January 12, 2018 From the Archive Celebrating Shithole Literature By Brian Ransom In my enviable role as social-media manager, I get to pick through old issues of The Paris Review to find interesting, overlooked pieces to surface. Nestled in issue no. 78 (Summer 1980), among Bobby Anderson’s “Edie Sedgwick: A Reminiscence” and Mallarmé’s poem “A Tomb for Anatole,” I discovered three folks tales by Paulé Bártón, a writer from what the president vulgarly referred to yesterday as a “shithole” country. Little information about Bártón is available, but according to the issue’s contributor’s note, he was born in Haiti in 1916 and spent most of his life as a goatherd. He was imprisoned in Fort Dimanche under the Duvalier regime and subsequently exiled. I stumbled upon this trio of narrative pearls when I was an intern here last summer. The writing is immediate and compact, stunning in its musicality and plick-plock rhythm. Reading “The Woe Shirt” for the first time—not having any idea what it was, where it came from, or how to find more of it—I nearly wept at my desk. Today, we’ve unlocked it from our archives in celebration of writers from shithole countries the world over. “The Woe Shirt” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick. Then he rode to buy a woe shirt. He saw Mari then, standing. She said, “You going to buy that shirt, I know! You’ll go buy that beggar shirt Bélem, I know. Oh it will cost you all your little money all your goats and old friend parrot to get it! I tell you clearly, look at what you do! Spend everything on a beggar shirt, no sense!” but Mari saw that Bélem felt the shirt on him already, too late, “O.K. then, say good-bye twice to your parrot,” she said. Subscribers can also read two more of Bártón’s short stories in our archives: “The Broom Is Busy” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Boki was watching Álse Odjo with a twig broom sweep the floor. The twig-ends were breaking off and Álse Odjo kept sweeping them up. “You losing broom all over the floor!” Boki said, “I see that broom creating its own work!” “Just like everyone on this island!” Álse Odjo said back, “That’s the island way,” she didn’t laugh, “This broom born and raised here, you know.” “Emile Plead Choose One Egg” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem he says, “The salt sea will find this wound on me, it always does when I swim in it, always clean my wound.” But Emilie knew the wound of confusion and no-choice was too deep inside for the salt sea to sting it clean for Bélem right now. Brian Ransom is the social-media manager for The Paris Review.
January 12, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Obama, Netflix, and Escorts By The Paris Review I never expected to like Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, but it needed only a few minutes of my attention to have me laughing out loud. Though the description might be off-putting—“Bored with killing animals, seventeen-year-old James is busy plotting his first real murder when brash new girl Alyssa catches him off guard at school”—the show is witty and barefaced in the way that a Wes Anderson film could be if Anderson’s films weren’t so masculine. Alyssa and James have a push-pull relationship that left me refreshed at the end of the show’s eight twenty-minute episodes, wondering where the two and a half hours had gone. —Eleanor Pritchett If you live in the New York City area or are visiting soon, please carve ten minutes out of your day for The New York Earth Room and then, if you have ten more minutes, The Broken Kilometer. These are two strange little rooms, both created by the artist Walter De Maria, both maintained by Dia, both completely free to enter. I won’t (oh god, a pun, why not) soil the surprise of either piece, but I will say that when I visited these two exhibits in quick succession last Sunday, I saw the city open up—almost unfold before my eyes—in ways that it hadn’t for me ever before. What other rooms could be lurking among the tapas restaurants and purveyors of high-end socks? I wondered. What other mysteries does the city hold? —Brian Ransom Read More
January 12, 2018 At Work Transgression and the Prohibition: An Interview with Moyra Davey By Sarah Cowan Still from Les Goddesses, 2011. Courtesy the artist. “A work, once finished, is ‘like a tombstone,’ ” Moyra Davey writes in her latest book, Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest. Always aware of the inevitable end, she has constructed a practice conscious of its own past and reliant on radical self-doubt. Her photographs, films, and essays cross-reference and depend on one another as she makes a subject of her own process and its intentions, fears, and failures. Davey has published twelve artfully designed books that lovers of her work covet for their rarity. This most recent book gathers two essays, “Les Goddesses” (2011) and “Hemlock Forest” (2016), along with photographs and stills from their respective film iterations, in which she is recites her text aloud for the camera, opening it up to the serendipity of mistakes. Davey emerged in the eighties, in an art world allergic to the confessional work she was making. Over time, she experienced a “gradual seeping in of a kind of biographical reticence,” until, as she writes, “my subjects constituted little more than the dust on my bookshelves or the view under the bed.” In the Les Goddesses film, she appears not photographing dust but wiping it from her own portfolios in order to reconsider the brassy, sexy photographs she made of her punk teenage sisters in the eighties. She pins the prints to the walls of her apartment where they function as visual footnotes in a monologue dealing with family and disappointment. Davey often portrays herself in her New York City apartment, within reach of any bookmarked volume in the crosshatched piles on her shelves. Her writing is weighted by reverence for other artists, writers, and filmmakers, whose quotes crowd her paragraphs. “Perhaps I still ‘write’ like a photographer,” she once wrote. “I go out into the world of other people’s writing and take snapshots.” Davey tends to invite her audience in at what feels like the most inopportune moment, when she is surrounded by notes, her rooms in a state of honest disarray, a mess of chairs and dishes piled in the sink. That’s why, as I sat down in her living room for our interview, I felt an uncanny familiarity—everything: the bookcases, the couch, the kitchen, was as I had seen it before—down to her cannonball-like pitbull, Rose, who lay on her back, watching us talk upside down. INTERVIEWER How did these two pieces come together into this book? They were made years apart—Les Goddesses in 2011 and Hemlock Forest in 2016. DAVEY After I made Les Goddesses, I spoke about it as a kind of love letter to my family. I tell the story of my sisters and myself when we were debauched teenagers. I draw parallels between my mother and my siblings, and Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters and their “bad behavior” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They got pregnant before marriage, they ran off to France, they lived as free spirits. Bringing the two stories together began with these fabricated coincidences of dates, for instance. My parents getting married exactly two hundred years after Wollstonecraft’s parents, having the same number of children, and coincidences of given names like Claire and Jane. By linking my family stories to the Romantics, I grant them a different kind of valence. Then, two or three years after making Les Goddesses, there was a tragedy. My sister Jane’s youngest daughter, Hannah, overdosed, and I started to rethink the way I had portrayed my siblings and all the drugs and drinking. I began to wonder what would it mean to revisit the story of Les Goddesses, in light of this fatal overdose, and not to show us as cute, fearless punks from the early eighties, but as we are now, visibly scarred women in our fifties and early sixties? What does our reckless behavior mean now, in light of what happened to Hannah? Read More
January 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Cornel West–Ta-Nehisi Coates Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers By Jennifer Wilson Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates. There’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He says in his book The Gulag Archipelago, “Wherever the law is, crime can be found.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates Chekhov for me is the great writer of compassion. —Cornel West It was the fall of 2008 and I had just started a Ph.D. program in Russian literature at Princeton University. In retrospect, I don’t know what kind of twenty-two-year-old I was that I would leap so enthusiastically into long days and nights spent reading about serfs, brain fever, and Cossack rebellions, but there I was. I was anxious about keeping up with all the reading, so I eagerly signed up for a course on Anton Chekhov, who once famously said, “Brevity is the sister of talent.” About a month into the class, my already frazzled nerves snapped in two when I learned that our next session would be guest taught by Cornel West. As someone who grew up in a black family, this was bigger news than if Chekhov himself would be joining us. I was, however, a bit surprised; I knew Cornel West as many things: an intellectual and lyrical genius, a spitter of “black prophetic fire,” an extra in my least favorite Matrix film, and even a fashion icon, but back then I did not associate him (or really anyone who’d ever been on TV) with nineteenth-century Russian literature. But, as I would learn that day, West has long loved Russian writers, Chekhov in particular, whom he places at the center of his vision for radical social change. In interviews and public talks, West describes himself a “Chekhovian Christian” (and he seems refreshingly unconcerned that most people don’t have a clue what he means by that). There were only two other students in the class, and we were scheduled to be there for about three hours, so there would be no hiding in the corner; I’d have to talk to Cornel West, most likely more than once. When he arrived, he smiled warmly (revealing his signature gap tooth) and introduced himself to each of us individually. He wore his usual three-piece black suit, and he took care to thank our professor, “Sister Ellen,” as he called her, for inviting him. Read More
January 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Private Literature By John Vincler Seeing manuscripts after Susan Howe. Robert Walser, Microscript 215, October–November 1928. Courtesy Robert Walser-Zentrum, © Keystone / Robert Walser-Stiftung Bern. “Emerging from an Abyss, and re-entering it that is Life, is it not, Dear?”—a sentence written by Emily Dickinson, most likely in the year before her death, in a letter to her sister-in-law. The sentence also appears in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, her ode to archives, rare-book rooms, and research libraries. It appears in a sort of wave: first it is transcribed within Howe’s text, then follows in facsimile; we read the line, then we see it as it was written by Dickinson in her late, confident, sprawling and looping penciled hand. Howe has plucked this from the abyss and put it before us. We do not simply read Howe’s book; we see something of what she has seen. It is as if Howe has sought to take the experience of working in a rare-book room or a research library and enfold that experience into the space of her slim book. * Libraries and museums collect the objects of the past so that they can be brought forward into our present, so that they can be called forth as witness to some future. Perhaps also so that the past can be made more legible. Howe begins Spontaneous Particulars with an image of a single page from William Carlos Williams’s book-length essay-poem Paterson (which remained unfinished at his death). We look upon and read this lone typescript page, heavily marked up with its deletions and emendations made in pencil. No transcription is given. It reads, in part, “To drown the roar, stopped at the library / for peace … for a clue to the resolution of the turmoil.” Further down the single stanza, it continues, “A meaning, a meaning? What do they know / and feel we do not know?” Read More
January 11, 2018 Document Chateaubriand on Life in a Society Dissolving By François-René de Chateaubriand François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was a French historian, diplomat, and writer. Long recognized as one of the first French Romantics, he was, in his lifetime, celebrated for his novellas. Today, however, he is best remembered for his posthumously published memoir, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, which will be republished by New York Review Books Classics as Memoirs from Beyond the Grave in February. In the selection below, Chateaubriand observes Parisian society dissolving and recomposing itself in the aftermath of the French Revolution. SOCIETY—PARIS Paris, December 1821 When, before the Revolution, I read the history of public disturbances among the different nations, I could not conceive of how people had lived in such times. I was astonished that Montaigne could write so cheerfully in a castle that he could not so much as stroll around without running the risk of being abducted by bands of Leaguers or Protestants. The Revolution made me understand how possible it is to live under such conditions. Moments of crisis redouble the life of man. In a society that is dissolving and recomposing itself, the struggle of two spirits, the clash of past and future, the intermingling of old ways and new, makes for a transitory concoction that leaves no time for boredom. Passions and characters set at liberty are displayed with an energy unimaginable in a well-regulated city. The breaches of the law, the freedom from duties, customs, and good manners, even the dangers intensify the appeal of this disorder. The human race on holiday strolls down the street, rid of its masters and restored for a moment to its natural state; it feels no need of a civic bridle until it shoulders the yoke of the new tyrants, which license breeds. Read More