June 21, 2018 In Memoriam A Space Cowboy’s Curriculum By Gary Lippman Ten things I know about John Perry Barlow: 1. John Perry Barlow died this past February at age seventy, but people have been trying to describe him for decades. Among the attempts: “Internet guru,” “the thinking man’s Forrest Gump,” and “an oracle of the unusual” (this last phrase from his dear friend Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, one of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Pranksters). His New York Times obituary described him as “a former cowpoke, Republican politician and lyricist for the Grateful Dead whose affinity for wide open spaces and free expression transformed him into a leading defender of an unfettered internet.” Barlow himself, on one of his business cards, presented his job title as “Peripheral Visionary,” which was typically waggish of him but too modest. His vision, as he grooved through cyberspace and “meatspace” (which is what he called real life), could be direct, just as it could be X-ray or cosmic. 2. The first time I hung out with my friend Barlow, the year was 2008, and he was cavorting around a party in Manhattan, cackling like a bedlamite as he shot colored lasers from the knuckles of the high-tech black leather gloves he wore. Witnessing this, I thought of the chorus to a song he’d written, a chorus I already knew by heart: “I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.” Read More
June 8, 2018 In Memoriam Three Brief Encounters with Anthony Bourdain By Brendan Francis Newnam Anthony Bourdain during the Peabody interview for Parts Unknown. 1) The first time I met Anthony Bourdain, he told me a joke. I was an enterprising host and producer of a fledgling food-and-culture podcast and radio show, and word had spread that he was in the building, recording an interview. I waited outside the studio like a nerdy paparazzo, with my headphones, microphone, and recording kit cocked and ready to go. When he emerged, I quickly slipped between him and his publicist, introduced myself, and asked him if he knew any jokes I could share with my audience. He smiled and said, “Sure. Ready?” “Yeah,” I replied. “So why did Jesus cross the road?” “I don’t know.” “Someone nailed him to a chicken.” We shook hands, and he was off. His joke was too off-color to use on my public radio show. People often described Anthony Bourdain as a rock star, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Anthony Bourdain was a punk. Read More
May 23, 2018 In Memoriam Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth? By Megan Abbott I first discovered Philip Roth at age fifteen. My parents, bless them, placed Goodbye, Columbus in my hands. Having grown up in the suburbs of Detroit—the rock-ribbed WASP enclave of Grosse Pointe—I found him exotic, thrilling. His audacity staggered me. His books were smart and dirty, and until then, I didn’t know you could be both. In college, in grad school in New York, I kept reading him—going back into his early works and moving forward with the latest ones. I taught American Pastoral to undergraduates, standing in front of a classroom in upstate New York and trying to explain why this book was so important from an intellectual perspective when really all I wanted to talk about was how moved I was by it, how it brought me to tears. I’d have Roth jags, where I’d read or reread several of his books in a row, like that one heady summer, around age thirty, when I read the first four Zuckerman novels in sweaty sequence, the paperback print smearing in my hands on the subway. In recent years, I read his slimmer novels in near tandem with my dad, and we swapped emails about them, savored them. And I’ll never forget the experience of reading Nemesis, Roth’s exquisite and haunting final novel, and reading it so slowly, with such care, because there already was this sense, confirmed a year or two later, that Roth might not reward us with another. Read More
May 23, 2018 In Memoriam Philip Roth, 1933–2018 By The Paris Review Philip Roth, a towering figure of twentieth-century literature, has died at the age of eighty-five. He had a long history with the The Paris Review. His story “The Conversion of the Jews” was pulled from our slush pile when Roth was just twenty-five years old, and published in issue no. 18 (Spring 1958). Roth then made his first visit to New York, where he met the magazine’s young editors and writers. The connection was immediate. As he described in his speech at our 2010 Spring Revel, “This time I sent my story not to The Paris Review slush pile, from which I’d been plucked first time around by none other than Rose Styron, but right to the top.” His next story, “Epstein,” was published in issue no. 19 (Summer 1958), and “Goodbye, Columbus” was published in issue no. 20 (Autumn–Winter 1958–1959). In the early eighties, the writer Hermione Lee interviewed Roth for our Art of Fiction series. In her words, Roth “listens carefully to everything, makes lots of quick jokes, and likes to be amused. Just underneath this benign appearance there is a ferocious concentration and mental rapacity; everything is grist for his mill, no vagueness is tolerated, differences of opinion are pounced on greedily, and nothing that might be useful is let slip.” In 2010, The Paris Review presented Roth with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. In the interest of letting nothing useful slip, here is a quick roundup of our various and varied Philip Roth pieces from over the years. Read More
May 16, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, Straight-Arrow Virginia Gent By Gordon Lish Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011. Back in the day when I was stepping out and Anatole Broyard kept a one-room city fifth-floor walkup in which I would not infrequently step out in, Tom was living only a block or so easterly and would, damn our eyes, catch me making my way to or from where I wasn’t supposed to have been stepping and, bless his heart, not inform on me, despite his being the straight-arrow Virginia gent he was. Back in the day when there was talk between Tom’s Sheila and my Barbara of the two squads going halvsies on a great big house in Hamptonia, we all were sitting around in said real estate after a Sunday brunchy fress—Tom’s sidekicks Eddie Hayes and Richard Merkin among the newspaperbound bagelbound boasters—and I just so happened to have launched myself into a rapsode bearing on my baseball-playing startlements, this before I was expelled from the school where I’d done the startling, and Tom said he had a couple of mitts, why didn’t we go on out onto the lawn and throw it around awhile, and I said, thanks but no thanks, I having been a catcher when I was doing my startling and would therefore require the glove worn by a catcher if I were to catch a ball thrown by a pitcher known to me to have been a farm-team pitcher for the Dodgers, unless it was the Yanks, whereupon Tom allowed as to how he had happened to have fetched out from the city to Hamptonia the very variety of mitt, and so he had and so we did, humping it out onto the lawn and just as humpily regrouping among the housebound, Tom mum as you’d want that no toss he’d lobbed at me could I, the be-mitted braggart, begin to handle. Read More
May 15, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, 1930–2018 By The Paris Review Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to the first American astronauts. And then, having revolutionized journalism with his kaleidoscopic yet rigorous reportage, he decided it was time to write novels. As he said in his Art of Fiction interview, “Practically everyone my age who wanted to write somehow got the impression in college that there was only one thing to write, which was a novel and that if you went into journalism, this was only a cup of coffee on the road to the final triumph. At some point you would move into a shack—it was always a shack for some reason—and write a novel. This would be your real métier.” With The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe wrote a sprawling, quintessential magnum opus of New York in the eighties. His first two novels were runaway best sellers, and his success won him the bitter envy of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, among others. “Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” writes Norman Mailer, in a 1994 review of A Man in Full. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers—he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.” Although Wolfe’s later two novels, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood, won him more accolades from The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award than anything else, his cutting portrayals of America earned him a lasting and well-deserved place in literature. In his 1975 book of art criticism, The Painted Word, Wolfe describes the “Art Mating Ritual” in a way that still feels perfectly current: the artist must perform what Wolfe dubs the “BoHo Dance.” She must move to Lower Manhattan and perform her bohemian disdain of wealth. In short, she must get close enough to the people uptown—“the Museum of Modern Art, certain painters, certain collectors”—to spit on them. When George Plimpton sat down with Wolfe for his Art of Fiction interview in 1994, at Wolfe’s favorite Italian restaurant, Isle of Capri on the Upper East Side (still open—and still relatively highly reviewed on Yelp), “the author arrived wearing the white ensemble he is noted for—a white modified homburg, a chalk-white overcoat—but to the surprise of regular customers looking up from their tables, he removed the coat to disclose a light-brown suit set off by a pale lilac tie. Questioned about the light-brown suit, he replied: ‘Shows that I’m versatile.’ ” Although Wolfe’s wide-ranging interests and stylistic leaps were indeed versatile, he did have a singular focus: our hypocrisy, our greed, and our status-obsessed culture. His is an incisive voice we would have been grateful for in 2018 and beyond. Below, read some of our favorite moments from his interview, which subscribers can enjoy in full. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More