July 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Where the Voice of Alejandra Pizarnik Was Queen By Patricio Ferrari Hay, madre, un sitio en el mundo, que se llama París. Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande. (There is, mother, a place in the world called Paris. A very big place and far and very big again.) – César Vallejo In a diary entry of May 1959, while still living with her parents in Buenos Aires, shortly after the publication of her third poetry collection, the twenty-three-year-old Alejandra Pizarnik wrote: Je voudrais vivre pour écrire. Non penser à autre chose qu’à écrire. Je ne prétend [sic] pas l’amour ni l’argent. Je ne veux pas penser, ni construire décemment ma vie. Je veux de la paix: lire, étudier, gagner un peu d’argent pour m’independiser [sic] de ma famille, et écrire. (I would like to live in order to write. Not to think of anything else other than to write. I am not after love nor money. I don’t want to think nor decently build my life. I want peace: to read, to study, to earn some money so that I become independent from my family, and to write.) Bold and assertive in tone, these words are less of a confession than a daring conviction, a resolution, a literary plan. Circumstantial? Purposely stylized? Perhaps the more essential question here is: Why did the Argentinian-born poet turn to a foreign language that, until then, she’d almost exclusively employed just to read French literature? Read More
July 24, 2018 Redux Redux: Writers at Play 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, we bring you J. D. McClatchy’s 2002 Writers at Work interview, Nancy Lemann’s short story “Sportsman’s Paradise,” and Mark Halliday’s poem “Ballplayer at Midnight.” Read More
July 24, 2018 At Work The Vocabulary of Tourism: An Interview with Laura van den Berg By Andrew Ervin In The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg’s phantasmagoric fourth book, a recently widowed woman named Clare travels alone to Havana to attend the Festival of New Latin American Cinema. There, she sees her deceased husband Richard and everything she knew—or thought she knew—about their marriage is thrown into turmoil. It’s the perfect premise for a novel that, in van den Berg’s hands, is both emotionally nuanced and philosophically profound. Part of the book’s appeal is the way van den Berg shines a light on the casual misogyny of some of our once-revered artists. “Torture the women, Hitchcock was reported to have said when a young director asked him for advice,” she writes. And, “If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her, Hemingway had once written in a letter.” The novel’s clear-eyed scrutiny of the treatment of women in horror films made me rethink a lot of my own viewing habits as a kid. Though I’ve admired van den Berg’s fiction for about a decade now, we first met in 2015, when we were on a panel together at the Brooklyn Book Festival. This interview was conducted via email, this spring. INTERVIEWER How did you begin to write this novel? What questions did you seek to raise or what did you want to know more about? VAN DEN BERG Ah, so many things were on the brain! Ghosts. Death. Accidents. Violence. Sick parents. Marriage. Florida. Tourism. Planes. Hotels. Cameras. Horror films. Misogyny. Secrets. More specifically, I wrote much of the first draft while living on the campus of Bard College, in a house that I’m fairly sure was haunted. I was only at Bard for a semester. I had been bouncing around between various campuses for a few years and that winter I was on the road a lot because I had just put out my first book and my husband and I were spending too much time apart and my father was ill—life felt so transient, as if everything was moving too quickly for me to absorb anything. So the book sprung from a tangle of chaotic feelings—plus an attic ceiling that would unfold itself in the middle of the night. I would come out of my bedroom in the morning and the stairs would be out and waiting like an invitation. There’s a line from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing that goes, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I’ve long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we’re traveling. And, of course, the gap between what we see and what we know has much resonance for horror films too. Read More
July 24, 2018 Arts & Culture Ode to the Library Museum By Erica X Eisen The Morgan Library. There is no friend in the world better than a book; in the abode of grief that is this world there is no [better] consoler. —Mir Ali Heravi In the Chester Beatty Library, there are books made entirely of jade. There are picture scrolls featuring calligraphy by the brother of the Japanese emperor. There are papyrus codices that constitute some of the few surviving texts of Manichaeism, a religion of darkness and light that rivaled Christianity in scale until its last believers died out in fourteenth-century China. There are Armenian hymnals, Renaissance catalogues of war machines, and monographs on native Australian fauna. There is all of this and more—thousands and thousands of other works diverse in period and place of origin, waiting for human eyes. And yet as I walk through the galleries, as I survey the cases of books safe behind their glass, it occurs to me that if a book is a thing meant to be read, then in a certain sense, these objects have lost their function to all but the scholarly epigraphists, backs bent in the private study room. And yet far from becoming something less because of this, the books on display have become something more. Can we recover a physical literature? Can we recover a literature that is not merely read but felt? The library museum gestures at just such a possibility. By immobilizing pages, by securing spines, by presenting material that is illegible or unintelligible to the average modern reader, the library museum ruptures our habitual schema for what to do when confronted with a text. We cannot comprehend the sentences, the words, the script itself even. And furthermore. we are not meant to, are meant instead to attune ourselves to their textures, their heft, their thingness. When we cease to read, we begin to see. At the point of losing sense, we regain sensation. Read More
July 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Michael Stipe, R.E.M., and the Anxiety of Influence By Christian Kiefer Michael Stipe’s “Infinity Mirror.” (Photo: Toby Tenenbaum/Brooklynvegan.com) There was a time when art was cool—books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures—and you could love what you loved, proudly and without reservation. For me, as a child and then a teen from a small town, I wanted to pull all of it into me, to make it part of who I was or who I was becoming or who I wanted to be. And this feeling stayed with me right up until I made it to graduate school. Critical theory killed me, or nearly did, because it made it wrong to think anything was cool. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence was a wrecking ball. “What we used to call ‘imaginative literature’ is indistinguishable from literary influence,” he writes in the preface. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” was another. “To give an Author to a text,” Barthes writes, “is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.” There were other such texts, of course, texts that were read (or misread) to deny the very act of imagination itself, as if art were simply a structure built by social and political forces, ultimately designed to be used for some other intellectual purpose—to make a point or to tear down another. I found it difficult to understand why anyone would ever want to discount the author of a work, for it felt—and still feels—like a denial of the best of what art really is: the singular and individual act of a heart, a mind, a soul reaching out to grasp hold of another heart, another mind, another soul. Which is to say that I still think art’s cool. Books. Movies. Bands. Literary magazines. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and cynicism is death. Read More
July 23, 2018 At Work Self-Aware Self-Awareness: An Interview with Andrew Martin By Max Ross The characters in Early Work, Andrew Martin’s debut novel, are poets, playwrights, film buffs, grad students, adjunct college instructors, thirtyish, liberal, well-read. They like drinking, screwing, smoking cigarettes, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, tapas. But the simple act of liking anything isn’t simple for them; most of their pleasures are guilty ones. “Yeah, I’m pretty into monotonous drug rap right now,” says one of the characters. “I mean, like everybody. I guess it’s the usual racist thing, where white people like it because it takes their worst suspicions about minorities and confirms them in lurid and entertaining ways?” “Yeah, that’s why I like it,” I said. “Racist reasons mostly. I’m not thrilled about the misogyny, though. In my experience, you don’t really want to be the guy bringing up the genius of Yeezus in a room full of women. Even if someone loves it she’ll probably wonder what your problem with women is.” There’s a sort of cultural calorie counting at work, as if Martin’s characters were compulsively glancing at the side of the box to see what sociocultural contaminants might be hiding in their media—before indulging anyway. The story follows Peter Cunningham, an affable slacker who’s dropped out of Yale’s Ph.D program in English (“Were we supposed to read these books? Were my fellow students genuine in their stupid ideas about literature?”) to go live in Virginia with his longtime girlfriend, a medical student named Julia, and work on a collection of stories that he doesn’t work on much. “I knew, because I’d been told, that passivity was not a quality to aspire to,” he says at one point. “But I thought it was possible that there was some secret nobility, a logic, in letting the tides of life just knock one around, in keeping the psychic ledger balanced.” His windsurfing is disrupted by the presence of Leslie, a would-be screenwriter who’s visiting Charlottesville to write a screenplay. Their attraction to each other is irrepressible, and Peter must decide whether or not to exchange the comforts of his life for something more volatile and uncertain. That is, it’s a story of a love triangle, pure and familiar. Martin reinvigorates the form, transposing its chords and riffing on its most familiar melodies. While Peter plays the lead, it quickly becomes clear that Julia and Leslie have more control over his destiny than he does. It’s the women, in this book, who have gravity. What’s perhaps most striking, aside from the book’s humor, is the psychological acuity of its characters. Maybe because they’ve all done time in New York, or maybe just because they’ve come of age alongside social media, there’s a general self-awareness, and an awareness of this self-awareness, that enlivens the prose and feels at once recognizable and original. I recently spoke with Martin about his book via FaceTime. We discussed, among other things, the literary archetypes he was working from, the authors that influenced him, and the intersection of self-awareness and guilt. He was in his apartment in Boston. His dog, Bonnie, most likely a Collie-Retriever mix, occasionally entered the shot to offer input and affection. INTERVIEWER The set-up of the novel—its plot and, if you don’t squint too hard, the characters—will be fairly familiar to readers. But this feels like a deliberate decision on your part. MARTIN Oh, yeah. The basic premise of the book is borrowed from any number of older, better novels. It’s about youngish people who want to be writers, and all of the friendships and sex and conflicts they have with each other. The characters fit into certain archetypes, at least superficially. There’s a tortured male artist, his long-suffering partner, and the wild, brilliant woman who shows up and makes everyone lose their minds. It wasn’t shocking to me, or to anyone who knows me, that this was what I’d come up with. Many of my favorite books are about writers and their romantic entanglements. At the same time, I was very conscious of wanting to subvert the templates I was working from. It was crucial to me that this not be a novel about a young man who finds his “true self” by screwing over his girlfriend and running off with another woman. I didn’t want it to be moralistic one way or the other, but it was really important that it not be about Peter’s, I don’t know, coming-of-age, even though it’s very much set up to look like it might be. To that end, there was a very deliberate effort—maybe overly deliberate, in that I’ve tipped the scales so strongly in their favor—to have a set of really dynamic intellectual women at the center of the novel. There’s obviously this trope in literature of the male writer who succeeds by being awful to everyone around him. Both the men and women in the book are reading these post-war writers who define that attitude—Mailer and Roth and Updike, all of whom I admire to varying degrees despite their huge blind spots—and there’s an ongoing tradition of sexist bullshit in literature, which I’m trying to engage with and push back against. I did want to capture the fact that most of the successful professional writers I’m close with in real life are women, and many of the lousy-acting male writers are less productive, or at least less interesting, than their female counterparts. I think it’s a reflection of reality rather than ideology, though there’s no way to take one’s politics out of it, probably. Read More