June 17, 2011 Contests Get a Digital Subscription and Win a Signed Copy! By Sadie Stein Have you bought your iPad subscription to the Review yet? What? You haven’t?! Sign up now, send us the confirmation e-mail, and we will enter you to win a copy of the new issue signed by cover artist Matteo Pericoli. The drawing will take place Monday. Send your entry to [email protected] with the subject line “Digital Edition Drawing.”
June 17, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: T. S. Eliot and Friends, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler By The Paris Review Every summer the good people at Oxford Classics sponsor a reading group in the Reading Room at Bryant Park. I joined them this week to discuss New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing’s novel about freelancers who haunt the British Museum. What I remembered—what everyone remembers—is the scary depiction of writer’s block. (George Orwell: “To a professional writer it is … an upsetting and demoralizing book, because it deals, among other things, with that much-dreaded occupational disease, sterility.”) What I noticed this time was the love story between Jasper Milvain, a slick young critic on the make, and shy, scholarly Marian Yule, the nicest, toughest, smartest person in the book. —Lorin Stein Galleys of the two-volume Letters of T. S. Eliot just landed on my desk. And everyone who’s anyone is here: Ezra Pound, Lytton Strachey, Edmund Wilson, and Conrad Aiken, but also Wyndham Lewis, Jacques Riviere, and James Joyce. How disarming, though, to see a letter addressed to Bertrand Russell as “Dear Bertie” and signed “Affectionately, Tom.” —Nicole Rudick I had the chance to do a Q & A with Carmela Ciuraru this week, the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. The book is a series of portraits of literary figures throughout history—the Brontes, George Eliot, O. Henry, Georges Simenon—who for one reason or another adopted pseudonyms. It’s fascinating—and, incidentally, piqued my interest in an author I hadn’t read, Fernando Pessoa. —Sadie Stein Aaron Sorkin and David Carr talk about cocaine, journalism, and The New York Times. —Thessaly La Force New Directions Pearls are small books on large topics: Fitzgerald on booze, Garcia Lorca on duende, Borges’s Everything and Nothing. The books are about the size of postcard, which means they fit in your back pocket and can also be used as fans or as bookmarks for bigger books. Right now I’m reading Joseph Roth’s The Leviathan, a longish short story about the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik and his holiday in Odessa. It’s a gem. —Robyn Creswell Molly Lambert takes on Kanye West over at Grantland and produces this glorious footnote: “Almost all classic West Coast rap is about being the world’s worst boyfriend. Too Short and Eazy-E would not be very good boyfriends.” —Cody Wiewandt I reread From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I remembered even less well than Grub Street, but which brought to mind David Grann’s piece on Peter Paul Biro. —L. S. Tom Bissell reviews the video game L. A. Noire. —T. L. Because you can’t watch this too many times and, well, it’s Friday. —Peter Conroy
June 17, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Father’s Day; Church Going By Lorin Stein Dear Lorin:Father’s Day is coming up, and this year I want to get my dad something he’ll actually read. The last three books I am certain he has read are: something by George Pelecanos, Lush Life by Richard Price, and certainly something by Sue Grafton. What would be something different, but not too different?Best,Bryant Bryant? My long-lost half-brother? Can it really be you? On the theory that our fathers are the same person, I would recommend Pete Dexter, Scott Spencer, the oft-mentioned-in-this-column Elmore Leonard, and maybe most of all The Main, by Trevanian, about which I remember almost nothing except that Dad lent it to me once when I was home sick and said it was really good. (And that I liked it, too.) Dear Paris Review,I have been struggling to understand the final stanza of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” for a month or so. The more I think about it, the more I doubt my thoughts. Could someone please help give an explication of the stanza? I’m having problems answering bigger and smaller questions—for example, why is the air “blent”? Who is recognizing “our compulsions”? And why are they “robed as destinies”? And by whom are they robed? And to what is “that” referring in the line “that much can never be obsolete”? The final two lines baffle me as well. I’m sorry. Usually I am a very good close reader, but I have failed with this one. Please help. —Caroline Grey A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. P.S. It wouldn’t hurt to remind your readers how to read poetry well. Consider this a general service, too. Thank you for sending me back to “Church Going.” I enjoyed rereading it and thinking about it again. I’m afraid these (very rudimentary, very literal-minded) answers will have occurred to you, but here is where I’d start: Read More
June 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Joe Ollmann, Cartoonist, Part 3 By Joe Ollmann This is the third and final installment of Ollmann’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1 and here to read part 2. DAY FIVE Recently, I went to Bar Pam Pam, a mysterious old-man bar in my neighborhood that I have often passed but never had the courage to enter. My friend Murray and I asked what was on tap, and the owner said, “Vieux Montreal” and stopped there. I liked that—it was like an old-time saloon. What kind of beer do you have? Just beer, stranger. This bar was wonderful, genuine, unmanufactured focus-group atmosphere, no loud music and a welcome refuge from hipsters and young people. The old-man bar, like many old men, is an institution that is dying out. It made me think of all of the other old-man bars that I know and love in Montreal. Come with me, I’ll show you … Bar Pam Pam I’ve already told you the appeal of this little gem, mere footsteps from my home! But a few notes from my visit there are worth the telling. A tipsy woman took out her guitar, randomly sang “Me and Bobby McGee” in heavily accented English, put the guitar back in its case, and continued drinking. No one else clapped or even seemed to notice this performance. Later, a heavy, bearded dude came in, and the bartender immediately brought a pitcher and glass to his table. “Why you bring this? You never see me before,” said the bearded man. “My friend, every night you come, this I know,” said the bartender, with a smile that was met by one from the bearded man. This was obviously their ritual. Read More
June 16, 2011 Softball TPR vs. High Times: The Stoners Win By Cody Wiewandt Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7 Total HT |3|2|3|1|0|?|0 12* TPR |0|0|1|3|4|1|2 11 Of all the great rivalries in magazine softball, none is as heated as the annual High Times–TPR soiree. The Bonghitters, as they like to be called, are a formidable force despite their propensity for a very unathletic activity. (“We had a 29-game undefeated streak in the early 2000s,” former editor in chief Steve Bloom once boasted to The New York Times.) The Parisians rallied as best they could; two of our stronger players—Chris “Art of Fielding” Parris-Lamb and Paul “The Fixer” Wachter—removed their ties and dusted off their gloves for the game. There was some huffing (a few words at second base, a few elbows in the baselines), some puffing (a spirited rules discussion, an almost-spirited bench-clearing brawl), and when the dust cleared they had (just barely) blown our house down. Things we know for certain: we scored eleven runs. Things we don’t know for certain: they scored twelve. Like in Rashomon, it depends on who you ask. Yes, we succumbed to eviler forces when we let stand a phantom run they claimed crossed in the sixth, but, really, it just felt like the right thing to do. This is not to say we didn’t go down swinging—au contraire! Down by eight runs early, we did our best Dallas Mavericks impression to claw our way back to within one run of a tie. Then, in the sixth, our confidence faltered. A throwing error (by yours truly) and some timely Times hitting extended their lead to three, which is where it would sit until the final frame. A two-run homer by Jim “Big Tree” Rutman (his second of the day) briefly buoyed our spirits, but ultimately that was the closest we’d get to salvation. Although we lost, we’re not all sad. Three cheers for the Big Tree, whose two home runs collectively had enough juice to make it to Brooklyn. Two more cheers go out to our captain, Stephen “Andrew” Hiltner, for his fancy base running and his even fancier mitt. And we might as well throw in another one for the needed lesson in humility. It’s a long, long season—better to stay grounded. Until next year, High Times.
June 15, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor died this week at ninety-six. Described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” Fermor authored twelve books and numerous articles. A BBC tribute gives him his due. Australian minister for small businesses Nick Sherry has declared that the bookstore is doomed. Speaking in Canberra, the politician declared, “I think in five years, other than a few specialty bookshops in capital cities, you will not see a bookstore. They will cease to exist because of what’s happening with Internet-based, Web-based distribution … What’s occurring now is an exponential take-off—we’ve reached a tipping point.” Not one but two prominent “lesbian bloggers” are revealed to, in fact, be straight men. Francine Prose and Keri Hulme have sharp words for Naipaul. Rehabilitating the original “Uncle Tom.” Murakami publicly criticizes Japan’s nuclear policy. The return of Batgirl. Actor Mark Rylance quotes poet Louis Jenkins in his Tony acceptance speech. Werner Herzog will narrate an audio version of surprise-hit “bedtime story” Go the Fuck to Sleep. The 100 greatest nonfiction books?