The Paris Review's Blog, page 689

What We’re Loving: Carson, Comyns, “Carriers”

Detail from an illustration by Ellen Weinstein for the summer issue of Nautilus, a science quarterly.

I don’t care if I never read another charming little book about Marcel Proust—not now that I’ve read Anne Carson’s chapbook The Albertine Workout. In fifty-nine numbered paragraphs (or perhaps, exercises), Carson reviews what little we know about Marcel’s mistress, the most-mentioned and yet most elusive character in Proust’s work. Carson’s findings take us deep into the questions of what love and sex mean to Proust, and in our own lives. As the title implies, you can read The Albertine Workout in one sitting, but you will keep feeling it for days. —Lorin Stein

This week, I discovered the Web site for Nautilus, a science quarterly. I have yet to see the print version, but if it’s anything like the online iteration—elegantly and smartly designed, with illustrations that often have the look of early- to mid-twentieth-century artwork—then it’s worth picking up. The content isn’t what you’d necessary expect from a science magazine (I grew up around hardcore publications like Nature and Science): there’s fiction, photography, and art, in addition to pieces on, say, evolution, lepidoptery, architecture, and ecology. I came to the site looking for Lauren Weinstein’s comic strip “Carriers,” which she posted daily this past week. Weinstein is one of the best cartoonists at work, and this five-part story is proof of that. She and her husband are both carriers for cystic fibrosis, and the comic details her struggle in waiting to find out if her unborn child tests positive for the defect. Weinstein’s characteristic humor keeps pathos at bay, and she reflects entertainingly, by way of her terrific serpentine scroll-downs, on the how and why of genetic mutations such as this one. —Nicole Rudick

What do you think when you hear the name Luis Suárez? If you’ve followed the news this week, the phrases “biting lunatic,” “delinquent toddler,” and the “Hannibal Lecter of soccer” might come to mind; “family guy,” “superhuman,” and Uruguay’s “favorite son” haven’t crossed the minds—or lips—of many sports pundits. If you’re curious about understanding Suárez beyond the memes and gifs, Wright Thompson’s profile from late last month explores the Uruguayan player’s childhood and the mystery surrounding an incident when he head-butted a referee and received a red card in a youth match—which may or may not be true. What really stuck with me after finishing the essay wasn’t the story of the referee or the media scrutiny, but the history of Suárez and his wife, Sofia Balbi. After the pair fell in love at fifteen, Sofia moved to Spain with her family. Suárez, at the time working as a street sweeper, knew that he could never afford a plane ticket on his own. Instead, he dedicated himself to soccer until he became good enough to be picked up by a European team. The thing is, his “completely irrational” plan worked—he played first for Groningen, then moved to Ajax and finally to Liverpool, where he now plays. He married Balbi in 2009, and as Thompson writes, “He loves his family, and soccer gave it to him, and guarantees no Suárez will ever again pick up coins while cleaning the streets.” While this romantic tale doesn’t justify his actions last week, it helps explain the desperation you catch sometimes in his eyes when you watch him play, “someone who fights to win, no matter what … He bites because he is clinging to a new life, terrified of being sucked back into the one he left behind.” —Justin Alvarez

Regular readers of the Daily already know how Nicole, Sadie, and I feel about the neglected English writer Barbara Comyns. Last week it was my turn to read her gothic novel The Vet’s Daughter. It reminded me powerfully of something Donald Antrim told The Paris Review in issue 203: “In building another world through the fantastic I was making a set of rules that had to be observed, a logic that had to be carried through—that I was in some ways obeying the premise of the very opening line.”  —L.S.

Wilton Barnhardt’s Lookaway, Lookaway is an ideal beach read, particularly if your beach of choice is south of the Mason-Dixon. Out in paperback this week, the novel is a scathing but tender satire of the contemporary South, skewering the hypocrisies that attend a regional identity in flux. Barnhardt’s ensemble cast seems, at first, full of familiar caricatures—a mannered matriarch, a wronged sorority girl, a faintly bigoted Civil War reenactor—but his observations are so acute, and his ear so assured, that what should be a brittle, mean-spirited polemic of a novel is instead a large-hearted frolic: it’s preternaturally wise about these United States and those who refer to them as such. —Dan Piepenbring

This week’s big North Korea story was Kim Jong-un’s denunciation of that Seth Rogen movie as an act of war—it overshadowed a more interesting piece of news. The North Korean defector Shin Dong Hyuk, believed to be the only person born in a North Korean prison camp to escape from the country, gave a powerful and profound testimony last week to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Shin has remarkably mobilized the story of his experiences as a prisoner of the totalitarian regime to raise global awareness of North Korean human rights abuses. Blaine Harden’s biography of Shin, Escape from Camp 14, chronicles, with great candor and reverence, the grim details of Shin’s life growing up in a prison camp and his harrowing journey to escape. One of the most complex, devastating aspects of the book is the extreme guilt Shin harbors for coldly betraying his mother, with whom he never had the chance to build bonds of affection. You’ll read it in one sitting. And as a chaser, check out Shane Smith’s VICE doc, which tracks Smith’s boozy, wandering ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway to access North Korean labor camps in the forests of Siberia. —Chantal McStay

Nirvana enthusiasts will recall 1993 as the year of In Utero, but few remember it as the year Kurt Cobain collaborated with William S. Burroughs. Cobain admired the Beat Generation and held Burroughs in the highest regard—so much so that he contacted the novelist about working on a record together. The result was The ‘Priest’ They Called Him, a ten-inch record that narrates a heroin addiction in its final tailspin, infused with elements of grunge and spoken-word Beat culture. Burroughs reads impassively over Cobain’s guitar: “‘Fight tuberculosis, folks.’ Christmas Eve, an old junkie selling Christmas seals on North Park Street. The ‘Priest,’ they called him …” This past April marked the twentieth anniversary of Cobain’s death—both Cobain and Burroughs are gone, but the record serves as a fitting testimony to their respective ambitions. —Yasmin Roshanian

Philosophy of the World

Detail from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Kaufhaus im Regen, 1926-7.

In the summer, a trip to the grocery store or the laundromat can pose one existential conundrum after another. On seemingly every corner of the city, one is greeted by a young person with a clipboard in his hand, an enormous T-shirt on his back, and desperation in his eyes. And then come the questions—huge, unanswerable, world-shaking.

DO YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT?

SPARE A MOMENT FOR GAY RIGHTS?

DO YOU LIKE TO LAUGH?

ARE YOU REGISTERED TO VOTE IN NEW YORK STATE?

CAN I ASK YOU A QUESTION ABOUT YOUR HAIR?

YOU LOOK LIKE A FRIENDLY PERSON! CAN I ASK YOU SOMETHING?

ARE YOU JEWISH?

DO YOU LOVE CHILDREN?

If you are feeling contemplative, you may think, DO I like to laugh? It really depends on the circumstances. Sometimes laughter is inappropriate. There’s nothing fun about nervous laughter. And what about cruel laughter at other people’s expense?

DO I care about the environment? What does caring mean, really? Am I doing enough to lower my carbon footprint? Does using Mrs. Meyer’s soap and Small Steps paper goods mean anything? I can’t wait until I run out of dishwashing liquid so I can coordinate all my scents. “Small Steps” is such a smart marketing ploy. It helps the self-satisfaction of selfish people like me.

CAN you ask me a question about my hair? I don’t know! Maybe something is preventing you—a magical charm or spell. Maybe it’s a highly specific kind of jinx that doesn’t allow you to ask people questions about their hair.

Of course, you rarely think anything of the kind. You think only, fleetingly, that you want to avoid an unpleasant moment with this poor, young person and his awful summer job. That you have no interest in seeing some midtown comedy show. That you already have a hairdresser you like and don’t need the hard sell about some full-service package from a dubious salon. At most, you might question the logic of having three canvassers for Children International stationed on a single block; is the idea to wear you down?

Sometimes I entertain myself by imagining what different philosophers would answer if someone posed these queries. I recommend this game, which works especially well with Sartre and Schopenhauer—Fichtean idealism, after all, applies to most of these situations. No matter which philosopher you choose, it adds an element of intellectual engagement to any errand.

I don’t have the heart for straight-up snubbing; I always mutter “sorry” as I scuttle past. I used to be more apologetic—sometimes I would explain that I didn’t have much money, or already gave to someone else. Occasionally I would explain my reservations about a certain charity and their allocation of funds—well, when I was a teenager. (After one lecture about how my dad had abandoned his ancestral people, I learned better than to explain I was half Jewish.)

Yesterday, I was walking down Broadway and was accosted by three young people in a row, all advocating for children of the world. People around me stared straight ahead; I did my usual sheepish shuffle. The woman directly ahead of me, however, took a different tack. “I’m going to walk that way now,” she said pleasantly to the young man, indicating a direction that was not his, and did just that. I wonder what philosopher she was channeling.

W.T.Ph

Image: VectorOpenStock, via Wikimedia Commons.

And so the first round of the World Cup comes to an end with a bang from Thomas Müller, and—pace Ronaldo, who put on a fine late show—various degrees of whimper from the departing nations Portugal, Russia, South Korea, and Ghana.

At last, those of us who have followed Rihanna on Twitter for the last two weeks have found certain of her exigent questions answered: for example, to June 19’s “ENGLAND whatchu gon do?!!” we can now confidently say, “Nothing.” Other tweets of hers have been by turn prophetic, emphatic, and envy-inducing: “Uruguay defense is almost disrespectful,” also from June 19, uncannily anticipated Luis Suárez achieving full disrespectful status five days later. “W.T.Ph,” more exclamation than question, has been and will continue to be applied usefully throughout this free-ranging, attacking, and mesmerizing tournament. “Goal keepers getting phucking sleepy” has its own kind of lullaby poetry; and who wouldn’t want to be Germany’s Miroslav Klose, the coholder of the record for most goals scored in World Cup tournaments, who’s now, more urgently, an object of Rihanna’s undistilled affection? “My nigga Klose,” she tweeted on June 21. Lionel Messi, eat your heart out.

Coming up, eight games in four days. Brazil vs. Chile looks like a good one, while Uruguay, hobbled by a dementia of denial to which both team and country appear to have succumbed, probably won’t do much against Colombia. Mexico has played well, but we can expect the Dutch, with Van Persie and Robben, to outclass them. France should beat Nigeria, and most people who are not Greek will be rooting for Costa Rica to triumph over Greece. Germany vs. Algeria is a grudge match: at 1982’s World Cup, in Spain, Germany and Austria contrived a result that would see both teams go through at Algeria’s expense, a shameful performance that has not been forgotten in North Africa. Lionel Messi, whom Nigeria’s coach Stephen Keshi claims is from Jupiter (confirmation awaited from Tom Cruise) will beat Switzerland. And last of all, there’s what might be, in competitive terms, the cream of the crop: Belgium vs. USA. How far can this mercurial USA team go? Or rather: USA, whatchu gon do?

Jonathan Wilson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. He is the author of eight books, including Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. He lives in Massachusetts.

House-sitting and Other Work

Precarity and creativity in other people’s homes.

Charles Demuth, Modern Conveniences, 1921.

When I moved back to Portland, Oregon, in 2010, after four years away in New York and Arizona, no one would hire me. Not Whole Foods, not the local New Seasons market, not the upscale Zupan’s chains. “Thanks for your interest in the Deli Service Clerk/Courtesy Clerk/Cashier/Meat Cutter - Back up position,” an automated email said. “If your skills match up with the requirements of the job, we’ll be in touch to arrange an interview.” No one got in touch. Trader Joe’s wouldn’t even respond to my inquiries. If I, a thirty-six year old with college degrees and retail experience, couldn’t get hired to work a register, what hope could I feel in anything?

I subsisted on egg dishes and microwavable food. Whatever canned soups were on sale I bought by the armful. In lieu of a “real” job, I made it my job to spend very little money. Portland is a tough town for good employment. It has a glut of eager applicants and limited industry. Our main commercial offerings are arguably food, advertising, and stylishness. Combined with our large artist population, that means that countless musicians, writers, and painters are cooking and serving your meals.

Hope came from a local landmark, Powell’s Books, which hired me as a temp cashier in the summer of 2011. I’d worked at the flagship store full-time between 2000 and 2006, and the intervening years seem to have erased my employer’s memories of my often gruff customer service, my habit of sleeping on the lunchroom couch, and my tendency to use the company Xerox machine to photocopy material for whatever I was writing. That summer, by the large windows along Burnside Street, I stood at the cash register and pushed keys for four to nine hours a day. But when the season ended, the store created a few permanent part-time cashier positions, and I didn’t land one. “We’re sorry to say we’ve found somebody else,” my manager said weeks after my interview. He wasn’t as sorry as I was—he, with a job to cover his mortgage and health insurance.

I was back where I started. I struck out on my own and became a house sitter.

That’s misleading. It wasn’t really my doing.

An ex-coworker from Powell’s emailed asking if I wanted to watch her dog. Technically, this job qualified as house-sitting, since it involved sleeping at her house, but Diane was more concerned with her dog than her property. A devoted animal lover, she’d adopted this friendly mutt named Jasper from an organization in Utah and doted on him like a son. It was impossible not to. Jasper was adorably sociable. He loved long walks, chasing squirrels, and sitting by your feet when you sat at the kitchen table; that’s how his Canine OkCupid profile would have read.

Diane is tall, in her fifties, worldly and intelligent, with the sort of dry humor I always find amusing. She had out-of-state family affairs to attend to and would be away for a few weeks. Free food, free lodging, free Wi-Fi, and some cash—for someone scraping by, this was the perfect gig. Clearly it was an act of philanthropy and pity, knowing, as she did, that I had no work other than writing small, irregular freelance pieces for even smaller checks. She also wanted to give me a quiet place to write in a remodeled two-bedroom house far roomier and more comfortable than the cramped, gloomy one I shared with two other ex-Powell’s coworkers, their dogs, and their newborn daughter.

The idea of house-sitting had never occurred to me, but the prospect was exciting. I wrote back immediately with a simple “Hell yes.”

Her generosity lasted for more than two years. She’d go on vacation and I’d watch the house. She’d visit her aging father in Los Angeles and I’d watch the house. She’d meet her sisters in California and take care of family obligations, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. She was retired. She could do what she wanted. For some reason she chose to help me maintain my tenuous, creative existence; in return, I made sure her dog and home were safe. I only made a little money, but it was often enough to pay rent. I also got tons of writing done at her place, which also helped cover rent. When the room you rent only costs $250 a month, and you eat lots of tacos and Trader Joe’s gluten-free Pizza al Pollo Asado, you can do that.

A writer needs other skills than “craft.” You need to be industrious, flexible, and humble. You need regular work. The list of famous writers’ day jobs is familiar: Dr. Seuss the adman, Herman Melville the customs inspector, T.S. Eliot the banker, William Carlos Williams the doctor. William Faulkner famously got fired for reading the magazines in the Mississippi post office where he worked. Franz Kafka took a job at an insurance company and hated it.

There’s your profession, and then there are the odd jobs and one-offs you do to fill revenue gaps. As odd jobs go, mine are unremarkable. I painted a house once. I made sandwiches at Subway, tended the bar at a Christmas party, managed files on a college campus, tried to find work as a tutor, and did clerical work at my dad’s construction business after college. Safe and easy, these did the trick, though I’ve also sold my own chapbook on the streets, and I trimmed weed in a basement for two days; that hurt my wrists.

At Diane’s, I collected the mail, took out the trash, and greeted landscapers when they arrived. In the morning, I’d walk Jasper. After that, I’d cook breakfast without my shirt on and wander around in my boxers, the damp air of another person’s home cooling my skin as if it always had. Nakedness feels more naked in someone else’s space. Most times that sense of exposure made me feel at home there. Sometimes, it made me uneasy. When I hung my clothes in the closet, they hung beside Diane’s. When I took them out, some smelled like her. It wasn’t sexual; it was intimate. House-sitting is a collaborative, trusting act. There’s a sweetness in protecting someone’s belongings that is equal to the assorted kindnesses the homeowner affords. There’s also a sense of trespassing.

Diane always left me clean towels, but sometimes I needed a Band-Aid or lotion, so I had to search. Her bathroom had many drawers which made it hard to resist snooping, but I did, as a matter of respect. Some people I know said that when you hire a house sitter, you should expect the house sitter to go through your things. Whatever the homeowner’s expectation, though, I believe it’s my duty to respect people’s privacy. No snooping, no rummaging, no copping—or even searching for—pills. On the other hand, I didn’t respect Diane’s ice cream. “I ate all the pistachio and coconut gelato,” I wrote her in a text. “I couldn’t stop! I’ll leave you some cash.” She texted back: “No worries.” That was what I wanted to provide her: no worries.

Even though Diane’s neighborhood is filled with night life, traffic, and freaks, nothing ever happened. Nobody tried to break in. During the day, I sat at my computer. At night, Jasper and I sat on the couch, his face draped across my thigh as I read. I enjoyed the time so much that I barely thought of it as work, but these creature comforts were borrowed comforts, and the transaction reminded me of all that I wanted and lacked in life. I was at home here, and also, a drifter.

During this period, a few other generous souls offered regular house-sitting gigs, some of which paid in cash and writing space, and one of which paid in solitude and peace. Mary, a friend of Diane’s and another previous Powell’s coworker, let me hang at her house when she and her boyfriend went out of town. A witty, vocal Texan with long hair and an iced coffee habit, Mary’s generosity and progressive politics had won me over at Powell’s as much as her fire and temper had. She was passionate and authentic, her charm inextricably linked with her loyalties and blemishes. She’d left Powell’s to work with unions, and she extended me the same empathy that she’d extended to the miners and laborers she’d advocated for.

Mary’s boyfriend is a musician. They live in a small green house in a walkable neighborhood, and their basement is filled with records, CDs and instruments. In one corner stands a small recording studio, in the opposite, a washer and drier. When they were on tour, I parked myself at their kitchen table under a painting Billy Childish made, and I wrote for days and days, shoveling chocolate and tea into my mouth while guarding their house and equipment with my life. It energized me to know that such a talented person recorded demos under the same worn roof that I composed essays, to know that, in the damp space beneath my feet, he played late into the night, working out the melodies that he turned into songs. When I fetched my laundry from the basement, I passed a hanging garden of tour lanyards. They draped over rafters, the plastic badges listing the band names and year, and together composing a record of all the places he’d visited and people he’d entertained.

What you might call an invisible economy of house sitters exists across the country. Untold numbers roam our city streets, leaving their familiar bedrooms to stand sentinel over strangers’ homes while using them as getaways, weigh stations and de facto offices. As one 2006 AARP Magazine article describes house-sitting: “Imagine staying in some of the loveliest locations on earth—and all you have to do is feed the cats.” Websites like HouseCarers.com and Luxury House Sitting have emerged to connect homeowners with sitters, yet as Airbnb thrives and CouchSurfing.org gains millions of members worldwide, house-sitting goes relatively unnoticed as an industry. This is partly because it’s a cash economy, partly because it, depending on the client, bears such close resemblance to what you call “crashing at your friend’s place.” Don’t be fooled. The arrangement may be casually intimate, but it is business. Imagine what would happen if the house got robbed because the sitter failed to lock the back door.

If a novel depicted house sitters’ lives, its scenes would depict the complex relationship between the homeowner and sitter, the way trust is built between strangers in such an intimate setting as a home: how house keys are swapped, free food is provided or withheld. They would depict the life spent in that stranger’s house, including how much or how little house sitters snoop. The story would address the question of origin: How did this subculture start? And what did homeowners do before house sitters? Were there historical antecedents, or did people just leave their porch lights on to deter thieves? In the process, the story would illustrate how this group represents the face of what economists call precarity, or America’s new part-time economy, a place where increasing numbers of people have multiple part-time jobs with no health insurance, rather than a single full-time career.

To reduce costs and avoid paying for insurance, many companies have replaced full-time with part-time employment. Sadly, Powell’s does this. Other companies, including Starbucks, now cap workers’ hours under full-time, or change schedules week to week. House-sitting provides a way to earn supplemental, tax-free income, as well as the additional benefit of enjoying a higher standard of living in a nicer house and neighborhood than part-timers’ income can often afford—a welcome balm to one’s imperfect work life.

Although I still think of myself as a house sitter, I no longer am one. When a set of house-sitting offers conflicted with my day job, I had to decline, and the offers eventually stopped coming. In 2012, I landed a regular job: twenty-two hours a week at a tea shop. The tea is top-notch, and the shop is free of pretension and doilies. Customer service gets me out of the house and socialized enough that I don’t become feral, and for three of the four days that I’m not at the shop, I write.

Yet I revised this essay from another person’s house. A couple of talented writers just moved back to town this month, and they needed someone to watch their rental and dog while they attended a wedding. Was I available? I didn’t know. I hadn’t house-sat for over a year. I’d sold my car since then. I have that work schedule. And now that I live with my girlfriend in a well-lit apartment across town, I no longer need to escape to other people’s homes. Even if I did, long stays wouldn’t be easy without a car. But for these two, I agreed. I like them. I like their dog. I like quelling their worry by making sure they know everything’s taken care of while they’re away. The extra cash sounded nice. A few days walking a sweet dog in a different part of town also sounded refreshing. So here I am, out of retirement and writing at their kitchen table, and eating their food as usual. I may have outgrown the need to house-sit, but the benefits are evergreen.

But I’m thirty-eight. My girlfriend and I want to buy property someday. We want to take more vacations. Maybe one day we’ll have a kid. The wages of the part-time retail clerk-writer won’t let me contribute as much as I would like to financially. The question that looms for many people in my position is: What to do? For now, this.

Aaron Gilbreath has written for Harper’s,the New York Times, Vice, The Awl, The Believer, and Narratively, and he wrote the musical appendix to The Oxford Companion to Sweets. Find him @AaronGilbreath.

Keep Calm and—Stop It, Just Stop It, and Other News

Even the creators of the slogan didn’t like it.

Bernard-Henri Lévy remains, at sixty-five, the paragon of “noble insolence”: “Responding to a recent query from a Parisian newspaper about the secret of his perpetual youth, his advice was, ‘Don’t spend time with boring people.’ The unbuttoned white shirt—he tells interviewers that he would choke otherwise—is a form of social provocation that he doubtlessly relishes; it also constitutes a dandyish parlor trick, leading otherwise shrewd judges of character and intellectual talent to underestimate his political acumen and Puritan work habits.”
The “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster that launched millions of profoundly vacuous parodies is seventy-five years old today—but it was only first seen in 2001. The British Treasury refrained from printing it during World War II because they thought “the phrase was ‘too commonplace to be inspiring … it may even annoy people.’” Prescient.
Have novelists exhausted the supply of decent titles? Last year saw two books called Life After Life; this year there’s Remember Me This Way and Remember Me Like This; and Stephen King’s Joyland came eight years after Erica Schultz’s Joyland.
Celebrity novels, reviewed: Chuck Norris’s The Justice Riders “wraps up with Justice sharing the gospel with Mordecai, then shooting him dead after the bad guy rejects Jesus—which is sort of Norris’s worldview in a nutshell.”
To catch a (phone) thief: “You’d NEVER send a message with the incorrect ‘your’—no matter how plastered you are!”

What Talent Wants to Serve: An Interview with Donald Margulies

Photo: Ethan Hill.

The playwright Donald Margulies is at what he describes as a “delicious” point in his career. He’s written the screenplay for The End of the Tour, an adaptation of David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself that recently completed filming. His newest play, The Country House, opened June 3 in Los Angeles at the Geffen Playhouse, and begins New York previews September 9 at The Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It’s an “homage” to Chekhov, employing themes and images from Margulies’s favorites: Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull. It’s also his first play ostensibly about the theater itself. The play is an ‘off-stage comedy’ set during the Williamstown Theatre Festival, focusing on a family of actors who have returned to a familiar house in the Berkshires after the recent death of a beloved family member.

Margulies is the author of over a dozen plays, including The Model Apartment, Sight Unseen, and Dinner With Friends, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000. He lives in New Haven with his wife; he has a son at college in Minnesota. His workspace is a series of rooms on the third floor of his home, walled by books, with windows overlooking his abundant backyard. When we spoke, first in his “bill-paying” room and then over fat sandwiches in New York, he appeared energized by his career’s activity, as if even its description gave him inspiration. He is now at work on the book for a musical, an adaptation of Father of the Bride, which would be a first.

Has any of your writing for the screen begun as writing for the stage?

I’ve adapted three of my plays into screenplays—Sight Unseen, which has not been filmed, and Collected Stories and Dinner With Friends, both of which were produced for television—but I have never begun a play that I decided would be better served as a screenplay. In the case of my most recent screenplay, The End of the Tour, my long-time manager, David Kanter, sent me David Lipsky’s book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, with a note that said, “Take a look at this, there might be a play in it,” because the book is almost entirely dialogue, the transcription of a four-day conversation between Lipsky and David Foster Wallace. I started reading it and was excited because I thought it did lend itself to adaptation—not for the stage but for the screen. I saw its potential as something much more expansive than two guys sitting around talking—namely a road picture. I was intrigued by the idea of seeing this iconic figure on the American landscape. The End of the Tour is consistent with themes that have interested me as a dramatist for forty years, which is what no doubt attracted me to it.

You were originally trained as an artist. How did writing become your primary mode of thinking?

I grew up in baby-boomer Brooklyn. My parents were not intellectuals. They were not artists. My father sold wallpaper. My mother was a housewife until she went back to office work when I was ten. We were middle-class Jews who didn’t go to synagogue, but we did go to Broadway. My parents came of age during the Depression—they loved movies and they loved Broadway, and they instilled that love in my brother and me. Our family took a few memorable excursions to Broadway during my childhood. We spent a couple of weeklong school vacations seeing eight or nine shows—mostly musicals—at a time when a middle-class family could afford to sit in the balcony for not much more than the cost of a movie ticket. Those experiences stayed with me. I didn’t become a theater geek, and I didn’t become an actor—I was never very comfortable performing—but I discovered I could write, parodies and sketches, mostly.

Did you have any sense when you went to plays with your parents that you might be responding to them on a different level or for a different reason?

The first nonmusical play that I ever saw was Herb Gardner’s comedy, A Thousand Clowns. The play starred Jason Robards as an anti-establishment father figure to a boy, his nephew, whom his irresponsible sister left with him. The boy was not much older than I was when I saw it—maybe he was twelve or thirteen and I was about nine. I think the fact that there was a child in the story with whom I could identify really drew me into it. I remember feeling privileged to be in a theater where I was privy to very adult humor that I understood and enjoyed. I was excited, I remember that vividly. But it’s not as if I went home and started writing plays. It was a feeling that I identified and recorded and stored away. When I was in high school I wrote some short stories. A story I wrote that was published in the literary art magazine that I coedited got me into trouble. The story had the word fuck in it, the principal suppressed the publication, the ACLU came to the rescue, and my coeditor and I fought the principal’s decision. We took him and the New York City Board of Education to court—and won. The case, which attracted attention in the New York press in 1971, was my first brush with the media.

“Young Boy Knows The F-Word”?

Close. I remember the headline of the Daily News when we won the case—“Four Letter Words OK in School Mag, Judge Rules.” When it was unimpounded by court order, the story didn’t shock or impress many people. It was very much the work of a precocious seventeen-year-old. It wasn’t until a few years later that I tried my hand at playwriting.

Do you preach patience with your students?

I’m very much a structuralist—not that I insist upon creating “the well-made play,” but I do pose fundamental questions like, Where is the conflict? What is your play about? Basic, pedantic questions, but the truth is that people really need to identify and articulate their subject. It seems revelatory to them sometimes—“Wow, what is my play about? What am I trying to say?” I think it is essential, particularly in drama, to know what is at stake that must be resolved in ninety minutes to two hours. I often pose the Passover question, Why is this night different from all other nights? In other words, Why is the action taking place now and not yesterday or tomorrow?

When I teach Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I ask, What is the event? And they say, It’s Big Daddy’s birthday. And I reply, No that’s the occasion. The event is that it’s Big Daddy’s last birthday. That distinction raises the stakes for every member of the family.

What about setting? Much of your work is set in Brooklyn.

For a little while there I consciously didn’t write about Brooklyn. I wanted to get out of the head of a Brooklyn writer. And then, after a couple of plays that took departures, I did return to it with Brooklyn Boy. I take comfort in some of the writers I admire, like Philip Roth and William Faulkner, who basically tilled the same neighborhoods and land and always found new stories to tell. And I’m okay with that. The plays that I wrote earlier in my life, earlier in my career, tended to emanate from Brooklyn, and I think that’s because my proximity to my past was that much closer when I was in my twenties and thirties writing those stories. Now I feel like that part of my life I’ve explored, for now, and it’s receded from my consciousness to a certain degree—I don’t feel the same need to go there.

Do you recognize a tendency with your students to care most strongly about success at a young age?

Like so many young artists of any kind, I too was very invested in early success. I really wanted it. I don’t really know why, but I did. By my early thirties, after several disappointing, would-be breakthroughs, rather than self-destructing, I was able to concentrate on the work. Revenge became a very strong motivator for me—the I’ll show them element.

Were you very self-critical as a young writer?

The lessons that I learned early on were to trust my instincts, to be more assertive when I feel things aren’t going well, to take more control. More than my deficiencies as a playwright, being less passive in the making of theater was something I had to learn over time. Not deferring so much to others to make certain decisions and assumptions about the work. In the theater, people talk about how playwrights need to be nurtured. I always bristle at the word nurture. It’s infantilizing. My instincts have served me very well all of my life, except when I have not heeded them. There are times I probably should have been more of a prick. I know my own capacity for things. I know what makes me happy and I know what makes me miserable, so I try to stay away from those things.

What is the work like now?

When my son was young, I really liked having the office across the street. It felt very much my own. Now Lynn and I will have breakfast and I’ll say, OK, I’m going to commute to work now, and head upstairs. And I teach. Teaching is a big part of my life, and I’ve been doing it a long time, and it’s something I really enjoy doing. When I became a parent twenty-two years ago my day became conscribed more nine to five. Now that my son is more independent and our lives are more relaxed and less built around his schedule, I’m working longer in the office. I’ll wander up there at various times in ways that I was not doing when he was younger. Having said that, if I’m in the throes of something I’ll have a pad by my bed and jot stuff down, and sometimes feel the need to go and sit at the desk. But that doesn’t happen a lot. I write sporadically. I can’t say that I get up and read the paper at six and start to write at seven. My life hasn’t really worked out that way. I write when I have to, when it becomes a kind of biological necessity. I think I learned a long time ago that to have a career as a playwright, and a produced playwright, there’ll be inquiries I need to respond to, there’ll be a play that I’m casting that is part of the day, or another play that I’m rewriting or preparing for publication, or a screenplay that I’m writing, or material that I was sent to consider for something else—that’s all part of it. And even if it’s not actually writing it’s part of the business of being a playwright. I’m not even midcareer anymore—I’m one of the old guys—and the plays are getting revived and it’s wonderful. They’re given new life. Dinner With Friends hadn’t been seen in New York in fourteen years—it’s a new generation in the theater.

Whenever I finish a play I always think I’ll never write another one.Until I come up with another idea—which, for me, can take a couple of years. It’s when I hit my nadir, out of a fatalistic sense of resignation, “Oh, well, that was a nice career,” that something happens.

Zack Newick is at work on a novel about the future.

Love Story

From the cover of Barbara Cartland’s The Romance of Food.

“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.” —Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’“

Too much camp is bad for the soul. It’s unwholesome, lacking in spiritual nourishment—like eating only processed foods. Irony is no substitute for feeling, detachment no replacement for intellectual engagement: enough camp begins to eat away at both. After a steady diet of midcentury educational films, salacious memoirs, and Florence Foster Jenkins recordings, one begins to feel oneself morphing into a sort of soulless Lord Henry Wotton, and the only remedy is beauty, spareness, and fresh air. Part of the problem is that earnest camp is heartbreaking; in order not to cry, one needs to put up defenses, and this is in itself exhausting.

Periodically, I need to go on cleanses. In these virtuous moods, I resolve to listen to only the finest music, read the best books, watch films worthy of the term. I banish my collection of 1930s Love Story magazines. I shun the “High Gruck and Outsider Art” playlist on my Spotify account. The words “Russ Meyer” are not to be mentioned in my hearing.

The problem is that in the midst of this, your copy of Barbara Cartland: The Romance of Food arrives in the mail from England and tempts you like a rosy-hued she-devil. And then it follows you everywhere, with the promise of easy laughs and garish pictures and oddity nonpareil. You can hide it in the closet. You can stick it under the kitchen counter with the other cookbooks. Still you hear its siren song, which is sort of quavery and backed by a lot of lush strings.

Even fourteen years after her death, Barbara Cartland remains one of the queens of camp. Beyond the 700+ fade-to-black historical romances, the feud with Princess Diana, the albums, the pink-themed parties, the husbands, the makeup, there was the legend. Barbara Cartland believed her own press. She was fully committed to her character. “I’m always the heroine, I’m always the virgin,” she blithely tells an interviewer—perhaps aware that it’s grotesque, but not caring. And this, of course, was the secret of her power.

Well, that and—aptly enough—nutrition. The cookbook talks a lot about that. As Cartland asserts in the “Breakfast” section, “I believe that because it is impossible to eat a really balanced diet or to get absolutely pure food which is not polluted with chemicals, one has to take it in the form of vitamin pills and capsules. The vitamins I recommend for most people are …” And then she lists a bunch of vitamins. (“Vitamin E is the nearest thing we have to life and is absolutely essential as it carries oxygen to all parts of the body.”)

Of course, the book has a lot of the sort of thing one would expect: elaborate, French-inflected menus courtesy of her chef, name-dropping, anecdotes, talk of love.

The fifth Duke of Sutherland was one of the best looking men I have ever seen. Six-foot-three, with fair hair and vivid blue eyes, he looked like a Viking. Every morning at the fairytale Dunrobin Castle, which I have made the background for many of my novels, he ate his porridge from a wooden bowl edged with silver, which his Nanny had given him.

On “Kidneys in Cream”:

This is a rich, exotic dish which is full of goodness besides being an aid to virility. Some of the youngest-looking men on the screen and stage declare they owe their youthful appearance to a large consumption of liver and kidneys.

On “Asparagus Tart”:

Curry has always been used as a love stimulant and makes me think of blossoms in sleek dark hair and fragrances of spices coming from an Indian bazaar. I once ate a curry cooked by a beautiful Maharani who had spent eight hours preparing it. It was superb.

There are unappetizingly styled pictures replete with china cupids and not a few pink carnations. There are line drawings of languishing maidens and ardent suitors and, yes, many things are heart-shaped. It is exactly what one might expect of a Barbara Cartland cookbook: in other words, making fun of it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

After I had read it cover to cover—and I did, of course—I noticed something I hadn’t at first: an inscription on the flyleaf. “Dearest Larry,” someone has written in a clear, feminine script. “May you find as much enjoyment in the receiving as I have found in the giving! Happy Father’s Day! Love always from the one who gave you the ‘reasons’ for today’s celebration! B.”

The exclamation marks, by the way, all have little hearts under them instead of dots.

Here is what Cartland writes in her introduction, which is decorated with a drawing of some long-stemmed roses: “Just as with the Greeks, Romans, the Arabs and the Hindus, some recipes may seem ludicrous, others are successfully stimulating to love and most important, highly nutritious!”

Maybe she’s right after all.

Still Moving

Photo: Gabriel Smith, via Flickr.

My friend Jacob tends to be right about things. He has great taste in music; I find myself nodding my head at him whenever politics comes up; and when he laid out, like tarot cards, his hopes for this World Cup—as nearly all of my friends did before the start of the tournament—I couldn’t help but think that his predictions would work for me, too. We’ll have our parting of the ways soon enough: the Netherlands plays Mexico in a few days. The truth is, if Mexico wins, I’ll be happy for him. And I like to think that if the Netherlands wins, he’ll be happy for me, too.

Empathy like that provides balance in the world of blinding madness that sports can be. It’s a particular type of immigrant upbringing, perhaps, that gives you an agnostic indifference to overdetermined allegiances—a hope that, regardless of what happens, there’s beauty that comes from it, and an instructive joy to share and pass on.

So: I watch Bosnia for my friends Sasa and Veba, because Bosnia reminded me so much of them—committed, creative, pensive, puckish. Colombia for my aunt Claudia and her mother, Nelly. For Alejandra, and Beti and Marlon, Japan, because they always, and almost always impractically, propose to play beautifully, thinking this time they’ll get it right. Algeria for Camus’s ghost and for their players born in France, who heard the call to come back. Nigeria because Rashidi Yekini’s goal at USA ’94, Nigeria’s first ever in a World Cup, touched me in some still inchoate way—and because few things in the world are better than a happy Teju Cole. Italy—despite the neutral hardwired animosity—for how Andrea Pirlo ambles on the field, far off from everyone’s pace, seemingly alone, surrounded not by defenders but rather by his own genius. Costa Rica for sixty-five and a half years with no armed forces. Argentina for Messi—if only for Messi.

Today, Germany plays the United States. If Germany wins, I’ll be happy for my friend and colleague Daniel, the Israeli sociologist from Cologne with the Belgian mother, a world-class scholar who knows absolutely nothing—nothing!—about pop culture but likes the Fussbol tabloids he reads online as lowbrow as humanly possible. I’ll be happy for Raoul, the New Yorker with a map of Germany on his face and in his last name, his old-school green Mannschaft shirt standing out among a sea of USA fans in some Upper West Side bar. And if the U.S. wins, I’ll be happy for Clay and another Daniel and Clay’s son, Gus. If Ghana wins I’ll be happy for Africa and the black-starred strands of DNA that sing their dirges and daydreams of diaspora, as there’s every chance in the world that what we now call Ghana is where my lifeline began. And if Portugal pulls off what looks this morning like the impossible, I’ll remind myself that Lisbon is one of my favorite cities. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.

Yesterday, Nigeria lost to Argentina and qualified for the next round. Switzerland routed Honduras (why so rough-and-tumble, Honduras?) and qualified for the next round. Things happen in a World Cup that complicate the simple binary of wins and losses, of catastrophe and triumph. But after today’s results, the only way to move on in this World Cup will be to win, be it in regular time, extra time, or penalties. You win and move on. Or you lose and move on. Either way, we’re moving. I’m moving toward your joy.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, will be published next year. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Future Library

© Katie Paterson; commissioned by Bjorvika Utvikling and produced by Situations

© Katie Paterson

© Giorgia Polizzi

© Katie Paterson

© Katie Paterson

Photo © MJC

© Giorgia Polizzi

Right now, one thousand new trees are growing about twenty minutes outside Oslo. In the city’s new library, a window from a quiet room on the fifth floor faces out onto the nascent forest, which you can see across the harbor. These—those trees, this room—are the basic components of the Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library, a century-long project that contemplates the full scale of the publishing process, with its many tangibles and intangibles:

It will be 100 years before the trees are cut down to provide the paper for an anthology of books—a Future Library for the city of Oslo—read for the first time in 2114 … Every year from 2014 to 2114, a writer will be commissioned to contribute a new text to a growing collection of unpublished, unread manuscripts held in trust in a specially designed room in the new Deichmanske Public Library in Bjørvika until their publication in 2114.

That room, intended to be “a space of contemplation,” is lined with wood from the felled forest; once the initial clear-cutting was complete, Paterson and a group of loggers planted the new saplings themselves, as photographed above.

An eight-person trust will guide the project into the future, with a small editorial panel—including the Booker Prize’s Ion Trewin—selecting the writers, the first of whom will be announced in September. Writers have no obligation to say what they’ll write or how long their manuscripts will be; they can produce whatever they want. A particularly ambitious or deranged author could take it upon himself to write an epic, laying waste to a significant percentage of the forest in so doing.

Paterson has also designed a limited run of certificates made from the trees that were cut down to make the new library. The double-sided print features a graphic of a tree trunk and functions as a deed or a share, entitling its owner to receive the anthology of Future Library books in 2114. New York’s James Cohan Gallery is showing the certificate in “The Fifth Season,” a group exhibition whose opening reception is tonight at 6 P.M.

“It grows in the mind,” William Pym, a curator at the gallery, said of the project. “There’s really not much to see.” Given its duration, Future Library is destined to be “forgotten and then remembered again,” he added, noting that attention paid to the project will ebb and flow over the years as new writers are chosen and as printing technologies advance.

The project foregrounds the most easily or willfully forgotten part of bookmaking: the trees. A bound book sits at a far remove from the natural world it came from—Future Library reminds us of the geographical realities of publishing, of the time and resources necessary to make paper. And as, presumably, digital media will continue to proliferate over the next century, Paterson’s art is resolutely, provocatively analog: every part of its process is tethered to the physical world. A visitor in Oslo can stand in the library and point to the source of the paper.

A Screaming Comes Across the Tongue, and Other News

Paul Klee, Mumon sinkt trunken in den Sessel, 1940.

For seven years in the sixties, Dennis Hopper disappeared from Hollywood. What was he doing? Attending the Fonda-Vadim nuptials, hanging around LA’s Love-In, watching Martin Luther King Jr. speak, and photographing all of it.
Today in brave souls and/or fool’s errands: “I’m drinking everything mentioned however peripherally in every Pynchon book and jabbering a bit about what it’s like … So what is Chivas Regal like? I’m tempted to say that a screaming comes across the tongue.”
Amazon is demanding concessions from publishers that are tantamount to “assisted suicide for the book business” …
… And a new, “fiercely independent-minded” book, The Everything Store, reminds of Amazon’s considerably less-incendiary early days: “Bezos hired writers and editors who supplied critical advice about books and tried to emulate on Amazon’s website ‘the trustworthy atmosphere of a quirky independent bookstore with refined literary tastes.’” Years later, these people were replaced by an algorithm called AMABOT, which, given the meaning of amatory, sounds sort of like an animatronic sex doll.
But it must be said: “When Anne Campbell of the Open University in Scotland looked at how students used Kindle readers and paper books, she found that the electronic devices promoted more deep reading.”
Soon before her seventieth birthday, a woman named Sandy Bem found that her mental faculties had deteriorated enough that she wanted to take her own life—so she planned her suicide with her family. “We looked at the calendar and said, ‘OK, if it’s going to be next week, what day is it going to be?’” her husband said. “I wouldn't have had it any other way,” her daughter said.