The Paris Review

What We’re Loving: Boar Hearts, Panic, and Shirley Jackson

The Paris Review — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:19:15 +0000

Laurel Nakadate, Kalispell, Montana #1, 2013

I stayed up much too late finishing Shirley Jackson’s newly reissued Hangsaman—and then was so spooked it took me another two hours and a warm milk to finally fall asleep. The novel, loosely based on the unsolved 1947 disappearance of Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden, is as scary as The Haunting of Hill House, as chilling as “The Lottery,” and as weird as We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (And that’s saying something!) Perfect reading for a gloomy weekend, if not a work-night. —Sadie Stein

“Head shot for boar! Open him up! There’s no taste like live boar-heart while it’s still beating in your hand!” Thus Hermann Göring in The Hunters of Karinhall, a movie script by Terry Southern. The script was never produced, oddly enough—but it is newly excerpted in Hot Heart of Boar & Other Tastes, a little chapbook of Southern snippets and outtakes and put-ons that had me laughing before my second cup of coffee. —Lorin Stein

Your Borders Gift Card Is Useless, and Other News

Sadie Stein — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:45:10 +0000

“Useless, useless.” —John Wilkes Booth

Listen to James Salter read (Booker-winning!) Lydia Davis’s “Break It Down.”

We sort of would have assumed this, but apparently it took a Manhattan federal judge to declare that unredeemed Borders gift cards are, in fact, worthless. (Sorry, everyone whose bar and bat mitzvahs I attended!)

Oh dear. Poet David R. Morgan has confessed to multiple instances of plagiarism. (He says he’s “deeply sorry.”)

Meet Rosamunde Pilcher. In her native England, “the eighty-eight-year-old is regarded as a successful, if stylistically limited, writer of romantic novel. In Germany, she is nothing short of a national heroine—Julian Fellowes, Colin Dexter, and Ealing Studios rolled into one. More than one hundred of her love stories, set in Cornwall and Devon, have been turned into television films, all shot on location—but with German actors—and invariably aired on Sunday afternoons.”

What We Wish We Were: On Biopic-Mania

Liz Brown — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:11:37 +0000

Sometimes there are things you didn’t know you wanted to see.

Like Michael Douglas, spangled and rouged, arms out in a white ostrich-trimmed cape, prancing sideways across a Vegas stage. This is barely two seconds of the trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, about the relationship between Liberace and his younger lover, Scott Thorson, but those are two seconds I want to see over and over.

Usually I get cranky and snide about biopics. The last one I saw was Hitchcock. I went to have my prejudices against the genre affirmed, and they were. I kept watching Anthony Hopkins in his fat suit and thinking about his makeup, the boom just outside the frame, the camera rolling back on its track, the contrivance of the whole thing—and not in some provocative, Brechtian sense. I left full of scorn for the labored verisimilitude and regurgitated history—a petty way to go to the movies, but kind of satisfying, too, in the way that being petty can be.

Maybe it’s a good film if you weren’t aware Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for so-called icy blonds and that he got creepily obsessive when it came to his leading ladies. And if that’s not clear from watching Hopkins/Hitchcock skulk around dressing rooms, Jessica Biel/Vera Miles explains it to Scarlett Johansson/Janet Leigh and us in a scene that feels more like a DVD featurette about the “making of” than dialogue between two people. Read More »

Choose Your Own Adventure: Author Edition

Sadie Stein — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:10:49 +0000

Herewith, a handy-dandy infographic that lays out the basic publishing options for an author. Via Jane Friedman.

Click the image to access a zoomable file.

Poetry Gone to Pieces: Talking Civilization with Dana Crum

Dorian Rolston — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:31:07 +0000

It’s early on Sunday morning, about five-thirty, and Dana Crum has awoken without meaning to. His apartment lights have been left on. Craning his neck from the couch, he observes that he never found the bedroom. Sloughing off the rude awakening, he decides to get an early start on the puzzle of his poetry. He bears down to write. He uncaps his fine-pointed roller ball pens—blue, black, red, and green—and confronts his notebook.

And he sounds rather startled, some hours later, by my phone call. “Hello,” he groans, after the third ring. I ask how he’s doing. “All right,” he says, then interjects, “Actually, can I call you back?” Trying once again to get himself going, he puts on a pot of cinnamon stick tea (Lipton, for a change from Bigelow), while I begin to wonder whether he’s nursing another hangover (Scotch, single malt). As I look over his autobiographical poetry, the canon seems to divulge as much. “In my unlit apartment on Valentine’s Day, me on a soiled sofa above rotten piping, drinking / Macallan from the bottle. My cat’s tail curls into a question mark,” he writes in “Portraits of a Former Lover,” a zuihitsu of imagistic confessions published recently in Blackbird. When we resume talking, though, he explains that not even a single line had taken shape and so he had simply given up and gone back to sleep. “I really wish I could start a poem, and write the first line first, the second line second, and so on,” he insists. “But that doesn’t happen.”

What does happen, as he described it, is something like a young boy emptying his collection of jigsaw puzzles into a heaping jumble then kneeling down to rummage through the pieces. Each piece, for Crum, is a “fragment” of poetry. Often, he has no sense of where a fragment belongs within a poem, no inking even of where within his entire body of work. Unbidden, fragments infuse his days with poetic potential: falling from a giant puzzle box in the sky as he walks to work, or turning up under a school paper he happens to be grading, or springing from the jostle and bounce of a subway ride. His craft is not so much writing a poem as it is cobbling together myriad lines and images and phrases—“a mélange,” he calls it—into the provocative, confessional free verse for which he is becoming known. “I’m receiving a piece of my vision of life,” he says. “These bursts of inspiration are me expressing myself all the time, something my imagination has been trying to get out all along.” Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, the lights are always burning. Read More »

Manuscripts Lost and Found, and Other News

Sadie Stein — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:30:09 +0000

A lost Pearl S. Buck manuscript, found in a Texas storage unit, will be published this fall.

In other literary surprise news: on public display for the first time is a previously unknown Tolkien poem, “The Fall of Arthur,” part of a magical literature exhibition at the Bodleian Library.

It’s sad enough when a bookstore closes, but what to do about the inventory? Seattle-area Once Sold Tales scrambles to place 500,000 books by month’s end.

Eoin Colfer lists his top fictional villains. Discuss.

Keith Richards claims to owe fifty years’ worth of library fines, which the Huffington Post estimates at over $30,000.

Lydia Davis Wins Booker Prize

Lorin Stein — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:33:35 +0000

Credit Theo Cote

Hats off to our beloved contributor Lydia Davis, who was just awarded the Man Booker International Prize, Great Britain’s most prestigious prize for fiction. In the judges’ citation, Sir Christopher Ricks asked how best to describe Davis’s works: “Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations.”

Click here to read some of Davis’s most recent fiction in The Paris Review—or click here to receive our next issue, with five of her newest stories (or miniatures, or anecdotes, or essays, or whatever you’d like to call them).

Diamonds Are Forever

Adam Plunkett — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:05:26 +0000

Ever since I made the mistake of moving away from New York a couple of summers ago, I haven’t been able to spend more than a day or maybe two in the city or in Brooklyn without thinking of the dancing in “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” Of course there isn’t any actual dancing in “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”—it’s a plan they abandon, the diamond-soled girl and the poor boy—but who would come back to the city a little bit older and sadder and think of the long nights on rooftops and not of the way that time collapses when you’re young in New York and in love? She said, “Honey, take me dancing,” and they ended up sleeping in the doorway. Time passes in that line from the start of the night to its aftermath, and the night itself is lost to memory in the way that everyday whimsy and arguments are, especially with wine, especially with pulls as relentless as those of the city’s excitement and of the comforts of new love and home. The doorway is a compromise between the worlds that put them off-balance—the world inside the doorway, and Broadway. She said, “Honey, take me dancing,” and they ended up sleeping in the doorway / By the bodegas and the lights of Upper Broadway.

Wealth: you couldn’t have a story like this of Upper Broadway and not describe the shames and trappings of wealth, the extravagant ludicrousness of having diamonds on the bottoms of your shoes, the thin pretense of trying to hide anything. She’s like a fable, the rich girl. You can hear her playing and taunting, fun and vain, eager to please and anxious to be reassured of what she knows is hardly true.

She said, “You’ve taken me for granted
Because I please you
Wearing these diamonds.”

If she pleases him, it’s not with the diamonds that he has to compensate for, and because she knows this but wishes that she didn’t, she says please in two syllables and diamonds in seven, as if to say how silly—how crazy—it would be to want her wealth, as at least part of him does.

He gets there in the end, wearing diamonds, but not without denial, resentment, and envy. It’s this self-consciousness, if not self-awareness, that rounds the song out into drama. She makes the sign of a teaspoon / He makes the sign of a wave. She plays at doing something, and he, drawn inward, just plays at reaching out to her, but his self-consciousness makes it just the sign of a wave, shy of what he feels is real communication. (Maybe his version of play is a pun like “sine wave,” which, being a pun, feels too embarrassing to say.)

She makes the sign of a teaspoon
He makes the sign of a wave
The poor boy changes clothes
and puts on aftershave
To compensate for his ordinary shoes.

The rhyme with aftershave feels right, but it’s hard to say why. Our ineffable certainty is like that of the poor boy reacting to his anxiety by fixing himself up—likely because it feels right and not because he thinks the uncomfortable thought that he has to compensate. It’s the narrator who thinks that. His interpolation helps to set the characters off-balance with themselves and each other, excited and anxious, ready for the dancing that never happens.

* * *

After the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of Graceland last year, I worried that the album was dead. Read More »

Last Chance for Our Special Tote Bag Offer!

Sadie Stein — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:53:43 +0000

Quick!

Subscribe now, and you can still get our special anniversary tote bag, with our compliments!*

*Offer good for US subscribers only.

Our Detective So Supreme

Sadie Stein — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:07:27 +0000

Today marks the anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth. While his creation Sherlock Holmes has inspired hundreds of adaptations in many media (in several of which no one finds it weird that a modern man is named Sherlock Holmes), I think we can all agree that these tributes achieved their apex in the following theme song. Warning: this is strangely catchy, oddly stirring, and will stay in your head for the rest of your life.