July 19, 2010 Department of Sex Ed Dollface By Hilton Als It’s the queers who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who – in the same car – asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman’s locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person’s instructions, in my now dead aunt’s little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own ass—“gay cancer.” Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith—he sat in the front seat, I in the back—and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: they said we looked suspicious, we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else. It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to Edwin Denby’s writings, and George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” and got me writing for Ballet Review. Who wore red suspenders and a Trotsky button; I had never met anyone who dressed so stylishly who wasn’t black or Jewish. Who, even though I was “alone,” watched me as I danced to Cindy Wilson singing “Give Me Back My Man,” in the basement of a house that my mother shared with her sister in Atlanta. Who took me to Paris. Who let me share his bed in Paris. Who told my mother that I would be O.K., and I hope she believed him. Who was delighted to include one of my sisters in a night out—she wore a pink prom dress and did the Electric Slide, surrounded by gay boys and fuck knows if she cared or saw the difference between herself and them—and he stood by my side as I watched my sister dance in her pink prom dress, and then he asked what I was thinking about, and I said, “I’m just remembering why I’m gay.” Read More
July 16, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Walt Whitman, Air Guitar, Laurie Anderson By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading this week. Lorin Stein The June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review continues to float around the office. Maureen Tkacik’s cover story, on the career facing a young journalist today, is the best thing I’ve read on the subject. To my shame I had never read Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy until this Monday. The essay “Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme” moved me to tears in the barber chair. There are four different friends to whom I want to send my copy of this masterpiece—right now—but I’ve marked up so many favorite passages, I’ll need to copy them out first. Plus I can’t decide who needs or deserves it most. I have left a copy of the new Open City in the bathroom that others might discover Samantha Gillison’s wry, wistful story “The Conference Rat.” Also this week I read Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense, a collection of his reviews. Over the last dozen years, Steve has taught me more than any critic about contemporary poetry. The book is kind, wise (at times, exasperatingly wise) and full of insight. The last pages, a series of aphorisms, made me love it. Caitlin Roper Smithsonian magazine is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. I’m enjoying their rich, deep “Forty Things You Need to Know About the Next Forty Years.” The magazine’s founding editor, Edward K. Thompson, said it “would stir curiosity in already receptive minds.” Mission accomplished. Favorite articles include: “6. Oysters Will Save Wolves From Climate Change,” “21. Science Could Enable A Person To Regrow A Limb,” “26. Novelists Will Need A New Plot Device” (poet Rita Dove on the future of literature), and “36. Goodbye, Stereo; Hello, Hyper-Real Acoustics” (Laurie Anderson on the sounds of the future). Read More
July 16, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Manhattan Unfurled, Partying at The Paris Review By Lorin Stein I’m looking for good books about New York to give as host/hostess gifts. What would you recommend? —Elizabeth P., New York City There is always E. B. White’s little classic Here Is New York. The old edition is the one to buy for its beautiful jacket. Ten years ago I gave a copy to my friend Matteo Pericoli, a native Italian in love with the plain style in American prose. Matteo then turned around and created an even more beautiful book: Manhattan Unfurled. This unique object, which unfolds like an accordion, consists of two thirty-seven-foot pen-and-ink drawings. One portrays the western shore of Manhattan, the other the east. Matteo also made a children’s version, See the City, with pencilled annotations, e.g. “This is a power plant”; “United Nations (I drew more than 3000 little lines!)”; “This is a not-so-famous building, but I like it.” I don’t know which version I prefer, loving them both as I do. If your hosts lives downtown, you may also want to give them Luc Sante’s Low Life, with its haunting history of the tenement city New York used to be. Then, if your hosts are unemployed, you can always give them Gotham. Once, as a house-sitter in Greenwich Village, I spent the better part of a week in a gigantic Adirondack chair reading Gotham from cover to cover. I mention the chair because you need a big sturdy comfortable one, or a book stand. There is no question of reading the book in bed. Read More
July 16, 2010 Arts & Culture The Only Ones Left on the Island By Elif Batuman The final installment of a four-part review. 5:56 P.M. Another break. As sometimes happens with people under duress, our biological systems have warped into synch and pretty much all 400-odd culture lovers seem to have to pee this time. “Five-minute call!” I’m still in line on the trailer steps, where a faint but palpable ripple of panic passes through the crowd. 6:02 P.M. Back in the theater, I ask the LA Times critic how he is doing. “So-so,” he says. “Hanging in there.” He asks me whether anyone has ever tried to stage the dramatic poem written by Stepan Trofimovich in the first part of Demons. I don’t know that they have, but what a marvelous idea! The description of this lyrical drama is one of my favorite passages in Dostoevsky’s novel: It is some sort of allegory, in lyrical-dramatic form, resembling the second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of women, then a chorus of men, then of some powers, and it all ends with a chorus of souls that have not lived yet but would very much like to live a little… Then suddenly the scene changes and some sort of “Festival of Life” begins, in which even insects sing, a turtle appears with some sort of sacramental Latin words, and, if I remember, a mineral—that is, an altogether inanimate object—also gets to sing about something… Finally, the scene changes again, and a wild place appears, where a civilized young man wanders among the rocks picking and sucking at some wild herbs, and when a fairy asks him why he is sucking these herbs, he responds that he feels an overabundance of life in himself, is seeking oblivion, and finds it in the juice of these herbs, but that his greatest desire is to lose his reason as quickly as possible (a perhaps superfluous desire). I am filled with a desire to see a turtle uttering sacramental the Latin words, and a mineral that somehow gets to sing about something. It strikes me as criminal that Peter Stein didn’t include these highlights in his performance. What excuse did he possibly have—there hadn’t been enough time? 6:05 P.M. I count seven empty seats behind me, and eleven to my right. 6:18 P.M. Nikolai has gone to confess to a monk that he once seduced a fourteen-year-old girl and drove her to suicide. This chapter was omitted from the first editions of Dostoevsky’s novels. 6:23 P.M. Nikolai confesses to the monk that he really did secretly marry the pretty retarded lame girl. The monk totally has Nikolai’s number. I hadn’t realized before how much this conversation resembles the exchange between Raskolnikov and the detective in Crime and Punishment. 6:40 P.M. Still confessing. “On my conscience is a premeditated poisoning that no one knows about.” 6:47 P.M. The confession shows no sign of ending. If this was a plane we would be in France by now. I glance at the program notes to see what else has to happen before the dinner break. The mayor has to explode in a fit of jealousy. I wonder how long that will take. 6:48 P.M. Nikolai is weeping in the monk’s lap. Read More
July 15, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Caitlin Roper, Editor, Part 2 By Caitlin Roper This is the second installment of Roper’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:30 A.M. John Waters interview. He’s in Provincetown for the summer, so we have to talk on the phone. I’m disappointed not to meet him in person, but still excited to talk. Waters is a charmer. I’m instantly enthralled and never want to hang up. 1:00 P.M. My friend Max sent me some images of paintings by Walton Ford, whom we both admire. I think Ford is my favorite contemporary painter. He paints gigantic, detailed watercolors. There’re sort of Audobon, naturalist illustration-inspired, with a dark, anti-colonial, anti-industrialist twist. I spend about fifteen minutes looking at all the Ford paintings I can find online. This is an example of a kind of culture that is not best delivered via computer screen. I long to see some Ford paintings at full size. 4:15 P.M. “Puritan, Inc.,” a review of Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History on TNR’s The Book written by my friend and colleague David Wallace-Wells. 5:00 P.M. Max sent me this video, probably captured by a security camera, of a guy strolling down the street in a track suit and a pair of sunglasses. He does a double-take, and nearly gets hit by a car careening down the sidewalk. He leaps to safety, missing death by inches. I find it so alarming I watch it over and over again. The way the guy looks up, jukes to one side, then leaps expertly out of the way—I cannot believe it. 6:45 P.M. The Kids Are All Right at the Loews Village 7. I liked Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art. I saw it in college. I know little about this one, which is my ideal movie-going scenario. As soon as the movie starts, I’m engaged. This is the best movie I have seen in a theater since Joon-ho Bong’s Mother. Also, Mark Ruffalo is hot. 9:15 P.M. Kickstarter and Rooftop Films teamed up for a film festival. The roof in Park Slope is vast. We slink in during a film and settle in folding chairs. The film shorts are projected on a screen hung on a brick wall. It’s a warm night, but there is a gentle, steady breeze. I watch two shorts and find my eyes drifting back to the horizon, where a herd of clouds makes its way across the plains of the blue-black sky. Read More
July 15, 2010 Arts & Culture Charlotte Strick, Paris Review’s Art Editor By Thessaly La Force In the middle of redesigning The Paris Review (stay tuned!) our new art editor, Charlotte Strick, takes time out to discuss how she got into the design business. (She’s also responsible for the gallery of book jackets you see above.) Read more on FSG’s new blog, Work in Progress. I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer since the age of three, because my mom had been a fashion designer in England. I grew up with her talking about what London was like after the war, how it was this burst of color after so much gray. Carnaby Street, and Mary Quant . . . I just thought, wow. That’s what I want to do. Of course, that scene had long since passed when I became an adult. But that was my dream, and I grew up drawing, making little fashion magazines. I made a logo for myself. And I grew up with my father pointing out typography to me, because he had been very involved in the Calligrapher’s Workshop that’s now part of the AIGA. I remember at the age of five, him pointing out, “Look at that sign! That’s a terrible letter j!” I got quite snobby about stuff like that. I wanted to go to art school, I wanted to go to RISD. But my family said, “Go to liberal arts school, be a fine arts major, but study all these other subjects. Then you can go to art school if you really want to.” I went sort of frustrated. I did a lot of painting, I took art history classes. All the time I was drawing and trying to teach myself to sew. I came out and I was working for Elie Tahari. At the time they were just branding Theory, which is huge now. There was a girl a few years older than me, who had gone to design school, and she was given the task of designing the Theory logo. I looked over her shoulder and thought, “What is she doing?” I hadn’t been on a computer much at that point . . . Read More