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.
September 22, 2011 Events Stop Me If You’ve Heard This By Daniel Herbert Abe Vigoda by Drew Friedman from 'Even More Old Jewish Comedians.' Veteran actor Abe Vigoda’s friends think it’s funny that he’s not dead. “Abe, was the ground cold when you got up this morning?” asked Stewie Stone, who was compéring a party for Even More Old Jewish Comedians at the Friars Club last Thursday evening. The book, by artist Drew Friedman, is the third in a series of caricatures of his Borscht Belt comic heroes. For the occasion, the midtown club’s Milton Berle room was full of elderly Jews and even older jokes. “Milton Berle was famous,” Stone announced, “for the size of his cock. When he died, he left it to the Friars Club. So if you wanna see it, it’s on the second … third and fourth floors.” The crowd, sipping wine, laughed knowingly. They had heard this before. The wood paneled room hosted a mix of retired dentists and doctors; senior women sporting sparkly blazers, cloying perfume, and vibrant hair; comedy nerds seeking autographs; and a lot of quick-witted wisecrackers in their eighties and nineties. Read More
September 21, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Gustave Flaubert. Photograph by Nadar.A cultural news roundup. Michel Houellebecq has been found. So has a James M. Cain manuscript. Neil Young is writing an autobiography. So is Jermaine Jackson. So is Julian Assange. But without his consent. “If I say ‘David Bellos has to be one of the smartest people now on the planet,’ what language am I using? English of a kind; but scarcely the Queen’s, which—to judge from her public utterances—retains a careful insularity; mid-Atlantic schtick is not Her Majesty’s bag.” Nor Shakespeare’s. The Sondheim-crossword mother lode. Shakeups at DC Comics … But peace at the Poetry Society. “The general editorial posture of the magazine leaned away from the conventions of the establishment and toward the eccentricities of bohemians everywhere.” Salman Rushdie joins Twitter. “Flaubert once bet some friends that he could make love to a woman, smoke a cigar, and write a letter at the same time. He won, as they looked on in admiration.” These are beautiful, if we do say so ourselves.
September 21, 2011 Books A Doyle Man By Michael Dirda Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle, was the first grown-up book I ever read—and it changed my life. Back in the late 1950s, my fifth-grade class belonged to an elementary school book club. Each month our teacher would pass out a four-page newsletter describing several dozen paperbacks available for purchase. I remember buying Jim Kjelgaard’s Big Red and a thriller called Treasure at First Base, as well as Geoffrey Household’s Mystery of the Spanish Cave. Lying on my bed at home, I lingered for hours over these newsprint catalogues, carefully making my final selections. I had to. Each month my mother would allow me to purchase no more than four of the twenty-five- and thirty-five-cent paperbacks. Not even constant wheedling and abject supplication could shake her resolve. “What do you think we are, made of money? What’s wrong with the library?” Read More
September 20, 2011 Correspondence Document: T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf By T.S. Eliot Printed with the permission of the T. S. Eliot Estate. 38 Burleigh Mansions, St Martins Lane, London W.C.2. 27 August 1924 My dear Virginia, Forgive the unconscionable delay in answering your charming letter and invitation. I have been boiled in a hell-broth, and on Saturday journeyed to Liverpool to place my mother in her transatlantic, with the confusion and scurry usual on such occasions, and the usual narrow escape from being carried off to America (or at least to Cobh) myself. In the tumult on the dock an impetuous lady of middle age, ‘seeing off’ a relative going to make his fortune in the New World, by way of the Steerage) stuck her umbrella in my eye, which is Black. I should love to visit you, seriously: the Prince of Bores to refresh his reputation: but the only pleasure that I can now permit myself is, that should I come to Eastbourne (which is doubtful) we might visit you by dromedary for tea: if I leave London at all I am most unlikely to get done all the things that I ought to do (such as my 1923 Income Tax Return) and certainly not any of the things that you want me to do. I have done absolutely nothing for six weeks. One thing is certain: I MUST stay in London, where Vivien will be, after this week, is uncertain. ButWhen do you want to publish my defective compositions? When do you want the MSS? I should like at least to provide a short preface, which might take two or three nights’ work, and make a few alterations in the text to remove the more patent evidences of periodical publication. These three essays are not very good (the one on Dryden is the best) but I cannot offer you my ‘Reactionary’s Encheiridion’ or my ‘By Sleeping-Car to Rome: A Note on Church Reunion’ because they will not be ready in time. But you shall see for yourself, as soon as you wish, whether you think these three papers good enough to reprint. But what about a FRAGMENT of an Unpublished Novel from you to me? One exists most of the time in morose discontent with the sort of work that one does oneself, and wastes vain envy on all others: the worst of it is that nobody will believe one. But no one regrets more that these moods should occur to Mrs. Woolf (of all people) than Yr. devoted servt. Thos. Eliot Document from The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volumes One and Two, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, published by Yale University Press in September 2011. Reproduced by permission. The letter is a part of the T. S. Eliot collection of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.