February 2, 2012 Arts & Culture Document: Happy Birthday, James Joyce By Sarah Funke Butler Image courtesy Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.; document now part of a private Joyce collection in New York. There’s so much to celebrate today, February 2, the birthday of James Joyce. On January 1 of this year the published works of Joyce came into the public domain. What does this mean? It means that scholars no longer need to go to his grandson Stephen Joyce, bowl in hand, begging for a ladle full of text. It means that I can translate for you the above illegible bit of manuscript from Ulysses in Joyce’s hand: By Bachelor’s walk jogjinglejaunted Blazes Boylan, bachelor.In sun, in heat, warmseated,sprawled, mare’s glossy rumpatrot. Horn, Have you the ?Horn. Have you the ? Hawhaw horn. Clearer? Good. Even better, it also means that I can quote you the slightly different published version of this passage: By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot with a flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the ? Horn. Have you the ? Haw haw horn. You see the improvement? Excellent. The irony of Stephen Joyce’s virtual censorship of the work of a man continually at odds with the censors himself has not gone unnoted—especially because Joyce reveled in the thought of perplexing scholars for generations to come. (The censorship that afflicted—if not made—Joyce’s career is also tinged with irony: who among the hormonal pubescent lads you know would have the patience and determination to locate, let alone reread, the dirty bits?) You may recognize this snatch of text from the eleventh chapter of Ulysses, the Sirens episode. Read More
February 1, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Despite protests, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s book comes out. Louisa May Alcott, in love and war. The hatchet job of the year. Shirley MacLaine’s next life: Downton Abbey. Get your master’s in thriller writing. Chaplin, the musical. Adaptationpalooza! The hills are alive with … The Rebel Nun? And other titles that almost were. The art of letter writing. The lost language of stamps. B&N vs. Amazon. Librarians fight back. Shit agents and editors say.
February 1, 2012 Humor The Epigraph By David Parker Milton wasn’t working. The aspiring novelist had already written the perfect dedication (“For my friends”), and he’d long had a list of possible titles, yet he still had no epigraph, the mysterious but meaningful quotation he’d seen at the beginning of every great book. He’d been holding John Milton in reserve for this very situation. When contemplating the epigraph for his debut novel, the writer had always been confident that if all else failed, he could find inspiration in Shakespeare or Milton. For his part, the Bard hadn’t cooperated. A line like “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” might work for a paperback legal thriller, but nothing Shakespeare wrote seemed appropriate for the “Borges meets Zola, if Zola had somehow been influenced by Nabokov” collection of loosely related vignettes set in a fictional megalopolis in an indeterminate near-future the writer hoped to get published by next fall. Read More
January 31, 2012 At Work Lysley Tenorio on ‘Monstress’ By Aria Beth Sloss I first heard of Lysley Tenorio a little more than a decade ago, when his story “Superassassin” came out in The Atlantic. “Superassassin” is the rare work that gets a child narrator right, and it features all of what I now recognize as the trademarks of Tenorio’s work: startling imagery, moments of sadness combined with gestures of heartbreaking intimacy, and an unstinting commitment to character. Monstress, Tenorio’s first collection, is out from Ecco this month. Characters include transsexuals, lepers, healers, and a horror-movie screenwriter named Checkers. Reading about them, you feel, as the narrator of “Felix Starro” says, “that breath of relief that there is someone in the world, finally, who understands what hurts you.” There’s an emphasis in this collection on the power of imagination. The narrator of “Superassassin” is a young boy whose fantasies have started to eclipse reality, and the narrator’s teenage sister in “L’amour, CA” follows her dreams about America and love to an unhappy ending. In “Felix Starro,” the grandfather performs ritual “cleansings” for men and women who believe themselves to be truly healed. What place do you think imagination has in our lives as children and how does that change, or not, as we become adults? I can really only speak for myself. As a kid, I had a pretty good imagination but one that, in retrospect, was fairly systematized to the ways of the world I knew. For example, for years I had a fantasy world on the side, one in which I was a child star who had his own sitcom, was a frequent guest on talk shows, and even had a few cameos on—should I admit this?—Dynasty. Read More
January 31, 2012 Bulletin Last-Chance Bolaño By The Paris Review “Compassionate, disturbing, and deeply felt … tragic and beautiful.” —NPR “A scathing novel with a lot of exuberance to it, not unlike the man who wrote it.” —The Economist “Thoroughly, weirdly absorbing.” —The New York Times That’s what the critics are saying about Roberto Bolaño’s lost novel, The Third Reich, which we serialized with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. Over the course of four issues, we followed the adventures of Udo Berger, a young German who falls into louche company in an insalubrious resort on the Costa Brava—but of course, as a reader of The Paris Review, you know all about it. But maybe you missed an installment. Maybe you left it on the beach. Maybe your sinister uncle stole a copy from your apartment. Maybe you never subscribed at all. Well, kids, you’re in luck. Subscribe now* to The Paris Review, and receive all four installments—the entire Third Reich—plus three more issues to come. All for only $50. That’s right: you’ll receive seven issues, 196 through 202, and catch up on our most popular installments to date. Plus: interviews with Janet Malcolm, William Gibson, Nicholson Baker, and Jeffrey Eugenides; new work by Geoff Dyer, Jonathan Lethem, Frederick Seidel, and John Jeremiah Sullivan; and much more. But don’t delay! This offer only lasts through February 7. *Offer good for U.S. subscriptions only.
January 30, 2012 On Food Starve a Fever, Feed a Cold By Robin Bellinger My husband and I got engaged on December 30, 2005, in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. We spent the next night at home, having planned a feast for two. About halfway through an afternoon of strenuous cooking, however, Andrew became quiet and glassy-eyed. He took to the couch, rousing himself only when I served the fish. The sight of his laden plate made him flinch, but he bravely took a bite of potato-crusted salmon. “Mmm,” he said unconvincingly, “this is good.” Mine was overcooked. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he said. I thought that was a drastic overcorrection, but before I could say so, he was on his way to the bathroom, where he remained for many hours. This gave me plenty of time to drain the champagne, eat up my gougeres and caramels, and contemplate the future to which I had recently committed myself. Is this a psychosomatic reaction to the idea of being with me forever? I wondered. I suppose this is what having children will be like, I thought, as I did my best to keep him clean and comfortable and get him into bed once his body had expelled everything. Now I know that when your child is sick, you, too, are often sick, making motherly nursing even more challenging than I had imagined. I spend long stretches of every winter making cup after cup of peppermint or ginger tea to decloud my head. This past December, as I coped with my third annual Thanksgiving-through-New-Year’s malaise, I thought to consult Mrs. Beeton, whose masterwork, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, I remembered included a chapter on invalid cookery. Read More