December 8, 2015 On the Shelf The Greatest Literary Impostor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Emile Ajar’s La Vie Devant Soi. Sam Sacks opens his review of our anthology The Unprofessionals with a litany of all that’s been co-opted by careerism in literature: “Consider the extraliterary responsibilities expected of authors who have had their novels accepted for publication: Develop an active presence on Facebook and Twitter (and, for the truly motivated, on Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest); create an accompanying web site, video trailer, and soundtrack; go on a book tour, naturally, but also participate in a variety of reading series in anticipation of and well after the publication date; take part in panels and signings at book expos; give interviews to blogs and podcasts and write personal essays about your background, your development as a writer, and your process of creation; not only review other books but join the great merry-go-round of blurbing … ” (He also calls The Unprofessionals “a showcase for serious literature.”) The tropes and psychology of anorexia have always been embedded in literature, Katy Waldman tells us: “Anorexia mirabilis—the saintly loss of appetite—signaled an embrace of Christ-like abnegation and suffering … And guess what? The archetype of the fasting mystic had a daughter. Equally lovely, equally slender—in her the delicacy of spirit won out once more over the coarseness of tissue. She rebelled against her mother by applying her native rigor not to prayer, but to an artistic sort of femininity. Think Jane Eyre, ‘delicate and aerial,’ or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, ‘little’ and ‘beautiful lithe.’ Consider Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, her ‘hand and wrist … so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.’ That Mary reference is not coincidental—like her mom, the new anorexic was pure and asexual. Yet she was also a creator, driven and intense … The economic and social realities of nineteenth-century England conspired to idealize female slenderness.” Not unrelatedly: Upon first publication, the Brontë sisters’ novels were reviewed variously as “vulgar,” “brutalizing,” “pernicious,” “godless,” and “venial”—probably because critics believed the authors were men. For Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, as they chose to be known, male pseudonyms meant freedom: “It allowed their imaginations to trespass in the darkest crevices of the psyche and return with tormented monsters like Heathcliff, the Ahab of the moors, and dynamos like Miss Eyre. Their pseudonyms strengthened their moral resolve, emboldening them to speak truth to that most tyrannical seat of power: ordinary society.” For Charlotte, the revelation of her true identity came at a steep cost, and she did her best to forestall it: “Charlotte insisted on the charade of separating Currer Bell from Charlotte Brontë in public, as Thackeray found out to his cost. He hosted a party for her at his house, and as he was leading her to dinner on his arm (she came up to his elbow), he addressed her as Currer Bell. ‘I believe there are books being published by a person named Currer Bell,’ she snapped back, ‘but the person you address is Miss Brontë—and I see no connection between the two.’ After dinner she sat in a corner and refused to mingle; Thackeray fled to his club.” From the annals of good old-fashioned fraudulence: In 1974, a little-known writer named Émile Ajar won the Prix Goncourt. Ajar was actually “the Lithuanian-born Free French aviator, onetime French consul general in Los Angeles, and award-winning novelist Romain Gary … Gary’s novels are autobiographical, and much of what he claims to be memoir is made up, complicating any attempt at unraveling the true from the false … In France, which celebrated the centennial of Gary’s birth last year with conferences, exhibits, and the publication of his last interview, Le sens de ma vie, none of his thirty-plus novels, memoirs, and essays have ever gone out of print. In the United States, few of them still are … He was far more successful as a storyteller than as a stylist. But his propensities make it difficult to find a place for him in French literary history, where he does not fit into that story that others have told.” Tired of bookstores where only some of the books are recommended by the staff? Head to Aaron Hicklin’s shop, One Grand, in Narrowsburg, New York, where everything comes with institutional approval. “His concept was to present collections of volumes handpicked by various creatives—including Tilda Swinton, Michael Stipe, Lena Dunham, and Edmund White—in response to the question, ‘If you were stranded on a desert island, which ten books could you not do without?’ … Hicklin aims to make bookselling more selective and personal—in other words, everything that Amazon is not—by attaching familiar names to titles and having them explain why those books have shaped them.”
December 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Making Cameos By Sadie Stein Not a good gift. There was this shop in the neighborhood where I’d sometimes go. It was a good spot to find inexpensive gifts: small vases, lacquered boxes, a decorative dish where you could leave your spare change—noncommittal things just north of impersonal. I’d have gone there more, but for the saleslady. She was sour. I mean, really puckered—the sort of acerbic person whose life needs an injection of sunshine from a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or an Anne of Green Gables or a Pollyanna. The requisite plucky orphan never seems to have come into her life. The first time I visited her shop, there were some other customers there. “Can I buy these individually?” one asked her. “No, just as a set,” she said curtly. After the shoppers left, she turned to me. “Can you believe what assholes people are?” she demanded balefully. “This is what I deal with all day.” Read More
December 7, 2015 Prison Lit Extreme Remedies By Max Nelson George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, forty years later. George Jackson Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on the French revolutionary Madame Roland, here. On August 21, 1971, George Jackson pulled a pistol on his wardens at San Quentin, the notoriously racist maximum-security prison to which he’d recently been relocated. When the news broke that he’d freed several of his fellow inmates, presided over the slashing of eight prison officials’ throats (six guards and two trustees), and then died under heavy gunfire while sprinting to freedom, it provoked a strange mixture of shock, anger, revulsion, and grief. Gregory Armstrong, Jackson’s editor at Bantam, would later confess to a reporter how relieved he was that he hadn’t followed through on his offer to help the younger man escape. Bob Dylan wrote a protest song in Jackson’s praise. (“He wouldn’t take shit from no one / He wouldn’t bow down or kneel / Authorities they hated him / Because he was just too real.”) Jackson’s attorney, Stephen Bingham, under suspicion of having smuggled in the escape weapon, fled the country for thirteen years. Huey Newton gave Jackson a long, effusive eulogy (“he lived the life that we must praise”). A group of Black Panthers imprisoned in Folsom advised his parents to “take pride in the fact that you have a large strong family of budding warriors.” Since the 1970 publication of Soledad Brother, his ferocious, disquieting collection of letters from prison, Jackson had been an international celebrity. In his introduction to the book’s first printing, Jean Genet insisted that the collection “must be read as a manifesto, as a tract, as a call to rebellion, since it is that first of all.” Abdellatif Laâbi read the letters admiringly during his own imprisonment; they let “one follow,” he told his wife in 1975, “the transformation of a man who challenges a new kind of slavery, strips its mechanisms down, and keeps his dignity intact throughout the worst kind of ordeal.” The day before Jackson’s death in 1971, Derrida wrote Genet a long letter worrying that the introduction hadn’t done justice to the dire situation Jackson’s writing was meant to expose. “With the best intentions in the world,” he cautioned, “with the most sincere moral indignation in the face of what, in effect, remains unbearable and inadmissible, one could then lock up again that which one says one wants to liberate.” Read More
December 7, 2015 Contests Can You Name These Writers? By Stephen Hiltner Update: The winning responses were announced on December 9. “Paris Review,” by Anthony Russo. (Click to enlarge.) Here at The Paris Review’s offices, we’re often uncovering oddities from our archive: our “Twenty Year Index,” content from our very first Web site, festschrifts from bygone anniversaries. Last week, though, we discovered something entirely different: an illustration by Anthony Russo depicting a Paris Review office chock-full of literary heavyweights. And we’ve decided to have some fun with it. If you can correctly identify all eleven writers in Mr. Russo’s illustration, we’ll give you a free one-year subscription to The Paris Review—along with a copy of our new anthology, The Unprofessionals. Just send an e-mail with the names and their accompanying numbers to [email protected]; the first three correct lists will win. Good luck—and have fun! Stephen Hiltner is the senior editor of The Paris Review. You can find him online on Instagram and Twitter.
December 7, 2015 Bulletin Aesop and The Paris Review By The Paris Review A concentrated treatment to reinvigorate intellect and imagination. How to Use Read attentively from cover to cover at least once; repeat as desired. For best results, pair with a responsible intake of red wine. Ingredients Erudition, insouciance, concision, onomatopoeia, allegory, exposition, allusion, anastrophe, synecdoche, metaphor, ekphrasis, irony, verisimilitude, euphony, assonance, litotes, caesurae, alliteration, metonymy. What to Expect Aroma: ink, paper Product texture: smooth, substantial Feel: stimulated, transported We recommend pairing this stimulating read with application of a facial cleansing masque. Read More
December 7, 2015 On the Shelf You and Your Fantastic Hopes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kurt Vonnegut with his wife Jane and their three children, Mark, Edie, and Nanette, in 1955. Photo: Edie Vonnegut Our new Winter issue, out now, features an interview with Gordon Lish, the editor whose drastic emendation of Raymond Carver’s work remains contentious even now, decades after the fact. In an excerpt of the interview in the Guardian, Lish talks about his reasoning with Carver: “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with. There was a prospect there, certainly. The germ of the thing, in Ray’s stuff, was revealed in the catalogue of his experience. It had that promise in it, something I could fool with and make something new-seeming … But Carver’s were not the only ones I’d worked on to that extent. Not the only ones by a long shot. There were many. I’ve been decried for a heinous act. Was it that? Me, I think I made something enduring. For its being durable, and, in many instances, beautiful.” Subscribe now to read the whole interview. Kobe Bryant’s versified retirement announcement is only the latest example (and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, not an especially sublime one) of the sports poem, a venerated form whose proponents include Randall Jarrell (“Say Goodbye to Big Daddy”) William Carlos Williams (“The Crowd at the Ball Game”) and Marianne Moore (“Baseball and Writing”). But how to tell which is the most accomplished of all time? With a March Madness–style tournament, of course, conducted by Daily contributor Adrienne Raphel: “In honor of Bryant, I’ve pitted sixteen sports poems against one another—with both ‘sports’ and ‘poems’ arbitrarily defined … to determine which sports poem should be crowned victorious. The four regions: Basketball, Baseball, Football, and Running.” Zadie Smith argued in 2008 that literature was too dominated by lyrical realism. In a new interview with The White Review, she refines her thinking: “The fashionable argument against ‘realism’ has become a bit simple-minded … In fact I think we are rather sophisticated in our understanding of the limits and illusions of language, and that this is again largely due to our familiarity with the literary uses of language in everyday life. When you hear, for example, two girls at a bus stop and one is telling the other a ‘story’—‘and she was like … and I was like … and they were like’—the storytelling girl is not doing this because she imagines that with this act of mimesis, with this ‘realistic’ re-telling, she has fooled her listener into believing that what she is presenting is ‘authentic’ or an unvarnished truth, in some sense essentially ‘real’—no. She is performing a speech act in which both parties understand, at least to some degree, that what is happening is a form of ‘performance’, a bracketed and partial reality. The problem with the argument that all realism is naïve is that it assigns to both parties in the literary exchange—the reader and the writer—an almost childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice.” Kurt Vonnegut’s wife Jane played a critical role in her husband’s career—it was she who convinced him that he should write at all. “Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Jane, and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text … Her faith sometimes baffled him. ‘I can only hope, and this on your instigation, that I’ve not reached my full stature,’ he wrote. ‘I’m willing to work like a dog to attain it.’ And he did … ‘I don’t want to let you and your fantastic hopes down with a thump.’ ” Did you know? This thing called Art Basel happened in Miami: a bunch of overblown parties that may or may not have been art-related. Kaitlin Phillips was there, watching the arrivistes: “Christopher Bollen playful-seriously accused all artists of the Dunning-Kruger effect, ‘a psychological term for people who highly exaggerate their skill sets. I feel like all artists have to be sufferers of it. What you are trying to achieve, like, outweighs even your own experience of what it is’ … Aesthetically, I’m more willing to diagnose the suits from last night with Dunning-Kruger; the men without so much as a Wikipedia entry, or even a personality, let alone charisma or looks, god forbid politesse, trying to talk their way into clubs. But I’m being morbid. ‘What is your criteria? I just want to learn,’ said a man, angrily. ‘There’s no criteria,’ said the doorman, a real cool customer. And there were women too: ‘You don’t understand the culture,’ lisped (or rasped) a thickly beautiful woman in a thick Italian accent. ‘You don’t understand the culture.’ Neither, apparently, did she, not that I don’t sympathize with the trials of a chunky-junky-jewelry woman. It’s a postlapsarian scene, baby—you can’t just walk in on the Louboutins you never learned to walk in.”