November 17, 2020 Redux Redux: You Would If 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. José Saramago. Photo: Sampinz at Italian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. This week, The Paris Review is celebrating the birthdays of three different writers. Read on for José Saramago’s Art of Fiction interview, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Murderer,” and Margaret Atwood’s poem “Frogless.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). 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. José Saramago, The Art of Fiction No. 155 Issue no. 149, Winter 1998 In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers. I don’t have any of those problems, but I do have problems just like any other person doing any other type of work. Sometimes things do not come out as I want them to, or they don’t come out at all. When things do not come out as well as I would have liked, I have to resign myself to accepting them as they are. Read More
November 17, 2020 Arts & Culture No Walk Is Ever Wasted By Matthew Beaumont André Breton. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics? In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. “Lost steps?” Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. “But there’s no such thing!” There’s no such thing as lost steps! If one were to search for the principle that epitomizes what, in an echo of the title of a book by the late Marshall Berman, might be called “modernism in the streets,” one could probably find it in this exclamation. It informs the writings of all those authors who consistently sought to make the cities with which they were familiar seem new or strange by traversing them aimlessly, sometimes desperately, on foot, in a state of heightened susceptibility to the relentless stimuli of the streets. But it is also a doctrine that, almost a century later, still resonates in the cities of today. Read More
November 16, 2020 Arts & Culture We Are Built to Forget By Meredith Hall Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales) When Raymond Carver died, he left a folded paper in his pocket, a list of what he did not want to forget: eggs peanut butter hot chocolate Australia? Antarctica * My old friend Robin called last week to tell me that our high school classmate was reminiscing about being on the basketball team with me. “You have to be kidding,” I laughed. “Can you picture me playing basketball?” “Well,” my friend said. “You did. I can send you photographs from the yearbook. You were on the team all three years until you got kicked out of school. You weren’t any good at it. Graceful but no killer instinct.” So, apparently, I was on the high school basketball team for three years until I was expelled from school, a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. How is that something I could forget? The forgetting causes me great unease. I don’t want to see the photographs. * We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss. * The morning light through the dusty old screens is fractured into tiny squares across the table. My grandmother, Twila, and my brother and I are the only ones awake. My parents and my sister and my brother and my grandmother’s old mother and her sisters and their husbands sleep on sagging beds and sofa beds and cots in all the rooms in the tilted little camp my grandmother rents each summer. The lake is silver. I have yanked my bathing suit from the line and pulled it, cold and still wet from last night, up over my warm skin. I am very young, maybe five, and I love this place and my grandmother and my parents and the sleeping people and the silver lake and the hatched yellow light on the old table. Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me. I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach. Read More
November 16, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 34 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 selections below. “We’re heading toward winter, which in the book world means prize season is upon us. There won’t be banquets and after-parties this year, but these awards do afford book lovers the opportunity to look back on something other than politics and COVID—and to reflect on books that have helped us understand and weather this tumultuous era. This past week, Souvankham Thammavongsa was named the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which celebrates the best of English-language Canadian fiction. Among its past winners are many who, like Thammavongsa, have graced the pages of The Paris Review. This week’s The Art of Distance joins in the celebration by unlocking interviews with and stories by Giller honorees as well as other notable Canadian writers. Happy reading, and stay safe.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Mavis Gallant. Photo courtesy of Mavis Gallant. Mavis Gallant, who spent much of her life in France, was very much a world citizen. But when asked about her home in the Art of Fiction no. 160, she said, “I am a writer and, of course, a Canadian.” There’s much more here about writing and traveling and the tether that binds an artist to a place. Read More
November 16, 2020 Arts & Culture To Be an Infiltrator By Mónica de la Torre “Untitled”, 1988 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, framed photostat, 10 1/4 x 13 inches. Published in Photostats, Siglio, 2020. Copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Time the substantial we, / epochal and great, as only we can see it, our particular. —Alice Notley No one wants to be defined by history’s contingencies, by catastrophe, but attempting to ignore how they shape us would be as ludicrous as trying to stop the clock. What if instead we broke down the chain of events leading to them, undoing their fatal sequence and leaving their parts open for reassembly? Is this what’s at stake in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photostat works? In the book Photostats, they appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment, but they’re equally apt on gallery walls as reminders that no matter how open or walled-off any space may be, it escapes neither interconnectedness nor time’s inexorable march. Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarmé). Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years—they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. Each cluster of dates and references displays its own oblique associative logic. The larger narrative it may or may not point to can be searingly legible or obscure to varying degrees. Regardless, those gaps between elements in each of the clusters are openings inviting us to fill in the blanks by bringing in our own associations, personal histories, and biases. I took apart dates and historical events and remembered or discovered what occurred then that might have had a bearing on him. Let’s not forget he was a transplant, a politically minded one, who identified specifically as American but was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico: two places with a complex relationship to the U.S. I wonder with whom in the art world he would’ve spoken in Spanish and how his conversations would’ve taken shape according to what he’d say in one language and not the other. Did he think of this? Am I projecting? He carefully avoided labels. Read More
November 13, 2020 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Fall By The Paris Review Contributors from our Fall issue share their favorite recent finds. Tourmaline (Photo: Mickaline Thomas) A few months ago, this essay on freedom dreaming, by Tourmaline, found me when I needed it. The whole thing is a wave of beauty. When I first read it, I thought: I see that world. I want that world. But I more than want the world it describes; I need it. Fast forward. The Nigerian government—using its police force and army—turned a peaceful protest against police brutality into the widely reported massacre we are still recovering from. Ten days after, I read this essay about abolition by Mariame Kaba. With my mind still raw from footage of live rounds ripping through the air as people screamed and then fell quiet, I was too scared and exhausted to dream that day. But these two essays remind me of the same things: We can have more than what we have always known. We can imagine beyond everything we have ever seen. We deserve more than make-do, more than empty promises of reform. We owe the dreaming to ourselves and to each other. If the first thing about revolution is creation, as Kwame Ture stated, then our ability to create newness, to make the immaterial tangible is crucially linked to our freedom. It looks different often, but I am trying to do the daily work of ensuring that nothing—including my own rage and grief—destroys the place where my imagination is stored. —Eloghosa Osunde Rachel Eliza Griffiths. At a time of so much loss, what could be more necessary than an elegy turned affirmation of identity? If an elegy usually focuses on the dead, Seeing the Body, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s latest collection of poems written after the loss of her mother, directs the elegy back toward the living self. The opening title poem asks “How does the elegy believe me?” The pulse of the book is a series of unlabeled photographs, which make up the middle section Daughter: Lyric: Landscape. In a white dress set against majestic rocks or folded nude into furniture, the poet figures herself as both ghost and geological element. Loss strips the self but it also distills the spirit. Elegy becomes self-portrait. In a country afflicted with such a deep and ongoing history of systemic racism and racial violence, death and grief are defining aspects of Griffiths’s life and identity as a Black woman. Toward the end of the collection, “Good America, Good Acts,” a poem for Chikesia Clemons, a young mother and victim of police brutality, ends with these powerful, punishing words: “Yes, / America, you’ve done just about enough.” The book is as much a political lament as it is a personal memorial. In poems ranging formally from quick rivulets to dense meditations, there is no distinction between monumental loss and the body as monument (“Now we meet in my body… ”). Griffiths draws our attention past absence to the mirror processes of dying and grieving, both embodied (“A grief makes its own blood”). Griffiths reconsiders her own birth and her mother’s birth (while filling out her death certificate), and in one of the most powerful poems, she depicts her own rebirth as the labor and delivery of language: “Examine the fontanelles / of syllables, pressing / & striking / the echoes of her voice / until I scream & shriek / inside the lonely gauze / of my rebirth.” The impulse of poetry is physical. Both the poems and photographs function as illuminating fragments of the poet and her mother (“We break mirrors inside of each other / to see again.”). The distance of death is shattered by exquisite intimacy. Alive with pain, rage, and desire, this kind of grief has knuckles. As someone for whom grief and motherhood are inextricable, I am invigorated by Griffiths’s vision in Seeing the Body. Beyond memory and ritual, we have the power to incorporate our dead. —Elizabeth Metzger I couldn’t have wished for better reading during the pandemic than a new manuscript by Maureen Gibbon. I was transported from our insane world into that of Manet during his last years. Delving into a story about the great painter’s syphilis managed to distract me from the pandemic. I decided to reread Gibbon’s first novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow, an all-time favorite, which I first read when it came out in 2000. The novel is sharp, deep, and direct. I’d never before read a woman’s coming-of-age, both sexually and emotionally, told in such a straightforward, unpretentious manner. Gibbon, with reverence but without sentimentality, presents us with the life of a working-class girl as she learns about drugs, sex, and men. The opening of the novel is one of the best first sentences ever: When I was eighteen, I went parking with my boyfriend Del, my best friend June, and her boyfriend Ray. What I mean is that June fucked Ray and I fucked Del in the same car, at the same time. I think Maureen Gibbon is criminally underrated. She’s able to create worlds where someone else’s everyday becomes my own. —Rabih Alameddine Jack Dylan Grazer and Jordan Kristine Seamón in We Are Who We Are. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis / HBO. For the last eight weeks, I’ve been awash in Luca Guadagnino’s sublime We Are Who We Are. The cultural reframing of American families transplanted to a military base in Italy becomes, in Guadagnino’s hands, a study of a cross section of U.S. citizens suddenly forced to externalize “American values.” Against this backdrop, Guadagnino trains his lens on the emotional lives of teenage children, exploring their protean desires, rage, melancholy, and their emerging and still amorphous sexual identities. Guadagnino’s range and insight reels in the subtle tonal shifts of the interstitial as well as the high points of raw Dionysian energy. He displaces and upturns most of our visual expectations for the interior lives of the young. His gaze is both tender and unrelenting, picking apart complex relationships and the multiple ways they manifest across the jagged spectrum of eros. I recognize something similar in the lush tonality of American artist Jesse Mockrin’s work. Mockrin re-creates key details from paintings of the Rococo and Baroque eras to depict the cycling of myth and narratives through time. Her paintings transform and invert the expected horror vacui of the images from these periods by using elision, where the subjects fall out of the frame. This in turn highlights the energeia of the minutiae—the central act and the hands that guide the act. The negative space in her paintings is compounded and given a potent psychic charge by this sense of disorientation brought about by what is left outside the frame. —Rohan Chhetri Sufjan Stevens. Photo courtesy of Asthmatic Kitty Records. I’ve long been a Sufjan Stevens fan. The second album I bought was Seven Swans. The tone and lyrics on that collection brought me fully up to speed on Stevens’s unironic use of Christian allusion, story, and dogma. Wait—a highly gifted singer-songwriter who was plainly a believer, but not part of Christian rock? How can this possibly be? As soon as it was available, I got Stevens’s newest album, The Ascension. It is what I think is called electropop, and it has the catchy hooks and the highly processed synth sounds one might expect from such a category. I am not finished listening, but at this point I can say that even though I don’t respond strongly to every cut on the album, the many I do respond to represent an advance. The album is a passionate reexamination of Stevens’s faith, one that includes the doubt that is part of any fully aware Christian’s journey. The strategy brings to mind the Songs of Solomon (as well as literature, such as Kabir and Rumi, from other traditions) in their blurring of the borders between eros and theos. There is also a kind of Old Testament exhortation to the lyrics—Stevens does not shy from complaining, vehemently, to God about His hiddenness, His apparent lack of presence, particularly in our current historical moment. Some songs gloss Stevens’s frustration at being either reviled or deified for his faith: “I don’t wanna be your personal Jesus / I don’t wanna live inside of that flame.” And it may be that my recommendation also leans too heavily on the religious angle. I assure you, the album continues and extends Stevens’s musical explorations. His sound is, as always, eccentric, melodic, and unique. But the most subversive and idiosyncratic element in The Ascension, as in all Stevens’s work, is his faith. And I am most grateful for that. —Jeffrey Skinner One of the most transformative literary experiences of my past few months has been a podcast called Literature and History, which is written, researched, performed, sound-engineered, and everything-elsed by one incredibly talented guy, Doug Metzger. It was first introduced to me by my partner, Steve Potter, who’s also a writer; he stumbled across it after we’d been longing for a survey course that could orient us to all the literature we’d half-forgotten or that we wish we’d read. In Literature and History, Metzger led us on a comprehensive and generous march through Anglophone literature’s lineage of influence—not just the white-washed Greek and Roman classics, but a very intentional widening of the canon that includes work once influential to English-language traditions but is rarely studied now, like Mesopotamia’s creation epic and the lower-class folktales of Ancient Egypt. Metzger focuses on one piece or genre of literature at a time, and he offers a lyrical and moving summary before moving on to historical context, discussing everything from how the work was received at its making and how it has been received over time, to its influence on later writing, to what we find problematic with it in a modern context. Metzger is a careful and thoughtful reader and historian, and over the many, many hours I’ve now spent with this podcast, I’ve learned to really trust the deft way he incorporates gender, race, class, and time into the discussion. Besides being very informative, Literature and History is also unabashedly punny and delightful to listen to; I once spit out lukewarm mocha in the car when Metzger referred to Olympic wrestlers in Hesiod’s time as “well-oiled—or maybe we should just say well Greeced.” I was initially skeptical about the episodes’ concluding comedy songs, but they are more often than not a pedagogical, musical, and linguistic joy. While listening, my partner and I often bet on what he’ll choose as a topic. Babylon’s gods sing about how much they love beer; the heroes of Greece and Troy engage in an epic rap battle; Orestes and Electra share a bluegrass hoedown. The podcast embraces silliness but is, in its research and context, incredibly serious. I can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the ancient literature that influenced today’s. —Emma Hine Still from Soleil Ô. Courtesy of Janus Films. On September 29, the Criterion Collection released the latest box set of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. Founded in 2007, the World Cinema Project started as an extension of Scorsese’s Film Foundation, as a means of preserving cinema from countries outside of Americentric and Eurocentric traditions. Of the six films released in the latest box set, Soleil Ô (1970), by Med Hondo, from Mauritania has made quite the indelible impression on me as an expansion of the oeuvre of postcolonial, Africa-centered films. Like other postcolonial films, such as Touki Bouki (1973), by Djibril Diop Mambéty, or Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film Black Girl, Hondo’s film takes on the question of African identity, the effects of colonialism, and the inheritance of trauma. What sets Soleil Ô apart is the protagonist’s voice as he chronicles his travels through Paris until his descent into madness. The audience is fully enmeshed in the psychosis of the protagonist as he attempts to make sense of his humanity, or lack thereof. The fourth wall is intentionally broken throughout the film. There are no extras, because everyone is a spectator. Spectators in the film are as much an audience as the people watching the film. Often, spectators look to the camera or gawk at the protagonist without being cued. Hondo shows us how Blackness becomes theatrical in the imagination of white people. The juxtaposition of the white gaze within the film and the film as an artistic object with an exterior audience shows how two-fold this violence is, how it happens in real time for the protagonist. I have seen this movie a couple of times now and the protagonist’s descent into madness resonates with me, as I think of the camera that is always present. The protagonist has no private space. As an audience, our last act becomes to witness him, and to confirm his descent by imposing our gaze until the film’s end. —Cheswayo Mphanza Not only am I happy when I’m watching the YouTube video of the Commodores singing “Nightshift,” I’m only happy when I’m watching this video. Like anything by Mozart or George Eliot or Van Gogh, it has unfathomable depths, but first it pulls you in with its surface. On its surface, it’s a training film: if you’re not cool, the video will teach you how to be cool, and if you’re cool already, it’ll teach you to be cooler. Watch the guys groom before the concert. Watch them as they sway on stage, not in a choreographed way but the way people do when the music skips past the cerebral cortex and goes directly to the hips and feet. Then the good stuff kicks in: tributes roll out to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, monumental figures who are celebrated so casually that you feel you’re listening not to a bunch of associate professors of musicology taking a break at a scholarly conference, but to five guys in a parking lot who’re just getting ready to start the night shift. And what is the night shift? Here it’s the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist state between this life and the one we’ll be reborn into. As in George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo, in which the president walks among the shades as he searches for his dead son, Willie, here the living musicians commune with the dead ones: “You found another home,” they say, “you’re not alone,” and “we’ll be there at your side.” There’s an air of happy exhaustion throughout the whole piece, starting with that Jamaican dancehall beat and ending with the band looking as though they’ve showered after work and are now wearing Romulan navy uniforms out of a forgotten Star Trek episode, ready to party before they have to go to work again. The YouTube video of the Commodores singing “Nightshift” is the best short film of 1985, the year the song was released, and every year thereafter, which is why I’m going to stop writing and go watch it again after making one final point, which is that if more people smiled like William King (the Commodore in the red shirt), there would be no more wars. —David Kirby Explore our Fall issue here.