July 12, 2024 The Review’s Review Sad People Who Smoke: On Mary Robison By Adam Wilson ROBISON, HER DOG, AND, CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT, HER BROTHERS, LOUIS, TOMMY, MICHAEL, DONALD, AND ARTHUR, 1982. PHOTOGRAPH BY JEAN MOSS-WEINTRAUB, COURTESY OF MURRAY MOSS, FRANKLIN GETCHELL, AND ESQUIRE MAGAZINE. Mary Robison was interviewed by Rebecca Bengal for the new Summer issue of The Paris Review. I am reading Mary Robison and thinking about smoking. Specifically, I’m rereading Robison’s 1979 debut, Days, a collection of short stories about sad people who smoke. There’s Charlie Nunn, the retired teacher who smokes while supine on the rug, letting ash accumulate on his unshaven chin. There’s Guidry, the alcoholic who rests the day’s first cigarette on his sink’s soap caddy as he shaves. There’s Gail, the bride whose father strikes a match on his trouser fly to offer her a light. These characters don’t smoke because they’re sad; they smoke because it’s the seventies. Still, I’m tempted to read all the smoking as symptomatic of a condition that afflicts characters across Robison’s oeuvre: a near pathological refusal to consider any moment but the present one. When I first read Robison, I was also a sad person who smoked. That was seventeen years ago. I was an M.F.A. student living in my first New York apartment, a sixth-floor junior one bedroom ($1,300 a month!) just south of 125th Street on Manhattan’s West Side. I’d take my Camel Lights onto the fire escape, which offered a view of the shimmering Hudson. Unlike the characters in Robison’s stories, whose default mode is passive resignation, I was romantic; sadness and smoking were aspects of the “young writer” persona I hoped to cultivate. I’m embarrassed to admit that I once defended my habit to a girlfriend by explaining that cigarettes were my friends before she was around and that they’d comfort me after our inevitable breakup. All this is not to say that I wasn’t sad, or that I didn’t love smoking, but that both were integral to my conception of self. Read More
July 11, 2024 A Letter from the Editor The Ringo Starr of the Haiku Pantheon By Srikanth Reddy If you attended school in the U.S. like I did, the first poem you wrote as a child was, more likely than not, some version of the Japanese haiku. As a grown-up, you may have gone on to read the haiku masters Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson—the Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison of Edo-period Japan. But most Western readers have yet to twig on to Masaoka Shiki, the Ringo Starr of the haiku pantheon. Born more than two hundred years after Basho, this latecomer to the declining literary form launched a haiku revival in late-nineteenth-century Japan, writing haiku about modern subjects like baseball (“dandelions / the baseball rolled / through them”) and penning a memorable little essay titled “Haiku on Shit.” By the time of his death from tuberculosis at thirty-four, Shiki had written nearly twenty thousand verses and founded a new school of haiku poetry with its own literary magazine, Hototogisu, which continues to publish haiku today. Read More
July 10, 2024 On Translation Five Mixed Metaphors for Translation By Daisy Rockwell Drawing by Daisy Rockwell. The Lego Metaphor, Part One I once saw a Lego metaphor for translation. On some online forum somewhere. I liked it, but it was slightly off, and then I forgot it. So I had to make up a new one. I’ve thought of a few versions. I’m still trying to get it right. Here is one version: Imagine (if you will) that you have purchased the Hogwarts Castle Lego set. You have given up the dining room table for this project. You get about three-quarters of the way through. Then a dog, or a cat, or maybe just A lurching adult Bumps into it. Broken! Read More
July 9, 2024 Eat Your Words Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother, was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. O’Connor, after a diagnosis of lupus brought her home to Milledgeville in 1951, led a life in a farmhouse outside of town with her domineering mother, Regina, that bore some resemblance to a nun’s. Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her “filet mignon.” Otherwise it seems she found most pleasures, especially the physical kind, to be base. In her fiction an amorous girl goes up to the hayloft with a man and gets her wooden leg stolen in the story “Good Country People.” Two girls make themselves hot, bothered and ridiculous laughing over a nun’s claim that their bodies are “a temple of the Holy Ghost” in a story of that name. And yet somehow O’Connor’s lunch order—which captured my imagination when I read about it in Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery—sounds paradoxically, well, pleasurable. Read More
July 8, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok on “Person Walking Backward” By Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok Achat1999, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Kim Hyesoon’s poem “Person Walking Backward,” translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok, appears in our new Summer issue, no. 248. Here, we asked Kim and Ok to reflect on their work. 1. Kim Hyesoon How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? This poem began during an interview. The poet who came to interview me asked, “What do you think about Korean poetry these days?” I answered, “I think Korean poetry these days is like a dog running on the highway.” There is a dog inside my poem. This dog living in “Person Walking Backward” is eternally digging through the “pile of garbage” of the present. The poem is a poem about time, two types of time. Continuous time and frozen time. The dog’s time and my life’s time. The poem’s time and my time. Dying’s time and living’s time. Each is the possibility of being to one another. Read More
July 5, 2024 Categories The Nine Ways: On the Enneagram By Jacob Rubin Light through stained glass. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0. When I was a boy, the most obvious thing, in almost any situation, seemed to be something that wasn’t named. This unspoken thing usually had to do with desires or strong emotions that appeared to run under people’s words. In a stained glass window, the least striking element is often the very scene being depicted. People could have that quality when I was little, resembling stencils marbled with glowing hues. Where did their hidden longings end? Where did mine begin? Read More