July 16, 2020 Arts & Culture The City Has No Name By Lizzie Davis Juan Cárdenas. In Juan Cárdenas’s novel Ornamental, the city has no name. It could be here, or anywhere. Its location in time isn’t specified either. There’s a faintly futuristic overlay, but the narrator’s diction swings between antiquated formality and present-day slang, and, among other anachronistic details, there are both spider monkeys and henchmen on the security team. Characters, too, are referenced only by generic designation. “My wife,” “the directors,” “the taxi driver,” “the architect.” Even descriptive nouns of that kind are withheld from the study participants, who have volunteered for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. They’re granted only numbers. The choice to leave those coordinates unfixed suggests universality, as if this same story might have played out (might be playing out) in any number of labs, in any number of cities. But it also enacts the social and political repression of a certain kind of anonymity. “A city can’t be talked about without names, it’s impossible,” number 4 says. “It’s all been worked out so the story stays neatly inside the mute numbers.” How, Ornamental asks, do the nameless—disembodied voices, unattributed speech, figures “emancipated from any arithmetic”—participate in meaningful discourse, find a place among others, work toward common interest, tell their stories? And when do we encounter those stories, as readers who live in named cities and bear names ourselves? Read More
July 15, 2020 Arts & Culture The Many Voices of Bobbie Louise Hawkins By Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Like her good friend the writer Lucia Berlin, Bobbie Louise Hawkins was an excellent observer of others. Like Lucia, too, she was wise and damn funny. Her stories are vitamin-packed, full of her own specific and inimitable possibilities of voice. Or maybe we should say voices, or voicings, because the singular doesn’t quite do it justice. Her voice could take on multiple angles and colors, depending on the setting and time of day, the interlocutor, or, more accurately, the listener, and the number. It wasn’t unusual to hear her with a Texas drawl in the morning in her garden (this voice said “honey” a fair amount, and unfurled like a smoked tumbleweed just rolling out of the fire), a soft New Mexican clipping of word endings in the afternoon, and a British tilt at a party in the evening. Her voice could even take on several aspects at once, especially when she was giving a reading. Voicing was important enough to Bobbie that she offered classes on how to talk (and not talk) into a mic. Don’t pop those p’s! Make sure you cut the mic! No heavy breathing between words! And while the novella One Small Saga is not as voicey as some of her other work, her marvelous capacity to listen and deftly mimic is acutely on display. She speedily gets her world and her characters “in,” as E. M. Forster, a writer whose prose she admired, put it. Consider one quick sentence early on, the short passage that takes place in Mr. Collins’s sitting room. Bobbie builds this Englishman’s whole character out of just a handful of syllables. The narrator has just noticed the wall hangings, “patterned blue and white cotton to match the drawn drapes … ‘Nigerian,’ Mr. Collins told me, seeing me looking, ‘handwoven native.’ ” In three tight-lipped words we get the tone of the whole of the British empire circa 1950, from the mouth of one of its servants. Still, in this autobiographical work (Bobbie claimed not to have done any other kind), what’s mainly going on is an attempt at taking the measure of the life the narrator wants to live. She starts that process by recounting a mistake that isn’t a mistake at all. She does something stupid (marries Axel) to get to the next thing (the story of her life). How else would a ferociously observant, intelligent, original young woman born into poverty in the thirties get out of the fix she is in? She has plans, inchoate as they are, and takes the ship that will get her started, pointed firmly in the direction of elsewhere. That the ship she travels on has a “green marble swimming pool” hidden in its depths, which she soon finds herself plunging into daily, seems emblematic. Like Bobbie, the narrator of One Small Saga has an unerring ability to sniff out the unlooked-for and the exceptional. Read More
July 15, 2020 Sky Gazing What Is the Word for Sky? By Nina MacLaughlin Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. Antonio Correggio, Jupiter and Io (digitally altered), 1540 How many languages does the rain speak? Is anyone fluent in all of them? Are all of us fluent in all of them? Have you also suffered not being able to balance language with non-language? When we’re not with each other in the usual ways, not in person, so much of what we communicate—with a tick of the shoulder, the slight bow of the head, the hand through the hair, the cross of a leg, blood rising to the neck, the hand upon another’s knee, or chest against chest in embrace—is unavailable, muted. We have words, which we toss back and forth to each other, through screens, through phones, now and then through letters in the mail. For so long I thought of words as distancers, approximations. So much gets expressed when we sit together in the same room, vibrating at each other. Peter Matthiessen writes of the meaninglessness of trying to express the inexpressible in words: The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. The time has come for a new language. We can vibrate with the tulip petals, the sunset, the morning light in the asparagus fern on the windowsill. We can share that ring. Between us, though, for now, words are what we have. Sky. Rhymes with high and fly and why. Rhymes with eye and bye and die. Stay with me. There’s breath in the word. Each one of its three letters makes itself known. S hisses with space and air, curves like clouds, like the paths of the wind, the sound of shifting leaves against streets and sidewalks. Which leads to the tall stalk of K, like the edge of a cliff falling into the sky. K—every edge that the sky comes up against. Skyscrapers, peaks, the bark on all the trunks, each rock. K—the craters where the sky sinks in. K—the kaleidoscope. The cliff and the kaleidoscope, the hard edge and all the colors spinning. And Y, eye, I. Like the S, the Y keeps coming. It lasts out the mouth, cold and hot at once. Eye for all-seeing sky, eye that absorbs its light, its sun god, its glowing, pearly moon. Eye that strains to see as far as the eye can see. And also I. I and sky. I and all. I am yours, Sky. I belong to you. I am in you. Ég is the word for sky in Hungarian. My English-speaking mind adds another g and the sky becomes a whole, huge, endless egg, we inside suspended, hung in the albumen (from the Latin albus, white), also known as the glaire (from the Latin clarus, bright or clear). Read More
July 14, 2020 First Person An NDN Boyhood By Billy-Ray Belcourt Billy-Ray Belcourt. Photo: Tenille Campbell. My twin brother, Jesse, and I were born marked by a history of colonization and a public discourse of race we can’t peel from our skin. We were made to take on a mode of embodiment that erodes from the inside out with vicious precision. At the same time, we came into being because love is mathematical: when two people desire each other, they multiply, in various shapes and forms. In our very corporeality we are thus a container for the terror of the past and the beauty that it can’t in the end negate. In this way we, like NDN boys everywhere, are subliminal. The first year of Jesse’s and my life was a hotbed of decisions, desires, and disavowals that would hover above our shared emotional worlds deep into adolescence. This isn’t my story to tell in painful and careful detail, so the picture I paint now is one that’s rehashed from a handful of sources, including something like intuition. Here goes. My mom and dad loved while coated in the ash of history. Twentysomethings entranced by the ecstasy of optimism, they made a family out of nothing but the human need to be a part of something less resonant with toxicity than solitude. They didn’t know how to ask the question Sheila Heti poses in Motherhood: “Who is it for me to bring all this unfolding into being?” Perhaps the philosophical basis for their children’s lives was that they no longer wanted to exhale smoke. Read More
July 14, 2020 Redux Redux: Thunder, They Told Her 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. Kazuo Ishiguro. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about summer storms, rain, thunder, lightning, and everything watery. Read on for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Art of Fiction interview, Larry Woiwode’s short story “Summer Storms,” and Denise Levertov’s poem “Sound of the Axe.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a 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. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196 Issue no. 184 (Spring 2008) INTERVIEWER Why did your family move to England? ISHIGURO Initially it was only going to be a short trip. My father was an oceanographer, and the head of the British National Institute of Oceanography invited him over to pursue an invention of his, to do with storm-surge movements. I never quite discovered what it was. The National Institute of Oceanography was set up during the cold war, and there was an air of secrecy about it. My father went to this place in the middle of the woods. I only went to visit it once. Read More
July 14, 2020 At Work What’s the Use of Being a Boy: An Interview with Douglas A. Martin By Spencer Quong Though a work of fiction, Douglas A. Martin’s recent novella Wolf is written in response to true events: in the early 2000s, two boys, ages twelve and thirteen, were persuaded by a child predator to kill their father. Wolf shifts between various timelines as it imagines the lives of the boys preceding the act—the mental abuse by the father, the manipulation and sexual abuse by the predator—the moment of violence itself, and the courtroom proceedings. In real life and in this novella, the boys were tried as adults and ultimately sentenced to, respectively, seven and eight years in prison. It’s difficult to write about true events, especially those that receive extensive press coverage, but Martin explicitly writes against the callous sensationalism of the news cycle. He returns the story to the boys themselves. With a narration in the close third person, Martin creates a composite, in all its contradictions. The boys are seeking freedom from their father. They genuinely believe they’ve found an answer in the abusive family friend. Martin allows this belief—this optimism, curiosity, sensitivity, earnestness—to live on the page alongside violation and claustrophobia. What makes Wolf unique is its refusal to disentangle all these emotions for the reader. In one particularly wrenching scene, the younger boy is writing notes about the nature of love—it seems, perhaps, to be a love note addressed to or about the family friend who has been abusing him: “He writes it on pieces of paper, like it was going to happen the way he wants it to. He knows what love looks like. This was how at first it was going to feel, he has to know like the friend said.” And despite all I know about the context, it is difficult to refute this certainty, he knows what love looks like. The voice is so immersive that I am alongside the boy and, if only for a moment, conflate love and abuse. Even after I shake myself into my own body, I have to ask, How well do I understand the difference? I’m realizing how much I usually depend on instruction to understand and name suffering. Wolf asks us to do this work on our own. In one of the courtroom scenes, Martin shifts to the perspective of the jurors, who think to themselves: “Best not to get too close to them. Best not to imagine being like one of them, having felt what either must have at one time or another.” When I wrote to Martin, I wanted to ask how to resist this tendency: Best not to get too close. I wanted to know how writing—despite how regularly language is used to lie and mislead—could ever be enough. This interview was conducted over email in May. INTERVIEWER How did you first learn about the crime that inspired Wolf? When did you realize you had questions that needed to be explored in writing? MARTIN It was about a year after the actual event, once the story had gone national and the trial was beginning. One day it was a front-page piece, and that was the first I saw of it, almost twenty years ago now. I am not someone who normally reads the paper, but I wanted to know more than just what was behind the picture of two boys and a much larger man in court. My reaction to how my care was being solicited was part of what led to me writing, but also, any time the boys were quoted, it felt so out of place. When I tried to read about the story, the reporting kept bothering me. It continued to play out in the paper for a while, along with new headlines like “bizarre twist,” and stories taking angles on how it was all part a growing trend of children who might be tried as adults given the severity of their violent acts. It got to the point where I felt if I read anything more, I should write it more as I felt it. Read More