April 6, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tea Cakes and Putin and Vets, Oh My! By The Paris Review “Some poems smack of a gentility one would like in some moods to smack out of them.” Even before I read that sentence—about the sainted Elizabeth Bishop!—I knew Maureen McLane was the poetry teacher for me. Her first book of criticism, My Poets, is the survey course of my dreams: a long, loving argument with and about everyone from Chaucer to Gertrude Stein. As befits her subject, McLane is both plainspoken and lyrical, falling at times, as if naturally, into verse as clear as her prose. —Lorin Stein I remember a college professor commenting that he was never sure Stephen Crane “knew what he was doing” when he dropped all sorts of clues and oddness into his stories. I had the same thought while reading Barbara Comyns’s 1959 book, The Vet’s Daughter. Does all this strangeness serve a purpose? Does the bizarre ending mean something? Whether the answer is yes or no, I still enjoyed the novel more than anything I’ve read in months, and I’ve already ordered the rest of her books. —Sadie Stein Robert Caro—never disappointing—had a particularly good piece in the April 2 edition of The New Yorker, on John F. Kennedy’s assassination but from LBJ’s perspective. It’s a bizarre and fascinating tale of how history is formed both by monumental events and by intimate details. And that famous photograph of his swearing in—as he stands grim-faced and flanked by Lady Bird and Jackie—will never look the same to me again. —Nicole Rudick It wasn’t the intimidating length or experimental style that had me wondering, Wait, what?, when reading Finnegans Wake. It was my damned curiosity about the “careful teacakes” that Joyce introduces. My foodie heart salivated at the thought—where do I get one of those? Luckily, I stumbled upon A Trifle, a Coddle, a Fry: An Irish Literary Cookbook last weekend and was thrilled to find a recipe for these mysterious treats alongside sixty-six other recipes gathered from food references in the writing of twelve Irish authors, including Beckett and Shaw. Crack it open for a satisfying literary and gastronomic adventure, and let the sating begin. —Elizabeth Nelson Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin has kept me up the last three nights. —L.S. This week I attended a reading of Dante’s Inferno inside Saint John the Divine cathedral, a massive Gothic-revival church near Columbia University. If you missed it, mark the date. It happens annually on Maundy Thursday (which, for those needing to brush up on their Christian calendar, commemorates the day of the Last Supper). It was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. A wooden pew is really the only place one should learn about Hell. —Allison Bulger
April 5, 2012 Out of Print LOL Cats By Sadie Stein Out of Print is a new series in which we feature our favorite library discards, used-bookstore finds, and family hand-me-downs. Circa 2002, I forced my eighteen-year-old brother to drive me to a church basement in the outer suburbs of Chicago to watch a community-theater production of a play about the life of poet Stevie Smith. As I recall, we got into a screaming fight on the way there, and he further enraged me by falling asleep during both acts and leaving the theater several times for cigarette breaks. In truth, the show was abysmal, and in retrospect–given the number of soliloquies by a lead with a highly unconvincing British accent and very distracting Dutch-boy wig–his behavior was downright saintly. All of which is to say, I was obsessed with Stevie Smith. I liked her idiosyncratic verse and her strange novels; I was interested in her latter-day career as a beatnik cult figure; I loved the book of her collected sketches, Some Are More Human than Others. But the root of my obsession was a little-known text I’d picked up in a London charity shop, 1959’s Cats in Colour. Read More
April 5, 2012 On Television Dear Don Draper, Relax Already By Adam Wilson Dear Don Draper, I just got off the phone with my mother, and she’s a bit upset. This is not your fault, I know. Mothers! You never really had one, so let me explain. They’re a complicated bunch, prone to outbursts of emotion. Always clutching their chests like their hearts are exploding; always assuming any discoloration is cancer. For example, your ex-wife, one of the worst mothers around. One minute she’s slinkily horny, and the next she’s screaming at Sally for no reason. One minute she’s stuffing her face with Bugles—they still have those by the way—and the next she’s convinced that she’s dying, ruining your fun by forcing you to face mortality. See what I mean? And Betty’s not even Jewish! Speaking of Jewish: my mother. “Daddy and I almost plotzed,” she tells me, “when that Jewish father said that ridiculous prayer. I mean, they could have had a normal Jewish person. You know, someone who went to NYU or Parsons even. Not some schlub in a madras jacket.” Read More
April 4, 2012 Bulletin Vote for TPR in the Tournament of Lit Mags! By Sadie Stein Final 4 Bracket Dear readers, This is a matter of honor. If you love and believe in The Paris Review, now is the time to show what our fans are made of. We are currently in the Final Four of the Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour Tournament of Literary Magazines. As they explain, “[Oxford American] will now take on another program with a shining pedigree, The Paris Review, in what promises to be a battle of titans. The surprises this year are all on the other side of the bracket. Many thought that the Georgia program had grown too old and could never return to its glory days under coach Lindberg, but their execution has been flawless, and they play a measured style that has everyone buzzing about the old days. The real Cinderella story of the tourney, however, has been Ecotone, a tiny program that, thanks in part to the recruiting pull of recent grad (and power forward) Edith Pearlman, has made a surprising run, littering the courts with higher seeds.“ You know what to do. (If you don’t, it’s vote in comments.) You gotta believe.
April 4, 2012 On the Shelf Walk Like Updike, Live Like Lowell, Eat Your Words By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. RIP illustrator John Griffiths. A slideshow of his Penguin covers. Speaking of covers, Meg Wolitzer asks whether male authors garner better ones. The best spokesman for an Ernest Hemingway novel? Papa himself. The world’s first edible cookbook is printed on sheets of fresh pasta, blueprints for its own destruction that, when baked, turn into a lasagna. Perhaps not shockingly, members of Russia’s Public Chamber have criticized a school notebook, part of the Great Russians series, the cover of which features an image of Stalin in military regalia. The publishers, defiant, point out that in a recent TV contest, Stalin placed third in a vote on the country’s “greatest historical figures.” The Awl’s number-one tip for writing the Great American Novel? “Move out of Brooklyn.” The big news in Salt Lake City was not that yours truly was there (although I was): luminaries of the horror genre converged on the Beehive State for the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards, where writers Joe McKinney and Allyson Byrd won big. In which Ian McEwan helps his son with an essay on one of his own novels … and gets “a very low mark.” Sylvia Plath slept here (and take a peek into fourteen other writers’ bedrooms). Robert Lowell wrote here—on Manhattan’s West Sixty-seventh Street—and it can be yours for $685,000. The Little House books are canonical—literally. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical series join the Library of America. John Updike predicted New York’s newly announced 6 1/2 Avenue in a 1956 New Yorker article: “As a service to readers who are too frail or shy for good-natured hurly-burly, we decided to plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue.”
April 3, 2012 Arts & Culture “An Egoless Practice”: Tantric Art By Lauren O'Neill-Butler Bikaner, 2002, 14 It could be a cult classic: the debut edition of Siglio Press’s Tantra Song—one of the only books to survey the elusive tradition of abstract Tantric painting from Rajasthan, India—sold out in a swift six weeks. Rendered by hand on found pieces of paper and used primarily for meditation, the works depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear departure from Tantric art’s better-known figurative styles. They also resonate uncannily with lineages of twentieth-century art—from the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism to Minimalism—as well as with much painting today. Rarely have the ancient and the modern come together so fluidly. For nearly three decades, the renowned French poet Franck André Jamme has collected these visual communiqués, and it hasn’t been easy: in 1985 he survived a fatal bus accident while traveling to visit Hindu tantrikas in Jaipur. In Tantra Song, Jamme assembles some of the most pulsating works he’s acquired, while unpacking his experiential knowledge of Tantra’s cosmology. Western views of Tantra tend toward hyperbole. (The New York Times recently published an article, “Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here,” noting, “Early in the twentieth century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain.”) Jamme’s book serves as a corrective to this slant and sheds significant light on the deep historical roots—and fruits—of the practice. Siglio will release a second edition of the book on April 19. Jamme and I recently discussed these anonymously made paintings, the altered states they induce, and their timeless aesthetics. Read More