The Paris Review

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.

Read More »

They say it’s better to give than to receive, but by bidding in the Paris Review Auction, you can do both!

This year’s auction features extraordinary feasts, luxurious excursions, rare first editions, and one-of-a-kind artwork, as well as book discussions with Paris Review editors, naming opportunities for novel characters, and much more. It’s a chance to be a part of our rich history—and pamper yourself or someone special in the bargain.

And a holiday bonus: all proceeds support America’s premiere literary magazine. (That’s us, by the way.)

To view and bid on these and other exclusive items click here. Auction ends December 11.

Why is it that when I ask people in Los Angeles if they have heard of The Paris Review, they either know exactly what I am talking about or look at me with utter confusion?
—Susan, Los Angeles

Funny, the same thing happens back East. The fact is, for all its influence over the decades, The Paris Review has never had more than 20,000 subscribers at a time. Usually a lot fewer. On the other hand, last year we did a survey (not scientific, but not not scientific) and discovered that our subscribers tend to read the magazine from cover to cover. If you know the magazine, you generally know it cold. And you stand a passable chance of being a writer, or agent, or editor, or critic yourself. So, in the republic of letters, the Review is unavoidable, but that republic is tiny. (If you told most book-lovers that one single little magazine had published the first major stories of Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace, very few would believe you. Which is to say, if The Paris Review didn't exist, no one would think to invent it.)

Plus, here we are, a quarterly published in English, in New York City, named after a city in France. A review that runs no reviews—only interviews. A fiction and poetry magazine whose founding editor was America’s most famous sportswriter, performance artist, and fireworks technician.

What’s not to be confused?

I just belatedly saw Midnight in Paris this weekend (I know, I know ... ). As Gil Pender puts it for 1920s Paris, what would be your “Golden Era” (if an enchanted vintage car could take you there)?
—S. Margaretta

Do you believe in golden eras? Was the sky any bluer when Hemingway wrote the last sentence of The Sun Also Rises? Later, of course, he looked back on that time with yearning, and his nostalgia is contagious: he and his friends had been young. And a few of them happened to write great novels in their youth. On the other hand, they saw the world as a ruin: the real world, the world they had looked to inherit, was destroyed in the war, never to be recovered. As for Paris, the great moment of art and literature in Paris had ended a decade before they got there.

I skipped the movie, but I saw the trailer, and I know the feeling—either you admit that Paris makes you nostalgic or you pretend you are someplace else. I’ve felt the same way in Kansas City. I feel it all the time in New York. The sight of Diane Keaton smoking a cigarette, banging on a typewriter, with a telephone—a real telephone—clamped against her ear fills me with longing more acute than any picture of Le Dôme. And it’s not because I prefer Woody Allen’s older movies, or because I do love the novels of the seventies, but because it all happened just about the time I was born and things started falling apart. Read More »

We’ve heeded your wishes and, by popular demand, our super-duper Leanne Shapton–illustrated Paris Review beach towel is now available for purchase, yours for a very reasonable $20.

But wait! For only $20 more, you can add a full year of fiction and poetry. That’s right: with the price of a subscription, the towel can be yours, free.

The smartest towel of summer and reading material to match? That’s what we call a deal.

Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs relaxing on the beach.

Have we got a contest for you! Break out those Photoshop skills and place your favorite writer on our super-duper Paris Review beach towel for a chance to win exactly this towel! Meta, we know. To enter, join our Flickr group and submit your image to the pool. We’ll share the winning image, along with a couple of our favorites on The Daily by the end of this month.

P.S. Don’t do Photoshop? If you’d like to get a beach towel of your own, simply subscribe or renew with our special beach towel offer.

Dear Thessaly,

You’re probably still in bed, or finishing up a short story, but here in Paris it’s four o’clock; across the street from my hotel the bells of Nôtre Dame are playing “Three Blind Mice”; and I owe you an update from the Ville-Lumière.

It’s my first time here in years, since the indoor smoking ban in fact, but no sooner did I get through customs than I started craving a cigarette. I think it must be the strain of reading airport signs in French. This craving intensified in the taxi. By the time I got through breakfast at a tourist café on Saint Germain—jambon beurre, three cafés crèmes—it was time for a Gauloise Blonde and a nap.

My hosts at Shakespeare & Co. kindly booked me a room around the corner from the famous shop. Mine is the best room the Hotel Esmeralda has to offer, and one of the highest, smelling faintly but not unpleasantly of blow-dryer and dead mouse. It is five flights up. Reaching the top of the stairs, I dropped my bag, conked out, and dreamed of Robert Silvers: he had climbed up after me to inquire about an essay he had written on the early history of The Paris Review—an essay slated to run in our last issue, but it hadn’t.

This anxiety dream is easy to explain. You see, on the flight over I’d been reading a doctoral dissertation, Enterprise in the Service of Art: A Critical History of The Paris Review, 1953–1973, in preparation for my talk at the bookstore: “The Paris Review: Past, Present, Future.” I had taken plenty of notes, but nothing that added up to a talk.

Read More »