February 7, 2011 My Literary Hero An Evening with J. D. Salinger By Blair Fuller Why did his elegance surprise me? In the winter of 1952, I received a telephone call from my mother, Jane Canfield. There was to be an evening party at my parents’ house on Thirty-eighth Street, she told me. “A Harper’s party,” she added, Harper’s being the publishing house of which Cass, my step-father, was chairman. My mother said that I would be a welcome guest and that my younger sister, Jill, and her husband, Joe Fox, were expected. I had graduated in June the previous year, delayed by two years in the Navy, at the end of World War II, and another year as a student in France. I wanted to be a writer. The Harvard Advocate had published a short story of mine. In Archibald MacLeish’s writing workshop I had started to write a hopeless novel, and had continued to its uninteresting conclusion months after graduating. Now I was a marketing trainee with the Texas company Texaco and would be posted to West Africa in the summer. These were my last months in New York. My mother continued, “Someone that I know you admire has accepted—J. D. Salinger.” I told her I would most certainly come. The Catcher in the Rye had come out the year before. I had read it with enthusiasm but not with the extreme admiration I felt for his short stories in The New Yorker. They seemed to me matchless in their vividness, especially in conveying his characters’ subtle and complex emotions. When I arrived that evening, Mary, the maid, was waiting at the door to take the guests’ overcoats, and I could see that the house was as finely turned out as it could be: flowers in the vases and the antique furniture shining. “The bar is on the porch,” Mary told me. I got a drink and joined Jane and Cass in the living room with “Mac” MacGregor, Harper’s editor-in-chief. Soon Jill and Joe arrived, and for a short time it was a mostly family party. Then, nearly all at once, the thirtysome others crowded in, Salinger among them. A headshot of him had appeared on the Catcher book jacket—dark hair slicked back above a longish, handsome face. This night he was well dressed in a suit with a faint glen plaid pattern, a white shirt whose collar was secured behind the knot of his necktie by a gold collar pin. His cufflinks caught the light. Why did his elegance surprise me? Read More
February 4, 2011 Look Competition By Wang Qingsong 2004 © Wang Qingsong, Courtesy the artist. Here, Chinese painter-turned-photographer Wang Qingsong draws from his memories of the Cultural Revolution, when the walls of China’s cities were covered with handmade posters pasted up by rival Red Guard factions. He filled the walls of a rented Beijing movie sound stage with more than six hundred mock advertising posters that he drew by hand, mimicking corporate logos. If you look closely at the photograph, you can spot him, megaphone in hand. From the exhibition “When Worlds Collide,” on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through May 8, 2011. Click to enlarge.
February 4, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: From Calcutta to Cairo By The Paris Review Teddy Weatherford, right. Photograph courtesy of The Atavist. Read this fascinating story on The Atavist about Teddy Weatherford—the Count Basie of the East—who would perform on both sides of the Pacific in a white sharkskin suit. He died not long before the end of World War II, and at his funeral, forty thousand Calcuttans mourned his death. These days, he’s often not much more than a footnote in most jazz histories. —Thessaly La Force Jason Epstein has always been the most forward-looking of publishers. He invented the trade paperback, cofounded The New York Review of Books and the Library of America, and hit on the Amazon model—alas, before there was a Web. At eighty-three, he still explains the business better than anyone. If you want to know how publishing works—and why, increasingly, it doesn’t—read his latest in the Review. —Lorin Stein Straining to inject some topicality into my reading, I ferreted out a copy of Amitav Ghosh’s beguiling blend of travelogue, memoir, and anthropological study, In an Antique Land. Calcutta-born Ghosh moves to the Egyptian village of Lataifa where he researches the correspondence of a twelfth-century Jewish Tunisian merchant, while observing the daily lives of his contemporary Muslim neighbors. Although he recognizes the incongruity of his own presence, Ghosh crafts an elegant meditation on the wayward tracks left by history that emphasizes the long, whispered conversation between cultures over those noisier moments of confrontation. Next on the list: Border Passage by Leila Ahmed. —Jonathan Gharraie Read More
February 4, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Read, Write, Drink; Do You Tweet? By Lorin Stein At which New York City bars can one sit, read, write … and drink? Yes, all at the same time. —Charlie As you may have noticed, lower Manhattan has many more hospitable bars than hospitable cafés. This is especially true of my neighborhood, the East Village. The first novel I ever edited, I edited in the back room of Botanica, on Houston Street, where the Knitting Factory used to be. The music is loud enough that you don’t notice it, and the chairs are grouped to discourage conversation. My old favorite bars for reading, the Spring Street Lounge and the International Bar, have both undergone renovations and are hopelessly changed. Ever since the smoking ban, Holiday has reminded me depressingly of the National Cathedral: a Gothic church with a department-store smell. (A smoke-free bar still puzzles me, in my heart.) Also Stefan, famous for stirring the drinks with his finger, is dead. The Old Homestead, where my friend Jason had his nose broken with a cue stick, and where I read Dennis Cooper’s novels and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and first read Frederick Seidel’s Going Fast, closed years ago. It was a strange bar, but very good for reading most of the time. Apart from the pool table, they had a small black-and-white TV, which sat on top of an old bureau and never had the sound on, a jukebox, and a cat who was sweet on everyone. The two most regular customers were a transvestite, who always sat alone and often fell asleep, and a middle-aged Czech dental assistant named Jan. Otherwise, the clientele was mainly Polish, mainly male, and mainly drunk. All ages were welcome, from the visibly preteen to the ancient. The Old Homestead was the first place in America I ever saw Żubrówka; the two gentle matrons who ran the place kept a contraband bottle under the bar. The Homestead was replaced by one of those “Irish pubs” with the wide-screen TVs. Lately I’ve been reading at Jimmy’s 43, on Seventh Street, beside the electric heater. Read More
February 3, 2011 At Work Karen Russell on Swamplandia! By Nicole Rudick Photograph by Michael Lionstar. Swamplandia! is twenty-nine-year-old Karen Russell’s first novel. But the Miami native is already well known in literary circles for her debut story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). The overlapping themes in St. Lucy’s—the pitfalls and wonders of childhood, reality’s spectral double, and the changeable mood of the Florida swamp—resurface, with equal deftness and wit, in the novel, which also borrows the Bigtrees, a family of alligator wrestlers. In Swamplandia!, the Bigtrees operate the titular theme park on a small island in Florida’s archipelago, and Ava, the youngest daughter, traces the park’s and the family’s demise—the “Beginning of the End” she calls it—after the death of her mother. Were there theme parks on islands in the Florida you grew up in, as there are in the novel? There were definitely a lot of these little Diane Arbus-y–constructed realities everywhere. We had Monkey Jungle, Parrot Jungle, a serpentarium off I-60, zoos, and the Miami seaquarium. It was this seamless, whole cloth thing: There is the seaquarium, now we go to the grocery store. It doesn’t really interrupt reality. We had a little boat when I was really young, and we would go tool around the islands near Pristine Bay, and I loved that. I was reading YA novels where kids are always shucking their parents and living for months on an island, so that was exciting. There’s a whole genre of YA novels where some kid is stranded by a plane, or stuck on an island, or lost in the woods, and they use their kid resources to survive through sheer luck. That was always my favorite trajectory. I was an anxious kid, and these books seemed like the best invention ever: here is a door I can carry with me wherever I go; I could just open a book in any situation. Read More
February 3, 2011 On Film Letter from Sundance By Thessaly La Force According to festival lore, in 1981, the film director Sydney Pollack suggested to Robert Redford that he move Sundance from Salt Lake City in September to Park City in January, arguing that the lure of fresh powder would attract more Hollywood types to Utah. Redford did exactly that, and now, after touching down in Salt Lake, Sundance-goers must drive almost an hour into the plush Park City, which stands at seven thousand feet above sea level and is home to one of Utah’s four Whole Foods and the United States Ski Team. It’s easy to feel like you’re sitting in a model train as your bus snakes around the bottom of the mountain to get to a theater. The infrastructure from the 2002 Olympics lingers. The houses are built for renting, as if they were meant to be on reality television: beds and bathrooms galore and, of course, a hot tub. Like many resort towns where the tourists outnumber the locals, there’s a weird hybrid of heartland authenticity and city-slicker trendiness. On Main Street, women walk around in fox coats and Sorrel boots, though at night, you might catch one in bare legs and stilettos, trying to avoid the black ice, feeling just as out of place as Pale Male, the Central Park–dwelling Red-Tail Hawk, would if he were ever to venture to the Rockies. In the mornings, you can observe people in ski gear, their feet locked into plastic boots, waiting for buses next to publicists, reporters, and the occasional obnoxious-man-on-his-cell-phone who is, one is made to presume, making a big deal. Read More