Burnt by lightning nevertheless
she’ll walk this terra infinita
lashes singed on her third eye
searching definite shadows for an indefinite future
Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang
askew as sheltering
some delicate indefensible existence
Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft
a place of origins as yet unclosured and unclaimed
Writing cursive instructions on abounding air
From Adrienne Rich’s “Itinerary,” published in The Paris Review
Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.
Source: proustitute
Because of the prevalent skepticism of our time people don’t have the courage of their convictions.
Source: theparisreview
Frida kept a collection of ex-votos, paintings offered in thanks to saints. These small scenes show angels hovering over the infirm and the saved, their tiny bodies curled in prostrate postures of gratitude or suffering. Cursive captions offer summaries so brief (“I was crushed by a horse; the horse was startled by a snake”) they seem gags clamped over the full stories. Ex-votos are full of Frida’s hope, and her stubbornness: hers was a body pulled almost gravitationally toward injury, and yet her paintings point ceaselessly at grace.
Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old. The corsets remain to this day in her famous blue house—their embedded mirrors reflecting back our gazes, their collages bringing the whole world into stricture. In one, an open circle has been carved into the plaster like a skylight near the heart.
Frida’s Corsets by Leslie Jamison at The Paris Review
Francisco Goldman on ‘Say Her Name’
How long after Aura’s death did you start working on the book?
I started working on the book in December. She died in July. Those ensuing months after Aura’s death were so horrible and I was probably drunk for almost all of it. In December—I was dreading being alone in our apartment over the holidays—Chloe Aridjis, the writer from Mexico City who was living in Berlin, offered me her apartment. It was this very literary apartment with a very nice writing desk, and it was good to be someplace where I didn’t know anybody. And the city itself—it seemed cold, gray, a rainy drizzle coming down every day that almost made nighttime seem like daytime—it somehow matched my mood perfectly. I started it there, and in a way the book accompanied me through my mourning. It was like my indispensable other self.
You call this book a novel, but obviously many of the fundamental elements of the story are true. Could you talk a little about what you see as the relationship between fact and fiction in this book?
I made things up in order to be able to tell the truth. I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory you are already in the realm of fiction. I am not claiming that there is not some other side to Aura that I missed. And there is the way I portray myself: a factual account of the kind of widower I was would give a completely different impression. I was a really superb widower. I honored her every day. I founded the Aura Estrada Prize [which gives a large stipend to Latin American women who are thirty-five and under and write in Spanish]. We have enough money for the next twenty years. I worked. I got her book published. But, really, that wasn’t emotional truth. The emotional truth was that I was in complete chaos. I was lost. I couldn’t have been more lost.
For me the most important thing was that she had to get all the good lines. I thought, well what would she have said? What might she have said? I would trade back and forth, so there were things in the novel that I thought of or said that I would give to her, which is what the essence of love is anyway, why love is so important, because for once in your life you leave yourself and all your yearning and all your imagination. You’re trying to enter the other person and think of what they feel, of what they want, of how they are experiencing it. That is very rare; at least, it was very rare in my life.
One of the things that is the hardest about losing someone is that you are no longer defined in your relationship to that person.
It is horrendous. I don’t know if God is in the details, but love is certainly in the details. I wanted to fill the book with an effusion of all of those little details of everyday life. It’s really what makes relationships, it is what is transformative about a relationship, and to lose them is falling into a void, you can’t believe it. To this day I haven’t gone back into the fish store.
It gets back to what we were just talking about in terms of the loss of identity.
That’s a really good point, yes. I was reading Alcestis, Euripides’s tragedy. That play is so screwy because it is a grief play, but King Alcestis himself sends his wife to die because he doesn’t want to die. And it is Herakles who goes back to Hades and brings her out. There is a wonderful lament that says exactly that: You will no longer be the man you were. In a weird way, in my book, I am both characters, the narrator is both characters. He is the husband, who loses everything, and Herakles, who goes and brings her out of Hades. Which, yeah, that is kind of what I intended.
From The Paris Review
I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don’t know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don’t really believe that. I still see Icarus.
(via ahuntersheart)
Source: tornbread
The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me. But it’s not necessarily easy listening. It can be fractured, dissonant music, in the sense of Charles Mingus or Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.” The poem “Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time” opens with the words, “Lurid, garish, gash.” I want the sense of physicality, flesh and blood, body language. I want the words to act physically on the reader or hearer.
Adrienne Rich
W. W. Norton: The Paris Review Interviews Adrienne Rich
(via aperfectcommotion)
(via mythologyofblue)
Source: wwnorton
Excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Robert Stone
STONE
Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed—you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read work aloud to yourself?
STONE
No. My inner ear is very accurate. I know what the writing sounds like.
INTERVIEWER
Your prose is very rich in sensual detail—imagery intensified by the cadence of the sentence.
STONE
I use the white space. I’m interested in precise meaning and in reverberation, in associative levels. What you’re trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You’re trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
INTERVIEWER
I see that. But one of the things I respond to most in your writing is the tremendous particularity, your way of relating language to reality. It seems to me that there’s a danger, if language takes the reader too far into cosmic preoccupations, of losing that immediacy.
STONE
The object is to make a connection between your characters and the contour of things as they are. The danger is of becoming pretentious. And yet it’s necessary that a given dramatized scene have a richness of reference. Take a basic philosophical question: why is there something rather than nothing? Two people in love, two people in a battle to the death, refer to that question. To say so directly is preposterous; you have to get there along the path of your art. How do you relate events to that basic question? You choose words that open up deeper and deeper levels of existence by sustaining a sound that perfectly serves the narrative and that at the same time relates through a series of associations to the larger questions.
INTERVIEWER
That would account for the shifting levels of your rhetoric, which plays the colloquial against high ornamentation. The effect is a constant tone of irony.
STONE
Irony is my friend and brother. “To know true things by what their mockeries be.” There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. “There it is.”
STONE
My difference with those writers is that they take realism too seriously and so have to react against it. I don’t feel the necessity of reacting against it. I don’t believe in it to start with. Realism as a theory of literature is meaningless. I can start with it as a mode precisely because I don’t believe in it. I know it’s all a world of words—what else could it be? I had the curious luck to be raised by a schizophrenic, which gives one a tremendous advantage in understanding the relationship of language to reality. I had to develop a model of reality in the face of being conditioned to a schizophrenic world. I had to sort out causality for myself. My mother’s world was pure magic. And because I had no father I eventually went into a sort of orphanage when my mother could no longer cope. So at the age of six I went into an institution, which taught me to be a listener. I had to deal with all the ways people were coming on to me, had to listen to all their trips and sort them out. Realism wasn’t an issue because there wasn’t any. I always had a vaguely dreamlike sense of things. There was no strong distinction for me between objective and imaginative worlds.
INTERVIEWER
Life was failing to provide you with coherent narrative.
STONE
That’s right. Life wasn’t providing narrative so I had to. I had very little personal mythology of my own.
(Full interview at The Paris Review)
Notes from the Paris Review’s interview with Jeanette Winterson
I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own awareness of the world. Most of us spend a lot of time censoring everything that we see and hear. Does it fit with our world picture? And if it doesn’t, how can we shut it out, how can we ignore it, how can we challenge it? We are continually threatened in life, it’s true. But once you are alone with a book, and it’s also true with a picture or with music, all those defenses drop and you can enter into a quite different space where you will learn to feel differently about yourself.
[…]
It goes back to the idea of people continually being at the mercy of things that they don’t recognize because they refuse to recognize them. As we know, cancer and aids in their early stages are virtually undetectable unless you’re lucky. By then the damage is done. I feel very strongly that people—because they shut so much out—are prey to destructive forces that take them over, gut them as human beings, leave them as nonfunctioning shells, and by the time they discover this it is too late. So that’s why some of the stuff in Written on the Body and Art and Lies is not necessarily for the squeamish. I wanted people to recoil and to have to think about it.
