May 14, 2012 Arts & Culture Literary Paint Chips: Gallery 3 By Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. Fox Stain Graham Greene Iteration Pudding Hood Fence Skipper’s Whiff Pizza Noise White Martyr’s Tongue League Funeral Suit Dead Sea Doze Dishwater Blonde Stupid Blue Dorsal Bible Black Lo’s Socks Poop Poop American Autumn Damned Spot Spit Black Georgie’s Pins Oatmeal Tweed Treasure Blue Nimbus Card Felon Yellow Wine-dark
May 14, 2012 On the Shelf Slang and Secrets: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein The ten most-read books in the world. Caleb Crain: “Like poetry and pornography, slang is easier to recognize than to define. Most of it is disapproved of by someone, but obscenity alone doesn’t qualify. It isn’t slang, for example, to refer to manure with a four-letter word. But if you put the article ‘the’ in front of that four-letter word and equate the president-elect of the United States to it, then slang it is, and very complimentary.” After seventy years, the identity of Lorca’s lover is revealed. In honor of late artist Mike Kelley, a replica of his home. Speaking of homes, Updike’s will become a museum. Walking with George Bernard Shaw.
May 11, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Walking While Reading By Lorin Stein I’ve been reading a few things lately on the subject of walking, including treatments philosophical (Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Thoreau’s “Walking”), narrative (Walser’s The Walk, new from New Directions next month), and poetic (O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and some Wordsworth). I’m thinking of writing an essay on the subject and noting that my list so far consists of only dead men. Can you recommend any writers who are female and/or living who have written about walking? Rebecca Solnit is female and very much alive. You should start with her Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And if city walking interests you—or the subject of walking with one’s mother—you will want to read Vivian Gornick’s modern classic, Fierce Attachments. As it happens, I’m in the middle of a brand new book about walking: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert MacFarlane. I keep saving it for bed to make it last. The American edition won’t be out until October, but the British edition comes out early next month; if you can possibly wait for it, I would. You will want to read MacFarlane, above all for the wealth of his references, but also for the unabashed, Norsey music of his prose: I’ve read them all, these old-way wanderers, and often I’ve encountered versions of the same beguiling idea: that walking such paths might lead you–in Hudson’s phrase–to “slip back out of this modern world.” Repeatedly, these wanderers spoke of the tingle of connection, of walking as seance, of voices heard along the way. Bashō is said to have told a student that while wandering north he often spoke with long-dead poets of the past, including his twelfth-century forbear Saigyo: he therefore came to imagine his travels as conversations between “a ghost and a ghost-to-be.” With so much to read out there—and more being published all the time—how do you find the time to get through it all? Please don’t quote my actual name. Dear “Stefan” (not his actual name), You’re mixing me up with Kurt Andersen—and I have no idea how he gets through it all. I get through almost none of it. It just sits there on my desk and table and shelves, glowering, until our interns box it up and take it to the Strand. But the nice thing about books is that they don’t go anywhere. The good ones keep. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.
May 11, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Janácek, Cooke, and Literary Booze By The Paris Review My brother-in-law described First Position as Spellbound without the hard words. He meant that in a good way. This story of six kids in training for an international ballet competition is just as touching and absorbing—and almost as funny—as Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 documentary about the national spelling bee. —Lorin Stein I saw Janáček’s The Makropulos Case on Saturday, and three-plus hours standing has never gone by so quickly. Based on Karel Čapek’s popular 1922 play of the same name (sidenote: Čapek gave us the word robot as we know it), it’s the tragicomic tale of a labyrinthian legal case, a man-eating diva, and the elixir of life. (Intimations of the decline of European aristocracy are in there, too.) The score—and the chatty libretto, for that matter—stand alone, but Karita Mattila’s performance (in what is considered one of the toughest soprano showcases) is worth seeing. —Sadie Stein Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers not only instructs us on how to get tipsy (or rip-roaring drunk) on William Faulkner’s favorite mintjuleps or Raymond Chandler’s companion gimlet, it also offers us whimsical fodder for our perfect boozy daydreams: “Imagine a warm summer evening out on the shore of Long Island—say a party at Gatsby’s house, the bartenders serving up light, refreshing Gin Rickeys as the jazz band swings.” Yes, please! (Drinking stories and famous imbibing passages included.) —Elizabeth Nelson For fans of Soviet-era sci-fi, Olena Bormashenko’s new translation of Russian classic Roadside Picnic is being published this month. The book was originally written by brothers Arkady and Boris Stugatsky in the 1970s, but took eight years to get past Soviet censors unscathed and has been out of print in the English for three decades. Now it’s finally back on the shelves, and judging by the praise Bormashenko has received for her work, it’s in excellent shape. The hero of Picnic is a “stalker,” or a go-to guy in the black market of alien technologies that appeared on Earth after the perplexing and ancient “Visit.” And yes, it is the “stalker” of Roadside Picnic that served as inspiration for the spellbinding film by Andrei Tarkovsky. —Allison Bulger Sam Cooke—Greatest Hits: Here is a singer too often overlooked in the great expanse of pop classics. You can have your ol’ blue eyes, I’ve got nothing against him. You can have your Bing and your Brown. All I need is a little bit o’ Cooke. I’ve been listening to this CD every minute of every day. Though blatantly missing “(Ain’t That) Good News,” it makes up for it in the lounge jazz beats of “Win Your Love” and the eerily foreboding “Frankie and Johnny.” The song ends with Frankie shooting Johnny over a misunderstanding. Cooke died at thirty-three under similar circumstances. —Noah Wunsch
May 11, 2012 First Person My Mother’s Love By Albert Cohen Shortly after fleeing to London from Nazi-occupied France, novelist Albert Cohen learned of his mother’s death in Marseille. His grief took the form of a series of personal essays for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother. It was translated into the English by his wife. In honor of Mother’s Day, we bring you this excerpt. She waited three hours for me in that square. Three hours which I could have spent with her. While she was waiting for me, wreathed in patience, I chose to concern myself, stupidly enthralled, with some poetic amber damsel, abandoning the wheat for the chaff. I missed three hours of my mother’s life. And for whom, good God? For an Atalanta, an attractive arrangement of flesh. I dared to prefer an Atalanta to the most sacred goodness, to my mother’s love, my mother’s incomparable love. Incidentally, if some sudden illness had deprived me of my strength or merely all my teeth, the poetic damsel would have pointed me out and ordered her maid to sweep away that toothless garbage. Read More
May 11, 2012 Bulletin Book Perfume, Newspaper Dresses By Sadie Stein Perfumes that smell like books? Depends on the book, really! Prom dresses made of newspapers? Depends on the broadsheet, really! An MRI with John Jeremiah Sullivan. A study finds that literature increases empathy. Thomas Jefferson’s gardening journal. The best audiobooks for a road trip.