January 17, 2012 At Work Paul Maliszewski on ‘Prayer and Parable’ By Amie Barrodale Paul Maliszewski is a friend of mine. He recently published a short-story collection called Prayer and Parable. Around the end of last summer, I asked him if I could interview him about it. We exchanged questions by e-mail for a week. Several times I said that I was incompetent—forget the whole thing—but Paul reassured me I was doing fine. What I especially like about the book is that Paul doesn’t compromise when it comes to portraying reality. He’s a little like Fellini in 8 ½: he preserves the confusion, meaninglessness, suddenness, and asa nisi masa of the everyday. I have a question that might be a little bit unanswerable. I know you think a lot about individual sentences, and I wondered what makes a good sentence. Am I right in thinking that you give a lot of time to them? I do give a lot of attention to sentences, but mainly because they don’t come out right for me on the first go-round, or the second, or the eighth, or the thirtieth. Revising takes me a lot of time. I drive myself crazy. I’ll just stare at lines. There are sentences in this book where I had a page, back and front, of all the different versions I was at one time trying. One sentence I’m thinking of was not particularly long or complex, but it was at the end of a story, and I didn’t want it to seem too ending-y, or pat. So there I was, scratching out, writing something new, circling back. Reading like that is a hard thing to turn off. I catch myself revising e-mails and I think, What are you doing? When I’m working on a story or essay, if I find something messed up, I make myself start over and read it through again. If I find something else wrong, I start back over, and I keep starting over until I can read it without stopping, until I don’t suffer any doubts. That takes a long time, Worse, sometimes revising one sentence throws things off further down the page. It’s like I’m working on a pipeline and making a repair at one point, and whatever fix I make feels right, but it twists things around so that they get gummed up later. Read More
January 16, 2012 Arts & Culture Document: Manuscript Pages of ‘Great Expectations’ By Charles Dickens In the 1830s, the Reverend Chauncey Hare Townshend, suffering from various maladies, began to develop an interest in mesmerism, the cult of hypnotism that was then enjoying considerable popularity in Europe and which was said to possess healing powers. Townshend studied under Dr. John Elliotson, a leading practitioner of mesmerism who helped establish University College Hospital as well as the city’s Phrenology Society. In 1840, Dr. Elliotson introduced Townshend to another of his brightest students: Charles Dickens. Read More
January 16, 2012 Books Ways and Means By Sadie Stein Many people engage in dubious experimentation in their youth. Some get involved with intravenous drugs. Others sleep with problematic men. A few tattoo their faces. I, for my part, went on a spree when I was nineteen of cooking exclusively from a 1917-era cookbook. The book, A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband (with Bettina’s Best Recipes), might sound vaguely titillating. It’s not. ATWtPaH, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron, is the story of Bettina and Bob’s first year of marriage. The fictional, surnameless couple, who populate a series of domestic vignettes (with menus and recipes), seems to live on the outskirts of an anonymous American city where Bob does … well, some kind of office job. It’s 1917, but apparently no need at all to mention the War. My copy is a yellow hardcover I acquired at a long-ago church sale; it’s illustrated liberally with images of mischievous chef-cupids and periodic thumbnail sketches of the newlyweds. By the time we meet the pair, on their first night in their brand-new, cozy brown bungalow, the honeymoon is over—literally. When the happy-go-lucky Bob suggests dinner out, after they disembark from the train, he’s treated to the following: “I’m ashamed of you! We’ll take the first car for home—a streetcar, not a taxi! Our extravagant days are over, and the time has come to show you that Bettina knows how to keep house!” Read More
January 13, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Slanderous Correspondence; Imitations By Lorin Stein I take great and perverse joy in reading insulting, inflammatory, and slanderous correspondence between authors, publishers, and celebrities. Could you recommend some particularly bilious rivalries? As Mr. Wilson so justly proclaims in the beginning of “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” we are indeed old friends. I fully share “the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation” that he says he feels for me. In the 1940s, during my first decade in America, he was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapaest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches. So begins the famous response, by Vladimir Nabokov, to a negative review by Edmund Wilson in The New York Review of Books. The book: Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. A fun game to play: Exactly where does Nabokov start to show his teeth? Is it “the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels”? Or “not necessarily pertaining to his profession”? Or even that “justly” in sentence one? Six years later, when Norman Mailer was attacked by Gore Vidal in that same magazine, Mailer took his case to the masses—on The Dick Cavett Show—with less sinuous results. The lesson, most publishers will tell you, is never respond. But it’s awfully good TV. I am taking a beginning poetry class and am expected to write imitations of poets on the class list. What should I be careful to do or not do? What should I pay attention to in an imitation? To get the most out of the exercise, try to make the meter sound exactly like the meter of the poem you’re imitating. And make sure the teacher checks your work. The meter will look and sound right to you—and if you are a beginner, it will almost certainly be wrong. (You will say your words out loud in your head as if they marched along ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, when in fact they will go baah-duh-dee, buh-dee-doo.) Don’t get hung up on matching the vocabulary of the old poems. You won’t get it right, and it will sound fake. Use words that are more or less natural to you. And have fun! Read More
January 13, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Keith Haring’s Journals, ‘Library’ By The Paris Review I could spend days nosing around the Guggenheim’s online publication archive. The museum has digitized a number of its rare and out-of-print publications and made them available for free. What bounty! Even in black and white, the abstract compositions in the 1940 catalogue for “Art of Tomorrow,” one of the Guggenheim’s first shows, still look revolutionary. —Nicole Rudick Of the many books I received over the holidays, the only one I have read cover to cover is the new edition of Keith Haring’s Journals. Self-analytical but never narcissistic, the artist writes insightfully about art, death, and his generation: “It’s not an easy time to be alive and maybe an even more difficult time to die.” —Artie Niederhoffer I moved to Berlin when I was twenty-one, just out of college, and I laughed aloud in recognition when Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in his forthcoming A Sense of Direction, described living in the city as “an infinitely long weekend with your parents out of town … The old crimes licensed you to ignore the claims of the past; the low cost of living licensed you to ignore the demands of the present; and the future was something that would happen when we moved back to New York, where many of us would once more live in uncomfortable proximity to our actual parents.” —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I’ve been reading Tom Clark’s blogging on Vanitas—check out “Clean.” —Sadie Stein I can’t help but admire Trong G. Nguyen’s Library. Since 2007, the New York–based artist has been rewriting books, word for word, on individual grains of rice. Very little is lost in translation. —Eliza Martin I’ve been very distracted by Letterheady today. Gertrude Stein and Ray Bradbury both had particularly appealing stationery. —Emma del Valle If you’re interested in multifaceted companies, read Interview Magazine’s chat with Jean Touitou, the founder of A. P. C. clothing. Touitou is a sharp man, and he sheds light on his journey to the top. He began his career in fashion at age twenty-six, about which he says: “Basically a man at twenty-six is like a woman at sixteen … An adolescent.” —Jessica Calderon
January 12, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” By Robyn Creswell Thomas Sayers Ellis. Most of the poems stuck in my head are rap songs. Rap is the music I grew up listening to, and the lyrics from those days, the late eighties and early nineties, have stayed with me. I’ve forgotten most of the poems I had to memorize at school; of Keats’s “To Autumn,” I remember only the famous lines. On the other hand, Big Daddy Kane’s “Smooth Operator,” Rakim’s “Mahogany,” or Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind”—these are poems I know by heart, from beginning to end, and will probably never forget. Some people don’t believe raps are poems. They have a point. On the page, arranged into lines and stanzas, raps lose most of their appeal. I’m grateful to Bradley and DuBois’s enormous Anthology of Rap, if only because I now know what Raekwon is saying on “Triumph” (which doesn’t mean I understand it: “The swift chancellor, flex, the white-gold tarantula / Track truck diesel, play the weed, god, substantiala.” Can I get a footnote?). But when raps are spelled out like this they lose their fluidity, their life in three dimensions. Rap is not monotonous, though it is almost always composed in couplets and four-four lines. But the good songs always surprise you, leave you wrong-footed, put the emphasis or rhyme where you don’t expect it. There is no doubt that Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” is a poem, but it is one of the few that feels to me like a rap—an especially good one. This is because of the way it establishes a pattern and then continually breaks away from it. The poem is based on the repetition of or, but as we read through it, what seemed like a formal constraint becomes a principle of transformation, a hinge that keeps flexing. The poem begins, as I read it, by riffing on the either/or logic of identity questionnaires (“You could get with this, or you could get with that,” as Black Sheep once put it, in a different context). But it quickly ramifies into geography, history, poetics. Read it out loud a few times and you might find you already have it memorized: Read More