December 3, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Baseball Leaves Me Cold By Lorin Stein I’m dating an athlete—more problematically, he’s a great watcher of sports. I was raised on football, so I have no problem screaming at the television with him when pass interference doesn’t get called, but baseball and basketball leave me cold. Are there any good books on either sport—I do love a weepy sports narrative—that I could read to pique my interest? I’m tired of asking my boyfriend to explain the designated hitter to me—as, I’m sure, is he. —M. K. Dear M. K., We at The Paris Review Daily—okay, I, Lorin—know diddly about sports. So we decided to … um, bunt? Hand-off? Bring in a couple of pinch hitters? You get the idea: Your question has been referred to our two Paris Review Daily sports correspondents, Will Frears and Louisa Thomas. Thus Will: If she wants to understand her boyfriend and the pitiable nature of his condition, she should read A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley, or Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby. The really good baseball books are The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn; Ball Four, by Jim Bouton; and pretty much anything by Roger Angell. I can’t think of a good basketball book, but for the true weepy sports experience, watch Hoosiers. If the boyfriend is a soccer fan and she wants to dazzle him with her technical know-how, then Inverting the Pyramid, by Jonathan Wilson, is a must-read. And Louisa: Jim Bouton’s Ball Four won’t explain the designated hitter, but it will tell you what “beaver-shooting” is, and it will make you laugh. Gay Talese’s “The Silent Season of a Hero” barely visits a ball field, but it will make you ache for Joe DiMaggio. If your boyfriend is a statshead, read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball to demystify sabermetrics. (Plus, it’s always satisfying to read a story in which the men in charge hadn’t a clue.) John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are, about Bill Bradley as a Princeton basketball player, is in awe of its subject, but so am I. To learn the rules, try Wikipedia. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
December 3, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: End of Empires, Keep Your Day Job By The Paris Review Mary Gaitskill. Illustration by Adrian Bellesguard. Sometimes you get lucky: You find a used book for five dollars at The Strand by an author you’ve been meaning to read. The cover of Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin, is garish, and its themes—incest, middle-school mean-girl power dynamics, adolescent pseudo-rape—are objectively repellent. But Gaitskill is so dead-on in her examination of the emotional life of her two central characters that I can’t help losing myself in the pages until finding a line—one girl holds “her aloneness around her like a magic cloak”—that when I look up, I discover I’ve missed my subway stop. —Miranda Popkey I have been reading J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, a historical novel–cum–comedy of manners set during the Irish guerrilla war of 1919–21. The backdrop is a grand, Victorian-era hotel in County Wexford, whose squash and palm courts are gradually going to seed—a charming, if somewhat creaky allegory for the end of empire. But with history about to blow their roof off, Farrell’s Anglo-Irish protagonists contrive to worry about how to replace the shingles. I’m everywhere reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro’s great theme, how the collapse of old orders gives new license to self-deception. —Robyn Creswell Read More
December 2, 2010 A Letter from the Editor East Bay, Left Bank By Lorin Stein First The Paris Magazine, now this! We like to think of The Paris Review as the little magazine that launched a thousand little magazines. And yes, in our book, imaginary magazines count extra. We wish “The Oakland Review” a long and happy life … or at least a superfun night. Just give back the bird once you’ve finished?
December 2, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Dan Chiasson, Poet, Part 2 By Dan Chiasson This is the second installment of Chiasson’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY TWO 7:00 A.M. I have an e-mail from a guy I met last summer in Paris, Thierry Corcelle, of the incomparable Librarie Thierry Corcelle, 29 rue de Conde, right near the Luxembourg Garden. Thierry has a new catalogue; I look through it on my computer, marveling at it. I could look at these things forever. What Thierry sells, essentially, are Joseph Cornell boxes that don’t know they are Joseph Cornell boxes: old magic sets, wooden puzzles, dioramas, circus sets, toy soldiers, tarot cards … I went into serious debt this summer buying the following items: 12:00 P.M. I am actively scouting ideas for poems. I browse around in Robert Pogue Harrison’s great study of burial, The Dominion of the Dead. Harrison talks about a Jules Verne novel (From the Earth to the Moon) in which, one of the astronaut’s dogs dies on a space mission. They try to expel her into space, but she just bobs alongside them. I have to read that story. 8:00 P.M. My wife and I fire up the Dick Cavett. First we watch his interview with Orson Welles. Welles is playful, clearly adores Cavett, funny, totally of this planet in a way that I miss, later, when we watch the interview with Alfred Hitchcock, who is all “Hitchcock” persona. The Welles interview sets the agenda for the rest of the week. Tomorrow night I have to travel, but Thursday, it will be a double bill of The Lady from Shanghai and The Stranger. Read More
December 1, 2010 At Work Lynda Barry on ‘Picture This’ By Nicole Rudick Lynda Barry is many things: a cartoonist, best known for her long-running strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek; the author of two illustrated novels, Cruddy and The Good Times Are Killing Me; and the sought-after instructor of the workshop “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her two memoir-cum-workbooks—2008’s What It Is and Picture This, published last month by Drawn & Quarterly—Barry puts her many talents into play. The books’ dense collages, lively cartoons, and hand-drawn text use autobiographical tidbits and philosophical flights of fancy to explore the creative impulse, asking such questions as What is an image? and Why do we stop drawing? Barry, a friend of Matt Groening’s since their days at the Evergreen State College in the seventies, agreed to meet me for breakfast, where we talked art, writing, and cigarettes. One of the themes of Picture This is forgetting in order to remember, which seems pretty counterintuitive. When you combine it with Don’t—the name of the cigarettes, which are a running gag throughout—the meaning of the lines becomes very contradictory. Forget to remember to forget to remember, or remember to forget to remember to forget. Yeah, it just makes your brain go uuuuuuuhhh. That’s exactly what I wanted: to get to the point where you realize you don’t know what you’re looking at. Plus, it’s fun coming up with slogans. “What would you do for a don’t?” “Don’t consider it.” I stumbled on these magazines called Grade Teacher, which were sent to grade-school teachers every month, and I have a pile of them from the late twenties to the sixties. They have stuff like “Fun Things to Draw” or “Let’s Do Our Bulletin Board.” But the big ad sponsorship is from coal companies and asbestos companies: “Free giant charts for your class about how wonderful coal is!” The weirdest things are the art projects with asbestos powder, like “Lets make beads and make necklaces and wear them.” I am not joking. Read More
December 1, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Dan Chiasson, Poet By Dan Chiasson DAY ONE 6:15 A.M. Our children wake us up. Nobody wants anything read to them this morning. They are involved in some kind of acrimonious negotiation involving Lego heads (“That’s my head!” “It’s MY head!” “No, mine!” et cetera) so I go into the next room and start thinking about a class I am guest teaching today at BU. I’ve been reading (and writing) father-son poems, and I think, Why not just tell the students what’s on my mind: Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem for his son, “Three Things There Be.” The poem comes in several variants; I print them out and look at a brief discussion of the variants as well as the provocative “spoiled riddle” poems (poems that act like riddles but give their solutions away) on Slate, by Robert Pinsky. I go to the Times website, and there is (fortuitously) this article on metaphor and the brain. I skim it for something I can say to the class. Neuroscience is very keen on poets and poetry these days: It turns out that when you call someone a cockroach, you activate the same part of your brain that can recall the picture of an actual cockroach 8:30 A.M. I head into Boston. It’s an hour drive this time of day. I get a four-shot latte at Karma Coffee, Route 20 in Sudbury (do yourself a favor). I am listening a lot to the Byrds’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo these days, especially “One Hundred Years from Now.” I have a problem that technology has solved. When I like a song, I listen to it over and over for weeks at a time. You used to have to keep rewinding the tape, and the tape would snap or come unraveled. Now, with iPods, it’s no problem. Read More