The Paris Review

Kim Jong-Un’s First Speech, Interpreted as Doggerel

Anacharsis Clootz — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:39:27 +0000

On April 15, Kim Jong-Un, the new leader of North Korea, gave his long-awaited maiden speech, on the hundredth anniversary of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder. Befitting the occasion, enormous crowds attended, and male and female soldiers marched with goose-stepping precision.

North Korea-watchers considered it an important moment to gauge the new leader, and he did not disappoint, celebrating the particular take on history that distinguishes North Korea from all other nations.

A full transcript has just been provided by a North Korean website, but for the readers of The Paris Review, a condensed version has been prepared, in poetic form.
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Malcolm Cowley, Life Coach

Rebecca Davis O'Brien — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:05:57 +0000

In the fall of 1946, my grandfather was twenty years old and back home in Pittsburgh, having completed his English degree at Purdue and a tour with the navy. Though he was expected to join the family diamond business, Richard Max Davis dreamed of becoming a writer—he just wasn’t sure how to do it. So he wrote a letter to Malcolm Cowley. And Malcolm Cowley wrote back.

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Get It Together: On Mourning Adam Yauch

Dave Tompkins — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:00:57 +0000

The Beasties at Grand Royal’s G-Son Studios in Atwater Village, California, ca. 1995. Photograph by Brian Cross.

I’m not sure who had the ball when George Clinton passed by in a golf cart. It could’ve been Mike D. It could’ve been Yauch. I just remember standing there astonished, watching George quietly scoot by in his Mothership mini, while my defensive assignment broke to the basket and scored. The Beastie Boys were playing some intrasquad hoops in a parking lot behind the Atlanta Amphitheater, a Lollapalooza stop during the summer of 1994. A portable basketball goal had been traveling with them, providing a transitional arc and some adrenaline for the stage. I don’t even remember who was on my team. I just know that I was playing with a bunch of guys once falsely accused of throwing pies at kids in wheelchairs.

Yauch evidently hadn’t given up his outside shot for Buddhism. Adam Horovitz dribbled with an Archibaldian low center of gravity, while Mike D crashed about with his Kurt Rambis hustle. Keyboard player/carpenter Money Mark spent much of the game in midair. I spent much of the game looking for my fadeaway. In my defense, I was firing into the sun on a freshly reconstructed knee, ligament grafted, no brace. If I had reinjured it that day, I would’ve told anyone with a working set of ears that I’d blown out my knee playing basketball with the Beastie Boys—that I was treeing out of my mind until George Clinton put a golf cart on me.

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Remembering Rosset and Sexy Hoaxes

Sadie Stein — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:22 +0000

In the Evergreen Review he founded, a moving tribute to Barney Rosset.
The best-read cities in America.
Cooking Cather.
Mike McGrady, perpetrator of sexy sixties literary hoaxes, has died. To quote the Los Angeles Times,“Inspired by popular best-sellers by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, McGrady challenged his newsroom buddies to write their own terrible, trashy, sex-filled best seller. McGrady and 24 other writers each took a chapter; in every badly written one, Penelope Ashe engaged in fantastical sexual exploits.” The rest is (sort of) history.
Odd couples, indeed: famous literary roommates!
Swamplandia! author Karen Russell wins the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

Carlos Fuentes, 1928–2012

Sadie Stein — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:27:03 +0000

“When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”

—Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68

Dear Betty Draper Francis, Stop Weighing Your Food

Adam Wilson — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:03:46 +0000

Dear Betty Draper Francis,

As I write this I’m live-streaming President Barack Obama’s Barnard College commencement speech on my laptop.

What’s a laptop? Imagine a typewriter that’s also a Sears catalogue that’s also a post office that’s also a high school yearbook. Oh, and in the dark before dawn, when the wind howls like a pack of rabid Dire Wolves and thunder claps like a thousand canon balls colliding in the ether, you can log on and look at pictures of cats wearing Halloween costumes.

As for Obama, it’s true: he’s of African descent. More importantly, he’s brilliant and beautiful and a supporter of gay marriage. I wish you were with me, Betty, watching the president tell the women of tomorrow that, yes, you can close the gap between life as it is and life as you want it to be. Read More »

Susan Sontag in a Teddy Bear Suit

Sadie Stein — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:30:42 +0000

Photo by Annie Leibovitz
We recommend Flavorwire’s entire, inspired list of “Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers,” but this is really the must-see.

Watch This: Telling Tales

Sadie Stein — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:30:23 +0000

Here in New York, it’s dreary and gray. What better weather to enjoy a little Poe? No, not John Cusack. We were thinking more of this terrific 1954 animated version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” narrated by the incomparable James Mason.
(Thanks, Page-Turner!)

As Ever

Sadie Stein — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:11:17 +0000

To paraphrase Mr. Bennett, my life holds few distinctions, but I do have a really good sign-off. Since I was twenty-one, I have ended all correspondence As ever.

I’ll give credit where credit is due: I stole it. I first saw the valediction at the bottom of a professor’s e-mail. This professor was something of a legend at the university I attended, a gregarious scholar who had trained generations of burgeoning linguists. By the time I knew him he’d been teaching at the university for some fifty years and was as known for his periodic open houses as for his engaging lectures. I was a senior before I was invited to one of these parties, although really, anyone could go. But that year, I was taking the professor’s seminar and so was added to the guest list.

It was a pleasant e-mail to receive by any standards: warm, welcoming, and written with just enough informality to suggest friendliness while maintaining dignity. And there, at the end, “as ever” and the professor’s name.

I was immediately enchanted. Read More »

Garcia Márquez Lives, Clockwork Orange Is Fifty

Sadie Stein — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:00:36 +0000

Norwich, England, earns the title of a Unesco City of Literature.
The curse of the New Yorker profile?
Happy golden anniversary, Clockwork Orange. Perhaps happy isn't the word?
Copyediting Copyediting.
Angela Garnett, daughter of Vanessa Bell, who chronicled her Bloomsbury childhood in a memoir, has died at ninety-three.
Rumors of Gabriel García Márquez's death were greatly exaggerated.