November 30, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Diary Snoops and Ill-Advised Marriages By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, I am a bit of a snoop, though I’ve really been trying to be better about it. But lately, my new roommate has taken to leaving her diary in the bathroom. This is just curious behavior anyway. Is she documenting her bladder movements? I need to know! I must resist! Help me. All the very best, Nosy in Nashville Dear Nosy, Get your own diary and make sure it’s about the same size as hers and leave it in the bathroom beside hers. Write in your diary about how badly you want to read her diary but you know you must resist. And how you have resisted. And why you must continue to resist. Do a still-life drawing of her diary in your diary. If her diary is still in the bathroom in a week, write about that. At the end of the year, you may have a book on your hands. Sincerely, Lynda B. Read More
November 29, 2017 Arts & Culture Listen: Hemingway’s Unrequited High School Crush By Robert K. Elder A undated photo of Frances Coates, Ernest Hemingway’s unrequited high school crush. It was as if a lightning bolt struck the teenage Ernest Hemingway, right there in the orchestra pit. Although Frances Coates, seventeen, was only cast as “Third Servant” in the high school performance of Martha, her brief opera solo made an impact on Hemingway, sixteen, who was playing cello and gazing up at her. The biographer Carlos Baker describes how a classmate of Hemingway’s made a caricature of a boy with desperate eyes and labeled it: “Erney sees a girl named Frances.” Baker also notes that Hemingway was too shy to ask Coates to prom. Now, you can hear that voice, in recordings recently found by Coates’s family. Read More
November 29, 2017 Novemberance Death’s Footsteps By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fifth and final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which has run every Wednesday this month. Sharon Harper, Germany, mise en scene. 1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone. It’s a brown-red smell, deep and dense and fungal. I walked with someone who knew about plants, who’d tug at branches and look at the underbellies of leaves and show me what he knew. I felt lucky to learn, and tried to pay attention. The boardwalk footpath lead deeper into a boggy place, and the silence seemed to densify around us, and we tread with lighter steps. On the planked path he paused. “Sphagnum moss,” he said, pointing to a mound. I told him I did not like the word sphagnum, that it sounded like something you suffer from. “Feel it though,” he said. It was good advice. I crouched and pressed my palm into the moss. It was cool and damp and feathery, with a cushioned give, welcoming and soft. I wanted to lay my face in it, my whole body, to let the entire weight of me get absorbed into this cooling cloud of plant. Read More
November 29, 2017 Arts & Culture White Man on a Pedestal By Toniann Fernandez Kenya (Robinson), If I Were King, 2017. The fourth statue of J. Marion Sims was erected at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on November 10. The other three monuments to Sims—which live in New York’s Central Park; in Montgomery, Alabama; and in Columbia, South Carolina—celebrate the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” the man who developed the surgical technique for the repair of the vesicovaginal fistula, an injury often encountered during childbirth. This recently erected statue, however, is dedicated to the atrocities Sims committed: to the black women he tortured through bloody, nonconsensual, and nontherapeutic surgeries without anesthetics. His new plinth reads PONEROS, Greek for “Evil One.” To his right, is a gang of ten thousand five-inch-tall, plastic white men (cumulatively, they are eighteen feet tall) referred to by their maker as “Daves.” Both are part of Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson)’s exhibition“White Man on a Pedestal (WMOAP),” which seeks to amend history without erasing it. It’s a clarion call for reorienting our perspective. The exhibition asks viewers to consider white privilege as a plastic toy and to evaluate their own complicity in its proliferation. Read More
November 28, 2017 Redux Redux: James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Dorothea Lasky 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 our 1984 interview with James Baldwin, Raymond Carver’s story “Why Don’t You Dance?,” and Dorothea Lasky’s poem “I Had a Man.” You can also listen to all three in the third episode of our new podcast, featuring guest readers LeVar Burton and Dakota Johnson. Read More
November 28, 2017 On Language Solving Riddles, Reading Poems By Geoffrey Hilsabeck “I saw two wonderful and weird creatures / out in the open unashamedly / fall a-coupling,” wrote a monk in Old English a thousand years ago, either composing or transcribing a riddle about a rooster and a hen. This riddle and a hundred others—as well as elegies, proverbs, and dreams—were written into one big book, which was bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral by its bishop and subsequently used by the monks as a cutting board and a beer coaster and left vulnerable to bats and bookworms. Still, ninety-four riddles survived. A thousand years later, I found two dozen of these riddles, translated into modern English and collected in a slim volume called The Earliest English Poems, and a few years after that—now, to be precise—I have published a book of my own riddles and elegies and proverbs. Riddles aren’t confined to English. There are riddles etched into clay tablets from ancient Babylon, and Sanskrit riddles in the Rig Veda (1700–1100 B.C.E.). Samson posed a riddle to the Philistines at a wedding, as did Queen Sheba when she visited the court of King Solomon. The ability to solve a riddle is a sign of wisdom or folly, the business of prophets or fools. The Hebrew prophet Daniel could unwind spells, interpret dreams, and explain riddles. But so could Oedipus. He solved the riddle of the sphinx: What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? A lot of good that did him. For the Greeks, riddles demonstrated the limits of knowledge. “All men are deceived by the appearances of things,” wrote Heraclitus, illustrating his point with an apocryphal story about Homer, who was said to have once been embarrassed by some boys when he failed to solve their riddle about lice. Read More