August 31, 2010 Arts & Culture A Love Letter to Elvis Costello By Adam Wilson I came to cynicism late. The others had been listening to punk rock for years, espousing anarchy on bathroom walls, wallowing in upper-middle class suburban angst. But my parents were still together, and believed in human goodness. I took their sixties idealism, cradled it until that first girl fucked my friend instead of me. But back up a couple years. Here’s me, age twelve, brink of puberty, pale moustache coming in like dawn through a bend in the windowshade. I’m in a baseball card store, too old to be buying baseball cards. Alison’s at the counter. “Topps?” she says. “Fleer? Upper Deck?” “Upper Deck,” I say. Alison turns, reaches. Blonde hair hangs almost to the small of her back. T-shirt rides up, revealing a swath of plumber’s butt. Stretch-marked handles spill over hips. This is love. My father removes a record from its sleeve, blows dust. Dust hangs in the summer sunlight. My heart is a helium tank. I float. The man on the cover is puberty incarnate. His knees are elbows. His ankles angle inwards. He could use a new pair of glasses. I get the first line wrong. “It’s so funny to be seeing you after so long girl.” I hear “It’s so funny to be seeing you at the salon girl.” Because this record is an artifact from the eighties. Men spent that era in hair salons. How else the Jheri curl? How else the shimmering Jew-fro my father still sports? But I’m not looking. I’m listening. I’m picturing Alison the card shop owner, hair blow-dried into staticky orbit around her pink dome, hair photosynthesized, hair blooming like sunflower blossoms, framing her pistil face, awaiting my stamen, awaiting pollination. Then the chorus: “Oh Alison, I know this world is killing you. Oh Alison, my aim is true.” My hometown: the median household income is $25,000. Alison: bordering on obese, breaking her back, bending for our allowance money. Alison, this world is killing you. Let me be your savior. My aim is true. To my untrained, un-jaded ears, Elvis sounded so sincere. But high school is a cruel carnival. Every ride ends in tears. Every game is rigged. Good prizes unattainable. All you win is some shitty stuffed walrus, sweatshop stitched. My best friend was Paul Gunzburger. People called us Wils-Burger. I rode on the back of his moped. People called us gay. I sported limp blonde locks and girlishly un-chiseled arms. People called me Hanson, like the band. Sang “Hmmbop” as I passed in the halls. We met a girl. Sexiest unibrow you’ve ever seen. Hips like a hip-hop muse. Always had her own weed stash. Read More
August 30, 2010 On Sports Rooting For Muscles By Louisa Thomas It’s a weird moment for women’s tennis. Not bad, but weird. Watch the bizarre slow-motion video montage of “women who hit very hard” on the Times website. Then watch it again. Underneath the glitter, these Amazons are straight out of Herodotus. But with the exception of the Serena Williams and perhaps the leonine Kim Cljisters, the glittering women here (Dementieva, Jankovic, Stosur, Azarenka, and Zvonareva) are mostly unknown to Americans. Serena’s withdrawal from the 2010 U.S. Open—she needed surgery after cutting her foot—and the absence of Justine Henin, the Belgian known as “the sister of no mercy,” has left the field wide open. They say that the U.S. Open, with its fast and reliable surface, is the place where the best usually win. But in this year’s hobbled women’s draw, all bets are off—and, though Venus Williams, even with a bum knee, and the resurgent Russian Maria Sharapova, are always contenders, it will most likely be a woman whose name most Americans can’t pronounce, let alone remember. The men have Rafa and Federer; the women . . . Wozniacki and Clijsters? The Women’s Tennis Association is no doubt praying for the requisite underdog to emerge, preferably an American under six feet tall. Melanie Oudin, last year’s darling, is apparently the most sought-after woman in the tournament, despite the fact that she’s ranked 43rd in the world. Oudin, the sunny, blond, all-American raced to the quarters of the 2009 Open wearing rose and honey-yellow Adidas sneakers inscribed with the word “BELIEVE.” But nobody believes she can do it again; the eighteen-year-old has a 17-20 record this year and came into the tournament on a four-match losing streak. So why is she so popular? Her success last year only accounts for part of it. Unlike the women in the Times video, who look more like LeBron James than Chris Evert, she’s diminutive, scrappy, and has a reassuringly all-around game. This morning, in the showcase Arthur Ashe Stadium, she filleted the court, demolishing the qualifier Olga Savchuk with the kind of tennis that defeated four Russians in a row at the Open last year. (For those who don’t have the Tennis Channel, you can watch many of the matches live on usopen.org.) It’s easy to see Oudin’s appeal—and her potential, if she can develop a big weapon that will counter some of her disadvantage in size—but it’s also hard not to wonder if some of it doesn’t come from a reaction against the rippling quads and veiny biceps of some of the more powerful girls, and against their consonant-laden names. The contrast between Oudin and Serena, the reigning queen of American tennis, can’t be missed either. When Serena lost in the semis at the Open last year after a profanity-filled rant against an official who called her for a foot-fault cost her match point, tournament director Jim Curley called her behavior “threatening.” I, for one, am rooting for muscles. We’ve always wanted our beskirted players to be pretty; why not gorgeous? And is there anything more astonishing than the wave moving through Samantha Stosur’s quadriceps, echoed by those flowing pink pleats? She has the flanks of a thoroughbred, and the beauty. Off to the races. Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor at Newsweek. Her book, Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Will and Faith in World War I, will come out in 2011.
August 30, 2010 At Work In Search of Proust’s Overcoat By Stephanie LaCava Proust’s Overcoat tells the story of Jacques Guérin, a Parisian perfume magnate, who was obsessed with the works of Marcel Proust. In 1929, through a chance connection, he met Proust’s family, only to discover that they intended to destroy the author’s notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Guérin ingratiated himself with Proust’s heirs, and through bribery and kindness, amassed a collection of Proust’s belongings and manuscripts, saving it from destruction. I recently exchanged e-mails with Lorenza Foschini, an Italian journalist, about her book. Why was Proust’s overcoat so special? Proust’s contemporaries, like Jean Cocteau, described his style as embodying an old, refined elegance. He was a real dandy, always dressed in large silk shirtfronts by Charvet, a double-breasted waistcoat, very light colored gloves with black points, a flat-brimmed top hat, a rose or an orchid in a buttonhole of his frock coat, and a walking cane. But even on the hottest days, Marcel didn’t remove his heavy fur-lined coat. This became legendary among those who knew him. How did you discover this story? Those who love Proust know that such passion often becomes a mania. This was so in my case. When interviewing the well-known Visconti costume designer, Piero Tosi, I could not resist the temptation to ask him if he knew the reason why the great filmmaker (Luchino Visconti) stopped production on his beloved project, bringing In Search of Lost Time to the big screen. In the early seventies, the American studios allocated a lot of money for this project and there was talk of casting actors like Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, even Greta Garbo. Tosi was invited to Paris to go over production plans. It was there that he met a very special person. My book comes from the extraordinary story that Tosi told me about this man, Jacques Guérin. I can understand the need to collect the letters, diaries, and notes of a writer. But can you explain our obsessions with a writer’s personal objects? Why a bed? A rug? A coat? It’s because of Guérin that a draft of Swann’s Way became available to us. The same goes for several versions of the last volume of In Search of Lost Time. My book is a story about the incredible efforts of a great bibliophile. Guérin was able to save important papers that offended the bourgeois respectability of Proust’s prude sister in law. After Proust’s death, his family began to deliberately destroy and sell his notebooks, letter, manuscripts, furniture, and personal effects. Proust’s homosexuality surrounded him like an invisible and insurmountable wall. His family’s unwillingness to understand this led to a history of silence that mutated into rancor. This transformed into acts of vandalism as his papers were destroyed and his furniture abandoned. Finding the coat is only the conclusion of a series of adventures and coup de théâtre that Guérin had to face. I do not want to reveal them now; you have to read the book. Of all of Proust’s objects collected by Guérin, which is your favorite? Read More
August 30, 2010 From the Archive Happy Birthday R. Crumb By Caitlin Roper In honor of R. Crumb’s birthday today, here are a few of my favorite outtakes from his interview, the first Art of Comics, which appears in our summer issue, still on newsstands. Interviewer Ted Widmer asks Crumb how he feels about publishing hardcover books: INTERVIEWERYou’ve taken what was a medium of thirty pages of flimsy, low quality paper with a paper cover and now you’ve conquered the hardcover book format. CRUMBReluctantly. I love the old, cheap comic book format so much because the format itself is a statement. It keeps you from becoming too pretentious. I like that about it. Keep it cheap and low-grade, the format, keep it cheap and accessible and then you’re not required to be overly artistic or have overly deep, profound meaning or whatever, you know, all that stuff that can make you very self-conscious. I got reluctantly dragged into hardcover books. INTERVIEWERBut I think your fans are happy that those hardcover books exist because you would have to be a maniacal collector to get all of your stuff otherwise. It’s basically impossible to find back issues of The East Village Other, but for hardly any money you can buy The R. Crumb Handbook and see your greatest hits. CRUMBYeah, that’s true. And also, the whole context of cheaply produced comic books is gone, basically. All those newsstands, that kind of distribution is gone. In June we posted a slideshow of Crumb self-portraits. My favorite is the one where he’s squinching up his nose to keep his glasses on his face. I love Crumb’s answer to Widmer about his next projects: INTERVIEWERDo you see a sequence of more literary stories coming out? You’ve done some Samuel Johnson, Philip K. Dick. CRUMBThe classics illustrated. I did a sequence from Nausea by Sartre a couple of years ago. I did a couple of other things like that. I have lots of ideas about stuff like that but there’s always so much work in it, it’s so time consuming. I’m getting old, you know.
August 27, 2010 From the Archive Friendships from The Paris Review By Thessaly La Force Here’s a short and lovely video for a Friday afternoon. Rose Styron, the wife of the late William Styron, recalls the earlier days of The Paris Review, and the parties that the Styrons used to throw. “We had the John Marquands,” she says, “The Peter Matthiessens, the Tom Guinzburgs, and George Plimpton. We were all a gang, and had a wonderful time.” What a vibrant literary life! And what friendships! Her memories remind me of the touching speech Philip Roth gave at our Revel this year to accept the Hadada Award. Roth describes his first visit to New York to meet Plimpton, and how he made friends with the magazine’s young editors and writers. The result? “This time I sent my story not to The Paris Review slush pile, from which I’d been plucked first time around by none other than Rose Styron, but right to the top.”
August 27, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Star Trek, Swede Levov! By The Paris Review You must look at this casting sheet for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wesley Snipes as Geordi? I mean, come on! Talk about parallel universes. —Thessaly La Force I am always eager to read a new essay by Doubleday editor Gerald Howard. His latest (in Tin House) is about depictions of working-class life in new American fiction—or really, the lack thereof. —Lorin Stein I’m reading American Pastoral, which has elicited startling responses in public. The quantity and sheer magnitude of the comments I get! One time I opened the book near a window in a coffee shop. A passerby stopped dead, peered at the cover for confirmation, and then starting banging on the window shouting, “Swede Levov! Swede Levov!” —Daisy Atterbury Dan Engber has written a delightful cultural history of quicksand. “Time was, a director could sink a man in the desert and still win the Oscar for best picture. Today, that gimmick has been scorned in third-rate schlock.” What the heck happened? I say: bring it back. —Thessaly La Force I have also been catching up on the posts of (sometime diarist) Rita Konig. Rita blogs about decorating for The New York Times. Her current post is about washing machines. I have never owned a washing machine. I have never thought about owning a washing machine. I have no interest in washing machines. And yet I find Rita’s interest addictive. (No doubt Gerry would have something perceptive to say about that.) —Lorin Stein I’ve just finished The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s entrancing account of a walking journey through Suffolk, England. This sublime work doesn’t just confound traditional literary taxonomies: it actually exposes the slightness of the very question of genre. —Mark de Silva In honor of the upcoming U.S. Open, I’ve been rereading David Foster Wallace’s on tennis—the Times piece on Roger Federer and the Esquire piece he wrote on Michael Joyce. His sense of wonder is almost childlike. —Miranda Popkey