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
October 14, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 29 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive selection below. “This week we continue our serialization of Edward P. Jones’s ‘Marie,’ a timely story from our archive about a tough-minded woman who seeks connection while facing the challenges of aging and bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. If you missed part 1, you can read it here and then scroll down for the next installment of the story. We’ll post parts 3 and 4 in the coming weeks. Don’t forget that subscribers to the print magazine need only link their account for digital access to a treasure trove of stories, poems, landmark interviews, art portfolios, and more. As ever, we wish you a safe and sane week and hope that this story provides focus, calm, and a bit of relief. Read on for part 2 of ‘Marie,’ by Edward P. Jones.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Photo: © Peter / Adobe Stock. Nothing fit Marie’s theory about life like the weather in Washington. Two days before, the temperature had been in the forties, and yesterday it had dropped to the low twenties, then warmed up a bit with the afternoon, bringing on snow flurries. Today the weather people on the radio had said it would warm up enough to wear just a sweater, but Marie was wearing her coat. And tomorrow, the weather people said, it would be in the thirties, with maybe an inch or so of snow. Appointments near twelve o’clock were always risky, because the Social Security people often took off for lunch long before noon and returned sometime after one. And except for a few employees who seemed to work through their lunch hours, the place shut down. Marie had never been interviewed by someone willing to work through the lunch hour. Today, though the appointment was for eleven, she waited until one thirty before the woman at the front of the waiting room told her she would have to come back another day, because the woman who handled her case was not in. Read More
October 14, 2020 First Person Slow Violence By Lynn Steger Strong The US Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC. The day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings two years ago, I was applying thinly sliced yellow-dyed marshmallows in the shape of daisies onto cupcakes for my daughter’s sixth birthday party. I’d been watching Christine Blasey Ford speak—I’d moved from the couch to the floor—but I’d turned the TV off around the time that Lindsey Graham appeared to start crying. I went running. I was angry. Worse than angry: I had that feeling that I’ve felt so often the past four years—but also, my whole life—that what was happening was deeply wrong, and that was why it was happening, and that was just the way things were. Running, I tripped on something and I fell, hands and elbows first, on the hard dirt. I got a nasty gash on my left arm. I smashed the lower half of my phone. I got up, though, and kept running. My elbow stung, burned, but I didn’t stop to look at it. I felt the warmth of blood, a few drips on my fingers. It was only later, back at our apartment, that I saw how wide and deep and bloody the cut was. I showered quickly, and poured half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my arm. I put on the short-sleeved shirt I think of as my mom shirt. It was humid, mid-September, but I put on a cardigan to cover up the blood. I put the cupcakes into a cupcake carrier. I put the cupcake carrier into our old stroller and walked them to my daughter’s school. I listened to the hearings as I walked. I was shaking by the time I got to our daughter’s first-grade room. The party was for all the kids with September birthdays and another mom read a book to all the kids. I sat quietly in the back. When it was my daughter’s turn to walk six times around the sun, I stood up. I had begun to sweat and I pulled the sleeve of my cardigan up over my elbow. I saw another mom blanch at the site of my cut, avert her eyes, and I pulled the sleeve back down. We clapped and sang as my six-year-old danced around in circles. My daughter wanted me to bring her home with me but I left her there. I sat on someone else’s stoop close to the school until it was time to pick her and her sister up. Rattled is what I felt, rickety. Standing there, clapping, trying to smile. A low roiling under everything. The burn, but also the shame, the mess and gore, but also the absurd stupidity of that cut stuck now to the cardigan’s thin wool. I was glad about the gash, though. I did not want to show it to those other mothers I did not know, but I talked about it to friends. It felt like proof that something happened that day, a concrete marker for what has felt true in my body for so long. Read More
October 14, 2020 Arts & Culture The Death of Max Jacob By Rosanna Warren The following piece is excerpted from Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Company next week. Max Jacob was born in 1876 to a nonobservant Jewish family in Quimper, Brittany. After succeeding brilliantly at the lycée, he went to Paris for advanced studies at the École Coloniale and in law. He gravitated quickly, however, to a life in the arts. He met Picasso in 1901, and their intense friendship became the nucleus of the community of modern artists at the ramshackle studios in Montmartre, the Bateau-Lavoir. Jacob experienced a mystical vision of Christ in 1909 and formally converted to Roman Catholicism in 1915. He is most famous for his collection of radical prose poems, Le Cornet à dés (1917) (The Dice Cup), but he published many other collections of poems in verse and prose, novels, short stories, plays, and esthetic meditations. He spent two long periods in association with the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (1921–1928 and 1936–1944). He was arrested by the gestapo in February 1944 and died of pneumonia on March 5, 1944, at the camp at Drancy. His name was on the list for the next transport to Auschwitz. Max Jacob. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In late December of 1943, Max Jacob went to Orléans and Montargis to buy Christmas gifts for the children of the village of Saint-Benoît. He stayed for five days as a guest in the house of one of his doctor friends in Montargis, where he enjoyed the warmth of a cheerful family. He returned to Saint-Benoît for Christmas—the Mass celebrated in the basilica, the crèche with its plaster figures brought out year after year—followed by days of writing letters of New Year’s greetings and making ceremonial visits in the village. When he reported all this to Jacques Mezure on January 5, 1944, he didn’t yet know that his sister, Mirté-Léa, had been arrested. Mirté-Léa was seized on January 4 and taken to the internment camp at Drancy. Jacob was beside himself. He threw himself into a campaign to save her, writing to everyone he imagined might have influence with the Germans: Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, Misia Sert, Sacha Guitry, the Bishop of Orléans, the Archbishop of Sens. He consulted his friend Julien Lanoë about whether or not to ask Coco Chanel, who had a German lover. His letters were heart-wrenching. He described his little sister, the “companion of his childhood,” her suffering as a widow, her devotion to her mentally handicapped son. “Dear friend, permit me to kiss your hands, the hem of your dress … I beg you, do something,” he implored Misia. Sacha Guitry replied that he couldn’t help “some unknown Jew.” If it were Max, he said, “he could do something.” Drancy now contained men, women, and children. Transports to Auschwitz were leaving almost every week. Even as her brother sent his desperate appeals, Mirté-Léa was shoved into a train car on January 20; she went immediately to the gas chamber on her arrival. Max Jacob never knew what became of her. Read More
October 13, 2020 Redux Redux: X Sends Regards By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Louise Glück. Photo: © Katherine Wolkoff. This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting the work of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read on for her poems “The Denial of Death,” “A Night in Spring,” and “A Warm Day.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, to celebrate the students and teachers in your life, why not gift our special subscription deal featuring a copy of Writers at Work around the World for 50% off? And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. The Denial of Death By Louise Glück Issue no. 226, Fall 2018 I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together. The concierge procured an old blanket for me. By day, I sat outside the kitchen. By night, I spread my blanket among the orange trees. Every day was the same, except for the weather. After a time, the staff took pity on me. A busboy would bring me food from the evening meal, the odd potato or bit of lamb. Sometimes a postcard arrived. On the front, glossy landmarks and works of art. Once, a mountain covered in snow. After a month or so there was a postscript: X sends regards … Read More
October 13, 2020 Arts & Culture Oath By Eileen Myles The following is Eileen Myles’s foreword to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, the first anthology of its kind. F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry will be released by isolarii later this month. Galina Rymbu and Yes Women group (Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber), MY VAGINA, 2020. Only yesterday I think it was yesterday I drove here to Long Island from New York City and I stopped at a small farm that sells milk and eggs. The name of the farm is welsh—Ty Llwyd. The language excited me and I couldn’t stop telling the woman there about my trip to Wales same time she had moved to the states—’bout 1970. She showed absolutely no interest. Yeah, yeah. I was in Russia in 1995 and 2017. I digress. I’m queer, and most recently I’m thinking of myself as a they feminist. I was formerly a they lesbian wanting to suture the two groups dykes and transwomen in particular since there’s a growing sense in the trans community that lesbians and trans women are in opposition and I just don’t think it’s true. But I’m becoming more interested in attaching my transness to my feminism not my female body. I think the female body is every body’s business. Yet so much of the pleasure of this book (and my own work historically and today) is all the iterations of the things that happen to a female body. The pussy in time: Her vulva resembles a large gray rabbit – large, a bit fat and gray with long hanging ears, why Read More