August 31, 2010 Arts & Culture A Love Letter to Elvis Costello By Adam Wilson I came to cynicism late. The others had been listening to punk rock for years, espousing anarchy on bathroom walls, wallowing in upper-middle class suburban angst. But my parents were still together, and believed in human goodness. I took their sixties idealism, cradled it until that first girl fucked my friend instead of me. But back up a couple years. Here’s me, age twelve, brink of puberty, pale moustache coming in like dawn through a bend in the windowshade. I’m in a baseball card store, too old to be buying baseball cards. Alison’s at the counter. “Topps?” she says. “Fleer? Upper Deck?” “Upper Deck,” I say. Alison turns, reaches. Blonde hair hangs almost to the small of her back. T-shirt rides up, revealing a swath of plumber’s butt. Stretch-marked handles spill over hips. This is love. My father removes a record from its sleeve, blows dust. Dust hangs in the summer sunlight. My heart is a helium tank. I float. The man on the cover is puberty incarnate. His knees are elbows. His ankles angle inwards. He could use a new pair of glasses. I get the first line wrong. “It’s so funny to be seeing you after so long girl.” I hear “It’s so funny to be seeing you at the salon girl.” Because this record is an artifact from the eighties. Men spent that era in hair salons. How else the Jheri curl? How else the shimmering Jew-fro my father still sports? But I’m not looking. I’m listening. I’m picturing Alison the card shop owner, hair blow-dried into staticky orbit around her pink dome, hair photosynthesized, hair blooming like sunflower blossoms, framing her pistil face, awaiting my stamen, awaiting pollination. Then the chorus: “Oh Alison, I know this world is killing you. Oh Alison, my aim is true.” My hometown: the median household income is $25,000. Alison: bordering on obese, breaking her back, bending for our allowance money. Alison, this world is killing you. Let me be your savior. My aim is true. To my untrained, un-jaded ears, Elvis sounded so sincere. But high school is a cruel carnival. Every ride ends in tears. Every game is rigged. Good prizes unattainable. All you win is some shitty stuffed walrus, sweatshop stitched. My best friend was Paul Gunzburger. People called us Wils-Burger. I rode on the back of his moped. People called us gay. I sported limp blonde locks and girlishly un-chiseled arms. People called me Hanson, like the band. Sang “Hmmbop” as I passed in the halls. We met a girl. Sexiest unibrow you’ve ever seen. Hips like a hip-hop muse. Always had her own weed stash. Read More
August 26, 2010 Arts & Culture The Cat is Out of the Bag By Thessaly La Force Over at The Atlantic today, Lorin shares some exciting news: our September issue (and Lorin’s début) will feature interviews with Norman Rush and Michel Houellebecq. On Rush: When Norman Rush explains why he didn’t publish his first book until the age of 53, that means talking about his politics, his time in prison, and the extraordinarily long and happy, argumentative marriage that has inspired so much of his astonishing fiction. Among other things, the interview is an essay about marriage. On Houellebecq: . . . Houellebecq talks about having been abandoned by his parents and raised by his grandmother. He remembers his years with her as the happiest time of his life. In most contexts, this mix of opinion and personal information would rub me the wrong way. (I would rather stare at sheet rock than read a celebrity profile.) But in a Paris Review interview, because both people have given it so much thought, the connections tend to be interesting. At least, they fascinate me. And that’s not all: For the interested, upcoming interviews will include Dave Eggers, Ann Beattie, Samuel Delaney, Louise Erdrich—and, yes, Jonathan Franzen. And we’re making our archive searchable online. Soon you’ll be able to read the aforementioned Morrison, Crumb, Hemingway, Faulkner, plus Stephen King and James Baldwin and the rest of the gang.
August 25, 2010 Arts & Culture All Together Now By Thessaly La Force Lorin has written more for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog over at The Atlantic. I hope you’ll read everything he’s written so far, but I thought I’d take the time to mention today’s entry. Here, Lorin addresses the death of the book review, and his very inspiring reasons for moving from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux to The Paris Review: I left book publishing to edit The Paris Review because I think the situation can be dramatically improved. Not in the high-stakes game of bestsellers and Time covers, but down here on the ground, where reputations and markets are built and readers make up their own minds. I want there to be a magazine where fiction and poetry come first, where there’s no hype, and where the aim is to reach the 100,000 people who, a few years ago, had never heard of Roberto Bolano—but whose lives have been slightly changed by his fiction. I am one of those people. For what it’s worth, I have also been one of the people who say they don’t like stories or poems. It wasn’t actually true in my case. (I suspect it’s not true in general.) What annoys me is the idea that I should like a story or a poem, just because somebody took the trouble to write it. We are indeed competing for limited airspace. With apologies to Ezra Pound, a story or poem needs to be at least as involving as an expose by David Grann, as tough-minded as a comment by Hendrik Hertzberg. Which is to say, it must if possible be even better written. Literary writing (or, if you prefer, imaginitive writing) has certain advantages of its own, none of them weakened one bit by technology. It can often be funnier than other kinds of prose. It can deal more humanly with sex. It can say shameful things about family life—not by treating them as scandals but, on the contrary, by showing that they’re normal. More sins are confessed more deeply, through the screens of verse and make-believe, than you will ever find on a talk show or reality TV. Literature gives the best accounts of intimacy. Lena McFarland is right—you may not learn stuff you didn’t know from a work of fiction. But there can be great comfort in seeing the troubles of daily life put into words of power and beauty. And as David Foster Wallace observed, literature has a way of making you feel less alone. TV doesn’t do that. It entertains and entertains, but there is a part of you it gives the silent treatment. In my experience, even the Web can you leave you feeling lonelier, once you turn off the computer. Fiction and poetry connect you, or they can, to something bigger and quieter and more lasting than the day you had at work. The question of posterity is fascinating. Some writers hope to live on, through their words, after death. Some write for the present day. Either way, they take us out of the moment and out of our smallest selves.
August 23, 2010 Arts & Culture We’ve Got Freedom On Our Minds By Thessaly La Force Lorin will be guest blogging this week over at The Atlantic for Ta-Nehisi Coates. We’ll be reading, and hope you will too. Today, in his first post, he tackles the hubbub surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, and the magic of discovery for literary fiction: But already, in the first mini-backlash against the book—or really, against the all the attention it’s received—we hear it implied that fiction should restrict itself to entertainment or fade into obscurity: that critics should spend more time celebrating mass-market novels because they’re what the people “actually” want. This fake populism pretends to speak for women (as if women weren’t the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men). Really it’s the logic of the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Unfortunately, you find the same logic at work all over publishing today. Without a complex network of local bookstores and local reviewers, more and more houses see the blockbuster as their only viable business plan. They spend vast amounts signing up and promoting books that seem written to spec. That model is great if you’re publishing mysteries, or vampire books, or chick lit, or books about Founding Fathers. A good formula, well executed, can be a beautiful (and profitable) thing. But for literary fiction, the fiction of discovery, formulas are death. In my 12 years at FSG, we saw publishers lose millions every season trying to corner the market on the Big New (preferably Young) Literary Sensation. Meanwhile really tricky, idiosyncratic writers—Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, Elif Batuman, Richard Price, Sam Lipsyte, Roberto Bolano, James Wood, Hans Keilson—confounded even the most charitable expectations of the chains, and went through one printing after another. Now Franzen seems poised to do the same thing on a much, much bigger scale. I name these particular authors, all published by FSG, only because I was there when it happened: I know for a fact no magic was involved. The books succeeded because critics kept yelling eureka (and because some resilient booksellers, like that clerk at Cluster of Grapes, kept putting them in customers’ hands). These books may never have cornered any market. That wasn’t the point. They found the readers who needed them. Each became a few thousand people’s favorite book.
August 17, 2010 Arts & Culture Searching For Me By Colin Nissan A modern tale of heartbreak and video games. For years I’ve enjoyed a mildly successful career as a voice actor. Specifically, an advertising announcer, which means I get paid to say things like, “Get into a Saturn for just $299 a month.” I’ve hawked everything from cars and credit cards to hotels and beer, all with a tone that rarely deviates from that of a pilot announcing a plane’s gradual descent over the intercom. I recently asked my agent if I could try auditioning for video game character voices. I thought it would be fun and maybe even legitimize the fact that I play more video games than a forty-year-old who has been laid probably should. I went on a few auditions. Regrettably, and I’d like to think, understandably, I failed to convince anyone that I was a Latino mercenary, a Korean soldier, or a homicidal Midwestern drifter. I frantically practiced accents in anticipation of what might come next. My German sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger. My French, like Pepé Le Pew. Thankfully the next audition turned out to be for neither, but for an old, foul-mouthed lawman in a game set on the American frontier called Red Dead Redemption. My agent called. I got it. A week later, I went into Rockstar Games in Soho for the recording and screamed two hours of lines as Marshall Leigh Johnson. I threatened, chased, arrested, and killed people. I even died. I didn’t just die, I died with an accent. I was in the freaking zone. After signing my paperwork, I left, sweating, voiceless, and thrilled to bid farewell to my voice-over innocence. A new day had dawned for me and my badass larynx. A month later, New York City was covered in promotions for the game. Subways, buses, sides of buildings. It was the most highly-anticipated game in years. I couldn’t contain my gravelly chuckle as I walked past posters of myself, or the under-my-breath “hee-ya” when a police horse crossed my path. I imagined kids rushing toward me at Comic-Con begging me to do the voice. “Sorry, I can’t,” I’d say. (in the voice) “It IS you!” They’d scream. “That’s right,” I’d reply, “Now go on and git!” I’d sign posters right across the yellowed whiskers of my beard. I’d sign the breasts of the kids’ moms. I’d draw the barrel of a pistol as the “i” of my signature. It would be my thing. I monitored the game’s Web site for the latest news. With the release two months away they put out a trailer that, to my confusion, didn’t feature my voice when the Marshall spoke. I asked my agent about it, she told me not to worry and that it was typical to use different voices specifically for the trailers. A month later another trailer came out. Still not my voice. IMDB released credits for the game. I wasn’t listed. My agent maintained her position. They must have used the name of the trailer voice actor by mistake, she said. I no longer shared her optimism, but knew where I needed to go for the answer: the GameStop in Park Slope, May 18th at midnight. I passed by the store early that day to confirm the pickup time for the big release night. During an extremely short lull while chatting with two whitehead-ravaged clerks, I succumbed to a confusing urge to tell them who I was. “You’re the Marshall?” they said in disbelief. “That’s what the badge says.” Dear God, celebrity had already wreaked havoc on me. Read More
July 27, 2010 Arts & Culture The Things We Carried By Elliott David Otto Dix went to war voluntarily. A good part of his WWI duty on team Germany was as a machine-gunner, which provided Dix with front row seats to the Battle of Somme and other horrifying displays of anatomy, brutally exposed. He was entrenched in gore. He was repeatedly wounded, once near-fatally. Things around him were about as violent as is conceivable—and Dix, like others who thrilled to the front, spent those years cultivating a conception of violence. Which is shitty and all, except that that was his motive from the get go: Dix was eager for the terribleness, volunteering, he once explained, “to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it.” He got it. And for the next near-decade, Dix stored the sought-after experience of those war years in the sick, fragmented cinema of the brain where we keep all the worst of what we’ve seen, that asylum for repression from which broken imagery escapes into our nightmares and peripheral vision. Then, in 1924, Dix produced Der Krieg (The War), a cycle of fifty-one demented and harrowing prints that document his experience in battle: exposed brains; eviscerated youth; abstractions that, upon reflection, reveal themselves to be piles of disembowelment; blood blood blood. The series acts as sort of post-traumatic stress exorcism modeled after Francisco Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra. Loose translation: “I’ve seen shit you can’t even imagine and these artworks will only give you a fraction of an idea of how awful my daydreaming mind has forever become.” Read More