March 4, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Daydream Trouble; Oxford Commas By Lorin Stein Hello! I am a student. During my study time I should put my concentration to to study. But I can’t do it cuz of daydream. What should I do? —Anik Khan Hello there, my distant twin! Isn’t daydreaming insidious? For you it’s study time. For me it’s worst in the mornings. As you get older, everybody tells you, time speeds up; what they don’t tell you is that the time before you get out of bed speeds up to a whiplash-inducing blur, and that your daydreams grow longer and more consuming, like those giant worms in Dune, devouring minutes and hours like so much sand. Sometimes I try to snap out of it by thinking of Marcus Aurelius. He had the same problem we do, two thousand years ago, and would remind himself that dancers and craftsmen lived for their work and “choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things they care for”; the point being, why should he lie there staring at the ceiling (he was emperor of Rome) … but for me this doesn’t usually work. Proust, in his big novel, stands up for the habit of daydreaming: Marcel spends all morning, every morning, just lying there, letting his mind wander from the dreams he had the night before. Few of us have this luxury, at school or afterward. Besides, it can be terrible to feel that you are, in the words of that sad song, dreaming your life away. Just this morning on the way to work, I realized I was talking to myself, daydreaming a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. (I’m telling you, it gets worse.) A friend of mine advises Zen meditation. Several writers I know use stimulants. The trouble is, these tend, very quickly, to make you pretty crazy. In his recent Paris Review interview, Jonathan Franzen talks about his own struggles with distraction: “Cigarettes had always been the way I snapped myself to attention … I’d quit because I’d decided that they were getting in the way of feeling.” There are, of course, other things to be said against cigarette smoking, but I like the way Franzen puts it, because he suggests that distraction, or daydreaming, is part of what it means to have emotions. Your daydreaming self is your feeling self, your passive self. The self that things happen to. Of course you need to make time for your studies. If you catch yourself staring at the wall and dreaming of something you’d like to see happen, or someone you miss, or the way things might turn out, someday, make yourself go back to the book—but my advice is that you not let it worry you too much. Don’t punish yourself. This is one of those cases, I think, in which it is better to negotiate a shaky truce than hope for any kind of lasting victory. Read More
March 3, 2011 Arts & Culture Mr. Mayor? Mr. Mayor? By Thessaly La Force The Armory Show kicked off today. Yesterday, The Daily’s special culture correspondent Jon Cotner was at the fair’s press conference with Mayor Bloomberg. Says Jon, “Reporters kept attacking Bloomberg for his education cuts. Eventually Bloomberg said in desperation, ‘If anyone wants to talk about art, I’m happy to talk about art.’” And so were we.
March 2, 2011 In Memoriam Open City By Lorin Stein We are all very sad to hear that Open City magazine has closed up shop after twenty years of downtown glory. We looked up to them as big brothers- and sisters-in-arms. As Thessaly put it just now, every issue got you on its wavelength—and that wavelength was a good place to be. Open City introduced many of us to writers like David Berman, Sam Lipsyte, Samantha Gillison, and Mary Gaitskill (not to mention Open City editors Thomas Beller, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Robert Bingham). It was the epitome of cool, from its design to the mix of fiction and poetry in its pages to its rent parties (price of admission: one copy). Even the readings were cool—as cool as the Aqua Velva eyes of head editor Joanna Yas. (We hope and trust another magazine will put those eyes to use, and fast.) The good news is that Open City Books will stay in business. The backlist may be small, but with early works by Berman, Lipsyte, Edward St. Aubyn, it is mighty indeed. We look forward to Open City Books’ next publication: Lara Vapnyar’s novel The Smell of Pine.
March 2, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Croissant Not Included By Lorin Stein Johnathan Wilhelmi of Everyman Espresso on 13th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. Wasn’t this a nice morning surprise! Everyman Espresso, in Manhattan’s East Village, is giving away free coffee with every purchase of our winter issue. If you want your local café to stock the Review, tell them to get in touch. We’ll be happy to set them up with an account.
March 2, 2011 At Work Adrienne Rich on ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve’ By Kate Waldman Photograph by Robert Giard. Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. One of the twentieth century’s most exhaustively celebrated poets and essayists, she counts among her many honors a National Book Award, a Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Hass has ascribed to her work the qualities of salt and darkness, praising its “relentless need to confront difficulty.” But Rich’s latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, ranges from dismay to joy, the outraged to the erotic. Over e-mail, Rich shared her thoughts on poetry and power, the search for a more nuanced wartime aesthetic, and the meaning of the “woman citizen.” Let’s start with the title, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. The book has an epigraph from Webster’s Dictionary: definitions of the verb “to serve.” It’s an interesting range of meanings, from the idea of obedient servitude to the authoritative (from law, the military, a prison sentence), to the meeting of another’s needs, to being of use. The title poem begins with an erotic moment registered in a world of torture and violence. It turns, midway, from the sensual and “poetic” to an official grammar, parsing violent policies as you might diagram a sentence in a classroom. The poem was inflected, you could say, by interviews I was hearing on Amy Goodman’s program, Democracy Now!—about Guantánamo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the “renditioning” of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured. The line “Tonight I think no poetry will serve” suggests that no poetry can serve to mitigate such acts, they nullify language itself. One begins to write of the sensual body, but other bodies “elsewhere” are terribly present. Read More
February 28, 2011 Arts & Culture Robyn Creswell and The Angry Arab By Lorin Stein We just came across this interesting exchange between our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, and the blogger known as The Angry Arab. TAA challenged Robyn to name “one important literary book written during the Sadat era.” Click here to see Robyn’s response.