May 18, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 9 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “ ‘To engage your humor and your emotions, that’s quite a trick,’ T. C. Boyle says in his Art of Fiction interview. ‘I’d like to think that I’m able to do that, to keep the reader off balance—is this the universe of the comedy or the tragedy? or some unsettling admixture of the two?—to go beyond mere satire into something more emotionally devastating, and gratifying. If that ain’t art, I don’t know what is.’ Paris Review humor aspires to strike that balance, pull off that trick: taking all the emotional and intellectual and aesthetic requirements of literary storytelling and throwing in what E. B. White calls ‘the sly and almost imperceptible ingredient’ of durable humor. This week, enjoy some levity on us. I think we could all use a few belly laughs.” —EN I first fell for E. B. White as a little girl, upon reading Charlotte’s Web. I loved him again when, at the conclusion of my first editing job, at the Metropolitan Museum, my boss gave me Maira Kalman’s illustrated Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. I became a fan a third time when I realized White was Roger Angell’s stepdad: What were their dinner conversations like? Lively, based on some action-packed passages in his Art of the Essay interview. Punctuation has never been so threatening (“Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim”), nor children’s capacity for new vocabulary so vivid (“Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net”). Also not grandiose, based on his modest assessment of success (on reviving Strunk’s Elements of Style: “It cost me a year out of my life, so little did I know about grammar”) and his utter devotion to Katherine White. He also discusses midcentury satire, recaptioning cartoons, and other funny things in a charming, casual way that the interviewers George Plimpton and Frank Crowther describe as having the “off-hand grace” of an improvising dancer. I call it a fourth arrow in the heart. —EN Read More
May 11, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 8 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “There is, of course, a great deal to grieve about this long stay-at-home term, but among the things I am truly grateful for—in addition to all the frontline workers who are keeping us safe—is the quiet wellspring of awareness that bubbles every day. So many things were right here all along, in my home, if only I hadn’t been too busy to notice them. For instance, I know my family better than I did eight weeks ago. Having spent all this time with them, I like them more, which means I love them better. I can’t regret that. The archive pieces unlocked this week are a grab bag of staff favorites, but I’d like to think of them collectively as a tribute to the handful of unnoticed wonders this strange way of living has the capacity to reveal. It’s a small consolation, I know, but I hope a meaningful one.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Corey Arnold, Crabbing aboard the Rollo, ca. 2008. In one of Corey Arnold’s Fish-Work photographs, two fishermen process crabs on a ship’s table as the deck tilts at an alarming angle under their feet. In another, they face a foam-topped wave—taller than they are—apparently menacing the starboard rail. The world might be a pitching ship now; the inexpert sailor might turn from the work, mesmerized by the danger of capsizing. But the people who supply our food—fishermen, farmers, grocers, and couriers, among others—carry on, deft and sure-footed. Here’s hoping that the fleets, threatened by rock-bottom prices because of restaurant closures, can continue to do so, and that we can all find our sea legs as the weather continues to shift. —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer Read More
May 4, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 7 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “These past few weeks, even as I’ve relished the extra time to read, I’ve missed sports acutely. Just a few innings of baseball before bed! Oh, what I’d do for the swish of a three-pointer! So, as the Paris Review softball team’s permit application is stalled at NYC Parks and Rec, as the only basketball being played is me throwing laundry into the hamper, as MLB comes up with more and stranger ideas for how to restart the stalled-out season, I went back to the archive to find some interesting moments in the magazine’s sports literature. I hope it’s a balm for those among us missing sports. For those who stay far from even the sidelines, I’d encourage giving these pieces a shot. You’ll see that literary sportswriting rarely keeps to the bounds of the baseline—it is about character development as much as athletic performance, about linguistic craft as much as physical form. Let us not forget Robert Frost’s outlook on poetry, from his Art of Poetry interview: ‘I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete.’ In that, perhaps we’re all in it for sport.” —EN The Paris Review has had the good fortune to serialize a handful of novels over the past decade, among them Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special. A group of retired footballers meet up every November to reenact a historic play: the premise is straightforward enough, but the complexity of this group portrait will knock the breath out of you like an encounter with a very solid offensive lineman. Here are part 1 and part 2. Subscribers can read the whole book now, or you can order a copy in our Bookshop.org store. At the opening of her essay “What I Did Last Summer,” Betty Eppes admits, “I was a pretty good tennis player—fluctuating between No. 1 and No. 3 at my tennis club in Baton Rouge.” Betty drops the racket for another adventure. Admittedly, The Basketball Diaries is more about sex and drugs in sixties NYC (be forewarned, some observations have aged less than gracefully) than about basketball, but this early version of Jim Carroll’s memoir does talk about pickup games, his high school’s jock culture, and hitting an “incredible amounts of jump shots” while stoned. Read More
April 27, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 6 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “In celebration of the warmer days soon to come, this installment of The Art of Distance is devoted to spring—to stories, poems, and other pieces that put us in mind of the season’s hope, bounty, and optimism. Spring has sprung in these pages, at least.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Photo: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma. I’m watching spring blossom through the window of my sister’s childhood bedroom; the sun is bright, the breeze is cold, and the birds are louder here than in Manhattan. Reading William Styron’s “Letter to an Editor,” the preface to issue no. 1, I imagine that the spring of 1953 was as crisp and as bright as this one. Styron’s letter is an anti-manifesto manifesto, a critique of criticism itself, its very syntax exuding a biting and springlike energy. He admits that all ideas fall subject to scrutiny when put to paper. He writes, “It’s inevitable that what Truth I mumble to you at Lipp’s over a beer, or that Ideal we are perfectly agreed upon at the casual hour of 2 A.M. becomes powerfully open to criticism as soon as it’s cast in a printed form which, like a piece of sculpture, allows us to walk all around that Truth or Ideal and examine it front, side, and behind, and for minutes on end.” Styron asks, however, that we try to put all that aside, resisting intellectual exercise and simply enjoying the patient work of writing and reading. —Elinor Hitt, Intern Read More
April 20, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 5 By The Paris Review A month ago, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Love letters, fan mail, business correspondence, even missives to a future self: letters can bring us together across time and space. The connection they offer feels particularly welcome in our disjointed moment. There’s something special about letters between friends, diary entries, and even appeals sent into the unknown—see this week’s pieces from the Paris Review archive to prove my point. Pen to paper does still create some alchemy.” —EN With little to do these days but sit inside and look out the window, I’m very aware of my neighbors, for better (the kid in the high-rise across the street airing her stuffed animals by letting them down from the window on strings) and for worse (the man downstairs playing music that shakes my floor). Mavis Gallant is, too, only she makes her Paris neighbors immortal characters of a tiny, finely wrought serial. Her “Diaries” remind me that to set down observations of the world honestly, precisely, and completely—however physically small that world might be—is to find the inevitable story in it. —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer Read More