May 16, 2018 Arts & Culture You, Too, Can Live in Norman Mailer’s House By Nadja Spiegelman Images courtesy of Core NYC. Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights pad is on the market! The fourth-floor two-bedroom apartment overlooking the promenade was first listed in 2011, but the sale fell through when the prospective buyer discovered the atrium wasn’t up to code. Norman Mailer was afraid of heights, and so, macho to the core, he had his apartment outfitted with crow’s nests, gangplanks, galley ladders, and hammocks. In short, he built himself a nautical jungle gym on which to exercise his biggest personal fears. Now his son Michael has removed all that, bringing the space in line with those rigorous regulation-atrium requirements. The walls have been painted white, and Norman’s stacks of books have been whittled down by professional stagers, but the $2.4 million price tag is the same as it was seven years ago. Mailer had nine children (from six wives), who will split the proceeds. “The nautically themed space is iconic, like its creator,” the real-estate listing reads, in excellent Executioner’s Song–esque prose, “with a two-story glass and wood atrium and a sloping wood ceiling recalling the curves of a grand sailboat.” Sure, as Joan Smith wrote after his death, “Mailer hated authority, homosexuality, women and almost certainly himself.” Sure, he stabbed one of his wives with a penknife, complained about the “womanization of America,” helped spring a murderer from jail, made a failed run for mayor, and declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” But the place probably isn’t haunted. Look at that view. Read More
May 16, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Leslie Jamison By Leslie Jamison In our new series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Any discussion of my fridge in the current moment needs to begin with a discussion of who lives in my home: my husband and I, our nine-year-old daughter (who likes Lunchables but not the particular flavor of Lunchable that has been sitting in our fridge for the past week), and our three-month-old daughter—who, in her beautiful way, takes up much of the time that might otherwise be spent, say, cleaning out the fridge. Which is all to say: our fridge is actually a pretty decent portal into the acts of survival that constitute our daily life. Read More
May 16, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, Straight-Arrow Virginia Gent By Gordon Lish Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011. Back in the day when I was stepping out and Anatole Broyard kept a one-room city fifth-floor walkup in which I would not infrequently step out in, Tom was living only a block or so easterly and would, damn our eyes, catch me making my way to or from where I wasn’t supposed to have been stepping and, bless his heart, not inform on me, despite his being the straight-arrow Virginia gent he was. Back in the day when there was talk between Tom’s Sheila and my Barbara of the two squads going halvsies on a great big house in Hamptonia, we all were sitting around in said real estate after a Sunday brunchy fress—Tom’s sidekicks Eddie Hayes and Richard Merkin among the newspaperbound bagelbound boasters—and I just so happened to have launched myself into a rapsode bearing on my baseball-playing startlements, this before I was expelled from the school where I’d done the startling, and Tom said he had a couple of mitts, why didn’t we go on out onto the lawn and throw it around awhile, and I said, thanks but no thanks, I having been a catcher when I was doing my startling and would therefore require the glove worn by a catcher if I were to catch a ball thrown by a pitcher known to me to have been a farm-team pitcher for the Dodgers, unless it was the Yanks, whereupon Tom allowed as to how he had happened to have fetched out from the city to Hamptonia the very variety of mitt, and so he had and so we did, humping it out onto the lawn and just as humpily regrouping among the housebound, Tom mum as you’d want that no toss he’d lobbed at me could I, the be-mitted braggart, begin to handle. Read More
May 16, 2018 At Work Boy Genus: An Interview with Michael Kupperman By Eric Farwell Michael Kupperman’s work traffics in one-off and absurdist premises and is immersed in a certain kind of Americana nostalgia. His ongoing series Tales Designed to Thrizzle, which comprises eight issues collected in two volumes, features jokes that riff on everything from Dick Tracy villains to the Hardy Boys; Mark Twain and Albert Einstein team up for raunchy adventures; and fake 1940s-era ads for haunted chewing gum punctuate oddball comics about magicians and Picasso. Kupperman’s work is notable not just for its impeccable comedy but for lampooning its subjects in a contemporaneous style and language, making the comic simultaneously irreverent and ahistorical. It was a surprise, then, to learn that his latest effort, All the Answers, isn’t humorous. The graphic memoir is a serious look at his father’s time as the math whiz on the popular 1940s radio and television program Quiz Kids, a show that featured hyper-bright children and teens answering difficult questions on topics in their area of expertise. While most kids ended their tenure on the show before high school, Joel Kupperman stayed on well into his teens, spending a decade or so living as a minor celebrity—a life that was fraught with anxiety and discomfort. As an adult, he repressed the experience and refused to talk about it until Kupperman began researching his years as a child and teen sensation. On a sunny day in April, Kupperman and I spoke by phone about the book’s impact on his family and his own understanding of his father’s trauma. INTERVIEWER All the Answers begins with your early awareness of a decline in your father’s mental acuity. Why did you decide to make that decline the subject of a book? KUPPERMAN It was really a combination of personal and professional coming together. I was looking for a more serious project to do, because all my work up until that point had been humorous, and my career trajectory was not going in a positive direction—it felt like things were falling apart. I also realized that my father was losing his mental cohesion and that I had very little time if I was going to get anything from him. In some ways, honestly, I didn’t want to do this book because it was so personally painful. If I’d had any excuses not to do it, I would probably have abandoned it in the early stages. Once I passed a certain point with it, and some realizations about my family and myself had become apparent, I really had to complete it. Read More
May 16, 2018 Arts & Culture The Birds at Rikers Island By Violaine Huisman In order to get to Rikers Island, you must cross a bridge that rises steeply, hiding the other side from view. A sign in brightly colored cursive reads: HAVE A NICE TOUR! At the top of a wooden staircase, you present your ID in exchange for a numbered badge. The exchange evokes travel: ferry ticket counters, border-patrol booths. I expect to smell the ocean. Instead, there is a pungent odor of sewage, for which Tommy Demenkoff, who runs arts education programs for the department of corrections, apologizes. It’s not usually like that. Tommy drives our group—Nikos Karathanos, ten company members performing in The Birds at St Ann’s Warehouse, and me—to the island in a white and blue corrections van. On the way over, to our right, a peninsula shoots into the East River: LaGuardia’s runway. The bridge affords the city’s best view of planes taking flight. Read More
May 15, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, 1930–2018 By The Paris Review Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to the first American astronauts. And then, having revolutionized journalism with his kaleidoscopic yet rigorous reportage, he decided it was time to write novels. As he said in his Art of Fiction interview, “Practically everyone my age who wanted to write somehow got the impression in college that there was only one thing to write, which was a novel and that if you went into journalism, this was only a cup of coffee on the road to the final triumph. At some point you would move into a shack—it was always a shack for some reason—and write a novel. This would be your real métier.” With The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe wrote a sprawling, quintessential magnum opus of New York in the eighties. His first two novels were runaway best sellers, and his success won him the bitter envy of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, among others. “Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” writes Norman Mailer, in a 1994 review of A Man in Full. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers—he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.” Although Wolfe’s later two novels, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood, won him more accolades from The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award than anything else, his cutting portrayals of America earned him a lasting and well-deserved place in literature. In his 1975 book of art criticism, The Painted Word, Wolfe describes the “Art Mating Ritual” in a way that still feels perfectly current: the artist must perform what Wolfe dubs the “BoHo Dance.” She must move to Lower Manhattan and perform her bohemian disdain of wealth. In short, she must get close enough to the people uptown—“the Museum of Modern Art, certain painters, certain collectors”—to spit on them. When George Plimpton sat down with Wolfe for his Art of Fiction interview in 1994, at Wolfe’s favorite Italian restaurant, Isle of Capri on the Upper East Side (still open—and still relatively highly reviewed on Yelp), “the author arrived wearing the white ensemble he is noted for—a white modified homburg, a chalk-white overcoat—but to the surprise of regular customers looking up from their tables, he removed the coat to disclose a light-brown suit set off by a pale lilac tie. Questioned about the light-brown suit, he replied: ‘Shows that I’m versatile.’ ” Although Wolfe’s wide-ranging interests and stylistic leaps were indeed versatile, he did have a singular focus: our hypocrisy, our greed, and our status-obsessed culture. His is an incisive voice we would have been grateful for in 2018 and beyond. Below, read some of our favorite moments from his interview, which subscribers can enjoy in full. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More