January 30, 2018 Redux Redux: Benjamin Nugent, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Kristin Dombek 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 Benjamin Nugent’s story “God,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem “Kingdom Come,” and Kristin Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to all three in the ninth episode of our podcast, “God, Etc.” And if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts by subscribing on iTunes. While you’re there, tell us in the comments how much you love the show. “God,” by Benjamin Nugent Issue no. 206 (Fall 2013) We called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends. Read More
January 30, 2018 Look Mirtha Dermisache and the Limits of Language By Will Fenstermaker An excerpt from Mirtha Dermisache’s Libro No. 1 (1972). No importa lo que pasa en la hoja de papel, lo importante es lo que pasa dentro nuestro. (“It’s not important what happens on a sheet of paper, the important thing is what happens within us.”) —Mirtha Dermisache Despots, from those who composed the efficiently murderous junta that ruled Argentina to the petty kakistocracy that runs the United States today, curb the written word because they fear its expressive power. They haven’t learned that what they should fear is not written language but, instead, the very impulse to write. It is more prevailing than literature, capable of surviving where art cannot. The writings and artistic practice of Mirtha Dermisache are a testament to this. Her work, which she created while living under the junta in Argentina, is lasting and subversive even though she barely penned a legible word. One could argue that writing is a state of being in conflict—with oneself, with one’s subject, with one’s government, or with one’s community. But the unconscious impulse to write comes before the word, and it does not always take the form of language. Everything that follows—in how we traditionally conceive of writing—is an attempt to capture that compulsion, to make approximate marks that convey our thoughts to others. This is what John Berger referred to when he wrote, “The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience.” Prose, he came to believe, expressed something that was far from truth because it was too artificial and too trusting; it did not “speak to the immediate wound.” Read More
January 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Going Through Blanche DuBois’s Luggage By Susan Harlan Still from A Streetcar Named Desire. There is no piece of luggage quite like Blanche DuBois’s trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire. This object contains the life, or the life traces, of one of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring characters. Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors understand—that artifice is not the opposite of truth but a means of achieving it. And if she is the ultimate actor, she possesses the ultimate stage prop: her trunk. This object is baggage, furniture, and character all at once, a heavy and unwieldy onstage presence that mirrors Blanche’s own frail but nonetheless steely physicality. In the opening scene of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation—he had also directed the Broadway production of the play with Jessica Tandy as Blanche, which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947—Vivien Leigh’s Blanche emerges from the steam in the railway station carrying only a small purse and a large, round box (possibly a hatbox). She walks forward tentatively, as if afraid of something unseen. The soldier who helps her onto the streetcar passes the box up to her, and she clutches it as she walks through the streets of New Orleans, dodging people and noises. Blanche doesn’t travel with her trunk; it follows her. She travels light, and indeed, she is light—Mitch (Karl Malden) will refer to her as “light as a feather,” an observation that links her with the fluffy sartorial contents of her trunk. She boasts to Stella (Kim Hunter) that she hasn’t put on weight in ten years, but, as she will remind her sister later, she still feels a sense of heaviness: she carries the burden of the family’s plantation, Belle Reve. For Blanche, Belle Reve is a beautiful white Southern dream of an ancestral estate that has been reduced to ruin, lost. Read More
January 29, 2018 Arts & Culture “We All Have a Fatal Flaw” and Other Aphorisms By Muriel Spark The aphorisms below are plucked from Muriel Spark’s fiction. In the words of Penelope Jardine, editor of The Good Comb: The Sayings of Muriel Spark, “That doesn’t mean either that Dame Muriel did not actually think what she says here and perhaps means it very much.” A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn’t got a chance. I think waiter is such a funny word. It is we who wait. How can she truly love? She’s too timid to hate well, let alone love. It takes courage to practice love. Literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls. How seldom one falls in love with the lovable … how seldom … hardly ever. How do you know when you’re in love? The traffic in the city improves, and the cost of living seems to be very low. Read More
January 29, 2018 Arts & Culture Serial Killers, Versace, and Me By Sarah Weinman Edgar Ramírez as Gianni Versace in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college (such things were possible in the late nineties). The gig itself was worlds away from my current occupation as a crime writer. “Inventory asset management” was the vague, jargony title that described the mix of my duties: lifting heavy objects—furniture, office supplies—and computer data entry. It was meant to be tedious, a spirit confirmed by the office’s gray cubicles, the recycled air, and the lack of ambition among my colleagues. But my mornings were not boring. I began my summer gig the first week of July, and within a week I had developed a lively routine. One of my coworkers—perhaps even my then boss—left a stack of printouts at my desk. They weren’t for my job. They were something else entirely. “Hey, Sarah!” he’d say. “Here’s the latest on that spree killer you’re obsessed with.” And every morning, I’d sift through the papers, then search on AltaVista or Lycos for the latest on a twenty-seven-year-old fugitive named Andrew Cunanan. I needed to know more. I needed to know why. Two decades later, I suppose I still do. Read More
January 29, 2018 In Memoriam Nicanor Parra, the Alpha-Male Poet By David Unger Nicanor Parra died last week at the age of a hundred three. Here, David Unger remembers a collaboration with Parra that seemed doomed from the start. Nicanor Parra. Photo: Fundación Iberoamericana I first began translating the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1973, on the recommendation of Frank MacShane, the professor of my graduate translation course at Columbia University. I bought Obra gruesa, an anthology of Parra’s poetry published by Chile’s Editorial Universitaria at the Las Americas bookstore in Union Square. Back then, there were four Spanish-language bookstores on or around Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Later, I picked up Poems and Anti-Poems and Emergency Poems, two New Directions collections of Parra’s work. At the time, I was a serious silk-scarf/whiskey-breath poet, best buddies with classmate Frank Lima, a Rimbaud-like, jail-schooled poet. I devoured these three Parra books, then went about looking for poems that had not been translated into English. I found “Último brindis,” a cynical mathematical poem that exemplified Parra’s antipoetry philosophy, and translated it as “The Final Toast.” Read More