April 22, 2019 Look Look, It’s Earth Day By The Paris Review Happy Earth Day! When the oceans have boiled over and the birds have died out, when the coasts have receded and the scorched vegetation ceased smoking, at least we’ll still have the work of the sixteenth-century miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel by which to remember the natural world. A new book, Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt, examines how Hoefnagel became infatuated with nature. It contains eighty color facsimiles of his masterwork, Four Elements, in which he depicts all manner of flora and fauna in stunningly detailed watercolors. A selection of these pages appears below. Joris Hoefnagel, Animalia Qvadrvpedia et Reptilia (Terra): Plate LXI, ca. 1575/1580, watercolor and gouache, with oval border in gold, on vellum. Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. Read More
April 22, 2019 Arts & Culture A Walk with Fame By Aysegul Savas Inside the church at Tepoztlán One winter in January, I stood with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in front of a glass coffin, in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán. Inside, a figure lay under a purple cloth. “Is that a saint of some kind?” Muldoon asked. “Do you think that’s real?” I said I doubted it. “That’s disappointing. Where I come from in Ireland, in the cathedral in Armagh, is the head of blessed Oliver Plunkett. A church without a head is really no church at all,” he said, with the bare trace of a smile. “When your expectations are as high as mine, almost everything is going to be disappointing.” We had walked to the church together from town, retracing the poet Hart Crane’s footsteps around Tepoztlán. Muldoon walked slowly, his tweed jacket flapping, his brows knit together behind his thick frames. I was nervous and enthusiastic, wanting to make a good impression. I was standing next to a real writer; someone I’d read and admired. We were in Tepoztlán as part of a writing program—Muldoon was leading a poetry class, I was participating in a cultural journalism workshop. I’d traveled there from Paris, where my husband and I had recently moved for my husband’s work. I’d never been published, despite many dozens of story submissions. I kept a blog, which was read by my mother and three friends. I worked odd, exhausting jobs, determined not to commit myself to any serious work that might get in the way of writing, but was rapidly losing faith in my own potential. Read More
April 19, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sapphics, Scandals, and Skies By The Paris Review Richardson Bay as seen from Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California. Photo: Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). In the May issue of Harper’s, Joe Kloc tells a story about a community of people called anchor-outs, who live “on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels” in California’s Richardson Bay, “doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.” The story is compelling, the prose unfussy and clear—and the photographs, by Therese Jahnson, are the perfect complement—but there is more going on here. The real miracle is how the article resists, gracefully yet firmly, the temptations of this kind of reporting, the very real traps it could have fallen into. It would be easy for an outsider to impose a straitjacket of meaning on this community, as writers have done for generations, or to see himself as a savior patronizing them with the boon of his voice, as more than one writer has seen himself; Kloc does neither. Gently, he suggests another way of looking at our world, maybe scarier but more honest, and another way of looking at those with whom we share it. —Hasan Altaf Read More
April 19, 2019 Arts & Culture Fully Half Korean By Michael Croley West Virginia, EPA photo by Jack Corn, 1974 “Why all the middle-aged men, Mike?” my writing professor asked me one afternoon during my junior year of college. She was curious (concerned? baffled?) why, in the two semesters we had spent together, my stories were often about white men twice my age. While my peers wrote about college and high school kids doing college and high school things, I veered toward chronicling the failures and half-measures of middle-aged men. My professor asked whether I had ever thought to write about my own life, my unusual background—my mother is Korean and my father is Appalachian. I remember feeling squeamish at the thought. It had occurred to me, but I wasn’t ready to write about it. I told her maybe I would when my parents had passed on, but that wasn’t the only reason. In many ways, I had never fully felt half Korean, which is an odd thing to say, to be fully half of something. But what I mean is, I identified then as mostly white and Appalachian and my being half Korean, though undeniable in my features, seemed secondary. What seems extraordinary about our lives to others is often ordinary to ourselves. I could see why my professor might see the fertile ground in such stories, but they held little appeal to me. Around this same time, I came across a short story set in India in a national magazine. I disliked the story and thought that the only reason it had been published was because of its unique setting. It was as if our struggles back home, all the poverty and hardship in Appalachia, were givens, not worth reading about—surely not the stuff of the stories that the New York publishing world seemed to crave. In the late days of the twentieth century, at the small state college I attended in Bowling Green, Kentucky, there was not a lot of talk about agency, representation in literature, or appropriation. I could have been wrong about the exoticism I perceived in that story in the magazine, but I don’t think so. It made me think that if I wrote about my parents, myself, what it had been like to grow up half Korean in a town with an ugly racist past, my stories would be published only for that content and not for their prose. I feared that if that happened, I would be trading on my heritage and exploiting it. So I hunkered down into white male characters and the white male writers who taught me how to write about white men. Read More
April 19, 2019 Arts & Culture Why Does This Feel So Bad? By Jenny Odell Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears. Here’s an example. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, I used The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. The book has a checklist in the back where you mark the different species you’ve seen. That many birding books have such a list tells you a lot about how people tend to approach this activity; in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. But this was somewhat inevitable for me as a beginner, learning to pick out discrete, individual birds. After all, when you learn a new language, you start with the nouns. Over the years, my continued attention began to dissolve the edges of the checklist approach. I noticed that certain birds were in my neighborhood during only part of the year, like cedar waxwings and white-crowned sparrows. In the winter, my crows came by less often. Even if they stay in the same place, birds can look different not only throughout their life but during different seasons, so much so that many pages of the Sibley guide have to show different ages, as well as breeding and nonbreeding versions, of the same bird. So, there were not only birds, but there was bird time. Then there was bird space. Magpies abounded near my parents’ house an hour south, but never here. There were mockingbirds in West Oakland but not in Grand Lake. Song sparrows had different songs in different places. The blue of scrub jays got duller as you went inland. Crows sounded different in Minneapolis. The dark-eyed juncos I saw at Stanford had brown bodies and black heads (the Oregon subgroup), but had I traveled east, I would have seen variations. Read More
April 18, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Sometimes Sadness Is Just What Comes between the Dancing By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, I’m in a stable tumultuous relationship. I love my partner dearly, and she returns my enthusiasm. Some of the time. There are days when I feel love radiating off her, and others when I could not buy a kind word or any showing of support. I realize all relationships have ups and downs, and I’ve come to accept and respect my partner’s moods. Still, I find it very difficult to cope with things when I am on her bad side, especially if I myself am suffering. I try my best to communicate this to her and not to be so sensitive. Despite knowing that things inevitably will revert to normal, I feel very abandoned and unloved in the moment. I’m not sure if I’m being unfair or overly needy or what. Kind regards, Confused in Love Read More