April 8, 2011 James Salter Month Document: Possible Titles for ‘Light Years’ By Thessaly La Force At every magazine or publishing house, there’s always an editor or two with a knack for titles. But even so, rarely does one come in a flash of divine inspiration. There are iterations and themes and the same words written over and over. Here is a glimpse of what James Salter’s process was like with his novel Light Years (a book both Jhumpa Lahiri and Porochista Khakpour wrote about this week). Salter seems so close at points, circling back to light and years, sometimes on the same page but not always the same line, ranking his favorites and weighing the opinions of others. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center. Click to enlarge. Read More
April 8, 2011 The Revel Last Chance for Tickets to the Revel! By Thessaly La Force On Tuesday, The Paris Review will be hosting its Spring Revel, a fund-raiser held each year at Cipriani’s 42nd Street. As readers of The Daily may already know, Robert Redford will be presenting James Salter with The Paris Review Hadada; Fran Lebowitz will be awarding Elif Batuman the Terry Southern Humor Prize for her piece in The Daily called “My 12-Hour Blind Date with Dostoevsky”; and Ann Beattie will be giving April Ayers Lawson the Plimpton Prize for her short story “Virgin.” It’s a very fun affair. To quote Mary Karr: the Revel is “prom for New York intellectuals.” We are excited for those of you who are already coming. A few tickets are left, and it goes without saying that they are available for purchase to all of our readers.
April 8, 2011 James Salter Month From the Archives: ‘Sundays’ By Rosalind Parry In honor of James Salter month, and in lieu of This Week’s Reading, we are opening our archives to share some of the many short stories that Salter published in the Review. “Sundays” (issue 38, 1966) is a sensual, contemplative story (and part of what we all have come to know as the novel A Sport and a Pastime). Every setting is intimate and quiet and seems to belong entirely to the couple at the center of the story: the bed they awake in, the lake they dip their faces in, the pines they picnic in, the cafe they take shelter in, and the bed to which they return: They put their clothes on behind the car. No one else is around. Near to shore the surface of the water is broken by weeds. The leather seats are hot, and when Dean starts the engine small birds skim out ofthe grass and out across the lake. They eat in Montsauche in a little auberge. Sunday. Everything is hushed. Dean sits looking out at the street. It’s a silent meal. Afterwards there is nothing to do. He feels as if he is taking care of a child. He is thinking of other things. The day seems long. They drive—Dean takes the top down and they head towards Nevers, the wind curving in, the sun on their backs. He begins to grow sleepy. They pull off the road. They sit down under the trees. Pines. It’s very quiet. The dry cones click in the breeze. The shadow of branches is laid across their faces. Dean closes his eyes. He is almost asleep. “Phillipe,” he hears her say. “Yes.” “I would like to make love in the woods sometime.” “You’ve never done that?” No. “Strange,” he says. “You have?” He lies. “Yes.” “I have never. Is it nice?” “Yes,” he says. It’s the last thing he remembers. Read the full story here and check back next week for more from the archives. To read essays from James Salter month, click here.
April 8, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Reader’s Guilt; Toadstools By Lorin Stein I always tell people that my favorite book is Infinite Jest, and even though I haven’t gotten halfway through it, it’s still the best half of a book that I have ever read! Do you have any guilt from unread books floating around? Hmm. You mean books I’ve started that, if the title of one should happen to come up in conversation, I’d nod, implying—without ever explicitly stating—that I’d read the whole thing? I can think of one or two. The Man Without Qualities, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, Blood Meridian, Molloy, Jane Eyre, Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, American Pastoral, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, V., Vanity Fair, The Education of Henry Adams, The Beautiful and Damned, The Satanic Verses, Underworld, The World as Will and Representation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Hopscotch, Tristram Shandy, The Long Goodbye, The Hobbit, Shikasta, Contempt, Scaramouche, Watership Down, The Three Musketeers, and William Faulkner (pretty much opera omnia) spring to mind. Dear Mr. Stein, I have lately searched in vain for the right collective noun for toadstools and, in the absence of any viable candidates, have opted for sect, e.g., “a sect of toadstools.” May I in good conscience proceed? I trust your judgment. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Angus Trumble We are not prescriptivists, here at The Paris Review. Over the years our house usage has wobbled between OK and okay, et cetera and its abbreviation—even (in the old, hot-type days) between one typeface and another … in the space of a single issue. If you want to call a bunch of fungus by your own private collective noun, who are we to say no? Go crazy with that! I only worry that the plural may cause confusion. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
April 7, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Kim Hastreiter, Editor, Part 2 By Kim Hastreiter This is the second installment of Hastreiter’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:05 A.M. Hop over with Drew and Jacob to Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills to catch the Gus Van Sant show as well as the Ed Ruscha garbage paintings. The guys were drooling over the Van Sant homoerotic boy paintings. They were just okay in my book and forty thousand dollars each. And the exhibition was sponsored by Gucci. (So LA). I liked the Ruscha garbage paintings, although I wouldn’t have bought any of this art even if I were a zillionaire. Gus Van Sant at Gagosian. 12:15 P.M. I dropped off the boys at the hotel and headed up to Laurel Canyon to visit my friend, the artist Adele Lutz. Within five minutes of Hollywood Boulevard, I was completely in nature. We hung out drinking diet cokes in Adele’s lush backyard looking for mountain lions (one walked through her yard just the week before!). 2:45 P.M. Starving. Adele and I head down to a wonderful new spot I heard about called Tinga, on La Brea and Second Street, where they make the most yummy Oaxacan street food. Boy, did we have an outrageous lunch. The food is ridiculous and the folks who run it are sweethearts. They kept giving us stuff to try. Crazy good. They gave us a salsa made from toasted grasshoppers. Yikes. Norwegian chefs.6:30 P.M. Head downstairs to the Standard pool to check out the setup for our “Beautiful People” party we’re throwing with Guess. It starts at seven. Everyone is running around. Madness. Meet Josh Madden who is deejaying for us and bond with him immediately. He is cute, smart, and a true-blue Paper fanatic. His brothers are famous: Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte. Josh is more into being a regular guy. The party is full blast by eight. My posse arrives: the Brunettis, Press and Gefter, Cameron Silver and Jeff Snyder, and my old friend Debi Mazar decked head to toe in Isabel Toledo with her cute husband, Gabriele, in tow. Their Cooking Channel show Extra Virgin is a hit, so bulbs are flashing. It’s fun. Cobrasnake comes with his mom, who I adore with the hilarious Johnny Makeup! Paper fans are everywhere. Four identically dressed chefs from Norway introduce themselves, as does Jesse Williams, the gorgeous guy who plays one of the Grey’s Anatomy doctors. Turns out he’s a big Paper fan! Beautiful person Keri Hilson sings fiercely. It’s a success so I breathe a sigh of relief, run upstairs, and pack, as we have to be at the airport at five A.M. the next morning to catch the first flight back to New York to be back in time to throw our East Coast “Beautiful People” party that night! Oy vey. Read More
April 7, 2011 James Salter Month Love and Glory By Ian Crouch Our Spring Revel is on April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. If you’re interested in purchasing tickets to the Revel, click here. There may have been less startling primers on adult sexuality than James Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime for me to read as a young man, but few could have been as illuminating or comprehensive. Anyway, as with cold water, it is best to jump in. Or as the novel’s narrator explains, citing Rilke, “there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.” The erotic passages are justly famous, scandalous in 1967 and still instructional, in a practical sense, decades later. There was much to learn: about terminology (the male organ is rightly called a prick), positions (nothing tantric, but interesting for a teenager), and accessories (“In his clothing he conceals, like an assassin, a small tube of lubricant”). Salter is a great celebrant of the human anatomy and its various uses, but is equivocal about the emotions that sex produces: it can be tender, selfish, thrilling, boring, and, at times, even murderous, producing a “satanic happiness.” The more significant education, however, came from Salter’s sensibility, his mature insistence that sex is more than just a private act conducted by two people in the dark, that it exists as a part of history, with a past and future as well as a present. Also: that sex is central to love, which is central to life; that greatness and heroism exist in even the most common of places; and perhaps most striking, that “straight” men could be in love with each other. The novel follows an affair in France between Phillip Dean, an American, and his lover, a young Frenchwoman named Anne-Marie, and is told from the perspective of a voyeuristic, sometimes obsessive third person, the narrator, who feels from Dean “the pull of a dark star.” Dean may be petulant and inconstant, but he is in some essential way pure. Read More