January 6, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Literary Dinners; Crumbling Apartments By Sadie Stein I’ve been dreaming of hosting a cozy winter dinner party based on a famous meal from literature. What famous feasts are the most completely described? I’d like to be able to re-create the menu, the atmosphere, and the attire, if possible. There are probably a few people in the world more interested in this question than I—but, I’d reckon, a very few. As long as we’re being frank here, you may as well know that I belong to a literary potluck society in which we do monthly themed dinners. (We have yet to venture into the realm of costume.) Laurie Colwin once wrote a whole essay on books containing good food; she singled out the early novels of Iris Murdoch, the Barbara Pym canon, and Anna Karenina. Inasmuch as I own and have used the Barbara Pym Cookbook, I can’t really agree that any of these vivid descriptions would make for very satisfying dinner parties (or, in the case of czarist Russia, a very relaxing one for the cook). Here are a few other ideas to get you started: The Master and Margarita (for more manageable Russian cuisine—and think of the costume opportunities!). If you fancy something Dickensian, see any of the gluttonous Joe’s numerous meals in The Pickwick Papers. If you really want to take the guesswork out of it, Heartburn comes complete with recipes. Proust is a no-brainer—if Proust can ever be called a no-brainer. If your interest runs to tea, root out Enid Blyton. And at the end of the day, does any book in the world have better food than Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy? If you don’t feel like going the fictional route, there is always the food memoir. Nowadays, you’re spoiled for choice. Or (ration-bound Pym aside) consider the subgenre of cookbooks authored by enthusiastic writers: two whose quality is rivaled by their own idiosyncrasies are Roald Dahl’s Cookbook and The Tasha Tudor Cookbook. Whatever you decide, please drop a line and let me know—the group and I are always looking for ideas. What do you think about movie adaptations of books? Are there any instances where you think the film actually improved on a particular story, or do you find that adaptations for the most part don’t do justice to the original text? Of course there are terrific adaptations. The Godfather, after all, made a thriller into a baroque masterpiece. We could list successful adaptations all day—I hope you will, in comments—but just a few that I like: The 39 Steps, The Dead, Persuasion, The Remains of the Day, High Fidelity, The Leopard, and, most recently, the new Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which manages to cover a lot of ground with enviable economy. I recently moved into a crumbling three-bedroom in Bushwick, with peeling hand-painted green wallpaper in the cramped and poorly lit stairwell. The front door’s peephole, the tin cover of which unmoors itself at night and clatters to the ground, overlooks a dismal and gloomy green landing, where I can easily envision a seedy groping or muffled strangling taking place. My own room is separated from the living room by an old-fashioned sliding parlor door about the size and weight of a Prius. The bathroom window opens into a murky blue chute, which smells like laundry and cigarettes and exhales a strange warmth. What books should I read here? Reading’s the easy part—sounds like your pad is made for it. What you should watch, and posthaste, is Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. On the other hand, maybe you shouldn’t. Read More
December 23, 2011 Ask The Paris Review A Question of Provenance; Monogamy By Lorin Stein Dear Lorin, May I once more avail myself of the generous hospitality of your advice column to help solve another of my small mysteries? I am currently editing the 1852–54 journal kept on the Australian goldfields by the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner. It is a fascinating document, from which most of the best bits were ruthlessly excised prior to publication in 1917 by his industrious daughter, à la Cassandra Austen, though fortunately they survive in the manuscript. On November 8, 1852, Woolner and his two traveling companions strayed from the main road north from Melbourne toward the diggings, became separated, and got lost in the bush: “I went on and saw—what produced this observation, ‘That [he] who wants to avoid strange sights must shun byways.’ A brutal, worse than brutal sight.” So far I have not been able to identify the quotation, if indeed it actually was one. It seems possible that the inverted commas were merely added for emphasis; it’s a rather clunky aperçu, yet I wonder if any of your readers recognize it? Elsewhere in the journal Woolner recorded without hesitation, and in detail, even a measure of cold detachment, scenes of drunkenness and violence, shady characters, the accidental drowning of a friend, and several murders in and around the goldfields. On this occasion, though, whatever Woolner saw so shocked him that he was obviously not prepared to note any particulars. Bodily, I presume, but what on earth was it? On that gothic note, may I also add my sincere compliments of the season? Angus Trumble Dear Angus, When you say jump, The Paris Review does not ask how high. We put our best people on this one. The results—while inconclusive—were revealing. Within minutes, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, wrote in from North Carolina with a passage from Tommaso Grossi’s Marco Visconti in an 1849 translation. This looked promising at first, only it had nothing to do with Woolner’s text, and was rejected. (Sullivan: “Could it have been this? My gut says no.”) Next our associate editor, Stephen Andrew Hiltner, proposed a line from the Tao Te Ching, but admitted that Woolner was unlikely to have known Chinese. Our deputy editor, Sadie Stein, claimed—impressively, and with some vehemence—to recognize the sententia from Horace. The poem has not been found. Our Latin consultant, Brian FitzGerald of Lincoln College, Oxford, doubted a classical provenance. He directed us to some chapters from Proverbs, in which, however, there is no mention of strange sights. Our managing and Web editors, Nicole Rudick and Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, came out strong for Dante. So far we are unable to supply the relevant verse. One of Sadie’s contacts, a professor of Greek, suggested Oedipus Rex, either the messenger reporting Laius’s death or else a speech by Oedipus himself. Our close readings have not produced a match. On the other hand, we have now figured out what Woolner saw. (Private letter to follow.) Read More
December 16, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Apologizing; Glitz and Glamour By Lorin Stein How do you manage to apologize to someone when you think you also deserve an apology (but believe you are never going to get one, and the conflict remains unresolved)? Is there some way to prove a point while also expressing a sincere desire to be friends again? The short answer, I think, is no. You probably can’t make your point and make up at the same time. But it sounds as though—whatever went down—there were plenty of hurt feelings to go around. Maybe you can set aside the question of blame, and the unresolved conflict, and focus on the feelings. To start with: you feel rotten, and you’re sorry to have hurt your friend. If you own up to that, you’ll make it that much easier for your friend to let down his or her guard. Don’t expect an actual apology—even if you do get an apology, it probably won’t be the one you want. We’re human, so we all feel our own pain more sharply than the pain we cause in others. Try to correct for that bias, if you can, and at least you’ll know you’ve tried. (Thanks to Geoff O’Sullivan for the sage counsel on this hard question. We’ve all been there.) One of my students mistakenly believes the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers 1930s to be the pinnacle of American glitz and glamour. Aside from the obvious—Scott Fitzgerald, Midnight in Paris, A Moveable Feast, and the like—what ought I offer to open her eyes to vastly superior qualities of the Lost Generation and its Jazz Age? If your student can handle a strong dose of decadence—sex, drugs, and experimental lit—give her Geoffrey Wolfe’s biography of the expat publisher Harry Crosby Jr., Black Sun. Twist or shout? A little of both. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.
December 9, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Isolation; Being in a Band By Sasha Frere-Jones This week our friend Sasha Frere-Jones was kind enough to share his good counsel. By day, Sasha is the pop critic for The New Yorker, and by night he is a member of the bands Calvinist and Piñata. By day or night, he gives darn good advice. My family members are music lovers. They are obsessed with rare albums (dad), Internet radio (older brother), and attending live performances (mom; anything “spiritual” or classical). I’m done giving them novels because they don’t read them. Can you recommend any books for the music enthusiast’s library, or, even better, DVDs? Both volumes of the The Old Grey Whistle Test DVD collection are fantastic. It’s all pop music from the seventies, played live and immaculately filmed for the BBC. I have no idea where the BBC got such fancy, high-res cameras: the footage looks a decade ahead of whatever the Americans were producing. The performances are uniformly great. (If these linked clips of Bill Withers performing “Ain’t No Sunshine” and Talking Heads playing “Psycho Killer” don’t move you, I’m out of DVD ideas.) As for books, Christopher Small’s Musicking is appropriate for any music lover, irrelevant of preferred genre. Small’s openness and attention to the social aspects of music are unmatched by any other music writer. What’s your opinion on job-interview etiquette? Is it sufficient to send thank-you e-mails? The handwritten note seems to me a thoughtful gesture, but it takes a day or so to arrive. Is it overkill to send the e-mail, as well as the old-fashioned note? The handwritten note is a red flag; it’s really only a charming move when the two parties already know each other. A brief, cheerful e-mail is best. Nothing startles like an e-mail that blooms open into several screens’ worth of type. I have not hired people on the basis of e-mail length, as it usually corresponds to loopy behavior (as do multiple e-mails sent within the space of an hour). Read More
December 2, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Locker Room Freud; Travel Writing By Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein Dear Paris Review, I have an etiquette question. Is it permissible to tell a complete stranger in a gym locker room that he looks like Sigmund Freud? And, if so, how does one tactfully go about it? The relevant details include: this man is usually naked, he has a giant shlong, and he looks exactly like Sigmund Freud! He even has some kind of foreign accent. Part of me is just curious to know if he gets this a lot, but part of me is curious to know whether he may in fact be Dr. Freud. —Avi Steinberg It is permissible, of course. The most tactful approach, in our view, is to just lie down and start free associating. If he is in fact Sigmund Freud (which strikes us as unlikely), your confession will be met with an icy, yet obscurely liberating, silence. You could also offer him a cigar. What’s the best way to structure a memoir or personal narrative? Is this the sort of memoir that involves being stuck in a crevasse? If so, lead with the crevasse. If, on the other hand, this is the sort of memoir that’s interesting all the way through, we suggest that you begin with your feelings about your mother and take it from there (see “etiquette question,” above). What travel writing would you suggest for someone dealing with a recent loss and exhausted by urban living? I want to take a trip to refocus and regain a sense of daily hope. There must be something more literary and nuanced than Eat Pray Love? While neither of us is a great aficionado of travel writing, we agree that it’s a genre at which the English are particularly adept, be they heroic polymathic questers like T. E. Lawrence or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or comic bunglers along the lines of Graham Greene’s Henry Pulling, or more recently, Geoff Dyer. Sadie says: In times of distress, while I’d like to turn to the former, I’d probably lose myself in the latter—Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s. I do love Leigh Fermor, however. His A Time to Keep Silence is thoughtful and inspiring without making a fuss about it. In all frankness, though, whether at home or on the road, I find nothing more soothing than a tried-and-true “comfort read,” which for me means Barbara Pym and for you might be something completely different. Lorin recommends Travels with a Donkey and Life on the Mississippi—but then, he always recommends those.
November 18, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Well-Read Lovers; Constant Rejection By Angus Trumble This week we asked our friend Angus Trumble to give us the benefit of his wisdom—and received an embarras de richesses. Thanks to all for your questions and to Angus for his answers; there was none we could bear to cut. By day Angus is the senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. By night, and sometimes also by day, he blogs on such topics as the euro crisis, the Ladies of Bethany, and his own globe-trotting adventures. Dear Angus, Do the best readers make the best lovers? Would you be more likely to break up with someone if they never read, or read all the time? I am flattered that you feel I have the necessary qualifications to provide an accurate answer to this question. In my experience, the well-read can be excellent lovers, although there are times when a specific literary prompt may inhibit the natural flow, as for example when one’s partner genuinely believes himself to be some sort of Vronsky, when in fact he lacks the magnificent build, military bearing, disposable income, or even the remotest capacity to smolder. I can quite confidently say that it is unlikely that I would ever commence a relationship with a person who never read, which removes the need to break up with him. My parents’ marriage survived a period in the late fifties, when my mother read the complete works of Sir Walter Scott, evidently led in his direction by a genetically encoded taste for the lowering mist, gloomy crags, and bloodstained crofts and glens of the Highlands of Scotland. On the whole, therefore, I am for readers—although it is also true that I would immediately eject anyone whom I caught in bed with a romantic novel by the late Dame Barbara Cartland. Have you ever had a story accepted for publication through a slush pile? As a matter of fact I have, although it was a book review and not a story. My first long article for The Times Literary Supplement was entirely unsolicited and dealt with what struck me at the time as a wholly new and remarkable historical analysis of, of all things, the epidemiology of the Black Death. To my astonishment, in due course this offering propelled me onto the front cover, together with an enormously magnified photograph of a plague-carrying flea. So there is hope. What should you do if you don’t like a book halfway through? How do you know when you should give it up? For years, far too many years, I fell into the dangerous trap of being determined to finish a book despite having reached the conclusion half way through—or at the very least having become deeply suspicious—that in all probability this would not give me pleasure or profit. Yet essentially I am an optimist, and therefore, I suppose, when faced with undeniable evidence that a novel in which I am immersed is, for example, a bleak and depressing saga of frustrated sexual longing and entirely populated by characters of scarcely conceivable dullness, part of me hopes that twenty pages hence there awaits bright flashes of comic genius that may yet salvage the experience. Optimistic though I continue to be, from the vantage point of comfortable middle age I can now say that this is never true and that certainly the healthiest, most sensible, and efficient strategy is to abandon ship. Read More