January 20, 2022 The Review’s Review Back to the Essence By The Paris Review Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty years. The fact that you could make something that good and decide not to put it out says everything about Mobb Deep’s seat in the pantheon. The whole thing is a kniving, wintry blast of phonetic artistry, but the last lines are Shakespearean. The rapper is Prodigy, a twenty-year-old Albert Johnson the Fifth (Albert the Third was Albert J. “Budd”Johnson, a major early bebop saxophonist who came out of Dallas and got his break recording with Louis Armstrong in the early thirties). Prodigy will die in his early forties from problems related to sickle-cell anemia, but at the moment he’s talking about his home ground in the vast housing projects of Queens. The song is a warning to would-be intruders or, in Big Noyd’s words, “motherfucking violators.” In six seconds Prodigy draws an eerie picture of cops surveilling the block: “As jakes look over the hill, their eyes see nothing but nighttime,” while in the buildings, “due murders” happen “at an unseen right time.” Whoever is being spoken to fails to listen and gets “two to his dome so his last thought is hot.” At that point the story needs to make a pivot from “Be careful or you’ll get killed” to “You weren’t careful and now I’ve been forced to shoot you.” Prodigy: You came as a whole But you’re leaving In incomplete pieces And didn’t expect to meet Jesus In your adolescence Sending you back to the essence So you can feel at home And safe in God’s presence Whole, home. He murders you, and he blesses you. Even in the act of taking your young life, he retains the power to confer his blessing on you, and gives it. That’s how far above petty bullshit he’s hovering. Chills. —John Jeremiah Sullivan Read More
October 20, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Foxes, Unicorns, and Ghostworms By The Paris Review Yrsa Daley-Ward’s new collection, bone, opens with a small explosion, a two-line poem called “Intro”: “I am the tall dark stranger / those warnings prepared you for.” The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning here—of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined, as when she writes of an affair, “Remember on the right night and / under the right light / any idea can seem like a good one.” Daley-Ward, who was raised by her religious grandparents in a small town in Northern England, self-published bone in 2014; it sold more than twenty thousand copies, a staggering figure for a self-published book, let alone of poetry. Penguin reissued an expanded edition, with forty additional pages, last month. The excellent long autobiographical “It Is What It Is” describes her brother’s heated reaction to their father’s funeral, and the breathlessness as she narrates their swift escape along the highway, thinking of their separation as children, propels the poem to its painful close. “Today is the first day of the rest of it,” she writes in the last poem, resigned but also dogged, “Of course there will be other first / days / but none exactly like this.” —Nicole Rudick Assigned reading can be either tedious or life changing. Pastoralia, the second story collection from the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders, falls into the latter category for me. A little more than four years ago, I was a junior in college, a shy journalism student who didn’t especially identify with any of the newshounds surrounding me. I enrolled in a fiction workshop, and when that went well, I enrolled in another. The critiques, the meat of the class, were valuable, but what I long for now are those undergrad creative-writing syllabi, packed as they were with revelations: the full-moon beauty and madness of Kelly Link; the plinky, playful fables of Italo Calvino; the lyrical precision and tightly knotted emotions of Alice Munro. Those first encounters with the writers on those lists shaped the way I think about fiction. The author who struck me most, though, was Saunders, in whose work I found everything I’d ever wanted from writing but never known how to express. His stories full of arresting images and incredible heart, tales that were bitingly funny and dark without descending into cynicism. I fell under the spell of short fiction and began writing my own. And now I’m here—probably as the result of a number of factors, but I can’t discount the impact of stumbling across Saunders at the right time. I hope he wins every prize there is. —Brian Ransom Read More
August 4, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Pinkies, Pain, Plays By The Paris Review From And She Would Stand Like This. Photo by Ahron R. Foster. Lately, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has been researching the early formation of the blues, in the years 1870 to 1910. His studies led him to an old newspaper from his own town in North Carolina, but nearly every edition of the paper had vanished. Now he and his colleague Joel Finsel have organized a group of middle schoolers to find and transcribe surviving copies. In John’s words: “The Wilmington Daily Record, a seminal African American newspaper (the offices of which were torched during a violent white-supremacist uprising here in 1898), has always been known to history and considered important, either inspiring or infamous depending who was talking. But for all practical archival purposes, it didn’t exist. You couldn’t read it, even if you had access to the fanciest academic databases and things. That was a very specific historical problem that we set out to solve. And we did find some copies. The most exciting moment was when Jan Davidson, the historian at our local historical museum, realized she had three copies of the paper in the basement of the museum!” John’s discoveries haven’t been limited to Wilmington. He recently struck gold in Indiana, too: “I knew that the songwriter Paul Dresser had once been in love with a woman named Sal, an Indiana madam, and that she’d inspired his famous song ‘My Gal Sal,’ which I wanted to know more about for a piece about Dresser that ran in the Sewanee Review. Anyway, as I’m reading around in the Evansville Courier and Press for the 1870s and eighties, I start seeing references to ‘bagnios,’ one of the period euphemisms for brothels, and then to a person called Sallie Davis, who supposedly kept the nicest one in town, and finally to ‘Sal’s place,’ as shorthand for the same establishment. On further inquiry, the woman’s real name turned out to be Annie, just like Paul Dresser’s brother had always said it was, the brother being Theodore Dreiser.” —Lorin Stein Friday night, I was in the presence of realness, fierceness, and royalty. I sat front row for And She Would Stand Like This, a theatrical retelling of Euripides’s The Trojan Women by Harrison David Rivers. Making use of drag and ball culture, the play, directed by David Mendizábal, reimagines the Trojan women as black and Latinx queer men and transgender women. It is set in a hospital waiting room, where an unnamed virus ambiguously fills the role of the warring Greeks, pitiless and destructive. By leaving the virus unnamed, Rivers renders timeless the early days of AIDS, reminding those who need reminding that there are still waiting rooms where doctors face queer and transgender populations with uncertainty, especially when these patients are people of color. The play beautifully complicates the essential trauma of kinship, love, and belonging with several times the body glitter and melanin of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim. Rivers and the talented cast use chorus, repetition, and performance to their highest level of impact. The play turns masterfully on its platform stilettos, delivering triumphant choreography by the supreme Kia LaBeija and somber tragedy worthy of, well, the ancient Greeks. Performances are through Sunday, but RuPaul has already tweeted an endorsement, so act fast. —Julia Berick Read More
February 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bey, Bureaucrats, Bloody Hands By The Paris Review From There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. In the early 1920s, a series of unsolved murders terrorized the residents of Osage County, Oklahoma. Most of the victims were members of the Osage Nation—a tribe that had grown rich when oil was discovered on their reservation—but as the killings continued, even their privately funded investigations failed to crack the case, until it drew the attention of an ambitious young bureaucrat in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover. Through heroic and ingenious detective work, Hoover’s agents at what was then called the Bureau of Investigation exposed a cabal of white Oklahomans conspiring to kill Indians for their oil. The case made Hoover’s name, and the Bureau’s, but as David Grann shows in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI—out this April—the true scale of the conspiracy has never been revealed. It is an incredible story, stirring and impossible to put down, by a writer whose true-life mysteries always go deeper than the reader expects. —Lorin Stein In a New York Times opinion piece last November, just after the presidential election, the poet Morgan Parker wrote about being “a thing to be hated”—that is, being a black woman. “Society believes that black women are not beautiful,” she writes, “and so maybe I believe that, too.” Parker’s tremendous new collection, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé, echoes that sentiment but also takes it to task. Her feelings of invisibility alight in the first poem, “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood,” which doesn’t somuch open the book as explode from it. “At school they learned that Black people happened,” she says of a group of kids. It’s a small, powerful line whose suggestion—in part that black identity is history and thus forfeit in the present—permeates these poems. Parker, though, doesn’t concede the point (“A secret is during commercials / I am living other lives”), and she derives strength and inspiration from other black women, including Mickalene Thomas, whose photocollage appears on the book’s cover. In a poem written in response to Thomas’s work, Parker captures the embodied fullness of Thomas’s images of self-possessed black women: “Jeweled lips, we’re rich / We’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, / history and clothes and a mother.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
September 2, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Forehead Blotches, Lasagna Hogs, and Crust Punks By The Paris Review From William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest. In the new issue of Aperture, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, pays a visit to William Eggleston in Memphis. As you might expect, it is a memorable visit. Eggleston plays piano for John and his wife, Mariana. They talk about Bach and Big Star and Mississippi Fred McDowell; and about Eggleston’s fifty-year marriage. They look at his photos, too. “He asked me to pull down the new boxed set of his Democratic Forest (2015). Ten volumes. I stopped at certain pictures. He leaned forward and, with his finger, traced lines of composition. Boxes and Xs. Forcing me to pay attention to the original paying of attention. ‘Either everything works, or nothing works,’ he said about one picture, a shot of an aquamarine bus pulling into a silvery station. ‘In this picture, everything works.’ ” —Lorin Stein After reading Amie Barrodale’s debut collection You Are Having a Good Time, I was reminded of something Geoff Dyer wrote in his introduction to Prabuddha Dasgupta’s photography portfolio in our two hundredth issue: “Longing can exist entirely for its own sake, with no object in mind, as a kind of intensified nostalgia or eroticized elegy.” It’s this aimless form of desire that drives Barrodale’s stories and gets her characters into trouble, as in “William Wei” (for which Barrodale won our 2011 Plimpton Prize), about a morbidly depressed New Yorker’s attempt to crystallize a relationship with a woman he’s spoken to only on the telephone, mostly when she’s stoned. In “Catholic,” a young woman has a one-night stand with a married man, obsesses over him, and compulsively e-mails him without response: “I told him a tree of plum blossoms fell on me and I saw some young men wearing outfits … I always wish there was a point to all those e-mails. Maybe there was. I don’t know. I do know. There was.” Like so many of the troubled people in these fictions, she struggles to articulate the profundity in her bad decisions. Still, she desperately convinces herself that the beauty is there, somewhere. In You Are Having a Good Time, we know meaning exists, but we’re all too fucked up to understand its various expressions. It’s one of the quintessential sentiments of this collection: the stories are as eloquent as a plum blossom tree collapsing on a lonely woman—if only we could figure out just what that eloquence means. —Daniel Johnson Read More
April 15, 2016 On the Shelf The Glories of Word Processing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From an ad for the Xerox 860. Our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, on David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing: “David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis because life gave it to him … He wrote about it in fiction, essays, journalism, and reviews; it may be his most consistent theme at the surface level. Wallace himself drew attention, consciously or not, to both his love for the game and its relevance to how he saw the world … For me, the cumulative effect of Wallace’s tennis-themed nonfiction is a bit like being presented with a mirror, one of those segmented mirrors they build and position in space, only this one is pointed at a writer’s mind. The game he writes about is one that, like language, emphasizes the closed system, makes a fetish of it (‘Out!’). He seems both to exult and to be trapped in its rules, its cruelties. He loves the game but yearns to transcend it.” Everyone likes to shit on Microsoft Word now, but Dylan Hicks, reviewing Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, reminds us that the genesis of word processors was an exciting time to be a writer—and that word processing offered a glimpse of perfection: “Culling from specialized publications, mainstream journalism, and author interviews, Kirschenbaum recaptures the excitement and optimism writers often felt in the face of this magical new technology. To many, word processing seemed to promise a new possibility for aesthetic perfection. ‘Perfect’ was the leading marketing keyword, found in ad copy and in product names such as WordPerfect, Letter Perfect, and Perfect Writer, and more than a few novelists greeted the mantra as something more than hype. If, in one traditional view, literary perfection was either illusory or the province of poems and other short works, now, it seemed, even a long novel could be refined to an apotheosis of unalterable integrity. The modularity of word-processed text made major structural reorganization a matter of a few clicks (well, you’d probably need to switch back and forth between several floppy disks). You could tinker endlessly with sentences: transposing phrases, deleting a comma, replacing an adjective, restoring the comma. You could search out and decimate pet words and phrases. Hannah Sullivan, a scholar quoted by Kirschenbaum, wrote in 2013 that, with word processing, “the cost of revision” had ‘fallen almost to zero.’ Kirschenbaum quotes a 1988 interview with Anne Rice in which she held that, with word processing, ‘there’s really no excuse for not writing the perfect book.’ ” The main problem with using enormous mirrors to communicate with extraterrestrials is that it’s too expensive. Yes, it sounds like a surefire way to make contact—you just rig up a heliotrope and beam a lot of light to the moon, where all aliens live—but when Victorian-era inventors tried to make good on this idea, they realized that mirrors aren’t cheap. Sarah Laskow explains: “In 1874, Charles Cros, a French inventor with a flair for poetry (or, perhaps, a poet with a flair for invention), floated the idea of focusing electric light on Mars or Venus using parabolic mirrors. The next year, in 1875, Edvard Engelbert Neovius came up with a scheme involving 22,500 electric lamps. Then, an astronomer writing under the name A. Mercier proposed putting a series of reflectors on the Eiffel Tower, which would capture light at sunset and redirect it towards Mars … In 1909, William Pickering, the American astronomer who … proposed the existence of a Planet O, gave some idea why. He calculated that a system of mirrors that could reach across the distance from Earth to Mars would cost about $10 million to construct.” Eileen Myles on living in Marfa: “I went to Marfa on a Lannan residency in March of 2015 & fell in love with the place. I had been hearing about Marfa forever and grumpily thinking why can’t I get invited there though most of my friends who had been there are visual artists but I wanted in. I think I even told the Lannan people about my deep frustration as I was accepting the invitation. Everyone loves Marfa though some people love to laugh at it because it’s the most delightful combination of rough and twee. Things are falling down but there’s always someone there to catch it for a year and put a sign on it and make it cool. It sees itself and yet the land is always hovering … But driving that stretch which is bordered by mountains is my real vista. I like to listen to music and drive along that road and sometimes the train passes. That’s heaven to me.” It’s Friday, people. Get out there and befriend a pelican. The dean of a Czech medical school did it, so you can, too: “Vladimír Komárek, the dean of the Second Faculty of Medicine at Charles University in Prague, met his college’s adopted pelican and immediately had a bond with it … In an interview posted on the university’s website, the dean said the faculty had adopted a pelican at Prague Zoo, but he had never personally visited it … He scooped up his new feathered friend in his arms and posed for the cameras. Many commenters lightheartedly suggested that the duo shared the same haircut, and said this was why they appeared to get on so well. The bird seemed calm in his arms, despite the fact he was a human stranger.”