October 6, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Chris Weitz, Director By Chris Weitz Photograph by Summit Entertainment. DAY ONE, KIND OF The first thing that occurs to me at the beginning of my cultural week is a question about criteria. What qualifies? If you read—or, as I did, listen to—Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, the whole of culture is going to hell in a handbasket, as mash-ups and the digital entrepôt rid us of professional reportage, musicianship, originality, and notions of humanity itself. He cites Facebook as an example of the degrading of our standards: What is a “friend” from now on? Punters of my generation—and probably most readers of The Paris Review will find this a curious thing to say, but my three-year-old son will likely see it as a word for the tally of standardized connections amassed through the mediation of a Web site. Now then. DAY ONE, REALLY Monday begins, technically, at 12:00 A.M. “Sunday night,” with an Alan Watts lecture on the subject of “Play and Sincerity.” I have long used Watts to put me to sleep, which implies that he is soporific. Not so; it’s that I find his voice comforting. I also indulged in Zombieland, the unfeasibly entertaining comedy directed by Ruben Fleischer. Of the two ruling monster metaphors currently infecting the public mind (the other being vampirism, to which I have to confess I have contributed), I favor the flesh-eating variety, though that may simply be an indication that I have a Y chromosome. While we are at it, I am afraid that I rate Justin Cronin’s vampire epic The Passage a “sell.” The word is that Ridley Scott is to direct the movie version, and this may be one case of a book that benefits from boiling down. I hope that Sir Ridley is in his best science-fiction mode and can bring some of the quotidian genius that he brought to Alien and Blade Runner. My dad, who served in the Office of Strategic Services at the end of World War II, always said that the New York Times was the greatest intelligence resource in the world. When I got old enough to have developed a taste for a newspaper without (as he called it) funny papers, we had two subscriptions for the house, so that there would be no scuffling over favorite sections. (We also received the Post, for shits and giggles.) Read More
October 6, 2010 Events The Whistle-stop Tour Hits the West Coast By Nicole Rudick Photograph by Alain Picard. Catch Lorin Stein in the Golden State this week, at three events. Tonight: San Francisco The venerable City Lights hosts a conversation between Stein and Oscar Villalon, former book critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, as part of the city’s LitQuake festival. The fun starts at 7 P.M., at 261 Columbus Avenue. Tomorrow: Claremont Stein joins Aaron Matz, Scripps English professor and the author, most recently, of Satire in an Age of Realism, to talk literature and publishing in the Internet age. The conversation begins at 4:15 P.M. at Scripps College, 1030 Columbia Avenue, and is open to the public. Saturday: Los Angeles The final stop on the whistle-stop tour and an event not to be missed. Stein and Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin discuss the role of a literary journal in the era of constant distraction. Get to Book Soup, 8818 West Sunset Boulevard, early. The conversation starts at 5 P.M.
October 5, 2010 Events An Editor Abroad: Chicago By Lorin Stein J. C. Gabel, Lorin Stein, Danielle Chapman, and Mairead Case. I always forget how giant Chicago is. How giant, how elegant, and how proud. Under Culture Commissioner Lois Weissberg, the city has come into possession of an exact replica of Maxim’s, the Paris restaurant, in the basement of a Gold Coast condominium designed by Bertrand Goldberg. Beatles fans: This is the site where John Lennon recanted his “bigger than Jesus” claim. On that hallowed ground Stop Smiling’s co-founder, J. C. Gabel, Mairead Case, and I talked shop last Friday night before a crowd of fellow editors (Poetry, Playboy, The Baffler, the Trib), Ms. Weissberg, and assorted civilians passionate—to the point of forcible ejection—about The Paris Review. It was all part of the city’s “Cocktails and Conversations” series. New Yorkers, can you imagine such a thing? Verily, they are Sweden to our United States. Many thanks to Danielle Chapman, of the Department of Cultural Affairs, for having us. Even more thanks to J. C., who out-Virgiled Virgil, giving me the grand tour of the city, from Saul Bellow’s old apartment building and the Third Coast bar, to the thirty-third birthday of Poetry’s Fred Sasaki. May Fred enjoy many happy returns. Another thing I forget—and then always remember—about Chicago, or rather Chicagoans, is what snappy dressers they are. Chicago men are not afraid of a necktie or a hat. The peaked cap also is worn. On Michigan Avenue I saw plenty of all three (plus a woman sporting the first fur coat of the season), as I provisioned for the forty-nine-hour California Zephyr to San Francisco. Last-minute purchases included: Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, A Tale of Two Cities, Cousin Bette, Ragtime (I will read Doctorow, I will!), a pair of warm pajamas, a sturdy pigskin toilet kit, and a smallish bottle of Johnny Walker Red. As it happened, I read the last page of The Anthologist at five-thirty Sunday morning, simply too happy to sleep, as my bunk lurched and tossed like a cozy Cyclone (I even found myself hanging on to the straps). Thus did I cross the Rockies. In this connection, I must finally thank Patricia Daliege, Amtrak’s chief ticket agent at Chicago’s Union Station, for saving my bacon in the face of an intractable Paris Review–Amtrak imbroglio. If not for Ms. Daliege, and the sleeper compartments she finagled out of seemingly thin air, your humble correspondent would have detrained in the thunderstorming moonscape of Green River, Utah, and taken his chances against the sands. To Patti Daliege, merci. To read more about Lorin’s trip, click here.
October 4, 2010 Arts & Culture William E. Jones: Punctured By Eric Banks There might never be a more bountiful kingdom of photography than that established under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and ruled by the former economist Roy Stryker, some 171,000 negatives made to document Depression America between 1935 and 1942. Though he was no photographer (Gordon Parks joked that he couldn’t even load a camera), Stryker pulled no punches during his reign. “I never took a picture,” he once wrote, “and yet I felt a part of every picture taken. I sat in my office in Washington and yet I went into every home in America. I was both the Stabilizer and the Exciter.” He might have added the Excisor. Scattered among the Library of Congress’s FSA archive are curious reminders of Stryker’s autocratic touch: For the first three years of the project, he registered his disapproval of an image—whether to make an example out of those he thought had wasted valuable film or out of some darker fit of spite—by taking a hole puncher to the negative, ensuring that it wouldn’t be subsequently printed. It didn’t seem to matter who took the picture. Walker Evans got holes punched in a handful of negatives; so did John Vachon, a lowly FSA clerk at the time who was learning the trade on weekends. If Stryker’s one-man photographic death panel was democratic in judgment, it was sporadic in execution. In some negatives the holes are perfunctorily, even apologetically clipped along the borders of the negative; in others, Stryker seemed almost wrathful, going straight for the jugular by obliterating offending faces, necks, or buttocks. In his video “Punctured,” a reformatted version of his 2009 film “Killed,” the LA-based artist William E. Jones has performed a sort of perverse resurrection of Stryker’s perforated negatives, a Lazurus act that’s doubly miraculous because it uses the powers of video animation to raise up the quite-dead world of documentary photography. (The video is currently featured in an exhibition at Andrew Roth gallery in Manhattan.) From 100 perforated images he located in the Library of Congress archives, Jones has produced 4,500 digital files at different scales of enhancement and organized these into a hypnotically syncopated, nearly five-minute-long looped movie. The structural logic is provided by Stryker’s hole itself: each of the hundred images appears for a total of around three seconds, beginning with an enlarged, screen-filling close-up of the negative space of Stryker’s hole, a giant black spot that then smoothly and very rapidly appears to recede in size as the surrounding photograph comes into view. Then, bang, another Stryker reject appears, with the same fast zoom-out, from hole to whole. Read More
October 4, 2010 On Translation The Sins of a Translator By Lydia Davis I wrote the first draft of Madame Bovary without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek. Up to the front door would come Andy, our cheerful rural mail carrier, with yet two more packages—this time, Alan Russell’s Madame Bovary (a British Penguin Classic from 1950) and the volume of Flaubert’s letters that covered the period in which he was writing Madame Bovary. Reading the letters was a bright wide-open window on Flaubert the man—far better than any biography. I read them to know him better and to hear him grumble, usually, about the novel and the experience of writing it. Most of his letters were to his lover, the poet Louise Colet, and it was really too bad for all of us when they broke up two-thirds of the way through the writing of the book. I did not study the other translations during my first draft because I had to establish my own style and my own understanding of what I was reading before I could risk the rhythms and eccentricities of the others striking my ear and possibly creeping into my prose. (As in translating Proust Swann’s Way and most of the previous books I had done, I also did not read ahead more than a paragraph or at most a page, so that the material would be a surprise to me, and fresh.) Then, in the second draft, as I revised what I had written, I looked again and again at the previous translations—sometimes at all of them, in the case of a particularly sticky problem, but usually at five or six that were proving useful in different ways. Over time, I began inevitably to imagine the translators. The Joan Charles translation (an abridged Garden City Book Club edition from 1949) follows the original very closely—she wouldn’t dream of adding or omitting material with the self-confident and rather presumptuous writerly flair of, for instance, Francis Steegmuller (American, 1957) or Gerald Hopkins (English, 1948), authors of the two “classic” and popular translations of Madame Bovary—one for each side of the Atlantic. Nor does she rearrange the sentences much. For a while I liked Joan Charles—I saw her as prim, correct, neat, sober, honest, frank, clear-eyed. I thought of her as a sort of ally in what I was trying to do. I thought she was unjustly ignored and passed over by the later translators, who didn’t mention her. Then I became somewhat disillusioned, as she made the occasional mistake and tended to lapse into a rather wooden style. Eventually I came to see her as tight, humorless, thin as a rail. She must have lived through World War II in England, was perhaps in London during the Blitz, endured food rationing, etc. She was perhaps not very attractive, perhaps horsey? Bad teeth? Always in a cardigan sweater, putting shillings in the gas meter? Then again, this may be unfair—she may have been lovely. Read More
October 1, 2010 Events An Editor Abroad: Pittsburgh By Lorin Stein Inspecting Winifred Lutz's Garden Installation through hole in wall. Photograph by David Keaton. According to the timetable of the Capitol Limited, I spent exactly twenty-four hours and one minute in Pittsburgh. It felt, I am pleased to report, more like a week. In the first place, I met one of my literary heroes, Chuck Kinder. Chuck is a legend in Pittsburgh. Among other things, he is the real-life inspiration behind Michael Chabon’s Wonderboys. If you’ve seen the movie, he’s Michael Douglas. Only Chuck’s funnier and better-looking and West Virginian. Also, in real life his manuscript doesn’t blow away (it, Honeymooners, was the first novel I ever signed up for FSG). After years of phone discussions and sheafs of correspondence, he more than lived up to his reputation for hospitality. In fact, he and his wife, Diane Cecily, and their friends were so hospitable, I almost missed my midnight train. And would hardly have minded if I had. I cannot tell you all the things we did. The day’s events, included, in no particular order, a guided tour of the magical Mattress Factory (pictured above and below); a leisurely rooftop interview with the charming Guatemalan journalist Silvia Duarte; two fiction readings; a lively staged talk with the book critic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, including the by-now requisite opinions on Jonathan Franzen qua bestseller; a studio visit with Diane Samuels, who is copying Fagles’s Odyssey (in a tiny, elegant hand) onto a large painting of the street behind the house where she lives with Henry Reese, director of City of Asylum (I can’t even begin to describe City of Asylum!); and a multigenerational farewell party at Chuck and Diane’s, where I learned much that I had never guessed about the moped scene in Cincinnati (it’s coed, and it’s hopping), the early history of the nickelodeon, how to roast a groundhog (use a corn cob), the difficulties of writing closed captions for girl-on-girl pornography [moans intensify], and the Depression-era practice of using textbooks for fuel. About which last factoid I remain skeptical. With Henry Reese and photographer David Keaton in Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Dots Mirrored Room. Photograph by David Keaton. Also in Pittsburgh I was told by an Amtrak ticket agent—for the second time in exactly two days—“You won’t make your train,” then sent running down a platform while somebody woke up the sleeping-car attendant, who was cheerful and informal about it and made up my berth in his boxers.