Our Correspondents
Little Red and Big Bad, Part 3
By Gabrielle Bell
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Our Correspondents
Little Red and Big Bad, Part 2
By Gabrielle Bell -
Our Correspondents
H.D. Notebook, Part 2
By Anthony MadridHeadnote: Part 1 of this piece appeared here (on The Paris Review Daily), on Wednesday, May 3, 2017. Mr. Madrid originally intended to publish part 2 in June, but lost track of time. You needn’t read part 1 to understand part 2. There is no part 3.
H.D.
❧ 1
Poetry readers who spend a lot of time in used bookstores will have seen some of H.D.’s novels from time to time. They stand out because their titles are unfamiliar, and because they are recently printed books. One does not find old-looking hardcovers.Asphodel. What is that. HERmione. What is that. Majic Ring. The White Rose and the Red. Friends of modernism say: “Why have I never heard of these?”
Before my H.D. project, my assumption was that these books must have been previously judged unfit for publication on the grounds of their containing explicit scenes of girl love. Wrong. None of them have explicit scenes of any kind of love. The only hot-sex bit in any of the H.D. prose I’ve read actually was printed in her lifetime. Privately printed, but printed. It’s in her novella Nights, and it’s woefully hetero. (It’s her and that musician guy, father of her only kid.)
My next wrong thought was that she had written all those books “for the drawer,” just her way of working out her feelings, et cetera. This would have made her a very unusual case: a writer whose prose was private but whose poetry was invariably intended for the public. Most people are just the opposite, but that doesn’t matter, ’cuz she did intend to publish these novels and memoirs—the ones she finished anyway, with maybe like one exception. She sent ’em around or allowed Norman Pearson to send ’em around for her. They just never found takers.
This—or rather the equivalent of this—would not happen today. Or I doubt it. Semi-unintelligible melodramas, thoroughly interesting and impossible to care about, where the point of view is suppressed to the threshold of nonexistence—there are many, many small presses who would be happy to put these works into circulation in 2017. Their mission statements literally say this.
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Our Correspondents
Little Red and Big Bad
By Gabrielle Bell -
Our Correspondents
There Is No Safe Place to Hide
By Anelise ChenAnelise Chen is the Daily’s “mollusk” correspondent. This week, the mollusk worries about how to maintain barriers in a dissolving world.
Camilo Ramirez, Wave. From the series “The Gulf.”
Growing up in Los Angeles in the early nineties, the mollusk had worried often about acid rain. Spawned in Taiwan, on an island choked with lush, photosynthetic matter, the mollusk had felt most at home among wet, squishy kin. Rain was not yet something to fear; she would play in it alongside the snails and polliwogs who lived in the shallow puddles by her house. But after she moved to LA, there was nothing but cars and smog, which clung in the air like the toxic atmosphere on Venus. Eventually, the mollusk learned that the smog precipitated into acid rain, which—her fourth-grade science teacher said—could sear the hair right off your head. The rain was just as acidic as lemon juice, and it had the power to corrode a car’s expensive paint job! Her teacher always seemed bitterly emphatic on this point, as though he had suffered personal losses. He told his students to construct rain catchers out of liter soda bottles and hang them outside. One dark afternoon, the mollusk heard pitter-patter on the roof. When the rain ceased, she ran out with her packet of pH strips. She watched in high suspense as the water absorbed into the strip, streaking it a dark, insalubrious yellow, just like Venus: acid rain. Read More
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Our Correspondents
“Would You Like to Write Something for My Magazine?”
By Anthony Madrid
Leaf from a manuscript of Valerius Maximus.
I actually have two magazines. They don’t exist. Each one is better and more interesting than the other. I am the sole editor, have been from the beginning. There are no copies of either of these magazines. They are famous all over Europe and South America.
Maybe you would like to write something for one of my magazines?
The older of the two, there’s no way you’ve ever heard of it, is called The In-House Newsletter. Some people just call it Book Report. One smart-mouth in Laos calls it What I Did Over My Summer Vacation. No one has ever seen or discussed this magazine in any way. Let me tell you how it works. Read More
