September 18, 2017 Procrastination Confessional Rearranging the House at Night By Ann Beattie In our new series, Procrastination Confessional, writers share the strange things they do to avoid writing. Ann Beattie’s procrastination still life. It has long been my assertion that writers will do anything in order to avoid writing. Ask any of my former students. Teaching used to be the perfect way to avoid writing, as seminars and private conferences took up a lot of time, along with written comments. Have you heard that writers are a bunch of narcissistic alcoholics? (Probably Trump could not be so eloquent, but don’t we suspect that’s what he thinks?) Narcissism, itself, is time consuming—and drinking may be more alluring to some than dyeing all their white shirts black (yes, that was one writer friend’s method of avoidance) or midnight gardening wearing an LED visor (why start writing so late?). I happen to be a night owl. To avoid writing, I might Google this, tap my dictionary icon—etymology, another way to drive away serious thought—or look at some of my husband’s paintings and ask why he’s painted so few birds (a guaranteed rousing discussion). But now I’ve avoided writing this piece long enough, so let me confess: At night, feeling I should be quiet because of aforementioned husband, I try to avoid writing in my favorite time period by assembling—is there any way I can make this sound more dignified?—tableaux of found objects from within my own house, so that something funny will await the unsuspecting. (We have guests, too—my life is not just a prolonged prank pulled on my husband.) Imagine my delight, muffling a chuckle [professorial interjection: Exactly what would this sound like?], as I realize that the eBay hat with foxtails (go on, trolls, hate me—that will provide me with diversion) might be put atop my husband’s sculpted bust of me, with the faux-fur (I’ve got some shame) “stole” looped around my neck to dangle in a casual way. Alongside this, one of my favorite gifts, ever, from another writer who shall be known only as “E.” A turkey with a leather nose, so lifelike that the night I received it, I laughed and laughed, then placed it, inadvertently, below an air vent, so that when I saw it in the middle of the night, feathers ruffling in the breeze, I almost had a heart attack. Back to the assemblage: Why not add, oh, the jester’s hat bought in Prague? (One time, when another writer came to dinner, my husband and I, in a major miscalculation, put on our hats, only to be told we’d worn them TWO YEARS IN A ROW) … Anyway, with so much tabletop to spare, good to add the tiger mother with cubs that bob at the flick of a finger, and, in a moment of inspiration, drop the Edgar Allan Poe mask (a gift from a journalist friend who also avoided writing by wrapping and mailing, a really serious method of avoidance) on the bust, then replace the jester’s hat and see if the shark fin could be added atop the hat like a cherry on the perfectly demented sundae. Add the lion hand puppet with the kindly face and rearrange with politically incorrect fur tails, and voilà. All that’s needed is the white mouse to bring up the rear with Lioness, and to step back. Read More
September 15, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Morphine, Martyrs, Microphones By The Paris Review McDermott & McGough, The Stations of Reading Gaol (IV. Oscar Wilde taking his constitutional.), 1917 (detail), MMXVII, oil and gold leaf on linen, 24″ x 18″. The other evening, after my colleagues had all gone, I slouched into one of our office reading chairs and dipped into Paul Yoon’s latest collection of short stories, The Mountain. I didn’t get far—I read “A Willow and the Moon,” which opens the book, and stopped—but only because Yoon’s prose is far too mesmerizing to rush through. The story, a beautiful amalgam of sorrow and longing and hope, follows a boy through to adulthood, from the First World War to the Second, from the sanatorium high in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, where his mother volunteers, to the basement of an English hospital, where bombs fall around him. As a boy, he looks on as his mother wrestles her addiction to morphine, as his father loses his interest in the family, as his best childhood friend falls ill, all the while making of himself what he can on his own. Though every page of the story heaves with lonesomeness and despair (for the lives that could have been had his parents never married or wars never begun), “A Willow and the Moon” nevertheless warmed my heart: the boy harbors neither resentment nor rage for the lot he’s been given, only sadness for all that’s happened and hope for all that’s still to come. —Caitlin Youngquist On Monday, I went to the opening of the Oscar Wilde Temple, an installation at the Church of the Village by artist duo McDermott & McGough. The temple’s Stations of the Cross depict phases of Wilde’s arrest, trial, imprisonment, and release; its altarpiece is a linden-wood sculpture of the author; and the walls are draped in fabrics and hues from the contemporaneous Aesthetic movement. It also includes a half dozen small portraits of LGBTQ “martyrs,” such as Brandon Teena, Sakia Gunn, and Martha P. Johnson. If the installation sounds minimal, its impact is otherwise: housed in a small room underneath the church, the temple feels consecrated, and also invigorating. Wilde celebrated his homosexuality openly, even in the face of persecution, and in him, McDermott & McGough have found a martyr and a saint for today’s LGBTQ community. The temple is a project the pair started thinking about in the eighties and have only now produced. But the timing is apt, McGough says; considering the political moment, he quotes Toni Morrison: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work.” Wilde’s example provides inspiration for resistance of all kinds: his subversion was public and powerful. —Nicole Rudick Read More
September 15, 2017 On Poetry On Finding a Lost Ezra Pound Poem in a Castle By Daniel Swift The Schloss Brunnenburg, where Ezra Pound once lived. Hast thou 2 loaves of bread Sell one + with the dole Buy straightaway some hyacinths To feed thy soul. —Ezra Pound I found this short poem by Ezra Pound as I was researching a book about Pound’s years in Saint Elizabeths Hospital. It appears for the first time in my book The Bughouse and in the Fall issue of The Paris Review. Finding a previously unpublished poem by Ezra Pound sounds both adventurous and grittily archival, but really, this was neither. It was waiting in an obvious place: in the Schloss Brunnenburg, in the Tyrol, in Northern Italy, which is the fairy-tale castle where Pound lived late in his life, and where his daughter still lives today. The poem wasn’t lost, it just hadn’t been found; and perhaps this is because it doesn’t look quite right. It is too tender, too small. It isn’t hugely complicated. Everyone knows that Pound was the archetypal impossible modernist, austere and difficult. Yet here was a little poem, written on the back of an envelope, about flowers. It lacks, for better and for worse, the grandeur we expect. Read More
September 15, 2017 Legends of the Fall The Day After By Stephen Greenblatt Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a few of his own. William Blake, The Expulsion from Eden (detail), 1808. The first humans were perfectly beautiful and very wise, but they lacked one of the five senses on which fallen humanity most depends: sight. In their original state, Adam and Eve were completely blind (Clem. Hom 3:42, in Evans 95). They had no need to see, since they were in a world designed to meet their every need. If they wanted something to eat or drink, it was always within grasp. And when God brought the animals to Adam for him to name, Adam simply reached out and touched each of them, knowing from the touch what name to assign. Perhaps their happy blindness—happy, of course, because they did not know that they could not see—helps to explain their transgression, since it might have been difficult for them to distinguish the forbidden fruit from all others, particularly if the enemy were bent on deceiving them. In any case, their condition helps to explain their complete absence of shame, for it was only after their fall that God removed the coating that had blinded their eyes. As soon as they could see, in the wake of their disobedience, they hastened to cover themselves: “And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.” Read More
September 14, 2017 Arts & Culture John Gardner’s Tricksy Death and Tangled Legacy By Ben Pfeiffer From the cover of John Gardner’s Grendel. I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm. —John Gardner, when asked what effect he thinks his writing has had on people, in conversation in The Paris Review, issue no. 75 (Spring 1979). Two weeks before his third wedding, John Gardner, novelist and writing teacher, was drifting in a small boat on a lake in the middle of the night, despairing. He’d lost control of his personal life, his health, and his finances. Once made rich by his best sellers, he now owed five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. Once a literary darling, he’d made himself an outcast. That night on the lake, he told his friend he was afraid he was going to die. And days later—thirty-five years ago to the day—he did. John Gardner was only forty-nine when his motorcycle crashed along the Susquehanna River in New York. Read More