June 25, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, Who Gave His Life to Work and Eros By Henri Cole Donald Hall in 2014. Photo: Henri Cole. He worked hard and now can rest. He was one of America’s best-loved poets and won all the literary awards. At eighty-six, he had his first New York Times best seller, with Essays After Eighty, celebrating the indignities of growing old. I once gave him a terrible review, and we didn’t speak for years. “I know I was pissed at you for ten or twelve years,” he wrote. “I take it back. You are good.” He was a judge for the Pulitzer the year I was a finalist. We became friends. He wrote dozens of books: poetry, short stories, children’s books, criticism, and textbooks. He was devoted to the art and craft of writing, and his discipline was an example to others. He seemed to give his life over to work and Eros. He was also very funny and very particular (“I love chicken salad, egg salad as long as it has onion, turkey and salami. I don’t like tuna”). The horrors of antiquity—a “black fatigue,” congestive heart failure, “a hundred and fifty colonoscopies,” walking more slowly with his “rollator,” falling down, the loss of words—did not exclude joy and love. Read More
June 21, 2018 In Memoriam In Memory of Stanley Cavell By Patrick Mackie While driving back from a party through the warm London night last Monday evening, I decided to tell my girlfriend about Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Macbeth. The story does not reflect any better on me, if you know the essay in question. It centers on a description of the Macbeths as a portrait of a marriage gone perfectly, metaphysically wrong, one where the sharing of thought and passion has become ghastly and vampiric. But the play was on my mind because I was due to see it the following night, so maybe I can be forgiven my conversational choice. The production felt strikingly close to Cavell’s account. So I was thinking the next day about emailing him about it; instead I heard the news of his death. I am still reeling from that news as I write these brief thoughts. Read More
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