TAKE YOUR DESTINY IN YOUR HANDS

Angels: Almighty Father, we are tired of these
Nigerians ... in heaven o
GOD: What have they done this time?
Angels: Everything! They don't listen to instructions!
They don't obey traffic rules, they don’t wait for their
turn in anything! They are reckless!(exasperated). In
fact they have turned heaven upside down since the
first time we started admitting them.
GOD: Pls, bear with them. They are very special to
me...ehm let me call Satan in hell to see how he's
doing....
(phone rings) hell-o Lucifer, how are things over
there…?
Satan: Baba God, pls call me later. There's an issue I'm
trying to resolve.
(ten minutes later)
GOD: hell-o Lucifer
Satan: I'll call you back. The issue has turned into a
crisis.
(one hour later)
Satan; Sorry Baba GOD.
GOD: Lucifer are you having problems over there?
Satan: It is these Nigerians I have with me in hell. He
(stammers) they.. they....they have quenched the fire
in hell and installed air conditioners"

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The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

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