June 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Spooning By Lawrence Weschler I was paying a visit to the studio of Jessica Anne Schwartz, a promising young San Francisco artist recently transplanted to New York, and over in the corner, on the floor, off to the side—she hadn’t particularly been intending to show them to me—she had ranged a series of small painted studies on board from several months back. She’d pulled them out earlier for the first time since she’d made them, across the last several months of 2017, and was trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with them. All images of a single spoon, from a wide range of vantages—“I’d first found the spoon abandoned out in a garbage pile on the street,” she explained—and in a tumbling array of alignments. She and I gazed upon the assembled panels for a while, she leaning over, assaying a few other arrangements, sighing. “Single Serving” was the name she’d assigned the entire set. Back then, she explained, she’d only just recently broken off from a long-term relationship, really only the second serious relationship in her life. Fresh out of high school, she’d married. The marriage had lasted eighteen years, and then she’d almost immediately taken up with this second guy, and that had lasted another eight. This new period, in the middle of 2017, had really been the first time in her life she’d found herself living alone. She’d gone into fierce mourning, this business of being all alone being all she could think about—that and, of course, how she was no longer with the boyfriend. Read More
June 27, 2018 First Person On Writing Letters to Famous Strangers By A. M. Homes John Templeton Lucas, The Letter Writer, 1877. As a teenager, I wrote letters to strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there were dozens. My inability to leave home, my separation anxiety, was all-encompassing. It wasn’t just about leaving my mother, though that would have been enough. It was about house and home—family—in the largest most literal sense. If I left the house, something might happen. It might not be there when I got back. This soul-crushing sense of impending doom was crippling. It started in nursery school, when my mother would drop me off at the little house at the top of the hill. They’d have to hold me back while my mother drove away, never looking in her rearview mirror at her sobbing child. I didn’t write to strangers because they were famous. I didn’t want an autographed eight-by-ten. I wanted to tell them about my life, my day at school. I wanted to drive a wedge between my childhood and the larger world that I hoped I might join one day. I wanted a way out. Read More
June 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Girl, Interrupted, Twenty-Five Years Later By Tara Wanda Merrigan Susanna Kaysen. Photo by Michael Lionstar. When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like “an anthropologist in the loony bin.” She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands—“a standard anthropological thing, a study of a village, of who married and who didn’t and what were the feuds,” Kaysen told me. Her husband’s study made her realize that “McLean was sort of like a village but somewhat larger. Our ward was a tiny little village with our doctors and nurses and aides.” Kaysen hired a lawyer and got ahold of her medical records and began writing. She pared down details about herself and her struggle with mental illness so that the resulting memoir, Girl, Interrupted, reads today like a comedic travelogue of an extended stay at a young women’s ward. Lines like this one, about restrictions on sharp flatware, are typical: “We ate with plastic. It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital.” And yet the readers of twenty-five years ago—Girl, Interrupted was published in June 1993—were not quite ready to recognize the book’s detached perspective. Instead, Kaysen said, many took Girl, Interrupted as some sort of stigma-defying big-t Truth about life with mental illness. During the book tour, readers would line up to tell Kaysen how her book had spoken to them. The author recalls hearing things like “nobody else has ever said these things” and “I feel like I’m not alone.” Or: “You wrote this book for me.” “I would say to myself, I didn’t. I don’t know you. I wasn’t try to reach you,” Kaysen said. “What had spurred me to write was rage and a desire to dissect this world. And that didn’t seem to register for a lot of these people.” Read More
June 26, 2018 Redux Redux: In Dire Straits By The Paris Review This week, we bring you three pieces about immigration from our archive. Read Dany Laferrière’s 2017 Writers at Work interview, in which he bemoans complacency in the face of suffering; meet the narrator from a war-torn country in Gretchen Herbkersman’s short story “Thor”; and travel to impoverished Detroit, the city in which the American immigrant dream once lay, in Philip Levine’s poem “A Walk with Tom Jefferson.” Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237 Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017) To watch someone see you, when you are begging or homeless, and the person isn’t scandalized. He’s not happy about it, but he is thinking if someone has to be homeless, it might as well be you. If you saw that someone you went to school with had become homeless, you would be scandalized. You’d say to yourself, It can’t possibly be! But for all the others who are homeless, it can’t possibly be either! But it’s like that when you don’t know the person—you are categorized by race, or as a part of society that we accept seeing in a miserable situation. Native Americans drinking on a street corner or blacks in dire circumstances—these are things society thinks are normal. I’m not saying they accept it, but it’s something they’ve always seen. Well, I’ve been in that situation. I’ve been seen that way—He’s an immigrant and not white, and he’s in dire straits, that’s normal. There is nothing more extraordinary than seeing compassion in someone’s eyes, but not the slightest surprise at your situation. That is what it is to be a desert island, with no one to protect you—which could plunge some people into despair, bordering on insanity. But for a writer, it can be interesting. Because you can observe society, since you are completely invisible. No one sees you. People will say and do anything in front of you. Read More
June 26, 2018 Arts & Culture A Life of Reading Is Never Lonely By Edmund White Photo by Nadja Spiegelman. Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice murmuring in your ear. No wonder Victorian parents used to read out loud to the whole family (a chapter of Dickens a night by the precious light of the single candle); there’s nothing lonely about laughing or crying together—or shrinking back in horror. Even if solitary, the reader’s inner dialogue with the writer—questioning, concurring, wondering, objecting, pitying—fills the empty room under the lamplight with silent discourse and the expression of emotion. Who are the most companionable novelists? Marcel Proust and George Eliot; certainly they’re the most intelligent, able to see the widest implications of the simplest act, to play a straightforward theme on the mighty organs of their minds: soft/loud, quick/slow, complex/chaste, reedy/orchestral. But we also cherish Leo Tolstoy’s uncanny empathy for diverse people and even animals, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyricism, Colette’s worldly wisdom, James Merrill’s wit, Walt Whitman’s biblical if agnostic inclusiveness, Annie Dillard’s sublime nature descriptions. When I was a youngster, I loved novels about the lost Dauphin or the Scarlet Pimpernel or the three musketeers—adventure books enacted in the clear, shadowless light of good and evil. Read More
June 26, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, 1928–2018 By The Paris Review Donald Hall, who served as The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, died Saturday at the age of eighty-nine. Hall had an enormous influence on American poetry. A prolific writer, he published more than fifty books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited numerous anthologies, including the influential New Poets of England and America (1957; coedited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson). His biggest renown was for his poetry, where he explored mortality, baseball, and the distant past, and returned, again and again, to the subject of the death of his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Although Hall went on to have other lovers, including his longtime companion Linda Kunhardt, he arranged to be buried next to Jane, beneath a headstone inscribed with lines from one of her poems: “I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART, BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU BESIDE ME?” Hall served as poet laureate of the United States in 2006, and had, in his house in New Hampshire, a framed photo of himself standing between the Obamas. But before all that, he was an editor—first at Harvard’s literary magazine and then at The Paris Review. In this magazine, he published some of the earliest work of Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Louise Simpson, and James Wright. “I was trying to define a generation,” Hall once said about his early days as an editor. “I think it worked very well.” There are few great poets with whom Hall was not in regular correspondence. “My letters are my society,” he said in his Writers at Work interview. “I carry on a dense correspondence with poets of my generation and younger. Letters are my café, my club, my city.” In an essay for the Library of Congress, Hall wrote, “Way back we didn’t call ourselves poets, because it would have been pretentious. Poets were rare, and poets were great or they were nothing.” Although he often mourned the state of contemporary poetry, of technology and the proliferation of words, Hall measured himself and the poetry he loved against the greats. “The desire must be,” he said, “not to write another dozen poems, but to write something as good as the poems that originally brought you to love the art. It’s the only sensible reason for writing poems. You’ve got to keep your eye on what you care about: to write a poem that stands up with Walt Whitman or Andrew Marvell.” And Hall built poems that would last, poems for posterity, poems that could not be washed away. From his poem “Exile,” which appeared in the first issue of The Paris Review: Each of us waking to the window’s light Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone; Our furniture has vanished in the night And left us to an unfamiliar dawn, Even the contours of our room are strange And everything is change. Waking, our minds construct of memory What figure stretched beside us, or what voice Shouted to call us from our luxury— And all the mornings leaning to our choice. To put away – both child and murderer – The toys we played with just a month ago, That wisdom come, and make our moving sure, Began our exile with our lust to grow. (Remembering a train I tore apart, Because it knew my heart.) We move and move, but only love the lost, Perversity our master to the bone; We search our minds for childhood, and are tossed By fevers to rebuild a child unknown.