May 30, 2017 At Work The Hipster Pyramid: An Interview with Francesco Pacifico By Adam Thirlwell Francesco Pacifico. Photo: Riccardo Musacchio and Flavio Ianniello The last time I interviewed Francesco Pacifico for The Paris Review Daily was back in 2013, when he published The Story of My Purity. That novel, whose slacker narrator was unusually both Catholic and celibate, was an examination of a certain hipster atmosphere—and in his new novel, Class, Pacifico continues his malicious analysis of that global condition. Class tells the story of an Italian couple in New York, Lorenzo and Ludovica, and the fresco they inhabit: filmmakers, literary scouts, total wastrels … The more I thought about this novel and its dark concerns, I began to realize how Pacifico’s look so beautifully matches his writing’s contradictions. The first time you meet him, with his beard and his smile, you have this sense of a charming bohemian happiness, a man never far from recreational drugs. But as I have come to know him, I’ve learned that his beard is a disguise: it might look like the absolute genial hipster accoutrement, but really it’s the beard of a savage second-century prophet. And in his novels, too, the apparently comical surface will suddenly rupture, revealing its ethical precision, its melancholy soul. INTERVIEWER We finished our last conversation talking about translation. You said, “I loved changing things in the translation … I don’t like the unnatural effort of conveying everything in translation. Choices have to be made.” And now here we have you seemingly translating this new novel on your own. How did you go about it? PACIFICO My editor Mark Krotov and I used the method you and I used when we rewrote an Emilio Gadda story in English for Multiples, the translations issue you guest-edited for McSweeney’s. I would turn up a version where I would convey everything I’d thought of the registers, the way people talked in my novel. It was of course much simpler than Gadda’s. While translating it, I really rewrote it—for two reasons. One is that Class is a book about the way Italian bourgeois are influenced by American culture and language. So I had to turn every conceptual joke on its head. There’s a lot of English in the Italian version, plus an assorted slang of Angloitalian. And there’s a lot of Italian in this English version. The other reason was, I’d gained enough distance from Class to realize the Italian version hadn’t been properly edited—there were a lot of moral asperities that I had to tone down because it was a crazily bleak book. Now my Italian editor and I think we should publish the new version as a paperback. Read More
May 17, 2017 At Work The House of Song: An Interview with Michael Robbins By Daniel Johnson The Overlook Mountain House—near Woodstock, New York—features prominently in “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday.” After his first two collections, Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex, Michael Robbins drew comparisons to poets like Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon. In those poems—with titles like “My New Asshole” and “Pissing in One Hand”—Robbins is concerned for the fate of the whales, and he’s unafraid to spit vitriol about banks, oil pipelines, Xbox, Jesus, Jay Z. He writes about the modern world with such referential range, and such sharpness, that you can almost miss his superhuman command of verse and rhyme, which Dwight Garner has called “dizzying.” Those poems are anchored by constant allusions and tributes to the music Robbins loves. Most memorably, in Alien vs. Predator’s “I Did This to My Vocabulary,” he exclaims the names of heavy-metal bands as Santa Claus roll calls his reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas”: “On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom! / On Motorhead, and Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem!” Two poems published in The Paris Review over the past year, “Walkman” and “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday,” are more autobiographical and ruminative; they seem to follow in the tradition of the New York School. “Schuyler was too tender / for me then,” Robbins writes in “Walkman,” “but now / he is just tender / enough.” It’s this pivot toward tenderness—rich with memories, “beautiful experiences,” secrets, breakups, apologies, Schuyler-esque wishes—that might best characterize the departure from his earlier work. You can hear a little Taylor Swift (Robbins is a fan) in the last lines of “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday”: “Wherever / you are, I hope you stand / still now and then / and let the prayers / wash over you like the breakers / at Fort Tilden that day / the huge gray gothic / clouds massed and threatened to drop / a storm on our heads / but didn’t.” I met Robbins at a café in Brooklyn, where we talked about Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, his book of essays forthcoming in July, and the stylistic shift between his collections and his poems in the Review. INTERVIEWER The two poems in the Review recently—“Walkman” and “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday”—are a radical departure from those in your books. ROBBINS After The Second Sex, I didn’t want to write any more poems in the vein of my two collections. I just didn’t want to be one of those poets who write the same book over and over again. I knew that I wanted to write a different kind of poem. So the first thing I decided, before I knew what I was going to write, was that I wasn’t going to rhyme, and I wasn’t going to worry about meter. Read More
May 11, 2017 At Work Fantasy Life: An Interview with Tabitha Soren By Louisa Thomas Tabitha Soren, Modesto Nuts bull pen, California, 2014. In 2003, Tabitha Soren went to the Oakland A’s spring training in Phoenix with her husband, Michael Lewis, who had just finished writing a book about the Oakland A’s front office, Moneyball, which would be published later that year. Soren brought her camera; she wasn’t a baseball fan, and she thought she would be bored. “I thought it was going to be a pretty place to shoot,” she told me when we spoke over the phone. She didn’t expect that project she began there would take her fourteen years. Back then, Soren had only just begun her career as a fine-arts photographer. She first made her name on the other side of the camera, as the face of MTV News’s politics coverage in the 1990s, then as a reporter at ABC and NBC News. Since she left journalism to become a fine-arts photographer, her photographs have been widely collected and shown. Her latest project, Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream, chronicles the trajectories of twenty-one baseball players who began their professional careers at that spring training in 2003. Ten of them are featured in the book, which also includes a series of linked short stories by Dave Eggers; the larger show will be up at San Francisco’s City Hall from July 20 to January 6. Read More
May 9, 2017 At Work Misplaced Logic: An Interview with Joanna Ruocco By Martin Riker Hilarious, possibly impervious, Joanna Ruocco is, of all the writers I know, the one who writes most purely in order to write—or so I’ve always imagined. I’ve long wanted to ask her about the impetus behind her wonderfully weird assortment of prose, so when I learned she has five books coming out this year—two last month alone—each utterly different from the others, it seemed the perfect opportunity. The Week is a collection of stories that could be the offspring of Padgett Powell’s and Thomas Bernhard’s comic shorter works. From “Paparazzi”: “It is best to be a mediocre person, a person that can be easily replaced. In the succession of generations, there will be many people who think and do what you think and do, and who inspire the same kinds of feelings in other people that you yourself inspire in other people, and you know that it works the other way too, that before you were born there were people who thought and did what you think and do, with adjustments made for available technologies and prevailing opinions.” The Whitmire Case, a novella-length chapbook, is a comic/surrealist detective story about a young woman who “resembles, in form, in spirit, nothing so much as a sourdough starter,” whom one day everyone suddenly fails to recognize. Another chapbook, The Lune no. 12, extracts “The Boghole & the Beldame,” a lyrical account of a witch (I think?) that reads more like an immersive poem. The novel Field Glass, written in collaboration with Joanna Howard, is a grim fragmentary series of what seem to be radio transmissions concerning the inhabitants of a postapocalyptic hostelry. It is fiction in close conversation with theory, starting with an epigraph from Paul Virilio and ending, in the acknowledgements, with the opening of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (“The two of us wrote Field Glass together. Since each of us were several, there was already quite a crowd.”) Last—not least!—Dark Season, written under the pseudonym Joanna Lowell, is a 327-page historical romance novel about an epileptic young woman and a brooding nobleman; it is the fourth romance novel Ruocco has written, under three different names. INTERVIEWER Can we start with the romance novel? Dark Season is the first I’ve read, but in dipping into some others for comparison, I was delighted by how good you are at it, how seriously you take it. Why do you write romance novels? RUOCCO I’m glad you think I’m good at it. One of the rejections I got from an agent who read Dark Season said it was “fourteen times too literary,” which was very funny and specific. It did make me think about literariness—what constitutes literariness as an appealing or off-putting quality in a text—and I realized that I tend to create metaphorical linkages when I write. A metaphor can provide narrative continuity, but it didn’t work in the romance novel. It needed to feel more literal, or maybe more literal, less literary. Anyway, I write romance novels for the money! Or at least, theoretically—I haven’t actually made any money. But I told myself I was writing them for the money. And I like to write them. I like how formally constrained they are. I spend so much time tending to language when I write that it’s fun to be forced by a form to focus on macro-level plot arcs instead—the overcoming of the central antagonism, the libidinal slide from antipathy into desire, all the preposterous barriers to delay the inevitable. In nonromance writing projects, I never want to repeat myself stylistically. I always want to find some new way into sentence making/arranging—that’s part of the project—but this is also why I find romance so pleasing. I get to repeat with variations the same form again and again. INTERVIEWER You’ve written other romance novels under other pseudonyms—Toni Jones’s No Secrets in Spandex is my favorite of your titles—and I wonder why you don’t stick to a single pseudonym. Don’t romance writers build up an audience, book to book? RUOCCO I think they do, and I am always in the process of utterly failing to market myself through those kinds of choices. But the pseudonym is part of the feel of each book for me. Toni Jones couldn’t have written Ghazal in the Moonlight. She’s way too sporty. Joanna Lowell is a good pseudonym for Victorian romance, so I’m going to stick with her. INTERVIEWER In some ways, I think every one of your books should have a pseudonym, or heteronyms, like Pessoa—where part of the point of fake names is to allow you to be an entirely different writer each time. RUOCCO I want that! A new name for every book. I published this steampunk kind of story in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet last year, and I really wanted to publish it as Jo Ruocco instead of Joanna Ruocco because it was much more of a Jo Ruocco story, but then I couldn’t figure out how to ask for a name emendation without feeling crazy. Maybe I’ll publish something as Hildebrand von Schlange. Read More
May 8, 2017 At Work Relationships Normally Beyond Our Knowing: An Interview with Madison Smartt Bell By Andrew Ervin Linear time doesn’t exist in Madison Smartt Bell’s new fever dream of a novel Behind the Moon, at least not for long. The fractured narrative centers on a young woman named Julie who falls into a deep Badlands cave while fleeing would-be rapists. In her liminal, un-, or semi-conscious state, she’s able to interact with the prehistoric paintings on the cave walls. Elsewhere, in interspersed sections, her mother—who gave her up for adoption years earlier—is lured to the hospital to which Julie has been transferred and where she remains in a coma. A shady shaman also steps in to help, or to attempt to. The novel works in disordered and mystical ways. It maintains a remarkable ability to surprise. Bell is likely best known for his trilogy of historic novels about Toussaint L’ouverture and the Haitian revolution and the widely taught craft book Narrative Form: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, but it would be a mistake to snooze on his back catalog titles like Save Me, Joe Louis and Waiting for the End of the World. I find myself going back to his short stories every few weeks, especially those in Zero db and The Barking Man. Over the past three decades, Bell has proven capable of changing direction in his work, but a singular American voice resonates throughout his oeuvre. A. M. Homes has called Behind the Moon “a visceral, full-body primal experience.” Bell cotaught (with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires) the one and only creative class I took as an undergraduate at Goucher College. In a letter at the end of the semester, he wrote to me, “We’ve already gone over most of these stories pretty thoroughly so I won’t go into them again except to admire your patience for painstaking revisions—much greater than mine as a student (or even now, sometimes).” I’m still an obsessive rewriter. Something I wrote in that class formed, many years later, the basis of my first published story, so to claim that Bell’s guidance and inspiration have been foundational to my own writing life would be a vast understatement. But that’s only part of the reason it was such a joy to exchange emails with him about Behind the Moon near the end of April. Read More
April 20, 2017 At Work Real Space: An Interview with Patrick Cottrell By Colin Winnette I think writers attend M.F.A. programs to meet people like Patrick Cottrell—or at least, I did. When we met in our first semester, he was a quietly focused and deeply intelligent student who sat back from the pack as we clamored for attention and support. Cottrell and I began sending each other work, and the constructions of the classroom soon felt secondary. Reading the forceful clarity of his sentences, how they openly wrestle with their influences while still feeling original—somehow both arch and sincere—I knew I was in on a secret that wouldn’t stay hidden for long. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace announces Cottrell’s arrival. A manic detective story about a young woman seeking to understand the suicide of her adoptive brother, Cottrell’s debut novel is prickly, hilarious, and extremely sad. I interviewed Cottrell over the phone, and what was meant to be an hour-long conversation gave way easily to four (and more than 120 pages of transcription). Cottrell talks like he writes—with great authority and considerable anxiety—and I left our conversation as I left his book: feeling electrified and knowing I would have stuck with it for as long as it would have me. Read More