December 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Staring at a Digital Black Hole By Amir Ahmadi Arian Tehran skyline On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet. Many of us are members of family group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, used to receiving a “good morning to my children” from a parent, a “did you finally go to the doctor?” from the other parent, a picture of the overdue first snow in Tehran from an aunt, and a joke about the president from an uncle. Over the years, these short messages have served as daily reminders of where we come from and who our people are. Above all, they have been our daily reassurance that our families were fine. The internet had functioned as the umbilical cord that kept alive the part of our soul still dependent on the motherland. That morning, the cord was cut. * The internet blackout, we learned, was the Iranian government’s response to the protests that broke out after it announced a 300 percent increase in the price of gas. The decision was made and implemented at midnight, with no advance warning given. Thanks to the state of Iran under sanctions, the news of the price hike was like a lit match in a barrel of dynamite. Protests spread very wide, very fast. The protesters moved beyond the gas price issue to target the entire status quo. The Iranian government let loose its police and militia. The crisis became so deep and so serious, the bloodshed so vast and the heap of corpses so high, that the government cut off the internet to keep people from organizing and to stifle the distribution of videos of its brutality, which included numerous instances of indiscriminate shooting at unarmed protesters. For us, the Iranians abroad, desperate and in the dark, the savagery was nothing new. Everyone who has paid attention to Iran, a country beleaguered by ruthlessness of sanctions and brutalized by its own vicious, paranoid government, expected an explosion of violence. But the internet blackout came out of nowhere. None of us had ever thought that one day Iran would become a digital black hole, a dark void on the blindingly glittering map of the global network. We found ourselves locked out of the house whose windows, we had thought, we would always be able to look through. Read More
December 10, 2019 Redux Redux: Credible Threats That Appear and Disappear Like Clockwork 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 celebrating the release of the Winter issue. Read on for three archive pieces written by contributors to our new issue: an excerpt from Georges Perec’s novel A Man Asleep, a selection from Jeffrey Yang and Kazumi Tanaka’s collaboration “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home,” and Rae Armantrout’s poem “Now See.” 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. from A Man Asleep By Georges Perec Issue no. 116 (Fall 1990) You are sitting, naked from the waist up, wearing only pajama bottoms, in your garret, on the narrow bench that serves as your bed, with a book. Raymond Aron’s Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, resting on your knees, open at page one-hundred and twelve. At first it’s just a sort of lassitude or tiredness, as if you suddenly became aware that for a long time, for several hours, you have been succumbing to an insidious, numbing discomfort, not exactly painful but nonetheless intolerable, succumbing to the sickly-sweet and stifling sensation of being without muscles or bones, of being a sack of potatoes surrounded by other sacks of potatoes. Read More
December 10, 2019 Correspondence A Letter from New York By Ralph Ellison In 1939, three years after leaving the Tuskegee Institute, Ralph Ellison regained contact with his close friend Joe Lazenberry, a Tuskegee classmate whom Ellison had presumed deceased. The following, a reply to a letter from Lazenberry, is the fullest account Ellison wrote of his time spent in New York; Dayton, Ohio; and again in New York after leaving school. It is a factual and meditative version of both his life and the development of his mind in his midtwenties. Ralph Ellison. Photo: United States Information Agency staff photographer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. To Joe Lazenberry New York April 18, 1939 Dear Joe: You have no idea how glad I was to hear from you again. I mailed the card in spite of having been informed that you were deceased, like Mark Twain, and I assure you that more than mentally my heart was in my mouth. It was like this: I happen to know a girl from St. Paul, Zelma Jackson, who gave me this information with a very positive assurance that it was true. I didn’t know what to think; she was positive and I couldn’t accept. I started to write your mother but decided that it would be too painful; after all the damn gal might have known what she was talking about. Well, I thought, that guy couldn’t leave without giving me a chance to cuss him out for failing to answer my letters, he’s bad, but not that bad. Then last month I wrote Rabb asking him about you and he answered that if you were dead it was only from the neck up. So with that hope I sent out the feeler. I am glad we are no longer out of contact. I suppose it takes some such incident as this to make one realize you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry. I’ve known a slew of people since the Tuskegee days Joe but none I would rather have as a friend—and alive. In broad outline it is surprising how similar the patterns of our lives have been. The following brief list of events will explain what I mean. Read More
December 10, 2019 Happily The Silence of Witches By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Edmund DuLac, illustration for The Little Mermaid, 1911 I have a dream my mother is standing at my front door crying. Her hair is wet and tangled in seashells. She’s read a story I’ve written. “How could you,” she says. “Your own mother.” She opens her coat and out march my husband, his daughters, my brothers, my sons, my father. I try to run away but they catch me by the collar. “How could you, how could you, how could you?” they chant. “Your very own mother! Your very own us!” I’ll stop writing. I’m sorry. And I do. I stop forever, and instantly my lips and hands are dotted with mold. White threads spread across my face where mushrooms begin to swell. I grow wild with silence. “Oh, for god’s sake,” says my mother. “Forget it. Enough with the drama.” “But my silence is real,” writes Maurice Blanchot. “If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.” Of all the silences in fairy tales, the most pronounced is the Little Mermaid’s. For a potion that will turn her into a human, she pays the sea witch with her tongue. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” the sea witch lives where no flowers or sea grass grow, where “all the trees and bushes were polyps, half animals and half plants.” It’s the sea witch’s silence, her exile, her house built from the bones of shipwrecked humans, the toad feeding out of her mouth, and the snakes sprawled like illegible cursive “about her great spongy bosom” that is the silence of poets. It’s Blanchot’s silence. It’s the silence of outsiders and mothers. Once kept it will run ahead, and wait for all of us to catch up. And as it waits, it will grow. The Little Mermaid’s silence is the silence of children. But the sea witch’s silence is the silence of an old woman with a story no one will ever know. The first silence is soft and lovesick and melancholy like sea foam. The second silence surrounds you like water surrounds a drowning woman, transparent and cruel. It’s been a difficult year. My stepdaughter moved in for seven months and then moved out. She left Mavis, her pet tarantula, behind. My husband and I argued more than ever. My grandmother died so I couldn’t call her up to ask her advice. In an act of grief I bought a yellow rotary telephone for my desk. It’s plugged into nothing. Sometimes I just hold the receiver up to my ear and listen. Sometimes I talk. As the date of my stepdaughter’s departure grew closer, I practiced politely biting my tongue. There was so much to say, but I said nothing. I bit and I bit. “Peace,” I once wrote in a story about daughters, “is what pain looks like in public.” Read More
December 9, 2019 Line Readings Comics as System By Ivan Brunetti In his new column “Line Readings,” Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole. Pictures and words, pictures as words, words as pictures, neither quite pictures nor words: comics are self-contained systems, worlds unto themselves, answering to no one. From one panel, to one page, to one sequence, to one story, to one book, each level of a comic holds a small universe, and each small universe folds out into a larger universe. These systems need basic parameters and a modicum of internal consistency so that they can function not unlike language, but they are also dynamic, fluid, unstable, imperfect, flexible, and open-ended … not unlike language. As we decode them, they reconstitute themselves in our brains as narrative (or poetry, or both). In any one panel, or the spread of two panels, or any given sequence, we glimpse the entire book in microcosm. Consider the above panel from Mark Beyer’s 1987 book Agony. What exactly is happening in this strange image? And, stranger still, why is it possible for us readers, with relative ease, to figure it out? Read More
December 9, 2019 Arts & Culture The Only Untranslatable American Writer By Brian Evenson Gary Lutz (photo: Carol L. Steen) About a decade ago, I was in Paris with a gathering of French translators and editors, talking about Gary Lutz’s work. Several of them had, at one time or another, tried to translate him, and all of them—some after months of trying—had found this to be impossible. Lutz’s work was too deftly sewn into the English language to be picked free of it. Each story is so much about the specific tonal, sonic, and rhythmic relationships within English, and so much about torquing a given historical moment of that language by injecting it with archaisms and oddity, that to reproduce it in French just didn’t work. It was, one translator told me, more exacting than poetry, and infinitely more complex. “Technically I could translate it,” he told me. “I did translate several pages of it. But, then, rereading it, I realized it had, somehow, when I wasn’t looking, escaped. Then I retranslated those pages a different way. Still it was gone. I could try again, but no. Lutz will always escape.” These were translators who relished a challenge. They had, between them, translated the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, Mark Z. Danielewski, William H. Gass, and David Foster Wallace. One of them had translated a story of mine that contained a list of more than a hundred varieties of barbed wire, arranged to create certain sonic patterns. “What other American writers are untranslatable?” I asked. They shrugged. “Just him,” one of them finally replied. So when I say that Lutz is unique, I mean this in a much more serious way than how the term is usually applied to writers. Read More