April 18, 2011 On Poetry David Orr: Lost in the Archives, Spring 1974 By David Orr W. H. Auden. The best thing about The Paris Review, aside from the editors’ formidable liquor stash, is the magazine’s sense of history. Sure, there are older American literary journals (The Yale Review was founded, no joke, in 1819), but The Paris Review has had a consistent idea of itself for longer than many publications that predate its debut in 1953. Of course, that consistency makes some aspects of the magazine vulnerable to, oh, for example, parody. But it also makes The Paris Review’s archive a useful tool with which to survey an art—and one’s personal response to that art—over several decades. So for the next month or so, that’s what I’ll be doing for the gracious and impeccably shirted Lorin Stein, and the equally gracious (and presumably impeccably shirted) Thessaly La Force. Let’s begin at the beginning, which for me was the spring of 1974. In the poetry world, this was a season of uncertainty and transition, as seasons in the poetry world so often are. The popularity of the “deep image” style associated with James Wright and W. S. Merwin was just beginning to wane; John Ashbery was on the brink of arriving at his full prominence (Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror would complete the only hat trick in the history of the major poetry awards in 1975); and W. H. Auden, whose hand both stirred and hindered several currents in American poetry, had died only a few months earlier. In fact, Auden is the subject of the “Art of Poetry” interview in the Spring 1974 issue, lending a poignant touch to that meticulously casual series. This being Auden, things get pretty droll pretty quickly: INTERVIEWER: Do you have any aids for inspiration? AUDEN: I never write when I’m drunk. And: INTERVIEWER: Have you read, or tried to read, Finnegans Wake? AUDEN: I’m not very good on Joyce. Obviously he’s a very great genius—but his work is simply too long. Read More
April 15, 2011 The Revel Until Next Year … By Thessaly La Force What a week! We’re still recovering from Tuesday’s Spring Revel. Check out these dispatches of the fête in Elle, The Observer, New York Social Diary, Bloomberg, Electric Literature, and Women’s Wear Daily. And now, because it’s Friday and we can’t bear to forget, here are some more pictures of the party. Syrie Moskowitz. Read More
April 15, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cycling, Skiing, and an Island of Solitude By The Paris Review Jeanne Mackenzie’s anthology Cycling is a collection of lighthearted, cycle-related selections from various literary figures, including James Boswell, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, and P. G. Wodehouse, to name but a few. The book is beautifully printed—who could resist its cover?—and the selections delightful, and it’s endearing to see so many writers brought to rapture by so similar and elegant a sensation. As George Bernard Shaw fittingly concludes: “Yes, bicycling’s a capital thing for a literary man.” —Stephen Hiltner John Swansburg, this week’s culture diarist, pointed me in the direction of an interview that Slate’s Michael Agger conducted with James Salter last year about Solo Faces and Downhill Racer. —Thessaly La Force Ted Hughes’s translation of Jean Racine’s Phèdre absolutely crackles. It’s a poem about envious royals and epic feuds, but to me it was at its best when Hughes captured the private dilemmas of these very public figures. When Phèdre denies her throne, insisting that she cannot rule a country if she cannot rule herself, it is an incredible moment that pits person against state and soul against country: “Me? Rule? Me take control/Of a state flying to pieces/When I cannot control myself?”—Rosalind Parry I’ve been reading Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s Sacred Trash, a book about the Cairo geniza—that small storehouse where, for centuries, local Jews deposited their shopping lists, letters, wills, and personal libraries. Cole and Hoffman’s book tells the story of how the geniza was “discovered” by European scholars, transplanted to Cambridge, England (also St. Petersburg, New York City, and Budapest), and eventually changed the way we think about Jewish history. I can’t think of another work that succeeds so well in making archival research into gripping adventure. —Robyn Creswell Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace in this week’s New Yorker is an item you simply cannot ignore. Oh, and did you see his vacation pics? —T. L.
April 15, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Outer Space; Dad Books By Lorin Stein I’m having trouble finding nature poems that deal with outer space (planets, galaxies, and weird phenomena like black holes, and so on). Has a true artist ever written on this theme? It would have to be someone with intellect and sensibility, not just a pop sci-fi writer. Thanks so much for any suggestions. —Alex The book you are looking for—at least, one of them—is The Cosmos Poems, by Frederick Seidel. Weird phenomena abound. A sample: It is the invisible Dark matter we are not made of That I am afraid of. Most of the universe consists of this. I put a single normal ice cube In my drink. It weighs one hundred million tons. It is a sample from the densest star. I read my way across The awe I wrote That you are reading now. I can’t believe that you are there Except you are … Dear Mr. Stein, Recently my dear old dad has requested a “good book” for his sixty-first birthday. In the past, as far as fiction is concerned, he’s seemed especially drawn to the classics, such as Ulysses, Moby-Dick, the poetry of William Butler Yeats, and anything else one might read as an English-lit major. Understandably, he’s now going through a bit of a literary midlife crisis and is looking for some excitement. What contemporary works would you suggest to reawaken his intellectual spirit and introduce him to the fiction of the twenty-first century? Best Wishes, Jemima M. If we start with your father’s predilection for Ulysses and Moby-Dick, and if by “good book” we assume your father means a big, ambitious novel with what Alex calls “intellect and sensibility”—and a real story to tell—I suggest Hilary Mantel’s Booker winner Wolf Hall, a historical novel about the court of Henry VIII that makes brilliant use of old-fashioned modernist stream-of-consciousness and at the same time, in its handling of private life between the sexes, is very much of our century. I suspect your father might also like either of Jonathan Franzen’s last two novels, The Corrections or Freedom. Or Péter Nádas’s complex, tricky, very inward family saga of Hungarian intellectuals in the late twentieth century, A Book of Memories. (My mother loved this one.) At the very top of the list I’d put Norman Rush’s Mortals, the story of a middle-aged CIA agent, undercover as a Milton scholar at a university in Botswana, facing hard changes in his career and his marriage. Read a few pages of each; I bet one will have his name on it. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
April 15, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Sadie Stein to Join Editorial Staff of ‘The Paris Review’ By Lorin Stein Starting next month Jezebel fashion and arts correspondent Sadie Stein will join The Paris Review (and The Daily) as a contributing editor. Sadians stay tuned!
April 15, 2011 At Work Philip Connors on ‘Fire Season’ By Maud Newton Photograph by Martha Connors. To be a fire lookout, Norman Maclean once wrote, isn’t a matter of body or mind, but of soul. Philip Connors should know. He’s spent a third of each year for nearly a decade watching for smoke in the Gila National Forest. His new book, Fire Season, which started as a diary in The Paris Review, is at once a fascinating personal narrative, a history of “a vocation in its twilight,” and a poetic tribute to solitude and the natural world. Connors examines the wilderness and his experience of it by turns from a remove, dispassionately, and up close, with great feeling, and evokes a whole world in charming but disciplined prose. He’s funny but not self-indulgent. He’s plainspoken but not condescending or tinnily folksy. Without being didactic or blinkered, or even obvious about what he’s doing, he offers an impassioned defense of a life and place he loves. Your lookout tower stands on a mountain that rises more than ten thousand feet. From it you can see the first wisps of smoke below, but you can also—when things are calm—write. How much of the book came into being up there in your seven-by-seven-foot glass box in the sky? Once I signed the contract, I had romantic visions of feeding a giant roll of paper into my typewriter and cranking out a record of events as they happened that season in the lookout, writing it all down the way Kerouac wrote On the Road. Foolishness! As I sat there that summer, the thought of immortalizing my experience between hard covers paralyzed me. I couldn’t get started. So I developed strategies to generate raw material I could draw on later. The most successful of these involved typing long letters to my editor, Matt Weiland, about everything I was seeing, everything that was happening, and just trying to stay unself-conscious about the writing. On my days off I’d hike down with the letters, make a quick photocopy for my files, and drop them in the mail to New York. Anything that moved him or intrigued him eventually led me down a fruitful path. Anything that left him cold I abandoned. This meant that I didn’t start writing the book until fire season was over and I was back in town. I needed time to sift through what of the experience was worth recounting and what was not. The goal became to write a book about watching mountains that left out the boring parts—easier said than done. Read More