December 23, 2024 Diaries Christmas Tree Diary By Jake Maynard Friday, November 29, 2024 27 degrees A twelve-hour opening shift and I dripped snot on the first customer’s debit card. But that’s Christmas tree season. Other than the barrel fire, there’s no place to get warm, so I wore fleece thermals with jeans on top, pockets full of pine needles already. Plus a hoodie and a blanket-lined denim trucker jacket that passes for hip. Ty doesn’t wear a coat, just three Carhartt hoodies on top of each other. Jack wears a knee-length puffer jacket from Goodwill. Brian wears a hoodie with the hood cinched tight around his face and his beard poking out. He looks the most like an elf. He also looks the most like Santa. Kids like to bring up one or the other. Sometimes we try to wear gloves, but they get caked in sap. People are always asking why landscapers and construction workers are selling Christmas trees. The short answer is that trees are heavy and construction workers are strong, and that winter is cold and we’re mostly cool with that. We’re set up across from a gay club in a rich part of Pittsburgh. Our boss started selling Christmas trees in this lot fifteen years ago. From that came a seasonal nursery selling flowers and shrubs in the summer, which led to a landscaping service, which became full-service contracting, which is why now you have a bunch of carpenters temporarily assigned to tree duty. We make good money in tips. I work in the nursery during the warmer months and on jobsites when the plant business slows. Even I’m surprised that it’s here, just a rickety greenhouse and a few sheds dropped onto a sloping city lot in the neighborhood where the Mellons and Carnegies once built their mansions. Now luxury apartments, dorms for adults, are encroaching. It feels like one might rocket up from the ground at any minute, launching us out into the burbs, where rent’s cheaper. The nursery’s vibe has been variously described as crunchy, folksy, chill, granola, and “aesthetic”: hand-painted signs fading in the weather, a long, rusty pergola full of wreaths made with tree trimmings and some handmade ornaments dropped off by their makers. We spread a ton of mulch, lean the trees on X-shaped racks scabbed together with scrap lumber, hang some floodlights, light a few barrel fires, and crank Casey Kasem’s Christmas Top 40. The same songs every day. Unless Brian’s working, then it’s Latin American Navidad songs or Christmas ska. It keeps him upbeat in the cold. Read More
December 20, 2024 The Review’s Review The Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review: Part Two By The Paris Review Wilhelm Amberg, Reading from Goethe’s Werther (1870), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Colored Television by Danzy Senna: among its subjects (not in order of importance) are LA, the vagaries of a writer’s life, and race—often in terms of a word that, coming from New Orleans, I am deeply familiar with, but which I thought I was not allowed to use. Until Danzy Senna said it was OK. More than OK. She prefers it to any less specific word. What is this word? Mulatto. The book’s heroine is writing a gigantic historical novel on this topic, which her husband describes as the “mulatto War and Peace,” and which is destined for failure—a failure resonant with universal poignance. Danzy Senna’s novel is deeply hilarious, though the passages I highlighted are not: “She’d never understood so profoundly how much being a novelist was at odds with domestic life, with sanity. … That kind of writing had no beginning and no end. It just crept around the house, infecting every element of family life.” The new (posthumous) Gabriel García Márquez novel, Until August (translated by Anne McLean), which he did not think was good enough to publish, is so good that its essential García Márquez qualities put one to shame—the quality of his vision, the quality of his prose, of his emotional capacity, and basically of his entire life. No, it isn’t his best, but I reveled in the memory of a master whose mere scraps I scarfed up adoringly, such as: “torrential geniuses with short and troubled lives,” as he remarks of Mozart and Schubert. —Nancy Lemann, author of “The Oyster Diaries” Read More
December 18, 2024 First Person Learning to Ice-Skate By Virginia Higa William Charles Anthony Frerichs, Ice Skating (1869), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. In Stockholm it didn’t snow on Christmas or New Year’s Eve or at the beginning of January. The days were gray and, in the afternoon, just before it got completely dark, there was often a dank glow that turned the sky brown. That December, we bought some cheap skates and went one night—in midwinter it’s most accurate to use the term one night even when describing something done during the day—to skate in Vasaparken, where they flood the grass pitches with water, turning them into a huge floodlit rink that never closes. I’d skated only a couple of times in my life and so many years ago that I’d lost any muscle memory my body might have had. Read More
December 16, 2024 First Person A Sex Memoir By Edmund White From Interiors, a portfolio by Claudia Keep in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. In my novels and memoirs I have written quite a bit about sex, even very outré sex. I’ve always insisted that I’ve approached sex as a realist, not as a pornographer. That is, I like to represent what goes through someone’s mind while having sex—the idle thoughts, the resentful thoughts, the comic aspects of the body failing to meet the acrobatic ambitions of the imagination—and the sometimes enriching, sometimes embarrassing or dull, often distracting or irrelevant or wonderfully intimate and tender moments of lovemaking. I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me it would be thousands of sex partners. There is still a prudishness about sex, not only in America but everywhere. Sex and comedy are the two subjects that are never taken seriously, though we think about sex constantly—and about comedy periodically, if we’re lucky, if only in the form of self-satire. I suppose prudishness guarantees paternity, so crucial in keeping bloodlines pure. Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now that they are getting married and fathering offspring. Paternity is not the problem for them so much as respectability. Internet anonymity has facilitated new possibilities of “cheating” and hypocrisy. It may seem absurd for an octogenarian to be writing a sex memoir, but it could be argued that he has decades of experience to draw on and an unimpeachable point of view, even if the horse he has in the race may have become feeble and hobbled. Because I am in my eighties, have most of my marbles, have been a practicing gay since age thirteen, and lived through the oppression of the fifties, the post-Stonewall exaltation of the seventies and the wipeout after the advent of AIDS in the eighties, the discovery of the lifesaving therapies of the nineties, the granting of gay marriage equal rights in the States in 2015 and the parallel right to adopt children, the brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labeled “woke” (trans people, drag, books, puberty-delaying drugs)—because I’ve witnessed all this drama and melodrama—I’m perfectly situated to view how we got here. The following piece is adapted from one of the chapters of my forthcoming memoir, The Loves of My Life. The thing about gay life is that you have countless mini-adventures, which years later leave only the faintest grooves on your cortex. The handsome big blond with the sweetest smile and strongest Boston accent I’d ever heard, who wanted to get fucked only and moved out to San Diego, where he caught the eye of many a sailor, got infected with AIDS, and died. The young Kennedy-style gay politician whom I invited to dinner after yet another bad affair, on the principle that I should shoot high and aim for the top. He came to dinner more than once, we had “sophisticated” (i.e., cold) sex, and he got AIDS and died. Read More
December 13, 2024 The Review’s Review The Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review: Part One By The Paris Review Issunshi Hanasato, The Timeless Treasures of Literature (ca. 1844–1848), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain, One more year has passed: the humanoid robots are coming, my taxi has no driver (not even a metaphor), and ChatGPT tells me “there is hope even in the most hopeless times.” In our unreal reality, I’m inspired by a genre of compassionate absurdism: Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Leonora Carrington, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon. Another such writer is Enrique Vila-Matas, whose brilliant essay-fiction Insistence as a Fine Art (translated by Kit Schluter) came out this summer. Beginning in somewhat ekphrastic mode with Julio Romero de Torres’s painting La Buenaventura, Vila-Matas embarks on a playful defense of “insistence”: how authors echo themselves and others in their works; how these spiraling repetitions create an imaginary world more truthful than the adamantine pseudofacts of general reality. The publisher—Hanuman Editions—is also an expert practitioner of “insistence”: reimagining the legacy of Hanuman Books, a cult series of chapbooks produced between 1986 and 1993. —Joanna Kavenna, author of “The Beautiful Salmon” Joseph Andras’s writing favors the political: his novella Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, published in translation by Simon Leser in 2021, is narrated by a pied-noir during the Algerian Revolution, and in Faraway the Southern Sky, released in English this spring, the author traverses Paris to retrace the steps of Ho Chi Minh’s life there. Andras hunts down the houses where Ho Chi Minh allegedly resided and the offices where he worked, constructing a map of the relationship between France’s capital and Ho Chi Minh’s burgeoning radicalism. Descriptions of Paris’s underbelly intermingle with Andras’s account of a twenty-something-year-old who, dreaming of liberating his country, would one day dictate the assassination of his political enemies. The novel is a story of how ideologies transform but also, largely, of hope: “If the rebel intoxicates, the revolutionary impedes. … If the first is accountable only to himself, the other embraces humanity as a whole.” —Zoe Davis, intern Saskia Vogel’s translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan: A Novel in Verse does what you want a translation to do: take you inside a world and an experience that you couldn’t otherwise access, and make you ache for it. This epic follows three generations of Sami people in Norway as they try to preserve their way of life in the face of shifting borders and encroaching modernity. This spare and beautiful book will haunt you. —Megan McDowell, translator of Samanta Schweblin’s “An Eye in the Throat” Read More