September 9, 2013 Quote Unquote Good Things By Sadie Stein Leo Tolstoy by Leonid Pasternak. “The best stories don’t come from ‘good vs. bad’ but ‘good vs. good.’” —Leo Tolstoy
September 9, 2013 Arts & Culture Don’t Snip My Brakes in Long Beach By Dave Tompkins In 1977, O. J. Simpson thought he was going to Mars. Instead he was kidnapped and taken to synthetic Mars, staged at a CIA base somewhere in New Mexico. Or Arizona. Wherever. The American public bought it, just as they believed O. J. Simpson could be an astronaut. The transmission from Mars was all a conspiracy, project-managed by Hal Holbrook and NASA in the film Capricorn One. Accompanied by James Brolin and the assistant DA from Law & Order, Simpson escaped this fraudulent Mars in a Lear jet, only to crash-land in the desert. Last time we’d seen James Brolin in the desert, he was gunned down by Yul Brenner in Westworld, astonished that the Russian cowboy-robot was using real bullets. This time Brolin is rescued by Telly Savalas in a crop duster. The assistant DA from Law & Order isn’t so lucky. Nor is O. J. I remember Simpson’s eyebrows being full of sand upon realizing the birds in the sky were really helicopters. I may have writer’s block. It’s not all spaceman in the trashcan as one would imagine. (One would imagine nothing, I’d think. And I would think, if I didn’t have writer’s block, or indulge in a hopeless tautology.) But I have been thinking about O. J. on Mars with sand in his eyebrows, rather than, say, geo-acoustic mapping, torpedoes, and swamp outlaws—the real concerns of my unfinished future. Read More
September 9, 2013 Bulletin Have Questions About The Paris Review? Ask Our Editors on Reddit! By The Paris Review Pictured [l-r]: associate editor Stephen Hiltner, deputy editor Sadie Stein, digital director Justin Alvarez, assistant editor Clare Fentress, and editor Lorin Stein. Have a question about The Paris Review? How do the interviews work? What’s our pitch process? Are we a CIA front? Paris Review editors will be hosting a Reddit AMA (short for “Ask Me Anything”) tomorrow, September 10, at 3 P.M. EDT. You can read the full thread here. See you then!
September 9, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles, Part 4 By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner’s research into the endless ways we’ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Every Monday for the next three weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. During the Middle Ages, every alchemist worth his saltpeter tried to find the philosopher’s stone, the water stone of the wise, the miraculous stone that is no stone. It was the means to transmute base metals into gold and—more importantly—concoct elixirs of immortality. The word is Arabic in origin: al-kimia, al-khymia, or al-kīmyā. It’s how chemistry begins. Science as we now conceive it did not exist in the medieval period. (The word scientist only became commonplace in the nineteenth century, after Cambridge University historian William Whewell coined the term in 1833.) Instead, there was natural magic and philosophy—and alchemy, the experimental attempt to combine different elements and uncover the factual mysteries of nature. Read More
September 9, 2013 On the Shelf Dr. Who Poetry, and Other News By Sadie Stein “We’re trying to reorder some of the myths based on the documents.” Bolaño’s unpublished work, on view in Spain. Harper Lee and agent Samuel Pinkus have apparenty reached an “agreement in principle” to settle the eighty-seven-year-old author’s copyright lawsuit. While he might have objected to their dissemination, here are twenty-two out-of-print J. D. Salinger stories that you can read online. A crowd-funded Dr. Who poetry book? Oh, it’s happening.
September 6, 2013 Windows on the World Lidija Dimkovska, Skopje, Macedonia By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. My late childhood and entire youth window. I began to write in front of this view, and while I am here, I still do, at a low, small table. On a typewriter then, on a laptop now, but preferably in a small notebook with lines. I look outside often; the pictures have become very familiar. Two brothers used to live in the building with their families and their old mother, a small, tiny woman in black who always was screaming at her grandchildren, often beating them or running after them. They also were screaming, and that noise was present in the air until the parents would come home from work. Later, I found out that they moved the grandma from the first floor to the cellar, where she died. One of her daughter-in-laws was Serbian; once, the Serbian woman sent me and my friends to the shop to buy her a special orange juice, Fructal. She opened it, and for the first time in my life I tried this juice that my family could not afford. The roof of the building was always in my view. In the mornings a stork would come to the chimney on the roof and look through my window. We looked each other in the eyes, and we understood each other. He was my sky, I was his earth’s friend. It was impossible not to write. —Lidija Dimkovska