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The Daily

October 19, 2020
Arts & Culture

William Gaddis’s Disorderly Inferno

By Joy Williams

William Gaddis. Photo: Jerry Bauer. Courtesy of New York Review Books.

Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him …

—William Gaddis on writing a novel

A magnificent example of rant. A perfect example really. The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s first novel, was seven years in construction. J R, his second, took more than twice that long. In each case the invalid miraculously arose and, with commanding vigor, transformed and transforming, entered the realm of great literature.

Back in 1957, Malcolm Lowry kept trying to deliver his enthusiasm for The R through a mutual friend, David Markson. “It is a truly fabulous creation, a superbyzantine gazebo and secret missile of the soul.” Mr. Gaddis did not respond. He had not read Under the Volcano (“It was both too close and too far away from what I was doing … ”). On the other hand, he wrote a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer and even sent him a copy of The R and never received a reply. Read More
October 16, 2020
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Trail Mix, Safe Sex, and Conversation

By The Paris Review

Armistead Maupin. Photo: Christopher Turner. Courtesy of Harper Perennial.

Why did I sleep on the Tales of the City television reboot? Maybe my 2019 self knew that her October 2020 counterpart would desperately need to hear one of her favorite fictional characters, Anna Madrigal (played by the incomparably sympathetic Olympia Dukakis), declare to a doom-mongering millennial documentarian: “We’re still people, aren’t we. Flawed. Narcissistic. Doing our best.” I write now to recommend the show, but with the caveat that you must read all of the books first (start here), and it’s not a bad idea to watch the previous television adaptations, either. Go ahead, immerse yourself in the five-decade epic of Mrs. Madrigal, a San Francisco landlord who resembles a fairy godmother (imagine!), and the eclectic tenants of her hilltop home as they navigate friendship, romance, and gender identity. Armistead Maupin’s Tales series found me when I was about twenty-four, and it gave me both an escape from my own situation and an education about the wider world. Like Dickens, Maupin writes for the masses, and he originally published the first five books of the Tales in serial. He gives characters names like Anna Madrigal, DeDe Halcyon, and Mary Ann Singleton; Michael Tolliver, the boy looking for love at the center of it all, is surely an outright nod. And like Dickens, Maupin is both an operatic storyteller and a documentarian of contemporary social issues, though he doesn’t judge or preach. The Tales were where I first met and loved transgender characters and where I learned about AIDS as it was experienced personally and over decades by gay men, rather than as a distant reason for high schoolers to practice safe sex. The books were, sad to say, revelatory for me even in the early aughts—but when they were first published, in the seventies and eighties, they were revolutionary. Beyond the candid treatment of then-taboo subjects, each book interweaves juicy personal stories and a dark secret that the gang works together to uncover—a stand-in for the real danger in their lives and a nudge that living honestly is the best policy. But these are cozy mysteries: whether you’ve recently broken up with your person or you’ve just found out they’re a psychopath, you can always go home to Barbary Lane, where Mrs. Madrigal will roll you a joint and affirm your human value. Now that things are feeling scarier than ever, what a godsend it is to revisit Maupin’s clear-eyed yet somehow still hopeful world. —Jane Breakell Read More
October 15, 2020
Arts & Culture

The View Where I Write

By John Lee Clark

Read John Lee Clark’s poem “Line of Descent” in our Fall issue.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up, scribbling on index cards while snacking on molasses. Lucille Clifton said that she wrote such short poems because that’s how long she could hustle during her children’s naps. Truman Capote famously described himself as a “completely horizontal author,” writing longhand in bed or on a couch, with cigarettes and coffee handy. Maya Angelou often rented a room at a nearby hotel, by the month, and had the staff take out the paintings and any bric-a-brac. Charles Dickens liked changing venues but required that his traveling desk and the same ornaments be arranged just so. Agatha Christie puzzled out her murder stories in the bathtub while munching on apples. Victor Hugo abolished distractions by locking himself in a room without any clothes, for fear they would tempt him to go out. What he did permit himself was what many writers have: a view.

I am no different. Where I write, on the twenty-fifth floor of an apartment building in downtown Saint Paul, I possess a most breathtaking view. Directly below me is a thick circular grove of—what shall I say?—soft-branched willow trees. A short distance due west lies a pond in the shape of a bear claw. I can see the reeds at its bottom and the cattails dancing around it. Due east across a field of tall grass, warm sunlight bathes over a series of clumps—perhaps houses?—and a long knoll crammed with fuzzy flowers.

I never tire of tracking the snaking strip of beach that frames my vista. To the far west is a cape, the northeast a bay, and farther east swells out a peninsula. Strangely, there are no boats. Neither are there any cars. Not as far as I am able to observe, at any rate.

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October 15, 2020
At Work

Escaping Loneliness: An Interview with Adrian Tomine

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Adrian Tomine. Photo: Susan De Vries.

Adrian Tomine and I were both English majors at UC Berkeley in the nineties. We undoubtedly roamed the corridors of the English department in Wheeler Hall at the same time, along with the future actor and fellow English major John Cho. We were all dreaming of telling stories or being in stories, and I wish there were some alternate past in which we all hung out and encouraged one another and said, Go for it, dude!

I would have been a fan of Tomine’s work back then, given how much of a fan I’ve been of his work since his early Optic Nerve comics. I have all of his books, which is more than I can say for almost any other writer. He’s a natural storyteller who brings together a clean line in his drawing to fit the spare lines of his stories. He’s also a master of the short form, from anecdote to short story and short novel. As someone who has suffered through writing a collection of short stories, I can testify that simply because a form is short does not mean it is easy. If anything, short forms are harder because the storyteller has to be concise and must know what to leave out as much as what to leave in.

Tomine knows what to leave out. The absences in his work, from what is not drawn and what is not said, make the presences stand out even more vividly. One thing absent from much of his earlier work was his status as an Asian American, which he begins to gesture at in his midcareer efforts, such as the story “Hawaiian Getaway” and the hilarious Shortcomings. What is refreshing about his approach to Asian Americans is his lack of sanctimony. Instead, he treats Asian Americans with his trademark astringency and satire. I’m all for it. I love my fellow Asian Americans, but our necessary convictions and beliefs can easily turn into pompousness and a painful lack of self-awareness. As someone who is both inside and outside of Asian America, Tomine sees through and draws from these blind spots, mixing sympathy with skepticism in just the right dose.

Now, in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Tomine returns with the storytelling style his fans have come to expect, but here he foregrounds his own Asian American life. Not that being Asian American exhausts the meanings of his life or his art—far from it—but it is one meaning, and he extracts a lot of humor from it, the way a dentist extracts a tooth. There’s some numbness and pain involved, but if there’s blood, you, the patient, and now the reader, don’t see it. This is the terrain of microaggression, sublimated response, and understated ambition that Tomine explores with the precise touch of a dentist gazing perpetually into a mouth, doing the crucial work of the quotidian. It’s lonely work, indeed, but by dwelling for so long and so thoroughly in the loneliness of his art, Tomine brings us close, terribly close, to the halitosis of being human, to the emotions we might prefer to keep at a distance.

INTERVIEWER

What do you like to be called as an artist?

TOMINE

I’d probably say “cartoonist.” But if I’m meeting my wife’s extended family and they want to say, Oh, we heard you’re a graphic novelist, then I’d happily go along with it.

INTERVIEWER

In a review of your previous book, Killing and Dying, Chris Ware said you write comics for adults. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about the work you engage in. Is that frustrating?

TOMINE

Compared with how frustrating it used to be, it feels like we’re living in a fantasy world. Even ten years ago it was so different. Now there’s a pretty good chance that if I meet someone and tell them I’m a cartoonist or a graphic novelist, they’ll be interested and polite, as opposed to being confounded or put off or, like, protecting their children. The most interaction I have with random people is through my kids’ school. And in Brooklyn, it’s almost a boring, conservative job, like, Oh, he’s a graphic novelist? Well my dad’s a full-time protestor—or something like that.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a funny episode in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist where you’re the dad at your kids’ school getting asked to do show-and-tell about your work. And you do a poop sketch. But some brat tells the story to their parents, and then you’re humiliated by this email to all parents saying, “There was an incident today … ”

TOMINE

I probably made it sound much worse than it really was. Read More
October 14, 2020
The Art of Distance

The Art of Distance No. 29

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 selection below.

“This week we continue our serialization of Edward P. Jones’s ‘Marie,’ a timely story from our archive about a tough-minded woman who seeks connection while facing the challenges of aging and bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. If you missed part 1, you can read it here and then scroll down for the next installment of the story. We’ll post parts 3 and 4 in the coming weeks. Don’t forget that subscribers to the print magazine need only link their account for digital access to a treasure trove of stories, poems, landmark interviews, art portfolios, and more. As ever, we wish you a safe and sane week and hope that this story provides focus, calm, and a bit of relief. Read on for part 2 of ‘Marie,’ by Edward P. Jones.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Photo: © Peter / Adobe Stock.

Nothing fit Marie’s theory about life like the weather in Washington. Two days before, the temperature had been in the forties, and yesterday it had dropped to the low twenties, then warmed up a bit with the afternoon, bringing on snow flurries. Today the weather people on the radio had said it would warm up enough to wear just a sweater, but Marie was wearing her coat. And tomorrow, the weather people said, it would be in the thirties, with maybe an inch or so of snow.

Appointments near twelve o’clock were always risky, because the Social Security people often took off for lunch long before noon and returned sometime after one. And except for a few employees who seemed to work through their lunch hours, the place shut down. Marie had never been interviewed by someone willing to work through the lunch hour. Today, though the appointment was for eleven, she waited until one thirty before the woman at the front of the waiting room told her she would have to come back another day, because the woman who handled her case was not in. Read More
October 14, 2020
First Person

Slow Violence

By Lynn Steger Strong

The US Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC.

The day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings two years ago, I was applying thinly sliced yellow-dyed marshmallows in the shape of daisies onto cupcakes for my daughter’s sixth birthday party. I’d been watching Christine Blasey Ford speak—I’d moved from the couch to the floor—but I’d turned the TV off around the time that Lindsey Graham appeared to start crying.

I went running. I was angry. Worse than angry: I had that feeling that I’ve felt so often the past four years—but also, my whole life—that what was happening was deeply wrong, and that was why it was happening, and that was just the way things were.

Running, I tripped on something and I fell, hands and elbows first, on the hard dirt. I got a nasty gash on my left arm. I smashed the lower half of my phone. I got up, though, and kept running. My elbow stung, burned, but I didn’t stop to look at it. I felt the warmth of blood, a few drips on my fingers. It was only later, back at our apartment, that I saw how wide and deep and bloody the cut was.

I showered quickly, and poured half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my arm. I put on the short-sleeved shirt I think of as my mom shirt. It was humid, mid-September, but I put on a cardigan to cover up the blood. I put the cupcakes into a cupcake carrier. I put the cupcake carrier into our old stroller and walked them to my daughter’s school. I listened to the hearings as I walked. I was shaking by the time I got to our daughter’s first-grade room.

The party was for all the kids with September birthdays and another mom read a book to all the kids. I sat quietly in the back. When it was my daughter’s turn to walk six times around the sun, I stood up. I had begun to sweat and I pulled the sleeve of my cardigan up over my elbow. I saw another mom blanch at the site of my cut, avert her eyes, and I pulled the sleeve back down. We clapped and sang as my six-year-old danced around in circles. My daughter wanted me to bring her home with me but I left her there. I sat on someone else’s stoop close to the school until it was time to pick her and her sister up.

Rattled is what I felt, rickety. Standing there, clapping, trying to smile. A low roiling under everything. The burn, but also the shame, the mess and gore, but also the absurd stupidity of that cut stuck now to the cardigan’s thin wool.

I was glad about the gash, though. I did not want to show it to those other mothers I did not know, but I talked about it to friends. It felt like proof that something happened that day, a concrete marker for what has felt true in my body for so long.

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