April 2, 2013 First Person In the Margins By Sadie Stein Last Christmas, my brother, Charlie, gifted me with a piece of paper on which was scrawled, “Good for 1 tattoo.” This was perhaps a slight improvement over his gift of the year before (“Good for one dinner with Charlie. On you”) and arguably approaching his 2010 present-giving apex (autographed baby pictures of himself.) But it was still a pretty low-risk investment on his part; Charlie knew I was never going to break down and actually ink a permanent Dimples on my shoulder, something I’d flirted with through the years. “Just a small, classic Dimples,” I would explain to my mother. “A tribute!” And she would say, “Munnie would be appalled. And so would Yumma.” As might be clear from the nomenclature, we have entered the Land of the WASP. Yumma, my grandmother (née Ruth Mary), was the daughter of Munnie (Margaret), whom I am said to, but do not, resemble. Munnie was a legendary figure, a mother of five who managed to render even the hardships of the Depression magical with her ingenuity, her creativity, her sense of fun. A hard worker who held things together after her husband died, she maintained a busy, cheerful existence until her death from cancer in her sixties. Munnie, with Dimples Although Munnie died many years before I was born, she has always been a vivid presence to me, kept alive by Yumma’s stories of cream-puff swans and Halloween parties, and by the Scrapbook. The Scrapbook is a remarkable thing: two volumes in which Munnie hand-copied every scrap of correspondence she and my grandmother ever exchanged and bound them, with photographs and newsclippings and tracings of any drawings, into two large volumes, each 300 pages long. Munnie made one of these for each of her five children. My father calls the resulting tomes the Least Jewish Thing Ever Created. Read More
April 2, 2013 Bulletin Paris Review Nominated for Two National Magazine Awards By Lorin Stein On the eve of celebrating our sixtieth birthday, The Paris Review is up for two National Magazine Awards: Fiction and General Excellence. Our fiction finalist is Sarah Frisch, whose story “Housebreaking” appeared in issue 203. These nominations are the latest in a series of recent plaudits. Last month, we received seven nominations for the Pushcart Prize. We also had a story (“The Chair,” by David Means) chosen for The Best American Short Stories and an essay (“Human Snowball,” by Davy Rothbart) selected for the year’s Best Nonrequired Reading. This week, New York magazine placed our new issue in the top quadrant of its famous, feared Approval Matrix, while Adam Sternbergh, blogging for the New York Times, called it “great … great … great.” He singles out “a great, long interview with Mark Leyner,” the Art of Fiction with “New York literary icon Deborah Eisenberg,” and “a great new poem from Frederick Seidel”; plus, “you’ll look great toting The Paris Review,” thanks, presumably, to our great cover.
April 2, 2013 At Work You Take Your Love Where You Get It: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith By Christopher Higgs Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry.” Goldsmith is the author of eleven books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, Sucking on Words, was first shown at the British Library that same year. In 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. Earlier this year, he began his tenure as the first-ever Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I recently sat down with Goldsmith to discuss his new book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Since your practice emphasizes the value of the selection process over the creation process, how do you choose what to include and exclude from Seven American Deaths and Disasters? I began with the assassination of JFK, which is arguably the beginning of media spectacle, as defined and framed by Warhol. His portrait of Jackie mourning iconizes that moment forever. Although he made Marilyn’ss, he never memorialized her death, thus it never entered into the realm of media spectacle in the same way. From JFK, I naturally proceeded to RFK, an eyewitness account of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It’s an incredible linguistic document—you really feel the newsman’s struggle to find words to describe what is unfolding before his eyes. John Lennon is taken from a cassette tape made by someone scanning the radio the night of and days following his assassination, which feels like an audio document from a lost time. Space Shuttle Challenger is from a TV broadcast of the event and its long, weird, silent aftermath. Columbine is straight transcript of a harrowing 911 call. The World Trade Center, the longest piece in the book, is from several sources—talk radio, news radio, color commentary—stitched together into a multichapter epic, thus mirroring the gargantuan scale of the event. And Michael Jackson is from a catty FM station, where the shock jocks have no problem cracking jokes and making racist comments at his expense. Read More
April 2, 2013 On the Shelf The Bookstore of the Year, and Other News By Sadie Stein Oxford, Mississippi’s amazing Square Books has been named the PW Bookstore of the Year. All the book industry April Fool’s Day pranks—from a 52 Shades imprint to the Big Six becoming a Big One—seem depressingly plausible. Buck up! Here are seven pranks and tricks from literature. You can take a cruise with Margaret Atwood. The novel she’s promoting, MaddAddam, is a dystopian tale described as “unpredictable, chilling and hilarious,” all words we like applied to our cruises, too. BuzzFeed is launching a long-form reads section, which the editor characterizes as “BuzzFeed for people who are afraid of BuzzFeed.” We imagine the fearless are also welcome.
April 1, 2013 Bulletin Marie Chaix and Harry Mathews at La Maison Française By Sadie Stein Here’s one we won’t be missing: tomorrow evening, at 7:30 P.M., join Marie Chaix and Harry Mathews as they discuss writing, translation, and collaboration at NYU’s Maison Française. Read more about their story here!
April 1, 2013 First Person On the Occasion of the Removal of My Girlfriend’s Dog’s Balls By Simon Akam Nine weeks ago, a frigid, low-pressure system deposited some six inches of snow on central Belgium. On a Tuesday evening my girlfriend returned from work to her parents’ house outside Brussels and attempted the construction of a snowman in the garden. The process was unsuccessful; it was very cold and the snow was dry powder, with none of the cohesive properties required for the manufacture of what the Flemish call a sneeuwman. Abandoning the original project, my girlfriend sat down on the submerged lawn. As her body reached this thrillingly accessible position her dog attempted to mount her, over and over again. He would not desist. Exasperated, my girlfriend made a decision she had long toyed with. She condemned his balls. Read More