December 16, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Apologizing; Glitz and Glamour By Lorin Stein How do you manage to apologize to someone when you think you also deserve an apology (but believe you are never going to get one, and the conflict remains unresolved)? Is there some way to prove a point while also expressing a sincere desire to be friends again? The short answer, I think, is no. You probably can’t make your point and make up at the same time. But it sounds as though—whatever went down—there were plenty of hurt feelings to go around. Maybe you can set aside the question of blame, and the unresolved conflict, and focus on the feelings. To start with: you feel rotten, and you’re sorry to have hurt your friend. If you own up to that, you’ll make it that much easier for your friend to let down his or her guard. Don’t expect an actual apology—even if you do get an apology, it probably won’t be the one you want. We’re human, so we all feel our own pain more sharply than the pain we cause in others. Try to correct for that bias, if you can, and at least you’ll know you’ve tried. (Thanks to Geoff O’Sullivan for the sage counsel on this hard question. We’ve all been there.) One of my students mistakenly believes the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers 1930s to be the pinnacle of American glitz and glamour. Aside from the obvious—Scott Fitzgerald, Midnight in Paris, A Moveable Feast, and the like—what ought I offer to open her eyes to vastly superior qualities of the Lost Generation and its Jazz Age? If your student can handle a strong dose of decadence—sex, drugs, and experimental lit—give her Geoffrey Wolfe’s biography of the expat publisher Harry Crosby Jr., Black Sun. Twist or shout? A little of both. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.
December 16, 2011 Events Bah, Humbug! By The Paris Review Stop by Housing Works Bookstore Cafe this Sunday afternoon to hear Emma Straub, Eileen Myles, Kurt Andersen, Joshua Cohen, Ira Glass, John Hodgman, and many others, including our own Lorin Stein, in the second annual marathon reading of A Christmas Carol. (Spoiler alert: Lorin reads the part where Scrooge renounces his Scroogey ways.) Where: Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012.When: Sunday, December 18, 1 P.M.
December 16, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: ‘Betsy-Tacy,’ Doomed Quests By The Paris Review If you have children to shop for, you can do them no greater favor than to introduce them to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, the first four volumes of which were just rereleased with original Lois Lenski illustrations by Harper Perennial. —Sadie Stein “This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that.” That’s Ice Cube rhapsodizing on Ray and Charles Eames’s Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades. The short video, in which Ice Cube praises L.A.’s architectural sublimity, is part of “Pacific Standard Time,” an exhibition I wish (impossibly) were traveling to the East Coast. —Nicole Rudick Life is full of doomed quests—and then it tosses up the weird happy ending, with naked children wandering around on the dinner table. See for instance Wyatt Mason’s amazing profile of Ai Weiwei, now an e-book from GQ. —Lorin Stein If you are in New York this winter, stop by the Asia Society to see Sarah Sze’s kinetic new show “Infinite Line.” I’ve always been drawn to Sze’s webbed sculptures, but this time I particularly liked a series of pen-and-ink llustrations, each of which depict twelve seminal (but confidential!) events in the lives of friends and collectors. Each unfurls with Escher-like intricacy—but also pluckiness and whimsy. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn Check out Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film, The Wages of Fear, this weekend, either here in New York at the Film Forum or on DVD. It’s kind of like Speed, but with no love story and an overlay of existentialism. Oh, and more entertaining than that implies. —S.S.
December 15, 2011 The Poem Stuck in My Head Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster” By Olivia Cole Lately I’ve been thinking about Frank O’Hara and his sometimes terrible taste in men. I can’t help but see the painter Larry Rivers as a thoroughly undeserving recipient for one of my favorite poems, O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster.” The pair’s messy entanglement started (inevitably) at a party, with a drunken kiss and grope behind a curtain. The two were hidden, but O’Hara was wearing his trademark white tennis shoes, and the two pairs of shoes, his and Rivers’s, were in full view of the heaving room. O’Hara’s letters to Rivers maintain that he could take him or leave him, but, like those trainers peeping out from underneath the curtain, the poems rather give the game away. Rivers’s involvement with O’Hara was against his better judgement, and in his autobiography he claims never to have had full sex with a man, a fact that partly explains the poem’s fixation with impossibility and insurmountable distance. Read More
December 15, 2011 Arts & Culture Taylor’s Multitudes By Liz Brown Silvano and I met about ten years ago through mutual friends. I don’t remember the exact shirt he was wearing at the time, but I know it had bright colors and elaborate embroidery. (Later, I learned it came from Alpana Bawa.) Also, he was wearing one dangling, bauble-y earring. Possibly it included a feather. This was at a party where most people worked in publishing, which is to say, he stood apart. Other details I have filed away about Silvano include that in the house he shares with his husband, Craig, there is a shrine to Anna Magnani and a poster from his 1977 campaign for supervisor of Board 5 in San Francisco. In the poster, he wears a one-shouldered top and tights and is beaming, his long arms flung skyward, a look inspired by a Patti Labelle album cover. He was running as the “dada alternative” to Harvey Milk. Also, in Robert Gluck’s novel Jack the Modernist, the narrator goes out to a performance piece in which Silvano appears as “Madame Chiang-Ch’ing.” More recently he got his associate’s degree in accessories at FIT. I knew all this about Silvano, but I didn’t have any idea how much Elizabeth Taylor meant to him. Not even when I met him at his home Sunday morning and he came to the door wearing a purple felt fedora, an iridescent purple mandarin-collared jacket, and purple suede boots. We were on our way to a preview of the Elizabeth Taylor collection being auctioned off this week. Read More
December 14, 2011 In Memoriam George Whitman, 1913–2011 By The Paris Review George Whitman. It is with sadness that we mark the passing of Shakespeare & Co. proprietor George Whitman, a good friend to this magazine and to literature generally. Whitman played host to literary giants and hundreds of itinerant travelers. A living legend and a certified character, he for decades managed to balance the demands of an artistic institution and a popular tourist attraction. He’ll be missed and remembered—as he is in this bittersweet reminiscence by Alexander Nazaryan.