The Paris Review's Blog, page 774

James Franco Is Garbo, a Novelist, and Other News

At the Henry Review, Joshua Cohen reads from his novel-in-progress.
A poetry shutdown begins, and poets and critics fail to reach a compromise.
“It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker’s scale version of the world.” Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson.
Ready or not: here is the book trailer for James Franco’s novel.

 

James Franco is Garbo, a Novelist, and Other News

At the Henry Review, Joshua Cohen reads from his novel-in-progress.
A poetry shutdown begins, and poets and critics fail to reach a compromise.
“It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker’s scale version of the world.” Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson.
Ready or not: here is the book trailer for James Franco’s novel.

 

The Diary Diaries

At the end of last year I returned to England after two years working in West Africa. In my bedroom at my parents’ house in Cambridge I encountered my old diaries. They sat in that ancient space alongside a photograph of my intake at Sandhurst in the year I spent in the army before university, and a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom that my father once gave me. I was twenty-seven and uncertain of what I wanted to do with my life; I hoped reading my written record might give some better idea.

Reading the diaries in public garnered me strange looks on the London Underground. When a woman inquired I emphasized that that the handwriting was my own; I was not perusing another’s journal without permission. The process took about two months.

My oldest journal is a 1992–93 “mid-year” diary manufactured by a firm called Dataday. After a four-year hiatus, a series of page-a-days produced variously by Collins, Dataday, and WH Smith begins in 1996 and runs until 2002. Next come exercise books, one sheathed in a tan leather cover inset with porcupine needles, and a tranche of Moleskines. The final shift in format begins three volumes from the end of the archive. The books become larger; eight by eleven inches. They are bound in quarter leather and the covers are marbled. The first bears in gilt script Simon Akam and سيمون أكم , which is a rough transliteration of my name is Arabic. New York 2008 appears further down. In short, a slightly embarrassing trajectory of increasing literary pretension.

I first kept a diary in the summer of 1992, when I was six years old. I imagine it was a school project, a record-of-your-holiday-please, which in our familial case was to Brittany in northern France. My writing at this stage is wholly descriptive.

Thursday 16 July 1992

at school in the morning I did a jigsaw and in the afternoon I palys [sic] with clever sticks and after school I went canoeing with P palyed [sic]

The real, day-to-day effort starts four years later, at ten.

Monday 1 January 1996

I still can’t get to grips with the fact that ’95 has ended, it went so fast. T. H. … came round and rattled on about his Christmas presents, we showed him the end of the The spy who loved me and he piped down, probably scared stiff. In the afternoon Daddy and I fitted my bike computer, the black tape wound around the front forke [sic] to secure the wire gave the bike a mean look. We watched the worst Bond movie I’ve ever seen, On her Majasty’s [sic] secrat [sic] service.

I do not know why my diary began when it did, in the dead time of New Year before the Christmas decorations came down. Whatever its inception, that daily diary persists, with periods of greater and lesser enthusiasm, for seventy-eight months. It peters out entirely in the summer of 2002, when I have just turned seventeen. The last, rather embarrassing entry is scrawled as follows:

Friday July 26 2002

Pulled [British slang for made out with] F. H. in a punt [flat-bottomed boat propelled with a pole] on the way to Grantchester. [Photogenic village outside Cambridge, once haunt of poet Rupert Brooke] Read More »

Lorrie Moore on Alice Munro

“Well, I have no relationship to her. I’ve never met her. And as for her work, I came to it too late probably for it even to have been an influence, which fills me with despair. I am merely a big fan. She is a great artist, alive and among us, and still writing as well as she did at the start—if not better, which is really saying something, since if you look again at Lives of Girls and Women, her first book, you will see it is a masterpiece, not like any other first book I can think of offhand. (You will also find in it many of the elements of Love of a Good Woman and other later fiction—the obsession with drowning, the allure and menace of men, the erotic moment as narrative pivot and the glimpses of wickedness that only the young are able to act upon to save themselves; the middle-aged must attempt to endure, make do, compromised and complicitous, with what they know.) Her later fiction is quite bold structurally—its handling of time is fearless and satisfying and not to be imitated. She seems over and over again to be writing a kind of ghost story. She is also witty and cruel (that is, unblinking) and painterly. Although she writes of the provinces, she is the least provincial writer I can think of. I’m not sure that this is always understood about her.” —Lorrie Moore, the Art of Fiction No. 167

 

With Profound Admiration: Grazia Deledda, Nobel Laureate

The morning Grazia Deledda won the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature was like any other. Or rather, she attempted to make that day in Rome indistinguishable from the last. She simply exclaimed Già! (Already!), and fled to her office. She was protective of her daily writing routine, already threatened by sharing a crowded house with her husband, adult sons, and niece. Deledda maintained the same schedule seven days a week: a late breakfast, a couple of hours of reading, lunch followed by la pausa (a nap), and, finally, a few hours of writing in the afternoon. By dinner, she had four handwritten pages.

But there were expectations of the first Italian women to receive the prize, and she understood what was at stake. It had been a year since Benito Mussolini dropped the charade of constitutional rule in favor of Fascism. Deledda had never been to northern Europe, but Il Duce made it known that, upon her return from Stockholm, he expected her to attend an official state ceremony in her honor. Mussolini, who had imprisoned several of her friends and many countrymen, wished to give her a portrait of himself, signed “with profound admiration.”

And so the writer allowed throngs of journalists and photographers and notable well-wishers into her home the next day. By all accounts, the diminutive writer was calm and graciouss, or at least tolerant of the fuss, which is more than can be said for Checcha. Her beloved pet crow was visibly irritated by the commotion, and thrashed wildly above the crowd, searching for an empty room. After an open window sufficed, Deledda hurried everyone out, insisting, “If Checcha has had enough, so have I.”  

She was a fatalist, to be sure, but by the time Deledda received the prize, at fifty-six years old, she understood attention made people vulnerable, and had the potential to devastate. People who dealt in extremes, whether by volition or chance, made it into her stories, and from the very beginning, her stories had a way of getting her in trouble.

Deledda (1871–1936) grew up in Sardinia, the second largest island in the Mediterranean, although she would be a teenager before she rode a horse all the way up to Monte Bardia, a peak from which she could finally glimpse the sea. Her birth coincided with the first anniversary of the unification of Italy, but she was very much of Nuoro, what she called “a bronze-age village.” Her first language was sardo logudorese, the spoken idiom of Sardinia; Italian, the language she would write in, was a foreign one. Read More »

Away from Her

“Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it.” —Alice Munro, the Art of Fiction No. 137

 

Alice Munro, Laureate, and Other News

Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation called the Canadian writer (the second Canadian laureate, if we count Saul Bellow) a “master of the contemporary short story.”
Ten things you need to know about Alice Munro. Need, people!
Here is a BBC Listener magazine crossword set in Greek, from 1936. The prize was the Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot. And no, no part of that would happen today.
Semi-related: American adults are bad readers.

 

Death of a Salesman

Once called the “friend of every insomniac in Southern California,” Cal Worthington haunted the nether regions of broadcast programming for more than sixty years. Judging by the frequency of his appearances, their consistency, and their longevity, Worthington might have been the biggest television star in the history of the West. That makes him as much a deity as anything California culture has seen in its short history. But he wasn’t an actor or a journalist or a politician. His church was a chain of car dealerships and his prophesies a series of madcap advertisements. For better or worse, everyone who lived in Southern California had to reckon with him.

Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through the lot of his Dodge dealership, accompanied by an escalating succession of exotic animals. Originally it was an ape, then a tiger, an elephant, a black bear, and, finally, Shamu, the killer whale from SeaWorld—each of which was invariably introduced as Cal’s dog, Spot. Not once did he appear with a canine. The banjo-propelled jingle (set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”) exhorted listeners to “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal,” a catchphrase that became the basis for the most infamous mondegreen in Golden State history. To this day, Pussycow remains a nostalgic code word exchanged among Californians who came of age in the era before emissions standards. Read More »

Does God Ever Speak Through Cats?

Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.

 

Bones

You discover one day—while everyone else is doing whatever it is that makes them happy—that you can almost pop one of the bones in your hand right out of the skin. It’s awesome. First, you practice in secret, when you’re bored or exasperated by school. But one day, you are practicing out in the open when someone notices the little bit of white sticking out, and they say, Wow, how cool, and they ask you to do it again. Look at this guy, they say—when formerly you were ignored or marginalized or made to feel you were odd or would at any rate never to amount to much—and it occurs to you: maybe you’re on to something.

You get good at it, the bone popping, and in college you realize there’s a whole department devoted to the study of it: how they did it in the old days, how it became different when the boats came to North America. Yet, on the musty college campus, everything seems safe and no one’s trying hard enough. In fact, it’s difficult to find anyone doing a good or brave job of bone popping.

Eventually, you find places in the big city—loft buildings, various dark cafés—where people gather. Most can pop one or two hand bones, but a few can do their whole arm bone or an entire leg. Some of these people are actually making a living doing this. They get contracts to spend years on one big bone popping. Some win awards, or fellowships. But no matter how good you get, one old timer says, never remove your heart. Then you’re dead.

So you practice, getting good, refining your technique. Read More »