TOBI'S DESK

For boys like me, who think quitting is a better passport to create dreams, remember Eisten. For boys like me, whose brains are fire & water, oceans are splashes of thoughts interwoven. Its unbroken. unwritten. Unsecured. Its carnal desires are sore throat hurts. List your spiritual needs before the wind pilot light & song echoes … Continue reading For The BoyChild: for boys like me → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2Gsp0d9

  Amid the rancorous screaming matches of political discourse in 2016, a tempering voice emerged from an unlikely source: the dictionary. During the presidential election and its aftermath, Merriam-Webster ’s Dictionary mobilized its large social-media following to fact-check political figures who treated all language like fiction. From explaining the meaning of fact  to differentiating between bigly  and big league , the dictionary served as a biting challenge to the new regime, winning praise for its pithy critiques. Merriam-Webster’s resistance to an administration steeped in nativism, however, is complicated by the dictionary’s original goal to create and preserve a monolithic American culture. Noah Webster Jr., the dictionary’s founding author, was one of the first American nationalists, and he wrote his reference books with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English—one that often existed at the expense of regional and cultural variation of any k

On April 3, The Paris Review  will honor Joy Williams  with the  Hadada Award  for lifetime achievement at our annual gala,  the Spring Revel . In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection,  Ninety-Nine Stories of God . Take a look at the other stories and illustrations that appeared this week .   An original illustration by Brad Holland.   4 Passing Clouds was the brand of cigarette favored by the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier. According to one of her early teachers, her magnificent voice was attributed to “a wonderful cavity at the back of her throat.” This was the only explanation given for the purity and power of her voice. Near the end of her brief life, Ferrier sang Mahler’s symphony “The Song of the Earth.” We die, but life is fresh, eternally fresh, was Mahler’s ecstatic conviction. Nature renews herself year after year … for ever and ever. Ferrier was in tears when she concluded “The

1. In “Teasing Myself Out of Thought,” from her excellent last collection of essays and reviews, Words Are My Matter , the recently departed and much missed Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: “Kids are taught writing in school as a means to an end. Most writing is indeed a means to an end: love letters, information of all kinds, business communications, instructions, tweets. Much writing embodies, is, a message.” Not surprisingly, Le Guin despised writing as “merely…the vehicle of a message,” because for her writing’s purpose was to write “as well as we can.” And in another essay, “The Operating Instructions,” she writes: All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. That last sentence hammers at my head. I worry about getting made up by other people’s language; and I worry about the same for my students, my friends, my community. How s

Nigerian poet and pianist Echezonachukwu Nduka, whose writing has appeared in Brittle Paper, will be performing a selection of African classical music at the 2018 Transformation Spring Recital. The selected pieces—including works by Ghana’s Fred Onovwerosuoke, and Nigeria’s Peter Sylvanus, Chijioke Ngobili, and Christian Onyeji—are part of a collection titled Choreowaves, which he discusses in the […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2GqJrak

Waking, Or Knife-cuts like Questions on my Left Wrist “I wake up and on the other side of the bed is a name that claims me. I cannot conjure what I was before that moment: rays slicing through the wood door are knife cuts like the questions on my left wrist. What is a man? […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2pQ7x8j

Nigerian photographer Benneth Nwankwo is working on a documentary street photography project. Titled Nigeria Through the Lens, the project sees him shooting remarkable photos of places in the country. “I’m documenting photographs that champion Nigeria’s culture and diversity,” he explains in an email to Brittle Paper. “I hope to work with a small number of successful artists […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2GkSKJa

  Years ago, the German photographer Jaroslav Poncar told me about running into the legendary French anthropologist Dr. Michel Peissel in Himalaya in the seventies. “People were saying, ‘Peissel is coming! It’s Peissel.’ So I went out to meet them—Peissel and his nice blonde companion,” Poncar added with a grin. Later, in Paris, Peissel and Poncar ended up living on the same street, and Peissel would hang around Poncar’s studio. He was, Poncar said, “a braggart.” Peissel would do things like forget to mention the two mathematicians he met during his seminal travels on the steppes—as if he were the only European to venture so far afield. “And! Michel did not discover that horse,” Poncar had sniffed, referring to an archaic Tibetan breed called the Nangchen, which Peissel is credited with bringing to light. “But the French love horses,” Poncar offered by way of explanation. I didn’t quite absorb his meaning. What he seemed to suggest was that Peissel could be forgiven because the Fren

I. Bibliomancy is a form of divination in which one consults a book for answers and advice. The process is simple: Stand the book up on its spine. Ask your question. Let the book fall open to a random page. With your eyes closed, place your finger on the open page. The passage on which your finger lands contains your answer. Throughout history, sacred texts like The Bible and the I Ching have been prime bibliomantic candidates. The ancient Romans often used the work of Homer and Virgil . I made my first foray into bibliomancy while reading Ronald Johnson ’s ARK for a graduate class on serial poetry. It was partly a matter of coincidence: In “Ark 73, Arches VII,” Johnson references the “sortes vigiliane,” or “Virgilian lots,” the proper name of the ancient Roman bibliomancy by way of Virgil. This was the first I’d ever heard of the practice, and I was curious to try it out. I had another motive, too: I was looking for a way to reanimate the text. ARK is by no means a bori

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, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen.   Dear Poets, I met a boy my first semester of college, and I immediately liked him, but then I watched as he fell in love with another girl. They had everything in common, and he experienced many firsts with her. They dated all through freshman year, then broke up over the summer. Then he and I began dating. We love each other immensely, and we’re even planning a future together. I know bits and pieces of his past relationship, but I’m too nervous/insecure to ask him about it directly. I feel like it shouldn’t matter, but I also want to understand that part of his life. I am experiencing many of my own firsts with him and his ex-girlfriend pops into my head. I find myself jealous and angry and hurt sometimes, even wh

On April 3, The Paris Review  will honor Joy Williams  with the  Hadada Award  for lifetime achievement at our annual gala,  the Spring Revel . In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection,  Ninety-Nine Stories of God . One story and illustration will appear each morning this week.   An original illustration by Brad Holland.   49 One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphize that which is ineffable and indescribable. We can only know what God is not, not what God is. We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing. NAKED MIND   Joy Williams has published ten stories in  The Paris Review.  Her most recent, “ Flour ,” appears in the  Spring issue .  From  Ninety-Nine Stories of

The Carlton Hotel This   sequence f rom   Terry Southern’s 1959 novel  The Magic Christian  was   originally   remov ed  over potential libel concerns. Sometime in the early 1970s, after the release of  The Magic Christian  movie, Terry dusted the piece off, hoping to bring his character,  “grand guy”  Guy Grand, the billionaire trickster ,  back for a series of new adventures, but the piece didn’t find a home. We are publishing it here for the first time.  The   massive   and opulent Carlton Hotel, built in 1909 in Cannes, continues to be a locus-point for celebrities and special events held during the Cannes Film Festival.   About a week after Guy Grand purchased the smart Carlton Hotel in Cannes, excavation work was begun, presumably for the purpose of an elaborate expansion of the lower and ground section of this already magnificent structure. Rumor had it that a vast complex of underground passages and rooms were to connect the hotel with the beach area opposite, thus giving

When I interviewed for jobs after receiving my B.A., the first question was always “How fast can you type?”—a question never asked of the men I sat next to in my classes, who were often offered the management trainee positions I wanted. Needless to say, this was unacceptable to me. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, with a degree in psychology and statistics from UCLA. As early as elementary school, I remember my teacher sending a note home to my parents saying that I was being rerouted into special honors classes. The assumption of college began right then: My mother and my father both made it clear that their expectations for me were high and nonnegotiable. I was excused from most chores to concentrate on bringing home more of “those As.” First would come As, then would come college. I won a scholarship to UCLA and worked summers as an accountant/salesperson in a furniture store. My parents stretched themselves financially to support my education, my mother taki

We are lost cities finding reasons to join our broken aspirations together, a lost elegies uprooting tubers of yam planted by our forebearers, dreams seeking for home and abode to abide by in the nexus of classism. We’ve missed the track created by our ancestral ancestors in the dark days. now, the light created by … Continue reading For The BoyChild: finding home → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2Idehno

Joy Williams in her signature black sunglasses.   Last month, midway through the seven-hour drive between Marfa and Austin, my friends and I sat at a picnic table over burnt winter grass, eating the last of our forty grapefruits and some cold steak whose marbling had turned to candle wax. An old man approached us from some distance, making his way over with difficulty. We waited to be hit up for a handout. He wore suspenders over a neat plaid shirt open to a sunburnt throat, and his eyelids were folded over like dog-eared pages. His white mustache combed the wind, and he called us all ma’am. He’d seen us wrestling our flapping map and had come to point out the landmarks: the dainty bank with Doric columns and plywood for windows, the old hospital, the old hotel, the old pharmacy. Everything was now something else, or shuttered—it was a hipster-free, pre-Marfa situation, a town dying like a tree dies, from the center out. My friend studied the black-and-yellow business card he gave

On its most visceral level, Leila Slimani ’s The Perfect Nanny is about infanticide: “The baby is dead,” we read on its very first line. What could possibly jar after that? But this literary blockbuster ( Chanson Douce , or “sweet song,” in its original French) may be just as startling for how the killer instincts of its “perfect” nanny, Louise, are gradually exposed but never condemned. Nor does Slimani blame mother Myriam for her instinct to abandon her children: “this thought that fleetingly crosses her mind, this idea that is not cruel but shameful…We will, all of us, only be happy, she thinks, when we don’t need each other anymore. When we can live a life of our own, a life that belongs to us, that has nothing to do with anyone else.” The mother’s thirst for freedom rivals the nanny’s hunger for feeling needed by the family she serves—a craving that, untended, manifests in murder. “She has no patience now for their tears, their tantrums, their hysterical excitement,” we are tol