The Paris Review's Blog, page 191

Motherhood Makes You Obscene

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Marguerite Duras.

My mother had green eyes. Black hair. Her name was Marie Augustine Adeline Legrand. She was born a peasant, daughter of farmers, near Dunkirk. She had one sister and seven brothers. She went to teachers college, on a scholarship, and she taught in Dunkirk. The day after an inspection, the inspector who had visited her class asked for her hand in marriage. Love at first sight. They got married and left for Indochina. Between 1900 and 1903. A sort of commitment, adventure, a sort of desire, too, not for fortune but for success. They left like heroes, pioneers, they visited the schools in oxcarts, they brought everything, quills, paper, ink. They had succumbed to the posters of the era urging, as if they were soldiers: “Enlist.”

She was beautiful, my mother, she was very charming. Many men wanted her over the years, but as far as I know, nothing ever happened outside of her marriages. She was brilliant, and had an incredible way with words. I remember her being fought over at parties. She was one of a kind, very funny, often laughing, wholeheartedly. She was not coquettish, all she did was wash herself, she was always extremely clean. She had a sewing machine but she didn’t know what to have it make. I, too, until I was fourteen or fifteen, dressed like her, in sack dresses. When I started to become interested in men, I picked out my outfits more carefully. Then my mother had me sew incredible dresses, with frills, that made me look like a lampshade. I wore it all.

I’ve written so much about my mother. I can say that I owe her everything. In my everyday life, I don’t do anything that she didn’t do. For example, my way of cooking, of preparing a navarin of lamb, blanquettes. My love of ingredients, she had, too. I bore everyone at home with that. When there’s no extra bottle of oil on hand, it’s a problem. That’s normal. What’s abnormal is buying only one bottle of oil. What can you do with just one bottle of oil? What a disaster! What I’ve also inherited from my mother is fear, the fear of germs, along with the constant need to disinfect. This stems from my colonial childhood. Although my mother was very smart about practical things, she didn’t concern herself at all with the domestic realm. As if it didn’t exist. As if the house were a temporary thing, a waiting room. But the floors were washed every day. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more clean than my mother.

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More UFOs Than Ever Before

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America?

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Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

When we speak of translation in these end-of-days, it is often in the loftiest of tones, as though it were a sacred duty undertaken by devoted adepts prostrating themselves before the altar of language. The self is renounced, the greed for authorship forsworn in service of a greater calling, which is no less than bridging the gaps between the peoples and cultures of the world.

This is certainly true if you’re translating, say, Don Quixote, or Heian-period Japanese poetry, or a new novel by Senegal’s latest rising star. But only a small minority of translators have the skill, opportunity, and financial security required to take on such labors of love. The rest of us, to earn a living wage, will have to make do with whatever garbage we can get. By garbage I mean any or all of the following: corporate-speak, brand manifestos, NGO reports, think tank reports, letters from government agencies replying to American oil companies, letters from government agencies replying to human rights organizations, prose written by self-professed wunderkinds whose trust funds and unearned self-confidence are paying for the translation, and that vilest genre of all, the art text.

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Loitering Is Delightful

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Ross Gay. Photo: Natasha Komoda.

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands

NO SOLICITING

NO LOITERING

stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.

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Not Gonna Get Us

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Original illustration © Jia Sung.

“Don’t eat pigs,” she said. “So I can kiss you, if we meet again.” That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs, not pork. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again.

We’d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who’d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn’t know pastoral Xinjiang existed.

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Eating Oatmeal with Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray as a young man. Photo provided by the author in 2016.

The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray died on December 29, at the age of eighty-five, four years after a fall from the outside steps of his house left him with a spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair, and almost three years after I went to Glasgow to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with him for The Paris Review. Gray was a Whitbread Award–winning author, best known for the weird, speculative work, Lanark, an autobiographical tale in four out-of-order books (two of them nonrealist), and several volumes of short stories, but also for his painting, for illustrating his own work, and for cutting a wide and eccentric swath in the Glasgow arts scene. He was a socialist, an advocate for Scottish independence, a fierce proponent of friends’ work, and a tireless critic of the craven or pompous. Rereading my interview with him now, on the occasion of his death, I’m amazed by how cool and professional it is, and how much it leaves out, as I suppose it had to, of what Gray was really like, and what he meant to me.

COVER DESIGN FOR LANARK: A LIFE IN FOUR BOOKS, 1981.

I’ve written before that I believe favorite books are about wish fulfillment; a book becomes a favorite because something in you wants to live that life or have that adventure. A favorite author is something different, however. We choose them—or at least I choose mine—not just because of the work, but because the person behind the work seems to understand something secret and essential and foundational about ourselves. In this sense, Alasdair Gray became one of my favorite authors in a scene about forty pages in to Lanark, in the chapter “Mouths.” Before this moment, the action in the book has concerned a man who remembers neither his name nor his history, who arrives by train in an odd, gloomy, urban landscape from which people keep disappearing. He picks the name Lanark off a wall. During a medical examination that’s part of Lanark’s arrival intake, a doctor discovers a small black spot on his elbow, like a scab, and explains that it’s just a bit of dragon hide, nothing to worry about. As the book progresses, the itchy, scabby spot of dragon hide grows. Lanark, depressed in matters of love, takes to his bed. Then this:

It was a sullen pleasure to remember that the disease spread fastest in sleep. Let it spread! he thought. What else can I cultivate? But when the dragon hide had covered the arm and hand it spread no further, though the length of the limb as a whole increased by six inches. The fingers grew stouter, with a slight web between them, and the nails got longer and more curving. A red point like a rose thorn formed on each knuckle. A similar point, an inch and a half long, grew on the elbow and kept catching the sheets, so he slept with his right arm hanging outside the cover onto the floor. This was no hardship as there was no feeling in it, though it did all he wanted with perfect promptness and sometimes obeyed wishes before he consciously formed them. He would find it holding a glass of water to his lips and only then notice he was thirsty, and on three occasions it hammered the floor until he waked up and Mrs. Fleck came running with a cup of tea. He felt embarrassed and told her to ignore it. She said, “No, no, Lanark my husband had that before he disappeared. You must never ignore it.’ ”

I read this with a delicious sense of being known. My earliest memory of awareness of my own body is from sitting in the backseat of our family car with my knees up. I must have been wearing shorts or a swimsuit, and when I looked down I saw a pitted and sagging lump of flesh attached to my hip, lolling onto the seat. I was probably eleven or twelve. What is that?! I thought something was wrong. It was my own body, but horribly distended, and it had silver stretch lines on it, like worms. I had to check to see if my other hip looked the same, and when I saw that it did, I realized that I’d gotten fat without noticing it, and that nothing would ever be the same again.

That I wasn’t actually fat, and that fatness equaled doom in my girlhood milieu is a sad but different story. The part that matters is that my very first memory of knowing I had a body is entwined with a sense of the body’s horrible transformations. The length of the limb as a whole increased by six inches … on three occasions it hammered the floor until he waked up…  Somehow, in my heart of hearts, I know just what that feels like. Gray’s understanding has always felt consoling and liberating to me. Our ailments, depicted in his imaginative splendor, became an arena of potential freedom instead of one of doom.

Lanark manuscript page, Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray, in his own humorous self-description, was a “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian.” I’ll add that he was fair-skinned and not very tall, with small, clear, blue eyes and a crazy nest of hair, ginger in his younger years and then white. I arrived in Glasgow to meet him with a tape recorder (an actual tape recorder, as a backup to my phone) and a list of questions, determined to keep to myself the belief that Gray should love me. The writer as a human being will never be able to satisfy the reader who wants to feel known, and I was old enough to not expect it.

I met him three times at his ground-floor apartment in a beautiful old townhouse in Glasgow’s university district. The flat had two rooms and a kitchen so utilitarian it seemed from a previous generation. We sat in the back, at a table by a window overlooking a garden, in a room that had otherwise been emptied save for a hospital bed outfitted with jaunty nautical sheets. The walls were lined with Gray’s paintings. He wore soft clothing, on one day gray jersey pants, on another a blue sweater, and seemed physically fragile, but he spoke in brilliant and exhausting torrents, leaping from one idea to another. The transcripts in many places are unintelligible to me, including those where he lapsed into old English, or seemed to be quoting from memory. At one point, early on, he exclaimed, “Oh God! I’m afraid you’ve come to confer with a man whose mind is crrrrrrumbling with senility [long rolled rrrrrr]” but that was not true. It was the opposite, as if his long life of reading and writing and painting had placed him within another realm, as brilliantly detailed as the land of Unthank in Lanark, in which he roamed freely, occasionally dragging out treasures for the outsider to enjoy.

It is always a struggle to listen for a long time uninterrupted, and Gray’s discursive fluency was majestic and astounding and ultimately produced feelings of desperation, as I listened intently and waited for small moments to break in. I had hoped, of course, that we’d talk, and we did not—I’m fairly certain he made it through three days without knowing my name—but what happened instead was better. I sat with him through his daily routines, watching while he ate his morning oatmeal, prepared by a nurse. I scrambled on the floor to help find books he wanted to refer to, and pushed the chair and rearranged his feet. My raw transcripts contain endless notes on the voices and intonations in which he said things “[very shrill]…[facetious voice]…[raucous laughter]”, and are peppered with dialogs like this:

VS: Do you want me to move you somewhere?

AG: Oh dear. Brakes on, brakes off? And the brake’s off on that side.

VS: The brake’s on on this side.

AG: How do we push it off?

VS: I have no actual…. I don’t necessarily want to mess with it. It’s probably the other way. Here. It’s that. ta-da.

These were small intimacies. But it felt significant to share a moment of frailty with a man who once wrote that “Diseases identify people more accurately than variable factors like height, weight and hair color.“

Gray’s understanding of our bodies was profound—the dragon hide, the well-chronicled eczema and asthma, the pornographic and sadomasochistic sexual fantasies. But what made him truly great was the humor and humanism and humility with which he approached these things. He was reluctant to discuss his own legacy. When I asked about it, I noted, “He flinched, fine wrinkles fanning out across his forehead, and deflected the conversation.” And yet, his legacy lives on vibrantly.

Read our Art of Fiction interview with Alasdair Gray here

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. In her column for the Paris Review, Eat Your Words, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Eating Oatmeal With Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray as a young man. Photo provided by the author in 2016. 

The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray died on December 29th, at the age of eighty-five, four years after a fall from the outside steps of his house left him with a spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair, and almost three years after I went to Glasgow to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with him for The Paris Review. Gray was a Whitbread Award–winning author, best known for the weird speculative work, Lanark, an autobiographical tale in four out-of-order books (two of them non-realist), and several volumes of short stories, but also for his painting, for illustrating his own work, and for cutting a wide and eccentric swath in the Glasgow arts scene. He was a socialist, an advocate for Scottish independence, a fierce proponent of friends’ work, and a tireless critic of the craven or pompous.  Re-reading my interview with him now, on the occasion of his death, I’m amazed by how cool and professional it is, and how much it leaves out, as I suppose it had to, of what Gray was really like, and what he meant to me.

COVER DESIGN FOR LANARK: A LIFE IN FOUR BOOKS, 1981.

I’ve written before that I believe favorite books are about wish-fulfillment; a book becomes a favorite because something in you wants to live that life or have that adventure. A favorite author is something different, however. We choose them—or at least I choose mine—not just because of the work, but because the person behind the work seems to understand something secret and essential and foundational about ourselves. In this sense, Alasdair Gray became one of my favorite authors in a scene about forty pages in to Lanark, in the chapter “Mouths”. Before this moment, the action in the book has concerned a man who remembers neither his name nor his history, who arrives by train in an odd, gloomy, urban landscape from which people keep disappearing. He picks the name Lanark off a wall. During a medical examination that’s part of Lanark’s arrival intake, a doctor discovers a small black spot on his elbow, like a scab, and explains that it’s just a bit of dragon hide, nothing to worry about. As the book progresses, the itchy, scabby spot of dragon hide grows. Lanark, depressed in matters of love, takes to his bed. Then this:

It was a sullen pleasure to remember that the disease spread fastest in sleep. Let it spread! he thought. What else can I cultivate? But when the dragon hide had covered the arm and hand it spread no further, though the length of the limb as a whole increased by six inches. The fingers grew stouter, with a slight web between them, and the nails got longer and more curving. A red point like a rose thorn formed on each knuckle. A similar point, an inch and a half long, grew on the elbow and kept catching the sheets, so he slept with his right arm hanging outside the cover onto the floor. This was no hardship as there was no feeling in it, though it did all he wanted with perfect promptness and sometimes obeyed wishes before he consciously formed them. He would find it holding a glass of water to his lips and only then notice he was thirsty, and on three occasions it hammered the floor until he waked up and Mrs. Fleck came running with a cup of tea. He felt embarrassed and told her to ignore it. She said, “No, no, Lanark my husband had that before he disappeared. You must never ignore it.’”

I read this with a delicious sense of being known. My earliest memory of awareness of my own body is from sitting in the backseat of our family car with my knees up. I must have been wearing shorts or a swimsuit, and when I looked down I saw a pitted and sagging lump of flesh attached to my hip, lolling onto the seat. I was probably 11 or 12. What is that?! I thought something was wrong. It was my own body, but horribly distended, and it had silver stretch-lines in it, like worms. I had to check to see if my other hip looked the same, and when I saw that it did, I realized that I’d gotten fat without noticing it, and that nothing would ever be the same again.

That I wasn’t actually fat, and that fatness equaled doom in my 1980s girlhood milieu is a sad but different story. The part that matters is that my very first memory of knowing I had a body is entwined with a sense of the body’s horrible transformations. The length of the limb as a whole increased by six inches… on three occasions it hammered the floor until he waked up…  Somehow, in my heart of hearts, I know just what that feels like. Gray’s understanding has always felt consoling and liberating to me. Our ailments, depicted in his imaginative splendor, became an arena of potential freedom instead of one of doom.

Lanark manuscript page, Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray, in his own humorous self-description, was a “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian.” I’ll add that he was fair-skinned and not very tall, with small, clear, blue eyes and a crazy nest of hair, ginger in his younger years and then white.  I arrived in Glasgow to meet him with a tape recorder (an actual tape recorder, as a backup to my phone) and a list of questions, determined to keep to myself the belief that Gray should love me. The writer as a human being will never be able to satisfy the reader who wants to feel known, and I was old enough to not expect it.

I met him three times at his ground-floor apartment in a beautiful old townhouse in Glasgow’s university district. The flat had two rooms and a kitchen so utilitarian it seemed from a previous generation. We sat in the back, at a table by a window overlooking a garden, in a room that had otherwise been emptied save for a hospital bed outfitted with jaunty nautical sheets. The walls were lined with Gray’s paintings. He wore soft clothing, on one day gray jersey pants, on another a blue sweater, and seemed physically fragile, but he spoke in brilliant and exhausting torrents, leaping from one idea to another. The transcripts in many places are unintelligible to me, including those where he lapsed into old English, or seemed to be quoting from memory. At one point, early on, he exclaimed, “Oh God! I’m afraid you’ve come to confer with a man whose mind is crrrrrrumbling with senility [long rolled rrrrrr]” but that was not true. It was the opposite, as if his long life of reading and writing and painting had placed him within another realm, as brilliantly detailed as the land of Unthank in Lanark, in which he roamed freely, occasionally dragging out treasures for the outsider to enjoy.

It is always a struggle to listen for a long time uninterrupted, and Gray’s discursive fluency was majestic and astounding and ultimately produced feelings of desperation, as I listened intently and waited for small moments to break in. I had hoped, of course, that we’d talk, and we did not—I’m fairly certain he made it through three days without knowing my name—but what happened instead was better. I sat with him through his daily routines, watching while he ate his morning oatmeal, prepared by a nurse. I scrambled on the floor to help find books he wanted to refer to, and pushed the chair and rearranged his feet. My raw transcripts contain endless notes on the voices and intonations in which he said things “[very shrill]…[facetious voice]…[raucous laughter]”, and are peppered with dialogs like this:

VS: Do you want me to move you somewhere?

AG: Oh dear. Brakes on, brakes off? And the brake’s off on that side.

VS: The brake’s on on this side.

AG: How do we push it off?

VS: I have no actual…. I don’t necessarily want to mess with it. It’s probably the other way. Here. It’s that. ta-da.

These were small intimacies. But it felt significant to share a moment of frailty with a man who once wrote that “Diseases identify people more accurately than variable factors like height, weight and hair color.“

Gray’s understanding of our bodies was profound—the dragon hide, the well-chronicled eczema and asthma, the pornographic and sadomasochistic sexual fantasies. But what made him truly great was the humor and humanism and humility with which he approached these things. He was reluctant to discuss his own legacy. When I asked about it, I noted, “He flinched, fine wrinkles fanning out across his forehead, and deflected the conversation.” And yet, his legacy lives on vibrantly.

Read our Art of Fiction interview with Alasdair Gray here

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. In her column for the Paris Review, Eat Your Words, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Tove Jansson on Writer’s Block

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Tove Jansson

I’m sitting comfortably parked on a bench in a little park behind Saint-Sulpice and I’m supposed to find something to write about. It’s very quiet here. Pigeons copulate on a patch of grass, some tourists catch their breath on the benches across from me, an organ plays behind my back, far away.

A clochard comes every now and then and bothers the tourists—he explains, at length, that he also understands Italian. I just keep quiet, and eventually he goes away.

I can’t comprehend why this has to be so hard; one should be able to write just about anything at any time, in a purely professional way.

(I wonder how it is for other people.)

For the time being I have only written the date on the first page of my notepad but that was yesterday.

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Redux: Revolve on the Past Year

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re resolving to read even more of our archive in the New Year. Read on for Octavio Paz’s Art of Poetry interview, Rachel Cusk’s “Freedom,” and Catherine Davis’s poem “The New Year’s Burden.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door—and if you subscribe via our special bundle, you’ll get a tote bag, too! And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast!

 

Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42

Issue no. 119 (Summer 1991)

I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico. To celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, other religious festivals, and at New Year’s, they made the fireworks for the town. I remember how they made the church façade look like a fiery waterfall. It was marvelous.

 

 

Freedom

By Rachel Cusk

Issue no. 217 (Summer 2016)

“What’s it called,” Dale said, “when you have one of those bloody great blinding flashes of insight that changes the way you look at things?”

I said I wasn’t sure: a few different words sprang to mind.

Dale twitched his paintbrush irritably.

“It’s something to do with a road,” he said.

Road to Damascus, I said.

“I had a road to Damascus moment,” he said. “Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year’s. That was part of it, realizing that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.”

 

 

The New Year’s Burden

By Catherine Davis

Issue no. 21 (Spring–Summer 1959)

I will not, though I would, resolve,

As the New Year’s Eve comes on,

To do, not do, review, revolve

On the past year, how it has gone,

Taking not all, but still enough

(Seeing I had not much to lose)

Of what, for all my falling off,

Might have been mine, as then, to use:

….But if I cast off heaviness,

….This is my burden, none the less …

 

If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published.

On Nighttime

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Source: Thinkstock.

I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done.

There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything.

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