November 12, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Drinking Away Writer’s Block; Favors for Friends By Joshua Cohen This week “Ask The Paris Review” received a number of doozies, including a question about writer’s block. It occurred to us we should kick that one over to a real writer—ideally, a voluble one. Joshua Cohen, author of Witz and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, was kind enough to share his good counsel. —Lorin Stein I have been unable to write for the past three weeks, bordering on a month, and it hurts. More than the act of writing ever did. It hurts. More than the pain I no doubt cause others with poor literary attempts, but I’ll have to go selfish on this one, even if it is poor writing, I’d rather that than just blinking. So, do you have any tips or a potent elixir to kick writer’s block? Thank you. —Ayat Ghanem Dear Ayat, Glengoyne is a superior single-malt whisky distilled from barley that’s dried by air and not by peat smoke. This unique process results in a spirit whose oaken, sherry, banana, apricot, peach, and marzipan nose contrasts pleasingly with—who cares? You don’t want to read bad tasting notes; you want to make better notes of your own—n’est-ce pas? Thing is, there’s no single cure for the Block (this is what serious writers call it; cf. the Clap, the Syph, the Herp). And the reason there’s no single cure is that there’s no single type of Block. The Block can be daylong, or weeklong; it can last for years (Truman Capote) or decades (Ralph Ellison, Henry Roth). I can’t think of any other writers just now. Hold on—let me top myself off. You might take comfort from the fact that while writing can’t be forced, time spent not writing can be put to good use. Try acquiring other skills, like rolling cigarettes or reading. Learn to differentiate between scotch and bourbon. Learn the differences among corn whiskey, rye whiskey, and wheat whiskey. Learn what, if anything, separates whisky from whiskey. Ayat, take comfort from the fact that a writer does not always have to write—and not all scotch comes from Scotland. Of course alcohol is only effective if it’s mixed—not with juices or sodas, you understand, but with narcotics. Speed weekly and hallucinogens monthly. Though the existence of ADD/ADHD has never been scientifically proven, the drugs developed to address these disorders very much exist and are excellent: Ritalin, Adderall. Dextroamphetamines and regular amphetamines go together like love and marriage, like a horse and carriage … what was I saying? Let me just swallow these. OK. One second. Swall … owed. Finally, Ayat, don’t discount the two greatest cures for the Block: plagiarism and suicide. Good luck! Read More
November 12, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mahmoud Darwish, Neutral Milk Hotel By The Paris Review Photograph by Amarjit Chandan. Journal of an Ordinary Grief, by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, is a mixture of memoir, history, dream dialogue, and political polemic. Originally published in Arabic in 1973, it has now been translated for the first time into English by Ibrahim Muhawi (who also translated Darwish’s genre-bending memoir of the Beirut war, Memory for Forgetfulness). Darwish’s prose is a miraculous, quicksilvery substance, slipping from lyricism to analysis to Beckettian humor in the space of a paragraph. His subject is Palestinian life under occupation, and this is one of those rare works able to register the complexities of that experience while also being politically and artistically uncompromising. —Robyn Creswell This week I read my favorite essay ever on (what else?) Michel Houellebecq. It’s by Ben Jeffrey, and it can be found in The Point, a Chicago magazine devoted to literary and cultural criticism. I just took out a two-year subscription. —Lorin Stein I picked up Montauk, the slim novel by Max Frisch, at the recommendation of a young writer. I’m now obsessed. Frisch’s writing has a way of sticking in my head, and, I’ve discovered, slipping into my dreams. —Thessaly La Force Read More
November 12, 2010 Arts & Culture What Bloggers Owe Montaigne By Sarah Bakewell Portrait of Michel de Montaigne, c. 1570 The weekend newspapers are full of them. Our computer screens are full of them. They go by different names—columns, opinion pieces, diaries, blogs—but personal essays are alive and well in the twenty-first century. They flourish just as they did in James Thurber’s and E. B. White’s twentieth-century New York, or in the nineteenth-century London of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it. No end—but there was a beginning. The essay tradition blossomed in English-speaking countries only after being invented by a sixteenth-century Frenchman, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. His contemporary, the English writer Francis Bacon, also used the title Essays, but his were well-organized intellectual inquiries. While Bacon was assembling his thoughts neatly, the self-avowedly lazy nobleman and winegrower Montaigne was letting his run riot on the other side of the Channel. In his Essais (“Attempts”), published in 1580 and later expanded into larger editions, he wrote as if he were chatting to his readers: just two friends, whiling away an afternoon in conversation. Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he said. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.” His writing followed the same wayward path. In doing this, he rejected almost every literary virtue the French were to hold dear for the next few hundred years: clarity, rigour, beauty, and elegance. Yet his rebellious style gave him immense appeal to British, Irish and American authors. For more than 450 years, they took inspiration from Montaigne and his meandering charms. Read More