The Paris Review's Blog, page 769

Or, The Modern Prometheus

Anyone watching the CW’s Hart of Dixie last night will have noticed, at the 1:40 mark, an unexpected cameo by our very own digital director, Justin Alvarez. (You may know him as the mind behind our Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, among many other things.)

Allow us to set the scene. Dr. Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson) and Joel Stephens (Josh Cooke), in the Rammer Jammer, pass a poster for a one-man stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Joel: Oh my—[laughs] I have to send this to my friend Justin at The Paris Review. He is going to flip out. Also, we must go.

Dr. Hart objects, on the grounds that said production is some four hours long and features a third act in German. But this proved to us that the writers of the show know what they’re talking about; Justin (who has an MFA in playwriting, a fact we imagine will figure in his character’s trajectory) is indeed a fan of experimental theater with an enviable attention span.

Our in-office research has informed us that the character of Joel is supposed to be a New York intellectual, and is apparently not a fan favorite.

 

Literary Vigilantes, and Other News

Seven haikus for failed hip hop clothing lines.
Lionel Shriver: “I have grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure—when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them.”
An ode to literary siblings.
“It became crystal clear that some piece-of-shit scam artist was preying on aspiring writers just hoping for a wisp of recognition. I considered this an added insult—nobody deserves to be swindled, but it took a particular kind of cruelty to bilk sweet, earnest, well-meaning writers, especially the ones who’d worked hard enough to actually finish a book and were now struggling to get it out there and read by people.” Davy Rothbart on literary vigilantism.
Spanking may be bad for vocabulary.

 

Sit and Cry with the Door Closed

How do you say good-bye to Lou Reed?

For many of us, he’s been unavoidable, not just as a musical touchstone but as a cranky éminence grise: walking his dog, sitting in cafés with Laurie Anderson and berating waitresses (“Oh, c’mon, you know how I like my eggs.” “No, sir.” “The fuck you don’t!”), turning up at tribute concerts at St Ann’s, Tibet House, and Town Hall.

For a while, he and Laurie Anderson could be found at Les Deux Gamins, on Waverly Place, every morning around nine A.M. After Laurie left, Lou Reed would continue reading the New York Times, then look around the café to see if there was anyone who hadn’t noticed him. If there was, he’d slowly get up, saunter over, and tap them on the shoulder. “Hey. Hey listen. You got a cigarette?” The casual no, no, sorry was then followed by a visible HOLY SHIT! IT’S LOU REED, as he leaned over them with solicitous menace. If they looked sufficiently disturbed, he’d whisper, “Could you go get me one?” They sometimes did.

The tenderness and mercy and wonder of songs like “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Pale Blue Eyes” and “I’m Set Free” wasn’t always easy to find in the geezer who seemed to have more ways of saying fuck you to well-wishers and critics alike than Eskimos have words for snow. But if you could get him talking about Doc Pomus or Dion or Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, the light of the true believer would shine in his eyes.

At Jenni Muldaur’s birthday party last year, she had an old Victrola set up, and I brought a box of forty-fives—the Bobby Fuller Four, the Drifters, the Hombres, the Shirelles, Nervous Norvus. Lou Reed started looking through them admiringly. He stopped when he got to the Jaynetts’ “Sally Go ’Round the Roses,” holding it up like you would the Holy Grail.

“I love that record,” I murmured.

He tilted his head and gave me a look equal parts who the fuck asked you? and me too, me too!

 

Vile Bodies

INTERVIEWER

Whom do you read for pleasure?

WAUGH

Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner.

INTERVIEWER

And Raymond Chandler!

WAUGH

No. I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t care for all the violence either.

INTERVIEWER

But isn’t there a lot of violence in Gardner?

WAUGH

Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of other American writers, of Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example?

WAUGH

I enjoyed the first part of Tender Is the Night. I find Faulkner intolerably bad.

—Evelyn Waugh, the Art of Fiction No. 30

 

Recapping Dante: Canto 4, or the Halloween Special

Full disclosure: canto 4, despite the ominous nature of canto 3’s ending and the fact that 4 is meant to open in hell, is not that scary. There is a distinct shortage of zombie/ghost-chase/door-gag montage scenes in this segment, and almost no haunted houses. So, we are probably meant to assume that Dante decided to take this holiday episode in a slightly more cerebral direction—he’s skipped right over the cheap scares, and has decided to hit us with a sort of theological horror show. Indeed, as Dante awakens from his spell, and walks beside Virgil, he notices that his guide’s face is stricken with a fearful pallor. When Dante inquires, Virgil informs him that it is not fear, but pity, that has altered his expression; the pair are entering limbo, where those who might have been able to enter paradise, had they lived in the time of Christ, are instead forever confined. Which is to say, no matter how saintly you are, if you had the misfortune of being born during one of the richest cultural eras in human history (like Virgil himself), you’re still out of luck, if not in hell proper.

Dante asks Virgil if anyone has ever made it out, and in the slightly embittered tone of someone who has watched countless coworkers get promoted above him, Virgil tells Dante of Moses, Noah, and a few others who were “plucked” from limbo and taken upward by some mysterious stranger. (Jesus, obviously, but how could Virgil know that?)

At this point, Dante and Virgil come across a band of poets—Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. The poets join our travelers to help them solve the mystery of how two unvaccinated poets are going to make it safely through hell. The poets also make Dante part of their poets club. It’s probably no coincidence that seeing these great writers animated lends them a sense of immortality (both in body and in their work), and that anyone who should join them may also be graced with a similar literary significance; after all, Dante writes that “their honorable fame … echoes” in his life on earth. It’s also difficult to tell whether Dante is nerding out and imagining what it would be like to hang out with his heroes, or if he’s pulling some sort of lyrical power move and trying to assert himself as one of the greatest poets of history (again, only time will tell).

Dante briefly describes their conversation by saying that they spoke “of things that here are best unsaid, just as there it was fitting to express them.” This can be interpreted more or less as “We were talking about poet stuff … you wouldn’t probably get it.”

As the band of six approaches a haunted castle (ruh roh) with a giant river, they walk across the water without difficulty. A clue! It looks like the river is meant to keep the less than great or those who aren’t poets or philosophers or the out of this beautiful pastoral scene in Limbo. Time to investigate.

Dante names the shades he sees inside—Socrates, Plato,  Diogenes, Cicero, Seneca, and, roaming all alone, Saladin. (Hollander points out that the moderns in limbo, though Dante considered them infidels, are “representatives of … Islamic culture”). But there’s one shade that Dante does not call by a name, and refers to only as the “master.” It’s old man Aristotle!

But Dante and Virgil, having come this far escorted by the four poets, must go on alone. Dante writes “The company of six falls off to two,” which we all know really just means he’s really just saying “Let’s split up, gang!” Poet stuff.

This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. His has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

 

Literary Cultural Districts, and Other News

A group of advocates is looking to establish the nation’s first literary cultural district in historically-rich Boston. Says the Globe, “Its proponents don’t know exactly where its borders will lie, or what, precisely, visitors will do, but more significant is this: the very idea that there could be a literary cultural district is recognition that the city is undergoing a renaissance.”
A Cleveland house where Langston Hughes lived as a high-school student is on the market, following a foreclosure.
Germaine Greer has sold her archive to her alma mater, the University of Melbourne. The feminist’s portion of the three million dollar sale will go to her charity, Friends of Gondwana Rainforest.
“Because we are less sure of what fiction is ‘saying,’ we are less preemptively defended against it or biased in its favor. We are inclined to let it past our fortifications. It’s merely a court jester, there to amuse us. We let in the brazen liar and his hidden, difficult truths.” Rivka Galchen on the relevance of fiction. 

 

Shopping for Groceries with the Romantic Poets

Jason Novak is a cartoonist in Oakland, California.

 

And Now I Know How Joan of Arc Felt

Morrissey would like to stress that he has not been consulted over any takedown request to remove the Tumblr blog named This Charming Charlie. Morrissey is represented by Warner-Chappell Publishing, and not Universal Music Publishing (who have allegedly demanded that the lyrics be removed) … Morrissey is delighted and flattered by the Peanuts comic strip with its use of Morrissey-Smiths lyrics, and he hopes that the strips remain.

Thanks to Mozzer’s intervention, This Charming Charlie is going strong.

 

What We’re Loving: Marionettes, Ducks, and Connell

I was about to describe Barbara Comyns’s hyper-vivid little novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) as Ivy Compton-Burnett on acid. Then I googled Comyns. Top result: “Barbara Comyns Is Not Anyone on Acid.” Thank you, Emily Gould. But why do so many readers reach for the same cliché? Who Was Changed is trippy from sentence one: “The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had forced the windows open; so the ducks swam in. Round the room they sailed quacking their approval; then they sailed out again to explore the wonderful new world that had come in the night.” The real trippiness of the novel—about an English village struck by a mysterious epidemic—lies not just in its eye-rubbingly bright details, but also in its moral sensibility. Flood, fire, madness descend on Comyns’s characters without any of the usual narratorial handwringing, occasionally accompanied by ducks. Comyns is so matter-of-fact as to be surreal, and irresistible. —Lorin Stein

Until recently, I had never read Evan S. Connell; quite the faux pas when you consider that Mrs. Bridge originated as a short story in the Fall 1955 issue of The Paris Review. In this, his first novel, Connell paints a brilliantly handsome and moving portrait of a woman by the name of India Bridge and her unspectacular Kansas City family. We follow the quotidian concerns of a woman plagued by upper-middle-class luxury, and while her obsession with all things bourgeois lends humor to the novel, Connell refuses to pass any sort of judgment on his protagonist. And yet we feel the muted despair of a family divided by perpetual boredom, isolation, and the complete inability to connect. We ache for a mother’s attempt (and failure) to mother, a wife’s desperation to be loved, a woman’s unending struggle with herself. Connell’s prose is decisively, and artfully, quiet; yet the silence he weaves into the novel’s 117 chapters brims with the same fervor and frustration buried in his characters. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More »

Horror Story

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.” So begins Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury’s 1962 tale of a demonic carnival that descends on a Midwestern town. I’ve long loved the 1983 Disney adaptation (which is way scarier than many a grown-up horror movie, and actually nothing like the synth-heavy trailer) but until this fall, had never read the book. When I did, I was intrigued by the dedication: “With love to the memory of GENE KELLY, whose performances influenced and changed my life.” In his afterward, Bradbury explains the unexpected dedication—altered for the second edition—and also relates the anecdote below, in a talk he gave in Pasadena a few years ago.