The Paris Review's Blog, page 801

Poets in the Workplace

Remember: today is Take Your Poet to Work Day. Full instructions for toting your preferred wordsmith can be found here; an excerpt is below. (Since a poster-size version of this picture glowers over the Paris Review kitchen, I think we’ve got it covered.) 

 

Man Steals Books to Find Meaning of Life, and Other News

“Everyone on earth has one good book in them,” and other bad advice for aspiring writers. 
A young man who stole eight hundred books from a single store, in search of the meaning of life, says, “I couldn’t comprehend the meaning of life … I was hoping to find the answer by reading those books.”
John Grisham novels were banned at Guantanamo Bay, which greatly pleased John Grisham.
A comprehensive history of the limerick is being penned, appropriately enough, by the Limerick Writers Centre.
The Atlantic Books releases a history of Mark Twain writings from the magazine archives.

 

Donna Stonecipher’s “Model City”

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical device that offsets the blatant generalization being made. The best of such sentences are aware of their blatant generalizations but strive for truth anyway, recklessly. That’s the last line of this recording. Stonecipher’s syntactical attempt to polarize the past and future sinks as it tries to swim, for she—or the general truth of life—has already convinced us that the past, present, and future are in flux.

Read the full poem in our Summer 2013 issue.

 

The Feelies at Maxwell’s

Photo credit: Seth Ditchik.

Minutes before the Feelies take the stage at Maxwell’s for the last time ever, the room is packed tightly enough to induce heart palpitations in a fire marshal.

It’s small, the back room of Maxwell’s, with a capacity of two hundred. From the bar and surrounding area it’s hard to glimpse the stage, even though the room is only about the size of a rural post office. The lucky fans at the foot of the stage must sacrifice drinking privileges, as going to the bar and returning to the front is impossible. The room is hot. No one who’s ever been to Maxwell’s has praised the venue’s air circulation.

In no way is Maxwell’s an ideal place to see a show, except that it is.

The highlight of a Feelies show is often the blistering combo of “Raised Eyebrows” and “Crazy Rhythms.” The booming, oddly-metered bass drumming of “Eyebrows” was inspired by the rapid and arrhythmic explosions of the grand finale of a July 4th fireworks show.

In a few weeks, Maxwell’s, the Hoboken music venue almost always described as “legendary” or “venerated,” will close its doors permanently. Beleaguered by issues municipal and demographic, the club has become too much of a hassle to run, says Todd Abramson, the co-owner and booker. The parking in Hoboken is abysmal; the population is changing.

“It was just time,” says a weary Abramson, who will close Maxwell’s on July 31.

Perhaps no band will miss Maxwell’s more than the Feelies. Read More »

This Is a Book

This is a 3-D orihon, or accordion book, made by Chicago artist and teacher Tom Burtonwood, and developed for the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College.

 

Live Like William Blake, and Other News

The picturesque West Sussex cottage where William Blake lived, sometimes nude, from 1800–1803 (the period during which he wrote “Jerusalem”) is on the market for £650,000. The agent says, “The original part of the cottage has been altered little in its essential features. The rooms in which William Blake lived retain enormous character and the dining room was at this time the site of his printing press.”
Reading (along with writing and doing puzzles) improves cognitive function in old age, a study shows.
In which writers such as Emma Straub and Matthew Specktor discourse on their favorite literary streets.
Google’s Kafka doodle was not remotely Kafkaesque, Twitter feels.
July 17, obviously, is Take Your Poet to Work Day. Herewith, handy cutouts of several bards. Blake not included (but that’s probably a good thing).

 

Smoke

If you live on a peak in fire-prone country, as I do every summer in the Black Range of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, the big one will eventually come for you. This knowledge does not cushion the fact that if you’re a lookout evacuated by helicopter you can’t help but feel a failure. The point of the job is early detection: the sooner a smoke is spotted, the more options you give firefighters to contain it. When you’re airlifted by the whirlybird, the options have dwindled to none but run.

I realize self-quotation is a dishonorable habit, but it sounds a little smug to say I saw it coming and leave it at that. The fact is, a lot of people saw it coming. All you had to do was read the story written plainly on the faces of the mountains.Read More »

Watch Richard Wright Act in Native Son

In 1948, Richard Wright starred in this screen test for the film adaptation of his classic 1940 novel, Native Son. Says Studio 360’s Amanda Aronczyk, “if that sounds like a bad idea, that’s because it was”—not least because the non-actor was twice as old as twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas—but this clip remains a fascinating piece of literary and cinematic history.

 

Required Reading for Bastille Day

Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of 30 June 1878.

So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. It is the passionate printed advice of M. Marat, to abstain, of all things, from violence. Nevertheless the hungry poor are already burning Town Barriers, where Tribute on eatables is levied; getting clamorous for food.
—Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution

The old saw that “an army marches on its belly” was blunted on July 14, 1789, as a half-starved, bibulous mob overran the walls of the Bastille, the Bourbon kings’ infamous political prison-turned-armory. Leaders of the rabble were more excited about hoarding gunpowder and fusils than about liberating the prison’s seven remaining, apparently apolitical inmates. Over the next two centuries, La Fête Nationale (or simply “le quatorze Juillet”) has metastasized from a Gallic celebration of freedom to a worldwide excuse for holding a multiday anarchic party, ideally with decent wine and minimal casualties. Read More »

J. K. Rowling’s Party is Over, and Other News

By now, you are probably aware that J. K. Rowling wrote detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under the guise of Robert Galbraith, an ex-military family man. Quoth she, “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”
Can’t imagine what anyone would stand to gain by revealing the truth behind the modest seller.
The publishers who turned the novel down are, of course, kicking themselves.
Related: of the pseudonym.
For your alienated youngster: My First Kafka .