April 24, 2018 Redux Redux: Excessive Doom Scenarios 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. Sunday was Earth Day, but before you head outside to explore the wonders of nature, linger a moment with The Paris Review. This week, we bring you Gary Snyder’s Art of Poetry interview, in which he urges us to love the world; Roger Salloch’s story “Romantic Landscape”; and Mark Strand’s poem “After Our Planet.” Gary Snyder, The Art of Poetry No. 74 Issue no. 141 (Winter 1996) I feel that the condition of our social and ecological life is so serious that we’d better have a sense of humor. That it’s too serious just to be angry and despairing. Also, frankly, the environmental movement in the last twenty years has never done well when it threw out excessive doom scenarios. Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step, I think, and that’s why it’s in my poetry, is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world, which means the nonhuman as well as the human, and then begin to take better care of it. Read More
April 24, 2018 On Food Sometimes the Pie Just Calls Your Name By Rick Bragg An illustration from A Apple Pie, by Kate Greenway. 1964 This is not the first memory I have of food. My first memory, I believe, was when I ate the Wet-Nap that came in the bottom of a two-piece dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken just outside the high school football stadium in Sylacauga, Alabama, because I believed it was food. The less we say about that the better. This is only my first memory of my mother’s food. And I thought I would die. I had already been banished from the kitchen, banished from any proximity to the hot stove and sharp instruments. She made me step back even a few steps farther, beyond the door, in case I should suddenly go peculiar and fling myself into the cabbage grater. I had exhibited some unusual behavior already, even beyond the Wet-Nap incident, behavior that made biting into a moistened towelette seem almost humdrum in comparison. I had, after chewing on it like it was gum, somehow poked a plastic poinsettia berry up my nose, requiring medical attention. The less said about that the better, too—though even that should not be strange for the son of a woman who walked around with a marble in her mouth for about three years. I also went crazy at a lumberyard. That time, they said it was probably just sunstroke. Read More
April 24, 2018 Arts & Culture Women Intellectuals and the Art of the Withering Quip By Dustin Illingworth Illustration from the cover of Sharp, by Michelle Dean. “If one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do,” the British writer and journalist Rebecca West wrote to a friend in 1952. “First, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writing well just can’t be forgiven.” West, ignoring her own advice, neither died prematurely nor blunted the fineness of her writing. As a young woman, she made her name with witty, digressive book reviews that were often wonderfully cutting. (On Henry James: “He splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.”) She also wrote several novels and covered world events for prestigious magazines, including the trial of the English fascist William Joyce and the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle. Her final book, an idiosyncratic history of the year 1900, was published just before her death at the age of ninety. It was the capstone to a career that spanned almost seven decades. West’s true audacity was not merely “to go on writing,” as she put it, but to flourish in an insular, nepotistic intellectual culture that was largely hostile to women. She was ambitious, unafraid, and prodigiously gifted—in a word, sharp. The literary critic Michelle Dean’s new book of the same name, a cultural-history-cum-group-biography, examines the lives and careers of ten sharp women, among them Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Dorothy Parker, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, and Zora Neale Hurston. What unites this disparate group, Dean claims, is the ability “to write unforgettably.” If this casts something of a wide net, it does so out of necessity: the collected body of work this constellation of women produced—a mixture of fiction, book and movie reviews, essays, cultural criticism, and journalism—comprises a map of twentieth-century thought. “The longer I looked at the work these women laid out before me,” Dean writes, “the more puzzling I found it that anyone could look at the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century and not center women in it.” Read More
April 23, 2018 Arts & Culture The Book Jean-Patrick Manchette Didn’t Live to Finish By Gary Indiana Ivory Pearl is the lion’s share of a book that, sadly, Jean-Patrick Manchette—polymath, chess whiz, jazz superenthusiast, comic-book lover, literary genius—didn’t live to finish. Like Boris Vian, who also died young, Manchette was impossibly overgifted, able to do anything supremely well with playful grace and intelligence. Like Vian, he was an artist whose work was matched by a beautiful personality, an artist one falls in love with. Read More
April 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Curtis Sittenfeld’s Unambiguous Sophistication By Adam O’Fallon Price The definition of what qualifies as “chick lit” (an unpleasant term, besides which, I’ve personally always thought if you were going to coin a sexist word for women’s books, chicktion has more pizzazz, but I digress) is, in its purest form, a stupid tautology. A book is marketed as chick lit if it broadly appeals to women; books broadly appeal to women if they’re marketed as chick lit. Of course, this definition doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny. For one thing, the category of “fiction that appeals more to women than men” is, as we know, “fiction.” Accordingly, most books are marketed toward women. The Corrections was infamously, and briefly, featured in Oprah’s book club and marketed as a family drama, which it is. In this sense, all fiction—and this has been roughly true since the early nineteenth century, when the burgeoningly popular, still somewhat novel novel form, was declaimed as a woman’s art—is chick lit. What, then, are the real criteria for membership in this dubious category? Is it books written by women or books that have female leads? Books about the domestic sphere? Clearly not, or not just, as that category would include, for example, Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson. It would seem, then, to mostly come down to an amorphous sense of middlebrow quality or ambition and an accompanying sense that certain popular women writers belong, almost as a function of their popularity, in a kind of gilded literary ghetto. (As Jennifer Weiner noted, male writers of popular fiction like Nick Hornby or Jess Walter are not consigned to “dick lit.”) In the last few years, however, certain woman writers have come along who thankfully challenge this tiresome paradigm. They are both popular and literary and seem to have no problem standing with a foot in each category. Chief among them is Curtis Sittenfeld, whose story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, arrives on April 24. Read More
April 22, 2018 First Person The Difficulty in Writing About Murder By Cutter Wood Anna Maria Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. My mother-in-law enjoys quilting, prosecco, chocolates, family photographs, geraniums, skim milk, and the new children’s wing at the public library. She is a kind woman, and—as long as you don’t curse—an eminently forgiving person, with a bent toward digital ineptitude that is at once exasperating and endearing. “Okay, I clicked on it,” she says to me over the phone. “Now it disappeared.” “It shouldn’t disappear,” I say. “Nothing just disappears.” “Well, it disappeared.” When the whole family goes to the beach, she packs a sun hat and snacks and tells us about her childhood catching crabs at the shore with only a piece of chicken and a string. At some point, as the conversation trails off, she reaches into her beach bag (purple, she sewed it herself) and gets out a book, and for the next hour she doesn’t say a word. Such an innately garrulous woman, what is it that has so engrossed her? Naturally, she is reading about a murder. My mother-in-law is quite an aficionado of murders. She’s traveled the winding canals of Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti, in the novels of Donna Leon, as he investigated the drowning of an American serviceman; she’s followed along behind Louise Penny’s chief inspector, Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, as he unraveled the mystery of the socialite CC de Poitiers’s fatal electrocution at a curling competition. At night, reclining in her easy chair by the living-room window, she takes out her hearing aid and falls so wholly into these stories—pages snapping crisply one after another, thumbnail chewed to a nubbin—that she forgets about the dog waiting by the door and the kettle whistling on the stove. What my mother-in-law does not read, however—and this is a point of pride for her—is true crime. She will read about the decapitation by snowmobile of a fictional errant insurance salesman (through the transmogrification of literature, she becomes the main character, literally stumbling on the head of the late insurer), but if a murder has actually occurred, it somehow precludes her interest. For my mother-in-law, something distinguishes the real murder from the fake, something prevents her from reading the former yet allows her to consume the latter with immense enthusiasm. She loves the characters in murder mysteries, she’s told me, their foibles and their deadpan philosophizing, but when she reads true crime, there’s a sense that the events are being sensationalized for her consumption, and she simply feels uncomfortable. This discomfort has been very much on my mind lately, because over the past few years, as I’ve undergone that slow process of becoming a part of my wife’s family, I’ve also been writing one of those very books, a book about an actual murder. Read More