August 15, 2011 Arts & Culture To Bricktop, on Her Belated Birthday By Patrick Monahan Photograph by Jack Robinson. Courtesy The Jack Robinson Archive. Whenever she was asked about her start in the world, the legendary saloonkeeper Bricktop—born Ada Smith—replied: On the fourteenth day of August 1894, in the little town of Alderson, West-by-God-Virginia, the doctor said, “Another little split-tail,” and on that day Bricktop was born. T. S. Eliot later added, “…and on that day Bricktop was born. And to her thorn, she gave a rose.” Bricktop is a not a familiar name to most people today, though the crumbs of her extraordinary life are indispensable to the telling of a certain moment in the history of Americans in Paris and café society everywhere. Woody Allen’s latest movie, Midnight in Paris, could hardly recall the days of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, or the Fitzgeralds without Zelda crying, “Let’s go to Bricktop’s!” Ada Smith, like many African Americans of her day, was born poor. Her mother, who ran a boarding house, had a passion for cleanliness and a self-confessed trigger-fast Irish temper. Around 1900, the family moved from Virginia to the South Side of Chicago, where Ada got her first taste of the theater. She hung around the stage doors of Chicago’s great vaudeville houses, waiting for the likes of Sophie Tucker, a belting singer known as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” to emerge. But it was the back rooms of saloons, with their sawdust-covered floors, that captured her imagination. Read More
August 12, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Adaptation; Fall Reading By Lorin Stein You may have heard by now that there’s a Paradise Lost movie in the works, starring Bradley Cooper as the Devil—WTF?! Do you think film adaptation is a good or bad thing for books, particularly ones with wide recognition to begin with? —Liesel WTF indeed. The two most famous complaints about Paradise Lost are that it’s really, really long (Edgar Allan Poe) and that it’s weak on visuals (T. S. Eliot). If ever a blind poet needed the magic touch of Ridley Scott, that poet was John Milton. But I’m the wrong person to ask—I’ve been holding out for the movie version ever since tenth grade. Are there any books coming out this fall that you’re particularly excited about? —Leo Lots—and the stack keeps growing. Two days ago, for example, my sister gave me the galleys of a first novel, Various Positions, by the young Canadian writer Martha Schabas, all about the sexual awakening of a ballerina. Anna tells me I’m going to love it (no matter that I skipped Black Swan) … But sticking just to novels that I’ve actually read: in these pages I’ve already mentioned Chad Harbach’s debut, The Art of Fielding, Nicholson Baker’s sweet-natured book of smut, House of Holes, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novella The Truth About Marie. Readers of The Paris Review proper know Ben Lerner as a poet; his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, is about … well, it’s about a young poet on a fellowship in Madrid, but I enjoyed it so much I read it twice (and laughed out loud both times). I keep going back to Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon, which is fascinating and only sort of a novel; it veers from fiction into biographical essay, into essay on the art of fiction. Last night I stayed up late—much later than I meant to—reading Spring, an addictively earnest novel about English yuppies in love, by David Szalay. Finally, Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot has what must be the most seductive first sentences of the season (seductive, anyway, to a certain micro-demo, which I suspect may include certain readers of the Daily): To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but by date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeline had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeline had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.” Read More
August 12, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sea Voyages; Cats in Space By The Paris Review I can’t pretend it’s a light read, but Michael Kimball’s Us is heartbreakingly lovely. It’s a story of death, loss, and loneliness—but the writing’s a pleasure, and sometimes you just need to read something with weight. –Sadie Stein Accounts of scientific expeditions and sea voyages have long been my preferred summer reading—they seem particularly suited for never-ending afternoons spent lolling by the ocean. I’m using the last warm days to finish The Journey of Anders Sparrman. –Clare Fentress I first encountered Wodehouse during a childhood August, and slurped up all of Jeeves immediately. What better time to indulge in the unflagging fun than now, when Norton has just released stupendously colorful new editions of the books? –Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I didn’t go on vacation this summer, so I’ve been vicariously living through the galley of The Best American Travel Writing 2011. It includes a round-the-world sea voyage with Christopher Buckley and trashy Miami parties with Emily Witt. –Ali Pechman I’m really eager to get my hands on Faye Dudden’s Fighting Chance—which tells the story of how women’s suffrage fractured the like-minded abolitionist community. Here’s a great piece on the book from the Wilson Quarterly. –S.S. While browsing The Atlantic’s new video channel, I came across this clip documenting some important bioastronautics research. –Natalie Jacoby NYRBlog quite bluntly states what I’ve thought more than once in “Here’s What I Hate About Writer’s Houses”: “That art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer.” –A. P.
August 11, 2011 Poetry Two Poems: ‘The Crew Change’ and ‘Rice in the Spoon’ By Don Share These poems by Don Share bring surprising music and thrilling turns of mind to the matter of everyday life. We especially liked the eerie litany of woebegone objects in “Rice in the Spoon”: “Sea glass beached / on a porch bench” or, better yet, “A brown bust / of a sad man.” Whether Jethro Tull’s Aqualung is or is not a classic is a question Share’s readers are left to settle for themselves. —Dan Chiasson Read More
August 11, 2011 Arts & Culture Playing the Field By Josh Dzieza Kacie Kinzer, Tweenbot, 2009, cardboard, paper, ink, batteries, motor, and wheels, 36 x 8 1/2 x 14 in. Photo © Scott Rudd On a recent balmy night, in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, I watch a dozen adults hop excitedly between platters of white, gray, and black arrayed in a circle. They move at a waltzlike pace, stepping, stopping, pointing. This strange spectacle isn’t an art project, exactly, but a game: part of a one-night arcade organized by the magazine Kill Screen for MoMA’s exhibition of interactive objects, “Talk to Me.” The game is called Starry Heaven, after Kant’s epigram that the two things that fill him with wonder and awe are “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” The rules of Starry Heaven, however, are decidedly unfriendly to anyone following the moral law within him. As players move from disc to disc toward the center of the circle, they must conspire with each other to point at another player on an adjacent disk, banishing him. “It requires them to collaborate with their fellow players—and to stab them in the back,” says Eric Zimmerman, who designed the game with Nathalie Pozzi, an architect. “It tells a perverse moral fable.” Another game, in the museum’s lobby, takes a more laissez-faire approach to pitting players against each other. It has only one rule—to follow the instructions that appear on a screen—but the game’s title, BUTTON, for Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now, encourages players to break it. As I walk toward the five-foot-wide screen, it tells the four men standing in front of it that the first one to hit his button ten times will lose. They run, dive, grabbing their bucket-size rubber buttons from the floor—and then they stop, seemingly at a loss. Cautiously they press their own buttons, watching each other: a suicide pact. Then, one of them grabs his neighbor’s button and starts bashing it furiously. People in line cheer as the screen shows his competitor’s animal avatars blasted by lightening bolts. He walks away with his arms raised in triumph. Read More
August 10, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Philip Levine is America’s new poet laureate. Save the Words is dedicated to bringing underutilized vocabulary back into circulation. A locupletative goal! The Popeye Cookbook is, not shockingly, heavy on the spinach. Bienvenue en France, Google Books! An unlikely hit: The Waste Land app earns back its costs in a mere six weeks. “I think it’s one of those things where you’re standing in a room, and you’re like, ‘Let’s make a new food magazine.’ And that’s a terrible idea. The world does not need a new food magazine … But if it’s such a bad idea that you can do a good version of it, then that’s a cool challenge.” An Edinburgh marathon reading of Theresa Breslin’s Prisoner in Alcatraz attempts to break the world reading record. Signs of a publishing rebound? John Burnside on researching a book: “I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.” Watch Britten’s Turn of the Screw, live. “There was something a bit Wellsian about photographs of riots and looting across London this weekend. Pictures of burning shops and broken windows and young men confronting uniformed police included crowdsourced images snatched by witnesses in the rapid, unexpected diffusion of trouble. The most dramatic, of Tottenham on fire and the blackened aftermath, are positively apocalyptic. To me, it all seems uncanny and reminiscent of late Victorian science fiction. Even the place names have that quality of ordinariness that Wells exploits in his fantasy of a London apocalypse: Tottenham in flames, insurrection in Enfield, anarchy in Leyton and Islington …”