August 4, 2017 The Lives of Others What Insanity Is This, Dr. Euclides? By Edward White After his best seller about the War of Canudos swept through Brazil, Euclides da Cunha went to Amazonia. It nearly killed him. Joricramos, Euclides da Cunha. There’s an argument that 1922 was the moment modernism took flight. It saw breakthrough works by a slew of writers including Joyce, Eliot, and Fitzgerald; Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus while Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago; Hitchcock directed his first movie as Disney made his first animations; Mussolini’s Fascists took hold of Italy, and Einstein got his hands on the Nobel Prize. Less known than those canonical events is the modernist happening that struck São Paulo, where a festival of exhibitions and lectures gave many Brazilians their first exposure to modern art, unveiling young, homegrown creative talents with a radical vision: to ditch the long-burning obsession with emulating European civilization, and instead glory at the beauty beneath their own feet. In the nineteenth century, this would have sounded absurd to educated Brazilians, Eurocentric to the core. But the 1922 generation was the first to have grown up with Os Sertões (“The Backlands”), a classic of Brazilian literature largely unknown to the outside world. Published in 1902, the book is a unique, genre-defying exploration of the country’s arid northeast and the calamity that befell it in 1897, when, in the name of the Brazilian national motto “order and progress,” the federal government flattened the town of Canudos and butchered as much of its population as it could get its hands on. It was written by Euclides da Cunha, a young civil engineer whose experience of the so-called War of Canudos turned him from a zealous government propagandist to the anguished voice of the Brazilian conscience. Read More
August 4, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Sadie: A Ghost Story By Sadie Stein It’s not as though I’ve never had the opportunity to see a ghost. I’ve spent plenty of my life in “haunted” spaces. Besides my grandparents’ house—where, after all, a ghost had been seen—there was the 1830s former funeral parlor where one of my best childhood friends lived. Another friend, who’s very sensitive to such matters, claims that she always had an uneasy feeling in my parents’ home; I never felt a thing. In the years since, I’ve stayed in haunted monasteries and onetime graveyards and, once, the site of a long-ago murder. In each, I slept without incident. I am writing this, in fact, from a big, old, drafty New England house full of creaks and corners. My husband is plagued in the nighttime by its inexplicable slamming doors and, once, through the window, saw the woods erupt into flame. I, of course, slept through it. I could be surrounded by a Haunted Mansion’s worth of swirling, leaping, leering spirits and presumably I wouldn’t even notice them. Read More
August 3, 2017 First Person Meeting Sam Shepard at a Friend’s House on Eighth Avenue By Brian Cullman © Universal City Studios, 1979. The violin was psychedelic green, green as a shamrock, green as Kermit the Frog, a take-no-prisoners green. I bought it for thirty dollars at a yard sale in Providence. “The violin’s free,” the owner told me, though he counted the money more than once: four fives and a ten. “I’m just charging you for the case and the bow.” His girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, had painted it with acrylic paint one night when she was high, and then she’d painted it again. It was green to stay. Even when it was in the case, he could see it glowing in the dark. He’d wrapped it in newspaper and kept it at the back of the closet along with ice-skates and the broken Crock-Pot. He was selling those, too. I had no need for a violin, green or otherwise, but it seemed like a good investment. When I brought it back to the dormitory, my roommate grabbed it, tuned it and was playing along with a Taj Mahal record within the hour. A week later, I still hadn’t figured out how to hold the bow. Read More
August 3, 2017 First Person Fantasy and Reality By Sheila Kohler Ironically, one of the questions a writer of fiction hears most often is, How much of the story is true? It is a slightly annoying question. One is prompted to ask whether the story does not stand on its own. Yet it is an understandable query. What is being asked is, How did you do it? Where does it come from? These are questions we all wish to ask but can rarely answer. Behind them lies all the mystery of art. Sometimes, though, the answer is straightforward. In the case of a story I wrote some years ago, “The Transitional Object,” fiction enabled me to reverse what had happened in reality, with impunity, to make my protagonist active—always more satisfying in fiction—when I had actually been passive. It was my passivity, my inability to defend myself, that galled particularly over the years. In order to do this, I made my protagonist younger than I was, a psychology student at the Institut Catholique, in Paris, who goes to her professor to discuss the paper she is writing. When the student rejects her professor’s sexual advances, he gives her a low grade so that she’ll lose her scholarship. Having no other means of support or protection, she goes hungry. All of this prepares for and makes possible a dramatic act of revenge. Read More
August 3, 2017 On Poetry Satellites Are Spinning: Notes on a Sun Ra Poem By Paul Youngquist Sun Ra, taken during the filming of Space Is the Place. Courtesy the collection of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis. Sun Ra, the visionary leader of the jazz ensemble he called his “Arkestra,” once submitted a manuscript of poems to a commercial publisher, receiving it back with a curt editorial comment: they seemed written in an alien language. He took it as a compliment. Like most readers of his poetry, I encountered it first in a form other than book. I wish I could say I bought those old El Saturn records with poems printed on their jackets—that would make me so cool—but I came to Sun Ra late, after he’d left the planet (in common parlance, died) in 1993. I never saw him perform live, I bought only digital versions of the Arkestra’s recordings, and I confess I never bothered reading their microtype liner notes. Sun Ra’s poetry remained unknown to me until I heard it late one night. I was watching that glorious low-budget science-fiction blaxploitation docudrama, Space Is the Place (1974): The pulsating orange spaceship carrying Sun Ra and the Arkestra to planet Earth has just landed. Wearing a Pharaoh’s headdress, Sun Ra speaks quietly about music as “another kind of language,” not alien but concerned with other worlds. Cut to June Tyson, his favored vocalist, head wrapped in gold netting, eyes shaded by bronze aviators, mouth smiling as she sings, in silver tones, “The Satellites Are Spinning,” by Sun Ra: The satellites are spinning A new day is dawning The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening Oh we sing this song to A brave tomorrow. Oh we sing this song to Abolish sorrow. The satellites are spinning A better day is breaking The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening. Read More
August 3, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Help! My Friend Is a Vaper, and Other Questions By Lorin Stein Dear Paris Review, I’m suspicious of memoirs. I don’t think people remember things as well as the genre suggests they do, and life doesn’t play out so neatly. I love Vivian Gornick’s writing partly because her memoirs work according to different rules, but she seems to be doing something pretty unique. Are there others like her? Sincerely, Memoirphobic Dear Phobic, Or should I say, Dear Telepathic—I was just about to recommend Vivian Gornick to another advice seeker. (See below!) Nobody writes like her, but if you want to read an autobiography where the remembering sounds believable, try Pack My Bag, by Henry Green. I wouldn’t take it as fact, I would never trust a memoir in matters of fact: as you say, most people don’t remember things very exactly. And then, of course, writers often have good reasons to lie … Read More