September 3, 2017 In Memoriam John Ashbery, 1927–2017 By The Paris Review John Ashbery. Photo by Lynn Davis. We are very sorry to hear of the loss of our admired and beloved contributor John Ashbery. I don’t know what the poet that I am is, very much. I was rather an outsider as a child—I didn’t have many friends. We lived out in the country on a farm. I had a younger brother whom I didn’t get along with—we were always fighting the way kids do—and he died at the age of nine. I felt guilty because I had been so nasty to him, so that was a terrible shock. These are experiences which have been important to me. I don’t know quite how they may have fed into my poetry. My ambition was to be a painter, so I took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester from the age of about eleven until fifteen or sixteen. I fell deeply in love with a girl who was in the class but who wouldn’t have anything to do with me. So I went to this weekly class knowing that I would see this girl, and somehow this being involved with art may have something to do with my poetry. Also, my grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester, and I lived with them as a small child and went to kindergarten and first grade in the city. I always loved his house; there were lots of kids around, and I missed all this terribly when I went back to live with my parents. Then going back there each week for art class was a returning to things I had thought were lost, and gave me a curious combination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. —John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No. 33
September 1, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Degradation, Demolition, Disillusion By The Paris Review Brianna McCarthy, Garden of Lost Things. From the cover of Electric Arches. Eve Ewing is a sociologist of education, so it’s no wonder my favorite poem in her first collection, Electric Arches, observes the small, curious eddies of interaction in an elementary school. In “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then,” she writes in the style of Greek epic poetry about invisible, individually insignificant moments—about the science teacher, for instance, watching fourth-grader Javonte Stevens telling the gym coach “that Miss Kaizer will be sending over three kids / who did not bring in their field trip money / and cannot go to the aquarium / is that okay”—that accumulate, by poem’s end, into an enthralling, powerful narrative. Elsewhere in the book, which also contains visual art and prose, Ewing writes trenchantly and tenderly of the demolition of a hospital (“the dynamite never says ‘but my uncle died / here … and I still smell the ammonia / and see the misshapen pound cake’ ”) and of her childhood neighborhood in Chicago (“once you got to about Albany and Fullerton you could see / every place my brother had ever been, if you knew where to look”). Her language is conversational, her verse lulling the reader into territory that feels immediately familiar, even when it isn’t—into a world of “Kool cigarette green,” “lime popsicles,” and “promised light.” —Nicole Rudick This week, I’ve been reading the first-ever English translation of Guido Morselli’s The Communist, a political coming-of-age novel about Walter Ferranini, a Communist party member and deputy in the Italian parliament. If that’s not the kind of escapism you’re looking for these days, trust me when I say that Ferranini is William Stoner reincarnated as Communist politician in 1950s Italy. Ferranini hates parliamentary proceedings; he finds them boring. He can’t seem to reconcile his political career, a reward for his years spent as a labor organizer, with his beliefs: he is having—has had, for most of his life—an existential crisis. The novel goes on like this, grumpy and disillusioned, sometimes funny and often sad. Morselli shot himself in the head in 1973, apparently out of despair that not a single publisher had accepted any of his manuscripts. Shortly after his death, all seven of his novels were published. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
September 1, 2017 Arts & Culture What’s Better? By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. (The Idle Meditations of Shtyck-Junker Krokodilov) Both adults and children may go to pubs, but only children can go to school. Alcohol relaxes the metabolism, aids fat deposits, gladdens a man’s heart. School isn’t capable of all that. Lomonosov said: “Science nourishes youth, glee to elders grants.” But Vladimir the Great often said: “Drinking is the joy of Rus.” Which of the two to believe? Surely the older one. Tax revenues certainly don’t come from schools. Read More
September 1, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Annabelle: A Ghost Story By Sadie Stein The other day, I went to see a movie. It was two P.M.; I was alone. The theater nearest our apartment is extremely comfortable, with large, fluffy, fully reclining seats and swinging armrests for easy canoodling. Yet the movies on the screen are never romantic. Most are big-budget fare full of CGI and superheroes and emoji. There’s rarely something I’d pay almost twenty dollars to see. On this day, however, they were showing the latest film about the demonic doll. In fact, this latest is the prequel to the other Annabelle films; it tells the backstory of the doll’s possession. To my disappointment, it did nothing to address the question of why Annabelle resembles an especially grotesque Charlie McCarthy marionette in a Carol Burnett wig. Doll horror movies are rarely scary, which is strange given how uncanny many people find dolls themselves. Still, they have become a tired trope. As with clowns, the idea of the doll is at this point scarier than any on-screen reality. (Besides, if you do finds dolls inherently frightening, there’s not much narrative tension to be gained from their turning evil.) But I always go to see any movie in which a doll plays the part of a murderous villain. And although I am a great defender of doll life and have never found my own dolls the least bit sinister, I will admit that one of the scariest ghost stories I’ve ever heard revolved around a doll. Read More
August 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Two in One By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. Don’t trust those Judas Iscariots, those chameleons! In our day, faith is easier to lose than an old glove—and I’ve lost it! It was evening. I was taking the horsecar. It isn’t right that I, as a high-ranking official, take the horsecar, but on this occasion I wore a fur greatcoat and could conceal my face in its marten collar. It’s cheaper, you know … Despite the cold and late hour, the car was crammed full. Nobody recognized me. The marten collar allowed me to travel incognito. Riding, I dozed and studied the little ones … Read More
August 31, 2017 On History Finding Home After the Vietnam War By Zachary Watterson “The San Luis Valley resembled in magnitude nothing so much as the ocean.” “I hated being over there,” Ron Sitts said. He looked at his hands. Freckles and blond hair circled his knuckles. On his index finger a scarred-over, decades-old gash. Over six feet tall, he had a thin nose, large ears, deeply tanned skin, and a shock of silver-white hair. A man who was once a Kansas boy plowing his father’s fields; planting, cultivating, and harvesting barley, wheat, corn, and sorghum; mowing and baling alfalfa. He rocked gently, his slippers on the tiled floor. We were sitting in the house he had built in a small town in South-Central Colorado. “The massive destruction and human suffering caused a depression in me. I felt guilt that I was unharmed.” From the time I was eight years old until I left home at eighteen, I lived with Ron and my mother in New Jersey. At twelve, I was the best man at their wedding. They separated shortly after I left home but I have kept in close touch with Ron. His stories of flying a rescue helicopter over the Gulf of Tonkin in the late 1960s had kept me rapt at the dinner table when I lived with him, but this was the first time in years that he had spoken to me about the war. “I felt guilt,” he went on, “that my job was to rescue, not to kill. I was prepared to do whatever I was ordered to do. Even if it was against my principles. Later I began to feel glad it wasn’t my job to kill.” “I try to imagine,” I said, but I had other impressions of the war drumming in my brain—the Rolling Stones’ percussion in “Paint It Black” as fires burned in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, his film about Marine recruits who endure basic training and later face the Vietcong during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Sergeant Hartman tells his recruits the “free world will conquer Communism.” And here comes Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin.” Private Joker, played by a bespectacled Matthew Modine, wears a helmet bearing the words BORN TO KILL and a peace-symbol button on his uniform. He attempts to explain the contradictory emblems by saying he’s “trying to suggest something about the duality of man, the Jungian thing.” I try to forget Hollywood. Read More