May 6, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Geoff Dyer, Lydia Davis’s Cows By The Paris Review Thanks to a three-day flu I read Rebecca Wolff’s witchy coming-of-age novel The Beginners, then stayed up late reading the rest of Jennifer Egan’s juggernaut A Visit From the Goon Squad (it lives up to the New Yorker excerpts), then started rereading Geoff Dyer’s deeply charming book on photography, The Ongoing Moment, plus a bunch of his old magazine pieces, now newly collected in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition … all worth a good deal of coughing and sneezing. —Lorin Stein I picked up Lydia Davis’s The Cows, a chapbook about, well, the cows that live across from her. “She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.” —Thessaly La Force Amid the impeccably constructed drama of the last of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, Rabbit at Rest, sits an unforgettable line about how popular culture produces and reproduces itself, one generation after another: “They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavor of glop.” —Rosalind Parry Thanks to associate editor Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, my summer reading list has unmistakably flipped its wig. Friedersdorf has compiled May 6, 2011 Fiction Contact By Adam Gilders I remember thinking, after the second or third unreturned phone call, maybe this is how it begins with stalkers. A few unreturned phone calls, three or four, but it’s the absence of a good reason that really sets you off. I mean, why isn’t he returning those calls? There’s no good reason. You want to address the problem, to set things straight. So there’s a few more calls, like, why aren’t you answering my calls? It’s not that it’s a big deal to me, it’s not that I don’t have anything else to do, or that my life lacks meaning, but there’s no good reason to be avoiding me. We used to be pretty good friends, and it’s not like we had a big falling out. I mean, it just came into my mind to give you a call, since we hadn’t been in touch for a few years, and I thought maybe you’d want to know that things hadn’t worked out with my marriage. The point is, I suddenly had an insight about how stalkers are born: mounting frustration, burning resolution, determination to make contact. So you’re thinking the stalker gives birth to himself, but the stalker, and I use the word loosely, very loosely, isn’t necessarily responsible for the birth; there’s at least two parents, I mean. There was never any threat to your person. With the restraining order you reported that you had reason to believe that you were in danger. The only one who was in danger: me. I’m the first to admit that I went too far with some of my … When I cut off the tip of my finger and sent it in a package. Sent the tip of my thumb, with the note: What would it take Dale? (What does it?) How did that add up to a threat to you Dale? It added up to a lot of pain for me, but not a threat. If he stopped thinking about himself for five minutes and thought about … Sent him my finger. Do you know what that’s like, in terms of pain? Friend is: Dale This story first appeared in Another Ventriloquist. See also: “Adam Gilders and Another Ventriloquist.”
May 6, 2011 Fiction Contact By Adam Gilders I remember thinking, after the second or third unreturned phone call, maybe this is how it begins with stalkers. A few unreturned phone calls, three or four, but it’s the absence of a good reason that really sets you off. I mean, why isn’t he returning those calls? There’s no good reason. You want to address the problem, to set things straight. So there’s a few more calls, like, why aren’t you answering my calls? It’s not that it’s a big deal to me, it’s not that I don’t have anything else to do, or that my life lacks meaning, but there’s no good reason to be avoiding me. We used to be pretty good friends, and it’s not like we had a big falling out. I mean, it just came into my mind to give you a call, since we hadn’t been in touch for a few years, and I thought maybe you’d want to know that things hadn’t worked out with my marriage. The point is, I suddenly had an insight about how stalkers are born: mounting frustration, burning resolution, determination to make contact. So you’re thinking the stalker gives birth to himself, but the stalker, and I use the word loosely, very loosely, isn’t necessarily responsible for the birth; there’s at least two parents, I mean. There was never any threat to your person. With the restraining order you reported that you had reason to believe that you were in danger. The only one who was in danger: me. I’m the first to admit that I went too far with some of my … When I cut off the tip of my finger and sent it in a package. Sent the tip of my thumb, with the note: What would it take Dale? (What does it?) How did that add up to a threat to you Dale? It added up to a lot of pain for me, but not a threat. If he stopped thinking about himself for five minutes and thought about … Sent him my finger. Do you know what that’s like, in terms of pain? Friend is: Dale This story first appeared in Another Ventriloquist. See also: “Adam Gilders and Another Ventriloquist.”
May 6, 2011 At Work Adam Gilders and ‘Another Ventriloquist’ By Craig Taylor and Deirdre Dolan Adam Gilders. In 1998, Adam Gilders, a Canadian writer, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Before his death in 2007 at the age of thirty-six, he wrote close to two hundred stories. Though Gilders’s fiction has been featured in The Paris Review and The Walrus, two of his friends, Jason Fulford and Leanne Shapton, decided to publish a more comprehensive book of Gilders’s writing under their independent imprint, J&L Books. Together, with Geoffrey Bainbridge, Miranda Purves, John Zilcosky, and Adam’s mother, Carla Gilders, they edited Another Ventriloquist, which debuts this Saturday, May 7, at the J&L FUNdraiser. We spoke to Jason and Leanne about the book. Another Ventriloquist is an unnervingly good read. Can you talk about the status of the book when Adam died of a brain tumor in 2007? Had any of his friends discussed with him the possibility of gathering his writing into a book? He never talked about publishing a collection of his stories. That was all our idea. When he died, he had around two hundred unpublished pieces on his computer. One of the first conversations we had with his mother and friends after the funeral was about needing to get his stories collected and published. We never even knew he wrote so much. He was very critical of his own work and most of it he would have never brought forward for publication, especially not the older pieces or funny stuff like “Michael Douglas.” This is the one silver lining we can see to the situation—we get to read all these stories. Read More
May 6, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Strong and Wise Mothers; No Children, Please By Lorin Stein Dear Lorin: This Mother’s Day, I’d like to give my mom a thoughtful gift as a gesture of my deep love and respect for her. I’d like to give her a book with a strong, wise female character whom she might resemble. Do you have any suggestions? Laurel Yes, I made that mistake once: I gave my mother To the Lighthouse—and told her that Mrs. Ramsay reminded me of her. She didn’t much like the comparison. Mrs. Ramsay is certainly strong and wise, and we want our mothers to be strong and wise, but so often our mothers have ideas of their own. I suggest Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories, which contains not only tributes to strong and wise mothers (including Mrs. D) but also funny and sympathetic stories about mothers under pressure. My mother has an etiquette question: is it impolite to say when being seated in a restaurant “Away from children please,” given that she has four children (but they are adults and she didn’t take them to restaurants until they had manners). —A friend This one I checked with my own mother, who managed a restaurant when my sister and I were children, and has pronounced views on restaurant etiquette. Her view: away from children, by all means! I feel the same. It is always depressing to see adult conversation sacrificed to the whims of some little psycho in a high chair, playing fort-da with its knife and fork. I think our mothers were absolutely right to leave us at home (even if, in my case, this has left me with an unslakable and expensive weakness for eating in restaurants, and for eating late, and generally for the company of grownups … ) Happy Mother’s Day to all! Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
May 5, 2011 A Letter from the Editor “Lit It Crowd” Lousy with Parisians By Lorin Stein Photography by Douglas Adesko. At the risk of, um, tweeting our own horn, this month’s Paper Magazine singles out our own Thessaly La Force and Sadie Stein, plus Daily contributors Maud Newton and Emma Straub, as New York’s most “influential, fun, and fabulous” Twitterers. But you knew that …
May 5, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Amélie Nothomb, Writer, Part 2 By Amélie Nothomb This is the second installment of Nothomb’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Photograph by Catherine Cabrol. DAY FOUR In the evening we are invited to a huge turn-of-the-century building, with something of the Phalanstère to it, entirely inhabited by artists. This is the Westbeth Center for the Arts, the largest artist’s community in the world, and it is where tonight’s “Literary Safari” is supposed to take place. The name of the event disturbs me: are they going to hunt writers with guns? The organizers reassure me: writers will be chosen by artist-inhabitants of the Phalanstère and invited into their apartments to read from one of their books. My host is Dorothy, former actress of avant-garde theater, eighty-six years old, a tiny, skinny woman of exceptional vivacity and intelligence. The audience and I are invited into her strange apartment with a sinusoidal ceiling, a moving museum of the past. They suggest that I read for fifteen minutes from my most recent novel to appear in English, Hygiene and the Assasin. There is nowhere to hide: American audiences love hearing an author read her work. So I throw myself into it, reading first in French, without sparkle, and then in English. This last exercise proves to be a considerable challenge. The mixture of emotion and effort is so intense that, literally, I liquefy: I perspire so much that I see enormous drops of sweat falling on my text. It’s very annoying. After fifteen minutes have passed, I am nothing but a puddle. The audience, very friendly, asks me questions. With reluctance, I leave Dorothy, who lays all the flowers in her apartment in my arms: I have the impression of being a diva. Read More