October 12, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Steve Jobs. Photo by COG LOG LAB. A cultural news roundup. Roberto Saviano has won the PEN/Pinter International Writer of Courage Award for his exposés on the Naples mafia. Steve Jobs, the movie? Catch-22, the cartoon! Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is now an editor at large at Faber & Faber. Christopher Hitchens: “The influence of Larkin is much greater than I thought. He’s perfect for people who are thinking about death. You’ve got that old-line Calvinist pessimism and modern, acid cynicism—a very good combo. He’s not liking what he sees, and not pretending to.” Amy Winehouse’s father, Mitch, will write a memoir. Asterix goes on the road in his retirement. Audio fiction goes Hollywood. Dale Carnegie goes digital. Margaret Atwood goes green. Coetzee’s papers, meanwhile, go to the University of Texas. “The first real recipes for what you could identify as biscotti come from about 1550 or so.” Franzen on David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction. Literary matchmaking. Literary jerks.
October 11, 2011 At Work Kate Beaton on ‘Hark! A Vagrant’ By Nicole Rudick Kate Beaton makes comics about the Bröntes, Canadians, fat ponies, the X-Men, Hamlet, the American founding fathers, Raskolnikov, gay Batman, Nikola Tesla, Les Misérables, Nancy Drew, Greek myths, and hipsters throughout history. Little is spared her lively pen and waggish, incisive wit. Born in Nova Scotia, Beaton studied history and anthropology, discovering through her university’s newspaper that she could put her knowledge of people, places, and dates to work in a humor column and, later, in comic strips. In 2007, she launched Hark! A Vagrant, which now receives more than a million hits each month. Her new book, of the same name, lampoons Kierkegaard, lumberjacks, Marie Curie, Jay Gatsby, Anne of Cleves, Oedipus, and everyone in between. Do you remember the first comic you drew in college? It was about Vikings! Vikings invading the school campus. It was a how-to guide for dealing with this breaking news. The Vikings were very interested in biology class, apparently. In comics, everybody is an expert in their own sense of humor, so either you’re funny to someone else or you’re not. And it’s putting yourself out there quite a bit for someone who is a little bit shy, which I was. I didn’t put my name on the first comics I submitted in case people hated them. You don’t want to be that person who’s unfunny. Trying to be funny and not being funny? That’s awful. Read More
October 11, 2011 Odd Jobs Misspent Youth; Reading ‘Fup’ By Chris Flynn Detail from 'Peasant Spreading Manure,' Jean-Fracois Millet, 1855, oil. Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. Nam Le: I ran through the usual money-makers of misspent youth: door-knocking in the outer ‘burbs, Christmas-carolling at the bottom of escalators, child-laboring in the family business, pyramid-selling to my parents, my friends, my parents’ friends, my friends’ parents. I did time in a call center, spent one year on my knees lacing up Doc Marten boots for feral teenagers, and another fending off feral twenty-somethings while editing the university student paper. Then I finished my law degree—and threw in my lot with the greatest ferals of all. Colum McCann: I was a “wilderness educator” back in Texas in the mid-eighties, after taking an eighteen-month bicycle trip across America. This meant working with kids who were at risk, or juvenile delinquents. We lived out in the woods for three months at a stretch, built pine-pole shelters, treehouses, an outdoor latrine, a gravity-fed shower. It was a magnificent interruption in my life: out under the stars. At night I used to read these tough, streetwise kids to sleep—Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, and a fable called Fup by Jim Dodge. They loved Fup in particular, a fable about a duck, a sound-anagram for “Fucked Up.” I still hear from these kids—they’re all over the country now and generally they’re out of trouble, except for the fact that they might be reading Fup to their kids. Chris Flynn is the books editor at The Big Issue and the fiction editor at Australian Book Review.
October 10, 2011 Arts & Culture On ‘Artaud-Mania … The Diary of a Fan’ By David O'Neill Johanna Fateman began her 1997 fanzine, Artaud-Mania, by professing, “Dear Diary, I am writing to you because confessional writing is the self-effacing form most suited to the abject position of the fan.” Until then, the twenty-two-year-old Fateman hadn’t confessed much in her work; her earlier zines (including the series Snarla, cowritten in the early nineties with fellow high school misfit Miranda July) never had the insular or solipsistic feel typical of many of that era’s photocopied missives. What’s more, the syphilitic and schizophrenic Artaud, an enfant terrible of French arts and letters, was an unlikely idol for the feminist punk scene that Fateman had been a part of and was reacting against—post–Riot Grrrl publications that rarely ventured beyond subjects like the DIY music scene, grassroots organizing, and personal politics. Her appreciation for Artaud came through artists and writers like Nancy Spero and Kathy Acker. Like them, she was inspired by his fierce articulation of what Spero once termed a “sense of victimhood”; Fateman put it more bluntly when she wrote approvingly that Artaud was a “crazy bitch with male authority.” Read More
October 10, 2011 Fiction At the Hotel Roquefort By James Jones James Jones. The Paris Review was founded in 1953, the year after my father won the National Book Award for his novel From Here to Eternity. James Jones was a newcomer on the literary scene, an outsider who had fought in the Pacific and had only completed two semesters of college. By the time my parents moved to Paris in 1958, The Paris Review was a hugely important literary magazine. And although my father never felt a part of the highly educated, ivory-tower crowd, he was extremely fond of William Styron, George Plimpton, and Peter Matthiessen, the magazine’s founders, and felt a deep kinship with them as people who were committed to the written word. My father was interviewed by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. for the Autumn/Winter 1958–59 issue of The Paris Review, just after the publication of his second novel, Some Came Running, which was savaged by the critics. The interview gave my father a chance to speak his mind and set the record straight, and it is one of the best interviews he ever gave. It seems only fitting that a section of his earliest, unpublished work should be printed in The Paris Review, whose three founders came to his defense and continued to stand by him and his work long after his death in 1977. —Kaylie Jones Read More
October 7, 2011 Ask The Paris Review L.A. Advice: Writers Dating, Fear of the Blank Page By Sadie Stein Last night, seventy-five or so Angelenos gathered at the Standard, Hollywood to listen to Ann Louise Bardach, David Kipen, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Lutz, and Michael Tolkin answer audience questions on life, love, and books. Subjects ranged from The Onion (everyone’s favorite contemporary humor publication) to Dickens (in whom “the archetypes for all modern fiction can be found”) to the possibility of making a living as a poet (consensus: other sources of income help). What follows are a few of the questions the panel addressed. Should writers date each other? Tolkin: No. Bardach: Sure, but not in the same genre. That’s the important thing.A guest: A writer and a reader? Bardach: Well, yes, every writer should have one. How does one get over the fear of the blank page? Tolkin: First of all, it’s more a blank screen now. Don’t leave it blank. Put something on it, anything. If it’s bad, you can improve it, tear it apart. If it’s good, even better. The important thing is getting something down, taking that step. How does it feel when your book is adapted [into a movie] but you’re not asked to be involved? Is it hard? Tolkin: I take the money and run. Lethem: I’d actually prefer not to be involved. I mean, I wrote the book: I’ve spent all that time with it already. And it’s a very different medium. Better to work on someone else’s story. Lutz: Screw up someone else’s book, you mean. Kipen: Thus far, no one has tried to adapt any of my book reviews. But I’m open to it. What are your goals for a new novel? What’s your hope for it? Tolkin: Kill every other book on the shelf.Lethem: It’s a great line, but I actually feel the opposite: it’s those other books on the shelf that inspire me, and I want to join their company, add to that conversation. And, you know, looking around this room—I’m going to get very sincere, here—it’s affirming. This is not what we are made for, what I am made for. We sit and we write words, and for whatever reason, you’re all out here to listen, and see us. We’re in this strange, solitary profession, hoping to connect with a few people and, look—we packed a room. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.