September 1, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Radhika Jones, Editor By Radhika Jones DAY ONE MORNING Tea and the NYT Editor’s Choice on the iPad. Morning commute: F train, relatively uncrowded because it’s the end of August. Reading survey reveals it’s a periodical-dominated morning: the Times, the WSJ, the Metro, the Post, and two people facing off with The New Yorker. I pull out my advanced reader’s copy of Skippy Dies, which I am in the middle of, and which is so absorbing that I need to be careful not to miss my stop. Second cup of tea steeping in office kitchen. Delightful news via memo left under my door: from now on, the motion-sensor light in my office will only come on if I push it. I hate the fluorescent light, but until now have been powerless to disengage it. Now I will just never turn it on! Wake up computer and look at Time.com to see what my colleagues have been up to overnight. Also look at the NYTimes Web site, and the Guardian, and Talking Points Memo. And a few book blogs, an old Paris Review habit I’ve reignited in these slightly news-slow summer months—which is how I come across the sad story of the death of VQR‘s managing editor. On deck for this morning: signing off on finished magazine pages; ideas meeting; edits for next week. Also opening all the mail that has piled up in the last few weeks. I should open my mail every day. Then it would not pile up. I know that, but sometimes I rebel, and this time it has gotten so bad that random colleagues have begun stopping by my office and offering to help me open it. I am the office Collyer Brother. Morning meeting over. Half an hour until next meeting. Office gloriously unfluorescent. Work takes on low-lit, romantic flavor. E-mail from my brother wondering which Scrabble app he should download so we can play together. I want to play with him, but he lives in Andover, Mass., so if we are to play, I will have to join Facebook. Open InCopy. I love InCopy. It lets me work in layout, and secretly I’ve always wanted to be a graphic designer. This reminds me that I never saw that documentary Helvetica, all about the font. Turn on iPad and add Helvetica to Netflix queue. It’s available for instant viewing! Maybe I will watch it this weekend. Meetings meetings meetings. Lunch! AFTERNOON Back at my desk after Italian food and a lovely chat with an entertainment publicist who fills me in on a few fall movies. Caitlin Roper (of Paris Review fame) alerts me to a tweet from Bill Burton saying the President just bought a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. I’m going to go ahead and assume that’s because we put Franzen on the cover of Time. President Obama, if you need any more book recommendations, feel free to call me directly. I think you’d really like David Mitchell. Heroically refrain from reading Skippy Dies during multicolor wheel spin while waiting for InCopy file to open. Culturally with-it colleague Gilbert Cruz drops by, ostensibly with a work question but actually to recommend I watch the Free Willy horror movie recut on YouTube. It’s fantastic. Then we watch The Shining recut as romantic comedy. Then, because I am a Harry Potter fan, I must read “Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Gitmo” on time.com, about the books on offer for Guantanamo detainees. Call neighborhood bookstore, BookCourt on Court Street, to see about the first Paul Murray book. They don’t have it, alas. Meanwhile, twilight is coming on, and it’s kind of dark in here. May need to buy an office lamp. LATER Writing headlines is hard. LATER STILL I’m done for the day. Skippy and I are reunited! EVENING Friday nights were made for catching up on Top Chef. Life before DVR—I’ve blocked it from my memory. Read More
August 31, 2010 Arts & Culture A Love Letter to Elvis Costello By Adam Wilson I came to cynicism late. The others had been listening to punk rock for years, espousing anarchy on bathroom walls, wallowing in upper-middle class suburban angst. But my parents were still together, and believed in human goodness. I took their sixties idealism, cradled it until that first girl fucked my friend instead of me. But back up a couple years. Here’s me, age twelve, brink of puberty, pale moustache coming in like dawn through a bend in the windowshade. I’m in a baseball card store, too old to be buying baseball cards. Alison’s at the counter. “Topps?” she says. “Fleer? Upper Deck?” “Upper Deck,” I say. Alison turns, reaches. Blonde hair hangs almost to the small of her back. T-shirt rides up, revealing a swath of plumber’s butt. Stretch-marked handles spill over hips. This is love. My father removes a record from its sleeve, blows dust. Dust hangs in the summer sunlight. My heart is a helium tank. I float. The man on the cover is puberty incarnate. His knees are elbows. His ankles angle inwards. He could use a new pair of glasses. I get the first line wrong. “It’s so funny to be seeing you after so long girl.” I hear “It’s so funny to be seeing you at the salon girl.” Because this record is an artifact from the eighties. Men spent that era in hair salons. How else the Jheri curl? How else the shimmering Jew-fro my father still sports? But I’m not looking. I’m listening. I’m picturing Alison the card shop owner, hair blow-dried into staticky orbit around her pink dome, hair photosynthesized, hair blooming like sunflower blossoms, framing her pistil face, awaiting my stamen, awaiting pollination. Then the chorus: “Oh Alison, I know this world is killing you. Oh Alison, my aim is true.” My hometown: the median household income is $25,000. Alison: bordering on obese, breaking her back, bending for our allowance money. Alison, this world is killing you. Let me be your savior. My aim is true. To my untrained, un-jaded ears, Elvis sounded so sincere. But high school is a cruel carnival. Every ride ends in tears. Every game is rigged. Good prizes unattainable. All you win is some shitty stuffed walrus, sweatshop stitched. My best friend was Paul Gunzburger. People called us Wils-Burger. I rode on the back of his moped. People called us gay. I sported limp blonde locks and girlishly un-chiseled arms. People called me Hanson, like the band. Sang “Hmmbop” as I passed in the halls. We met a girl. Sexiest unibrow you’ve ever seen. Hips like a hip-hop muse. Always had her own weed stash. Read More
August 30, 2010 On Sports Rooting For Muscles By Louisa Thomas It’s a weird moment for women’s tennis. Not bad, but weird. Watch the bizarre slow-motion video montage of “women who hit very hard” on the Times website. Then watch it again. Underneath the glitter, these Amazons are straight out of Herodotus. But with the exception of the Serena Williams and perhaps the leonine Kim Cljisters, the glittering women here (Dementieva, Jankovic, Stosur, Azarenka, and Zvonareva) are mostly unknown to Americans. Serena’s withdrawal from the 2010 U.S. Open—she needed surgery after cutting her foot—and the absence of Justine Henin, the Belgian known as “the sister of no mercy,” has left the field wide open. They say that the U.S. Open, with its fast and reliable surface, is the place where the best usually win. But in this year’s hobbled women’s draw, all bets are off—and, though Venus Williams, even with a bum knee, and the resurgent Russian Maria Sharapova, are always contenders, it will most likely be a woman whose name most Americans can’t pronounce, let alone remember. The men have Rafa and Federer; the women . . . Wozniacki and Clijsters? The Women’s Tennis Association is no doubt praying for the requisite underdog to emerge, preferably an American under six feet tall. Melanie Oudin, last year’s darling, is apparently the most sought-after woman in the tournament, despite the fact that she’s ranked 43rd in the world. Oudin, the sunny, blond, all-American raced to the quarters of the 2009 Open wearing rose and honey-yellow Adidas sneakers inscribed with the word “BELIEVE.” But nobody believes she can do it again; the eighteen-year-old has a 17-20 record this year and came into the tournament on a four-match losing streak. So why is she so popular? Her success last year only accounts for part of it. Unlike the women in the Times video, who look more like LeBron James than Chris Evert, she’s diminutive, scrappy, and has a reassuringly all-around game. This morning, in the showcase Arthur Ashe Stadium, she filleted the court, demolishing the qualifier Olga Savchuk with the kind of tennis that defeated four Russians in a row at the Open last year. (For those who don’t have the Tennis Channel, you can watch many of the matches live on usopen.org.) It’s easy to see Oudin’s appeal—and her potential, if she can develop a big weapon that will counter some of her disadvantage in size—but it’s also hard not to wonder if some of it doesn’t come from a reaction against the rippling quads and veiny biceps of some of the more powerful girls, and against their consonant-laden names. The contrast between Oudin and Serena, the reigning queen of American tennis, can’t be missed either. When Serena lost in the semis at the Open last year after a profanity-filled rant against an official who called her for a foot-fault cost her match point, tournament director Jim Curley called her behavior “threatening.” I, for one, am rooting for muscles. We’ve always wanted our beskirted players to be pretty; why not gorgeous? And is there anything more astonishing than the wave moving through Samantha Stosur’s quadriceps, echoed by those flowing pink pleats? She has the flanks of a thoroughbred, and the beauty. Off to the races. Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor at Newsweek. Her book, Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Will and Faith in World War I, will come out in 2011.
August 30, 2010 At Work In Search of Proust’s Overcoat By Stephanie LaCava Proust’s Overcoat tells the story of Jacques Guérin, a Parisian perfume magnate, who was obsessed with the works of Marcel Proust. In 1929, through a chance connection, he met Proust’s family, only to discover that they intended to destroy the author’s notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Guérin ingratiated himself with Proust’s heirs, and through bribery and kindness, amassed a collection of Proust’s belongings and manuscripts, saving it from destruction. I recently exchanged e-mails with Lorenza Foschini, an Italian journalist, about her book. Why was Proust’s overcoat so special? Proust’s contemporaries, like Jean Cocteau, described his style as embodying an old, refined elegance. He was a real dandy, always dressed in large silk shirtfronts by Charvet, a double-breasted waistcoat, very light colored gloves with black points, a flat-brimmed top hat, a rose or an orchid in a buttonhole of his frock coat, and a walking cane. But even on the hottest days, Marcel didn’t remove his heavy fur-lined coat. This became legendary among those who knew him. How did you discover this story? Those who love Proust know that such passion often becomes a mania. This was so in my case. When interviewing the well-known Visconti costume designer, Piero Tosi, I could not resist the temptation to ask him if he knew the reason why the great filmmaker (Luchino Visconti) stopped production on his beloved project, bringing In Search of Lost Time to the big screen. In the early seventies, the American studios allocated a lot of money for this project and there was talk of casting actors like Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, even Greta Garbo. Tosi was invited to Paris to go over production plans. It was there that he met a very special person. My book comes from the extraordinary story that Tosi told me about this man, Jacques Guérin. I can understand the need to collect the letters, diaries, and notes of a writer. But can you explain our obsessions with a writer’s personal objects? Why a bed? A rug? A coat? It’s because of Guérin that a draft of Swann’s Way became available to us. The same goes for several versions of the last volume of In Search of Lost Time. My book is a story about the incredible efforts of a great bibliophile. Guérin was able to save important papers that offended the bourgeois respectability of Proust’s prude sister in law. After Proust’s death, his family began to deliberately destroy and sell his notebooks, letter, manuscripts, furniture, and personal effects. Proust’s homosexuality surrounded him like an invisible and insurmountable wall. His family’s unwillingness to understand this led to a history of silence that mutated into rancor. This transformed into acts of vandalism as his papers were destroyed and his furniture abandoned. Finding the coat is only the conclusion of a series of adventures and coup de théâtre that Guérin had to face. I do not want to reveal them now; you have to read the book. Of all of Proust’s objects collected by Guérin, which is your favorite? Read More
August 30, 2010 From the Archive Happy Birthday R. Crumb By Caitlin Roper In honor of R. Crumb’s birthday today, here are a few of my favorite outtakes from his interview, the first Art of Comics, which appears in our summer issue, still on newsstands. Interviewer Ted Widmer asks Crumb how he feels about publishing hardcover books: INTERVIEWERYou’ve taken what was a medium of thirty pages of flimsy, low quality paper with a paper cover and now you’ve conquered the hardcover book format. CRUMBReluctantly. I love the old, cheap comic book format so much because the format itself is a statement. It keeps you from becoming too pretentious. I like that about it. Keep it cheap and low-grade, the format, keep it cheap and accessible and then you’re not required to be overly artistic or have overly deep, profound meaning or whatever, you know, all that stuff that can make you very self-conscious. I got reluctantly dragged into hardcover books. INTERVIEWERBut I think your fans are happy that those hardcover books exist because you would have to be a maniacal collector to get all of your stuff otherwise. It’s basically impossible to find back issues of The East Village Other, but for hardly any money you can buy The R. Crumb Handbook and see your greatest hits. CRUMBYeah, that’s true. And also, the whole context of cheaply produced comic books is gone, basically. All those newsstands, that kind of distribution is gone. In June we posted a slideshow of Crumb self-portraits. My favorite is the one where he’s squinching up his nose to keep his glasses on his face. I love Crumb’s answer to Widmer about his next projects: INTERVIEWERDo you see a sequence of more literary stories coming out? You’ve done some Samuel Johnson, Philip K. Dick. CRUMBThe classics illustrated. I did a sequence from Nausea by Sartre a couple of years ago. I did a couple of other things like that. I have lots of ideas about stuff like that but there’s always so much work in it, it’s so time consuming. I’m getting old, you know.
August 27, 2010 From the Archive Friendships from The Paris Review By Thessaly La Force Here’s a short and lovely video for a Friday afternoon. Rose Styron, the wife of the late William Styron, recalls the earlier days of The Paris Review, and the parties that the Styrons used to throw. “We had the John Marquands,” she says, “The Peter Matthiessens, the Tom Guinzburgs, and George Plimpton. We were all a gang, and had a wonderful time.” What a vibrant literary life! And what friendships! Her memories remind me of the touching speech Philip Roth gave at our Revel this year to accept the Hadada Award. Roth describes his first visit to New York to meet Plimpton, and how he made friends with the magazine’s young editors and writers. The result? “This time I sent my story not to The Paris Review slush pile, from which I’d been plucked first time around by none other than Rose Styron, but right to the top.”