June 4, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Reading Mojo, Friend Dumping By Lorin Stein Boy Reading, by Thomas Pollack Anshutz.I’m in a bad spot in my reading habits. I’ve been watching a lot of reality television, and I’ve cracked open half a dozen books, and abandoned them all. What would be good to get my reading mojo back? —S. Johnson, New York City Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch. Or really Elmore Leonard, anything. When I was a kid and convinced of the genius of Raymond Carver, I tried to get my father to read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and my dad responded by giving me Leonard’s novel Glitz, explaining that Leonard had a better ear for dialogue—plus in his novels stuff actually happened. This of course was not fair to Raymond Carver. My father might also have pointed out that Leonard’s books are funny. The one trouble with Leonard, and the reason I no longer read his novels, is that I have real trouble putting them down. Also I never remember anything about them. All I remember about Rum Punch, for instance, is the title and that it kept me up all night. Post script: a friend who knows his way around reality TV suggests Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected as a sort of halfway house on the long road back to the novel. Judging from my one brush with The Real Housewives of New York, this is an excellent recommendation—Ramona and Kelly are Dahl characters come to life. Read More
June 3, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Sarah Crichton, Part 2 By Sarah Crichton This is the second installment of Sarah Crichton’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Sarah Crichton. Photograph by Joyce Ravid. DAY FOUR 7 A.M. Morning edition. The New York Times. Kagan, oil spill, crushing debt. Market’s going to hell in a hand basket. Leaving late today because I’ve put off a mammogram long enough. Kill time with Architectural Digest. Jean Strouse has an article on a house in Costa Rica. These days, fewer magazines send fewer writers to fewer fab spots on their dime. Good on you, Jean Strouse! Tear out pages with decorating tips I’ll never use. Killing more time, turn on Morning Joe. Tired of the banter, go to YouTube and watch the Lady Gaga and Beyoncé video people have mentioned, “Telephone.” 9 A.M. Wander back to kitchen where the radio is still on. BBC World. Bangkok is preparing to explode, and expats are calling in with observations in real-time. Very exciting. Hard to pull away to leave for mammogram. In fact, decide to pretend I have a ten-thirty appointment, when I know full well it was ten. 10:45 A.M. Have brought Janet Malcolm article to appointment with me; I’m almost done. (It’s very long.) She’s visiting the Bukharan part of Forest Hills, and has just accidentally spotted the little girl who has, in essence, been orphaned by the murder: “A child on a tricycle, pedaling vigorously and laughing in a forced and exaggerated manner, preceded [the couple]. It was Michelle. Gavriel recognized me from the courtroom, and paused to exchange a few words. Walking to the subway, I swore at myself. Had I stayed in Khaika’s garden another minute, I would have had the chance to observe Michelle in the heart of her feared father’s family. But perhaps my glimpse of her face distorted by mirthless laughter sufficed for my journalist’s purpose. I thought I got the message.” 11:00 A.M. The View comes on. In the doctor’s. I try hard to stay focused on my magazine. I lose the battle. The show is too weird to ignore. 11:45 A.M. Back on the No. 4 train to Union Square. Manage to finish Malcolm piece, and mourn the fact that it’s over. 6:40 P.M. Home. As I cook, All Things Considered. Marketplace—they’re playing “Stormy Weather,” which means another bad day on Wall Street. I have shameful plans for the rest of the night. I think, Yes! At eight, American Idol: we’re getting to the finish. And when that’s over: Glee. Fine, mock me. But I love that Matthew Morrison; loved him as a love-struck Italian boy in Light in the Piazza, and as a love-torn lieutenant in South Pacific. I love a song-and-dance number. I have an hour before AI (as they say), so I put on an old Segovia LP (I love the pops of the vinyl against the warm strings), and read a large chunk of a surprisingly good manuscript. At eight, I forget my plan and put Joni Mitchell’s scratchy For the Roses on the turntable. The vinyl pops pop pop. I stage my own song-and-dance number. If this were Shindig!, they’d give me a cage. 10:50 P.M. Damn. Missed all shows, but catch a few final moments of Julianna Margulies in The Good Wife. She is so beautiful. 11:00 P.M. Jon Stewart is very good tonight: Release the Kagan. 11:30 P.M. Dip around in Jules Feiffer’s memoir. Read More
June 2, 2010 Softball Team Paris Review Dominates Vanity Fair By Christopher Cox After the jump, a recap of last night’s softball game against Vanity Fair. Read More
June 2, 2010 Department of Sex Ed Department of Sex Ed By Giancarlo DiTrapano Between the sheets with Ignatius Reilly. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual. My father gave me A Confederacy of Dunces when I was twenty-one. Like most people who have read this book, I fell hard for the protagonist, a waddling, unkempt mammoth toddler with “blue and yellow eyes” and crumbs in his mustache. Unlike most people who have read this book, however, my love for Ignatius involved wanting to be naked with him in my bed. Until then, I’d always thought of myself as straight. I walked straight and I talked straight. I dated girls, I slept with girls, when I jacked off, I jacked off to girls. I had a girlfriend for ten years, and I loved her. I enjoyed each and every time we fucked. Boys never interested me. Not “cute boys,” anyway, not “handsome men.” The only members of my sex I ever noticed were the stockier set. The jovial ones. That was the word I could live with—jovial: both happy and like some god you might see in a fountain. Every time I passed one on the street I’d think something like, “If that guy was my friend I would probably hug him so much that people would start to wonder if we were gay.” Reading Confederacy, well, it changed me. I was living in Rome at the time. I was often alone so I was often reading. I was being fascinated by a lot of books. My fascination with this book, however, and with the man in the middle of it. I read it erect. I reread it, erecter. Who in the fuck was this Ignatius? Who was this? I lusted after this chubby mess of a man until I felt sick in the stomach over it. One scene, near the beginning of the book, had an especially dizzying effect on me. (I’ve read it hundreds and hundreds of times.) It’s where we find Ignatius practicing a little “self-love” in his bed; an innocent, even saintly, wank to a happier time in his life. He had accessories nearby: a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, and a jar of Noxzema: Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large devoted collie that had been his pet in high school…Ignatius’s eyes dilated, crossed, and closed, and he lay back among his four pillows, hoping that he had some Kleenex in his room. This is the page where I went fag. The solitude and isolation, the very sadness of it all, didn’t turn me off—on the contrary, it was the hook. Sex scenes had always been filled with gorgeous people. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual. I think it must have been the first time, in literature or film or life, when it occurred to me these were two different things. It was loud and clear. I had been fooling myself. I wanted something else from the Ignatiuses of the world. Something if much more than hugs. Giancarlo DiTrapano is the editor of New York Tyrant, a tri-quarterly literary magazine.
June 2, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Sarah Crichton, Book Editor By Sarah Crichton Sarah Crichton. Photograph by Joyce Ravid. DAY ONE, Saturday, May 8 3:28 A.M. Up. Always up at 3:28 A.M., on the nose. Before I crashed, I started Jill Lepore’s piece on the real historical Tea Partiers in The New Yorker. I flip past Lepore and move onto Janet Malcolm’s piece on the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the Bukharan Jewish doctor, for hiring a hitman to off her dentist husband. Brilliant. “We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up.” Heaven. 5:21 A.M. Awake again. Magazine’s on my chest; light’s still on. Bukharan killers dance in my head. Continue reading. 6:43 A.M. Awake again. Get up? Or shoot for more sleep? Return to Malcolm, who dazzles me, the way she weaves in and out of her piece. “I have let Fass run on too long, and have got ahead of my story. Let me go back to my talk in the hallway with the law guardian, who had said yes to an interview…” I’d love to read some of this to someone, but of course everyone’s asleep and my husband is in Bratislava, I think. 8:50 A.M. A proper weekend wake-up time. Tea, yogurt, weekend Times. What’s in there is scary: oil spills, crushing Greek debt. So start with real-estate section. Mean co-op boards can’t scare me! Work methodically through the sections, ending with the book section, which I’ve already read, so I pick up last week’s Book Review, which is still on the stack by my chair, and read that instead. Francine Prose on how anti-Semitic Irène Némirovsky really was. 10:00 A.M. Switch on NPR. Car Talk. I don’t own a car anymore, but I love those brothers. Would I love them as much if they didn’t have Southie accents? 11:00 A.M. Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Love that show too, but I’m done chopping vegetables for my soup, and Roy Blount, Jr. isn’t on, so I switch it off. 11:05 A.M. Boot up PC. Check to see if money has miraculously appeared in my checking account (it hasn’t); if I’ve heard from my husband in Bratislava (I haven’t); if there’s something on 1st Dibs that I should know about and buy. Read somewhere that Gwyneth Paltrow did a cute hip-hop routine with Jimmy Fallon, so track it down on Hulu. 12:30 P.M. Pick up Zipcar, and head to JFK to pick up Oberlin-student daughter, in for quick Mother’s Day visit. On radio: Live from the Met. Berg’s Lulu. The wonderful Marlis Petersen as Lulu. Reluctant to leave the opera when I get to JFK, so I sit in the parking lot until intermission. Buy Star magazine in the terminal. HOUSEKEEPERS TELL ALL. Only, they don’t. Daughter arrives. Back in Zipcar, Lulu loses to the new Grizzly Bear CD, which my daughter wants me to hear. 6:50 P.M. Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu) at BAM Rose Cinema in a beautiful fresh print. Couple behind us carp as we sit down. We are tall; they are not. My daughter, sweeter than I, says, “No problem, let’s swap seats.” As we start to settle into our new seats, the couple now behind grumbles, and my daughter starts, but I make it clear I’m not moving. I haven’t seen the movie on a full-size screen since a Brattle Street Theater/Janus Film marathon in the early 1970s. The movie is a joy—farce, satire, visually delicious. But the audience is rigid with respect, and when my daughter starts cracking up, you can sense the irritation. I think they think we are drunk. We’re not. I am intimidated and quiet into a chuckle, but Eliza refuses to be muted. Rightfully so. 11:20 P.M. Home in time to catch Betty White host Saturday Night Live, who’s been picked because of a Facebook contest. She looks damn good for eighty-eight, and she always could talk quasi-dirty, which of course is what they’ve got her doing. I nod off as she’s being a baker, talking about her “big, dusty muffin.” Read More
June 1, 2010 Terry Southern Month Terry Southern Month By Lorin Stein Terry Southern, © Steve Schapiro.It’s buck season, the sun is defying all forecasts, the Vanity Fair softball team is atremble at the prospect of tonight’s grudge match, and to greet the arrival of summer we at The Paris Review Daily are hereby declaring June 2010 “Terry Southern Month.” For the next twenty-nine days stay tuned for a celebration of the longtime contributor who wrote Dr. Strangelove, The Magic Christian, and the pornographic novel Candy, inter alia. As George Plimpton explained in 1996, the year of Southern’s death: Terry was in a a sense largely responsible for the birth of this magazine back in 1953. In the early stages of publishing a Paris-based New Yorker imitation entitled The Paris News-Post, its editors, Peter Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes, were so impressed by the strength of The Accident, a story submitted by their friend Terry (a section of his novel Flash and Filigree) that they decided to scrap The New Yorker imitation and start a literary magazine. The story was incorporated in the first number. Thus, The Paris Review. Here, for starters, is an interview by Mike Golden from issue 138 in which Southern discusses Paris in the fifties, making Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper (RIP), and the famous “lost” pie-fight from Dr. Strangelove: Read More