March 12, 2012 First Person 314 Bedford By Christopher Bollen “Love amid apocalyptic urban debris, love amid pimps and drug pushers, love on staircases scattered with used needles … can barely pay the rent.” This was not an atypical note to find myself jotting down in my early twenties, part of a scribbled, half-legible foray into a novel I would never write. I wrote this in 2002, three years into my very first no-lease, single-occupant New York apartment and one year before I would eventually leave it, fleeing on grounds of emotional distress for a nondescript studio in Gramercy across from the Thirteenth Precinct (note my subconscious need for police protection). The cloying repetition of the word love suggests a rather flagrant tendency toward romanticizing crime and poverty, the ellipses symptomatic of someone too undisciplined to develop a thought. The only real character of this imaginary novel is the building. At least it was for me during the years that I called 314 Bedford Avenue, between South First and South Second streets on the grimy, sun-bleached south side of Williamsburg, my home. To pass by the six-floor tenement now is not to see the building I lived in a decade ago. DuMont Burger has replaced the Puerto Rican dry cleaners in the street-level store front, where I never recall a single person entering or exiting with pressed shirts or anything approximating a claim ticket. Green metal café tables have taken the place of the wheelchair-bound homeless man with no legs who lived and slept seated for nine months of the year outside the entryway, his single mode of communication being “don’t touch me!” whenever anyone asked if he needed help. The building’s facade, still the color of a sick tongue, seems to have been water blasted, and the fire escape has been skinned and painted. As New Yorkers, we all live in a peculiar state of location upgrade, a kind of reverse Manderlay, where places we had once known have outpaced our own internal soft-focus (as an exercise, I recommend replacing the word nature with real estate developers in the opening page of Rebecca). Memory must do the decay work of time, and it is here at 314 that I remember the black, rusted iron gates of the front door, the hallway swabbed in yellow plaster, the chipped linoleum floor tiles attempting a marble mosaic, the five flights up to my apartment where, even drunk at 2 A.M., I had to be careful not to step on syringes, used condoms, sleeping prostitutes, and take-out ketchup packets. Read More
March 12, 2012 Bulletin A Tote for 200! By The Paris Review Our 200th Issue tote! We are thrilled to offer you what may be the coolest tote bag in Paris Review history! When you renew or subscribe to The Paris Review, you’ll receive this 11” x 13” eco-canvas tote, which takes its design from the cover of our two-hundredth issue (itself an adaptation of our very first cover, in 1953). And, as if it needs saying, a full year of fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays. All for $40. Subscribe now!
March 9, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Campy Fiction; Smoking Strictures By Lorin Stein Watching a marathon of Twin Peaks has gotten me thinking about camp. There are movies and television shows that we delight in, and discuss seriously, though the content may not be “serious.” What can be said about campy contemporary fiction? Please give me a list of fabulous, outlandish books, preferably with a narrator who will repulse and delight me all at once. Something bad, but well-written. Delight may not be the operative word, but David Vann’s new novel, Dirt, is outlandish, repulsive, well-written, and utterly over the top. (In one climactic scene, the teenage hero imprisons his mother in a toolshed after she threatens to have him arrested for the statutory rape of his cousin.) True to its title, the book is down and dirty. I am not sure whether the camp is intentional—but then I often suspect that many of the best “camp” artists, as for instance Lynch and Almodóvar, do mean it. Their sincerity is their power. If you’re looking for high camp—without the Sturm und Drang—it doesn’t get campier than James McCourt’s 1971 send-up of the opera world, Mawdrew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”). And if soap opera’s more your speed, try Cyra McFadden’s 1977 The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County. Dear Lorin, I’ve recently moved to Manhattan only to learn that I am actually a ghost—that I am, apparently, an apparition. Needless to say, this discovery has been rather disconcerting, but my chief worry is that the recent strictures regarding smoke in apartments and Central Park will cause me rapidly to be evicted from my apartment, and possibly excommunicated from the city outright. I have it from trusted sources that you are at once smoking, wispy, and nebulous—indeed, altostatus cumulus—and yet you seem to face little threat from the law. Lorin, my friend, how do you do it? Spiritedly, Spook Dear Spook, My secret is I don’t smoke very much. It’s bad for you! It’s probably even bad for ghosts … To the wise members of The Paris Review, The only poem I have ever memorized was for Spanish class in ninth grade. It is time to add to the repertoire, but which poem do I choose? I imagine that it would be a comfort—something inspiring about living, loving, the natural ups and downs of being human. Perhaps something about choices, or appreciation. Not too long or too short. Something to share when the moment is right, or something to keep to myself, to repeat in a chant-like form on long runs through the woods. I maintain full confidence in your advice. Sincerely, Julia Dear Julia, Once my friend Cary and I had a poem-memorizing contest. He memorized poems by Richard Hugo. I memorized poems by Keats. Each poem had to be longer than fourteen lines, and each of us had to pay the other a dollar for every line we muffed. My favorite of the poems I learned is the “Ode on Melancholy,” which I think may fit the bill. At least, I go around repeating it to myself in low moments, and it seems to do the trick. (Note that the word globed should be pronounced with two syllables.) Read More
March 9, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cecil Beaton in the City, ‘Threats’ By The Paris Review Andrea del Castagno, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1450–57, tempera on panel. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. If you get the chance, check out “Cecil Beaton: The New York Years,” which has extended its run at the Museum of the City of New York. It’s a record of the artist, designer, photographer, and general man-about-town’s relationship with the city in pictures and words, and both the duration of Beaton’s career and the scope of his creativity are something to behold. —Sadie Stein On the recommendation of our art editor, Charlotte Strick, I’ve started reading Amelia Gray’s debut novel, Threats—the nifty cover of which Charlotte designed, so perhaps she’s biased. But so far, it’s with good cause: the narrative is subversive and impressionistic, evidentiary and eccentric. It reminds me occasionally of Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, another deeply imaginative book and one that, in the spirit of this post, I’d wholly recommend. —Nicole Rudick It is, as Andrew Butterfield says in The New York Review of Books, a show “of staggering beauty and revelatory importance” and “a landmark exhibition,” and it is also your last chance to see it this week. I spent last Sunday strolling through the “The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I can’t imagine a more colorful or vibrant way to spend the weekend. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I recently discovered Literature Map, an addicting bit of artificial intelligence that plots writers by similarity. Watch your favorite authors drift about in a blue void like awkward, disembodied party-goers! A Marauder’s Map for the literary. (Also good for finding new reads.) —Allison Bulger I visited the Whitney Biennial last week and caught Sarah Michelson’s disciplined performance of “Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer,” a piece about movement, repetition, and the relationships formed in dance. Michelson’s residency ends March 11 and it’s a spectacle not to be missed. —Elizabeth Nelson A screener of Lena Dunham’s Girls made its way around the office a few weeks ago. It contained only three episodes, but I couldn’t get enough. —D.F.M.
March 8, 2012 Books A Panorama of ‘Middlemarch’ By Jason Novak A ten-foot-tall panel illustrating the classic English novel by George Eliot. Click in and scroll down for the whole story. Read More
March 7, 2012 On the Shelf #JonathanFranzenHates, Nabokoving, and Other News By Sadie Stein Nabokoving. A cultural news roundup. “Once again, it’s that time of year when otherwise mature adults paint their faces in the palettes of their favorite book jacket designers, and all across Facebook college kids post pictures of themselves Nabokoving. Yes, we’re talking about book awards season.” Happy birthday, John Updike! Happy birthday, Douglas Adams! Geoff Dyer on “bunking off.” With friends like these, Saul Bellow didn’t need enemies. Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys get the “blue plaque treatment” in London. Stephen King: “The idea that a writer can bring his core audience into the tent with a blurb … you might as well try herding cats.” The fact that Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s here is a selling point. The fact that it has eighteen rooms doesn’t hurt, either. Footnotes upon footnotes in Footnote. “Eggers named his journal after McSweeney before he knew anything about the man, and didn’t discover his identity until after McSweeney died in January 2010 at age sixty-seven.” The famously combative Ben Jonson. Jonathan Franzen: “Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose … it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium … People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.” #JonathanFranzenHates