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.
July 6, 2011 Arts & Culture On Acknowledgements By Anna North Anyone who wants to study writers’ idiosyncrasies need look no further than their acknowledgments. One contemporary author thanks her therapist, another his probation officer, a third someone he calls the “Infamous Frankie G.” In the backs of books I’ve found shout-outs to the Ship Manager of HM Frigate Unicorn; a book on Satanism; and an ice hotel. But alongside the quirky is also the heartfelt. I’ve encountered declarations of love—“my children, my jewels”; “without you, I’d be sunk”; “not only the most supportive parents a writer could ask for but the most loving, kind, and inspiring people I know.” One set of thank-yous closes with the code IALYAAT, which I hope means, “I Always Love You At All Times.” Acknowledgments also offer an all-too-rare view of the writer as actual human being. We often think we’re seeing the author’s real self when we read her fiction, but as any author who’s ever been asked what happened after she fled her family of international superspies and threw in her lot with a group of itinerant circus performers knows only too well, this is a delusion. The acknowledgments at the back of a novel are tantalizing because they’re often the only true thing amid a pack of lies. And at the end of a really great book, how wonderful to recognize that it was written not by a monolith or a beam of white light or the manifestation of the goddess Athena, but by a living, breathing person who remembered to thank her agent. Read More
July 6, 2011 Poetry Poem: Tender Range By John Rybicki Today’s poem, John Rybicki’s “Tender Range,” is an incantation that seems particularly fitting for a crisp fall day. It’s a series of lyrical fragments arranged as a kind of stay against loss and death. We liked this poem for the way it subtly but persuasively finds a fresh language for the sense of imperilment that lurks around us, as in the eerie lines “I don’t know anything / about blowing a child out/ like a balloon, or what comes after— .” —Meghan O’Rourke Read More