September 5, 2011 Odd Jobs Labor Days By Chris Flynn Detail from Jean-François Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure, 1855, oil on canvas. Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. Here, in honor of Labor Day, T. C. Boyle and Jim Shepard present stories of factory work. T. C. Boyle: I worked one summer at a factory near my hometown of Peekskill. I was a college kid, the other workers were lifers. I was never quite clear what the cast-metal things we made there were—they were called muffins and aximaxes—and I wasn’t much good at repetitive tasks. I was far better at after-work activities, like driving my spavined, oil-burning Renault to the local bars and the deep clear lakes. But when I think back on that time, I see elephant-size pots of molten metal, steam rising—or maybe it was some sort of carcinogenic gas—and I see the one-armed guy my own age, Vinnie, a lifer, to whom I eventually sold my Renault for the same amount I’d paid for it at the beginning of the summer: fifty dollars. My final recollection of him, of that time, that place? Waving good-bye. Jim Shepard: For some weeks one summer when I was in high school I worked as something called a passivator for a company that manufactured cabinets for computers. The cabinets were the size of desks and dressers and made of stainless steel, and the solder marks discolored the steel in rainbow patterns. Those patterns had to be removed, but the steel couldn’t be sanded, so that’s where I came in. I stood in a large sink, like a small above-ground swimming pool made out of steel, in the basement of the building. There, I swabbed the discolorations with a wand covered with gauze soaked in hydrochloric acid. The wand had an electric current flowing through it. The combination of the current and the acid washed away the discolorations like magic. Alas, the fumes from the acid were also so strong that they made it hard for me to see straight. And the gauze had to be changed periodically. And the acid ate through my giant rubber gloves. How would I know when the acid had eaten through too much of the gloves? I would feel, I was told, a slippery sensation, before the burning began. And that was indeed the case. My father put a stop to my working there when he heard, with some disbelief, what I’d been doing. Chris Flynn is the books editor at The Big Issue and the fiction editor at Australian Book Review.
September 2, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Elusive Epigraphs; Travel Books By Lorin Stein Dear Mr. Stein, May I take advantage of the hospitality of your letters column to ask if you or your readers can help me to solve a small puzzle? I have come across an epigraph ascribed to Proust that heads the first chapter of Hamish Miles’s English translation of Édouard VII et son temps by André Maurois (King Edward and His Times, London: Cassell, 1933, p. 1). It reads: “Every social status has its own interest, and to the artist it can be just as compelling to show the ways of a Queen as the habits of a dressmaker. —Marcel Proust.” An excellent colleague of mine remarks that this certainly sounds genuine, and he even wondered if the aperçu came from the bit in Le Côté de Guermantes where Proust talks sniffily about grocers writing aristocratic novels, but I am afraid it is not there. Now we find that the epigraph is nowhere to be found in Maurois’s original French text, so the plot thickens. Much as I am tickled by the idea of an industrious and I daresay underappreciated translator recklessly concocting a spurious epigraph for the purpose of self-promotion, or worse, something tells me that there is an alternative explanation. So can anyone, do you think, identify these lines about “the ways of a Queen” and “the habits of a dressmaker,” and pin them on Proust? Thank you, Angus Trumble We all hoped it was made up. But no. The epigraph comes from “An Historical Salon,” an essay—really, a celebrity profile—that Proust wrote for Le Figaro in late 1902. His subject is the Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, a niece of Napoleon’s and the last Bonaparte to remain in Paris after the fall of the Second Empire. She was known for her literary salons, which included Mérimée, Flaubert, and the Goncourts. In the sentences you quote, Proust has just finished his you-are-there description of one of the princess’s soirées and he’s gearing up for the mini bio (which, in the case of Princesse Mathilde, is slightly delicate, since she left her first husband, a Russian tycoon, for another man, with the connivance of yet another uncle: Czar Nicholas I; it’s good to know people). As translated in F.W. Dupee’s edition of Pleasures and Days, the entire paragraph reads: An artist will serve the truth only, and have no respect for rank. In his portrayals he will take rank into account as a principle of differentiation like nationality, race, or environment. All stations in society have their interest for an artist, and it is as exciting for him to picture the ways of a queen as the habits of a dressmaker. Read More
September 2, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: A Fan’s Notes, Foster Wallace on TV By The Paris Review In light of the recent article about TV producer Michael Schur and his obsession with David Foster Wallace, I spent tropical storm Irene watching the first two seasons of Parks and Recreation for signs of the maestro. At least, that’s why I watched the first couple of episodes. Then, well—it was just like that scene in Infinite Jest with the Saudi medical attaché, only with Netflix. —Lorin Stein September is officially the beginning of football season in America and the perfect time to read the best football book ever written, Frederick Exley’s fictional memoir A Fan’s Notes, which has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with why we watch it. —Cody Wiewandt I was immediately taken with Jeff Sharlet’s new book Sweet Heaven When I Die. All I had to do was open to the first lines of “Sweet Fuck All, Colorado:” “When I was eighteen I fell hard for the state of Colorado as embodied by a woman with long honey blond hair and speckled green eyes, who drank wine from a coffee mug and whiskey from the bottle.” —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I escaped the hurricane but got stuck in Chicago this weekend, which at least gave me a chance to spend time at one of my favorite Evanston bookstores, Market Fresh Books (they sell books for $3.99 a pound!). Among the treasures I picked up was an illustrated 1882 edition of Nicholas Nickleby, which I was all the more excited to dive into after reading in last week’s New Yorker about all the “fun” at Dickens camp. —Ali Pechman Let’s hear it for small presses! Bookthug, an indie house in Toronto, recently reissued bpNichol’s The Captain Poetry Poems. Originally released as a mimeograph by bill bissett in 1970, Bookthug’s edition marks the first complete publication of all of the poems in the series, plus a smattering of drawings by Nichol. This is joyous, mythmaking poetry at its best. —Nicole Rudick Read More
September 1, 2011 Arts & Culture Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns By Roz Chast I first noticed William Steig’s covers and cartoons around 1970, when I was a teenager and would page through my parents’ New Yorker magazines. His drawings didn’t look like the rest of the cartoons in the magazine. They didn’t have gag lines. There were no boardrooms, no cocktail parties with people saying witty things to one another. His men and women looked as if they were out of the Past, although I wasn’t completely clear as to what era of the Past they were from. Sometimes the drawings made me laugh, and sometimes they didn’t, but I always wanted to look at them. I had a sense that these cartoons were made by someone who had had to create his own language, both visual and verbal, with which to express his view of the world. His subjects? Animals, both real and imaginary. Also cowboys, farmers, knights on horseback, damsels in distress, gigantic ladies and teeny-tiny men, grandmas, clowns of indeterminate gender, average joes, families, old couples, young couples, artists, deep thinkers, fools, loners, lovers, and hoboes, among other things. Read More
September 1, 2011 Poetry Poem: Remembering the Children of First Marriages By Lucy Tunstall Lucy Tunstall’s poems leaped out at us from the slush pile for their fresh, unfussy takes on the vagaries of contemporary life; she is one of those poets whose voice already seems familiar. “Remembering the Children of First Marriages” invokes the structured repetition and close observation that make Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” (“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey”) so extraordinary; here, Tunstall, a British poet, turns her gaze not to a winsome cat, but to children of divorce, as if they, too, could be held up to the light and anatomized. An irony, of course, is that there is nothing singular about children of divorce. —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
August 31, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Novelist and poet Susan Fromberg Schaeffer has died at seventy-one. Ruth Rendell speaks out on health cuts. Snape, the dark-horse winner of a Harry Potter popularity contest. This is controversial. What to read when you’re sick. P. G. Wodehouse: the movie. Javier Cercas: “I respect music too much—if I write I write, if I listen I listen.” Tweeting from beyond the grave? Samples of Obama’s summer reading. The most-wanted out-of-print title? Madonna’s Sex. The first Kashmir Book Festival has been canceled amid fears of violence. She Loves You: the Beatles and pronoun use. A. S. Byatt: “I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.”