August 29, 2011 Look Chez Panisse Menus By Patricia Curtan This weekend marked the fortieth anniversary of Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. I was swept into the adventure of the restaurant almost at its inception; though I had no restaurant experience, I was recruited to fill in for someone who didn’t show up for work. Alice is a dedicated Francophile, and early on she wrote out each nightly menu, in French, in her elegant calligraphy. Eventually, her devotion to France was replaced with the appreciation of California’s food and culture, and the names of growers, producers, and ingredients took prominence on the menus. Over the years, many Bay Area designers, poets, writers, calligraphers, and printers have placed their stamp on the Chez Panisse menus. I’m lucky to have been one of them. Read More
August 26, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Writing Jobs; Literary Style Icons By Sadie Stein Hi Sadie, I would like to know how to find jobs writing, as someone very new to the field. I am unsure where to start looking. Some ads just look like scams to me. Help! Thank you, Angela Dear Angela, We received two queries on starting out as a writer this week, as it happens—maybe it’s the time of year? I always think of “back-to-school” as a much more logical starting point for new ventures than January 1, personally. But to answer your question, to the extent that that is possible in a few short paragraphs? First of all, the necessary warnings. Making your living as a writer is hard. Obvious, maybe, but it bears repeating. My parents—and for that matter, my grandfather—wrote for a living, and stable isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind when discussing my childhood. I often think that if I had any other marketable skills, I’d do something else. And keep in mind that many of the great writers in history have done so while holding down day jobs. I’m sure the structure of regular employment—not to mention the financial security—is a real help to many. But if you are serious about writing professionally, in any capacity, the best advice anyone can give you is to write, and as much as possible. Which is not to say you should go for any “gig” advertised on Craigslist; you’re right to be wary. People have different views on blogs. In my case, I found keeping a personal blog to be useful both in developing a voice and in forcing myself to be accountable to a readership, even if that readership was just my grandmother. I’d add the caveat, though, that you want to be careful what you put out there—this writing, as much as anything in your clips file, will define you both professionally and personally. For the pitch, think of interesting takes on things that genuinely engage you. Don’t be shy. Familiarize yourself with publications and Web sites and get to know their tones. Not everyone can pay much; that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile clip. Ask questions. Go to readings. Talk to everyone you meet. Keep in mind that there’s no shame in striking out—and you will—and that no rejection feels as bad as the knowledge that you haven’t tried. Dear Sadie, What are some of your favorite author twitters? –SB I think we can all agree that the best writers don’t always make the best twitterers, and vice versa, but there are a few who have mastered both genres. (Is Twitter a genre? I’m afraid it might be.) Polymath Wil Wheaton—as one might expect from someone who exercises such economy of characters in the spelling of his own first name—is a Twitter star for a reason. Ditto the ever-entertaining Stephen Fry. Maud Newton is necessary reading for the reader. And Shakespeare (@WillShake) isn’t half-stepping, either. Dear Sadie, Who is your literary style icon? Fictionally speaking, I’ve definitely gone through phases where certain characters exerted undue influence. I’m no particular lover of Hemingway, but who wouldn’t be seduced by this description of Lady Brett Ashley: “She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” Oh, and she also sports a fedora. (Not recommended for an undersized sixteen-year-old, in case the younger me is reading this.) If we’re talking literary figures beyond the page, the list gets even longer: Carson McCullers, Barbara Pym, and my personal inspiration for the years 2003 to 2005, Sylvia Beach. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
August 26, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: The Unseen Bestiary, The Avoidance of Love By The Paris Review From ‘Monstrorum Historia,’ by Ulisse Aldrovandi, 1642. Just in time for Borges’s birthday, Lindsey Carr is curating a collaborative art project documenting creatures that have never been seen. The project, The Unseen Bestiary, a sort of DIY Book of Imaginary Beings, is soliciting brief descriptions to accompany Carr’s drawings. —Mackenzie Beer I’m rereading Stanley Cavell’s great essay on King Lear (and everything else), “The Avoidance of Love,” in preparation for what I’m told is another great essay, by Mark Greif, in the new issue of n+1. (Some lifetime subscription that turned out to be!) —Lorin Stein I’ve been slowly working through the strikingly lyrical essays in City Dog this summer, so I was excited to see new poems by W. S. di Piero in the fall issue of ZYZZYVA. Something about them reminded me of the end of summer. “Starting Over” perfectly evoked that late-August feeling of everyone coming home: “here you are the nothing / that is the place, / and all the places are you, / none of them yours to keep.” —Ali Pechman I just learned everything I know about Batman from intern Cody, who puts the super back in superheroes. —L.S. Since I realized that Spotify has such a great collection of Alan Lomax recordings, I’ve been totally hooked. —Sadie Stein Moving books around in my house, I rediscovered my copy of Boulevard Transportation, a collaboration between Rudy Burckhardt and Vincent Katz. The former’s photographs—framing and juxtaposing country and city streets, architectural elements, faces—and the latter’s poetry—casual glances and delighted observations—are perfectly suited to each other. On one spread, Burckhardt’s closeup of reeds waving against sun-dappled water is set opposite this from Katz: “I put bare / feet to Terra / swim in the lake / all day long / there is nothing / to do / listen to wind in the trees.” —Nicole Rudick I was one of those lame kids without a rock collection, but Léonard Rosenthal, famed 1920s Parisian jeweler and author of The Kingdom of the Pearl, has reformed me. If you aren’t sold on reading about rocks, check out the Edmund Dulac illustrations that originally accompanied the text. —M.B. I’ve always felt more like a New Yorker than a Californian, but this video is amazing. — A.P.
August 25, 2011 Arts & Culture Collapse By Yevgeniya Traps Alexander Lobanov, Untitled, n.d. Collection abcd, Paris. The opening lines of “From a Great Mind,” a song by the Siberian folk-punk singer Yanka Dyagileva, run something like this when translated from Russian: From a great mind, only madness and jail,From a reckless head, only ditches and barriers,From a beautiful soul, only scabs and lice,From universal love, only bloodied physiognomies. A similar sentiment animates “Ostalgia,” the recently opened exhibit at the New Museum in New York. The name for the show is taken from the German neologism ostalgie, a portmanteau of east and nostalgia meant to evoke a longing for life in East Germany, particularly its daily rituals and their trappings. But the show—and this is probably true of its namesake concept—is not really about a longing for communism. It is rather about the hunger for the kind of meaning that can only emerge from meaning’s suppression. Repressive regimes raise the stakes: under them, art is not something artists are paid to create, but something that extorts a price—perhaps a terrible one—from the artist. Ostalgie is not for the totalitarian government but for the clarity that emerges from the knowledge that great minds risked the gulag, the madhouse, the blindfold, and the rifle with every act of artistic creation. Read More
August 25, 2011 Poetry Poem: Episode By Jennifer Michael Hecht Jennifer Michael Hecht. It’s Thursday, as good a day as any for an incisive and surprising poem by Jennifer Michael Hecht about a hangover. We liked it because of the way it evokes the light mantle of head-clouded shame that follows too much bourbon or rum; its wrapping, self-analyzing lines convey the cloudiness and the strange clarity that come the day after drinking too much. Who hasn’t vowed that “nothing that ever happened/ will happen again?” —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
August 24, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. A cultural news roundup. New York poet Samuel Menashe has died at 85. James Salter wins the Rea Award for short fiction. Would Joyce have tweeted? One biographer thinks so. BookLamp: it’s like Pandora, for books. “Writing about sports the way that smart people talk about sports is a simple idea, and a good one.” E-books, now with sound tracks. “Now the fact that the president of the United States apparently doesn’t read women writers is not the greatest crisis facing the arts, much less the nation—but it’s upsetting nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their manifestations may seem relatively benign.” Publishing is experiencing an upswing. But are there too many books being published already? The Berlin library will return books confiscated during the Third Reich—including a Communist Manifesto that may have belonged to Friedrich Engels. Google celebrates Borges. Being immortalized by Julia Roberts isn’t enough to save one London bookshop.