March 4, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Daydream Trouble; Oxford Commas By Lorin Stein Hello! I am a student. During my study time I should put my concentration to to study. But I can’t do it cuz of daydream. What should I do? —Anik Khan Hello there, my distant twin! Isn’t daydreaming insidious? For you it’s study time. For me it’s worst in the mornings. As you get older, everybody tells you, time speeds up; what they don’t tell you is that the time before you get out of bed speeds up to a whiplash-inducing blur, and that your daydreams grow longer and more consuming, like those giant worms in Dune, devouring minutes and hours like so much sand. Sometimes I try to snap out of it by thinking of Marcus Aurelius. He had the same problem we do, two thousand years ago, and would remind himself that dancers and craftsmen lived for their work and “choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things they care for”; the point being, why should he lie there staring at the ceiling (he was emperor of Rome) … but for me this doesn’t usually work. Proust, in his big novel, stands up for the habit of daydreaming: Marcel spends all morning, every morning, just lying there, letting his mind wander from the dreams he had the night before. Few of us have this luxury, at school or afterward. Besides, it can be terrible to feel that you are, in the words of that sad song, dreaming your life away. Just this morning on the way to work, I realized I was talking to myself, daydreaming a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. (I’m telling you, it gets worse.) A friend of mine advises Zen meditation. Several writers I know use stimulants. The trouble is, these tend, very quickly, to make you pretty crazy. In his recent Paris Review interview, Jonathan Franzen talks about his own struggles with distraction: “Cigarettes had always been the way I snapped myself to attention … I’d quit because I’d decided that they were getting in the way of feeling.” There are, of course, other things to be said against cigarette smoking, but I like the way Franzen puts it, because he suggests that distraction, or daydreaming, is part of what it means to have emotions. Your daydreaming self is your feeling self, your passive self. The self that things happen to. Of course you need to make time for your studies. If you catch yourself staring at the wall and dreaming of something you’d like to see happen, or someone you miss, or the way things might turn out, someday, make yourself go back to the book—but my advice is that you not let it worry you too much. Don’t punish yourself. This is one of those cases, I think, in which it is better to negotiate a shaky truce than hope for any kind of lasting victory. Read More
February 25, 2011 Ask The Paris Review To Marry a Writer; Houellebecq’s Latest By Lorin Stein I’m remarrying at “a certain age.” My mother once said “You’d make some man a lovely wife if you weren’t a writer.” We can chortle at this or, do you think, we can agree that to have a life partner, male or female, hunkering down on a subject, translating perception into the written word, is difficult to live with à la longue? And how can we be authentic but also companionable in an acceptable key? —Jane Merrill First of all, felicitations and lots of luck. I think living with somebody, à la longue, is pretty tricky no matter what he or she does for a living. So they tell me. The downside of writers, I gather, is that they spend all day alone (which makes them slightly crazy by supper time), suffer from writer’s block (ditto), and by and large are not much help when it comes to paying the rent. But many of you are such good company! And you ask such good questions! If you discover the golden mean of authenticity and companionability, I hope and trust you will let us know. (Maybe in your next book?) Last year, I first read of Houellebecq in The Paris Review, whose Whatever and The Elementary Particles I loved. Currently, I’m enjoying Le Tellier’s Enough About Love. Can you recommend more contemporary French fiction in English translation? Also, is there a time line for an English translation of Houellebecq’s latest? —Peter S., Saint Paul, MN I treasure Houellebecq, but I’m having trouble finding a critical opinion, in English or in French, that can really explain and defend the merit of the work. Any suggestions, links? Who are the best French critics nowadays? —Alex Peter S., the latest issue of The Review of Contemporary Ficton is devoted to the publisher P.O.L.—source of much that is new and original in French letters today. I think it will interest you. One P.O.L. author, Édouard Levé, appears in our spring issue. (You will recognize him as the real-life source for the character Hugues Léger in Enough About Love.) According to Houellebecq’s American publisher, The Map and the Territory is scheduled to appear in spring 2012. And while we’re on the subject: Alex, check out Ben Jeffrey’s essay in The Point and Sam Lipsyte’s in The Believer. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
February 18, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Grown-up Writers; Reading Parameters By Lorin Stein Is there an age requirement in submitting to magazines? I am seventeen years old, and I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was thirteen. I feel like I am ready to submit my work to publications like The Paris Review. But it seems like the normal age to be published these days is your forties, and no offense to those writers, but I think when teens hear about a young-adult novel or material of that nature, it would be nice to also know that it was written by an actual teen. (And I don’t think we should have to go to a teen magazine just for that.) So why is the norm so close to the forties and fifties? Is it really for the maturity of the work? If that’s the case I think I would fit in without a problem. —T Oh, T! I remember feeling exactly the same frustration. Unfortunately—and it is unfortunate, when you’re sitting there waiting for high school to end—grown-ups enjoy two big advantages over teenagers, when it comes to writing: They know what it’s like to be a kid—and also what it’s like to be older. (It is constantly surprising, how different it is to be older.) And they just have more practice writing and reading. They know which rules it’s okay to break and when to break them. Nothing teaches you that but time and practice. If I were you, I wouldn’t turn up my nose at the teen zines. But to answer your original question, I don’t think there’s any age requirement for submitting to grown-up publications. And if there is, to hell with it—that’s a rule you should go ahead and disregard! Read More
February 11, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Distorted Sexuality; Winking Etiquette By Lorin Stein What would you recommend as a good, raw novel/short story about characters with distorted sexuality? —Shira, Israel Distorted—such an interesting word! If I understand your question, you’re looking for fiction about characters who feel that their desires have somehow been bent out of shape, whether by life or by something native to them. That describes many of Mary Gaitskill’s protagonists, for instance the two heroines of Two Girls, Fat and Thin, or the narrator of Veronica. Dennis Cooper’s early novels are full of this kind of anxiety—books like Closer, Frisk, and Guide. But maybe you’re thinking of another kind of story, like Lolita, where sex acts as a distorting lens for the narrator—but the reader sees clearly. You will find that sort of dramatic irony in Evan Connell’s Diary of a Rapist or Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. You might also enjoy Lydia Davis’s story “Story,” about how hard it is to think straight when you’re unhappy in love. As the title suggests, it’s one of the oldest stories in the book. I just read a blog post about why sending someone a “wink” on a dating Web site is stupid. This seemed like a reasonable argument to make. But then the blog writer went on to say that in real life, it is “totally unacceptable” to wink. The guy said that if you wink at a stranger in a bar, the stranger would call the police. Is that true? Or is it sometimes okay to wink (in real life)? Should I save it for specific situations? (Which ones?) —Georgia You should believe only half of what you read on the Internet. To my knowledge, winking is neither illegal nor actionable in any county that permits the sale of alcoholic beverages. (I haven’t surveyed the rest.) Like the eye roll, the wink is a gesture of complicity. Between friends, it means you share a secret. Between strangers, it means you wish you had a secret to share. You should—you must!—wink whenever the spirit moves you. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
February 4, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Read, Write, Drink; Do You Tweet? By Lorin Stein At which New York City bars can one sit, read, write … and drink? Yes, all at the same time. —Charlie As you may have noticed, lower Manhattan has many more hospitable bars than hospitable cafés. This is especially true of my neighborhood, the East Village. The first novel I ever edited, I edited in the back room of Botanica, on Houston Street, where the Knitting Factory used to be. The music is loud enough that you don’t notice it, and the chairs are grouped to discourage conversation. My old favorite bars for reading, the Spring Street Lounge and the International Bar, have both undergone renovations and are hopelessly changed. Ever since the smoking ban, Holiday has reminded me depressingly of the National Cathedral: a Gothic church with a department-store smell. (A smoke-free bar still puzzles me, in my heart.) Also Stefan, famous for stirring the drinks with his finger, is dead. The Old Homestead, where my friend Jason had his nose broken with a cue stick, and where I read Dennis Cooper’s novels and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and first read Frederick Seidel’s Going Fast, closed years ago. It was a strange bar, but very good for reading most of the time. Apart from the pool table, they had a small black-and-white TV, which sat on top of an old bureau and never had the sound on, a jukebox, and a cat who was sweet on everyone. The two most regular customers were a transvestite, who always sat alone and often fell asleep, and a middle-aged Czech dental assistant named Jan. Otherwise, the clientele was mainly Polish, mainly male, and mainly drunk. All ages were welcome, from the visibly preteen to the ancient. The Old Homestead was the first place in America I ever saw Żubrówka; the two gentle matrons who ran the place kept a contraband bottle under the bar. The Homestead was replaced by one of those “Irish pubs” with the wide-screen TVs. Lately I’ve been reading at Jimmy’s 43, on Seventh Street, beside the electric heater. Read More
January 28, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Writers Obsessed with Writers; Fancy Magazines By Lorin Stein I love books, like Nicholson Baker’s U & I and Ian Hamilton’s In Search of J. D. Salinger, that are as much explorations of one writer’s obsession with another as the critical studies or biographies they purport to be. Can you recommend anything else in this vein? —Anonymous Can I ever! First, if you haven’t read it yet, get hold of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. A sample: Looking back it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of D. H. Lawrence; on the other, it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray it was meant to delay and alleviate. That is sentence one. Things go, hysterically, downhill from there. Read More