June 22, 2011 At Work Will Self on ‘Walking to Hollywood’ By Jonathan Gharraie Image via Ever since the publication of his first collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, twenty years ago, Will Self has blazed an entertainingly wayward trail across the British literary scene by satirizing cultural mores, institutional prolixity, and political hypocrisy alike. His novels, How the Dead Live and The Book of Dave, ingeniously remapped London from the respective viewpoints of the deceased and a postapocalyptic puritanical cult. In his latest book of nonfiction, Walking to Hollywood, Self takes us on three ambitious walks, including a traversal of the fast-eroding East Yorkshire coast and an “airport walk” from his home in Stockwell, South London, to Hollywood, all the while trailing his and our sense of reality a long way behind. I met Will at his home on an overcast spring afternoon. He proved a generous host and entertaining company. Before we could start, I had to suppress my lifelong phobia of dogs and win over Maglorian, the tiny hero of this splendid vignette, who remained sweetly indifferent to my anxiety while listening in on our chat. Why did you start these walking tours? I think it was to do with stuff in my own life—with not drinking and consciously wanting to exercise more. My father was an academic who specialized in urban and regional development, so I grew up with somebody who talked about cities. Back in 1999, I was writing a column for the British Airways flight magazine and conceived of this incredibly environmentally incorrect idea that I would fly somewhere in Britain every morning from Heathrow, or one of the London airports, then take a long country walk, then fly back in the same day, and write about that. In the last one, even with my malformed environmental consciousness, I began thinking, “This is wrong, it’s not right on all sorts of levels!” So instead, I decided to walk to Heathrow. It occurred to me when I set out to do it that this was an adventure—it really was terra incognita, probably nobody had done it since the pre-industrial era. There was something profoundly strange about this. After that, it occurred to me that I didn’t know anybody who had walked from Central London to the countryside, and I began to conceive of these ex-urban walks as a way of curing myself of the sense of dislocation that had come over me in my adult life. I’d ended up not knowing where I was in a very profound sense. Read More
June 20, 2011 At Work The Summer Issue: Matteo Pericoli By Sadie Stein Matteo Pericoli, whose illustration “A view from 62 White Street” is our summer issue’s cover, has worked as an architect, illustrator, author, journalist, and teacher. He is the author, most recently, of The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York. I caught up with him at last week’s launch party to ask him a few questions about the cover. Can you describe your approach to work? I like to think that lines and words have much more in common than one would instinctively think. So in the drawings that I do, I try to choose the best possible lines, the most efficient, the most essential. Not just my drawings but line drawings in general are ways to tell stories, not just visual representations. Tell me about this drawing. One thing of course is that it’s Lorin [Stein]’s view; one is that it has shutters, which are not very common in the city. What’s interesting is point of view: It’s only here. It’s nowhere else, and there’s nowhere else like it. I don’t look for any aesthetically interesting composition. I don’t see beauty, I see narrative. You have drawn a great deal in New York, which seems like a place full of narrative, but not one that necessarily gives of itself easily. First and foremost, there is always what people perceive of a place. And once there is a shared agreement about a place, a city gives itself easily, as you say. It takes a long time to get to the innermost reaches of a place. When I started drawing in 1998, the first drawings I made were all about the island and the outermost viewpoints. I would ride the Circle Line. I was an alien. I got to know the exterior before I began to draw the innermost. And in 2001, when Manhattan Unfurled came out, right after 9/11, I was thinking about skylines, cities. Read More
June 15, 2011 At Work The Summer Issue: Six Questions for Amie Barrodale By Sadie Stein In Amie Barrodale’s “William Wei,” the eponymous narrator enters into an unusual relationship over the phone with a woman who claims to have met him at a party. What follows, as he says, “changed my life.” Barrodale took the time to answer a few questions. How would you characterize your work? When people ask me what kind of things I write, I just say I write stories. I don’t know what else to say. The details of this story feel real. What inspired it? I met someone who did this to me. Or something similar. Your fiction seems to deal frequently with questions of human disconnection. Disconnection, yes. I don’t know why. I find disconnection painful and very, very emotional, so I like to try to write about it. You can’t boil it down or sum it up. You can only describe it. A Google search tells me “William Wei” is “the Video Producer for Business Insider,” “Professor of Statistics at Temple University,” and a professor of surgery. Coincidence? The names came from nowhere but later I learned that Wei, in addition to being a surname, means “who are you?” in Chinese. Or I read that somewhere. I hope it’s true. It’s also a greeting for the phone, Wei. What writers are you into these days? Who are you reading now? I really like the stories Donald Antrim has been writing in The New Yorker lately. I love V. S. Naipaul and the novel Pitch Dark by Renata Adler. I also love Wong Kar-Wai, and I just now found, through your guys’ recommendation, Chris Marker. I’m traveling so I’m not reading; my suitemate took the book I brought, and I’m a little embarrassed to say what it was. What are you working on? I’m working on a novel, but I’m a little superstitious and yesterday a tarot card reader told me not to discus my idea—someone might take it. I mean, it was a friend with a deck of those cards. I would have discounted it, except that she was the second friend with cards to tell me that, about this book, so … Subscribe now and get the summer issue and a Paris Review beach towel!
June 9, 2011 At Work Peter Sellars on ‘The Winds of Destiny’ By Kevin Berger Theater director Peter Sellars has never seen a great work of art that didn’t reflect the madness of modern life. Which for years has driven critics around the bend, who have accused Sellars of dragging classic operas and plays through the mud of topical politics. This Friday at the venerable Ojai Music Festival, Sellars will stage The Winds of Destiny, a recent work by renowned composer George Crumb, to evoke the U.S. war in Afghanistan. I recently caught up with Sellars in New York, and again on the phone, when he was in Brussels directing Desdemona, a new theater work by Toni Morrison. His exuberance as a director carries over to his conversations, where his infectious high spirits never flag, even when addressing criticisms of his work. In the The Winds of Destiny, Crumb recasts Civil War folk songs, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in a blistering setting of percussion and female voices. Why did you choose this piece for the Ojai festival? Because the sense of being at war with one’s own country, and the violence of that, is so intense, and has left such a deep scar in the life of our country, that it has not only not healed, it is being reopened in our lifetime. Certain people in America now are trying to rewrite the social contract of this country to exclude a huge segment of the population from prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. We’ve returned to the same issues of the Civil War, where the future of America is about whether we’re going to allow people who are not white to be treated equally. And George Crumb has set the music in a strange, haunted universe of memory, of regret, and those memories contain an enormous amount of violence. That’s by definition post-traumatic stress disorder: things being replayed again and again; strange rattling and rustling and sleeplessness. This is music that really cuts deep. Read More
June 6, 2011 At Work Enrique Vila-Matas on ‘Never Any End to Paris’ By Scott Esposito Decorated with numerous awards in his native Spain—including the same Premio Rómulo Gallegos that catapulted his friend Roberto Bolaño to international renown—Enrique Vila-Matas has pioneered one of contemporary literature’s most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers. Taking the Modernists as towering giants that will never be equaled, Vila-Matas works to inscribe himself—at times literally—in the margins of their works. His tools are irony, parody, paradox, and futility, and his goal is to mix fact, fiction, and autobiography in order to depict not reality but truth. I asked him about his newly translated novel Never Any End to Paris—his third in English—based on the time he spent in Paris as a young writer attempting (and gloriously failing) to triumph as Hemingway did. Never Any End to Paris uses your youth in Paris to explore ideas of creativity, influence, and identity. The narrator is a writer whose facts and dates are similar to yours, though—I think—he both is and isn’t you. Do you think art requires certain compromises with reality? Which reality? If you mean the conventional “consumerist reality” that rules the book market and has become the preferred milieu for fiction, this doesn’t interest me at all. What really interests me much more than reality is truth. I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature. This sentiment is very similar to something you say in Paris—“where there is a mirage there is life”—and it reminds me of something I heard you say in an interview: that for the modernists the quest is rectilinear, in contrast to that of Ulysses, whose quest was a circle. In your books, what inspires this search? In a movie by Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray says “you can’t go home again.” Sometimes I think about this phrase, and in order to calm down I imagine myself as a Chinese who came home. “I’m just a Chinese who returned home,” wrote Kafka in a letter. Sometimes I wish I were this Chinese, but only sometimes. Because the truth is that what I write frequently brings me to a descent, a fall, a journey within, an excursion to the end of the night, the complete opposite of a return to Ithaca. In short, I long to journey endlessly, always in search of something new. Always alert. Read More
June 3, 2011 At Work Joe Dunthorne on ‘Submarine’ By Thomas Bunstead Craig Roberts plays Oliver Tate. Novelist Joe Dunthorne’s delightfully British debut, Submarine, is told from the point of view of teenager Oliver Tate, whose twin mission is to lose his virginity by his sixteenth birthday and to salvage his parents’ ailing marriage. The film version, which was adapted by Richard Ayoade, was picked up by Harvey Weinstein and Ben Stiller and opens today in the U.S. I spoke with Dunthorne not long ago about his experience working with Ayoade and the process of adaptation. Harvey Weinstein is notorious for cutting films to make them more palatable. Have there been any significant changes to the film ahead of the American release? One thing they’ve added is a card at the start saying something along the lines of “Dear Americans, I am Oliver Tate. I come from a country called Wales, which is near England. You may have heard of famous Welsh people like Catherine Zeta Jones and Anthony Hopkins. You have never invaded Wales, and for that we are thankful” and so on. It’s a kind of introductory card, which is written by Richard Ayoade, the director, at Mr. Weinstein’s suggestion, and the idea seems to be that it needed signposting as a comedy. Whether that’s a judgment on the book, or the film, or American audiences, who knows! At least they didn’t do a Trainspotting and subtitle it … The Welsh accents weren’t quite thick enough to warrant that. Trainspotting is an interesting link though, because it showed that something may be key to the novel but that doesn’t necessarily make it key to the film. You know how in the book of Trainspotting there’s that absolutely crucial scene where Begbie meets his father down by the train tracks—which is where the title comes from—well, Danny Boyle did away with that. There was something I felt was key in Submarine the novel, namely the revenge of Zoe, the fat girl whom Oliver and his friends bully, but with the film script, it suddenly became expendable. In the book, it’s when Oliver gets his comeuppance for being a bit of a shit, so it’s important in terms of his “coming of age,” but for the film it felt too peripheral. What you end up asking yourself is, is there room in a film for something that sits at that sort of tangent to the narrative? A scene that’s somehow faraway from the story but remains important. Maybe not. Maybe it’s something to do with the linearity of film, or maybe simply the two or so hours of viewing time doesn’t allow for those sorts of digressions. Read More