The Paris Review's Blog, page 841

Built of Books, and Other News

Dutch artist Frank Halmans makes book houses, in a series called Built of Books.
Pablo Neruda is going to be exhumed. Why? “Manuel Araya, who was Neruda’s chauffer during the sick writer’s last few months, says agents of the dictatorship took advantage of his ailment to inject poison into his stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago.” Stand by.
Simon Akam: “I hate Bridezillas for one simple reason: bride does not rhyme with god. Ergo, Bridezillas is not a functioning pun.”
The Vatican Library, or Bibliotheca Apostolica, is planning to digitize its eighty-nine thousand holdings.
In more accessible reading, a tribute to NYC bookstores.

 

A Week in Culture: Tim Small, Publisher, Writer, Filmmaker

DAY ONE

10:00 A.M. Having just quit my job (well, not just quit, but still) to dedicate myself to “my own projects,” I have the great luxury of being able to sleep until ten every morning. It’s disgraceful. I eat bread and butter and drink a cup of tea while I watch yesterday night’s NBA highlights.

I am in love with Kyrie Irving.

11:00 A.M. Yesterday I gave a copy of Train Dreams to my special lady, mostly because I started reading it again and it’s just a perfect-perfect gem of a book. I read more of it on the subway as I make my way to VICE Italy, my old office, where I have to pick up two pallets of new Milan Review books. They are both comics and they will both be presented at BilBOlBul, the independent comics festival in Bologna. One is the Italian translation of Prison Pit, a hilarious and ultra-violent graphic novel by Johnny Ryan, which is like a mixture between violent mangas, wrestling, and a twelve year old’s brain. I decided to title it Il pozzo di sangue, which literally means “the well of blood.” The other is called Rap Violent in the Ghetto Street and it is a collection of dumb, satyrical comic strips about rap and new-age philosophy (but filtered through a weird take on Italian popular culture) by Dr. Pira, an Italian artist who specializes in terrible drawings with an amazing sense of humor. It’s very hard to explain to Americans, but Italians seem to get it. Read More »

The Fun Part

“You can’t help it,” she said. “It’s a genetic thing. You weren’t allowed to own land in the Middle Ages.”

We were excited to see Sam Lipsyte on The Henry Review—and even more so when we realized that the video showcases the author reading from “This Appointment Occurs in the Past,” which first appeared in issue 201! Check it out.

 

The Art of Losing

Writers often hate talking about the book they’ve just written. On the one hand, books are an exercise in preservation, an old-fashioned sort of external hard drive. But for the author personally, a book can also be an elaborate act of forgetting. I wonder sometimes whether I’m driven to write about certain things, especially difficult things, just so I’ll never have to deal with them again; I’ll capture my subject and be done with it. From a particular angle, the writing life for me is a gradual process of self-erasure—first the crisp details go, then the plot, the underlying obsessions—or else each book is a box in which something of myself can be stored away forever.

I’ve never felt this shrinking, unpublic side of writing as strongly as I have with the book about real-life murders I just finished—work it’s just not possible for me to be “done with.” The book tells the stories of killings, but I didn’t want to recount the cases with the heavy hand typical of stories that turn on crime and justice. The buffoonish, Wayne LaPierre–esque division of the world into good guys and bad guys may be an easy, reflexive way to organize the life around us, a busy firing of synapses that adds up to something less than thinking. I never saw the point of it, but I admit, in this instance, it would have made terrible stories easier to forget.

It’s stressful to keep in the forefront of our minds how real lives are pixelated with good and bad acts. It’s even worse when the real lives you’re writing about belong to murderers, and the acts—at least one of them—are as bad as possible. After all my research and all the interviews, I felt the weariness I imagine sin-eaters feel—the people who take responsibility for the world’s sinful deeds so others won’t have to. Read More »

Happy World Book Day, and Other News

Happy World Book Day, the biggest book show on earth. May we suggest a sinister book cake?
In its honor: dream ballets and operas, based on books. (Fear and Loathing: the opera, anyone? Why not?)
Sam Lipsyte talks to The Henry Review about “overcoming despair,” hardcore, and assfuzz.
Barbara “Cutie” Cooper, a ninety-six-year-old LA blogger, has hit the best-seller list with a guide to staying married for seventy-three years.
This Sunday, you can hear Disturbing Fan Mail. Not in New York? Check out the letters sent to Mark Twain, and his trenchant responses.

 

Shakedown: Cossery in Egypt

Egypt’s political efflorescence has inspired a surge in Western readership for its novelists, and few have benefitted more than Albert Cossery. An expatriate who lived in the same Saint-Germain-des-Prés hotel room for the last sixty years of his life, Cossery’s eight novels celebrate a highly attuned lethargy, the slow-burning ire of pranksters and misfits. But with countless Egyptian activists jailed, tortured, and killed since 2011 by the entrenched organs of the state they sought to overthrow, one might dismiss the renewed interest in his works as well-meaning, if solipsistic. It doesn’t help that the man, who died in 2008, seemed to have written off the revolutionary enterprise altogether: “There’s nothing worse than a reformer. They’re all careerists.” But this was before last week, when the Harlem shake fully arrived in Cairo, and four guys arrested in their underwear prompted the youthful vanguard’s latest tack: the formation of a “Satiric Revolutionary Struggle,” which, as its first action, shut down the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood with a four-hundred-strong throng of syncopated dancing.

The reaction to the Harlem-shaking of the Brotherhood’s headquarters was more than a convenient vindication of Cosserian thought—it reminded us of a truth he gently but persistently nudged along his whole life: in a world of unsmiling authority and unswerving ambition, the prank is the apotheosis of political action, the only point of escape. Read More »

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

Crusoe in California

The September after I finished college, I moved to Orange County with my boyfriend. He was going to graduate school to study Shakespeare. I had decided to become a famous writer, though I had no idea how to go about it. The only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to be the kind of writer who gets shipwrecked on a South Sea island, and not the kind of writer who gets an M.F.A. in the Midwest. I belonged to the Melville school, I told myself. I was going to have a lot of adventures. Southern California didn’t seem particularly exciting, but it was closer to the South Sea than New York. At least, I thought so. I had a poor grasp of geography.

Unfortunately for me, I also belonged to the Alvy Singer school. (Would Melville and Alvy Singer get along?) I was a native Manhattanite who had rarely ventured west, and I soon found that Southern California didn’t suit me one bit. With no seasons, no job, and no driver’s license, I felt that I was going nowhere, both literally and metaphorically. Time seemed not to pass, and books were my only friends. Read More »

Fitness for Writers, and Other News

“Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” Mohsin Hamid’s fitness tips for writers.
The Vida results are in, and they are, as per usual, damning.
“I was bored at work and looking for a distraction.” Maris Kreizman on the birth of Slaughterhouse 90210.
It is World Read Aloud Day, should you have a child handy! (An adult will do too.)
Why it’s needed? #FictionalCharactersIWantToMarry is a thing. (Reuven Malter, not that you asked.)

 

March 5, 1815

“I was speaking to Mde. B. this morning about a boiled loaf, when it appeared that her master has no raspberry jam; she has some, which of course she is determined he shall have; but cannot you bring a pot when you come?”

—Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra