The Paris Review's Blog, page 756

Troy to Ithaca

We highly recommend you spend some time with this nifty interactive map, which plots Ulysses’s epic ten-year voyage of The Odyssey on a real-life globe, placing the sirens, the cyclops, and the lotus-eaters in a recognizable geographical context.

 

Listen to Garrison Keillor, Iris Murdoch, and William Styron!

Photography credit Nancy Crampton.

This is exciting, and something we’ve had in the works for a long time.

Since 1985, 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review have co-presented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which became the foundations of our Writers-at-Work interview series. As of today, 92Y and The Paris Review are making these recordings available at 92Y’s Poetry Center Online and here at The Paris Review. The release of these recordings is made possible by a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker, who worked in the art department at The Paris Review and volunteered as an archivist at 92Y’s Poetry Center.

The online series kicks off with audio of Garrison Keillor on the secrets of humor writing; Iris Murdoch on what makes a great book; and William Styron on the future of the written word. The series also happily features George Plimpton, the late, great founder of The Paris Review, conducting many of the interviews.

Stand by in the coming months for audio of John le Carré, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, Paul Auster, Tony Kushner, Czeslaw Milosz, Maya Angelou, Jamaica Kincaid, and Allen Ginsberg, among others.

 

First Position

Once upon a time, I was part of a small army. The army was not made of soldiers, no, it was more like a children’s crusade, a throng of aspiring young ballet dancers that marched up and down New York City’s long avenues—Broadway, Seventh, Eighth—that were dotted, in those years, with so many studios. The School of American Ballet, feeder for the New York City Ballet, was the most famous, but there were others too and it was at John Barker’s studio on West 56th Street that I took classes six days a week for most of my high school life.

Weekdays, class was from 4:30 to 6:00; Saturdays, it was at 11:00 A.M. The studio itself was unremarkable: ruined wooden floor, bleached and pocked by the amber nuggets of rosin ground into its surface, long barres that lined three of the walls and full-length mirrors that lined the fourth. We spent about forty-five minutes at one of those barres, perfecting a series of exercises that had been born in the court of France and refined in the glistening winters of Imperial Russia. Pliés, tendus, and rond du jambs, all executed to the strains of Chopin. The barre was followed by work in the center: an adagio, and petit allegro. Then there were the big jumps, like grand jetés, and some point work, which allowed us the giddy sensation of rising up on our toes, defying nature and even, for a moment, mortality itself. Finally, there was the obligatory reverence, in which we curtseyed to our supremely difficult and demanding teacher.

After that we were free—until the next day, when the ritual began all over again. For it was a ritual, and, as such, had its sacred preparations. The brushing and winding of our hair into the tight bun, the sewing of ribbons on our ballet shoes, the donning of the requisite pink tights and black leotards were acts performed with both sanctity and love. The studying of ballet creates its own kind of religious order, and the girls who do it are akin to eager novitiates, fired by their all-consuming faith and their utter willingness to undergo daily mortification of the flesh. And as with any religion, the ballet hierarchy decreed that there was an established scheme of things and that a young dancer could have a secure and known place within it. When class was over, I once more joined the swarm of girls with turned-out walks and bony shoulder blades, girls who paraded down the street wearing the marks of their collective discipline: the buns, still wound painfully tight, the big, punishing bags weighed down with their heavy loads. We knew we were of a different tribe—recognizable and unique—and it filled us with pride. We were purified by our discipline, etherealized by our shining goal.

I loved being part of this elite. High school was a vague scrim; I had few friends, and no time for team sports (my brief experience of field hockey was like a tour in hell) dances, parties and the like. Instead, I fraternized with the other dance students; my best friend in those years was a girl who lived in the Bronx, the other end of New York, and went to a different school. But joined by the blood ritual of our shared dance experience, she was my soul mate, my sister under the skin.

Still, my own vision of an actual future in dance was somewhat fuzzy. I knew my strengths: I was musical, I had a strong jump and my point work was crisp. But I could not turn worth a damn, and I lacked both extension and a certain vital ferocity of attack. I was content to live in the daily-ness of it all—that was for the moment sufficient. Yet after years of single-minded study, I abruptly abandoned the ranks of the ballet girls. No one was more surprised by this turn of events than I. It happened like this: after twenty-four years of marriage, my father left my mother for another woman. Worse—much worse—was that I had changed, overnight it seemed, from a girl who continually found favor in her father’s adoring eyes to a young woman who would never find it again.

The initial shock of his desertion was like a tidal wave; I gasped and sputtered in the cold shock and grief of it. I impulsively decided that I could not tolerate one more day in the difficult and often abusive presence of Mr. Barker, and wrote him a letter to tell him I would not be coming to class any more. I wept all the way to the mailbox, but I did not turn back. I put that life behind me, and focused instead on getting into college—I was a senior in high school at the time—and carving out a new identity for myself.

In retrospect, it seems to me that by wrenching myself away from something I had loved so deeply, I was both inflicting a kind of self-punishment as well as unconsciously imitating my father’s rejecting behavior. But at the time, I knew only that dancing belonged to the past, and the past was a country from which I desperately longed to escape. For many years, I succeeded. I locked the ballet girl I once was in a closet and never let her out. I cultivated another self—one who attended college and graduate school, held jobs, went on dates, and kissed scads of frogs before stumbling on a prince. I found a vocation—writer—and turned it into a deeply gratifying career. I married, had children, bought a house in Brooklyn. But all that time, the ballet girl remained—mute, neglected and sad. I could not afford to let her out; her presence was too painful to me, too much a reminder of who I had been and what, despite everything I now had, I had lost.

But even though she was in serious lockdown, this ballet girl grew restive and balked at her exile. She did not want to be locked away; she demanded to be acknowledged. Alarmingly, she was even able to crack the door a little bit; I could hear her voice and even though I still could not bring myself to let her out, I began to listen to it. She told me a story about a ferocious young ballerina named Ginny Valentine and soon Ginny’s story became part of The Four Temperaments, a novel I began writing in the late 1990s. In order to complete this book, I needed to start attending ballet performances again; I had not seen live dance in years. So I returned to the theaters where I had once been a regular: City Center, the New York State Theater, and the Metropolitan Opera House. Most evenings, my eyes filled with tears as soon as the curtain rose. The Four Temperaments turned out to be a waiting vessel; into it, I could pour so much of what I thought, felt and remembered from those years. It also was a kind of joyful revision of the past: my character succeeded as a dancer in a way that I had not. It was a both a gift and privilege to write it, and when it was published in 2002 I felt a kind of peace—even a sense of redemption—that went bone deep.

Although the ballet girl was no longer locked away, I was not on the most intimate of terms with her; I still felt the need to keep her at some remove. But when I hit fifty, something shifted; I could feel the tectonic plates of self rumbling and rearranging inside. And even though I could not be that ballet girl ever again, I decided that for the first time in more than thirty years, I wanted to put on a pair of ballet shoes and resume my place in front of the mirror.

I was not entirely ready to confront the “now,” and find it so sadly wanting when compared with the “then.” I had to live with the idea for a while, hoarding it like a delectable bit of candy that I had stolen: delicious, yet laced with both danger and shame. Desire turned out to be stronger than fear, and on a bright September morning a few years ago, I showed up for a ballet class with four other women—all middle-aged moms like myself, nary a swan among us. My hair was short; no bun required. And the pink and black combo I remembered seemed to have gone the way of rotary dial, so my yoga pants and white T-shirt fit right in, as did my black ballet slippers.

I was nervous after a hiatus of more than three decades. But I was in some deeper way ready too, for I realized, if not now, when? Or more aptly, if not now, never. At first, I was saddened by how much my body had forgotten: feet that no longer would point in a high clear arch, the arabesque that wobbled and quivered when I tried to hold it. But I kept on, week after week, and was cautiously heartened by how much my mind had retained. I still knew the names of all the steps. I remembered how to hold my head and my arms, to turn toward the barre, and not away from it, after the completion of an exercise. And the joy I took in those small accomplishments outweighed the sorrow engendered by the losses.

I could no more return to the time I had been young and in full possession of whatever physical gifts I possessed than I could soften my father’s implacable heart and bask in his love once again. But I no longer had to banish the ballet girl to the closet or even keep her safely across the room. Instead, I could welcome her into my life, and let her lead me back to the barre. Back, in some true and everlasting sense, home. I have been taking ballet classes since that September day, and with each class, I feel as if I am slipping, like Alice through the looking glass, past a membrane that is not impervious but gauze-like and permeable. Behind it is the realm of girlhood. I no longer have that girl’s lithe, unmarked body, nor her hopeful innocence; what I have instead are the talismans of youth that I can see and touch, and the graceful geometry of the exercises and steps, precious in their eternal familiarity, humbling in their eternal novelty. And I can immerse myself again in the loving austerity of the rigorous, yet generous discipline that once shaped and governed my days.

Yona Zeldis McDonough’s fifth and most recent novel, Two of a Kind, was just released from New American Library.

 

As True Now As It Ever Was

Subscribe now! Okay, it’s slightly more expensive these days.

 

Stephen King Freaks Out Twitter, and Other News

Tattered Covers Books is opening an additional three outlets in Denver.
The Pitchfork Review , the new print branch of the venerable music review site, drops (as they might say) this weekend.
Stephen King joins Twitter; doesn’t say much; people freak out.
Titles include those by Lee Child, James Patterson, and George R. R Martin, and, uh, Hitler.
“I have no idea who else is reading me. The New Yorker certainly isn’t. I’ve sent to them for fifty years. I’ve been sending since 1963. That’s fifty years of rejections.” The Rumpus sits down with Stephen Dixon.

 

Lost in Translation: Notes on Adapting Ballard

The first sentence of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise ranks, in my estimation, among the most striking ever written. It begins with a characteristic bit of misdirection:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the usual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

It’s a singular accomplishment: one word into the novel and the reader is already disoriented, groping for the context of time, left to wonder what precisely constitutes the implied before. This is typical of the sensations incited by reading Ballard’s prose. His writing throbs with vigor and curiosity, springing forth the recesses of his vision, every sentence wound into curlicues of imagination. It’s rich, robustly literary stuff—which is to say intensely literary stuff, difficult to envision translated faithfully to the silver screen. An aesthetic medium, the cinema seems ill-equipped to convey the density of great prose, to illustrate externally the inner life articulated with nuance by words. Film is bound to a certain literalism: the indexical relationship between the image and what it communicates is direct, unavoidable. A film can’t describe—it can only show.

We refer to this as medium specificity—those qualities which distinguish the art of literature from the art of cinema, as well as from theater, painting, poetry, and so on. When a literary work is adapted as a film, the specificity of the art must be translated: it may be about the same thing, but, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, how it’s about what it’s about needs to be reconceived. Now, a variety of screenwriters and directors have sought to realize a film version of High-Rise since its publication in 1975, including Paul Mayersberg, Nicolas Roeg, and, much more recently, Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali, whose take came perhaps the closest to fruition. Only now has it finally seemed underway: British director Ben Wheatley, the radical auteur responsible for Kill List and Sightseers, has been confirmed as the project’s new lead and is set to begin shooting in early 2014. We will learn soon enough how he has dealt with the issues of translation.

The prospect is doubtless intimidating. Ballard’s prose resists translation: its hard to account for its almost poetic sense of rhythm and meter, for the elasticity of the sentences, for the density of the page. What are you going to do, shoot a writhing mass of ex-bourgeois maniacs in the corridors of an oversized apartment? How painfully literal. Certainly the images are there in the work—the garbage-piled elevator shafts, the smears of blood and graffiti along the inner hallway walls, the half-drained pool with its acrid-yellow water. This is stuff you can film. But what about the pungency of the air, the encroaching lunacy of the mind? What about that crucial later: How do you begin a film with something as succinctly remarkable as the novel’s first sentence, without recourse to the artlessness of a solitary title card?

Adaptation, as a practice, intends to convey three things from the source text: the story, which is usually easy enough; the imagery, which is manageable; and the tone or tenor of the writing, which is where these kinds of difficulties arise. Consider the following passage from High-Rise:

Far below him, the cars in the front ranks of the parking-lot were spattered with broken eggs, wine and melted ice cream. A dozen windshields had been knocked out by falling bottles. Even at this early hour, at least twenty of Laing’s fellow residents were standing on their balconies, gazing down at the debris gathering at the cliff-foot.

Translation, in this case, seems fairly straightforward: the cinema is certainly capable of handling an image of trash-strewn vehicles and residents peering curiously down at them, and little, if anything, would be lost in the process. But take a passage like this, by contrast:

He gazed up at the derelict washing-machine and refrigerator, now only used as garbage-bins. He found it hard to remember what their original function had been. To some extent they had taken on a new significance, a role that he had yet to understand. Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this—sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

The strange beauty and intrigue of this paragraph, the compelling mystery of its reflections, seems beyond the range of the image it suggests: you could imagine Wheatley shooting a man and a trash-filled fridge, but not the implication of their meaning—not the “exhausted” future pondered, the landscape beyond technology.

I conducted an interview by telephone recently with author Martin Amis, who has adapted his own work for the screen (his script for London Fields is currently being filmed). I asked him about the process. “The better the prose in the novel,” he observed, “the less likely that a successful film will be made of it. You really want something that’s written like The Godfather, where the prose is nothing much.” In such cases the screenwriter and director are left only with the task of translating the story and its attendant images, which in the best cases have been described plainly and simply as if in preparation for the inevitable film. This isn’t necessarily a guarantee of a great film, but in general poorly written books lend themselves better to the act of adaptation—if for no other reason than there is less to fail at and less to lose. Consider this passage, from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight:

They didn’t look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big—muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with un-tidy bronze-colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be in college, or even teachers here rather than students … But all this is not why I couldn’t look away. I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine.

This description, written perfunctorily (and quite badly), presents few problems for the filmmaker tasked with bringing it vividly to life on screen. You merely need to cast actors who resemble these descriptions, and shoot them in a way which complements their “devastating” beauty. The prose more or less goes on like this:

One side of his mouth pulled up into my favorite uneven smile. I couldn’t catch my breathe soon enough to respond to that remark. He turned and walked away. “I’ll see you at lunch,” he called over his shoulder. Three people walking in the door stopped to stare at me. I hurried into class, flushed and irritated … I sat in my usual seat, slamming my bag down in irritation.

This isn’t really even prose—it’s stage direction. The book consists of little else: long exchanges of dialogue enriched by the occasional description of the facial expression of the speaker. And this is all you really need if you want your book to serve as a strong foundation for a film: a cracking story of young love told in a simple, straightforward manner, as if the book itself were only one or two steps removed from a screenplay already. The elegance and sophistication of Ballard’s prose, which seems to spill out over the sides of the page, won’t be contained by a screenplay or an image so easily—it must be whipped into a very different kind of shape. The film version of High-Rise needs to thrive on its own kind of elegance and sophistication: and elegance and sophistication of image, of vision. It needs a filmmaker who can not only translate, but invent, flesh out, enliven. The image needs to be animated by its own inspiration—one that imagines something as marvelous as later.

Calum Marsh is an essayist and critic born in Great Britain and based in Toronto. His writings have appeared in such periodicals as the Atlantic, Esquire, and the LA Review of Books.

 

The Ghost of Christmas Past

This Saturday marks the fourth iteration of what is becoming a beloved holiday tradition: the marathon reading of A Christmas Carol at the Housing Works Bookstore. From one to four P.M., a series of readers—including Jami Attenberg, Saeed Jones, Téa Obreht, and our very own Lorin Stein—will read aloud the classic tale of Christmas redemption. Caroling starts at noon!

 

Recapping Dante: Canto 10, or Why We Are Doing This

Farinata by John Flaxman

This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

There is a circle in hell reserved for the people who stop reading Dante and never make it to canto 10.

If there’s ever been any question as to whether the Inferno is really a great work of art, the answer lies in canto 10. If there is ever any doubt that Dante is worth rereading always—perhaps every year, like the Torah—canto 10 will remind us. If somehow we forget what sorrow, or remorse, or horror, or despair looks like—if we forget that sometimes human beings are at once so callous, and strangely tender, there again is canto 10.

If canto 10 is magnificent, it is perhaps because Dante takes two characters who have fizzled out of history almost entirely—real nobodies, by twenty-first-century standards—and has made them immortal. After Dante, could we ever forget Farinata, the Ghibelline who took Florence from the Guelphs and defended Florence with his own sword as the city was about to be razed? Can we complete the Inferno without remembering Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, whose heart breaks right before us? If ever I forget what exactly it is about art that I love—or worse, begin to feel disillusioned by it—canto 10 reminds me.

Imagine that you are walking through a field of sepulchers, lids propped open, and all of the sudden a voice speaks to you in your native dialect. The voice belongs to Farinata. Who are your ancestors, he asks. Dante identifies himself as a Guelph, and the sinner tells Dante with a sort of unabashed pride that he twice chased his ancestors from Florence. Dante retorts that his ancestors returned twice—a skill the Ghibellines had struggled to learn. There’s something charming about this witty Dante—Dante later reminds the reader that there is also a pope and a cardinal in the sepulcher. You’ll see in the Inferno that there are countless bishops, popes, and cardinals in hell; Dante got political with his commentary.

Farinata is interrupted by Cavalcanti, who asks Dante why his son, Guido Cavalcanti, is not with him. Dante responds that he and Virgil are on their way to visit other sinners, some of whom Guido probably “held in scorn.” Cavalcanti bursts out—What? Did you say “he held?” Lives he not still? The moment in which Cavalcanti mourns the death of his son is one of high tragedy—Cavalcanti has, in an instant, lost everything at the hands of something as simple and as pathetic as a verb tense. Dante has broken away for a moment from his lyricism and into a sort of colloquial tone, almost as if he’s trying to elbow us in the rib, lean over, and whispering hey, remember, this is poem second, and it is art first. Of course Guido isn’t dead yet, but Cavalcanti is so overwhelmed by sadness that he falls back. Virgil warned Dante not to feel pity for the sinners, and with the exception of Pier delle Vigne, who will appear in a later canto, Cavalcanti may the easiest sinner to fall for.

But after Cavalcanti falls back, Farinata continues, and responds to Dante with a powerful premonition. Yes, he says, Farinata’s own faction, the Ghibellines, hadn’t yet found a way to get back into Florence, but soon enough, Dante would learn just how hard it really is to figure out such a thing. Dante too would be exiled.

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

 

Coziness Porn, and Other News

Since Alice Munro skipped the trip to Stockholm, there is instead a Nobel video, and we can all watch it!
David Ulin on Nelson Mandela, the writer.
Here is some unabashed coziness porn: a slideshow of reading nooks. HuffPo ran it on #SanctuarySunday (which exists, it would seem) but on a Monday morning fraught with wintry mix, I daresay we need it even more.
And apparently on the same page, the Guardian brings us a list of comfort reads.

 

Golden

We love these gorgeous vintage ALA posters!