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Lillyhammer, now streaming on Netflix.

My name wasn’t on the list. When I told her I was with The Paris Review, the woman in charge gave a can’t-be-bothered shrug and stuck me on the red carpet between a correspondent from the socialite party blog Guest of a Guest and a reporter from The New York Daily News. The two were in deep discussion about a monthly gathering for gay men over six foot two.

“The Tall Gay Agenda, you’ve seriously never heard of it?”

“But I would never get in—I’m only 5'9''!

“It’s not just for tall gays, it’s in celebration of. Admirers are welcome!”

I was eavesdropping hard, announcing my dorky heterosexuality by wearing a backpack, revealing my red-carpet naïveté by not carrying a recording device and mumbling the name of my publication.

“Shouldn’t you be, like, hanging out with The Observer or something?”

The occasion was a screening and gala to celebrate Lilyhammer, a quirky new series starring Steven “Little Stevie” Van Zandt (of Sopranos and E Street Band fame). Stevie plays a former New York mobster removed to rural Norway after ratting out his boss and joining the Witness Protection Program. The show, which premiers today through Netflix’s Play at Home streaming service, is the company’s first foray into original programming.

Prophetic bloggers have buzzed about the inevitability of this move for years: Netflix is coming, and the masters of pay cable are terrified. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I streamed the whole thing. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/06/buffering/feed/ 0 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/06/wislawa-szymborska/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/06/wislawa-szymborska/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:58:39 +0000 Lorin Stein http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=26552 Read More »]]> Last week Wisława Szymborska died in Kraków at the age of eighty-eight. Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in 1996 and was Poland’s best-loved living poet. Her poem “Negative” appeared in issue 144 of The Paris Review, translated by Joanna Trzeciak:

In the dun-colored sky
A cloud even more dun-colored
With the black outline of the sun.

To the left, that is, to the right
A white cherry branch with black flowers.

On your dark face, light shadows.
You have sat down at a small table
And laid your grayed hands on it.

You give the impression of a ghost
Who attempts to summon the living.

(Because I'm still counted among them,
I should appear and knock:
Good night, that is, good morning,
Farewell, that is, hello.
Not being stingy with questions to any answer
If they concern life,
That is, the storm before the calm.)

This is a story about the life and death of a Hollywood icon—much of it myth, uncorroborated hearsay, and patchwork nostalgia, but it’s all how I remember it.

In its day, which is to say from around 1996 to 2003, Les Deux Cafés was the brightest starlet of the Hollywood nightlife scene, and like many of her sexy habitués, she was famously unpredictable, hauntingly seductive, and seemingly hell-bent on her own destruction.

Hidden in a nondescript parking lot, behind an unmarked steel door, the “the two cafés” girded a pair of Provençal-style gardens dotted with mosaic-top tables and dripping with night-blooming jasmine and eucalyptus. Around the old magnolia tree dropping its leaves on the slate slab floor, past the mobile garden bar (and tables 20-23), you approached the main house through the patio—an elevated porch, covered by a canopy of grapevines and three species of Japanese wisteria, and heated year-round by an outdoor fireplace. These were the most coveted tables (numbers 50-62), each of them handmade glass-tile arabesques—where Al Pacino shot double decaf espressos and Six Feet Under shot episodes, where Tim Roth and his family ate most Sunday nights, where Heath Ledger, Djimon Hounsou, Nicole Kidman, Ridley Scott, and David Lynch ate Hama Hama oysters and drank Veuve Clicquot on quiet nights, and Lenny Kravitz and Bill Murray chopped it up and table-hopped on the busy ones.

Inside the house, a two-story white clapboard Craftsman bungalow, you came to the walnut-paneled banquettes (tables 70-101), where romantic couples would be getting engaged. The House, which was placed on a trailer and moved several blocks to this site, had reportedly belonged to James Cagney in the thirties. Designer Paul Fortune—who, after his masterful work at Les Deux Cafés, would famously revamp the restaurant at the Sunset Tower—hung his own portrait of the actor over the indoor fireplace.

Behind the house was the cavernous kitchen, and down a long, poured-cement corridor, past the bathrooms where TV stars did cocaine, was the Trapeze Bar—a jazzy, high-ceilinged modernist boîte where, long after the California smoking ban, performers still puffed through their sets, and, right after the Grammys, Puffy would dance on tables and buy out the bar’s collection of Krug Clos du Mesnil.

But, though the café was Siren-song beautiful, the real draw—what we lurch for with the electromagnetic descriptor vibe—was felt more than seen. The service was abysmal (infamously, and intentionally so), the food was okay, but the scene ... the scene was the thing. It was lost on no one that the garden tables were arranged as an amphitheater, the better to watch everyone else. Owner and guiding spirit Michèle Lamy casted the staff more than hired them, and, consciously or not, we all performed in her play. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/06/a-star-turned/feed/ 6 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/03/xi-chuan-beijing-2/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/03/xi-chuan-beijing-2/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:30:12 +0000 Matteo Pericoli http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=25857 Read More »]]> A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows.

This is one of three windows in my study. The study is a one-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor. I don’t know how many stories this building has—probably twenty-five or more—but I have never been above the seventeenth floor.

During the day, if I don’t need to be at school, I stay in my study. It is crowded with books and old objects I collected from flea markets. I don’t have many friends visit me. I used to have a neighbor who was the manager of a small company that installed central heating. He occasionally came to talk with me, and I discovered that he had been a lover of poetry when he was young. I am sure he didn’t know who I was, though, so I told him that I was a teacher of literature, which is true.

The window faces east. When I sit at my desk in front of a wall of books, writing, the window is to my left. When I bought this apartment, which is a fifteen-minute walk from my home, in the late nineties, the building standing in front of my window was already there, as was the bridge, but the building behind the bridge was not, so there was a vast view across the city. But the whole city of Beijing was a giant construction site in the nineties and 2000s, and the view couldn’t last. Once I got used to the buildings in the window, I seldom looked out of it. No trees can reach the fifteenth floor, so no birds perch at my window. When I look out, I see cars running on the bridge. Nothing else. —Xi Chuan

Much obliged,
Calliope

A few near misses: Ethan Frome (1911) begins in 1910 in rural Massachusetts, but the main action occurs in the 1890s. Main Street (1921) describes a small town during the war years, but it's set in Minnesota. Sadie’s favorite Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Understood Betsy (1916) is set in Vermont—but it’s for children. Our Town is of course a play. Spoon River Anthology is set in Illinois and is, of course, a book of poems ... but if you want New England life in the early twentieth century, I can’t help recommending the Tilbury poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.g., Children of the Night (1921), which includes the sonnet “Rueben Bright”:

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down to the slaughter-house.

Closer to the bull’s-eye: The Late George Apley (1938) or Point of No Return (1949), both by John P. Marquand. The former traces the decline of a Boston Brahmin family between the Civil War and the Depression. The latter concerns a Don Draper–ish New York banker, Charles Gray, who has tried to bury his humble beginnings in Clyde, Massachusetts. The past—i.e., the twenties—catches up with Charles in the person of Malcolm Bryant, a sociologist who published a study of Clyde. Point of No Return may be set a little late, but it’s funny and evocative and pure pleasure to read.

Previous advice columns have addressed the question of good movie adaptations of novels. What I’m wondering is, what books have you wished would be translated into film?

Sadie writes: I feel a certain kind of nerd (and I’m describing myself) devotes an undue amount of time to pondering these questions. I have never understood, for instance, why Georgette Heyer novels (specifically The Grand Sophy) have never gotten the miniseries treatment—I mean, Netflix tells me that there are dozens of lurid Catherine Cookson adaptations, but the infinitely more clever, subtle, and (I daresay) historically accurate Heyer has generated nary a one? (Okay, that’s an exaggeration—a vigilant fan site tells me that there has been a spoof of The Reluctant Widow and a German adaptation of Arabella.)

It is a favored pastime among Barbara Pym fans to ponder wholly inappropriate casting choices for adaptations of Excellent Women. I am not exempt from this practice.

Others I’d personally like to see: The Secret History; the entire Betsy-Tacy canon (also, by necessity, a miniseries. Very high-budget); The Little Stranger; The True Deceiver (in my fantasy world, Bergman adapts this); The Sea, The Sea (I see Ian McKellan in the lead); The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll; The Art of Fielding. Some of these, obviously, are more likely than others. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/03/twincest-girls-on-film/feed/ 11 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/03/staff-picks-modernist-journals-france-gall/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/03/staff-picks-modernist-journals-france-gall/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:52 +0000 The Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=26417 Read More »]]>

France Gall.

I’ve spent several hours poking around the Web site of the Modernist Journal Project, a wonderful archive of magazines—The Egoist, The Little Review, The Tyro—from the heyday of modernism. It’s always bracing to read Wyndham Lewis’s BLASTS in their original typography, but I’d never heard of Le Petit Journal des Réfusées (published in 1896, in San Francisco). Its single issue was printed on wallpaper cut in the shape of butterfly wings. All the poems are presented as having been written by women—though in fact they’re probably the work of the editor, James Marrion—and rejected by more famous magazines. “We know of two copies of this journal,” the site’s editors write, “and they are not identical.” —Robyn Creswell

I keep watching France Gall sing her 1965 hit “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son” over and over and over again. The refrain means “I’m a wax doll, I’m a stuffed doll.” It could also mean “I’m a doll made out of records, I’m a doll made out of sound.” In later life, Gall claimed that she had been too young to understand the lyrics, by Serge Gainsbourg (or to understand the doubles entendres in another hit he wrote for her, “Les Sucettes”). I love Gall’s girlish dignity. Somehow the joke just isn’t on her. —Lorin Stein

I watched Robert Altman’s 3 Women over the weekend and was transported—by the film’s gauzy surrealism and also by Sissy Spacek’s preternatural woman-child. When her character Pinky uttered the line “I wonder what it’s like to be twins … do you think they know which one they are?” I couldn't believe that I’d also been thinking of watching Persona. —Nicole Rudick

Sarah Levine, when asked about the unlikeable narrator of her novel Treasure Island!!!, replied, “There is a moral center to the book—and she doesn’t inhabit it.” But what the protagonist lacks in compassion and modesty, she makes up for in wit. I found myself smiling—nay, giggling—at her seemingly endless (and endlessly entertaining) capacity for egotism. —Emily Cole-Kelly

I recently revisited Evelyn Waugh’s controversial imperialist satire, Black Mischief, in which the oblivious Oxford-educated emperor of an island off Africa’s east coast returns home to modernize his empire and, of course, fails catastrophically. It’s bitterly funny. —Emma del Valle

In New York, it’s sometimes hard to imagine living city life on the cheap. Anatole Broyard’s remembrances of 1940s West Village bohemia in Kafka Was the Rage are a wonderful corrective, portraying longings of the heart, rather than the pocketbook. —Josh Anderson

Li Po chanting a poem, by Liang K’ai (13th century).

I’ve loved Pound since I was a teenager. My first lover, Charles Burch, who was a poet himself, used to read Pound to me and swoon over it. I feel that most of our enthusiasms are imitated from people we admire or are in love with, and so this particular poem I used to read to David Kalstone, the great poetry critic and champion of Elizabeth Bishop, who was also my best friend. He introduced me to so much great modern poetry—Merrill, Bishop, Ammons, Ashbery—so I was happy to introduce him to a poem that had so much resonance for us as two friends.

Ezra Pound’s beautiful translation of a poem by Li Po, from Pound’s great early book Cathay, is a compendium of all his many gifts. Somewhere Pound says that the ideas in poetry should be simple, even banal, and universal and human; he points out that the chorus in Greek tragedies always sticks close to home truths of the sort “All men are born to die.” “Exile’s Letter” has this universal simplicity (“There is no end of things in the heart”). It is about the sadness of parting from dear friends. As someone who was himself often living far from writer-friends, Pound knew all about the exquisite melancholy of leave-taking. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/02/%e2%80%98exile%e2%80%99s-letter%e2%80%99/feed/ 8 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/02/document-happy-birthday-james-joyce/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/02/document-happy-birthday-james-joyce/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:55 +0000 Sarah Funke Butler http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=26166 Read More »]]>

Image courtesy Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.; document now part of a private Joyce collection in New York.

There’s so much to celebrate today, February 2, the birthday of James Joyce. On January 1 of this year the published works of Joyce came into the public domain. What does this mean? It means that scholars no longer need to go to his grandson Stephen Joyce, bowl in hand, begging for a ladle full of text. It means that I can translate for you the above illegible bit of manuscript from Ulysses in Joyce’s hand:

By Bachelor’s walk jogjingle
jaunted Blazes Boylan, bachelor.
In sun, in heat, warmseated,
sprawled, mare’s glossy rump
atrot. Horn, Have you the ?
Horn. Have you the ? Haw
haw horn.

Clearer? Good.

Even better, it also means that I can quote you the slightly different published version of this passage:

By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot with a flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the ? Horn. Have you the ? Haw haw horn.

You see the improvement? Excellent.

The irony of Stephen Joyce’s virtual censorship of the work of a man continually at odds with the censors himself has not gone unnoted—especially because Joyce reveled in the thought of perplexing scholars for generations to come. (The censorship that afflicted—if not made—Joyce’s career is also tinged with irony: who among the hormonal pubescent lads you know would have the patience and determination to locate, let alone reread, the dirty bits?)

You may recognize this snatch of text from the eleventh chapter of Ulysses, the Sirens episode. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/02/document-happy-birthday-james-joyce/feed/ 10 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/01/on-the-shelf-33/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/01/on-the-shelf-33/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:56:53 +0000 Sadie Stein http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=26322 Read More »]]> A cultural news roundup.