The Paris Review's Blog, page 800

Wine for Dummies, and Other News

Wine for Dummies (yes, like the books) is a real thing, and will shortly be presented to any host who invites me to dinner.
In case you were wondering, this summer, Bill Gates will be reading, among other things, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger and Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts.
Scrapbooks compiled by Ernest Hemingway’s mother throughout his childhood have been made available by the JFK Library.
Someone has returned The Real Book About Snakes to Champaign County Library forty-one years late, with a fine in cash. Writes the conscientious borrower, “Sorry I’ve kept this book so long but I’m a really slow reader! I’ve enclosed my fine of $299.30 (41 years—2 cents a day). Once again, my apologies!!”

 

Archie Revisited

“If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper …” So says Sebastian Flyte of his teddy bear, one of the most memorable minor characters in Brideshead Revisited. Both affectation and security totem, Aloysius (played in the iconic ITV miniseries by one Delicatessen) was modeled on a real toy: Archibald Ormsby-Gore, who belonged to Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend John Betjeman.

And while Aloysius may be Archibald’s most famous literary representation, it’s not the only one: in the 1940s, Betjeman wrote a book for his children, titled Archie and the Strict Baptists. (The main character, a practicing Baptist, is a keen amateur archeologist.) An illustrated version appeared in 1977. The bear, which Betjeman was holding when he died, now resides in St. Pancras, with his elephant companion, Jumbo.

 

Maximum Ride

 

While the thesis of this article—that business travelers still enjoy reading—may seem less than revelatory, we were intrigued by the following anecdote:

Carrying a book while traveling often spurs conversations with strangers, many business travelers say.

[Gene] Jannotti says he was holding a James Patterson novel when he walked into a restaurant and the maitre d’ remarked that he had read the same book.

“I told him he couldn’t have read the same book and then opened the cover to show him James Patterson’s autograph,” Jannotti says. “Needless to say, he escorted me to a very nice table and came by several times to be sure that I was happy with the food and the service.”

We feel that, on the contrary, there was every need to say this. We are, however, still figuring out the best use of the information.

 

How to Prepare for the Past

Lillian Roxon died forty years ago this August.

Lillian was an Australian journalist who moved to New York in the late 1950s to cover popular culture for the Sydney Morning Herald and who fell madly in love with the city and with the sixties rock scene as it emerged. An unbridled enthusiast, scenemaker, and troublemaker, she was also one of the original Wild Grrrrls: bawdy, carousing, fiercely independent, unashamedly smart women on the town.  Together, she, Germaine Greer, and Linda Eastman terrorized the city. At least the parts of the city that men frequented.

I met Lillian when I was about sixteen. She had just published The Rock Encyclopedia, and I devoured it, read it cover to cover. This was pre Creem, and almost all there was for music junkies was Hit Parader, Teen Beat, and 16 Magazine. So of course I bought her book. And corrected it. The spirit of the book was wonderful, but the facts were all askew, and for a young trainspotter that was unforgivable. She had John Stewart from the Kingston Trio listed as a member of Buffalo Springfield. Things like that. I sent her about thirty handwritten pages of corrections, and she sent back a note graciously asking if I’d like to work on the second edition with her.

There was no second edition, but she became my patron, taking me off to Max’s Kansas City and to clubs I never could have gotten into, not to mention taking me to all the back rooms and backstage scenes I didn’t even know existed. Read More »

The Mysterious Book Sculptor of Edinburgh Strikes Again, and Other News

The mysterious book sculptor of Edinburgh has struck again. Reads the card (perhaps intended to clarify things for those who wondered if the work was antibook), “In support of libraries, books, words & ideas.”
“Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a shortcut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future.”
“Instagram for writers”? Meet Hi.
If the case of J. K. Rowling has whetted your appetite for pseuonymous lore, are you in luck! Read more on CNN, , and Time . (Although this book remains our favorite on the subject.)

 

An Incident on Canal Street

In July of 2001—I was in college at the time, working as a part-time waitress and part-time fact-checker—I found myself on Canal Street on a sweltering afternoon. It had been a long and unglamorous summer, hot in the way everyone knows from New York summer movies, but not, I remember thinking, even remotely iconic, or at least not any frame into which I happened to wander.

I frequently wore a series of enormous house-dresses I had gotten at a yard sale, and tried very hard to like certain classic albums by listening to them, intensely, on a loop. Somehow it seemed imperative, then, to fight violently for a spot on the lawn at Bryant Park, no matter what film was showing. I was too young to drink. I was acutely aware of being a total waste of time, and also found this interesting. It is hard to overstate my unsexiness. Two people I knew were involved with Shakespeare productions that were designed as thinly-veiled allegories on the political situation. Everyone was wearing those mesh slippers, bedecked with sparkly flowers, which you could buy in Chinatown for a few dollars. At home, my dad was fighting with my teenage brother, who had a penchant for stealing the family car. “Your brother,” said my dad, “has a total disregard for the dictates of the social contract, as they apply to him. In this way, he is like Hitler. Well,” he amended, “Hitler and Edwin Booth.”

On that particular day, the street was packed with vendors and workers and tourists looking for bags (although it should be noted that this was prior to the real designer-knockoff bag boom, or indeed, the ensuing crackdown.) This was no country for old men, although obviously it was full of old men. I had detoured through Chinatown in order to get some of the slippers, and also some five-for-one-dollar dumplings, and in the process of acquiring them had learned to add sugar to the soy sauce and sriracha on offer (this is a tip I share with you now) and seen three rats, which one assumes, but is always nice to have verified, I suppose.

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What We’re Loving: Psycho-Biddies, Illusions, MTV

It’s hard to read in a heat wave, but the July issue of Asymptote is so absorbing I hardly notice my sweat drops hitting the keyboard. Even more impressive than the diversity of things translated—book reviews in Urdu, fiction in Bengali, poetry in Faroese—is their quality. I’ve especially enjoyed the excerpt from Operation Massacre, a novela negra by the great Argentinian writer Rodolfo Walsh, and the interview with David Mitchell about his translation of a memoir by Naoki Higashida, an autistic Japanese thirteen-year-old. Here is Mitchell on the misery of translation: “As a writer I can be bad, but I can’t be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right.” —Robyn Creswell

I usually behave at museums, but last weekend, at Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, currently at the Met, the guards were just waiting for my friend and me to leave. A number of the amorphous, neon, strangely suggestive ceramics for which Price is particularly known appeared to have small windows carved out of their exteriors to reveal dark, hollow interiors (see, for example, Price’s Pastel). But upon closer examination, it became difficult to tell whether the windows truly exposed new space, or whether they were simply painted on—perfectly executed optical illusions. Clearly, the only option was to get even closer. This is not allowed. Repeat offenses were unavoidable, though; I wanted an answer! The sculptures gleamed so! I felt taunted. A definitive answer could not be determined before we were ultimately shooed away. A partner exhibition of Price’s work, at the Drawing Center, which I hope to see this weekend, consists only of works on paper; it will be easier to be better there. —Clare Fentress Read More »

What Reader Species Are You?

I had, I admit, become a jaded infographic skeptic. No more! I said to myself. And then, one day, in the midst of a heat wave, you run across an infographic so intriguing, so well laid-out, so Linnaean, that you think: Yes. I am a human being and man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is, etc.

(Click to view at original large size.)

Infographic by Laura E. Kelly.

 

New Joseph Heller Story, and Other News

A first edition of The Cuckoo’s Calling—signed by Robert Galbraith—has sold on AbeBooks for $4,453 (£2,950), and the remaining copy is listed for $6,193.24.
Anyway, now we know who leaked J. K. Rowling’s identity: her law firm.
“Almost Like Christmas,” a short story written post-war by a young Joseph Heller, will be published next week by Strand Magazine.
It is unclear whether teachers (according to a Pew study) abhor the Internet’s influence on student writing …
… or welcome it.

 

The Golden Age of Soviet Children’s Art

Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920–35: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times is a stunning compendium of illustrations from the twenties and thirties. As Philip Pullman writes in his introduction,

In the dark and dangerous world of revolutionary Petrograd, a group of Russian poets and artists, among the greatest of the century, came together to create a new kind of book for children about to enter a Brave New World.  These artists and writers dreamed of endless possibilities in a new world where children and grown-ups alike would be free from the bitterness of ignorance. For a time, when children’s publications still escaped the scourge of state censorship, their books became a last haven for learning, poetic irony, burlesque and laughter.