The Paris Review's Blog, page 804

Rahm Emanuel to Jump in Lake If Kids Read, and Other News

“This ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendentally platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers.” And other literary takedowns.
Playing on children’s eternal desire to see authority figures drenched in cold water, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Chicago Bear Israel Idonije have sworn to jump in wintry Lake Michigan if local kids read two million books this summer.
Think the fun is over now that you’re back at work? Not so fast: here’s an idioms and formulaic language quiz!
Plus: (more) dirty jokes from Shakespeare.
When James Joyce, Jeanette Winterson, and Salman Rushdie wrote for children.

 

Summer!

“I’ll have to calm down a bit. Or else I’ll burst with happiness.” ―Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

 

What We’re Loving: Tragedy, Poetry, Music

I’ve been catching up on the last two issues of the Fairleigh Dickinson journal, The Literary Review. Of special brilliance: a long polyphonic poem by Leon Weinmann about Simone Weil, a bravely whiny New York poem by Rachel Zucker (“I don’t want to have coffee or not have coffee/or listen to This American Life podcast on infidelity”), and a novella by Paula Bomer, “Inside Madeleine,” about a town slut destroyed by love. It's so arresting I raced to finish so I could pass the issue along to a friend. —Lorin Stein

Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle is a strange mixture of concert film—specifically, the 2011 tribute to the late Canadian folk singer at Town Hall—and documentary. But if at times the biographical elements are unsatisfying, the music makes it well worth seeing. Beyond the lovely McGarrigles covers from the concert (I especially liked her son, Rufus Wainwright’s, version of “Walking Song”) we are treated to original recordings by Kate and Anna, as well as the kind of impromptu jam sessions that take place when everyone in the family is a professional musician. I promptly dug out all my McGarrigles albums, and have been listening to little else since. —Sadie O. Stein

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Light and Dark

It has been almost three months since the Boston Marathon bombings and the riveting manhunt that followed: less than a hundred days, a fraction of the time needed to understand what happened, what will happen.  Still, that searing week lingers vividly in our consciousness. A runner crumples on Boylston Street, paralyzed by the blast. Medics rush against the tide of a fleeing crowd. A helicopter outfitted with heat sensors tracks the shadowy movement of a man under a tarp, stowed away in a boat moored in the inland backyard of a place called Watertown. It has all the contours of a dream: precise in some places, blurry in others, tantalizingly real and unreal.

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Happy Fourth!

George Plimpton’s passion for fireworks is legendary: he devoted a book to the subject, and held the title of Fireworks Commissioner of New York for some thirty years. In 2011, his son, Taylor, wrote movingly about sending his father’s ashes into space with his favorite firework, the kamuro.

In 1994, Plimpton hosted the terrific documentary Fireworks, based on his book.

 

Happy 4th!

George Plimpton’s passion for fireworks is legendary: he devoted a book to the subject, and held the title of Fireworks Commissioner of New York for some thirty years. In 2011, his son, Taylor, wrote movingly about sending his father’s ashes into space with his favorite firework, the Kamuro.

In 1994, Plimpton hosted the terrific documentary Fireworks, based on his book.

 

Notes from a Bookshop: Early Summer, or Six Months In

Photo Credit: Couple of Dudes.

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

—Austin Phelps

When I tell people I run a bookshop, they often respond with envy or admiration. But first, a funny look flashes across their face—sometimes fleeting, sometimes not. A look that says, Poor girl. A look that says, She must be daft.

I am not daft. It’s no secret that the bookstore industry is in trouble, and, six months into this experiment, I still don’t know if this dream is viable. Aside from the question of whether people will buy books or will simply use the shop to browse and then order from Amazon when they get home—or, as Michele Figlate’s fantastic Center For Fiction piece flays, order from their iPhone on the spot using our free Wi-Fi—there are the more prosaic reasons I may not be cut out to run a small business, like quarterly taxes and mopping the floor. But people’s love of books is not something I lose much sleep over.

I’m a romantic, but I’m also a pragmatist. I did not open Moody Road Studios and assume it would pay my home mortgage or student loan, or even for my dark chocolate habit. Like many writers, I survive by keeping a dozen lines in the water. So I write. And edit. And review. And copyedit. And teach. I love each of these things and feel fortunate to be able to do work that I love and get paid for it. And I knew that in order to open this shop, I would need to continue to do all of these things in order to make it work. I won’t necessarily make money, but I can’t afford to lose any money either. Read More »

Completely Without Dignity: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard

Of the two people who have written books called My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard is the less notorious. In Scandinavia, where the tradition of memoiristic writing is less prevalent and self-exposing than it is in America, he wrote, for three years, twenty pages a day about himself, his friends, his wife, and his kids. When the first of the six books was published, reporters called everyone he’d ever met. It sold half a million copies.

But unlike most literary controversies, this one’s less interesting than the work that provoked it. Knausgaard has written one of those books so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary. Before, there was no My Struggle; now there is, and things are different. The digressiveness of Sebald or Proust is transposed into direct, unmetaphorical language, pushing the novel almost to the edge of unreadability, where it turns out to be addicting and hypnotic. A man has written a book in which a man stays at home with his kids, and his home life isn’t trivialized or diminished but studied and appreciated, resisted and embraced. An almost Christian feeling of spiritual urgency makes even the slowest pages about squeezing lemon on a lobster into a hymn about trying to be good.

Book One ends with that impossible thing: an original metaphor for death. The last sentence of this interview may do the same for writing. Read More »

Happy Birthday, Mary Frances

Image via Gourmet

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.” —M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

 

Beer Paradise

 When referring to places I’ve been before the coming of hops into my life, I say, “I’ve been there, but I wasn’t a beer person yet.” At five o’clock on a mid-September Friday afternoon, the woman I am dating and I have to sneak out of our Charlotte offices early for our first trip to Asheville together and my first visit to the city “as a beer person.”

She comes from the eleventh floor, on loan to the bank from her consulting company. It’s her first job after graduating from Chapel Hill, and she took it while she figures out what she really wants to do. I descend from the thirty-ninth floor, permanently on loan to the partners at my law firm. It’s my first job after graduating from the law school down the road from her sorority house, and I took it, in part, so that someone might introduce me to a woman or to her sister or to her mother much in the same way that Alec describes Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical Amory in This Side of Paradise:

 ALEC: Oh, he writes stuff.

CECELIA: Does he play the piano?

ALEC: Don't think so.

CECELIA: (Speculatively) Drink?

ALEC: Yes—nothing queer about him.

CECELIA: Money?

ALEC: Good Lord—ask him, he used to have a lot, and he's got some income now.

(MRS. CONNAGE appears.) MRS. CONNAGE: Alec, of course we're glad to have any friend of yours—

ALEC: You certainly ought to meet Amory.

Exhausted, but with an excited tiredness fueled by escape from the source of the exhaustion, we settle into my Tahoe. We pull out of the dank subterranean parking garage, head west, and aim for the mountains.

 

****

 

Earlier in the week, I sent the first of many emails to the woman about the pending trip, writing,

What made you want to go to Asheville this weekend? I LOVE that you suggested it!...What about the long run planned on Saturday morning? We could do it in Asheville pretty early and still have time for breakfast/lunch there before having to come home…. My only concern is not having enough time because we have to come back early. What do you think?

 

The drive to Asheville isn’t much different. We fill every minute of the trip by planning our every minute in the mountain town. I think, later, of the “great wave of emotion” that washes over Amory and Rosalind, or Francis Scott and Zelda:

 

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening—always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day…. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified….

 

There, the analogy of Amory and Rosalind’s affection to our own ends, and Fitzgerald’s more selfish interest in Asheville, cut from the same cloth of my new ale affection, begins. Once the sixteen-story Buncombe County Courthouse rises from the rolling hills, my gentlemanly concerns for the lady on my right desert me quicker than a shine runner on Chatham Road. And my passion for beer sets in.

 ****

 In the three years since this initial After Beer Era trip to Asheville, the city’s craft beer community has grown and matured faster than the hop bines crawling heavenward in front of Highland Brewing Company off Old Charlotte Highway. One indicator of the region’s maturation has been the birth of Asheville Beer Week, whose second annual celebration ended last month. Among other rare offerings during the past week, Highland poured a 2008 vintage of its perennially popular Cold Mountain Ale and a keg of its Auld Asheville Ale, brewed in 2009 for the brewery’s fifteenth anniversary.

And perhaps it’s a good sign that Asheville lost the title of Beer City USA in 2013 after four years of holding it. The designation is essentially an online popularity contest conducted each year by homebrewing pioneer and Brewers Association president Charlie Papazian. But the country’s established beer hubs—San Francisco, San Diego, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, and Seattle—have never won, and Portland last claimed the title in a tie with Asheville in 2009. Maybe “Lil’ Ole Asheville,” as beer writer Anne Fitten Glenn once wrote, has finally grown up.

There’s no one in the “Paris of the South” that keeps a finger on Asheville’s beer pulse as reliably as does Glenn. She’s covered the handful of new breweries that have opened this year, including King Henry VIII-influenced Wicked Weed and Thomas Wolfe-inspired Altamont (The English monarch reportedly said, “Hops are a wicked and pernicious weed, destined to ruin beer,” and Wolfe used “Altamont” for his depiction of Asheville in the roman à clef Look Homeward, Angel.)

Glenn was an invited guest when two of the country’s largest craft beer makers, Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, announced their plans  to build breweries in Buncombe County—if one can call restaurants, walking and cycling trails, outdoor music venues, and boat access a “brewery.” Another Colorado-based beer outfit, Oskar Blues, started its second canning line in December about thirty miles away from Asheville at the mouth of the Pisgah National Forest in Brevard. This brewery, the maker of Dale’s Pale Ale, that so valued Glenn’s community contacts and her ability to navigate the region’s deep-rooted and convoluted brewery political structure that it hired her to work in marketing—but not before she wrote the definitive “intoxicating history” of the local beer she holds so dear.

 ****

In the years since I first met Glenn, shortly after my first After Beer Era trip to Asheville, she’s become my favorite Asheville drinking buddy. One of the first beers we shared together was a Wedge Iron Rail India Pale Ale at Clingman Café, a small sandwich shop across the street and around the corner from the brewery in the River Arts District. Glenn told me this is only place to find Wedge’s beers outside the brewery’s taproom—Wedge owner Tim Schaller is as regular a sight at the restaurant as the “Tim Special” is on the menu: egg, fresh mozzarella, tomato, and pesto on ciabatta.

Schaller bought our beers that day from a small table on the other side of the main seating area before Glenn and I rushed to speak on a panel about the local beer economy at the Southeast Land & Real Estate Conference. The crowd in the musty hotel event space prved as electrifying as the conference’s name; I was glad I had that lunch beer in me.

Glenn released her book chronicling “the region’s explosion into a beer mecca” earlier this year. And one figure is inextricably tied to that story.

In the summer of 1935, and then again in 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald installed his mentally unstable wife in Highland Hospital, a well-regarded treatment facility in Montford. Meanwhile, the author lived in rooms 441 and 443 at the Grove Park Inn in nearby north Asheville. During that time, says Glenn, a local bookstore owner and friend, using the discarded bottles in Fitzgerald’s hotel room for reference, estimated that Fitzgerald consumed up to thirty beers per day. She wuotes his secretary:

I haven’t ever, before or since, seen such quantities of beer displayed in such a place. Each trash basket was full of empties. So was the tub in one of the baths. Stacks of cases served as tables for manuscripts, books, supplies of paper.

Glenn notes a local’s memoir “paints a fairly sympathetic portrait of a tortured artist who produced more in the way of extramarital affairs and empty beer cans than short stories.” (Although it should be noted that Fitzgerald wrote “The Crack-Up” and started The Last Tycoon during his time at the Grove Park Inn.)

The beer geek in me yearns to know Fitzgerald’s beer of choice, hoping he preferred bottles of locally-made homebrew (his own homebrew recipe resides in Princeton University’s collection of his papers) to Pabst Red, White and Blue, one of the few beers available in Asheville after Prohibition. But given the bounty of bottles and cans allegedly in his possession, Glenn’s assumption is probably correct: “it likely was most any kind he could get his hands on.”

In the mid-1930s, Fitzgerald could have legally bought beer containing only six percent alcohol-by-volume (ABV) or less in North Carolina, and most of the widely available beer was a good bit less. It’s anyone’s guess if he would have enjoyed a small-batch collaboration in 2010 between the Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa and Highland called The Great Gatsby Abbey Ale. At seven percent ABV, he wouldn’t have had a problem partaking in his usual quantities. “[M]erely a vapid form of kidding,” Fitzgerald might say, as he wrote in Paradise.

 ****

 There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight…into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes…. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.

 I sometimes long for the Before Beer Era days, a time when I didn’t plan weekend trips around brewery visits, beer dinners, and tap takeovers. Like Amory’s short, yet vast feast, the beer festivals and tastings occasionally become overwhelming—too little time to enjoy too many different malted libations. But as I learned on that first beer-centric trip to Asheville, there is no going back.

On the Saturday afternoon before we plan to return to Charlotte, the woman and I sit outside at a wooden picnic table, its legs settled into the gravel that fills the parking lot next to the river at Wedge. The wood is fresh—its color many shades lighter than the dirty sand on the banks of the French Broad a few hundred feet away. A metal bucket of spent peanut shells sits between us and our pint glasses rest on the table; the pings of the husks the only thing to break the silence. It’s no surprise, to either of us, that the end is near:

 

ROSALIND: I'd rather keep it as a beautiful memory—tucked away in my heart.

AMORY: Yes, women can do that—but not men. I'd remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness.