June 6, 2012 In Memoriam Ray Bradbury, 1920–2012 By The Paris Review “I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference? Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.” —Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203
May 29, 2012 In Memoriam In Memoriam: Marina Keegan By The Paris Review It is with deep sadness that we note the death of our reader Marina Keegan. Marina graduated last week from Yale, where she was a finalist for the Wallace Prize in creative writing, a leader of the Occupy Morgan Stanley protest, and a staff writer for the Yale Daily News. One of her most popular articles, on the path from Yale to Wall Street, earned her a guest column in The New York Times Dealbook. A musical she wrote, Independents, is set to be performed this summer at the New York Fringe Festival. She died Saturday afternoon in a car accident at the age of twenty-two. Marina came to the Review recommended by her classmates, who described her as the star writer of their class. She was funny, self-assured, blazingly bright, full of mature dedication, and passionate for life. In her final column for the Daily News, she exhorted her readers to “make something happen to this world.” Our hearts go out to her family and friends.
May 16, 2012 In Memoriam Get It Together: On Mourning Adam Yauch By Dave Tompkins I’m not sure who had the ball when George Clinton passed by in a golf cart. It could’ve been Mike D. It could’ve been Yauch. I just remember standing there astonished, watching George quietly scoot by in his Mothership mini, while my defensive assignment broke to the basket and scored. The Beastie Boys were playing some intrasquad hoops in a parking lot behind the Atlanta Amphitheater, a Lollapalooza stop during the summer of 1994. A portable basketball goal had been traveling with them, providing a transitional arc and some adrenaline for the stage. I don’t even remember who was on my team. I just know that I was playing with a bunch of guys once falsely accused of throwing pies at kids in wheelchairs. Yauch evidently hadn’t given up his outside shot for Buddhism. Adam Horovitz dribbled with an Archibaldian low center of gravity, while Mike D crashed about with his Kurt Rambis hustle. Keyboard player/carpenter Money Mark spent much of the game in midair. I spent much of the game looking for my fadeaway. In my defense, I was firing into the sun on a freshly reconstructed knee, ligament grafted, no brace. If I had reinjured it that day, I would’ve told anyone with a working set of ears that I’d blown out my knee playing basketball with the Beastie Boys—that I was treeing out of my mind until George Clinton put a golf cart on me. Read More
May 15, 2012 In Memoriam Carlos Fuentes, 1928–2012 By Sadie Stein “When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.” —Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68
May 8, 2012 In Memoriam R.I.P. Maurice Sendak By Sadie Stein Photo by John Dugdale.It is with great sadness that we note the death, at eighty-three, of legendary writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. In books like Where the Wild Things Are, Outside Over There, The Nutshell Library, The Sign on Rosie’s Door and many more, Sendak defined childhood for many of us. Last September, we ran this interview with Mr. Sendak; his inimitable wit, wisdom, and legendary cantankerousness came through loud and clear.
April 25, 2012 In Memoriam A Singular Southern Gentleman Goes Out “Biting” By Gary Lippman Whenever I rang the phone at a certain house in the kudzu-covered college town of Gainesville, Florida, I knew what I was likely to hear: not a polite “hello” or “good afternoon,” but a gruff-voiced, rural Georgia-accented statement of self: “Harry Crews.” And whenever I visited my friend Harry, the notorious American novelist and essayist who died (“bit the big bagel,” he’d say) in March at the age of seventy-six, I knew what I’d likely find: a great boulder of a man in a bathrobe sunk into a brown recliner chair in a living room filled with books, photographs, and, on one wall, the framed quilted image of a typewriter. “Come on in, blood, grab a seat, how ya been?” Harry would call to me as I stepped inside. He took pride in rarely locking his home’s front door, just as he prided himself on keeping his number listed in the Gainesville white pages. “All’s good,” I’d say, dropping into a chair that faced his. “New York’s fine, how you been?” “Well, I’m hurting.” Read More