Skip to main content

The Art of Distance No. 6

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“In celebration of the warmer days soon to come, this installment of The Art of Distance is devoted to spring—to stories, poems, and other pieces that put us in mind of the season’s hope, bounty, and optimism. Spring has sprung in these pages, at least.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Photo: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma.

I’m watching spring blossom through the window of my sister’s childhood bedroom; the sun is bright, the breeze is cold, and the birds are louder here than in Manhattan. Reading William Styron’s “Letter to an Editor,” the preface to issue no. 1, I imagine that the spring of 1953 was as crisp and as bright as this one. Styron’s letter is an anti-manifesto manifesto, a critique of criticism itself, its very syntax exuding a biting and springlike energy. He admits that all ideas fall subject to scrutiny when put to paper. He writes, “It’s inevitable that what Truth I mumble to you at Lipp’s over a beer, or that Ideal we are perfectly agreed upon at the casual hour of 2 A.M. becomes powerfully open to criticism as soon as it’s cast in a printed form which, like a piece of sculpture, allows us to walk all around that Truth or Ideal and examine it front, side, and behind, and for minutes on end.” Styron asks, however, that we try to put all that aside, resisting intellectual exercise and simply enjoying the patient work of writing and reading. —Elinor Hitt, Intern 

Spring, to me, inevitably leads to the singsong rhyme “April showers bring May flowers” repeating in my head, and when I think about flowers, I think about this Clarice Lispector short story (translated from the Portuguese by Rachel Klein). “Someone who has never stolen is not going to understand me,” goes the first paragraph. “And someone who has never stolen roses will never be able to understand me. When I was little, I stole roses.” But wait, there are many more roses in the archive, including in the brief poem “In the Storm of Roses” by Ingeborg Bachmann (translated from the German by Mark Anderson): “Wherever we turn in the storm of roses, / thorns illuminate the night.” Though they are separated by an ocean and different languages, there’s something oddly similar about Lispector’s and Bachmann’s writing. —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor

Spring is my least favorite season. It’s too cold to enjoy being outside, yet (most years) one feels wrong staying in. I love how Galway Kinnell’s poem “Last Spring” acknowledges spring’s harshness, like some kind of vengeful seasonal reformer after the long dreamy winter. Spring’s onslaught of light destroys cozy illusions—“It sent up my keepsakes / My inventions in dust / It left me only a life”—and demands that we be here now. I’m grateful to the poem for recognizing how hard that is (in any season, and whether you’re a spring skeptic or not) with the wonderful final line, in which the speaker finds himself “knocking on the instants to let me in.” —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer

Blackberries, an early concern of this long story by W. S. Merwin, won’t be in season until July, but his sensuous language is perennially evocative of life’s springtime stirring: “The limestone upland, the causse, was fragrant too, in whatever season, and its scents changed through the hours as the shadows moved, and the cool patches in the air, the damp currents from under the trees. Beyond the west wall of the garden, in the spring, three big bird cherry trees silently exploded in white flowers, their thick sweetness laced with a rank bitterness like that of almonds.” It’s a story not only long but lingering, asking a patience befitting its pastoral nature. The time is made rich by loamy smells, verdant pastures, and all the decadent flavors of food freshly harvested. —Lauren Kane, Assistant Editor

New Yorkers know this is tulip season: I’ve seen the East River Park abloom in Dutch delights—to say nothing of Tompkins Square and its daffodils. Walking the pooch down petal-laden paths, I’ve been reminded of what a bloom can do, and I think back to the fun we had in issue 228 with sculptor Francesca DiMattio’s amazing ceramics. Her maximalist vases are sculpture in their own right, but they also embrace their vestigial purpose as vessels, standing at the ready for any bouquet. And if we’re looking for floral motifs in TPR’s art, don’t forget Thomas Demand’s cut-paper cherry trees (accompanied in issue 212 by Ben Lerner verse) or Michel Beret’s “fastidious flower fantasies” from issue 4. —Emily Nemens, Editor

At the cold center of Amie Barrodale’s short story “William Wei” is a relationship for our moment: a forged-over-the-phone nondalliance between the narrator and a mysterious woman named Koko, who calls one night as he is eating a Mediterranean salad while lying belly-down like a dog on his army-style cot. Their eventual meeting smolders into an anticlimax perfect for reading as the flames of midspring lick at our windows from the outside, always beyond reach. —Brian Ransom, Assistant Online Editor

 

Sign up here to receive a fresh installment of The Art of Distance in your inbox every Monday.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3aBzx4c
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China

Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED . When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discu
Post a Comment
Read more