December 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Houses Still Standing 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. © Molly Crabapple “We are older than you,” Pepe says, when I meet him on the lemon-yellow striped bridge. The bridge is in Paloma Abajo, a neighborhood in the Comerío municipality that Defend PR is helping to rebuild. He is older than I am, with a neat gray beard and a bandana printed with marijuana leaves wrapped around his hair, but he is speaking not of himself but of our respective countries of birth. Puerto Rico was colonized before the United States, and by the time U.S. gunboats boomed into its harbor in 1898, it had enjoyed its hard-won autonomy from Spain for several months—not that this helped the island in the eyes of its new overlords. In the opinion of many U.S. politicians, Puerto Rico was populated by members of the deficient “Spanish” race, too lazy and primitive to be granted either independence or statehood. How little some attitudes change. I draw Pepe’s house—a wonder of lime green, high amidst the greener hills. “Don’t draw the American flag,” he tells me. “My wife put it up.” Later, he takes me inside the house, whose three squat stories he built with his own hands. He made their walls so thick and strong that even Hurricane Maria could not knock them down. Two black-and-white portraits of Pedro Albizu Campos hang in the living room. Albizu was a brilliant Afro-Caribbean lawyer, the founder of the Partido Nacionalista, and fluent in six languages. In 1921, he graduated valedictorian of his class at Harvard. In the years that came after, he advocated for armed insurrection against U.S. colonialism and spent twenty-six years in prison, where the U.S. (allegedly) experimented on him with radiation. They only let him out to die of the cancer this radiation caused. He is now venerated, by many Puerto Ricans, as a martyr for la patria, a sort of secular saint. “My father was one of Albizu’s soldiers,” Pepe says. The photos were the first objects he hung back up on the walls after the hurricane had passed. Read More
December 20, 2017 Best of 2017 Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2017 By The Paris Review Fleur Jaeggy This past July, I read Fleur Jaeggy’s most recent collection, I Am the Brother of XX (New Directions, 2017) with a mix of envy and admiration. While it may not qualify as holiday reading, this slim volume combines all of my favorite fictional things: a touch of cruelty, the comitragedy of the absurd, and a reverence for the domestic. I am a firm believer in the idea that in everyday household objects we find the magic, menace, and violence of our world distilled, a notion Jaeggy extrapolates to great and unsettling effect. In these strange, dark tales, photographs and paintings frequently come alive. Tea cups and spoons converse with spinsters. A lonely diner finds companionship in the fish she is about to eat (“He is already a friend”), while nihilistic children harbor sartorial obsessions with a “certain blue coat” or “eggplant-colored penny loafers.” As with all of Jaeggy‘s work, I Am the Brother of XX is menacing, moving, and disturbingly comic—austere, but without ever losing its sense of play. I recently shared my favorite story in the collection, “Agnes,” with a poet friend of mine. Her response sums up my feeling exactly: “It’s perfect. I wish I’d written it myself.” —J. Jezewska Stevens (“The Party”) Read More
December 20, 2017 Our Correspondents How the Grinch Self-Actualized By Anthony Madrid It appears a great deal is already known about the Grinch. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, did some graduate work at Oxford, left school to establish his Zarathustra’s eyrie on Mount Crumpit in Canada—and was fifty-three years old at the time of his conversion to Christianity. I should say his putative conversion. The book documenting this most famous episode of his life is called How the Grinch Stole Christmas!—not The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It doesn’t matter; Google knows what you meant. The television cartoon, upon which so many people in my generation have based their personalities, aired for the first time in December 1966. Boris Karloff, who did the voice of the Grinch, was nearly eighty at the time. He had less than two years to live. Read More
December 19, 2017 Redux Redux: Lucia Berlin, Eileen Myles, Caleb Crain 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 Lucia Berlin’s short story “B.F. and Me,” Eileen Myles’s poem “Sweet Heart,” and Caleb Crain’s story “Envoy.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to all three in the fifth episode of our podcast, “To See You Again”; and if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts and subscribe in iTunes. While you’re there, tell us how much you love the show in the comments. Read More
December 19, 2017 Arts & Culture Utopia Interrupted: The Uncertain Future of the Mall By Matthew Newton Architectural rendering at Monroeville Mall, 2016. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space An attractive young woman with long dark hair stands in the atrium of a shopping mall. She is alone. There are no other passersby—no shoppers or security guards or senior citizens walking laps. To her left is a seating area with two unoccupied chairs, one gray, the other wrapped in geometric-print fabric. Nearby, an escalator operates without passengers. Its metal steps collapse and build and collapse again. Behind her, the concourse is vacant. Brown, gray, and white floor tiles abut the terrazzo before vanishing in the distance. The outline of her body is silhouetted against a storefront of blue-white glass, giving the scene the impression of a half-rendered hologram. No merchandise or display racks are visible, and it’s unclear if the store is out of business or sells nothing at all. The woman, who is wearing a floral-print dress that’s cut just above the knee and white high heels that strap at the ankle, appears happy despite the loneliness of her surroundings. She is carrying four shopping bags. Two are slung over her right shoulder, while two more hang at her side. No store names appear on the bags, but each one is a different color. There is a sense she has been shopping for hours. With her shoulders turned and her eyes searching, the woman poses like a fashion model stopped at the end of a runway. Yet something is not right. She appears to be waiting for a photograph that will never be taken, and her expression seems to ask: Can you see me? Read More
December 19, 2017 At Work An Interview with Kerri Pierce By Joel Pinckney The Faroe Islands. Jóanes Nielsen’s novel, The Brahmadells, is one of the first books to be translated into English from Faroese, the native language of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago of eighteen islands situated in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway. Its capital, Tórshavn, which figures prominently in the novel, has around twenty thousand inhabitants, making it one of the smallest capitals in the world—and the Islands’ native language, Faroese, only has around sixty thousand native speakers. Nielsen’s novel was translated by Kerri Pierce and published last month by Open Letter. This roving tale of the history of those small and remote islands tells a story both intimate, tracing the complex familial legacy of the Brahmadells and other families over several generations, and general, weaving historical documents and characters into its narrative thread. It is a captivating and enlightening immersion into a place most readers will find unfamiliar. Kerri Pierce and I spoke by phone earlier this month. Pierce’s translation marks the eighth language from which she has translated, though talking with her, one would never know. She was humble and unassuming, and she spoke of her voracious appetite for translating new languages as one might speak of learning to cook a new dish, or adding half a mile to one’s jogging routine. We discussed how she stumbled into translating, and the value of translated literature. Read More