The Paris Review's Blog, page 46

W Stands for W

The W Hotel, Barcelona. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When I was first hired as a bartender by the W Hotel in Seattle, the brand was still owned by Starwood, an indistinct consolidated corporation that has since been subsumed into the ravenous belly known as Marriott. There was a lengthy process involved in getting the job. I interviewed twice: once in the HR office and then a second time downstairs with the manager of the hotel restaurant and lounge. After being hired, I attended a mandatory, introductory eight-hour job training that was quite similar to the one I’d experienced prior to beginning a regrettable stint at Starbucks. I was stuffed into a room with about twenty other new hires—everything from housekeepers to sous-chefs to servers to maintenance workers—and we were each inundated with Starwood history. Starwood business policies. Starwood subsidiary family trees.

We watched videos. We read dense packets filled with glowing customer surveys and reviews. We broke into small groups, and we were quizzed about the things that we learned. We won prizes—Starwood-engraved keychains, W Seattle pens, and the like—for each answer we got right. These gifts would be tossed about the room by the two HR workers who gave these training sessions, and they would clap with absurd enthusiasm each time. Their gusto was on brand with that of a game-show host or some seasoned motivational speaker as they shouted into their blouse-pinned microphones.

“And you get a prize!”

“And YOU get a prize!”

As when I worked at Starbucks, the oddest portion of this arduous training session had to do with language. There were particular ways in which we were trained to speak, both with patrons and coworkers. Example: The elevator isn’t an elevator, it is “the lift.” The bathroom or restroom is neither, it is “the WC.” Even our various job titles were sometimes tied up in this peculiar rebranding. Maître d’s were “W insiders,” room attendants were “W stylists,” and maintenance workers were “W engineers.” The dishwashers were still dishwashers, and the bartenders were still bartenders, and the chefs were still chefs—though there was still that portentous prefix, W, that was always present to remind you that this job wasn’t just like any other job. This was a job at the W.

“But what, exactly, does the W stand for?” someone inevitably inquired, pausing in their vigorous note-taking, in their Starwood-embossed notepad, with their hot pink W Seattle pen.

“We are so HAPPY that you asked!” the game-show hosts from HR exclaimed—and jumped up and down. And then, they took turns speaking, alternating one after the other, as if this were some odd, obsessively rehearsed performance that they had been eagerly waiting to unleash.

“W stands for WOW!”

“W stands for WISTFUL!”

“W stands for WHIMSICAL!”

“W stands for WONDERFUL!”

“But more than anything …”

In unison now, pointing at all of us like we were meant to sing along, ending on a line that seemed vacant of meaning altogether:

“W STANDS FOR W!”

***

As a newly hired bartender for the W, the first step began with uniform (designer jeans, fitted black button-down) and extended to everything from mixing lavish cocktails to serving high-priced meals. But we were more than just bartenders, remember: we were W bartenders. Not only did I need to do everything that a normal bartending gig required, I also had to aim for something extraordinary in the lives of my customers—something that would really Wow them. Sometimes this meant recommending things that only a Seattle local would know about, like taking the foot ferry to West Seattle for a weekday lunch on the beach or dining at a hidden local restaurant on the quiet north end of Capitol Hill. Sometimes it meant phoning across town for an uncommon spirit or a wine that a customer wanted and having an overeager brand rep deliver it to our front door. But this is a customer philosophy that exists in any brand of high-end service, and it was a detail of the job that I was more than happy to deliver. I liked to make people feel happy and appreciated. And I was, for the most part, proud of where I worked and what I did.

Starwood was—I must admit, when I was first hired there—one of the better corporations that I’d ever worked for. Healthcare packages were generous and affordable and had relatively low deductibles. There was an employer-match commitment for contributions to retirement, and low-risk stock investment options. Employee discounts for Starwood-brand hotels were likewise very generous, sometimes shockingly so, and one could routinely secure drastically reduced rates for rooms at even high-end properties around the world. One of my coworkers at the time, whose brother worked for a major airline, took such advantage of this particular perk that the two of them frequently tag-teamed airfare and lodging benefits, paying little more than taxes and processing fees for trips to places like Paris, Bangkok, Oslo, and New York City.

But the W itself was still a strange, strange place. Everything was about “brand identity,” and managers were always neurotically preoccupied with doing things to reinforce our not-like-the-other-hotels trendiness. We hired DJs to spin house music during lunch on weekdays and brunch over the weekends. We served meals on narrow wood planks. And every year, around Thanksgiving, we erected some truly bizarre monstrosity in the middle of the lobby and were told that it would be our W Christmas tree.

One year, this “tree” was a tentacled mess of pink and yellow fluorescent string with an elongated, pulsing white strobe in its center. Another, it was a series of circular glass sheets, in total maybe one hundred of them, which were layered like a cake from base to peak and made me think of a tornado. Then there were the mirrored boxes filled with mirrored balls, stacked like presents, and crowned, where the angel might normally go, with a blinding, neon pink W.

In retrospect, I suspect that all this was a selling point when it came to the Starwood portfolio and to Marriott’s decision, ultimately, to purchase it. Prior to the merger between these two companies, Marriott didn’t have trendy properties; they were the no-frills business brand. They were the hotel you stayed at when you had a conference on a Monday and Tuesday before you flew out early Wednesday morning. They had no hotel trendy enough to have the nerve sufficient to erect a precariously leaning tower of glass and call it a tree—so this tree, and everything it stood for, was what Marriott International, Inc. wanted for Christmas.

In celebration of the historic Starwood-Marriott marriage, it was announced that a three-day celebration would be hosted by a W hotel somewhere in the world so that all the eclectic W eccentricities could be brazenly on display. All the bigwigs would be invited: general managers, regional directors, international overseers; and because our hotel was one of the original hotels in the W brand, and because we had recently undergone a significant and distinct renovation, the W Seattle was selected as the location for the weekend reception.

***

The entire hotel was tirelessly entrenched for the weeks leading up to the celebration. The cooks designed and redesigned countless rainbow-colored hors d’oeuvres and entrées, served on leather, clay, and latex. The managers paced the lobby, trailed by an army of W engineers, pointing to this or that couch or chair and moving it slightly to the right or somewhere out of sight in the basement. And the bartenders created cocktail after cocktail, encouraged again and again by supervisors to “really let loose with these. Experiment. WOW us!”

In some ways, it was like being written a blank check. As a bartender, especially when you work for a larger business, you’re generally expected to do things a certain way, over and over again; rarely can you deviate from a predetermined formula. In our hospitality microcosm, this was like landing a Guggenheim fellowship or a MacArthur grant. Pour costs, food costs, money, was no longer of concern. We could experiment and create without any restrictions.

“Yeah, okay,” we smirked. But we crafted elaborate, absurd concoctions. We layered amaros and ports in medicine vials. We strained purple-and-pink spirits into empty salt-and-pepper shakers. A particularly memorable drink from this period of unadulterated Whimsy involved the hollowed-out carcass of an Anaheim pepper, filled with blanco tequila, pineapple and strawberry shrub, a touch of salt, and a splash of champagne. I’m not sure how we propped the pepper up. I think it was sort of corkscrewed into a Mason jar filled with dyed seashells.

Two days before the big weekend, a cartoonish character with a job title like manager of magnificence or ambassador of amazing checked into the hotel unannounced and immediately began to survey the scene. He critiqued everything from the fur-upholstered furniture to the dining room’s stark, minimalistic design. Soon, he made his way to the food and drinks. He sniffed and then dumped a viscous and fluorescent cocktail directly into a spotless sink. He spat out an amuse-bouche in disgust. Constructive criticism is one thing; across-the-board dismissal is another. Normally, I would have been offended by somebody telling me that every drink I made them was awful, that everything coming out of the kitchen was garbage. But it was hard to take the guy very seriously.

“This is all wrong!” He tugged at his pin-striped pajama bottoms and rolled up the sleeves of his yellow corduroy bomber jacket. Then he ran his fingers through his bleached mohawk. “Look at yourselves! This will be a disaster if you don’t step it up.”

Almost everything that we had come up with as a hotel was scrapped. New furniture was wheeled in. Lighting was accented with blue and purple and yellow wherever possible. And our menu, insofar as the bar and kitchen staff had drafted it, was reenvisioned. All with the director of disappointment peering always over our collective shoulders.

The obsessive director was not an anomaly in corporate culture, though he was, certainly, an extreme. I had seen many like him before—people whose entire job description is to go from property to property and find things wrong with them, or, as he might put it, ways to optimize. But the trouble with this common corporate philosophy is that sometimes there isn’t really anything wrong. Some of the most beloved, successful restaurants and bars exist for years, decades, generations, simply because they don’t change. And some of the finest recipes—in food and drink—are astounding in their simplicity. The Negroni has three equal parts: Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin. Béchamel, essentially, consists of butter, flour, and milk. That corner restaurant that is still standing, and thriving, and that you love so much, they do it because that same dish you fell in love with several years ago is still just the way you remember it. And it’s still the same because it is perfect just the way it is.

But try telling that to the commandant of change.

We did as we were told. And when the three-day extravaganza began, the hotel looked like a demented peacock: shockingly colorful, shrieking shrill music, posing however possible.

The top-tier management from Marriott were collectively delighted. They slurped the gold-dusted oysters with champagne mignonette. They sipped their steel horns filled with an otherworldly blend of cucumber soda and Chartreuse. And they paused one after another to deliberate over the “meaning” of a mural above their cocktail tables depicting a creature who was half octopus, half fighter jet.

Our chief critic remained apprehensive, though he would retract his hand at times when he instinctually reached out to identify another glaring fault. Instead, he zipped up his lambskin jacket with gold-studded shoulder pads, straightened his spine, and gulped a tincture of sparkling wine and caviar, coughing as he finished.

***

After the congratulations were imparted, and the illustrious three-day event was through, we settled back into something resembling normalcy. Over-the-top drinks, but not so absurdly over-the-top. Over-the-top food, but not served by people wearing embroidered gloves or on dishes forged with seal bones. It felt like waking after a frenetic night of fever dreams or some epic night of partying: the staff in a daze; all of us moving a little slower than usual, regaining our bearings one drink or food order or new customer at a time. Eventually, I mixed someone something mundane like a Manhattan or a cosmopolitan, and when nobody shouted at me to serve it in a jeweled goblet or to garnish it with a lit sparkler, I breathed a long sigh of relief.

But when the fiscal year drew to a close, we soon discovered other unfortunate changes as Marriott employees. Our healthcare plans became less generous and comprehensive. And it was rare now to secure significant hotel discounts in any destination, domestic or abroad, and when you did it was usually at an affordable property: almost never at any of the luxury lines.

As much as we were told that we would remain the same W property, the Marriott powers that be couldn’t resist making some changes to the restaurant and bar menus as well. Our mostly locally sourced beer-and-wine list was largely exchanged with the same boring selections that populate every other Marriott-property menu. The kitchen stopped seeking out local, high-quality meat and produce in the same way, and suddenly the menu was inundated with many of the same generic sorts of things that you will find at every standard business hotel in every city in America.

What remained was the shell. The veneer of W. We could no longer keep good people in the kitchen, because the pay was poor and the work was boring. But that beef patty puck on our once-delectable burger was still presented on that same wooden plank. My coworker could no longer tag-team discount rates and globe-trot to wherever he and his brother wished to go, but now he could shrug and admit that there were—technically—more properties in the world where he could stay. I could no longer tell my friends and family that I had amazing healthcare, “even as a bartender!” But I could still tell them that I was insured.

One evening, I had to tell a regular who spent a lot of money at our property that we were out of all his favorite wines because of changes to our menu and distributors, and his exasperated sigh, the way he shook his head, will always stay with me. We’ve all felt this way before, I think, when corporations consolidate to expand their profit margins and businesses we like suffer the consequences. It’s not just that things change and that one has to adjust to something new. It is that things change, almost uniformly, for the worse: to the detriment of regular people; to the benefit of corpulent corporations.

From what I gathered from the staff who were hired after the merger, the HR training sessions remained largely the same. It was still W this and W that. Except, now, the notepads were embroidered with the word Marriott rather than Starwood. There was still the same song and dance of corporate history, but now it was largely the story of the Marriott family tree, with the W hanging like window dressing. HR kept up their enthusiasm, regardless, from what I heard. There were still quizzes. Gift giveaways.

“And you get a prize!”

“And YOU get a prize!”

But I like to imagine a different version of this routine, replacing a lot of what I was told in that training meeting with the colder, corporate truth. I imagine that HR duo, with their robotic smiles and blouse-pinned microphones, posturing like old times, only to say something like “Try not to get sick while you work here!” before admitting that thousands of Marriott employees were, in fact, at that exact moment, on strike in several major cities around the country. They demanded fair pay. Protection against sexual harassment. Decent health care. They wanted that Wow! that the W, and other properties, promised them. And they wanted it Now!

“But what, exactly, does the W stand for?” someone would inevitably inquire, pausing their vigorous note-taking in their flimsy Marriott notepad with their faded pink W Seattle pencil.

“We are so HAPPY that you asked!” The game-show hosts from HR would exclaim and jump about. And then they would launch into their familiar, fatigued refrain, their list of all the wondrous adjectives and positive connotations that the letter W apparently stood for all at the same time. But here I imagine them reaching the end of this strange tautology, and something suddenly occurring to them for perhaps the first or the thousandth time as their postures soften and their smiles fade: that a letter means nothing, inherently; that a corporation will never own nor mass-produce sincere human emotions; that to believe a W stands for anything, besides being an arbitrary character, is both bizarre and inane.

Still, they will lean forward, their eyes laden with lethargy.

“But more than anything …”

All together now.

“W STANDS FOR W!”

 

Stephen Haines is an M.F.A. graduate of Western Washington University and the former managing editor of Bellingham Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Los Angeles Review, Invisible City, Pacifica Literary Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle.

Making of a Poem: D. A. Powell on “As for What the Rain Can Do”

Joshua Sampson, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245.

How did this poem start for you?

This poem began as a silence of wishing. As one does when falling silent. One wishes a something that isn’t happening. Or a something that is happening but should happen (one wishes) differently. In this case, I was in my kitchen nook. Outside it was raining. But raining in that dire way—trees falling, streets flooding. And endlessly so. San Francisco was at the bottom of what meteorologists were calling an atmospheric river. In thirsty California, rain is so often wished for. And now here I was, wishing it away. I didn’t want to be against the rain.

Was there a certain word or image that catalyzed your writing?

The phrase “well you know what so-and-so can do” was floating around my brain, only I had plugged rain into the spot marked “so-and-so.” And it seems as soon as I caught myself thinking negatively about the rain, I felt a correction in my thinking was in order. So I went to all the places rain might go, trying to select mostly positive things. Flood, for example, is usually a negative, but the flooding of a rice field is magical—it creates a safe haven for birds while hindering weeds. The first two lines seemed to strike a nice balance with each other—one long and one short. So I kept that pattern going.

Did the poem come easily, or was it difficult to write?

It just all fell out pretty much as it is, except that the sixth stanza was written after the seventh but seemed to belong before the seventh. Otherwise, my choice was to be gentle with this poem and let it spill out line by line, one at a time, as if each line were the only answer to the question of what the rain could do. Each line was made to stand in a couplet with one other line. Only in the fifth stanza do two lines of a couplet actually refer to each other. Otherwise they are meant to be odd couples. Sadly, there were seven such couples, so they wound up being a sonnet. But maybe they were headed for sonnetness all along? I don’t know really. Partners at a dance choose each other for all sorts of reasons and fall into patterns of motion. I let the poem tell me what it wanted. I let it have its way with me. Maybe I encouraged it? When one has gone into a wishing silence, one doesn’t know what wish will come to fill it.

Do you wish you’d done anything differently?

I have no regrets.

 

D. A. Powell is the author of five books of poetry, including Repast: Tea, Lunch and Cocktails and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. 

The Cat Book

Cat Playing by Oliver Herford. Public Domain, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

What’s your favorite Dawn Powell book? I’m beginning this way because critical essays on Dawn Powell always emphasize her obscurity, her failure to achieve fame or fortune in her lifetime (1896–1965) despite her enormous output. Just once, I want to skip that part. Let’s pretend I’m writing this from a parallel universe where Dawn Powell is the literary legend she deserves to be, where everyone knows the story of the Ohio-born New Yorker whose sparkling, lacerating fiction distilled the spirit of the city. And maybe you really do have a favorite Dawn Powell book. Mine is A Time to Be Born (1942), no question—the other day I was rereading it in the park and attracting stares because I kept laughing at its farcical scenes and snappy one-liners (“They couldn’t have disliked each other more if they’d been brothers”). But you might instead be partial to The Locusts Have No King (1948), or to her luminous short-story collection, Sunday, Monday, and Always (1952). Or maybe you prefer The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, which weren’t even written for publication (they weren’t printed until 1995) but rank among her funniest work. If you love those diaries and have a trollish sense of humor (which, if you love Dawn, you probably do), you might give me a joke answer: Your favorite Dawn Powell book is Yow.

Yow was Dawn Powell’s first and only children’s book project—as she put it in her diary, “a story to be read aloud.” All its characters were cats; the conceit was “a complete cat-world with humans as pets.” She wrote it in 1950. No, 1952. Actually, 1954. Make that 1955. Okay, 1956. Just kidding. Yow doesn’t exist. Or, rather, it exists only in the diaries, as a project that Powell is constantly on the verge of starting. She spent the final sixteen years of her life resolving over and over—for real this time!—to write “the cat book.” Even on her deathbed, Powell refused to give up on Yow. “Drying up, weak, no appetite,” she wrote in one of her last entries ever. “Will take liquid opium plus pills I guess. God how wonderful if I could get some writing done—if, for instance, I could knock off the cat book just for fun.”

Heaven knows it’s not unusual for writers to have ideas and not follow through on them. (You should see my diaries.) But it fascinates me that Powell was so utterly defeated by a kids’ book about kitty cats, because writing usually came so easily to her. From the twenties onward, she published a new novel every other year, in addition to ten plays and around a hundred short stories in her lifetime. On the side, for extra cash, she churned out book reviews and the occasional Hollywood screenplay. She did all this while managing her institutionalized son’s medical care, her husband’s alcoholism, and her highly active social life in New York City (and, relatedly, her own borderline alcoholism). Powell had many problems, but writer’s block was never one of them. On February 14, 1962, she recorded the death of her husband: “Joe died at about 2:30.” Five days later, she wrote: “Fatigued, numb, brainfogged yet must reassemble novel. … Must have it done by Monday.” And she did.

Yet Yow wouldn’t come. Hubris, it appears, was at least partly her downfall: she assumed that a children’s book would be easy to write, a mindless hack job. Her diaries are full of self-reminders to get Yow over with, as if it were a dental cleaning. On April 2, 1950: “Remember to do cat book for Julia Ellsworth Ford juvenile prize.” July 15, 1954: “Plan to finish Eva story, also ‘Yow’ story over weekend, maybe.” December 16, 1961: “Will do the Scrubwoman story and ‘Yow.’ ” March 15, 1965: “Getting excited and clarified on novel. Would like to rush it—also do the lovely play and the ‘Summer Rose’ one and the cat one.” Even in that deathbed entry, “the cat book” isn’t a grand plan; it’s something she hopes to “knock off.”

Perhaps a lesson here is that writing a children’s book is much harder than it looks. But it really is a loss for children’s literature that Powell never got the hang of it, for she understood children as very few writers do. She may not have been particularly fond of them (March 23, 1952: “The Child Dictatorship. Visiting parents must use language and ideas suitable for children. … Censor is present. Revolt possible”), but enjoying the company of children is not necessary for understanding them. A Time to Be Born contains a throwaway observation about childhood that knocked the wind out of me the first time I read it:

For some reason women, flouted in love, invariably find an incomprehensibly satisfying revenge in soaring socially. “I will give a white-tie dinner for eighteen,” they promise themselves. “How he will burn up when he hears about it.” … The idea that the defaulting lover will be hopelessly chagrined by this social soaring (no matter how he may abhor such a formal life) is as fixed in the female mind as is the child’s dream of avenging itself on Teacher by slowly flying around the room with smiling ease.

It’s so casual, so tossed off, and yet this turn toward childhood fantasy is so vivid. Had she had traveled through time and read my fourth-grade diary, in which I detailed this exact fantasy? No, she simply remembered—genuinely, viscerally remembered—what it feels like to be little.

She remembered it well enough, in fact, that she got an entire novel out of it, the autobiographical My Home Is Far Away (1944)—my second-favorite of her books. As the novel recounts in lightly fictionalized form, Powell was seven when her mother died, and her traveling-salesman father remarried a monstrously abusive woman. A precocious child, Powell kept diaries and wrote stories even then; when she was twelve, her wicked stepmother burned them all as a punishment. In response, Powell ran away from home to live with her favorite aunt. One could easily imagine a version of this as a novel for children, but Powell rendered it as adult literary fiction. As she wrote in a 1945 diary entry, “This book must not be merely the story of an ‘interesting child.’ It must show the adult which is already in this child and her impatience with the delay.” It’s a view of childhood that echoes another one of my favorite passages from A Time to Be Born:

As a child she could not remember having any child feelings, but only a sense of outrage at the indignity of a superior person, a full-grown princess, like herself being doomed by some mean witch to what seemed endless imprisonment in the form of a child, suffering all the humiliations of smallness, dependence, tumbles, and discipline. It disgusted her to be buttoned into leggings on some one’s lap and to be afraid alone in the dark and to hurt when she fell down when her mental inferiors, namely her parents, suffered none of these things.

It’s a classic Powell cocktail of comedy and empathy, and it hints at what might have blocked her from writing Yow. Powell was a cat person, and her diary is quite sweet on the subject of her cat, Perkins. Named after Powell’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, she was the only pet Powell ever had; when the cat died in 1945, Powell declared, “I cannot have another pet—it would be unfaithful to my little dear who liked no one but me, knew no other cats, no mice, no love but mine.” Her obituary for Perkins is one of her most charming character sketches: “Very dainty from the start, she waited like a modest bride till I was in bed with the lights out, then washed herself and leapt softly onto the bed, tucked herself in my neck and nuzzled off to sleep.” But sweetness and charm were not what animated Powell as a novelist, and maybe cats weren’t complex enough to sustain the attention of an author whose interest was human beings in all their undainty immodesty. To put it another way: Powell liked cats, but she loved people. “The artist who really loves people,” she wrote in a 1948 entry, “loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is ‘cynicism.’ ”

I won’t speculate that the name Dawn Powell would be better known if she’d succeeded at writing for children. It would be greedy, in any case, to wish for more than the treasure trove of work she gave to us. Still, I’m a little obsessed with the slender empty space on the bookshelf where Yow should be. You’d think the cat book would have been easy to write. You never know what’s possible and what isn’t, in the span of a lifetime, until you try, and try, and try, and try, and try.

 

James Frankie Thomas is the author of the novel Idlewild.

Fall Books: Zadie Smith, Moyra Davey, and Maya Binyam Recommend

Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself.

Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now?

A man walks down the street trying to recollect the final lines of an unfinished poem he had been composing two nights ago when the phone rang. It was his seventy-four-year-old mother calling to remind him of the suit she’d ordered for his birthday, now ready for collection at the tailor’s, although it was likely alterations would have to be made. He reaches the corner and treads on a large corrugated nail that goes rolling off the pavement and into the street. The man’s first thought is that this nail has fallen out from somewhere inside him; his second thought is that it dropped out of the woman wheeling a bicycle a few metres ahead. His third thought is that the nail fell out of the teenager with the pierced lip who delivers the post each morning. Unable to draw any conclusions, the man casts one final glance at the nail now lying parallel to the tire of a parked car and returns to the matter of the unfinished poem, which, should he ever complete it, will surely fit him better than the tailor-made suit.

What I love about Chloe’s work is the way it stages a series of rejections. It is not especially psychological. (The man does not think the nail has fallen out from inside him.) Nor is it overly obsessed with what we might call the relational. (The man does not think that the woman dropped the nail.) It rejects sociological generalizations. (The man does not think that the nail is the fault of this generation, or the internet, or “the way we live now.”) It is also beautiful. It sits like a jewel in your mind. It is not in the business of offering the reader prefabricated conclusions about the nature of social reality presented in the overfamiliar language of journalism, activism, or advertising. It is refreshingly unbound to any temporal sense of necessity. Chloe’s writing matters not because its topics are ripped from today’s headlines but because she is trying to illuminate this world using only words. The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s. In what way can a human being be made to feel like a bug? asks Kafka. What’s more significant in a person’s life? asks Chloe. Events, ideas or things? Nails, poems, or suits? And the single-minded search for words that “will surely fit”—better than any template or tailored suit—is what animates every page of this wonderful book.

—Zadie Smith

A friend in London handed me a copy of Kate Briggs’s The Long Form as I was about to board a plane, and I quickly read a hundred and fifty pages in the air. Over the next week or so the book bled into my dreams and my consciousness; I could think of almost nothing else but this story of a young single mother and her newborn, both in a desperate quest for sleep. There is a fly-on-the-wall quality to the prose, which sustains a quasi-verité account of the derangement (and joy) of new motherhood, whereby we imagine a story composed in real time, its author holding the baby in one arm and writing with the other. The Long Form is also an exhilarating experiment in form, an examination of the function of time in the novel, which includes an irresistible graphic element that punctuates the narrative and helps to conjure the stagelike setting occupied by the maternal dyad. Briggs invokes E. M. Forster—“Every novel needs a clock”—and indeed her novel’s timepiece has us on the edge of our seat, turning the pages in anticipation. I finished The Long Form and started again from the beginning; I wanted to understand how this miracle of a book had come to be; I was not ready to let go.

—Moyra Davey

Last month, I picked up Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez, a debut poetry collection out next week. Together, the poems have the quality of a diary whose pages have been scrambled. Time moves according to its own logic, sometimes conflicting with the body moving through it. Someone is always leaving, arriving. The poems stake out beginnings and endings almost obsessively, but then fail to oblige them. Mother, father, sister, brother: the relations are cyclical, slippery, each person moving in and out of the thing they represent. In “The Night Before I Leave Home,” Gonzalez writes:

My brother turns to me near sunrise
to ask, What do you think he’s doing? Right now?

And I spin a story of a father
waking to polish his teeth, spit blood
into the eye of a porcelain bowl, wash a face like my brother’s.

That was a game, yes, us seeking the man
he was when not hurting us one and then the other,
and then the game ended

It’s so easy to read poems too quickly. But I’ve been trying to return to these periodically, spontaneously, when I’m not so desperately seeking plot—though they contain that, too, and more.

—Maya Binyam, advisory editor

Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums

W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Korsika Sept 95.”

I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away.

 

—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo

The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance.

The photographs in the published work of W. G. Sebald represent a similar miscellany of beginnings, with each peculiar form interrupting and channeling the text as it moves toward its inevitable close. “Fiction,” Sebald once observed in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, “is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient.” To resist this dynamic, he concedes, is a difficult task for both the reader and the writer. However, an innate desire to “arrest the passage of time” persists, and it is this that draws us to “certain forms” of visual art. For example, he continues, when you look at a painting:

You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this—they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow.

For Sebald, considering the debris gathered in these “tiny pools of timelessness,” as he called them in another interview, provides us with the material for assembling alternative histories—novel configurations of people, things, places, and events contingent on nothing but a shared reprieve from oblivion. Historiographically, these patterns are dynamic, their potential to coalesce into a meaningful image temporary. The provisional nature of this knowledge, like the content of a found photograph, he suggests, corresponds to the precarious nature of its materiality. Any inclination to consolidate such transitory matter into a meaningful design, he told the journalist Michaël Zeeman,

has no higher ambitions than, for a brief moment in time, to rescue something out of that stream of history that keeps rushing past. This is why, among other reasons, I have photographs in the text, because the photograph is perhaps the paradigm of it all. The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in a box in an attic. It is a nomadic thing that has only a small chance to survive.

Not all of Sebald’s photographic salvage is reproduced in pattern books of his prose. Those that are possess a particular characteristic, a resilience in relation to the flow of the text that changes—like the stones in the Bay of Ficajola—the conditions of their context. Inherent within their makeup is something that resists their erosion into words, something that must be seen and not read. A picture, explained Sebald in one of his last  interviews,

being visual information, can be contemplated, it does not have to be decoded in time. You can just sit and see it, and the ideal reader for me would be a reader who doesn’t read the text but sees it, who lifts it out of the perennial wasting which occurs in time.

The images are there not only to guide and channel the reading but to fundamentally transform it—their work is to transform the act of reading into looking. As Theodor Adorno, the German critical theorist and longtime influence on Sebald, wrote in his exegesis on “melancholy science,” Minima Moralia: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.” In the moment of looking, the text, pushed to the peripheries of vision, is rendered almost transparent; pushed to the limits of focus, it dissolves into a field of gray. Like the moons in Saturn’s rings, it is in this nebulous fringe of shifting patterns that the photographs find simultaneously both their origin and their annihilation. “I begin by surveying things I’ve accumulated: notes, documents, bits of transcribed interviews,” Sebald explained in another of his final interviews. It is here, among the aggregated fragments and remnants that the photographs most often belong.

Watching a video of Sebald, at his desk, surveying his photographs with magnifying glass in hand, it is tempting to interpret his work—the prose fiction, the poetry, the essays—as existing, prior to the texts, as an assemblage of pictures. One imagines a pristine terrain of images being dissolved into the current of language, each photograph gradually written away until only the most unyielding ones remain. The jumble of photographs and manuscript pages obscuring and framing each other in the television image of Sebald’s desk are reflected in a similar mixed spatial and temporal aggregation on the printed page, where the whole is defined as much by overlapping and masking as by juxtaposition. Sometimes the edges of the photographs cause shadows to fall on the text and vice versa. Windows and lighthouses, doorways and gravestones: sometimes, the images protrude from the temporal plane of the writing (the time of the narrative); sometimes, they are visible from below the surface. The interruption of reading performed by the images confirms the irregular chronological dynamic of Sebald’s work. Constantly hindered, sent back into countless eddies and still backwaters, time, like the mineral water that is sieved through the salt frames of Bad Kissingen, percolates as much as it flows.

W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Amerika 97.”

From “October Heat Wave”:

From the flyover
that leads down
to the Holland
Tunnel I saw
the red disc
of the sun
rising over the
promised city.

By the early
afternoon the
thermometer
reached eighty-
five & a steel
blue haze
hung about the
shimmering towers

whilst at the White
House Conference
on Climate the
President listened
to experts talking
about converting
green algae into
clean fuel & I lay

in my darkened
hotel room near
Gramercy Park
dreaming through
the roar of Manhattan
of a great river
rushing into
a cataract.

 

W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Den Haag” (1993).

From The Rings of Saturn:

Report has it that when the house [the Mauritshuis] was opened in May 1644, three hundred years before I was born, eleven Indians the Governor had brought with him from Brazil performed a dance on the cobbled square in front of the new building, conveying to the townspeople some sense of the foreign lands to which the power of their community now extended. These dancers, about whom nothing else is known, have long since disappeared, as soundless as shadows, as silent as the heron I saw when I set off once more, flying just above the shining surface of the water, the beat of its wings calm and even, undisturbed by the traffic creeping along the bank of the Hofvijver. Who can say how things were in ages past?

 

W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Paris IX 99.”

From Austerlitz:

For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

 

Max und Moritz. Old Rectory, Poringland, Norfolk, August 1999.

 

Max und Moritz. Old Rectory, Poringland, Norfolk, August 1999.

 

From “On the Natural History of Shadows” by Nick Warr, in Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials, edited by Clive Scott and Nick Warr, forthcoming from Boiler House Press this month.

Nick Warr is a lecturer in art history and curation in the School of Art, Media, and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is also the East Anglian Film Archive’s academic director and photographic collections curator.

Two Strip Clubs, Paris and New Hampshire

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse au Moulin Rouge, 1890. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Every summer, my mother would take me and a friend to Salisbury Amusement Park to eat fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar and go on the roller coaster until we were sick and then get our minds blown by the 2001 Space Oddity dome, which spun us around in complete darkness while a narrator intoned about galaxies and time warps. But best of all: every hour, on the hour, the Solid Gold Dancers jogged out of a pit in the center of the fairgrounds and, sweating under the August sun in full gold lamé, would kick, spin, leap, and boogie for fifteen minutes while disco music boomed (those loudspeakers carried barely any treble, which made for a peculiar version of disco). Sunrays glinted off the sequins and I was hypnotized. It all jumbled together in my mind, the sensations, the nausea, the ecstasy. That gold-flecked feeling of 1979 faded away until thirty-five years later, when my French husband, Bruno, took me to the nightclub in Montmartre that started it all: the Moulin Rouge.

I walked through red velvet curtains into the past and straight onto the set of the sweetest magical movie flop of my youth, Xanadu! Roller skates, a swimming pool rising up out of the stage where we could see women dancing underwater. In costumes made of diamonds and skin. I was in heaven. The show lasted two hours. It had everything: a fantastic light show and sound system, constantly changing sets—a castle, a pirate ship, a circus, a London street corner at the turn of the century, a … a Chinese opium den?

Even though the women had naked boobies, they still looked like angels. I think angels do have naked boobies, now that I’ve seen this show. And there were so many of them! A teeming flock or herd. Singing and kicking and dancing. Costume changes for every act. A personal favorite was the giant red-feather puffballs with legs sticking out. No arms, no head, just a big red puffball on legs. One act featured good-natured Siamese twins, another strongmen who balanced whole humans on a single elbow, wow! At the Moulin Rouge, clowns are bare-breasted along with the angels. And I shouldn’t have been surprised that in France, one clown act per nightclub experience was not enough … there had to be two.

 

Naked boobies in Versailles. Photograph by the author.

 
“My husband is a clown,” I told our table with pride, as they were American tourists, and perhaps did not know that, here, clowns are cool. “His clown name is Mikoto.” Bruno’s normal job was funeral director, which may explain the desire to go to clown school. He is obsessed with them. One time he made me watch a sad French-clown DVD that opened with one old clown trying to hang himself but there was another clown in giant shoes at the other end of the rope. Next came a giant foam phone and the clown just saved from death made a beeping sound and the entire audience in the DVD and Bruno cracked up. What the heck? Except for the beeps, the clowns in the video didn’t say a word, and they moved very slowly. I could feel my face growing grimmer and grimmer as the audience and Bruno buoyed higher and higher on rare joy. Nearly everything in life seemed to elicit disdain from Bruno and his countrymen, and mimery is the exception? “It’s poetry,” Bruno tried to explain. “Expressing emotions with the body. Slow, small, the void. I love things that come from nothing and go back to nothing. Leave no trace.”

There are few things in life I just cannot understand or stand, and my husband’s passion for the sad clown is one, and it’s such a big part of our life. On our second date, he took out his clown nose and put it on. He said, ominously, “You can say anything when you have this nose on.”

My clown name would be American McNasty.

Upon my announcement that Bruno was a clown, there followed a shocked silence.

“I’m afraid of clowns,” the American husband at our table said.

“He’s afraid of clowns,” the wife confirmed. “I’m drunk,” she added, just giving information. Every table got an exquisite bottle of champagne, and she’d chugged it while I’d been transfixed by the beauty.

For the final act, everyone came onstage: clowns, strongmen, mermaids, roller skaters, red puffball heads, turn-of-the-century London streetwalkers, and angels, arm-in-arm in a line, doing an increasingly frantic cancan as the music crescendoed along with our hearts until the moment we just couldn’t handle any more, and the velvet curtain blessedly dropped. A collective sigh rose like a giant feather, and then came a thunderous applause and foot stomping. After which we filed dazedly, spent, out of the theater into the peculiarly light Parisian night.
 

A shaved tree in Versailles. Photograph by the author.

 
Bruno and I met on a Paris park bench when I was visiting the country. We fell instantly in love and got married, and when we were deciding where to live, there was only one answer, and it wasn’t my country.

Bruno didn’t exactly hate America. Not like England, which he very exactly hated. From a teenage vacation to our shores forty-five years ago, he had formed this idea of us as made up of equal parts Coca-Cola, air-conditioning, white teeth, and “everybody friendly and excited”—that last bit said in the tone with which one would read medical symptoms off WebMD when trying to determine the nature of a family member’s illness. It took two whole years to convince him to come experience my homeland with me.

Wanting to give him the most American first day possible, I arranged for us to arrive on Halloween—a holiday the French don’t celebrate because it’s “commercial.” They prefer, say, Bastille Day, which features a parade to commemorate a bunch of people hundreds of years ago storming a prison and setting free the seven inmates, who all went on to get killed in a riot the following day. This time of year was also good because I wanted him to see the leaves changing colors, which happens in France, too, but the foliage in France is sparser, more … curated. The French plant their trees in rows and then sometimes they shave them into rectangles! Driving down the street in France in fall, you don’t get the feeling you do in New England—that you’re Moses and God parted the sea for you except it’s a sea of fire. A giant sea of fire.

As we moved further away from the airport in Boston to New Hampshire down double-yellow-line roads encroached by trees of all different heights and widths and raggedyness, Bruno’s normally squinty eyes got bigger and bigger. “I feel like I’m in every one of your American movies right now,” he said. “Wild and free, like the legend. Soon a car following us will appear in the mirror, and there will be the chase, and then the big explosion.”

I had a similar sensation upon first arriving in Paris, except in reverse, and I was in a book instead of a movie. Everything was concentrated and old and unfriendly and tasteful and civilized and well done and planned—even the doorknobs. Even the buttons! Everything tiny and tasty—a tiny coffee from a tiny man at a tiny table, and it was the most perfect coffee you could ever imagine, and I was the only one who spilled, like a big dumb animal. And when I bent down to wipe up my mess, I saw that even the metal feet of the tiny table were pieces of art carved long ago that would last forever. One time I overheard a long and tortuous conversation where a Frenchman tried to convince another Frenchman that nothing exists, and my bulgy eyes got squinty.

The first real American “meal” I introduced Bruno to (not counting the gargantuan chocolate chip cookie wrapped in plastic we purchased at a gas station) was a Dunkin’ Donut decorated with a black-frosting spider on an orange-frosting cobweb and a “spooky” drink with a curly straw adorned with a plastic goofy Dracula face on it. He sat seriously in his professorial sweater and his glasses and his, well, French face; he ate and drank it to the end, and then he gave his assessment. “It’s more surprising than scaring. It’s all the same texture, only the chemical sugar or the chemical salt changes the taste. It acts like food: I swallow it and I will shit it. But it is not food.”

Next I took him to a dive-bar strip club in Bedford, New Hampshire, which I first visited at the age of sixteen with my father. He had just gotten out of prison, where he learned how to do commercial refrigeration repair, which is what we were doing at the club. Bruno comes from a big family and old money, and I come from mostly just one sickly mom and no money. So it’s a view into another class as well as another culture we offer each other. The Moulin Rouge called me back to the heaven I disappeared into in my youth to escape the rough edges—any condition is bearable as long as you sing and dance it. But I’m not ashamed of the rough edges. They gave me a sharp eye with which I can find innocence and a sort of maternal benevolence in people and things that may appear to be anything but. Cheap, creepy doughnuts and windowless buildings with (probably) cheap, creepy patrons felt like the pathway down which to lead Bruno into the strange beauty of my childhood.

It was early afternoon, so it was just six girls in various Halloween getup, the bartender, and us. Bruno had never been to a strip club before. Bruno is a seducer. Sex for him is communication, emotion, a tango. Me, not so much. I’m an erratic dancer, pretty erratic emotionally too now that I think about it, and way too goofy for sexy talk. I just dive into sex like I do everything else, with my enthusiasm making up (I hope) for any lack of skill. Bruno had seen burlesque, of course, but it didn’t do much for him. The body without the relationship was just not his thing. And the prospect of a lap dance made him feel squeamish. He had friends who would go to prostitutes, but not in the sense American men do. These were more like mistresses. There was repartee, dinner, sometimes even no sex! I think in France it’s almost impossible to see women as objects, and just everything is more fancy and more distant. In France, taking your clothes off is an art form. You don’t just grab an artist and stick a euro in their garter.

As Bruno seemed nervous, I suggested he order a drink. He picked a Tahitian cocktail and it was served in a kid’s plastic beach bucket, just a giant amount of alcohol over a giant amount of ice (this bartender had no way of knowing how offensive ice is to the French) with a can of Truly sticking out of it. Bruno was saddened. “This is too high a level of aggression,” he said.

He then explained to me what a Tahitian drink should be like, could be like, and I explained to him that we don’t really notice these kinds of details. We are not concerned with presentation, and we don’t savor. The idea is to get drunk. “But why?” he asked. I shrugged. There is no real answer to that question—about anything in America—except to ask back: Why not?

The girls did not swarm us. They were content to huddle together like penguins keeping their mostly naked pelts warm with each other’s body heat. A Black girl in cat ears and a tail ventured out to do a few spins on a pole. Another girl pulled up a chair to face her, yelling out terms of endearment and ranking her performance with superlatives. They were both laughing.

“The whole day’s been like this,” the bartender told us. “No one.” The day shift is rough.

I asked Bruno if there was anything like this in France.

“We have places like this, but not the mood. The mood of being lost in life, in the belly of a ghost ship. And we don’t have the way of being nice to each other, the women.”

Another girl took over the pole—this one blonde and blowsy, with big strong thighs and small natural breasts and a bit of a belly. She wore cowboy boots and a fringed skirt and nothing else. She seemed nice. Looked like she had a kid or two. I said to Bruno, let’s pull up some chairs.

Hanging from the pole like a bat, she asked us how we were feeling. I explained that it was Bruno’s first time. She seemed to feel that was marvelous. She was making a lot of eye contact, chatting, smiling, even laughing. She lifted up her skirt and slapped her own ass in our faces, which made us laugh. “You guys are fun,” she said. It felt genuine, intimate—we were just hanging out making each other laugh. She bent down and massaged my shoulders. Holding eye contact. It was pleasant, not dirty—like petting an animal, or your pet petting you. Telepathically, she said, “We’re friends. We understand each other. Life is hard. Let’s smooth the way.”

I had supplied Bruno with two hundred dollars in fives, and I gave him a poke. He held one out to her hesitatingly. She gave a sideways judo kick that stopped just short of his face, and held the leg at that angle until he gave up on waiting for her to take it from him, and stuck it carefully in her boot. We stayed with her for the next three songs until all the fives were gone.

Our girl was the best representation of my roots I could have hoped for—of how much humanity rough edges have to offer. She just did it, did her thing, against bare, dark walls—no backdrop at all, no spotlights changing colors, no costume change. She made something out of nothing, with her physicality and her generosity. She held nothing back. She poured all of herself out onto us all at once, and just kept on pouring.

When I think of her—how she blends crass and top-class in one bold spirit—is when I really miss America. Because it’s what I know in my bones, and that’s the only thing I can’t find in this beautiful, beautiful country I now call home.

Back in the car, after the club, Bruno was smiling, a sight I don’t often see. He was in a dream. “Is it possible the friendliness is real? People could be that nice?” he wondered. “It was not sexual, but sexual, too. Like life. It was life!”

After that I took him to a honky-tonk where the stools are in the shape of butts. You put your butt on a butt—now that’s my idea of humor.
 

 

Lisa Carver published the nineties zine Rollerderby and has written twenty-four books, including, most recently, No Land’s Man. She lives in Montmorency, France, with a bunch of stepchildren and animals.

The Paris Review Wins 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won a 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges wrote:

For seventy years and counting, The Paris Review has remained wonderfully distinctive and sophisticated, never short on chic art direction, impeccable curation, or international flair. The interviews make you ache to have been in the room for the conversation. Readers will find exceptional work by feted writers in every issue, but The Paris Review does not rest on its legacy: it deftly employs its footing as the standard bearer for American literary magazines to uplift talent that hasn’t yet gotten its due.

We are deeply grateful to the Whiting Foundation for providing the literary ecosystem with vital funding and support, and we congratulate our fellow 2023 winners: Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mizna, n+1, Orion, and Oxford American.

Announcing Our Fall Issue

Sometimes, as the Review’s print deadline looms, I catch myself fantasizing about a return to university life. I should clarify that, in this fantasy, “university” is a quiet, spartan room, with a bed, an armchair, and a constant supply of paperback classics. It is entirely lacking in lectures, academic conferences, or tenure-track infighting, and also bears no resemblance to my actual experience as an undergraduate: a fog of nervous smoking, romantic dysfunction, and tearful struggles to conjure up an essay on, say, doorframes in the work of Henry James.

Sadly, there is, to my knowledge, no program or job at which reading is the sole responsibility—and, of course, nothing complicates a love of books like the attempt to build a life around them. Not one but two pieces in our new Fall issue suggest, for instance, that even too much Shakespeare can have side effects: in Rosalind Brown’s “A Narrow Room,” a conscientious student on deadline for an essay about the Sonnets finds herself continually waylaid by an erotic triangle of her own invention, while Ishion Hutchinson recalls his undoing as a homesick sophomore alone in a windowless yellow closet in Kingston, Jamaica, obsessing over local folklore, Crime and Punishment, and Hamlet. And in Munir Hachemi’s rollicking “Living Things,” translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, four arrogant, well-read young men spend the summer after graduation working in the South of France, searching for that “hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined experience,” only to find that their education has in no way prepared them for the outside world, with its onslaught of corruption, exploitation, and force-fed chickens.

My tendency to romanticize university likely originates from those moments when getting through the assigned reading became an almost mystical interlude. I sometimes think of the night I spent with The Book of Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century text usually considered the first autobiography in English. A visionary with a less-than-kosher approach to the saintly life, Kempe had run a brewery that went bust and given birth to fourteen children before she persuaded her reluctant husband to join her in a vow of chastity and embarked on a whistle-stop pilgrimage—much to the irritation of her fellow travelers, who quickly tired of her God-given gift of tears. I’d loved Margery, her shameless grandiosity and the frankly sexual tone in which she wrote about God and his Son, and I’d forgotten about her until a few years ago, when I came across Robert Glück’s ravishing, funny, heartbreaking novel Margery Kempe (1994), which interweaves her story with that of his all-consuming affair with a younger, richer man. As Glück tells Lucy Ives in his new Art of Fiction interview, he, too, first discovered Kempe as an undergraduate, while studying medieval literature at UCLA, and was drawn to her precisely “because she set everyone’s teeth on edge,” but it wasn’t until he found himself in anguish over a breakup that he realized he could set his midlife crisis alongside hers. The novel broke over me as what Kempe would call a “revelacyon,” and turned me—as it has many others—into a proselytizer for Glück, who has a knack for conveying the religious power of desire. “When people would ask me—and sometimes they did—to write about them,” he tells Ives, “I’d reply, ‘First, you have to break my heart.’ ”

Glück, incidentally, is not a believer in the “short story”; he prefers the conte, the tale, or the piece of gossip. We’ll leave you to ponder the differences—I’m not sure I can always tell; it’s possible that my mind was somewhere else during that particular lecture—as you read this issue, which also includes an Art of Theater interview with Lynn Nottage, poetry by Bei Dao and D. A. Powell, and debut fiction by Liam Sherwin-Murray.

Looking for Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Photograph by Laura Kolbe.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf brings into sharp focus the question of what to do with one’s life. I’m referring not to the text, to the content, to anything written on the pages, but to the objects: the books, the five published volumes.

The first bit of Woolf merch I ever bought, in Woolworths in about 1975, was a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Waves. On the cover was a portrait of the author by someone called Vanessa Bell. I couldn’t read what was inside, gave up after about five pages, and never tried again. Around the same time, I bought similarly lovely editions of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I did get through, under compulsion, at university, though I struggled with the preciousness, the sense of someone walking—writing—around on tiptoe. That was pretty much it for me and Woolf’s fiction until the pandemic when I was nudged toward it by an unlikely enthusiast from the American West. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry writes of how, after a serious illness, he found, for the first time in his adult life, that he couldn’t read fiction—unless it was by Proust or Woolf. I picked up the novels again and, despite McMurtry’s lobbying, failed to make any progress.

Which was surprising because I had, by then, come around to Woolf in several ways. In 2003 I’d gone to see Patti Smith perform at Charleston, the home of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa. This was one of several rustic hubs of Bloomsbury life, and it’s obvious, as you are shown around the bright rooms with their painted furniture, the sanctuary and liberation this place offered from the oppressive dreariness of English life between the wars. The handmade look is like a precursor of the make-do aesthetic I was familiar with from London squats in the eighties, which remains my ideal of interior design. This fitted in well with Smith’s performance when she read passages from The Waves, which sounded much better as Virginia’s clipped English “yellow” became Patti’s New Jersey “yellah.” If it sounded almost impossibly cool and contemporary that was because in places the original had given way seamlessly to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations.

Shortly after that I read plenty of Woolf that I could relish: A Room of One’s Own, the essays in The Common Reader, the essays on almost everything, in fact, and, crucially, the Selected Diaries and Selected Letters, published by Vintage and bought in Delhi in 2010. For me, then, Woolf fell into that subsection of writers whose minor works or private writings I preferred to the major ones. The closest comparison was with John Cheever, whose work can be arranged in an ascending order of importance, which is an exact inversion of the generally accepted hierarchy of merit: novels, stories and, at the peak, the posthumously published Journals. There’s also an overlap with D. H. Lawrence, much of whose best writing after Sons and Lovers is scattered across essays, travel books, dashed-off poems and letters. We’ll come back to Lawrence a little later.

Having read the Selected Diaries I was on the lookout for the remaining volumes of the complete Diary. I say “remaining” because I had inherited or absorbed volume one (1915–1919) when my wife and I merged our libraries. It was part of a lovely Penguin edition, each cover featuring a photograph of the author’s desk cluttered with all the paraphernalia of the writing life. I read that first volume as a test. Would it prove that I needed to read the other four volumes or, on the contrary, that for a lazy reader like me the Vintage selection was enough? Mathematically the answer was the latter. I was skipping, or reading without dwelling on, approximately the same ratio of entries that had failed to make the cut of the Selected. Or, to put it the other way around, I was concentrating on the same proportion of pages that had been included. There were further complicating questions, of course: Were the bits I skimmed or skipped the same passages that the editor had omitted? Did my de facto selection coincide with hers? They weren’t and it didn’t. Entirely absent from the Selected, the entry of September 10, 1918, when the twenty-six-year-old Woolf decides “to write down [her] impressions of Paradise Lost” was enough to clinch it. For a very simple reason: it’s one of the best things ever written about Milton:

The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful, & masterly descriptions of angels bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror & immensity & squalor & sublimity, but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon ones own joys and sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men and women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage & the woman’s duties. He was the first of the masculinists; but his disparagement rises from his own ill luck, & seems even a spiteful last word in his domestic quarrels. But how smooth, strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry! I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot & imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing in to, long after the surface business in progress has been despatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities, & masteries. Moreover, though there is nothing like Lady Macbeth’s terror or Hamlet’s cry, no pity or sympathy or intuition, the figures are majestic; in them is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.

Clearly, I had to read all five volumes which meant that I had to find the remaining four.

It is possible, as you don’t need me to tell you, to buy almost any book on the internet, however long it’s been out of print. But doing that robs life of one of the things that gives it purpose. For the last decade I’ve always been vaguely looking out, in real life, as it were, for these other volumes. In the last five years the search has intensified. Even if I went out to buy something unimportant, like a propelling pencil, say, I was conscious that this errand might be the pretext that led to the discovery of those supremely desirable objects, volumes two to five. It was frustrating but that is the nature of any of life’s projects, like being stuck in your sagging tent with nothing to read but a rain-warped paperback of The Waves, hoping the weather will break so you can make the long-postponed attempt on the summit of K2. The waiting and thwarting are part of the undertaking, enhancing the eventual achievement. Hence the joy of that unforgettable day, October 8, 2018. I was shopping on Golborne Road, on the way to buy sea bass from the fishmonger—and there it was: volume five (1936–1941), in very good condition, outside a junk shop, for a pound. If that’s not a moment of (budget) being I don’t know what is.

I had the first and last volumes and needed only the piggy (three, to be exact) in the middle to complete the set. The key word here is set. I was now obliged to get the remaining volumes in that same Penguin edition, and finding these, in the wild as it were, was unlikely to happen since I was living in America (which made the discovery on Golborne, when I happened to be back in the UK for a short stay, even more extraordinary). Game on, as they say!

What happened next, as so often happens in life, is that I did the very thing that eats away at the foundations on which a fulfilling life is built. I broke my own self-imposed rule and bought volume two (1920–1924) on the internet. I was going through one of those irrational, insane, balance-of-the-mind-disturbed phases when I couldn’t think of anything to read so I clutched at the life-saving straw of volume two. It arrived in worse condition than advertised. It looked like a book—it was a book—but it was also a lesson and rebuke in printed form. Even though there were no previous underlinings in biro—that would have been intolerable, possibly fatal—every hour spent reading this copy was so tainted by the foxed cover, the brown paper, the all-around shoddiness, that I could hardly bring myself to open it.

So let’s summarize things as they stood at the beginning of this summer. I turned sixty-five, had an estimated ten or fifteen years left to live, two volumes to find, and half of volume two still to read in this grubby edition that I couldn’t stand the sight of. And another thing had come into play, something I’d become increasingly conscious of over the previous decade. Occasionally we all have to look up dimly remembered quotations on the internet. That’s an invaluable resource but at a deeper level of satisfaction I need to see the words in full context on an actual page.

One of the strange noncoincidences in the lives of Woolf and Lawrence is that despite having so many business associates, acquaintances, friends, and enemies (in Lawrence’s case people were constantly shifting back and forth between these last two categories) in common, they never met. Lawrence corresponded briefly with Leonard Woolf about a house rental in Cornwall but in the seven volumes of his letters (all of which I own) he makes no mention of Leonard’s famous wife. He never set eyes on her but from a train in Italy she saw him sitting on a bench with Norman Douglas, looking “pinched and penetrated.” That is the most amazing glimpse in the whole of literature. I’d first read about it in The Faber Book of Writers on Writers and then in various biographies of Lawrence. I guessed I’d read about it in the Selected Diaries, too, but to properly experience the unexpected fleetingness of this sighting, in the flickering hurry of life, I wanted to read it in the real time of the complete Diary. I knew it had happened but didn’t want to know when it was going to happen, so avoided looking it up or reading anything else about it. There were many reasons for reading the complete Diary but this was the main one. That, as Philip Larkin concluded in the course of another train journey, was where I was aimed. To use another sporting cliché, there was everything to play for.

Life went on. I had other little bibliographic targets to hit, was preoccupied with and distracted by the usual jumble of half-formed intentions. I had books to write, friends to see, drinks to drink, promises to keep. But always there was the ongoing project of looking out for volumes three and four of the Woolf complete diaries. There were also what might be called corollary occasions when, shortly after leaving a well-stocked secondhand bookshop—I’m thinking in particular of the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood—I realized that although I happened to have bought a copy of News of the World by Paulette Jiles (a book I hadn’t even been looking for that had been made into a film not worth seeing) I’d somehow forgotten all about Woolf’s complete diaries, the very things that I was most looking for. It was like that moment in a car when you become suddenly conscious that for the last twenty minutes you’ve been completely oblivious to the fact that you were driving. The thing is, that’s part of driving too; that’s book-hunting, that’s living alright.

And then I read that, having been unavailable for ages, the diaries had been republished by Granta. Wow.

This involved a dizzying recalibration of purpose but several things were immediately clear. First, it really took the shine off getting volume five for a quid. Second, it was going to be all or nothing. I couldn’t have volumes one, two, and five in the old Penguins and three and four in the new edition. This was not just me being obsessive. No one in their right mind could have countenanced the ungainliness and asymmetry of that. Either I’d keep looking for volumes three and four in the old Penguins (with the attendant risk that I might snuff it before I found them) or splash out on the new Granta ones. I grappled with this for days even though it was, from the start, a total no-brainer. I got—was always going to get—the lot.

This reissue is one of the great publishing undertakings of recent years, a public service practically, albeit one that involved my eating a big plate of crow. Each volume has a new foreword by a contemporary writer. Why didn’t they ask me? I’d love to have done that! But there’s no denying the elegance of the objects, each of which has a stylish black-and-white photo on the cover board (there’s no dust jacket). The paper is a relaxing cream, and the type, large and clear, is so easy on the eye I wonder how I squinted through the smaller font and cramped pages of the Penguins. Volume two of the Granta comes in at 447 pages compared with 371 in the Penguin. With the text having been reset like this I spent quite a bit of time transferring my old annotations from the first Penguin volume to the new pages of this edition, but that’s fine, the kind of boring clerical task that I enjoy—almost as much as I enjoyed getting back on the horse and picking up where I’d left off reading volume two.

The other remarkable thing about these elegantly hefty volumes is that they’re surprisingly light. But not light enough to take to Italy where I was going to be spending a month. This would involve a lot of train travel so I reverted to the wretched old Penguin volume two. For the last several days of the trip my wife and I were staying with our friends Joanna Hogg and Nick Turvey in Tuscany. Nick had rejuvenated a decrepit old table in our bedroom by painting it primrose yellah. It looked very pretty but he must have used the wrong kind of paint. It wasn’t wet but it remained tacky and the cover of volume two became glued to it. Part of the photo came off, stuck to the table, and the stress of this led to the whole cover falling apart shortly after. It was a delicate situation. Nick could claim that I’d slightly spoiled his “new” table but from my point of view he’d completely ruined my horrible old book. It didn’t really matter because as soon as I returned from Italy I transcribed all the latest markings into the new Granta edition and moved on to volume three. But imagine if I’d brought that new edition and set it down on the table overnight? Would the glossy finish have been enough to protect it (the book from that viciously clingy table, I mean)?

Anyway, the important thing is that volume three (1925–1930) continues to be great, even if bits of it are a bit of a bore—quite a lot of a bore in quite a lot of places, actually. I’m still slipping and skipping at roughly the same ratio and rate that I did in volume one but am plodding along, inching towards the point when VW will see DHL on the train in Italy. I was hoping this might have happened in volume two when I was in Italy, on a train ideally, but it didn’t. It’s still to come, I’ve no idea when. At the moment it’s all Knole House, Vita, Orlando, rain and fret in England. Then we suddenly leap from March 1927 to May. An editorial note explains that the Woolfs spent most of April in Italy. There are no entries for April but “VW’s letters give a spirited and detailed account of their travels; see III VW Letters, nos. 1741-7.” So the episode with Lawrence—the episode that wasn’t even an episode—wasn’t in the Diary at all. Obviously I don’t have III Letters but I’ve checked my edition of the Selected and yes, there it is: a letter to Vanessa dated 9 April 1927:

Looking out of the carriage window at Civita Vecchia, whom should we see, sitting side by side on a bench, but D.H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas—unmistakable: Lawrence pierced and penetrated; Douglas hog-like and brindled—They were swept off by train one way and we went on to Rome.

It’s as I’d remembered it, but even better: “pierced” rather than “pinched.”

The fact that this passage is not in the Diary don’t mean, to put it in McMurtryese, that I ain’t going to continue reading them. That’s the thing about life, something you think lends it a purpose doesn’t last forever. A thing you’d set your sights on turns out to be a misremembered mirage, but that doesn’t mean you give up and stop; like some parched traveler in the desert you keep stumbling on, keep on keeping on in that same direction. Then something else comes along, perhaps taking you in a different direction altogether and that may well turn out to be an illusion too but God knows you’d be lost without it. You tell yourself that it’s better to be a never-say-dying moth than to drown yourself in a stream of consciousness. You say: Remember, if you keep looking there are still bargains out there! You start wondering about trying to get hold of all the volumes of the complete Letters, even though the surprise has been drained out of that much-anticipated surprise nonencounter on the train in Italy. You think, Maybe if the Diary proves a success Granta will consider reissuing the Letters too and might ask me to write a foreword—or, even better, pay to reprint this little essay, maybe without the moth-and-drowning gag which was both juvenile and in rather poor taste. Which means, on reflection, that it is indispensable.

 

Geoff Dyer is the author of many books including, most recently, The Last Days of Roger Federer.

Jets and Trash

In May 2005, I graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism. That fall, I got a job off Craigslist working for a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan man named Richard Zaher, who was creating a jet charter company called Paramount Business Jets, seemingly by himself. He lived in a dark, bare apartment in Lower Manhattan with his sister. I went there zero to four times a week over around three months. In his bedroom, we worked on his company’s website.

The website’s purpose was to entice customers to call the company, which for a fee would facilitate travel by private jet. My job was to (1) copyedit the text he’d written; (2) find and Photoshop images of jets, jet interiors/cockpits, limousines, mansions, cruise ships, champagne, and other things to put on the website; (3) collect statistics and write descriptions for a hundred-plus types of jets. My work is still online, I recently learned. This sentence made me laugh a little, reading it in 2023:

Richard was also an actor. His acting name was Baktash, which seemed to be his birth name. He’d been in two movies. He’d starred in FireDancer—the first Afghan film submitted to the Academy Awards, a film assistant-directed by his sister, Vida, who when letting me in the apartment a few times had seemed quiet and stoic, like her brother—and he’d appeared briefly in Spike Lee’s Inside Man.

At events for Inside Man, which was released during the time I worked for him, Richard got Angelina Jolie (who’d earned a pilot’s license in 2004), Clive Owen (who’d starred in Inside Man), and Michael Rispoli (The Sopranos) to agree to provide quotes for Paramount Business Jets’s “accolades” section. All three celebrities told Richard he could write the quotes himself. I remember Richard pretending to be Owen while working on the Owen quote, saying variations of it aloud.

I worked seated on the edge of a futon—Richard’s bed—in sofa-mode, using an Apple desktop computer that was in front of me on a tiny square table. Richard sat facing the same direction I faced, four feet ahead and two feet to the right of me, at his desk. I saw his back most of the time. I liked not being looked at. His bedroom had only his desk, the futon, the square table, and a closet. Taped high on the walls, near the ceiling, somewhat comically out of view, going around half the room, were pieces of computer paper with motivational statements printed on them. I didn’t notice them until several days in the room. I don’t remember what they said.

I was impressed by Richard’s sustained, patient focus. He would stare at the website for hours, inspecting it for slight improvements. I related to this method. While working on my own writing, before and/or after work, in NYU’s library, I would stare at the computer screen silently with a blank face, reading my writing as if I were reading it for the first time, trying to gauge how it made me feel and why, due to which words, images, commas, et cetera. Richard’s ability to do this not with creative prose that he was emotionally invested in but with a website about jets impressed and moved me.

Sometimes he’d read parts of the website aloud in a voice unlike his normal soft-spoken one. Sometimes he’d ask me what I thought about a passage of text. He seemed to trust me, which made me feel good, because I had low self-esteem. He’d occasionally call the person doing the website’s HTML to tell him what changes to make. The website, though still in development, looked very professional. If I had seen it on my own, I wouldn’t have suspected the company to be two people in a bedroom.

While Richard stared at the screen and I described jets in friendly, balanced prose in which I tried to maximize readability—while also attempting to vary my focus and syntax—we often listened to my mix CDs, which featured indie bands like Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes, and Jets to Brazil. One day we listened to a Neva Dinova song that began with these drawled lyrics: “I can’t stand this anymore / When you scratch away the layers, there’s nothing there, and I don’t give a fuck / You can’t hurt me anymore / Chop off my arm, there’s a hole in my heart / I don’t give a fuck.”

Richard laughed and stopped the CD and said he was sorry but it was too depressing. I was surprised he’d been listening to the lyrics. Then I was surprised I’d assumed he hadn’t been listening to the lyrics, which were almost all about sadness, low motivation in life, unrequited love, and other topics that didn’t seem good for business. The Neva Dinova song that we (fortunately, for Richard) didn’t finish ended with two minutes of this group-sung chorus: “The world’s a shitty place, and I can’t wait to die.” Lyrics like these pleased and consoled me back then. My own writing featured similar sentiments.

We also worked in silence, and sometimes we listened to his CDs, most of which were soundtracks to epic movies set in the remote past. We listened to the soundtrack to Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, many times. Richard was built like Crowe—six foot one, strong. Personality-wise, he seemed calm, quiet, taciturn, almost a bit autistic, which I liked. We rarely talked, and never about our personal lives. He was born in Afghanistan in 1976, fled war as a child, and arrived in the U.S., in Virginia, when he was ten, I knew from IMDb. I was born in Virginia in 1983, grew up in Central Florida, and had a writing degree, he knew from my résumé.

After I finished writing the jet descriptions, I stopped going to his apartment but continued working for him remotely—gathering photos, writing celebrity bios, updating his IMDb page, making an IMDb page for his sister. Then, sometime in early 2007, I worked for him in person once or twice more, at his new apartment in, I think, Queens. His company was opening. He offered to pay me a salary. I declined because working full-time for a jet charter company seemed dreary and stark; I was focused on my writing, and would soon get a part-time job at a restaurant whose food I liked. Our last communication was on October 13, 2007, when Richard emailed me asking for his IMDb login info.

I didn’t think about Richard much until 2020, when I wrote the first draft of what you just read, and then checked and saw that Paramount Business Jets still existed, as it had the few other times I’d looked over the past thirteen years. It seemed to be doing well, with at least eighteen employees. Richard now lived in Virginia, I learned. He had at least two kids, and had founded a nonprofit organization, Best You Best Me, that was, according to its website, “based on the philosophy that ‘we are one’ and that by helping to alleviate suffering in another is helping to alleviate suffering in ourselves.”

On Best You Best Me’s YouTube channel, I watched a video titled “Helping the Homeless in DC – Jan 2019.” It started with Richard in a car, saying in his quiet voice, “Here we are in D.C. I’m about to go out there and … find … some homeless person … and give him some money … and some advice.” The video showed a long-range view of Richard approaching a man sleeping on grass in a park, wrapped in a blanket. As poignant acoustic-guitar music played, captions narrated what was happening, including the dialogue.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Richard. There was no response. “Excuse me, sir. Hello.” The caption stated, “He slowly pulled the blanket lower. I could now see his tired, red, blue eyes.” The man replied, “What do you want?” Richard said, “I just want to tell you God bless you, and I want to give you one hundred dollars.” Richard kneeled, and they seemed to talk some more, though the captions did not relate what they said to each other.

The video cut to the next scene. Richard approached “a gentleman sunbathing on a bench.” Richard asked, “What do you do when it gets really cold?” The man answered, “I go to a homeless shelter.” They talked more, then the video cut to a black screen showing a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote: “Somewhere along the way, we must learn that there is nothing greater than to do something for others.” The video ended. He hadn’t given advice, at least not in the video. I felt endeared and touched by his video’s brevity, awkwardness, and earnestness.

I watched more videos. There were eight total. Two of them showed Richard and other people picking up trash in a forest and alongside a road in Virginia. The videos became longer, more involved. In the seventh, Richard said he’d wanted to help West Virginians, and that one of his organization’s directors had suggested McDowell County, one of the poorest counties in the U.S. After calling churches asking how he could help, Richard drove a truckful of food five-plus hours to the town of Welch, where he interviewed residents about their lives and stayed overnight in a church.

I was surprised that Richard had started a nonprofit and was posting documentaries of his charity work, not because it seemed unlike him—I barely knew him—but because it seemed unlike most people. His behavior calmed, interested, and, in a general way, inspired me.

When I next looked up Richard, three years later, earlier this year, as research for this piece, I saw that his organization now held an annual donation drive to McDowell County, and had posted a video titled “Saving A Turtle In The Middle Of The Road.” There were now thirty-one videos, including one at a school in Mexico, and one about helping a stranger in a snowstorm.

I printed and read articles and interviews to learn more about Richard/Baktash’s history. When he was five, he and his family fled from Russian invaders. Some of his family members were killed. He, his sister, and their mother survived. “We left everything,” he says in one article. “The freedom fighters took us out as there were jets flying by. We hid in the caves and went from night to night to cave hotels.” They lived in India for five years before moving to Virginia with thirty-five dollars. Richard’s mother, who’d worked in radio in Afghanistan, was hired by Voice of America, an international radio broadcaster. On the weekends, she worked in a convenience store.

When he was twelve, Richard started a business mowing lawns. Later, he worked as a dishwasher, busboy, costumed performer, and door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman. He graduated with a degree in aerospace studies from a flight school in Florida. Around this time, at age twenty-four or so, he also acted in the film FireDancer. Three years later, in July 2005, he founded Paramount Business Jets, hiring me a few months later. Inside Man, his second and last movie, came out in March 2006.

Paramount Business Jets struggled for around a year after opening, until 2008, when Richard put together a travel package to visit the Seven Wonders of the World by private jet at a cost of $356,250 per person. He knew it wouldn’t sell, but it generated publicity, attracting customers. In 2013, Paramount Business Jets appeared on Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing companies list, and five years later Richard founded Best You Best Me with the motto “Alleviating suffering through acts of kindness.”

One of my favorite Best You Best Me videos is from 2022. It starts with a black screen and gentle piano music. Text appears and fades, a sentence at a time: “One morning in 2018, I had a realization.” “The kindness I received and gave was key to living my purpose.” “That inspired me to start Best You Best Me.” “And weeks later, our first project began!”

The video cut to a shot of Richard explaining that he’s going to clean up a back road near where he lives. Brief, first-person-view clips show him buying tools and renting a truck from Home Depot. Next, the video shows the road, trees, and cloudy November sky as Richard drives the truck. “I’m overriding my mind right now,” he says, the words appearing on the screen. “Because my mind is telling me, ‘This is … stupid.’ But my heart says, ‘You have a purpose.’ ”

 

Tao Lin is working on a book titled Self Heal: How I Cured My Autism, Autoimmunity, Eczema, Depression, and Other Health Problems Naturally. He lives in Hawaii.