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
August 16, 2017 In Memoriam Repo Man: Glen Campbell in Charles Portis’s Norwood By Rebecca Bengal Glen Campbell was the perfect articulator of Portis’s defiantly at-odds small-town characters and their old-fashioned dreams. Glen Campbell in 1967. Like most sharecroppers’ kids, the country singer Glen Campbell, who died last week of complications of Alzheimer’s, instinctively looked for the quickest way out of the cotton field. He was born in 1936, in Billstown, Arkansas, an unincorporated community near the evocatively named town of Delight; he was, he often told people, the “seventh son of a seventh son.” Campbell got good at the guitar fast—he received his first Sears model at the age of four, a gift from his Uncle Boo, and by the age of seventeen he had left Pike County far behind. Notably, he made it in Los Angeles long before he went to Nashville—a trajectory that would point him toward becoming one of the first true country pop stars, like the rhinestone cowboy of his own mammoth hit song. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Campbell would become best known for performing other writers’ songs. Like Willie Nelson—a friend later in life with whom he recorded versions of “Hello Walls” and “Just to Satisfy You” on his variety TV show, and an aching rendition of “Funny (How Time Slips Away)”—he was deeply influenced by the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He had an ability to wrest the heart out of stories of the common man in the common place—the rhinestone cowboy with the “subway token and dollar tucked inside my shoe”; the plaintive yearnings of the overworked, under-romanced Wichita Lineman; the contemplative, brokenhearted hobo of “Gentle on My Mind.” Even when he took issue with the lives he sang about (after Campbell made a hit covering Cree musician Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” he told a reporter that people who advocated burning draft cards “should be hung”), Campbell was most at home in the world of other people’s songs, as he would be until the end of his life. His ability to channel other personas may well owe as much to skills honed early on as a session musician, but they also speak to the survival instincts of a man with eleven siblings who left behind his impoverished, cotton-picking childhood as soon as he could. His phrasings were as versatile as his appearance; you could picture Campbell, with his genial, down-to-earth good looks, slipping into virtually any situation. You might work the factory line with him, you could have a beer with him, you would let him sell you a used car—or, perhaps, drive a stolen vehicle across the country. Read More