April 12, 2012 The Revel Revel Yell By Sadie Stein When people hear that one works at The Paris Review, they often assume it’s a glamorous affair: parties, champagne, stories of the magazine’s early days in France, and famous writers as far as the eye can see. Last Tuesday, they were right. The Spring Revel isn’t just our big fund-raiser. It’s also a chance for the old guard to meet the new kids and vice versa. This year, former editor Mona Simpson presented newcomer Amie Barrodale with the Plimpton Prize, and young Adam Wilson—winner of the Terry Southern Prize for humor—paid tribute to Southern himself. Robert Silvers, now in his fiftieth year helming The New York Review of Books, was toasted by the freshest face in the magazine business: Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, who bought The New Republic a month ago. Zadie Smith described what it’s like being a new kid at The New York Review, and Bob remembered being a new kid under George Plimpton. Read More
April 12, 2012 Arts & Culture Exit Art, 1982–2012 By Hua Hsu Jeannette Ingberman and Papo Colo in front of the gallery's 578 Broadway location. Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman founded Exit Art in 1982 as a space for “unusual” art, which is saying a lot given that this was a time when artists were bisecting public plazas with giant panels of unfinished steel, using subway trains as canvases, and performing year-long pieces that consisted of never going indoors. That February, Papo and Ingberman curated their first exhibition, “Illegal America.” The show explored the ways in which the practice of art had occasionally run afoul of the law, from Charlotte Moorman playing cello in the nude to Chris Burden ordering his assistant to shoot him in his arm. The catalogue consisted of a series of artists’ statements housed in a box, which was sealed shut. In order to open it, you had to tear through a dollar bill glued across the flaps—an illegal act, albeit of the mildest kind. Exit Art’s mandate was clear from the very beginning: the brash claim that they represented an “exit” from the traditional art world; a neck-and-neck passion for politics and aesthetics; that gag of a catalogue, the kind that implicates gallerygoers as more than passive collectors of names on placards. Yet their remarkable, thirty-year existence on the fringes will soon come to an end. Read More
April 12, 2012 On the Shelf The Smell of Books; the Power of ‘Wuthering Heights’ By Sadie Stein The Department of Justice is suing several large publishers, plus Apple, for alleged price collusion on e-books. How not to squander a book advance: a primer from Emily Gould. (Hint: leather vests don’t count as investments, whatever the lady at the shop may say.) Meanwhile at the Awl: how not to ruin a book tour. Servicey! Wuthering Heights … home of wind turbines? Concerns over wind farms in Brontë country. While rhapsodizing about the “smell of books” is something of a personal peeve, this video, in which University College London chemists analyze the distinctive perfume, is interesting. Apparently, the bouquet is “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” Welcome to the Storyverse. Günter Grass speaks out on his ban from Israel.
April 11, 2012 On Television Dear Don Draper, Stop Ignoring Me By Adam Wilson Dear Don Draper, I worry that you may not be getting these letters. I have yet to receive a response, and after seeing last night’s episode, I’m convinced that either the mail isn’t arriving or you’re willfully ignoring my advice. Especially the stuff about smoking. I mean, cancer is one thing, but watching you light up with a hundred-plus fever and a hacking cough made my own tonsils burn and balloon. The bad news from the future is there’s still no cure for the common flu. Or maybe there is but Big Pharma won’t let us have it. However, we do know this: despite what your ads may say, cigarette smoke doesn’t soothe a sore throat. Shocking, I know. Try some Halls and a neti pot. Read More
April 11, 2012 Arts & Culture A Badjohn in Harlem: An Afternoon with Earl Lovelace By Anderson Tepper Readings take place in bookstores, bars, even laundromats, yet an old-fashioned home salon is a rare and special thing nowadays. In Harlem, especially, the living-room salon evokes a storied past of the 1920s Renaissance soirées of writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. When you step into the grand, rambling Graham Court apartment of poet Quincy Troupe and his wife, writer Margaret Porter Troupe, you are immediately transported to a vibrant, sun-drenched world of creativity. One room has been turned into a gallery of contemporary artwork inspired largely by the African diaspora (together the Troupes edit the NYU journal Black Renaissance Noire); a large sitting room, where a makeshift table/bar has been set up, is crowded floor to ceiling with books; while the living room, with rearranged sofas and twenty or so folding chairs, has been transformed into an intimate space for the day’s honored guest and audience. And all around, there are sweeping views across the Harlem rooftops and off into the hazy distance. On a recent Sunday, the great Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace was in town to be feted at the Troupe’s Harlem Arts Salon. The house was packed and festive, and the wine was flowing. I remember first discovering Lovelace in the late eighties—and I still have my worn copies of The Wine of Astonishment and A Brief Conversion and Other Stories to prove it. These books were wonders in themselves: sleek, colorful paperbacks published by the beloved imprints Aventura’s Vintage Library of World Literature and the Heinemann Caribbean Writers series. Yes, Lovelace—his name, too, had its own special ring—evoked a whole world, a vision of Trinidad and the Caribbean that was bursting with life, with its own rhythm of dreams and vexed sorrows, its calypsonian sages and steel-pan virtuosos, its gurus and Garveyites and badjohns, or street-corner rebels. Lovelace was a revelation (as was his compatriot Sam Selvon, whose short story “My Girl and the City” still sends thrills through me), and over the years, I suppose, I’ve missed him without even realizing it. Read More
April 11, 2012 On the Shelf Happy Birthday, Gatsby; Good-bye, Britannica By Sadie Stein The eighth installment of Kramers Ergot moves toward (cerebral) genre. Rule Britannia: An appreciation of the legendary eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This Rizzoli boutique is far more lovely than one would expect a department-store bookstore to be. What are the most frequently shoplifted books? Crowdsourcing the answer! Guess who “enjoys working with Amazon”? Robert Gottlieb, that’s who. On the “Dark Lady of American Letters”: Margaret Fuller was a divisive figure due to “the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others … The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them.” Bookish weddings. Happy belated birthday, Great Gatsby.