August 1, 2012 In Memoriam Gore Vidal, 1925–2012 By The Paris Review “The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.” —The Art of Fiction No. 50 [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 1, 2012 On the Shelf Wharton, Borges, and Grey: Fan-Fic Galore! By Sadie Stein The latest Dead Authors Podcast features Jorge Luis Borges. In all honesty, who isn’t interested in lists of famous literary feuds? A new generation takes over Doonesbury. A new generation discovers The Babysitters Club. Leigh Stein explains how to read in public. Marc New York’s Fifty Shades–inspired ad campaign. An excerpt from The Age of Desire, Jennie Fields’s Edith Wharton–themed romance. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 31, 2012 Arts & Culture A Snail’s Pace By Casey N. Cep Edward Lear, self-portrait as snail. When John Ashbery reviewed Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems in 1969 for The New York Times, his review was accompanied by an illustration: two giant snails stretching from under their shells to touch one another. Ashbery never mentions the mollusks in his review, but beneath the image is an excerpt of Bishop’s prose poem “Giant Snail.” “I give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will,” Bishop’s mollusca persona muses, and one senses how very likely a proxy it is for the poet herself. Bishop is not the only writer to have found solace or some of herself in a snail. Her coil-shelled critter was an homage to a paean by her mentor Marianne Moore. Moore’s “To a Snail” is a discourse on poetics that culminates “in the absence of feet” and “the curious phenomenon of your occiptal horn.” Moore seized on the snail’s self-sufficiency and endless ability to contract, praising its “grace” and “modesty.” Read More
July 31, 2012 Bulletin Paris Review Moleskines: Now in Stock By The Paris Review We love these limited-edition Paris Review Moleskines. It’s the iconic notebook we all know and love, stamped with our original logo and featuring a quote on the frontispiece from Dorothy Parker’s 1956 interview. Smart, indeed: get yours today! [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 31, 2012 On Sports Hacks Britannica: Reviving an Olympic Tradition of Crapness By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi At the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, to which Britain did not send a delegation but at which it did earn two medals by virtue of owning Ireland, the first-place finisher in the marathon, a New York City bricklayer, was disqualified for having covered eleven miles of the course by automobile. The runner-up, a British-Bostonian brazier competing for America, whose trainers had administered him strychnine and brandy and egg whites and who had been borne along by officials for part the race, was declared the victor. At the 2012 London Olympics, in a video clip shown during the opening ceremony, the comic actor Rowan Atkinson (as Mr. Bean) was digitally inserted into the beach run that opens Chariots of Fire; imagining the scene as a race, Atkinson flags, veers offscreen, then overtakes the other runners in a car, rejoining the pack just in time to win. Such filmed-to-order interludes, which cutely recontextualize iconic personages for special occasions, are familiar from Academy Awards broadcasts, and their appearance in a live Olympic commencement marked conspicuously the London show’s direction by British filmmaker Danny Boyle. Read More
July 31, 2012 On the Shelf Infinite Bikini, New Fitzgerald By Sadie Stein Match your bikini to your beach read. A slide show of situationist artist Robert Montgomery’s London street poetry. The New Yorker runs unpublished fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald. A visit to Deep Valley. A redditor posts every Harry Potter illustration in a single image. “To have undertaken the thankless task of listing all the books I can recall ever reading gives me extreme pleasure and satisfaction. I know of no author who has been mad enough to attempt this. Perhaps my list will give rise to more confusion—but its purpose is not that. Those who know how to read a man know how to read his books.” Henry Miller on his favorite books. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]