December 15, 2011 Arts & Culture Taylor’s Multitudes By Liz Brown Silvano and I met about ten years ago through mutual friends. I don’t remember the exact shirt he was wearing at the time, but I know it had bright colors and elaborate embroidery. (Later, I learned it came from Alpana Bawa.) Also, he was wearing one dangling, bauble-y earring. Possibly it included a feather. This was at a party where most people worked in publishing, which is to say, he stood apart. Other details I have filed away about Silvano include that in the house he shares with his husband, Craig, there is a shrine to Anna Magnani and a poster from his 1977 campaign for supervisor of Board 5 in San Francisco. In the poster, he wears a one-shouldered top and tights and is beaming, his long arms flung skyward, a look inspired by a Patti Labelle album cover. He was running as the “dada alternative” to Harvey Milk. Also, in Robert Gluck’s novel Jack the Modernist, the narrator goes out to a performance piece in which Silvano appears as “Madame Chiang-Ch’ing.” More recently he got his associate’s degree in accessories at FIT. I knew all this about Silvano, but I didn’t have any idea how much Elizabeth Taylor meant to him. Not even when I met him at his home Sunday morning and he came to the door wearing a purple felt fedora, an iridescent purple mandarin-collared jacket, and purple suede boots. We were on our way to a preview of the Elizabeth Taylor collection being auctioned off this week. Read More
December 14, 2011 In Memoriam George Whitman, 1913–2011 By The Paris Review George Whitman. It is with sadness that we mark the passing of Shakespeare & Co. proprietor George Whitman, a good friend to this magazine and to literature generally. Whitman played host to literary giants and hundreds of itinerant travelers. A living legend and a certified character, he for decades managed to balance the demands of an artistic institution and a popular tourist attraction. He’ll be missed and remembered—as he is in this bittersweet reminiscence by Alexander Nazaryan.
December 14, 2011 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Cult author Russell Hoban has died at eighty-six. Just what every child hopes to find under the tree: a Joyce Carol Oates doll. Not so much? How about some grammatical correction? A children’s science book? Or a Vonnegut-inspired tee? (#booknerd) These same people might enjoy an at-home table-reading party. The Utne Reader pulls up stakes for Kansas. Tuck Everlasting: The Musical. Literary novels, the HBO shows. On Joan Didion’s “Oh, wow.” : “Much of the fun in these rather bitchy back-and-forths is seeing literary heavyweights get just this peevish.” Capote in the buff! Pooh’s predecessor!
December 14, 2011 Events John Jeremiah Sullivan Tonight at The Half King! By The Paris Review Photograph by John Taylor. Come listen to John Jeremiah Sullivan read tonight at an event hosted by The New York Times Magazine! We can’t promise James Wood on bongos, but there may be music from Michael Jackson, Axl Rose, Bunny Wailer, or Geeshie Wiley, and there’s sure to be lots of good bourbon-drinking. John Jeremiah SullivanAt The Half KingTonight: Wednesday, December 147:00 P.M.505 West 23rd StNew York, NY 10011
December 14, 2011 Books Vile Bodies, or Bad Sex Virgins By Jonathan Gharraie Hendrick Goltzius, The Fall of Man, 1616, oil on canvas. Courtesy The National Gallery of Art. We have to get our stories straight, she and I, but first we have to get John Updike’s stories straight. I have just bought the Everyman edition of The Maples Stories, and I am trying to describe to my date the arc of the Maples’ marriage and why I think these stories are successfully erotic, how they bring the best out of Updike. I am actually talking about myself, about all the stuff I’ve read, but that’s okay. As last of the male narcissists, Updike would understand. She understands. We are both rehearsing our lines for the evening over a curry somewhere in North London. It is exceptionally, reproachfully cold, and neither of us feels particularly well-equipped to withstand the inclement weather. My shirt makes me look like a Bond villain and feels like a rumpled parachute. The curry is the wrong kind of hot. She asks the most difficult question of all. “How are you going to pass me off?” I struggle to reply. She is both my date and not my date. She is the girlfriend of an old friend, and I have been instructed to show her a good time, in return for temporary London accommodation. I am being conspicuously trusted. We are getting to know each other, having only met twice before tonight, but I must be very transparent because she quickly settles on an apt description of our relationship. “I know,” she says, patting me gently on the arm, “we’ll say I’m your chaperone.” She makes me sound like a debutante and, in a sense, this is accurate. This is the first time I have attended the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, but the same is true for her. Read More
December 13, 2011 On Film Miss Piggy, Literary Icon By Emma Straub Though most people love Miss Piggy for her work as a film star, I have always loved her best as a writer. When I was in elementary school, I bought Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life at a library sale in Westport, Connecticut, the posh town where I was born and where my family spent our summers until I was ten years old. The book has been of vital use to me ever since. I was a sturdy child and entered puberty what felt like light years before most of my friends, my thick girl body morphing into a curvy one. Miss Piggy’s womanly advice reached me at a vulnerable moment, when I needed all the help I could get. Miss Piggy covers all the bases: romance, finance, diet and exercise, etiquette, and fashion. Though of course the book (“as told to Henry Beard,” and originally published by Knopf in 1981) is intended to be humorous, I think it reads like a rallying cry for the full-figured glamourpuss—that she should love her body and her clothes and her lovers, and, most of all, herself. Miss Piggy is a confident and witty faux-Francophile. She has perfect hair, she wears great dresses, and who cares if she has thick ankles? Certainly not her paramour, Kermit, who would sleep on railroad tracks if she asked. Read More