March 9, 2021 At Work Language Once Removed: An Interview with Sara Deniz Akant By Lauren Kane Sara Deniz Akant. There’s something special these days about a phone call. A particular kind of listening happens when you’re not watching faces on a screen or coping with the internet connection but instead focusing just on the voice on the other end of the line. Sara Deniz Akant is a poet whose ear is especially attuned to disembodied voices, whether they be documents from long ago or the memory of her mother’s singing. As a result, so many of Akant’s poems feel alive with multiple speakers, though they are playfully mysterious characters. Her collection Parades (2014) sent me to my old Latin reference books, but in vain. Everything I recognized was not quite what I’d thought, a familiar ancient sound slightly muddled on its way to the twenty-first century. The poems in Babette (2016) are also deft explorations of meaning that toggle between their own lexicon and one you can translate. Akant’s two poems in the Winter issue of The Paris Review are just as convivial, with voices fading in and out of focus. It’s tempting to say her process is about acting more as conductor or clairvoyant than as poet, but at the same time, Akant speaks about days spent writing in her spare office with an academic’s clear articulation about everything from research to how to recognize the end of a poem to the perks of living between languages. Throughout our telephone conversation earlier this year, Akant and I discussed how one’s own language can linger in notes until it becomes like the voice of someone else, how marginalia can mingle with text, and the creative boundaries of word processing. INTERVIEWER Can you remember what first sparked your interest in literature? SARA DENIZ AKANT I was forced to memorize and sing poems in grade school, and I think just having all of that language set to music was pretty influential. Also, my mom would walk around the house singing songs, and singing the wrong words to them. There was one about a sinking ship called “The Golden Vanity.” And my grandfather would sing to me in Turkish—for example, “Fış Fış Kayıkçı,” a nursery rhyme. But I mark in my mind one particular moment in retrospect, because at the time, I certainly wasn’t thinking that real people were writers. One year I got really sick, and I stayed home from school for a few days and had all these fever dreams—I called them “voices in my head.” That’s the origin of my feeling, for the first time, like a writer. In my mind, there’s the fever dream time, and then I dabbled in it until I was twenty-one or twenty-two and taking a class called Poetry in the Present during my last semester of college. It was a small seminar taught by Anselm Berrigan. We mostly read New York School poets. I was really moved, and everything kind of fell out in front of me. I didn’t have any other plans after college, and so I found this passion in the last moment. Read More
March 2, 2021 At Work Showing Mess: An Interview with Courtney Zoffness By Lynn Steger Strong Like so many books, for so long now, I read Courtney Zoffness’s Spilt Milk while mostly isolated with my family. I’ve spent much of this year thinking about what books are worth, why any of us keep bothering. I felt disconnected from fiction that seemed too invested in its own intelligence to engage with characters’ flaws or vulnerabilities. In this time, Spilt Milk enacted a particular sort of magic on me. It’s nonfiction, memoir, a series of essays, unabashedly interested in the quotidian. As a mother, Zoffness worries that her child worries too much, just as she used to and still worries. In another essay, Zoffness, as a freshly minted M.F.A. student, finds herself doing research for the memoir of a Syrian Jew because she needs a paycheck, and so begins tracking the persecution and forced departure of ten thousand Jews from Aleppo. Yet another essay centers on raising her young white son in brownstone Brooklyn, a son who is obsessed with visiting the police precinct close to their home, and the arrival of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. What Spilt Milk helped me to remember was how intimate books can feel, at a time when intimacy feels so hard to come by; a single consciousness unfurling through all the spaces that lack easy resolution, willing to lay itself bare. It’s a strange time for all of us, trapped as we are in our own ways, so relentlessly isolated and afraid. Books are not a cure, and yet books like Spilt Milk remind me that there is a way to feel closer to other people, to feel intimate with them, to see all the ways the individual is so often the surest path to understanding the universal. INTERVIEWER One of the things that I sometimes find challenging, or just less true-feeling, about nonfiction is its desire to land somewhere specific. I think so much of life is messier, more about questions than answers, than this idea suggests. You do a gorgeous job of giving us the satisfaction of an essay that feels whole and nourishing while allowing for ambivalence and uncertainty to still feel alive at the end. I wonder if you could talk about how you think of endings? How do you know your pieces are finished and how do you think about the sense of understanding you want your reader to leave with? ZOFFNESS Endings are so deceptive. That final period gives the illusion of resolution or conclusion when my thoughts and feelings on nearly every subject and experience in Spilt Milk remain unresolved. I think that one of the aims of an essay is to ask questions, not necessarily answer them, and I try to embed this spirit of inquiry in each piece, to be transparent about my own internal conflicts or uncertainty along the way—whether over parental choices or astrology or my feelings about other people. I want to show messiness. This approach hopefully trains readers not to expect a resolution, but it can also make it harder for me to discern the right endnote. Several of these endings gelled through trial and error. Read More
February 17, 2021 At Work Sliding into Patricia Lockwood’s DMs By Julia Berick If navigating the internet were an Olympic sport, Patricia Lockwood would sweep the medals. She is not a coder or a programmer (though surely she could be). She doesn’t live in the internet but upon it. She sails along on trends and tweets, a fisher of men, understanding, as she writes, that “everyday their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once.” As the tides shift, she is always one twist ahead of the internet’s dangers, such as overexposure and cancellation. We here at The Paris Review are often made aware of her one important question we have yet to answer: Lockwood is not only the quiet queen of twitter, she is also a poet, memoirist, sublime critic, and her first novel is on sale this week. I spoke to Patricia Lockwood about her “internet novel” No One is Talking About This over direct message on Twitter, which was something like interviewing Scorsese on the set of Gangs of New York, or something like Scorsese interviewing Fran Lebowitz in front of the World’s Fair Panorama of New York. Unlike Lockwood, the internet overwhelms me. It always has. Lockwood caught COVID-19 in early 2020 and is still suffering from nerve-related difficulty with her hands. She had to ask me to slow my typing because my blank terror at awaiting a response on any messenger app, a form of communication detached from facial expression, intonation, and occasionally context, sends me into a frenzy. I was embarrassed but not surprised to betray myself. Lockwood knows how to cast an astral projection on the Web, while most of us (read: this interviewer) are still tapping the bloated backside of a desktop PC trying to find our way “inside the computer.” Lockwood’s novel is about a woman who navigates the internet with such perfect ease that she becomes an Internet-ese celebrity expert asked to speak about the internet to audiences around the world, what it is and what it means. The protagonist of No One is Talking About This describes the feeling that the internet “was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals, cheer at bullfights, call little kids Pussy as a nickname, believe in fairies or mediums or spirit photography, blood purity or manifest destiny or night air, did not lobotomize her daughters or send her sons to war, where she was not subject to the swells and currents and storms of the mind of the time—which could not be escaped except through genius, and even then you probably beat your wife, abandoned your children, pinched the rumps of your maids, had maids at all. She had seen the century spin to its conclusion and she knew how it all turned out.” The first part of the novel is told from so deep within the internet that it is almost vertiginous, but Lockwood never loses control. Then, the protagonist steps out of her element and into the real-life concerns of her family. Lockwood’s novel is in two distinct parts: there is the era before her niece’s genetic condition becomes clear, and the after. I slid into Lockwood’s DMs to ask her about the novel, her screen names of yore, the Zoom cat, and I snuck the conversation back, once or twice, to the terra firma of her astute literary criticism, which seems to be a third language in which Lockwood is fluent. @juliaberick: Hello, Patricia! Thank you for agreeing to an interview by DM. I felt it would add a note of authenticity to this interview if we scheduled it for 2 A.M., but quarantine is strange enough. @TricaLockwood: Hi Julia! Let’s do this little old thing DM hogs, in the chat @juliaberick: Can I start by asking what the last DM you got was before this one? I’m interested in what it’s like to be very online and have open DMs. @TricaLockwood: Looks like it was a red heart on a koala picture I sent to John Darnielle. @juliaberick: Does one receive bundles of dick pics? Cornucopias of dick pics? @TricaLockwood: Yeah, I’m not sure why I left them open. I have always been more inclined to openness; I like to hear about things. Occasionally people will DM to say thank you for a poem I wrote, or that they named their cat after Miette—I would miss those things if I were locked down. I don’t get all that many dicks, really. A few textual wangs, here and there. But Twitter also hides “suspicious content,” so I don’t click on pics if there’s a warning. @juliaberick: Thanks, Twitter. You met your husband online—is that right? Does that change your idea of “strangers on the internet” do you think? Like maybe the masses are actually friends waiting to be made, husbands waiting to be wed, instead of just faceless analytics? @TricaLockwood: Maybe. Or maybe I met my husband online because of this quality, because my mind was ALREADY so open that anything could fall in. Including—my god—a Man. @juliaberick: HA There are theories that online dating is changing the gene pool, because people can self-select more readily for partners, and that this is especially true for those who might have been too shy to meet folks irl—though perhaps your story with your husband disproves them. I just think about how the internet is changing the way we mate. @TriciaLockwood: I don’t know about that—our case might actually support those theories. Because we never had kids! No chance to SMell EAch OTher beforehand. @JuliaBerick: HA Okay good point Did you keep any of your early conversations? @TriciaLockwood: Sorry, can you see my typing ellipses? I’m probably typing too slow but I’m having problems with my hands. I didn’t actually—all those love letters lost like gorillas in the mist. They’re locked up somewhere in a Hotmail account, I think. If you want to keep something safe on this earth, put it in an old Hotmail account. @JuliaBerick: Sorry ‘bout your hands. I can see the ellipses! I’ll slow down. I learned my typing speed from trying to capture the heart of a 14 yo boy on the AIM and I’ve never recovered composure. It’s not great now that I Slack my colleagues all the time. Someone with the right skills and the right pleather can probably liberate those love letters for you at some point… @TriciaLockwood: Spandex, probably. It’s a privilege, not a right. Did you ever capture the boy on AIM? @JuliaBerick: Not at all @TriciaLockwood: Hahahahaha @JuliaBerick: I must have put up the wrong away message after all Can you remember one of your early screen names? @TriciaLockwood: Oh yeah I’ve got a great one. fruitandcake. Does this ring any bells? @JuliaBerick: Hahaha @TriciaLockwood: THE FIG NEWTON TAGLINE. MY BRAND WAS INTACT FROM AN EARLY AGE. @JuliaBerick: That is truly impressive The entire time I was reading the novel, I pictured you like the oracle of Delphi. @TriciaLockwood: A CARYATID WITH WHITE EYES—sorry caps lock was still on My toga pouring like a fountain Oracles is also a very “online word,” though I don’t know how many remember that The training program for oracles is the same as it is for vestal virgins, except they switch out the snatch and the eyes. In my opinion. @JuliaBerick: HA I had a friend who asked everyone he met for a year, “would you rather do ___ celebrity with a snatch in the middle of her stomach or with three eyes?” This seems relevant But okay a real-ish q I’ve read that you revised the first section of the novel, in the first months of the pandemic, to add in things that had happened since you began writing. What didn’t make it into the novel that you wish had. The cat lawyer? The QAnon Shaman? Can you even believe the cat lawyer? @TriciaLockwood: AH, I actually tweeted this one. It’s the Perfect Dinosaur Butthole. That should have made it. @Juliaberick: They changed something in the matrix @TriciaLockwood: Exactly. You can smell some uncanny difference. Berenstain Bears. @Juliaberick: I think that if we were meeting in person, I would have said 25 minutes ago that I cannot believe how brilliant the novel is, except that I can, because your work is fabulously, uncannily exquisite @TriciaLockwood: Thank you! Yes, all these interviews would be so changed if we were able to do them in person. There’s been a sense of grief throughout the process, in fact, and I think that’s the reason. @Juliaberick: Your recent review in LRB of Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults also basically wiped out my brain and replaced it—it was so newly correct. It also made want to think about your novel differently About how both Twitter and (forgive me) autofiction make the writer the HERO. The manipulator. Do you think that is true at all? Does Twitter change Lenu’s into Lila’s? @TriciaLockwood: I loved doing that review—I felt limerent the whole time I was working on it. It’s been my constant companion ever since the election, up through the Georgia runoffs, up through the insurrection. The entire time I was doing my promotional push, it’s all I was thinking about. I was like, stop asking me all these questions! I’m considering the problem of Alfonso! No, a Lenu can’t be changed into a Lila. It’s a leopard/spot situation. But also Lila identified Lenu as *someone like her,* which is easy to forget. She takes her by the hand because there IS some likeness, some ruthlessness that she identified—the ruthlessness that will eventually write the story. That’s why one critical approach to them considers them as parts of each other. This is not quite right, I think. Lila identifies something animal in Lenu, some scent that is like hers. @Juliaberick: Even if what is animal in Lenu is only her desire to be like Lila Hmm @TriciaLockwood: One temptation with a book like this, the book I wrote, is to make the protagonist both right and good. To position her on the correct side of every issue. To go back and revise in the light of further information, to elevate her. Lenu talks in one of her bookstore Q&As about how we must not become “policemen of ourselves,” while at the same time tailoring everything she says to some standard of Nino’s. Nino, that little fuck! Twitter is certainly a place where this can happen—where we issue proscriptions while at the same time tailoring our speech to different audiences within the stream. Sorry that was all a mouthful. God knows I took approximately One Thousand Pages of notes on all these themes. @Juliaberick: I think one interesting thing about your protagonist is that she is aware of how useful it is to be nimble, to move more quickly than the morality of the internet. She exists above all the morass of offending and being offended. There is also her canny sense of how to bring her internet skills to the real world. When she sees a geneticist who is conspicuously excited by how rare the baby’s condition is, instead of being pained, she thinks, “Messy bench who loves drama.” It’s a quick phrase that puts the doctor in a place where she can do no real harm. In some ways she is absolutely without moral standing, maybe because she stands so centered in the slipstream. @TriciaLockwood: Yes, her soul is not a moral soul, it is an attentive one, a white beam of observation. But nimbleness within the portal is also ruthlessness. It is what keeps you ahead, what keeps you out of other people’s teeth. Yet in the second half of the book the protagonist is surely thinking, to what end? What did I believe was chasing me before? Why was I practicing this agility, what was I adapting to? Has it given me the muscles for what I’m now experiencing? Has it given me the language, the ability to listen, the cry? Does it allow me now to lift and carry a human life? To some extent she finds that it did, that whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for these moments. @Juliaberick: In that way, the novel really sadly/eerily presages the pandemic: a stark medical reality has pulled a lot of people out from their less conscious routines. Did you see people around you asking themselves those questions this year? Recognize it? @TriciaLockwood: I did. I think that’s true, though I also think the internet been a crucial way for people to connect this year. At times we’re all biting each other like the Donner Party, but it still has been crucial. But for me, I got COVID in March, and that threw me out of the portal in another way—I had a lot of neurological symptoms, and I developed Howard Hughes–level nerve pain in my hands. So first I couldn’t really read and understand what was happening online, from spring all the way through fall. And then I couldn’t use my trusty finger, my little ET pointer, to scroll in the same way. @Juliaberick: I sincerely hope you are feeling better. My partner hid the fact that you had COVID from me until we started to feel better from our own. He knew I would have been very worried for that ET pointer. @TriciaLockwood: Hahahahaha @Juliaberick: We had like a nothing case We just ate ramen and groaned at each other But for a minute there I was sure it was the end @TriciaLockwood: Yeah, did your body Prepare to Die? Everyone I’ve talked to, even people who had mild cases, experienced a moment where their Bodies Prepared to Die. @Juliaberick: I prepared to defend my sanity. My gentleman was like: But are you sure its COVID? (I’m a rampant hypochondriac.) And it was an ENORMOUS moment of intellectual crisis, because I was like, can I really be crazy enough to be making this up? And then he got it too and I had only enough energy to say “see” and then moan like we were the Ingallses in the part of Little House on the Prairie where they all get diphtheria @TriciaLockwood: My husband and I both experienced that too and we really were on death’s door, down on all fours and crawling from room to room. I think it’s because at that point you just couldn’t get tested, and doctors really did treat you as if it was an INCREDIBLY REMOTE POSSIBILITY that you might have it. Which is insane—at that point thousands of people a day were dying in NYC! @Juliaberick: We were in NYC And my doctor was saying don’t get tested, the ER is a battlefield from which you will never return @TriciaLockwood: Right. Like we really didn’t feel we could go to the hospital. @Juliaberick: I guess I did prepare to die Now that you mention it I had blocked it out @TriciaLockwood: Perhaps because the body was encountering something absolutely new, for the first time in a long time. I found it interesting later. @Juliaberick: I’m finding it interesting now. It is the total surrender everyone is always talking about. While you were sick, did you have religious feelings you thought you had lost track of? (I was going to have my final question be about something else. But COVID just fills the brain.) @TriciaLockwood: No, nothing of the kind actually. But I felt returned to my childhood in the most visceral possible way. My dreams were hyperreal and populated with my oldest friends and most ancient episodes. I actually recovered memories, as if some path in the brain had been set on fire. In a way it was DOPE AS HELL. @Juliaberick: I know what you mean. I don’t want to keep you past an hour. Please carry on promoting this masterpiece and lighting my brain on fire from the spires of the LRB. And… I’m sorry that we at The Paris Review have kept you waiting on that review of Paris. @TriciaLockwood: NO, I never want to know! Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.
January 13, 2021 At Work Being Reckless: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard By Lydia Kiesling Read an excerpt from In the Land of the Cyclops here. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest release, In the Land of the Cyclops, is a collection of essays and reviews translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken and published in the United States by Archipelago Books. The title essay, first published in a Swedish newspaper in 2015, is an enraged response to a critic who asserted that Knausgaard’s depiction of a relationship between a teacher and a student in his first novel was pedophiliac. Knausgaard argues forcefully that explorations of all human impulses are necessary, and touches on many of the themes that have lately become associated with his body of work: Nazism—which forms a central plank of Book 6 of My Struggle—identity, literary freedom. While Knausgaard is a writer who is provocative in both the scope and the theme of his work, his politics resist neat categorization: “All my books have been written with a good heart,” as he puts it in this essay, perhaps conveniently. And despite the provocations of its title essay, the book is really a cabinet of Knausgaard’s curiosities. His interests lie in visual art, destabilized reality, meaning, and perception. There are pieces on topics as disparate as the photography of Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman, the perfection of Madame Bovary (“Madame Bovary is the perfect novel, and it is the best novel that has ever been written”), and Knut Hamsun’s Wayfarers. The Bovary essay seems to contain the key to the collection, to the extent that there is one: Knausgaard describes Flaubert’s book as a novel “which is about truth and which asks what reality is.” About Francesca Woodman’s photographs, which he first dismissed, he changes his view: “Why did I find Francesca Woodman’s photographs, youthful as they were in all their simplicity, so relevant now, while those great paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suddenly and completely seemed to have lost their relevance to me?” A review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, a novel by an author who is a byword for outrage, is about “an entire culture’s enormous loss of meaning, its lack of, or highly depleted, faith.” The pandemic poses problems for book tours, and Knausgaard, according to his publisher, hates Zoom. We corresponded via email at the dawn of 2021. INTERVIEWER The title of your new collection is used as a derisive descriptor for Sweden. Sweden also appears at length in Book 6 of My Struggle, as a figure of scorn for what you describe as its failed, hypocritical social policies. In America, on the Left, there is a fantasy of a sort of single, undifferentiated “Scandinavia” that has wonderful social programs and proves that capitalism can exist along with strong social supports. But during the pandemic, Sweden made choices that did not seem to be in keeping with that reputation. How does the pandemic response align with or recalibrate your ideas about Sweden? KNAUSGAARD I would say that there was a certain one-eyedness in Sweden’s approach to the pandemic. They did it their own way without looking to other countries. Even when the death rate in the country was ten times higher than that of the neighboring countries, they continued to do it their way. Having said that, we don’t yet know for sure why some countries have been hit harder by the pandemic than others. But Sweden’s approach wasn’t out of character for sure. Read More
January 11, 2021 At Work Ways to Open a Door: An Interview with Destiny Birdsong By Claire Schwartz The spectacular present-day emergencies have inspired calls for art that responds to the moment, that speaks to the now, that lays claim to a particular kind of relevance. Emergency authorizes presentism, even as a virulent strain of presentism has everything to do with the emergencies we are facing. In this way, emergency casts the solution in terms of the logic of the problem, which guarantees the problem’s endurance; there is no out from this place. It feels, then, like a vital recalibration when I encounter Destiny Birdsong’s poem “Pandemic,” which is definitely not about COVID-19, and remember that language holds a history—and that history enters the present whether I recognize it or not. Throughout her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, from Tin House, Birdsong reminds you that if you offer deep attention—if you are precise and specific and careful—you will end up exactly where you need to be, which is to say: you will learn something about where you already are. The poems in Negotiations attend to a series of concerns—sexual violence, autoimmune disease, anti-Blackness, artistic genealogies, the nourishments and injuries of kinship—but it would be more accurate to say that the poems in this collection expose the entanglements that have long existed, so that to name one site of encounter is necessarily to summon others. Birdsong’s poems reveal the ways that so many borders—nation, race, gender—are structured to maintain hierarchies of allegiance and care. In “400-Meter Heat,” which departs from the 2016 Olympic race where Bahamian sprinter Shaunae Miller-Uibo secured a narrow victory over American Allyson Felix, Birdsong writes: “I’m saddest whenever two black women are competing // because I never know who to root for, / and I’m arrogant enough to believe my split loyalty // fails them (which makes me more American again).” To notice is not only to reflect; it is also to register possibilities. The emergencies of the present are scored through with the fault lines of the past. Birdsong’s poems transform as they touch. From our respective quarantines, Destiny Birdsong and I spoke over FaceTime about the complications of metaphor, embodied histories in language, and the possibility of curses. INTERVIEWER Negotiations has two epigraphs. Terrance Hayes, “What moves between us has always moved as metaphor,” and TJ Jarrett, “The worst has already happened to us, she said. / What good is metaphor now?” Would you say a bit about your relationship to metaphor in the context of this project? BIRDSONG I grew up in an environment where metaphor worked very strongly. Because there were certain things that people just didn’t talk about outright, metaphor became a way to sustain relationships that were complicated, or very tender. Also, people said horrible things to me because I had albinism. Those lines from Terrance Hayes really spoke to the way I grew up—afraid of language in a way that made metaphor a safe space. I read TJ Jarrett’s poem, “At the Repast,” a little later, at a moment in my life when that aversion to transparency just wasn’t working. I had to come to terms with things that had happened to me. I realized how dangerous it can be to refuse to say a thing. I had to call things what they were. In the poems, I’m always toggling back and forth between those two worlds. Read More
October 15, 2020 At Work Escaping Loneliness: An Interview with Adrian Tomine By Viet Thanh Nguyen Adrian Tomine. Photo: Susan De Vries. Adrian Tomine and I were both English majors at UC Berkeley in the nineties. We undoubtedly roamed the corridors of the English department in Wheeler Hall at the same time, along with the future actor and fellow English major John Cho. We were all dreaming of telling stories or being in stories, and I wish there were some alternate past in which we all hung out and encouraged one another and said, Go for it, dude! I would have been a fan of Tomine’s work back then, given how much of a fan I’ve been of his work since his early Optic Nerve comics. I have all of his books, which is more than I can say for almost any other writer. He’s a natural storyteller who brings together a clean line in his drawing to fit the spare lines of his stories. He’s also a master of the short form, from anecdote to short story and short novel. As someone who has suffered through writing a collection of short stories, I can testify that simply because a form is short does not mean it is easy. If anything, short forms are harder because the storyteller has to be concise and must know what to leave out as much as what to leave in. Tomine knows what to leave out. The absences in his work, from what is not drawn and what is not said, make the presences stand out even more vividly. One thing absent from much of his earlier work was his status as an Asian American, which he begins to gesture at in his midcareer efforts, such as the story “Hawaiian Getaway” and the hilarious Shortcomings. What is refreshing about his approach to Asian Americans is his lack of sanctimony. Instead, he treats Asian Americans with his trademark astringency and satire. I’m all for it. I love my fellow Asian Americans, but our necessary convictions and beliefs can easily turn into pompousness and a painful lack of self-awareness. As someone who is both inside and outside of Asian America, Tomine sees through and draws from these blind spots, mixing sympathy with skepticism in just the right dose. Now, in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Tomine returns with the storytelling style his fans have come to expect, but here he foregrounds his own Asian American life. Not that being Asian American exhausts the meanings of his life or his art—far from it—but it is one meaning, and he extracts a lot of humor from it, the way a dentist extracts a tooth. There’s some numbness and pain involved, but if there’s blood, you, the patient, and now the reader, don’t see it. This is the terrain of microaggression, sublimated response, and understated ambition that Tomine explores with the precise touch of a dentist gazing perpetually into a mouth, doing the crucial work of the quotidian. It’s lonely work, indeed, but by dwelling for so long and so thoroughly in the loneliness of his art, Tomine brings us close, terribly close, to the halitosis of being human, to the emotions we might prefer to keep at a distance. INTERVIEWER What do you like to be called as an artist? TOMINE I’d probably say “cartoonist.” But if I’m meeting my wife’s extended family and they want to say, Oh, we heard you’re a graphic novelist, then I’d happily go along with it. INTERVIEWER In a review of your previous book, Killing and Dying, Chris Ware said you write comics for adults. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about the work you engage in. Is that frustrating? TOMINE Compared with how frustrating it used to be, it feels like we’re living in a fantasy world. Even ten years ago it was so different. Now there’s a pretty good chance that if I meet someone and tell them I’m a cartoonist or a graphic novelist, they’ll be interested and polite, as opposed to being confounded or put off or, like, protecting their children. The most interaction I have with random people is through my kids’ school. And in Brooklyn, it’s almost a boring, conservative job, like, Oh, he’s a graphic novelist? Well my dad’s a full-time protestor—or something like that. INTERVIEWER There’s a funny episode in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist where you’re the dad at your kids’ school getting asked to do show-and-tell about your work. And you do a poop sketch. But some brat tells the story to their parents, and then you’re humiliated by this email to all parents saying, “There was an incident today … ” TOMINE I probably made it sound much worse than it really was. Read More