July 26, 2012 Video & Multimedia Watch: Kipling on Truth in Writing, 1933 By Sadie Stein We are grateful to Open Culture for drawing our attention to this rare film of Rudyard Kipling. From 1933, it shows the sixty-seven-year-old author giving a speech to the Royal Society of Literature (and guests from the Canadian Authors’ Association) at Claridge’s. “We who use words enjoy a peculiar privilege over our fellows,” observes the voice of the (already-fading) British Empire. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 26, 2012 Department of Sex Ed A Rosier Crucifixion: The Erotic World of Henry Miller By Hannah Tennant-Moore Henry Miller has just been laughed at for rhapsodizing about Walt Whitman. He’s sore. A woman enters the apartment. Henry drags her into the bathroom. He fastens his “lips to her red mouth.” “Please, please,” she begged, trying to squirm out of my embrace. “You’ll disgrace me.” I knew I had to let her go. I worked fast and furiously. “I’ll let you go,” I said, “just one more kiss.” With that I backed her against the door and, without even bothering to lift her dress, I stabbed her again and again, shooting a heavy load all over her black silk front. I closed my copy of Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion, restored my tray table to its upright position, and avoided eye contact with the gaunt elderly woman in the aisle seat as I squeezed past her legs. Read More
July 26, 2012 Softball TPR vs. Vanity Fair: The Sense of an Ending (With Pictures!) By Cody Wiewandt Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7 Total TPR |1|0|0|1|3|2|0 7 VF |3|0|1|0|0|1|1 6 Last Tuesday marked the end of this summer’s softball season, and The Paris Review went out in style, coming from behind to take a spirited contest from arch nemesis (one of many, surely) Vanity Fair. It was a contentious affair, bookended by two controversial calls: a play at home plate in the first, and a play at first in the bottom half of the seventh. Due to superior oratory skills (and truth), the former went our way, resulting in a TPR run; due to the notion that a team cannot possibly be right twice in the same game, the latter went to Vanity Fair. (It ultimately only provided a brief respite from the inevitable.) Between the spats were many cheers, a few tears, and a lengthy discussion on the virtues of run-on sentences (decidedly none at all). Instead of prattling on, I now present a gallery of photos, taken and curated by TPR’s own Alyssa Loh. Before I go, a quick note to my teammates: Hell of a season. I’ll see you when I see you. The Paris Review: fashionable on the field and off. Read More
July 26, 2012 On the Shelf Helpmeets, Field Guides, Burning Questions By Sadie Stein “Few couples have had as complicated and even posthumous a relationship as Friderike Burger and Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer who was and continues to be one of the most widely translated German-language authors in the world.” The eternal question, really: What would happen if fonts were superheroes? The other eternal question: What would happen if great authors were Olympics commentators? Vote for the best YA novel ever written. A field guide to the American blurb. An endangered species? The Man Booker long list is announced. Oh no! Citing rising operating costs, the Bowery Poetry Club joins the list of closing literary landmarks. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 25, 2012 Contests The Finalists: Win a Bicycle Contest By The Paris Review Our inbox runneth over! We asked you to describe the facing image in three hundred words—in the style of Ernest Hemingway, P. G. Wodehouse, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Bishop, or Ray Bradbury—and some two hundred of you did just that. We had hoped to announce a winner yesterday, but it took us this long just to read through all the manly terseness, Jeevesian whimsy, California deadpan, villanelles (“Write it! Pedal faster”), and Martiana. Plus a surprising number of entries that went their own way and ignored the “in the style of” part of the contest—thereby forfeiting the chance to win a bicycle but showing impressive powers of imagination when it comes to devils and flappers on wheels. Scroll down to read excerpts from our finalists. And again, many thanks to Velojoy and Hudson Urban Bicycles! The Drones’ First Annual Charity Tour De Blandings and Fancy Dress Ball took a wrong turn when Freddie Widgeon and Billie Mainwaring arrived. Somehow each had misread the invitation and got the idea that the cycling was fancy dress. Billie came as a “Muse of Modern Dance,” all chiffon and gauze and trailing scarves. Isadora Duncan on a velocipede. Freddie had on a fearfully complete devil’s costume, though how he’d pedal in those hoof-shaped boots got right past me. —Elliot Nesterman Read More
July 25, 2012 Arts & Culture 112 Greene Street By Claire Barliant Exterior of 112 Greene Street. Photo by Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone. I met with Jessamyn Fiore in the air-conditioned back offices of David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery in late June to discuss her new book, 112 Greene Street, a series of interviews with artists who helped found or were associated with the eponymous location, one of the first alternative art spaces in New York City. Opened in 1970 by artists Jeffrey Lew, Alan Saret, and Gordon Matta-Clark, 112 Greene Street served not as a commercial gallery but as a space in which artists could create and exhibit works collaboratively. Their participation in the burgeoning SoHo art scene also included cofounding FOOD, a pay-what-you-wish restaurant known for its delicious soups. Back then, the neighborhood more closely resembled a small village, rather than the glamorous, high-end shopping district it is now, and all of the artists associated with 112 Greene Street who were interviewed by Fiore remember that communal period fondly. Fiore has a direct lineage to the groundbreaking gallery: her mother, Jane Crawford, was married to Gordon Matta-Clark, who died from pancreatic cancer in 1978 at age thirty-five. Known for his daring “building cuts”—literal dissections of buildings slated for demolition—Matta-Clark was, by all accounts, charismatic and widely admired and loved. Fiore herself ran a nonprofit art gallery in Dublin for several years before relocating to New York, where she curated an exhibition at Zwirner about 112 Greene Street last winter. She is warm, easygoing, and candid; it’s easy to see why the artists, whom she considers her friends, would trust her to preserve their memories in print. Read More