September 24, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Nathanael West, Pavement, Eliza Griswold By The Paris Review I’ve just finished Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and am halfway through The Day of the Locust (New Directions not long ago issued them together in a single paperback volume). The undercurrent of violence in the two novels, the way in which nearly every act and thought is awash in it, is startling. The characters in Miss Lonelyhearts are drowning in Prohibition booze; how else to manage the crushing disappointment and despair of early thirties America? But the illusion of Hollywood hope that masks alienation and desperation in Day of the Locust feels like a much longer hangover. —Nicole Rudick If you fell in love with Stephen Malkmus’s dead eyes in the “Major Leagues” music video, or appreciate apathy raised to the level of art, or just really like the sound of 1994, then read Chuck Klosterman’s GQ profile of Pavement from earlier this year. New York Magazine also has a sharp—and more recent—analysis of the band’s resurgent appeal. —Miranda Popkey The Tenth Parallel, Eliza Griswold’s account of years traveling through regions of Africa and Asia crossed by the latitudinal line that—owing to centuries of historical accidents and decades of misguided Western intervention—marks where Christian and Muslim cultures meet, or rather collide. What’s particularly striking is the restraint of the writing, given the violence—both physical and spiritual—she chronicles in a series of stories. There are clearly no simple answers to the conflict, and Griswold, to her credit, avoids reductive solutions or comforting interpretations. The stories themselves are enough. —Peter Conroy The GQ oral history of GoodFellas is a reminder that the best pulp culture is invariably produced by insurgent campaigns. It’s also made me wonder whether the enduring power of “Then He Kissed Me” owes more to the Steadicam shot to which Scorsese set it, or vice versa. —David Wallace-Wells I heard David Bezmozgis read from his forthcoming novel, The Free World, at the FSG Reading Series last Tuesday. And I pocketed a galley that’s been keeping me up past my bedtime. The book isn’t out until April of next year, but in the meantime, you can tide yourself over with “The Train of Their Departure” in The New Yorker. —Thessaly La Force I watched eagerly the first installment of “Grand Openings,” a video essay on director David Fincher—and especially his credit sequences—by Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas. Nobody else seems to have figured out how to make use of the possibilities of video criticism beyond the DVD-commentary model, and though the series Seitz has produced for the Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source over the past year or two might not be all masterpieces, he is truly miles ahead of the competition. —D. W.-W.
September 24, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Books for the Well-Read; Narratology By Lorin Stein My ex-boyfriend’s birthday is fast approaching. He’s not just any ex—he’s The Ex, the one responsible for approximately ninety percent of my current taste in books, film, and music. We’re still friends, and I want to buy him a book, but I’m stuck. What do you buy for the man who’s read everything, and introduced you to all the authors you love? —Joelle D. Come with a backup. My friend Jennifer and I tend to like the same books, but she has read much, much more than I have. So a few years ago, when I gave her Henry Green’s novel Loving, I kept stashed away (already wrapped up) J. R. Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself. She’d read both, as it turned out … but claimed that she had been “meaning to reread Ackerley for years.” It was such a nice lie. I hope your ex would say the same were he in her shoes. He sounds lucky to have you! Read More
September 24, 2010 Arts & Culture Good-Bye to All That: The Basquiat Cult By Christian Viveros-Fauné Jean-Michel Basquiat, from “Tuxedo,” in issue 87, Spring 1983. Jean-Michel Basquiat would be turning fifty years old this fall. Instead, he has been dead for twenty-two years, the victim, at twenty-seven, of a 1988 heroin overdose the art world witnessed more or less firsthand. Basquiat’s crack-up begat a frenzy of speculation that drove that decade’s art-market crash (since the rise of the contemporary auction ecosystem, there seems to be about one every decade). His funeral reportedly featured more art dealers than mourners; Jeffrey Deitch—now the director of LA MoCA, then the high-flying founder of Citibank’s art-advising arm—gave the eulogy. According to Phoebe Hoban’s detailed account in her unsparing book Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, the ruined artist left behind “917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171 paintings.” That, and a counterfeit fable of overnight sensation for biographers, filmmakers, and groupies to pore over. Read More
September 24, 2010 Department of Sex Ed Trashy Is as Trashy Does By Jillian Lauren My first sexual fantasy involved my abduction by a composite character made up of equal parts Danny Zucko from Grease and the weathered carny who had looked me dead in the nine-year-old eye as he pulled the lever of the Tilt-A-Whirl. The post-abduction details were unimportant. What mattered was the moment of being caught; what mattered was the fact that one moment I’d be navigating the root-torn sidewalk of my street and the next an arm would be around my waist and the world would be set into wild motion. The next fantasy I can remember was a lesbian prison gang rape. I appropriated this fantasy not from the wonders of cable TV but from books. My mother was a voracious reader, if not a discerning one. Lining her shelves were the eighties airport standbys: V. C. Andrews, Danielle Steele, and Sidney Sheldon. Every night I sat on my white wicker bed and read trashy novels by flashlight until I began to understand what sex was in those stories—a plot device. Sex, I learned from my reading, was a function of power and nothing more. If one could just wield it properly, one might figure out a way to win a happy ending, or at least a prison protector. But it wasn’t until age fourteen that I met Seymour Glass and fell in love. I read Nine Stories and read it again and found that it left me suffering more sleepless, feverish nights than the carny and Danielle Steele combined. I wasn’t even sure why I related to it exactly. I had so little in common with the female characters who populated Salinger’s landscape—slim, Gentile women in camel-hair coats sunk in noble pain while standing on train platforms in New England college towns. There is nothing literary about the pain of a fat, Jewish Jersey girl wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and sitting on a bench in the Livingston mall, eating bagels and smoking cigarettes. And yet, boiled down to the metaphysics of the thing, there was my world, a world of persistent discomfort and inappropriate hunger. A world in which perilous desire trembles just under the surface of the polite world. Seymour kisses the arch of a small foot and moments later puts a bullet into his brain. Eloise, drunk and heartbroken, kills her daughter’s imaginary friend. It was a world of sensual details and dangerous, irreparable moments. I first read Nine Stories and felt the nakedness of being recognized in my loneliness. Desire wasn’t a narrative device with a neat payoff; rather, it was an ocean of longing that unfolded toward an ever-receding horizon. The book got inside me in a way that changed me irrevocably and, conversely, felt like it had been there all along. And that, I imagined, would be what having a lover would feel like. Trashy novels encouraged me to employ sex as a strategy. But it was ultimately Salinger who made me want to fuck. Jillian Lauren is the author of the memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Her novel, Pretty, will be published by Plume next summer.
September 24, 2010 Arts & Culture Good-Bye to All That: Deitchland By Charlie Finch When Jeffrey Deitch opened his gallery in Soho in 1995, his program had promise. He exhibited the great Japanese artist of sound and light Mariko Mori, Chen Zhen’s installation of street latrines from Beijing (a tribute by the late artist to the old ladies tasked to clean them), and the African-American performance artist Jocelyn Taylor, who took over the windows of a whole Soho block to create an ironic red-light district—the highpoint in a career that would dissipate thereafter. Read More
September 23, 2010 Events Tonight: Lorin Stein Chats with Jean-Christophe Valtat By The Paris Review Tonight, at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, Paris Review darling Jean-Christophe Valtat will be reading from his recent novels Aurorarama and 03, and discussing his work with Lorin Stein and Mitzi Angel, the translator of 03. The event begins at 7 P.M. at 58 West 10th Street—please come if you can!