September 27, 2011 At Work Philip Hensher on ‘King of the Badgers’ By Jonathan Gharraie Philip Hensher. King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher’s seventh novel, comes on the heels of his ambitious, fictional survey of seventies Britain, The Northern Clemency. King of the Badgers focuses on the staged kidnapping of China O’Connor, in circumstances that inevitably recall the disappearance of Shannon Matthews. Shannon disappeared from her hometown of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in 2008 and, after huge national media attention, was discovered a month later in the home of her step-uncle, who was eventually convicted and jailed along with Shannon’s mother. It delves into the private lives of the community in the fictional Devon town of Hanmouth. I met Philip in a trendily minimal Fitzrovia café, where Philip spoke of his imagined world as alive and elusively present. Let’s begin with Hanmouth, the setting for King of the Badgers. What kind of place is it? Well, it’s one of those places with a betwixt and between status. It’s a town: it’s not a village and it’s not a city. Pressures in England are pushing most places in one direction or the other. Surprising places are suddenly being declared cities. Chesterfield is a city now. Brighton is a city now. If it’s not big enough to have a claim to being a city then it’s pushed down toward being a village. I like those betwixt and between places, ones with about forty thousand people. They are small enough that people know each other, or recognize each other. Small enough that faces recur, but big enough for the chain of connections to stretch to a breaking point, so that people can still be strangers. Hanmouth is also an old town of the sort that are all over England. There’s history in them that people want to identify with, but at the same time modernity keeps cropping up. Read More
September 26, 2011 Fashion & Style At the Bazaar By Alexandra Pechman Ralph Gibson, Caroline Winberg (Harper’s Bazaar, May 2005). It’s easy to overlook that Vogue, seemingly eponymous with the word fashion, debuted after Harper’s Bazaar, America’s first fashion magazine. Steeped longer in the Victorianism that defined the nineteenth century, Bazaar set about cataloguing the changes that an era of colonialism and industrialization brought to women’s dress. The original weekly (titled Harper’s Bazar) saw its first printing in November of 1867, as a slim, sixteen-page newsprint volume featuring drawings and articles on every aspect of fashion. The news item “Colors” reads more like an issue of political importance. (“Bismarck, or gold-brown, is the prevailing shade, and reappears in some guise almost every where. The new shades of green are its only formidable rivals. The deep green known as ‘Invisible,’ now called ‘Mermaid,’ is in great favor.”) An early cover from an 1868 issue shows hand-drawn hairstyles alongside paper-doll-like figures, nodding at French sophistication with hairdo trends like the “diadem of curls” and the “fleur de lis coiffure of braids.” “Harper’s Bazaar: A Decade of Style” at the International Center of Photography catalogues the transformations that technology of a different sort wrought on women’s bodies. The collection of more than thirty images—vivid color photographs from the past decade under editor Glenda Bailey—features work by famed fashion photographers such as Patrick Demarchelier, Terry Richardson, and Peter Lindbergh, as well as art-world luminaries like Nan Goldin and Chuck Close. Read More
September 26, 2011 Arts & Culture A Father, A Daughter, A Novel By Jesse Browner Photograph by Christa Lohman. A basic but serviceable simile for memory is the mirror: you look into it and it shows you as you once were. Most of us recognize that the analogy is simplistic at best, and the novelist reaching into his past for material knows it better than most. I was a fifty-year-old writer trying to breathe life into the character of a seventeen-year-old boy. It was a daunting prospect, perhaps, but I was not to be put off by the presumptuousness or difficulty of the task; after all, inventing people is what I’m (occasionally) paid to do. I naturally intended to draw on my every memory of myself as a seventeen-year-old. Like me, my protagonist would be somewhat bookish but in no way a nerd; deeply introspective but not withdrawn; a peripheral figure on the margins of the in-crowd, longing to be admitted yet vaguely contemptuous of the object of his desire; chaotically libidinous but physically uncertain of himself; and above all a strenuously ethical being, ever seeking and ever falling short of the moral high ground. He would make a rather handsome character, I thought. Read More
September 23, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Sexual Suicide; Canine Doppelgängers By Sadie Stein I’ve recently become enamored with a delightful young lady. She’s a beautiful writer and very well read. Her sense of humor is precise and deeply compatible with my own. She smells great and she wears great shoes and—you get the idea. I want to give her my old tattered copy of my favorite autobiography, Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus. It is equal parts raunchy and precious. Mingus spares no detail when it comes to fellatio, convincing a woman to be a prostitute, siphoning gas out of a car, or playing some serious double bass. I know we live in New York and this is the twenty-first century, but would I be committing sexual suicide? I’m feeling like this could cut to the chase and expedite the inevitable. But maybe such ham-fisted logic is why I’m still single. Sincerely, Colin Dear Colin, The old “do I give my crush a sexually explicit book” conundrum. Old-timey etiquette dictated that a book and flowers were the only gifts an unmarried lady could receive with propriety from a gentleman. Were it that simple. I’d say it’s all in the presentation: if you can manage to frame it with something self-deprecating, like “I’m giving this to you in spite of the potential creepiness of the fellatio/prostitution angle because I love it” that could, potentially, disarm. If I were the recipient of such a gift, it would depend on how well I knew the giver, and whether I thought you were (a) sharing it innocently or (b) being somewhat insinuating. Since in this case it appears to be the latter, I’d probably hold off. All that said: that book rules. I’m starting in on The Paris Review’s interview archive, and I’m a little overwhelmed! What is your all-time favorite Paris Review interview? —Lara Dear Lara, It’s a cop-out to say it’s hard to choose a favorite, but it’s true: I’ve never read one in which I didn’t underline or dog-ear at least one quote, and there are several that I turn to when I need inspiration or solace. But brass tacks: the one I have forwarded and passed along more than any other is, without a doubt, P. G. Wodehouse. We Mets fans gotta stick together. Read More
September 23, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: ‘DOC,’ ‘Luminous Airplanes’ By The Paris Review H. L. “Doc” Humes in Greenwich Village, ca. 1961. Photo: Courtesy of the Humes family. A gregarious talker, novelist, activist, hippie, druggie, filmmaker, and original hipster, Harold L. “Doc” Humes was the kind of man who inspired followings. (Even Wikipedia can’t help but gush, describing him as “a contemporary Don Quixote.”) He was also, of course, a founding editor of The Paris Review. His daughter’s documentary about his rollicking life, DOC, is screening at the Anthology Film Archives on October 1st and 2nd. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn Paul LaFarge’s strange, experimental, oddly moving Luminous Airplanes is worth reading for its own considerable merits. But for the full, interactive experience, you have to immerse yourself in the Web site, too. And that’s all I’ll say. —Sadie Stein I have been rereading John Cheever’s stories and am happy and surprised to discover they are all fairy tales—not just the openly magical ones like “The Swimmer” or the European stories, with their nobles and castles, but even a country-club story like “Just Tell Me Who It Was,” in which a jealous husband goes looking for a tell-tale golden slipper. How had I never noticed this before? —Lorin Stein I recently found a copy of the Huntington Library’s facsimile edition of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, issued together with extended commentary. I’m a sucker for facsimile editions, and this a gorgeous, visionary book—Blake’s diaphanous, pliant figures; wilting, overgrown plant life; organic page designs; and stained coloration. Every Blake fan should have this in his or her library. —Nicole Rudick Rob Delaney writes in Vice this week about why we need to save St. Mark’s Books. —Natalie Jacoby Woody Allen would be baffled. But who doesn’t like a tribute to Manhattan? In any case, it got me to rewatch the opening sequence—and I defy any New Yorker not to get goosebumps when the fireworks go off over the river. (Philadelphians, even!) —S. S. And while we’re talking Woody Allen? This is when Twitter justifies its existence. —S. S. Riot Grrrl revival! —N.R.
September 22, 2011 On Film Mystic River By James Franco Think of all the takes of all the shots of all the movies ever made. Think of all the scenes and angles and alternate readings and alternate lines that were recorded on film—and then discarded in the cutting room. There are endless reels that have been perused and discarded by editors, never to be seen again. Many filmmakers would consider the discarded material worthless, but I, as an actor who has spent fifteen years in front of the camera, consider all of it valuable. They are the essence of my art. Usually each shot is taken four to ten times and, in the final edit of the film, only one of these takes, or portions of a few of these takes, will be used. At best, only one tenth of my total output is ever seen by the public. The other shots are filed away or destroyed. Sometimes these takes are inferior. But sometimes—as when they feature an actor like River Phoenix in a film like My Own Private Idaho, the best of his generation giving his best performance—every scrap is gold. Gus Van Sant made My Own Private Idaho in 1990 and released it in 1991. All the dailies were on film, nothing digitized; when I heard that Gus had held on to the editor’s film rolls, I told him that I would do anything to see them. We spent two days in Portland watching as much as we could. While we were watching, we discussed how Gus’s movies have changed in the intervening decades. His films now are much more spare in story and dialogue; they involve longer takes and fewer cuts. We were naturally led to wonder what Idaho would be like if he made the film now, and Gus offered to let me make my own cut. It was overwhelming to be able to cut the raw material of my favorite film, a film that had moved me, that had helped shape me as a teenager. The only way I could justify cutting such material was to do what Gus and I had discussed: I cut it as if Gus had made it today.