August 2, 2021 First Person A Great Storyteller Loses His Memory By Rodrigo García Rodrigo García’s new memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, recounts the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez, in close detail. Amid family discussions and trips to the doctor, García explores the challenge of writing about grief while living within it. In the below excerpt, García documents the aftermath of his father’s dementia diagnosis and considers the emotional weight of the memory loss upon the renowned writer. Gabriel García Márquez at the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, 2009, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Writing about the death of loved ones must be about as old as writing itself, and yet the inclination to do it instantly ties me up in knots. I am appalled that I am thinking of taking notes, ashamed as I take notes, disappointed in myself as I revise notes. What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile. A few months earlier a friend asked how my dad was doing with his loss of memory. I told her he lives strictly in the present, unburdened by the past, free of expectations for the future. Forecasting based on previous experience, which is believed to be of evolutionary significance as well as one of the origins of storytelling, no longer plays a part in his life. “So he doesn’t know he’s mortal,” she concluded. “Lucky him.” Of course, the picture I painted for her is simplified. It is dramatized. The past still plays a part in his conscious life. He relies on the distant echo of his considerable interpersonal skills to ask anyone he meets a series of safe questions: “How is everything?” “Where are you living these days?” “How are your people?” Occasionally he’ll venture an attempt at a more ambitious exchange and become disoriented in the middle of it, losing the thread of the idea or running out of words. The puzzled expression on his face, as well as the embarrassment that crosses it momentarily, like a puff of smoke in a breeze, betrays a past when conversation was as natural to him as breathing. Creative, funny, evocative, provocative conversation. Being a great conversador was almost as highly regarded among his oldest group of friends as being a good writer. The future is also not completely behind him. Often at dusk he asks, “Where are we going tonight? Let’s go out to a fun place. Let’s go dancing. Why? Why not?” If you change the subject enough times, he moves on. Read More
July 30, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Melancholia, Music, and Meaning By The Paris Review Cynthia Cruz. Photo: Steven Page. Courtesy of Cruz. America: land of the free, home of the brave. A country, as our cultural mythos would have it, sans the social restrictions of the Old World. A country, thanks to the competitive fervor of meritocratic capitalism, without class. But we know this isn’t true: the idea of the United States as a land of the Protestant work ethic and the righteously rich is a fantasy, one especially relevant in the world of the arts. As the poet Cynthia Cruz painstakingly illustrates in her new book The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an expansion of her 2019 essay of the same name, the working class is more often than not shut out of the arts in the contemporary U.S., reliant as this world is on low wages, credentialism, and social networking. In chapters that combine her own personal experiences as a working-class writer and the work of many American and international writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—including Clarice Lispector, Barbara Loden, James Baldwin, the Jam, Cat Power, and more—Cruz explores the “melancholia” that results when a working-class artist abandons their origins and is subsumed into the middle and upper classes. In a world that denies their very existence, she argues, the working-class artist is a ghost: “neither dead nor alive, the working class exists between worlds.” Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Mark Fisher and Freud, as well as some good old-fashioned proletarian internationalism, Cruz makes a convincing argument as to how the working class can best resist assimilation and instead continue to make provocative, formally experimental work that transcends the borders of both class and country. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
July 30, 2021 Brush Strokes On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. Michaël Borremans, Study for Bird, 2020, oil on linen, 14 1/4 x 11 3/4″. © Michaël Borremans. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. I didn’t understand how much I needed to look at the faces of others until I drove into Manhattan this past December to stare into a stranger’s unmasked face on my birthday. The sole reason for this trip was the stranger’s face—a portrait by Michaël Borremans, an artist I had taken to describing for nearly a decade as my favorite painter whose work I had never seen in person. I knew Borremans’s work mostly from the giant monographs and exhibition catalogs on his work I’d check out from the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library several years ago while I was working as a rare-book librarian a few blocks south at the Morgan Library & Museum. I’d lug these giant books from one library to another and then home in my backpack on the train from Midtown back to Brooklyn, renewing them over and over until they could be renewed no longer, sometimes requesting them again immediately, repeating the cycle. These paintings, or at least their reproductions, had a special resonance for me then. In the Morgan’s reading room, I routinely looked at the miniatures painted in the medieval manuscripts requested mostly by visiting academics. And when I would reshelve the printed books housed in J. P. Morgan’s former study in the old library, I’d always take a moment to look upon Hans Memling’s panel painting Portrait of a Man with a Pink. Read More
July 30, 2021 Arts & Culture A Literature on the Brink of Dawn By Richard Zenith Fernando Pessoa. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. One afternoon while browsing in the English bookstore, located midway between two of the offices where he worked for a few hours nearly every day, Fernando Pessoa spotted a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The scandal generated by its partial publication in The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920, may not have reached Pessoa’s attention, but by 1933 he knew all about its celebrity status as a banned book, judged obscene and still unavailable in the United Kingdom and the United States. The copy he saw—and purchased—was of the two-volume Odyssey Edition, published in December 1932, in Germany. Both volumes have come down to us in pristine condition, without so much as a fleeting pencil mark. The only evidence that Pessoa actually read Ulysses, or enough of it to know that he wanted to read no more, is the laconic commentary he scribbled, in Portuguese, on a scrap of paper: The art of James Joyce, like that of Mallarmé, is art preoccupied with method, with how it is made. Even the sensuality of Ulysses is a symptom of intermediation. It is oneiric delirium—the kind treated by psychiatrists—presented as an end in itself. A literature on the brink of dawn. Read More
July 29, 2021 At Work The Things We Hide: An Interview with Megan Abbott By Rebecca Godfrey Photo: Drew Reilly. “Ballet was full of dark fairy tales,” Megan Abbott observes in her new novel, The Turnout, noting that “how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself.” These mysterious and private rituals of young women—these “dark fairy tales”—are at the heart of Abbott’s work. Over the course of ten novels, she’s explored the violence and crime that pervade American girlhood. In Dare Me, competitive cheerleaders become suspects in a murder case. In The Fever, an outbreak of illness is tied to the “enigmatic beauty, erotic and strange” of a small-town high school. While undoubtedly one of our best crime novelists, Abbott has also always struck me as akin to an anthropologist; she not only explores the hidden subcultures of teenage girls but reveals the coded language and shared ethos of their cliques and sects, the way their secrets are not merely secrets but a means of expressing forbidden eroticism, dreams, and rage. In The Turnout, Abbott delves into the rarified world of ballerinas, astutely noting the symbols and signals underlying the romantic image. “There was such a boldness to this girl, a barbarism to her,” she notes. “This pink waif, her tidy bun.” While she may have the gaze of an anthropologist, Abbott, in fact, began as a Ph.D. student studying film noir at NYU. Her first book, published in 2002, was a prescient work of critical theory, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. Reading Chandler and Hammett, she’d often wondered, What would happen if the femme fatale told the story? She wrote her first novels, including Bury Me Deep and Queenpin, as sly, meta takes on pulp fiction, with alluring, often menacing women as protagonists. With 2011’s The End of Everything, Abbott began to write about the violence of seemingly all-American girls in seemingly all-American suburbs, gaining not only a wider audience but numerous Edgar Awards and admirers among crime writers. The Wire’s David Simon invited her to be a staff writer on The Deuce, alongside Richard Price and George Pelecanos. More recently, she wrote and coproduced a television adaptation of her novel Dare Me and is now doing the same for The Turnout, while also working on a television series with The Queen’s Gambit’s Scott Frank. I caught up with Abbott over email during a sultry, tense summer, a summer that felt increasingly Abbott-esque. Boldness and barbarism were everywhere. Heat waves and wildfires seared and scarred. A mysterious illness continued to cause infection and fear, a former America’s sweetheart vowed revenge against her father, angrily confessing a desire to “send him to jail,” while in the music video for the song of the summer, an eighteen-year-old singer posed as a cheerleader easily turns a boyfriend’s bedroom into a sea of flames. INTERVIEWER What drew you to write about ballerinas in The Turnout? ABBOTT When I was seven or eight, I took ballet classes at this strip mall dance studio where two sisters—twins, actually—were the main teachers. They were so beautiful, in that classically ballet way, and seemed to contain mysteries. I was fascinated by them, their bodies, their rigor, their coolness and elegance. And their wordless exchanges with each other. I wondered what they were like out of the studio. Did the coolness ever slip? Did they have grand romances? Were they close? Growing up in suburban Detroit, I was always yearning for a glamour that felt just beyond, and they seemed to embody everything I longed for—mystery, exoticism, self-containment. And they looked like they held secrets. They became the spark. Read More
July 28, 2021 From the Archive Ring around the Archive By Christopher Notarnicola A jeweler appraises a ring, 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I recently proposed to my girlfriend, and so I spent much of the past few years thinking about engagement rings. In Western culture, at least, the ring has taken on such symbolic significance that we casually and almost exclusively refer to a part of the human body in relation to its function as ring carrier—the one true purpose of the digitus quartus. Spend enough time shopping for engagement rings and one might come to believe that every aspect of a person’s being exists only to honor the extra-human perfection that is the ring. But spend some time in The Paris Review archive and one might find that the ring is as multifaceted as any radiant cut diamond, as subject to human frailty as the promises, ideals, and bonds it has come to symbolize, and as individual as the hand on which it rests. In issue no. 225, Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Simple Pleasure. Pure Pleasure.” (expertly translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker) is a story built around the desire for a particular ring: She walked around the decapitated body and paused to look at the dead man’s left hand. There, around his ring finger, right above the edge of a large pool of blood, was the jade ring. Two entwined, green serpents. An extremely delicate thing. The Detective shot her hand out toward the object but stopped short of touching it. There was something about the ring, something between the ring and the world, that blocked her contact. It was then that she looked at her own hand, immobile and large, suspended in the dawn air. Read More