May 10, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Pleasure as a Means By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, My cousin is getting married in a month. We were born ten days apart, which we take pride in like we planned it, and grew up like sisters. We drifted a bit and now work different hours and are states away. We have a tradition of writing something to each other before momentous occasions. I’ve always looked up to her—she’s an adventurous, kind soul and has shouldered a lot of unexpected responsibility with grace. I have this well of happiness for her and her soon-to-be husband, but I’m having trouble expressing it. I know she’d appreciate even a simple “I’m so happy for you,” but I want to say more. I feel both giddiness and this more stable undercurrent of joy for them. Can you help point me in a direction for well wishes like these? Are there any you hold dear to your heart? Thank you, Speechless Congratulations Dear Speechless, One of the most common requests that poets get is to recommend poems for weddings. Sometimes we get asked to write original pieces for close friends, sometimes just to help find one for someone else to read. There are so many excellent love poems, and it’s difficult to pick the right wedding poem for a couple I don’t know. But wedding season is approaching, and I bet many folks will be writing in with similar requests soon, so I will give this one a shot. For you, for your cousin, let’s read “On the Occasion of Your Wedding,” by Sandra Beasley. Sandra writes: People will tell you it is natural to pair off. People say this despite the Pope, in his backseat built for one. People say this despite the cuttlefish, with three hearts of his own and no room for more … Sandra notes that there is nothing natural about the messiness of a dedicated partnership, the “clog of drain hair” and “the way you tuck used Kleenex into the crevice of his recliner.” And yet in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she applauds the couple for saying, “Screw it and I do.” In your letter, you mentioned your cousin’s adventurousness and her ability to meet the challenges that have come her way. It sounds to me like she is the kind of person who would nod her head at Sandra’s sage advice that “they make duct tape for situations like this.” I love this poem because not only does it celebrate the courage it takes to choose marriage in this endlessly chaotic world where nothing is promised, but it also includes small and practical blessings like “knowing when to leave the room.” Best of all, it ends with a single joyful thought—one that is perhaps the same thought all we romantics dressed as cynics have at weddings—“You fools. You lucky, lucky fools.” –SK Read More
May 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Nietzsche Wishes You an Ambivalent Mother’s Day By John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary Mary Cassatt, Sleepy Baby, 1910. The cultural institution of Mother’s Day began with a single massive flower delivery. In 1908, Anna Jarvis, widely regarded as the founder of the holiday, delivered five hundred white carnations to Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mother had taught Sunday school for decades. It was the start of a century-long Mother’s Day tradition: give solid-white carnations in honor of the memory of the deceased; give solid-red and solid-pink ones to the moms who still live among us. For a single day, the life of a mother is supposed to be easy. She can take a break and bask in the admiration of her absolute purity, unmitigated faithfulness, unbridled charity, and total love. But perhaps this form of celebration is too easy; perhaps it masks the true difficulties and precariousness of a woman bearing and raising children. In truth, very few things about motherhood seem absolute, unmitigated, unbridled, or total. And maybe we should accept, even celebrate, precisely this ambivalence. Read More
May 9, 2018 On Books Selected Sentences from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi By Anthony Madrid A few words about an underappreciated piece of reading technology. Talking about underlining in books. Nobody shows you how to do this, and it’s a pity. You find out quick that if you do it wrong, you ruin the book. If you do it right, though, you create a precious heirloom. How do you do it right? Use a ruler, for starters. They make little stubby ones for this purpose. Then there’s the question of where exactly the line should go. Should it touch the bottom of the letters on the line, or should you give it a little space there? Depends. And then there’s the ink. When I was first underlining, I didn’t understand. You can’t use inks that are gonna show through. Also, you probably don’t want the ink’s color to dominate the page. Bloodred ballpoints are usually too much. The effect can be as bad as that of a highlighter. And you can’t use pens with runny noses that are gonna form solid droplets at their tips. You can’t, unless you like big ol’ gobs and smears of ink at the end of each stroke. Heaven knows not every book asks to be underlined. But heaven is founded on the idea that some books really do demand it. Reading any of these nineteenth-century supremo-supremo novelists without marking the best bits is insanity. You’re going to need those sentences later. Read More
May 9, 2018 Hue's Hue Lilac, the Color of Half Mourning, Doomed Hotels, and Fashionable Feelings By Katy Kelleher Lorde at the MTV Video Music Awards. In 1960, the architect John Macsai cracked open a book of brick samples to show his employer, A. N. Pritzker. Pritzker was, according to the Chicago Reader, an “incomprehensibly wealthy” man who wanted Mascai to build him a hotel. The building would be the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. Mascai had already drafted up the shape of the structure. It was going to be a subtly striking building, a fine example of mid-century modern style perched on short stilts in downtown Lincolnwood, Illinois. Mascai’s plans called for a long low-slung building with the main structural elements, like the supporting steel beams, placed on the outside, allowing for extra-large rooms on the inside. Like most design of the era, it emphasized function and comfort equally, with few decorative touches (and certainly no Morris-esque flourishes). Macsai wanted to use gray bricks and white painted steel for the hotel’s facade. But Pritzker had other ideas. The gray, he said, was dull. He was a man with more dollars than sense, and he didn’t want something tasteful or subdued. He wanted to build something that would stand out, that would trumpet its existence to pedestrians from a mile away. And so, after pawing through the sample book, Pritzker picked out a purple glazed brick. He didn’t pick a deep purple or one of those obscure dark maroons that can read as brown in the right light, and he didn’t choose a soft gray-leaning mauve either. He picked lilac, a shade darker than thistle and lighter than mulberry, a shade that is undeniably purple, even at dusk, even at dawn. Read More
May 9, 2018 On Music This Feels Like Never-Ending By Alexander Lumans The Dillinger Escape Plan in concert. Photo: Stefan Raduta. And I was every question that never had an answer I see right through you And never even noticed that there always was a reason That we were never meant to be left alone. —The Dillinger Escape Plan, “Milk Lizard” 1. “Low Feels Blvd” I am not what you picture when you think of a metalhead; I have no tattoos, no wide ear gauges, no long hair with which to head bang. There are teenagers who are twice as metal as I will ever be. But I do listen to metal—have done so for years—on both the brightest days and the grayest. I do have a pierced septum; it’s relatively new and more an accessorized front. And I do want a tattoo, though I’ve only committed to the temporary kind. However, skin accessories and a darkly monochromatic wardrobe do not alone a metalhead make. One might assume this crowd to be full of fearless counterculture anarchists who give zero fucks about what anyone thinks. I am not so confident. I am afraid of letting people get too close because I don’t trust others to understand me on a basic emotional level; I rarely trust my own judgment in the myriad of easy and difficult situations that daily life presents; and what little remaining self-esteem I have lies buried beneath a high-rise of self-hatred that manifests in destructive impulses—all of which leads me, on the worst days, to wish I weren’t alive. In other words, I live with major depression. What does my depression look like? More often than not, I sleep too late; I’m sad and angry at myself for sleeping in; my whole day is thrown off course. With no established routine or foundation, I become sadder and angrier. Hopelessness sets in like quick-dry cement. Feeling all but ruined, I just want to go back to sleep. Instead of pulling myself out of my emotional quagmire through self-care, I feel paralyzed. I sleep more. With any notion of a regular schedule long gone, once I’m finally awake, I recount every single way I’ve failed myself. Tomorrow feels so impossible I don’t even want to think about it. Then all this repeats the following morning because I’ve stayed up too late worrying about what I cannot control. When this becomes the norm, I tell myself that I simply want to disappear. This is, somehow, the best answer. I know that’s not healthy to think, but I’m still searching for what is healthy. What could make me want to stay here through today’s sadness, loneliness, and pain? Read More
May 8, 2018 Redux Redux: Emily’s Other Daffodil By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we help you usher in the month of May with a bouquet of archival reads. Learn about John Fowles’s wild-orchid hobby in his Art of Fiction interview; follow the hunt for a flatware pattern in Belle Boggs’s story “Imperial Chrysanthemum”; and read May Swenson’s Emily Dickinson–inspired poem “Daffodildo.” Read More