September 5, 2018 Arts & Culture For the Ugly Ones: The Spiky Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes By Lauren Elkin Virginie Despentes. Photo: Jean-François Paga. Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. —Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself. Despentes is a legend in France, especially among young women. Much of this reputation rests on her first novel, Baise-moi (1994), a taboo-shattering book about a pair of young women, Nadine and Manu, who go on a killing spree across France. One has worked as a prostitute, the other as a porn actress; in between murders, they have graphically described sex in hotel rooms with a series of men. In 2000, Despentes codirected a film adaptation with Coralie Trinh Thi that starred Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson, all three former porn actresses; because the sex scenes were unsimulated, the film was hotly controversial and was initially banned in France. But it wasn’t the violence or the graphic sex that stopped me from reading her work. In Baise-moi, I got as far as this description of Nadine’s roommate, Séverine: Read More
September 5, 2018 At Work Trump Is a Performance Artist: An Interview with Eileen Myles By Shoshana Olidort Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. In part, Myles’s stardom can be attributed to the award-winning television show Transparent, in which a queer poet played by Cherry Jones is based on Myles. But while Myles’s stint on television—in addition to serving as poet-muse, Myles made a cameo on the show—may help to explain their rise to a level of celebrity usually out of reach for even the most successful poets in America, Myles’s stature has been decades in the making. In addition to producing more than twenty books, Myles famously ran a write-in campaign for presidency in 1992. Among their most cited poems is “An American Poem,” in which Myles identifies as a Kennedy, one who forsook the wealth and comfort afforded by a famous, successful American family for a life of poverty and obscurity as a poet in New York. In real life, Myles grew up in an Irish Catholic blue-collar Boston family. Much of their work, including the legendary Chelsea Girls, reflects on Myles’s childhood and the poetry scene of New York in the seventies and eighties. The last few years have been especially prolific for Myles, whose new collection, Evolution, comes on the heels of last year’s Afterglow (a dog memoir), which had in turn followed another book of new and selected poems as well as a new edition of Chelsea Girls. I’ve long admired Myles’s work, and I taught their poems in a course on feminist poetry earlier this year. Current events and our political milieu made me especially keen to speak with them. We spoke over Zoom, a video-conferencing program—Myles from their living space in Provincetown, where they were teaching, and I from the living room of my Stanford student-housing unit. Myles was totally present, forthright, and willing to engage with me but also pushed back more than once. When I asked about the intersection of poetry and politics, Myles responded, “What do you mean?” They forced me to reconsider not only how I was formulating my questions but what, in fact, was behind those questions in the first place. Read More
September 4, 2018 Redux Redux: If You Can Hoe Corn for Fifty Cents an Hour … 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. Yesterday was Labor Day, so this week, we bring you Jim Harrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Richard Yates’s short story “A Wrestler with Sharks,” and Henri Coulette’s “The Blue-Eyed Precinct Worker.” Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104 Issue no. 107 (Summer 1988) If you can hoe corn for fifty cents an hour, day after day, you can learn how to write a novel. You have absorbed the spirit of repetition. When you look at my wife’s garden you understand that; the beauty of the garden—the flowers and the vegetables—that’s how an artist is in his work. And I think the background that at first nonplussed me—that rural, almost white-trash element—stood me in good stead as an artist, in the great variety of life it forced me into, the hunger to do things. Read More
September 4, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Olivia Laing By Olivia Laing In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Kathy is conducting an audit of her fridge. She has just had an email. A man she knows, B, who is truly among the most beautiful men ever to live, is in the hospital with an inoperable brain tumor. The symptoms had begun, the email said, two days after she had last seen him in May. B with his doe eyes, B who had set himself against death, who had been a hospital carer for so many years, was himself about to die. Once, they had been about to meet when she mentioned casually that she had a cough. No, B said. I can’t see you. I am looking after a neighbor who is immunocompromised. Somewhere on her laptop there was a photo of him when he was very young and recently bereaved, his arm around a cheetah. They looked the same, like blood relations. Read More
September 4, 2018 Arts & Culture Because the Story Was Mine By Thea Lim I can’t remember the first time someone asked me what I was. The question has always oueen a part of my landscape, as common as denim or dirt. Now people ask it of my daughter. The question itself is funny—what are you?—so nonsensical, so naked of etiquette, frenzied to know. Sometimes it’s friendly, a password whispered in front of a door, asking if we are the same. Usually, it’s not. I used to try to play games with the question, beat it. Well, I would say, I have a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature. Now, made sad and wise by age, I just tell people what they want to know, reeling it off like a rhyme: my mother is white from England; my father is Chinese from Singapore; I was born in Canada. Is there something necessarily humiliating about having to list your race—and your parents’ race and your grandparents’ race—before you can gain entry into conversation? If so, it’s only because we’ve made race something to be ashamed of. This is what I tell myself: you can think your way out of this trouble, this pain. I never wanted to write fiction that was rooted in where I came from. That where is overexposed, like a stripped nerve. This is a problem for writers of color—or for anyone who knows there’s a narrative attached to their body, a narrative over which they have no control. Telling the truth, just being me, felt like a crude performance. Writing about my life was giving into the lust of the dominant gaze. And there was no way I could write my story and pass it off as pure fiction: I reverse migrated with my family from Canada to my father’s country, Singapore, and then I migrated back to Canada, my birth country, as an adult. This journey was so embarrassingly specific, so convoluted, it could not be masked well enough to be a story of its own, loosed from autobiography. Instead, I swung hard in the opposite direction. I wrote angry, reactionary work, telling the world all the ways it was wrong. I published a novella of feminist fiction in 2007 because if my writing didn’t have a righteous point to make, how could I justify doing something as bourgeois as writing? (Bougie in the Marxist sense not the Migos sense.) An instructor told me that when you write, you have to leave the soapbox behind—you can’t let politics determine the story. Because he was white, I ignored him. Maybe it was easy for him to put aside politics, but mine weren’t something I could take off like a T-shirt. Then, at a workshop for writers of color, another teacher said the same thing, a little differently: if you can’t get past your own morality, you will be judging your story too much to write it. This was a ground-shaking relief. It gave me a choice that wasn’t either turning my cheek or slapping back. It gave me permission to walk away. Read More
August 31, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Wedding Woes and Mutual Hatred By The Paris Review This summer I visited my ancestral home, which is loosely defined as Cleveland, Ohio and tightly defined as any room holding my Great Aunt Laura. She maintains not only my family history (the memory of my great grandmother staying up late playing solitaire, for example) but also a more general understanding of four generations of life in Cleveland. In the hours I wasn’t rapt around her table, I was reading Dorothy West’s The Wedding. Turned on to West by The Paris Review’s Feminize Your Canon column, I tore through her novel of a late-summer wedding. Set within a carefully cultivated black upper-class community in Martha’s Vineyard, The Wedding is the story of the much anticipated nuptials between a daughter of a respected family and the white jazz pianist with whom she has fallen in love. West’s sympathies are teasingly veiled. Through her characters, who span generations and therefore approach the couple’s union differently, she suggests a certain difficulty but not impossibility of judgement. The Wedding certainly has enough heartbreak and suspense for a beach-read, but West is a sociologist of the first order. Though they are given little credence, writers (and aunties) know better—history is always complicated. The Wedding published in 1995 when West was eighty-seven is a beautiful novel and a record worth keeping close. —Julia Berick If you scroll too deep into the Internet, it’s easy to feel like the world is ending. The Polar Ice Caps are melting and Trump is gushing toxic tweets. Olivia Laing’s debut novel, Crudo, is a merciless catalogue of the political and personal anxieties that plague us, breathlessly recounted by a middle-aged writer named Kathy who bears an undeniable resemblance to late punk-poet Kathy Acker. In the seemingly cataclysmic summer of 2017, Kathy is about to be married to a man twenty-nine years her senior. But instead of planning her wedding, she spends her days swiping through social media and bemoaning the omnipresent panic brought on by an endless onslaught of information. “Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore the atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own.” Though the plot itself is sparse, Kathy’s narrative tumbles along at breakneck speed; it’s uncomfortably crowded with Kathy’s wedding woes, her reactions to political events, and the gossip of the boring, heterosexual couples that Kathy encounters during her vacation in Tuscany. It’s less a novel than a single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing. —Madeline Day Read More