August 14, 2019 Arts & Culture García Márquez’s Five Favorite Cocktail Stories By Santiago Mutis Durán On the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez in Bogotá, Colombia, Santiago Mutis Durán, the son of Márquez’s close friend Álvaro Mutis, gathered together small author-less stories that Márquez had written down or told over the course of his lifetime. Mutis Durán’s essay was originally published in Conversaciones desde La Soledad magazine in 2001 and has been translated for The Paris Review by David Unger. GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ IN HIS HOME IN MEXICO IN 2003. PHOTO: INDIRA RESTREPO. We’ve all heard the kinds of stories that get passed around, author-less and persistent. I once heard Gabriel García Márquez tell the Mexican poet Adolfo Castañón one of these “unsigned” stories: A young couple, a bit tired of city life, decided to move to the country with their two Labradors. Once settled into their little country house, they became friends with their neighbors, a couple that had fruit orchards and raised rabbits. One morning, their neighbors came over to say that they were going to town and would return the following day. The morning passed peacefully, but in the afternoon, the Labradors came into the kitchen with rabbit parts in their mouths. Shocked by this unexpected turn of events, the couple discussed what to do next. After putting the rabbits back in their cages, they returned home, decided not to say anything to their neighbors. They felt disheartened, but went through the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. The following morning their neighbors knocked on their door. Each held a dead rabbit in their hands. Before the couple even had a chance to come up with an excuse over something they had been dreading since the day before and that had kept them awake all night, their neighbors said: “We found them dead in their cages this morning; we’re in shock since yesterday we buried them in the garden.” Read More
August 14, 2019 Arts & Culture What Thom Gunn Thought of Oliver Sacks By Lawrence Weschler Thom Gunn, left, in 1960 at Hampstead-White Stone Pond. Oliver Sacks, right, with his beloved BMW motorbike at Muscle Beach. Courtesy of the Oliver Sacks Foundation. Photo taken from Sacks’s memoir On the Move. Back in the early eighties, when I first met up with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, he was still largely unknown. Though his masterpiece Awakenings had appeared in 1973, it had gone largely unread and was actively dismissed, if read at all, by the medical community, since its layering of nineteenth-century-style case histories ran against the double-blind, quantitative-tracking, peer-reviewed conventions demanded of medical writing at the time. Newly arrived at The New Yorker, I persuaded Sacks to let me attempt to frame him as the subject of one of the magazine’s legendary multipart profiles, and we began to spend a lot of time together. Ever so gingerly, Sacks began to broach a quite astonishing prehistory—how at age twenty, when his Orthodox Jewish mother, one of England’s first female surgeons, first learned of his homosexuality, she had torn into him with hours of “Deuteronomical cursings” (filth of the bowel, abomination, the wish that he had never been born); how a few years later, in the late fifties, having completed his initial medical training at Oxford, he bolted free of homophobic England, like a bat out of hell, racing toward California, where he undertook four years of medical residencies, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, and threw himself into a leather-clad, motorcycle-straddling, bodybuilding, drug-fueled scene. His original impetus for heading to San Francisco, he told me, may have been the presence there of the poet Thom Gunn, who was openly dealing with material Sacks felt he still couldn’t. Sacks urged me to go visit Gunn to get his sense of things, which I happily did, meeting him at an espresso place in the Castro. After I’d worked on the profile for more than four years, Sacks asked me to shelve it: still deeply closeted, and in fact entirely celibate at that point for the fifteen years since he had left California for New York, he couldn’t deal with the prospect of having his sexuality revealed—and I certainly had no intention of outing him if he did not want to be outed. Seven years before his death, after by that point thirty-five years of celibacy, he finally allowed himself to fall in love and be fallen in love with, by the superbly kind and elegant writer Bill Hayes—and indeed a few years after that, Sacks wrote about his sexuality in his late-life autobiography, On the Move. And then, on his very deathbed, Sacks urged me to return to my original intention, to write up the multipart profile I’d been planning to all those years earlier. “Now,” Sacks said. “Now, you have to do it!” At last, the book I produced with his blessing, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks, has been released this week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book includes my 1982 interview with Gunn, which is excerpted below. WESCHLER How’d you first meet Oliver? GUNN I met Oliver here in San Francisco in it must have been 1961, shortly after he’d arrived in California as a medical intern. He rode a motorcycle and called himself “Wolf,” which is apparently his middle name. One time he kiddingly said, “What would my maternal grandfather think if he knew the way I am using his name?” It sounded nicely ferocious. And he wrote a great deal. He wanted from very early on to be a writer, and he kept extensive notebooks. Extensive. I remember at one point there being something like a thousand typed pages of journal. One summer he decided to chronicle the trucking life, had gotten on his motorcycle, which broke down, and ended up hitching with truckers and coming back with a long account of what it was like to be a trucker. Read More
August 13, 2019 Redux Redux: Helpless Failed Brake By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Jorge Semprún. This week, The Paris Review is celebrating the simple joys of bicycling. Read on for Jorge Semprún’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Paulé Bártón’s short story “The Woe Shirt” and Carol Muske-Dukes’s poem “No Hands.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Read More
August 13, 2019 Devil in the Details For the Love of Orange By Larissa Pham Paul Gauguin, Still life with Oranges, 1881 Something odd happened to me in late 2017: I became enamored with the color orange. That fall, I’d met someone, and orange was appearing everywhere, like some kind of hallucinatory sign. It sped by on the side of a truck, flowers in the park, the color of his surfboard. It appeared in past purchases: an orange skirt I bought in the spring, imagining it billowing in the wind, a tangerine wristlet made of pebbled leather. It appeared in poems I wanted to read aloud: Frank O’Hara’s lover in an orange shirt; Ada Limón’s ripening persimmons. I wanted to know what it meant, that I was seeing this color as if for the first time, and why it was suddenly all around me. When I was in high school, in spring—sun out, the world thawing—my friends and I would walk from our campus down to the wetlands, a startling bit of wilderness in the middle of Beaverton, Oregon. There was a pond, and a dock that led out onto it, where you could sit in skinny jeans and kick your legs out over the water. On bright and windless days, the landscape on the other side of the pond was reflected in its surface as perfectly as in a mirror. I loved to sit on the dock and look at the trees dancing on the water, their colored foliage, their leaves precisely outlined against the sky. There was something about the tree line that felt particularly painterly—like something out of an American natural-history landscape, red alder and Oregon ash and western red cedar all lined up in a row. It’s this feeling I return to when I consider the natural world—that awe at its specificity, its many names. It took me a long time to realize that all things are visible, even if my human eyes can’t see them: shingles on a roof, eyelashes on a mouse, leaves on a tree. Naming things is a means of recognizing them, and I’m drawn to flower guides and botanical illustrations the way a bookish child is drawn to a dictionary. I wanted to apply this same kind of naming to the color orange, to understand why it was all around me. Read More
August 12, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Téa Obreht By Téa Obreht In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Our fridge tends to be bursting with bags of fruit and vegetables and arugula that will super-definitely be eaten before it wilts; but on the occasion of this particular photograph, taken the morning after my return from summer in Wyoming (before which a massive clearing-out had taken place), it mercifully boasts just five categories of items. First we have the New Perishables, last night’s jet-lagged bodega haul: yogurt, Dubliner cheese, eggs. Roasted red peppers, for some reason? Basic, utilitarian, devoid of any emotional relevance, destined for immediate consumption. Then there are the Dry Goods—farro, granola, polenta—which, thanks to my conviction that leaving them in the pantry would prompt a full infestation by New York City vermin, spent the whole summer in cold storage. Read More
August 12, 2019 First Person Death Valley By Brandon Shimoda Hiroshige, New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji, 1857. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My grandfather Midori wanted to return, after death, to the desert. He wanted his ashes scattered in Death Valley. On November 9, 1996, we gathered on a hill on the road to Stovepipe Wells. Midori’s ashes traveled, in a clear cellophane bag in a wooden box, by car from Denver, North Carolina, to the airport in Charlotte, by plane to Las Vegas, and by car to Death Valley. We chose a hill and walked up. I had the feeling we had gathered as strangers, that each of us was walking alone. That with Midori’s death we had been particularized by our relationships with him, each of us compelled by what we shared with him, what we did not share with each other. We each found a rock that reminded us of Midori. We built a monument. The monument amounted to a prototypical effigy. The sun was high. My grandmother June was wearing a white turtleneck and jeans. There was a purple cactus with luminous spines. Midori’s ashes were gray, a puzzle cut into a trillion pieces. June scattered his ashes with a spoon. Scattered is not the right word. June dressed the rocks with Midori’s ashes. She planted his ashes, while walking in a circle around them. She released them. Read More