March 6, 2019 Arts & Culture How I Began to Write By Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel García Márquez delivered the following speech at the Athenaeum of Caracas, in Venezuela, on May 3, 1970. Gabriel García Márquez. Photo: Patrick Curry. First of all, forgive me for speaking to you seated, but the truth is that if I stand, I run the risk of collapsing with fear. Really. I always thought I was fated to spend the most terrible five minutes of my life on a plane, before twenty or thirty people, and not like this, before two hundred friends. Fortunately, what is happening to me right now allows me to begin to speak about my literature, since I was thinking that I began to be a writer in the same way I climbed up on this platform: I was coerced. I confess I did all I could not to attend this assembly: I tried to get sick, I attempted to catch pneumonia, I went to the barber, hoping he’d slit my throat, and, finally, it occurred to me to come here without a jacket and tie so they wouldn’t let me into a meeting as serious as this one, but I forgot I was in Venezuela, where you can go anywhere in shirtsleeves. The result: here I am, and I don’t know where to start. But I can tell you, for example, how I began to write. It had never occurred to me that I could be a writer, but in my student days Eduardo Zalamea Borda, editor of the literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, published a note in which he said that the younger generation of writers had nothing to offer, that a new short-story writer, a new novelist, could not be seen anywhere. And he concluded by declaring that he was often reproached because his paper published only the very well-known names of old writers and nothing by the young, whereas the truth, he said, was that no young people were writing. Then a feeling of solidarity with my generational companions arose in me, and I resolved to write a story simply to shut the mouth of Eduardo Zalamea Borda, who was my great friend or, at least, became my great friend later. I sat down, wrote the story, and sent it to El Espectador. I had my second shock the following Sunday when I opened the paper and there was my full-page story with a note in which Eduardo Zalamea Borda acknowledged that he had been wrong, because obviously with “that story the genius of Colombian literature had emerged,” or something along those lines. Read More
March 5, 2019 Redux Redux: Lovers Surprised by Love 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. Gabriel García Márquez. This week, we’re reading Gabriel García Márquez’s 1981 Art of Fiction interview, Junichiro Tanizaki’s short story “The Victim,” and Laurel Blossom’s poem “Plea to a Potential Lover.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69 Issue no. 82 (Winter 1981) If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says “God help me from inventing when I sing.” It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. Read More
March 5, 2019 At Work I, a Novelist: An Interview with Halle Butler By Patrick Cottrell Halle Butler (Photo: Jerzy Rose) I, a novelist, met novelist Halle Butler in Chicago in May 2017. My girlfriend, also a novelist, was reading with Butler at a café in Logan Square. Halle was standing outside with her friend, a novelist, and they were smoking cigarettes. Butler had on a wrinkled button-down shirt from a thrift store, dirty sneakers, and jeans with holes in them. She seemed wry and friendly. At the time, I don’t think she was aware I was a novelist, but as we talked, I couldn’t stop myself from referring to my debut novel, which had come out a couple months earlier. She smiled in a conspiratorial way, then told me she would have trouble remembering the title because she was already drunk. My girlfriend and I were hungry, so we went inside and ordered gumbo. Halle got up to read an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The New Me (Penguin). She burped a few times, then announced she was a Granta Best Young American Novelist. Everyone laughed when her narrator admits she is “afraid of the taste of water.” I wondered, who is this Halle Butler person? I wanted to become her friend immediately. This would be a good place for me to describe, in summary, Butler’s new novel, The New Me, but I hesitate to say that it’s about loneliness, alienation, depression, and friendship. I will say that I experienced waves of empathy for her narrator and her narrator’s anxiety sweat. The New Me is a bold and absurd work of comic genius that dissects social mores, neoliberalism, and consumerism disguised as self-improvement. In other words, Butler and I are kindred spirits and I’m so grateful to have become her friend (when she’s not making fun of me). INTERVIEWER First of all, thank you for writing such a beautiful, enraged treatise on living alone in an apartment in Chicago in the winter with one quasi friend and a terrible job. Where did this book begin for you? BUTLER I assure you the pleasure was all mine. I wrote the first few chapters specifically to perform aloud—the intro/overture part, the train scene, the Tom Jordan part. I really like doing readings, but I felt like I’d never totally cracked the code for how to keep people from glazing over, which is definitely a common thing at a reading—getting and keeping people’s attention is really hard, unless they already know you—which, in my case, is often. So I tried first person, lots of potshots, language that would allow me to read in my “irate idiot” party voice. I like it when you feel like you’re witnessing someone interacting with their work in front of you, rather than some kind of self-conscious performance of a reading, if that makes sense. I read the first handful of pages of The New Me at Cafe Mustache in Chicago, in 2016. Read More
March 5, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: The Phantom Gambler By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s new monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. On September 24th, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7. “Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America. “Mystery Man Wins Fortune,” the Los Angeles Times reported. No one knew the identity of the fair-haired young Texan who’d just made history, and so he became known as the “Phantom Gambler.” “He was cool,” said Jack Binion, president of the Horseshoe. “He really had a lot of gamble in him.” But it would be years before the phantom would be seen in Vegas again. Read More
March 4, 2019 One Word One Word: Dipshit By Halle Butler In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. I was on an airplane last year, and the woman sitting in front of me was a real piece of work. She had two young kids who were totally fine, totally quiet, really low energy—but she kept trying to engage them and turn everything into a teachable moment. She had a very loud, affected voice. I shit you not, this is a direct quote: “Asher, if you wish it, you may have one of your Laffy Taffys now, but then only two Laffy Taffys will remain.” How elegant! The kid didn’t respond, didn’t care either way, but she kept pushing them on him as if it were some kind of Stanford marshmallow experiment. Every time she said something, she repeated it (once more for the balcony!). Of course, she read to them, at top volume, from some Amelia Bedelia–style chapter book the whole flight, overarticulating like it was fucking Chaucer, nervously glancing from side to side to see if we noticed how good she was at this. Meanwhile, the kids tuned her out to play video games and eat wads of candy. When the plane was descending, she was like, “The flight to Manhattan is not all that long, if you recall the flight to London. Do you recall when we flew to London? That was a much longer flight than this, the flight into Heathrow. You may have another Laffy Taffy if you wish.” At that point, the guy across the aisle closed his eyes, exhaled, and said, very softly, “Jesus fucking Christ.” That woman was a dipshit. Read More
March 4, 2019 On Music What We Saw When We First Saw the Wu-Tang By Will Ashon The cover of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). It starts with the picture, back in the time when the picture comes first. Before we’ve slipped out the white paper inner, before we’ve pulled out the black disc inside—three fingers on the label, the meat of the thumb resting along its edge. Before we’ve lifted the lid of the turntable, placed the record over the spindle, before we’ve set the whole thing running. Before the needle comes down, before that bump and crackle as it rides the run-in grooves. Before the music. A creation myth. The very first time. A big room, hard to make out, curtains and a gilt mirror at the back, half of a reflective, misshapen globe, a sun sinking (or rising?) through clouds and smog. The floor wooden, or etched with double lines to make it look wooden, the pinstripe on the suit of a god. A ring of votive candles, seven or eight in the shot, each set on a thin stick stuck into a blob of gold, the flames running horizontal—quite a distance—in such a way as to suggest an open door, or fan, or a complete lack of walls, as if the shot were taken on a platform high up in the sky, levitating above a city. But not a gust, nothing variable, utterly under control. Each flame uniform, part of a set, so that the candles seem to be pointing at something or someone just beyond the frame. There are six figures. It’s possible, if we squint, to see a seventh, distorted by the light from the sun at the back. But what we can interpret as a head and shoulders blocking the light is in fact a cutaway, and what we’ve seen as a circle—that rising sun—is a huge, stylized W, their emblem. Legs bent, shoulders hunched, arms out in front of them. Gun fingers toward the back, thumbs cocked. The hand of the second figure distorted, so that the thumb seems to grow over the top of its index finger. The front-most figure making signs, right hand pointing downward, left hand the kind of shape you form to throw the shadows of a duck or an alligator onto a wall. Fingernails very white, overexposed, long and thin and graceful. Maybe we know how to interpret these hand signals, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. Read More