March 15, 2021 Arts & Culture Imagining Nora Barnacle’s Love Letters to James Joyce By Nuala O’Connor James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, seated on a wall in Zurich. Image from the UB James Joyce Collection courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. The fact is no one should be able to read the intimate words that anyone writes to their partner—those outpourings are composed for two people only: the lover and the loved. But when you’re writing a novel about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, and the letters are published and are, well, just there, they become impossible to ignore. Whenever I told anyone I was writing a bio-fictional novel about Nora and Joyce, they would remark, with glow-eyed glee, “Oh, no doubt you’ll include the letters.” And, yes, I have included them. But not quite as you might think. The first challenge for me as a novelist was that the letters are still under copyright—they were first published in 1975. The second challenge was that Nora’s half of the correspondence was not available, missing—perhaps destroyed—and I had to fill those gaps with imagined letters of my own. I mimicked Joyce’s real letters as closely as I could. I wrote Nora’s part of the correspondence using Joyce’s letters as a call-and-response guide. When he praised her for using certain stimulating phrases and words, I included them in her letters to him, in the voice I had invented for her. Read More
March 12, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Maps, Marvels, and Madmen By The Paris Review Charles Lloyd and the Marvels. Photo: D. Darr. Charles Lloyd, one of the living legends from the great era of sixties jazz, has ridden a late-career high with a sort of supergroup he calls the Marvels, consisting of himself on tenor sax, Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Leisz on steel guitar, Reuben Rogers on bass, and the wizardly Eric Harland on drums. On their first two albums, the group offered a mix of classic Lloyd originals, jazzed-up folk and rock covers, and vocal collaborations with Lucinda Williams. This group doesn’t feel like a studio band; clearly they’ve played together and enjoyed it, learned each other’s tics and tricks. So their latest record, Tone Poem, seems to catch them in medias res, doing what they do—and since everyone here is a master musician, they’re doing it damn well. The album opens with two jaunty Ornette Coleman tunes that focus on the melodic beauty of the late avant-gardist’s compositions. Next, they offer a slow, hopeful take on Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem.” Other highlights include a lush and luxurious ten-minute version of “Monk’s Mood” and a look back at “Lady Gabor,” written by Lloyd’s long-ago collaborator Gábor Szabó, a major sixties innovator in his own right whose music is too little known now. Overall, this is a mostly relaxing album, with a seamless flow of sounds, thanks to Lloyd’s smooth, continuous voice on sax, Frisell’s incredible ability to create and sustain musical textures, Leisz’s subtle steel guitar work, and Harland’s light touch. After only a few listens, Tone Poem has whispered its way deep into my consciousness. —Craig Morgan Teicher Read More
March 12, 2021 Eat Your Words Cooking with Kenji Miyazawa By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Photo: Erica MacLean. Lately, when I think about jealousy or, shall I admit it, when I feel jealous, I remind myself of the story “The Earthgod and the Fox,” by the Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933). When I think about politics, I consider Miyazawa’s story “The Fire Stone.” For my artistic practice, there’s “Gorsch the Cellist”; for my place in nature, “The Bears of Nametoko.” I can’t say there’s a Miyazawa story for everything—the writer died young and lived nearly a century ago in rural northern Japan—but he had stories for many of our basic human vices, and for our basic forms of goodness, too. And this only scratches the surface of his work’s appeal. Miyazawa was born in 1896, the son of two pawnbrokers in the town of Hanamaki in the rural Iwate Prefecture. His parents were pious Buddhists and wealthy people by local standards; their son became a teacher of agricultural science and a social activist who attempted to improve the lot of farmers in his region. His poetry and fiction were not celebrated or even much published in his lifetime, but word spread posthumously, and he is now one of Japan’s foremost writers, widely taught in schools. When I decided to cook from Miyazawa’s work, I asked Tetsuro Hoshii, a Japanese acquaintance who lives in my Brooklyn neighborhood, to help me with the menu, and he revealed excitedly that he was named after a tribute to a Miyazawa novel—that’s how brightly the writer’s star continues to shine, almost a century after his death. Read More
March 11, 2021 Arts & Culture The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman By Halle Butler Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1900. Photo: C. F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”—essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. The story had irony, urgency, anger. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. Beautifully clear. The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well—the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn’t being told straight. Reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror. It was genuinely chilling. It felt haunted. The story is based on Gilman’s experiences with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, late-nineteenth-century physician to the stars. Mitchell administered this cure of extended bed rest and isolation to intellectual, active white women of high social standing. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams all took the cure, which could last for weeks, sometimes months. Gilman was clearly disgusted with her experience, and her disgust is palpable. Read More
March 10, 2021 Écuyères The “Princess Daredevil” of the Belle Époque By Susanna Forrest In Susanna Forrest’s Écuyères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. Émilie as a “beauty of the circus” holds the center as Hippodrome girls and lesser écuyères make up the frame. Illustration appears in the January 5, 1878, issue of La Vie parisienne. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the circus poster, nothing but these words: “Today: Debut of Mademoiselle Émilie LOISSET” Nothing else, no other program. Why would you add more? It suffices for the habitués of the Franconi circus. It’s a talisman, this feminine name … Émilie Loisset! ÉMILIE LOISSET! ÉMILIE LOISSET!!! —“Scapin,” a.k.a. Alexandre Hepp, in Le Voltaire, May 15, 1881. I used to know three things about the circus horsewoman Émilie Loisset: she was beautiful, she was good, and, like many of the most cherished young women of a morbid, misogynist nineteenth century, she died tragically and gruesomely when she was only in her twenties. While these bare facts are true, they do not evoke a person so much as an archetype—the virtuous beauty who meets her fate with her melancholy face untouched. The way in which men wrote about her before and after her death reminds me of what Elisabeth Bronfen called “culture [using] art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.” In fiction and in reminiscences and journalism and even riding manuals, her death is reenacted over and over as melodrama, cautionary tale, and plot twist. I was hoping that by collecting and overlaying these texts, I’d find the real woman amid them. What I found instead was an international game of telephone mined with conflicting accounts, confused identities (of both people and horses), facts carried over into fiction and fiction into “facts,” lavish, unverifiable hearsay, and, somehow, a glimpse of an individual who both was and was not what the men wanted her to be. I searched French, Belgian, Austrian, and German newspapers of the period, contacted aristocratic European families, triangulated points on maps and dates in sporting pages, signed up to genealogy communities, queried museums and archives, and finally found myself zooming in on the handwritten record of her death—and, as it turned out, her true name. I’ve reached the limits of what I can research during the pandemic, but this is what I know so far. She was born Marie Laurence Émilie Roux in Paris in 1856. Her father, Jean-Joseph Roux, was a popular ice-cream maker, and her mother was Antoinette Fortunée Loisset, an illegitimate daughter of the circus proprietor Jean Baptiste Antoine Loisset and Virginie Hélène de Linski—his later wife and codirector, who had been just sixteen when she had Antoinette. Virginie went on to have many more children with Jean Baptiste, although between the Loissets’ constant traveling and their circus habit of reshuffling family and stage names, it’s hard to straighten out their doubled family tree (not to mention the fact that one child can be Séraphin François in Belgium and Franz Seraph in Germany and eventually be known simply as François). Most of the children performed in their father’s circus, with varying degrees of endurance and success: equestrianism was their specialty, whether rosinback acrobatics or high school dressage. Read More
March 9, 2021 Redux Redux: Pulling Away the Greenery 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. Anne Carson. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the launch of the Spring issue by featuring a few contributors who have appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Read on for Anne Carson’s Art of Poetry interview, Allan Gurganus’s short story “Art History (From An Only Modestly Good Translation),” and Forrest Gander’s poem “Body Visible.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88 Issue no. 171 (Fall 2004) One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what they call ecstasy. Read More