July 2, 2011 Arts & Culture Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview By Sarah Fay Today, as you may know, is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov’s death. There won’t be parades, but there will be an abundance of talk, mainly on NPR, about his most famous novel Lolita or his penchant for butterflies. On no other day will the words lepidopterist—one who studies a large order of winged insects, including butterflies and moths—and nymphet—which Nabokov forever altered to mean “a sexually attractive or sexually mature young girl”—be used with such frequency. What probably won’t be discussed is Nabokov’s shrewd and savvy approach to publicity and fame. Perhaps more than any other writer in the twentieth century, he knew how to control his image. As John Updike wrote in Assorted Prose, Nabokov was not only one of the best writers in English, but also “a solid personality” giving a performance “scarcely precedented in American literature.” It would be hyperbolic to place Nabokov in the same category as celebrity doyens like Madonna or Lady Gaga, but he could certainly have taught them a thing or two about fame and the art of the interview. Fame descended on Nabokov after the 1958 publication of Lolita. He was sixty years old at the time and held a lectureship at Cornell. My father took Nabokov’s American literature course and says he can’t remember anything about it except for the way that Nabokov, wearing a black cape, used to sweep into the lecture hall with Vera, his wife and assistant, in tow. Nabokov would then deliver his lecture from prepared notes to great affect. His dramatic performances in class drew students to him, and, according to Nabokov’s most meticulous biographer Brian Boyd, his European literature course was second in enrollment to Pete Seger’s folk-song course. As a literature teacher, Nabokov emphasized the importance of reading for detail, assigning students fewer books in order to read them slowly. He quizzed students on the pattern of Madame Bovary’s wallpaper and sketched the path that Bloom walks in Ulysses on the blackboard. According to Nabokov, this approach “‘irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends,’ and ‘schools,’ and ‘myths,’ and ‘symbols,’ and ‘social comment,’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.” Read More
July 1, 2011 At Work Timm Kölln on ‘The Peloton’ By Peter Conroy Left: Manuele Mori. Right: Andy Schleck. In 2005, photographer Timm Kölln began an ambitious five-year project to document professional cycling through the voices, faces, and bodies of the athletes who define it, traveling to major races around Europe and shooting riders alone against a white backdrop moments after they stepped off the bike. The result, The Peloton: Portrait of a Generation, collects ninety-six photographs and interviews with professional cyclists—some superstars, some journeymen, others now-forgotten names of the sport. Kölln’s photographs capture the utter limits of physical experience in an athlete. His interviews (conducted by journalists from the magazine Rouleur) skip the familiar clichés of sports journalism to offer unvarnished and nuanced perspectives on what it means to spend a life on two wheels. Looking ahead to the start of the 2011 Tour de France tomorrow, I recently spoke to Timm from his home in Berlin. For you, was it the cycling or the photography that came first? Photography. I grew up in Spain, and when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t let me have a bike. They thought it was too dangerous to ride in Barcelona. But I always had this dream of having a racing bike. And when we moved back to Germany, the first thing I did—I think we’d been in Berlin for two days—was buy a bike, not a racing bike, but a bike. I was always inspired by older sports photography, and that also influenced me in my approach to cycling. When thinking about how to do the portraits for The Peloton, I thought the only way to get as close as possible to the riders’ states of mind and efforts on their bikes was to shoot them without helmets and without glasses, an image we rarely get in sports media. Read More
July 1, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Harriet the Spy, Happy Fourth of July! By The Paris Review In the embarrassing oversights department, I had been meaning and meaning to read the novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Why did it take me so long? His latest work to be translated into English, The Truth About Marie, is haunting, clever, funny. I can’t wait to read more … as soon as I finish Harriet the Spy. Where was she all my life? —Lorin Stein I saw a really interesting film recently: The Target, which was cowritten by Vladimir Sorokin. It’s a strange mix of Anna Karenina, sci-fi, and social commentary, but it works. Light viewing it’s not, but if you’re in the mood to stomach a dystopia in which love is a soulless illusion, it’s worth seeking out! —Sadie Stein Also, I’m going to see Le Rayon Vert—back at Film Forum by popular demand. —L. S. This weekend, I’m reading Rebecca Wolff’s The Beginners, a debut novel about a fifteen-year-old girl who befriends a new couple in town, the Motherwells. The Motherwells say they’ve moved to Wick, Massachusetts, to study the town’s history of witchcraft, but from the reviews, it sounds like spookier things start to happen. —Thessaly La Force Even though Monday is Independence Day, today is the ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Check out one of my favorite contemporary Chinese short-story collections, the irreverent and absurd I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen. —Ali Pechman Read More
July 1, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Larger than News; Professional M.F.A. People By Lorin Stein Hi Mr. Stein. I went to a talk you gave many months ago at McNally Jackson about The Paris Review. You said something that has stayed in my mind, especially now that President Obama has said that we will be withdrawing from Afghanistan. You said that you believe what you’re doing with The Paris Review (and literature in general) was just as important as the coverage a newspaper like The New York Times gives to the wars in the Middle East. Can you explain? I see in some ways how you are making a point, but I can’t help but think that literature has to weigh a little bit lower on the scale of important things, especially against war. Sincerely, Thom Yikes! I hope I didn’t say that—I certainly don’t think it! What I can imagine saying is that, in one person’s tiny life, it is possible for art to loom larger than the news of the day. I can also imagine saying that this strikes me as a good thing. There are people the country needs to hear from regarding military strategy, and people it doesn’t. I, for instance, am someone with whom there’s not much point discussing troop levels. Your question makes me think of Roberto Bolaño’s comic novel The Third Reich, all about a writer who sacrifices everything—love, friends, home, job—for a board game … a board game in which he restrategizes the entire Second World War so the Nazis will win. Writers are like that. They are, among other things, people for whom the unimportant outweighs the important. What’s more (at least in Bolaño’s fiction), they are people you wouldn’t want to see involved in foreign policy, because they’d screw it up, or play—as often as not—for the wrong side. What do you think of M.F.A. programs? A. R. Ammons says in his Paris Review interview that “it sometimes happens that these professional M.F.A. people are also poets, but it rarely happens.” Do you agree with Ammons, or do you think these places can play a meaningful role in nurturing poets and other writers? Yours, E. M. I think A. R. Ammons is using the word poet in a special way. Poets often do. He means there are not many great poets in writing programs. It’s true: but then, there are not many great poets anywhere. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn something about poetry in a writing program. And most of them are nothing if not nurturing. For me the question is whether nurturing—whether being part of a caring community—makes for better work or for poems that people will actually want to read out there in the cold, hard world. For others, being part of that community is a powerful incentive to write. For these people, I think an M.F.A. makes all kinds of sense. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
June 30, 2011 Softball TPR vs. Vanity Fair: Literary Softball Bullshit By Cody Wiewandt Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8 Total VF |0|1|0|0|0|1|1|1 4 TPR |2|1|0|0|0|0|0|0 3 There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come out with it: yesterday we lost to Vanity Fair in softball. I know, I know—we’re embarrassed, we’re heartbroken, and to say that we were demoralized after the game is an understatement. (Oh, how we wept!) If life were a sports movie, this would be the game right before our turnaround, the low point that brings us back together, spurring us on to greatness. Our grizzled coach would make a passionate speech, and our distracted star player would wake up and dedicate himself to the team. Cut to the montage where we hit home runs and laugh at our practical jokes, topped off by a spinning newspaper with a headline like: “TPR ONLY ONE GAME OUT OF FIRST!” This isn’t a movie though, and thinking about those Vanity Fair hooligans pouring champagne all over each other after the game kept me awake last night, and probably will for weeks. It started off well enough: after two innings we were up three to one, and it seemed like the rest of the game would be a walk in the park or a day at the beach or a peach on a beach or something like that. I started thinking about what I would write, certain I would preface it with “Not to be mean, but Vanity Fair really isn’t good at softball.” What hubris. From the third inning on, our bats were silent, our mitts were loose, and before you could say “Siddhartha Finch” we were in extra innings. After holding us at no runs in the top half of the eighth, they scored the winning run on a sharp single into right field. C’est la vie. In the end, we let our—dare I say vanity?—get the best of us. We also let their third baseman—a big bald guy wearing jorts (jean shorts) and drinking a Coors Light—get the best of us when he told us to quit with our “literary softball bullshit.” He reminded me of my seventh grade gym teacher. He might actually have been my seventh grade gym teacher. In a game like this there aren’t many highlights, but it would seem like adding salt to the wound if I failed to mention a spectacular catch by our right fielder Karen “The Franchise” Maine and the equally spectacular pitching performance by Devin “Meal Ticket” McIntyre. Meal Ticket, we should have pulled you an inning earlier; this loss isn’t on you, so don’t beat yourself up. You two surely can hold your heads high; the rest of us can remind ourselves that even though we lost, our mothers still love us.
June 30, 2011 Nostalgia Memories of the Kennedy Administration By Peter Terzian Rose Kennedy with President Kennedy. I graduated from college in the late 1980s with a degree in English literature and no real idea of what to do for a career. One afternoon I wandered out of Harvard Square after a movie at the Brattle Theater and saw the grand yellow Georgian mansion where the nineteenth-century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had lived. A sign said that it was open to the public for tours; they must hire tour guides, I thought. I imagined it would be pleasant to work in a dusky, book-filled house, tucked away in a quiet pocket of the world. I went inside and filled out an application. When I got a call a few weeks later, it was to interview for an opening at a different, affiliated historic site: John F. Kennedy’s birthplace, a not so grand, actually kind of poky early-twentieth-century house in the nearby suburb of Brookline. I was a little disappointed, as I didn’t have much interest in the Kennedys. But I didn’t have any other employment prospects either, so when an offer was extended, I accepted. My parents were pleased, at least. I had grown up hearing from them about the shock of the Kennedy assassination, how they had gathered with friends in front of the television set and mourned for days—for four days, to borrow the title of a commemorative book my father had on our shelves back home. The National Park Service maintained both Longfellow’s and Kennedy’s houses, and I was surprised to find that my title would be “park ranger,” something I had never thought I’d be. On my first day I was given a catalog from which I was to order a ranger’s uniform: flared pants and a shirt with epaulettes, both dull green and made of stiff, scratchy, nonbreathable polyester; and a broad-brimmed campaign hat, the kind that Smokey Bear wore. I was at war with my uniform and its hopeless lack of coolness from the beginning. When my half-hour break came around each noontime, I did a quick change into my civilian clothes in the bathroom before going to pick up lunch in nearby Coolidge Corner, where I might run into someone I knew, and another quick change when I got back. There was barely time left to eat. Read More