October 18, 2010 Letter from Our Southern Editor Bill Bailey Comes Home By John Jeremiah Sullivan A mug shot of Axl Rose at eighteen. Five years ago GQ assigned me to write about Axl Rose, who was mounting a “final comeback” with his Chinese Democracy, release of which had already been postponed by more than a decade. The album title was meant as a punch line. Q: When will Guns N’ Roses come out with something new? A: When there’s democracy in China. That stage in the singer’s career turned out to be neither a comeback (few people liked the record, and nobody played it much) nor final—a minute ago I ran his name through Google News and found he’s hard at work being Axl, showing up hours late to shows, getting pelted with bottles, making bizarre requests on tour riders (black napkins, Grolsch beer, honey in “bear-shaped tubes”). The story was, by turns, fun and frustrating to report. I followed the band around Europe for a while, feeding cigarettes to the band members’ model girlfriends and failing to secure face time with “Ax.” His manager back then was a real specimen. Before one show, in Spain, I sat at a coffee table with this person, struggling to explain how it might help justify the seven thousand words we were about to expend on the band if the front man would speak to me for a few seconds. I think at one point I actually said, “Give me thirty seconds.” Axl had by then become, as he remains, sealed off from the press to an almost Michael Jackson level. The manager kept pausing to answer cellphone calls from Elton John. “Well, that’s because they don’t know Tea for the Tillerman,” he said into the phone at one point, referring to the classic Cat Stevens record. What were he and Sir Elton talking about? I still wonder sometimes. He told me that, if we would agree to put Axl on the cover, “maybe we could talk about an interview.” I couldn’t figure out how to say, in any non-offensive way, that GQ covers are typically reserved for extremely conventionally good-looking people in the midst of a career peak, such as Axl once was but hadn’t been in a very long time. I let it drop. Axl broke with the manager soon thereafter, passive-aggressively blaming him in an “Open Letter to Fans” for the failure of Chinese Democracy. Thinking back, I feel sympathy with the manager. What I read as superciliousness was probably professional trauma. He was the devil’s own PR man. The most memorable trip I made in connection with Axl was to Lafayette, Indiana, where he grew up. I drove there hoping to track down his oldest childhood friend, a man named Dana, who’d never been interviewed. Dana turned out not surprisingly to be a very reclusive person, and although he did eventually meet with me, it took several days to coax him out. I spent them inventing little research projects. I visited the public library and found old yearbook pictures of Axl. I photographed the church where he sang in the choir. And lastly, on the morning of the day when Dana finally called me back, I went to the local police station. Did they have any records on Axl? No, they didn’t think so. Really? That seemed impossible. Would they mind checking under his many Indiana names? William Bruce Rose Jr.? William Bruce Bailey? Bill Bailey? W. Rose? A friendly lady officer agreed to help me out. Read More
October 15, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Adaptation; Lending Books By Lorin Stein I’m a student at the Tisch School for the Arts in New York City, where I concentrate in writing for musical theater. I’d like to adapt a novella or short story for the stage and was hoping you might have some suggestions. Thanks, Leslie Since you ask—I’ve always thought Grégoire Bouillier’s novella-length memoir, The Mystery Guest, would make a fantastic play. It’s the true story of a guy who goes to a fancy party where he doesn’t know anybody, hoping to find out why his girlfriend walked out on him five years before. To my mind, it’s very dramatic stuff. At FSG we even made a fake movie trailer to promote it. Full disclosure: I translated the thing into English, but I signed away any royalties years ago. I just want to hear someone sing a show tune about Sophie Calle. Read More
October 15, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Booker Gossip, Wittgenstein Gags By The Paris Review Two years ago, in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Booker Prize, The Guardian dredged up a judge from every single year willing to dish on the behind-the-scenes goings-on: Wives promote their husbands’ books; punches are thrown; Salman Rushdie is insulted. Another Booker-related treat: a funny and surprisingly poignant profile of aging table-tennis great Marty Reisman, written in 1999 by this year’s winner, Howard Jacobson (once a ranked junior table-tennis player in England), published for the first time in the U.S. this week by Tablet Magazine. Sample description of Marty: “a leftover Beat poet about to read to a bunch of contemporary kids in a non-English speaking country.” —Miranda Popkey “A typical Wittgenstein gag was drawing an arrow to the ‘W.C.1’ in a London address on a letter he was going to mail and writing, ‘This doesn’t mean ‘Lavatory.’” If the great man finding amusement in such things tickles you—and it really should—you’ll enjoy the rest of Jim Holt’s little book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. And oh yes, French children are apparently fond of jokes about the fantastical creature known as the zizi tordu, or “twisted penis.” Now you’ll read the book, won’t you. —Mark de Silva A History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. I was pulled in by the fluid, experimental structure and kept reading because Krauss, like Roth, gets Jewish families exactly right. Elie Wiesel wrote that the ambivalent “and yet” is the most Jewish of phrases; it is also protagonist Leo Gursky’s constant refrain. —Kate Waldman The novelist Douglas Coupland previews his upcoming, five-part Massey Lecture on the culture of our near-future in the Globe and Mail. And Vaughan Bell looks backward, to an era in which murder was among our most social and democratic activities. —David Wallace-Wells Zadie Smith has a short essay in The New Yorker‘s money issue about lending funds to a friend. I appreciate her honesty: “Until this episode, I’d thought of myself as a working-class girl who’d happened upon money, my essential character unchanged. But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it.” Bonus: Zadie was a young violist, just as I was! —Thessaly La Force
October 14, 2010 On Translation Some Kind of Beautiful Signal By Thessaly La Force Each year, the Center for the Art of Translation publishes an anthology series called Two Lines that focuses on literary translation. This year’s anthology is titled Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, and it was edited by the translator Natasha Wimmer and the poet Jeffrey Yang. If you’re like me, you’re probably familiar with Wimmer’s work on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and The Savage Detectives, though Wimmer has also garnered praise for her translations of the novels by Mario Vargas Llosa. Last week, Wimmer was part of a collective response to Lydia Davis’s musings on translating Madame Bovary. But this week, Wimmer has been blogging on the Center for the Art of Translation’s Web site, where she describes discovering the writing of Bioy Casares and his novel The Invention of Morel: Not only had I not read it, I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t even heard of it. As anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with Argentinian literature will tell you, this was a travesty. Once you’ve read Borges, you read his great friend and collaborator, Bioy. The cult classic The Invention of Morel is perhaps the defining work of fantastic literature in Spanish, and as Rodrigo would say, fantastic literature may be the Argentinian literature par excellence. She also discusses an essay by Roberto Bolaño that appears in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal: Scott Esposito: Lastly, I wanted to ask you about the piece you translated for this volume, Roberto Bolaño’s essay “La traduccion en un yunque,” which you translated as “Translation Is a Testing Ground.” It’s an interesting piece about the limits of translation, which it illustrates by talking about those authors who will and can be translated versus those who can’t or won’t. What was the thought-process that got you from “yunque” to “testing ground”? And did your own extensive experience with translation inform your decision to go for this interpretation of “yunque”? Read More
October 14, 2010 At Work Michael Cunningham By Thessaly La Force Photograph by Richard Phibbs. By Nightfall, the sixth novel by Pulitzer Prize–winning Michael Cunningham, tells the story of Peter Harris, a gallery owner in Manhattan whose comfortable marriage is interrupted by the arrival of Mizzy (short for “the Mistake”), the younger brother of his wife, Rebecca. Peter—a straight man—finds Mizzy’s youth intoxicating and seductive. Soon, Peter is questioning his life, his marriage, even his sexuality, and wondering if it’s worth throwing it all away. Earlier this week, Cunningham answered my questions about his book over e-mail. You write, “History favors the tragic lovers, the Gatsbys and the Anna K.s, it forgives them, even as it grinds them down. But Peter, a small figure on an undistinguished corner of Manhattan, will have to forgive himself, he’ll have to grind himself down because it seems no one is going to do it for him.” Why create someone like Peter and not … well, a Gatsby? A Peter as opposed to a Gatsby. I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from reading the modernists, particularly Woolf and Joyce, who insisted that fiction depict the 99.9 percent of the population who are not Gatsby or Nostromo or David Copperfield; who insisted that part of the novelist’s job is to ferret out the epic story of outwardly unextraordinary people, who are of course extraordinary to themselves. I just don’t feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. At one point, Peter says, “I don’t know. I mean, how could I love another guy and not be gay?” “Easy,” says Uta. Why is it easy? Human sexuality is tremendously complicated, so much so that the designations “gay,” “straight,” and “bisexual” are all but meaningless. How many of us have had crushes, and even sexual experiences, with people who fall outside our official “erotic category”? Okay, not everyone, but many of us. I’m interested in sexuality that falls outside the official lines of demarcation. As is Uta. The seed of By Nightfall was really Mann’s Death in Venice. Although I didn’t want to rewrite Death in Venice, I’ve always been fascinated by Aschenbach’s fascination with Tadzio, which is eroticized but not exactly sexual; it’s more about Aschenbach’s love of youth and beauty and ephemerality. If it was just a book about an old letch hungering for a young boy, what good would it be? I wanted to write about an essentially straight guy who finds himself powerfully drawn not only to a boy but to what the boy represents. If Peter had simply become obsessed with a girl, the story would have been too conventional. Read More
October 13, 2010 Arts & Culture The Woodcuts of Lynd Ward By Art Spiegelman It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration. Read More