March 28, 2024 Syllabi Syllabus: Diaries By Jhumpa Lahiri Lahiri at Boston University, where she attended graduate school, in 1997. “I’ve kept [a journal] for decades—it’s the font of all my writing,” Jhumpa Lahiri told Francesco Pacifico in her Art of Fiction interview, which appears in the new Spring issue of The Paris Review. “That mode, which involves carving out a space in which no one is watching or listening, is how I’ve always operated.” She described a class she recently taught at Barnard on the diary, and we asked her for her syllabus for our ongoing series; hers includes a wide range of texts which all carve out that particular, intimate space. Course description What inspires a writer to keep a diary, and how does reading a diary enhance our appreciation of the writer’s creative journey? How do we approach reading texts that were perhaps never intended to be published or read by others? What does keeping a diary teach us about dialogue and description, or about creating character and plot, about narrating the passage of time? How is a diary distinct from autofiction? In this workshop we will evaluate literary diaries—an intrinsically fluid genre—not only as autobiographical commentaries but as incubators of self-knowledge, experimentation, and intimate engagement with other texts. We will also read works in which the diary serves as a narrative device, blurring distinctions between confession and invention, and complicating the relationship between fact and fiction. Readings will serve as inspiration for establishing, appreciating, and cultivating this writerly practice. Read More
March 27, 2024 Notes from a Biographer See Everything: On Joseph Mitchell’s Objects By Scott Schomburg Photograph by Therese Mitchell. Courtesy of Nora Sanborn and Elizabeth Mitchell. A black-and-white photograph, three and a half by five inches, shows a figure in profile—a silhouette in suit and hat, alone on a giant heap of demolished buildings far above the cathedral tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. I found it in a stack of photos stored inside a small envelope with a handwritten label: “NY Downtown, Summer 1971.” The man’s expression is hidden, but his stooped posture and tiny scale against the massive pile make the picture feel lonely. His eyes are fixed on something beyond the frame, but the longer I studied it, the more I could see him staring at the Twin Towers, which, though unfinished, had reached their full height. The man in the photo is the writer Joseph Mitchell, who was then in his early sixties, or “well past what Dante called the middle of the journey,” as he wrote in his notes. From 1938 to 1964, he published legendary profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker, mostly portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of the city. By 1971, he was a stranger to himself. Increasingly he wandered the city by day and at night, surprised by the intensity of his emotion. The beauty of commonplace images—“a sunflower growing in a vacant lot”—had become almost unbearably moving to him, and sometimes he stared for a long time at certain old buildings in the city, trying to understand why he felt so drawn to them. For more than three decades, the story goes, he went to his office at The New Yorker on West Forty-Third Street almost every day, worked behind his closed door, and never submitted another story. But unpublished fragments—notes, drafts, letters, photographs, and found objects—attest to another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he noted, he worked as hard as he ever did. In his published stories, he preserved lives that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, then he gathered objects from their threatened worlds. Mitchell couldn’t find one single way to describe what had changed—he called it “living in the past,” “living with the dead,” “living as in a dream, or, I might as well say it, as in a nightmare”—but he claimed to know the exact moment when he metamorphosed into an obsessed collector. Read More
March 26, 2024 Writers' Houses With Melville in Pittsfield By J. D. Daniels View of Mount Greylock from Herman Melville’s desk in Pittsfield. Licensed under CCO 4.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The fictional Pittsfield, Massachusetts, native Mack Bolan first appeared in Don Pendleton’s 1969 novel The Executioner #1: War Against the Mafia. A self-righteous vigilante (“I am not their judge. I am their judgment”), the by-now-lesser-known Bolan was the inspiration for the popular Marvel Comics antihero Frank Castle, also called the Punisher, who made his debut in 1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man #129 and who has been played by Dolph Lundgren, Thomas Jane, and Ray Stevenson in three movies and by Jon Bernthal in a recent Netflix television series. (Season one, episode one: Castle is reading Moby-Dick.) Bolan’s and Castle’s origins are not the same. Castle’s family was murdered by the mob—that’s how the red wheel cranks into motion, that’s his permission to kill. But Bolan’s story is different. His father gets in debt to the mob, gets sick, and falls behind on loan payments. His sister, Cindy, starts turning tricks for the mob to help pay off her father’s debt. When Bolan’s little brother finds her out, he tells their father. Their father shoots his son, Bolan’s brother, wounding him, then kills his wife and daughter, Bolan’s mother and sister, before killing himself. War Against the Mafia begins with Bolan turning away from the fact that it was his own father, not the mob, who murdered his family. Given that Bolan was from Pittsfield, where Herman Melville lived from 1850 until 1863, and given that Castle in 2008’s Punisher: War Zone snarls in a church, “I’d like to get my hands on God,” and given that “War Against the Father” could be another name for the satanic Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby-Dick as a murderous revolt against God the Father, it was no surprise to me that these overlapping references filled my head as I drove toward Pittsfield through blinding sleet. “You Are At 1724 Feet Highest Elevation on I-90 East of South Dakota,” said a brown sign near Becket, Massachusetts. Hence my elevated thoughts. Read More
March 25, 2024 Revisited A Conversation with Louise Erdrich By Sterling HolyWhiteMountain Photograph by Angela Erdrich. The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interview series has been a hallmark of the magazine since its founding in 1953. These interviews, often conducted over months and sometimes even years, aim to provide insight into how each subject came to be the writer they are, and how the work gets done, and can serve as a kind of defining moment—crystallizing a version of the writer’s legacy in print. Of course, after their interviews appear in our pages, many writers just keep going, and their lives undergo further twists and turns. Sometimes, too, there are gaps and omissions in the original interviews that can become clear as time goes on. This is part of why we’re launching a new series of web interviews called Writers at Work, Revisited. The first will be an interview by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain with Louise Erdrich, who was originally interviewed for the magazine in 2010. *** Americans have most often viewed Indians through an anthropological lens; the desire to understand us through difference overtakes all else and creates a permanent distance between the seer and the seen. It is the oldest story in America, and over time has exerted such pressure on Indians that we’ve become explainers nonpareil in every facet of our lives—our fiction being no exception. Once you see it you cannot unsee it; the sheer amount of explaining directed at non-Native readers that takes place in Native writing is remarkable. The best of us, though, continue to do what good writers in this country have always done: produce fiction that is more in conversation with the aesthetic lineage of English literature than any particular audience or political question. From the start Louise Erdrich’s writing has had this quality, and her large body of work is a lodestar for the Native writers who have come after her, showing us how to write past America’s ideas and expectations about Indians into places both more tribally specific, and more human. Her work acts as the primary bridge between the writers of the Native American Renaissance—N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko—and the explosion of Native writing currently taking place. Her characters, regardless of their culture or history, remind us of that great paradox of humanity, that we are all profoundly different, and very much the same. Perhaps most importantly her work reminds us that good fiction is made up of good sentences. I had expected, because of her lack of public presence, to meet a writer who was something of a recluse. When I finally made it to Minneapolis, however, I found her to be open, self-effacing, funny, generous, and troublingly up-to-date on the politics of the moment—in both America and Indian country. She was also familiar to me in that way Indians are regardless of what tribe or geography they come from. She spends most days, when she is not traveling to various parts of the Midwest for familial and ceremonial reasons, working in her bookstore, Birchbark Books, one of the finest independent bookstores in the country. The store is the only one of its kind: owned and curated by a major Native writer, run by Native employees, where you can find a copy of Anna Karenina a few feet from abalone shells and sweetgrass. Louise was gracious enough to take time from her usual day of working in the back office to talk with me in the basement of the store. —Sterling HolyWhiteMountain Read More
March 22, 2024 Writers' Houses Looking for Lorca in New York By Zain Khalid Federico García Lorca at Columbia University, 1929. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For a son of the titular city, reading Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother’s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, my mother is thoroughly racist and takes every opportunity to remind me, her sometimes destitute child, about the silent cruelty of money. “At least you got to leave,” I want to tell him. “Imagine being stuck with her for the rest of your life.” He would likely understand my irrational attachment; after all, he was so consumed by Spain, its art and its politics, that his country would go on to swallow him whole. Still, it is crucial for those of us with this sort of umbilical tether to unwind it and test how far it might stretch. In June 1929, following a voyage on the sister liner of the Titanic, Lorca arrived from Spain by way of Southampton, England, to New York, a city he would immediately call a “maddening Babel.” The poet was thirty-one, nursing his wounds from a breakup with a handsome sculptor, Emilio Perojo, whom Lorca maintained used him to gain access to the art world. Lorca had also become estranged from a pair of his Spanish friends and contemporaries, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and felt hemmed in by the success of his most recent work, Gypsy Ballads. He wrote, “This ‘gypsy’ business gives me an uneducated, uncultured tone … I feel they are trying to chain me down.” With the help of his parents and at the urging of Fernando de los Ríos, a law professor and friend of the family, Lorca enrolled in a summer program at Columbia University. For the better part of a year, in room 617 of Furnald Hall, and then in room 1231 of John Jay Hall, he would write Poet in New York. The language is hallucinatory and toxic, peyote laced with sulfur: pigeon skulls lie in corners; cats choke down frogs; blond blood flows on rooftops everywhere; tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires. V. S. Pritchett wrote about the book: “What we call civilization, [Lorca] called slime and wire.” Read More
March 22, 2024 On Things A Well-Contained Life By Isabelle Rea Photographs courtesy of the author. What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness. The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers. Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up. One of the best ways to understand containers is to imagine a world without them. We would have piles. Bracelets, creams, stick-shaped kitchen items, fruit. Small things would get lost under big ones. Or, an alternative: a line of items that snakes through an apartment or house, up and down stairs and spiraling into the center of the room. When you want to find something, you simply walk along the line of items, confronting each individual thing. Read More