December 12, 2011 Arts & Culture The Long March By David Zax On a recent Sunday evening, in a lounge at the Jane Hotel in Manhattan, the writers Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer enacted before an audience the final pages of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, a 1971 work of literary pastiche by the author Frederic Tuten. Andersen played the role of Chairman Mao, sitting for a fictitious interview. “Have you seen Godard’s La Chinoise?” asked Kreamer, playing his interlocutor. “Have you seen Dali’s Mao/Marilyn?” “Chairman Mao, perhaps I might ask your opinion on birth control.” Tuten himself, a septuagenarian in a black blazer, sat at the front of the room, beaming with happiness at the event held in his honor. If you have not heard of The Adventures of Mao, you would not have been out of place at its marathon reading. Indeed, some of those who gathered to participate in the reading—a roster including Lydia Davis, Wallace Shawn, Walter Mosley, John Guare, and Edmund White—admitted to having had only a glancing familiarity with the novel or its author. Yet The Adventures of Mao, about, as the title suggests, the Chinese dictator’s rise to power, has always had its advocates; Susan Sontag called it “soda pop, a cold towel, or a shady spot under a tree for culture-clogged footsoldiers on the American long march.” In 1972, the book achieved that pinnacle of literary attention, the John Updike New Yorker review. Analyzing the novel’s five distinct modes—textbooklike history of the Long March; ample direct quotation from the likes of Hawthorne, Melville, and Fenimore Cooper; passages of literary parody of authors such as Kerouac and Malamud; “normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversations”; and, finally, that extended interview with Chairman Mao—Updike declared the resulting sum “an intelligent, taut, and entertaining change from conventional novels.” Despite Mao’s champions over the decades—New Directions embalmed it as one of its classics in 2005—the event at the Jane Hotel was in some ways an unlikely one. It had all begun in the Strand Bookstore, where three men in their twenties stumbled upon the book and brought it to their book club. Read More
December 12, 2011 Nostalgia The Laundry Room By Thomas Beller The streets are covered in snow. The wind whips harshly, a blizzard’s aftermath, and in the laundry room in the basement of my childhood building, I find a neighbor pulling clothes out of the dryer. She is distracted when I say hello, stares at me unrecognizingly. But then something clicks and a shaky stream of lucidity pours fourth. She asks after my mother, my wife, the kid. And I ask after Gary, my old babysitter, who used to take me downstairs to their apartment on the C line. The building has four lines of apartments—A, B, C, and D—and two separate elevators. The C line, facing east, gets the least light. It shares the landing with the D line, which overlooks the river and gets the most. Through a door, down the service hallway, and through another set of doors, and you are on the A-B landing, where I grew up and now return for the holidays. In the whole building, these days, there is a slight tension, the old guard and the new. Anyone who has come in during the last decade spent a fortune to be here. The old guard are certainly not have-nots, but they come from a different world. They march with dignified postures in and out of the lobby, nodding to the doormen, almost indignant at what their apartments are worth, the strain of the contradiction playing faintly on their faces. Read More
December 12, 2011 Bulletin The Paris Review Sport Pen! By Sadie Stein The venerable Kaweco company has been making this “sport pen” for generations. Designed for ladies, sportsmen, and officers, its compact size means it is easily carried in a pocket—a novelty at the time of its invention! Storied history aside, it’s quite simply a delight to write with, look at, and handle. I’ve been hooked since I first started using them ten years ago. It’s with great pleasure that we present this limited-edition Paris Review sport pen—a must for the sportspersons and officers in your life, but just as delightful for the rest of us. A small luxury that will bring you pleasure every time you use it, and a lovely gift either on its own or with a year of The Paris Review.
December 9, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Isolation; Being in a Band By Sasha Frere-Jones This week our friend Sasha Frere-Jones was kind enough to share his good counsel. By day, Sasha is the pop critic for The New Yorker, and by night he is a member of the bands Calvinist and Piñata. By day or night, he gives darn good advice. My family members are music lovers. They are obsessed with rare albums (dad), Internet radio (older brother), and attending live performances (mom; anything “spiritual” or classical). I’m done giving them novels because they don’t read them. Can you recommend any books for the music enthusiast’s library, or, even better, DVDs? Both volumes of the The Old Grey Whistle Test DVD collection are fantastic. It’s all pop music from the seventies, played live and immaculately filmed for the BBC. I have no idea where the BBC got such fancy, high-res cameras: the footage looks a decade ahead of whatever the Americans were producing. The performances are uniformly great. (If these linked clips of Bill Withers performing “Ain’t No Sunshine” and Talking Heads playing “Psycho Killer” don’t move you, I’m out of DVD ideas.) As for books, Christopher Small’s Musicking is appropriate for any music lover, irrelevant of preferred genre. Small’s openness and attention to the social aspects of music are unmatched by any other music writer. What’s your opinion on job-interview etiquette? Is it sufficient to send thank-you e-mails? The handwritten note seems to me a thoughtful gesture, but it takes a day or so to arrive. Is it overkill to send the e-mail, as well as the old-fashioned note? The handwritten note is a red flag; it’s really only a charming move when the two parties already know each other. A brief, cheerful e-mail is best. Nothing startles like an e-mail that blooms open into several screens’ worth of type. I have not hired people on the basis of e-mail length, as it usually corresponds to loopy behavior (as do multiple e-mails sent within the space of an hour). Read More
December 9, 2011 Events Alice in Bed, Again By The Paris Review Last Thursday at the New York Public Library, Lorin interviewed Jean Strouse on Alice James, the “hysterical” sister of William and Henry. They discussed her sexually charged relationship with William, her passionate love for another woman, and the very peculiar genius of the James family (with dramatic readings from the letters). Click here to listen to a recording of the conversation.
December 9, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: ‘Desire,’ Tim Tebow By The Paris Review Last night I read Sydney Smith’s attack on the Methodists and listened to Desire. It’s been that kind of week. —Lorin Stein Chuck Klosterman offers one explanation for why Broncos’ quarterback Tim Tebow is so polarizing: “The crux here, the issue driving this whole ‘Tebow Thing,’ is the matter of faith … The upside to secular thinking is that—in theory—your skepticism will prove correct. Your rightness might be emotionally unsatisfying, but it confirms a stable understanding of the universe. Sports fans who love statistics fall into this camp. People who reject cognitive dissonance build this camp and find the firewood. But Tebow wrecks all that, because he makes blind faith a viable option. His faith in God, his followers’ faith in him—it all defies modernity. This is why people care so much. He is making people wonder if they should try to believe things they don’t actually believe.” —Natalie Jacoby This weekend I’ll be hoping to see one of the more curious, and surely more fascinating, Nobel acceptance speeches as the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who lost his speech and the use of his right hand after a stroke some twenty years ago, accepts his prize by playing the piano. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn The fruitcake from Holy Spirit Monastery in Georgia—rich with fruit and pecans and liberally doused in peach brandy—has converted many a fruitcake-scoffer. And if you know one of those defiant iconoclasts who already loves it, well, you’ve found your holiday gift for the foreseeable future. (Mine arrived last night and we’ve already eaten half!) —Sadie Stein In her debut novel, The Faster I Walk The Smaller I Am, Kjersti A. Skomsvold has created a world—through the eyes of a terribly shy old woman who ponders death—that is calm and incredibly strange. —Jessica Calderon I eagerly started reading a galley of Men in Space, Tom McCarthy’s first novel, which will be published in the US for the first time in February. The first hundred pages contains a very funny letter from a gay Netherlandish art curator on Václav Havel’s reinvention of Czech military costumes: “After two thousand years, Plato’s philosopher king becomes a reality—and the first thing he does is get some fag to spruce up his goons and make them march around more aesthetically. Sometimes I despair of our profession.” —Nicole Rudick Emma Straub’s piece on the phenomenon of “showrooming” (a word I didn’t even know!) was a revelation. —Sadie Stein