April 16, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Mary Szybist Reads Amy Woolard By Mary Szybist In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “If By You You Mean We” by Amy Woolard Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019) The apples are early this year, & the grass is late. The taxi is Early & the past is late. The fist is late. The tooth—like the news Of the tooth—broke both early & late. I’m telling you: this all Really happened. I had a love I ripped through like it was bread. I had bread & cheese, apples & sugar on my every plate. A sugar rose on my every cake. A love like a water Ring soaked into the grain of my kitchen table. Sugar, I don’t need it Refinished. The way it happened, I was my own witness. When we was Together / everything was so grand. I love you like the fifty-two bones of the feet, The fifty-four of the hands, the hell & the fast foam from a high-water wave Smoothing itself toward me like a flu passed through a kiss. I couldn’t Keep anything down. So happened it was my bread & butter for years To turn the tables of this town. I didn’t know a morning That wasn’t the end of my night. I came in through your basement Bedroom window. I brought a love like two forkless fists stuffed With lemon cake. A love like the house spider that crawls in & then out of your open mouth during sleep, leaving only your waking Tongue & its hustled memory of caught snowflakes from an early flurry. Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.
April 16, 2020 At Work How to Survive the End of the World: An Interview with Mark O’Connell By Rosa Lyster In Mark O’Connell’s eerily prescient new book Notes From an Apocalypse, he spells out a question that now feels inescapable: “How are we supposed to live, given the distinct possibility that our species, our civilization, might already be doomed?” In trying to answer, he traveled to places where the looming apocalypse could be glimpsed, talking to those who believed, or wanted to believe, that the collapse of civilization was already underway: preppers, survivalists, people hell-bent on the colonization of Mars. For his subjects, the question of how to survive the apocalypse is a practical one, and they respond to it with answers like “be obscenely rich,” “dig a big hole in the ground and just stay in it,” or “gaily wash your hands of society, which you were not all that keen on to begin with.” For O’Connell, and for most of us, the question is more complicated—not just how to survive, but how to live—and the conclusions he reaches are what give the book its hope. Mark and I became friends through Twitter, a fact which has done great damage to my belief that real friendships cannot be forged on the computer. I messaged him more or less out of the blue to ask for his advice on a writing-related problem that I believed to be an intractable disaster, and he pointed out the solution that had been in front of me the whole time. This is typical. As a friend, Mark is generous, with an apparently boundless enthusiasm for connecting people whom he (always correctly) believes will get on with one another. His first book, To Be a Machine, was awarded the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Dublin Review, and the Guardian. This interview was conducted over email during the first week of April, while I was in Cape Town and Mark was in Dublin. INTERVIEWER The book starts with an epigraph from Annie Dillard, “These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?” What is it about those lines that appealed to you? O’CONNELL When I was putting that quote in as the book’s epigraph, I distinctly remember thinking that I was not myself entirely sure why I had chosen it, but that surely I would never be asked to account for it, because no one ever pays much attention to these things. And now here I am, having to do just that for The Paris Review—yet more evidence for my conviction that I can never be permitted to get away with anything. So thanks, Rosa, for that. It’s from For the Time Being, a book I love maybe more than any other book by a living writer. One of the things she does in the book, and in those lines in particular, is sort of deflate the apocalyptic sensibility, the notion that we are living in extraordinary times. The epigraph gestures toward what I was trying to do in my book, which was to do justice to the extreme apocalyptic urgency of our current time while also bearing in mind the fact that, in terms of the broader picture of human life on earth, this is also just business as usual. Dillard, for me, is an ideal writer, in that she inhabits the world in an ecstatic way while refusing to avert her eyes from its darkness. She is also incredibly funny, without ever stooping to being humorous. INTERVIEWER What’s the difference, for you, between a writer who is incredibly funny and a writer who is being humorous? It feels like an important distinction because I think for some people, there’s a suspicion of levity when the subject is inarguably serious, unless the funniness comes delivered to the reader in a package with a label that says “Let Us Pause for Some Light Relief Before We Head Wearily Back To The Salt Mines.” Was that something that you thought about when you were writing the book? Which is, I should say, incredibly funny. O’CONNELL Maybe this is a very idiosyncratic and unsustainable distinction, but I can think of nothing less funny than humor as a mode of writing. It’s like stand-up comedy or something. Almost impossible to be authentically funny within the brutal constraints and expectations of that formal context. It’s very gratifying to me when people find my writing funny, but it’s also always very unpredictable. Often the things that people find funny in my writing are things that I have written in a spirit of more or less deadly seriousness. And I’m fine with that—actually, I love it. Because for me, funniness is often an epiphenomenon of absolute seriousness. As a nonfiction writer, you constantly come across situations that are inherently funny, and being funny is just a matter of diligently describing reality. You literally just jot down in your notebook the amazingly strange things that people are constantly saying, and the amazingly strange things that are constantly happening around you, and you write about it as accurately as you can, and often that just winds up being funny. I think the reason I don’t like a lot of so-called humorous writing is that it sort of misses the point of how funny things are, and drowns that reality out with a load of jokes. I also think that writers who are not funny are, in some basic and irreducible sense, unserious. INTERVIEWER Throughout the book, you meet a lot of apocalyptically minded people—preppers, bunker salesmen, tech billionaires who want to colonize Mars, tech billionaires who are buying up tracts of New Zealand. As you point out, the idea of civilization’s collapse is nearly as old as civilization itself. But you also make the case that there are particularly lurid strains of doomsday scenarios active today, exemplified by the visions of people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Can you talk a bit about that? Read More
April 15, 2020 On Technology What’s Inside That Giant Cross? By Steven E. Jones Cellular cross in Tampa, Florida. Photo: Steven E. Jones. The apotheosis of the combination of religious iconography with cellular technology may be the cell tower disguised as a cross. There’s a striking example near my university in Tampa, Florida, on the grounds of the New Life Tabernacle Church. The cross stands out at the edge of church property near the northbound lanes of Interstate 75. At about a hundred fifty feet, it’s much taller than the palm trees along the road, and it glows bright white against the blue sky. From the highway, the cross looks bright white and thin, almost delicate. Up close at the cell site, which is located between a grassy soccer field and a retaining pond, the steel poles look grayish and a little weathered. The tubular upright is enormous, bolted together in three large segments and slightly faceted. I know that the top is packed with antennae, amplifiers, relays, and cables. Standing close to the tower and looking up, I can see large ventilation holes in the upper segment and a small lightning rod sticking out from the very top, too fine to be visible from the highway. (Tampa is supposedly the lightning capital of North America.) Read More
April 15, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Book of Disquiet By Eddie Grace In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. Maybe it is true that books find you when you need them: The Book of Disquiet sat on my shelf for at least a year before I took it down, sometime in February. The hardcover is fat and dense, and the text is, like a drug, rather mood-altering, so I was still working my way through it as things began to change, and am still working through it now, in a world that has come to feel entirely different. The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, is properly speaking perhaps not a book at all, and I imagine Pessoa would not necessarily be pleased to have his name so prominently affixed to it. Under the orthonym “Fernando Pessoa” he did write an introduction, but he credited the texts themselves to two different authors, his semi-heteronyms “Vicente Guedes” (who “endured his empty life with masterly indifference”) and “Bernardo Soares,” an assistant bookkeeper. The book is made up of fragments of varying length, something like disconnected diary entries. They have been ordered in different ways since they were first collected in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death; in 2017, the Half-Pint Press in London did an edition “typeset by hand and printed by hand on a selection of various ephemera, and housed unbound in a hand-printed box.” Maybe Pessoa had a plan in mind for his fragments, maybe there was a structure that we just can’t divine—the version I have, Margaret Jull Costa’s 2017 translation of Jerónimo Pizarro’s 2013 edition, is, I think, the first in English to present them as close to chronologically as scholars can figure out—but if any hypothetical order exists I’d rather not know: these are scattered times. Things one didn’t even know one held to or depended on are gone. Rhythm, habit, the rituals that mark and shape the day, something as mindless as the commute that shifts you from one gear to another, none of that registers anymore. There is a frozen-in-place quality to things, an eternal present-ness. Which is a way of saying that it’s been hard these days for me to find meaning; we are storytelling creatures, but I seem to have lost the plot. I can’t register a story, keep up with a narrative, make sense of any frame. In The Book of Disquiet, though, there seems thus far to be no plot to lose. There are characters and events, but I can find no thread to follow, no causes and effects. Every fragment feels self-contained, its connections to those on either side tenuous at best. As far as I can tell, there is really nothing to be gained from reading the book front to back: you could approach this as bibliomancy, opening at random to find something that speaks to you (no. 27: “To organize our life so that it is a mystery to others, so that those who know us best only unknow us from closer to”). Jull Costa notes that its “incompleteness is enticing, encouraging the reader to make his or her own book out of these fragments.” For me it has been less a building and more a ritual: prayer beads, mantras, a worry stone. Read More
April 15, 2020 Freeze Frame Tsai Ming-liang’s Shadow City By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him. Still from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. For most of the second half of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 masterpiece of unfulfilled desire, the characters struggle to breathe through makeshift face masks, fashioned from materials as desperate as plastic bags or metal jelly molds. Their daily lives are being slowly constricted, suffocated by something in the air, which we presume to be Kuala Lumpur’s famous near-annual smog, except no one really knows for sure—the news on the radio provides conflicting information—so the smoke that descends upon the city takes on a more sinister aura. The air itself has become dangerous to breathe. No one knows when this oppressive anxiety will end. As I write, Kuala Lumpur is in virus-induced lockdown. Looking out from my apartment I can see only the odd car on what is usually a busy highway, and the neighborhood is almost eerily calm. The city’s streets are emptier and more silent than in the film, but the sense of stasis and uncertainty is the same. Both in the film and now, the anxiety is caused by something that threatens our health, but it is also tied to a deeper malaise: a fear that our societies are fragile and ill adapted to the swirling changes of modern life. Read More
April 14, 2020 Redux Redux: This Caliper Embrace 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. This week at The Paris Review, we’re having a little birthday party for Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, all born on April 13. Read on for Welty’s Art of Fiction interview, an excerpt from Beckett’s novel Molloy, and Heaney’s poem “Polder.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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. Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47 Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972) At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply—and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates. Read More