December 6, 2012 Look F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lyricist By Sadie Stein About ten years ago, after depositing my brother at camp, my parents found themselves in a junk shop in upstate New York. My dad came upon the following playbill for The Evil Eye: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts, presented by the Princeton University Triangle Club from 1915 to 1916. He opened the first page and noticed the following: “Book by Edmund Wilson, Jr., 1916,” and, a bit further down, “Lyrics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1917.” Numbers like “Jump Off the Wall” and “Harris from Paris” may be lost to history, but we thought we’d share the program with you nevertheless! Pause Play Play Prev | Next
December 6, 2012 Video & Multimedia And Everywhere That Mary Went By Sadie Stein On December 6, 1877, Thomas Edison made one of the first recordings of the human voice, a phonograph recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Below, Edison recites the nursery rhyme. This was not Mary’s sole claim to fame. The nursery rhyme, written by Sarah Josepha Hale and published in Boston in 1830, was inspired by the story of a young girl named Mary Sawyer, who had an inseparable pet lamb. The tune was added shortly thereafter. To this day, a statue of Mary and her lamb stands in the town center of Sterling, Massachusetts.
December 6, 2012 Correspondence William Styron in Letters, Part 4 By William Styron To George Plimpton September 18, 1953 Ravello, Italy Dear George: Last night I did something which I only do once or twice in a generation: I stayed up all night with a bottle of Schenley’s and watched the dawn. That sort of thing is a perverse, masochistic business and at around 9 A.M. I was entertaining the idea of writing two or three novels before I went to bed, but oblivion closed in an hour later, and I just woke up. It is now almost sunset. This is mainly by way of saying that if this letter doesn’t have a Chesterfieldian elegance + grace you will at least have been apprised of the reason. My main reason for writing this letter is one-fold, I have been forced down certain channels of contemplation by a recent communiqué from John (“The Second Happiest Day”) Phillips, to use current journalese. Primarily, I was interested in his remarks about a Hemingway issue of PR; and I think at this point and without further ado I can shoulder my burden as advisory editor of the snappiest little mag on the Rive Gauche and say that I think it’s a great idea. Peter and THG apparently (according to Marquand) are not so enthusiastic about the proposition; as for me I think that if you really have enough interesting, fresh material in the offing (it must be interesting, fresh, original, and there must be quite a bit of it) then it might be one of the literary coups of all time. As Marquand said, print the word Hemingway in neon all over each page and both covers. Anything goes. Read More
December 6, 2012 On the Shelf Scary Children Reading, and Other News By Sadie Stein Even terrifying people love books. “A bedbug had crawled out of a copy of True Blood while she was reading it.” When library books get bedbugs. “It is awful to think I’ll probably be regarded as some sort of authority on Brazil the rest of my life.” Benjamin Moser on Elizabeth Bishop and her adopted homeland. Might selling used books become illegal? “Al and the TAs are like reality-show TV contestants: regular people who suddenly have a huge audience.” Elliott Holt takes an online literature course.
December 5, 2012 Bulletin The Paris Review Mug: Now for Sale! By The Paris Review When we announced our special mug offer, cries were heard across the land: We already subscribe! We want to give the mug as a gift! We want two, three, four! Rest easy: the special-edition Paris Review diner mug is now available to everyone, for all your coffee-drinking and gift-giving needs. One side features our logo in black; the other, praise for the magazine from Newsweek in 1953: “The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time.” We at the TPR offices can vouch for it. Supplies are limited. Buy it now!
December 5, 2012 On Language Vispo By Nicole Rudick Amanda Earl, Sun. The Paris Review’s interviews have long featured single manuscript pages from among the subjects’ writings. They are meant to show the author at work, his or her method of self-editing, of revision—an illustrative supplement to the process described at length in the conversations. To me, though, they always exist first as instances of visual artistry. The particularities of each writer’s markings are immediately perceptible: the way Margaret Atwood’s handwritten lines appear impatient and vital in contrast with the prim logos of the SAS Hotel stationery on which she penned a poem; the way Yves Bonnefoy’s long, spidery insertion lines give physicality to the pallid rows of words; the way David McCullough’s xed-out typewritten phrases become so many tiny, busy intersections. In the same way, I’ve always found the looping inscriptions of Cy Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings, in particular Cold Stream, to be a kind of magic—the secret scribblings, writ large, of a mind at work. (It’s no coincidence that Twombly worked as a cryptographer in the army.) I’m struck by the frequency, in Paris Review interviews, with which authors describe writing as being a visual activity. John Edgar Wideman imagines his drafts as “palimpsests.” Don DeLillo finds that “the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality … They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.” Read More