August 20, 2013 Video & Multimedia Watch The Paris Review on Charlie Rose, Here! By Justin Alvarez Now we’re making it really easy for you! For those readers who were unable to catch James Salter, Mona Simpson, Lorin Stein, and John Jeremiah Sullivan discussing The Paris Review’s sixtieth anniversary on Charlie Rose, are you ever in luck! You can now watch the full segment below (sans introductory interview with Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman). Yes, we’ve given this a lot of ink, but what can we say—we’re proud! If you have issues with the video, click here to watch.
August 20, 2013 On the Shelf Mark Twain Designed His Own Notebooks, and Other News By Sadie Stein Twain’s notebooks, Plath’s pens, and other preferred writing paraphernalia of famous authors. Via the minds at McSweeney’s, an invaluable Field Guide to Uncommon Punctuation. An elaborate, book-themed proposal involving a custom children’s book, a library, and a lot of planning. The Today Show has reanimated its book club, and kicked off with The Bone Season, by twenty-one-year-old Samantha Shannon. (“The next Rowling?” asks Today, unfortunately.)
August 19, 2013 Bulletin In Case You Missed It… By Sadie Stein If you weren’t able to catch James Salter, Mona Simpson, Lorin Stein, and John Jeremiah Sullivan talking The Paris Review’s sixtieth on Friday night’s Charlie Rose (or, like some of us, were forced to watch it in closed caption), you’re in luck! Tonight, the show airs again on Bloomberg TV at 8 P.M. and 10 P.M. EST.
August 19, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles: Part One By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? My research into the endless ways we’ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is released today as The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever (Scribner). Every Monday for the next six weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. We’ve always had a thing for sequels. The suggestion of a second act is built into the fossil record. Tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals were already digging premeditated grave sites. They intentionally buried dead kin in fetal positions, indicating some hunch about posthumous rebirth. By Neolithic times, when we’d gotten the hang of agriculture, food started being placed alongside entombed bodies—presumably so they’d have snacks for their journey to the spirit realm. Our terror and awe of mortality can be traced back to prehistoric nothingness. Every story about immortality since then has been a story about the meaning of death, an attempt at warding off our innate fear of finality. As soon as we figured out how to write, we started jotting down consolatory tales about living forever. The cuneiform tablets of Nineveh, among the earliest written documents, tell of King Gilgamesh, whose best friend dies. He is stricken with grief. But he is the omnipotent king of Uruk, the one who gazed into the depths—the one who slayed the Bull of Heaven!—surely he’s almighty enough to bring dead loved ones back from the grave. Mute with sorrow and pride, he buries his friend beneath a river and sets out to find eternal life. The scorpion people, whose knowledge is fathomless and whose glance is death, warn him about dangers ahead. A lady of the vines tries to console him, telling him that love is the closest mortals can come to immortality. Crossing the Waters of Death, he discovers a marvelous underwater plant that contains the secret of perpetual youth—the watercress of immortality, as the clay etchings call it, or the “never-grow-old”—but, alas, a serpent promptly steals it away. History’s prototypical protagonist fails, yet his story ends the only way it can: with acceptance of reality. Of mortality. Read More
August 19, 2013 In Memoriam John Hollander, 1929–2013 By Sadie Stein “Literature is not different from life, it is part of life. And for someone like myself, The Odyssey is as much a part of nature as the Aegean. And I react to the Aegean—as distinct, say, from the Caribbean—because its history is part of its physical substance. What I know about it, and feel about it, even mistaken things, is a part of it. Certain great texts are like this. Paradise Lost is like the Himalayas. It’s there. A part of nature, not separate.” —John Hollander, The Art of Poetry No. 35
August 19, 2013 On the Shelf Heartless Thief Steals Books on Bikes Bicycle, and Other News By Sadie Stein Shocking, shocking: a Seattle thief has stolen the Books on Bikes librarian’s bicycle. Thankfully, the trailer of books was not attached. “Sixty percent of the thirty-six books recommended for four-to-eight-year-olds feature animals, or are in other ways concerned with nature. For the nine-to-twelve age group, it’s just over fifty percent.” Why are children’s books so preoccupied with fauna? Casual sex: a great way to get book recommendations! By contrast: an interview with the author of the best-selling The Art of Sleeping Alone: Why One French Woman Gave Up Sex. (This is, obviously, the English title; French people are presumably less obsessed with French women than are anglophones.) Behold: the trailer for C.O.G., adapted from David Sedaris’s Naked! Read More