March 17, 2011 At Work The Spring Issue: Joshua Cohen By Moe Tkacik In our spring issue—out now—Joshua Cohen’s short story, “Emission,” tells of the comic misfortune of a drug dealer turned felon whose lewd past is exposed, against his will, on the Internet. Okay, so: mostly what I loved about this story was a meta-thing, which was that it was not true. “Meta-thing”—that sounds like a nefarious robot, or a late-night omelet. Anyway, I’m with you; it’s not true, it’s fiction. But I am still too traumatized from the daily onslaught of interactions with Internet people and their tsunami of experiences and opinions and consumer preferences to know how to fashion prose from anything other than what I know or feel at any given time actually happened and/or was true. Which is to say, I know for a fact this story, “Emission,” about a twenty-something exposed on the Internet as a sexual deviant, is based, partly, on “real-life events,” because you admitted in an earlier e-mail to being inspired by a terrible night we spent with that dreadfully boring coke dealer someone inadvertently brought home one night after an n+1 party, a Tunisian I’ve been condemned to wonder about repeatedly, unimaginatively, since Tunisia spread the Facebook meme of democracy across Arabia. And yet, what I see as a composite sketch of an unremarkable, ruined evening becomes a vivid fable almost by magic once the characters have been outfitted with better names. There is Richard Monomian-cum-Dick-cum Mono—conjuring up onanistic activities (su mano); dread diseases contracted through insanitary contact with adolescents; the lone son too simpleminded for his father’s polynomials, his solitary life and single Google hit, et cetera, et cetera. And Emmanuelle and the unsavory fumes of her Emission blog, collateral damage of the benevolent reign of the omniscient God that is the Internet; fearless, prolific Emmanuelle who is crucified merely for delivering truth. May she rise again in the sequel? There won’t be a sequel, I don’t think (unless you decide to write one and post it online without approval). But as for “inspired by”: yes, Methyl, the dealer in “Emission” is half based on that “Tunisian” (read: New Jerseyan) coke dealer we brought home that night, who so mercilessly hit on you and, I believe, stayed for breakfast. My man’s other half is another dealer who calls himself, seriously, Blo J. When I used that name in the story, Lorin suggested, “Change it. No dealer’s called that.” Good edit, bad sense of reality. Let that be the slogan for the “new” Paris Review. Read More
March 17, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Zachary Kanin, Cartoonist, Part 2 By Zachary Kanin This is the second installment of Kanin’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 8:00 P.M. I had dinner with my best friend from when I was a baby. DAY FIVE 10:00 P.M. Played harmonica with the “The Calamity Janes” at the Rod and Gun club in Williamsburg. My friend Chris discovered that he is a prodigy at zooming in and out on a FlipCam. Read More
March 16, 2011 Arts & Culture Sybille Bedford at One Hundred By Lisa Cohen This is Sybille Bedford’s centennial year—she would have been one hundred years old today—and The Paris Review is marking it with a reading on Thursday, March 24. To learn more, click here. If you are interested in attending, please e-mail us. Sybille Bedford, 2004. Photograph by Luciana Arrighi. I have been reading and rereading Sybille Bedford’s work for the past twenty-five years, and I was lucky to get to know her fierce, vulnerable, inimitably vibrant self late in her life. I am writing from London, where I’ve come to attend a birthday dinner in her honor, tonight, in the cellars of the wine merchants Berry Bros. and Rudd. The evening, planned by her friend and literary executor, Aliette Martin, opens with Sybille’s favorite champagne, Pol Roger, and the five-course menu pairs excellent wines with elegant but unfussy food, beginning with a 1998 Gewurztraminer (Hommage à Jean Hugel, Maison Hugel) and foie gras mi-cuit, toasted brioche, and onion confit. Sybille—she disliked the epithet “Bedford”—was born in Germany and spent much of her life in Europe, but she chose to write in English and was one of the language’s great twentieth-century stylists. Much of her work, including her best-known novel, A Legacy, moves freely between fiction and memoir, exploring the pleasures and traumas of her upbringing between the wars in Germany, Italy, England, and the south of France. She is known, too, for her sensual writing on travel and as a connoisseur of food and wine. She had “a genius for living,” an admiring ex-lover told her; she called herself “a sybarite with a political conscience.” Her legal reporting bears out that mixture: covering the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London, of Jack Ruby in Dallas, of the Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, and more, she produced crystallized essays about character, justice, and the rituals of law. She has been dubbed a modernist and a traditionalist; her cool, staccato dialogue has been compared to Quentin Tarantino’s. She published her last book, Quicksands, in 2005. Read More
March 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Zachary Kanin, Cartoonist By Zachary Kanin DAY ONE 11:30 A.M. A graduate student came to my house to film me making a sandwich for her documentary, which, as far as I can tell, is about cartoonists eating lunch. 3:30 P.M. While on a stroll in the park, three teenagers ran up behind me, threw me to the ground, and punched me repeatedly in the head. I threw them off and ran far enough away to call the police. I spent the next several days replaying the scene in my head. Read More
March 16, 2011 At Work The Spring Issue: Peter Cole By Robyn Creswell The spring issue of The Paris Review includes five poems of Kabbalah translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole. Cole has translated several volumes of poetry, including The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 and Aharon Shabtai’s War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems. His most recent book of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled, and Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, a book of nonfiction written with his wife, Adina Hoffman, was just released by Schocken/Nextbook. I’ve never read poems quite like these—wild yet severe, also a little bit unearthly. Can you give some context for understanding them? What is their relation to Kabbalah? The anthology these poems are drawn from—The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, forthcoming from Yale—covers some fifteen hundred years, and the poems emerge from diverse varieties of Jewish mystical thought and practice: Palestine of Late Antiquity, the eleventh- and twelfth-century Jewish communities of Muslim Spain and medieval Germany, and, later on, Christian Spain, Ottoman Palestine, Yemen, North Africa, Italy, and Eastern Europe. By and large, Jewish mystics were preoccupied with other masochistic pleasures (rolling in nettles, fasting and wearing sackcloth, observing turbocharged versions of the traditional commandments, et cetera), so there isn’t a great deal of Kabbalistic poetry. But the best of it epitomizes an extraordinarily potent if lesser-known aspect of Judaism. That wild severity and otherworldliness you describe reflects the history of Jewish esotericism through the ages, some of which is in fact shockingly mythic, intricate, erotic, and often just plain weird. Read More
March 15, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Sex, Hastily, Then Beignets By Lorin Stein For a long time now, we’ve been thinking that our friends over at The Awl should start a culture diary of their own—and now they have! And with no less an eminence than David Orr, poetry critic of The New York Times Book Review. Hot, hot, hot!