February 17, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: ‘Bunting’s Persia,’ Dickinson’s Manuscripts By The Paris Review In you’re in the New York area, tomorrow is the last day to see the unmissable exhibition of rare Emily Dickinson manuscripts and letters at Poets House. This is the first time much of this material has been on view; who knows when it will be again. It’s also worth making the trip to see poet and artist Jen Bervin’s striking quilts, which are stitched according to the symbols and corresponding variant words in Dickinson’s fascicles. —Nicole Rudick In the early 1930s, the young English poet Basil Bunting taught himself Farsi with a dictionary and a copy of the Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh, given to him by Ezra Pound. (“It’s an easy language,” Bunting explained, “if it’s only for reading you want it.”) The translations he made are collected in Bunting’s Persia, a slim book, including excerpts from the Shahnameh and lyrics like this one by Sa’di: Without you I’ve not slept, not once in the garden nor cared much whether I slept on holly or flock, lonely to death between one breath and the next only to meet you, hear you, only to touch … I read it on Valentine’s Day. —Lorin Stein This week I found myself fascinated by the New York City Graffiti & Street Art Project, an experiment by the library of Lewis & Clark college that charts the most interesting examples of street art across the city, sorted by neighborhood, media type, subject, and more. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I just stumbled upon this breezy interview with cartoonist Lee Lorenz from last year. Part of The Comics Journal’s “Know Your New Yorker Cartoonist” column, the conversation is an endearing remembrance of a life in pictures, with the added pleasure of some insider gossip. —Josh Anderson Try Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf for a healthy dose of fiery medieval homuncular misanthropy. Great reading material for long, slow queues, crowded subway rides where even the conductor is exasperated, and angry times in general. —Emma del Valle Seventeenth-century love letters, Latin bibles, a Shelley manuscript, and English children’s stories: I’ve suddenly discovered the Morgan Library’s blog. —D.F.M. It’s official: I have an extreme case of Linsanity. —Natalie Jacoby
February 16, 2012 Department of Sex Ed The Fetish By Vanessa Blakeslee The slim novel came my way quite by accident. I had stumbled across a review of the film The Lover and ordered a VHS copy through my movie-of-the-month club. The first Saturday I could secure a house free of hovering parents, my fellow honors English friends and I, as sex obsessed as we were lit geeks, watched, enraptured, Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical depiction of an adolescent girl in French Indochina who embarks on an affair with a wealthy Chinese man. The girl’s family is crass and impoverished, but she is a good student and wants to be a writer. Soon after, I got my hands on a paperback with a cinema-still cover and was not disappointed. “I’m fifteen and a half,” the unnamed narrator repeats early in the book. “There are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we’re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.” Nothing suggested sex as much as sensual lyricism, warm, distant places, and anything French. I was also fifteen and a half, a virgin consumed with the mysteries of sex, of forbidden encounters. I was also going to be a writer. I read the book and watched the film again and again. Just what was The Lover’s appeal? By then I had discovered Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Lolita, but Duras’s novel resonated more acutely, an exotic Lolita tale but told from the woman’s (if she could be called that) point of view. My favorite section was where the narrator describes herself on the ferry, wearing gold lamé high heels and a man’s fedora: “Going to school in evening shoes decorated with little diamanté flowers. I insist on wearing them. I don’t like myself in any others, and to this day I still like myself in them.” It is the day she is about to meet the “Chinaman” for the first time. She is fixated on this particular, outlandish ensemble, as stubborn as a child playing dress up. But the faint hint of pedophilia, of prostitution, fell so far into the background that it became practically invisible to me then, obscured by the striking imagery and strange, lush atmosphere of colonial Saigon. Read More
February 16, 2012 Studio Visit Leanne Shapton By Thessaly La Force It’s no secret how much I admire Leanne Shapton. The former art director of The New York Times’ Op-Ed page is also the author of several books, including Was She Pretty? and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. She’s also a contributor to The Paris Review. Open any of the last four issues to glimpse her beautiful illustrations of Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich. Or buy issue 196, whose cover she painted. I visited her studio space north of Manhattan last spring. I can still remember her dog, Bunny, running to greet me. Leanne served tea and sweets, and we talked long after I turned off my tape recorder. I wake up, walk the dog, or let the dog out. I’ll pretty much start working right off the top, depending on what I need to do, on deadlines. I was talking to Sheila Heti about how and where we work. Sometimes I feel I get a lot done waiting for something else, with my shoes and coat on, with the car running. I don’t have a set routine. I can work for hours at a time, but I get a lot of stuff done in these weird starts and stops, which makes it a little bit harder to track. I have so many backs of envelopes with notes written on them in my pockets or stuffed into the side door of a car. I also use my Blackberry to write myself notes. Last night, I wrote myself an e-mail that said, “Tough girls with dark pink skin, England air, etc.” Now it’s sort of coming back to me, but when I woke up and read it, I was like, “What? What did I drink?” Lots happens in these little spaces between work and eating and sleeping. Sheila said she had this image of me standing up—you know how you stand up and eat when you’re really hungry? Well I stand up and work. It’s not a Hemingway thing, it’s more like I have to get this done, because the elevator is coming up. Some thing happens then. And that’s when I work. Read More
February 15, 2012 Bulletin Win Two Free Tickets to ‘Seminar’ By Sadie Stein In Theresa Rebeck’s highly acclaimed Seminar, now playing at the Golden Theatre in New York, four aspiring young novelists sign up for private writing classes with Leonard (Alan Rickman), an international literary figure. Under his recklessly brilliant and unorthodox instruction, some thrive and others flounder, alliances are made and broken, sex is used as a weapon and hearts come unmoored. The wordplay is not the only thing that turns vicious as innocence collides with experience … Of course, here at 62 White Street, this sort of thing is just another day at the office! But for anyone eager to experience the underbelly of the literary world—not to mention a night of great theater—here’s your chance. We’re giving away eight pairs of tickets to Seminar, valid through March 18. Subscribe or renew between now and Tuesday, February 21, to be eligible. We’ll randomly draw winners next week—but really, with a full year of poetry, fiction, and interviews in the offing, everyone wins! *The Paris Review is not responsible for transportation or lodging.
February 15, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. #litpickuplines. Literary speed dating. Literary love letters. “Some people have made seduction a way of life. Incapable of resisting opportunities, they give priority to the nascent state; they are collectors of beginnings.” The museum of failed relationships. “It’s easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the internet.” Matilda comes to Broadway. Homer, Inc. Is this how you imagined Sam Spade? Drive-by poetry. García Márquez-inspired fashion. Houston-inspired books. “I used to avoid talking about audio books.”
February 15, 2012 Arts & Culture Fever Pitch By Morgan Macgregor Morgan and Taylor, a collage. Have you seen this video of a three-year-old weeping over Justin Bieber? It became an Internet phenomenon, culminating in Jimmy Kimmel flying the toddler to his show so she could sit on Bieber’s lap. A lot of people thought it was pretty cute. Others found it disturbing, lumping it in with the broader societal problem of the sexualization of increasingly young girls. This particular example may be a little extreme: she’s three. But there’s a general feeling out that girls are crushing way too hard, way too young, on the boys they see in magazines. Look around, and you’ll find no shortage of six-, eight-, ten-year-olds in the grip of a pretty serious Bieber fever. I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. Remember Hanson? For about five years of my life, they were my life. Them, and another band, The Moffatts. The Moffatts were the Canadian Hanson: an all-brother band that sang and played instruments and had hundreds of thousands of utterly rabid, scarily desperate young girls tearing their hair out over them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I spent the years between the ages of thirteen and seventeen doing very little aside from obsessing over these two bands. Or that between 1996 and 2000 I went to more than a hundred of their concerts, television spots, autograph sessions, radio interviews, and other public appearances. That I followed them around most of Canada and a good part of the United States. Or that I spent, in total, probably about sixty nights sleeping in parking lots, on sidewalks, in decrepit motels, and in the back of a minivan. My friends and I once spent four nights in a Walmart parking lot, in the rain, just to be first in an autograph line. Yes, I had friends. I had a posse, and we were famous in the world of band fans. We were interviewed in newspapers and by radio and television stations everywhere we went. The Life Network did a special on us called The Things We Do for Love. When we showed up at the Sally Jesse Raphael show in New York, to see The Moffatts, the fans waiting outside the studio screamed for us, asked us for our autographs. We were famous for loving famous people. Read More