February 2, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Ezra Pound’s “Exile’s Letter” By Edmund White Li Po chanting a poem, by Liang K’ai (13th century). I’ve loved Pound since I was a teenager. My first lover, Charles Burch, who was a poet himself, used to read Pound to me and swoon over it. I feel that most of our enthusiasms are imitated from people we admire or are in love with, and so this particular poem I used to read to David Kalstone, the great poetry critic and champion of Elizabeth Bishop, who was also my best friend. He introduced me to so much great modern poetry—Merrill, Bishop, Ammons, Ashbery—so I was happy to introduce him to a poem that had so much resonance for us as two friends. Ezra Pound’s beautiful translation of a poem by Li Po, from Pound’s great early book Cathay, is a compendium of all his many gifts. Somewhere Pound says that the ideas in poetry should be simple, even banal, and universal and human; he points out that the chorus in Greek tragedies always sticks close to home truths of the sort “All men are born to die.” “Exile’s Letter” has this universal simplicity (“There is no end of things in the heart”). It is about the sadness of parting from dear friends. As someone who was himself often living far from writer-friends, Pound knew all about the exquisite melancholy of leave-taking. Read More
February 2, 2012 Arts & Culture Document: Happy Birthday, James Joyce By Sarah Funke Butler Image courtesy Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.; document now part of a private Joyce collection in New York. There’s so much to celebrate today, February 2, the birthday of James Joyce. On January 1 of this year the published works of Joyce came into the public domain. What does this mean? It means that scholars no longer need to go to his grandson Stephen Joyce, bowl in hand, begging for a ladle full of text. It means that I can translate for you the above illegible bit of manuscript from Ulysses in Joyce’s hand: By Bachelor’s walk jogjinglejaunted Blazes Boylan, bachelor.In sun, in heat, warmseated,sprawled, mare’s glossy rumpatrot. Horn, Have you the ?Horn. Have you the ? Hawhaw horn. Clearer? Good. Even better, it also means that I can quote you the slightly different published version of this passage: By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot with a flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the ? Horn. Have you the ? Haw haw horn. You see the improvement? Excellent. The irony of Stephen Joyce’s virtual censorship of the work of a man continually at odds with the censors himself has not gone unnoted—especially because Joyce reveled in the thought of perplexing scholars for generations to come. (The censorship that afflicted—if not made—Joyce’s career is also tinged with irony: who among the hormonal pubescent lads you know would have the patience and determination to locate, let alone reread, the dirty bits?) You may recognize this snatch of text from the eleventh chapter of Ulysses, the Sirens episode. Read More
February 1, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Despite protests, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s book comes out. Louisa May Alcott, in love and war. The hatchet job of the year. Shirley MacLaine’s next life: Downton Abbey. Get your master’s in thriller writing. Chaplin, the musical. Adaptationpalooza! The hills are alive with … The Rebel Nun? And other titles that almost were. The art of letter writing. The lost language of stamps. B&N vs. Amazon. Librarians fight back. Shit agents and editors say.
February 1, 2012 Humor The Epigraph By David Parker Milton wasn’t working. The aspiring novelist had already written the perfect dedication (“For my friends”), and he’d long had a list of possible titles, yet he still had no epigraph, the mysterious but meaningful quotation he’d seen at the beginning of every great book. He’d been holding John Milton in reserve for this very situation. When contemplating the epigraph for his debut novel, the writer had always been confident that if all else failed, he could find inspiration in Shakespeare or Milton. For his part, the Bard hadn’t cooperated. A line like “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” might work for a paperback legal thriller, but nothing Shakespeare wrote seemed appropriate for the “Borges meets Zola, if Zola had somehow been influenced by Nabokov” collection of loosely related vignettes set in a fictional megalopolis in an indeterminate near-future the writer hoped to get published by next fall. Read More
January 31, 2012 At Work Lysley Tenorio on ‘Monstress’ By Aria Beth Sloss I first heard of Lysley Tenorio a little more than a decade ago, when his story “Superassassin” came out in The Atlantic. “Superassassin” is the rare work that gets a child narrator right, and it features all of what I now recognize as the trademarks of Tenorio’s work: startling imagery, moments of sadness combined with gestures of heartbreaking intimacy, and an unstinting commitment to character. Monstress, Tenorio’s first collection, is out from Ecco this month. Characters include transsexuals, lepers, healers, and a horror-movie screenwriter named Checkers. Reading about them, you feel, as the narrator of “Felix Starro” says, “that breath of relief that there is someone in the world, finally, who understands what hurts you.” There’s an emphasis in this collection on the power of imagination. The narrator of “Superassassin” is a young boy whose fantasies have started to eclipse reality, and the narrator’s teenage sister in “L’amour, CA” follows her dreams about America and love to an unhappy ending. In “Felix Starro,” the grandfather performs ritual “cleansings” for men and women who believe themselves to be truly healed. What place do you think imagination has in our lives as children and how does that change, or not, as we become adults? I can really only speak for myself. As a kid, I had a pretty good imagination but one that, in retrospect, was fairly systematized to the ways of the world I knew. For example, for years I had a fantasy world on the side, one in which I was a child star who had his own sitcom, was a frequent guest on talk shows, and even had a few cameos on—should I admit this?—Dynasty. Read More
January 31, 2012 Bulletin Last-Chance Bolaño By The Paris Review “Compassionate, disturbing, and deeply felt … tragic and beautiful.” —NPR “A scathing novel with a lot of exuberance to it, not unlike the man who wrote it.” —The Economist “Thoroughly, weirdly absorbing.” —The New York Times That’s what the critics are saying about Roberto Bolaño’s lost novel, The Third Reich, which we serialized with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. Over the course of four issues, we followed the adventures of Udo Berger, a young German who falls into louche company in an insalubrious resort on the Costa Brava—but of course, as a reader of The Paris Review, you know all about it. But maybe you missed an installment. Maybe you left it on the beach. Maybe your sinister uncle stole a copy from your apartment. Maybe you never subscribed at all. Well, kids, you’re in luck. Subscribe now* to The Paris Review, and receive all four installments—the entire Third Reich—plus three more issues to come. All for only $50. That’s right: you’ll receive seven issues, 196 through 202, and catch up on our most popular installments to date. Plus: interviews with Janet Malcolm, William Gibson, Nicholson Baker, and Jeffrey Eugenides; new work by Geoff Dyer, Jonathan Lethem, Frederick Seidel, and John Jeremiah Sullivan; and much more. But don’t delay! This offer only lasts through February 7. *Offer good for U.S. subscriptions only.