The Paris Review

Art credit Kiersten Essenpreis

Wikipedia has, of late, been in the crosshairs for its regrettable classification of certain American writers as “women authors” (and businesswomen) and its utility as a platform for petty “revenge editing.” You can watch battles play out in real time now, as people edit and re-edit each others’ work, manipulating facts and public perception at will. With very little power comes, apparently, no particular sense of responsibility.

And yet at its best, Wikipedia is, if not the objective repository of all human knowledge its founders envisioned, a rather delightful showcase of human weirdness. The enforced aridness of the site’s format only serves to heighten the brilliance of those moments when the peculiarity shines through. I was reminded of this the other day when I decided to look into the origins of the game red rover. (Why? Don’t worry about it.)

I had hoped to learn that the game had some sort of specific historical significance—maybe involving the Gunpowder Plot, or the Reformation, although I would have settled for the Black Death—which it doesn’t. (The name might, or might not, allude to pirates.) But the Wikipedia entry had greater treasures to offer the armchair investigator. I refer, specifically, to the following:

As with any game involving physical contact between players, there are those who maintain that its inherent risks, however unlikely, must be weighed against the pastime’s potential to generate personal enjoyment. For example, when the runner breaks through a link (or attempts to break through), it is worried that the action can hurt the linkers’ arms or body or knock these individuals to the ground. Practices particularly discouraged are linking players hand-to-wrist or hand-to-arm (rather, players should hold hands only), “clotheslining” an opposing player at throat height, or extending the hands so an onrushing player runs into a fist.

It’s at moments like this when misanthropy is most alien to me.

True, my interest might be keener than most. As a child I had an almost unlimited enthusiasm for red rover. From the moment I first played it—at the home of an intermittent best friend with whom I had very little in common (now a wedding planner)—I recognized it as my sport. (I suspect it may still be my sport.) Read More »

Every morning, I would start the day with the Smashing Pumpkins—haunting “Disarm,” anthemic “Today.” Over and over, in a bedroom still mired in childhood, where a mound of carelessly tossed stuffed animals crept up my white wood dresser, I relentlessly played Siamese Dream. This, I thought, is how one becomes a teenager.

When the sun was at its hottest, late in the afternoon, I would stand at my front door, forehead pressed against the mesh screen, waiting for some friend’s mother to pull up in a beige Nissan and carry us to the mall. Here, I would spend hours in too-short shorts in too-cold air conditioning deliberating between pungent Plumeria or Freesia lotions at Bath & Body Works, scarfing down greasy slices of food-court pizza, and buying a hideous glittery cropped tee my mother would take one look at and matter-of-factly proclaim I would never wear. Until I was called for dinner, I’d read Seventeen, wondering if, once my dreaded braces came off, I’d be as beautiful as the young girls staring back at me with their wisps of charcoal eyeliner rimming their almond-shaped eyes, the ones who looked like they hadn’t cried since they fell off pretty pink bicycles with white baskets and streamers flowing from the handlebars. After that night’s iteration of chicken and rice, the phone would ring. For the next hour and a half, I would talk about nothing with the person I had had nothing to say to at the mall just a few hours before.

It was the summer of 1993, and I was bored. Read More »

I remember in sixth grade a substitute teacher asked the class if we knew any poems by heart. Did I! I favored the assembled company with a little Wordsworth, some Blake, and, because I was cool like that, a soupçon of Ogden Nash. Needless to say, everyone was really impressed, and I was incredibly popular for the rest of the school year. My penchant for oversize flannel jumpers only helped!

As usual, I was ahead of my time: Penguin Classics has released an amazing app called Poems by Heart, a memorization game that helps users learn poetry. For me the virtues of rote learning were their own reward. But for those who require slightly more incentive, the app provides a scoring program, a recording mechanism, and original art. Flannel jumper optional.

It’s a busy time here at The Paris Review. Tomorrow is our annual gala, the Spring Revel, and in two weeks, we move our little office from the Tribeca loft that has been our home for the past eight years to a new space in Chelsea. Boxes are piled high; loose books and papers are strewn about; scissors and tape will not stay in the same place.

Last week, we were clearing a bookshelf of its contents and came across a batch of small, white booklets. The Paris Review: Twenty Year Index, Issues 1–56, they were titled; they appeared to be lists of everything that had been published during the magazine’s first twenty-three years, and were put aside for recycling. Flipping through them later, we realized that the booklets also contained an introduction by George Plimpton, a founder of the magazine and its editor for the first fifty years of its history.

A minihistory of the Review, full of forgotten anecdotes and remembrances, the introduction is particularly poignant as we prepare for these two (for us) significant events. George recalls early offices of the magazine, angering Ernest Hemingway with brash interview questions, the many volunteers who flocked to the Review and gave a fledgling publication a boost. He writes of raucous Revels past: “The Revels were memorable affairs, with so much effort spent by staff members in entertaining the guests that very often the fund-raising aspects of the events were forgotten. The extravaganza on Welfare Island (although 750 people turned up) actually lost money—and primarily because a piano was left out in a glade and was ruined in a post-party rain squall.”

Here’s to a Revel that’s just as fun, but minus the rain.

An Index is simply a statistical compilation which does not suggest the quality of the material listed, or the critical standards that guided its selection. It can only record the appearance, not the gist, of William Styron’s introductory “letter” which set forth the magazine’s principles in the first pages of the first issue—a letter addressed to John P. C. Train, the managing editor, who in questioning Styron’s manifesto elicited a reply which turned out to be lively and pertinent and a considerable improvement on the original document.

An Index can list the people who have worked for the magazine, but it cannot acknowledge their individual contributions. Their number has been vast. The Paris Review has traditionally published a masthead longer by far than Fortune magazine’s. Indeed, so many volunteers turned up to help in the early days that the managing editor referred to the females by the collective name of “Apotheker” (Joan Apotheker … Mary Apo …)—from the German for “druggist,” which he apparently thought appropriate. Their male counterparts were referred to as “Musinskys”—named after the first of their breed who came to work for a Paris summer. Read More »

Last Christmas, my brother, Charlie, gifted me with a piece of paper on which was scrawled, “Good for 1 tattoo.” This was perhaps a slight improvement over his gift of the year before (“Good for one dinner with Charlie. On you”) and arguably approaching his 2010 present-giving apex (autographed baby pictures of himself.) But it was still a pretty low-risk investment on his part; Charlie knew I was never going to break down and actually ink a permanent Dimples on my shoulder, something I’d flirted with through the years. “Just a small, classic Dimples,” I would explain to my mother. “A tribute!” And she would say, “Munnie would be appalled. And so would Yumma.”

As might be clear from the nomenclature, we have entered the Land of the WASP. Yumma, my grandmother (née Ruth Mary), was the daughter of Munnie (Margaret), whom I am said to, but do not, resemble. Munnie was a legendary figure, a mother of five who managed to render even the hardships of the Depression magical with her ingenuity, her creativity, her sense of fun. A hard worker who held things together after her husband died, she maintained a busy, cheerful existence until her death from cancer in her sixties.

Munnie, with Dimples

Although Munnie died many years before I was born, she has always been a vivid presence to me, kept alive by Yumma’s stories of cream-puff swans and Halloween parties, and by the Scrapbook. The Scrapbook is a remarkable thing: two volumes in which Munnie hand-copied every scrap of correspondence she and my grandmother ever exchanged and bound them, with photographs and newsclippings and tracings of any drawings, into two large volumes, each 300 pages long. Munnie made one of these for each of her five children. My father calls the resulting tomes the Least Jewish Thing Ever Created. Read More »

“Sorry, wasn’t there a cabaret here?” a British woman asked the waiter. He was laying a napkin on the table and put a glass of white wine on top of it. For a second, I thought the woman was talking to me.

“Oh yes,” the waiter said, “this part of the bar used to be the Oak Room. They only put that wall up a couple of months ago.” He tapped a panel between her table and mine, then put an identical glass of wine in front of me.

The Algonquin Hotel’s Blue Bar lived up to its name: neon tubes snaked clear around the narrow room, reflecting their blue glare on its oak panels and plastic banquettes. Hirschfeld prints covered the walls and Sinatra crooned from a speaker in the ceiling. I wanted to answer the woman, but found myself far away from her. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a baritone voice announced, “The Oak Room is proud to present … Steve Ross!”

The crowd applauded. Candles flickered inside their glass holders. A curtain at one end of the room parted, and Steve appeared in Noël Coward’s emerald smoking jacket. He wove through the tables, making his way to the grand piano. The crowd hushed, and he began to play Porter, Gershwin, and the saloon songs he knew I liked.

“If it isn’t the jeunesse dorée!” he beamed at me after the show, shaking hands with people as they filed out of the Oak Room.

“Did you know,” he told me when most of them were gone, “that the first Algonquin Round Table was right over over there?” He pointed to a corner of the Oak Room, just on the other side of the door from where we were standing. Waiters were clearing the tables; the baritone in the light booth was pulling on his coat. Alexander Woolcott might as well have been lingering over lunch. Read More »