September 13, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 2 By Katherine Bernard Ernest Hemingway goes hunting at the Marc Jacobs Spring 2013 show. I am in range and my hat, which is in this season, is good and on, a damn cute hat, and I can see the entire show and the open runway, which is showing fashion. Afterward, Marc, who is an American man who can wear a skirt and make it look good, will throw a party. Open bar. There she is. That’s a damn fine one, too. The spots are fine, and her hair parts in a fine way, and the dress hangs low and true and near the floor, within the finery. It’s as dark as if it wasn’t light. I could shoot, aim, and get my shot. But then there’s the crowd. Well, the crowd. Yes, the crowd. Hm, the crowd. Come on. Shoot. She’s not going to stand there all day and it’s already dark and in the darkness I can see the next one emerging. Hell, is it a worthwhile head? She’s a small target with a small face and what if the dress got marked? It’s Marc Jacobs, which is too good. Which is too good.
September 13, 2012 Arts & Culture Small, Good Things By Casey N. Cep One of Mary Oliver’s poems begins “Something has happened / to the bread / and the wine.” A most unusual mystery, the comestibles have not gone the way of the plums in William Carlos William’s “This Is Just to Say.” Oliver’s wine and bread, as she explains in the second stanza, “have been blessed.” These two central elements of the Christian faith have been lifted from their ordinariness, isolated in order to show the extraordinariness of even the most ordinary of things. The bread and the wine join water and words to become what believers call sacraments: Eucharist is a sacrament made from staple food and festive drink; baptism is a sacrament made of clean, clear water. One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths. That setting apart is the calling of Christians but also the vocation of the writer. Read More
September 13, 2012 Bulletin Announcing Our New Mug! By The Paris Review A year after our café au lait cup sold out, we’re pleased to announce the arrival of its sturdy American cousin, the diner mug—perfect for keeping your coffee or tea warm while you read Ottessa Moshfegh’s tale of doomed love in a Chinese boomtown or Roberto Calasso on possession, sacrifice, and his resemblance to Groucho Marx. One side displays our classic logo. The other side (not pictured here) gives a fair and up-to-the-minute assessment of the magazine you love: “The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time. —Newsweek, 1953 ” This straight-talking mug is yours with a one-year subscription or renewal. Order now! Offer good for U.S. addresses only. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 12, 2012 On Sports Stage Struck By Scott Korb Most of what I read about professional tennis, particularly the profiles of the game’s biggest names, appears around the Grand Slams, three of which are played over the summer here in the northern hemisphere. This was the summer of Roger Federer, Andy Murray and his new coach Ivan Lendl, and Venus and Serena Williams. Novak Djokovic, the world’s top men’s player when the summer began, had had his moment in Vogue in May 2011, during a season when, at one point, he’d string together forty-three straight victories and lose only six matches. Near the end of that season, about a month after Djokovic saved two match points against Federer’s serve to win their U.S. Open semifinal, the New York Times Magazine ran an essay by Adam Sternbergh called “The Thrill of Defeat.” The occasion for the piece was the “278 million to 1” odds against the Boston Red Sox’s “epic” collapse during the 2011 pennant race. To a Federer fan looking back to the Open, though, those odds seemed about right. What also seemed right were Sternbergh’s thoughts about the basic absurdity of sports and, my affinity for Bart Giamatti notwithstanding, the “terrible sportswriters” who “argue that sports are a grand metaphor, a stage on which we witness essential narratives about determination, bravery and heart.” Read More
September 12, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 1 By Katherine Bernard F. Scott Fitzgerald Attends the Alexander Wang Spring 2013 Show. I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere sit in front of you at the Wang show: —“So sorry, but the front row is reserved for bloggers. Writers are in the second.” “I am most certainly a blogger.” —“What’s your blog?” “It’s called Tumblr. Keeps my readers in high spirits.” [A pause; it endured horribly.] I cannot accept that I’m to be deprived of half the view of a show that endures for a mere five minutes. Not to mention the insult of being told by an intern. In turn, I— —“Hi, can I take a quick picture of your style for my blog? ” “Oh, absolutely!” —“Wait, don’t smile.” “Oh, no, of course, I’m sorry.” —“And who makes your suit and shoes?” “Happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing. You can just put ‘vintage’.”
September 11, 2012 First Person Letter from Portugal: Sonnets from the Portuguese By Sadie Stein Dollhouse with Portuguese tile, Museu Do Brinquedo Sintra. You will have heard of Sintra. A stunning enclave some forty minutes outside Lisbon, filled with palaces and piles and follies of every era, Lord Byron called it “Glorious Eden,” and started “Childe Harolde” at Lawrence’s Hotel, on the Rua do Consiglieri Pedroso. (There is now an Escadinhas Lord Byron just outside its doors.) Tourists have been flocking there ever since. We visited the Palácio da Pena with its majestic views, and the pink-hued Palácio Seteais, and the fourteenth-century Palácio Nacional de Sintra and the Gothic pleasure gardens of the Regaleira Estate, rich with grottoes and gargoyles and secret passages. We ate at the Queijadas de Sintra. It was very much the Lucy Honeywell school of tourism, but wonderful all the same. We were part of a multinational throng. I was vaguely aware of being a failure as someone who experiences life to the full, and probably the worst kind of American imperialist to boot. I studied my vocabulary list diligently. In the afternoon, I visited the Toy Museum, lured by the sight of a six-foot Playmobil woman beckoning me in from a wrought-iron balcony. Some visitors seemed disappointed by the somewhat haphazard collection (“Where are the teddy bears?” demanded one disconsolate British tourist. “Where are the rocking horses?” implored her companion.) Read More