April 21, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Meta, Menudo, Mandates By The Paris Review Camille Claudel. Jim Harrison, who died last year at seventy-eight, was a gourmand with a trencherman’s appetite—food comes up in his Writers at Work interview several times. Though he evokes an atmosphere of overindulgence, the man was sensible and had rules for his dinner guests, the first being very practical considering: “No one is allowed to use cocaine before the meal when I cook … Cocaine creates a sort of bubblegum nimbus that slaughters the palate and sensuous capacities, in addition to shrinking the wee-wee and tearing holes in the social fabric.” Jane and Michael Stern once described Harrison’s food writing as a “combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah.” The years didn’t change him, evidenced by the new, posthumous A Really Big Lunch, a collection of essays from the 2000s in which Harrison goes on about “left-leaning, spit-dribbling, eco-freak readers” who wouldn’t want to eat freshly killed meats and suggests that Ronald Reagan “eat my menudo in order to regain the foreign affairs advantage.” He compares a red wine from Chateau Grillet to the “seductive quality of the minute hairs on the back of a woman’s thigh in high summer” and reminds us that of all the animals, man alone cooks. The collection is chockablock with these zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue. —Jeffery Gleaves Craig Morgan Teicher is fast becoming one of my favorite contemporary poets. In his new collection, The Trembling Answers, I love that he recognizes small moments of wonder in the quotidian without trying to have those moments transcend the workaday world. So, for instance, he thinks on “high school nights // spent grieving high school nights—they stick / in the heart like sharp bones, / clog the way like / artery-fat.” There is also an overriding sense in his poems that the life he once imagined for himself is not exactly the one he now leads. Who doesn’t gaze into a mirror with their younger self and see dissatisfaction looking back while, in turn, trying to elicit an understanding that the future they behold, though spare and sometimes troubled, is on balance pretty terrific. Teicher’s poems transpire in a “plain mood,” during “eventless afternoons,” and end “on a low / note, or so tonight would have it,” nights when “I put the kids to bed. I did the dishes.” These humdrum moments contain both contentment and regret—the latter, “the hooks that won’t come out.” This is a book about facing, daily, “this one life that is all I am.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 21, 2017 On the Shelf Language Is a Parasite, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Peter Lund, a Danish naturalist, copying rock paintings at Lagoa Santa, Brazil. Every writer needs a hobby. When he isn’t writing bleak, bloody fiction or exploring the primal violence at the heart of the American experience, Cormac McCarthy likes to unwind with a little theoretical scientific research. Who doesn’t? His work at the Santa Fe Institute has led him to write a new treatise on the nature of the unconscious and the emergence of human language: “The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they weren’t there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion … The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus has arrived by way of Darwinian selection and language has not. The virus comes nicely machined. Offer it up. Turn it slightly. Push it in. Click. Nice fit.” Now that O’Reilly’s out at Fox, perhaps he can really settle into his career as a thriller writer—fiction, with its unfettered escapism, could offer him just the outlet he needs, at a remove from the troubles of the real world. After all, his 1998 novel, Those Who Trespass, was invented from whole cloth—except, of course, for all those parts about sexual harassment and vindictive revenge. Actually, the novel is uncomfortably prescient, as Jia Tolentino writes: “The main character is a violently bitter journalist named Shannon Michaels, who, after being pushed out of two high-profile positions, takes revenge on four of his former colleagues by murdering them one by one … The second sentence of Those Who Trespass describes Ron Costello, a correspondent for Global News Network, on assignment in Martha’s Vineyard and struggling with a ‘basic human need, the need for some kind of physical release.’ Costello spots a pretty camerawoman at a party, happily notes that she’s had too much vodka, and approaches her with ‘intense sexual hunger … tonight he wanted this freelance GNN camerawoman named Suzanne. He wanted her in a big way.’ When Suzanne rejects Costello, he’s furious. (‘Goddamn bitch. She’ll be sorry,’ he thinks.) Then the vengeful Michaels kills Costello by shoving a silver spoon through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.” Read More
April 20, 2017 From the Archive A Dip in Foley’s Pond By Caitlin Love Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. You can also sign up for a free ten-day trial period. In Peter Orner’s three Paris Review stories—“Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” “The Vac-Haul,” and “Foley’s Pond”—three outrageously morbid things happen: a boy’s younger sister drowns in a pond of toxic sludge; a man is murdered with a bike spoke (“His stomach was so ripped apart the police had to collect him up in a bucket”); and a woman walks into a classroom and starts shooting and taking hostages. They’re bite-size stories, under fifteen-hundred words, and the violence rushes in like a flash flood, though it doesn’t cleanse anything. Rather, it leaves you with an aftertaste like when you eat yogurt off an unpolished silver spoon. I devoured them. I think what propelled me through these three upsetting stories is that the violence doesn’t actually happen to the people in the stories’ centers. “Foley’s Pond,” for instance, is narrated by a classmate of Nate Zamost, the boy who’s two-year-old sister is fished out of the pond; in “Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” the narrator hears about the man who was killed by a bike spoke from a friend at a boarding school in South Africa. The remove is greatest in “The Vac-Haul”: the narrator only hears about the shooter on the radio, while he bides time with his job for the sewer company. Read More
April 20, 2017 At Work Real Space: An Interview with Patrick Cottrell By Colin Winnette I think writers attend M.F.A. programs to meet people like Patrick Cottrell—or at least, I did. When we met in our first semester, he was a quietly focused and deeply intelligent student who sat back from the pack as we clamored for attention and support. Cottrell and I began sending each other work, and the constructions of the classroom soon felt secondary. Reading the forceful clarity of his sentences, how they openly wrestle with their influences while still feeling original—somehow both arch and sincere—I knew I was in on a secret that wouldn’t stay hidden for long. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace announces Cottrell’s arrival. A manic detective story about a young woman seeking to understand the suicide of her adoptive brother, Cottrell’s debut novel is prickly, hilarious, and extremely sad. I interviewed Cottrell over the phone, and what was meant to be an hour-long conversation gave way easily to four (and more than 120 pages of transcription). Cottrell talks like he writes—with great authority and considerable anxiety—and I left our conversation as I left his book: feeling electrified and knowing I would have stuck with it for as long as it would have me. Read More
April 20, 2017 On the Shelf Smells like Teen Spirit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That way lies madness—and great innovations in odor-concealing technology. There are great things happening along the I-95 corridor. The rest stops, for one—if you’ve stopped at the Walt Whitman Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, you know what paradise is. But what if I told you that there’s something in the vicinity even better than the rest stops? And what if, to sweeten the deal, I added that it concerns antiperspirant technology? Adam Davidson has the facts: “You smell better now—and will smell even better in the future—because of the advances that are occurring along Interstate 95 between Philadelphia and Newark. You could call that stretch of road ‘the stink highway.’ This revolution began in 1990, when George Preti, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, isolated the specific molecule (3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid) that produces the distinct odor of underarm sweat. Before Preti’s discovery, you had to, in his words, ‘carpet bomb’ smells by applying a perfume strong enough to overwhelm and erase all odors. Once Preti cracked the code, scientists could create scents that adhere only to the nasal sensors that are most sensitive to 3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid. Deodorant designers are now able to create precisely the scent they want, which could be no discernible scent at all.” A literary collector is parting with some of his most impressive acquisitions—pony up and you could take home, say, a letter from Proust bemoaning the sex he’s been forced to overhear. Danuta Kean writes, “The most amusing letter in the collection … was from Proust to the son of his landlord … Proust complains about being able to hear his neighbors’ loud sex. The noise was not the problem, the letter reveals: ‘Beyond the partition, the neighbors make love every two days with a frenzy of which I am jealous.’ ” Read More
April 19, 2017 Look Booze in the USSR By Dan Piepenbring P. Letunov, text reads: “Either, or,” with the bottle labeled “vodka,” 1983. In the American imagination, the Russians are a vodka-loving people, every last one of them. They gargle with it. They water their plants with it. Their cars run on it. Is any of this true? Who cares? It feeds a treasured stereotype—the plump, stoical Russian, in some kind of furry ushanka, swilling that sweet, sweet fermented potato distillate until the first glimmer of dawn sweeps across the desolate, frozen Soviet horizon. But get this: not all Russians drink. It’s true! Even Tolstoy himself, one of the few Russians that Americans pretend to know and care about, eschewed the bottle. After his wild, drunken youth, he founded a temperance society, the Union Against Drunkenness, and he hoped to affix a label to all vodka bottles marking them as poison—with a skull and crossbones, the whole works. In an 1890 essay called “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” he comes off as a total killjoy: Read More