The Paris Review

MONDAY

6:30 A.M. Woke up. Bought coffee at deli.

Read amNewYork on the subway to Queens. Page six: Khloe Kardashian and her giant basketball-player husband wear their pajamas to open Xmas presents.

8:30 A.M. At Queens College illustration class, one of my students turned in a drawing of anthropomorphic poop.

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We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!

Werner Herzog filming Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

In the current issue of The Paris Review our Southern Editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, writes about the discovery of an elaborate prehistoric cave-art tradition in, of all places, Middle Tennessee, and about the archaeologist Jan Simek, the onetime Neanderthal expert who leads the research on these remarkable Native American sites. By a stroke of good timing, this month also marks the U.S. premiere of the German director Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a spellbinding 3-D documentary about La Grotte Chauvet, a cave in the south of France—discovered only in the mid-nineties—that contains exquisite animal paintings more than thirty thousand years old (the famous images at Lascaux go back a mere seventeen or eighteen thousand years, by comparison; Chauvet is another Lascaux back from Lascaux). In the following Q & A, Sullivan talks cave art with two of the more interesting underground explorers of our time.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

Mr. Herzog, you mention in the new film that you were limited to very few days and hours of shooting in the Chauvet cave, because of the possible ill effects (mold and so forth) that too much human traffic could have on the fragile environment. Also you had very little crew, and were forced to keep the equipment light. How might the movie have been different, if you’d been given unlimited access?

WERNER HERZOG

Constraints—which in this case were massive—are never really completely productive. However, I had to focus to the very essentials, and probably, with two or three times as much schedule available for me, the film wouldn’t have been much different. It has never, in my life as a filmmaker, made much difference how the constraints were. Technical constraints, schedules, you name it—they always have forced me to be quick and intelligent.

One small thing, maybe, which keeps nagging me, is a sort of a scratched painting, the outlines of an owl. It’s very strange and mysterious, and unique, because you do not have depictions of birds in the Paleolithic caves—with one exception that comes to mind: Lascaux, where there is a bison apparently hit by spears. His entrails are coming out of his belly, and there’s a dead man on the ground, face up, and there’s a stick, and a bird on it, as if the soul of the man were departing him. A beautiful and touching image, but of course, a different cave, and something like 18,000 years later.

The problem with the owl in Chauvet is that you can only film it properly with light coming from profile. And as we could not step beyond the confinements of a metal walkway that runs through the cave, protecting the floor, it would have been very difficult to move a light. Perhaps on some sticks we could have held something, and with quite some time and tricky arrangements, I could have made it visible. But I take it as it is.

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Photograph by John Taylor.

Come listen to John Jeremiah Sullivan read tonight at an event hosted by The New York Times Magazine! We can’t promise James Wood on bongos, but there may be music from Michael Jackson, Axl Rose, Bunny Wailer, or Geeshie Wiley, and there’s sure to be lots of good bourbon-drinking.

John Jeremiah Sullivan
At The Half King
Tonight: Wednesday, December 14
7:00 P.M.
505 West 23rd St
New York, NY 10011

See our editors in action! This Wednesday night, join editor Lorin Stein at the New York Public Library as he discusses the James Family—that’s Henry, William, and Alice—with Jean Strouse, author of the recently reissued biography of Alice James. The fun begins at 7 P.M.

Then, next Thursday, Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan will be chatting with Wells Tower about the art of the essay, also at the New York Public Library. Seats are free; don’t miss it!

But first thing’s first: tomorrow, at 7 P.M. at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint, Poetry Editor Robyn Creswell will be on a panel tackling the biting wit and anarchist bent of the novels of Albert Cossery. Come learn more about the books that Creswell calls “hymns to laziness.”

We hope to see you there!

Photograph by John Taylor.

Readers of the Daily are familiar with the musical musings of our Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan. This afternoon, Sullivan spoke with John Schaefer on NPR’s Soundcheck about Michael Jackson’s genealogy, Christian rock, deciphering Geeshie Wiley lyrics with John Fahey—and finding historical depths in everything, even the impossibly shallow. Listen to their conversation here.

Sullivan also reads tonight at 8 P.M. at BAM.

Peyton Sawyer's House on One Tree Hill— and John Jeremiah Sullivan's in life.

Last spring our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, came up to New York to give a little reading here on White Street. The surprising but true story he read, about living on the set of One Tree Hill—because it was his family’s house—just appeared in the new issue of GQ:

My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said, “that way they cain’t get you with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody’s boss came forward with the Stamp.

We commend the essay to your attention, the video version too.