May 11, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked contributors from our Spring issue to write about what they’re reading, looking at, and listening to this month. Still from Hereditary, 2018. For months now, I have been waiting anxiously for the movie Hereditary to come out. It’s supposed to be out on June 8, but I keep hoping that this is a publicity joke and that it will come out sooner. Like everyone else, I found out about the movie back in January, when they showed it at the Sundance Film Festival, and the audience lost their minds and reported back to the Internet. Everyone who has seen it has said that it is some sort of love child between Rosemary’s Baby (excuse the pun) and The Shining, maybe with some of The Exorcist thrown in. I don’t know how this could even be possible, but please count me in. As the weather grows warmer, the flowers bloom, and the date grows nearer and nearer to its release, I get even more lovesick and pathetic with longing to see it. I watch its trailers every day, sometimes many times, and have even watched the horror-fan YouTube videos people have made doing close readings of the trailers. I have theories about the movie I have written in several notebooks, and then crossed out most of them. I have visited the Etsy site the movie’s production company has made with beautifully odd dolls that one of the main characters, a supernatural child named Charlie, has made, a hundred times, hoping that they will list more for sale (the dolls sold out immediately). I wait and wait until June 8, begging most people I know to go see the movie with me, but knowing I will probably end up going alone, crying in the dark. Why am I so excited? It’s such an awful time right now. And I get so sick of things—books, movies, poems—that are hailed as great but have no source of catharsis. I want to burn and feel better. I really hope Hereditary lives up to the hype. I don’t know. I have faith. —Dorothea Lasky Lately, I can’t stop writing love poems. I write a short story—it’s a love poem. I start a new novel—long love poem. Sonnet, sestina, triolet: love poem, love poem, love poem. Maybe this is why “It’s Raining in Love” by Richard Brautigan keeps playing in my mind. I think I accidentally memorized it twenty years ago. It’s a kicky, self-conscious poem right from its opening stanza (“I don’t know what it is / but I distrust myself / when I start to like a girl / a lot”), and I adore the speaker for how cooly he winces at his crushing (“It makes me nervous,” he declares). All that’s A+, but then Brautigan goes on to discuss how crucial inconsequential questions become when you’re in love. Everything is code, sign, weather—even the weather, especially rain: If I say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” and she says, “I don’t know,” I start thinking : Does she really like me? Rain, the speaker asides, shouldn’t be so weighty; it happies slugs, it’s a means of “programming flowers.” “Programming flowers”—! Did Brautigan proactively reclaim the word “programming”? I adore that. So affectedly casual elsewhere, when Brautigan starts “programming flowers,” he slides into rhapsody, reminding me how, enthralled by a lover, we all might become so programmed to bloom. —JoAnna Novak Read More
May 11, 2018 First Person All I Want for Mother’s Day Is a Goddamn Drink By Lauren Elkin A tipsy Klimt This Mother’s Day, I’d like to raise a mocktail to all the mothers-to-be, to all of us united in suffering the joys and the indignities of pregnancy, stone-cold sober. As my own mother tells it, she knew she was pregnant with me, her firstborn, when she got disproportionately sick from one gin and tonic. When I, in turn, pushed away a glass of Côte de Beaune at the dinner table, I knew something was up. Now, twenty-one weeks in, I wish I could go back to that night, back when it still didn’t count, and finish my glass of chardonnay. What was I thinking? I just wasn’t thinking. Read More
May 11, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Émile Zola By Valerie Stivers In her Eat Your Words series, Valerie Stivers cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. It’s finally the season for the farmers market, which inspired me to dig out my copy of The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola (1840–1902), a book whose descriptions of the central Parisian market of Les Halles in its heyday are perhaps literature’s greatest market scenes. Zola was friends with Cézanne, and he spends a very many pages in painterly descriptions of Les Halles, where at dawn, for example, “piles of greenery were like waves, a river of green flowing along the roadway” and the light “seemed to transform” cabbages into “magnificent flowers with the hue of wine-dregs, splashed with crimson and dark purple.” Later, “the swelling hearts of the lettuces were ablaze, the various shades of green burst wonderfully into life, the carrots glowed blood-red, the turnips became incandescent in the triumphant radiance of the sun.” Read More
May 10, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Writing By Amit Chaudhuri Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation, c. 1880. When does writing begin? The act of committing the first words to a page—as I am doing now—is cited for its difficulty. Though those words might well be deleted from the final draft, the resistance of the blank page is justifiably famous. It’s an entrance to the unknowable, like the doorway on your first school-going day as a child. Once you’ve gone through, you’re in a different domain; you’re in the story, which involves inhabiting a new space and a new self. Before going in, you stare at the lit doorway of the blank page, partly with anxiety and partly with exhaustion. Exhaustion because the blank page is not only the beginning but the end of something. It’s the end of the hours or days or months you’ve spent considering both the subject and the prospect of writing about it. Arriving at the blank page represents our coming to the end of the undecided space we call living. Now we must get down to telling. Read More
May 10, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Pleasure as a Means By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, My cousin is getting married in a month. We were born ten days apart, which we take pride in like we planned it, and grew up like sisters. We drifted a bit and now work different hours and are states away. We have a tradition of writing something to each other before momentous occasions. I’ve always looked up to her—she’s an adventurous, kind soul and has shouldered a lot of unexpected responsibility with grace. I have this well of happiness for her and her soon-to-be husband, but I’m having trouble expressing it. I know she’d appreciate even a simple “I’m so happy for you,” but I want to say more. I feel both giddiness and this more stable undercurrent of joy for them. Can you help point me in a direction for well wishes like these? Are there any you hold dear to your heart? Thank you, Speechless Congratulations Dear Speechless, One of the most common requests that poets get is to recommend poems for weddings. Sometimes we get asked to write original pieces for close friends, sometimes just to help find one for someone else to read. There are so many excellent love poems, and it’s difficult to pick the right wedding poem for a couple I don’t know. But wedding season is approaching, and I bet many folks will be writing in with similar requests soon, so I will give this one a shot. For you, for your cousin, let’s read “On the Occasion of Your Wedding,” by Sandra Beasley. Sandra writes: People will tell you it is natural to pair off. People say this despite the Pope, in his backseat built for one. People say this despite the cuttlefish, with three hearts of his own and no room for more … Sandra notes that there is nothing natural about the messiness of a dedicated partnership, the “clog of drain hair” and “the way you tuck used Kleenex into the crevice of his recliner.” And yet in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she applauds the couple for saying, “Screw it and I do.” In your letter, you mentioned your cousin’s adventurousness and her ability to meet the challenges that have come her way. It sounds to me like she is the kind of person who would nod her head at Sandra’s sage advice that “they make duct tape for situations like this.” I love this poem because not only does it celebrate the courage it takes to choose marriage in this endlessly chaotic world where nothing is promised, but it also includes small and practical blessings like “knowing when to leave the room.” Best of all, it ends with a single joyful thought—one that is perhaps the same thought all we romantics dressed as cynics have at weddings—“You fools. You lucky, lucky fools.” –SK Read More
May 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Nietzsche Wishes You an Ambivalent Mother’s Day By John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary Mary Cassatt, Sleepy Baby, 1910. The cultural institution of Mother’s Day began with a single massive flower delivery. In 1908, Anna Jarvis, widely regarded as the founder of the holiday, delivered five hundred white carnations to Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mother had taught Sunday school for decades. It was the start of a century-long Mother’s Day tradition: give solid-white carnations in honor of the memory of the deceased; give solid-red and solid-pink ones to the moms who still live among us. For a single day, the life of a mother is supposed to be easy. She can take a break and bask in the admiration of her absolute purity, unmitigated faithfulness, unbridled charity, and total love. But perhaps this form of celebration is too easy; perhaps it masks the true difficulties and precariousness of a woman bearing and raising children. In truth, very few things about motherhood seem absolute, unmitigated, unbridled, or total. And maybe we should accept, even celebrate, precisely this ambivalence. Read More