February 20, 2018 Redux Redux: Hunter S. Thompson, Amie Barrodale, Pablo Neruda 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 first-ever Art of Journalism interview, with Hunter S. Thompson; Amie Barrodale’s short story “William Wei”; and Pablo Neruda’s poem “Emerging.” You can listen to Barrodale’s story and Neruda’s poem—as well as Terry McDonell’s tale about his 1984 visit, with George Plimpton, to Thompson’s home in Colorado—in “Tomorrow’s Reason,” the latest episode of The Paris Review Podcast. If you like what you hear, tell your friends! Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1 Issue no. 156 (Fall 2000) Journalism is fun because it offers immediate work. You get hired and at least you can cover the fucking City Hall. It’s exciting. It’s a guaranteed chance to write. It’s a natural place to take refuge in if you’re not selling novels. Writing novels is a lot lonelier work. “William Wei,” by Amie Barrodale Issue no. 197 (Summer 2011) I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. “Emerging,” by Pablo Neruda Issue no. 57 (Spring 1974) A man says yes without knowing how to decide even what the question is … If you like what you read, why not become a subscriber? You’ll get instant access to our entire sixty-four-year archive, not to mention four issues of new interviews, poetry, and fiction.
February 20, 2018 Revisited Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State By Neel Mukherjee Various covers for V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State Ethics today means not being at home in one’s house. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia There appears to have been some contestation in the published form In a Free State was to assume. Subtitled A Novel with Two Supporting Narratives, V. S. Naipaul’s 1971 masterpiece features the eponymous novel, two stories which he calls “supporting narratives,” and the bookends of a prologue and an epilogue, taken from his own journal during his travels. It is, therefore, more accurately, a novel with four supporting narratives. I mentioned “contestation” because Naipaul and his editor at Andre Deutsch, the formidable Diana Athill, amicably disagreed over the final form: it was Athill’s opinion that the (short) novel bearing the title In a Free State should be published as a stand-alone book. Though Naipaul refused the suggestion at the time, he came round to her point of view nearly four decades later, in 2008, when he issued only the novel, shorn of all the “supporting narratives,” with a short introduction explaining his decision. I am of the view that Naipaul’s earlier decision was the correct one: it had resulted in a formally original and dazzling book, over and above being a remarkable, clear-eyed, truthful and brutal meditation on exile and displacement. Because form seems to have historically been considered—and is still seen as—a white guy’s thing, and because Naipaul never strayed from the realist mode, In a Free State was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries. It seems too late in the day, especially after historians such as Hayden White, to talk of form and content separately, but there’s no way to think about a disease without naming it first. Contiguity is a form of continuity, too, and brings with it new sets of meaning. Realism has always troubled its practitioners: In what sense does a novel represent the world in a lifelike manner? Surely by artifice? What is real, or realistic, about the extreme selection process that is plot, the progression of a life’s events that make it on to the page? If we could do away with all the elements that are normally considered crucial to coherence in the realist novel, such as plot, character, and continuity, could we still have something that could answer to the name of novel? If all the connective tissue were taken out, could a narrative still cohere through, say, metaphorical underpinnings, or meaning? Could discrete parts make a sum without the simple method of scalar addition? Read More
February 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Real Scandal in Academia By EJ Levy Collage of pulp-fiction covers. My first tenure-track job out of grad school was in Washington, D.C., a dozen years ago, when it was common for Washingtonians to claim that D.C. was Hollywood for ugly people (both towns being focused on power, prestige, social ascendance, and its attendant glamour—basically, high school for grown-ups). So I wasn’t surprised to see that the sexual harassment allegations sweeping Hollywood are also common to D.C. More surprising is the relative lack of attention thus far to such harassment in academia, where—to judge by the content of literary fiction—sexual harassment has been a staple for decades. (J. M. Coetzee’s brilliant Disgrace comes to mind, as does Roth’s The Dying Animal, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World, Malamud’s A New Life, to name a few, and of course Nabokov’s Lolita, whose predatory narrator is a professor of literature, if not preying on a student.) Some of the male writers whose work I most admire are famous both for their books and for their famously bad behavior. My ex-girlfriend grew up with John Gardner’s family—the novelist and mentor to Raymond Carver—and told me stories of climbing trees to watch him fuck his grad students. These used to be war stories that men told with a certain pride. A professor once told me, without irony, that there were undergrads who considered sleeping with a prof part of completing a liberal arts degree. He actually believed this. Read More
February 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tattoos, Death Grips, and Love Letters By The Paris Review I’ve long admired Eddie Martinez’s wild, colorful abstractions, but until now, I’d never seen them in person. This week, I saw half of a show at two New York locations of the gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash. In Chelsea, a block from our office, is a suite of big paintings called “Love Letters.” Each of the roughly half dozen canvases are painted on oversize reproductions of personal letterhead: “Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez” lines the top of each “page,” and their address runs along the bottom. Moyer is Martinez’s wife, so these paintings could be playful messages to her, as though doodled in a moment of affection on a handy piece of paper. Humor runs throughout Martinez’s work: the pun “fine ants” appears in one painting, and his last show at the gallery was titled “Samoneye.” (Get it? “Sam and I”? I love puns.) Drawing is also an essential part of his work. These paintings are based on Sharpie drawings (some five hundred such drawings fill a wall in Martinez’s studio) blown up in size and then rendered in layers of form and color. Floral and cartoon figures and bulbous, Guston-y shapes are camouflaged behind scribbles of brushwork and slashes of spray paint in gray-blue, vivid red, and mustard yellow. Admiring the lines and dripping fields of color almost feels like watching Martinez in action. —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 16, 2018 At Work Different Forms of Illumination: An Interview with Hermione Hoby By Emma Cline I ran into Hermione Hoby recently at a studio party in an old Greenwich Village brownstone. It was the last party before the occupants had to move out, the building already sold to its new owner. The windows were open to the January air, prosecco sloshed in plastic cups, everyone kept getting too hot so they’d go out to stand in the hallway. People seemed a little sad, a little manic, after a strange winter. There had been a vintage-clothing sale earlier that day, the unsold stock still in the studio. Hoby disappeared to try on a green silk dress in the bathroom. She emerged in the dress, looking uncertain—there was no full-length mirror, she said, so she didn’t know how it looked. We told her the dress looked great. I don’t know if Hoby did, in fact, get the green dress, but the party—someone trying on someone else’s silk dress, a strange elegiac ripple in the air—felt like a scene from Hoby’s own novel, a kind of New York night that seems to happen less and less often the longer you stay here. There are so many moments like that in Neon in Daylight, so many acutely observed interactions that kept reminding me of the dizzying stretch of time after I first moved to the city—how the streets, familiar to me only from movies, seemed to call forth a strange self-consciousness, how every interaction was colored with an intensity that was almost physically exhausting. Hoby is acutely aware of the way lives and desires overlap in this city, how selves are tried on and discarded, and she tracks the minutest shifts of feeling and mood with intelligence and hypersensitivity. Her novel follows Kate, a grad student newly arrived from England, and her relationships with Bill, a washed-up writer still coasting on the success of his first book, and his daughter, Inez, a brash nineteen-year-old who hustles odd jobs off the miscellaneous-romance section of Craigslist. It takes place over the summer and fall of 2012, though the passing of time, as filtered through the consciousness of Kate, takes on the quality of a fever. Life in the city is a kind of welcome sickness. This interview took place over email. Read More
February 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin By Valerie Stivers As a not-quite-heterosexual high-school girl, I considered the grand science-fiction gender experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), one of my formative love stories. The book was published in 1969 and won Hugo and Nebula awards, but it was still radical when I devoured it in the eighties and is still radical today. It tells the story of Genly Ai, a human-diaspora interstellar explorer who arrives solo on the planet Winter to convince its citizens to join the Ekumen, a benevolent interplanetary federation. Ai is a human man, but the humanoid people on Winter have no gender and instead go once a month into a kind of estrus called kemmer, in which their bodies are spontaneously inspired to become either male or female, for the purpose of sex. (Sounds fun … right?) As a person who is always a “man,” Ai is considered a pervert on Winter, but in their society—unlike ours—this isn’t a very big deal. More central is how Ai grapples with his relationships with the local people, in particular a government minister named Estraven, who may be an ally or an enemy or a friend … or more than a friend if Ai can expand his categories. Hot beer: the drink of choice for the maybe-lovers Estraven and Ai. Le Guin said that she wrote her science fictions as thought experiments, skewing our world in search of moral insight, and her imagined society on Winter poses questions of how humans would organize themselves if we could all bear children and if we saw ourselves as humans first and sex objects only sometimes. It’s much more than just a love story, but in high school, I took it as one. Genly Ai’s long, slow, dawning appreciation of Estraven—and especially a night when he sees his friend shirtless, by a fire, as “gaunt and scarred … his face burned by cold almost as by fire … a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light”—set my standards for the highest romance. Read More