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The Daily

 

  • The Print Series

    Theodoros Stamos, Untitled, 1965

    By

     theodoros_stamos_untitled_stamos_paris_review_1024x768Since 1964 The Paris Review has commissioned a series of prints and posters by major contemporary artists. Contributing artists have included Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and William Bailey. Each print is published in an edition of sixty to two hundred, most of them signed and numbered by the artist. All have been made especially and exclusively for The Paris Review. Many are still available for purchase. Proceeds go to The Paris Review Foundation, established in 2000 to support The Paris Review.

     

  • The Culture Diaries

    A Week in Culture: Claire Cottrell, Art Book Shop Owner and Editor

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    -1

    DAY ONE

    7:00 A.M. Wake up to dog barking and strong skunk smell in house. Fear that door to garden was left open and skunk is loose in house. Get out of bed to confirm. Garden door is not open and skunk is not loose. Go back to bed for thirty minutes. 

    7:30 A.M. Get out of bed. Wash face. Gather belongings, including black cocoon coat purchased for an imminent trip to Paris found for sixteen dollars the day before at a second-hand store. Head home to Mount Washington.

    8:00 A.M. Arrive at home. Make tea. Take daily vitamins. Make new favorite quick morning oatmeal: half cup of oats, two heaping tablespoons of maple syrup, cinnamon, chopped apple, fresh dates, walnuts, boiling water. Settle in to enjoy oatmeal and tea. Realize that laptop, aka lifeline, is in Amos’s car. Freak out. Cancel all morning obligations, citing laptop debacle. Text Amos.

    8:05 A.M. Amos drops off laptop.

    8:10 A.M. Finish oatmeal. Finish tea. Resume all morning obligations. Including: reviewing reactions to Sybil’s sad demise on last night’s Downton Abbey, looking at Atelier Bow-Wow’s pet architecture—otherwise known as teeny tiny buildings on teeny tiny sliver of land—for an article, researching Bruno Munari’s useless machines for a contribution to the new arts journal, synonym. cover

    9:15 A.M. Tackle e-mail. Respond to e-mails from three weeks ago. Debate including ‘apologies for the delayed response.’ Decide against it thinking, No need to always apologize. For all they know I answer e-mail every few weeks because I live in a cabin removed from civilization and spend most of my time in nature. Read More

  • Arts & Culture

    The Worst Poet in the World

    By

    220px-William_McGonagallThe handwritten manuscript of a poem by the man considered the worst poet in the English language, William Topaz McGonagall, is expected to fetch up to £3,000 at auction. While the doggerel-esque verse, “In Praise of the Royal Marriage,” is certainly no threat to Tennyson, it  doesn’t seem worthy of the dead-fish and rotten-egg tributes the Scottish bard’s performances regularly elicited on the music hall stage. His most infamous work is probably “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” commemorating an 1879 bridge collapse in which numerous train passengers were killed; it is either a masterpiece of outsider art or of insensitivity.

     

    Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
    Alas! I am very sorry to say
    That ninety lives have been taken away
    On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
    Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

     

  • Arts & Culture

    Hear That Lonesome Gasket Blow, Part 4: Tonight the Sea Is Douce

    By

    Katherine+Mansfield2

    On the Saturday closest to my thirtieth birthday, I went out on the town with Andrew and Izzy, two of my Highbury flatmates. With my time in dreamy Wellington drawing to a close—to say nothing of my waning metabolic rate—the need to run a little wild at the end of an afternoon spent contemplating fiction felt realer than ever.

    To this end our trio wound up, at three in the morning, after hours of dancing, walking toward a Burger King on the corner of Cuba and Manners. This Burger King occupies the ground floor of a heritage building with an Edwardian Baroque façade. Once home to the first Te Aro branch of the Bank of New Zealand, the building now shoulders what the local government describes as “considerable townscape significance.”

    “My uncle used to be the president of Burger King,” said Andrew, sitting across from me and eating fries. The Burger King before us teemed with loud, drunken revelers.

    “I can one-up you,” said Izzy. “My grandfather used to be the chairman of the National Front.”

    “What’s the National Front?” I asked.

    “You don’t know what the National Front is?” said Izzy. “Are you kidding me? Fucking Americans!”

    “Look,” I said. “I know about a lot of things outside of America. I can’t know about all of them.”

    “You know what the Klu Klux Klan is,” said Izzy.

    “Well, of course.”

    “It’s like the Klan, but in the UK.” Read More

  • On the Shelf

    Cake and Pie, and Other News

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    2666one

  • 2666, in pie-chart form. (Black, in case you were wondering, represents “dread, unease, foreboding.”)
  • Not merely one book-themed cupcake, but a series. (We look forward to 2666.)
  • “Let us not speak of the cookbooks.” A pair of academics attempt to organize their library
  • There is no Hilary Mantel–Kate Middleton feud!
  • Mantel just called the duchess “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung … without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.” And no Anne Boleyn.
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