March 11, 2024 At Work “Let Me Tell You Something”: A Conversation with Jamie Quatro By Andrew Martin Jamie Quatro. Photograph by Stephen Alvarez. Last June, the Review published Jamie Quatro’s “Little House”—what appears at first glance to be a quiet, traditional story about childhood and family life. Gentle in tone and careful in construction, it leaves the reader discomfited to realize that the narrator has left the thing that drove her to tell it—the real story—almost entirely unsaid. The story is part of a triptych by Quatro, the second part of which, “Yogurt Days,” was published in The New Yorker; in that story, the same narrator remembers her evangelical mother taking her along as she attempted to save the spirit of a man suffering from a mysterious (to the narrator) illness. The third story, “Two Men, Mary,” published in our most recent Winter issue, completes the triptych, and is itself structured in three parts. Anna recalls herself first at sixteen, working in a frozen yogurt shop, and her first sexual encounters with older men; then, decades later, as a published writer on a plane to a literary conference, who has a rendezvous with the man sitting next to her; and finally, in the present, where she turns to a very different kind of surrender. We exchanged emails about the uses of autobiography in fiction, how these stories came about, and what we are to make of their singular narrator, Anna. Which of the stories in this series came first? Were they published in the order you wrote them? “Two Men, Mary” came first. When I was drafting, I had no idea the story would end up as part of a triptych. “Little House” was the second story I drafted, but chronologically, it comes first, so it’s great that it was the first piece published of the three. In “Little House,” Anna—who narrates all three stories—is looking back on her early childhood and interrogating her relationship with her father and her younger sister, who has accused the father of sexual abuse. After finishing the first two, I realized that I would need to write a third piece foregrounding Anna’s relationship with her mother. That story, ”Yogurt Days,” also wrestles with themes of faith and sexuality. You know, I keep thinking I’m going to write something new, something I’ve never written before. And I keep coming back to God and sex. Read More
March 8, 2024 In Memoriam Remembering Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024) By The Paris Review Photograph by Rae Armantrout. It’s hard to believe Lyn is dead, because her mind, her spirit, if you will, was always so full of life. The last time I saw her, when she was already quite ill, she talked about the comical way the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected commencement speeches, and about what she’d learned about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley faculty. She was still engaged with the world, in other words, despite her situation. She was a very private person, yet she opened herself up to other people and to new experiences again and again. As she says in her book The Fatalist, ”I adventure and consider fate / as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. I recite an epigraph. / It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/disorder) as part of a whole—which is not to say she couldn’t take sides against oppression. She could and did. As a girl, she loved reading the journals of explorers. She was a kind of explorer herself. For example, in the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with other poets and then alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. (And she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was diagnosed with breast cancer some twenty-odd years ago.) She didn’t believe in borders or in endings. As she says in My Life, “But a word is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t think that was a bad thing. It made her curious. She had a unique combination of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. I admire her more than anyone I know. Her generosity was utterly without self-interest; her curiosity was never intrusive. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. When I had cancer in 2006, she helped to organize a kind of private fundraising campaign among friends and sent me several thousand dollars. Because of her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what exactly, but I’ve always suspected she was a major contributor herself. She has influenced countless other poets, but no one else could come close to writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. I was impressed, influenced perhaps, by the way her poetry was, to quote one of her titles, a “language of inquiry.” The first book of hers I read, back in the mid-seventies, was called A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. Back then the consensus seemed to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. But as I’ve said, Lyn didn’t believe in borders. Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her book The Cell presents resistance as a kind of measuring device: “resistance is accurate—it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It is like her to cast resistance as a form of exploration, of appreciation even. That poem concludes with her characteristic humor: “It is not imperfect to / have died.” Those lines strike me with full force now. I want to scream that it is far from perfect that Lyn is dead, but she knew best. —Rae Armantrout Read More
March 7, 2024 Oral History Ten Years without Gabriel García Márquez: An Oral History By Silvana Paternostro Gabriel García Márquez. Photograph by Daniel Mordzinski. Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean. I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. When he died in 2014, I was putting the final touches on the book that came of it: Solitude & Company, my collection of voices about the prankster who lifted himself from the provinces and won the Nobel Prize. A few days after his death, his agent and confidant, Carmen Balcells, told me, close to tears, that the world would now see the rise of a new religion: Gabismo. I was interested in this prediction, as a journalist. And so I kept abreast of the story of Gabo’s life and legacy after he died. His archives were transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, whom he called his sacred crocodile, died. In Colombia, the itinerant school of journalism that he started—the one where I attended his workshop—became the Gabo Foundation. And then there were unexpected developments: in 2019, Netflix announced a series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude—an adaptation he’d sworn would never occur. (Macondo has been rebuilt by art directors somewhere in the interior of Colombia.) In 2022 a journalist reported that he’d had a daughter, who was born in Mexico City in 1990 and whose existence he’d kept secret from the public. And this week, a novel, Until August, is being published posthumously in Spanish, English, and twenty other languages. It’s the story of a forty-six-year-old married woman who decides she’ll have a one-night stand every August 16, the day she makes a solo overnight trip to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried to put gladioli on her grave. I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise. GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA (García Márquez’s nephew): The last time we saw him, his cancer had already metastasized and his memory was affected, but he could still speak and carry on a conversation. He arrived and exclaimed, “When were all these people born?” GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA (poet and journalist): He looked like a lost grandfather—hugging his sisters, his nephews, his family, but still very lost. GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: He was always coming up with these literary and poetic phrases, but at the same time he was just such a prankster. MILAGROS MALDONADO (art promoter and friend of García Márquez’s): He said that what scared him most in life was losing his memory as he aged. I didn’t know that was a thing in his family. GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: He resolved the whole oblivion thing with a hug and a smile, saying, “I know that I love you. I know I love you.” Read More
March 7, 2024 The Revel Announcing the 2024 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prizewinners and Presenters By The Paris Review Photograph of Moira McCavana by Mara Danoff; photograph of Caleb Crain by Peter Terzian. We are excited to announce that on April 2, at our Spring Revel, Moira McCavana will receive the George Plimpton Prize, presented by the 2020 winner, Jonathan Escoffery, and the Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Caleb Crain by Jhumpa Lahiri. Both prizewinners were selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent and recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Isabella Hammad, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, Emma Cline, and the 2023 winner, Harriet Clark. Read More
March 5, 2024 On Psychoanalysis Dead or Alive By Adam Phillips Girl buried with a crown of ceramic flowers, Patras, Greece, ca. 300–400 B.C.E. From the Museum of Patras. Photograph by Fred Martin Kaaby, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue—is something that needs to be assessed—but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it? Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay “Art as Technique” of 1917: Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life … The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater’s remark that “our failure is to form habits,” when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us—and clearly we need reminding—that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it. Read More
March 4, 2024 On Drugs The Institute for Illegal Images By Erik Davis Alien Embrace, ca. 1996. Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades are always drawn; the stairs are rotting; the door is peppered with stickers declaring various subcultural affiliations: “Acid Baby Jesus,” “Haight Street Art Center,” “I’m Still Voting for Zappa.” As in many buildings from that era, at least in this city, the first floor parlor has high ceilings, whose walls are packed salon-style with the core holdings of the institute: a few hundred mounted and framed examples of LSD blotter. The III maintains the largest and most extensive collection of such paper products in the world, along with thousands of pieces of the materials—illustration boards, photostats, perforation boards—used to create them. Gazing at these crowded walls, the visitor is confronted with a riot of icons and designs, many drawn from art history, pop media, and the countercultural unconscious, here crammed together according to the horror vacui that drives so much psychedelic art. There are flying saucers, clowns, gryphons, superheroes, cartoon characters, Escher prints, landscapes, op art swirls, magic sigils, Japanese crests, and wallpaper patterns, often in multiple color variations. Read More