September 24, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Books for the Well-Read; Narratology By Lorin Stein My ex-boyfriend’s birthday is fast approaching. He’s not just any ex—he’s The Ex, the one responsible for approximately ninety percent of my current taste in books, film, and music. We’re still friends, and I want to buy him a book, but I’m stuck. What do you buy for the man who’s read everything, and introduced you to all the authors you love? —Joelle D. Come with a backup. My friend Jennifer and I tend to like the same books, but she has read much, much more than I have. So a few years ago, when I gave her Henry Green’s novel Loving, I kept stashed away (already wrapped up) J. R. Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself. She’d read both, as it turned out … but claimed that she had been “meaning to reread Ackerley for years.” It was such a nice lie. I hope your ex would say the same were he in her shoes. He sounds lucky to have you! Read More
September 24, 2010 Arts & Culture Good-Bye to All That: The Basquiat Cult By Christian Viveros-Fauné Jean-Michel Basquiat, from “Tuxedo,” in issue 87, Spring 1983. Jean-Michel Basquiat would be turning fifty years old this fall. Instead, he has been dead for twenty-two years, the victim, at twenty-seven, of a 1988 heroin overdose the art world witnessed more or less firsthand. Basquiat’s crack-up begat a frenzy of speculation that drove that decade’s art-market crash (since the rise of the contemporary auction ecosystem, there seems to be about one every decade). His funeral reportedly featured more art dealers than mourners; Jeffrey Deitch—now the director of LA MoCA, then the high-flying founder of Citibank’s art-advising arm—gave the eulogy. According to Phoebe Hoban’s detailed account in her unsparing book Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, the ruined artist left behind “917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171 paintings.” That, and a counterfeit fable of overnight sensation for biographers, filmmakers, and groupies to pore over. Read More
September 24, 2010 Department of Sex Ed Trashy Is as Trashy Does By Jillian Lauren My first sexual fantasy involved my abduction by a composite character made up of equal parts Danny Zucko from Grease and the weathered carny who had looked me dead in the nine-year-old eye as he pulled the lever of the Tilt-A-Whirl. The post-abduction details were unimportant. What mattered was the moment of being caught; what mattered was the fact that one moment I’d be navigating the root-torn sidewalk of my street and the next an arm would be around my waist and the world would be set into wild motion. The next fantasy I can remember was a lesbian prison gang rape. I appropriated this fantasy not from the wonders of cable TV but from books. My mother was a voracious reader, if not a discerning one. Lining her shelves were the eighties airport standbys: V. C. Andrews, Danielle Steele, and Sidney Sheldon. Every night I sat on my white wicker bed and read trashy novels by flashlight until I began to understand what sex was in those stories—a plot device. Sex, I learned from my reading, was a function of power and nothing more. If one could just wield it properly, one might figure out a way to win a happy ending, or at least a prison protector. But it wasn’t until age fourteen that I met Seymour Glass and fell in love. I read Nine Stories and read it again and found that it left me suffering more sleepless, feverish nights than the carny and Danielle Steele combined. I wasn’t even sure why I related to it exactly. I had so little in common with the female characters who populated Salinger’s landscape—slim, Gentile women in camel-hair coats sunk in noble pain while standing on train platforms in New England college towns. There is nothing literary about the pain of a fat, Jewish Jersey girl wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and sitting on a bench in the Livingston mall, eating bagels and smoking cigarettes. And yet, boiled down to the metaphysics of the thing, there was my world, a world of persistent discomfort and inappropriate hunger. A world in which perilous desire trembles just under the surface of the polite world. Seymour kisses the arch of a small foot and moments later puts a bullet into his brain. Eloise, drunk and heartbroken, kills her daughter’s imaginary friend. It was a world of sensual details and dangerous, irreparable moments. I first read Nine Stories and felt the nakedness of being recognized in my loneliness. Desire wasn’t a narrative device with a neat payoff; rather, it was an ocean of longing that unfolded toward an ever-receding horizon. The book got inside me in a way that changed me irrevocably and, conversely, felt like it had been there all along. And that, I imagined, would be what having a lover would feel like. Trashy novels encouraged me to employ sex as a strategy. But it was ultimately Salinger who made me want to fuck. Jillian Lauren is the author of the memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Her novel, Pretty, will be published by Plume next summer.
September 24, 2010 Arts & Culture Good-Bye to All That: Deitchland By Charlie Finch When Jeffrey Deitch opened his gallery in Soho in 1995, his program had promise. He exhibited the great Japanese artist of sound and light Mariko Mori, Chen Zhen’s installation of street latrines from Beijing (a tribute by the late artist to the old ladies tasked to clean them), and the African-American performance artist Jocelyn Taylor, who took over the windows of a whole Soho block to create an ironic red-light district—the highpoint in a career that would dissipate thereafter. Read More
September 23, 2010 Events Tonight: Lorin Stein Chats with Jean-Christophe Valtat By The Paris Review Tonight, at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, Paris Review darling Jean-Christophe Valtat will be reading from his recent novels Aurorarama and 03, and discussing his work with Lorin Stein and Mitzi Angel, the translator of 03. The event begins at 7 P.M. at 58 West 10th Street—please come if you can!
September 23, 2010 At Work Pressing Flesh with Sam Lipsyte By Giancarlo DiTrapano Sam Lipsyte. Photograph by Ceridwen Morris. From his first collection of stories, Venus Drive, to his most recent novel, The Ask, Sam Lipsyte has consistently penned the best comedic literature of the past decade. In the fall issue, he has returned to the short form and chiseled us out what might be his best story to date. It’s your classic tale about a good man with a bad plan. A lot like life, it’s a tale of things almost working out. Last year I interviewed Lipsyte about The Ask. This month he let me do it again, this time about “The Worm in Philly.” The hero of your new story wants to write a book about Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Why Hagler? As the narrator says, why not Hagler? Truth is I’ve always been a Hagler fan. There were things I left out of the story, like his subsequent career as an action-movie star in Italy, or the rumor that he wouldn’t shake hands with white fighters because he refused to touch “white flesh.” I used to follow a fighter named Mustafa Hamsho, who lost to Hagler a few times. I like both of those names a lot. Hagler and Hamsho. Hagler’s baldness was maybe an homage to Jack Johnson, but it was ominous in a fiercely contemporary way. He was kind of a throwback, but there was also the possibility he was from the future. I love the “white flesh” thing. I do that too. I want to talk about drugs though. Without answering the first part of this question, why do I love reading about drugs and why do you love writing about drugs? Why are drugs so hard to resist, whether they’re on the page or in the pocket? I’m glad you do that, Gian. That’s good. I’m not sure why you love reading about drugs. Maybe at a certain point the reading high is better than actually doing them? That could be preposterous though. I guess I’ve written about drugs a good deal because for a time, in my younger days, certain hard substances were the major elements in my life. My movements and decisions revolved around them. I like to pretend it was all some meaningless blur, but it was a very intense and focused time. I had a daily purpose (to get more drugs) that heightened the experience of being alive (a heightening then nullified by the drugs). I felt very alert during the mission phase of the day. Make no mistake, it was a horrible time, but I’ve always been fascinated by that robotic intensity. Also, it’s a way to give your character something to do, and we all know you have to keep those fuckers in motion, or readers might find out they are just constructions in a fiction! I try to make sure the drug-users in my stories aren’t acting high. Most of them tend to do drugs to get straight anyway. They are in that awful place. So their interactions might seem slightly off, but mostly these could easily be people not doing dangerous drugs. It’s just that occasionally they die from their addictions or else make really bad decisions that lead to more misery. That’s where the comedy kicks in. Drugs are hard to resist for some people because they work really well. And then don’t. But you find that out later. Read More