The Paris Review's Blog, page 787

In Which Jane Austen Tells Your Fortune, and Other News

Oxford Dictionary Online (not to be confused with older sibling OED) has added twerk, derp, and selfie.
“I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of a cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones.” The Jean-Paul Sartre cookbook.
The top twenty books people leave in motel rooms. (Fifty Shades Freed leads the pack.)
The (inevitable?) Jane Austen tarot deck.

 

Notes from a Bookshop: Late Summer, or Summer Is a Kind of Island

3. Arcana

Of one order are the mysteries of light
and of another are those of fantasy
Rider Tarot Deck instructions

—Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

A good friend came to visit this spring, and a few times during her stay, she pulled a book off the shelves, either from Moody Road Studios or at my home, shuffled the pages under her thumb, and stuck a finger on a line like an arrow hitting a bull’s-eye. Then she’d read the single line aloud, a kind of party trick.

This would typically happen when we’d be in the middle of a conversation, talking about some big questions that we were swirling at the time, the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I, will-this-work-or-not, should-I-take-this-chance kind of conversations that tend to occur after some Southern Comfort on a patio. She used whatever book was in her hand as a literary tarot, and believed the line would tell us all we needed to know. Usually, bizarrely, it worked.

I tried this on my own, but it fell flat. After the house was asleep, I would pose a question in my head and stalk a book, pull it from the stack before it could resist, flip open its pages and point hungrily at it, waiting for its answer. Each time, the result was tinny, hard-pressed, wanting. It reminded me of late nights with my Ouija board as a kid, waiting desperately for something to speak to me when I was really just waiting for my own voice.

People ask a lot of their books. They want them to be amazing, they want them to be cheap, they want them the moment they walk through my door. I often feel like a kind of carnival showman, flashing bright colors in front of the customer, hoping something catches their eye. People’s personal restrictions always amaze me. “I don’t read books with dogs in them.” “I don’t like to have to think too hard.” “I can’t buy books with white covers.” Really? Read More »

Childish Things

“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” —John Betjeman

 

On Keeping a Notebook, Part 1

Photograph courtesy of the author.

When I decided to move to New York to pursue writing, I took all of the notebooks I’d kept in high school out back of my apartment and burned them on the sidewalk separating my building from my neighbor’s. I didn’t use an accelerant because I expected the paper to burn easily, for the whole pile to go up in flames at the toss of a single match. Instead, I sat on the sidewalk with book after book of matches, tearing the notebooks apart and crumpling them, holding individual pages over the flames so they would catch, watching the spiral bindings blacken but persevere into the eventual pile of ashes and scraps of brown paper left behind an hour later. When my roommate came home, she told me what I’d done was stupid.

I’ve kept a notebook since elementary school. Back then, I called it a diary because that’s what my friend Christina called hers. I remember her reading me accounts of eating hot dogs, meeting a cute boy, doing homework: “factual” records of events that were, whether or not important, beats on which to hang memories. I fashioned my diary after Christina’s but eventually grew bored and abandoned it. I didn’t see the point; I didn’t yet know what it meant to record the story of my inner life. I had a completely different relationship with my inner life then. There wasn’t a sense of anxiety around the need to find words for those things I was thinking and feeling. That anxiety came a few years later, in middle school, when my social life took a downturn and I started to keep a notebook again. The first thing I wrote was a song, the lyrics and melody for which are lost forever, as is the notebook. Read More »

Finch Printing, and Other News

Behold: an analog typewriter printer that uses ink made from zebra-finch droppings.
A massive archive of Charles Bukowski’s manuscripts and letters is now available online at Bukowski.net.
Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, and other popular stars of celebrity fan fiction.
This Japanese crime syndicate publishes its own magazine. Says the Guardian, “The front page of the magazine, a professionally produced publication featuring the gang’s familiar diamond-shaped logo, carries a piece by its boss, Kenichi Shinoda, instructing younger members to observe traditional yakuza values, including loyalty and discipline.”

 

Damned Spot

We urge you to check out this gallery of alternative Shakespeare covers. 

 

The Beauty of the Heroine: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Poetic Portrait

The Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere, 1874, albumen silver print from glass negative, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1952, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“The beauty of the heroine is evident to every one,” Julia Margaret Cameron wrote as the postscript of a letter accompanying the first copy of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which she illustrated with photographs. She was speaking specifically of her image Vivien and Merlin, but, as evidenced in a show of her photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of Cameron’s greatest talents lay in animating many heroines of poetry through her unconventionally dreamy photographs. Read More »

In the Club

Photo by Chris Boland / www.distantcloud.co.uk.

“I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.” —Jeanette Winterson, the Art of Fiction No. 150

 

The Last Bookstore

Photography credit Scott Garner.

My father’s father was a carpenter. I never met my grandfather, but I know from photographs and stories that in addition to farming, keeping dairy cows, and working on a cannery line, he earned money by carpentry. I also know from the sawhorses that my father inherited from his father.

The wooden trestles stood ever-vigilant in our garage, ready to serve whenever their nail-bitten, blade-gauged bodies were needed. The sawhorses were two of a few inherited things that reminded me of the grandfather I never met: a pear tree that still stands but no longer grows heavy with fruit in early autumn; a concrete trough he made that my sister, used for her horse’s drinking water; a pitchfork on which the handle had been replaced many times, and that we used for moving straw, hay, manure, or leaves, depending on the season.

Our inheritance felt large, but it was the sawhorses that I most admired, especially when my father put them to use constructing bookshelves for my bedroom. My father was no stranger to construction; he built the log cabin in which I was raised. He inherited not only tools but also skills from his father, so he was able to cut, stain, and install the wide bookshelves on my bedroom walls in no time. The shelves were required to house my growing library, acquired book by book in a thrilling sequence of gifts, purchases, and trades.

The day those bookshelves were installed was both an end and a beginning. It was the beginning of my treating books like objects and the end of my venerating them as relics. The order of the library, the logic of the archive, the structure of the bookstore all faded that day; suddenly, my books were mine to play with and I could do with them as I pleased. I could arrange them by height or by color. I could divide them with whatever objects I wanted: the painted deer skull I had been given as a dream catcher, the glow-in-the-dark vampire mask I had bought on a family vacation, the ornate carousel music boxes I had collected. Read More »

Kafkaesque Hotels, and Other News

“Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on.” Mark Slouka explains the etiquette. 
The great affect/effect problem.
Libraries across Quebec are banding together to help rebuild the branch destroyed in the July Lac-Megantic oil-train derailment.
“The rise of the belles-lettres establishment, celebrating France’s literary culture, and even that of its neighbours, is the latest marketing sensation in the French capital, as hoteliers come up with ever more innovative—or desperate—ways to attract guests.” These include a Proust-themed hotel, a hostelry devoted to literary lovers, and a third containing an ominous-sounding Franz Kafka room. 
The latest in long-overdue library books: an alumna returns a volume to her Michigan school library thirty-three years late, from Dubai.