The Paris Review's Blog, page 44

Ask Me About God: On Ye West

Screenshots from “Donda Studio Session for Hurricane (2021).”

After a nearly scandal-less summer of 2023, in the caustic August light, Ye West was spotted on a small boat in Venice, Italy, with his ass half out. His new wife had been giving him a blowjob in public. There were other patrons on the boat—it might have been a water taxi helping them from one place to the next. The couple appeared to be performatively oblivious to their surroundings. The boat became their black backstage, a transparent curtain between performance and private life, and it put me in the mind of Ye’s 2021 live performances leading up to the release of his tenth studio album, Donda. For at least one week, he lived beneath the Atlanta stadium where he was hosting the first two public listening parties to debut the album, which was still unfinished. The third performance, in Chicago, Ye’s hometown, also featured the installation of a replica of his childhood home, which he set on fire on stage, leveraging his Promethean dream against the serenity of fantasy. The album itself is not just an elegy for his mother, his martyr; it’s also one for him. He enacts his ego death by it, asks for forgiveness in advance, and retreats, “Off the Grid.” He’s ready to exercise his right to disappear into the next myth even as the old myth is not quite finished with him, not yet obsolete. In the Chicago version of this live listening show, he remarries Kim Kardashian and they walk offstage while the make-believe house keeps burning. Everything, even his family, is a prop on this set. This myth will not stop burning. And while Donda seems to genuflect and repent the loss of the maternal figure, the loss of the womb itself, the lack of access to that primal source of solace, there’s one line on the album that stands out to me as its deeper vendetta: “a single black woman you know that she petty.” Here, he denigrates the same power he uplifts. This is the same mother he laments; he’s hashing out lingering resentments. He’s just unsentimental enough to make a masterpiece that vacillates between grief and backlash. My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence; the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy.

Beneath the spectacle of the first Donda shows, there was a twin bed in a small prison-style rectangular space, with a digital clock and a flat-screen television on the wall. One ex machina–esque fluorescent light beamed from the ceiling. The floor was carpeted in bureaucratic gray, and on it the contents of one small suitcase were neatly arrayed like they might be in a college dormitory. There were also some free weights, which made it all look lonelier and more honest. A gray wardrobe held a few hanging garments. Ye was filmed in that room leading up to the second performance, doing push-ups, huddled with his collaborators and affiliates listening to and editing songs for the album, and yelling militant rehearsal commands as the show approached, a look of messianic drive and casual terror in his eyes.

“Make me new again, make me new again,” a section of the album entreats in a rap-gospel howl, a humble bridge between lyrics that land like mourning benches in a ruin. When showtime comes, Ye wears bright red on stage as if covered in blood, as if he wants to signify the lamb luring the wolf, yearning to be hunted, while his face is shrouded in a ski mask to feign anonymity. He doesn’t want to flash a Dizzy Gillespie grin, or a Louis Armstrong supergrin, or a Miles Davis minor scowl, or an Ellingtonian mélange of chagrin and glamor. Part of Ye’s regenerative capacity is this recovered stoicism after intermittent bouts of what some call mania and others assume is megalomania and others still dismiss as just another half-militant half-capitalist nigga shining in every direction at once. Maybe he hears the spirit of John Coltrane, who announces, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” He finds a static identity and the idolization it attracts oppressive, and maybe sometimes he self-sabotages or risks everything to escape this. In this album-long apology to his mother, he seems to repent to the audience too, and then to retract it all and go back to his secretive and ritualistic mourning.

Screenshot from “Donda Studio Session for Hurricane (2021).”

He deploys supernatural momentum throughout his cycle of sabotage and comeback that defies Coltrane’s omnidirectional grammar, to find statements that feel more linear and pillared. Just when you suspect he has delivered a final self-abnegating blow, or experienced a debilitating crisis, he gathers what elements of his soul he can access and retaliates and bests himself. If he can’t exceed his past selves, he cancels himself, goes dark, and finds miraculous renewal in the debris and ruins. He uses a personal grammar of interruptions to move between glory and disgrace with playful elegance. It’s easy to remember and hard to forget, as if he’s sharing his traumatic amnesia with us while emerging from under its wounding, coming out swinging.

Lashing out at himself first to test his weapons, he takes the stage at the 2022 BET Awards, held in the middle of summer, in black leather and denim complete with gloves and another black mask, dark sunglasses over his eyes. “Ima sweat before you catch me looking regular,” he quips later on Instagram with satisfied candor. This hubris doesn’t hurt to watch, it feels like justice for the black aesthetic vernacular, for every hood-rich kid in a winter outfit in July. Ye stands on television and says: this is our deliberate armor, our fatigues, this is how tired of your style we are—and we are not weary. Then he mocks the Universal record exec who asked him if he was hot before his speech, saying, “You work at Universal.”

Ye’s logic is brutal and self-possessed. He does not care about what the mainstream might consider deranged or irregular. He’s already risen from the dead, he asserts, so what if you’re offended by his resurrection antics. In fact, please take offense so he knows they are making an impression. His fame assails him and he exacts vengeance with the blunt irreverence of a dissatisfied child who is too smart to be controlled by so-called authority figures. He is not afraid to show it when it takes effort to sustain; he chooses transparency over surveillance. Nice work if you can get it, he insinuates, another jazz-standard lyric he lures toward rap bravado. Suddenly his every utterance is a work song and he’s starting in the middle of the field or the cosmos, entangled with other star patterns and being dragged along in the sun, or the spotlight. Fame, which he pursued, which now haunts him, which now precludes his ever appearing regular, which now demands that he use excess and not manual labor to sweat some days—fame is his undoing and ours. What we desire of him is both his sweat and his silence behind the mask—we need him to perform our idea of him, which we collectively fixate into reality, and then to never slip outside the margins of this contrived persona. He seems happiest being regular, but that option is unavailable to him now. Even in ignominy. He defaults to performing himself, and then that self-parody becomes irreconcilable with his material objectives and he buckles. This is as close as he can get to intimacy with his public, this transactional shaming and rehabilitation enacted upon him and then, with himself as accomplice, upon his fans and fanatics. He has no true friends.

He went through a phase in late 2021, shortly after the release of Donda, when his divorce from Kim Kardashian and their ensuing effort to coparent amicably became the subject of public conflict, during which he would instruct his adversaries to “find God,” casting them out of his universe and into a drift from which even he could not rescue them. His piety was important to him during that span, and he was holding his Sunday Service in Downtown Los Angeles almost every weekend. Sunday Service is Ye’s church, with its own immaculate choir and dress code and code of Christian ethics. Some accuse it of being cultlike. Everyone wants an invite. One of those weekends, after service, he came to a venue I help run for an event we were doing in celebration of Alice Coltrane. He pulled up smiling a Ye West supersmile, unabashed. We discussed Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes while members of the Sai Anantam Ashram Singers chanted and invoked the spirit of Ganesh. In person he felt smaller and more vulnerable but also alarmingly sincere and alert. He didn’t seem at all compromised by the versions of himself that existed to be exalted in the realm of myth; he seemed motivated to get down to earth and dismantle that lore. We took photos in front of the venue, which he made sure to art-direct, and he took some photos with the grandson of John and Alice Coltrane. He suggested we meet at his office to continue our discussion and the next time I saw him in the news he was in Miami with his son at a football game. Then his calls on others to find God escalated into calls on the recording and high-fashion industries to let go of their egos along with him. Roll calls, name calling. This all backfired—he made statements he couldn’t retract and was effectively blacklisted, quieted, nudged nearer to Christ in that he would have to die and come back again in this life. That period, which feels timeless and undone, scandalized him into the obscurity we now glimpse on that boat in Venice, in that August lust. God disappeared from his iconography.

Ye as we knew him went missing. I kept hearing Prince’s response to a question a journalist asked him during a postconcert press conference in Paris: “Is there a question that you want to be asked?” the reporter wondered. “Ask me about God,” Prince implored. Find God. Stop looking for him in me. These routes that famously controversial men have to take to undeification, so that they can retrieve themselves, are arduous and impossible. They’re not coming back. We’ve abandoned them and they abandon us in return. Their retaliations are natural, inevitable. We observe in real time as if they are abstract. They don’t want redemption, they want out. They already know about God, and God is the light in them threatening to die of the light shining from without, from fans and psychopaths who see their obsession with sound as a commitment to the chaos inflicted upon them.

***

Ye’s vicissitudes trouble me in particular because I had a father once. He was brave and chaotic too. Awful and beautiful too. A workaholic full of ennui too. A man who went on and off lithium and made music all day in our living room and had so many obsessions he was Afro-blue neon with trouble too. Searching for God too. What did he do, to be so black and blue too? Was it hubris, or misplaced altruism? Or the myth of the dedicated working-class black man who gets some money and becomes chronically paranoid about descending back into poverty. His shame proceeds him and is disguised as pride. His love saves him and is threatened by fanaticism. My dad died and I started looking for alibis and Ye Wests and new Gods. Was it him or me who was consumed by a quiet survivor’s guilt? Did their success shatter too many myths for their own minds? Did my inheritance amount to an endless search for God that does not want to be found, only embodied? When my father died, it felt like the discrepancies between civilian life, domestic life, and the music industry had chased him away and made him a stranger to himself, unfit to endure the contradictions he had formerly chased for us. It felt like somebody besides him should get in trouble for this estrangement, but also like he was the arbiter of it, the will behind his own trouble, which he exchanged for our comfort and survival. The only people like him whom I’d encountered seemed similarly tormented by their own tyranny. Ye, as an updated version of an archetype whose heart I carried within my own, seemed like he might avenge the cycle, and I’d hoped so, until he couldn’t find God, and I couldn’t find my father, and we couldn’t find Ye either, and there was nothing profound about it, it’s just that they were all missing and not very missed. Case dismissed into the anticlimactic afterlife of black entertainment.

In a video of his forty-sixth birthday party in 2023, which Ye held at a warehouse in LA where they served sushi off the naked bodies of women, in the tradition, his nine-year-old daughter North is filming him in a close-up fish-eye style while he stoops and shadowboxes with her camera in a performance of the Donda track “Off the Grid.” The song is a celebratory manifesto about making it out, the real American dream of privacy retrieved after notoriety or windfall. North tends to her father’s performance in an austere formation that is part father-daughter play but with a hint of appeasement, and the need to make sure he’s okay. It’s like she’s the one watching over him, the way she holds the camera and moves when he moves, while he hovers low to meet the lens until she’s taller than he is. Their duet is the shattered domestic life reimagined as public life, theatricalized into something tangible beyond the pulp mythos, a song about getting out entrenched in a Hollywood occasion, a sad star-studded birthday party for a falling star who will rise again whether he likes it or not, by way of a boat or a new album or both.

This is how fathers like mine and like Ye hang out with their daughters, their heirs. We’re terrorized and terrified and fearless together. We are to join the band, to make ourselves useful, to run the family business, to be enthralled, while also performing enough carefree innocence to make all their hard labor, their sweat and inability to look regular ever again, worth what it costs them. It costs them everything, and they go off and do not return. They lose touch with the voice of God. Then they even lose interest in it. We don’t ask them about it ever again. Instead, we ghostwrite their apologies and suicide love notes and become their vicarious revenge. The stakes are very high, we cannot go off course, we are their final chance at home, which is burning, which is shipwrecked, which is escaping to Europe for new dereliction in a tragic effort to reimagine the dead era when Europe would embrace disgraced black stars. We crop out the rest of the scene for them while taking in everything ourselves, so we can remember what to rescue one another from. A song about exile, a song about deregulated black sound becoming the self as it’s disappearing. Rescue us from these sad songs and from the pathos of hope for rescue.

I keep a small sacred altar of their mistakes and their miracles side by side. Some days I glance at it and demand, Ask me about God.

Screenshot of Kanye West and Daughter.

 

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at Los Angeles’s music and archive venue 2220arts. She’s a staff writer for LA Times’ Image and 4Columns. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and an exhibition on backstage and performance culture for The Kitchen in New York.

A Fall Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor

Detail from the cover art of issue no. 245, Joeun Kim Aatchim’s Piggyback (Amused), 2019.

Among the numerous accolades I received as a high school student was the honorific, awarded by the Hinsdale Central class of ’95, of worst driver. There’s something about cars, and driving culture at large, that’s never wholly agreed with me. Even now, when an Infiniti cuts me off on the freeway, I’m tempted to ram it in the name of eternity and of all language art.

Nevertheless, Olivia Sokolowski’s racy poem “Lover of Cars,” published in the new Fall issue of the Review, came to me as a revelation—a revved-up paean to “all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500s / and San Remo Green Beemer i4s” in the showroom of the author’s imagination:

                                                                                  I want to wrap

my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral        down

a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo

the color of my innerlip           I want to slip deep as a splinter

in a black Countach

What I love most about this swerving verse is how Sokolowski taps the brakes on her own autoerotic fantasy (“but that’s for when I graduate /     from Honda Girl”). “Lover of Cars” made me wonder if the same hapless instructor at Hinsdale Central taught us both driver’s ed and sex ed for a good reason—the point of each course being to prevent a life-altering accident.

You can learn more about how “Lover of Cars” came down the assembly line in this month’s Making of a Poem; it makes me wish Infiniti or Honda would name a vehicle after Sokolowski’s poetic alter ego, Olivia+. In fact, any number of our Fall issue contributors could have an automobile named in their honor. The Bei Dao would make a revolutionary electric vehicle; we hope you’ll feel as transported as we were by our extended excerpt from the author’s long-awaited poetic autobiography, propulsively translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. And it’s easy to imagine packing the family into a Jolanda Insana for a long weekend; as the late poet writes, in Catherine Theis’s plucky translation from the Italian, “the streets of the sublime are endless.”

The de la Torre and the Tanaka, too, sound like high-performance vehicles. Not that all poems have to be GTI. Nora Claire Miller’s “Rumor” is more likely to derail you, while Katana Smith’s poetic still life “& Nothing Happens” stops time altogether; D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” shows how poetry and weather can “turn on a dime.”

At the risk of driving my extended metaphor too far, I can’t resist ending with a little story about poetry and cars. The Ford Motor Company once invited Marianne Moore to float possible names for a new sedan. Ford ultimately rejected all of Moore’s suggestions tout court, including the Bullet Lavolta, the Intelligent Whale, the Mongoose Civique, and the Utopian Turtletop, but I’d take any of her recommendations over the marketing department’s choice: the Edsel.

 

Srikanth Reddy is the Review‘s poetry editor.

Tobias Wolff Will Receive Our 2024 Hadada Award

Photograph by Elena Seibert.

In an interview published in The Paris Review no. 171 (Fall 2004), Tobias Wolff pinpointed the radical power of a well-written story. “Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.”

The Paris Review has always sought out just this kind of writing, of which Wolff’s own body of work is an extraordinary example. We are thrilled to honor him with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Vivian Gornick. 

Over the last several decades, Wolff has established himself as a virtuosic storyteller across several forms. His memoirs, novels, and short stories express, in infinite variety, the human struggle to reconcile the truth we wish for with the one we get. In This Boy’s Life (1989), his memoir about a peripatetic childhood—which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize—and Old School (2003), his novel modeled in part on his own disastrous attempt to fit in at an elite prep school, he captures the vulnerability of youth with precision and delicacy. His books set during the Vietnam War—which include a memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994), and a novella, The Barracks Thief (1984)—bring the candor and intimacy of personal experience to one of the defining events of the last century. In Pharaoh’s Army was a National Book Award finalist, while The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Wolff may be best known, however, for his short stories, which have been published in four collections—In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985), The Night in Question (1996), and Our Story Begins (2008)—and anthologized widely. Wolff’s stories are defined by their capaciousness and expert construction, from the brilliant title story of his first collection, in which a beleaguered professor fights against the stultifying demands of the academy, to “Nightingale,” a standout from his most recent collection, which depicts the anxious ruminations of a parent who has just left his son at an ominous military academy. Many readers will have first encountered his work through the story “Bullet in the Brain,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1997, a kaleidoscopic account of a jaded critic’s last moments on earth that transforms, unexpectedly, into a reverie for the things in life worth remembering. Widely recognized as a master of the form, Wolff has won three O. Henry Awards, as well as The Story Prize, and has been honored for excellence in the short story with both the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award.

“I remember exactly where I was when I first encountered the staccato prose of Tobias Wolff,” says the Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson:

It was December and I was in a tiny apartment in New York City, without a kitchen. I was reading “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke.” It was snowing outside, the flakes fizzing in the air shaft, and I was rushing through the story, gulping it down, as if it contained essential nutrients. I’m almost certain I made a sound—I was alone in the apartment—when the woman lifted off her wig. Though I didn’t think of myself as prudish, I was startled when Professor Brooke stayed the night, almost against his will, and felt a new era in my own life begin. Suffice to say, I ordered nine hardback copies of the collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, which contained this story, so that I could give one to everyone I loved. I’d never before spent so much money on books—so for this one reader the story ended one more time, with the discovery of the pleasure in generosity.

Many of us at The Paris Review have a favorite Wolff story that we turn to at specific moments for solace, for a laugh, or for spiritual help. Those of us over forty remember rushing to the newsstand to buy a copy of The Atlantic Monthly after a friend called to say there was a new Tobias Wolff story out. One of us recalls reading all of “The Other Miller” while walking home. It’s a great pleasure now to introduce students to Wolff’s stories—standards in anthologies, firmly entrenched in the canon—that we first read on flimsy paper, standing up. Though we can’t claim to have discovered Tobias Wolff, it’s in the spirit of rediscovery and acknowledgement of rightful place that we award him the Hadada prize. His work, in its vernacular beauty, its depth, and its moral capaciousness, deserves the lasting and glorious reputation we hope to insure.

Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor Emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he was previously a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Wolff also taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a Whiting Award, and in 2015, President Barack Obama presented him with a National Medal of Arts. We look forward to presenting him with the Hadada at our Spring Revel—an annual gathering of writers, artists, and friends to celebrate the Review and honor writers—on April 2, 2024. Tickets are now available, and all proceeds help sustain the magazine. We hope you’ll join us.

Alpine White BMW M4 Convertible, Fiona Red Leather Interior

BMW of Mountain View Geniuses, “Tour the 2023 M4 Competition xDrive Convertible in Alpine White | 4K.”

I am not only a horrible driver but also a very confident one. I’ve never owned a car. I shouldn’t. Yet I’ve got an unaccountable and unyielding desire for a vehicle I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen. I want—have always wanted, with an impractical seriousness that astounds me—an Alpine White BMW M4 two-seater convertible with a perforated Fiona Red leather interior.

I can’t help myself. I want to get inside one so bad, and I want to ride it so slow, and I want to ride it fast, and I want to feel my feet thrill at being suspended only 120 mm above ground, at the threat of my toes being shredded into pavement. I want to park it and feel the brutal throb of my revving. I want to feel the car’s restraint, for to drive it at all is to tame it—it’s to feel 503 horses latent in the softest touch of gas.

Other cars can go faster. But these other cars look like small men who have taken too much testosterone. They do not come equipped with the M4’s elegant and low-sloping front-fender curvature. They do not have the same sleek steel-plated jaw directing the eye to the upper cusp of each tire. They are too souped-up. They are vehicles with aerodynamics. My M4 is aerodynamism.

As for the color scheme: why the white exterior and red interior? I don’t know. Japan? Peru? Candy cane? Mint? Fresh! Elegance!

While I dismiss other sports cars, I know that other vehicles—standard, medium-speed ones—have their appeal. They have their romance. I’ve experienced such things—I even went so far as to lose half my virginity in the back of a Jeep (a Wrangler befit with a busted passenger side door, a trunk full of old medical equipment, a sagging left-side tire, and a battery prone to failure, so prone in fact that one night it failed in the vacant parking lot of an Armenian church, which, incidentally, was when and where the partial deflowering took place, anyway). I could have developed hatchback attachments. Or gotten into salvaged cars—my great-grandfather ran a used-car junkyard, through which my grandfather and later my father paraded, climbing over engines, retrofitting fenders.

But all of that is behind me. Now I just want this one nice, perfect thing. No matter I’ve never seen one, no matter I’ll never afford one, no matter I should never drive one. I know you now, and maybe you know someone, who maybe possibly knows someone, who possibly knows or has heard of someone, who doesn’t have to let me drive their beautiful specimen, but who at the very least can take me for a ride.

 

Sophie Madeline Dess’s debut novel, Dead Center, will be published by Penguin Press in 2025. Her story “Zalmanovs” appears in issue no. 242 of the Review.

Making of a Poem: Olivia Sokolowski on “Lover of Cars”

An alternate ending to “Lover of Cars.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Olivia Sokolowski’s “Lover of Cars” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? 

I’ve been into cars since I was around fifteen and daydreaming of nineties Jaguars, but somehow, I’d never written much about them. Along the I-75 last winter, noticing and cataloguing the steady stream of cars along the meridian, I decided it was time to convert my obsession into a poetic one. Prompts are normally tough for me—I feel put on the spot and all my good images flee. But when I set out to write about cars, the task-poem turned out far better than I imagined. Perhaps because the topic is so rich—cars not only engage all of our senses but are also thoroughly ingrained in our cultural and personal histories. I surprised myself with the veer toward a family/coming-of-age narrative. The more luxurious bits, like dreaming of an otherworldly Audi or joyriding through Cinque Terre, were just plain fun to write. I lived vicariously through my speaker.

Who is this speaker? Do you imagine her as a character, or as kind of a pure voice? How similar is she to you, or to your voice?

I call my speaker Olivia+. She draws from my life without the responsibility of fidelity, and she acts and speaks in ways that I might not. She keeps an audience in mind but doesn’t expect a reply. She’s my freer alter ego.

Draft one.

Are the cars in the poem real or fictional? 

They’re all real, and many of them I feel strongly about. I see Kia Stingers everywhere and consider them good luck. A couple in a blue Tiguan frequently visited the berry farm where I worked during my college summers. The Hondas were all mine, too. I got a red Element right before my senior prom and loved every mile I drove in it. I grew up surrounded by cars in the suburbs and see them as symbols for self-expression and escape.

Did you show your drafts to other writers or friends or confidants?

I showed a later draft of this poem to my husband, Tom. He’s my one reader and he’s a good one—his critiques are pretty intense, but I’ve learned to love them. He said almost nothing about the draft, which was equal parts shocking, suspicious, and flattering.

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

The last hurdle for me was the poem’s ending. I knew I’d written what would be the ending pretty early on, but completing the poem wasn’t as simple as reorganization. After all the flash, I needed it to come to an emotional simmer, like raspberries reducing to compote. The speaker was ready to make a breakthrough, and my task was to articulate her epiphany in a way that balanced the poem and sounded final. It took a lot of tweaking, pacing, and days of rolling it around in my head to feel like I’d gotten there, and I was still wrong a couple times.

I knew the poem was almost complete when I could read it aloud without distraction. Pace, sonics, and the accuracy of verbs are all particularly important to me. In the final stages of revision, I feel like I’m lining up a very complicated combination lock—when the poem is finished, it makes that satisfying click. And then it fully opens. But I also don’t think any poem is ever completely finished!

 

Draft two.

 

Olivia Sokolowski is a poet at work on her first collection and a science fiction novel. 

Dare to Leave a Trace: On A City of Sadness

Yidingmu Police Station, Taipei, the morning of February 28, 1947. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was digitally restored and rereleased in theaters across Taiwan earlier this year. Running two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the melancholic art-house film shows in painstaking detail the dissolution of a Taiwanese family prompted by political regime change following World War II. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered Taiwan; soon after, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party (KMT) would retreat from China to the island, violently suppress native uprisings, and officially claim the island as its own in 1949.

“This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese and then the Chinese. They all rule us but none take care of us,” one of the film’s protagonists says in Taiwanese, a language that the KMT banned from schools. The English subtitles were less subtle: “They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.”

I attended a sold-out showing on opening weekend. In a somewhat surreal coincidence, the rerelease date coincided with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Just hours before I saw the film, I’d biked to a public square where a crowd of mostly Taiwanese people waved Ukraine’s blue-yellow striped flag. When Ukraine’s anthem was played, everyone put their hands on their hearts. One Ukrainian mother said to me, “Taiwanese people know what it’s like to have a crazy neighbor.”

Today China claims it will take Taiwan by force; the threat of regime change is never far. In Hong Kong, where the film was also rereleased this year, protesters, among them high schoolers, have been imprisoned and sentenced for subversion. But to be fair, in Taiwan—a country ruled by six successive colonial powers—it would be difficult to find a release date that didn’t take on a deep sense of resonance and foreboding. The year City was released, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party killed thousands of nonviolent protesters in Tiananmen Square. In contrast, Taiwan was on the cusp of freedom. It burst with national awakening. Soon, activists who read Mandela in prison would be released and run for election—and win.

City was the first film in Taiwan to represent the events of 2/28—a sequence of numbers known to every Taiwanese person today, though for decades it could barely be whispered. On February 27, 1947, a state agent beat a Taiwanese woman selling contraband cigarettes. When a crowd formed to defend her, a policeman fired into it, killing a man. People across the island began to revolt on the twenty-eighth, and in the days following, an estimated eighteen to twenty-eight thousand people were killed by the KMT. For nearly four decades, in a period now known as the White Terror, Taiwan would be ruled by a one-party dictatorship—the second longest time any country has been subjected to uninterrupted martial law. (Syria has recently surpassed Taiwan.)

In the years following City’s release, Taiwan has become a democracy. It’s considered the freest country in Asia and among the freest in the world. Just this week Freedom House released a report measuring people’s access to political rights and civil liberties. Taiwan is ranked sixth in the world, above both France and the United States. China is listed among the bottom ten nations. Whereas “6/4” is scrubbed from the internet in China—even the candle and ribbon emojis disappear from the available pool on phones and computers on June 4—the Taiwanese government has made 2/28 a national holiday. Schoolkids get that day off.

City views the trauma of regime change through the stories of two fictional Taiwanese families. In the first, the oldest of four sons leads a local gang whose territory is stolen by mainland Chinese rivals. At the start of the film, he wonders at the misfortune that has befallen his brothers—one has become a lunatic, another went missing in the Philippines while serving as a war medic for Japan, and the youngest is deaf. “Maybe my mother’s grave is not in the right spot,” he muses in Taiwanese.

The other family is a brother–sister pair, Hiroe and Hiromi; even their names nod to their cultural affinity with the now-ousted Japanese. Hiromi is a nurse; Hiroe is an intellectual-revolutionary with Marx on his bookshelf. He’d lobbied for Taiwanese rights under Japanese colonialism and, under his new anticommunist Chinese overlords, ramps up his activism.

The intersection of these families, and the heart of the film, is the tender love between Hiromi (played by Xin Shufen), whose diary provides the voice-over, and the deaf-mute photographer Lin Wen-ching (a strapping young Tony Leung), the youngest of the four sons. Lin’s deafness literally and metaphorically reflects the silence enforced by the KMT. Lin meets Hiromi through Hiroe, who is his best friend. The young couple sends money to support Hiroe’s dissident work. By the end of the film—it’s implied but never shown—both men are executed by the regime. Hiromi will raise her and Lin’s child alone.

In City, scenes unfold in Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Mandarin—undermining the official narrative of a single national language. For that reason, too, diary entries, songs, notes, and diverse legends permeate the film. Like currents flowing against the tide, these are counterforces to the language of heads of state—what Orwell called the enemy of sincerity.

For survivors of state violence, Hou suggests, there are few resources, little information, and often only official lies. In one scene, a woman and her three children receive a piece of cloth from Wen-ching, who has just been released from prison on charges of collaboration against the regime. We don’t know who this woman is; she appears just this once. We see a close-up of her face and, less clearly, her children standing behind her as she unfurls the cloth, sobbing when she reads the following words, written in dried blood:

LIVE WITH DIGNITY,

YOUR FATHER IS INNOCENT

Who wrote this? Why was their father arrested? Was he executed? On each of these questions, Hou leaves us in the dark, though I believe he does so to make a point about the confounding, fragmenting force of state violence. Within this void the cloth tells the truth.

Hou is interested in the private pains of upheaval. Prisoners write poems before they die. Hiromi writes in her diary. Wen-ching writes notes. The two lovers write to each other, having no other way to communicate. These texts appear in large block print that occupy the entire screen in a way that recalls old silent films.

Why so much text? The film’s screenwriters, Hou, Chu T’ien-wen, and Wu Nien-jen, were born after the violent uprisings and grew up during a time when it was forbidden to talk about them. To write City, they sifted through diaries, letters, and private archives. The film thus stands as a reflection on what remembering feels like: sifting through text. That activity is soundless. You must imagine the lives of people who have dared to leave a trace.

Consider, in contrast, the simple yet poignant narratives of the White Terror that have emerged in the mainstream news since government archives opened in the early 2000s. The BBC reported one such story. “My most beloved Chun-lan,” a father wrote on the night before he was executed, to his five-month-old daughter, “I was arrested when you were still in your mother’s womb. Father and child cannot meet. Alas, there’s nothing more tragic than this in the world.” He wrote that in 1953. The government confiscated it and never delivered to his family. His daughter would receive it fifty-six years later, at age fifty-six. She cried when she read it. “I finally had a connection with my father,” she told BBC. “I realized not only do I have a father, but this father loved me very much.”

Narratives like these have a beginning (arrest, execution), middle (prolonged, multidecade separation between father and child; suspended wondering), and end (cathartic reception of the letter; connection established). One of the central precepts of trauma healing holds that we reclaim events of loss through narrative. Hou refuses a narrative, thus refusing reclamation, suspending us in the psychic trauma of his generation.

For this reason, perhaps, in Hou’s films we don’t always realize when a scene has ended. One moment which I love most is sensual and innocent: Wen-ching and Hiromi sit close together on the floor, looking at each other, delighted and full of longing: two shy, sensitive people finding their way to love. In the background, the old-timey German lied “Lorelei” plays on a phonograph. Steps away, their male friends sit around a table, eating zongzi (a sticky rice dish eaten in the summer). They complain bitterly of the bribery and corruption that marked and followed 2/28, which has included nepotism; the KMT has fired locals—calling them slaves to the Japanese—and awarded those coveted government positions to family members.

But the two gorgeous young lovers are in their own world, talking about the music. Hiromi explains to Wen-ching—in a letter, written in her notebook—the legend of Lorelei. He writes back, telling her he knew the song before became deaf, then recounts how it happened. He was eight when he fell from a tree. A happy kid who lived in his own world, he at first didn’t even realize he had lost his hearing; his father had to tell him by writing it down. Hiromi looks surprised, and the camera cuts to a flashback, a child imitating a Beijing opera singer. This almost montage-like scene has no argument, no dramatic tension, no climax. It is all private logic. The effect is such that even the present moment of rapturous love has the feel of memory, recovered too late, useless yet still dazzlingly vivid.

***

When City was first released, an estimated 50 percent of the country’s population flocked to theaters to see it, resulting in the improbable box-office upset of a kung fu movie starring Jackie Chan. Early international acclaim for A City of Sadness included the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion Prize: City was the first Chinese-language film to receive this honor. (In September, Tony Leung received a lifetime achievement award at Venice, where three of his films have won the Golden Lion, City being his first.) Meanwhile, in China, City was banned until 2012, when it received a small showing at a film institute in Beijing. This year, the digital restoration was shown at film festivals and in Beijing and Shanghai, marking the first time that ticket-buying audiences could see the film. The few showings available were immediately sold out.

Yet, despite City’s canonical status in Taiwan, domestic critical reception was, and continues to be, uneven. Critics have argued that City fails to show the scale or barbarity of the killings of 2/28. It doesn’t show, for instance, how masses of Taiwanese people on the streets were bundled into burlap sacks and tossed into the harbor. It doesn’t show ordinary citizens getting stabbed by Chinese soldiers. It doesn’t show the Butcher of Kaohsiung, as he was named, a Chinese general who sprayed machine-gun fire into a crowd. When Hou does show street violence, it is enacted by local gangs and not by the KMT government: a band of vengeful Taiwanese randomly beat up people while shouting “Death to mainlanders!” This is a reference to the two million migrants from China to Taiwan after 1945, some of whom faced discrimination.

Were critics right? Partially. For me, the harshest thing I can say about A City of Sadness is also the most unfair: it’s no The Battle of Algiers, a film that confronted with lucidity the totalizing character of violence. Violence cleanses: that’s the ideology of its perpetrators, from the agents of the state to insurgent terrorists. Like City, Battle dealt with colonial occupation; like City, Battle dealt with its own country’s watershed moment of the twentieth century. But Battle, which premiered twenty-three years at Venice before City, exposed with complexity the levers of power, portraying a French general and his rationale for torture with care. In contrast, you won’t find in City anything about Chiang Kai-shek, who famously said, “I’d rather kill a hundred innocent people than let one communist escape.” The name of his campaign in China to exterminate leftists quite literally translates to “cleansing social movement.” Neither Chiang nor any high-ranking Chinese soldier appears in the film, much less articulates his strategy or beliefs; on occasion, a policeman or soldier rounds up dissidents or hauls someone off to get executed. In City, the human origins of power appear shadowy, opaque, without substance.

In Hou’s defense, City would never have been released had it featured a Chinese general describing a program of cleansing and torture. Besides, Hou’s style is elliptical and indirect—which also happens to be useful to evade censorship. “Nothing is worse than having something there for the sake of exposition or explanation,” he has said.

What, then, are the politics of the film? Above all, I think, Hou describes the inherent worth of preserving a free mind amid totalitarian conditions. Though many of the women in City are seen performing traditional roles—preparing vegetables in the kitchen, raising children—Hiromi’s diary provides the story of her inner life as well as the written narration of her family’s story. The seasons change, from winter to summer to winter again, but she keeps writing. Similarly, despite Wen-ching’s inability to speak and hear, he never stops observing his surroundings. The quiet takes in which we watch Wen-ching developing photos is a metacommentary on the patience required to witness the world with open eyes. For these two idealists, the mind triumphs in spite of physical and social stumbling blocks.

They also both continue to contribute to Hiroe’s doomed resistance movement. Three quarters into the film, Hiroe escapes prison and creates a little socialist utopia in the hills. When he’s not harvesting rice—trousers rolled up, stepping gingerly behind a water buffalo plowing a rice paddy—he’s writing pamphlets. These will spell his demise when he is eventually located, arrested, and executed by the KMT. But for now he has created a free world. When Wen-ching visits, he replies, “In prison I vowed to live for friends who have died.” A few beats later: “The only thing that matters is your beliefs.”

 

Michelle Kuo is a writer and professor based in Taipei. She teaches at National Chengchi University, and her book Reading with Patrick was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Cooking with Madame d’Aulnoy

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The cooking is extreme. In one story, “Finette-Cendron,” a Cinderella figure, pleases her fairy godmother by baking her a cake with “two pounds of butter”; later, she serves her a feast made from two chickens, a cock, and “two little rabbits that were being fed up with cabbage.” In another story, “Belle-Belle,” a cross-dressing girl kills a dragon after getting him drunk on a lake-sized wine cocktail spiced with “raisins, pepper, and other things that cause thirst.” In a third, “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” a princess brings her shipwrecked sweetheart “four parrots and six squirrels cooked in the sun,” along with “strawberries, cherries, raspberries, and other fruit,” served on plates of stone, and using large, “very soft and pliable” leaves as napkins. Lest anyone find d’Aulnoy’s repasts and their power unrealistic, the opposite is true, as I discovered while attempting to re-create the food with my friend Celia Bell, whose novel, The Disenchantment, published this May, was inspired by d’Aulnoy’s life and work.

Our leg of lamb was big enough to feed an ogre. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

The Baronesse d’Aulnoy was an influential early author of fairy tales and a pioneer of the genre, who lived from the early 1650s until 1705, mostly in Paris. The term fairy tale itself is said to have come from her decision to call her works contes de fées (“fairy tales” in French). Despite the diamonds, ogres, fairies, and woodland adventures that populate her writings, d’Aulnoy was concerned with marriage and its consequences; the relation between the sexes; and female education, empowerment, independence, and sexuality. Her witty, aristocratic tales traffic in the kind of doublespeak inherent to fairy tales that allow their writers to uphold myths and social mores while also speaking “harsh truths” and “open[ing] spaces for dreaming alternatives,” as the writer Marina Warner puts it in her book of fairy-tale theory, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers.

Read in this light, a story like “The Bee and the Orange Tree” reveals a subtext about female independence. In it, the shipwrecked Princess Aimée is raised by a family of ogres. When a handsome prince is also washed up onshore, the ogres want to eat him. Aimée saves his life, escapes the ogres (by baking a cake with a talking bean in it to distract them), and marries the prince in the end—a stock happy ending, due to her traditional virtues of sweetness, bravery, and goodness. But the meeting of the maiden and the ogre can also be read as a metaphor for marriage. Aimée is part of a “family” of cannibals, and is in constant danger of being consumed (as wives can be). She finds a beautiful and dazed young man washed up on the seashore, desires him, and takes action, ruthlessly killing the ogre-husband, tricking the witless ogre-wife, and incidentally killing a few ogre-children in order to escape.

A 2011 illustrated edition of Madame D’Aulnoy’s selected tales, The Island of Happiness, with slices of the cooked leg of lamb. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Celia’s novel, The Disenchantment, picks up on these themes from d’Aulnoy’s work and life. Celia’s heroine, Mary Catherine la Jumelle de Cardonnoy, struggles in an abusive marriage to an older man, trapped by her love for her two small children. The real Baronesse d’Aulnoy was married when she was fifteen years old to a man thirty years her senior, whom she schemed against with the help of her mother, and from whom she eventually managed to separate. D’Aulnoy might have had an affair with one (or both) of a pair of servants who helped her in the escape plot. Celia’s Mary Catherine is having an affair with a cross-dressing younger woman. When the ogre-like Baron d’Cardonnoy discovers them, the younger woman’s heroics place Mary Catherine in mortal peril, and the novel becomes a fairy tale in reverse, with the bride heading not into a marriage, but out of one.

I first read d’Aulnoy several years ago, at Celia’s suggestion, when I myself was unhappily married with two small children, and was considering my options. Somehow, divorce, which seemed like it should be emotionally and logistically possible for a woman in New York, was more daunting than I could have imagined. I was afraid of all the things women have always been afraid of. And also I was dismayed by how many things had gone wrong: a wife’s and a husband’s power to torture each other, the presence of unruly sexuality, the reality of raising children together that looked nothing like my dream. I appreciated d’Aulnoy’s stories for their ability to fully encompass the myths and ideals of marriage, while surprising me even four centuries later.

We made a Hunter’s Salad with chicken livers, inspired by the tale “The Hind in the Wood,” in which a hunter tracks his beloved, who has been turned into a deer. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Celia and I got together in New York to make food from d’Aulnoy’s work, which had also made its way into her own writing. As part of writing her book, Celia had meticulously researched seventeenth-century food: that was the era, Celia told me, when French cooking as we know it today essentially developed. It was just becoming fashionable to cook fresh food, in season, simply prepared, and also to make the kind of elaborate pastries and extravagant centerpieces that we think of as quintessentially “French.” Celia saw parallels between the elaborate showmanship and pretend rusticism of the French cuisine of that period and our own trendy farm-to-table culture. Celia also pointed out the woodsiness that lived alongside all the finery: “Everyone is encrusted in carbuncles and diamonds, but also every so often someone has to run away and live picturesquely off the fruits of the forest.”

Celia Bell, whose novel, The Disenchantment, takes inspiration from the life of Madame d’Aulnoy. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

The story “The Hind in the Wood” provides a wonderful example of this kind of sophisticated faux rusticism. In it, Princess Desirée is lost in the woods, and has been cursed by a wicked lobster-fairy by being transformed into a white deer by day, only to resume her human form at night. Her beloved fiancé, Prince Warrior, does not realize that Desirée is the deer, and spends his days trying to track and shoot her. (And Desirée does not mind. A barbed reflection on love!) The forest setting and animal transformations are contrasted with the tale’s other features. By night, Desirée repairs to a charming cottage with her devoted maid, Gilliflower, where the two read books “to divert our minds.” Gilliflower conveniently runs over to the nearest town to buy the books. It sounds like a weekend in the Catskills.

Celia spreads a layer of cherry jam on top of a mousse layer for the Princess Cake, so it will gush out like blood when the cake is cut. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

The menu Celia and I created, drawn from the four d’Aulnoy stories mentioned above, was classically French, but we adapted the recipes to incorporate some of the quasi-rusticism. It was almost too easy to do. Belle-Belle renders a dragon insensible with spiced wine, which made Celia think of a populo, a drink from the 1600s composed of wine spirits, musk, amber, pepper, oil of lemon, anise, and coriander. To make our version, Celia concocted her own oil of lemon infusion—a sweet, citrusy oleo-saccharum syrup, spiked with anise and coriander. My wine consultant, Hank Zona, suggested using a natural white wine from Corsican producer Yves Leccia as a base. (What better than a natural wine to epitomize rustic trendiness?) Hank also chose another beverage adhering to the old-is-new fad: a Blanquette de Limoux, from the French town where sparkling wine was invented in the 1530s, made in the méthode ancestrale, a close approximation of how it would have been made back then.

For our first course, Celia and I took inspiration from “The Hind in the Wood,” which ends with a protracted woodland idyll full of good things to eat. The characters in this story forage for food, nibbling on grass and eating apples with a beautiful “rosy color,” while listening to melodious birdsong. Today, diners at better restaurants, of course, often encounter foraged items on menus and will be familiar with this mood. Lacking a forest, Celia and I went to the farmers market and bought expensive microgreens (baby lettuces, nasturtium leaves, and purslane) and jewel-like edible flowers (we used Sichuan buttons, but pansies, marigolds, calendula, or bee balm would all be good). We tossed them with snipped parsley and the most French of herbs, tarragon, to make Salade Chasseur, traditionally a hunter’s foraged salad served with the offal from his kill. We topped our salad with savory wedges of chicken livers—the blood and guts as a contrast to the flowers and herbs seemed just right for a fairy tale.

Microgreens from the farmers market, prior to their transformation into a Hunter’s Salad. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Our main course was a roasted leg of lamb, or gigot, culled from the action in the story “Finette-Cendron.” D’Aulnoy’s version of the Cinderella tale includes an interlude in which the good Finette-Cendron and her two abusive sisters, Belle-de-Nuit and Fleur d’Amour, are captured by ogres. Her parents are spendthrifts and fools; even her fairy godmother insists that she behaves badly. Finette-Cendron refuses to be like them and acts according to her own conscience. When she encounters the ogres (a metaphorical family to mirror her real one), she ruthlessly dispatches them, pushing the ogre-husband into an oven and beheading his wife with an axe. D’Aulnoy rewards her with gold, jewels, and a handsome prince to love. Celia and I chose to reward our dinner guests with a repast from the ogre’s castle that would also be a nod to modern showmanship-cooking. The ogre is said to eat “a hundred lambs and a hundred sucking pigs” while waiting for Finette-Cendron to bake his bread. We made a massive leg of lamb, smothered in a butter-and-herb mixture.

The bloodred glaze of the Cannibal Princess Cake hides three layers and a meaty surprise. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Last, Celia designed a devious showstopper for dessert, a cake referencing the one Princess Aimée bakes to escape the cannibalistic ogres in “The Bee and the Orange Tree.” Aimée’s cake has a talking bean inside that misleads the ogres, giving her time to escape. Our cake was covered with a bloodred mirror glaze, to reference the ogres’ cannibalism, and contained an unexpected element not suitable for vegetarians, gelatin, for the same reason. It had so many steps and such laborious production techniques that it would provide a different kind of distraction, in order, Celia said, to keep the baker “away from whatever other responsibilities you have for some time.”

Fairy tales, according to Warner, have had staying power because they are essentially orderly. They draw boundaries, sorting out which behaviors are socially acceptable and which ones aren’t. D’Aulnoy’s heroines are unconventional, but their consoling magic is that they meet happy endings. And her achievement is that she made room for a wider range of characters to do so—unhappy wives, disobedient daughters, women who love to read. Our dinner party had a happy ending, as well, as we shared our food with our friends in my now-single-woman abode. Our cocktails were sweet, musky, and spicy, and we drank many of them. Celia turns out to be both a skilled writer of fairy tales and a dab hand at cooking challenging cuts of meat. Our lamb was tender and perfectly seasoned; the chunks of liver in the salad stole the show (both are items I’ve struggled to make correctly in the past). The Cannibal Princess Cake tasted of orange blossoms and cherries instead of human flesh, but we made-believe.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Populo from “Belle-Belle”

For the oleo-saccharum:

4–5 lemons

8 oz white sugar

1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper (or to taste)

3 star anise pods

1 tsp whole coriander

For the cocktail:

1 tbsp spiced oleo-saccharum

3 oz white wine

1 oz brandy

To make the oleo-saccharum, peel, halve, and juice the lemons. Coarsely chop the squeezed peels into bite-size pieces, then toss them with the lemon juice, sugar, and spices and leave to macerate overnight. Strain. For each cocktail, combine one tablespoon oleo-saccharum with the wine and brandy, shake over ice, strain, and serve.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Salade Chasseur from “The Hind in the Wood”

For the livers:

1 sprig rosemary

1 bay leaf

1 pint chicken livers

Dash of cognac

For the dressing:

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup vinegar

1 sprig tarragon, finely chopped

About 1/3 cup parsley, finely chopped

1 spoonful of Dijon mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

For the salad:

6 cups mixed greens

1 handful edible flowers

Choose your greens. If you have a garden, or a public park open to foragers, you might pick your own purslane—or wood sorrel, or bee balm, or lamb’s-quarter—but the salad will also be good if you use lettuce from the supermarket.

Make the livers. In a pan, heat a little olive oil and add the rosemary and bay leaf. Sauté until fragrant. Add the chicken livers and sauté on medium-high heat until they are cooked through or just pink in the middle. The texture of the livers should be creamy and firm. Transfer the livers to a plate and pour a dash of cognac into the pan to deglaze it. Reserve this liquid for your salad dressing.

Make the salad dressing. Finely chop the tarragon and parsley, then add to a bowl with the deglazed liquid from the pan you cooked the meat in, along with the olive oil and vinegar and Dijon mustard. Whisk, taste, and add salt and pepper and oil or vinegar to your liking.

To serve, toss the greens and flowers together with the dressing, and arrange the livers on top.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Le Gigot from “Finette-Cendron”

4–5 cloves garlic

1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary

Zest of 1 lemon

1/2 stick softened butter

Salt and pepper to taste

Leg of lamb (gigot) (usually 4–5 lb)

2 onions

4–5 carrots

Finely chop the garlic, rosemary, and lemon zest, and mix into the softened butter, along with salt and pepper. Using a sharp knife, score the surface of the lamb in a crosshatched pattern, then coat it thoroughly with the butter-and-herb mixture.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Heat the oven to 425°F. Peel and chop the onions and carrots, then place them in your baking dish with the lamb on top. Roast the lamb for fifteen minutes, then reduce the heat to 350°F and roast until the internal temperature reaches 130°F—usually for between an hour and an hour and a half, depending on the size of your gigot. Baste the lamb with its juices every fifteen to twenty minutes. When the internal temperature has reached 130°F, remove it from the oven and allow it to rest for ten minutes before carving. Slice thinly and serve with the roasted carrots and onions.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Cannibal Princess Cake from “The Bee and the Orange Tree”

For the mousse:

1 lb cherries, pitted

2 tbsp sugar

Dash of liquid from good-quality maraschino cherries, or substitute cognac

2 egg yolks (save whites for the cake layer)

100 g sugar

2 packets gelatin

40 ml water

200 g heavy cream

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

For the cake:

2 large egg whites

1 pinch cream of tartar

1 tbsp powdered sugar

3 medium eggs

75 grams granulated sugar

80 grams butter, room temperature

1/2 tsp orange blossom water

Zest of 1 orange

130 grams almond meal

50 grams all-purpose flour

Pinch of salt

For the mirror glaze:

1 tsbp plus 2 tsp gelatin, divided

1/4 cup cold water

2/3 cup condensed milk

1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp water

2 1/3 cups chopped white chocolate, or white chocolate chips

Red food coloring

To garnish:

Cherries or other red fruit

Comb honey

Red and white flowers

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Make the mousse. Purée the cherries with the sugar, then add the cherry liquid or cognac and bring to a simmer in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Whisk the egg yolks and remaining sugar together in a saucepan over low heat, stirring continuously (your goal is to temper the eggs and prevent them from curdling). When the egg mixture is warm and has begun to look creamy, whisk in about 1/4 cup of the cherry purée and heat through. It should thicken slightly.

Meanwhile, bloom the gelatin: Add two packets to 40 ml of cool water. The powder will expand and become gelatinous. Whisk the bloomed gelatin into the egg-and-cherries mixture, then add the rest of the puréed cherries and mix thoroughly. Allow the whole mixture to cool to room temperature. Do not under any circumstances add the mixture to the whipped cream (next step) before it is completely cool.

Once the egg-cherries-and-gelatin mixture has cooled (or while you are waiting for it to cool), whip the cream into stiff peaks. Gently fold the mixture into the whipped cream, being careful not to knock the air out of the cream. Pour the mousse into a greased, parchment-lined springform pan and transfer to the refrigerator to set. The mousse may set in just a few hours, but I recommend doing this step the night before you want to serve the cake, to avoid anxiety.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Make the cake. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper. The batter is quite stiff and the cake layer will be thin, so don’t worry too much about lining the sides. You do, however, need to choose a baking sheet that has more surface area than the springform pan you used for the mousse, as you will cut out the cake to the precise size you need after it’s baked.

Add the egg whites and cream of tartar to the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until they form soft peaks. Add the powdered sugar and continue to beat until the meringue forms stiff, glossy peaks. Set aside, and in a separate bowl beat the whole eggs and sugar until light and fluffy, then add the butter, orange blossom water, and orange zest and mix thoroughly. Gently fold in the almond meal and flour, and then fold this mixture gently into your meringue. As with the mousse, be careful not to knock the air out of your batter as you are folding. This cake has no chemical rising agent—it relies on the air trapped in your meringue to make it light and fluffy.

Using a spatula, spread your cake batter out onto your prepared baking sheet. You can make it as thick or as thin as you like; I spread it about one inch thick. You do not need to spread it all the way to the edges of the pan. Bake for fifteen to twenty minutes, or until the top turns golden brown and the cake is firm and springy to the touch. Allow it to cool completely.

To assemble the cake, take your springform pan with the set mousse and place it on top of the almond cake and trace the outline of the pan. Trim your cake in this shape: it should fit nicely into the top of your pan. Next, spread the rest of the cherry purée on top of the set mousse. Prepare a baking dish full of warm water large enough to hold your pan—an inch or two of water will be enough; don’t flood your cake. Place the sponge cake layer on top of the mousse pan, and place the pan in the warm-water bath for thirty seconds. Then place baking sheet on top of the pan and carefully flip it. Working slowly, remove the sides of your springform pan and then the top, being careful not to tear or dent the mousse layer. The mousse should hold its shape. Put in the freezer for thirty minutes or overnight.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Make the mirror glaze. Bloom the gelatin: Mix the gelatin and cold water and set aside until the gelatin expands. Meanwhile, whisk together the condensed milk, water, and sugar in a small pot. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, then whisk in the bloomed gelatin until it is fully dissolved and no clumps remain. (I suggest using an immersion blender for this step, but be careful to keep it fully submerged, so you don’t introduce bubbles into the glaze.)

Place the white chocolate in a mixing bowl, then pour the hot gelatin mixture through a sieve over the chocolate. The chocolate should melt completely. Mix with an immersion blender, and add red food coloring until you have a bright, shiny red. Transfer to a vessel that pours easily and allow to cool to 94°F, monitoring the temperature closely. The mirror glaze will set correctly if poured between 90 and 94°F. If it is too hot or too cold, you will not achieve the desired effect.

While you are waiting for the glaze to cool, prepare the mousse cake for glazing. Remove it from the freezer, and using an offset spatula, transfer it to a cake stand or cooling rack set over a baking sheet (the glaze will be messy—you want to catch any drips). When the glaze reaches 94°F, slowly pour it over your cake, starting at the center. The glaze should pool and drip down the sides. Continue to pour until you’ve used all the glaze, taking care to coat the whole cake evenly. The glaze should set within one or two minutes. Once it has set, use the spatula to carefully transfer the cake to a serving platter.

Garnish. I sliced my cherries in half and arranged them on the cake with the pits still in, to look like broken hearts. Cut small pieces of comb honey to go in between them, and garnish with a few red flowers.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan

Photograph courtesy of Nightboat Books.

She would say that driving a big car on a highway crossing the American desert was like doing calligraphy in her notebooks. She said that if you look at a mountain carefully and faithfully each day, you can become its friend. And this is what happened to her. Each thing that existed in the world provoked her curiosity, and often her wonder. She was never weary and always alert, as if to be alive were in itself such a stroke of luck that nothing must be let go of. She loved wild buttercups and blood-red anemones. She was friends with the flowers too.

Born in 1925 in Beirut, Etel Adnan was a poet and an artist. She died in Paris in 2021. I met her nine years ago in somewhat worldly circumstances, surrounded by famous artists and important gallerists. Everyone was talking but her. She had planted herself with her back to the crowd, facing an enormous fireplace. And she watched the fire without moving. She watched it with such intensity I didn’t dare approach her. I had read some of her writing: remarkable poems, and an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that had impressed me with her point of view on the world. Here was an artist, to be sure, but as young people say these days, “not just that.” It was this “not just” that I wanted to understand.

I first came to Etel to ask questions. Very soon I was coming back to see her, to be with her, to be in the delight of being with her.

ADLER

Do you work every day?

ADNAN

No, I’ve never done anything systematically. Never in my life have I said that I was busy. When something is asked of me, I’m available. It’s a quality of my character, not an effort. It makes it so that if I’m invited to dinner, I can go. I had many odd jobs before becoming a professor. I took things as they came. For example, perhaps an editor tells me, “You know, we need a piece for a magazine,” and I write a three-page text. Then they tell me, “No, it’s too short, you have to write more,” so I set myself to writing every day and I write a book called Paris, When it’s Naked. Chance plays an immense role in our lives. We think we’re directing things, but we’re also directed by what’s happening around us.

ADLER

Where did the desire to paint come from, for you?

ADNAN

In the room in which I first painted, in the philosophy of art department of an American university at which I was teaching, there were canvases, paper, brushes, knives. When I picked up a sheet of paper—not a canvas—the head of the department gave me tubes of colored paint, little tubes that had been left lying on the ground. Right away I found what’s known as a palette knife—a painter’s knife, not a kitchen knife—and I think the object itself, by its nature, allows you to make only flat shapes. So, I didn’t start painting with a brush. I really began with this knife, and it has remained my instrument. The tool you use directs what you do considerably. There is a collaboration between the objects that you use, and this is true beyond painting. I’m very sensitive to the role of objects in our lives. The fact that I always use a knife explains why I’ve made flat color blocks. At first, I made them very naturally, as they came, instinctually. It’s like with children—you don’t teach them drawing, they paint naturally. We paint naturally, like we speak.

ADLER

With what element do you begin a painting?

ADNAN

At first, since I had these little ends of pastels, I’d start with a red square. And this red square called for the gestures that followed. That’s how it is. You make a mark, and the mark creates a situation, and this situation calls for other gestures. And it comes along, and you learn as you go.

ADLER

Do you always start off with a color?

ADNAN

Yes.

ADLER

What is color?

ADNAN

I’ve had a somewhat philosophical year, during which I have rediscovered my interest in Nietzsche. Nietzsche gave us interpretive schemas and concepts, and one of these concepts is the will to power. Well, I discovered that color was the manifestation, the expression, of the will to power of matter. This is what great philosophers do—they furnish you with essential tools for thought. So there—color. Color is an affirmation of presence so strong that it’s almost alive, almost human. There’s a power in color. My friend Yvon Lambert came over the other day with a bouquet of peonies, and peonies are deeper than roses. They have a certain color—I’d almost say blacker, more assertive. It’s interesting. What’s beautiful, too, is the mixing of color. Since I had no formal training in art, no one taught me how to marry colors. Painter friends told me, “You’re not supposed to mix these colors, you’re not supposed to juxtapose them. How do you dare do that?” Because no one told me not to do it. I don’t see why I couldn’t. They have preconceived ideas. Mixing colors is very engaging because you witness the birth of a new color. It’s really a birth, like a child arriving. You put in a particular red, you put in a white, and you have a pink that you’ve never seen before and that helps with the following stage. I play by ear, as they say.

ADLER

You mean that colors speak to you, then?

ADNAN

That’s right, they speak to me. I deal with them. I answer them. There’s a discourse between the self and the white paper on which you work. It’s thrilling. You strike out into an unknown that renews itself nonstop. You never know what you can do unless you try. You have to try.

I had a purely literary education, very literary. But that helps in doing another kind of art. Whether it be music or poetry, it helps. It trains you. They’re the same problems. They’re problems of composition and of confidence. When you walk down the street, you don’t think about the next step. You just go for it. It’s the same with work. You begin and you continue. You must have confidence. You can’t have criticism intervening during the work. You have to leave criticism for later on. And then you need a certain modesty. This is what I can do. I’m obliged to accept it. It’s me.

ADLER

When did you understand that you yourself could also write poetry?

ADNAN

Oh, I’ve never thought that! I have never said I was a poet, for instance, except when I wrote my first poem, when I was twenty years old. It was about the marriage of the sun and the sea. And it’s funny, my most recent poems have nearly the same themes as the first ones, which never became books. They have not been published.

ADLER

Why is it, do you think, that we have a “need for poetry,” to use Yves Bonnefoy’s expression?

ADNAN

You have a need to free things up, to put them in order, to clear away nonessential things to make room in your head, so that an image can take its place. For me, that’s what poetry is. It’s when your attention recovers and rests. We live between veils, it seems to me. Nowadays I need to go out to dinner to find myself—I’m so outside of myself. We live outside ourselves. We rarely have moments where music or poetry provide relief. Even if it requires a lot of attention, it’s a relief, because it empties the mind, in the true sense of the word. We need poetry amid this chaos and chatter.

ADLER

You speak of “putting in order.”

ADNAN

In the best sense—that is, to empty out. Throwing out. I love throwing out. My girlfriend, Simone, hates it. I love it. We argue. I even take advantage when she’s not around to get rid of things. Because you need mental space. Cleaning the house means throwing things out. We are eaten up by objects and we become babysitters of our houses. So, you’ve got to clear away. That’s what it is to put in order.

ADLER

Let’s talk about philosophy. You went to the Sorbonne to study philosophy. Notably, you had Gaston Bachelard as a professor. What did that bring to you?

ADNAN

The fact that philosophy is not a break with daily life, and that daily life is poetry. This is very important. We don’t know the originality and freedom of Gaston Bachelard’s thinking well enough. He was widely read. There was even a cult. Students lined up to get into his classroom. In spite of this, up until now we haven’t recognized his importance to French thought.

I find his writing to be as extraordinary as the Surrealist manifestos. Surrealism is true philosophy as well. But it’s a philosophy well ahead of what people considered to be philosophy. For instance, Heidegger said the outcome of philosophy is poetry. Surrealism had said this before, Bachelard had said it before. He had freed up, dusted off, the image we had of philosophy as something detached from the world. People like him rediscovered that in each milieu we are the totality of our life and the totality of the world. We are in each second the result of our lives, of our environment, of the history of the world.

ADLER

The experience of reverie and dreams was very important to the work of Bachelard …

ADNAN

When you dream, you rarely know it. But when you wake, you carry within yourself almost the temperature of the dream. By “dream” Bachelard almost means a forethought. At times there is a halo around the thought. There’s a surface to the thought.

ADLER

And to create is to abandon rational thought and abandon yourself to the imagination?

ADNAN

Creation is a form of thinking. It’s abandoning a certain world of preoccupations in order to enter into another. I like the word make; the word create reminds me too much of religion. We’ve separated creators from noncreators. And everyone creates, in that sense. Everyone does things that generate the world of philosophy. There’s no absolute division. There are different intensities.

I’m astonished by the metaphysical questions that children ask. They have a freedom such that they’re able to surprise you with their remarks. We don’t record them, and fortunately we don’t publish them. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of higher thought, flashes of illumination. Lately, I have come to the conclusion that, on the level of what we call thinking, everything thinks. We say that animals don’t think, and  Descartes says that they are machines … but animals do think, they make decisions. Before it jumps, a cat looks, gauges the distance; it doesn’t fling itself eyes closed into the air. Everything that is alive thinks.

 

Translated from the French by Ethan Mitchell.

The Beauty of Light: Interviews with Etel Adnan will be published by Nightboat Books in November.

Laure Adler is a writer and journalist who served as a cultural adviser to the Office of the French Presidency from 1989 to 1992. She is the author of numerous books, including a biography of Marguerite Duras.

Ethan Mitchell is is an editor and translator working in Berkeley, California.

Correction

On October 3, 2023, The Paris Review published “Free Everything,” an essay by Miranda July, on the Daily. We were not aware that the essay had previously run in The New Yorker, and have removed it from our website. We regret the error. The original piece can be found here.

Free Everything

Photo by Friedrich Haag, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed via CC BY-SA 4.0.

I don’t remember the first time I did it, but I remember the first time I got caught. I was a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the store was called Zanotto’s, the item was Neosporin. I took it out of its packaging, bent down as if to scratch my ankle, and then wedged the tube of triple-antibiotic ointment into my white ankle sock. When the guard grabbed my arm, I was so scared I peed on the floor. As we waited for the police to come, I had to watch a janitor clean up my pee with a mop. I was taken down to the station and formally arrested: fingerprints, mug shot—they really wanted to teach this nineteen-year-old, transparent-dress-wearing punk a lesson. The lesson I learned was that I was now legally an adult, so I didn’t have to worry that my parents would be called. I was free—even my crimes belonged to me alone.

In time, I improved. I discovered that stealing required a loose, casual energy, a sort of oneness with the environment, like surfing or horse whispering. And once I knew I could do it, I felt strangely obliged to. I remember feeling guilty for not stealing, as though I were wasting money. After I dropped out of college and moved to Portland, Oregon, it became part of my livelihood. I stared at my shopping list like a stressed housewife, deliberating over which items to steal and which to buy with food stamps. My preferred purse was gigantic and discreetly rigid, like a suitcase. I packed it with blocks of cheese, loaves of bread, and lots of soy products, because I was a vegetarian.

But it wasn’t just about the supermarket—the whole world was one giant heist. It goes without saying that I used magnets to reset the Kinko’s copy counters to zero, and carried scissors to cut alarm tags out of clothes. Everyone I knew did these things. I say this not to excuse myself but just so you can visualize a legion of energetic, intelligent young lady criminals. Anytime anyone we knew flew into Portland, we urged her to buy luggage insurance and allow us to steal her bag from the baggage carousel. The visiting friend then had to perform the role of the frantic claims reporter and was given a cut of the insurance money. Some friends were up for this; others thought it was an inhospitable thing to ask.

My first employer in Portland was Goodwill, which, yes, is a charitable organization, and, no, I did not have any qualms about slipping books and clothes and knickknacks into my bag.

Because what is money, anyway? It’s just a concept some asshole made up. I also put red SOLD tags on large appliances and entire living room sets, and felt magnanimous as my friends gleefully loaded up their vans. One day, a coworker was admiring a pink blouse that had just come in. I encouraged her to take it, and when she wouldn’t, I put the blouse in a Goodwill bag and ran out of the store calling, “Sir! Sir! You forgot your bag!” Then I stuffed it into the bushes. At closing time, I fished it out with a halfhearted “What’s this?” and handed it to my prim coworker. Prim and ungrateful, as it turned out. I was called into the boss’s office the next morning; the pink shirt was on her desk. “The good news is we’re not going to press charges,” she said. I wept as I walked over the river to the place where my girlfriend worked as a dog groomer. I’d never been fired before. It was a lot like dropping out of school or being arrested. All these institutions, in their crude, clumsy way, seemed to be saying, You don’t need us, we’ll never understand you, and it’s important for you not to want us to.

I took the message to heart. I labored obsessively over creative pursuits they would never recognize, hurtling through systems and hierarchies as if nothing that already existed were relevant to me. I performed at colleges and scanned the room for what I could take. Even a box of chalk slipped into my pocket reassured me that I still had my freedom—the freedom to steal, to self-destruct, to ruin everything.

There was an exact moment when I decided to quit. I was sitting on a man’s lap and we had just determined that I was “his girl.” As we kissed I thought, Well, I guess I have to stop stealing now. As if the idea of having a boyfriend, of being straight, required straightening out in other ways. I may have been looking for an excuse; I may have realized that I didn’t need to be a criminal to be an artist. Art itself could be the crime—could be scary and dangerous enough to shoulder my rebellion. After a while, I also stopped getting into physical fights, working in peep shows, bleaching my hair white, and wearing my tights over my shoes. Still, for a long time I thought my biggest heist was fooling everyone into believing that I was an upstanding citizen, a sweet girl. Then, just a few years ago, I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult.

 

Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her novel All Fours is forthcoming from Riverhead in May.