January 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Breakdown of Human Communication By Morgan Parker and Adam Valen Levinson Two writers discuss false binaries, litmus tests for dating, and a lack of nuance on the Internet. Adam Valen Levinson and Morgan Parker met many years ago—more than five, almost certainly less than eleven—as undergraduates at Columbia University; neither recalls precisely how they met. Now, as published authors, the two often banter and joke and argue and lament from their respective homes in Harlem and Hollywood. These conversations are imperfect, but rigorously in search of some shared understanding (hope?) for the human capacity to love, to care for, to accept, to amend, to create beauty. These are admittedly risky beliefs for a black American woman and an American Jew to hold. These conversations don’t hold all the answers, but they exist and continue to exist, which seems to be better than everyone just giving up on the messy stuff of the world. Parker’s work deals with ideas of multiplicity—of beliefs, of identity, of histories, of possibilities. Valen Levinson’s work, fueled by his propensity to poke other people and beat up on himself, addresses questions of the heart with a reporter’s commitment to facts. The following interview, conducted over Skype, is the second recorded conversation between Parker and Valen Levinson; the first attempt was lost to a dead cell phone. VALEN LEVINSON I’ve found the switch to texting, and then the many different evolutions and generations that texting has gone through on different platforms, so tough because it’s taken what you can do with bodies and most of what you can do with faces all the way out of it. PARKER Yeah, I mean, you can’t really text well with someone that you don’t know that well. You can relay information, but— VALEN LEVINSON And yet the new generation is meeting their spouses and dog walkers and doctors and therapists that way. PARKER I know. I mean, I feel like it’s a different skill, right? Like, it’s a skill to be able—and I’m saying this as a poet—to communicate your personality and intonation in a text. Most people can’t do that. VALEN LEVINSON Really, though, I think that it’s impossible to do. It’s impossible to ever communicate in a way where there’s no chance of it being taken as entirely the opposite of what you’re saying. Full-body communication is way harder to misinterpret because it taps into biological and social things that go back millions of years. Even orangutans smile at each other. So when you tell somebody, Hey, shut the fuck up, and you’re smiling, our brains are like, Cool, dude, I’m on board, I get what you’re doing there. It takes so much longer to establish trust over text, and I feel like we think we’re just establishing all this trust and communicating, but we’re not. There’s such a narrow range of expressions in text. Read More
January 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Elders of the Island By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. All images © Molly Crabapple. Puerto Rico is an elderly island. A quarter of its population is over sixty-five. This is due to the last of a series of great migrations. Poverty, gifted to the island by Spain and then exacerbated by American colonization, sent able bodies abroad. First, in the early twentieth century, they went to roll cigars in Ybor City, Florida, and to till plantations in Hawaii, then they went to basic training (Puerto Ricans fought and died in both world wars), then, in the fifties, they went to sew garments and get cancer in the factories of New York. These workers kept the island close. Many returned, after decades of labor, to buy their parcela, a bit of land on which to resurrect a half-fictitious childhood on the green and generous earth, but this time with American modernity and the conveniences that was meant to imply. They looked with shame at the outhouse, the well, the mosquito net. In the early twenty-first century, the pattern continued. The island’s bankruptcy, unemployment, and the savage budget cuts imposed by the U.S. financial-control board—la junta—again forced working-age adults to leave the island, and their elderly parents, behind. Read More
January 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Curry Lit: Writing Authentically About India By Naben Ruthnum Cover illustration by Chloe Cushman. Even if the Indian subcontinent was never your home to begin with, it can serve—and has served—as a spiritual home in conversation, books, films, and pilgrimage-like trips. In her 1979 book Karma Cola, Gita Mehta observed these visitors and the industry of fake fakirs who sprang up around them to embrace their curiosity and take their money. As the vivid success of Eat Pray Love and Chip Wilson’s Lululemon empire have proven, the guru era is far from over. There are fraudulent ashrams and cultish inveiglers all over the subcontinent and in the islands where the disapora scattered: everyone has a cousin—or six—who gives 38 percent of their income to a leader who, in exchange, relieves them of their connections to family and friends. In the West, too, gurus proliferate in small local temples, Sai Baba megastructures, and the Bikram Yoga training camp. Karma Cola is history as reportage, a sardonic chronicle of minor vengeance for colonialism: the colonizers who just wouldn’t go away are now a source of capital for the country, a welcome variation on the one-way cash flow of the former empirical relationship. India can sell its wisdom, packaged for consumption by America and Europe’s young and directionless—or old and directionless, for that matter. Read More
January 3, 2018 Our Correspondents The Fuzz By Anthony Madrid and Coco Picard A few words about this presentation. The verbal part had a romantic beginning. I was obsessing over the rhythms of Korney Chukovsky’s poem “Telephone.” Suddenly—very suddenly—occurred to me the first rhymes of what I thought might be an existential masterpiece: “Long time ago there was … a fuzz.” Note the Russian accent. A great deal more came to me all at once. I was in the car. I felt frightened. I thought I might forget. So I uncapped a marker and wrote what I could on a box that was conveniently in the passenger seat. This is a true story. I kept writing more at stop lights, all the way to Chipotle. More came out on napkins there, but that stuff was trash and I cut it. Time I got to my office at school, I had “The Fuzz” that you see below, intact. And I was in a sweat to share it with the world. Over the next few days, I developed illustrations. These had no merit, but I sent ’em to people anyway. People all over the world: little kids, infirm persons. Part two of this story is where I turned to a real illustrator. I know her slightly. She is one of the good ones in Chicago. I had just read her graphic novel, Chronicles of Fortune, in transports of delight, on an airplane. I doubted she would be able to find time to do pictures for “The Fuzz,” as she was six or seven months pregnant and had plenty of other things to do, but voilà, she found the time. I should like to direct your attention to the panel where nobody knows why there was a fuzz. That image is a good meme. The whole thing is memes, all the way down. What else shall I tell you? I plan on writing another piece like “The Fuzz,” called “The Slime” (“Once upon a time … was a slime”). ’Til then, wishing everybody a happy 2018. Read More
January 2, 2018 Redux Redux: Eudora Welty, David Sedaris, Sharon Olds 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. Happy New Year, and welcome to your free weekly holiday in the archives of The Paris Review. This week, we bring you Eudora Welty’s Art of Fiction interview from our Fall 1972 issue; David Sedaris’s essay “Letter from Emerald Isle,” and Sharon Olds’s poem “The Beetle.” And why not ring in the New Year by listening to all three in the sixth episode of our podcast, “The Beetle and the Butterfly.” Read More
January 2, 2018 Best of 2017 Sex in the Garden By Stephen Greenblatt We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! William Blake, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (detail), 1808. The serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field, had observed with interest the humans’ sexual intercourse in Paradise. He saw that Adam calmly willed his penis to stiffen and then gently inserted it into Eve’s vulva. The act caught his attention in part because he thought that Eve was extraordinarily beautiful and in part because he had already noted a certain resemblance between Adam’s penis and his own body, which he could also harden or soften at will. One day, he approached Eve—Adam was away surveying a different part of the garden—and proposed that he stiffen his body and enter her, as Adam did. Lacking any knowledge of good or evil, Eve gladly consented. The snake made himself hard and penetrated the woman, moving his head this way and that to see what might be of interest. But it was dark inside and, after a while, concluding that Eve was more beautiful without than within, he withdrew. Eve, however, had experienced something intensely pleasurable, and she determined that when Adam returned she would teach him how to imitate what the snake had done. (Williams 57–58; Slavonic Enoch) Read More >>