September 12, 2017 Correspondence A Friend with a Heart-Shaped Leaf By Patience Gray Courtesy of Nicolas Gray. Patience Gray, the most important food writer you’ve never heard of, spent more than thirty years living in a remote corner of Southern Italy—without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone. Her 1986 cookbook, Honey from a Weed, is one of the most beloved of the twentieth century, yet little was known of her reclusive life until now. This illustrated letter, sent by Gray from Carrara, Italy, in 1966, is excerpted from Adam Federman’s new biography, Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray and is reprinted with permission from the publisher, Chelsea Green. As Federman writes in the introduction, Although she enjoyed the attention, Patience was rather guarded about her own life. This applied not only to visiting journalists and food writers but to friends and family as well. There was an “aura of secrecy about her,” a sense that her past was somehow shuttered, which Patience did little to dispel. “Patience loved secrets, secret rooms, dark corners, mysteries and so on,” her friend Ulrik Voswinckel recalled. This aura of secrecy was enhanced by her interest in astrology, mysticism, and her vast folkloric knowledge of edible plants and mushrooms. She shared her workspace in Puglia—to which others were rarely admitted—with a large black snake and often ruminated on the symbolic meaning of the scorpion, which happened to be Patience’s astrological sign. She was born on Halloween. It is perhaps not surprising then that several people, including Paul Levy in his profile for the Observer and the Wall Street Journal, described Patience as a modern-day witch.
September 12, 2017 Legends of the Fall Eating the Fruit By Stephen Greenblatt Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a few of his own. William Blake, The Temptation and Fall of Eve (detail), 1808. It was the day of creation, and Adam and Eve were only beginning to find their way around the garden when Eve came across the tree whose fruit they had been commanded not to eat. They were both hungry; the fruit looked appetizing; they ate. It was the first time that they had eaten anything. (William Pynchon, 1664) * When Adam related to Eve what God had commanded him—“But from the tree of knowledge, good, and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die”—Adam had an idea. He reasoned that by intensifying the terms of the commandment, he could protect Eve, and thereby protect himself, from even the possibility of transgressing. Why should they have needed protection? Because if the tree were that dangerous, then any contact with it must be risky; and because if one held a piece of fruit in one’s hands, then it was always possible to put it in one’s mouth. “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it,” he therefore reported the interdict to have ordained, “lest ye die.” “Neither shall ye touch it”—as anxious parents tell their children not to go near the stove—was, it seemed to him, a brilliant stroke. It would, in effect, create a buffer between the tree and any human who might be drawn toward it. But it turned out to be a disastrous strategy. For the first thing the serpent—the most cunning of all the beasts of the field—did when he found himself alone with Eve was not to offer her a piece of the fruit but simply to wrap himself tightly around the tree. Eve was astonished and horrified to see him do so, but he smiled and pointed out that he was still very much alive. And Eve, for the first time, felt she had been lied to. Read More
September 12, 2017 Bulletin Announcing: Free Pencil Day! By The Paris Review “Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.” —John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45 Pencils are a writer’s best friend—we’ve got sixty-four years of testimonials to prove it. We also have a few extra pencils … which is why we’re offering a special back-to-school offer. Subscribe to The Paris Review and we’ll send you ten Paris Review pencils (no. 2, of course). For one day only—subscribe now! Read More
September 11, 2017 Books On the Pleasures of Front Matter By Elisa Gabbert I don’t believe in not believing in guilty pleasures. Guilt is good—it’s part of what keeps me, at least part of the time, from watching YouTube videos when I could be reading. That said, I’m a promiscuous and impatient reader, so one of my literary guilty pleasures is reading the introductions to great books and not the books themselves. My love affair with front matter began in earnest when I read the 1989 Jacob Needleman introduction to the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. At the time, I was compiling a list of hybrid works (part prose, part poetry), and a friend suggested the Tao Te Ching fit the criteria. I admitted to my friend that I’d never read it. I’ve still never finished it, but the introduction I’ve read several times, and heavily underlined—it seems to me a kind of philosophical inquiry into what a book even is: “As with every text that deserves to be called sacred, it is a half-silvered mirror.” I assume Needleman means that we both see through it and see ourselves reflected in it, but I always think, too, of the famous double-slit experiment that used half-silvered mirrors to demonstrate wave-particle duality; perhaps this association with the quantum weirdness of reality is not accidental. Read More
September 11, 2017 In Memoriam Michael Friedman (1975–2017) By Sadie and Lorin Stein Michael Friedman. It was surprising, when we searched the archive, to discover that Michael Friedman published only one piece on The Paris Review Daily: a response to the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of The Death of Klinghoffer. It surprised us because over the years we’d talked about his doing so many different things, on so many different subjects, from a column on new music at Le Poisson Rouge to an online version of an informal seminar he held known as Michael Friedman’s Drunk Music Appreciation Class. As his obituaries amply demonstrate, Michael had other—and arguably more important—things to do with his time. When he died on Saturday, at the age of forty-one, the theater world lost one of its most vibrant and versatile talents. When someone dies, we’ve been known to describe him as “a friend to the Review.” Usually what that means is a regular contributor to our pages, or perhaps a material supporter of the magazine. Michael was neither. But in every sense, he was a true friend to the Review. He certainly gave his effervescent presence and restless, quicksilver intelligence to our events; as a theater veteran—not to mention a mensch—he knew the importance of showing up. And he was a friend, period. He was the best. No one wanted to have to write any of these tributes for him. He deserves them all.