October 21, 2010 At Work Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ By Miranda Popkey Photograph by Cormac Scully. Paul Murray’s second novel, Skippy Dies—recently longlisted for the Booker Prize—is more than six hundred pages long and tackles subjects ranging from string theory to World War I. Set at an Irish boarding school, the darkly comic tale (Skippy actually does die in the first chapter) is populated by a sharply drawn cast of confused, self-destructive teens and self-involved, irresponsible adults. Recently, Murray spoke to me from his home in Dublin. Did you draw any of the characters and themes from your own experiences? Were you bullied at school? I went to quite an illustrious school in Ireland called Blackrock College, and Seabrook College, the school in the book, physically resembles the school that I went to. But other than that, it wasn’t hugely autobiographical. I wasn’t bullied or anything; I wasn’t brutalized in any way. There were much nerdier kids in my school, and they would draw more of the fire, but I could see it going on around me. It wasn’t an evil place. But there was such a limited view of the world. It was a big rugby school, and I was incredibly bad at rugby. They would make you play it until you were about fifteen, no matter how incredibly pointless that was. So if you weren’t any good at rugby, then you sort of didn’t really have any kind of standing in the school. I think being a teenager is really, really hard. You’re caught in this double bind: You’re struggling to establish your own identity, and at the same time you have absolutely zero of the tools that you need. You’re completely dependent on your parents, you have no money, and your day is mapped out for you from beginning to end. My school was a boys’ school; there were no girls, so life really felt kind of pointless in that regard. You’ve got these huge sexual transformations happening, but if there are no girls, obviously all the energy is just going to be turned into brutalizing whoever is smaller than you. There was also a real emphasis on grades. The school would push students to perform well on exams and get a lot of points and get into good universities and so forth. The education system in Ireland is a real sausage factory. You go into class and you learn as many facts as you can and you regurgitate them in your exams, and there’s not a huge amount of respect for learning or a huge amount of respect for education. And because a lot of the kids were quite wealthy, some of them looked down on teachers. And the combination of a might-makes-right brutality and also getting a glimpse of the economic hierarchy that held sway in the country—all those things were really disappointing lessons to learn as a kid. It felt like my life began as soon as I left school. Read More
October 20, 2010 On Sports October Baseball and the Meaning of Hurt By Will Frears Dear Louisa, I’m very excited to be writing about the World Series with you. When I moved to America, I knew that it was important to find a sport, something to fill the void that my enforced separation from Arsenal Football Club was going to create. I settled (the term implies, inaccurately, some level of critical thinking) on baseball. I have an uncle who lives on the Upper West Side, and for Christmas every year he would send me Yankee paraphernalia. I did ask for it, he wasn’t imposing on me, and so, since I already had the cap and because I would be living in New York and am a locavore when it comes to sports teams, I settled into Yankee fandom. This was easy to do at the time—1993—because the Yankees were terrible. There was nothing fair-weather about it. I enjoyed the first few Yankee triumphs: My girlfriend in college was in love with Joe Girardi, who wasn’t a threat; I went to the Leyritz walk-off game in 1995; and after graduating from college, my friends and I used to go sit in the bleachers with a flask and a selection of loose joints. On May 17, 1998, the last time I took ecstasy, David Wells pitched a perfect game. It was a good time to be a fan. And then my team betrayed me. On the Internet one day, I discovered the Yankees, a team that so far had provided me with nothing but the occasional good time, had signed a deal with Manchester United. You know how people in Brooklyn can never forgive the Dodgers for moving to LA—well imagine they had killed your grandmother as well. Read More
October 20, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Carolyn Kellogg, Book Reporter and Blogger By Carolyn Kellogg DAY ONE 6:15 A.M. After the heat wave of late September, Los Angeles is experiencing a cold and rainy snap. I’m discovering that my new apartment, which is big enough for lots of books, is also drafty and uninsulated in the special way of LA buildings from the 1920s. So when I wake up, staying in bed seems like a very good idea; I read about eighty pages of Antonya Nelson’s Bound before forcing myself up, into the day. I wasn’t sure about the book at first—it’s a little slow to start—but I was very sorry to have to put it down. I leave it on my bedside table. 9:00 A.M. I’m up and blogging about a poetry festival I won’t go to, because it’s tomorrow, and three thousand miles away. 11:00 A.M. I get an invitation to moderate a conversation between Dennis Lehane and Tom Franklin. Hell, yes! I’ve moderated panels and done some onstage interviews—Richard Russo, James Ellroy, John Waters—and what I love is the possibility for serendipity and detour, the moment that could only have evolved from that particular strand of conversation. I saw Lehane at the Brooklyn Book Festival; he’s smart and funny onstage, fast. And I liked the beginning of Tom Franklin’s book, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which I stopped reading because someone else was reviewing it. My first thought is all the reading I’ll get to do to prep for the discussion. My second thought is, What will I wear? Because scooting into a high director’s chair in a dress can be tricky. 6:00 P.M. After several hours at the office, I head to Book Soup to see Ben Greenman read from Celebrity Chekhov. Book Soup is one of LA’s major independent bookstores, right on the Sunset Strip, with bookshelves crammed under high ceilings and a robust selection of literary fiction and art/film books; they don’t waste much room on pap. It also has a strange, L-shaped reading area. The author stands in a corner, with ten chairs in front of him, in five rows of two; off to his right, a similar setup. Ben does fine; no celebrities have shown up to protest the Chekhovian inner lives he’s given them. Afterward I try to prove to him that LA is not weird and drag him to Musso & Frank for a drink. In the spirit of his book, we riff on rock-star corollaries of contemporary writers: William T. Vollmann = Sonic Youth, David Foster Wallace = Kurt Cobain. Ben isn’t satisfied with my Bono counterpart, Dave Eggers. Suggestions are welcome. Read More
October 19, 2010 At Work Laura Kipnis and a Theory of Scandal By Natalie Jacoby Laura Kipnis is not a scandalous person. The Northwestern Professor of media studies has written five books, received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and is a contributor to Harper’s, Slate, and The New York Times. In her latest book, How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, she develops a “theory of scandal.” The book does not include the latest tabloid gossip; rather, Kipnis takes an academic approach in understanding the psychology behind stories of people like Linda Tripp and James Frey. I recently interviewed Kipnis in her New York apartment (where I was happy to see a set of The Paris Review interview series on her shelves). There doesn’t seem to be a lot of writing on the “theory of scandal.” What kind of research did you do for this book? There’s a currently little-read psychoanalyst named Theodor Reik, a student of Freud’s, who wrote on what he called social masochism, which involves people using society as an instrument of self-punishment, acting things out in public in a way that guarantees some kind of social retribution. I found this incredibly fascinating and useful, since the big question of the book ends up being about self-destruction, about people organizing their own downfalls. Reik isn’t very in fashion anymore, I don’t know why. He’s also written a lot of very counterintuitive stuff on guilt and revenge, which I draw on in a number of the chapters. René Girard’s book on scapegoats was also helpful in thinking about the social dynamics of scandal. What I didn’t find was much on scandal itself that was particularly useful, but that’s also exciting as a writer: You get to invent the terrain. Read More
October 18, 2010 Letter from Our Southern Editor Bill Bailey Comes Home By John Jeremiah Sullivan A mug shot of Axl Rose at eighteen. Five years ago GQ assigned me to write about Axl Rose, who was mounting a “final comeback” with his Chinese Democracy, release of which had already been postponed by more than a decade. The album title was meant as a punch line. Q: When will Guns N’ Roses come out with something new? A: When there’s democracy in China. That stage in the singer’s career turned out to be neither a comeback (few people liked the record, and nobody played it much) nor final—a minute ago I ran his name through Google News and found he’s hard at work being Axl, showing up hours late to shows, getting pelted with bottles, making bizarre requests on tour riders (black napkins, Grolsch beer, honey in “bear-shaped tubes”). The story was, by turns, fun and frustrating to report. I followed the band around Europe for a while, feeding cigarettes to the band members’ model girlfriends and failing to secure face time with “Ax.” His manager back then was a real specimen. Before one show, in Spain, I sat at a coffee table with this person, struggling to explain how it might help justify the seven thousand words we were about to expend on the band if the front man would speak to me for a few seconds. I think at one point I actually said, “Give me thirty seconds.” Axl had by then become, as he remains, sealed off from the press to an almost Michael Jackson level. The manager kept pausing to answer cellphone calls from Elton John. “Well, that’s because they don’t know Tea for the Tillerman,” he said into the phone at one point, referring to the classic Cat Stevens record. What were he and Sir Elton talking about? I still wonder sometimes. He told me that, if we would agree to put Axl on the cover, “maybe we could talk about an interview.” I couldn’t figure out how to say, in any non-offensive way, that GQ covers are typically reserved for extremely conventionally good-looking people in the midst of a career peak, such as Axl once was but hadn’t been in a very long time. I let it drop. Axl broke with the manager soon thereafter, passive-aggressively blaming him in an “Open Letter to Fans” for the failure of Chinese Democracy. Thinking back, I feel sympathy with the manager. What I read as superciliousness was probably professional trauma. He was the devil’s own PR man. The most memorable trip I made in connection with Axl was to Lafayette, Indiana, where he grew up. I drove there hoping to track down his oldest childhood friend, a man named Dana, who’d never been interviewed. Dana turned out not surprisingly to be a very reclusive person, and although he did eventually meet with me, it took several days to coax him out. I spent them inventing little research projects. I visited the public library and found old yearbook pictures of Axl. I photographed the church where he sang in the choir. And lastly, on the morning of the day when Dana finally called me back, I went to the local police station. Did they have any records on Axl? No, they didn’t think so. Really? That seemed impossible. Would they mind checking under his many Indiana names? William Bruce Rose Jr.? William Bruce Bailey? Bill Bailey? W. Rose? A friendly lady officer agreed to help me out. Read More
October 15, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Adaptation; Lending Books By Lorin Stein I’m a student at the Tisch School for the Arts in New York City, where I concentrate in writing for musical theater. I’d like to adapt a novella or short story for the stage and was hoping you might have some suggestions. Thanks, Leslie Since you ask—I’ve always thought Grégoire Bouillier’s novella-length memoir, The Mystery Guest, would make a fantastic play. It’s the true story of a guy who goes to a fancy party where he doesn’t know anybody, hoping to find out why his girlfriend walked out on him five years before. To my mind, it’s very dramatic stuff. At FSG we even made a fake movie trailer to promote it. Full disclosure: I translated the thing into English, but I signed away any royalties years ago. I just want to hear someone sing a show tune about Sophie Calle. Read More