November 22, 2017 Novemberance All This Blood and Love By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fourth installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. Jennie Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914. The field where I played soccer before I had breasts was called Metacomet Park. A nylon net full of balls would be spilled on the field for drills, and we ate orange wedges at halftime. Metacomet, known otherwise as Metacom or King Philip, was a Wampanoag chief, and in 1676, fifty-six years after the Pilgrims dropped anchor in Plymouth, he was assassinated in a swamp. The Puritans dismembered him, tore apart his limbs, hung his body parts in trees. The man who shot him got his hand as a trophy. For over twenty years, his head was displayed on a stake in Plymouth. Around the time that I played soccer at Metacomet, I also took walks with my mother in the fields near our house. Now those fields are no longer fields; they’re a subdivision where houses rise out of the land like crops, lined and alike, and the driveways arc at the same angles and the cars in the driveways are large and the bushes are tidy and round and all is neat and safe and lobotomizing. When my mother and I walked in the fields, no road or roof in sight, I thought about arriving on a land with no houses, with no streets or sockets or sinks, with no supermarkets to buy Fruit Roll-Ups or grapes. I imagined myself stepping onto the sand, seeing trees and high grass at sway in the wind. Now what? You’d have to be brave, I thought, facing that space. How do you just create a whole new world? I learned later that wasn’t the right question. A world had already been created in that place. How do you steal a world? How do you destroy it? How do you rewrite the story so it sounds so uncomplicated? Read More
November 22, 2017 Arts & Culture On “Oh! Susanna” By Anthony Madrid Regarding “Oh! Susanna,” there is little point in discussing the verses nobody knows. Let us confine ourselves to the verses everybody knows: Well, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee I’m gwine to Louisiana · my true love for to see It rained all night, the day I left the weather, it was dry the sun so hot, I froze to death Susanna, don’t you cry Oh! Susanna! · oh, don’t you cry for me I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee The piece is not, as I assumed all my life, an anonymous folk song. It was written by Stephen Foster in 1847, published in 1848. He also wrote “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”—and pretty much every other song ever used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Read More
November 21, 2017 Redux Redux: Jack Kerouac, Shelly Oria, Erica Ehrenberg 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 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac, Shelly Oria’s story “My Wife, in Converse,” and Erica Ehrenberg’s poem “Pause at the Edge of the Country.” You can also listen to all three in the second episode of our new podcast! Bring them on the road, in the air, or in the quiet car while you travel home for Thanksgiving this week. Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41 Issue no. 43 (Summer 1968) The original Buddha wouldn’t even walk on young grass so that he wouldn’t destroy it. He was born in Gorakhpur, the son of the consul of the invading Persian hordes. And he was called Sage of the Warriors, and he had seventeen thousand broads dancing for him all night, holding out flowers, saying, “You want to smell it, my lord?” But by the time he was thirty-one years old he got sick and tired … his father was protecting him from what was going on outside the town. And so he went out on a horse, against his father’s orders and he saw a woman dying—a man being burnt on a ghat. And he said, “What is all this death and decay?” The servant said,” That is the way things go on. Your father was hiding you from the way things go on.” “My Wife, in Converse,” by Shelly Oria Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) My wife and I took a cooking class recently. My wife and I take classes. It is a passion of my wife’s, taking classes. My wife is good at most things one could take classes in, which, when you think about it—and I’ve thought about it—means my wife excels in all things. And I believe that is in fact true. I believe my wife excels in all things. I am not blinded by love when I say this—we have been together eight years. They say after seven, whatever blindness you had is gone. “Pause at the Edge of the Country,” by Erica Ehrenberg Issue no. 216 (Spring 2016) He gets back in the car, resting a plastic tray of nachos on his jeans. I smell the salt, the corn, the nacho cheese, its under-smell of plastic, the way his hair smells when he hasn’t washed it in a few days, gasoline. Tune in for free—and while you’re at it, subscribe to The Paris Review for instant access to everything we’ve published since 1953. Order now and you’ll get a copy of our new anthology, Women at Work, for only $10 more.
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture What Is the Political Responsibility of the Artist? By Taylor Plimpton Armed women in one of the main squares in Tehran at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. Perhaps no modern writer has experienced as much political turmoil and upheaval as the great Polish storyteller Ryszard Kapuscinski. Take, for instance, his claim that during his time serving as a reporter and war correspondent, he witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. One might expect Kapuscinski to have a particularly informed response to the question that seems to be on so many people’s minds these days: What, if any, is the social or political responsibility of the artist? Or, to put it another way: Should writers be writing for a cause? Penned thirty-five years ago, Shah of Shahs is Kapuscinski’s retelling of the most notorious revolution that he ever experienced firsthand—the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The book is a brilliant, nuanced portrait of a country and its corrupt leader in the tumultuous days leading up to and following his removal from power. Yet, upon close examination of the text, it seems that the author’s allegiance isn’t to any political party or ideology or cause—he is as harsh a critic of the powers that toppled the Shah as he is of the Shah himself. Instead, his allegiance is simply to art, and to the truth. Read More
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture “Girl Poisoner Moron,” or Why Was Everyone So Bad at Murder? By Anne Diebel Women from Essipoff’s list: Mary Baker Eddy, Florence Elizabeth Maybrick, and Ma Barker. In 1938, Marie Armstrong Essipoff, a journalist, editor, and memoirist, was helping Theodore Dreiser research murders committed by women. She had been collecting newspaper clippings on “misspent lives,” and she sent a letter to Dreiser highlighting a few she pulled from her files in a “hasty survey” she’d done that morning after being woken at the “crack of dawn,” meaning ten thirty A.M. “Skeletons, gobs of flesh, knives, etc. etc. furnished on request,” she added. Essipoff concluded the letter by inviting Dreiser out to Great Neck, New York, where she lived with her husband, Dmitry—“who is, after ten years, still the most delightful man I know.” Six years earlier, Essipoff had published a memoir about her ten-year marriage to the writer Ben Hecht, brilliantly titled My First Husband, by His First Wife. Their union involved many literary parties, some shocking theater productions, and an experiment in nonmonogamy. (Essipoff granted Hecht two nights a week with his mistress, who didn’t “believe in marriage” yet soon became his second wife.) After their divorce, Essipoff became the first editor of the Chicagoan, a short-lived literary magazine modeled on The New Yorker, before moving to New York. Essipoff told Dreiser she was planning “off and on” to write these cases “into mysteries myself someday,” though she noted that this did not preclude his using them. If the fifteen murderesses Essipoff listed are any indication, average people used to be pretty bad at premeditated murder: overly reliant on poison and sloppy about hiding their tracks. And Essipoff delighted in their macabre ineptitude. Read More
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Wants to Forget By László Krasznahorkai René Magritte, The Empire of Light, II, 1950. We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not too illustrious children of a not too illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing within it, after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history, will have finally attained the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion. This age wants to forget it has gambled away everything on its own, without outside help, and that it cannot blame alien powers, or fate, or some remote baleful influence; we did this ourselves: we have made away with gods and with ideals. We want to forget, for we cannot even muster the dignity to accept our bitter defeat, for infernal smoke and infernal alcohol have gnawed away whatever character we had, in fact smoke and cheap spirits were all that remained of the erstwhile metaphysical traveler’s yearning for angelic realms—the noxious smoke left by longing, and the nauseating spirits left over from the maddening potion of fanatical obsession. Read More