January 23, 2019 YA of Yore What Was It About Animorphs? By James Frankie Thomas In her monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing. What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie. There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “You insatiable little book-suckers,” the publishing industry sneered, chucking chicken soup at a dozen newly identified subtypes of soul, “you’ll read anything, won’t you?” For children’s books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an unremitting glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “series” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly basis by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the pound. Often they came with a free bracelet or trinket, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public (by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs)—and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable crap. But then there was Animorphs. Read More
January 23, 2019 Arts & Culture The Poet with Many Names—and Many Deaths By Ha Jin Collage. Li Bai painting: public domain via Wikimedia Commons, a painting in Gu Lang Yu museum, Xiamen, Fujian, China. Moon photo: Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)) / https://Lucnix.be. He has many names. In the West, people call him Li Po, as most of his poems translated into English bear that name. Sometimes it is also spelled Li Bo. But in China, he is known as Li Bai. During his lifetime (A.D. 701–62), he had other names—Li Taibai, Green Lotus Scholar, Li Twelve. The last one is a kind of familial term of endearment, as Bai was twelfth among his brothers and male cousins on the paternal side. It was often used by his friends and fellow poets when they addressed him—some even dedicated poems to him titled “For Li Twelve.” By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called zhexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. Such a moniker implies that he had been sent down to earth as punishment for his misbehavior in heaven. Over the twelve centuries since his death, he has been revered as shixian, Poet Immortal. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal. Today it is still common for devotees of his poetry to trek hundreds of miles, following some of the routes of his wanderings as a kind of pilgrimage. Numerous liquors and wines bear his name. Indeed, his name is a ubiquitous brand, flaunted by hotels, restaurants, temples, and even factories. In English, in addition to “Li Po,” he once had another pair of names, Li T’ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him. And Ezra Pound, in his Cathay—his collected translations of classical Chinese poetry—called Li Bai “Rihaku” because Pound had translated those poems from the notes left by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who had originally studied Li Bai’s poetry in Japanese when he was in Japan. Pound’s loose translation of Li Bai’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” has been included in many textbooks and anthologies as a masterpiece of modern poetry. It is also one of Pound’s signature poems—arguably his best known. For the sake of consistency and clarity, let us stay with the name Li Bai. He also has several deaths ascribed to him. For hundreds of years, some people even maintained that he had never died at all, claiming to encounter him now and then. In truth, we are uncertain about the exact date and cause of his death. In January 764, the newly enthroned emperor Daizong issued a decree summoning Li Bai to serve as a counselor at court. It was a post without actual power, in spite of its high-sounding title. Yet to any man of learning and ambition, such an appointment was a great favor, a demonstration of the emperor’s benevolence and magnanimity—and, in Li Bai’s case, a partial restoration of the high status he had once held in the court. When the royal decree reached Dangtu County, Anhui, where Li Bai was supposed to be located, the local officials were thrown into confusion and could not find him. Soon it was discovered that he had died more than a year before. Of what cause and on what day, no one could tell. So we can say only that Li Bai, despite his renown, passed away in 762 without notice. Read More
January 22, 2019 Redux Redux: Mary Oliver and Francine du Plessix Gray 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 our 1987 Art of Fiction interview with Francine du Plessix Gray, who died on January 13 at age eighty-eight, and “The Swan,” a poem by Mary Oliver, who died last Thursday at age eighty-three. 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. Francine du Plessix Gray, The Art of Fiction No. 96 Issue no. 103 (Summer 1987) Our lifetime friendships can be more steadfast and trustworthy than any marriage, and considerably more treasurable. Those few persons whom I gained as friends before the age of twenty-five, for example. Nothing they would ever say or do would diminish my love and esteem for them. It’s as if they were grafted upon me. Read More
January 22, 2019 In Memoriam When Mary Oliver Signed Books By Billy Collins I didn’t know Mary Oliver as well as I would have liked, though our poetry paths crossed a few times. We were introduced more than once, but it wasn’t until one evening in October 2012 that we were brought into close proximity. We were asked to read together at an immense performing arts center in Bethesda, Maryland. I was excited at the prospect of our two readerships convening in one place, but drama of a different kind was on the horizon. Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on coastal Maryland and due to strike later that night. Read More
January 22, 2019 Arts & Culture To All the Introductions I’ve Loved Before By Michael Chabon Konrad Kachelofen’s printing of Eclogue of Theodulus, 1492. Public domain. “I never read introductions,” says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesn’t quite ring true. She amends it: “Well, I’ve read two,” she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, required reading for a photography class: “But it was fine because I like his style.” The other is Sherman Alexie’s introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (a favorite book, and author, of Rose’s), because “it felt like it would be rude not to.” I suspect that my daughter’s antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled as a foreword (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who don’t bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget. You will not find me among either group; in the second instance out of hard experience but in the first out of love, pure love, from the time of my first encounter, circa 1979, with John Cheever’s all-too-brief preface to his Stories, which contains the following passage, in which I now detect a premonitory stirring, two decades ahead of schedule, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: “These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” Certain forewords—Susan Sontag’s to A Barthes Reader, Walter Benjamin’s to Fables of Leskov—and prefaces—Raymond Chandler’s to The Simple Art of Murder, Robert Towne’s to the published script of Chinatown, Elmore Leonard’s to his Complete Western Stories—have become beloved, even crucial texts for me, to be regularly reread, as are Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita and Leigh Brackett’s to her Best of collection. Read More
January 18, 2019 In Memoriam Francine du Plessix Gray and Sorrel Soup By Vasily Rudich and Gabriella De Ferrari By her own account, writing wasn’t easy for Francine du Plessix Gray, who died last Sunday at the age of eighty-eight. As she told Regina Weinreich in her 1987 Art of Fiction interview, “I’ve always had a terrifically painful ambivalence of love and terror towards the act of writing.” But this doesn’t come through in her fearless books, such as the novel Lovers and Tyrants, a semiautobiographical account of her childhood, and Them, an unsparing look at her tyrannical parents. She was born in 1930 at the French embassy in Warsaw, but after her father died in 1940, Gray and her mother emigrated to America. Gray arrived in the country knowing not a lick of English; fourteen months later, she won the school spelling bee. Gray thrived in tense situations—she studied under the poet Charles Olson, whom she described as a “terrifying guru,” and before coming to fiction, she worked as the only woman on the night shift at United Press International, where she was forced to file stories “in a matter of minutes—sometimes a matter of seconds, since we were always trying to beat AP to the radio wire.” She went on to become a New Yorker staff writer and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she taught at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown. However, despite her success, when asked whether she’d like to be a writer in the next life, she replied: “Hell no. Have you ever met a writer who’d want the same karma a second time round? I doubt if one exists. We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others. The next time round I’d like to be a great athlete with a political mission, like Billie Jean King or Arthur Ashe, or perhaps a lieder singer.” Here, we bring you two short memories from those who knew her: Francine du Plessix Gray. Photo: Frances McLaughlin-Gill. Read More