January 31, 2018 Department of Tomfoolery Paris, Reviewed By Rosa Rankin-Gee Real life reviews from the City of Light, compiled from TripAdvisor.com Musee d’Orsay MUSÉE D’ORSAY Not worth unless you are into art Only go if you are interested in art history. I love history, but I couldn’t stay here for more than an hour, as its pictures doesn’t make sense to me. EIFFEL TOWER Very not good! We expect from the Eiffel Tower something romantic. But we got—very not good and not clean around the Eiffel Tower! At night you can’t see the city of Paris because there is not enough lighting!!! After visiting the Eiffel Tower, NO body helped us to find the way to go down!!! Read More
January 31, 2018 Arts & Culture The Baby, the Book, and the Bathwater By Heather Abel On female ambition and what gets thrown out. Robert Louis Stevenson’s baby book. Around halfway through writing my novel, I read a book that nearly derailed me. As any writer knows, reading while writing is always a risky pursuit. Cadences are easily stolen; we find ourselves singing a lullaby we don’t remember being sung to us. But there’s something worse than a book that turns us into magpies and mimics: one that squelches our very desire to write. The book that had this censoring effect on me was called, both innocuously and officially, The Baby Book. It was the first book I read after giving birth for the first time, as sleep-deprived and receptive as any cult joiner. I had not read about baby care during my first pregnancy, which ended after eleven weeks, or during the second. Due to an autoimmune illness that could compromise my ability to carry a baby to term, as well as my family’s Judeo-magical thinking that links stillbirths to positive thoughts, I refused to imagine anything beyond the birth. But once my own child emerged, gorgeous and awake, a heart beating beneath her thin skin, I was at a loss. I turned to the book all my friends recommended. Read More
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