October 3, 2017 At Work Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado By Lauren Kane Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s first collection of short stories, but Machado is no novice: her writing is prolific and varied, from essays on higher education and retail consumerism, fiction on clairvoyance and the afterlife, and criticism on Leonora Carrington and Game of Thrones. In Her Body, Machado flexes that versatility as her characters navigate the emotional landscapes of love, sex, and grief within the contexts of pandemic narratives and ghost stories. Throughout each of the book’s eight stories, Machado uses elements of the fantastic as a vehicle for better understanding the complications and challenges of reality. Machado and I spoke over the phone at the end of August, as she was preparing to start the semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the artist in residence, and just before her collection was named to the longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Our lively conversation took us from Victorian England to Law and Order and a lot in between. INTERVIEWER Let’s start at the beginning. What prompted you to start writing? MACHADO I have been writing basically my whole life. My family read to me a lot, and my grandfather’s Cuban, so there was a lot of storytelling in our household. I learned about stories through that oral tradition and through reading, and as soon as I was able to pick up a pen I was writing “books” and “stories” and sending them to publishers. I found Scholastic’s address in The Baby-Sitters Club and sent a letter saying, Here’s a chapter of my novel. Please let me know if you would like more of it. I wrote constantly, poetry and prose. For a while I wanted to be a doctor, but only because I was reading a lot of books about doctors. When I got older, I thought I wanted to be a journalist for a while. But I always returned to writing fiction. It was a stable thing in my life, and it was just luck that it was natural for me. But I feel like it was pretty late that I decided I wanted to be a writer, with writing as a part of my identity, as opposed to somebody who writes. Read More
October 2, 2017 On Poetry Lost and Pound By Daniel Swift A few weeks ago, I wrote here about a poem I found written on the back of an envelope among Ezra Pound’s papers in Italy. It is a small poem and it runs in full: Hast thou 2 loaves of bread Sell one + with the dole Buy straightaway some hyacinths To feed thy soul. It does not look much like a Pound poem. It is perhaps too tender, too straightforward. Yet, I suggested, it is filled with Pound’s perpetual concerns: with economics, in a minor key; with the possibility of the spiritual in the world of capitalist trade; and with the eternal problems of exchange. However, some sharp-eyed and well-versed readers soon wrote in to say that this sounded awfully like another poem, or other poems. (One subject line: “The Paris Review has been hoodwinked!”) This was, they reported, hardly a Pound poem at all, and in this they were right. Read More
October 2, 2017 First Person Love and Badness in America and the Arab World By Diya Abdo Diya Abdo and her grandmother, on the porch of their farm in al-Libban, ca. 2002. Firstborn children are good. Saturated, no doubt, with the anxiety of first-time parenthood, firstborns are rule followers, pleasers. When I tell my firstborn, five-year-old daughter, Aidana Sabha, that she has to drink the juice covertly because the bouncy house does not allow outside food or beverages, she crouches, doubled over under the table, hiding the silver pouch underneath her arched body. Unable to go against the place’s regulations, she asks to leave; she is thirsty but would rather give up playing to go home and drink than break the rules. In Jordan, to be a firstborn female child came with added pressure—to be m‘addaleh, sitt el-banāt, btiswi thuglik dhahab, worth your own weight in gold. Whenever my grandmother uses this phrase to describe some woman or other, I keep a tally of the qualities she admires. When she uses it to describe my mother, though always in the past tense, it means that my mother had listened, obeyed, self-abnegated—the butter would not melt in her mouth. When she uses it to describe my uncle’s wife, her daughter-in-law, it means that daughter-in-law is content with her lot, her dirty laundry unaired—her secrets in a well. When she uses it to describe her neighbor, it means that the neighbor is chaste, never flirting, never yielding to men’s plying compliments and denuding gazes—as pure as yogurt. But most importantly, to be worth your weight in gold means that your seira, your narrative, your story, is not on every tongue. A woman like this is given the highest compliment—she is, ironically, a man (zalameh) or the closest approximation, the sister of men (ukht zlām). My grandmother was definitely worth her weight in gold—zalameh. An illiterate Palestinian villager, she was married at nine and divorced by sixteen. After al-Nakseh, she crossed the River Jordan with two kids in tow, knit loofahs to make ends meet, made sure her children got an education, and rejected all suitors and offers of marriage. She prided herself on never once being a piece of gum, to be chewed up by gossiping mouths and spat out. Sumʿitha dhahab—her reputation was golden. Read More
October 2, 2017 Arts & Culture Art from Guantánamo By Erin Thompson Muhammad Ansi (released from Guantánamo in 2017), Untitled (Alan Kurdi), 2016. I’m looking at an image of a beach. Deserted, framed by distant headlands, with unsullied sands and clear waters. It is rendered in delicate strokes of watercolor. I’m thinking, as I have every time I have looked at the painting, about how much I would like to go there. But I can’t. No one can, not even the artist. This beach exists only in his mind. Although he has lived only yards away from the Caribbean Sea for fifteen years, he has rarely seen the water. He is a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp. Last year, a lawyer, a friend of a friend, asked if I would curate an exhibition of paintings made by her client, a Guantánamo detainee. When I said yes, word spread among the lawyers who volunteer to help detainees, and then among the detainees themselves. Soon, my office in Manhattan filled with the tang of acrylic from hundreds of paintings, and the floor was crowded with model ships, sails made from old T-shirts, and rigging unraveled from the lining of prayer caps. Read More
September 29, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fat Ladies, Flowers, and Faraway Lands By The Paris Review From The Paper-Flower Tree by Jacqueline Ayer. The Paper-Flower Tree is a tale from Thailand for children, but I bought it for my adult self last month. A young girl without much to her name encounters a peddler. The man doesn’t have too much either, but he does have a tree of mesmerizing paper flowers. The man plucks her a “seed” to plant so that she can grow her own paper-flower tree. The girl tends to it, but it doesn’t grow. When the paper-flower man reappears with a group of actors, she confronts him. He reminds her that he never promised it would grow. But as this is a children’s book, and happy endings are required, the girl wakes up the next morning to find a fully flowering tree. To an adult, or the kind of cynical child who knew early on there was no Santa, the story is about the ways in which magic is a pact between adults, children, and a suspension of disbelief. The book is also a testament to the graceful talents of the author, Jacqueline Ayer. The child of Jamaican immigrants to the United States, Ayer produced illustrations for Bonwit Teller and Vogue before moving to Paris and then Thailand with her husband. Ayer’s story, like that of her tale, is both satisfying and complicated. Her books, after a brief flowering, fell out of print. Enchanted Lion, a uniquely wonderful children’s-book publisher, has brought them back. And so after some patient tending, Ayer’s work is again getting the attention it deserves, including a show at the House of Illustration in London. Maybe you think you’re too old to enjoy a children’s book. Suspend your disbelief. —Julia Berick Read More
September 29, 2017 On Travel A Packing List for Writers By Ann Beattie Today, I wrote a friend for advice about packing. I’ll be going from Virginia to Nashville to New York City, after which I’ll be flying to Rome for three weeks. My friend mentioned that his wife takes up more than her share of their suitcase, because she believes men don’t need as many clothes. I wouldn’t consider sharing a suitcase with my husband. It’s disappointing enough to see your Jockey sports bra in another country—it looks so sad in hotel rooms abroad (bad pun!). How much sadder, then, to find it entangled amid chargers, extension cords, computer cords, unwound dental floss (how would I know how that happened? Big hello, though, to my dental hygienist), earphones, noise-canceling headphones, dangling cords, and bungee cords (you never can tell). I’d be hugely foiled trying to extract my underwear. Who wants to deal with a bunch of cords doing the kudzu around a bra when Caravaggio beckons? Though it seems to be common knowledge, I just discovered that it’s best to roll everything. Ankle boots are all-purpose, and you can roll delicate stuff into them with your socks. It’s the packing version of making a jelly roll (okay, you wouldn’t plunge a jelly roll into your boot). When you remove the boots, empty them right away. Santa spoiler alert: the next morning you might find (rolled up) twenty dollars in the toe! Read More