May 27, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Words We Don’t Say; The Tao of Travel By Lorin Stein Kurt Andersen had his list of “Words We Don’t Say.” As the editor of The Paris Review, what are some of yours? —Tom Michaels Usage snobbery is a poor man’s snobbery. It has no place at The Paris Review. When Kurt Andersen compiled his list of peeves, he had the excuse of working at New York—a magazine that pretty much exists to market snootiness on a budget. You will notice that most of his verbotens come from the tabloids, the trades, or lifestyle magazines. (There is something, not just ironic, but deep about a lifestyle magazine banning the word lifestyle.) Which is to say, Andersen was doing his job. He was maintaining a tone. Here at the Review we have no such excuse. All we’ve got are hang-ups. I blame mine on The Worth of Words, a late-Victorian usage manual that I picked up at a yard sale during high school and subsequently destroyed. It was too late. The Worth of Words had singed it onto my brain that the phrase due to should be used only in instances of someone actually incurring a debt of gratitude, that aggravate must never be used except in the sense of adding to, and that partially means only “with bias.” (Google Books has now reunited me with this manual and its insane author, Ralcy Halsted Bell. Entry one: “ABORTIVE means of untimely birth … To speak of an abortive attempt or act is hardly short of the ridiculous.” I do not recommend The Worth of Words, and I offer this tiny (partial) list of my own in a spirit of confession and contrition. Recently our managing editor, Nicole Rudick, cured me of an aversion to forthcoming (in the sense of “soon to be published”) with the help of the OED. Here, off the top of my head, are some more: Home (for house) Hopefully (for “I hope”) Disinterest (for “lack of interest”—yes, even though I know it’s totally correct) Delicious, Spicy, Tangy (used metaphorically) Tasty (ever, but especially in reference to a “lick”) Pleasantry (except in the sense of “joke”) Following (to introduce a list: as in “the following”) Contact (as a verb) Relationship (ever, ever, even when it’s the mot juste) Impact (unless we’re talking about, e.g., a car crash) I could go on. (Couldn’t you?) Read More
May 27, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Chad Harbach, The Mets, Masters of the Sob By The Paris Review Last Sunday I stayed in bed till one P.M.—then stayed up till two A.M.—reading the galleys of Chad Harbach’s first novel, The Art of Fielding. To say it’s the best novel I’ve read about a college shortstop would be true, as far as it went, but it’s about more than that: “For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.” —Lorin Stein I’ve been reading Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker article about New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon with mixed feelings. What Wilpon says about his players makes one wonder if he’s trying to sabotage his own team (which is also mine). Carlos Beltran is overpaid, David Wright is overpraised, José Reyes is always injured. These are opinions an owner should keep to himself. But when Wilpon says, “We’re snakebitten, baby,” he sounds like a true Mets fan to me. —Robyn Creswell If you haven’t read any of Diana Athill’s work, I highly recommend Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, a collection of her short fiction recently released by Persephone. Funny, engaging, and unexpected. —Sadie Stein I very much enjoyed Francine Prose’s short essay “Other Women” in the new feminist-themed Granta. Prose was secretly writing her first novel as a graduate student. She joined a feminist consciousness-raising group, and, after selling the book, she left her husband and moved to San Francisco. Somehow, she says, she became a feminist. But was it before or after she discovered her husband had slept with nearly every single woman in the group? —Thessaly La Force Read More
May 27, 2011 On Music Out of the Vinyl Deeps By Marisa Meltzer Ellen Willis in 1981. Photograph by Jade Albert.I have never particularly enjoyed rock criticism. It has a tendency to read bombastic, and the references feel dated almost instantly. None of this is true of Ellen Willis. When I first started reading her a few years ago, I wondered if I liked her writing simply because we share the same gender; now I think I like her because she was right. Willis, who was a native of Queens and a Barnard graduate, was hired by The New Yorker as the magazine’s first pop-music critic in 1968. Her tenure lasted seven years, and her column, Rock, Etc., covered everything from The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell to the birth of punk and Bette Midler. Her criticism could be feisty (Carly Simon’s “wide-eyes lyrics inevitably aroused my class antagonism”) or dismissive (The Velvet Underground’s eponymous album was “all about death, junkies, Delmore Shwartz—stuff like that”), but it was always sharp (Elvis was “John and Paul in one package”). She understood fandom and feminism equally—something all too rare in the present, where music criticism is still dominated by men. Willis was able to love Patti Smith as a rock-and-roll heroine but criticize her identity. She found Smith’s “androgynous, one-of-the guys image” to be problematic. “Its rebelliousness is seductive, but it plays into a kind of misogyny that consents to distinguish a woman who acts like one of the guys (and is also sexy and conspicuously ‘liberated’) from the general run of stupid girls.” Which is why it’s so unfortunate that she stopped writing about music in the early eighties. She felt like music had lost its edge after punk. She certainly didn’t disappear—she taught at NYU, wrote nonmusic criticism, and occasionally chimed in with a review of a Bob Dylan album when she felt like it—but her legacy became somewhat obscure. Her death from lung cancer in 2006, at the age of sixty-four, only made it worse. Read More
May 26, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Matthew Specktor, Writer and Editor, Part 2 By Matthew Specktor This is the second installment of Specktor’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Photography by Lisa Jane Persky. DAY FOUR 8:30 A.M. Breakfast, and a chunk of The Pale King. 11:40 A.M. I meet up with The Los Angeles Review of Books’ splendid poetry editor, Ms. Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Knowing her is even better than saying her name, which you could, if you wanted, skip rope to. We talk about Fairport Convention, Vietnam metaphors, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Joe Boyd, Frank Bidart, Richard Howard, and Led Zeppelin. (Always, Led Zeppelin!) We eat soup. I walk away feeling the way I always do after talking with Gaby, namely that I got the better half of the bargain. 3:20 P.M. Nicolas Jaar, and a nap. My draft of Zeroville is very nearly almost done, and I’ve gotten my licks in on a few more LARB essays. I feel semijustified in caving in to fever, and so, do. 8:15 P.M. I find myself standing in an intolerably humid Skylight Books, listening to an invisible Bret Easton Ellis—he’s somewhere up there, obstructed by the mob—read from Imperial Bedrooms. He then answers questions about The Hills, Glee, Twitter, screenwriting, loneliness. Just about everything except books. He’s charming, patient, funny, articulate, and reminds me how odd it can be when the reality of an author—or of anything—gets eclipsed by reputation. Lethem has a piece in his forthcoming Ecstasy of Influence in which he argues that notoriety is the only form of postwar American literary fame. He’s persuasive, dividing fame from regard among readers and suggesting that knife fights (Mailer), feuds (Vidal), and censorship (Nabokov, Ellis) are the royal road to visibility. Maybe. But this place is packed, largely with people half my age who are carrying thoroughly destroyed–looking Vintage editions of Ellis’s older books. Someone’s reading him, and that’s a good thing, regardless of what strains they’re locating in his work. A stray tweet I read later refers to “being here with other weirdos waiting to hear Bret Easton Ellis read.” I take that as proof positive that literature has not nearly outlived its use. Read More
May 26, 2011 Arts & Culture A Miniature Fascination By Sadie Stein Huguette Clark.When the 104-year-old copper heiress Huguette Clark died earlier this week, obituaries invariably included the word eccentric. This was surely due at least somewhat to her apparent preference for making her home in hospitals. But part of it—the bigger part, I’m guessing—was her passion for dollhouses. In her later years, Clark retreated into an expensive miniature world, surrounding herself with large amounts of the tiny. Second childhood? God complex? Arrested development? Maybe. But Clark wasn’t alone. Miniatures have exerted a fascination over adults—and often, rich and powerful adults—since Duke Albrecht V forced large portions of a sixteenth-century court into the construction of what’s known as the “Munich Baby House.” Queen Mary’s Windsor Castle fantasia—furnished and outfitted by practically every artisan with a royal appointment—is famous; less well known is the elaborate dollhouse for which Alice Longworth Roosevelt frequently neglected guests, or the modern-art masterpiece created in the 1920s by the bohemian Stettheimer sisters. The Thorne Miniature Rooms, housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, were a labor of love for Narcissa Thorne, bolstered by the Montgomery-Ward fortune. And heiress Frances Glessner Lee used her leisure to construct the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths, scale dioramas of murders so accurate that they are still used today to teach burgeoning MEs. Clearly, there’s something about the world at 1:12″. The writer, illustrator, and dollhouse-lover Tasha Tudor called the root of the appeal “perfection in miniature,” and it’s not hard to imagine that women of prior generations might have enjoyed exercising power over a larger domain than was their usual wont. A dollhouse could be aspirational: Faith Bradford, the Washington librarian who created the twenty-three-room miniature mansion on display at the Smithsonian, outfitted her creation with a full staff of servants—and Victorian piles, unsurprisingly, remain better sellers than apartments. Read More
May 26, 2011 Notes from a Biographer Mary Frank By Sam Stephenson Mary Frank in her studio, 2011. Photograph by Kate Joyce. The photographs in Mary Frank’s current solo show at DC Moore Gallery were made over the last three years, yet they evoke decades of history. The items in the photographs form a kind of collage: she composed new paintings directly onto the planks of her studio floor, then arranged sculptures, other works of art (some dating back fifty years), rocks, glass, torn paper, fragments of paintings, and fire around the new painting. It’s like she created abstract, autobiographical stage sets. Then she photographed the results. I first met Mary through her cousin Paul Weinstein. Their grandfather, Gregory Weinstein, had emigrated from Russia in the 1870s and started a multilingual printing company on Varick Street, a business Paul still runs today. I met him in the early days of the Jazz Loft Project through David Levy, the former director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. David told me that Paul was “a finisher,” someone who could help me organize a complicated New York project from my home base in North Carolina. That proved to be true: among other things, the seed of a four-year collaboration with Sara Fishko and WNYC on the Jazz Loft Radio Project came from a public event Paul threw for me at the Center for Jewish History on Sixteenth Street in 2005. One night around that time, Paul and I were having dinner downtown. I told him I’d spent the afternoon with photographer Robert Frank in his Bleecker Street studio. “My cousin Mary used to be married to him,” Paul said nonchalantly. I startled to attention, the small town of New York City revealing itself to me once again. Until then I only knew Mary Frank as a figure in a photograph. She was the beautiful, exhausted young mother in the car with her two children at the end of Robert Frank’s The Americans—the woman keeping their kids fed, clean, and happy on the road, while her husband completed the work that would make him immortal in the history of photography. Read More