May 18, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Improving Writing, Finding Happiness By Lorin Stein How do I improve my prose? The poet and diplomat Paul Claudel once wrote, “To beware the adjective is the beginning of style.” I ought to have written “the French poet and diplomat” or “the great French poet and diplomat,” because sometimes an adjective is a helpful thing; it is easy to take such advice too much to heart. On the whole, though, Claudel is right: most prose gets better if you take out all the adjectives (and adverbs) that you can. Hello, I have recently started reading your most wonderful publication, and I really like your recommendations based on books people have already read! Thank you for this and keep up the good work! Now, to the question about life, I put forth this question to a friend but he didn’t respond, maybe you can help? I’m happy with my life as it is today, but there is no joy of existence! I’ll try to explain this a little, for all that I have I still feel my life is incomplete! Can you help? P.S. I have varied interests, wonderful family, friends, comforts, and all this keeps me happy, and busy, but that feeling of incompleteness always remains! Thank you for your kind words about the Daily! Unfortunately, your question is beyond our pay grade. So I sent it to my mom. I half expected that she would tell you to meditate and drink fewer martinis, but then (as she says), she doesn’t know you. Her response follows! Your question about achieving true joy triggered an image of little Flora in Dickens’s Dombey and Sons. Never has there been such a joyful and generous creature. Then came Scrooge, after he learned that joy and generosity of spirit are inextricably linked. It seems to me that Dickens is onto something. I don’t know you, so it’s hard to say how you will find joy, but I would imagine that if you reached out beyond your family and friends—maybe to tutor a child who needs it, or read to someone in a nursing home, or even just give a ten-dollar bill to the next homeless guy who asks you for money—you may find that a certain amount of joy has been there all along, and you might begin to get the hang of it. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.
May 18, 2012 On Music A Mark So Fine: Joe Henry and You By Sam Stephenson Photograph by Michael Wilson. In November of 2001, I picked up Joe Henry’s album Scar and was stunned by the opening track, a slow blues number called “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation.” Henry, a white man, sang from the point of view of the black icon, expressing the comedian’s love-hate relationship with himself and his audience. Henry had the audacity and sensitivity to pull it off, with help from a spiraling, dipping, dripping saxophone solo by Ornette Coleman. Scar was released in May of that year. Henry couldn’t have known how tearful the nation would be that fall. He closed the album with these lines from the title track, sung in a careful, mournful tempo: The blade of our outrageous fortune, Like a parade, it cuts a path. Light shows on our foolish way And darkness on Our aftermath. If I love you, to save myself And you love me because we are So fool to think that our parade Could leave a path And not a scar. And I love you with all I am And you love me with what you are, As pretty as a twisting vine A mark so fine But still a scar. The album resonated with me throughout that first post–September 11 holiday season, more than Dylan’s “Love and Theft”, which was released on that particular Tuesday, a coincidence that generated new claims of clairvoyance from Dylanologists. Henry’s album cuts deeper. Read More
May 18, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Girls, Cribs, and Literary Detective Work By The Paris Review How often have you read a TV review by a writer of our generation and thought of Susan Sontag? It’s never happened to me—until this week, when I read Elaine Blair’s review of Girls in The New York Review of Books. By paying attention to one little sex scene, Blair makes deep arguments about sex scenes in general, the limits of romantic comedy, and the real meaning of sexual freedom. —Lorin Stein About a decade ago, my friend Mikey loaned me a book he thought I’d enjoy. I’ve only just got around to picking it up. Though I’m a bad friend, he isn’t: the book—Leonid Andreyev’s The Little Angel—is terrific, after a fashion. The stories are intriguing, especially “At the Roadside Station” and “The City,” but the translation is rather bad. I’d love to see it revisited by another publisher and translator. I’m looking at you, NYRB Books. And how about Natasha Randall? I loved her translations of We and A Hero of Our Time. —Nicole Rudick For those with a green thumb and a love of literature, look no further than Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries for an insightful glimpse into garden writing over the last two-hundred years. Lush illustrations color the pages and accompany extensive excerpts from the writings of influential figures of gardening’s past and present, such as Thomas Jefferson, Gertrude Jekyll, and Michael Pollan. Gain a little inspiration for your own beckoning plots, or simply get yourself excited for summer’s peak. —Elizabeth Nelson Read More
May 18, 2012 On the Shelf Auden, Furious and Peripatetic By Sadie Stein “In Defense of Brooklyn”—November 1946. Local jerky and artisanal bitters do not, however, figure in the argument. When St. Marks in the Bowery changed its liturgy, Auden did not like it at all. His opener: “Have you gone stark raving mad?” Speaking of Auden, his many New York addresses. Yes, all would now be very expensive. President Obama claims to have never heard of 50 Shades of Grey. This inspires ambivalence. Chicago celebrates the centenary of native son Studs Terkel (who actually died at ninety-six). A camera that takes written pictures. Newbery-winning children’s author Jean Craighead George has died at ninety-two. An accomplished journalist and a nature lover, George was perhaps best known for her 1973 novel, Julie of the Wolves.
May 17, 2012 Arts & Culture Live on Air By Jessica Gross Radio journalism is having some trouble with self-definition right now. Every art form always is, of course, but radio’s growing pains are under particular public scrutiny. In January, This American Life broadcast part of a monologue by Mike Daisey, who had visited factories in China that make Apple products; it turned out he’d invented pieces of the narrative based on reports he’d heard, not seen, about labor conditions in other factories. This American Life retracted the episode, and a thousand questions bloomed. What does this mean for the industry as a whole? Is journalism even about facts anymore? Are larger truths ever more important, or is that a false dichotomy? Is storytelling different from journalism? Where do documentary-style shows like This American Life fall on the spectrum, and to what standards must they adhere? Good questions, all, and vital ones. May I sidestep them? If the spotlight is on fact versus fiction, the refracted light falls somewhere else: on the reason this episode matters so much to us. The original Mike Daisey program was the most popular in This American Life’s sixteen-year history. Listeners cared about Daisey’s character and about the ones he described: his translator; a thirteen-year-old laborer; a man with a mangled hand. All, save for Daisey, were invented, in the pure sense of the word, but visceral. This is the point: we can’t care about information until we can feel, and we can’t feel until we know people. We can’t learn until we empathize. This American Life may be the go-to example of character-driven radio journalism, but it’s a pervasive practice right now. Radiolab, StoryCorps, The Moth, Radio Diaries—name a radio program and I will show you its protagonists. It’s impossible to say, for certain, where a form of expression begins. But I offer that this concept—that we need characters in order to understand pretty much anything—was first put into practice in radio by Edward R. Murrow, during World War II. Read More
May 17, 2012 On the Shelf Crime, Punishment, and Chess By Sadie Stein The link between chess and writing. An excised page of The Little Prince goes on the block. Live out your fantasies in the penthouses that serve as the setting for Fifty Shades of Grey. Speaking of fantasies … hot authors. A Bay Area judge allows a prisoner to go free—provided he reads an hour a day and completes book reports. Meanwhile, a white-collar criminal is ordered to write a book. (The author considered, and rejected, the opening line, “Call me a Schlemiel.”)