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Wolf Moon

In her monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor), by Odilon Redon, 1880

1. How did you hear about planet Earth?

 

2. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being abysmal, 5 being transcendent, please rate your experience with planet Earth:

1  2  3  4  5

3. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being frozen numb, 10 being the worst pain possible before exploding into a trillion meteoric fragments, how much pain are you in right now?

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

4. In general, do you wish you had more freedom? 

Please circle one: Yes   No

5. In general, are you glad to be tethered by gravity to planet Earth?

Please circle one: Yes   No

6. If you were to describe the smell on your surface, you would use the word(s) (please circle all that apply):

Snow
Black tea
Dust char on heater when heat is first turned on
Marshmallow
Wet nickel
Lily of the valley
Basement (damp)
Bone marrow
Normal rock
None of the above

7. Of the following moons, who do you like the most?

Io
Himalia
Leda
Dia
Locaste
Janus
Pan
Pandora
Thalassa
Charon
Styx
Nix
Oberon
Ophelia
Galatea
Skoll
Greip
Fenrir
Puck
Juliet

8. You identify as (please circle one):

Female    Male    Other

9. Do you identify as a god/dess?

Please circle one: Yes   No

10. Which of the following is your favorite song about the moon? Please circle one: 

“The Moon,” by Cat Power
“Song about the Moon,” by Paul Simon
“Blue Moon,” by Billie Holiday
“Blue Chicago Moon,” by Songs: Ohia
“Blue Moon of Kentucky,” by Elvis Presley
“Pink Moon,” by Nick Drake
“Harvest Moon,” by Neil Young
“Shining Moon,” by Lightnin’ Hopkins
“Bad Moon Rising,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“The Killing Moon,” by Echo & the Bunnymen
“Moonshadow,” by Cat Stevens
“Moon Dreams,” by Miles Davis
“Moon Palace,” by Luna
“Moon at the Window,” by Joni Mitchell
“Sisters of the Moon,” by Fleetwood Mac
“Drunk on the Moon,” by Tom Waits
“Man on the Moon,” by R.E.M.
“My Moon My Man,” by Feist
“The Moon Is the Number 18,” by Silver Jews
“What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” by Billie Holiday
“Mountains of the Moon,” by the Grateful Dead
“Standing by the Moon,” by the Grateful Dead
“Picasso Moon,” by the Grateful Dead
“Space Oddity,” by David Bowie

11. In general, do you feel like you’re waiting?

Please circle one: Yes   No

12. Do you want to be touched?

Please circle one:    Always      Mostly      Now and then      Rarely      Never at all      Prefer not to say

13. Do you welcome the inevitable arrival of more human beings? 

Please circle one: Yes   No

14. Which is your favorite phase? 

Please circle one:
New Moon
Waxing Crescent
First Quarter
Waxing Gibbous
Full Moon
Waning Gibbous
Third Quarter
Waning Crescent

15. Do you dream?

Please circle one: Yes   No

(If yes, please fill out question 16)

16. Do you dream about:

Contours?
Falling?
The horror of arrival?
Attraction and its many forms?
Swimming in the lava fields before they were solidified?
Stairways, elevators, ladders, other means of ascent/descent?
Icarus, his feathers, his avoidable death, an alternative night flight in which you would’ve seen him soar, would’ve seen him safely to new land?
Tidal waves, rogue waves, walls of water, flood, rhythm, swell, retreat?
Mirrors?
Shoes?
Blood?

17. In general, do you have an effect on human mood and/or disposition and/or sanity?

Please circle one: Yes

18. In general, do you have an effect on the human menstrual cycle?

Please circle one: Yes

19. Do you believe in werewolves?

Please circle one: Yes   No

20. Is the light you appear to shed made of ghosts?

Please circle one: Yes   No

21. When a human being goes outside for a night walk battered by various woes, big-picture woes (such as: species doom, environmental collapse, plague, racial and socioeconomic inequality, political upheaval, so much death) as well as individual woes (such as: a cracked tooth, a leaking shower, late rent, broken slats on the rope bridge that spans the chasm between any two people, so much fear, so much death), and the human being rounds a corner down Ash Street toward the river and finally remembers to look up, and sees you through the branches of a magnolia tree, bare at this wintry moment in the year, and the human being gasps and thinks in her puny human-being brain, “There you are,” where you is you, the moon, and the human being stops on the sidewalk to keep looking up at you for a longer amount of time than seems normal, and then scurries on in the mittens her mother made and a scarf pulled halfway up her face, crossing Memorial Drive lined with all those sycamores, and the human being arrives at the path by the river and sees you reflected on the black surface of the water, sees you in an elongated cone of light wobbling on the black surface of the water, and the human being realizes that you, this big pearl in the sky, just up there glowing and hanging in space and dropping your light down onto the black surface of the water, down onto this human being’s own cheeks and shoulders and forehead, are at the same time moving faster than the human being can believe, full-throttling through space, faster than should be possible for such a massive form to move, reminding her that even though she’s standing still, as still as she knows how to stand, the planet she’s standing on, planet Earth, is also hurtling along at some ridiculous pace, and even though she might think she’s standing still, inside her blood is zipping through her veins and her heart buh-bumps, and her guts are releasing acids and doing their churns to digest her dinner—the chicken soup she’d made with thigh meat and drummies—and as her blood zips and heart thumps, planet Earth and the moon are swinging through space together, nothing is still, nothing is silent, and this tiny human being, who stands near a mouse rustling in the brush on the bank, near a night heron crouched by the water, near the road and the sycamores bare of leaves, near the river always moving, this human being whose toes are getting cold, whose mind has grown over-familiar to itself, who feels, in this moment, everything beating at the same brittle pulse (her blood, the river, you, the moon) thinks now, with relief and glee, “Would you look at that moon!” and the human being notices her woes have been dissolved, that your size and quiet silver light, your mighty benevolence, the simple fact of you, have shifted her perspective, because how can those woes—so small, so amazingly temporary—matter at all against the scale and silence and span of time she considers when she sees you there, glowing, and it is not indifference on your part but a numinous impassivity that allows her to feel this dissolving, because how can a human being feel woe when there’s a vast pearl to look at and someday we’ll all die, and what we’re asking is: Do you mean it when you do that? When you dissolve our woes? Is it intentional? Are you aware of this, your own power and/or magic?

Please circle one: Yes   No   It does not matter

22. Do you believe some things should remain a mystery?

Please circle one: Yes   No

23. Is there anything else you feel we should know?

 

24. Please. We’re right here, listening. All we’re doing is looking for answers. Is there anything else you feel we should know?

 

Thank you for your time. 

 

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice. Her previous columns for the Daily are Winter Solstice, Sky Gazing, Summer Solstice, Senses of Dawn, and Novemberance.

Redux: Conceptual Baggage

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

CHARLES JOHNSON IN HIS OFFICE, WITH HIS GRANDSON EMERY, 2016.

“The question,” writes Emmanuel Carrère in “Exhaling,” a new piece of prose in our Winter issue, “is whether there’s an incompatibility, or even a contradiction, between the practice of meditation and my trade, which is to write.” Carrère isn’t the first to explore meditation, and the tension between silence and setting down words, in The Paris Review. Read on for Charles Johnson’s youthful experiments in meditation in his Art of Fiction interview, a lecture by a famous Buddhist in Danielle Dutton’s short story “Somehow,” a sudden interruption at a Buddhist monastery in Marilyn Chin’s poem “Lantau,” and a return to mindfulness as you focus on Jacques Hérold’s portfolio of pen and ink drawings.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239
Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018)

Let’s start with the fact that fuzzy-bunny Buddhism doesn’t often talk about what it’s all really about—that it’s a preparation for death. Buddhism begins with that young prince leading his sheltered life and seeing the four signs. He sees an old man, he sees a sick man, he sees a dead man, and he sees a holy man. And he realizes unequivocally, categorically, That’s me. I’m going to get old, I’m going to get sick, and I’m going to die. So how do I deal with this? Buddhism is about letting go of a lot of conceptual baggage, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—you let that go and there’s a sense of liberation and clarity.

Fiction
Somehow
By Danielle Dutton
Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018)

In one painting a woman serves a man a bowl of soup. Between his fingers are fingers, between his thighs her hand. Between his lips she sees his teeth as white as paper and remembers the famous Buddhist calling a sheet of paper the sun. A piece of paper is a cloud. It is the rain and the logger and the logger’s mother, too. And if you look hard enough, you’ll see yourself on the page—tits heavy, fingers spread, waiting for something to happen. Isn’t that what she’d written? Isn’t that what he’d meant? Wait, stop. That was a different one. That was a different one. That was a whole other essay.

Poetry
Lantau
By Marilyn Chin
Issue no. 182 (Fall 2007)

While sitting prostrate before the ivory feet of the great Buddha, I spilled almost an entire can of Diet Coke on the floor. I quickly tried to mop up the mess with my long hair. I peeked over my left shoulder: the short nun said nothing and averted her eyes; to my right the skinny old monk was consumed by a frightful irritation of his own. He was at once swatting and dodging two bombarding hornets that were fascinated by his newly shaved head. “I hope he’s not allergic.” I chuckled softly. And beyond us was the motherless Asian sea, glittering with the promise of eternity.

Art
Portfolio
By Jacques Hérold
Issue no. 26 (Summer-Fall 1961)

In recent years, a kind of fermentation gradually permeates his work. The precise line has given way to broad strokes, the brush has taken over from the pen. It is like a passing from the mineral to the vegetable kingdom. The crystal turns into seed, and the seed germinates, swells, explodes, is lavished. Its encounter with a temperament keenly aware of purely pictorial categories space, light has led the fantastic image back to earth, and both are fecundated.

 

If you liked what you read here, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed

Photo of Sara Ahmed by Sarah Franklin.

Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a company-wide address during which he called someone, a childhood friend, by an ugly racial epithet. When I complained about his speech, I was told there was no recourse. That’s simply how my boss’s boss’s boss was. No one felt the need to specify exactly what this meant. They just invoked some vague idiosyncrasy to explain away his bad behavior, which might otherwise be confused for something sinister—heavy and historical and violent—something that could, if it were named, prove to be a liability. I repeated my complaint twice: first at a mandatory “diversity and inclusion workshop,” during which employees were encouraged to share grievances, and then again after I had decided to quit, during my exit interview with HR. Both times, my complaint, once spoken, seemed to disappear. But complaints, according to the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, never really go away. If you are the complainer, they tend, as she puts it in her newest book, Complaint!, to “follow you home.” 

Sara Ahmed was born in Britain in 1969 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Soon after, the family moved to Australia, where Ahmed grew up before returning to the UK to complete her doctorate. She is the author of eleven works of nonfiction, the earliest of which are totems of feminist postmodernism, affect theory, and queer phenomenology. Her most celebrated contribution has been the figure of the Feminist Killjoy, who shares a name with Ahmed’s popular blog, which she began writing alongside her 2017 work, Living a Feminist Life. “When you expose a problem,” she writes in that book, “you pose a problem.” Being a Feminist Killjoy is a matter of identification; it is also, as Ahmed describes on the blog, what she does and how she thinks, “my philosophy and my politics.” 

In Complaint!, Ahmed collects oral and written testimony from dozens of people who have experienced sexual abuse, racist harassment, or bullying within universities, and have chosen either to go through the institutions’ formal grievance procedures or to challenge those procedures altogether. Though all her interlocutors work in academia, I felt throughout that I could be reading about any other scene from institutional life. The stories Ahmed tells will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to seek redress (or merely recognition) from an institution trained against them. Over and over, complaints are either discouraged before they’re made, or welcomed in the abstract but deemed not credible in practice. Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining. They are both diminished and demonized. On the one hand, their concerns are deemed inconsequential—they’re trying to make something out of nothing—and on the other, they’re presented as malicious and threatening, as if they have the power to singlehandedly take the whole institution down.

Complaint! is among Ahmed’s most personal works. In tandem with On Being Included, her 2012 study of diversity initiatives, it mounts a compelling case against the long-term viability of institutional life as it’s currently configured. For over twenty years, Ahmed was employed as an academic, first as professor of women’s studies at Lancaster University and then as professor of race and cultural studies and director of the Center for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, from which she resigned at the end of 2016. Her resignation was an act of protest against the institution’s culture of sexual harassment and thus, as Ahmed wrote on her blog, a “feminist issue.” She had begun the research that comprises Complaint! before resigning, but doing so allowed the work to find new life, traveling beyond the closed doors and brick walls of the university, into the wide-open field of public discourse. 

INTERVIEWER

There was a lot of media coverage of your departure from academia, but I’m curious to know more about your early relationship to it. What promise did the university hold for you as a young person?

AHMED

Being brought up in a middle-class environment, I was always told the university was where I would go. I was, originally, very interested in fine arts. I painted a lot of macabre, expressionist paintings, and I got into art school, but my father said it wouldn’t lead to a proper career, so I wasn’t allowed to go. I was also a philosophical child, so it then seemed obvious to choose the humanities.

I came to academia with a lot of hope, interest, and enjoyment. I still remember the sense of wonder—that it was possible to stay a student, to stay in a place of learning, to be surrounded by learning. I didn’t really know what an academic job was, but I loved writing essays, doing research, and going to the library. While I was doing my Ph.D., I realized that being a lecturer was something that was possible for me. It just so happened that there was a job opening in women’s studies at Lancaster. I didn’t have any publications, but they interviewed me, and they hired me, partly, I think, because I was so enthusiastic. I was very lucky. It was a permanent job in one of the largest women’s studies programs in Europe, and I was in an incredibly supportive feminist environment. I was so moved to be part of that. It wasn’t that I didn’t experience the other side of academia—the narrowing of what counts as knowledge, the ways in which what appears to be an open and inclusive environment can actually be a hostile and difficult one for people who don’t fit. I became aware really early on of the gap between what appears to be the case and what is the case. But it was still the promise and interest in learning that took me there, and that stayed with me. It was a lot to give up, when I did resign.

INTERVIEWER

So many people seem to go into academia with the idea that it will be a kind of refuge for their wonder. I’m curious how hopeful you feel that scholars can continue to find intellectual nourishment there.

AHMED

I don’t really use the language of refuge. I don’t know that universities can be places where you can go to have breathing space, given the kinds of pressures academics are under, and given the extent to which these institutions rely on precarious staff. All that makes it much, much harder to fight for alternatives. At the same time, the most inventive academic work comes from those who occupy precarious positions. A lot of the really important work—in Black studies, in gender studies, in women’s studies—comes out of a battle with institutions for something. When people become more secure and better resourced institutionally, they also tend to become more conservative and more willing to do, as I call it, the work of institutional polishing—play by the rules, make the institution look good—because there are benefits attached.

INTERVIEWER

In the early years of your academic career—when you focused on postmodernism, postcolonialism, queer phenomenology, affect theory—you were, essentially, producing theory. But with On Being Included and Living a Feminist Life, your research and methods shifted. They began to resemble something like sociology. And those books weren’t purely descriptive or analytical—they also formed part of the real-life work you were doing to try to change the institution you inhabited. What occasioned that shift?

AHMED

For a while, I had been doing work on race and strangers—who gets seen as a body out of place within neighborhoods—but eventually I turned my attention to the university itself. Lancaster was an incredibly white institution, and I’d already been aware of that, obviously, as one of the very few academics of color employed there. But I began to hear the justifications of that whiteness in faculty meetings. My ears were filling with the sounds of institutional machinery. I became director of women’s studies, and we were precarious—we were fighting to keep our autonomy, and I could begin to feel the withdrawal of the institution’s support. I could tell we weren’t going to have a future. So I was getting a little desperate.

By chance, a colleague in the management school, Elaine Swann, had gotten funding to do research on diversity in further education. She asked if I wanted to work on the project with her, and I said yes, primarily because it was a way of bringing money into the Institute. It was pragmatic, really, but then once I began the research, it changed everything. I ended up being involved with this group that was writing a race equality policy. Writing that policy was my first hard institutional lesson. We brought what I thought of as a critical language into it, but the university was able to use the policy—which was about articulating racism in the institution—as evidence of how good it was at race equality. What I learned from that was how easily we can end up being interpellated. It’s not only that there’s a gap between statements about inclusivity and diversity and what actually happens. It’s also that we end up working to create the appearance of what isn’t the case.

INTERVIEWER

I was so compelled by your point, in On Being Included, that the term diversity “can be used as a description or affirmation of anything”—that it’s often seen “as a ‘good’ word precisely because it can be used in diverse ways.”

AHMED

I like to call diversity practitioners institutional plumbers. You have to work out where something gets stuck, and how to get it unstuck. And in working that out, you have to become quite inventive. There’s a way in which “diversity” can be emptied of its more antagonistic content—i.e., the entire point of it—but that emptying can also be used strategically. I was very conscious of how administrators in charge of diversity initiatives would try to maximize the distance between themselves and the complainers. They were not going to be using the language of racism, those so-called negative words that are about rendering the institution accountable for reproducing violence. Sometimes people use words like “diversity”—friendlier, happier words—because they’re just trying to get things unstuck. They think that word might enable certain people to be at the table with them.

When I was researching Complaint!, I became more aware of the limits of that strategy. If we have to give up so much of our language—and ourselves—to get people to the table, then it might be that the table keeps its place. A lot of people talked to me about how when they tried to make complaints, it was often the diversity agenda that would be used against them—as if they weren’t doing this the right way, as if they weren’t being appealing enough, as if by even using certain words they were trying to make life difficult for other people, including other minoritized staff.

Still, it’s not always clear, in the context of people’s actual lives, how to complain effectively. It might be, for instance, that you have a complaint to make about how racism enables your white peers to get more research time. But you’re already the only person of color in the department, and so in order to give yourself any chance of getting what you need, you might try not to appear like a troublemaker. That kind of institutional passing isn’t about identifying with whiteness or with power, and it’s certainly not about using happy language in order to get somewhere. It’s just about trying to be safe. So, we can move between the registers. We can sometimes refuse to be positive because it takes too much out of us, and we can decide not to be negative, because that takes too much out of us, as well.

INTERVIEWER

In Complaint!, you write, using Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, that “complaints procedures could … be understood as ‘the master’s tools.’ ” At the same time, as you point out, making a formal complaint can be politicizing, since it shows the complainant how the institution systematically devalues her grievances. Do you think that trying to change things at a university by complying with the procedures they’ve laid down is always likely to be a losing game?

AHMED

Formal complaints can sound just like the master’s tools—bureaucratic, dry, tedious—but they’re also where you actually come to hear and learn about institutional mechanics, how institutions reproduce themselves.

To use the Lordeian formulation, the effort to rebuild the master’s house so that it can accommodate those for whom it was not intended cannot be understood purely as a reformist project. It is, potentially, revolutionary. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. It’s the sociability of complaint that leads it in a direction similar to a protest. You find your co-complainers, the people who get it, who have been there, your comrades. Some people cannot survive these institutions. Some people do not survive them. It is a fundamentally life-affirming task to build institutions that are not dependent on the diminishment of the life-capacities of others.

At my former university, a group of students put together a collective complaint, anonymously, about sexual harassment and misconduct. The fact that people need to work collectively is often a measure of what we’re up against. I could hear how these students were being talked about by others in the institution, I could hear how complainers were pathologized, accused of moaning about minor matters, and of being unwilling to let the institution recover from—that is, cover over—the problems they were trying to address. When you make a complaint about harassment that’s endemic to a university, you’re pitting yourself against people who don’t want that problem to be recognized. People are put under so much pressure to stop their complaints. They’re told it will end their careers, that it will end the careers of the people they should be in allegiance with and depend upon, that it will end everything. There’s some truth in those dire predictions. When bullying and harassment are institutionalized, it’s really hard to challenge them without challenging everything. And so, everything can begin to fall apart.

Through the collective, you can assemble and laugh and eat and drink, and remind yourself that the institution isn’t everything. The collective is what enables you to keep going. I am so grateful to Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble—with support from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others—for writing one of conclusions of Complaint! about the work they began when they were students. I am grateful that their collective became ours.

INTERVIEWER

I was so compelled by that story of the students in the anonymous collective, how once they recognized that their formal complaints against a particular professor would go unaddressed, they decided to inscribe all the library copies of his books with an acknowledgement that the author had been accused of sexual abuse. It made me wonder when complaint needs to cross over into sabotage. Is it possible to actually change an institution without stealing from it, disfiguring it, or vandalizing it?

AHMED

There are a few different instances of what we might call sabotage in the book, which come from people’s often quite inventive approach to getting information out. When complaints pass through a formal inquiry, the information is usually contained. Universities will use the language of confidentiality—the need to protect the identities of those who make complaints—to justify that containment, and there is some truth to that. But confidentiality is also misused. It becomes a way of keeping secrets. In my research, a lot of people talked about ending up in a file. The file is put away in a cabinet, and the cabinet is in a room, and the door to the room is locked, and that’s that. It might be that you’re at an event surrounded by peers, and maybe you signed a confidentiality agreement, or the institution that’s hosting the event is the institution in which the thing happened—there’s a restriction on what you can say about what went on. So the file isn’t just the papers locked up somewhere in the institution—the file becomes you. You have to keep it closed. And that weighs you down, it holds you back. It can be incredibly painful to know what happened, to know what you went through, but still you can’t say it, you can’t get it out.

And so, a lot of the instances of vandalism and sabotage are about what you have to do to get the story out. The institution has ways of handling these histories of violence to make them disappear, just like the family can contain the violence that’s happened inside it as a skeleton in the closet. A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it.

INTERVIEWER

There’s often a kind of onomatopoeia at work in the language you use to describe the circuitous processes people have to go through to complain. In both Complaint! and On Being Included, you sometimes seem to mimic, stylistically, that sense of claustrophobia. Your sentences can feel like a closed loop, in which the same phrases keep iterating—but then they shift such that a new possibility is illuminated. In other words, they model a way out. I wonder if your prose style has shifted as your ideas have been taken up—through Feminist Killjoys and your recent books—by readers outside academia?

AHMED

I think my writing began to change before that. It kind of changed when I wrote Queer Phenomenology, which in a way is, of all my works, the most located in a philosophical tradition. I became interested in “the table” in Husserl’s philosophy, which was only a passing reference for him. I was supposed to pass over it, because the point of the table was to point elsewhere. But I became totally fascinated by it. I got a tape recorder, and I started reading out what I was thinking about the table. I picked up the table, I felt the table, and my thoughts weren’t words so much as sounds. My writing became more and more about sound, and then, as I was writing the blog and Living a Feminist Life, it just got looser.

I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but once it happened, I became more interested in writing itself and in what I was doing with it. With the blog, you’re reaching people in a different way. You’re not dependent on the infrastructure of the university—the classroom or the seminar. We’re so used to it now, but back then it was still relatively new to me, the idea that I could write something and it would be out there, and I could get a response from someone straight away. There was some connection between the loosening of my writing style—trying to get at the affect and the sound of the thing I was describing—and feeling more directly connected to readers.

INTERVIEWER

Are there other people who have influenced you as you made that transition, loosening your attachment to the genre of academic writing?

AHMED

I’m working on The Feminist Killjoy Handbook right now, in which I have a chapter about the feminist killjoy as a poet. I use a very simple expression, “to let loose.” To let loose is to express yourself. It can even be about losing your temper. But it can also just mean to loosen one’s hold. Lauren Berlant taught me a lot about loosening a hold on things. They had an incredible way of creating room in the description of an attachment to something, which I think is really hard to do. And my aunt, Gulzar Bano, who is a feminist poet, taught me something, too. She wrote poems that were angry, on one level, but also very, very loving. When I think about both Gulzar and Lauren, I think about how the tightness or narrowness of words—of pronouns, say—can be experienced as giving you no room. You have to experiment with combination. There’s a connection between moving words around and opening lives up.

There’s one line in Audre Lorde’s “Power,” a very difficult and painful poem, about power lying loose and limp as an unconnected wire. I’m interested in the idea of language as a connected wire. You keep it going so that something can pass through. It could be electricity. When I think of electricity, I think of snap, snap, snap, sizzle. You have to let the violence in to get it out, to express it. In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde talked about writing that poem after stopping the car because she heard about the acquittal of a white police officer for the murder of a Black child. She had to stop the car, she said, otherwise she was going to have an accident. She had to stop the car, and a poem came out. She had to stop the car to get the poem out. That’s the connection, I think, between my auntie, and Lauren, and Audre—the absolute willingness to register the impact of violence, so that that registering is also the creation of a possibility for being otherwise.

INTERVIEWER

Practically everyone I know who earns their living within an institutional setting has considered leaving it. Most don’t. The idea of escape becomes difficult to separate from the hardships it might bring—reduced access to funds, community, and so on. But it seems as though your resignation acted as one of those possibilities for being otherwise. You’ve written that it enabled you to find a role that institutional life had inhibited, to act for others as a “feminist ear.” Could say more about that, the communities or modes of communicating that opened themselves up to you once you made your exit?

AHMED

[Laughs]

INTERVIEWER

Or maybe they haven’t!

AHMED

Maybe they haven’t. It’s a good question! I wouldn’t ever want to under-describe how difficult it is to leave. But for me, it didn’t feel like a decision. It was something I had to do. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I had this idea that I could become a writer and work independently. It would be very difficult for me, now, to get a job in the UK. I don’t think I quite understood that when I left. But resigning changed how I could do the work. I didn’t realize at first how much it really mattered to people that I had resigned. It led people to me, and it led them to feel that speaking to me wasn’t speaking to the institution. I was somewhere else, in my little cottage in the middle of Cambridgeshire, and being out meant all the stories could come out with me. I don’t think I could have written Complaint! if I’d stayed in the institution.

There’s a lot I miss about being part of the university. We created solidarity in the Center for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, and I really miss that. That space had a sense of urgency. We weren’t sitting around talking about, I don’t know, affect theory—which is not to say it’s not interesting to sit around and talk about affect theory! But it was a different set of conversations that together felt like an emergency. We were trying to change the conditions of our own material possibilities. I miss my course on race, which I’d taught every year since I became an academic in 1994. I miss the students. But wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’re missing something. You just have to decide what you’re willing to miss. And missing all that has given me so many other opportunities to share, to communicate, and to think with people outside of those institutional spaces. So I’m willing to miss it.

 

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor at The Paris Review.

The Review’s Review: You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory

Publicity photo of the Ronettes—Nedra Talley, Veronica Bennett (Ronnie Spector) and Estelle Bennett—by James Kriegsmann.

On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector’s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie’s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live version of the song from 2018: after showing footage from an archival interview the Ronettes did with Dick Clark sometime in the sixties, she comes out, to applause, and says, “Sorry, I was backstage crying.” Dabbing her eyes, she mourns the breakup of her iconic girl group, which also featured her older sister, Estelle, and cousin Nedra. “I thought 1966 was the end, no more Ronettes, no more stage, no more singing. I was out here in California and out of show business for seven or eight years. Let me tell you, life was a bitch.” She then describes starting over back in New York City in the ‘70s (she was raised in Spanish Harlem), and meeting Thunders while singing at the legendary gay club and bathhouse Continental Baths, where he cried all through her set. Later, she also met Joey Ramone, who produced an EP of hers and whose contributions to The Last of the Rock Stars include backing vocals on “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.”

On the haunting track, Ronnie’s voice, its teen-dream girlishness scratched with nicotine, bears witness to the time that’s passed. Although The Last of the Rock Stars is more produced than Johnny Cash’s stripped-down American Recordings (1994), the blueprint for such back-to-basics music projects, it served a similar purpose, reintroducing her to the public while reimagining her past. Where Erma Franklin shot a new video for an old song, Joni Mitchell rerecorded earlier hits of hers, and Cash reinterpreted foundational country tunes, Ronnie chose to cover tracks from her own heyday (“Hey Sah-Lo-Ney,” “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”), putting her cool, inimitable stamp on them.

In her 1990 autobiography Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, Or, My Life as a Fabulous Ronette, Ronnie recalls a bathroom in the famous recording studio Gold Star: “People talk about how great the echo chamber was at Gold Star, but they never heard the sound in that ladies’ room. And, between doing my makeup and teasing my hair, I practically lived in there anyway. So that’s where all the little ‘whoa-ohs’ and ‘oh-oh-oh-ohs’ you hear on my records were born, in the bathroom at Gold Star.” In my late teens, not long after the release of The Last of the Rock Stars, I spent a significant portion of 2007 primping in front of the cloudy mirrors in the girls’ bathroom of my public school, examining my relaxed, chin-length bob—one of the Black American girl’s evergreen coiffures—and combing the curled flip at the end just so. The ladies’ room: where teen girls gather to avoid class, and where iconic vocal stylings are born. I hadn’t yet figured out, then, how much my particular style of performing adolescence owed to Ronnie Spector. But it so happened that Ronnie’s aesthetic was on the rise again. Amy Winehouse had recently released Back to Black (at the time, I was an inveterate Amy-head), borrowing from Ronnie’s musical sensibilities and bringing back the piled-high beehive hairdo, that relic of teenhood the Ronettes had popularized five decades before.

Around the same time, on television, The Sopranos began airing its final episodes, and the beehive showed up there, too, as an important narrative thread in “Soprano Home Movies,” which premiered in April 2007. At a summer cabin in upstate New York, Tony’s sister Janice tells a story she’s heard about their parents: one night in the sixties, while driving home to Jersey from an evening at the Copa in Manhattan, Johnny Boy Soprano grew so enraged at his wife Livia’s complaining that he pulled out a handgun and shot through her beehive. There’s a distressing undercurrent to the anecdote, but Janice and her husband, Bobby, one of Tony’s mob capos, laugh at it, as does Carmela, who asks if anyone could see the gunpowder burns in Livia’s hair; Janice says Livia cut her hair into a bob the next day. Tony, meanwhile, looks very shaken, and soon starts a fight with the other man. On the surface, he’s upset about how dysfunctional the story makes their family look, but you sense that he’s also feeling sympathy for his mother, from whom he seems to have inherited his tendency toward depression.

A consistent theme of The Sopranos was the sense that all the good things in history had already happened and the chance to make a real impact was long past. As Tony put it, “I came in at the end. The best is over.” Winehouse’s vintage looks and music suggested she might have felt the same. But Ronnie, though she barely survived her torture at the hands of Phil Spector and her ensuing alcoholism, lived long enough to start over, making the kind of post-AA albums—Siren (1980), Unfinished Business (1987), and She Talks to Rainbows (1999)—Winehouse never got the chance to record. In her autobiography, Ronnie recalls listening on the other side of the bedroom door as Phil Spector and his songwriting partners sketched out “Be My Baby,” imagining how she’d bring the tune to life. Although she called her voice “the final brick” in Spector’s famed Wall of Sound, in truth, the recordings capture her voice competing with that Wall, scaling its heights. And in real life, barefoot, she escaped the actual walls of his mansion, with their barbed wire and booby traps. “It doesn’t pay to try / All the smart girls know why,” Ronnie sings on “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” but her efforts to rebuild her life belied those lyrics.

It’s true that you can’t put your arms around a memory. But you can reinterpret tone, as Ronnie did with her cover songs, adorning those faded records with the smeared-lipstick kiss of her vibrato. Her signature vocal tic, the “oh-oh-oh-oh,” which is all over The Last of the Rock Stars, gave her mouth the shape of shock, or smoke rings, the after-image of a bullet hole through a beehive. And her sound captures that mingling of anticipation and forewarning, of things recalled in perfect detail and those blurred or corrupted in memory, of pain and wistfulness and long-ago glee. When I listen to Ronnie, I can hear it all. —Niela Orr

I have a bad habit of buying gifts for people and forgetting to send them. Over the holidays, I found myself digging through my pile of books looking for something new to read—or old enough to feel that way—when I came across a small poetry book, A Horse with Holes in It, by Greg Alan Brownderville. As I flipped through the pages in an attempt to place it, I realized it was a thank-you gift I meant to send to a professor some years back. Selfishly, I’m glad this book never made it to the post office.

Most of the poems take place somewhere deep in the Delta, where Brownderville experiments with themes of religion, love, death, and desire. It’s decidedly Southern Gothic, yet the poet manages to be soulful without being overly serious, “they wept, and said some mystery words / like shahn-die, seconding my gibberish with God’s / because they know. They know honest gospel singing when they hear it.” Like the poet, I spent much of my childhood in Arkansas (and in church) and found myself wide-eyed, wincing, and giggling the whole way through. The fifteenth poem, “A Message for the King,” was my favorite of the collection, and ends: “Tell the king / we cheer him, we love him for these nights. / But before you kiss his face and go, / urge him / not to be too proud not to be too proud not to be too proud.” —Lauren Williams

This past week I had one of the most extraordinary TV viewing experiences of my life: my family sat down to watch an Apple TV+ adaptation of my daughter’s favorite graphic memoir, El Deafo, by Cece Bell. El Deafo tells the true story (true except that in the book and show, all the people are humanoid bunnies) of Bell’s grade school years, during which a brain infection causes her to lose most of her hearing. Little Cece is precocious and profoundly alive, and deeply sensitive to others’ perceptions of her newly acquired disability. It’s a story of how to find friendship, of learning whom to trust and how to trust them. What makes the show so extraordinary is that its producers made the decision to design all the sound in the show as Bell would have heard it through her hearing aids. Our ears need to reach for the sound, which is muffled, distant, and well worth pursuing. This is the first instance I can think of—though I’m sure there are others—in which the medium of television has been used to grant access to the charged space of another person’s disability, and in so doing takes us deeper than we could have imagined into Cece’s perspective, to know her, at least a little, as she knows herself. As a bonus, the soundtrack was written and recorded by indie singer/songwriter Waxahatchee. The show affords an unprecedented chance at empathy, making the world simultaneously bigger and much more intimate. —Craig Morgan Teicher

Rhetoric and Rhyme: On Rap

I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love

So come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed.

50 Cent, “In Da Club” (2003)

Is there any couplet in the English language that so concisely spans the dizzying sweep of poetic possibility, the subtle gradations of sense illuminated in a few short words and the abyss of nonsense toward which we are ever drawn by carelessness and entropy? You don’t have to answer that. The answer is “yes, many.” I was making a point.

You’ve probably heard the stately bounce of “In Da Club,” at least ambiently. It was 50 Cent’s mainstream breakout single, and he mostly spends it surveying the fixtures of his nightlife: drinks and drugs, cars and jewelry, prospective lovers and pissy haters. If we’re meant to take anything away from the song, though, it’s that 50 is twenty-five percent hedonist and seventy-five percent hustler. So he puts the song to work for him, makes it tell us what he’s about, what he’s been through, who his friends are, how he moves through the world. After fifteen years of career ups and downs, flops and feuds, fluctuating wealth and implausibly diverse investments, it remains an indelible sketch of 50 at his fiftiest.

Now, generally speaking, 50 relies as much as any rapper does on similes, homophones, trick rhymes, and assorted other kinds of semantic misdirection. He once even described the name 50 Cent as “a metaphor for change.” Yet when you look closely, “In Da Club” contains almost no wordplay, no figuration, no trickery. When he says you can find him in the club, he’s not being evasive; if you’re looking for him, that’s probably where he’ll be. When he offers you ecstasy—“I got the X if you’re into taking drugs”—he’s barely even using slang. It is, and fittingly for the calling card of a no-nonsense street magnate, a bracingly direct song. Except there’s this one line, tucked memorably but unassumingly into the hook, a line you could in fact read as the very essence of 50’s no-nonsenseness:

“I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love.”

It’s perfectly clear what he means by this: he doesn’t have time for romance. He’s not a player, he’s a hustler. No nonsense, all grind. It’s slippery, though, this little pinprick of character definition, how what it says sits at odds with the way it’s expressed. The distinction between having sex and making love is negligible biologically but critical sentimentally, after all—and here’s 50 using it to tell us how uninterested he is in sentimentality. Quietly but repeatedly, twice in each chorus of the song that introduced him to the global pop market as a hard-nosed hood kingpin, he’s framing his identity through language and idiom and metaphor. And finally, beneath the mythologies of money and sex, the beef and bullet wounds, what defines a rapper more intimately than his or her relationship to those things? And then there’s this: “So come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed.”

How do you follow such a pearl of rhetorical legerdemain as the sex/love line with that? This question haunts me.

It’s not wholly displeasing to the ear: the internal vowel rhyme is a nice touch, as is that third into binding the lines together. But what does getting rubbed mean? Does it mean being sexually serviced in crude, utilitarian fashion? Does it mean being murdered? Will 50 Cent kill anyone who touches him, or accept a tender embrace on the condition that it lead straight to intercourse? In either case, is the best word really rubbed, which is too mealy to sound threatening and too workmanlike to be sexy? What’s that conjunctive so doing there? What does this thought say about the previous one? How come I’ve never heard rubbed—rubbed out and rubbed off and rubbed on, yes, but never just rubbed—anywhere else? What am I missing? How, a thousand times how, does the sly precision of the immediately preceding line wind us up at a ham-handed muddle like this?

No, you’re reading too far into it.

The point I’m making is that rap lyrics, even ones from such a poetically trivial source as “In Da Club,” contain multitudes of meaning, and also of nonsense, of possibility, of exquisite care and carelessness and carefreeness, sometimes all at once. If 50 Cent can be ingenious and metaphysical and clumsy and puerile in the space of twenty words, six seconds, just imagine what depths of inventiveness and complexity and contradiction abound within a lyrical tradition that will soon turn … fifty.

Yes, many.

Rap music serves, consistently, contagiously, sometimes in spite of its own claims to the contrary, as a delivery mechanism for the most exhilarating and crafty and inspiring use of language in contemporary American culture. This is true on a number of levels, from the political and the conceptual down to the phonological and the syntactic, but I’m particularly concerned with the semantic: with the creation and control of sense. It’s worth thinking about how rap means—how it can say both less and more than it appears to, depending on the way we listen; how it compels and challenges us to follow along; how it forges these vital, beguiling grooves of imagination and reality that lodge and blossom in our personal and historical memory.

***

Let a nigga try me, try me

I’ma get his whole motherfuckin’ family

And I ain’t playin’ with nobody

Fuck around and I’ma catch a body

Dej Loaf, “Try Me” (2014)

Try me, as Dej Loaf says it on the hook to the song of the same name, sounds to my ear like it rhymes with Charlie. So do family, which is accordingly something more like fahmly, and nobody, which I hear as pretty much standard. Once the verse starts, the first four rhymes are forty, macaroni, on it, and recording. There’s only one conventionally perfect rhyme in the song’s whole three and a half minutes—scoring with boring—unless you count nobody with catch a body, which is a remarkably flippant way to refer to murdering someone. There are slant rhymes and then there are sheer drops. It’s not that Dej Loaf can’t rhyme—anyone can rhyme—it’s that she gets more mileage here out of deciding not to.

With apologies to Tolstoy, all perfect rhymes are alike, each imperfect rhyme imperfect in its own way. Perfect rhyme tells us about a relationship between words that never changes; that scoring with boring is a rhyme you can find in a dictionary is useful but also, not to put too fine a point on it, boring. But rhyming family with body—that’s interesting. How does she do it? Why does she do it? Imperfect rhyme—slant rhyme, off-rhyme, near-rhyme, half-rhyme, lazy rhyme, deferred rhyme, overzealous compound rhyme, corrugated rhyme, what have you—illuminates something about the person creating it, about their ear and their mind and what they’re willing to bend for the sake of sound. It tells us what they believe they can get away with through sheer force of will, like how Fabolous rhymes Beamer Benz or Bentley with team be spending centuries and penis evidently just because he knows he can. Or:

I’m ridin’ through the metropolitan, everybody hollerin’

Me I’m just acknowledgin’ with this million-dollar grin

Shine like a halogen, cool as the island wind

I don’t judge myself but if I do I’d give my style a ten

“From Nothin’ to Somethin’ Intro” (2007)

That last line isn’t particularly memorable by itself, but as the culmination of a chain of rhymes that drift in and out of alignment with metropolitan, it’s riveting—all the more so because he ends it by awarding himself a perfect score for style rather than precision. Style is how he gets away with spending two bars repeating the same vowel sound—at least as I say those words—and then abandoning it altogether. Confidence is how he gets halogen to rhyme with island wind.

In a similar way, imperfect rhyme tells us how much effort a rapper is willing to appear to put in, whether it’s a little—

I’m in the bucket, paid two hundred for it

My lil’ niggas thuggin’, even got me paranoid

I’m gettin’ money, that’s in any nigga category

Double M, I got Gs out in California

Rick Ross, “Stay Schemin’ ” (2012)

—or so much—

What you doin’ in the club on a Thursday?

She said she only here for her girl birthday

They ordered champagne but still look thirstay

Rock Forever 21 but just turned thirtay

 Kanye West, “Bound 2” (2013)

The former is from the Miami rapper Rick Ross, whose manicured Southern drawl—he says his last name as Rauwss and rhymes it almost exclusively with boss—goes only part of the way toward explaining how any of those end words could be aurally comparable. The latter is Kanye West, for whom obstinacy is as much an aesthetic principle as it is a personal liability. Both rappers are unusually fond of rhyming words with themselves, but for what scan to me as opposite reasons: Ross out of a sort of plutocratic lethargy, West out of pure insistence. Literary critic Adam Bradley, who calls forced cases like birthday and thirstay “transformative rhymes,” describes Kanye’s willingness to distort pronunciation on stylistic grounds as “the poetic equivalent of Jimi Hendrix using his amp’s feedback in his solo.” One pictures him standing before a perfect rhyme, stroking his chin, considering how best to perfect it by fucking it up.

Rhyme is the most powerful, least cerebral way I know to tap into that strange attraction words in close proximity exert on one another, what David Caplan, in Rhyme’s Challenge, calls “language’s need to couple.” By its form it sets up an expectation which, depending on how and when it’s met, can relieve you or surprise you, pull you forward in time or hold you in place: imagine if the last line of “Happy Birthday” had to rhyme with the birthday person’s name. Its internalized call-and-response dynamic gives it a sense of gravity, of purpose. It’s rhetorically means-justifying, so much so that researchers have documented a cognitive bias known as the rhyme-as-reason effect, according to which statements that rhyme are easier to pass off as true than ones that don’t. (See a 2000 Psychological Science report called “Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly (?).”)

Which accounts, perhaps, for what I’ve come to think of as slant idioms: single-use figurations based on imperfect rhymes that are as oddly compelling semantically as slant rhymes are aurally. Take the Notorious B.I.G., for instance—who rhymed birthday with thirstay two decades before Kanye did—and who, while cautioning inexperienced drug dealers to avoid consignment arrangements, finds time to compact that old Postal Service credo (“neither snow nor rain or heat nor gloom of night”) into a crystalline synonym for no matter what:

If you ain’t got the clientele, say hell no

’Cause they gon’ want their money rain sleet hail snow

Biggie Smalls, “Ten Crack Commandments” (1997)

Or take Jay Electronica capping off a happily-ever-after snapshot with a two-word distillation of a wedding send-off:

Life is like a dice game

One roll could land you in jail or cutting cake, blowing kisses in the rice rain

“Exhibit A (Transformations)” (2009)

and the Chicago rapper Vakill tap dancing around dead:

Some niggas claimin’ that they can drop me, serve me

Got it topsy-turvy, so fuck around and wind up autopsy-worthy

“Keep the Fame (Remix ’01)” (2001)

These coinages don’t just sound good, don’t just make plausible sense: I find them seductively self-evident, dazzling in their novelty and sublime in their perishability. In the seconds between call-and-response, they create and immediately fill a space in the language. You can’t explain the difference between thirsty and thirstay, I don’t think, but you can hear it.

And who’s to say this isn’t proof of a deeper semantic magnetism that rhyme allows us to tap into? Not the rhyme-as-reason of “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” or “He who smelt it dealt it,” but the rhyme-as-redemption of 2Pac reassuring his mother:

And even as a crack fiend, mama

You always was a black queen, mama

“Dear Mama” (1995)

—which I hear as its own kind of transformative rhyme: one that acts, that performs, the way I confess and I now pronounce you man and wife are more than just statements. It’s not that perfect rhymes can’t accomplish the same thing, just that the imperfection is what makes it feel purposeful, personal, human when it happens. It’s in surmounting perfection, or ignoring it, that you show what you’re capable of and what you refuse to be told you can’t do, even if it’s just rhyming family with nobody and nobody with body. It shows what you hold to be equivalent and thus, in a sense, true.

“People say that the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off, because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange,” Eminem tells Anderson Cooper in a 2010 interview. “If you’re taking the word at face value, and you just say orange, nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly,” he says. “If you enunciate it and you make it, like, more than one syllable—aw-rindge—you could say, like, uh: I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with Georidge.” (A bemused chuckle from Cooper.) This is just it: taking words at face value is what good rappers almost militantly don’t do. They find the blind angles, the shortcuts, the secret overlaps, and use them, sometimes, to build stunning models of invention and entente, spaces where small discords combine into larger resolutions and we see, hear, how boring it would be to live in a perfect world where like belongs only with like.

 

Daniel Levin Becker is a critic, editor, and translator from Chicago. He was an early contributing editor to Rap Genius. His first book, Many Subtle Channels, recounts his induction into the French literary collective Oulipo.

“Rhetorical Questions” and “On Rhyme” from What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language. Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Levin Becker. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.

 

Redux: You Don’t Know You’ve Remembered

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

What were you up to in the seventies? Were you serving popcorn at Westland Twins cinema in LA, like Gary Indiana? Studying history at Dartmouth, like Annette Gordon-Reed? Hanging out at Club 57 on Saint Mark’s Place, like Scott Covert? Here at the Review, we’re looking back to the decade: a pivotal period for some of our recent contributors and the source of aesthetic inspiration for our redesign. To get into the mood, we’re unlocking a piece of experimental fiction by Pati Hill, Eudora Welty’s classic Art of Fiction interview, Paulé Bártón’s poem “The Sleep Bus,” and a series of drawings by the sculptor Claude Lalanne.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47
Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972)

Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you’re tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized—if you can think of your ears as magnets.

Fiction
Dream Objects Moments
By Pati Hill
Issue no. 74 (Fall–Winter 1978)

I am a rocket.

As I shoot through the atmosphere I lose different parts of myself, most of them invisible to me though they can be seen by my passengers.

Poetry
The Sleep Bus
By Paulé Bártón
Issue no. 70 (Summer 1977)

No one on this bus
awake, no animals, no people.
Some damn racket bus!

To the back, shag goat sleeps.
To the front, the driver sleeps.

Art
Sculptures
By Claude Lalanne
Issue no. 49 (Fall 1970)

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

The Review’s Review: Wives and Daughters; Love and Light

Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK. Photo by Michael D Beckwith, with permission of the administration.

Agnès Varda’s 1967 Uncle Yanco is the earliest—and, at under twenty minutes long, the shortest—of her “California films.” Through greetings, dinners, interviews, and house tours, which she stages and reenacts for the camera as they occur in real time, the short documents the director’s first encounter with a distant relative, the painter Jean Varda, whose nickname titles the project. Jean lives on a houseboat in the endlessly quirky “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, where he paints, sails, naps, muses on love and light, receives his mail in the mouth of a jack-o’-lantern, and hosts a community of young, suntanned, bamboo-flute-playing hippies. The film is just as concerned with place as it is with person, and what makes Jean Varda’s home more stunning and fantastical than any movie set is that it actually exists, or existed.

Though its sensibility is so distinctly American, each time I return to Uncle Yanco, it gets harder to imagine the world it presents as part of today’s United States (Sausalito is in the outer reaches of San Francisco). Seen today, the film’s most striking feature might be its testament to the possibility of Jean Varda’s way of life: the radical embrace of joy and color that defines his every movement and word. “Hell is doing what you don’t like to do,” he tells Agnès, “and everything but ecstasy is vanity.” Part of me wants to cut through what can feel like Jean’s naivete to point him to the doom my reality seems daily to confront. Another part can’t help but wonder and hope that somewhere, there remains the potential for an existence like Uncle Yanco’s. And for rousing that part within me, again and again, I owe both Vardas a debt. —Owen Park

I was laid very low earlier this week by a case of strep, and to comfort me while I attempted pathetic little sips of water, I turned on the BBC miniseries Wives and Daughters, based on the 1866 Elizabeth Gaskell novel of the same name. Misunderstandings, love triangles, small-town gossip, an entomologist who sends an empty wasp nest to his beloved, and a headstrong heroine of virtue and self-possession who wasn’t done up in twenty-first-century girl-boss tackiness. I’m now feeling much better, and about halfway through North & South, another masterful Gaskell-based BBC series of nuance and superb acting—and, in this one, the class tensions marking life in a newly industrial northern England. —Lauren Kane

More historical fiction: Jaimy Gordon’s Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue is a whimsical period piece set in Providence, Rhode Island. Gordon affects a charming “olden” style that’s tongue-in-cheek but still quite delicate, although the plot’s narrative punchline—beautiful dumb society wife is molested by world’s first gynecologist unbeknownst to cuck husband—is brash in a Belle Époque–era, sex-farce way. It’s about the advent of scientific/mechanical reproduction in more ways than one: during a relaxed evening of proto-TV-watching, a parlor room audience is shown a series of image slides on a projector device, a nice intertextual foreshadowing moment to that media-brainwashing scene in The Parallax View. The way Gordon intercuts the diegesis of this scene with descriptions of the slides themselves also makes the text almost multimedia, which is very cool to do to a costume drama. And the novella is tiny, almost a vignette—more books should be this short. —Olivia Kan-Sperling

I am not exactly a person drawn to numbers and exacts—irrationality and the arts are much more my speed, and I definitely believe in ghosts—but luckily, I have the writing of Meghan O’Gieblyn to elegantly walk me through some of the most pertinent contemporary debates concerning consciousness, AI, and technology’s role in our lives. Her latest book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, is a thought-provoking look at the question of belief. Drawing on quantum physics, transhumanism, robotics, the eternal mind-body problem, and O’Gieblyn’s own experiences growing up as an evangelical Christian, this is a book that explores what we do—and absolutely do not—know about that rather old-fashioned concept of the soul. —Rhian Sasseen

Flip It: A Tribute to bell hooks

Books on Orr’s bed, her “second desk.” Photo: Niela Orr.

bell hooks died last month of kidney failure at age sixty-nine; she was, according to her niece, surrounded by her loved ones when she passed. Small towns in Kentucky were the bookends of hooks’s life: She was born and raised in Hopkinsville, and departed this plane seventy miles east, in Berea, home of Berea College, where she’d taught since 2004 as a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, and where she had founded a research center, the bell hooks Institute, in 2014. In a chapter called “Kentucky is My Fate,” from her 2008 book Belonging: A Culture of Place, hooks writes:

If one has chosen to live mindfully, then choosing a place to die is as vital as choosing a place to live. Choosing to return to the land and landscape of my childhood, the world of my Kentucky upbringing, I am comforted by the knowledge that I could die here. This is how I imagine “the end”: I close my eyes and see hands holding a Chinese red lacquer bowl, walking to the top of the Kentucky hill I call my own, scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash, a burnt offering on solid ground vulnerable to the wind and rain—all that is left of my body gone, my being shifted, passed away, moving forward on and into eternity. I imagine this farewell scene and it solaces me; Kentucky hills were where my life began.

It occurs to me that Kentucky played an important part in hooks’s literary criticism as well. In a chapter of her 1995 book Killing Rage: Ending Racism, she identifies Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterpiece, Beloved, as among the most vivid representations in Black literature of the terrors of whiteness. The novel—set between 1856 and 1873 and based on the real-life story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who fled Kentucky for Ohio and murdered her baby daughter to keep her out of slavery—concerns a family who have escaped a Kentucky plantation known as Sweet Home. In Killing Rage, hooks (who had written her dissertation on Morrison’s first two novels), emphasizes the critical acuity of the character Baby Suggs, a Kentucky-born leader whom she calls “a black prophet.” A formerly enslaved woman, Baby Suggs preaches to Cincinnati’s Black population in a clearing, where they can enjoy each other’s company and be spiritually edified away from the surveillance of prying white eyes. Baby Suggs teaches her community about the importance of loving themselves. “Here in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard … Love your hands! Love them … hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”

Baby Suggs’s life is far more gruesome than bell hooks’s was, but these Kentucky-born women (one fictional, one real) share a taste and a respect for beauty, for the sensual and spiritual pleasures to be found in nature and in ordinary objects. On her deathbed, Suggs “used the little energy left her for pondering color,” lavender and pink, little snatches of vitality hiding in quotidian swaths of fabric and household bric-a-brac. When hooks envisaged that red lacquer bowl in “Kentucky Is My Fate,” I imagine she may also have been picturing lavender and pink, and the spectrum of verdant hues ascribed to Kentucky bluegrass. Like Baby Suggs, and with similar brio, hooks devoted herself to helping others better perceive and appreciate what oppressive cultures try to devalue, whether that’s the grace of chestnut-colored hands or the understated resonance of a scene in an otherwise throwaway film. In her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks writes that “learning is a place where paradise can be created.” In her own way, hooks taught, as Suggs does, the critical transgressive potential of love and self-love, especially for and among Black people. Her clearing sometimes looked like a lecture hall, sometimes a small classroom. More often than not, her clearing was the pages of her books.

Reading hooks transformed my thinking on a bevy of subjects, including feminism, Buddhism, Christianity, celebrity, sex, romance, and the limits and possibilities of representation. In her 2003 book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, she notes that “throughout our history in this nation African-Americans have had to search for images of our ancestors.” This is true of my own search for biological forebears, but in terms of intellectual heritage, I feel lucky that I didn’t have to search very far to find the images hooks conjured in words, or the actual photographs of her on dust jackets. She was incredibly prolific, and her books were everywhere when I was coming of age. Since my teens, I’ve enjoyed the slow burn of revelation that comes through encountering and reencountering her work. I’ve learned the importance of being patient enough to let meaning reach me when I’m ready for it, allowing an insight to land slowly and settle in my mind. Rereading hooks has helped me to revel in ideas without necessarily articulating them to anyone but myself, lest I interrupt the process of recognition by blabbing what I think I know too soon. As the old folks say, some things can remain private, and these reading experiences that overwrite each other and take years to develop are among the most pleasurable.

In other words, hooks’s writing allowed me to access all the tender feelings that come as a result of knowing oneself. In Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1994), hooks describes how the notion of “erotic metaphysics” can be applied to enable Black women to “know and love who we are so that we can become more fully ourselves in the space of passion and pleasure.” That’s an experience I recognize—the eroticism of thought, the arousing sensation of concepts coming together. Ideas, I’ve discovered, are nimble like bodies and can be flipped over, just as the writhing women in Chantal Akerman’s 1974 film Je Tu Il Elle (I, You, He, She) tumble across a bed as a means of foreplay. I disagreed with some of hooks’s ideas, and was ambivalent about a few of her recommendations, but I always enjoyed wrestling with their meaning. Books like All About Love: New Visions (2000) and Salvation: Black People and Love (2001), shifted my perception, suggesting that love could be a revolutionary ideal and a mode of intellectual engagement. Love unfolds in private, of course, but I learned that it could also be practiced on a larger scale by treating the world as an object of desire. As hooks writes in All About Love, “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.”

Highlighted quotes from Orr’s copy of All About Love.

In the fall of 2007, when I started my first year as an undergraduate at Temple University, I had the queer thought that the world was beginning to resemble a very large television studio. Everyone I knew was executive producing themselves on screens, whether affixed to cathode-ray and flat-tube TVs or the tiny LCD windows on flip phones; sometimes the cameras were merely other people’s eyes. While I brushed my teeth in front of the dorm’s bathroom mirror, trying to navigate my image in the pall of bright fluorescent light, I’d practice retorts to arguments my professors and peers hadn’t yet made, or reimagine previous exchanges when I hadn’t been quick enough on the draw. Every space I entered (classrooms, lecture halls, even bedrooms) felt like a green room, as if I were waiting in the wings for an invitation to speak, to make some declaration with as much conviction as I could. I was ever-ready to pounce and defend and assert my perspective, and wherever I turned, I heard yammering: people were making pronouncements. Although robust discourse is characteristic of college campuses, this pitched loquaciousness was in the ether everywhere then—at the mall, on the subway, at my hair salon—like the fog and gun smoke that drifts over battlefields in cinematic depictions of the Civil War.

So many people felt pride in being against each other. There was a sense, on the cusp of the 2008 presidential election, that something big was on the horizon, and the twenty-four-hour cable media ran up the hills, claiming to conduct reconnaissance for the rest of us. YouTube had launched only two years before, and I spent the wee hours watching music videos and viral clips, enthralled by the freedom to curate my own customized television network. In the break between my morning classes, I’d watch The View, and in the afternoon I’d catch the most explosive clips from the morning shows, cut up and distributed online. In the evenings, I’d sidle up in front of Countdown with Keith Olbermann or the news roundups on Current TV, and hate-watch The O’Reilly Factor and Lou Dobbs Tonight. I remember my freshman year as a procession of disembodied heads, their mouths perpetually in motion and also, oddly, agape: Tay Zonday, Sarah Palin, Michael Eric Dyson, Ann Coulter. In those years before Twitter launched, there was so much to discuss: the 2008 primaries, the Jena Six, whether or not Soulja Boy was destroying hip-hop, the way the Bushes and Clintons kept “passing the presidency around like a party joint,” as I recall Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, saying on Bill Maher’s talk show.

In real life, the constant arguments, though often shallow and amateurish, could feel enlivening, unfiltered by the scrim and debate-prep performativity of corporate media. Even while disagreeing about whether or not something is an instance of modern lynching, or of “coonery,” it’s hard to affect a pose of roguish, faux-tough, kayfabe-style intellectual combat when your opponent is getting off at the same stop, or when you have to trust them not to accidentally nip you with a straightening comb, the smell of burning hair and grease raising the physical stakes. At least we were talking to one another.

One of the most bewildering aspects of that heady time was the constant debate about Barack Obama by Black pundits on cable news networks like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. I’d routinely see them making these appearances—particularly on Bill O’Reilly’s show, but it happened on liberal networks, too—only to be disregarded and even ridiculed once their segment ended. I didn’t understand why these men (and they were usually men) kept going where they were tolerated and not valued. The occasional meaningful exchange aside, the whole situation felt absurd, like a buttoned-up variation on pro wrestling. My impression of so-called public intellectuals in general, and certain Black talking heads in particular, was that they cared about screen time—getting famous or hawking their books—but were not really interested in critiquing the entertainment apparatus that the news was aggressively morphing into. Why didn’t they disentangle themselves from it all? If they had, they might have taken the rest of us kinfolk with them, and stopped allowing the Lou Dobbses of the world to use subjects that were important to us as rhetorical punching bags or fodder for ad-hominem attacks. I’m sure I didn’t articulate it quite this way at the time, but that was how I felt.

My sense of what a public intellectual could actually accomplish didn’t change until October 2013, when bell hooks was named the first scholar-in-residence at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. She launched a weeklong residency there that month, followed by two more such visits in 2014, and another couple in 2015, when the appointment ended. The residencies were organized around the themes of Black women’s bodily autonomy, feminism, and transgression, and saw hooks in dialogue with prominent cultural figures, including Janet Mock, Cornel West, Gloria Steinem, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Samuel R. Delany, as well as students from Eugene Lang and other institutions around the country. The events, generally ninety minutes long, were recorded and uploaded to the New School’s YouTube page. Watching from Los Angeles, where I was in a graduate writing program, I found them thrilling: there were discussions of Black love, the work of decolonizing public schools, and Pablo Freire’s philosophy, as well as critical engagement with popular films like Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013). By that time I had read hooks’s work, and watched a few televised interviews she had done in the nineties, but hearing her and her guests reason out loud, in real time—riffing, citing, moving from certainty to the exploration of still inchoate ideas and back again—was something else altogether. I’d never seen anything like the New School programming: it was electric to witness.

Among the things that set hooks apart from the other folks I’d encountered on TV was that she shared my suspicion of the “public intellectual” pose, questioned its political efficacy and the criteria by which certain thinkers were assigned the title. “I don’t see myself as a public intellectual, and I don’t talk about myself as a public intellectual, but I’m interested in the fact that other people are framing me [in that way] all the time,” she said, at the start of a 2015 talk with Laurie Anderson and Theaster Gates. “I could spend a lot of time trying to establish how I see myself, as opposed to how I am seen or categorized by other people… it’s been interesting to feel like that’s not my task. That actually takes me away from my task, which is the work.” I’d rather not be one of the people framing her that way. But I’m fascinated by hooks’s insistence on rejecting the term even as she redefined it, putting in the real work of advancing ideas in public forums and then interacting with those who responded to them. As she explained in a 2014 conversation with the artist Arthur Jafa, “My work is my passion, it is my calling. But it is not just like it’s all about me, or all about celebrity or fame or something like that … it’s about what the work does. My feeling of a sort of ecstasy is not in the writing itself or the thinking itself, it’s about hearing from people about what the work does. And then I know that yes, I am responsive to my calling, to what I’m put on this earth for.”

In the session with Jafa, hooks deconstructs a scene from Tate Taylor’s James Brown biopic Get on Up (2014), in which Brown, played by Chadwick Boseman, is upset that he’s been asked to open for the Rolling Stones at the 1964 T.A.M.I. show, despite his superior fame. hooks describes Brown’s private turmoil in the dressing room, then the moment of inspiration when, waiting in the darkness next to the stage, he decides to “flip it”—to subvert the billing he’s been given. He will overshadow the Stones by opening with a show-stopper, a set that would be impossible for them to follow:

And then he gets this flash, and he says, “We have to flip it.” To me, that’s the moment of critical intervention where he reimagines himself. And so, his reimagination, his flipping it is [that] he comes on so strong, so powerful, that no one can deny his presence, his visibility, his power as an artistic genius in that moment… I was charmed by that, because I was thinking about how so much of my life has been about flipping it. You know, saying I want to write books, and people saying, “N***** gal, who do you think you are?” Thinking that I can have sexual freedom as a young Black woman and having a group of Black men pull me off the street and say that to me, “N***** gal, who do you think you are?” And that constant sense of basically their saying to me, “Get back into the frame.” And me having to make a decision: Am I going to get back into the frame, or am I going to invent a way for me to live my life freely?

“Flipping it” can take many different forms. In a residency panel titled “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body,” which featured Shola Lynch, Mock, and Marci Blackman, hooks spoke about marketers “flipping the channel from the hate channel to the voyeur channel,” commodifying and profiting from people with marginalized identities. Over many years, I tried to make my own less cynical shift, flipping the channel and tuning out the mechanized rage of the pundits, instead engaging with media that promised to produce a countervailing effect, as hooks’s residency videos did. Watching them felt like stretching out, intellectually. They seemed to act as an anti-inflammatory, letting viewers see more of the speakers’ humanity, make more allowances for mistakes, and gather the evidence we’d need for more informed critique. In their capaciousness, the videos themselves amount to a kind of clearing.

One of the quotations that made the viral rounds in the wake of hooks’s death, a redefinition of the word queer, comes from the “Are You Still a Slave?” event: “‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and [that] has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” When I was a teenager, I understood the Q in LGBTQIA to refer almost exclusively to the term “questioning” but in recent years, “queer” often seems to have supplanted it. Of course, as hooks’s statement suggests, queerness and questioning, in the sense of critical inquiry, are intimately related. To ask questions is to be an agent in one’s own destiny, a crucial step in any attempt to find meaning within that existential at-oddsness hooks evoked. As she said in a 1997 conversation with the Media Education Foundation, “Thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life.”

 

Niela Orr is a story producer for Pop-Up Magazine, an editor-at-large of The Believer, and a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Her writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The Baffler, where she writes the “Bread and Circuses” column.

Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death

Photo of Elias Canetti courtesy of the Dutch National Archives, the Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO). Collage illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban.

1942

There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. 

     —

Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it.

1943

Freedom hates death most of all, but love is a close second. 

1944

It is not shameful, it is not self-absorbed, but rather right and good and conscionable that we are now filled with nothing more than the thought of immortality. Does no one see them, the people who are shipped by the trainload to their death? Do they not laugh, joke, and bluster in order to mutually uphold their false courage? And then twenty, thirty, a hundred, a multitude of airplanes flies off above you, loaded with bombs, every quarter of an hour, every couple of minutes, and then you joyfully see them return, shimmering in the sun like flowers, like fish, after they have leveled entire cities. 

1946

To invent a new history, an entirely new history, one never seen before. Whoever could do that will have lived, and must no longer blame himself for his own death.

—

To some death is like a sea, to others it is hard as a rock.

—

It is said that to many people death is a release, and there is scarcely a person who has not at some point wished for it. It is the ultimate symbol of failure: whoever fails on a grand scale comforts himself by thinking it possible to fail even more, and he reaches for that monstrous dark cloak which covers us all equally. 

—

The shortness of life makes us behave badly. Now it remains to be seen whether possibly the length of life might not make us behave badly as well. 

1947

I would love to study the faces in heaven. Otherwise I’d know of no reason to want to show up there. The faces in hell I already know well, as I wear them all at various times myself.

—

It is the hours in which one is alone that amount to the difference between death and life.

—

That the letters of the alphabet still mean something, that they still have their form and weight and the power to manifest something in this destroyed landscape of belief rife with bodies; that they still remain signs rather than having disintegrated like life itself; that they have not grown invisible out of shame, and that every good sentence they are forced to compose still holds potential; that an innocent man does not hang the moment any are crossed out on this page—or could it be that they are even more damned than we are and haven’t a clue?

1949

The thought that torments him is that perhaps everyone dies too late, and that our death really spells death only when it is delayed, and that each would have the chance to live on if he were to die at the right moment, though nobody knows when that might be. 

1953   

The emptiness of a restaurant that was just full. The children who have disappeared, the silenced voices. The sudden potency of the hour. The two waitresses who now assert their authority; no one orders anything more and thus they have taken over the place. Every emptying-out of this kind is both touching and sad at the same time, as if one were in a place that death has not reached, and as if it had already taken everyone else.

1955

We are sometimes so sad that it feels like we have died and know that there could be no reason at all for it to have happened.

1956

The bliss of simply withdrawing into the distance, something that traditional religions feed upon, can no longer be our bliss.

The Beyond is within us: a grave realization, but it is trapped within us. This is the great and irreparable fissure of modern humans. For within us is also the mass grave of all creatures.

1962 

With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life. 

1965 

The car still needs to be invented in which one is protected from every danger. Only when you get out of it could you potentially die. Safe, absolutely safe cars that people get into in order to feel immortal for a while.

My pencils are safer vehicles. As long as I write I feel (absolutely) safe. Maybe that’s the only reason I write. It does not matter what I write. I simply mustn’t stop. 

—

Perhaps what a critic wrote is true, namely that I have found my calling in composing brief “notes.” If that’s true, then I am not a writer and can hang myself.

1966

The painfulness of the stars since we started trying to actually reach them. They are no

longer the same stars. 

Now covered with the leprosy of death, they give off a different light.

—

There should be a court that could absolve us of death, if only we answered all of its questions honestly.

1968

I am so full of my dead, no else can die, for there is no more room.

1973

What will become of the images of the dead that you hold within your eyes? How will you leave those behind? 

—

Only within his scattered and contradictory sentences is it possible for a person to keep himself together, to entirely become something without losing the most important thing, to replicate himself, to breathe, to experience his own gestures, to form his own accent, to practice wearing different masks, to fear his own truths, to puff up his lies into truths, to piss off death, and once rejuvenated, to disappear. 

1977

To experience the death of an animal, but as an animal. 

1978

What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?

—

To carry the heart from autumn to autumn until it sinks within the leaves.

1979

To write without a compass. I have always had the needle inside me, always pointing to magnetic north: The End. 

1982

The souls of the dead engender wind as they leave their bodies. This wind is especially strong among suicides. Someone must have hanged himself in the woods, we say when a sudden wind rises.

—

Today I found myself again aboard the Titanic and aware of what the band really played as it went down.

1987

He forgot the dead, and they were alive once again.

1989

Your convictions have not changed in the slightest. But how will you justify them? Your repudiation of death is no more absurd than the belief in resurrection that Christianity has put forth for two thousand years. The difference is that your repudiation has not found any form. How can you live with it when in fact people continuously die? What does the hater of death say when victims succumb all around him? He cannot ignore them, as they throw death in his face. He is more fascinated with death than other people. He feeds his hatred with the continuous experience of death. The confrontation with it becomes his only subject, the constant of his existence. What can he say, how can he maintain the firmness of his convictions when he looks on endlessly and sees how they are vanquished?

He sees that he is compelled to witness a constantly committed crime, observing it with outrage again and again, unable to stop it. This leads to the danger that he will become inured to this crime. He finds himself in a war without end. Any peaceful conclusion is to him suspect; it can only lead to the acknowledgment of defeat. But since he battles entirely alone, he alone carries the responsibility. A death conceded—and all deaths are conceded.

In a world bursting with the implements and administration of death, one person alone will stand up to it and therefore be taken seriously. Bemused smiles everywhere. The fool will soon see. When it’s his turn, that will be the end of his recalcitrance.

1990

In sparing animals, a person grows younger. It is the hunt that makes him old.

1991

When he says that he believes in nothing but metamorphosis, that means he works at nothing else but the chance to escape, knowing full well he has not yet escaped death, but someone else will, someday someone else.

—

After the rain he went out in search of snails. He talked to them, they did not creep away from him. He held them in his hand, observed them, and laid them to the side where no bird could see them.

When he died, all the snails from the neighborhood gathered together to form his funeral cortege.

—

Slowly he loses, one after another, the letters of the alphabet. Which remain? Which does he slur? Which is the last that he slurs?

—

He plucks people from his meditations, in which he continually carries them around. At all times he has these people inside him. He could populate a city with them. He chooses to keep them in the dungeons of his memory. Sometimes he would like to see one, so he yanks him out and cooks him like a fish.

1994

It is time for me to sort matters out again within myself. Without writing I am nothing. I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write about what is on my mind. I will try to change that.

Translated from the German by Peter Filkins.

 

Translator’s Note

The Book Against Death (Das Buch gegen den Tod) is the lifelong project that, by definition, Elias Canetti could never live to complete. Begun in 1937 as a collection of notes about the meaning, nature, and consequence of death, entries occur for every year thereafter, right up until 1994, the year of his own passing. Because the impetus behind the project was Canetti’s burning desire to “defeat Death,” only by continuing to live and to write could he maintain battle. He could never bring himself to settle on a conclusive first sentence for the collection, nor to arrive at a fixed organizing principle. Instead, there was just the daily urge to write, and thus to live, filling notepad after notepad with the notes and aphorisms he worked at each morning.

Canetti’s notes are neither morose nor gloomy. Sardonic, mercurial, aghast, enigmatic, passionate—they are fueled by the fire of a man writing for life against death, in a century and locale suffused with the latter. Though selections of his aphorisms had previously come out in German, his entire notes on death were published by Carl Hanser Verlag for the very first time in 2014, and a number of them will appear in English later this year in an Elias Canetti reader edited by Joshua Cohen for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Within each lies the significance of the whole, and within the whole we are granted the warp and woof of a mind in constant thought. Like fireworks, they erupt from the small to the large, illuminating the dark through their explosive yet ordered connective pulse. 

 

Elias Canetti (1905−1994) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981.

Peter Filkins is the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken, as well as three novels by H. G. Adler, The Journey, Panorama, and The Wall. He published a biography, H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds, in 2019. Filkins’s fifth collection of poems, Water / Music, appeared in 2021. He teaches at Bard College.

Redux: Great Blinding Flashes

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons

It’s the very first week of 2022, so you can probably guess the theme of this Redux. Whether you spent New Year’s Eve setting off fireworks or having a road to Damascus moment, we hope you gave 2021 a good kick in the shins. Unlocked for you to read in these first days of the year: our interview with Octavio Paz, an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s Transit, a poem by Catherine Davis, and party snapshots by Andy Warhol.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42
Issue no. 119 (Summer 1991)

I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico. To celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, other religious festivals, and at New Year’s, they made the fireworks for the town. I remember how they made the church façade look like a fiery waterfall. It was marvelous. Mixoac was alive with a kind of life that doesn’t exist anymore in big cities.

Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons

Fiction
Freedom
By Rachel Cusk
Issue no. 217 (Summer 2016)

“What’s it called,” Dale said, “when you have one of those bloody great blinding flashes of insight that changes the way you look at things?”

I said I wasn’t sure: a few different words sprang to mind.

Dale twitched his paintbrush irritably.

“It’s something to do with a road,” he said.

Road to Damascus, I said.

“I had a road to Damascus moment,” he said. “Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year’s. That was part of it, realizing that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.”

Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons

Poetry
The New Year’s Burden
By Catherine Davis
Issue no. 21 (Spring-Summer 1959)

I will not, though I would, resolve,
As the New Year’s Eve comes on,
To do, not do, review, revolve
On the past year, how it has gone,
Taking not all, but still enough
(Seeing I had not much to lose)
Of what, for all my falling off,
Might have been mine, as then, to use:
But if I cast off heaviness,
This is my burden, none the less.

Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons

Art
A Warhol Portrait Gallery
By Andy Warhol
Issue no. 94 (Winter 1984)

A while back, Andy Warhol’s camera replaced his everpresent tape recorder. It was probably around the time he was going to nightclubs like Studio 54 every night; he couldn’t have a conversation, let alone tape one, over all that music.

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.