The Paris Review Daily

Posts Tagged ‘borders’

Allen Ginsberg Snaps, and Other News

January 25, 2013 | by

  • Should you fancy some of the two-foot letters from the recently disassembled Borders flagship sign, you can bid for them on eBay, with all profits going to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. And as someone who owns an S from an old marquee, I will judge you not at all.
  • An exhibition of beat-era Allen Ginsberg photographs is on display at Grey Art Gallery. The captions, which read like speedy mini-poems, are the best part.
  • The Following, a new Fox drama that features—along with Kevin Bacon and many other things—a Poe-obsessed serial killer, is probably no threat to the author’s legacy. However, it’s fun to read the tally of the show’s crimes against literature.
  • “I haven’t read my rivals because I think it could be a deeply demoralising process,” quoth Hilary Mantel.
  • Oh, and Judge Dredd might be gay.

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    Jolly Writers, and Other News

    January 4, 2013 | by

  • Happy Friday. Here are twenty photos of authors whooping it up.
  • By way of balance, a catalogue of authors’ ailments.
  • The end of an era: the Borders flagship sign comes down.
  • In related news, Barnes & Noble reported tepid holiday sales.
  • “There aren’t any obvious candidates for the Nobel Prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation.” The lackluster rationale for Steinbeck’s 1962 win. (Lawrence Durrell, meanwhile, “gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications.”)

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    On the Shelf

    October 5, 2011 | by

    Hans Christian Andersen.

    A cultural news roundup.

  • Odds on the Nobel?
  • Harry Potter takes his show on the road.
  • But not his e-book.
  • The trouble with Amazon.
  • Bad news for independent bookstores.
  • And chain bookstores.
  • In praise of the Farmers’ Almanac.
  • Hans Christian Andersen to be buried, again.
  • Volume 12 of  Selected Works of Kim Jong-il hits the shelves.
  • “That American culture could bring forth so relentless a critic is perhaps one of the reasons to still think well of it.”
  • A visit to southeast London.
  • Advice for students: “To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.”

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    On the Shelf

    July 20, 2011 | by

    Jane Austen

    A cultural news roundup.

  • An unfinished Jane Austen novel sells at auction for $1.6 million.
  • The end of Borders.
  • “Sigmund Freud, cokehead.”
  • California schoolbooks add the LGBT community.
  • So do Archie comics.
  • The rock memoir is huge: can the Thin White Duke (or for that matter Ziggy Stardust) be far behind? Bowie becomes publishers’ “top target.”
  • “We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history.”
  • Entering the publishing world in the digital age.
  • Longshot Magazine is back.
  • A Harry Potter plagiarism case bites the dust.
  • Frederick Seidel on a time before air-conditioning.
  • A brief history of Pendleton.
  • Alan Bennett: “I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there.”
  • How to undress a Victorian lady.
  • If the Paradise Lost adaptation is hell for Milton lovers, call Bradley Cooper the devil.
  • The NewsCorp scandal: (almost) stranger than fiction.

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    Put Up This Wall!

    April 26, 2011 | by

    A screenshot of Salty slapping Dan Safer.

    Last Saturday evening, before a small audience gathered in the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, a man named Salty repeatedly slapped a man named Dan.

    “Less on the chin, more on the cheek!” cried Dan Safer, a choreographer, standing inside the masking-taped square that had been marked off as the stage and steeling himself for yet another blow. With a red bandanna tied around his neck, Safer sported muttonchops, a handlebar mustache, and tattoos that ran the length of his arms.

    The fellow named Salty obliged, smacking Safer again and again until Safer’s face turned bright red and he grew dizzy, widening his stance to stable himself. “I love you!” blurted Salty, a slight blond figure in maroon corduroys and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie, after landing a particularly fierce slap.

    “How we doing on time there, Rob?” Safer now asked of Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House and the emcee of the night’s event, programmed by the French cultural institute Villa Gillet for an ongoing series called Walls and Bridges. Spillman had been conscripted as timekeeper for the current “piece.” He stood off to the side, a reluctant accomplice in this sustained act of public sadomasochism.

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