August 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less By Donald Hall Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. His Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 1991 issue. Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, an excerpt from which appears below. Donald Hall, 1977 When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn’t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams’s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize I haven’t finished reading a book in a year. An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty, he is slower but more canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment. In a Hollywood retirement home to meet a friend, I watched a handsome old woman in a wheelchair, unrecognizable, leap up in ecstasy when I walked toward her. “An interview!” she said. “An interview!” A writer usually works until late in life. When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of course I stayed to sign book after book and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded so much because they would never see me again. Read More
August 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Joan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill By Danielle A. Jackson Lauryn Hill. One recent midsummer afternoon, I trekked from Central Brooklyn to the South Bronx to meet the pioneering hip-hop journalist and feminist writer Joan Morgan, author of the new book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. We were to meet off the 5 train’s 138th Street stop, in an area some new shop owners and developers have taken to calling “SoBro.” This part of the Bronx feels industrial but also very much in flux. The highways are wide and noisy, and overpasses blot the skyline. On the same block, there are old, seemingly abandoned storefronts, low-level project buildings, and high-rise condos under construction. Morgan and I were meeting for drinks and dinner at Beatstro, a new restaurant on Alexander Avenue that serves as an homage to hip-hop—arguably the multicultural borough’s most well-known cultural export. Hand-painted murals and graffiti-inspired paintings adorn the walls; classic records from artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan and MC Lyte line the shelves by the entrance. Definitive books on the art form—Decoded, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, The Tao of Wu—lie out on the tables. Soft, textured, and deep-ruby, the lounge furniture comes from Bronx-area manufacturers. Read More
August 7, 2018 Redux Redux: Doing Battle with Your Successors 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 August Wilson’s 1999 Art of Theater interview, Ben Okri’s short story “The Dream-Vendor’s August,” and Joyce Carol Oates’s poem “Wild Bamboo, Late August.” Read More
August 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Seven Books I’ll Never Read By Adam O’Fallon Price There comes a point in every reader’s life when they must make peace with all the books they’ll never read. This is true even for the most voracious reader in the world. They say Alexander Pope was the last person to have read every book ever written. Given today’s publishing release schedules and the advent of e-books, a newborn in 2018 who lived to be eighty and did nothing but read their entire life would not even read a small fraction of the world’s library, an exponentially growing Babel straight out of Borges’s most fevered fantasy. When you’re younger, you know logically that you will not, cannot, read every book. Yet youth’s convincing illusion of immortality is not confined to the realms of romance and illegal substances—it informs your reading as well, and it does so in two senses. First, all books possess a nimbus of potentiality, however faint. True, it may not be likely that you’ll read Finnegans Wake, but it’s possible. Second, believing you possess an infinite amount of life, you can fritter it away on books both trivial and great. A nostalgic rereading of The Hitchhiker’s Quartet? Sounds fun! An abortive yearlong stab at 2666? Why not! But as holds true for many other things, these illusions begin to fall away around the age of forty. You don’t have time to waste on bad books, and you know yourself better than to seriously think you’re going to learn French in order to read À la recherche du temps perdu in its original language. You know yourself well—too well, maybe. Your tastes can easily become circumscribed by habit, and you venture less frequently afield to the strange shelves that turned up unexpected favorites in your youth. These tendencies should be countered whenever possible, but aging unavoidably shapes a reader. Read More
August 7, 2018 At Work Mermaids and Transgressive Sex: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs By Abigail Bereola How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs’s first book, is a short-story collection that delves into the lives of people who have Jamaica in common. Whether it’s the place they currently live, the place they left, or the place their parents are from, Jamaica always forms some notion of home. And How to Love a Jamaican explores, in part, what it means to make and remake that conception of home. In this book, there’s no single way to be Jamaican—the definition of the word itself expands to encompass each person who claims it. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Arthurs has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Granta, among other publications. A story from the collection, “Bad Behavior,” first appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of The Paris Review and was awarded the 2017 Plimpton Prize. Arthurs and I spoke on the phone two days after the collection was published, about invisibility, the idea of “a better life,” mermaids, and more. INTERVIEWER When you were writing these stories, what did you want from them? ARTHURS That’s such an interesting question. What did I want from them? I think I was working through various things and, intuitively, I was trying to make peace with things that had happened or were happening, and with myself. My stories are really personal, so even though it’s fiction, the stories, in different ways, feel as though they’re about me. At its essence, perhaps I just wanted to feel less lonely. These stories allow me to feel heard and maybe even understood. Read More
August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes on the Death of Oxana Shachko By Jacqueline Feldman From Oxana Shachko’s Instagram (@oksanashachko). Oxana Shachko told me she preferred that spelling, with the x, in 2016, as I was finalizing an essay that would describe, among other things, her life. In news articles about her, which have multiplied since her death by suicide in Paris this July, journalists more typically use the Romanization Oksana. I will stick with the spelling she and I agreed on even though I knew Oxana, an artist who was thirty-one, to take things like this lightly, often changing her mind. My essay deals with the women’s group Femen, which Oxana helped found in Ukraine. Beginning in 2008, it protested corruption in government; the conscription of Ukrainian women into sex work, which Oxana described as an issue of poverty, of globalization, even; and the failings of the hospital in Khmelnytskyi, of the Kiev Zoo. By 2013, the founding members all lived in exile. Oxana and another cofounder, Sasha Shevchenko, had fled to France, where they would become political refugees. The third, Anna Hutsol, went to Switzerland, where she was denied asylum. By the time I met Oxana in Paris, Femen had added activists internationally. The group had attracted attention in the West for its performative topless protests as well as for a certain overreach, taking on issues as far afield as the situation of women in Muslim countries. It would have surprised people I knew in Paris, where Femen was famous, that these women had begun with issues local to Ukraine. My memory is that Oxana left Femen in 2014 and that even then she showed ambivalence. (She’d say, for example, that she affiliated not with Femen France but with Femen International.) In later accounts, the date moves up. A 2016 text published by a gallery says she left the group in 2013. I am wary of making too much of slippages like this, particularly in retrospect. Still, if Oxana’s life did reshape itself on the many occasions she had to tell of it, her death has cluttered the truth further. Web searches turn up the work of artists less accomplished than she was, the photographers and filmmakers who shot her. If you didn’t know her, you might struggle to identify the paintings that were hers. She was born in Khmelnytskyi, which is in western Ukraine, where at the exceptionally young age of eight she apprenticed herself to a Greek man who painted icons. A deeply religious child, she came to identify as an atheist, a materialist, a communist, and, at last, a feminist. In her late paintings, her technique with gold leaf, with the tempera she herself made out of egg yolk, translates into a political vernacular. Madonnas, haloed, wear niqabs. An archangel is gay, as denoted by a rainbow. Jesus and fishermen float in a comfortable boat as hands reach up from below them to break the waves. They are the hands of humans sinking, which the sanctimonious men ignore. Read More