January 11, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Saintly Comics, High Relief By Sadie Stein In 1974, David Esterly was pursuing a career as an academic when he encountered a limewood carving by the seventeenth-century master Grinling Gibbons. He gave up English literature, devoted himself to the art of high-relief carving, and in the process became not merely the foremost Gribbons expert, but a master carver himself. The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making details Esterly’s restoration of a Gribbons drop at Hampton Court, but it is more than this. “I was apprenticed to a phantom, and lived among mysteries,” he writes of that time, and the memoir is indeed as much about engagement with the past, and the preservation of ancient arts, as it is one man’s journey. If you are in New York, through January 18, you can see Esterly’s intricate and beautiful work on display at W. M. Brady and Co. —Sadie Stein No matter how hard you try, you can’t help but stare at a train wreck, and Stephen Rodrick’s behind-the-scenes New York Times Magazine profile of Paul Schrader’s film The Canyons fills the guilty-pleasure, sweet-tooth fix quite nicely. A director desperate for a hit; a screenwriter (Bret Easton Ellis) more concerned with waging social-media jihads than actually writing; a porn star (James Deen) with a sensitive side; a budget that wouldn’t cover Kanye West’s ego; and, of course, Hollywood’s favorite child-star-turned-TMZ-punchline Lindsay Lohan: while this equation might not add up to a box office hit, it’s a fascinating look at the absurdity of Hollywood filmmaking. To see what’s become of the film so far, check out the trailer. —Justin Alvarez Read More
January 11, 2013 On the Shelf How to be a Bureaucrat, and Other News By Sadie Stein How to query an agent: a guide. If you’d rather be a Chinese bureaucrat, well, here’s a guide to that. “However disgraceful or unprincipled you may think the scribblers of today, rest assured that their eighteenth-century equivalents were at least as bad and probably worse. Furthermore, the laments and recourses of struggling writers have changed very little in the past three centuries.” Revise, revise, revise. An enormous book donation helps Sandy-ravaged schools get back on their feet.
January 10, 2013 In Memoriam In Memoriam: Evan S. Connell, 1924–2013 By Lorin Stein We are sad to learn that Evan Connell has died. An early contributor to The Paris Review, Connell was and is a quiet hero of contemporary literature. His novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge have been cited as a crucial influence by writers as different as Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith. In his history books—Son of the Morning Star (about General Custer) and Deus Lo Volt! (about the Crusades)—his poems, and his essays, he sang the glories of lost civilizations and unearthed the ruins at our feet. Connell delighted in tales of folly, of doomed experiments, but his own experiments bore fruits, plural, for no two are alike. We regret that Connell was unable to finish his Art of Fiction interview for the magazine; stay tuned in the next few days for selections from his work as it appeared in The Paris Review.
January 10, 2013 First Person Night Class By Ariel Djanikian In the spring of 2002, I signed up for a night class in existentialism. The choice was an emotional one. College was off to a rocky start. My education had no clear purpose; my friends were more like acquaintances; the whole country was careening toward an abyss. Meaning, in other words, was elusive, and I wanted to hear from the people who’d explained its elusiveness best. The instructor was Tom Meyer, only a lowly University of Pennsylvania graduate student, though I didn’t know it at the time. We arrived at the first class to find him sitting at a conference table, folding and unfolding a paperclip. To my immense satisfaction, he looked just like I thought an existentialist should: gaunt, pasty-faced. Black hair standing up from his skull. His clothing ratty at the collar and cuffs. For a first-day icebreaker, he had us go around the room and say our name, the name of an actor, and a type of deli meat. Read More
January 10, 2013 Arts & Culture Discipline and Punish By Arthur Holland Michel One way or another, we’re all running away from Foucault. In this distressing online game, you can actually run away from Foucault with your fingertips, rather than by merely existing in society. It’s scary, all but impossible, and totally futile. Well, of course; that’s the whole point. But who, apart from some people I know back at my upstate New York small, progressive, liberal-arts college, would actually play it? Real life is punishment enough.
January 10, 2013 Arts & Culture “Definitional” By Raymond Queneau In 1947, the French writer Raymond Queneau wrote Exercises in Style, a collection of ninety-nine retellings of the same story, each in a different style. The plot: the narrator gets on a bus, witnesses a fight between two passengers, and then encounters one of the passengers two hours later at the train station having a discussion about altering his overcoat. The premise references a treatise by Desiderius Erasmus, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. The new edition includes twenty-five exercises making their English translation debut. Queneau wrote many exercises during his lifetime. He swapped old ones for new ones when a new edition of Exercises in Style was published by Gallimard in 1973; others were published in magazines but never included in any edition of the book. And others still were simply never published at all. “Definitional” was originally included in the first French edition of Exercises in Style, only to be removed in the later edition. Read More