February 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin By Valerie Stivers As a not-quite-heterosexual high-school girl, I considered the grand science-fiction gender experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), one of my formative love stories. The book was published in 1969 and won Hugo and Nebula awards, but it was still radical when I devoured it in the eighties and is still radical today. It tells the story of Genly Ai, a human-diaspora interstellar explorer who arrives solo on the planet Winter to convince its citizens to join the Ekumen, a benevolent interplanetary federation. Ai is a human man, but the humanoid people on Winter have no gender and instead go once a month into a kind of estrus called kemmer, in which their bodies are spontaneously inspired to become either male or female, for the purpose of sex. (Sounds fun … right?) As a person who is always a “man,” Ai is considered a pervert on Winter, but in their society—unlike ours—this isn’t a very big deal. More central is how Ai grapples with his relationships with the local people, in particular a government minister named Estraven, who may be an ally or an enemy or a friend … or more than a friend if Ai can expand his categories. Hot beer: the drink of choice for the maybe-lovers Estraven and Ai. Le Guin said that she wrote her science fictions as thought experiments, skewing our world in search of moral insight, and her imagined society on Winter poses questions of how humans would organize themselves if we could all bear children and if we saw ourselves as humans first and sex objects only sometimes. It’s much more than just a love story, but in high school, I took it as one. Genly Ai’s long, slow, dawning appreciation of Estraven—and especially a night when he sees his friend shirtless, by a fire, as “gaunt and scarred … his face burned by cold almost as by fire … a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light”—set my standards for the highest romance. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Watching ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ in Tehran By Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Still from The Phantom of the Opera. On the first Friday of every month, a thin mustached man wearing a trench coat and a pair of dark reflective sunglasses came through our door with a shiny black briefcase packed with VHS tapes. He was a man of few words, and our exchanges were brief. He would place his briefcase on our dining table, unclasp it, and ceremoniously spread open its contents with a gesture that said, I lay it all out before you. His voice, normally stiff and remote, expanded into a high-pitched squeal if I requested a movie he had been chasing after but had not yet acquired. It delighted me to provoke him, not out of malice but because each time his toad voice erupted, I pictured him breathlessly trying to outrun his fellow smugglers through the subterranean corridors of the black market, the tails of his trench coat like wings in the wind, clutching the illegally filmed videos of movies screened in foreign theaters, where the shadowy bare heads of female viewers, sharpening their teeth on Red Vines and popcorn, filled the bottom of the screen. Besides, he was in on the joke. It was all a show. I was matching his performance with a false theater of my own. We both knew that deep down, the only thing I wanted was to rent The Phantom of the Opera over and over again. “Again?” my mother would ask, her voice drawn out, thinly disguising her concern. “Again!” I would command, my eyes wild with pleasure. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture In Turn Each Woman Thrust Her Head By Kim Todd Poster for The Penelopiad at the Buddies and Bad Times Theater. In the hot attic bedroom in Minneapolis, my twelve-year-old daughter is reading to me from the Odyssey. Curled in the center of the orange paisley chair, she conjures ship-smashing gales, feasts of roast lamb, a mouth full of salt. The words wash over me as I do leg lifts, building strength after breaking a foot, eager to run again. Sweat sticks skin to the polished wood floor. Sparrows chatter and build nests of junk-mail scraps and dryer lint on beams outside, just above the windows. A lock of dark hair hangs in my daughter’s face as she adopts the goddess Athena’s shocked voice. Odysseus has dared to doubt her, and in her wounded pride, she sounds a bit like an aggrieved mother. Your touching faith! Another man would trust Some villainous mortal, with no brains—and what am I? Your goddess-guardian to the end in all your trials. It’s a story we both love, though this is my daughter’s first encounter with Homer’s original. Athena, in particular, is magnetic. We’ve both dressed up as Zeus’s daughter at different times for Halloween. In the seventies, I went door-to-door in a lacy thrift-store dress that led everyone to ask if I was a fairy princess, and me to answer, through clenched teeth, “No. I’m the goddess of wisdom, weaving, and defensive war.” Two years ago, my daughter held a plastic shield from a knight costume on which she pasted a green foam Medusa’s head. Gray eyes, bronze-tipped spear, strategizing mind: there’s no denying Athena’s appeal. To slip into her golden sandals, even if they are just shiny fabric hot glued to flip-flops, is to slip on a measure of power. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Epic, Neglected Vision of Joan Murray By Farnoosh Fathi The following is adapted from the editor’s introduction to a new collection of Joan Murray’s poems, published last week. Joan Murray. Photo courtesy of Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. “What truth, what mystical awareness can be lived,” Joan Murray wrote in a letter to her mother. Like the young Rimbaud, Murray intended to make herself a seer—what she calls, among other figures, the “Unemployed or universal Architect.” She became this architect-seer not, as Rimbaud proposed, by a total derangement of the senses but by building “the firm reality of a consciousness, consciousness in the never-ending, the great wideness that one must blend withal.” Like Emily Dickinson and Laura Riding before her, Murray belongs to a radical arc of American metaphysical women poets, most of whom still remain unsung. Her untimely death from a congenital heart condition in 1942, at age twenty-four, marked the loss of an extraordinary poet; yet Murray’s poems recalibrate the notion of a life’s work. The tragic facts only underscore the epic achievement of her vision. Five years after her death, out of the blue woodwork of 1947, her first book of poetry was published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition with the title Poems by Joan Murray: 1917–1942. W. H. Auden, who had been dissatisfied with the manuscripts he had received as a first-year judge, had reached out to Murray’s mother to inquire about the possibility of publishing her daughter’s work posthumously for the prize. Murray had been a student in Auden’s Poetry and Culture course at the New School in 1940, and her mother countered Auden’s invitation with the accusation that he had killed her daughter by inspiring her “poetry fever.” But she was devoted to her daughter’s work and eager to see it published, so agreed to the Yale edition with the condition that her friend Grant Code—a poet, Harvard lecturer, and dance and theater critic—edit the collection. Read More
February 14, 2018 In Memoriam Watching Screwball Comedies with Harry Mathews By Ann Beattie Harry Mathews. Harry Mathews began publishing in The Paris Review in 1962, with an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. After that, he gave us poems, translations, and more fiction, much of it composed according to occult mathematical formulas of his own devising. From 1989 until 2003, Harry served as our Paris editor. In 2007, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, interviewed Harry for our Art of Fiction series. As she wrote in her introduction, “After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh. Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic French readers, Mathews remains relatively unknown in his native land and language.” Harry died last year just as our Spring issue, with an excerpt from his final novel, was going to press. —The Paris Review Harry Mathews, who died a year ago, on January 25, was born on Valentine’s Day. This is the first time his friends (including those in Key West, who, during the winter, often got to see Harry and his beloved wife, Marie) have had to be without him. About the time he turned eighty, maybe a bit earlier, he had to stop bicycling. He did this grudgingly, berating some of us for our concern (expressed as he was about to cycle off after certain … let’s just say wine-centric dinners). His good friend James Merrill was the person who’d urged the Mathewses to leave wintry New York and come enjoy the sun in Key West. (Merrill, on his own bicycle, was always a delightful sight as he sped toward you wearing his shirt, shorts, argyle socks, and sandals.) Not that Harry needed to imitate Merrill or his other close friend John Ashbery at all: his sense of style was singular, as was Harry. But how did I become dear friends with a person who had specially sewn compartments in his shirt pockets for his cigars? How did my husband and I appear, year after year, on New Year’s Eve to be poured as much champagne as we wished (forget that “wishing upon a star” nonsense; this was excellent champagne) and to watch a screwball comedy that would be midway through at midnight? He shushed us if we so much as whispered to the person sitting next to us. In the background, we’d hear fireworks, the screams, the ubiquitous unmuffled motorcycles, more piercing screams, and soon, very soon, the sirens, as the TV volume was adjusted upward to a near-deafening level. In Key West, certain individuals get the idea that they might, say, blow up a pier to celebrate the New Year. (Or, at the very least, set their neighbor’s garbage can on fire.) Read More
February 14, 2018 Arts & Culture The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois By Ibram X. Kendi W. E. B. Du Bois The dispute lasted for more than a year between itinerant black farmer Sam Hose and his wealthy white employer, Alfred Cranford. Hose requesting his wages. Cranford refusing to pay up. The dispute grew like the crops on Cranford’s farm outside of Atlanta, in Coweta County. On April 12, 1899, Cranford aimed murderous threats and his loaded gun at Hose. Hose grabbed a nearby ax, threw it at Cranford, and ran into the Georgia wilderness. Newspapers got wind of the incident and started blaring sensational details of the murderous Hose who raped Cranford’s wife as Cranford lay dying. Read More