April 7, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Kim Hastreiter, Editor, Part 2 By Kim Hastreiter This is the second installment of Hastreiter’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:05 A.M. Hop over with Drew and Jacob to Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills to catch the Gus Van Sant show as well as the Ed Ruscha garbage paintings. The guys were drooling over the Van Sant homoerotic boy paintings. They were just okay in my book and forty thousand dollars each. And the exhibition was sponsored by Gucci. (So LA). I liked the Ruscha garbage paintings, although I wouldn’t have bought any of this art even if I were a zillionaire. Gus Van Sant at Gagosian. 12:15 P.M. I dropped off the boys at the hotel and headed up to Laurel Canyon to visit my friend, the artist Adele Lutz. Within five minutes of Hollywood Boulevard, I was completely in nature. We hung out drinking diet cokes in Adele’s lush backyard looking for mountain lions (one walked through her yard just the week before!). 2:45 P.M. Starving. Adele and I head down to a wonderful new spot I heard about called Tinga, on La Brea and Second Street, where they make the most yummy Oaxacan street food. Boy, did we have an outrageous lunch. The food is ridiculous and the folks who run it are sweethearts. They kept giving us stuff to try. Crazy good. They gave us a salsa made from toasted grasshoppers. Yikes. Norwegian chefs.6:30 P.M. Head downstairs to the Standard pool to check out the setup for our “Beautiful People” party we’re throwing with Guess. It starts at seven. Everyone is running around. Madness. Meet Josh Madden who is deejaying for us and bond with him immediately. He is cute, smart, and a true-blue Paper fanatic. His brothers are famous: Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte. Josh is more into being a regular guy. The party is full blast by eight. My posse arrives: the Brunettis, Press and Gefter, Cameron Silver and Jeff Snyder, and my old friend Debi Mazar decked head to toe in Isabel Toledo with her cute husband, Gabriele, in tow. Their Cooking Channel show Extra Virgin is a hit, so bulbs are flashing. It’s fun. Cobrasnake comes with his mom, who I adore with the hilarious Johnny Makeup! Paper fans are everywhere. Four identically dressed chefs from Norway introduce themselves, as does Jesse Williams, the gorgeous guy who plays one of the Grey’s Anatomy doctors. Turns out he’s a big Paper fan! Beautiful person Keri Hilson sings fiercely. It’s a success so I breathe a sigh of relief, run upstairs, and pack, as we have to be at the airport at five A.M. the next morning to catch the first flight back to New York to be back in time to throw our East Coast “Beautiful People” party that night! Oy vey. Read More
April 7, 2011 James Salter Month Love and Glory By Ian Crouch Our Spring Revel is on April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. If you’re interested in purchasing tickets to the Revel, click here. There may have been less startling primers on adult sexuality than James Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime for me to read as a young man, but few could have been as illuminating or comprehensive. Anyway, as with cold water, it is best to jump in. Or as the novel’s narrator explains, citing Rilke, “there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.” The erotic passages are justly famous, scandalous in 1967 and still instructional, in a practical sense, decades later. There was much to learn: about terminology (the male organ is rightly called a prick), positions (nothing tantric, but interesting for a teenager), and accessories (“In his clothing he conceals, like an assassin, a small tube of lubricant”). Salter is a great celebrant of the human anatomy and its various uses, but is equivocal about the emotions that sex produces: it can be tender, selfish, thrilling, boring, and, at times, even murderous, producing a “satanic happiness.” The more significant education, however, came from Salter’s sensibility, his mature insistence that sex is more than just a private act conducted by two people in the dark, that it exists as a part of history, with a past and future as well as a present. Also: that sex is central to love, which is central to life; that greatness and heroism exist in even the most common of places; and perhaps most striking, that “straight” men could be in love with each other. The novel follows an affair in France between Phillip Dean, an American, and his lover, a young Frenchwoman named Anne-Marie, and is told from the perspective of a voyeuristic, sometimes obsessive third person, the narrator, who feels from Dean “the pull of a dark star.” Dean may be petulant and inconstant, but he is in some essential way pure. Read More
April 6, 2011 James Salter Month Dreams and Work: On ‘Light Years’ By Porochista Khakpour Our Spring Revel is April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. If you’re interested in purchasing tickets to the Revel, click here. I discovered James Salter just late enough, in grad school, at the suggestion of a brooding alcoholic, the best writer in the room, with whom I’d become entangled in a very Salter-esque doomed affair. I was the writer who’d gush about the stylists, steer the conversations from plot and story to diction and syntax, the one who’d make over-earnest pleas about art over mechanics, always to the rolled eyes of the Ivy Leaguers who made up most the program. Most everything I wrote failed on a story level as much as it succeeded on a sentence level, and so this writer-fling of mine one day said, “You should read Salter. Because he does that thing you like. But he also tells stories. He can help you.” I dashed to Light Years—Salter’s fourth novel, published in 1975—as I did to any of his suggestions. Up to that point, stylists meant maximalists, hysterical realists, the breathless and the sprawling: William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Stephen Dixon. I had never encountered a minimalist I could live inside of. But as minimal as Light Years was aesthetically, it was maximal emotionally. The sentences were sharp and piercing, alarmingly brief, and yet they contained entire lifetimes rendered in stream of consciousness within three-word observations about the seasons. “I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible,” Salter said in his Paris Review interview. I lived for that poet’s spirit in my storytellers. That taut and yet tender surface simplicity was applied to amplifying the elemental in this world destroyed me, as if trees and desks and fog and smoke are their own metaphors in a universe that is essentially figurative: Read More
April 6, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Kim Hastreiter, Editor By Kim Hastreiter DAY ONE, Los Angeles 9:00 A.M. Arrived at LAX late last night. Woke up shivering cold to gray skies in my mod jumbo suite at the super friendly no-fuss Hollywood Standard Hotel on Sunset. After a week of torrential rain, LA was damn cold. I was there for a quickie four-day stint and had fish to fry, so I dragged my ass out of bed, hiked across the street to Enterprise, grabbed a rental Camry and headed to my friend Robert’s Los Feliz craftsman bungalow for brunch and a catch-up. Ed Wohl boards. 10:35 A.M. Heading east on Beverly, I stopped in to check out my friends Robin and Cathy Petrovic’s fabulous Heath Ceramics store just past Fairfax. This extraordinary shop is filled with the wonderful dishes and tiles of Sausalito-based pottery-maker Heath, as well as great collaborations with other like-minded artists and artisans. 11:30 A.M. After turning left on Avocado Street, I passed Little Doms, the Los Feliz watering hole, and drove in circles looking for parking. I finally pulled up the steep hill outside my friend’s house and cracked hard into the car in front of me. Thank God for bumpers. 5:00 P.M. Back in Hollywood to meet up with my dear friend Ford Wheeler, a production designer, who’s in LA for twenty-four hours scouting for the new David Chase film he’s been working on. Funny how it takes coming to LA to see friends from New York. We hung out at the hotel for a few hours catching up on life and excitedly checking out an early copy of the spring design issue of T Magazine. His art-filled homes are featured on a six-page spread. Read More
April 5, 2011 A Letter from the Editor TPR Gets Two Ellie Nods By Lorin Stein The Paris Review has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards: general excellence in a literary magazine, for our summer, fall, and winter issues and best essay or criticism for “Mister Lytle: An Essay,” by our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Awards will be presented on May 9. In the meantime, we have made the entirety of Sullivan’s essay available online: When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make—a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t that helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life. Congratulations and thanks to all!
April 5, 2011 James Salter Month Document: An Outline for ‘Light Years’ By Thessaly La Force Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center. Click to enlarge. James Salter’s outline for his novel, Light Years, which Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about today. Writes Lahiri, “In the beginning it was the light, the warmth of the novel that enchanted me.” Note how Salter is careful to think of the seasons as he moves through the chapters. At the top of the page, Salter identifies a short list of possible titles for the novel, including The Feast Is Ended, New Life, and New Lives. On the bottom portion of this page, in his notes related to the fifth chapter, Salter writes, Life Is Meals. More than thirty years later, he would repurpose this phrase as the title of his 2006 book, cowritten with his wife, Kay Salter. The Salter archives reside with the Harry Ransom Center, in Austin Texas.