April 2, 2014 At Work Heroes of the Civil Service: An Interview with Antonin Baudry By Susannah Hunnewell Antonin Baudry, 2013. Photo: Clarisse Rebotier In 2010, a graphic novel, Quai D’Orsay, was published in France under a pseudonym, causing a quiet sensation. Set in, of all places, the Foreign Ministry, Quai D’Orsay starred a young speechwriter frantically learning on the job—the novel featured recognizable public figures, including the foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who famously said non to the war in Iraq. In France, graphic novels, or comic books (bandes dessinées), are a revered venue for pointed satire. The bestseller’s author, it turned out, was a wunderkind former staffer for Villepin named Antonin Baudry. A man of varied passions—board games, Metallica, Greek philosophy—Baudry is currently the French Cultural Counselor for the U.S. Last fall, he adapted the graphic novel for the big screen. The resulting film, The Minister, became an instant hit in France, earning the rookie screenwriter a nomination for a César, the French Oscar. The Minister is now showing (under the title The French Minister) at select theaters in the U.S., including the IFC Center, in New York; the graphic novel is available in English under the title Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. Sitting in his cavernous office in the French embassy, overlooking Central Park, the informal diplomat says he would love to try another graphic novel “on globalism, set in the Middle Ages.” Both in the graphic novel and the movie, you make it seem as if you hadn’t the slightest qualification to write speeches for the foreign minister. Is that true? Yes. I didn’t have the background that all the people there had at all. I had never met a politician before. I had never met a diplomat. What happened was that Dominique de Villepin was looking for young people from different universes to write for him. He heard through a mutual friend that I had done master’s theses in math and literature, and he wanted to meet me. I totally panicked. I said to my friend, Why did you do this to me? I had to buy a suit. The minister received me at the Quai D’Orsay, and it was just like being hypnotized. He explained a lot of things to me and everything seemed clear, and then when I left, I couldn’t remember a thing. And there was this time pressure. He said I had to answer within twenty-four hours because we were possibly on the eve of a Third World War. I was twenty-six, and I thought, Why not? I’d done academic writing and I knew I wanted to write novels. I accepted the job because I think many writers have no experience of the world. I once worked for the sanitation department in Berlin, cleaning the streets at five in the morning. I loved it for the same reason—it gave me the chance to observe another universe instead of staying in my room, contemplating myself. Read More
April 2, 2014 On the Shelf Poets Want Their Privacy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Smile, you’re on CCTV. “Delicious, unkosher, dark, vague, the Cloud / Of Mexico Pork threatens our borders.” In a new forum, John Ashbery, Cathy Park Hong, Charles Bernstein, Robert Pinsky, Rae Armantrout, and others contribute poems about the surveillance state in the twenty-first century. (Those lines are Pinsky’s.) Good news for grad students reluctant to enter academia: “Humanities Ph.D.s are all around us—and they are not serving coffee.” The Mets blew what now? An unfortunate headline teaches us the everlasting value of commas. Anyone who worships at the altar of user experience will wince at these designs by Katerina Kamprani, who has made it her task to suck the utility out of everyday objects. One man’s strangely inspiring search for a vocation: “He started the Restroom Association of Singapore to clean up the public toilets. People loved it. He then realized there were fifteen toilet associations around the world, in cities in Britain and Germany and Japan and some other places, too, but no world headquarters. So he started the World Toilet Organization … and that is how Jack Sim became the Toilet Man.” A brief history of naked babies in fashion magazines.
April 1, 2014 Nostalgia A Vintage Plimpton Prank By Dan Piepenbring Today’s been so chock full of hoaxes, shenanigans, pranks, put-ons, spoofs, tomfoolery, and good-natured hooliganism that we’ve almost forgotten to remind you of the hoaxes, shenanigans, pranks, put-ons, spoofs, tomfoolery, and good-natured hooliganism of yesteryear. One case in particular merits revisiting: we speak, of course, of a 1985 hoax executed in grand fashion by our late founder, George Plimpton. PBS’s American Masters tells the story with help from Jonathan Dee: For the April 1, 1985, issue of Sports Illustrated, George Plimpton wrote “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” a profile on an incredible rookie baseball pitcher for the New York Mets. Sports fans took his April Fools’ Day joke seriously. Even other journalists were willing to believe a novice could throw a 168-mph fast ball, thanks to his Buddhist training (Sidd was short for Siddhartha, the title character of Herman Hesse’s novel). To keep the hoax going, a nervous George Plimpton relied on a young Jonathan Dee, now a famous fiction writer but then an associate editor and Plimpton’s personal assistant at The Paris Review. Dee describes Plimpton’s tense days surrounding the hoax in this film outtake. American Masters’ Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself premieres nationally Friday, May 16, on PBS.
April 1, 2014 On Politics Here’s Pie in Your Eye By Rex Weiner Pieing for fun and profit. “I used to throw pies for a living.” The story usually elicits a good chuckle or two. It’s the perfect gambit when dinner-party conversation lags—a legendary prank executed long ago in my rascal past, a kind of April Fools’ joke. But what my audience never knows is this: they’re talking to a guy who once commanded a hit squad of domestic terrorists that carried out a slew of public attacks in broad daylight and got away with it. Well, mostly. An enraged crowd of Trekkies nearly stomped me to death after I’d boldly gone and pied William Shatner, their beloved Captain Kirk, at a Star Trek convention. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Read More
April 1, 2014 Bulletin Give a Warm Welcome to Our Newest Issue By Dan Piepenbring At last! Spring is here, Easter is coming, and, as you can see, the latest issue of The Paris Review has already taken its pastels out of the closet—it’s ready to sally forth into the cherry blossoms. And at its heart are two of our most anticipated interviews. First, there’s Cormac McCarthy on the Art of Fiction: I rise at six and work through the morning, every morning, seven days a week. I find the sun has a forlorn truth before noon. And there’s Thomas Pynchon on his process, his elaborate research for Bleeding Edge, and his depiction in the media: Being called paranoid seems preferable to any number of things. Especially now, with the degrees of access, the ubiquity of cameras—it’s a position that seems increasingly less, well, paranoid. The word that does bother me is recluse. I don’t consider myself reclusive. Plus, an excerpt from a newly unearthed novel by Roberto Bolaño; fiction by Lydia Davis and Ottessa Moshfegh; poems by Frederick Seidel, Anne Carson, and Dorothea Lasky; an essay by Christian Lorentzen; and a portfolio by Salman Rushdie. We humbly assert that it’s one of our strongest issues ever. See for yourself.
April 1, 2014 On the Shelf The Circus Is Brighter in Poland, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Cyrk” poster, designed by Lech Majewski, Poland, 1973. D. H. Lawrence’s hometown has opened a new pub called the Lady Chatterley. An enterprising fourteen-year-old has an urgent message for the government: change your official typeface to Garamond and you’ll save millions. Shakespeare plays illustrated in three easy panels. (“Three witches tell Macbeth he will be king. Macbeth kills lots of people in order to be king. Macbeth is killed.”) Taking stock of Monocle, which is now seven years old: “a magazine that is in general focused on a particular brand of well-heeled global urbanism … Monocle doesn’t have bureaus, it has bureaux … what Monocle and its advertisers clearly understand, even if the point is seldom made explicit, is that living in a first-tier city is a luxury good, like a Prada bag or a pair of Hermès boots.” Don’t merely go to the circus. Go to the circus in Communist-era Poland. “The visual style of the Polish School of Posters, funded and sponsored by state commissions, was characterized by vibrant colors, playful humor, hand-lettering, and a bold surrealism that rivaled anything similar artists in the West were doing at the time.”