The Paris Review

Once a month or so when I was a small boy, my father and I would spend a Saturday morning together in the St. James’s area of London, later meeting my mother and sister for lunch at a restaurant close by. The routine, which never varied and whose endpoint was always the same, started with a haircut at a Turkish barber’s above a clothes shop on a busy shopping street.

Descending into the world again, with newly cut hair, the facades of Jermyn Street—brassy, glazed, filled with the refined and adult promise of brogues, horn-handled hairbrushes, and silk pajamas—stretched left and right before us. Around the corner, through a short flurry of alleys, we came to St. James’s Square: home, in the northwest corner, to our destination, the London Library.

The library building is tall and slim, squashed into the corner between a stately townhouse and the Cypriot Embassy. My first impression of the place was of disjunction; inside and outside do not match up. In a third-story window, an owl perches on the sill (further inspection reveals it to be a decoy). In the stacks, through the latticed metal walkways, as in Borges’s The Library of Babel, “you can see the upper and lower floors, endlessly.” In the fifteen miles of shelving, desks appear at random, with or without a corresponding chair; members and librarians flit past, fragmented faces visible through rows of books. My father and I never stayed long, fifteen minutes or so at most. We returned his books to the librarians, picking up any that had been set aside, and then flung ourselves like hunters into the warren of the stacks.

I joined the library for myself when I was about eighteen and soon the place became an addiction, an obsession. In the summer before university, when many of my friends were embracing their new freedom on beaches or riding trains across Europe, I explored those corridors, picking out books with titles like The West of Buffalo Bill, and Ten months among the tents of the Tuski: with incidents of an Arctic boat expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, as far as the Mackenzie River, and Cape Bathurst. I chose at random. I found, and reveled in, shelving sections like “S. Devil &c.,” “S. Fingerprints,” “H. Exhumation,” “T. Hints for Travellers,” “S. Flower Arrangement,” and my favorite, “S. Fools.” Read More »

It’s The Paris Review’s 200th issue, and that’s a big deal.

As if two hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, belles-lettres, and iconic interviews weren’t reason enough to celebrate, this one is something special, including: fiction by Lorrie Moore, David Means, and Matt Sumell; poetry by Adrienne Rich, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Frederick Seidel; essays by David Searcy, Geoff Dyer, and John Jeremiah Sullivan; and literary paint chips by Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott.

The Spring issue also contains a blockbuster interview with Bret Easton Ellis:

American Psycho came out of a place of severe alienation and loneliness and self-loathing. I was pursuing a life—you could call it the Gentleman’s Quarterly way of living—that I knew was bullshit, and yet I couldn’t seem to help it. American Psycho is a book about becoming the man you feel you have to be, the man who is cool, slick, handsome, effortlessly moving through the world, modeling suits in Esquire, having babes on his arm … On the surface, like Patrick Bateman, I had everything a young man could possibly want to be ‘happy’ and yet I wasn’t.

Plus, Maggie Paley’s interview with Terry Southern—in the works since 1967. Southern, asked what he would do with unlimited financial resources, replied:

First I would engage a huge but clever and snakelike “Blowing Machine,” and I would have it loaded with one ton of dog hair each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It would be brought up East Seventy-second Street to the very end, where it would poise itself outside George Plimpton’s house like a great dragon. Then, exactly when Katherine the Char had finished one room, the powerful, darting snout of the machine would rise up to the third floor windows and send a terrific blast of dog hair into the room—a quarter ton per room. I would observe her reaction—I have friends opposite—with a spyglass, room by room. The entire place would be foot-deep in dog hair, most of which however has not yet settled and has the effect of an Arctic blizzard. Then I would drop in—casually, not really noticing her hysteria, or that anything at all was wrong, just sort of complaining in a vague way, occasionally brushing at my sleeve, et cetera, speaking with a kind of weary petulance: “Really, Katherine, I do think you might be more ... uh, well, I mean to say ...” voice trailing away, attention caught by something else, a picture on the wall: “I say, that is an amusing print—is it new?” fixing her with a deeply searching look, so there could be no doubt at all as to my interest in the print. If this didn’t snap her mind I would give her several hundred thousand dollars—all in pennies. “Mr. Plimpton asked me to give you this, Katherine—each coin represents the dark seed of his desire for you.”

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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!