August 18, 2017 This Week’s Reading What (Else) Our Writers Are Reading This Summer By The Paris Review Earlier this summer, in place of our usual staff picks, we asked five contributors from our Summer issue to write about what they’d been reading. This week, we’ve asked five more. You can read June’s writer picks here. Mihail Sebastian, circa 1930–45. I just finished Mihail Sebastian’s 1934 novel/notebook For Two Thousand Years, which Other Press is about to publish for the first time in the U.S. It is—among many other things—an elegant and candid and horrifyingly understated account of watching violent unreason rise around you. He almost can’t believe what’s happening. Alli Warren’s I Love It Though, from the excellent Nightboat Books, is helping me to love it, the whole fucked up thing, despite the long daily litany of reasons to despair: “I wave a flag for brute feeling,” she writes, and I’m rallying to it. “Or the courage or not / of me and my friends / orbital in lilt, directive in drink / while container ships brim / and caps and bergs / slope across the slog / I want to be able to continue / to love to stay alive.” With my daughter’s I’m reading ¿Qué puedes hacer con una paleta? by Carmen Tafolla, illustrated by Magaly Morales. I’m reading it some thirty times a night. —Ben Lerner (“The Camperdown Elm”) I recently read two excellent, very different books about identity, home, and belonging (the theme of my recent Paris Review Daily piece). The first was Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which uses personal interviews to analyze why people in the Southern U.S. are often hostile to government protections for their own threatened and beloved environment—and more broadly, why these people voted for Trump. The book helped me see how these choices might make at least an emotional kind of sense. The second is also set in the American South, and plays a terrifying thought experiment with Hochschild’s story of the deep antagonism and mutual misunderstanding between the North and the South of the United States. American War by Omar El Akkad evokes a dystopian future in which the disagreement about the proper use of fossil fuels leads to another American civil war, and we see how one individual—a girl from Louisiana who grows up in a refugee camp for displaced persons and is later subjected to years of torture—forms a desperate, enraged, dangerous sense of identity through her attachment to a home that has been utterly destroyed. —Emily Wilson (a translation of Homer’s Odyssey) Read More
August 18, 2017 Contests Emoji Poetry Contest By Nadja Spiegelman and Rosa Rankin-Gee T. S. Eliot once said, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” But he forgot to add: “And millennial poets translate poems into emojis.” Can you guess the following famous verses? The first ten people to name all three poems correctly will win a copy of our Summer issue (no. 221)—you can send your answers to [email protected]. If you can’t guess, why not transpose them back to verse? It is, after all, National Bad Poetry Day. 1. 2. 3. Read More
August 18, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Priscilla: A Ghost Story By Sadie Stein The most distressing of my mother’s ghost sightings took place while she was in college. Eager to get the facts right, on a recent visit I asked her—we were finishing dinner—about the exact circumstances. Had it been her freshman year? I asked. No; her freshman year, she’d worked as a live-in au pair for an acquaintance of her father’s, a professor. My grandfather had always made it clear that if my mother chose to attend a four-year university rather than the local community college, she’d be on her own financially. He considered it an act of largesse to have helped secure her a position that furnished not only room but board. In lieu of bus fare, my mother was given a switchblade, to wield if necessary when hitchhiking down the Pacific Coast Highway. The house where my mother went to work was not a happy one. The patriarch was a strict disciplinarian who insisted she grade the children according to a punitive demerit system. His wife (a former student) was nice but afraid of him. The children did not treat my mother with much respect; she was only seventeen. Once the parents came home to find her tied to a chair. In her sophomore year, she went to live with another family, almost as unhappy. The husband was a philanderer and the mother—also a former student—was unstable. Their child had developmental problems. My mother does credit that period with teaching her how to make bread properly; providing the family with twice-weekly loaves was one of her tasks. She says this is when she started to develop bad migraines, and also when her hair started to go gray. Read More
August 17, 2017 Arts & Culture The Model-Village Preservation Society By Matthew Sherrill Bourton-on-the-Water advertises its charming English quaintness in a perfect, one-to-nine town replica, complete with signage and living greenery. Photos via wolfcreekrcpark.wordpress.com. In the insistently charming Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water, there is one World War I memorial, one bird sanctuary, but four Kingsbridge Inns. That’s quite a few Kingsbridges, even in England, where pubs’ names often sound like they were dreamed up by an uninspired Mad Libs player with limited combinations of King’s-, Queen’s-, Lion’s-, and -Arms, -Head, et cetera. With so many Kingsbridges, one might suspect fierce loyalties among the townspeople, or age-old rivalries between the proprietors, but the odds are diminished by the fact that only one Kingsbridge is large enough to stand in. The other three don’t even serve drinks. The smallest is about the size of a Monopoly house. The lone, ordinarily proportioned Kingsbridge Inn overlooks the River Windrush, a foot-deep dribble wending through the town, which looks as if it could be the main attraction in an Anglophilic water park, with a drove of bored kids on inner tubes soon to round the bend after the next flock of mallards. The inn is owned and operated by Marston’s, a brewing and pub-operating behemoth that commandeers more than seventeen hundred pubs in the UK. The local residents, at least according to a tipsy and garrulous patron I meet named Gavin, prefer the Kingsbridge to Bourton’s other pubs, which lends it a strange sense of authenticity despite its corporate ownership—rendered authentic precisely because Bourton’s tourists are attracted to its more outwardly authentic competitors. From the adult-size Kingsbridge, where Gavin bids me a boozy farewell, the Windrush (which lends Bourton its bathetic nickname, the “Venice of the Cotswolds”) trickles alongside more restaurants, pubs, knickknack shops, and tearooms, before flowing past the perplexingly named Old New Inn. It’s here that, if you’re willing to fork over a reasonable £3.60, you will find the other three Kingsbridge Inns: in Bourton-on-the-Water’s model village. Read More
August 17, 2017 Arts & Culture Diary of a Displaced Person By Jonas Mekas Jonas Mekas, Kassel, April 1946. In 1944, at the age of twenty-two, Jonas Mekas left his small village in Lithuania, then occupied by the Nazis, in the company of his brother Adolfas. Mekas had begun his literary career as the editor of a provincial weekly paper and had published his first poems. He’d also had a hand in publishing an anti-German bulletin and had written a poem against Stalin; he was twice marked. Jonas and Adolfas set out for Vienna, aiming for Switzerland from there, but were instead pulled off a train near Hamburg and sent to a Nazi forced-labor camp. There, Mekas started keeping a diary. Eventually, of course, he reached New York, where he and Adolfas founded the influential magazine Film Culture and, later, the Film-makers’ Cinematheque, which grew into the indispensable avant-garde repository Anthology Film Archives. But in the years of the diary, 1944 to 1955, as Mekas navigates postwar Europe and the immigrant landscape of midcentury New York, uncertainty was the only constant. “As I reread these diaries,” he wrote in 1985, “I do not know anymore, is this truth or fiction … I am reading this not as my own life but someone else’s, as if these miseries were never my own. How could I have survived it? This must be somebody else I am reading about.” Originally published by Black Thistle Press in 1991, the diary, titled I Had Nowhere to Go, will be reissued this month by Spector Books. The three entries below, from January 1948, find Jonas and Adolfas in a Weisbaden displaced-person camp; Mekas is homesick and depressed but is, as he is throughout the diary, tenacious about living one day to the next. —Nicole Rudick Read More
August 17, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Cassandras at Weddings, and Other Questions By Lorin Stein Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? Email us. Dear Paris Review, I’m the only child of a single mom, who’s obviously been my best friend from the start. But here’s the thing: after twenty-six years, she recently remarried—okay, it’s been two years since—but I’m still “adjusting.” I read Cassandra at the Wedding around the time my mom got hitched, and it was exactly what I needed. Could you recommend a few more of those sorts of novels … to see me through? Ones with kids wrestling with their parents’ love lives or ones about mothers and daughters (nothing too cheesy, please), or—well, you get the gist. Love, A Mama’s Girl Dear Girl, Off the top of my head, first I think of Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here (1986), about a girl growing up as the confidante and caretaker of her reckless, volatile, romantic (and more than slightly crazy) single mother. Simpson published a chapter with the Review. You can read it here. Second, I think of Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid—about a girl’s painful individuation from the mother she adores. Third, I think of Swann’s Way: it’s not mother-daughter, but it is a novel—about love and sex and art and everything else—that begins with the pain of having to share one’s mother. And my colleague Julia Berick—who came to the Review by way of our neighborhood bookstore, 192 Books—recommends How to Be Both, by Ali Smith, in which the grown heroine has to face up to her mother’s extramarital crush. She adds one more: “Agostino, by Alberto Moravia, is a tiny, perfect sketch of the birth and death of a boy’s comprehension of his mother’s sexuality. As soon as he realizes, its existence it is lost to him. But, in seeing his mother’s sexual adulthood, he begins to approach his own. (And, of course, it’s Italian.)” Read More