September 12, 2018 Eat Your Words What David Foster Wallace Ate By Valerie Stivers The writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) didn’t really eat food. When I met him, in 1996, when I was twenty-three years old, I really couldn’t cook, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider this something we had in common. Wallace, who died by suicide on September 12, 2008, ten years ago today, burst into fame in the late eighties with experimental metafictions that took on the modern junk culture of advertising, celebrity, addiction, and alienation through technology. He struggled with those entities himself and was famous among his acquaintances for living mainly on packaged foods. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the excellent Wallace biography by D. T. Max, is littered with information like “he lived on chocolate pop tarts and soda” and “he had a love of showering, Diet Dr Pepper and blondies” and “there were only blondies and mustard in the fridge.” In 1995, the journalist David Streitfeld saw a kitchen with little more in it than a case of Dinty Moore beef stew and elicited the confidence from Wallace that “what’s really sick is I like to eat it cold.” Read More
September 12, 2018 Arts & Culture James Joyce’s Baby Talk (and Swift’s and Lear’s) By Anthony Madrid I don’t know that much about what babies actually say. I don’t have any. The ones I’ve seen in people’s apartments didn’t say anything. In one of my poems, I call babies “the crying people.” Heard plenty of that. The ones who said things were a bit older. The tiny ones gurgle. It doesn’t matter. When we talk about baby talk, we’re almost never talking about what comes out of the mouths of infants. We’re talking about the stuff we do that bears an important resemblance to what comes out of the mouths of infants. It’s all about (a) saying a lot more than you’re saying and (b) cute-ing it up. Everybody remembers the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Read More
September 11, 2018 Redux Redux: Such Is the Way with Monumental Things 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, to celebrate his work as the guest poetry editor of the Fall issue, we bring you selections of work by Henri Cole: his 2014 Art of Poetry interview, in which he outlines what he requires from a good poem; “West Point Remembered,” from the Fall 1988 issue, Cole’s first appearance in our pages; and the poem “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop.” Henri Cole, The Art of Poetry No. 98 Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) I think it would be rather narrow—and moralistic—to say that poetry must comfort us and point to what is good. I don’t think that is the function of art, though sometimes it is a happy result. In any case, a sentimental, moralizing poem is not what I want to write. I don’t want the reader to experience comfort—I want the opposite. Read More
September 11, 2018 At Work Becoming Kathy Acker: An Interview with Olivia Laing By Chris Kraus Left: Olivia Laing. Right: Kathy Acker. When Olivia Laing’s third book, The Lonely City, appeared in 2016, she was hailed as one of the leading contemporary nonfiction writers in the U.S. and the UK. After a breakup in her midthirties, she’d moved from London to New York. Adrift in a strange place and afraid of being alone for the rest of her life, she used her loneliness as a conduit to understanding the work of visual artists like David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Zoe Leonard, the reality-media pioneer Josh Harris, and many others. Loneliness, for Laing, became a new means of perception, a secret channel. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lonely City was named a best book of the year by various publications. Laing never expected that her next work would be a novel. In fact, she was laboring over a new nonfiction book when Crudo erupted. Triggered by her readings of the American writer Kathy Acker, Crudo was composed over seven weeks. Writing in a bracing and racy picaresque style, Laing adopts the third-person character “Kathy” that Acker herself often uses. The result is a hilarious mash-up between Acker’s emotional realism and taste for transgression, and the events of Laing’s very twenty-first-century life as she vacations in Italy, updates social media, and plans her small wedding. The book begins breathlessly, with one of the best openings in recent memory. “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married,” Laing writes. “Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York.” Slipping in and out of her Kathy Acker persona while closely following the events of Laing’s life and the media feed of the summer of 2017, Crudo is at once boldly experimental and highly pleasurable. Writing in real time about Jared and Ivanka, Brexit, the flooding of Houston, Trump’s tweets, and Grenfell, Laing captures the psychic effect of living in the perpetual state of remote emergency that defines the present. “There were several photographs of a care home in which several residents in wheelchairs, elderly black women were up to their chests in dirty brown water,” she writes. “The President was on it, he was using a full arsenal of exclamation marks.” As she astutely concludes, “Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about.” Olivia and I met for the first time two years ago, when we did a conversation in London for the program 5×15. Here, we continue over email. Read More
September 11, 2018 Arts & Culture The Post-9/11 Generation By Daniel Torday Lights at the 9/11 memorial. I’ve been teaching college students for the past decade or so, and every year, I pose the same question to my freshmen: Where were you on September 11, 2001? My first year of teaching a freshman writing seminar, the question led to a disarming conversation about how their eighth-grade teachers handled the news. Students from Manhattan and Brooklyn had parents who’d worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. They recounted with visceral detail how it felt not to know until late that day if their parents were okay. The eternity of waiting. Five years later, the discussion was different. Now freshmen described a glimpse of a memory of a third-grade teacher attempting to figure out how to talk as events unfolded. If pushed, they had to admit they didn’t know if they remembered watching news footage of the attacks that day or if their memory was of seeing that footage over and over years later. One student was certain her third-grade teacher made a point of not showing them the smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center towers. “I was sure I saw it that day,” another student said, “but now that we’re talking about it, I honestly don’t know.” When I recounted my own story of watching the events unfold from Brooklyn and then Manhattan that day, as I found myself doing each fall, they listened more intently than past students had. I was recounting a history they didn’t wholly remember. Last year, when I asked the question, I found myself a bit in shock at the response. I hadn’t prepared myself for the answer. Last year’s freshmen were not yet a year old on September 11, 2001. They knew of it only as a number or from reading about it. To them, it was history. Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Writers’ Cribs By Jane Mount Roald Dahl When Roald Dahl and his family were living in Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK, he realized his kids were so noisy that he needed his own writing space. After seeing Dylan Thomas’s shed in Wales, he built a shed of his own in his garden. Dahl wrote all his major works here, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. Dahl collected lots of photos, objects, and memorabilia, including part of his own hip bone. Read More