{"id":68106,"date":"2014-03-14T16:10:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T20:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=68106"},"modified":"2014-03-16T13:00:37","modified_gmt":"2014-03-16T17:00:37","slug":"what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: The Backwoods Bull, the Ballet, the Boot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mark_Twain_seated\"<\/a>

Photo via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

If you are afraid of public speaking, and ever called on to do it, I suggest that you avoid reading\u00a0\u201cThe Backwoods Bull in the Boston China Shop<\/a>,\u201d from the August 1961 issue of American Heritage Magazine<\/em>. In this lively article, the dean of American studies, Henry Nash Smith, tells how Mark Twain\u2014perhaps the most popular after-dinner speechmaker of his time\u2014flubbed what was supposed to be the comic relief at an 1877 banquet in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier. Twain made up an anecdote about three grifters passing themselves off as Whittier, Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Apparently, it bombed.\u00a0According to Twain\u2019s friend and editor William Dean Howells, \u201cNobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction \u2026 [Twain] must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the fact.\u201d Twain was so mortified that he wrote a letter of apology to the three venerable grandees, and they were nice about it, but a week later he told Howells, \u201cI see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies\u2014a list of humiliations which extends back to when I was seven years old and keeps persecuting me regardless of my repentancies.\u201d Thirty years later he was still trying to decide exactly how bad the speech had been, even reading it aloud to gauge its offensiveness. I am indebted\u2014if that\u2019s the word\u2014to Sadie Stein and her father for digging up this historical gem. It is the stuff of nightmares. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/b><\/p>\n

My decision to take up ballet at the ripe old age of thirty-one (572 in ballet years) is not without its challenges. The parts of my body that should be loose are tight, and the places that should be firm wobble; if I land one pirouette out of ten it\u2019s a victory. I\u2019m grateful, then, for Eliza Gaynor Minden\u2019s The Ballet Companion<\/i><\/a>, which not only visually breaks down basic steps (with a blessed glossary of all that French), but gives pointers on class etiquette and attire. Gaynor Minden also writes beautifully about the history of ballet (forget the tutu\u2014bring on the seventeenth-century six-foot hoop skirt!), as well as provides a detailed list of ballets to see before you die. If after reading you still need a reason to pull on those leg warmers, remember: it\u2019s never too late for a bracing dose of humility.\u00a0\u2014Rachel Abramowitz<\/b><\/p>\n

A few years ago, two of our uncles took my sister out to a French restaurant in Manhattan. One uncle was pushing her to order the duck confit. The other uncle turned to her and said, \u201cDon\u2019t do it. It\u2019s too rich. He made me do it once and I threw up. You\u2019ll throw up, too.\u201d The first uncle assured her, \u201cYou\u2019ll definitely throw up, but you should still get it.\u201d She ordered it and threw up right on schedule. We are a family of eaters, sometimes at any cost. But to A. J. Liebling, perhaps the best eater of the twentieth century, my sister\u2019s fowl adventure would have been child\u2019s play. I\u2019ve spent the past week immersed in his Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris<\/i><\/a>, a memoir of Liebling\u2019s years in the city and, of course, the food he consumed there; he was unapologetically obsessed with eating. He was even lucky enough to have friends who could keep up with him, such as Yves Mirande, the French playwright, who, by Liebling\u2019s account, could tuck away in one meal the contents of a New York\u2013size kitchen. \u201cIn the restaurant of the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua<\/i>, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes<\/i>\u00a0and a turbot\u2014and, of course, a fine civet<\/i>\u00a0made from the marcassin<\/i>, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. \u2018And while I think of it,\u2019 I once heard him say, \u2018we haven\u2019t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u2014Clare Fentress<\/b><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve caught me at SXSW\u2014strange to see it without the hashtag\u2014where I\u2019ve spent the past few days overhearing musicians as they talk shop. (\u201cDude, sick <\/i>whammy pedal. Is that the new one with true bypass?\u201d) It\u2019s quality eavesdropping, but none of it rivals the dudely conversation on offer in the \u201cTight Bros from Way Back When<\/a>\u201d tape, one of the gnarliest cultural documents to emerge from the late eighties. This is a forty-minute taped phone call between two bona-fide California metalheads, Kurt and Derek, that touches on a whole host of topics: police evasion, the occult, Jimmy Page, gravedigging, psychedelics, pyrotechnics, longstanding grudges (\u201cFrom second grade to now I\u2019ve fought this guy like two hundred times. And I\u2019ve lost three of those times\u201d), and many more. Its first twenty minutes\u2014in which Derek explains how his car got the boot, and how he went to extralegal measures to remove it\u2014make for some of the most memorable storytelling this side of Iron Maiden. \u201cImagine standing up, right? These bolt cutters were half my height, bro \u2026 I\u2019m cruising down the street in broad daylight with these bolt cutters slung over my shoulder, like I\u2019m carrying some skis or somethin\u2019? \u2026 I snapped the lock on the boot. It made the gnarliest sound, dude. I summoned the power of all the gods.\u201d The tape has been floating around musical circles for years; at the risk of sounding like Indiana Jones, it belongs in a museum, or at least a top-notch oral history archive. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/b> <\/p>\n

I already knew Exact Change<\/a> for their excellent publishing history\u2014their authors include Leonora Carrington, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Fernando Pessoa\u2014but thanks to our friends at Writers No One Reads<\/a>, I now know about their new monthly e-zine app<\/a>, too. The first issue is free, but poke around its archives and you\u2019ll find two additional free issues. Selections include excerpts from Kafka\u2019s notebooks, Emily Dickinson\u2019s envelope poems, and video work by Amy Sillman: all short, and thus perfect for your morning commute. \u2014Justin Alvarez<\/b><\/p>\n

In 1982, George Lucas founded LucasArts, a sister company to Lucasfilm dedicated to producing video games. From the late eighties through the nineties, the studio created a number of very successful and original adventure games, many of which I grew up watching my brother play; I\u2019ve recently returned to Grim Fandango<\/i><\/a>, released in 1998 and duly renowned for its sharp characterization, its stylish art direction, and, most of all, its genuinely funny writing. Grim Fandango <\/i>is set in the Land of the Dead, and the story features corrupt government officials and a mob plot to cheat the virtuous out of their just rewards in the afterlife and, caught up in it all, one Manuel \u201cManny\u201d Calavera, a travel agent and skeleton-in-love, who, in trying to rescue one wronged soul, may find redemption himself. It\u2019s full of charming and clever ideas\u2014for instance, folks in the afterlife aren\u2019t shot but \u201csprouted\u201d; plants take root in their skeletons, \u201cleaving you nothing but a patch of wild flowers on the ground swarming with butterflies\u201d\u2014and is wonderful to look at even sixteen years on, with a visual style that incorporates Mexican iconography (characters are calaca <\/i>figures), Art Deco, and an atmosphere distilled from forties film noir, especially The Maltese Falcon<\/i>, Casablanca<\/i>, <\/i>and Double Indemnity<\/i>. The dialogue is wry and funny, and the characters richly realized. There are some technical hurdles involved in getting it running on a modern computer, but I urge you, if you can, to discover it for yourself. \u2014Tucker Morgan<\/b><\/p>\n

Because I\u2019m getting impatient waiting for Ann Goldstein to translate the final installment of Elena Ferrante\u2019s Neopolitan trilogy, I\u2019ve been reading through the rest of Ferrante\u2019s work available in English. Apart from the first two trilogy installments, My Brilliant Friend<\/i> and Story of a New Name<\/i>, we Anglophone readers have Troubling Love<\/i>, Days of Abandonment<\/i>, and The Lost Daughter<\/i> available to us. None of these are as disconcertingly excellent as the trilogy, but that might just be because the trilogy sets an impossible standard. The Days of Abandonment<\/i><\/a>, in particular, is a great example of the terrifying and violent portrayal of domesticity and interior life that Ferrante is so good at. \u2014Anna Heyward<\/b><\/p>\n

Exploding in Sound<\/a> is a small record label that puts out noisy music. Among the bands on their roster are Krill, fronted by a Jonah who wails like he\u2019s caught behind baleen; Porches., with a crooner who seems to have strayed to some lonely bog; and Pile, whose piano accompanies a balletic barroom brawl. All are adept, ambitious, and something else live. \u2014Zack Newick<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are afraid of public speaking, and ever called on to do it, I suggest that you avoid reading\u00a0\u201cThe Backwoods Bull in the Boston China Shop,\u201d from the August 1961 issue of American Heritage Magazine. In this lively article, the dean of American studies, Henry Nash Smith, tells how Mark Twain\u2014perhaps the most popular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[13200,13198,13206,13199,13203,13207,13205,13204,1766,13202,13201,13197],"class_list":["post-68106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-j-liebling","tag-american-heritage-magazine","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-eliza-gaynor-minden","tag-exact-change","tag-exploding-in-sound","tag-grim-fandango","tag-lucasarts","tag-mark-twain","tag-metal","tag-tight-bros","tag-william-dean-howells"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We\u2019re Loving: The Backwoods Bull, the Ballet, the Boot by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 14, 2014 \u2013 If you are afraid of public speaking, and ever called on to do it, I suggest that you avoid reading\u00a0\u201cThe Backwoods Bull in the Boston China Shop,\u201d from\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What We\u2019re Loving: The Backwoods Bull, the Ballet, the Boot by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 14, 2014 \u2013 If you are afraid of public speaking, and ever called on to do it, I suggest that you avoid reading\u00a0\u201cThe Backwoods Bull in the Boston China Shop,\u201d from\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-03-14T20:10:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-03-16T17:00:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Mark_Twain_seated.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"5994\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"4171\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"What We\u2019re Loving: The Backwoods Bull, the Ballet, the Boot\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-03-14T20:10:50+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-03-16T17:00:37+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/\"},\"wordCount\":1588,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/what-were-loving-the-backwoods-bull-the-ballet-the-boot\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Mark_Twain_seated-1024x712.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"A. 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