The Paris Review's Blog, page 743

O, Youth!

From letters published in the February 1, 1881, edition of Harper’s Young People, a spinoff of Harper’s for readers six to sixteen.

Will Mary R., of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, please oblige me by giving her method of cultivating heliotrope, as it is one of my favorites, and I can never succeed in raising it. I have over two hundred plants in my parlor and sitting-room windows, and not one heliotrope.

I have a beautiful black goat named Dan, and a complete set of silver-plated harness … Dan will not allow any boy to come near him, but he loves me dearly, and I love him. I am eleven years old.

I and my brother used to have such good times fishing on these lakes in our canoes, and hunting deer in the woods, but now I am so lonely, for my only brother is dead. He went out in the woods to hunt deer, and got lost, and froze to death.

I am a subscriber to Young People, and although I am not one of the “little folks,” I find the Post-office Box very interesting, as I am very fond of children and of pets. I have a bright, intelligent pony, a Mexican dog four years old that does not weigh more than two pounds, a mocking-bird, canaries, and a lot of fancy pigeons, and two aquaria filled with fish.

In my letter printed in Young People No. 62 I intended to say that I would exchange postmarks, not for other postmarks, but for stamps and minerals. I regret that I made the mistake.

I am very much interested in “Toby Tyler” and “Mildred’s Bargain.”

I spent one summer at Cape May, and there I found a turtle that was so tame it would eat out of my hand, and drink out of a tea-spoon. I fed it on raw meat, soaked bread, and worms, but it ran away.

 

Chocolate: A Confession

A still from Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005.

Even at my loneliest and most cynical, I have always liked Valentine’s Day. The commercialized romance bothers me not a whit—I like watching couples being romantic, or awkward, or goofy. But this I will say: for those of us who don’t love chocolate, the onset of February is, well, disheartening.

Nowadays, scientists like to point to the fact that eating chocolate somehow mimics the physiological characteristics of female arousal, but one doubts that science is behind the ubiquity of the heart-shaped variety box. After all, the whole connection between chocolate and courtship goes back to the nineteenth century. I’m no historian, but I’d imagine it’s more a “sweets for the sweet” bit of marketing that struck an immediate chord.

If we are going to talk about amateur modern chocolate historians, Roald Dahl cannot be ignored. As anyone familiar with his oeuvre knows, the man loved chocolate. But the full extent of his feelings cannot be understood until one has read the manifesto “Chocolate,” in his highly idiosyncratic Roald Dahl’s Cookbook. Talking of what he terms the “Chocolate Revolution” of 1930–37, Dahl declares,

The dates themselves should be taught in school to every child. Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one’s life. But 1932 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers, and 1937 the Kit Kat—these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the mind of every child in the country. If I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them.

(Not that one imagines he went in much for Valentine’s Day.)

I appreciate chocolate’s usefulness as a widely accepted currency, a sort of edible euro. I can crank out a creditable brownie when needed, and I find that one of those enormous chocolate bars from Ghirardelli or Jacques Torres is an inelegant but effective solution to the question of what, if anything, to give a man on Valentine’s Day. For some years now, I have enjoyed sending my friends, on the slightest pretext, the excellent chocolate-covered caramels made by the nuns of the Mississippi Abbey (confusingly located in Dubuque, Iowa). Because what’s more romantic than a box of chocolates accompanied by lots of pictures of merry, confectionery Trappistines? Nothing, is the answer.

I like the occasional bite of chocolate. But—not that you asked—given the choice, I’m just much more liable to opt for lemon, or toffee, or apple. Death by chocolate sounds awful. I don’t like to think of my desserts as “sinful” or “naughty” or otherwise morally compromised. And in my experience, servers are eighty-five percent more inclined to be conspiratorial and knowing and cheekily present an unsolicited extra fork when there’s chocolate in the equation.

In my lowest moments, I admit, my lack of passion for cocoa makes me feel less of a woman. In these moments, the world seems to divide between sensual Nigella Lawson types, rolling around on fur rugs and moaning in ecstasy about chocolate, and the rest of us: disapproving spinsters standing primly in the corner, sucking on lemons.

And yet, if a bunch of contemplative sisters can reconcile their vocation with the production of the stuff, who am I to talk about a metaphorical, chocolatey, virgin/whore complex? The abbey’s Web site even has a special Valentine’s Day gifts page, listing red boxes of truffles and caramels, Swiss Mints, “Fudgy Chocolate Sauce,” and … “Heart of Jesus” cards. Really, what could be less sinful than that?

 

Time Is Running Out

Photo: Chris Willis, via Wikimedia Commons

Today is many things: Vanessa Redgrave’s birthday; the 365th anniversary of Charles I’s beheading; a Thursday. But more than any of these, it’s the penultimate day of our subscription deal with McSweeney’s. You must, in the parlance of infomercials and World War II propaganda, ACT NOW, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

To refresh your memory: this January only, you can get a year of The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for just $75*—a twenty percent savings over individual subscriptions. It’s what known among businessmen as synergy, and among laypeople as a totally white-hot deal.

Yes, our two magazines have always appealed to different readers. Our sensibilities, like our headquarters, are a continent apart. But for 2014 we say, vive la différence. You’ll have the most cosmopolitan bookshelf, nightstand, or bathroom on the block, and a full supply of the interviews, fiction, essays, poetry, and humor that keep us reading each other and make us want to spread the love!

Subscribe now or risk infinite regret!

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Visible Man: An Interview with Mitchell S. Jackson

A still from the book trailer for The Residue Years.

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years, was published last fall and drew immediate notice for its amazing use of language and voice, the cadence of its sentences, and the authenticity at its center. It tells the sweet, sad story of Grace, a recovering drug addict, and her drug-dealing son, Champ, as they both struggle in an African American Portland neighborhood that was ravaged by crack in the nineties.

Critics said the novel was about race, or poverty, or America’s failed war on drugs. Big, social themes. Personally, I disagree: to my mind, The Residue Years is a personal story, a novel about love, redemption, and freedom. Interspersed throughout are a blank form for a rehabilitation center, a police report, a Baptist church member registration form, a petition for child custody—subtle reminders that this novel is also about all the ways in which we are held captive by institutions that, more often than not, fail us. Between these pauses lie some three-hundred pages of beautiful sentences that mix urban slang with pitch-perfect lyricism, resulting in a new way of expressing American English—at least to my European eyes. Victor LaValle agrees: “It’s tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.” Amy Hempel has said that Grace and Champ are one of the fictional families she has cared about the most. And that’s at the heart of Mitchell’s novel: family.

Last month I fired up Skype and talked to Mitchell for more than an hour—I was in Milan, and he in Brooklyn—about his novel, his writing, and the dangers of how books are marketed today.

Your language is a fantastic mix of literary, poetic, lyrical English, and urban slang—it goes up and down and back and forth. I’m curious to know if you tried to bring together those worlds consciously.

I do feel like I’m in the middle there. I have my preliterary experiences in the urban world, listening to a bunch of hip-hop and listening to my uncles, my friends. When I got in school and started reading, I found people who were writing about a similar kind of experience, and whom I thought the canon respected. But I don’t feel like I’m in a tradition. I don’t think I read deeply enough in either field to really know about a tradition. I do have influences—James Baldwin, of course, and John Edgar Wideman. But also Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah. I like to stay in the middle. I think that that tension lets me play around with voice.

What was your starting point for the novel?

I started writing autobiographical scenes and tried to string them together. I didn’t understand the characters’ motivations. It took me years to figure out what they really wanted. I had a premise—mother on drugs, son sells drugs—but that’s not human. Those are just things people do. It took me some time to figure out what the humanity in the characters was. I saw that this story was really about a mother and a son, about their will to redeem themselves from the hurt they’d caused. Once I realized that, I went back and rewrote a lot of stuff. When I started, the characters were so close to my own life that I felt like they had to speak and act and behave like the people they were based on.

Champ and Grace began as avatars of you and your mom?

At the beginning, and then they became composites. But the origin was in truth. Once you realize the characters have a life of their own and you let them do what’s right for them, the work opens up. I wish I were as smart as Champ, but I’m not as smart as him.

How was your book marketed? Did they go for a hip crowd? A literary crowd? Did they focus on the African American angle?

I did a lot of literary events because, I suspect, my publisher didn’t want me pigeonholed as an urban writer. You know, the hip, urban black crowd—they're not buying many books. It was smart of my publisher to do that, because I have a feeling that black people will get to the book later, if they feel like it’s a success. But reading a positive review in The New York Times—I don’t think that’ll make the book a success with the urban crowd. I have a couple friends in the music industry, and I sent them the Times review, and I got nothing. No response. But then, this girl who’s a hip-hop promoter was doing some sort of meet-and-greet and she did an event with me—she called it an “author meet-and-greet.” It wasn’t even a reading. She sent out an e-mail blast, and all my friends got back to me and were like, Great, man, you’re really doing it! And I was like, Doing what? This is nothing! It’s like, this is what you guys value? Like, fuck the New York Times, all you care about is a girl who gives you free drinks at a meet-and-greet? I realized those friends of mine don’t get it.

Who was your perceived audience? Are the literary and African-American audiences separate worlds? It’s similar to what happens with Junot Díaz—he’s a Latino writer, but his books aren’t perceived to be books for the Latino community. They’re literary books, which means, to a large extent, that they explain the Latino experience to white people.

I think what happens, simply, is that people end up writing about their experiences. If you’re a black person writing about a black experience, they give it that marketing term to find an audience. But it marginalizes the work. Even before the literature, it’s like, here’s a black writer. If you hear the conversation about the guys who have six to eight books out and you start to hear phrases like “Great American Novel” or “one of the greatest writers of his generation,” they almost always refer to a white man or a book by a white man. But maybe Junot will be the exception. The thing about Junot that’s special is that, from the jump, he was christened as the guy they were gonna let through the door. He was in The New Yorker right away, and some people work their whole careers for that. I think that they single out one or two people so they can say, it’s not a fair playing field, but we’re gonna let a few of you over here. And this is not to say that it’s not deserved. Junot Díaz is probably my favorite living writer. I think he deserves it, but I do think that he was singled out. I mean, if I was part of the establishment and I was trying to maintain some kind of hold on it, I wouldn’t allow that many people through either.

Now, this next part is hard to say. I think that part of the problem is that a lot of black writers are … satisfied with being successful outside of what you’d call literary fiction. And if you take that satisfaction, you don’t get in the club. You have to write literary fiction to get in the club. And there aren’t that many black writers to choose from. As examples, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz are great. But where are the other Caribbean writers the gatekeepers have given a pass?

That said, I recognize that my backstory will bring people to the book who wouldn’t ordinarily come to it. On the other hand, I’m really hypersensitive to people judging it as an autobiography. I want people to come to the work, but when you get there, I want you to judge it by its merit. Not because of the fact that I might have been in prison or I might have seen some of the stuff that I talk about in the book. That’s the kind of position you put yourself in when they market you in a certain way. You get readers coming to the book for the wrong reasons.

Is it easy for you to write?

No. It’s easy to write notes. But I have such a high standard for myself, at the sentence level. I want to write a book where every sentence is beautiful. Where every single sentence is beautiful. It prevents me from putting down bullshit. But it also kind of stifles me, because it stops me from getting involved in the messy stuff. I’m never like, Let me slap this down and get on to this other thing and worry about that later. I’m so concerned with every single sentence that it’s kind of troubling.

Are you worried about what you’ll write next?

In a way. But I don’t think it’s about having other things to say, or about waiting for stuff to happen to you so you can write about it. It’s more about going back to that one story and telling it in different ways. I was listening to an interview with Jay-Z and he said that he’s only written about five stories in his whole career. He’s only had five things he wanted to say, but he said them differently. I want my writing to stay in Portland. Edward P. Jones only writes about D.C.—be it D.C. a hundred years ago, or today. There are so many stories in a place. And nothing beats writing about home.

Would you consider moving back in time, maybe writing more historically?

You know, I never thought about that. And maybe there’s something there. People often write about the South during slavery, but there’s not much about Oregon in those days. You just gave me an idea, man! Right on!

I want five percent.

Sure. I’ll give you five percent of zero.

 

The Tragic Diary of a Lunar Rover, and Other News

From a NASA presentation slide, 1963. Image via Wikimedia Commons

“My masters discovered something abnormal with my mechanical control system … I might not survive this lunar night … I am not fearful … Goodnight, Earth … Goodnight, humanity.” In the heartrending tradition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a Chinese lunar rover has live-blogged its own death.
Meanwhile, in Russia, a man was stabbed to death for having declared, to a very fervid admirer of verse, that “the only real literature is prose.”
There now exists a digital version of the Gough map, “one of the earliest maps to show Britain in a geographically recognizable form.” It dates between 1355 and 1366, when roads were a novelty. (Not that they aren’t today.)
If you’d planned on watching the Super Bowl “just for the ads,” you might be able to skip the game entirely: you can watch many of the ads ahead of time, because Capitalism Cares™. Now get out there and shop!
Under the cobblestones, the beach. Under Versailles, some magnificent subterranean reservoirs.

Key West Karaoke

While we’re on the subject of the Florida Keys, here’s Annie Dillard, Laurent de Brunhoff, Robert D. Richardson Jr., and Phyllis Rose singing the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” in Key West, circa 1995. If the sheer infectiousness of Dillard’s dancing doesn’t get you, maybe the nineties-era video effects will. This is Rising Star Video Karaoke, after all—not amateur hour.

 

This Month’s Most Expensive E-Books

If you’re flush, you could spend your days schlepping from to one rare-book room to another, hoping to stumble upon a first edition that’s both a worthy investment and an aesthetic treasure. Or you could just go to Amazon and buy one of these recently published e-books, which will, given their pedigree and initial cost, most certainly appreciate in value.

River Flow 2012 ($114.98) (“covers issues such as river hydrodynamics, morphodynamics, and sediment transport”)

The Perils of Gertrude: 1st Peril Special Edition ($199.00)

TRANSHUMAN: (Screenplay) ($200.00)

Moroccan Math Secrets (French Edition) ($200.00)

The Amazon’s Most Expensive Book (Arabic Edition) ($200.00)

(“This book is one of the most expensive available on Amazon in Kindle version. It does not exist on paper version. It caters to the richest people. Those who can buy it without flinching. It is not for the poor, stingy, or for those who count their money. Therefore, please do not buy this book if you do not have enough money on your bank account. If you are not wealthy but think you can read this book and ask for a refund afterwards, give up immediately, you are not the readership target. Any unusual thing is expensive! This is the law of supply and demand. Only a privileged few can buy and read this book. The others: go your way. Many free books are available for your long winter evenings. However, if you have a lot of money, and if the price of this book does not disturb you more than that, welcome and good reading.”)

Miscellaneous Thoughts, Volume I ($200.00)

Quay Walls, Second Edition ($247.96)

Proceedings of 2013 4th International Asia Conference on Industrial Engineering and Management Innovation ($319.20)

Ullmann’s Fine Chemicals ($347.60)

 

One Human Family

Photo: Serge Melki, via Flickr

I have never been one to moon over resort collections or sigh enviously over my friends’ sun-drenched Instagram photos. The truth is, I dislike the beach and sort of enjoy the misery of living through an unrelieved winter; it makes spring that much sweeter and, as the Byrds told us, for everything there is a season, etcetera, etcetera.

Nevertheless, lured by cheap rates and the promise of a haunted local doll named Robert, a few winters ago, my best friend and I decided to take a brief trip to Key West. We rented bicycles, visited the six-toed cats at the Hemingway House, posed with the Sponge Man, avoided Duval Street and the Parrot-heads eager to show female visitors around the “Conch republic,” and took a “fruit tour.” This involved having to pedal away really fast whenever a property owner approached, and culminated in our guide playing “Strangers in the Night” on, yes, a conch shell. A gentleman in a bar band told us that the island’s official philosophy is “One Human Family.”

At a bookstore near our guesthouse, I picked up a book from the “Local Interest” section called Undying Love: The True Story of a Passion That Defied Death, by Ben Harrison. And I read it obsessively. When I think of Key West, it’s not of sunsets or Margaritaville or Tennessee Williams. It’s of Carl Tanzler and his obsession with a dead woman.

Those whose interests run to the annals of necrophilia and bizarre crime are doubtless familiar with the story of the German-born X-ray technician; I am not ashamed to admit that it was new to me. For the uninitiated, the facts are as follows:

In the 1920s, Carl Tanzler (who would later style himself Carl von Cosel) emigrated from Germany to the the Florida Keys, where he told various tall tales about his aristocratic background and multiple degrees. While working in the TB ward of a local hospital, he encountered the beautiful young Elena Hoyos. Although the Cuban émigré had no interest in her middle-aged admirer, he became fixated on curing her. Her desperate family gave him free reign to try a mix of X-rays, chemicals, and herbs, but she died at twenty-two. At which point he insisted on building her an elaborate mausoleum, which he frequently visited in the night.

So far, so weird, but here’s where it gets truly bizarre. He had an aboveground telephone installed in the tomb so that he could talk directly to her corpse. And during his nightly visits, by means of a secret key, von Cosel started dabbling in amateur embalming. All the while, he’d been constructing a futuristic-looking airship not far away.

Perhaps as a result of some of these behaviors, von Cosel lost his job. He moved to a remote shack, stole her corpse, and lived with it happily for more than seven years. During this time, he tended to his love devotedly, rubbing her body with oils and spices, dressing it in fine silks, and, as she decayed, reconstructing her body and face with piano wire, wax, glass eyes, and paint. There was, needless to say, a great deal of perfume employed.

When at length the love nest was discovered, von Cosel was completely unembarrassed, and explained to the authorities that the two were very much in love and had been planning to move into outer space in the rocket ship. Despite the fact that he had constructed some kind of paper vagina for the corpse and they’d apparently been having sex on the regular, the cops were less than impressed. Von Cosel was summarily arrested.

It will come as no surprise that the story captured the public imagination. Many found von Cosel a sympathetic, tragic figure, and the tale wildly romantic. (The necrophilia part was not made public.) Von Cosel got off scot-free, and penned an autobiography. When he died a few years later, the obit reported that police found “a metal cylinder on a shelf above a table in it wrapped in silken cloth and a robe was a waxen image” crafted from Hoyos’s death mask.

The macabre incident, naturally, has served as the inspiration for a number of tracks on indie albums and, at the time of the case, gave rise to a popular Spanish-language song. But the true soundtrack to the von Cosel case is the song “La Boda Negra,” a favorite of Hoyos’s which von Cosel would pipe into her tomb after her death.

The lyrics of “The Black Wedding” tell the story of a young man whose bride dies before their wedding. He visits her grave nightly until, overcome by grief, he places her body on a bed of flowers, and kills himself.

Al esqueleto regido abrasado.

On our last day in Florida, we went to the beach. We rented beach chairs for $5 each from a young man working in the concessions stand. When he learned we were from New York, he became inexplicably defiant. He said he had been to New York, and it sucked, and that Key West had everything New York had, and more, and people were more laid-back and nicer to each other. We were not arguing.

 

The Pram in the Hall

Photo: Silver Cross UK, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the most popular quotations about creativity and parenthood is Cyril Connolly’s: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” This aphorism, snobbish in its dismissal of human distraction, has been passed down through generations of artists as a black warning banner—Have Children, Be Creatively Screwed Forever.

Having a child isn’t easy, of course. When my son, Julian, was born sixteen months ago, I became intimately acquainted with sleep deprivation and time constraints. The third night after we’d brought him home, I remember being in bed, so mentally and physically exhausted that when I looked up at where the ceiling and the wall met, I saw the seam crack open, revealing a horizon of white light and red lava.

I slept in naps, and although I found the first several months to be brutal and strange and basically a new realm of reality, my role as a father worked as a kind of energizer. The pram in the hall was no “somber enemy”—rather, because I was baggy-eyed, vein-drenched in coffee, and blindly stepping into the new world of fatherhood, producing work had never felt more important to me. I was creatively explosive, if a little loose and wild. I can’t remember showering or looking in the mirror for weeks. Given the sudden constrains on my time, the pockets in which I could work were like mines where I hacked away with a speed I’ve never experienced before, discovering and polishing work.

What’s been most difficult, really, is balancing the weird mix of father and writer online, where the community I know is mostly childless. This online world, which I love and cherish, is also detached and ironic and so image-based that being a dad doesn’t seem to fit. To age out, a writer must pass through three stages: First, you turn thirty, thus becoming “online old.” Second, you get married. Third, you have a child. I’ve done all three, and now I’m having to define myself online: Am I a writer or a Dad or a husband? Can I be all three?

Shortly after my wife gave birth, I commented on a friend’s Facebook status; my friend’s response was “Hey, look at this Dad on here.” It wasn’t meant to slight me, but there was something there, something that said I was now more Dad than writer. In our culture, fatherhood means baggy khakis and cars with side-impact airbags—it’s something of a joke.

Accordingly, the few writer-fathers I know online either make self-deprecating quips about their fatherhood or simply never post about being a father. I’m not comfortable with either approach.

The balance is hard to find. Being a writer—especially one who doesn’t make a living on his work—already involves a kind of guilt trip, but if you’ve ever felt neglectful for spending too much time in your head, dreaming up ideas or moving around in a world you’ve created, imagine amplifying that guilt ten times—because you now have a little person who’s reality depends on you being in reality. Countless times I’ve caught myself lost in my own thoughts while my son stares at me, wondering when I’m going to come back to him.

It doesn’t help that many of the male writers I’ve admired—not only as creators, but, strange as it sounds, as father figures of a sort—have fearfully adhered to the “pram in the hall” sentiment. For example, here’s David Foster Wallace in The Pale King:

Reynolds’s own professed take on marriage/family was that from boyhood on he had never liked fathers and had no wish to be one … Sylvanshine had found himself locking eyes with thirty-year-old men who had infants in high-tech papooselike packs on their backs, their wives with quilted infant-supply bags at their sides, the wives in charge, the men appearing essentially soft or softened in some way, desperate in a resigned way, their stride not quite a trudge, their eyes empty and overmild with the weary stoicism of young fathers. Reynolds would call it not stoicism but acquiescence to some large and terrible truth.

And here’s Don DeLillo, who never had children, in my favorite of his books, Libra. (Keep in mind, this paragraph is completely isolated, with large chunks of white space above and below; it’s one of only a few like this in the entire novel.)

A family expects you to be one thing when you’re another. They twist you out of shape. You have a brother with a good job and a nice wife and nice kids and they want you to be a person they will recognize. And a mother in a white uniform who grips your arms and weeps. You are trapped in their minds. They shape and hammer you. Going away is what you do to see yourself plain.

This isn’t to say that every male writer, say, my father’s age, is dark on parenthood, but it seems that so many are. In 1962, Cormac McCarthy had a son, and in order to concentrate on his writing he told his wife—who was already responsible for all housework and caring for the baby—to get a day job, too. She soon filed for divorce. As a father, William Burroughs was much more Jack Torrance than Danny Tanner: he accidentally shot his son’s mother, introduced him to drugs and alcohol, and exposed him to situations where grown men made sexual advances on him. The list of accusations reads like a nightmare, and it culminates with Burroughs’s son drinking himself to death at thirty-three.

There is some light on this topic. I’ve discovered many writer-fathers who not only continued to produce work, but produced work that is richer and more interesting because of their fatherhood. William Vollmann has a daughter. He rarely mentions her in interviews, and I can’t recall a single instance where she appears explicitly in his writing, but Vollmann once told an interviewer that having a child was the most fulfilling part of his life; he enjoys having her in his studio as he works. Vollmann has always been prolific, but arguably his best work, the National Book Award–winning Europe Central, was written while his daughter was a small child. J. M. Coetzee, Thomas Pynchon, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, Martin Amis, Richard Brautigan, and Vladimir Nabokov are all fathers whose post-birth have created powerful work. For the right man, then—and for plenty of men—the pram in the hall has the opposite effect of Connolly’s: it’s a motivator.

I do realize that I’m writing this from a place of privilege, as a white, educated male with a relaxed day job that allows me the brain-space for ideas such as this very piece. Trying to imagine myself as a full-time, stay-at-home mother, trying to work on a novel with an infant attached to my breast, sends a chill through me. It would be much harder to get work done. My wife, Melanie, is our son’s primary care giver, a full-time student, and works part-time as a massage therapist. Where I can come to the office and grab a cup of coffee, she has little to no time with her own thoughts. Doris Lessing, echoing Connolly, became so frustrated with her children that she left two of them with her father and moved away: “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”  

I believe in the magic of fiction and I want to believe that it can connect with the magic of children, with all its weirdness and imagination-play, in a positive way. I want to believe it’s possible to adhere to more than one image—that you don’t have to choose between parent or writer. In fact, I want to believe that writers can make the best kind of parents. J. G. Ballard once described his ambitions as a writer: “I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.” But he raised three children as a single dad. His daughter, in 2011, said, “My father was a kind, clever, and imaginative parent who, far from regarding his three children as an impediment to creativity, thought of us as an inspiration.” Ballard created some of his best-loved work as a father. He never complained. He was a writer and a father and was proud to be both.

Shane Jones is the author of several novels, including Light Boxes (2010). His next novel, Crystal Eaters, will be published in June.

 

We’re Olfactory Failures, and Other News

Crepe de Chine perfume ad, 1937

The justice system is cruel. You can be sentenced to death; you can be sentenced to life without parole; you can be sentenced to read Malcolm Gladwell.
Speakers of English may be unusually ill-equipped to describe smells. Our language lacks, for instance, a word meaning “to have a bloody smell which attracts tigers.”
At the intersection of art and commerce, poets sell potato chips. Poets sell iPads. Poets sell jeans and family vacations.
“We will likely make great selfies—but not until we get rid of the stupid-sounding, juvenile, treacly name. It rankles and grates every time one reads, hears, or even thinks it. We can’t have a Rembrandt of selfies with a word like selfie.”
Live like your forebears. Adhering to Ben Franklin’s rigorous schedule allowed this young man to “pick out a pretty fly outfit,” among other efficiencies.