I wanted to know how listening was like making something, and what that something might look like. Read More
November 6, 2017 Stolen The Mexican American Bandit By Myriam Gurba Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft. Still from the animated short Zimbo by the Guadalajaran directors Rita Basulto and Juan José Medina. My ex-wife stared as she watched my maternal grandmother slide a chicken into her purse. When she noticed she was being watched, my grandmother locked eyes with my ex-wife. In her thick Guadalajara accent, my grandmother bellowed, “For the dogs.” Her dogs were waiting outside of the buffet, in her truck. It was Mother’s Day and they were her most beloved. On our way home, my ex-wife asked, “Have you seen your grandmother steal meat before?” I looked at her with a deadpan expression meant to approximate the one my grandmother had given her. “She’s Mexican,” I answered. My grandmother’s habit of filling her purse with meat reinforces an American stereotype: that Mexicans are thieves. Consider the now-retired chip mascot Frito Bandito. And Speedy Gonzales, the cheese snatcher. But Mexicans invert this trope. “You live in California,” my paternal grandfather would remind me when we’d visit Mexico at Christmas. “You live there because of a robbery! The United States stole that land! Americans are thieves.” My grandfather’s indictment was supposed to make me, a gringa, ashamed. Instead, it made me secretly relish America. My family lived on stolen land and stolen fruit always tastes better. Its ill-gotten nature emboldens its umami, glazes it with immoral MSG. When I went on my first stealing spree, I became a Mexican bandit, and a practitioner of Manifest Destiny. Read More
November 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Ai Weiwei’s Selfie-Ready Public Art By Sarah Cowan Ai Weiwei, Gilded Cage, 2017. Last week, at the base of Central Park, a yellow leaf fell through the narrow openings in Ai Weiwei’s new public sculpture, momentarily matching its color, before landing at the feet of two African pedicab drivers. The men were switching between swapping jokes in French and asking tourists in English, “Where are you from?” as they held up laminated signs advertising their services. Those being approached scurried into Ai’s structure, using it as a convenient excuse not to engage, hiding behind its bars. The piece is one of over three hundred works included in Ai’s citywide Public Arts Fund project, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” This one’s title, Gilded Cage, constrains the structure to a cliché, even though its bars are painted more of a burned orange matte than gold, and its gaping opening defies captivity. Two concentric rings, which extend vertically from the pavement in towering, unscalable metal bars, form a beaker-shaped prison big enough for a handful of people. The outer ring is an inaccessible passageway at odds with the architecture of movement it contains: a sequence of turnstiles not unlike the ones just underground, whirling with commuters. If you pass your arm between the bars, you can shove the turnstiles into a spinning motion, though no bodies can pass their thresholds. Read More
November 6, 2017 Revisited Watership Down By Emily Ruskovich Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Emily Ruskovich revisits Richard Adams’s Watership Down. My parents had known each other for only three weeks when my dad asked my mom to marry him. She was stunned by his proposal, and so she said, Let me think about it. And she sat there for a few minutes in silence, thinking, while my dad, in agony, sat there and watched her think. After considering the question logically, my mom said yes, for five reasons. She laughs when she tells this story, though she assures me that it’s true. In those few minutes, she decided that even though she hardly knew my dad, she ought to marry him because: He, like her, ate the entire apple, swallowed the core and all the seeds, so she knew he was not wasteful or pretentious. He, like her, had always wanted to name a son the unusual name Rory, and that seemed an important, even wistful, thing to have in common. My dad knew all the words to the Kenny Loggins song “House at Pooh Corner,” so she knew he was probably kind to children. He, like her, was an Idaho Democrat. Most importantly, while they were dating those three weeks, they read Watership Down. That was the tipping point for my mom: if this strange and loud man could become so invested in the fates of rabbits as to have tears fill his eyes while he read, then he was, without question, a good man. They’ve been married now for thirty-three years. Read More