The Paris Review's Blog, page 778

Doctored

During the bedtime-story portion of his twenty-one-hours-and-nineteen-minutes-long speech on the floor of Congress, Senator Ted Cruz, in an episode that has already achieved notoriety, read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham as his two daughters watched at home in their pajamas.

“I will credit my father,” Senator Cruz said. “He invented green eggs and ham.” Cruz’s father, the senator remembered, would add food coloring to eggs or mix spinach into them to get the green color.

But not even Dr. Seuss would say that he invented green eggs and ham. It was a bet with his publisher that led Theodor Seuss Geisel to write the book. Bennett Cerf wagered $50 that Geisel could not write a book with only fifty words.

And yet by repeating forty-nine monosyllabic words and a single polysyllabic word (anywhere), Geisel assembled a book with 681 words total that would become his most popular book ever, selling tens of millions of copies. Geisel claimed that Cerf never paid him the $50, but Green Eggs and Ham was one of the many Beginner Books that made the author and his publishing house millions of dollars.

Part of Dr. Seuss’s midcentury success came from federal education reform that dedicated money to stocking school libraries and promoting early education. “Children’s lit,” according to critic Louis Menand, “was a Cold War growth industry, right alongside Boeing, Northrop, and Dow Chemical.”

Dr. Seuss, in particular, was very much of his time, and Menand offers a convincing read of The Cat in the Hat as an allegory for the problems of feminism, communism, and juvenile delinquency. Read More »

Typewriter, Tip, Tip, Tip

Paper Typerwriter, 2011, by Jennifer Collier. Vintage typewriter manual pages, gray board, and machine stitching. Via Art Made from Books: Altered Sculptured, Carved, Transformed.

 

The Tao of Joe Walsh

Recently, Bill Simmons, the popular sportswriter and editor-in-chief of Grantland, wrote an extended feature about last year’s The History of the Eagles, the two-part documentary chronicling the “legendary” band’s rise, fall, and reunion. In his article, Simmons states that one of the best parts of the film is “The Tao of Joe Walsh,” which basically translates to the hazy, drug-reduced, unintentionally funny, aging-rock-star wisdom of the Eagles’ part-time virtuoso guitarist. As part of his appreciation for Joe Walsh, Simmons highlights the following quote:

You know, there’s a philosopher who says, “As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on. And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t.”

From the above quote, it’s easy to understand why Joe Walsh is seen in a less than serious light. It is unfortunate that his legacy has become merely one of “rock ’n‘ roll’s survivors.” Though for many, “rock survivor” would not be an accolade to frown at, Walsh should be seen as something more than a former party animal who, though he has turned his life around, is not worth taking seriously. Read More »

Swag

Those with an appetite for funeral baked meats and a few mil burning the proverbial hole, NB: Elmore Leonard’s Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, estate can be yours. “His jeans are all lined up, his shoes are all perfect … I’ve never seen a closet so organized,” says the real estate agent, oddly. If this is not temptation enough, consider this description: “The home is a French Regency stunner with five bedrooms, four full baths, and three half baths. Set on over an acre, the graceful 4,733 square foot mansion is part of a secluded little suburban escape with its own private pool and tennis court.” All the mod cons (one presumes) and within easy distance of Detroit hot spots.

 

Two Shades of Wine, and Other News

“Wine plays an important role in Fifty Shades of Grey. I’ve always had a penchant for good wine, so combining two of my passions … was a natural extension of the series.” The foremost entrepreneur of our times, E. L. James, is launching a line of wines. Soon to be received by anyone who has the ill fortune to invite me to dinner.
This banned-books tote—which features fifty banned titles—is a striking reminder that goes beyond Banned Books Week.
University of Toronto professor David Gilmour has, not shockingly, stirred up controversy by stating in an interview that he is “not interested in teaching books by women.” And, “I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall.” And, just in case that wasn’t clear, “What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys … F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys.”
Lolita, Twilight, and eight other best-sellers that were initially rejected by publishers.
What hath the Romans wrought? A concise history of the hashtag.

 

Donald Antrim Wins Genius Grant

Here on Twenty-Seventh Street, we are kvelling: we just learned that our advisory editor, longtime contributor, and friend Donald Antrim is a 2013 MacArthur fellow.

In an interview published in issue 203, Antrim said of his fiction,

It took me a while to understand that in building another world through the fantastic I was making a set of rules that had to be observed, a logic that had to be carried through—that I was in some ways obeying the premise of the very opening line, and that each book would make itself out of itself as time went on.

The committee described his work as “at once absurd but relatable, free but structured, romantic but realistic, funny but sad.” He is in terrific company: among the other twenty-three honorees are Karen Russell, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, and the musician and writer Jeremy Denk. (See a full list of 2013 fellows here.) Hearty congratulations to all!

 

Bad Call: Meditations on the Pocket Dial

Still from the film Brief Encounter (1945).

My acquaintances rarely call me, but their pockets and purses ring me up faithfully. So it is for the Abigails and Aarons, the Abdullahs and Aaliyahs, A. A. and AAA—and one mustn’t forget the Yaschas and Yankels, the Xenas and Zinos. We alphabetical extremists, we who crown and conclude your contact lists: we aren’t a call away so much as a few unintended nudges. Perhaps your finger, seeking lipstick, flicks the “Contacts” key, and your phone highlights the earliest entry—dear old Abelard!—and your knuckle strikes “Call.” Perhaps, in the thick of all that accidental action, your pinky pokes the “Up” button, taking you to the list’s final entry: then it’s cousin Zabrina you’ve piped into your life.

Not to alarm you; not to suggest that, at this very minute, an army of Abners and Zilpahs are listening to their cell phones with unseemly interest, picking up on secrets you had never meant to share. No, it’s far more likely we’re hearing whish-whoosh, whish-whoosh: the song of your stride.

Is there anything quite like the pocket dial? Does any other form of social intercourse invite us—actually, mandate us—to spy on our acquaintances?

Mandate? you ask. Yes, mandate, at least for a few moments. “Hello?” we say, and listen. “Hello?” we say again. And hear the background music of our friends’ lives: the slamming doors, the roaring traffic, the whish and the whoosh. Where is he walking? we wonder. Why is she shouting? And we never find out. Unless, of course, we keep listening.

Which I don’t. Hardly ever. Only under duress. When, for instance, years ago, the enigmatic and taciturn youth I had recently started dating called me while he was catching up with his mom. This isn’t invasion, I told myself guiltily, as I noted his thoughtful inquiries and nodded with approval. This is research. This is good for the team. Read More »

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare

When we posted a recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale,” a reader noted that F. Scott Fitzgerald also made a recording of the Keats poem. That audio is great, but on the occasion of the author’s birthday, we thought we’d share another: Fitzgerald doing Othello’s act 1, scene 3 monologue. Keep in mind that the future writer trod the boards while at Princeton; while he may not recite like a trained Shakespearean, his reading is clear, emotive, and confident. And if you’ve never heard his voice, it’s a pleasure of a whole different kind.

 

A Lively, Unfinished Manuscript

Illustration from Reading the Landscape of America (Nature Study Guild Publishers) by May Theilgaard Watts. Many of the illustrations to this essay feature a variation on this blunted trapezoid, representing the boundaries of her passenger-side window.

A number of years ago, on a plane returning to the United States from Mexico, I sat next to a garrulous doctor who was also the head of New York’s cactus and succulent society. He told me about plant sales, about the traditional Bajan candy that was a great threat to one-hundred-year-old cacti, and about an earlier plane trip on which he smuggled an uprooted barrel cactus back to America wrapped in a ball of dirty T-shirts. But cacti were not the reason for this trip, he explained as he showed me a medal he had just won in a long-distance race up a Guatemalan volcano, running alongside other men in his age group, forty and older. He had been busy conquering a different harsh element of the Central American landscape. After landing, as we parted ways on the elevator up to ground transportation, to myself I thought, This is a character for a short story. But even though the stories that Ivan told me revolved around botany, geology, man’s will to bend nature, it never once occurred to me until reading May Theilgaard Watts’s essay “Looking Down on Improved Property (or an Airplane View of Man and Land)” that Ivan and his chatter might be just as suited to a short ecology study as to fiction.

May Theilgaard Watts. Courtesy of Bridget Watts.

In this essay from Reading the Landscape of America, Watts begins her narrative with a conversation overheard between businessmen about the evergreen plantings they had been collecting for their yards; she then reflects on the great landing strip on an orchid pinned on a fellow passenger’s lapel. Once she has sensed the small presences of nature, even in the vacuum of the airport, we find her looking out the plane window at the passing city grids and farm grids and reporting that “under this net, Nature is squirming and resisting.” At every margin, every mark on the human neatness of borders, she reels off the names “dandelion, cottonwood, ailanthus,” like a refrain announcing the little victories of hardy wilderness. In another essay from the same collection, “Prairie Plowing Match,” the concern with finding pockets of “native” flora among the “foreign” plantings imported by humans is the same, but this study finds a different refrain. She refers back to seventy-five years of local literature for text suggesting the original Illinois landscape she seeks, and she uses fragments of these historical tractor-pull programs to punctuate her description of a walk around the prairie. When she finds her “natives,” she finds them along a fence rail, on the grounds of a churchyard, and inside an abandoned school house. Read More »

The Fearsome Captain Underpants, and Other News

Herewith, the most-challenged books of 2013. Leading the pack is Captain Underpants.
Virgule, pilcrow, and other extinct punctuation.
“You can imagine a modern-day Charlotte Brontë writing embarrassing confessional scenes about masturbation, Lena Dunham–style, or a bit like Sheila Heti—and not understanding why other people found it all a bit much.” Moira Redmond on sex scenes that might have been. 
Lady Antonia Fraser has resigned from the Man Booker advisory committee following their announcement that the prize is going international.