July 2, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Teenage Literature, Wet Brains By Lorin Stein I need to buy a present for a thirteen-year-old boy. His parents suggested “a good book.” This thirteen year-old is not that interested in literature, so I want this book to be a gateway to good, weird literature for him. Suggestions? —James in Providence This is such an excellent—and delicate—question, we decided to call in some experts. Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time magazine. He is also the author of the novels Warp, Codex, and The Magicians, the last of which is centrally concerned with teenagers and gateway reading. Lev recommends: Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. I read and reread this book constantly from ages thirteen through sixteen. Vonnegut seamlessly merges (sorry for the cliché) the basic existential challenges of life with that early-adolescent sense of generalized grievance against the world of which thirteen year-olds are the chosen curators. Plus, it’s impossible to read Cat’s Cradle as a grownup, so it’s now or never. If that doesn’t work, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. After that I give up. Laura Miller is a staff writer at Salon, which she helped found. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, the editor of The Salon Guide to Contemporary Fiction, and the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. Laura writes: The Maze Runner by James Dashner is not exactly a literary triumph, but it’s accessible and action-packed (important to many young male nonreaders) yet also features just enough of that good, Vonnegutesque mind-blowing to show him that books can take you to places no other medium can. Read More
July 1, 2010 The Revel Spring Revel, 2010 By The Paris Review The Paris Review‘s Spring Revel, April 13, 2010 honoring Philip Roth. Photographs by Lucas Stoffel and Patrick McMullan.
July 1, 2010 Arts & Culture W. S. Merwin Named Poet Laureate By Lorin Stein We congratulate W. S. Merwin on being named Poet Laureate of the United States. Merwin published his first poem with the Review in 1955, and we have been proud to publish him ever since. Herewith, to celebrate his appointment (and for the pleasure of retyping it) one of his more recent contributions: To the Long Table The sun was touching the wet black shoulders of olives in a chipped dish descended from another century on that day I remember more than half my life ago and you had been covered with a tablecloth of worn damask for lunch out on the balcony overhanging the stream with the grapes still small among the vine leaves above us and near the olives a pitcher of thin black acrid wine from the cellar just below and an omelette on a cracked white platter a wheel of bread goat cheeses salad I forgot what else the ducks were asleep down on the far side of the green pond Jacques came and went babbling fussing making his bad jokes boasting about old days that nobody else remembered the lacquered carriages the plumes on the horses and what his mother had replied to the admiral whose attentions amused her all the castles they had lost before he had grown up and when the meal was over he said you too were for sale he had discovered you in a carpenter’s shop where you had been used as a workbench without regard for your true worth and the scars on you came from there your history without words upon which words have gathered
July 1, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Richard Brody, Part 2 By Richard Brody This is the second installment of Brody’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 10:19 A.M. WQXR: Schumann, Three Romances for Oboe and Piano, op. 94, played by Heinz Holliger and Alfred Brendel. One of the great chamber-music recordings. 11:05 A.M. The Genius and the Goddess: “Mailer satirized the homespun Miller as ‘the complacent country squire, boring people with his accounts of clearing fields, gardening, the joys of plumbing (“Nothing like taking a bath in water that comes through pipes you threaded yourself”).’” 11:55 A.M. Tag Gallagher’s superb biography of Roberto Rossellini—remarkable to learn that Italian critics hated Germany Year Zero. 2:10 P.M. Village Voice—interviews with the directors Lena Dunham, Aaron Katz, and Matthew Porterfield (the director of two great movies, Hamilton and the forthcoming Putty Hill), about BAMcinemaFEST. 5:30 P.M. I Am Love, which opens June 25. Operatic, for those who don’t like opera; Viscontian, for those who don’t watch Visconti; erotic, for those who like to watch. 8:10 P.M. The Genius and the Goddess: “In February 1959, when the seventy-four-year-old Danish author Isak Dinesen—wasted, skeletal and ravaged by syphilis—expressed a desire to meet them, Carson McCullers invited the actress and playwright to lunch at her house in Nyack, New York.” 8:30 P.M. Mozart K. 497, Malcolm/Schiff on Mozart’s own piano from around 1780. Reminds me that my favorite recording of this masterwork of symphonic scope, a Nonesuch LP of it, performed by Robert Levin and Malcolm Bilson, is unavailable on CD. Haven’t heard it since I sold my LPs in 1995. Wonder how it would sound now. 9:30 P.M. Watched Jonathon Niese complete his one-hit shutout; saw bits and pieces of the last few innings. Pessimistically expected that, pitching into the ninth inning, he’d lose both his one-hitter and his shutout—I was wrong. 10:00 P.M. Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore, Blowing In from Chicago, a Blue Note recording from 1957. The cut “Blue Lights,” composed by the alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce. 10:25 P.M. Erica Morini, Mozart, Violin Concertos 4 and 5. Morini: a Viennese immigrant (born 1904) with a mellifluous tone, who speaks Mozart as her mother tongue. These are privately-made live recordings, from concerts with a local orchestra, from 1965 and 1971, and a document of the vast cultural enrichment of New York that resulted from the desperate emigrations of the nineteen-thirties and forties. 10:57 P.M. I notice a strange Heisenbergian aspect to this diary—the nocturnal chunks of time usually devoted to reading are, this week, instead go into filling out the up-to-the-minute account of the day’s cultural doings. Am reminded of what one great rabbinic scholar said to me about another: I read ten books and write one; he reads one and writes ten. Nonetheless, I am learning something else about my own cultural life: that it’s weirdly regimented, by day and time. Read More
June 30, 2010 Terry Southern Month The End of Terry Southern Month By Lorin Stein As we come to the end of Terry Southern Month—and our first month in operation—I wish to thank all of you who wrote in, whether on the comments page or privately, to say how much you love Southern’s work. We had no idea how many other fans were out there. This has been one of those gratifying lessons that only the web can teach. Thanks also—equally—to those who hate the stuff, and piped up. We are not in the criticism business at The Paris Review. But we believe in it. Here we differ with our friends at The Believer: we like snark, when it comes from the gut. It may not be the lifeblood of the arts, but a healthy organism also needs bile, not to mention a gag reflex. You haters are going to hate this last piece. We make no apologies for it, but—at the risk of going off the reservation, into lit crit mode—we would like to point out that it makes the author queasy, too. (Even his anti-hero, “Art,” knows enough to be ashamed. Get it, Art?) Furthermore, we’d like to observe that this is typical of Southern’s work. His comedy depends on moral ambivalence. He may be turned on by bad behavior—if it weren’t a turn-on, it wouldn’t be bad. Or at least, no one would engage in it. But he knows it for what it is. In a story like the following, he’ll sacrifice good taste, comfort, even laughs for the sake of a truth “too … er, uh, gross for a general readership.” We trust you are not that. Read More
June 30, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Richard Brody, New Yorker Film Critic By Richard Brody DAY ONE 10:02 A.M. The week’s first cultural object is a new, yet-unreleased film by Claude Chabrol, The Son of Summer, starring Isabelle Huppert as a childless, married bourgeois intellectual who has a special, foster-like relationship to a young, disabled boy whom, one day, she kills. The film is so new that, in fact, it doesn’t exist—I dreamed it at the end of a morning of troubled sleep. 10:15 A.M. A chamber transcription of Haydn’s Symphony no. 94, the “Surprise” symphony, is playing on WQXR, New York’s classical-music station. It’s music I know and love—I play a spare transcription of the middle movements on recorder—but have never heard in this arrangement. 11:00 A.M. Twitter (and every hour or two for a few minutes, throughout the day). Love the sense of listening in on discussions at the next table when they know you’re listening. Good to chat back and forth with people I don’t know but would want to, with others I do know but don’t talk with often enough, with a surprisingly large yet tight group of fellow cinephiles. The 140 characters? A snapshot of an idea. 11:10 A.M. Heading for the subway, unusually late. 11:20 A.M. The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, by Jeffrey Meyers on the No. 6 and the R. Anticipating something like a twist on the line from Saturday Night Fever: “Maybe he’s not so smart and maybe she’s not so dumb.” 11:47 A.M. The New York Times’s Web site, checked intermittently throughout the day’s editorial duties. 3:20 P.M. Glenn Kenny’s blog Some Came Running led me to his piece at Mubi about politicized viewings of “Sex and the City 2.” It concludes with a citation from Slavoj Zizek, which prompted me to revisit Adam Kirsch’s critical debunking, in The New Republic, of Zizek’s politics (The Deadly Jester), and Josh Strawn’s debunking of Kirsch’s, at Jewcy. 7:52 P.M. “The Young Schubert,” a recording by the pianist Leonard Hokanson, a student of Artur Schnabel. Hokanson delights in Schubert’s adolescent inspirations. 8:20 P.M. NY Post: the bridge column. I played a lot in high school, not at all since then—but I read the bridge column every day. And Page Six: the item about Ron Jeremy lunching at Condé Nast. I saw him in the lobby beforehand, where lots of employees came up to greet him. Afterwards, plenty of people in the office were talking about him. 8:30 PM. The Times: Read the front-page story with the headline, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price.” Put any noun in the place of “gadgets” and there would be a price to pay; that’s true of any addiction or abuse, not just of electronic stimuli. Read the op-ed piece about legislative battles in Wisconsin over raw milk. 9:27 P.M. Bud Powell, A Portrait of Thelonious. Powell, the definitive bebop pianist and my favorite jazz pianist, whose scintillating yet melodious right-hand runs are anchored by the dark lightning of his left hand’s chords. His later recordings (such as this one, from a Paris studio in 1961) are much and wrongly maligned. What he lost in exuberance he gained in profundity; and where they’re exuberant (Live in Geneva 1962, for instance), they’re still more profound. 9:40 P.M. On-line Driver’s Manual and Study Guide—having let my license lapse, inadvertently, decades ago, I need to start again, with a learner’s permit: “You may not cross any railroad tracks unless there is room for your vehicle on the other side. If other traffic prevents you from crossing all the way, wait, and cross only when there is room.” 12:05 A.M. A few minutes of John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon, his low-budget Irish film, from 1956. 1:11 A.M. While preparing to DVR No Sad Songs for Me (which Jean-Luc Godard wrote about in Cahiers du Cinéma at the age of twenty-one), I burn to DVD—and start to watch—High Time, a 1960 comedy directed by Blake Edwards, starring Bing Crosby as a prosperous fifty-ish businessman who decides to get a college education. 2:48 A.M. The Genius and the Goddess. Reading about Arthur Miller’s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee and its heinous methods, in 1956-57, even after the fall of McCarthy: “Miller said his battle with the committee was ‘a fraud and a farce, except it cost me a fortune [$40,000] for lawyers and a year’s time lost in the bargain, worrying about it and figuring out how to react to it.’” Read More