May 31, 2013 Softball TPR vs. Departures: Season Openers and Citi Bikes By Stephen Hiltner 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 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 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).
May 31, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Illuminations and Despair By The Paris Review “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
May 31, 2013 Look A Tiny Library By Sadie Stein 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!
May 31, 2013 On the Shelf Dolly Parton, Our Lady of Free Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein 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.”
May 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: May, or Do Your Thing By Kelly McMasters Nothing is ever over in a place like this, which is one Of the reasons why people come to look at it. As an Exhibit the waterfall is naturally unsurpassed: part of Its fascination must be in the way it demonstrates how an event can still be permanent when it depends for its Definition on continually going over the edge —Douglas Crase, The Revisionist One of my favorite parts of working in Moody Road Studios is figuring out someone’s next favorite book. I enjoy sussing people out, reading their personalities, their quirks, feeling around for clues as to what they might like. Do they want romance or darkness? Are they in it for the sentences or the story? Do they want their world to disappear or to learn something or both? Do they (*gasp*) read the last page first? Years ago, I bartended in a little dive at the end of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and, especially during slow Sunday afternoon shifts, I liked to guess in my head what drink each new customer would order. I was reminded of these days recently when reading the lovely new memoir, Drinking With Men, by Rosie Schaap, who will read at the next Moody Road Reading Series on June 29. The martini men were easy to spot. So were the bridge-and-tunnel kids coming in for a Long Island Iced Tea (mostly because they reminded me of myself at that age). The whiskey neats were the musicians or artists or writers. Ginger ale and bitters meant you’d spent some time behind the bar or waiting tables. Read More
May 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film By Roger Berkowitz Barbara Sukowa in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt. In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.” In the years since that fiery time, Eichmann in Jerusalem has remained something to condemn or defend rather than a book to be read and understood. I therefore had some fears when I heard that German director Margarethe von Trotta was making a film about Arendt’s coverage of the trial. But Hannah Arendt accomplishes something rare in any biopic and unheard of in a half century of critical hyperbole over all things Arendt: it actually brings Arendt’s work back into believable—and accessible—focus. The movie opens with two wordless scenes. The first depicts the Mossad’s abduction of Eichmann. The second follows a silent Hannah Arendt as she lights, and then smokes, a cigarette. Around her, all is darkness, and for a full two minutes, we watch her smoke. Played with passionate intensity by Barbara Sukowa (who won a Lola, the German Oscar), Arendt ambles. She lies down. She inhales. But above all, we see the cigarette’s ash flare brilliantly in the dark. Hannah Arendt, we are to understand, is thinking. Although Arendt’s work follows numerous byways, one theme is clear: in modern bureaucratic societies, human evil originates from a failure not of goodness but of thinking. Read More