March 11, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Peter Stamm; Coping Without DFW By Lorin Stein I really loved The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and am looking to read more contemporary literature in translation. Are there any books you would recommend for starters? Well, I’m in the middle of a new translated novel that I can’t wait to go home and finish: Seven Years, by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm. I had never heard of Stamm—I picked the book up because the translator is Michael Hofmann. If Michael Hofmann thinks a book is worth spending that much time on, I’m always happy to read it. So far I am not disappointed. Seven Years begins like a Turgenev novella, in the present day, with a slightly disillusioned architect looking back on the youthful love affair that became his marriage, and on another love affair that didn’t. Just the kind of thing I like. And (as my friend Eric Banks pointed out last night—because it turns out he’s read it, too), Stamm deals convincingly with architects and architecture, something you don’t find in a novel every day. David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer, but I now find it hard to read him without becoming desperately sad. Please can you suggest ways of coping? —Hermione The last time I tried to reread Infinite Jest, I had the same feeling, and stopped. Then I got a note from a friend who, like Wallace, has suffered over the years from debilitating depression. My friend described how her last depression lifted. I can’t resist quoting her here, because what she wrote struck me as beautiful but also because it reminded me that Wallace overcame and overcame his sense of isolation, not only in life, but in his fiction, too—in Infinite Jest, for starters, the least solipsistic of contemporary novels, or even at moments in his last collection, the one my friend was reading: One day in late summer, I decided to give Oblivion another try, or rather to give this one story “‘Good Old Neon” a try. It was a collection I’d previously struggled with. But that story, reading it at the time I did, truly gave me this surge of Spirit—life force—that I doubt I would have found anywhere else. The story’s antihero trapped in various self-created hells of bad faith, and the narrator explaining to him that while we all get hung up on being untrue to ourselves, or faking our way through life, the vastness and complexity of our selves is such that we really couldn’t begin to fake them … We’re tied to the mast of these huge crazy ships, ploughing into dark, icy seas, and our only recourse is an occasional change of hat … He puts it about a million times more elegantly than that. It was one of the moments of the year. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
March 10, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Daniel Okrent, Writer and Editor, Part 2 By Daniel Okrent This is the second installment of Okrent’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR Rubenfeld hasn’t sent anything soaring over the wrong river recently, but he does have Al Jolson singing to a swing band accompaniment about ten years before swing came into vogue. The book is extremely fast-paced and well-plotted, but if you hold it up next to one particular book set in a similar time, and similarly dependent on the imagined lives of real historical figures, it’s paler than a bedsheet. The book I have in mind, of course, is E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and I say of course because if you were alive and literate in 1975, you’ve read it. I don’t think there’s a novel that has evoked such universal enthusiasm in the years since. Doctorow already had a minor reputation, but this single book was like a comet screaming across the cosmos, the subject of cover stories, lengthy reviews, talk-show discussions, et cetera, for weeks and weeks. I want to read it again. Tonight, the Prazak Quartet at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Four Czechs, former classmates at the Prague conservatory, playing Beethoven, Janacek, and Schubert with an earthy quality not so common among American chamber groups. Weill might be the most beautiful music room in New York, its proportions ideal, its acoustics excellent (especially in the tiny balcony), each of its glowing chandeliers an especially opulent grace note. I just wish it weren’t named after the donor who made it possible. Sandy Weill has been extraordinarily generous with New York institutions and should get credit for that, but one suspects he’s more interested in credit than in music. The only time I’ve ever seen him at Carnegie—whose board he chaired for years—was at a black-tie fund-raising gala. In his truly egregious autobiography, with its peacocking title and subtitle (The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy), he mentions exactly two pieces of music over the course of 544 pages: “Happy Birthday,” and the title song from Oklahoma! Excuse the digression. Lovely room, stirring music, great evening. Could have done without the ridiculous “15 bite hot dog” at the Brooklyn Diner before the concert, but that was my own fault. Read More
March 10, 2011 Arts & Culture Foreign Idiot By Christine Smallwood On a recent Saturday afternoon, the British psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delivered a talk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music titled “Acting Madness.” The event was being held in conjunction with BAM’s spring season, which features three plays about madness: David Holman’s adaptation of Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”; Macbeth; and King Lear. In a row with plenty of other seats, a young man with a wispy beard and glasses took the place directly next to mine. He was wearing, I noticed at once, a Paris Review T-shirt. My mind leaped as though a starter pistol had been fired. It was all so obvious: The Paris Review had sent this person to check up on me. In his essay “First Hates,” from On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Phillips usefully glosses paranoia as the refusal to be left out. That is, much worse than the fear that everyone is talking about you is the fear that no one is talking about you. As the gentleman in question and I waited in silence, I performed a little Phillips-inspired self-analysis. Either The Paris Review had sent this man here to stalk me, and he was announcing his intentions with his T-shirt, or he was a Phillips enthusiast and also a reader of The Paris Review—even my paranoiac fantasy had to concede this as a likely demographic crossover. Embarrassed, I meditated, very briefly, on my own unimportance. The Paris Review would survive with or without my post. This unimportance was a fact I was going to have to live with, because living without it—believing that this man had donned an official T-shirt in order to more conspicuously surveil my blogging—was crazy. Read More
March 9, 2011 On Music Nadia Sirota and Her Viola By Dawn Chan Photograph by Samantha West. “You are such a good drink, for a four o’clock drink,” Nadia Sirota tells her Campari and soda. Then, with a sort of resigned discipline, she also orders pizza so as not to turn up sloshed at her next gig in two hours. Sirota, a violist and radio host, has dark hair styled into sideways bangs, dark eyes, a tough-talking, trenchant sense of humor, and inked forearms. She explains that her tattoos—a stylized letter N and letter H, followed by brackets—are musical markings. Arnold Schoenberg used them in scores to denote what he called the Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, or the primary voice and secondary voice in a composition. Though she’s lately become an omnipresent figure in New York’s downtown music concerts, she’s probably less known than others in her circle (like her friend and frequent collaborator Nico Muhly). Perhaps it’s because creators tend to get more attention than interpreters. Or maybe it’s just because violists, to everyone’s detriment, tend to get no attention at all. Yet Sirota has collaborated with everyone from Meredith Monk to Grizzly Bear; she contributed to Arcade Fire’s recent Grammy-winning album, The Suburbs. This week alone, she goes from Webcasting a sold-out show at Le Poisson Rouge to moderating a discussion with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at WNYC to playing a recital with friends at the Ecstatic Music Festival that is tonight at Merkin Concert Hall. As with many violists, Sirota started by playing the violin as a child but soon grew frustrated with the repertoire. “The advanced-intermediate violin pieces are all these flashy stand-on-your-head études, which suck, musically. I mean, I just didn’t give a shit. And I didn’t want to put my time into learning how to do those kinds of tricks, when I didn’t feel like I was getting anything musical from it.” She adds, “I switched to viola around the same time I became an alto. Viola sounds like a man singing very high, or a woman singing very low. It has a sort of intermediate gender-weirdness thing which also I find very appealing.” She was a natural at the viola; as a Juilliard student in 2005, she won first place in the conservatory’s concerto competition. Read More
March 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Daniel Okrent, Writer and Editor By Daniel Okrent DAY ONE In just three weeks, I’ve discovered the best way to ruin Sunday morning coffee is to read the New York Times Book Review—not because I don’t like the reviews, or the reviewers, or the choice of books (although I could, on any given Sunday, kvetch about each of those). My problem is the continuing metastasis of the best-seller lists—hardcover, mass paperback, trade paperback, kids books, advice, et cetera, now joined by e-books as a separate category. Where once the lists took up a single page of the Book Review, they now spill over page after page, every inch they consume necessarily taking away space that could be devoted to … reviews. Maybe the proliferation of lists is an act of spite directed at publishers who have cut their advertising budgets so radically that the accompanying editorial space is already disappearing. My wife and I went downtown to the Mesa Grill, where I hadn’t been for fifteen years, to meet friends for lunch before a matinee performance of Three Sisters at the Classic Stage Company. Mesa is about as authentically Mexican as this production was authentically Chekhovian—which is to say, not nearly enough. Some excellent actors (especially Juliet Rylance, as Irina) nonetheless managed to triumph over a peculiar, modernizing translation that placed contemporary idioms into the mouths of turn-of-the-last-century characters. If you’re going to use modern speech rhythms and colloquialisms—which is certainly a plausible, if peculiar, option—then why put all the characters in nineteenth-century clothing, in a nineteenth-century house? Still, it was well-acted Chekhov, and that’s good enough for me. Dinner afterward in Brooklyn, at the home of poet Vijay Seshadri and his wife, Suzanne. Vijay is a spectacular talker, able to bounce from the most recondite literary subjects to Eastern theology to pot-roast recipes without pausing for a comma. The pot roast was damn good, too. Among the other guests was Mark Strand, who is much too tall and handsome for his own good. But at least he’s old. DAY TWO Picked up Michael Steinberg’s For the Love of Music, which came in the mail from my Minneapolis pen pal, Katie McCurry. A couple of years ago, Katie sent me an incredibly nice fan e-mail about a book I’d published six years earlier, and we’ve been writing to each other ever since. She’s a big music fan, and Steinberg—a past master of program notes for orchestras across the country—was one of her heroes. I see why: The opening piece, about how he fell in love with music as a child, is especially strong. The fact that it was Disney’s Fantasia that pulled him in makes me feel less dorky for having myself been seduced by the William Tell Overture. The association I made between classical music and the Lone Ranger’s gallop across the twelve-inch screen of our black-and-white Zenith was so firmly embedded in my eight-year-old skull that when my mother told me she was going to a concert featuring the Robert Shaw Chorale, I heard corral—and thought the concert would consist of an orchestra accompanying horse tricks. This week’s subway reading is The Death Instinct, by Jed Rubenfeld. Rubenfeld is better known as a Yale law professor than as a novelist, and of late even better known as the husband of Tiger Mom Amy Chua. I picked the book up because of the incredible review in the daily New York Times (“Tremendous follow-up to his 2006 novel, Interpretation of Murder … This novel is great”). I may put it down if I encounter another egregious clam like this one, on page twelve: “To their right rose up incomprehensibly tall skyscrapers. To their left, the Brooklyn Bridge soared over the Hudson.” Astonishing. Read More
March 8, 2011 Notes from a Biographer Letter from Japan By Sam Stephenson Stephenson has been blogging for The Daily about W. Eugene Smith, the subject of his forthcoming biography. Here, he writes to managing editor Nicole Rudick from Okinawa, Japan. Dear Nicole, Today is my fourteenth day in Japan. The first nine days were in Tokyo, followed by four in Minamata, and now Okinawa. In a few days I’ll leave here for Saipan, Guam, and Iwo Jima, all part of my month-long Pacific tour on Gene Smith’s trail. Photograph by W. Eugene Smith. Courtesy of Takeshi Ishikawa. Smith often said he felt like he was from Japan in a former life. His second wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, was Japanese American, and he made three extended trips here: beginning as a combat photographer in World War II, then to Tokyo in the early sixties, and Minamata in the early seventies. I spent my first two weeks interviewing his former associates through my interpreter, Momoko Gill. The prevailing responses—some of them wordless, from body language to tears—were similar to what jazz pianist Freddie Redd once told me: “Gene Smith is just a sweet memory.” In New York, Smith’s appeal wore thin among those that relied on him or expected things from him—publishers, gallery owners, benefactors, people from the “official” side of things. I don’t blame them. He couldn’t finish anything he started. He wrote long, complaining letters to people he barely knew, copying paragraphs verbatim from letters he’d written to others. He’d fake injuries for sympathy. His quixotic grandiosity—linked to feverish moral imperatives, alcoholism, amphetamine addiction, and bipolar disorder—went from valiant to insufferable. But over the past two weeks, I haven’t heard anything that indicates he behaved like that in Japan. Nor did he with jazz musicians and underground characters in the New York loft. He drank heavily in both places, though. I’m left wondering about the relation, for Smith, between people in Japan and the transient loft figures. Read More