September 6, 2017

John Ashbery was a prolific contributor toThe Paris Review. Over the years, we published forty of his poems, plus two long prose pieces, a series of collages, and an Art of Poetry interview.

From an early age, he started cropping up in other people’s interviews, too. Already in 1966, Allen Ginsberg was comparing Ashbery to Alexander Pope (“I was listening to him readThe Skaters, and it sounded as inventive and exquisite, in all its parts, asThe Rape of the Lock”). By the 1980s, Philip Larkin could use Ashbery as a stand-in for all that was hip and threatening in American poetry: “I’ve never been to America …And of course I’m so deaf now that I shouldn’t dare. Someone would say, What about Ashbery, and I’d say, I’d prefer strawberry, that kind of thing.” Whether we were interviewing Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Edmund White, Helen Vendler—it turned out to be impossible to discuss their work without at least mentioning his. And it is worth pointing out that this was post-edits. Often, at least in recent years, Ashbery’s influence or example seemed too obvious to discuss, so his name ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Here, in no particular order, are some Ashbery sightings from the Writers at Work interviews:

Ask The Paris Review

Postsurgical Reading, and Other Questions

ByLorin Stein

Have a question for the editors ofThe Paris Review?Emailus.

DearParis Review,

My writing mentor said that if I want to raise my writing to the next level, then I have to learn to write suggestively in addition to writing descriptively. Is this true and where can one learn to write suggestively?

Yours,

Stuck in the Basement

Dear Stuck,

Suggestive is good! Suggestive is a plus. Your mentor’s advice has the weight of the entire modernist movement behind it—all the way back to Paul Verlaine’s 1882 verse manifesto “Art poétique,” “Give us more nuance, / Not color, nothing but nuance!” It sounds better in French. And it’s easier said than done. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s advice on how to write a suggestive short story:

If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit. A story in this book calledBig Two-Hearted River是关于一个男孩回家击败的宽吗war … So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted. The river was the Fox River, by Seney, Michigan, not the Big Two-Hearted. The change of name was made purposely, not from ignorance nor carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry, and because there were many Indians in the story, just as the war was in the story, and none of the Indians nor the war appeared. As you see, it is very simple and easy to explain.

See issue no. 70, Spring 1981 forthe rest(including Hemingway’s definition of “beat to the wide,” which I omitted in the spirit of the thing).Read More

August 17, 2017

Ask The Paris Review

Cassandras at Weddings, and Other Questions

ByLorin Stein

Have a question for the editors ofThe Paris Review?Emailus.

DearParis Review,

I’m the only child of a single mom, who’s obviously been my best friend from the start. But here’s the thing: after twenty-six years, she recently remarried—okay, it’s been two years since—but I’m still “adjusting.” I readCassandra at the Weddingaround the time my mom got hitched, and it was exactly what I needed. Could you recommend a few more of those sorts of novels … to see me through? Ones with kids wrestling with their parents’ love lives or ones about mothers and daughters (nothing too cheesy, please), or—well, you get the gist.

Love,
A Mama’s Girl

亲爱的女孩,

Off the top of my head, first I think of Mona Simpson’sAnywhere but Here(1986), about a girl growing up as the confidante and caretaker of her reckless, volatile, romantic (and more than slightly crazy) single mother. Simpson published a chapter with theReview. You can read ithere. Second, I think ofAnnie John, by Jamaica Kincaid—about a girl’s painful individuation from the mother she adores. Third, I think ofSwann’s Way: it’s not mother-daughter, but it is a novel—about love and sex and art and everything else—that begins with the pain of having to share one’s mother. And my colleague Julia Berick—who came to theReviewby way of our neighborhood bookstore, 192 Books—recommendsHow to Be Both, by Ali Smith, in which the grown heroine has to face up to her mother’s extramarital crush.

She adds one more: “Agostino, by Alberto Moravia, is a tiny, perfect sketch of the birth and death of a boy’s comprehension of his mother’s sexuality. As soon as he realizes, its existence it is lost to him. But, in seeing his mother’s sexual adulthood, he begins to approach his own. (And, of course, it’s Italian.)”

Ask The Paris Review

Help! My Friend Is a Vaper, and Other Questions

ByLorin Stein

DearParis Review,

I’m suspicious of memoirs. I don’t think people remember things as well as the genre suggests they do, and life doesn’t play out so neatly. I love Vivian Gornick’s writing partly because her memoirs work according to different rules, but she seems to be doing something pretty unique. Are there others like her?

Sincerely,
Memoirphobic

Dear Phobic,

Or should I say, Dear Telepathic—I was just about to recommend Vivian Gornick to another advice seeker. (See below!) Nobody writes like her, but if you want to read an autobiography where the remembering sounds believable, tryPack My Bag, by Henry Green. I wouldn’t take it as fact, I would never trust a memoir in matters of fact: as you say, most people don’t remember things very exactly. And then, of course, writers often have good reasons to lie …Read More

July 20, 2017

Ask The Paris Review

best audiobook eva? and Other Questions

ByLorin Stein

DearParis Review,

When I suggest he read something, my dad always says, I’m waiting for the movie to come out, just to rankle me. I’ve been meaning to send him a stack of films that are truly good adaptations. What should I send?

Sincerely,

A Rankled Amateur

Dear Rankled,

It may not be your father’s speed, but you should definitely check outGabrielle, Patrice Chéreau’s 2005 adaptation ofThe Return约瑟夫·康拉德。H是伊莎贝尔uppert as the adulterous wife of a newspaper publisher in fin de siècle Paris. It got a César for best costumes. The sets are terrific. There’s one shot of a bathroom, and that’s all I remember—the bathroom, a normal bathroom, very much like the bathroom in the house where I grew up, which I had never seen until then as an historical artifact. It was that kind of film. It made you feel the past as presence.

More obviously, there areRebeccaandDon’t Look Now, two adaptations so perfect that you might think Daphne du Maurier’s books just adapted themselves—until, that is, you see either version ofMy Cousin Rachel: the 1952 adaptation starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton (as what has to be the least believable male virgin in the history of nonpornographic cinema) or the 2017 remake starring Rachel Weisz (and really only Rachel Weisz). In this new version, the ending has been rewritten so it doesn’t make any sense, and for some reason, even though the story’s set two hundred years ago, the men keep going around without their cravats—as if they’d just got off the magic airplane to Cornwall from LAX—and everyone seems to have been infected with a twenty-first-century case of potty mouth. It’s odd enough to hear the aged butler yell at some local yeomen about the “fucking holly,” while they’re trying to deck the ancestral hall—but when a little girl mouths the wordbitchat Rachel Weisz, in church no less, I reach for the soap.

From the Archive

It Was a Year of Pirates

ByLorin Stein

We’re going down!

A couple of weeks ago, before the president attacked the show on Twitter, I was asked to appear onMorning Joe. This surprised me. I was under the impression thatMorning Joewas a political program. It seemed to me the producers had made a mistake. Maybe they’d mixed us up with theNew York Review? With theLondon Review? Or, could it be … thePartisan Review? After I found the studio in Rockefeller Center and was deposited in the empty green room, my anxiety continued to mount. Howard Dean bounded in, looking for a piece of fruit among the battered doughnut boxes, and bounded out. In the corridor outside, I heard producers discussing the Senate health bill. As I was led onto the set, the previous guest, Al Franken, gave me a vague, encouraging pat. I must have looked as nervous as I felt. Not just nervous—disoriented, as if I’d wandered into somebody else’s dream.

The hosts nodded hello, then, just before the commercial ended and we went on air, Joe Scarborough mentioned a poem, one we’d published in theReview. “You know when you read something that makes you want to drop what you’re doing and run upstairs and find a highlighter?” he asked the others. “That’s how I felt when I read that poem that begins with the pirates.” So the penny dropped. I had been invited as the editor who’d published “Historically Speaking,” by Stephen Dunn, the same poem that haunted me all through the election—and the opening piece in ourWinter issue. It was a better reason than any I could have dreamt up.

It was a year of pirates in speedboats,
anonymous bullies spreading privacies
on the Internet, and the worst of them
doing worse than that and wishing to be known
for what they’d done, their perfidy
an advertisement for a cause …

Subscribenow to read the whole poem—and everything else we’ve published over sixty-four years of grappling with piracy, anonymous bullies, and other current events.

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Author Archives: Lorin Stein

Arts & Culture

The Ashbery Files

Ask The Paris Review

Postsurgical Reading, and Other Questions

Ask The Paris Review

Cassandras at Weddings, and Other Questions

Ask The Paris Review

Help! My Friend Is a Vaper, and Other Questions

Ask The Paris Review

best audiobook eva? and Other Questions

From the Archive

It Was a Year of Pirates

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