The Paris Review's Blog, page 821

In Patagonia in Patagonia

While I was traveling in South America, a friend, a writer, heard I was heading down to Patagonia. At the end of an e-mail he broke into all caps: “DRINK LOTS OF WINE FUCK SHIT UP RIDE A HORSE AND READ SOME BRUCE CHATWIN.” Fortunately, my boyfriend and I had been drinking wine and fucking shit up plenty in Argentina already. While I like horses in theory, I haven’t had the desire to get on one since I saw National Velvet as a child. His last command, though, made me curse myself—I’d meant to buy a copy of the Chatwin before leaving the states. I figured it was now unlikely I’d find a copy in English. The next afternoon, we entered a Palermo Viejo bookstore. High on a shelf in the brief English-language section, I excitedly located a shrink-wrapped copy of the Penguin Classics edition of In Patagonia.

In his smart introduction, Chatwin biographer Nicholas Shakespeare describes his own experience of reading In Patagonia in Patagonia: “One morning, in a gesture soon to be repeated by a generation of backpackers, I was waiting for a bus in the dusty scrubland west of Trelew when I dug out a book I’d brought with me … I’d never heard of the author, but his was the only contemporary book I could find about my destination. I opened the first page and I read the first paragraph and that, really, was that.” Shakespeare summarizes the oft-told circumstances surrounding the book’s inception: There had been a bit of mangy, ancient hide in Chatwin’s grandmother’s cabinet of curiosities when he was a boy. It was from a brontosaurus, he’d been told, from Patagonia. This scrap—which actually belonged to a Patagonian ancient sloth—ignited a spark that lingered in Chatwin’s imagination. As an adult he’d already been Sotheby’s auctioneer and an archeologist before turning to writing. After years of work on an unsuccessful manuscript, he was reminded of his desire to visit Patagonia by octogenarian designer and architect Eileen Gray. It had long been her dream to visit Patagonia, as well, and she told him to “go on my behalf.” So he did. It is said—perhaps mythically—that he sent a cable to his employer, the London Sunday Times Magazine, stating, “Have gone to Patagonia.” He wasn’t heard from for months.

The manuscript he delivered to his editor, which was published in 1977, was career defining. It has been credited with reviving the moribund “travel writing” genre. It’s also safe to say it birthed intrigue about Patagonia in the minds of his many readers—Shakespeare’s “generation of backpackers.” In a story about hiking in Chilean Patagonia from early this year in the New York Times, Ondine Cohane writes that she’d wanted to travel to Patagonia ever since she’d read In Patagonia twenty years before, in high school. She writes that the book “drew me both to the place and in no small way to the profession of travel writing itself.” While Shakespeare is an exception to this trend—he had visited Patagonia in his youth before returning with Chatwin in tow—he states that of all the authors he’d read on the place, “none had validated my Patagonia as Chatwin had.”

I admittedly didn’t know much about Patagonia before going there; it was my boyfriend’s dream more than it was mine. Back home, I had glanced through some Lonely Planets and Rough Guides and only half-pictured lots of empty space and perhaps some beautiful peaks. By the time I’d finished Shakespeare’s introduction to the Chatwin, I felt convinced I’d never needed a book as badly as I needed In Patagonia in Patagonia. Read More »

Happy Birthday, Mrs. Dalloway!

“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.” ―Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, published on this day in 1925

 

Auden Journal Found, and Other News

“I am happy, but in debt … I have no job. My [U.S.] visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.” A journal W. H. Auden kept in 1939, believed lost, has been found. (Not sure where; details are vague.) It will go to auction next month.
Meet the “grand impresario of American etymologists” and his “unique self-published journal, Comments on Etymology.”
David Hare is adapting Behind the Beautiful Forevers for the London stage.
Reading the stoop books of Brooklyn.
Speaking of the borough of kings: a topless book club.

 

In Session

Back-cover photo from the author’s first-edition copy of Gideon’s Trumpet.

In the late 1950s, the U.S. Supreme Court was as controversial and obscure as it had ever been. Little understood in the best of times, it had recently outlawed segregated schools over the objections of Southern states and expanded protections for criminal suspects—protections that Congress was already scheming to revoke. More than ever, the public needed the press to explain the workings of the court. But the newspapermen of the day were barely equipped for the task: they lacked the legal expertise to properly interpret a Supreme Court opinion, if they ever read one, and wire-service reporters habitually wrote their stories on the court’s opinions before they were even issued.

Yet while the justices resented being portrayed as “a mysterious body operating behind a veil of secrecy,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren once grumbled, they made little effort to communicate with the public. They generally refused to speak to the press, and until the 1920s, they delayed the distribution of printed copies of their opinions, forcing even the most diligent reporters to base their stories on a single hearing of the opinion from the bench. (And CNN and Fox News know how accurate first impressions can be.) “All of official Washington except the Supreme Court is acutely conscious of public relations,” wrote the New York Times’s Supreme Court correspondent Anthony Lewis in 1959. “The Supreme Court is about as oblivious as it is conceivable to be.”

Lewis was thirty years old in 1957 when it fell to him to justify the ways of the Supreme Court to men. A Harvard graduate who had already won a Pulitzer for national reporting, Lewis was hired by the Times’s Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston, who hoped to improve the paper’s coverage of the court. To do the job right, Lewis would need training, so Reston sent him back to Harvard on a one-year fellowship at the law school. Lewis would have made his mark simply by learning enough to parse opinions and report them. But he went further, writing eloquent articles that teased out larger truths from legal minutiae. Professorial by nature, Lewis treated newspaper readers to a continuing legal seminar over their morning coffee. After Lewis died this past March, at the age of eighty-five, he was eulogized as having transformed American legal journalism. Read More »

Mr. Men as Social Critique

We meet Mr Messy—a man whose entire day-to-day existence is the undiluted expression of his individuality. His very untidiness is a metaphor for his blissful and unselfconscious disregard for the Social Order. Yes, there are times when he himself is a victim of this individuality—as when he trips over a brush he has left on his garden path—but he goes through life with a smile on his face.

This series of reviews from 2010 is, in a word, brilliant.

 

Garry Winogrand and the Art of the Opening

Garry Winogrand, El Morocco, New York, 1955, black-and-white photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Scroll down for a slide show of photographs by Winogrand, with audio interviews conducted during the March 6 opening of his posthumous retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Garry Winogrand (1928–84) was the first photographer to realize how much juicy comedy could be squeezed out of New York’s art and literary scenes. During the late sixties, early seventies, when he would arrive with his Leica at a Museum of Modern Art opening or a costume ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday party, he would sometimes announce to the crowd, “I’m here,” as if an event did not officially begin until he was there to record it. 

He was more right than even he might have guessed. Were it not for his mordant photos of those ragged, sybaritic evenings, best represented in the 1977 book Public Relations, it would be hard to imagine them. Mad Men and other dramatic re-creations tidy up the social anarchy of those years; Winogrand’s camera didn’t. From the haphazard lines of men and women awkwardly at ease, uniformed in black tie or a too-tight harem top, heads wreathed with cigarette smoke and piles of teased hair, ghostly moues cut with rictus smiles and rows of perfect teeth, he fashioned dark instants of sublime lunacy. Everyone and everything seems false or imbecilic in his party pictures, his eye exposing secret acts of disintegration within rituals of supposed public glee.

Behind his mockery of the self-satisfied and the strivers, though, is a winking acknowledgement that anyone can appear stricken when blasted by a flash at 1/125 of a second. Photography turns one and all into fools, including—especially—artists like himself, eager to hunt life and trap as many of its fleeting variables as possible inside a 35 mm frame but doomed to return empty-handed far more often than not. Read More »

A Reading Rainbow, and Other News

Tessa Hadley on how to write tedium, interestingly.
Speaking of alleviating boredom: good reads for a long flight.
Can there ever be too many literary-tattoo roundups? Well, whatever your answer, here’s a good one!
LeVar Burton schools Stephen Colbert and Carey Mulligan on The Great Gatsby. But you don’t have to take his word for it!
Dan Brown apparently deals with writer’s block by hanging upside down.

 

Mother May I

This Sunday, give your mother the gift of great writing—along with our anniversary tote bag. For a limited time, when you subscribe, you get both: the perfect gift.*

*Offer good for US subscribers only.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What We’re Loving: Foot Juggling, Dancing, and Coregasms

“‘Quinoa cranberry pilaf,’ I wrote down. And then, ‘coregasm.’ Because that was the subsequent topic of discussion: women who have spontaneous orgasms during yoga. The barista was saying how wonderful it was that the issue was receiving attention, coregasms being something a lot of women experienced and were frightened to talk about. Those days were over.” Emily Witt on sex in San Francisco. —Lorin Stein

Last night, I turned to an old favorite, Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven’s memoir of his years in Hollywood. Niven had a successful second act as a raconteur and author, and his wit and urbanity are well known. But what I’ve always liked is how kind and generous he is about fellow actors: without ever resorting to gossip, he manages to give us fully-realized portraits of icons like Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. My favorite is the chapter on Fred Astaire, who comes off as modest and down-to-earth. Both men were widowed young, and their close bond is palpable. Niven also relates, amusingly, that Astaire was shy about dancing socially, and apparently embarrassed his daughter Ava at a school father-daughter dance with his ineptitude. Today is Astaire’s birthday: I’m celebrating by watching this over and over. And if you want a living tribute, my colleague (who is bashful about writing staff picks himself) says that the New York City Ballet’s current revival of the Astaire-inspired Jerome Robbins piece, “I’m Old-Fashioned,” is terrific. —Sadie Stein

I frequently visit The Public Domain Review for its wealth of interesting and unusual out-of-copyright tidbits, and its recent video on the Kawana Trio, described as “Artistic Foot Jugglers,” is no disappointment. It was filmed by Hans A. Spanuth for his Original Vod-A-Vil Movies series; you can find a handful of his films online that are a hard to match, however limited, record of the vaudeville acts that were so popular at the turn of the century. —Justin Alvarez

I’ve read a couple of Kate Christensen’s novels, but right now I’m enjoying the food writing on her blog. I find that many food blogs are picture-heavy and prose-devoid, but Christensen’s posts feature no photos and the suggested recipes are eloquently imprecise (most-used measurements include glug, handful, and knob). I’m looking forward to Christensen’s upcoming Blue Plate Special, an autobiographical account of her life in food, out in July. —Brenna Scheving

 

How to Land a Top-Paying Pierogi Makers Job

Selected from the AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.