The Paris Review's Blog, page 168

The Art of Distance No. 7

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“These past few weeks, even as I’ve relished the extra time to read, I’ve missed sports acutely. Just a few innings of baseball before bed! Oh, what I’d do for the swish of a three-pointer! So, as the Paris Review softball team’s permit application is stalled at NYC Parks and Rec, as the only basketball being played is me throwing laundry into the hamper, as MLB comes up with more and stranger ideas for how to restart the stalled-out season, I went back to the archive to find some interesting moments in the magazine’s sports literature. I hope it’s a balm for those among us missing sports. For those who stay far from even the sidelines, I’d encourage giving these pieces a shot. You’ll see that literary sportswriting rarely keeps to the bounds of the baseline—it is about character development as much as athletic performance, about linguistic craft as much as physical form. Let us not forget Robert Frost’s outlook on poetry, from his Art of Poetry interview: ‘I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete.’ In that, perhaps we’re all in it for sport.” —EN

The Paris Review has had the good fortune to serialize a handful of novels over the past decade, among them Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special. A group of retired footballers meet up every November to reenact a historic play: the premise is straightforward enough, but the complexity of this group portrait will knock the breath out of you like an encounter with a very solid offensive lineman. Here are part 1 and part 2. Subscribers can read the whole book now, or you can order a copy in our Bookshop.org store.

At the opening of her essay “What I Did Last Summer,” Betty Eppes admits, “I was a pretty good tennis player—fluctuating between No. 1 and No. 3 at my tennis club in Baton Rouge.” Betty drops the racket for another adventure.

Admittedly, The Basketball Diaries is more about sex and drugs in sixties NYC (be forewarned, some observations have aged less than gracefully) than about basketball, but this early version of Jim Carroll’s memoir does talk about pickup games, his high school’s jock culture, and hitting an “incredible amounts of jump shots” while stoned.

TPR art editor Charlotte Strick and illustrator and writer Leanne Shapton put their fins together for this portfolio, titled “Swimming Lessons,” from Summer 2016. Enjoy these poolside pictures until we can get back to the diving board.

TPR’s first poetry editor, Donald Hall, was perhaps second only to George Plimpton in his sports fandom. His Art of Poetry interview includes a brief but glorious anecdote about trying out for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I’d also direct you to “The Third Inning.” It borrows its structure from our beloved nine-inning game, but reaches far beyond the diamond.

And there’s plenty of sports in the Daily archive, as well. I’d start by pointing you to Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s tennis writing, which was a precursor to his 2018 book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, and to Leonard Gardner’s look back at Fat City from the half-century mark.

—EN

 

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A Dandy’s Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation

Frantisek Kupka, The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait), 1907

I’m not ashamed to say that I bought Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature because of the cover: Frantisek Kupka’s The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait) from 1907 is an exhilarating study of the color yellow. Its human subject, slouched in a wicker armchair, a cigarette dangling from one hand while a single, louche finger marks the page of a book, could be the perfect image of Des Esseintes, the dissolute antihero of Huysmans’s novel. Strictly speaking, the painting is a self-portrait of the habitually mustached Kupka, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to Charles Baudelaire, who haunts almost every page of Against Nature. This novel, about a dyspeptic aesthete who “took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude,” spends some two hundred pages luxuriating in excess and opulence while the hero cuts himself off from the rest of society.

An old idea that persists about the novel is that it ought to be morally instructive in some way, that it should teach us the correct way to live. Certainly, when Against Nature was published in French in 1884, much of the resultant hand-wringing was because Huysmans’s hero learns nothing new from his misadventures in self-isolation. The problem, according to Émile Zola, was “that Des Esseintes is as mad at the start as he is at the end, that there is no form of progression.” Barbey d’Aurevilly, who, depending on your point of view, was either a minor dandy in the Baudelaire coterie or just a nasty little pornographer, agreed: “Undertaken in despair, the book ends with a despair that is greater than that with which it began.” The reader is informed that in the flower of his youth, Des Esseintes often indulged in the pleasures of the flesh and the card table with his peers, but by the time we meet him in the first chapter, he has already begun dreaming of “a desert hermitage equipped with all the modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.” Page after page, chapter after chapter, Des Esseintes throws more and more money after his ennui and deviant tastes. He flees the crowds of Paris for the country, cuts himself off from outsiders, and attempts to swaddle himself only in objects and experiences that meet his particular aesthetic principles. Decadent literature had its heyday in France in the nineteenth century when the poètes maudits sought to overthrow nature, replacing with it human genius and the pursuit of pleasure, no matter how perverted. But for all Des Esseintes’s extravagance, there is nothing that can stop the rot, there is no escaping his malaise. Eventually, he is ordered back to the city by a pragmatic doctor, where he must abandon his solitary existence and at least try to enjoy the same pleasures as other people. All Des Esseintes can manage, before the doctor strides out the door, is a petulant “But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy!” The novel ends with our hero slumped in a chair.

So, what, if anything, do we stand to learn about self-isolation from an ailing aristocrat at the tail end of the nineteenth century? Des Esseintes is based loosely on Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, the dandy par excellence who was also the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Proust’s roman-fleuve, and Huysmans’s Against Nature, like so many great novels, are concerned with the twilight of a once-golden age.

The dandy was an important figure in decadent literature, a visible manifestation of a society infected by its own opulence. Things rarely ended well for the dandy, whether fictional or historical: they tended to die in poverty and obscurity, their witticisms forgotten, their fashions surpassed. But for a few blazing decades of the nineteenth century, in fiction and in society, they were the absolute arbiters of taste, and Jean des Esseintes might just have been their high priest.

Curated from the pages of Against Nature, the following is a decadent guide to staying home in style. Quarantine, but make it “fun”-de-siècle.

VÊTEMENTS

A disastrous place to start. The array of “iso-outfits” and work-from-home ensembles that have been bandied about the internet would surely have pushed Des Esseintes to the brink. It goes without saying that you should not be wearing sweats; you probably should not even own any. Your wardrobe should be seasonal and thematic; you may wear your tweeds to an English-style tavern, but not along the boulevards. A workaround for the effort of daily dressing is to invest in a silk dressing gown, or a velvet smoking jacket, and simply throw it over whatever you are or are not wearing. Remember, though, that for a dandy, the primary aim of dressing is one’s own pleasure; impressing the petite bourgeoisie at the opera is just a secondary thrill. In the current climate, the “quarantini” hour is probably your best opportunity to earn a reputation as an eccentric. Try wearing “suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats” or “sticking a bunch of Parma violets down [your] shirt-front in lieu of a cravat.”

BODY & MINDFULNESS

Even in his deepest despair, Des Esseintes never falls so low as to engage in anything resembling exercise. But just because you won’t catch him in a forearm plank doesn’t mean that you can’t take certain steps to take care of your body. As a dandy, you are encouraged to maintain a slender, rakish silhouette while young, but it is perfectly acceptable to become bloated and syphilitic as you grow older. You needn’t worry about flossing or brushing your teeth, either. Simply follow the example of Robert de Montesquiou and hold a gloved hand in front of your rotting maw whenever smiling in public.

Routine is important: our protagonist recommends selecting a daily menu for each season that should never be changed. Here’s Des Esseintes’s winter meal plan and sleep schedule, which can be tweaked as needed: “At five o’clock in winter, after dusk had fallen, he ate a light breakfast of two boiled eggs, toast and tea; then he had lunch about eleven, drank coffee or sometimes tea and wine during the night and finally toyed with a little supper about five in the morning, before going to bed.”

If you’re feeling snacky, then Des Esseintes recommends a hearty enema, the recipe for which is as follows: 1oz cod-liver oil, 7oz beef tea, 7oz red wine (preferably Burgundy), and the yolk of one egg. Those with a sweet tooth are advised that the best violet bonbons to be found in Paris are made by the chocolatier and librettist Monsieur Paul Siraudin, at his store on the corner of Rue de la Paix and Place Vendôme.

Many people have reported difficulty sleeping, an inability to concentrate, or “a mood of splenetic indecision.” To cure such complaints, Des Esseintes recommends a course of soporific literature before bed: “Read those books that are so charmingly adapted for convalescents and invalids, whom more tetanic or phosphatic works would only fatigue: the novels of Charles Dickens.”

INTERIOR DESIGN

Perhaps the most important element of the decadent guide to staying at home. First, you’ll need enough inherited wealth that you don’t actually need to work. Ideally, you’ll also want a modest acreage outside the city to avoid contagion from the masses. From there, your home is really what you make of it. Any space, no matter how dingy or rented, can be transformed with a bold aesthetic vision: “as a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius.” White walls, framed movie posters, and IKEA bookcases are fine, but have you considered turning your dining room into a ship’s cabin? Try a “ceiling of arched beams, bulkheads and floorboards of pitch-pine, and a little window-opening that lets into the wainscoting like a porthole.” Replace those flat-pack formica bookcases with built-in ebony shelving. For floor coverings, tiger skins and blue fox furs work best. In terms of original art, Odilon Redon etchings can be found online, but copper engravings by Jan Luyken are harder to come by. When in doubt, Gustave Moreau should be in the center of your mood board.

When it comes to decorating the bedroom, there are only two options: “you could either make it a place for sensual pleasure, for nocturnal delectation, or else you could fit it out as a place for sleep or solitude, a setting for quiet meditation, a sort of oratory.”

White walls are out; rooms draped in scarlet tapestries are in. If you’re thinking of giving your apartment a lick of paint, or exploring the possibility of a feature wall, the first chapter of Against Nature will help you choose a decadent color: stay away from all shades of purple (except plum) because they lose their luster in candlelight. In fact, your guiding principle should be to always select colors that “appear stronger and clearer in artificial light.” If you, or someone you live with, is best described as a “gaunt, febrile creature of feeble constitution” then Des Esseintes urges you to resist the temptation of the “most morbid and irritating of colours,” orange—it flares up to an unflattering fiery nasturtium-red by lamplight.

Finally, all dandies know that you need a statement piece that will gesture to your exquisite but slightly outré taste, while also tying the room together. It’s tricky, and usually expensive. Des Esseintes opted for a live tortoise whose gilded shell was festooned with jewels; thanks to Bulgari and Francesco Vezzoli, his dream could also be yours.

TRAVEL

When it comes to travel, Des Esseintes has a few pearls of wisdom for those of us feeling housebound. He reminds us that travel itself, the moving between places, is no fun at all, and that any pleasure we might pretend to derive from it exists “only in recollection of the past and hardly ever in the experience of the present.” The whole travel thing is “a waste of time,” because “the imagination can provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience.”

There are many ways to simply imagine travel: start by putting up “a series of colour-prints on the wall, such as you see in packet-boat offices and Lloyd’s agencies, representing steamers bound for Valparaíso and the River Plate.” Then, re-create a risk-free experience of strolling the deck of a cruise ship by “salting your bath-water and adding sulphate of soda with hydrochlorate of magnesium and lime in the proportions recommended by the Pharmacopoeia” then “taking out a ball of twine or a twist of rope, bought for the occasion from one of those enormous roperies whose warehouses and cellars reek with the smell of the sea and sea-ports.” Breathe it all in, and let your mind do the rest.

Des Esseintes would also advise against setting out for a dream destination once the quarantine is lifted, as it’s highly unlikely your expectations will be met. Having long held a fascination for Holland, Des Esseintes once visited the land of Rembrandt. There, he expected to find “patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality,” and, to be frank, he would have settled for “wild revelry or domestic drunkenness,” but the trip proved a bitter disappointment. Begrudgingly, he “had to admit that the paintings of the Dutch School exhibited in the Louvre had led him astray.”

HOUSEPLANTS & FLOWERS

Houseplants and flowers are nonnegotiable, but steer clear of “stupid flowers such as the rose, whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies.” Why not turn your apartment into a hothouse? Fill it with languorous, exotic plants from the tropics and flowers of tremulous delicacy. Sure, ZZ plants and devil’s ivy are easy to care for in a low-light situation, but ask yourself, are they “princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having nothing whatever in common with the popular plants or the bourgeois blooms?” Try a drosera or an amorphophallus instead.

If you’re not much of a green thumb (and full disclosure, it took a team of horticulturists to put together our hero’s hothouse), then you might be tempted to spruce up your place with fake plants. It’s a good thought, but a true dandy like Des Esseintes would take the concept one step further: “tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes.”

DATING & SEX

Like travel, this isn’t something you need to worry about too much as a self-isolating dandy. You ought to have debauched yourself in your early youth to the point of venereal infirmity, and now, the erotic life should leave you indifferent. If you are as decadent as Des Esseintes, this is a good thing. Why not get together on Zoom with the rest of your single friends, and hold a somber dinner party to bid farewell to your libido? You’ll need a dining room draped in black that opens out “to a garden metamorphosed for the occasion, the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses and pines.” The menu might take some coordinating, but it should consist of “turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviar, mullet botargo, black puddings from Frankfurt, game served in sauces the colour of liquorice and boot-polish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams, plum-puddings, nectarines, pears in grape-juice syrup, mulberries and black-heart cherries.”

WHAT TO READ

There’s only really one title in English that Des Esseintes can recommend, and that’s Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. For an immersive experience, you could read it in your ship’s cabin-cum-dining room, or while sniffing that twist of rope you bought earlier. Our hero also has strong feelings about Latin literature, so if you only ever read one Roman text, make it Petronius’s Satyricon. Baudelaire’s entire oeuvre is required reading, and from there you can branch into the poetry of Verlaine and Mallarmé. There is no reason to believe that Des Esseintes ever read a work written by a woman. If you, like Des Esseintes, feel strongly that “when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age,” you will prefer Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony over the tawdry Madame Bovary. There’s a lot of prevarication when it comes to Balzac’s Comédie Humaine: the sprawling body of work has its merits, but there came a point for Des Esseintes when “he no longer opened Balzac’s books; their healthy spirit jarred on him.”

Which brings us to the most important point about books: it’s essential for a dandy to collect them, and maybe even write them, but the reading of them is not altogether necessary. Special attention should be paid to bindings and editions, however. At a bare minimum you should be purchasing hardcovers, and where possible, leather-bound books. You’ll be slouching in your armchair for some time yet; you want those uncracked spines to look winsome in the artificial light.

 

 

Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in A Public Space, The White Review, T Magazine, and Harper’s. He is currently writing his first novel.

What Our Contributors Are Reading This Spring

Contributors from our Spring issue share their favorite recent finds.

Spread from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, by Emil Ferris

Very late on summer nights when I was a kid, I’d put our crappy pedestal fan on full blast, stick it right beside the couch so that it was refrigerating my face, and quite literally shiver my way through a spooky detective novel of choice. (Electricity was cheaper then.) Reading volume 1 of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters re-creates the goose-bumpy pleasure of an immersive mystery with horrors at every corner. The graphic novel is rendered in atmospheric detail by writer-artist Emil Ferris, using ballpoint pen to capture the fictional diary of Karen Reyes. Karen might be a ten-year-old girl or a budding werewolf—either way, the discomfort of living in an unfamiliar body is palpable on every page. The book is rarely formatted like a traditional multipanel comic. Instead, it spills out, free-form, with full-page panels and long text interludes. It has all the bizarro flotsam of an adolescent brain, too: sketches, taped-up photos, failed math tests, movie posters, covers of horror comics, and, of course, secrets aplenty.

In a very different flavor of diary, Emily Raboteau’s article for The Cut, “This Is How We Live Now,” documents a year of conversations about climate change with friends and family. These small, deeply personal conversations take place at birthdays, dinner tables, housewarming parties; in church basements; and online, all across the span of 2019. Raboteau braids the intimate, humdrum details of these events with observations of a planet in a state of almost unimaginable change: “Carolyn warned me at the breakfast table, where I picked up my grapefruit spoon, that I may have to get used to an inhaler to be able to breathe in spring going forward.” I am in awe of the impossible grace of this project, which dials down the scope of global change to its small-scale vibrations. For someone who needs a cool five or ten years to gain an ounce of insight, the perceptiveness of Raboteau’s climate diaries verge on clairvoyance. —Senaa Ahmad

In the midst of my quarantine in the wilderness of Canada, I have been reading The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre, by Noreen Khawaja, which is complicating all my inherited, unquestioned ideas about the Western contemporary cultural practice of working “the self.” Khawaja finds all the hidden strains of Christianity in Existentialist thinking—which, of course, purports to be atheistic—such as the idea that the self must be worked for, must be won, through labor. You aren’t merely yourself but have to win yourself, through conversion, baptism, or, in the case of atheistic moderns, through a struggle for “authenticity,” a struggle that is inherently spiritual in the sense that it can never be accomplished for good. You can’t just say, Great, I’m authentic, on to something else, but have to win this state continually, like the state of holiness in the eyes of God. In a line that I have sent half a dozen friends, who mostly replied, “um I do not understand this at all,” or, “I’ll have to think about that!” Khawaja writes, “This work takes on the form of an exercise (askesis), I suggest, to the degree that it is difficult to articulate what the work is good for, what it is supposed to achieve.” Amazing! She is asking, What are we even striving for personal authenticity for? What is being “true to yourself” supposed to win, both in the state of trueness, and if the “trueness” is won? Why have I never stopped and asked that question? Anyway, it turns out not really to be the kind of book from which you want to be pelleting random quotes at your friends in the midst of their particular quarantine, but it is undeniably brilliant and mind-altering, and Khawaja has a really direct, light, confident touch as a stylist. I feel like a secret portal is being opened as I read this book, into practices I see everywhere—from the injunction to exercise or to be stylish, to the more profound ways we work on the self: therapy, self-examination, even moving from one romantic relationship to another, in pursuit of—what? And for what? And for whom? — Sheila Heti

Wisława Szymborska

Having been appointed U.S. poet laureate shortly before 9/11, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people “turning to” poetry in times of crisis. Now we hear of it again, in these days of a global sickness. Fair enough, though that would imply that in non-crisis times, most people live with their backs to poetry—they have to turn around to find it. Like most poets, I live facing poetry. I read some nearly every day, typically with a cup of morning coffee. I don’t need poems of hopefulness; in fact, I put down poems that carry a “palpable design” of making me feel one way or another. I tend to read and reread the same kind of poems whether a crisis is raging or not.

These are poets whose work is tinged with irony, humor, slyness, and ambiguity. Instead of being glum or cheerful, they mix moods and shade the meaning. Patrick Kavanagh once described tragedy as “insufficiently developed comedy.”

Push the bad news far enough and it gets funny. Imagine Lear. The late Eavan Boland, to cite another Irish poet, said that “poetry begins where certitude ends.” I prefer poems that are wavering to ones that have an answer or even a prevailing wind. Seriocomic poems. So I read Charles Simic, Ron Padgett, Philip Larkin, Wisława Szymborska, and other mixed-message poets.

Some people face poetry every day. It’s like having an additional daily weather report, one that charts your inner weather, the changing barometer of feelings. And poets, of course, are known to be in touch with the outer weather, which they welcome into their sunny, rainy, or simply overcast poems, allowing the weather to change through the course of the day. From “Some People Like Poetry,” by Szymborska:

Poetry—but what is poetry anyway?

More than one rickety answer

has tumbled since that question first was raised.

But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that

like a redemptive handrail.

—Billy Collins

My Brilliant Friend (©Eduardo Castaldo/HBO)

Lately, a couple of friends and I have been watching My Brilliant Friend while texting. It’s one of these new-normal ways of staying in touch. We chose this HBO series adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s now-classic Neapolitan novels because we had read and discussed the books together. Like most people who love these books, who are astonished by their gorgeously intimate and complex portrayals of friendship and how identity is formed, I worried about how the world of Lila and Lenù, Naples in the fifties through the seventies, would come through on the screen. One’s own imagination can be tough competition. What I’ve experienced is not just immense relief but immense immersion—different from the one I experienced with the books but just as potent. Lila and Lenù are not exactly who I imagined and yet are exactly right. No doubt it helps that Ferrante herself is a consultant on this show, which is now in its second season. The landscapes have a dreamlike quality; Lila and Lenù’s childhood neighborhood looks like a deliberate set. But the tension, violence, love, and rivalry they experience are all too real. My friends and I text one another: how the show is different from the books, what characters look like, real-time analyses and reactions to whatever unfolds before us. Oh no, someone texts in the middle of a scene, and we all get it. I am in a different time zone from these friends because I moved last year, long before the phrase social distancing. I miss them. But for this hour, while we are all absorbed in this show, I can forget how far away they are. We text while reading the subtitled text on our screens. It’s part correspondence, part journal, part collaboration. Like Lila and Lenù, we know what it is to be filled with so much longing. —Beth Nguyen

I’ve been reading Claire Meuschke’s exquisite debut, Upend, which intersperses poems with scanned documents and transcripts from the immigration trial of her grandfather, on Angel Island. It’s lyric examination of that archive through erasure, reflection, echo. I love this book for the sensuous rigor of Meuschke’s mind, her oracular geometries: “Circle around the head to bring out the / head-like qualities of the head / shared air between here and the outer air.” Upend’s poetics unite the documentary and the visionary, and each extends the other. To see the present is to see the present absence that some misname the past. Every surface is a palimpsest, “generations of pastel choices over adobe the weather reclaims as earth color.” In “Census,” assembled Sherwin-Williams paint shades describe the lethal American spectrum whose slogan is “Cover the Earth”: “Restrained Gold / Mossy Gold / Harvest Gold / Ancestral Gold / Goldenrod / Marigold / Golden Gate / Golden Plumeria / Quilt Gold / Folksy Gold / Edgy Gold / Vintage Gold / Independent Gold / Humble Gold / Different Gold / Relic Bronze / Chivalry Copper / Artifact / Reliable White / Original White / Intimate White / Moderate White / Welcome White / Nice White …” But in Meuschke’s own words, the colors breathe and subvert category, talking to each other. “Stare at forest green to get cochineal on the page”; “what is the word for this blue so blue / you can consider the idea of purple.” —Margaret Ross

Linda Gregg

In the last week of last year, I decided to read more poems—one every day. Before this, all my daily rituals were prosaic. I was never taught to pray, and so I settled for other, unholy reminders of one day’s continuity with another: toothbrushing, deodorizing, a cup of coffee just so. If you are a certain kind of person, habit can start to seem religious. My boyfriend isn’t this kind of person—I’m the only zealot here—but he agreed to the poems. We alternate days, which is nice: half the time you read and half the time you listen. Sometimes we read in person and other times we send recordings. I hated the recordings at first—a stranger’s tinny voice, supposedly mine—and now that there is no need for them, I love them. I send one from the kitchen to the living room. He sends one from down the block.

The point here isn’t mastery. There are so many poems; three hundred and sixty-five later, there still will be. Maybe it’s something more like discovery. One of the best, so far, is by Linda Gregg, who died last spring, leaving behind half a dozen or so volumes of her work. Some of her most beautiful poems are about loss and refusal, about being alone and being beyond reach. They’re full of horses. “The Defeated” contains a simple lunch, a simple comfort:

I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken.

It is sunny outside. I miss you. My head is tired.

John was nice this morning. Already what I remember

most is the happiness of seeing you. Having tea.

Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake

in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.

I’ll try to tell you better when I am stronger.

These days, when nearness is literally perilous, maybe there is nothing luckier than this: to know that someone is on the other side of the wall, that nothing was taken away while you were asleep, that life goes on in the next room. For now, we’re still reading, recording, listening. A hundred or so down, a few hundred to go. The sun is bright, our heads are tired. Next year, we think we’ll go back to the beginning, and read them all again. — Clare Sestanovich

 

 

Poets on Couches: Tess Taylor

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“Musical Interlude”

by Eamon Grennan

Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000)

Through the voice, the soul’s work is done.

Janet Baker

Cragflower. Music of the sea.

The flower still standing

in its tormented place.

Morning full of voices. Mourning too.

Mahalia singing On My Way

and making it to Cay-nen Land.

On a rock, sit, listen to Bjorling

sing Only a Rose

over your friend’s ashes.

Chaffinch on the clothesline—

rosy biscuit breast aglow—

will any minute

confirm himself in song.

And listen,

the thin single note

of the sandpiper in lakedusk:

beige and bright white,

precise bill opening, closing:

only the one note

but enough to cut across

the whole valley

as a nightwind shakes

the stiff green reeds to whispering.

Pain, even a single grain of it

anywhere in the body

is a kind of stop and focus,

turning us to pure attention,

as may happen

with some small invisible

winged thing singing in the thick of hedges.

Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, The Forage House, and Work & Days. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press.

Classic Fiction with Binary Numbers

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the Guardian, The New Yorker, and New Scientist. His comic books—Baking with Kafka, Mooncop, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, and Goliath—are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family.

From Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

The Great Bird Search

A selection of the author’s childhood birds.

My mother remembers five separate deaths: tumor, disappearance, mauled by neighborhood animal, injury, and a fly-away. I remember four different colors; together we recall three names. We had these birds over six years—I think. Much of my childhood is foggy and uncertain. It’s shrouded, or sometimes replaced, by stories I’ve told myself and others. I’m concerned about why I can’t remember our birds clearly. How many did we have? I adored them; they were our bright things in a dark house.

A scene that I remember: My piano teacher sitting in a green chair, bald and patient. I’m sitting beside him on a piano bench, grinning because I have a secret. I pull out Bach. I pull out Duvernoy’s “School of Mechanism.” My piano teacher asks me what else I have in my bag. When I laugh, I look like a beaver; three index cards could fit between my front teeth. I reach to the bottom and pull out a cardboard box. A weight shifts around as I open the flaps. I place Nippy, a bright-blue parakeet, onto the piano. I’m excited for him to sing when I play my scales. Instead he poops quietly on the Steinway.

Nippy’s wings were clipped when we got him. Perhaps I thought I could encourage him to fly—I was five—so I threw him up in the air and he smacked into the ceiling. He crumbled down onto the bed, then wobbled back to life. Nippy was so beautiful; I didn’t know what to do with him. I stuffed him into my shirt, in drawers and shoes; I ran after him through the house and my father brushed him off surfaces. Nippy learned three words, then developed a tumor from stress and died in my hand. I thought life and death would always be like this—violent, morbid, pretty.

Once, my father dreamed he was in the neighbor’s yard, trying to reason with Nippy to come home. He was in his sleep clothes and the snow was melting. My blue bird scuttled away from his reach. My father spoke insistently to him, telling him that it was getting late and that his food and toys were next door. My father retells this often.

After Nippy, I don’t remember. I consult my parents’ photographs. Most of them are out of focus. We had a bad camera; I overzealously positioned the lens too close to the small birds. The blurriness makes it difficult to distinguish whether the plumage is light yellow, white, or light blue, all of which signify distinct birds in my memory. After careful consideration, I think these photographs are three different birds.

A. This one is sitting on a banker lamp, reading the “news.” I would tape various paper “books covers” on the lamp for the bird to “read,” though it chewed on the paper instead. This bird looks mostly white.

 

 

B. This bird seems yellowish and haggard, almost insect-like.

 

 

C. This one is the same color as my shirt, which is a light blue. I vaguely remember this one “begging” at the table, which would involve it sitting on my mother’s shoulder, then quickly descending down her arm to grab something off the plate.

 

 

A friend reminds me that outdoor birds used to get trapped in my family’s basement. Usually they were starlings. I would hear them banging in the vents. Once, an injured one clunked around for so long that my father took a broom to it and flattened it into the cement. My kid friends thought we were so brutal. They rumored my family to be living in ruins, sucking on rocks and committing strange crimes.

Other kids wondered why I didn’t eat Lunchables or watch television, or why I wasn’t allowed to go to the mall or sleepovers. That my parents are from another country felt insufficient, so I tried different explanations: My parents used to be circus performers! My mother is a butterfly scientist! We just moved to this country! Someone follows us with a knife! We are fluent in Esperanto! I am a spy! My childhood memories are a mix of fraudulence and exaggerations, tall tales I told as a kind of protection, which can make my memory-detective work tricky. My mythology of myself gradually became who I presented by default. I gave myself over to stories, leaving behind the facts, like my birds.

According to old diary entries, my other parakeets were named Pecky and Penelope. With names, I can begin to picture them dimensionally, place them in time. Pecky was definitely the white parakeet and Penelope was light blue. Penelope liked mirrors and doorknobs. Pecky liked to be pet on the neck. She would puff up and cock her head to the three o’clock position. I’d wiggle my finger below the beak, “under the chin” for her, and she’d close one eye. Beneath the feathers she was shrunken and bony like someone very old. When we spritzed her with a spray bottle, she became slender like a lizard. The other, nameless, yellow one I still can’t imagine. All I know is that it was our last bird.

Perhaps the key to remembering the yellow bird is finding its name. I look through a list online. Popular names include Coco, Baby, Largo, Dunly, and Stephen King. Popular unisex names are Whisper, Touche, and Megabyte. I scroll through various websites expecting something in me to light up like a metal detector. I message a childhood friend who used to ride her bike over. She confirms only what I already know.

I mention my search to my therapist and he tells me about the parrots of Telegraph Hill. How a woman had let go of her cherry-headed conures in the nineties and now they’ve taken over an area of San Francisco. I remember that I’ve seen those parrots before in real life. I visualize the vibrant parrots in a tree along the sidewalk; I get a jolt of a feeling similar to loss. And through that memory, I remember something else. I remember how I had also seen my yellow parakeet high up in a tree, through the back door of my parents’ house that my father left open, then never seeing it again.

After that, it feels as if I always knew. It’s funny, trying to remember an epiphany. I can write down what led to it—what my therapist said and how it unlocked something in me. But there is also an atmosphere to it, like a fog that pulses to show a walking path, or the settling of sediment that reveals a missing locket at the bottom of a pond. There is something mystical and frothy about the non-epiphany part of an epiphany. I remember it, but not exactly.

When I was hurt, I changed my stories to show it. I was certain my father took a broom to the starling in the basement, but when I ask my mother, she doesn’t remember it. Maybe it was another thing I made up. Or maybe it was true in another way. With language, my pain became malleable—I could control it and change it. It’s a common child’s game that isn’t fun as an adult. It’s the opposite of an epiphany: the veil evaporates and I already know what’s there. I just wish it weren’t.

Not long ago I started to tell the truth. Old habits fell away slowly and stubbornly. I said what was true even if it was dull or embarrassing. Sometimes I would look at something like a sidewalk or a leaf and feel immense gratitude. A big-bellied robin belting in the yard would fill me with awe.

Nippy, Pecky, Penelope, Henry. This last name falls into place at a random moment, as I look up from a chair. I remember all their songs clearly. You could hear them inside the house from the driveway. They would sing on my mother’s shoulder while she cooked. They would sing while we ate, along with the classical music on the radio, when I did homework. They would tuck one foot into their feathers and sing a little lullaby to themselves. They would land on my head and sing with their entire bodies, like alarms, as I walked through the house. They would hide behind the books and sing. They would sing along to thunder. Sometimes, they would sing at night.

 

Nicolette Polek is the author of Imaginary Museums, published by Soft Skull Press earlier this year. Her stories can be found in New York Tyrant, Egress, Fanzine, Hobart, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

From Pets: An Anthology , edited by Jordan Castro, out from Tyrant Books this week.

No Shelter

© Jeff McCollough (AdobeStock)

“It’s an elegy for New York,” my friend texts me. She’s just finished my book. It’s the end of February. We find barstools at a packed restaurant bar before a reading at St. Mark’s Church. “We’re ordering months of medication in case the supply chain fails,” she says, “and hand sanitizer—and masks. Masks, can you believe it.” Like me, she and her husbands are journalists, they’re hearing things from some of our friends in the field. She tells me she thinks people will still read the book, words of reassurance that only provoke anxiety. I think she sounds paranoid, like she’s speaking from a place of some dark cultish extremism.

The next two weeks change the world. Schools close. We need to rush the audiobook recording into three days, taping over the weekend. I take the subway for the last time, without knowing it, one of only three people in the entire car. Days before, I’d waited on a crammed platform for a train so jammed with bodies we couldn’t all press aboard. Now it feels like a late night in the early nineties, a city of emptiness and dread. It’s warm out, but I wear gloves, tiny red ones that belonged to a friend’s grandmother, calfskin from a different century that had known different fear and trauma and loss. The sound engineer lets me into the building, squeezes nervously into the far corner of the elevator on the way up to the studio. We finish the recording Sunday evening. I wait in a supermarket line for an hour and a half and hoist home whatever I can carry. I write an article about homeless college students who have nowhere to go.

The book couldn’t come out in the fall; the fall news cycle would be too busy, the election too much of a distraction. April would be perfect. We would publish in time to do university events, but still close enough to the Democratic National Convention, when social issues, like the ones my book explores, would be on the forefront of discourse. The safety net. Housing. Childcare. The minimum wage. The cost of college. Race. Gender. My book follows Camilla, a young criminal justice student, through her first year of single motherhood, and the entire constellation of factors that keep her homeless, despite her tenacity, her ambition, her blade-sharp mind. I wrote this book like a zealous missionary, to grab people by their lapels, to make them feel the irreversible curse of being born poor in America. April was worth the abbreviated marketing schedule, worth the last-minute squeeze into the catalogue.

Justin, my husband, takes photos of the brokers packing up their computers at the stock exchange. Guards had taken his temperature before they allowed him to enter the building. Normal. But that night his fever spikes. We quarantine from him in the house; he takes the bedroom, I sleep on the living room floor. He changes his clothes before he leaves the bedroom, wears gloves in the kitchen and bathroom, sleeps for two days. My breathing shortens, I feel a boot heavy on my chest.

During the day, I report. Between interviews I tend to Dahlia, who is desperate for my attention and some semblance of solidity. She’s twelve, navigating her first breakup alongside her first global crisis, while her parents are sick. At night, I’m sleepless, processing the scale of what’s happening. My insomnia gradually pivots to my book. I feel drenched in shame for even thinking about it. The next evening, I completely lose it and scream at Justin and Dahlia like a mother out of Albee.

*

Morning. I’m bleary and breathless on the living room floor. I reach for my phone. There’s a text from my editor: Blessedly, we’re moving publication, to a time a bit later this year when the earth is back on its axis. I take the deepest breath I have in days, my chest suddenly unencumbered. At least this will be okay. An hour later: I have just been told that our April directive (that I wrote you about an hour ago) may be changing. Please stand by. It’s days before the phone rings to inform me of the publisher’s decision. Over those days, I hear that Amazon will not be shipping books as part of their focus on essential goods. All my beloved bookstores have closed.

I’d been patient: My editor got tied up in another project after I submitted my draft. Finally, I got notes. I revised. I waited. And just as I was anticipating my next round of edits, the imprint that had acquired my book was shuttered after its most successful year ever. My venerated and venerable editor, a cofounder of the imprint, was out of a job; my book was orphaned. So began a spell waiting to see which editor would be assigned the book at a different imprint. And then nine months awaiting edits on that year-old second draft, only to be rushed into production, squeezed last minute into the catalogue, so it could come out this April. Publishing.

Privileged problems to have. Our savings had been drained by this book process, but my life was anchored way above the line. My anxiety could crackle through a home to which I held a mortgage, my insomnia borne out beside a committed coparent. I felt left behind by New York’s Gilded Age, but that was in part by choice: to be a writer, and to write about inequality.

The women I’d met at the Brooklyn shelter where I was reporting had no such choices. Privilege is an inheritance game. They were, for the most part, born poor. And over their young lifetimes, the struggle of poverty had become a tightening noose. These were young women who, for the most part, didn’t grow up in shelters. During their childhoods, a Section 8 check could pay the rent, and rents, while untenable, weren’t yet entirely infeasible, even at minimum wage. No longer. Each of them had found themselves alone, with the crushing responsibility of new motherhood, in the shelter on Fourth Avenue. The shelter, and its soup kitchen, was mainly run by volunteers, who stopped coming once the coronavirus threat became a dire reality. The soup kitchen had served its last meal the week before.

Back when I reported at the shelter, the buildings nearby were unveiling their offering plans, which included pet spas and stroller concierge service. I followed my subjects through the vast labyrinth of our failed social service system: the welfare offices where people would wait for days on end to settle a single check; the NYCHA offices where they’d vainly apply for subsidized apartments; the WIC offices where the size of a check was dependent upon whether a mother could still nurse her baby. Beyond the system were the bodegas and supermarkets that took EBT cards, the miles of subway track that led to the end of each line, and the buses that ferried New Yorkers far beyond the city’s glittering nucleus. I watched these women shoulder the heavy yoke of administrative burden; I was a witness to what it meant to lose a public assistance case for reasons of bafflingly inconsistent policies, or a letter that got lost in the mail. I watched it happen to my protagonist who was as organized and prepared to take on the system as anyone I’d known; a woman who, as a teenager, had sued her parents for child support and won.

I saw how literally impossible it was to find stable housing in a city that had handed ten billion dollars of tax abatements to billionaires, a city that housed more millionaires than anywhere else, where even if a so-called affordable apartment came up in the lottery—a lottery for housing, my god—as it did for my protagonist, the minimum income was unattainable for anyone under the line. That was during New York’s age of unprecedented prosperity, of skyscraping new developments, of luxury everything, when the people in power decided to shred our safety net instead of strengthening it. In January, 62,679 people found a bed in city shelters, and thousands more slept in private shelters—or on the street. How many will there be now? How many will there be the next time we’re all instructed to stay “home”?

 *

The call comes the next day. They’re going ahead with the book. The pipeline is open, that’s the way they put it. The printer in North Carolina is printing books. The warehouse is shipping them. Amazon will keep stocking and selling, and so will a direct distributor. Fall will be just as bad, perhaps. I ask what the plan will be should North Carolina close essential businesses. We see no sign of that happening, I’m told, not the way the virus is spreading. In my best good-girl voice, I inquire if it might be possible to look into what will happen if the printer shuts down and if Amazon stops selling books. I think about the Amazon warehouse worker I interviewed, who described how in the crammed warehouse there was no space to escape her colleagues’ coughs and sneezes, how Amazon refused to supply masks and gloves. I feel complicit and conflicted.

It’s no relief to realize this book is more relevant than I’d known when I was writing it, that so many elements of the struggle I chronicle soon will be lived out by millions. I know they’re right, that it’s an uncanny moment in which to publish a narrative about individual trauma, about wide systemic failure, about life in a shockingly divided city. I’m so sorry, my editor writes me after the call. He was on the line but too sick to speak, in the middle of a fifteen-day fever, gasping at home. Justin has a friend in a medical coma. My heart flutters at a terrifying speed for hours on end; with each half breath, I don’t know what’s panic and what’s the virus. I text my book’s protagonist to check on her. She tells me she’s not worried about getting COVID-19. I should drink water with lemon and bicarbonate, she says; she heard it cures the virus.

My half-capacity breaths suddenly drop to a quarter; I’ve had asthma since I was a kid, I’ve been assessing my lungs my whole life. After I put Dahlia to bed the following night, I feel my breathing capacity drop suddenly, now more like 10 percent. It’s 11:30. We text a doctor for advice. He tells us not to go to the hospital unless we think I’m going to die. I don’t know if it’s going to drop again, and if it does, if it will be too late to get me to a place that can help. I don’t know if any place is equipped to help. If this crisis will deem me worthy of a ventilator. We stay home. We cry a bit, not knowing what is going to happen. I tell Justin that at least I won’t have to worry about my book anymore. I apologize for not getting a real job, for thinking that I could make this life work the way I’d hoped. It occurs to me, finally, to feel scared for us, too.

Soon I’m breathing better, but sleeping less. Motivated by an almost ironic cynicism, I search for coverage of North Carolina’s virus prevention plans. There it is, posted just hours before: the governor has decreed all nonessential businesses close up shop by Monday, until April 29, a day after my book’s scheduled publication. Justin sleeps soundly beside me. I debate opening a bottle for a 4 A.M. solitary drink, something I’ve never done before. Instead, until dawn, I just write.

The data begins to accumulate, the millions newly jobless. I text the women I’ve stayed in touch with, women who were working at Applebee’s, or as home health aides, trying to get through nursing school, trying to offer their children a measure of stability without stable housing. None of them reply. My protagonist isn’t working now, but she’s not worried, she assures me. Her partner offers her a stability the system never did. He’s smart, she texts me, and they’re praying, they’ll be fine. I wonder if she’s trying to convince herself as much as me.

 *

The book was printed over the weekend, I’m told, it should be arriving at the warehouse that afternoon. I won’t be able to hold it in my hands unless I buy myself a copy online—shipping has been limited to retailers exclusively. My publicist emails me a picture of two stacked copies. I stare at the picture like it’s a photo of a lover, tumbled from an airmail envelope at an army base. It’s beautiful. I allow myself to feel that before I check the news. Before I return myself to the numbers, the numbers of jobs lost, the number of deaths. Justin’s friend will soon be one. The book’s protagonist will have finally felt the virus encroach; she will mourn two people lost. The next two weeks blur in a panic of writing and emails, careening between feeling zealous purpose and existential pointlessness.

My sleeplessness pulls me into novels about the AIDS epidemic, about slavery. I need relative traumas, ones that may offer perspective. I know what is coming for anyone struggling in this country, anyone who survives the virus. As a country, we’ve lived through worse, I try to tell myself. But who cares. We could have ended homelessness with a twenty-billion-dollar investment in subsidized housing, we could have listened to every scholar, every think tank researcher, every HUD staffer, who knows that this problem is solvable with a tiny fraction of the stimulus package, or a tiny fraction of the wealth of the billionaires who feign their liberalism. I’ve seen the paralysis and failure of our social services system in what, for some, was the best of times. Now it’s the worst of times.

Justin, home from making pictures of makeshift morgues in Brooklyn and the mass grave in the Bronx, catches me in a moment of preoccupation about my book, says at least I’m not publishing a navel-gazing novel. I snap at him in defense of navel-gazing novels. We still want to connect, to feel, to bring another person’s inner life into our own, I tell him in less-polite language. I wrote this book from a place of outrage, to move people to confront the horrors we were willing to perpetuate in the near past. The emergency was there all along. Never have Americans so desperately needed the ability to internalize the pain of others, to spur themselves into addressing our many plagues. Pub dates be damned, books are what will provoke our empathic imaginations. Like this one, they’ll continue to be written and published, sold and read, discussed and passed on. Now more than ever, or same as it ever was.

 

Lauren Sandler is the author of This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search For Home, out this week from Random House

Dog Philosopher

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the Guardian, The New Yorker, and New Scientist. His comic books—Baking with Kafka, Mooncop, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, and Goliath—are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family.

From Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

None of Us Are Normal

“You are not the first of my patients to mention that,” my omnipotent therapist said when I sat on her couch and voiced some deep-seated feelings about the film adaptation of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Funny how the best and worst thing your psychologist can say to you is the same. Here was the coach of my tenderest soul saying that I was not unique in the world—how dare she! On the other hand, maybe it would be nice not to be alone. Reading Normal People by Sally Rooney and then watching the very convincing Hulu adaptation, to be released today, I wondered if that was the spell of this story as well. Rooney addresses the contradiction again and again: the fundamental tension between being independent and needing to be understood, between wanting to be uncategorizable and wanting to belong.

Before I watched the series, with only the novel throwing light motes on my subconscious, I wondered if there were oceans of young reading women who saw themselves in the prickly character of Marianne. Certainly, the book found many fans—enough to push it into seven editions, reach almost 500,000 copies in the UK and 76,000 in Ireland, and sell translation rights into forty-one languages before adaptation. Or if Rooney was a convincing enough author to pull that most astounding trick, of making the lives of any individuals feel relatable on a grand scale.

Normal People is a pas de deux: a boy and a girl take turns misunderstanding each other as the novel follows them from their senior year in high school to their senior year of college. Their deep physical compatibility is derailed by a series of small misconceptions. The story is a kind of minimalist millennial antidote to the theatrical impossibility of the epics of my youth: Cider House Rules, Cold Mountain, Snow Falling on Cedars, dining on the idea that a tiny misunderstanding can cause ripples of heartache.

While both characters are almost supernaturally intelligent, Marianne is affluent, lonely, and deemed physically unappealing in high school, while Connell is working class, deeply knit into a friend group, and a golden athlete. They begin a physical relationship that quickly becomes emotional, but Connell, plagued by social anxiety, sees their love as an impossibility. They keep the romance a secret at his request, and it becomes an imbalance they spend years trying to correct—as they both come to see the subterfuge differently. Connell’s devotion to the “normal” splits them up, but not before Marianne persuades him to pursue a degree in English at Trinity, where they meet again for Act 2. In college, their roles are reversed. Marianne flourishes— in college she is normal—easily playing the confident intellectual, and Connell is at sea among the entitled students of Trinity, where the social code—once so important—is not clear to him. When they are together they are alone together—a bande à part—but if you are defying all the rules, how do you know which way is up? If you are starting from scratch, how do you say hello? What kept my heart pounding is how a couple so deep in love could fail to find the words for each other or, having them, fail to say them.

Hulu’s series is written in part by Rooney, in part by Succession writer Alice Birch, and in part by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe. It was codirected by the acclaimed Irish director Lenny Abrahamson, whose films include Frank (2014) and Room (2015)m and Hettie MacDonald, whose episode of Doctor Who won a Hugo Award. Blissfully, the acting on the part of Daisy Edgar-Jones (Marianne) and Paul Mescal (Connell) is transcendently believable. Edgar-Jones said that upon meeting Mescal, she thought, I know everything about you. She had to remind herself he wasn’t actually Connell. (Same, same.) By the series’s end I felt a deep intimacy with this Mescal/Connell centaur, in no small part through having watched him have quite a bit of onscreen (simulated) sex. Sex so compellingly and fairly choreographed that I surfaced, pulse in my ears, only occasionally, to think that this series must have had one of those newfangled intimacy coaches on set (it did). You see as much of Connell’s naked form as you do of Marianne’s, which is one of many moments when I wondered what the world would look like if Rooney issued edicts beyond fiction. Normal People is Mescal’s television and film debut and, when I was able to remember he was an actor at all, his well of pain made me wish more screen actors spent time on the stage. Edgar-Jones, poor lass, I couldn’t see at all. She was cloaked by my projections.

Rooney famously caught the eye of her agent with an essay titled “Even If You Beat Me.” In it, she writes about the temporary appeal of competitive debate, which at first seemed to break the arbitrary rules of high school: “Popularity was not a mysterious arrangement of personal loyalties within a social code I didn’t understand: it was essentially just the same thing as success. Successful people were popular. You knew whose jokes to laugh at, because they were the people who gave the best speeches and said the cleverest things. I found this transparency encouraging somehow.” But by the time she reached the top, as she did, Rooney saw the shallowness of the sport: “Observe it for long enough and you can see the moving parts. The harder I practiced, the harder it was to recapture that sense of glamour that motivated me in the beginning.” The clarity of Rooney’s debunking is appealing, but so is its near opposite: an almost naive belief in a meritocracy rewarding language and intelligence. Both of Rooney’s novels have a red-rover element. A bright contrarian hurls herself at convention, and it is hard to say whether you would rather have her win or—having made a good effort—join the chain, clasping hands on either side.

The fantasy of Connell and Marianne’s love isn’t only the fabulous sex—though it is undoubtedly fabulous—it is that they seem to be able to “couple” outside of the apparatus. Marianne explains to Connell her need for sadomasochistic play with a new boyfriend. “Did you want to do that stuff with me?” Connell asks, and Marianne explains no, with him she didn’t need to play. “I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to.” Marianne and Connell don’t need props or precedents, they don’t need labels or words, until, until … he is unable to ask a favor, or she is, and they run to ground just like everyone else. Does it work, in the end? Is their relationship a successful alternative collective or another failed college experiment? The series is more clear than the book on this point, but the fun is forming an opinion of your own and—perhaps—carefully defending it in a well-proctored debate.

I worried that twelve episodes of Normal People would be too many, the pain too protracted, the sex too performed. But the novel is beautifully translated. Watching the show gave me the feeling of having tied a parachute to my book and thrown it into the air. With all that airtime, Normal People wafts gently down to earth and, in having been duplicated, completes itself. The long silences onscreen made the book blossom for me in a way it couldn’t as I raced through it alone. In the book, we have sentences such as, “When he talks to Marianne he has a total sense of privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.” Close-ups throughout the series, often with an embarrassment of beautiful light, do what Rooney’s close third person does on paper. Often, in Mescal’s case, dialect and accent did things I hadn’t known I needed. Trying to explain why he puts up with all manner of boring immaturity from his friends, Connell delivers the devastating line to friendless Marianne: “They’re my friends at the end of the day, it’s different for you.” “Why is it different?” she asks, her young woman’s voice direct and unmodulated. “Ach,” says Connell. The wordless sound takes on habit and comfort and tradition, a single syllable we don’t have on this side of the Atlantic.  Watching the series, I could admire the economy of the book. Checking scenes in the novel, I could admire the generous humanity and intension of the actors. Mescal leans toward Edgar-Jones as though his life has led up to this moment. In a tense scene, Mescal catches Edgar-Jones midair as she flies at a boyfriend in rage. The leap, the perfect catch, isn’t in the novel. It is made possible by the bodies of the young actors, who, like their subjects, seem for once not to be acting at all.

When one has read a novel before seeing a film adaptation, the actions become “decisions,” as in, Oh, they decided to leave out the early violence with her brother, or, Oh, they decided to leave race out of that conversation. Some of us will watch Hulu’s Normal People and love it (if I haven’t been clear enough already, the twelve episodes are almost worth watching for the sex scenes alone) but some of us will find faults. A critical distance is what takes us further from the crowd and brings us closer to our idea of ourselves: argumentative Mariannes on couches and under duvets across the world. On one of those couches will be Rooney herself, having created in some way the meritocracy she admired. We’ll have tuned in because we love her stories, and I think many will stay for the beautiful projection of her ideas. There will be a lot of us out there watching—alone together—bande à part.

 

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

On Reading Basho with My Ten-Year-Old

In the column “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times.

Edo era poet Matsuo Bashō

By late February of this year, the virus had made me sufficiently nervous that I began packing to leave San Francisco. I wanted to go to my family home on the coast of California where I had grown up. It was isolated and my parents had always kept a pantry stuffed with dry goods, plenty of toilet paper, and two freezers filled with food in the garage. This semi-survivalist attitude had seemed an extreme and eccentric way to live when I was a child; now it seemed like we had reached the dreaded moment for which they were always preparing. As soon as my son and I arrived, I began to prepare the garden, planting the seeds my mother had left in the pantry before I had abruptly moved her into a nursing home in December. Then I turned my attention to homeschooling.

In school, my son, Ewan, had been instructed in something called new math, which was supposed to make him feel like he understood the process of mathematics—the “narrative.” Suddenly acting as his teacher, I found his math sloppy. I felt something awful gestating inside of me: a latent tiger mom enraged that her son could not quickly multiply numbers. I could and would fix math. I was irritated, too, that his writing was full of run-on sentences. I began teaching him conjunctions, and his sentences became fluent fairly quickly. And what should we read? I dug out my old copy of Tom Sawyer.

“He is not a nice boy,” my son observed rightly after Tom had beaten up Sid. “I’m afraid if we keep reading, a cat might get hurt.”

I had been teaching my own class of M.F.A. students over Zoom, using the books I had brought with me. That week we were reading poems by the Japanese haiku master Basho, translated by Jane Reichhold. I put away laddish Tom Sawyer, and opened up Basho, on a whim. Here is his second poem.

The moon a sign, this way, sir, to enter, a traveler’s inn.

“I see a hotel,” my son cried. “Like the kind we used to stay in, in Japan. With a huge white lantern outside. And the moon looks like one of those lanterns.”

There are one thousand and twelve haikus by Basho. If you read six a day, that will sustain you for about six months.

The old woman, a cherry tree blooming in old age, is something to remember.

“I see Oma,” he said, referring to my mother. “She’s sitting under the tree and she is old and the tree is old, but you can see where she was young peeking through when she smiles. Like flowers on the old tree. They are the same.” One by one, we went through the haikus on the first page, and then I asked him to write one. I told him that unlike new math, he did not have to worry about numerical precision. Forget about syllables.

He scribbled down:

The virus spreads, deaths increase, the earth is in grave danger.

Yes it is, I thought.

*

All poetry requires interpretation, but it is a characteristic of Basho’s haiku that the reader plays a role in fully constructing the poem. It’s as though Basho has left out a step somewhere in a math equation, and you must make the mental effort to do that step for the answer to reveal itself. This kind of cooperative art feels relevant right now, in a time when we are all staying home as much for ourselves as for each other. While Basho is respected in the West for his sense of play, his concision, and singular imagination, he himself most valued his ability to write poems that required another poet to add lines to his prompt, to which he would add additional lines. He valued most his ability to share a creative space.

My American father occasionally told me a story about meeting my Japanese great-grandmother, a former noblewoman. She had tossed out the first half of a witticism to my mother, who had been unable to complete it. “Shame,” my great-grandmother reportedly said. “You were not trained properly.” I was intrigued by this story and asked my mother to tell me more about it, but her failure had left her with a lasting sense of shame and she evaded answering me.

“I do not wish to discuss,” she would say.

Someone once said to me that harsh cultures seem uniquely able to produce beauty. Homeschooling has brought out a repressed desire to insist on precision from my son, just as it was once squeezed from me. I am trying to use haiku as a chance to explore beauty, wonder, and play—something beyond the search for one perfect answer.

*

After a couple of weeks, we have run out of vegetables and ice cream. This is a small town with a still-low infection rate, but the news has made it clear to me—to us—that anyone could be a carrier. I leave my son home alone when I go food shopping, and he always walks me to the door, making sure I have gloves and a mask, implements that appear in one of his first haiku:

Ewan, haiku 6:

Gloves are necessary. Hard masks. We are still under threat.

Basho, haiku 36:

Inside the temple, visitors cannot know, cherries are blooming.

In 1635, the ruling lord closed Japan’s borders to the rest of the world in an effort to keep out as many foreign influences as possible. Basho was born in 1644. And while historians like to point out that Japan was not entirely isolated from the West during this period of its history, it was closed off enough during Basho’s lifetime that his aesthetics are often admired as “purely Japanese.”

This is also interesting to consider at this moment since I, who have for decades gone to Japan at least twice a year, now cannot go at all; Japan has closed its borders to foreigners. Before this, in early February, I had joked to my friends in Japan that this would be a good year to see cherry blossoms; for once the most popular sights would not be overrun by tourists. Instead, I can only look at photos on Instagram, taken by photographers who have not willingly submitted to lockdown.

Ewan, poem 7:

Darkness takes the land

But the sky

Is left out.

*

It is a weird bit of synchronicity that Basho’s early poems seem to focus on spring, the season through which we are passing now. In northern California, spring comes early, making it possible to plant peas, beans, and carrots even in March. Now it is April. The plum blossoms have faded; the cherries are starting to open. Wild irises are blooming at the edge of the property.

Basho, haiku 86.

Scudding clouds. As a dog pisses while running, scattered wind showers.

“I think,” Ewan said, looking appalled, “that this is a very twenty-first-century haiku.”

“Because the dog is pissing?” I asked.

“Don’t say that word.”

“Dogs have always pissed. This is why we love Basho. He doesn’t sound old-fashioned or fake.”

The tiny amber-colored rufous hummingbird has arrived. Two pairs of purple finches (which are really red) are fighting daily over who may rest on the most desirable branch in the as yet leafless wisteria. One afternoon, I was clipping one of two bonsai pines, which had been neglected for the past two years since my mother became ill. I don’t know how to clip bonsai, but I have been watching instructional videos on YouTube. My son was picking up dead camellia flowers, but an insistent hummingbird persisted in dive-bombing the two of us, chattering at a high pitch frequency. It was annoying. “The feeder is empty,” Ewan finally observed.

I refilled the feeder and we continued our work in the garden.

Basho, haiku 97.

Iris growing under the eaves from a sardine’s weather skull.

“I know what irises are,” Ewan said. “Why is there a sardine head?”

“You have seen this in Japan when you were very small,” I replied. “In the old days, people hung up a sprig of holly with a sardine…”

“…and the holly would poke out the eye of the demons from last year.”

“Yes. The stink from the smelly sardine was supposed to help keep the demons away.”

“I remember!”

We spoke of how the last time we had seen my mother, in February, before her nursing home had disallowed visitors, we had thrown soy beans around her room to chase out the demons that had accumulated over the year, and then opened the door to let in good luck. We have not been to visit her since. She exists, like so much else, only on a screen.

“And so, in the poem, only the skull of the sardine is left over from February,” I said

“And the irises are blooming because it is April.”

Over and over, the poems remind us of the intensity with which life continues.

That night, Ewan wrote:

He scares me. Wings. Red head.

It took me a minute to realize he was not talking about the virus, but the hummingbird who had demanded we refill the feeder.

Basho, haiku 96.

First blossoms. Seeing them extends my life seventy-five more years.

 

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf) explores Mockett’s experience across “the divide,” and is a tribute to the complicated and nuanced history of the United States and its people.