October 11, 2017 On Poetry Thorn Vine on the Wall By Anthony Madrid I don’t remember what I was talking about, that day in class, but somehow I found myself explaining about the Shijing. The Shijing, I said, is the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry. The poems date back to the Zhou dynasty, which fell apart in the year 256 B.C.E. They are not the oldest poems in the world, but they are old, old. Most of them—and definitely the ones that everybody loves and quotes—sound like the lyrics to folk songs. My paddle keen and bright Flashing with silver Follow the wild goose flight Dip, dip and swing Dip, dip and swing her back Flashing with silver Swift as the wild goose flies Dip, dip and swing That is not a poem from the Shijing. That is a chant the kids did, in canoes, during camping, when my friend Michael Robbins was a ten-year-old nature boy in Colorado (during the Zhou dynasty). I cite it because it is exactly, and I mean exactly, like the poems in the Shijing. Here’s one. Judge for yourself: Read More
October 11, 2017 Comics The Life of a Memoirist By Tom Gauld From Baking with Kafka, by Tom Gauld. Printed with the permission of Drawn & Quarterly.
October 10, 2017 On Music Thelonious Monk and Me By Fred Hersch In honor of the centennial of Thelonious Monk’s birth, the jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch shares a few thoughts on one of his heroes. Thelonious Monk has been quoted as saying, “A genius is one who is most like himself.” By that standard, Monk was an undisputed genius. He was among the inner circle of jazz musicians who pioneered bebop, along with the alto-sax master Charlie Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the pianist Bud Powell, and others. They played together at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in the early 1940s, and Monk emerged from that scene to create some of the most distinctive and enduring music in all of jazz. Thelonious Monk (1917–82) has fascinated me for more than forty years. As a budding jazz pianist on the local jazz scene in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1970s, I was hipped to him by some older jazz musicians, and intrigued by him in every way. As a jazz pianist and composer myself, I have performed something written by him in almost every concert or club performance of mine in the last twenty years. Monk’s works, some of them cryptic and difficult and others just plain fun, are designed as springboards for improvisation. Everything he wrote fits in a book of around a hundred pages—compare that to the volumes of work by Mozart, Bach or Beethoven! Yet his canonic compositions, which are subjected to reimaginings in almost every music style, still retain their essential “Monkishness.” His tightly constructed themes and challenging harmonic progressions take years to master. Read More
October 10, 2017 Bulletin Women at Work By The Paris Review We are proud to announce Women at Work—our first collection of interviews in nearly a decade. Introduced by Ottessa Moshfegh and illustrated by Joana Avillez, the twelve interviews in Women at Work span the history of The Paris Review, from Dorothy Parker (1956) to Claudia Rankine (2016)—by way of Isak Dinesen, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Atwood, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Jan Morris, Joan Didion, and Hilary Mantel. Intimate, deep, full of surprises, these classic interviews will be a source of inspiration and instruction to writers, students, and anyone else who cares about the creative process, or about the specific challenges faced by creative women. Printed on acid-free paper, in a limited edition of five thousand copies, Women at Work is available exclusively from The Paris Review, with all proceeds going to support the magazine.
October 10, 2017 At Work Feeling Foreign: An Interview with Hernan Diaz By Joel Pinckney Photo: Jason Fulford In Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant, traverses the western expanse of nineteenth-century America on his way to New York to find his brother. Along the way, he gains the reputation of a terror and a legend, much to his bewilderment. Håkan is an atypical Western protagonist. He is a foreigner inhabiting a space typically reserved for American desperados, and, though a figure of physical prowess, he is emotionally and psychologically unsuited for life in the American territory—he kills, but he is haunted by it, “overwhelmed by an active, all-consuming hollowness … a stillness that had nothing to do with peace.” I met with Diaz last month at a café in Chelsea. He described the café, with its kitschy diner-like booths and railway-themed decor, as “irresistibly hideous”—a characterization perhaps apt for his protagonist, a figure of endless intrigue whose form provokes others “discovering what a man could be.” Diaz was candid, eager to discuss his work (and share his cheesecake). We talked about the usefulness of considering his book in light of the Western tradition and the American experience for immigrants today. INTERVIEWER Håkan Söderström comes to the American West without any knowledge of the English language. Before he learns English, your narrative is told in such a way that the reader experiences spoken English in the same way Håkan is experiencing it, given no dialogue that Håkan himself wouldn’t be able to understand. How did you decide on that technique? DIAZ It was the result of working within very tight constraints. I was worried about abusing archaisms and relying on a hokey Western vernacular. I didn’t want the book to sound like the transcription of the fake dialect in some bad Western film. How do I make these other characters talk, then? Oh, wait a minute—Håkan doesn’t understand what they’re saying! To me, one of the most fascinating formal problems in literature is point of view, because taken to its ultimate limit, I think it’s also an ethical problem, since it’s related to power. How much about your characters do you know? How far into situations or people can you see? Is it right, just to solve a narrative problem or achieve an effect, to break the laws you had set for yourself? I stuck with Håkan’s point of view in a very drastic way, in that regard. If he doesn’t understand, neither do we. Read More
October 10, 2017 Arts & Culture The Philosophy of Fly-Fishing By John Knight When I was seventeen, I drove to Missoula, Montana, to learn how to fly-fish. The town is one of the best places to fish in the country. Rivers with names like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot crisscross the valley harboring trout the size of walruses. I spent that summer learning to cast and looking for the eddies and pools where fish might be lurking. I tried a thousand different flies and a hundred different rivers, and though I tensed my entire body to be ready for a strike, though I was living with a friend who made his living as a fishing guide, in three months I didn’t catch a single fish. Not one. Published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler might best be described as a curiosity cabinet of a pious Renaissance naturalist. Framed as a dialogue between a veteran angler, Pescator, and his eager student, Venator, the book came recommended by practiced anglers and seemed to promise some bit of knowledge I was lacking. Next to descriptions of fish like pike (“a solitary, melancholy, and a bold Fish”), and bream (“scales set in excellent order”), were poems by George Herbert. Alongside a cheery round of fishing songs, I found instructions for making fishing line from horse hair (“take care that your hair be round and clear, and free from galls or scabs or frets”). I discovered that it was better to be “a civil, well govern’d well grounded, temperate, poor Angler, than a drunken Lord,” and that the clever angler would keep about two thousand black beetles alive through the winter in a firkin. Wasps are good bait if you dip their heads in blood, and if you wish to fish with maggots (and you are likely to wish it), find a “fly-blown” dead cat and you will soon be well prepared. Also “the crumbs of white bread and honey made into paste is good bait for a Carp.” My curiosity was pricked, but I doubted I was becoming a better fisherman. Modern fly-fishing is so different from what Walton practiced in the seventeenth century that the similarities perhaps begin and end with the fish. Whereas we have a cornucopia of expertly tied artificial flies, floating nylon line, and evolved casting techniques, Walton didn’t even have a reel—he just used a stick with hair tied to the end. To entice the trout, he might employ a fragrant oil; to seduce perch, he would select a minnow, a feather, or a cork, though he would not dare to try his luck before the mulberry trees were in bud. It seemed more like witchcraft than fishing. Read More