May 24, 2011 At Work Anthony Caro By Ariel Ramchandani When the museum is crowded, a trip to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes a huddled wait in line for the elevator. You ride up, packed in a sticky car with a school group and some tourists. When the elevator doors open, everyone rushes out, blinking in the sunlight, into what feels like another world. At first, the views of the city and the park dominate, then the five sculptures by Anthony Caro begin to assert themselves. They invite the viewer to come in close; the vista begins to act as a backdrop. The sculptures are substantial but also appear light—one looks as though it could soar right off the roof, whereas another is in danger of caving in on itself. Anthony Caro, knighted in 1987, is one of the most influential British modernists. Our interview felt like a lesson in itself: he answered my flowery prose with simple sentences; when I called him to elaborate, he pushed me toward more crystalline questions. He has an authoritative voice, and he spoke with a purposeful exasperation. One sees this impulse in his work, too: a dogged pursuit of form from a man who helped shaped modernism, whose simple philosophy matches his training as an engineer. The roof is a unique place to show—any installation is buffeted by the gleaming skyline and greenery of Central Park. Did you choose particular pieces that might work in this setting? The pieces were chosen because they were sturdy pieces that were in the New York area and fairly easy to obtain. I think that the New York skyline sets sculptures on the Met roof beautifully. Mind you, all sculpture on the Met roof fits beautifully. It is a wonderful place to show because you have that marvelous background. And I feel it’s quite intimate in a funny way. I think my sculpture is intimate. Mostly it is not public sculpture, though what I’m making for Park Avenue is public. But it is not a monument and has nothing to do with being a monument. After Summer, 1968. Click to enlarge. Read More
May 23, 2011 Arts & Culture Postscript: Celebrating Sybille Bedford By Sylvia Brownrigg Aliette Martin, at left. There are writers who speak several languages proudly, ostentatiously. There are novelists who pen stories in loud, colorful italics about coming from one country and moving to another. There is a fetishizing, even in our globe-trotting culture—web-linked, multiscreened, and simultaneously translated though it is—of nationality, its hold and its reach. Then there is the grace and subtlety of Sybille Bedford. To read Bedford’s work is to bask in the presence of someone at once German, French, and English—at the very least—who knew these countries from deep within herself and was able to enjoy their distinctions without ever belittling or simplifying them. If the word cosmopolitan had been coined with a particular literary figure in mind, it might have been Sybille Bedford. In a piece included in a volume published to honor Sybille after her death, her French friend and literary executor Aliette Martin recalled lines from Sybille’s last book, Quicksands: “To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline. The civilized mind needs alternatives for its expression.” Though Sybille chose to write in English, she routinely included quotations or phrases from other tongues, along with amiable translations—so that the reader could hear the music or humor of the original, but needn’t feel excluded if his or her mind happened to be more tramlined than the polyglot author’s. Ms. Martin was among those sipping wine or soda water in the elegant offices of The Paris Review not so long ago, at a gathering to celebrate Sybille Bedford’s centenary with readings from various of her books. Read More
May 20, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: 60 Fotos, Maud Newton’s Rapture By The Paris Review More looking than reading: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 60 Fotos. Errata Editions has reprinted the entirety of the original 1930 book, a series of photographs, photograms, and photomontages. Truth be told, each image—geometric, abstract, fluid, distorted, and disquieting—requires as much reading as just looking. —Nicole Rudick It sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but it’s not: soon, you may be able to take a blood test that can estimate how long you have to live. It may be too late, though, seeing as the Rapture is due to occur tomorrow. —Natalie Jacoby Whether or not you believe the world is going to end tomorrow, read Maud Newton on having her fortieth birthday coincide with the Rapture. —Thessaly La Force With a stunning and tragic Giro d’Italia in full swing in Europe and the Amgen Tour of California rolling closer to home, it’s been a good time to dig out The Rider, Tim Krabbé’s fictionalization of the 1977 Tour du Mont Aigoual race in southern France. The bikes are heavier and sprockets smaller than the feats of engineering raced today, but the raw drive to suffer and dominate that animates Krabbé’s lean staccato hasn’t aged a day. —Peter Conroy In his recent Paris Review interview, Ray Bradbury claims to have modeled The Martian Chronicles after Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I’m fond of Bradbury, and I’m fond of (and from) Ohio, and a friend recently passed Anderson’s short-story cycle along as suggested reading. It hit the mark for me, not least for its chilly evocations of claustrophobic, small-town America. —Stephen Andrew Hiltner Rob Delaney really panders to my weird, should-I-open-this-URL-at-work sense of humor. Recently, I was very happy to learn he’ll be writing a new column for Vice magazine. I’ve never been more excited about feeling like I did something wrong or inappropriate, which is how I feel when I read his jokes. —N. J.
May 20, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Good Food Writing; Crazy People By Lorin Stein Since being diagnosed with various health and digestive problems, I’ve had to change my diet and lifestyle drastically. In order to feel more as if it’s my decision and not my doctor’s, I have read various books on diet and nutrition, like Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet and Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. But diet and nutrition books are one thing. Now I’ve discovered the amazing thing that is food writing, through my reading of Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat. Who needs to eat bad food when you can read delicious descriptions of good food? I’m officially converted, but I don’t know enough about food writing to know where to turn next. Can you recommend some good food books? —Hannah Gómez Dear Hannah, To answer your question, we enlisted Gena Hamshaw, who for years maintained a double life as a brilliant book editor and a plant-based nutritionist. She kindly sent us the following: Isn’t it amazing to discover how much nutrition writing pales in comparison to really wonderful food writing? If you’re just getting into the world of gastronomical prose, you should probably begin by reading everything M. F. K. Fisher ever wrote. And if that’s too much, do at least read The Gastronomical Me, How to Cook a Wolf, and An Alphabet for Gourmets. They’re all exquisitely written, brilliant, and sumptuous, but never precious (which is a rare balance in the world of food writing). When you’ve finished devouring the Fisher oeuvre, you may want to explore some of Elizabeth David’s work, which is a little more exacting but no less smart. French Country Cooking and French Provincial Cooking are the real stars, but if you’ve had enough of France, Italian Food is great, too. A little more contemporary but just as compelling are Laurie Colwin’s food books; Home Cooking is a must read. And if you’re interested in the politics of food just as much as its pleasures, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is fairly indispensable. Of course, lots of cookbooks feature writing that’s fine enough to stand apart from the mouth-watering photos and instructions. I’m thinking in particular of Anna Thomas’s The New Vegetarian Epicure, which might as well be an essay collection, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (don’t let the candid and modest attitude fool you; the writing is superb), and most anything by Alice Waters. Mark Bittman’s writing is direct but sparkling with wit. Keep in mind, though, that some of today’s best food writing is on the web. Food blogs are tremendous resources, not only of recipes, but also of passionate and erudite food writing. I recommend Clotilde Dusoulier’s Chocolate and Zucchini, Shauna Ahern’s Gluten Free Girl, Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette, and, if you’ve got the patience for a perspective that’s as far from Paleo as can be, you can poke around my blog, Choosing Raw. Explore blogrolls and comments: the food-blog world is rich and full of excited writers. Happy reading, Gena As a general rule of thumb, how can you tell if a crazy person is too crazy? —Going Nuts Boredom. At least this is the view I heard years ago from a psychiatrist who spent his career treating schizophrenia. The tell-tale sign of insanity (he said) is to be profoundly boring to other people. There are some obvious holes in this theory; still, I like it on pragmatic grounds. Let’s say a crazy person may be too crazy, but he or she interests you. Then you may want to say “too crazy for what?” Whereas, if somebody’s droning on till you think you might cry—even if that person’s in his or her right mind, who cares? It may not be grounds for committal, but you still want to get off the phone. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
May 20, 2011 Letter from Our Southern Editor Charles Hardin Holly; Clovis, New Mexico; May 27, 1957 By John Jeremiah Sullivan Dear Lorin, A time comes when it’s healthful to put aside obscurantism and turn to bedrock, if only briefly. And while I flatter myself in thinking you know me as a man not prone to get overly excited about digital-remastering projects, nevertheless there are instances in which the beauty of the original song lay precisely in a primary attempt to expose its elements, and in these cases the additional stripping away of hiss and other shit can be revelatory, or in this instance (Best Ever: Buddy Holly, Techniche 2009), transformative. That plane crash was a Hindenburg of pop. It’s taken me into my midthirties to mentally recover the true damage of it from Don McLean’s rhymes. Ever really listen to “La Bamba”? You’ve probably unconsciously sold yourself on the idea that the Los Lobos version is slightly superior. Not so! It’s not the guitar, either, but the voice. When angels sing rock for fun they sound like Ritchie Valens. Did you know it’s Carol Kaye playing rhythm guitar there? Did you know Valens was seventeen when he died, that “La Bamba” hadn’t even been released yet? Snowy field in northern Iowa, flames. If you listen to the live versions of “La Bamba,” Valens played it basically like a sped-up Mexican folk song. Only in the studio did the ecstatic thing happen–at the point of intersection. I read somewhere that Valens didn’t even like it. On “Not Fade Away,” Jerry Allison plays a cardboard box (he’d ripped the idea from Buddy Knox’s lyrically creepy “Party Doll”). The beat is cartoonishly African. If you want to hear where it came from, listen to the song I hope to keep if the people in charge of the survival pod say you can keep only one, Charles Barnett’s “Run to My Jesus for Refuge.” Barnett was a Georgia man in his nineties. Alan Lomax met him at the end of a sand lane near the Sea Islands, right around the time Buddy Holly was making his song. Lomak asked, “Know Any Tunes?”. Barnett flipped a washtub over and started beating on it with two sticks, playing some of the most tenth-dimensional counterpoint you’ve ever heard, with galloping runs that suddenly freeze into cosmic pauses. “Mary, she wore a golden chain, / Every link was Jesus’ name. / I’m gonna run to my Jesus for refuge.” Supposedly Barnett could still jump into the air and click his heels together, at ninety-he-didn’t-even-know-what. Read More
May 19, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tom Nissley, Writer and Game-Show Contestant, Part 2 By Tom Nissley This is the second installment of Nissley’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:55 A.M. The pinnacle of my first day after I left my job in March was going to see a weekday matinee of The Fighter. I joked it would be matinees every day from then on, but I hadn’t indulged since, until today when my wife, Laura (who also works from home), and I play hooky at a noon show of The Lincoln Lawyer (H). We are two-thirds of the audience. As nice as it is to be out with my honey, and as indelible a spot Matthew McConaughey has in our hearts thanks to his early turn as Wooderson, The Lincoln Lawyer is no Fighter, sad to say. I go in hoping for an expert course in plot mechanics (a refresher I can always use), but feel instead like I am walking down the “Thriller” aisle at Plot Depot. A small prize, though: spotting a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet on top of a stack in McConaughey’s nicely cluttered office (my eye always shoots to the bookshelves). 5:30 P.M. I meet two newish friends, Maria and George, for a quick dinner before trivia night at the Washington Athletic Club. I think I had played pub trivia once (and lost) before going pro, and afterward, becoming a post-Jeopardy! ringer was the last thing I had in mind. But my friend Ryan made an offer I couldn’t refuse: joining him for trivia night with two transplants from LA I wanted to meet—Maria, a fellow novelist who used to write for, among other things, Arrested Development, and George, who seems too unassuming to enjoy being called legendary but what else can you say? Last month we trampled the competition, but tonight, in between talk about Ryan’s and Maria’s upcoming novels, the pecking order at TED conferences (which may have inspired this), the Luna Park/Largo heyday of LA comedy, and even last month’s Paris Review Revel, where George and Maria got to talk to Terry Southern’s widow after seeing his papers at the New York Public Library, we finish second, which still pays for our drinks. 9:40 P.M. Back at home, to the more orderly trivia territory of Jeopardy!, for the first half of the teachers’ final. Okay, Coryat of 37,600, but I need to read up on Biblical women, astronomy, and country music. Read More