Innehållsförteckning för 218 (Fall 2016) från The Paris Review

I didn’t mean to quit drinking, it just sort of happened. I’d always assumed it’d be difficult, or not difficult, exactly, but impossible. Then one New Year’s Eve twenty years ago at the VFW, Craig and I were drinking beer from brown bottles, peeling the labels off into little confetti nests. In Mexico the previous New Year’s Eve, I’d started drinking again after a year sober. I traveled by myself in Oaxaca for a month and had at least two beautiful experiences. The bus I was on broke down in the mountains and I watched the stars blink on with a Mexican girl who later sent me a letter I never answered. That’s one of the experiences. The others are secrets. We left the VFW at a reasonable hour for…

I met Ishmael Reed at the Bowery Hotel, in New York, where he was staying for a couple of nights with his wife, the dancer and educator Carla Blank, and his daughter, the poet Tennessee Reed. In the novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed’s most acclaimed work, black artists spread “Jes Grew,” a virus of freedom and polytheism and improvised expression that overthrows a repressive status quo. Reed, gray hair swept to the side, eyes constantly darting around, restless with ideas and mischief, has become Jes Grew personified. His own groundbreaking literary output over six decades, in multiple languages and every form—essays, fiction, poetry, film, even editorial cartoons—has infected a generation of artists. His work as an institution builder, anthologist, and publisher has spread the work of hundreds of writers from…

So often I dream of the secrets of satellites, and so often I want the moose to step from the shadows and reveal his transgressions, and so often I come to her body as though she were Lookout Mountain, but give me a farmer’s market to park my martyred masks and I will name all the dirt roads that dead-end at the Cubist sculpture called My Infinity, for I no longer light bonfires in the city of adulterers and no longer smudge the cheeks of debutantes hurriedly floating across the high fruit of night, and yes, I know there is only one notable death in any small town and that is the pig farmer, but listen, at all times the proud rivers mourn my absence, especially when, like a full…

As we assembled this portfolio by Lincoln Perry, we became curious about his synthesis of art of the past—Renaissance painting particularly, but also such disparate modern sources as Courbet, Picasso, and Balthus. When we reached him on the phone at his home in Maine, Perry spoke about the reciprocal relationship between content and form and his view of the history of art as an extended family. “I look to steal everything that moves me,” he has written, “anything that can suggest ways to solve the problems a painter faces.” He also drew connections between his own work and that of his wife, Ann Beattie, whose story “Panthers” appears on page 143. My father was absolutely hostile to all the arts. He was an old lefty who thought that the only…

Fulton near Pearl, dug up to lay new Fulton Center subway power lines, a stone wall, three feet high, in silt-muck seven feet below street level, inside it a ceramic bird’s half-blue, half-yellow head, stem of a pipe, chunk of glazed seventeenth-century stoneware decorated with the arms of Amsterdam, huge turkey vultures taking a liking to the landfill, the preferred source of food for peregrine falcons is pigeons. His own police department, the mayor brags, seventh-largest army in the world, and remember, too, the United Nations is here, so he has his own state department, too, an entrée into the diplomatic world. Gets deep inside the head, this man says—he’s permanently disabled—affects you emotionally, what’s happened here, pulverized glass, concrete, lead, asbestos traces, crap, he calls it, here, he shows…

I am not much of a morning person,” Jeremy Prynne warned us, as we made arrangements for this interview. “My natural habitat seems to be the hours of darkness, ad libitum. So I’ll be pretty useless until about ten thirty or eleven a.m. at best: but at the other end of the day I never tire.” So it proved. For four days at the end of January, we met after lunch in his rooms at Gonville and Caius College, at the University of Cambridge, and talked, with a break for dinner, until we pleaded exhaustion sometime after midnight. At the conclusion of each day’s interview, Prynne graciously walked us out through the sixteenth-century Gate of Honour before returning to his desk in the rooms he has kept since he was…

Our life stories are scary and droll, Like masks children wear on Halloween As they go from door to door Holding the little ones by the hand In some neighborhood long torn down, Where people ate their dinners In angry silence or quarreling loudly, When there was a knock on the door, A soft knock a shy boy makes Dressed in a costume his mother made. What’s this you’re wearing, kid? And where did you get that mask? That made everyone laugh here While you stood staring at us, As if you knew already we were history.…

“Wall Street says that cake sales are low” Or to put it bluntly “Cake is fizz” So why is a diabetic dreaming of cake Asked to leave a temple Because he didn’t know that rice cakes Were sacrament? (He managed to jam some into his pockets) He dreamed that Mount Diablo was a Devil’s food cake He began to munch it down until his path was Interrupted by his Pancreas The Pancreas had sticklike arms and legs It was frowning It put up a hand and beckoned him to halt He pushed aside the Pancreas and finished his Meal Next, he was attending the Asparagus Festival In Freiburg It was held in a great medieval hall and before Each person there was a plate of asparagus He started banging on…

She cut three slashes into a piece of chorizo, started wedging Valiums into it, and worried in a vague way that something unusual would be required of her. She thought she remembered David saying that he gave the dog nine of his Valiums before the groomer. It seemed like a lot, so she put the chorizo down on the counter and checked on her phone. According to PetPlace, a dog should take ten milligrams of Valium for every ten pounds of body weight. Simha weighed fifty-five pounds, so that would be five and a half pills, but Simha had tremendous anxiety. She had been banned from her first groomer, and the new groomer was already complaining. “Highenergy breeds may require a double dose.” Was a Labradoodle a high-energy breed? Emily…

Sweet runs the water ever out of spring and meadow, frothing low, rising, weaving through the sodden grass. Silver line, transparent flow, zigzag and shine and swerve where the willow damselfly dives and climbs. ~~~ When I think of a beginning ~ before the beginning, a needle on a gauge between something ~ and nothing, nothing and something ~ then sticking at something, the core of the earth ~ like a hot fist gathering force ~ a dance set in motion by a matrix contracting ~ it’s Spring beginning or never ending, beneath all change, continuing ~ look, look again, at what was there, is here, and if it is hiding, it’s not hiding from you. ~~~ Veils of gnats and midges hovering over gravel and muddy runs of silting…

We lived frugally. If somebody was coming to the house, my mother moved the plastic gallon jugs of milk to the front of the refrigerator and filled the other shelves with vegetables from the crisper. The only meal my mother did not cook herself was our Saturday lunch. For this, my father walked six or seven blocks to get us slices of pizza. One Saturday morning, my father went to see a man who had recently come back from India with pickles and letters for his acquaintances, the way people used to do in the seventies. My father came home with a jar of mango pickles, but without the greasy paper bag from the pizza parlor. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed with a cup…

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Experience teaches, but its lessons may be useless. I could have done without a few whose only by-product is grief, which, as waste, in its final form, isn’t good for anything. A helicopter beating all night above the firth, a Druid shouting astrology outside the off-licence will eventually put the Ambien in ambience. Our culture is best described as heroic. Courageous in self-promotion, noble in the circulation of others’ disgrace, our preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory truly epic, and the task becomes suspension of disparate particles lest they fall naturally into categories whose contemplation is bad infinity. Isolation. The odd aural hallucination. The meager ambit of a widow’s cabbage row corresponds to necessity and also to its architect’s state of mind at the time. Why do…

The ants had gotten in through the shattered bottom half of Leslie’s laptop screen. Now they crawled across her green- and blue-tinted Word documents and websites one or two at a time with no discernable pattern or destination. It must have been a hell of a place for an ant, all that glowing landscape to be negotiated, possibly forever. It wasn’t clear whether any ants escaped or if they all just died in there. If they were dying, they at least had the decency to do it over in the dark border area of the screen or down in the keyboard, rather than within her line of sight. She was trying to see how long she could go without getting a new computer; the sound of crackling glass every time…

In a field of broken antlers, I’m holy as the grass where a deer has slept. And still, this is the hell we make together, the pleasure of tangled violins. Each night I inhale my own wings when my skin remembers asters. Understand this: the pull of my womb, why we fuck in a field of dandelions. How loathsome is that? A woman who cuts her name into a cypress. But the story always begins with a lie, doesn’t it? A dark room full of birds where I slapped the bread from your hands and drowned in a bowl of water. So much magical thinking in that swallow of summer the women in my dreams never came with their mouths open. Blame my salted brain, or the fever tree that…

Little Edgar came home from school wanting to do something to help Little Rose. The “little” thing was something they’d picked up from a classmate’s mother who’d visited the school to talk about Personal Empowerment. She felt that no child should be slighted by being called “little” or “junior” or any other diminutive. There’d been an electronic letter sent to parents about this, summarizing the Empowerment session. To make sure she understood correctly what diminutive meant, Mandy had looked up the word. The kids who’d heard this talk were six. They were barely toilet-trained. That, anyway, was Little Edgar’s father Dick’s take on such nonsense. He said if he had any money, he’d get his son out of that school and send him to private school, to which Mandy said,…

I write my little song. And you call it Guitar noodle. You write without you here. And I call it the poem with you here in it. We have entered each other’s atmosphere In isolation, the way a bee knows The deep shadows in the folds of a flower But doesn’t know what a bouquet is, those Rows of spectrumed tulips in Holland are Work to it, bees in empty thought noodling Over lavender and ocher and quince, A thing, not something, but a true thing, Like the difference between crisis and Chris, The difference between time and a Timex, The difference between a bed and a desk.…

Chris Marker, whose name was not “Chris Marker,” was a play of masks and avatars, an artist who leapt, like one of his beloved cats, from medium to medium. If, as Walter Benjamin said, a great work either dissolves a genre or invents one, if each great work is a special case, Marker produced a series of special cases. He invented the genre of the essay film; he composed what is widely considered the greatest short film ever made, La Jetée, in 1962; in the late nineties, he issued one of the first major artworks of the digital age, the CD-ROM Immemory. Even Marker’s relation to his own celebrity was an evasive masterpiece: until his death in 2012, at ninety-one, he was everywhere and nowhere, refusing both the haughty fantasy…

AMIE BARRODALE’s first collection, You Are Having a Good Time, was published this summer. She received the 2012 Plimpton Prize for her story “William Wei.” ANN BEATTIE ’s most recent collection is The State We’re In. J EFF DOLVEN teaches English at Princeton University. He has just completed a book of criticism, The Senses of Style, and a collection of poetry, A New English Grammar. CHRIS JACKSON is the publisher and editor in chief of One World, an imprint to be launched next year by Random House. MA JOR JACKSON is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Roll Deep. L AWRENCE JOSEPH’s sixth book of poems, So Where Are We?, will be published next year. JOSHUA KOTIN teaches at Princeton University. He is the author of the…