September 23, 2010 Events Tonight: Lorin Stein Chats with Jean-Christophe Valtat By The Paris Review Tonight, at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, Paris Review darling Jean-Christophe Valtat will be reading from his recent novels Aurorarama and 03, and discussing his work with Lorin Stein and Mitzi Angel, the translator of 03. The event begins at 7 P.M. at 58 West 10th Street—please come if you can!
September 23, 2010 At Work Pressing Flesh with Sam Lipsyte By Giancarlo DiTrapano Sam Lipsyte. Photograph by Ceridwen Morris. From his first collection of stories, Venus Drive, to his most recent novel, The Ask, Sam Lipsyte has consistently penned the best comedic literature of the past decade. In the fall issue, he has returned to the short form and chiseled us out what might be his best story to date. It’s your classic tale about a good man with a bad plan. A lot like life, it’s a tale of things almost working out. Last year I interviewed Lipsyte about The Ask. This month he let me do it again, this time about “The Worm in Philly.” The hero of your new story wants to write a book about Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Why Hagler? As the narrator says, why not Hagler? Truth is I’ve always been a Hagler fan. There were things I left out of the story, like his subsequent career as an action-movie star in Italy, or the rumor that he wouldn’t shake hands with white fighters because he refused to touch “white flesh.” I used to follow a fighter named Mustafa Hamsho, who lost to Hagler a few times. I like both of those names a lot. Hagler and Hamsho. Hagler’s baldness was maybe an homage to Jack Johnson, but it was ominous in a fiercely contemporary way. He was kind of a throwback, but there was also the possibility he was from the future. I love the “white flesh” thing. I do that too. I want to talk about drugs though. Without answering the first part of this question, why do I love reading about drugs and why do you love writing about drugs? Why are drugs so hard to resist, whether they’re on the page or in the pocket? I’m glad you do that, Gian. That’s good. I’m not sure why you love reading about drugs. Maybe at a certain point the reading high is better than actually doing them? That could be preposterous though. I guess I’ve written about drugs a good deal because for a time, in my younger days, certain hard substances were the major elements in my life. My movements and decisions revolved around them. I like to pretend it was all some meaningless blur, but it was a very intense and focused time. I had a daily purpose (to get more drugs) that heightened the experience of being alive (a heightening then nullified by the drugs). I felt very alert during the mission phase of the day. Make no mistake, it was a horrible time, but I’ve always been fascinated by that robotic intensity. Also, it’s a way to give your character something to do, and we all know you have to keep those fuckers in motion, or readers might find out they are just constructions in a fiction! I try to make sure the drug-users in my stories aren’t acting high. Most of them tend to do drugs to get straight anyway. They are in that awful place. So their interactions might seem slightly off, but mostly these could easily be people not doing dangerous drugs. It’s just that occasionally they die from their addictions or else make really bad decisions that lead to more misery. That’s where the comedy kicks in. Drugs are hard to resist for some people because they work really well. And then don’t. But you find that out later. Read More
September 22, 2010 On Translation Group Think By Lydia Davis The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person—the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight. I’ve been translating from the French for decades (I must enjoy it), and yet, until I translated Proust’s Swann’s Way a few years ago, mine was always the first translation into English of whatever book I was working on, with the predictable advantage and disadvantage that came with that fact: I had no other translation to consult if I was stuck; but no reviewer could compare mine unfavorably to another one. In the case of Swann’s Way, however, there were two previous translations—one by C. K. Scott Moncrieff done during the 1920s and thirties, and one by an Irish-Australian, James Grieve, published in 1982 in Canberra and not available in the U.S. Few people had seen the Grieve version, but the partisans of the Scott Moncrieff were passionate, and it was no use arguing that his translation was written in a style quite alien to Proust’s and that his text was not nearly as close as it should and could have been (“jaws of Hell” for “entrance to the Underworld”?). To them, the translation simply was Proust. Madame Bovary is the first book I’ve translated that has already been translated many times into English—as many as nineteen times, by my latest count—so it has been a fascinating experience and nothing like, even, working with one major existing translation, the Scott Moncrieff Proust. Since I have looked again and again at about eleven of the other translations, I’ve come to know them well. It did occur to me from time to time, as I studied them—as I felt, in effect, surrounded by them as a group—that a group effort might be interesting. This translator is better informed than I am about French history (or rather, I later realized, looking more carefully, she found someone good to do her endnotes); that one is especially clever at dialogue; another seems to have a naturally rich vocabulary; and yet another is a good writer and might give a useful critique of the style of my version. Together we would produce a wonderful translation. Of course, the earliest of us lived in the 1880s, and most of the others, too, have died by now. I should add, apropos of “one, two, or three years of careful work,” that despite whatever I may say about the shortcomings of the other translations, I believe that each version I looked at was done with a certain amount of diligence—except perhaps for the Paul de Man revision of the Eleanor Marx Aveling. Translating is arduous, frustrating, time-consuming. Even a bad one can’t be dashed off. Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary comes out on September 23. For the next week she will be writing for TPR Daily about the tasks and sins of the translator. On October 4, she will be speaking at the 92nd Street Y. See Also: “Survival of the Fittest” See Also: Lydia Davis in Feed Magazine, from 2000
September 22, 2010 On Design Jennifer Over and Our New Web Site By Thessaly La Force You may have noticed that our Web site looks different. It’s prettier, less cluttered, easier on the eyes—it’s a delight to click on every page. Meet Jennifer, the Web designer with Tierra Innovation who was crucial to envisioning our redesign. Who better to explain our magical transformation? She recently answered some questions about the site via e-mail. For those unfamiliar with the old site, what has changed? Well, a big change is that the site now features a mix of evergreen content from the issue and more ephemeral content from The Daily and Twitter. You might drop in to check out something on the blog and then ten minutes later find yourself reading an interview from 1978. Another change is that it’s easier to browse the archives of The Paris Review. For the first time, you can browse by genre, which is a whole new way of looking at the work. The new site pulls a lot of amazing pieces from the archive to the surface. I hope that it excites your readers! What were you thinking about when you designed the new look? When we first met to discuss the look and feel of the Web site, Lorin described a vision of the publication—and by proxy the site—as “rough and ready.” That turned out to be a pretty provocative and inspiring idea that we kept drawing from over the course of the design. What could be considered rough and ready online is really open for interpretation. Ultimately our take was a design that’s well-considered without looking too polished. Simple background shades and rules. No textures or finishes to make things on-screen look tactile and juicy. An environment in which text can stand out. And most significantly, a design that is loose enough to change with regularity. Specifically, the color palette of the site will change based on each new issue’s cover. We also really wanted to embrace certain design elements of the print magazine, like the hand-rendered logotype, some of the mid-century-modern typography and the frontispiece illustration by William Pène du Bois. It was an interesting challenge to integrate those elements into a Web site in a way that feels natural and modern rather than anachronistic. The Paris Review has undergone many changes from 1953, when it was founded, to today, as realized by our new art editor, Charlotte Strick. In your research for the site, was there a look you liked the most? The least? Read More
September 22, 2010 Arts & Culture Good-Bye to All That: The Art Boom and Bust By David Wallace-Wells Art Basel Miami during the boom. “The plug was pulled, but life went on—invigorating life,” Jerry Saltz wrote last fall in a typically optimistic survey of “art after money.” You could hear the refrain everywhere, in galleries and studios, museums and bars: The bull market had been unbearable, turning work into a kind of mortgage payment, so maybe the bust would be good for art in this town. Saltz said it already was: “It’s as if a bunch of spotlights went out when the market crashed last October, and now, as they flicker back on, we’re able to see new green shoots busting out of the establishment’s cracks.” But not much has changed in New York since 2008, when that speculative boom ended and an exercise in disaster capitalism began. This season, the big-deal September show at the biggest-deal New York gallery, Gagosian, is the blue-chip debut of derivative Deitch darling Dan Colen. Money is still cool-hunting. This week, Saltz called the Gagosian show, dismissively, “an event straight out of 2007.” But one of these is an elephant and one is a gnat, and the market is stampeding again. New galleries have emerged since the crash, whole neighborhoods of them in fact, and new work has been assembled, sculpted, painted, and filmed—some of it very good work. But we are still beholden to art fairs, where the hustle is the spectacle, and we still anxiously await future auctions, when we’ll learn how well we’ve done—in collecting, in working, in making assessments. We are still enamored of gags, puns, and trompe l’oeil. We still tend to follow the scent of sweat where it pools—that antinomian territory called, in the generation after Basquiat anyway, downtown. Better would be to chase uptown, so to speak, after shows that, if young, aren’t insolent; if brash, aren’t gimmicky; and that do not rely for their power on the incongruity between the work and its staging. From here that frisson looks like a form of irony—and we want to say good-bye to all that.
September 21, 2010 At Work April Ayers Lawson on “Virgin” By Lorin Stein April Ayers Lawson’s short story “Virgin” appears in our new issue. It is Lawson’s first appearance in a magazine with national circulation. Last week she was kind enough to answer a few questions from her home in Greenville, South Carolina. In “Virgin” you describe sexual frustration and desire very convincingly—and very specifically—from a man’s point of view. How did you do it? Close observation. Male frustration seems to me more focused, more linear, than female frustration. This interests me a lot. Also, I enjoy asking men about what they think it means to be a man. I like to hear about the women in their lives—how they view their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives. I like to try to understand what it means to be “manly,” what it means for a man to think he’s failed to be manly. The more I understand men, the more I understand women. Also, when a story is about women—I consider the story to be mostly about the women—it makes more sense to me to feel them from the perspective of a man. Did you ever feel out of your depth? The perspective came naturally. If it didn’t I’d have aborted. When I write I’m doing it as an act of discovery. Also to get high. What I’m writing should feel at least as real to me as what’s physically around me. It should rise out of and also sustain a heightened sense of emotional reality. Otherwise, no point, no pleasure. The stories of yours that I have read are all set in the South among Evangelical Christians. Do you write with a Southern Christian reader in mind? Read More