January 16, 2018 Arts & Culture “What Does Your Husband Think of Your Novel?” By Jamie Quatro The spring my first book came out—a collection of stories, several of which detailed an erotic but unconsummated emotional affair—I was invited to speak at an all-men’s book club. I was excited such a club existed in my town. I told them I’d love to come. Southern male readers of fiction with serious literary habits! The meeting was held in the home of one of the members. About a dozen men showed up. We milled around and made the usual small talk. We ate good Mexican food and drank good Spanish wine and eventually gathered on sofas and chairs around the coffee table. I gave a brief talk about my “creative process”—something they’d asked me to discuss—and opened it up for questions. No one said anything. Men shifted in leather cushions and flipped through their copies of my book. It was hot out. Someone kept opening and closing the sliding back door in little screechy increments. Maybe no one actually read it, I thought. Finally the man sitting in the chair across from me flung his book onto the coffee table. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll just say it, because we’re all wondering the same thing: What in the hell does your husband think about your work?” Read More
January 16, 2018 On Politics Trump Disappears Up Himself By J. D. Daniels Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? —Donald Trump, as reported in The Washington Post Q. What is a “shithole”? A. It is an anus. Life is painful and full of disappointment. The French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, one of the great forgotten geniuses of the twentieth century, identified a bit of make-believe that might comfort a hurt, disappointed child: “the illusion that, with his pregenital sexuality, his immature and sterile penis, he is an adequate sexual partner for his mother and has nothing to envy in his father … so that he may be able to pretend to himself and to others that his pregenital sexuality is equal, if not superior, to genitality.” Today we revisit Chasseguet-Smirgel’s 1984 masterpiece, Creativity and Perversion. It is important to utter her meaning again in our time. Read More
January 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Martin Luther King’s Radical Anticapitalism By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor AP Photo/Horace Cort In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s politics traversed the same course. Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black Southerners. Read More
January 15, 2018 Listen Chinua Achebe on Martin Luther King: He Died Too Young By The Paris Review Chinua Achebe In honor of Martin Luther King Jr., we bring you audio from an unused portion of the Art of Fiction No. 139, an interview with Chinua Achebe conducted for issue no. 133 (Winter 1994) of The Paris Review. In this clip, Achebe discusses the legacy of none other than Martin Luther King Jr. A transcript follows: Yes, I think certainly, in my view, that Martin Luther King is an ancestor. And although he died at the age of thirty-nine, this is something we do not often remember—how young he was when he was cut down. But his achievement was such that some who lived to be a hundred didn’t achieve half as much. So he does deserve that status, that standing. If he were in my country, he would be worshipped … I did not meet him, unfortunately, and I think one of the reasons was what I have just said, that he died too young. He was thirty-nine. Gandhi, with whom he is often compared, had not even returned to India at thirty-nine; he was still studying. We are thinking not about a sportsman, who can achieve his peak at eighteen, we are thinking of a philosopher, a thinker, who had to mature into action. I have been lucky in the past few years to be invited, again and again, to speak on his day—two years ago at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and then last year at the Smithsonian, so I’ve become something of an expert on Martin Luther King.
January 12, 2018 From the Archive Celebrating Shithole Literature By Brian Ransom In my enviable role as social-media manager, I get to pick through old issues of The Paris Review to find interesting, overlooked pieces to surface. Nestled in issue no. 78 (Summer 1980), among Bobby Anderson’s “Edie Sedgwick: A Reminiscence” and Mallarmé’s poem “A Tomb for Anatole,” I discovered three folks tales by Paulé Bártón, a writer from what the president vulgarly referred to yesterday as a “shithole” country. Little information about Bártón is available, but according to the issue’s contributor’s note, he was born in Haiti in 1916 and spent most of his life as a goatherd. He was imprisoned in Fort Dimanche under the Duvalier regime and subsequently exiled. I stumbled upon this trio of narrative pearls when I was an intern here last summer. The writing is immediate and compact, stunning in its musicality and plick-plock rhythm. Reading “The Woe Shirt” for the first time—not having any idea what it was, where it came from, or how to find more of it—I nearly wept at my desk. Today, we’ve unlocked it from our archives in celebration of writers from shithole countries the world over. “The Woe Shirt” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick. Then he rode to buy a woe shirt. He saw Mari then, standing. She said, “You going to buy that shirt, I know! You’ll go buy that beggar shirt Bélem, I know. Oh it will cost you all your little money all your goats and old friend parrot to get it! I tell you clearly, look at what you do! Spend everything on a beggar shirt, no sense!” but Mari saw that Bélem felt the shirt on him already, too late, “O.K. then, say good-bye twice to your parrot,” she said. Subscribers can also read two more of Bártón’s short stories in our archives: “The Broom Is Busy” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Boki was watching Álse Odjo with a twig broom sweep the floor. The twig-ends were breaking off and Álse Odjo kept sweeping them up. “You losing broom all over the floor!” Boki said, “I see that broom creating its own work!” “Just like everyone on this island!” Álse Odjo said back, “That’s the island way,” she didn’t laugh, “This broom born and raised here, you know.” “Emile Plead Choose One Egg” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem he says, “The salt sea will find this wound on me, it always does when I swim in it, always clean my wound.” But Emilie knew the wound of confusion and no-choice was too deep inside for the salt sea to sting it clean for Bélem right now. Brian Ransom is the social-media manager for The Paris Review.
January 12, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Obama, Netflix, and Escorts By The Paris Review I never expected to like Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, but it needed only a few minutes of my attention to have me laughing out loud. Though the description might be off-putting—“Bored with killing animals, seventeen-year-old James is busy plotting his first real murder when brash new girl Alyssa catches him off guard at school”—the show is witty and barefaced in the way that a Wes Anderson film could be if Anderson’s films weren’t so masculine. Alyssa and James have a push-pull relationship that left me refreshed at the end of the show’s eight twenty-minute episodes, wondering where the two and a half hours had gone. —Eleanor Pritchett If you live in the New York City area or are visiting soon, please carve ten minutes out of your day for The New York Earth Room and then, if you have ten more minutes, The Broken Kilometer. These are two strange little rooms, both created by the artist Walter De Maria, both maintained by Dia, both completely free to enter. I won’t (oh god, a pun, why not) soil the surprise of either piece, but I will say that when I visited these two exhibits in quick succession last Sunday, I saw the city open up—almost unfold before my eyes—in ways that it hadn’t for me ever before. What other rooms could be lurking among the tapas restaurants and purveyors of high-end socks? I wondered. What other mysteries does the city hold? —Brian Ransom Read More