The Paris Review's Blog, page 780

The Dude Abides

When the world heard about the shooting prompted by a dispute over Immanuel Kant, we simultaneously recoiled at the violence and wondered that a work of philosophy should prompt such passions. Could it happen in America, we asked? Perhaps we have our answer.

 

See You There: Brooklyn Book Festival

We at The Paris Review are big fans of the Brooklyn Book Festival. There’s always a calendar of terrific events, and we never miss a chance to set up shop in Borough Hall Plaza. We love sharing our latest issue with people, and seeing reps from other publications, and learning about new magazines and presses, and meeting readers, and telling people that, yes, we do still exist, and making friends with the occasional character who wanders in by mistake. Whichever of these categories describes you, we do hope you’ll visit us this Sunday, at booth #82, at the corner of Adams and Joralemon Streets. We are conveniently located both across the plaza from the food court and around the corner from the Citi Bike rack.

 

What We’re Loving: YA, Sci-Fi, Street Art, and Zweig

Galvanized by the interview with Ursula Le Guin in our current issue, and recalling my love for her first three Earthsea books, I’ve embarked upon the second set in the series, which she began nearly two decades after the original trio. The long stories in Tales from Earthsea have been keeping me company late at night, the perfect companion for my recent bouts of insomnia. Though they function as back stories for characters and events in the earlier books, they’re also highly enjoyable as standalone narratives. What the best fantasy does—and what Le Guin does in spades—is give the impression that even when the book stops, the world inside its pages continues to exist beyond the bounds of the author’s invention. Upon her return to writing about Earthsea, Le Guin herself found that to be true: “What I thought was going to happen isn’t what’s happening, people aren’t who—or what—I thought they were, and I lose my way on islands thought I knew by heart.” —Nicole Rudick

After Sadie wrote about The Disaster Artist last week, I couldn’t help but pick up the book myself. I had seen The Room years ago—and the film’s as inexplicable as you’ve heard—but I was captivated by the unlikely bromance between a struggling actor and an enigmatic filmmaker at the core of the story. Yes, there are plenty of hilarious making-of stories, but it’s a sincere portrait of the rewards and peril of having an artistic vision you’re 100 percent committed to expressing. For the uninitiated: check out the book trailer here. —Justin Alvarez

Blek le Rat’s solo exhibition “Ignorance is Bliss”, lured me to the Jonathan LeVine Gallery this week, and his stenciled canvases have since been burned into my retinas. In these large, often monochromatic images, strewn with thick swashes of black, the viewer sees such forms as the oracle Sibyl from Greek antiquity, via appropriation of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl. Grace permeates the canvas; Blek subverts this with a skull tattoo on Sibyl’s arm. In a six-foot canvas we see several children playing tug-of-war with one of his iconic rats. On a nearby pedestal is Blek’s first work in sculpture, a small bronze statue of David holding a Kalashnikov while a rat gazes up from below. Seeing the culmination of thirty years of the Parisian-born street artist’s work, we experience both its sociopolitical resolve and the familiarity of his tightly controlled spray-paint forms; he innovated stencils and rats, and others took cues from him, or, indeed, lifted his entire style. For those who know street art through Banksy, here’s what the famously elusive artist allegedly said of Blek: “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only twenty years earlier.” And should you notice a stenciled Andy Warhol or a gas mask surrounded by rats on a wall in Brooklyn, that too, was Blek. —Adam Winters

Long before I went to work at Jezebel, I was a devoted fan of Lizzie Skurnick’s late, lamented “Fine Lines” column, in which she paid tribute to unjustly forgotten YA classics. So, like many people, I was thrilled when I heard about Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint devoted to just these titles. The series kicks off with a bang: the great Lois Duncan’s 1958 Debutante Hill. The book, Duncan’s first, is a classic coming-of-age page-turner with a protagonist you root for. But like all her fiction, it deals with real issues of class, social consciousness, and growing up with seriousness and sensitivity, and is as fresh and engaging today as it was upon its publication. But then, that is what Skurnick has always understood about these books: at their best, they are literature in the true sense of the word, and by no means only for young readers. (Although it’s exciting to think of a new generation discovering them.) —Sadie Stein

Since the current issue of The Paris Review features an excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s upcoming translation of Karl Kraus, I figured it would be thematically appropriate to tout Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday. (A shame, incidentally, about that title translation. In English, it sounds a little too much like a depressing expo installation; the book’s elegiac tone is more successfully rendered in the German original, Die Welt von Gestern.) As Kraus’s contemporary, Zweig’s memoir is useful reading for anyone interested in the social milieu of fin de siècle Vienna, and the precipitous decline of the Hapsburg Empire. Zweig’s dewy-eyed recollection of the prewar years in Vienna, not to mention his gushing description of boy wonder Hugo von Hofmannsthal, also provide a nice counterbalance to the eternally acerbic Kraus. —Fritz Huber

 

Substituting Russian Literature for Sex Ed, and Other News

Film still from Anna Karenina (1935).

“Jonathan Franzen gripe” or “YouTube comment about saggy pants”? You be the judge.
Forget condoms and turn instead to Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gogol, according to a Russian children’s ombudsman. Says Pavel Astakhov, “The best sex education that exists is Russian literature.”
The little-known original ending of “The Frog Prince” (spoiler: there was no kiss) sheds insight on why the Brothers Grimm were so grim.
A Stanford University study shows evidence that today’s kids are actually writing longer and better essays than people in Twitter-less 1917. However, according to a recent Pew Research poll of teachers, children are also writing too informally.
A defense of buying books and never reading them.

 

A Life in Matches

A Life in Matches: Marineland Restaurant, Marineland, California. Photograph by Ben Stott.

How does one document his or her life? Do you track the minute details of each and every day in a diary, like Ned Rorem, or measure it out with coffee spoons, as J. Alfred Prufrock declared? For Justin Bairamian, when digging through the last boxes and cases from his grandfather’s home, he found an old suitcase, full to the brim, with thousands of matchbooks. From the Savoy in London to the Marineland Restaurant in California, many with his grandfather’s own scribbles noting the location and year on the inside cover, Bairamian discovered a beautiful record of a life well lived.

Bairamian has allowed designer Ben Stott to catalogue a sample of the collection, one day at a time, on the blog A Life in Matches. It is a brilliant tribute to one man’s life, as well as insight into the evolution of graphic design.

 

A Demand for Love

For the first time in its sixty-three-year history, the National Book Foundation has published longlists for each of its four award categories. The fiction longlist was announced this morning, and it features a range of celebrated and debut authors, including Thomas Pynchon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Marra, and Paris Review contributor Rachel Kushner, for her latest novel, The Flamethrowers. Congratulations to all!

On The Flamethrowers, Kushner writes in her essay from our Winter 2012 issue:

As I wrote, events from my time, my life, began to echo those in the book, as if I were inside a game of call and response. While I wrote about ultraleft subversives, The Coming Insurrection, a book written by an anonymous French collective, was published in the United States, and its authors were arrested in France. As I wrote about riots, they were exploding in Greece. As I wrote about looting, it was rampant in London. The Occupy movement was born on the University of California campuses, and then reborn as a worldwide phenomenon, and by the time I needed to describe the effects of tear gas for a novel about the 1970s, all I had to do was watch live feeds from Oakland, California.

…

An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost.

It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash.

You can read an excerpt from The Flamethrowers here.

 

Happy Birthday, Mike Royko

“Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don’t want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: always remember to remove the bell from the cat’s collar before cooking.” —Mike Royko

 

Vladimir Nabokov’s Butterfly Drawings, and Other News

Booktryst highlights well-known lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings.
Has the Royal Hall from Beowulf been found? Archaeologists believe they now know the location of the hall where Hrothgar’s warriors once feasted.
Cal O’Mara, Jerry Potts, Bob Lang: author D. W. Wilson lists the top ten absent fathers in literature.
In feline book news, a cat procures the job title of “assistant librarian” at a Russian library. Perks include a raise in packs of cat food a month and “a spiffy bow tie.”
“Well, that’s the end of the Booker Prize, then.”

 

Not Weird About Brooklyn

I had to put my leather loveseat up on Craigslist three times before someone answered the ad, and then that someone, in all of New York City, was the guy my closest friend had been sleeping with a few months earlier. I’d never met him, but I knew that he’d once had to leave her house late at night to go take some kind of medication, and that he got really, really sweaty during sex. Also that he didn’t have Internet access at home, kissed exclusively in chaste little pecks, and had two alarmingly close friends who were women. He and Marie were both writing novels about angels. They’d met at the university where they both taught writing and had both earned MFAs in fiction (at different times), and after they’d written together at a coffee shop one winter afternoon, they relocated to his kitchen table for what Marie called “the download”: a pre-hookup conversation about family and spirituality that lasted for hours.

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The Sort of Thing That Would Be Difficult to Explain to Someone from Another Planet

“Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros.” —George R. R. Martin