July 24, 2015 Bulletin Next Tuesday: James Salter’s Memorial By The Paris Review Photo: Lan Rys A memorial service for James Salter will be held at five P.M. on Tuesday, July 28, at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York. All members of the public are welcome to attend. Salter, who died last month, was a longtime member of the Paris Review family. His first published short story, “Sundays,” appeared in The Paris Review no. 38, and he followed with four others (“Am Strande von Tanger,” “Via Negativa,” “The Cinema,” and “Bangkok”); his third novel, A Sport and a Pastime, was published by Paris Review Editions in 1967; his Art of Fiction interview appeared in the magazine in 1993; and he won the Hadada Prize, The Paris Review’s lifetime-achievement award, in 2011—where he announced to the admiring crowd, “This is my Stockholm.” Jim will be missed by all of us at the Review and by his many Paris Review colleagues from years past. We hope you’ll join us—and his family and many friends—in celebrating his life at his memorial on Tuesday.
July 24, 2015 On the Shelf A, B, C, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A few of the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise’s front pages. In its delicacy and volatility, the art of writing is rivaled only by the art of not writing: “There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of ‘not writing.’ Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body … It is easy to imagine not writing, both accidentally and intentionally. It is easy because there have been years and months and days I have thought the way to live was not writing have known what writing consisted of and have thought ‘I do not want to do that’ and ‘writing steals from my loved ones’ and ‘writing steals from my life and gives me nothing but pain and worry and what I can’t have’ or ‘writing steals from my already empty bank account’ or ‘writing gives me ideas I do not need or want’ or ‘writing is the manufacture of impossible desire.’ ” This is your annual reminder that in Key West there’s a Hemingway look-alike contest at a bar called Sloppy Joe’s. A hundred heavy-set men with vigorous white beards vie for the title of Papa: “Some wear safari outfits, khakis, and even the excruciatingly hot fisherman’s woolen turtleneck sweater. Some bring their own cheering squad. Most contestants admit (confidentially) that they may never win, but return year after year for the fellowship.” In Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the Sentinel & Enterprise, a newspaper with some 140 years of history behind it, has dedicated twenty-six of its front pages this month to what’s arguably (emphasis on arguably) the most urgent story of our time: the alphabet. Twenty-six typographers from around the world have designed letters to stretch across page A1 from July 13 through August 11. All your favorites are there: g, f, even k. “Print media has declined across the United States … The local newspaper, however, has the potential to thrive beyond the nationals, as it represents a tangible opportunity for community engagement along with local news that doesn’t get covered elsewhere. The Alphabet is going a step further and demonstrating how creative design and artist collaboration can invigorate the format, even if its nature as newsprint makes the work somewhat disposable.” Julian Barnes weighs in on museum selfies (oh, and the life and times of Van Gogh): “It has become harder over the last 130 years or so to see Van Gogh plain. It is practically harder in that our approach to his paintings in museums is often blocked by an urgent, excitable crescent of worldwide fans, iPhones aloft for the necessary selfie with Sunflowers. They are to be welcomed: the international reach of art should be a matter not of snobbish disapproval but rather of crowd management and pious wonder—as I found when a birthday present of a Van Gogh mug hit the mark with my thirteen-year-old goddaughter in Mumbai.” “Writing on a computer can be terribly distracting, so sometimes I like to use a pencil and paper to jot down ideas. I always end up drawing a cartoon duck. Inevitably, the duck is holding a notepad, and I can read the ideas that he wrote down.” Deeply practical ways to invoke the muse.
July 23, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Steins By Sadie Stein Here are the things you hear most often when you announce plans to marry someone who happens to have the same last name: That’s convenient! Guess you won’t have to change your name! Are you changing your name? Is he taking your name? Are you hyphenating? Are you related? I bet you’re sick of everyone joking about your having the same name! Not remarking on this seems to be completely out of the question. Read More
July 23, 2015 From the Archive Mannerism By Dan Piepenbring Rene Ricard in a photo by Allen Ginsberg. “Mannerism,” a poem by Rene Ricard from our Summer 1970 issue. Ricard was born on this day in 1946; he died last year. An obituary in the New York Times calls him “a notorious aesthete who roamed Manhattan’s contemporary art scene with a capacious, autodidactic erudition and a Wildean flamboyance.” In the eighties, his essay “The Radiant Child” helped to burnish the reputation of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Read More
July 23, 2015 On Language The Library of Babel as Seen from Within By Jonathan Basile Reproducing Borges’s imaginary library online. Since I first read it in a high school Spanish class, I’ve been fascinated by the theory of language implicit in Borges’s “The Library of Babel.” The story describes a universal library containing, in 410-page volumes, every possible permutation of twenty-two letters, spaces, commas, and periods—every book that’s ever been written and every book that ever could be, drowned out by endless pages of gibberish. Its librarians are addicted to the search for certain master texts, the complete catalog of the library, or the future history of one’s own life, but their quest inevitably ends in failure, despair, even suicide. Perhaps I was obsessed by the same desire for revelation, or haunted by the same subversion of all rational pursuit. In either case, fifteen years later the idea came to me one night of using the vast calculative capacities of a computer to re-create the Library of Babel as a Web site. For those interested in experiencing the futile hope of Borges’s bibliotecarios, I’ve made libraryofbabel.info, which now contains anything we ever have written or ever will write, including these sentences I struggle to compose now. Here, to give you a sense of the vastness and the unintelligibility of such a project, is a random page: Read More
July 23, 2015 On the Shelf Got Those Travel-writing Blues, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a poster for the 1913 World Esperanto Congress. Explaining the Internet’s Joan Didion obsession is a tricky thing: “In the crossover of feminism, fashion, and literary interests, there is a whole swathe of the internet where Didion is a staple reference. Her borscht recipe can be found on the website Brain Pickings, and her list of items to pack for reporting trips periodically crops up on style blogs … In 1989, she appeared in GAP ads with her twenty-three-year-old daughter, wearing black turtlenecks, and staring defiantly into the camera with only the barest suggestion of a smile. Last year, she wore huge black shades in ads for the French luxury goods brand Céline, which inspired devotion in unexpected places and in-depth analysis from the already devoted.” And yet this obsession seldom seems to extend to her political writing, which accounts for the bulk of her output—they only want her to write about herself. And what of that self? “To be so glamorously sensitive and beautiful that you have to be taken care of,” Pauline Kael once wrote, was the “ultimate princess fantasy.” This is peak road-trip season. If you’re not in a car right now, lighting out for the territories and exuding manifest destiny—well, it’s not too late. But don’t be all Fleetwood Mac about it. You cannot, in fact, go your own way. You can instead follow in the footsteps (tire tracks?) of writers past: Kerouac, Twain, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Wolfe … On second thought, stay home. It’s more or less impossible to be a good travel writer anyway. You risk falling into two camps: the Elizabeth Gilbert, interior psychodrama, “obnoxious white lady in brown places” camp, or the Bruce Chatwin, indomitable male, “colonialist’s baggage stuffed full with preconceived assumptions” camp. If you’re looking for role models, try Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy: “Stark was in the world with her writing, not above it, not in herself … Her writing restores humanity to people who have otherwise been stripped down to news reports, reduced to death tolls and photos of open-mouthed weeping. The secret to her success was listening to the people she visited and letting them tell the story. This shouldn’t be any secret. It should be what every travel writer does.” A man who speaks hardly a lick of French has triumphed in the Francophone Scrabble Championship having apparently memorized the entire French Scrabble Dictionary in just a few days. Nigel Richards, “the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,” regards words as “just combinations of letters,” like numbers: “He has learned no language logic, just a succession of letter sequences giving rise to words. In his head it’s binary: what draw (of letters) can make a scrabble, what draw can’t.” On James Purdy, who wanted to write stories that “bristled with impossibilities”: “In his novels and short fiction, possibility and potential are always compromised. There is neither transcendence nor transformation. His characters do not grow or develop; they dwindle and unravel … It’s hard to think of a contemporary writer whose work shares this sensibility, a cool elegance laid over extreme emotion. The most apt comparison may be Wes Anderson, whose films similarly feature casts of eccentrics, dialogue full of non sequiturs, deadpan humor, and unabashed farce.”