March 20, 2013 Notes from a Biographer Southern Holiday, Part 3 By Sam Stephenson The Pinehurst Hotel, ca. 1940: the possible model for Tennessee Williams’s Hotel Flamingo, where Blanche lived after she lost Belle Reve and before she moved to New Orleans. Mississippi and New Orleans were on my horizon. Light in August and Streetcar Named Desire were on my mind. That is to say, Gene Smith was back in the mix. The morality and narrative techniques of Faulkner and Williams influenced his photography: he taped the text of Faulkner’s Nobel speech to the wall above his desk in his dilapidated Sixth Avenue loft and considered Williams’s oft-maligned, rarely seen Camino Real a pinnacle of American theater. Plus, he once made a portrait of Williams in a pool, swimming the backstroke naked with an apparent erection (try that aquatic feat, literary lads). The fog of Smith had returned to my Southern holiday road trip. After an overnight stop in Mobile, Alabama, my destination was Laurel, Mississippi, south of Jackson and north of New Orleans. Laurel was the fictional hometown of Streetcar’s Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella, and the site of their family estate, Belle Reve. It was Blanche’s loss of Belle Reve after the war that sent her to steamy, bedraggled New Orleans to stay with Stella and her ape-husband Stanley Kowalski. The rest is theater history. I wanted to spend some time in Laurel and then follow Blanche’s path into New Orleans. Read More
March 20, 2013 On the Shelf Persepolis Ascendant, and Other News By Sadie Stein The banning of Persepolis in Chicagoland schools has, in the grand tradition, boosted the graphic novel’s (already robust) sales. “I have only one humble criticism. I wonder if you realize how good you are.” Mutual admiration letters betwixt authors (and yes, the unsolicited humble criticism is Mailer to Styron). “Philip Roth celebrated his eightieth birthday in the Billy Johnson Auditorium of the Newark Museum last night with the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed.” David Remnick was there. “There is no modernist stream-of-consciousness novel harder to get through than a publisher-author agreement.” And other things every writer should know. Edinburgh’s Looking Glass Books: we want to go to there.
March 19, 2013 At Work Blurring the Lines: An Interview with Michelle Orange By Michele Filgate Last month I read a book by David Foster Wallace for the first time. (Dare I admit that? Not having read DFW is practically a sin in most literary circles; it was something that embarrassed me for years.) I finally read the essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. When I finished the book, I was greedy for more essay collections in which the author gets me to read about something I didn’t realize I had any interest in. Michelle Orange’s This is Running for Your Life is exactly what I was looking for. While the author deserves comparisons to DFW and John Jeremiah Sullivan, she has her own distinct voice. Orange’s prose is animated by her innate curiosity and her convincing meditations on culture and her own life. I recently interviewed her via e-mail. I was struck by the essay about your grandmother, in which you talked about the many ticket stubs she sent you on which she had scrawled short reviews. Movies, it seems, are more than a personal pleasure. It’s almost as if you genetically inherited the desire to watch cinema, to immerse yourself in the stories. Did you become a film critic partially because of your relationship with your grandmother? There does seem to be something passed down about that kind of movie love, although in this case it skipped a generation—my mom is more of a special-event moviegoer. My father, though, is at least as devoted a movie-lover as my grandmother was, so I had it coming from several directions. What I sensed with my grandmother is that she seemed to need the movies as much as she loved them. Our trips to the Cineplex, where she would take seven-year-old me to see rated-R-for-mature-content movies like Night Shift, were the only time we spent alone together. They were memorable for that alone, but I think they embedded some of that need in me as well. She wasn’t interested in talking about a movie afterward. The pleasure was really in discovering and rediscovering that private response. Which is what made the ticket stubs so special to me—her effort to connect through this thing that we both loved so privately. In “The Dream Girl Is Over,” you posit, “What if all life, but especially the part of it that involves consuming art and images, is in some sense a reminder?” Do you think that’s why those of us who are drawn to art, in whatever form we consume it, find some sense of recognition and familiarity in the work that we love? There’s nothing better than encountering a voice that seems to have been living in your head, waiting for a microphone, or an interlocutor. It’s a feeling of being called. When art can make that connection it couldn’t be more personal. Read More
March 19, 2013 Arts & Culture Think of Me Fondly By Matthew Smith I was waiting for a friend on the steps of the Palais Garnier, pacing impatiently between the marble columns, when I noticed a paperback book sitting nearby: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Certainly not a random encounter, I thought, as the book is set in (and beneath) the home of the Opéra national de Paris. I opened it up, and found a note. “I am not lost!” it said. “This book was left here to find a new reader.” As it turns out, the Web site www.bookcrossing.com tracks books in their travels around the world. After you run across one of the traveling books, log the discovery on the Web site, post a review, and leave it somewhere else for a new reader to find. I sent mine on its next adventure not far from the Pont Neuf.
March 19, 2013 Arts & Culture Ululating to Air Supply By Robin Hemley She of the Karaoke Tribe, from the Archipelago of the Interminable Love Song, where Karen Carpenter never goes out of style, has not asked me to prove my love, but when she says she wants to go with her Filipina émigré friends to Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque, Iowa, to see Air Supply Live! in concert, I seize this as an opportunity, after twelve years of marriage, akin to a renewal of vows, and as close to sacrificing my life for her as I’m going to get. It’s a card I will hold in reserve. “Yes, I cheated on you with your best friend, but don’t forget, I went to see Air Supply Live! with you at Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque.” Hard work, marriage. You remember Air Supply and what they sang. Of course you do. That song. And the one that sounded just like it, and that other one, too. Yeah. Those. If I seem as enthusiastic about the concert as a zombie at a baby shower, then that’s twice as enthusiastic as I mean to seem. I embarrass easily. I’m overly self-conscious, and when someone does something really stupid around me, such as wearing a fake deer head to get attention, as I saw recently on a commuter flight, I feel that it’s me wearing that deer head. The same holds true at an Air Supply concert. I feel as though it’s me belting out stale lyrics along with the audience. Read More
March 19, 2013 On the Shelf Albums-as-Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Can there ever be too many albums-as-books? In a word: no. As long as we’re grappling with the Big Questions: Is this the worst book cover in the world? (No.) Not one but two bookstores saved by loyal communities! (Via Shelf Awareness.) Books about libraries: the perfect storm for bibliophiles. This guy, in particular, might enjoy them, since he’s banned from “all the libraries on the face of the Earth.”