July 8, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Life, Summer, Candy By The Paris Review I finally picked up Keith Richards’s Life the other week, and it’s all I want to read when I have a spare moment. —Thessaly La Force Over the long weekend, I devoured Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear—the story of a family moving to an island in the Hebrides following the death of the father, as well as the unraveling mystery of his life—and found it to be the perfect escape. —Sadie Stein One of the perks of having a kid is making time for books I otherwise wouldn’t make time for, especially the classics. Right now, we’re working our way through one of my favorites, Black Beauty. A good excuse to dig out my old Breyer set of Black Beauty, Duchess, Ginger, and Merrylegs. —Nicole Rudick I spent the holiday with friends in New England, and we played many a round of what I’ve always called “The Book Game” and Dwight Garner calls “The Paperback Game” and, either way, is about the most entertaining game in existence. (Hint: don’t play it with Terry Southern’s Candy, which has a seventy-word opening sentence. I speak from experience.) —S. S. Avi Steinberg on Mike Tyson. —T. L. Thanks to Maud Newton’s nostalgia for the Lone Star state (and my own), I’m making nachos this weekend. —N. R. If you haven’t already, read Jose Antonio Vargas’s personal confession of being an undocumented immigrant. “We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read.” —T. L. Don’t let these creepy ads for Children’s Hospital scare you away—it reacts to the Casey Anthony verdict. —Natalie Jacoby
July 8, 2011 Books In Defense of Wanderlust By Miranda Popkey Elisabeth Eaves.When you’re young—a child, a teenager, a twenty-something—it seems, as Elisabeth Eaves says, “like it will never end. You can do anything because time is limitless, it’s infinite.” You can move to a different state or a different country. You can buy a one-way plane ticket. You can go to graduate school. You can move in with your boyfriend and get engaged and buy a house; and then you can move out. You can sublet indefinitely. In her new book, Wanderlust, Eaves—a journalist and author who has worked for Forbes and previously published Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping, about her time as an exotic dancer—does all of these things. Instead of making choices that follow neatly, one from the next—the job that brings you to a city where you meet the person you marry—the Eaves of Wanderlust makes decisions that consciously, thrillingly refuse to build on one another. She travels to Cairo as a twenty-year-old college student. At twenty-three, she hikes the notoriously difficult Kokoda trail in Papua New Guinea. Fleeing the rekindling of her relationship with her ex-fiancé, Stu, she joins a husband and wife sailing from Whangarei to Tonga and nearly dies when their vessel is caught in a vicious storm on the open ocean. In person, Eaves may be slender and fair-haired, but she carries herself with a graceful, noticeable composure that makes it easy to imagine her haggling, at dusk, with a Jeep driver in Pakistan, trying to get him to lower the price of a ride she and her boyfriend desperately need. She maintains eye contact. She exudes competence. And Wanderlust, though on the surface concerned with Eaves’s love of travel—a celebration of years spent indulging that love, moving from one town, one country to the next with little notice, living abroad for months and years at a time, cut off, in the days before e-mail, from family and friends—is also about the process by which she became the adult she is now. She doesn’t have regrets, though she would tell her twenty-year-old self to “spend more time trying to figure out what you want to do on your own. It’s easy to fall back on what somebody else wants to do.” Read More
July 8, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Fiction v. Reporting; Blind Dates By Lorin Stein Having been a reader of the Review for some time now, I’ve seen your publication evolve and change over the years. I’m curious about the reasoning behind one of these changes: the disappearance of political reporting and socially minded nonfiction from your pages. Such writing not only, I thought, was very valuable in and of itself, but also gave important temporal and situational context to the contemporary fiction and poetry that a reader would often find on the next page. —Mona Stewart Part of the change is simply a matter of who’s around. My predecessor, Philip Gourevitch, was and is a brilliant reporter, one of the best at work today. (For proof look no further than this week’s New Yorker.) He has a feel for these things. My background as an editor is in fiction, poetry, and literary essays. Of course I have nothing against political nonfiction. Like you, maybe, I read The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, New York, The Atlantic, and n+1, all of which publish excellent political reporting—plus the paper every day (two of them, since the beginning of the DSK affair). But being a fan and being an editor are two separate things. Furthermore, those other magazines exist. And yet there is no magazine—none with the reputation and reach of The Paris Review—that is devoted entirely to literature as such. This was true when the magazine was founded in 1953, and it’s still true today. That’s what we do best. (And if you’re going to run a magazine, why not stick to what it does best?) Dear Lorin, I went on my first blind date last week. The date went well and I thought we were into the same things, but when I went back to his house his walls were filled with paintings of Mount Vesuvius (dormant and erupting, ancient and new). The bookshelves are empty, save for books on the subject. How much can one really read into somebody’s cultural collection? Have you ever met someone whose attraction ran toward the bizarre? I want to get to know him, but every time I look at him all I see is Mount Vesuvius! Isabelle Fascinating. I think you should ask him about Vesuvius! People with a passion are people worth getting to know. (And as far as pictures go, it could be worse. Remember A-Rod and the centaurs?) Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
July 7, 2011 Notes from a Biographer The Subject Talks Back By Deborah Baker Maryam Jameelah, the subject of Baker’s biography The Convert. Anyone who has ever written about a living person knows the wait. Sometimes you receive a laundry list of grievances. Sometimes word trickles back of rage and feelings of betrayal. There might be a letter from a law firm or simply a punishing silence. When all is said and done, the person you have written about has a kind of hold over your work that a reviewer can only dream of. I’d nearly given up waiting when there it was, wedged between the water bill and a bank statement, an airmail envelope addressed to me. Familiar handwriting, familiar return address in Lahore, Pakistan. My first book was a biography of an obscure American poet born in 1901. When I approached her in 1989, she was living as a recluse in a Florida citrus grove. Fifty years before, she had not merely renounced her own poetry but everybody else’s as well. Through an intermediary, she conveyed to me that I should write a sample chapter (she assigned the topic). If it met with her approval, we would work together on her biography. She could use a secretary, she said. But before I could reply, she fell ill. When she heard I had proceeded without her, she wrote me angrily, calling me “sluttish.” Her minions sent me lengthy poison-pen missives, dissecting my character. She never read a word of what I’d written. The day after I sent the final manuscript to the publisher, she had a heart attack, as if my book and her life were paired like Siamese twins and I had killed her by finishing it. This is the kind of magical thinking that binds the biographer to her subject. Read More
July 6, 2011 On Poetry Making ‘Of Lamb’ By Thessaly La Force In 1796, at the age of thirty-two, Mary Lamb had an attack of madness and killed her mother and wounded her father with a knife. She was institutionalized for three years until the death of her father, when, at the behest of her younger brother, Charles, she was brought to live with him. Charles Lamb was a clerk at the East India Company and a well-regarded essayist, and he remained Mary’s caretaker and companion for the rest of their lives. The Lamb siblings were part of a literary circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworths, William Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley, and they are the subject of the biography A Portrait of Charles Lamb by David Cecil. Their story is also at the heart of a strange new illustrated poem that was published as a book by McSweeney’s this month. Of Lamb is a collaborative project between poet Matthea Harvey and artist Amy Jean Porter. Harvey was fascinated by the process of erasures after seeing Tom Phillips’s A Humument and Jen Bervin’s Nets and decided to do one herself with the first book she could find for three dollars. “I picked up A Portrait of Charles Lamb completely randomly,” Harvey told me. “When I discovered that Mary and Lamb were on each page, a story in poems started to emerge.” There are echoes of Sarah Josepha Hale’s famous nineteenth-century rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which tells the story of a young girl named Mary Sawyer who brings her pet lamb to school. But there are also weirder, more fascinating moments, too: “Nerves his family / Trouble his home / Dark spirits his company.” Below are a few slides of Harvey’s erasures and the illustrations by Porter. Porter says she was “thinking of an illustrative tradition of a nineteenth-century British variety—Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter, Eleanor Vere Boyle” but also cites brass chandeliers, water towers, and artists such as Balthus and Gabriel Orozco as inspiration. Click to enlarge. BLOG_oflamb_1 BLOG_ofalamb2 BLOG_ofalamb_3 Join Harvey and Porter tomorrow, on July 7, at P.P.O.W. Gallery at 7:00 P.M. at 535 West 22nd Street, in New York, for a reading from Of Lamb.
July 6, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Photograph by Michael Stravato.A cultural news roundup. Artist Cy Twombly died this week at eighty-three. Newly revealed letters point to the existence of unpublished Salinger manuscripts. People do, in fact, give a damn about an Oxford comma. The best party game of all time gets its due. “Hemingway’s remains one of the iconic American deaths. He has come close to being remembered as much for his death as for his work, a terrible fate for a writer.” Penguin launches an app. For the first time, documents from the Vatican’s secret archives will go on view. Hang onto those proofs! When they’re good, they’re very, very good: the Mobys celebrate the best and worst in book trailers. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.” And other words of wisdom from Chekhov. No rabbits were harmed in the making of As You Like It.