April 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Don’t Hate Us ’Cause We Fabulous By madison moore “Excuse me … are you Prince?” the hotel concierge asked me. At first, I thought he was joking, the kind of slightly homophobic jab I’ve grown used to hearing over the years, so I laughed as I said, “No, I’m not Prince” with a tone of obviousness. “Are you sure?” he doubled down. I couldn’t believe it. Had he never seen a picture of Prince? Over my lifetime, I’ve admired many black divas and pop singers, from Tina Turner and Little Richard to Beyoncé and Lenny Kravitz, but Prince’s fierce, androgynous aesthetic completely changed my approach to my own body. Prince also made me queer. He was proof to my teenage mind that living outside the box is sexy, a kind of magic. Prince, for me, represented freedom. On April 21, 2016, I boarded a flight from London to New York for a special performance-studies conference at Yale organized by my dissertation advisor. I hadn’t been back to New Haven since I graduated in 2012, so I was eager to see old faces and go to all my old hot spots—BAR (the bacon-and-red-onion pizza is to die for), 116Crown … and I really couldn’t wait to get a piece of Lithuanian coffee cake. As the plane touched down at JFK, still rolling down the runway, I took my phone out of airplane mode and was showered with a barrage of messages, from WhatsApp to Facebook, with the news that Prince died. Wait, what? I immediately felt numb. It was a shock to me because Prince was still so young, so active, and I guess I had believed he would outlive all the rest of us. I had left London in a world with Prince in it. Six hours later, he was gone. When I used to pump around the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, a place you know of now only because of the 2014 riots, the place where I spent a small chunk of my early childhood years, kids who wanted to be mean called me Prince. I’d walk down the street really feeling good about myself, and people would just yell, Hey, Prince!—laughing, pointing, sneering. Even when I lived in New York City and actually even until this day, people still yell Prince at me as a homophobic insult. Over the years, I started associating the word Prince with faggotry—not Prince’s own faggotry but mine. Read More
April 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Helen Weinzweig’s Interior Feminist Espionage Novel By Sarah Weinman When I first read Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then I’ve described the book to others as an “interior feminist espionage novel.” That is, of course, a reductive way to look at this work, which is so much more than that single phrase can express. And yet those four words, taken together, suggest the scope and the breadth, the daring and the audacity, the humor and the pathos contained in a work of less than a hundred fifty pages. It was a novel I did not know I was looking for, but finding it was a revelation. The interior nature of Basic Black is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children. She wanders through Toronto in the titular basic black dress, a strand of pearls around her neck, cloaked by a tweed coat from Holt Renfrew—then and now the city’s most expensive, most fashionable, and snobbiest department store—designed to last for decades. “I fool no one,” Shirley understands. “I am regarded as a woman with no apparent purpose, offering no reason for my presence.” Regarded from inside, however, Shirley is anything but invisible. She is aglow. Her appearance, her age, her station are a cloak for a rich life of travel, adventure, and meaning. As the critic Art Seidenbaum notes in his review for the Los Angeles Times, “Her odyssey is erotic, but her appearance is prosaic.” Read More
April 12, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: The Most Beautiful Part of Your Body Is Where It’s Headed 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, I’m so angry all the time—at nothing, at the people around me, and at myself. I find that I’m unsatisfied in my job, in the town I live in, and in my own development as a person. I know I’m young, but I feel as though I’ve squandered every opportunity given to me. It’s like I have a beast inside of me, clawing at my lungs. There must be a poem for that feeling, right? For when you’re so angry you just want to scream at the next person who even mildly upsets you. I want to be kinder, gentler, and I realize that bottling up this anger is unhealthy. But I truly don’t know how to express it—please help me do so! Sincerely, An Angry Machine Dear Angry Machine, In your letter, you mentioned that you feel like you have a beast inside you. I have a poem for you that is about a beast, and also anger, but it is a very tiny beast. Specifically: Franny Choi’s poem “The Mantis Shrimp Speaks.” In the preface to the poem, Franny informs us that “the Mantis Shrimp has the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Their powerful limbs spear or club their prey using one of the fastest responses known to man. They can deliver a blow that is equivalent to the force of a bullet.” What a perfect metaphor for how anger makes us feel: both beast and also tiny, both supercharged and also insignificant, pounding our fists against the injustices of the universe. Franny writes: This is the only way I know how to tell someone what I want, to describe the infinitely unfolded accordion of my heart. To love with a rage gone blind from the knowledge of the stolen lands, dirty wars, honor killings, false idols, forced soldiers, and buried throats haunting every sentence. Too many truths setting my retinas ablaze, and me, mad, mad, mad at the end of it all. Sometimes your anger is not wrong or incorrect. Sometimes it means that you are paying attention. After all, “it is hard, being a prism in a burning city.” But note that the narrator of this poem specifies her need to “describe.” Your instinct is correct: bottling doesn’t help. Describing does. Articulating the rage (to a therapist, a friend, your journal) is a way of focusing it and pinpointing what the rage is against instead of letting it morph into a vague and all-encompassing “anger” at “nothing.” Find the somethings. Point at them. Detangle them. At the very least, putting anger into words is a way to push it out of your throbbing human body and, perhaps in the process, find a direction for those powerful limbs. —SK Read More
April 11, 2018 Bulletin Photos from Our 2018 Spring Revel By Julia Berick Nicole Zajdman, Josh Zajdman, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Dana Spiotta (Photo: Matteo Mobilio) April isn’t all cruelty and taxes. Every year, during the first week of the month, we celebrate The Paris Review at the Spring Revel. This year, we gathered friends, fans, and family to honor Joy Williams and sixty-five years of the magazine. John Waters, the legendary mustachioed auteur, was the self-described “monster of ceremonies,” escorting guests through an evening that recognized the emerging and established writers who have found a home at The Paris Review. The stars at Cipriani rivaled those across the street on Grand Central’s ceiling, as Don DeLillo, Radhika Jones, John Waters, David Sedaris, Patricia Marx, Tina Brown, Sir Harry Evans, Michael Cunningham, Lesley Stahl, Morgan Entrekin, Lewis Lapham, Hailey Gates, Ellie Goulding, Amor Towles, Dana Spiotta, Joanna Coles, Henry Finder, Emma Cline, and Kwame Anthony Appiah toasted with Review readers old and new. Guests hushed to the sound of George Plimpton interviewing Eudora Welty, a snippet from the first season of our podcast. As the crickets of Jackson, Mississippi, faded away, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, toasted Paris Review comrades who had died this year, including Drue Heinz, Bokara Legendre, and John Ashbery. The first award of the evening bridged the Review’s past and present. Named for our founding editor George Plimpton, the Plimpton Prize is presented each year to a new voice in fiction. The novelist David Gates presented Isabella Hammad the prize for “Mr. Can’aan,” from our Fall 2017 issue. Her story, which begins on the banks of the Jordan River a week after the Six-Day War, immerses the reader in the inheritance of loss passed through generations of Palestinians. In her speech, Hammad noted that the prize had brought her more than one kind of encouragement: Over the last few years since I’ve been living in New York, the conversations in this country surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and lives have definitely been changing … This should not distract us from the reality that the situation there has not improved. In fact, it has become palpably worse. Nevertheless, at a time when it is often difficult to feel hopeful about the future, that a story about Palestinians should win a prize like this does help me to feel a bit of hope. David Sedaris, known for spinning his own sadness into impossibly funny yarns, was awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor by the incomparable Patricia Marx, who threatened to upstage her honoree on the microphone as she explained her love for his work: There are plenty of writers whose work I like, but with those writers—let’s just say I didn’t read Crime and Punishment and wish I could visit the prison in Siberia and sleep on the bed of nails with Dostoyevsky. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—depressed. It’s different with David Sedaris. You read a story about his family or his boyfriend, Hugh, or even a line of his like, “As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character,” and you know you need to meet this writer immediately. As Cipriani’s legion of waiters noiselessly disappeared dinner, John Waters praised Joy Williams for her lifetime of characteristically uncompromising writing: Ms. Williams is a desert rat, and I mean that as a compliment. She calls wild animal trophy hunters psychopaths, and I agree with her. And wishes Earth First would rise again, though she realizes they were branded terrorists and anarchists by the FBI. You could say the same for her writing. It confuses our values and destroys moral superiority. “She’s probably not for everybody,” the New York Times once warned. But who are these “everybody” she’s not for? The literary deplorables, that’s who. If you can’t appreciate Joy Williams’s writing, you have no business being a reader. Get outta here, go to a movie or something! For all the hard edges and vacant horizons in her work, Williams warmly accepted the award and turned her appreciation to the magazine, extolling, The Paris Review appears to me a strong, glittering chain of continuity, a continuity of artistic excellence and discovery and verve, bridging the years, harboring all manner of marvels and singularities. I’m so happy to be honored here at this literary revel of revels, on the list, a very special list. I will tell you, I feel a churchy exultation and joy right now. Hadada, hadada, hadada. Our interim editor, Nicole Rudick, brought the evening to a close and the guests close to tears as she expressed her pride in the magazine’s potential and encouraged the audience to imagine that every Revel could be the best one yet. May April always bring renewed Review merriment—next year with you! Take a look at the photos below, by the photographer Matteo Mobilio, plus more from Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine—and we hope to see you next year! Read More
April 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Illicit Love Letters: Albert Camus and Maria Casares By Stephanie LaCava Maria Casares and Albert Camus. For the past few weeks, I’ve fixated on a collection of primary source material that reads like a tidy work of epistolary fiction. It’s a big book, nearly 1,300 pages, transcribed from original letters, postcards, and telegrams sent between the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus and the Spanish French actress Maria Casares between 1944 and 1959. It’s too heavy a book to bring on the subway, so I downloaded the electronic version on my phone. My camera roll is now nearly a hundred screenshots of exchanges in French between the two lovers. The book was published in France by Gallimard and has not yet been translated into English. The romance of Camus and Casares is richer, if not sadder, when considered alongside the narratives of each of their work. There is an eerie doubling of life and art. Absurdity is the only certainty, and this is confirmed over and over again by coincidence and chance. The two first met on June 6, 1944, the storied day the Allied forces landed in Normandy. Both were involved in the production of Camus’s play The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu), which was being staged in Paris at the Théâtre de Mathurins. Preproduction, Camus brought Casares to an evening hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (The latter remarked on the young actress’s beauty and confidence.) It is said that that evening, the two began their love affair—Casares twenty-one, Camus nine years her senior. Their fling ended abruptly when Camus’s wife, the mathematician and pianist Francine Faure, returned to Paris from Algeria after the Occupation. Read More
April 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Homework Assignment from W. H. Auden By Anthony Madrid W. H. Auden backstage at the 92nd street Y in 1966. Photo: Diane Dorr Dorynek I don’t know the backstory on this one. All I have is the assignment below, forwarded to me by my editor: What is he even talking about. Actually, I can explain that. The part I can’t explain is how Auden can possibly have thought anything good was gonna come out of this assignment. He was a glutton for punishment, I’ve heard. But you’d have to have a screw loose to hand out the above as an assignment. It’s not that the students wouldn’t do it; they’d try. But then you’d have to read the results. Take a sec and imagine the anger. Read More