The Paris Review - Fall 2016

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REED I became more accessible when I started collaborating with musicians. I went to this place called the Soul Food Kitchen in Oakland, this black restaurant. They were playing a song I had written for Taj Mahal on the radio. And I said, This is it. I told the guy, the chef who ran the place, that it was me on the radio, but he didn’t believe me. Bobby Womack was performing before forty thousand people in Oakland Park. I told the man standing next to me that Bobby Womack had recorded my songs. He didn’t believe me. And then I saw that George Clinton said Mumbo Jumbo’s one of the best books he’s ever read. He wanted to do a film of it. And Tupac mentioned me in a song, “Still I Rise.” So that’s worth a lot to me. Worth a lot. To see the work appearing in new forms and locations. We just have to keep challenging and breaking up stuff. In art and culture and other places. INTERVIEWER In one of your lectures, you encouraged your audience to “tell your stories, or people will tell them, and they’ll vulgarize and degrade you.” Aren’t marginalized people in a better position to tell their own stories today? Do you think things have gotten better or worse? REED It’s better because of social media, where more voices can get through. Worse because Jim Crow Hollywood and Jim Crow media won’t budge when it comes to diversity, and so black opinion and black images are still manipulated by outsiders. This whole discussion about Black Lives Matter is being conducted and controlled by media people who have little chance of being harassed by the police. Other people tell our stories. I’ve had this ongoing back and forth about the HBO show The Wire. I want David Simon, the creator, to admit that it’s a cliché. He should do something new, like a series about a suburban gun dealer who brings guns into the inner city. Richard Price was also writing The Wire. We were on a panel at a conference in Aixen-Provence together and I got on him. I said, You need to quit writing all these stereotypes about black people. And the audience turned against me. My friend Russell Banks got up, and he said, This is a local issue, you shouldn’t be bringing it up at this conference. But there was an International Herald Tribune on sale at the conference, and it had a big, full-page ad for 60
Reed, 2015. “Combative writing has always been our tradition, even when we try to avoid it.” The Wire. This stuff goes all over the world. Even a movie like Straight Outta Compton, about NWA and LA around the time of the riots. White writers tell our stories, but we have the ability to occupy some of the space. INTERVIEWER You have such a relentless imagination, even after writing so much, in so many forms, over the decades. What is your work routine? REED I get up early in the morning. And I take a lot of notes. I get a lot of ideas when I’m swimming. I swim three times a week. Some psychics ask, Where do you talk to God? For me, the ideas come when I’m in the bathtub or when 61
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HERMÈS BY NATURE
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THE TRENCH BOOT IN HORWEEN® BROWN
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“. . . one of the most influentia
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Editor Managing Editor Web Editor A
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Page 15 and 16: Michael Robbins WALKMAN I didn’t
Page 17 and 18: Crime’s 1976 classic “Hot Wire
Page 19 and 20: the resurrection of the body and li
Page 21 and 22: saying I was glad to help the cause
Page 23: Just think: there was a song that I
Page 26 and 27: name, twice, as though it were bein
Page 28 and 29: So what’s the story about? my mot
Page 30 and 31: eyes that some days seem black—an
Page 32 and 33: Wanda walks into a bar and stands b
Page 34 and 35: designed to fulfill the desires of
Page 36 and 37: Karen Solie A HERMIT Experience tea
Page 39 and 40: Manuscript page of “The Diabetic
Page 41 and 42: some Langston Hughes in the newspap
Page 43 and 44: attic of our house in Buffalo and p
Page 45 and 46: INTERVIEWER What appealed to you ab
Page 47 and 48: children were bombed at the 16th St
Page 49 and 50: INTERVIEWER I know you and Baraka h
Page 51 and 52: Last Stand of White Nationalism.”
Page 53 and 54: REED With literature you can condem
Page 55 and 56: But I do have problems with some fe
Page 57 and 58: tried to get the cash register by m
Page 59 and 60: INTERVIEWER Do you think that over
Page 61: wrote a long essay on James Baldwin
Page 65 and 66: Ishmael Reed THE DIABETIC DREAMS OF
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Page 69 and 70: No Cops ANDREW MARTIN The ants had
Page 71 and 72: his literary status that made him s
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Page 75 and 76: home, and they’d lain on the hard
Page 77 and 78: “Right, like I’m going to just
Page 79 and 80: ONCE THE READING was underway, Lesl
Page 81 and 82: “Just fucking write something,”
Page 83: They followed the exodus out of the
Page 86 and 87: She would start writing when she go
Page 88 and 89: Protectors AMIE BARRODALE She cut t
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Page 92 and 93: Sauce”; “Homemade Natural Fizzy
Page 94 and 95: The door to the guest room opened w
Page 96 and 97: “A Milk-Bone.” “And does she
Page 98 and 99: “Well, maybe. I can’t tell actu
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Page 103 and 104: desire to draw. I would draw everyt
Page 107 and 108: San Rocco, 2004, gouache, 12" x 9".
Page 109 and 110: Drawing Together, 2000, watercolor,
Page 111 and 112: This spread : Quotidian Paradise, 2
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Stations, 1990, oil on canvas, 60"
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The Moment Rethought, 1991, oil on
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Eurydice, 9-16, 1995, gouache, each
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change, continuing ~ look, look aga
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fell soundless on the shadowed snow
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translucent, scouring, churning, ch
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petrels taking flight. They turn to
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everything the river knows? ~ Mired
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to the light below the bridges—wa
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is caught and wound around the boll
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~~~ The river surges, then eddies t
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a line of the river stays true to i
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to the boat turned counterclockwise
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understood, star-crossed, unrequite
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Panthers ANN BEATTIE Little Edgar c
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“Take out the casserole. I’ll b
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Yes, he nodded. Out of the corner o
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“Little Edgar, get your little bu
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“Mrs. Rodriguez, Edgar has been t
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“We live in Key West. My friend w
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“That I could have been attacked.
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He’s maybe going to have to go ba
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“Little Edgar,” she repeated.
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Lawrence Joseph IS WHAT IT IS Fulto
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The Well AKHIL SHARMA We lived frug
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Years passed. We moved from Queens
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Friday’s. “Be careful,” I sai
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just like there was in me. The symp
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Betsy was probably going to end. I
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Rowan Ricardo Phillips LITTLE SONGS
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visit, he gave us keys and allowed
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I knew him warmly, but I did have a
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With my best and not even particula
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of my priggishness. Nonetheless, it
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ecall. It was meant to be George Pu
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This was the era of the Vietnam War
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most of Mao’s works at one time o
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We didn’t talk about poetry much,
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Shall I shut the door on this book?
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elations. I was clumsy, and inexper
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PRYNNE He was a great fountainhead
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this phenomenon of molecular forces
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about Parmenides as an author you c
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ight at the conclusion of the poem,
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Edinburgh, all over the place. On t
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dialectical part of it comes in. It
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Four Poems by J. H. Prynne YET WHY
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MORNING To the or so then for all f
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Marker Studio Front Door, 2012.
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identical to himself ? How do you r
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Kosmos: Red Bath, Zvezda, Moscow, 1
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of kitsch), no dust; the thousands
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Marker Studio #7, 2007.
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Marker Studio #4, 2007.
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Charles Simic HISTORY Our life stor
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CONTRIBUTORS AMIE BARRODALE’s fir
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WWW.HONEYANDWAXBOOKS.COM
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The Paris Review - Fall 2016

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