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  • Arts & Culture

    A Visit with Patrick Leigh Fermor, Part 3

    By

    Major PLF.TIF

    Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

    There was an incident dating from this vagabond period—from 1956, to be exact—that I was keen to ask Paddy about. Some weeks earlier I had come across, in a sort of anthology of classic put-downs, an anecdote about a contretemps between Paddy and Somerset Maugham. When I asked Paddy about it, he ferreted out a photcopy of a letter he had written at the time to a friend of everyone concerned, Deborah Devonshire, in which he describes what happened. It begins by telling how, after a week in the Alps with director Michael Powell’s team shooting Ill Met by Moonlight (Moss’s account of the Kreipe abduction), Paddy—who is, incidentally, played by Dirk Bogarde in the movie—had settled down to write in a friendly curé’s garden. The letter proceeds as follows:

    Before I’d set out, Annie [Fleming, wife of novelist Ian] told me that “Willy” had asked her to stay and to bring anyone she liked (so why not me) and when she got to the Villa Mauresque she rang up, announced the O.K., and collected me in a borrowed car.

    Lunch went swimmingly: Annie, Mr Maugham, his friend Alan Searle, and me. So well that, when we got up, Maugham—looking rather like a friendly Gladstone bag—said that he hoped I would stay and go on with my writing, and showed me a charming room. So all prospects glowed when we assembled on the terrace before dinner. The only other guests were a Mr and Mrs Frere; he was Mr Maugham’s publisher at Heinemann and she was Edgar Wallace’s daughter. Making conversation over marvellously strong drinks, I asked her if her husband was anything to do with someone I knew with the same name. She said she wasn’t sure: what did he do? I said, “He’s a herald.”

    “What sort of a herald?”

    “Oh, you know, works in the College of Arms—he’s Rougedragon Pursuivant, or something like that.”

    “How interesting.”

    “Well, he’s an exception to Diana Cooper’s generalization.”

    “Oh, what is that?”

    “She says it’s generally believed that all heralds stutter.” Read More

  • Softball

    TPR vs. Departures: Season Openers and Citi Bikes

    By
    Team         |1|2|3|4|5|6|7   Total
    Departures   |0|0|2|0|2|1|0       5
    TPR          |0|5|4|2|4|3|       18
    
    Photo by Emily Farache

    Photo by Emily Farache

    Well, folks: we’re off to a good start. Team Paris Review kicked off its season—and its residency at our new home field—with a comfortable win over the Platinum Card crew from Departures. Unlike the clientele of our vanquished foes, there was very little exclusivity in yesterday’s merry band of Parisian home-run hitters, which included the likes of Robyn “Big Daddy” Creswell, Adam “Watch It Fly” Wilson, Ben “Wisdom” Wizner, and Charlie “Buckets” Stein.

    George Plimpton, founding editor of (and longtime pitcher for) The Paris Review

    George Plimpton, founding editor of (and longtime pitcher for) The Paris Review

    Those distracted from the game by the blissful heat of the late-spring afternoon may have noticed the elderly fellow who, having wrested free a Citi Bike from a nearby docking station—and evidently intent on imitating our circling of the bases—began looping around the park, occasionally glancing down at his feet to study the bike’s mechanics. Judging it sound, he exited the park just as we wrapped things up, and headed north on Tenth Avenue. I couldn’t help but be reminded of another gray-haired cyclist, one who’d no doubt approve of both a city full of public bikes and of another season of Paris Review softball.

    Next up: Vanity Fair (June 11, 7:00 P.M., Central Park).

     

     

     

  • This Week’s Reading

    What We’re Loving: Illuminations and Despair

    By

    illuminatedmss

    Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art” opened at the Morgan Library earlier this month. The exhibition packs an astounding range of illuminated manuscripts, each depicting an aspect of the relationship between the body of Christ and medieval culture, into a single room. Though there are a few archetypal works on display, with their colorfully wrought letters, floral detailing, and flattened and disproportional bodies, many of the manuscripts are particularly particular. A German work depicts King David feeding the hungry; he holds a large skewer of meat in one hand and oversized pretzels in the other. Another is a parody of the Mass; I didn’t write down the provenance of the volume, but I did record some of the descriptive text provided by the curator, which narrates the drawings on the pages to which the book is opened: “A fox, dressed in a chasuble, ‘celebrates’ Mass—not on an altar but on the naked buttocks of a man standing on his head. With folded paws, the fox priest bows—not to a chalice but a tankard of ale.” Cheers. —Clare Fentress

    “Dear Lorin,” the note read, “I saw this book and thought you might like it, even though it is full of despair.” The book in question is Jean-Pierre Martinet’s 1979 mini-novella The High Life, newly translated by Henry Vale. The narrator, Adolphe Marlaud, is a midget who lives next to the Montparnasse cemetery. He works in a funerary shop, where he passes the time making advances (unwanted) toward the grieving female customers; evenings he spends in the arms of his concierge, an older (and much bigger) woman whom he calls Madame C. Then one night Madame C suggests that they see a pornographic movie, and the drama begins—except, as Marlaud observes, “There’s no drama with us, messieurs, nor tragedy: there is only burlesque and obscenity.” Many thanks to Matt Bucher, administrator of the David Foster Wallace listserv wallace-l, for turning me on to The High Life (even though it is full of despair). —Lorin Stein Read More

  • Look

    A Tiny Library

    By
    Image via The Atlantic

    Image via The Atlantic

    This wee structure, one of ten scattered about downtown Manhattan this summer, is the work of architects Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente. It operates on the give a book/take a book principle, and is in the tradition of the original, Wisconsin-based Little Free Library movement. Read more about it here!

     

  • On the Shelf

    Dolly Parton, Our Lady of Free Books, and Other News

    By

     

    • Did you know Dolly Parton has a discreet career delivering 50 million free books to children, as part of Imagination Library? Of course she does.
    • Pencil nibbler? These peppermint pencils are designed to stimulate concentration. (You’re actually just intended to sniff them.)
    • At the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee, participants were to be required not merely to spell but also to define the words in question. This resulted in indignation.
    • Speaking of! Twitter either showcases, or causes, abhorrent spelling and grammar.
    • Presented without comment: “A publishing company is spicing up a cross-Canada literary event by adding knitting to the equation.”