December 7, 2011 Studio Visit Gabriel Orozco By Sabine Mirlesse When Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco opens the back doors leading out onto his garden, it seems so serene that you would be hard-pressed to believe you were in the middle of downtown Manhattan. Inside, the walls are covered with boomerangs, his laptop is decorated with superhero stickers, and his painting palette is filled with cigarette butts. Recently, the artist invited me to his combined studio, kitchenette, and office space on the basement floor of his brownstone to talk about his working process, how he started out as an artist, and why it’s important to habituate your audience to disappointment. Orozco’s “Corplegados” work was recently exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. It is his first exhibition following his two-year museum retrospective, which traveled to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Modern in London. I always wanted to be an artist. At some point my father asked me whether I might instead want to be an architect or something like that, but I didn’t. I thought about it for maybe a month. My father was an artist. He was a painter and he knew how hard it is to make a living out of it. My mother was also a kind of artist—she was a pianist. All of my school friends, all their parents were artists, whether writers or photographers or sculptors. I was surrounded. I started with painting. Painting as an activity is wonderful. You are standing up and you have the freedom to apply colors to a white surface starting almost from nothing. You feel free when you are painting. You feel that you are concentrating on something very particular that is very difficult, but that you enjoy doing it, even though you know that you are probably going to fail, because it’s very difficult to make a good painting. Read More
December 6, 2011 Bulletin The Paris Review Auction—Now Live! By The Paris Review They say it’s better to give than to receive, but by bidding in the Paris Review Auction, you can do both! This year’s auction features extraordinary feasts, luxurious excursions, rare first editions, and one-of-a-kind artwork, as well as book discussions with Paris Review editors, naming opportunities for novel characters, and much more. It’s a chance to be a part of our rich history—and pamper yourself or someone special in the bargain. And a holiday bonus: all proceeds support America’s premiere literary magazine. (That’s us, by the way.) To view and bid on these and other exclusive items click here. Auction ends December 11.
December 5, 2011 Events Three Events with Our Editors By The Paris Review See our editors in action! This Wednesday night, join editor Lorin Stein at the New York Public Library as he discusses the James Family—that’s Henry, William, and Alice—with Jean Strouse, author of the recently reissued biography of Alice James. The fun begins at 7 P.M. Then, next Thursday, Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan will be chatting with Wells Tower about the art of the essay, also at the New York Public Library. Seats are free; don’t miss it! But first thing’s first: tomorrow, at 7 P.M. at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint, Poetry Editor Robyn Creswell will be on a panel tackling the biting wit and anarchist bent of the novels of Albert Cossery. Come learn more about the books that Creswell calls “hymns to laziness.” We hope to see you there!
December 5, 2011 On Sports The Sporting Life By Louisa Thomas Photograph by Nick Kenrick. It didn’t make sense to speak as we walked along an empty path by a lake in western Ireland, since the wind would carry only the sound of itself and of the rain against the stones and grass, and since there wasn’t much to say anyway. I tried not to picture our hotel, where there was a fire and books, and a tray of coffee and slabs of cake. Instead I stared at a sheep ahead huddled with some rocks. Bone-soaked, half numb, and disoriented, I thought of a little book I had recently read by John Casey, Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports. It is a lovely but peculiar collection of essays about his various athletic endeavors. Most of his activities are of the lonely, unwatched variety, like canoeing, sailing, and long-distance running. Casey spends a lot of time rowing a dinghy. Casey’s book is not really about a dozen sports (is rowing a dinghy a sport?). This book is about being sporting, about being a sportsman. What qualifies as a sport here is whatever encourages the cultivation of character. A sportsman is not merely athletic; he is fair and brave. He can read maps, tie knots, sleep in the snow, quote the Odyssey. He can take care of himself, though he is generous and self-deprecating. He is an ideal man from another era, an era that idealized its own nostalgia, too. Read More
December 5, 2011 Books Document: The Symbolism Survey By Sarah Funke Butler In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind? McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery. His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply. The pages here feature a number of the surveys in facsimile: Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer. Each responder offers a unique take on the issue itself—symbolism in literature—as well as on handling a sixteen-year-old aspirant approaching writers as masters of their craft. Even if he approached them en masse, with a form letter. And failed to follow up with a thank-you note. Read More
December 2, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Locker Room Freud; Travel Writing By Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein Dear Paris Review, I have an etiquette question. Is it permissible to tell a complete stranger in a gym locker room that he looks like Sigmund Freud? And, if so, how does one tactfully go about it? The relevant details include: this man is usually naked, he has a giant shlong, and he looks exactly like Sigmund Freud! He even has some kind of foreign accent. Part of me is just curious to know if he gets this a lot, but part of me is curious to know whether he may in fact be Dr. Freud. —Avi Steinberg It is permissible, of course. The most tactful approach, in our view, is to just lie down and start free associating. If he is in fact Sigmund Freud (which strikes us as unlikely), your confession will be met with an icy, yet obscurely liberating, silence. You could also offer him a cigar. What’s the best way to structure a memoir or personal narrative? Is this the sort of memoir that involves being stuck in a crevasse? If so, lead with the crevasse. If, on the other hand, this is the sort of memoir that’s interesting all the way through, we suggest that you begin with your feelings about your mother and take it from there (see “etiquette question,” above). What travel writing would you suggest for someone dealing with a recent loss and exhausted by urban living? I want to take a trip to refocus and regain a sense of daily hope. There must be something more literary and nuanced than Eat Pray Love? While neither of us is a great aficionado of travel writing, we agree that it’s a genre at which the English are particularly adept, be they heroic polymathic questers like T. E. Lawrence or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or comic bunglers along the lines of Graham Greene’s Henry Pulling, or more recently, Geoff Dyer. Sadie says: In times of distress, while I’d like to turn to the former, I’d probably lose myself in the latter—Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s. I do love Leigh Fermor, however. His A Time to Keep Silence is thoughtful and inspiring without making a fuss about it. In all frankness, though, whether at home or on the road, I find nothing more soothing than a tried-and-true “comfort read,” which for me means Barbara Pym and for you might be something completely different. Lorin recommends Travels with a Donkey and Life on the Mississippi—but then, he always recommends those.