September 29, 2017 On Travel A Packing List for Writers By Ann Beattie Today, I wrote a friend for advice about packing. I’ll be going from Virginia to Nashville to New York City, after which I’ll be flying to Rome for three weeks. My friend mentioned that his wife takes up more than her share of their suitcase, because she believes men don’t need as many clothes. I wouldn’t consider sharing a suitcase with my husband. It’s disappointing enough to see your Jockey sports bra in another country—it looks so sad in hotel rooms abroad (bad pun!). How much sadder, then, to find it entangled amid chargers, extension cords, computer cords, unwound dental floss (how would I know how that happened? Big hello, though, to my dental hygienist), earphones, noise-canceling headphones, dangling cords, and bungee cords (you never can tell). I’d be hugely foiled trying to extract my underwear. Who wants to deal with a bunch of cords doing the kudzu around a bra when Caravaggio beckons? Though it seems to be common knowledge, I just discovered that it’s best to roll everything. Ankle boots are all-purpose, and you can roll delicate stuff into them with your socks. It’s the packing version of making a jelly roll (okay, you wouldn’t plunge a jelly roll into your boot). When you remove the boots, empty them right away. Santa spoiler alert: the next morning you might find (rolled up) twenty dollars in the toe! Read More
September 29, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Gogol By Valerie Stivers This is the first installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1830s, peasant style was fashionable, literature was becoming more democratic, and, somewhat weirdly, the poet of human baseness, Nikolai Gogol, was producing some of the best food writing to be found in the Russian canon. His eerie and baroque first collection of short stories, Village Evenings Near Dikanka, is a series of narrations by a beekeeper to the folks gathered in his cottage at night as they’re served snacks: “Delicious beyond description! … Pies you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams: they melt in your mouth! And the butter—it just runs down your lips when you bite into them.” Every time I read Gogol, I want to cook like the Ukrainian housewives in his stories. In this post, I try to re-create a spread from the 1959 edition of Gogol’s collected works. Read More
September 28, 2017 Arts & Culture I Read Playboy for the Comix By Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman for Playboy, ca. 1981 In the late seventies and early eighties, I was a proud contributor to Playboy Funnies, an ongoing section in Playboy that tried to recuperate underground comix: they sanitized the movement while also acknowledging it. Hefner had once aspired to become a cartoonist and had an eye for the form. Tho as he once said in an interview—I’m paraphrasing—“I see how cartoonists live and how I live and I have no regrets.” I first convinced my clueless refugee parents to subscribe to the magazine when I was fourteen—“so I could study the cartoons.” A couple years later my father and I had a “heart to heart” talk. He told me I’d have to take the centerfolds off my wall since my mother was too embarrassed to come in and clean my room. Read More
September 28, 2017 Nostalgia George Plimpton on Playboy After Dark By The Paris Review To mark the passing of Hugh Hefner, we take a moment to remember when George Plimpton, a founding editor of The Paris Review, appeared on the television show Playboy After Dark in 1968 and was deemed “very successful with the ladies” by Hef himself. Clips courtesy the 2012 documentary Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself. (The title card that reads “TWO MONTHS LATER” is less confusing when the documentary is viewed in full.)
September 28, 2017 Arts & Culture The Starving Artist’s Cookbook By Nausicaa Renner For some young artists trying to make it, starving is a rite of passage; for others, it is a permanent state of dedication, or a financial necessity. No matter the reasons, the starving artist is a timeless figure, present in every era of every society, socialist or capitalist, boom or bust. But the starving artist of New York in the seventies and eighties holds a special place in the cultural imagination. On Sunday, I cleaved my way through the sweaty, contemporary crowds at the New York Art Book Fair, hosted at MoMA PS1, to see an exhibition of “Food Sex Art: The Starving Artist’s Cookbook Archive 1986–1991.” The cookbook was put together between 1986 and 1991 by EIDIA, an artist duo of Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf. EIDIA, comes from the Greek eidos, for “kind,” and is intended as an acronym for, among other things, “Everything I Do Is Art” and “Every Individual Does Individual Art.” The cookbook—a thick stack of typewritten pages bound with three rings—had an original print run of five hundred. It featured 161 “recipes,” some real and some strange, from artists including Peter Beard, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Quentin Crisp, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner. The project was also a video series. EIDIA filmed the artists cooking in their studios, and the original series ran to nine hours. The book is now a collector’s item, and this exhibition, presented by the rare-book purveyor Arthur Fournier, displayed individual pages next to old photos and the videos EIDIA shot. Read More
September 28, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Fickle Secret Admirers and Knowing the Ending By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, The other afternoon, I received a text message from a number I didn’t recognize. The sender asked to confirm my address, which I did, and then said there would be a “special delivery” for me, “arriving soon.” It was exciting to think I had a secret admirer, but in the end, nothing came. Since, I’ve tried googling the number, but it’s yielded no results; the area code is from Pittsburgh, and I don’t know anyone from there. Now I’m just curious who it is and what they sent. I feel a little tossed around and it’s making me angry to think I’m being taunted. Should I escalate this anonymous relationship and pressure the sender for answers, or just chalk it up to the many displeasures of the Internet age and let it be? Thanks in advance, Bemused in Brooklyn Dear Bemused, I’m at a loss here, so I’ve consulted a creature my friend Danny Ceballos knows, called the “Bad Advice Dolphin.” Danny read the dolphin your letter and here is the dolphin’s advice: Read More