Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i The Paris Review

Day 17 I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and into art—Turner’s commemoration of his banishment is as poignantly dramatic as The Fighting Temeraire. Ovid wrote prodigiously during his banishment, and although his work was mostly sad and often complaining, as a remote member of the same fraternity I find it hard to commiserate with him. There are worse predicaments, it seems to me, than enforced residence in a house on the Black Sea, writing lyric poetry for the rest of your life. Tomis is now the hefty Romanian port of…

My steeds live for War.My swords are not for show.My colt’s trained not to stopshort on the battlefield.My shield givesno cause for complaint. A slash of my saberclean as saltand off came ‘Amr’s nose! Between Qaww and Qārahthe troops flocked like grouseto a spring. I feared I’d diebefore ‘Amr’s womencould keen his death. We chargedthe foe from on highand my soul sick with bloodlustwas nearly healed—we skewered their loinswith Rudaynah spearsthat screamed as ifsqueezed in a vise. Our squadrons standarrayed for battlebanners flappinglike vultures’ shadows. I didn’t start thiswar that engulfs you.For generationsSawdah’s sonsfanned its flames.Friend and foe—all feel the heat.War is atfever pitch.I won’t desert you. A cavalry chargeof war-bitten ridersbloodied in slaughterarmor glinting,free warriorswith brows as brightas rhim gazelles,unlike Shaybān and La’mthose sorry tribeswith leprous buttsand brows black…

AETERNITAS The Eternalis like the axthe assassin slamsinto someone’s head. The Eternal is the actof pillage from whichin panic the garretnow is empty. The Eternal is scarlet,like fresh blood. Above itrises a vapor.Then it, too, disappears. The Eternal is likethe heart of himthe robbersmurdered without hesitation. The Eternal islike murder,it destroys the Effigy,the Face of the Dead. The Eternal is flawless,like the indecipherableSecretof the Perfect Crime. The Eternal is likethe eyeof the one killed:Dread is in his gaze. The Eternal weeps,like the many Archangelswho served Jesusin their Multitude. The Eternal is likethe Dawn, to whichthe Guardian Angel shallno longer awaken. DISTRIBUTION The disturbed man chopped up the bodyof the older woman for days and threw itinto garbage cans at various locations around the city. To get rid of all the…

In his acute, allusive writing on literature, visual art, and performance, Hilton Als has made critical analysis and introspection a conjoined practice. The essay, which he has called “a form without a form,” is his primary mode—open, omnivorous writing that invariably lays bare family and friendship, American fixations on and lived experiences of race and sexuality, and the places where metaphor and reality meet. In “The First Step of Becoming an Art Historian,” one of Als’s earliest published pieces, from 1985, he describes coming “to realize a desire to relate the illusion of memory, based on [others’] facts, to the illusory present.” It may still be as good a statement of his purpose and methods as any. Als was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, and grew up there…

AN ESSAY ON CHILDREN’S GAMES Many children’s games depend on a physical handicap. Hopscotch, for example, requires a skillful player to hop from square to square on one leg while the other merely dangles in the air, as though amputated so long ago he had time to practice jumping without it. Maybe I’m here on this continent simply to walk by myself for days, or years, as if no one there needed me, waited for me, asked about me, loved me, missed me, worried about me. But hopscotch isn’t the right metaphor because in fact, while I’m here, I do need all those people I wake up without and go to sleep without. Distance doesn’t lessen the sense of guilt. Guilt, the word rings out inside me every time I…

Claire’s roommates threw her out on November third, for falling behind on rent and hogging the Xbox. During the next three weeks, she lived in other people’s houses. She missed the Xbox, but couch surfing was like a game. She had to not smell like coke-sweat or wipe her nose all the time in front of her hosts, and she had to figure out the magic words that would make them let her stay. At her aunt’s house, she praised a samovar. Ding-ding, x 3 nights. At her friend Abby’s mom’s house, she praised a sword, and held it, at the invitation of its owner, Abby’s mom’s boyfriend, a former Naval Academy instructor, and slipped it back into its wall-mounted case, resting the blade and pommel in the felt slot.…

THE LUNATIC, THE LOVER, AND THE POET And, after the explosion, made spheres sing,A pure expression of pure poetry,Like rising rain or a nation with noFlag—. Something that whispers as the airDoes just before the lightning comes. A pureExpression of the breaks in the blank lakesOn Neptune’s moons. A ruined expressionOf pure poetry. A pure expressionOf ruined poetry. Either will do.A pure expression of pure poetryIn the podcasts of the pine trees will do.We will say we do not want it becauseWe will say we do not want it because.A pure expression of pure poetryThat boiled in the blur of the first atom. There’s a screen to tell you what pleasure is,Who pleasure is, when pleasure is, and why.You hold it in your hand and feel all thingsAs though the…

He was thinking of Lookfar, abandoned long ago, beached on the sands of Selidor. Little of her would be left by now, a plank or two down in the sand maybe, a bit of driftwood on the western sea. As he drifted near sleep he began to remember sailing that little boat with Vetch, not on the western sea but eastward, past Far Toly, right out of the Archipelago. It was not a clear memory, because his mind had not been clear when he made that voyage, possessed by fear and blind determination, seeing nothing ahead of him but the shadow that had hunted him and that he pursued, the empty sea over which it had fled. Yet now he heard the hiss and slap of waves on the prow.…

If you find me nocturnal and flawedLook again. Because tonightI looked at me as though you were looking.And it was like waterWanting To slip from its home in the riverWithout even touching the bank. I looked at you. I’ve known for so longThat I’m land. For so longI’ve prayedYour body of water most fraternalWould stretch out over mine. Shepherd and sailor Look again. Less loftiness.More care. My meter? Love.And your mouthIn mine unearned. My shame? The burningVerse. My faceThe dreamer’s face reversed. My calling?Sagittarius, at my sideEntwined with Taurus. My wealth? DoggedPursuit, your presenceIn everything: July, AugustThe zodiac at hand Illustrated magazinePage, newspaperTattered web. In every corner of the HouseThe trembling evidence ofYour face. We’ll pass on. The two of us. And friendsAnd all my vigor, this afflictionOf not seeing…

My wife, Gin, once knocked gently on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello,” she kept saying. “Hello. Who’s in there?” She and our therapist, Dr. Sherby, laughed a little about this, so I did, too. What fun. Keep knocking on my head like that, like it’s a door, or an egg. I wasn’t going to be the only one not laughing. That’s Human Survival 101. Not that survival is such a prize. But still, you might as well control your exit. Put your own little spin on how you step away from the show once and for all. I laughed as Gin kept knocking on my head, and I said, as if I might really be answering the door, “Just a minute, I’m coming. Hold your horses.…

She would remember everything, out of the blue and in full detail. She would see the jade ring wrapped around her ring finger and, immediately, she would see the other jade ring. She would open her eyes wide and, without knowing why, would fall silent. She would say, Yes, very beautiful indeed. And she would run her fingertips over the delicate shape of the serpents. A caress. The hint of a caress. An immobile hand underneath. An alabaster hand. A velvet island. SHE CROSSED THE CITY at dawn in the back of a taxi. She drifted between sleep and anxiety, her handbag pressed against her chest. The beginning of a long journey awaited her at the airport. She knew it and knowing it produced a sense of unease. She couldn’t…

SELF-RELIANCE Winter. Late Januaryafternoon. Night falls fast.You think I should know this by now. I am justnot feeling it the joyI should be feeling— the joy we are supposedto feel wewho are alive! Life! Life!Well. My preferred pronounsare we and we and I sink into the selfat my risk. Ours. O dialectic! Lyric, society,plurality, yo.O the ’90s! Here are the hemlocksstern as Adorno,thrusting into the fading blue. A dust of snowshook down on me.We are within hearing of traffic. Withinsight of a latrineautocorrected just now to Latina.Is it my softwareor me that’s racist? The difference?The differenceis spreading said Stein not Einsteinthough she thoughtherself an equal genius. My givenname autocorrectsto moron. The car become self-driving caris a retronym. Everybody’sautobiography too. We share a nervous system, autonomic, nonautonomous,with so manyanimals. Autarky the…

Not the scent of the smoke, but the sight of it, not the sight itself, but the screen through which it altered the sunlight—she couldn’t articulate the change exactly, it’s just that the light seemed odd, like the acidic light of a nightmare. She had overslept. She was used to waking at the sound of his alarm. Risen dazed and blinking into this strange day, the cool and yellow morning. Before she woke the girl, she stood on the deck. I have use of my limbs, she thought, without knowing why she thought it. And went back into the house. She dressed the child, and combed her hair, and shook cereal into a bowl for her—the child seemed not to notice anything at all, still pliant with sleep, and ate…

SONG OF SONGS I walked in the door, took off my coat, took off my sunglasses, set them down with my keys, took off my shoes and socks, my jeans, my shirt, my bra and underwear, set them all on the chair by the door, walked into the house naked, went to the fridge, got my cucumber, went to the bathroom, lay on the floor by the warm heater, kissed the floor, said your name, said it again, looked up at you, slipped the cucumber inside and went all the way up deep, said your name, cucumber in and out all the way, all the up in, all the way out, my cunt lips sliding on the cucumber, you, you, you, then you were pissing on my face, which made…

Every morning at Raines Elementary School in Jackson, Mississippi, all us black third graders were forced to stand and pledge allegiance to the stitched stars and bold bars of the American and Mississippi flags. One October evening, I asked Mama if I had to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. One October evening, Mama said no. I went to school the next day and sat my husky Toughskins in a wobbly desk while my black classmates stood and pledged allegiance as they were told. When my black classmates were done pledging allegiance, my white teacher took me out in the hall and told me to bend over and touch my toes. I told my white teacher that I did not want to pledge allegiance to those flags because those flags…

SYLVIE BAUMGARTEL’s first book of poems, Song of Songs, will be published in 2019. SARAH BOOKER’s translations from the Spanish include Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest, which was published in 2017. SZILÁRD BORBÉLY (1963–2014), a poet, essayist, novelist, and dramatist, was one of the most important literary figures to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. JULIAN BRIMMERS is a writer and cultural journalist based in Cologne, Germany. LISA COHEN is the author of All We Know: Three Lives and is at work on a book about queer friendship. ROBYN CRESWELL is the poetry editor of The Paris Reivew. EDIE FAKE is an artist living in the California High Desert. CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA is the author of six novels in Spanish, incuding El mal de la taiga, which is forthcoming in English…

Lai was hidden in the middle of forests when the Vai people found it. There was evidence of earlier townsmen there, as ends of stoneware and crushed diamonds were found scattered on hilltops in the unexpected company of domestic cats. But when the Vai people arrived from war-ravaged Arabia through the Mandingo inland, they found no inhabitants and decided to occupy the province with their spirits. On a plot of land one mile long and one half mile wide, they used smelted iron to build their village—a vast circle of houses constructed of palm wood from nearby trees, zinc roofs, and mud bricks to keep them cool during the dry season. During the day, the Ol’ Pas sat together and drew lines and symbols in the dirt that represented how…

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, a provincial town in Hungary, in the Soviet era. He published his first novel, Satantango, in 1985, then The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016). These novels, with their giant accretions of language, global erudition (he’s as familiar with the classics of Buddhist philosophy as he is with the European intellectual tradition), obsessive characters, and rain-sodden landscapes, might give an impression of hardened late-modernist hauteur, but they are also pointillist, elegant, and delicately funny. His gravity has panache—a collision of tones visible in other works he has produced alongside the novels, which include short fictions such as Animalinside (2010) and geographically vaster texts like Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004) and Seiobo There Below…

It was in the third of the essays I was writing on how we’d come to see the cities of the future as cities of the future (something to refocus our attention on, now that the cities of the future of the past, the structures in which we were all living, had been thoroughly codified and photographed and renovated, resold as more shimmering or more minimalist versions of themselves then rephotographed, and we were liking the reiterations on our Instagrams, enjoying this incredible proximity to architecture: I was an architect, writing about architecture in my poems), but it was hard to deny that we’d reached that time in our respective chronologies when cities of the future was something that had to be reenvisioned and discussed as you sat under studio…

FINAL INSTALLMENT… Mr. Field, a concert pianist, splinters his wrist in a train crash and uses his compensation pay-out to buy a house he has seen only in photographs—a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. Soon after their arrival, his wife, Mim, leaves without explanation. Left alone in the house, with its narrow windows and unusual arrangement of space, Mr. Field’s thoughts are oriented away from his failed marriage and toward the sea, the construction site next door, and a deceptively simple prelude by Chopin. As winter approaches, he becomes increasingly reclusive, until his only companion is an imaginary projection of the house’s prior inhabitant Hannah Kallenbach. x It doesn’t look like life, it looks like sea life I sometimes sat and…

FRIEND Montaigne was right, without the body’s meddling loveis more thrilling.Yet from the start in elementary what she didwith it was farfrom irrelevant, her jeans, mascara, rings allarticulate. And she was always so pretty. Claire Birchall ofthe yellow hair,the twins at my birthday party came out and told meI was unfairfor playing with no one but her. I said I was sorry.I didn’t care. Bev across the street who shielded me from Bridget,nightmare next door,not nothing. Then Bev in high school who spared methe group disease,four or five girls forever demanding IDs for safe conduct.I broke up with her over God (she believed) one lunch hour and afterthat was alone.Then Jenn in freshman year, devoted and dumped mewhen I moved inwith Jess in sophomore, who was it. That went on…

Kathy Acker’s impact as a writer and performer, a cultural figure, and an (often overlooked) academic is uniquely tangled: the innovations of her hybrid, transgressive literature, written between 1972 and 1996, baffled her contemporaries to a degree that, once they had cracked the code, it was easily written off as yesterday’s avant-garde. And yet her work, and her flamboyant punk persona, proved to be disruptive at a time when disruption didn’t signal an antitruth nihilism but a quest to subvert consciousness and challenge the rigidity of meaning, as she herself once put it. Her use of collage and appropriation raised questions that echo through today’s cultural landscape with striking urgency. A significant element of Acker’s creative process was her personal library. She was an avid and active reader. She frequently…

PAST ONE O’CLOCK I’ll quit smokingas soon as Iget lung cancer.The young don’t smokeanymore, they join gyms.I can’t help thinkingthey’ve misunderstoodsomething. The body’sa temple? The mindis a tempest. Somewherealong the linethe alternating stresses fall.And if I quit smokinghow would I signal you?The smoke alarmpings me awaketo tell me it’s dying.OK! I will get upto address againthe not-fire and maybeall creation. I mean,as long as I’m up. Down the smallrain is the wayof things, my umbrella’sa dead spider,so I popinto the bodega and buyone for $4which turns outto be impossibleto close once openedwhich I mentionto the bodega guynext time I pop inwho says yeahthat’s why they’re so cheap.So I walk throughthe rain’s “pockmarkedface” to the apartmentwhere David Attenboroughemotionally manipulatesme re snow-leopard cub.Everyone these daysfeels like Werner Herzoglistening toTimothy Treadwell’s cries. Past…