The Paris Review's Blog, page 851

Reader, I married him.

Brother Sun

I credit the singer-songwriter Donovan with introducing me to Saint Francis of Assisi. I credit also Franco Zeffirelli, director of the Donovan-scored Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972), and Paolo Belardo, my tenth-grade Italian teacher, who suspended all learning for a week to screen the film. But my low-heat fervor for the saint developed mainly as a result of my response to Donovan’s soundtrack, a gentle, hippie sing-along that became the most durable joke of my sophomore year. In lyrics like “Fish are in love with the water / Birds are in love with the air,” my friends and I had encountered a record amount of sappy earnestness, to which the only appropriate teenage response was ridicule. To make each other laugh, we would assume dreamy looks, loll our heads to one side, and warble about birds, butterflies, and flowers, about personified celestial bodies, while swaying our arms and hips. Were we popular? Not always.

But in my barely hidden self, I actually had no problem loving flowers, and the basic facts of Saint Francis’s life held immense appeal. A good-looking party boy, a prince of the popolo, renounces his possessions and societal privilege; embraces nature, poverty, and charity; walks the Umbrian countryside barefoot; clothes himself in a coarse habit bound by a cord; builds quaint churches; preaches penance; does mercy unto lepers—and amazes everyone. What more could a teenager ask than to stun the world with his previously hidden quality of being? Read More »

All the Difference

We were excited to learn, on this the fiftieth anniversary of his death, of the new cache of Robert Frost documents that has come to light. The letters, photographs, and recordings come from the personal collection of Jonathan Reichert, a friend of the poet’s, and will be on display at State University of New York at Buffalo starting Thursday. Just to whet your appetite, here’s Frost reading “The Road Not Taken.” It’s good, for those of us who have come to take the poem for granted, to take the words out of the yearbook context and rediscover its forthright beauty.

 

Southern Holiday, Part 1

Maude Callen's clinic in Berkeley County.

On Tuesday morning, December 11, I drove a rented 2013 Chevrolet Impala out of Chapel Hill on I-40 East, the first miles of a twenty-two-day road trip around the South, with points as far west as New Orleans and Shreveport. These were the first Christmas plans I’d made on my own in forty-six years.

Without children, my holidays since 1995 have alternated between my parents’ house in eastern North Carolina and my in-laws’ in Pittsburgh. Over a nearly identical duration, I’ve been researching the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith. Now I’m working to finish my last book on him. The first stop on this Southern holiday journey is Berkeley County, South Carolina, a former slave-plantation region near the coast where Smith photographed his 1951 Life essay, “Nurse Midwife.”

The truth is that I’m tired of Gene Smith. Read More »

Chatterley Sex Advice, and Other News

In today’s adaptation news, Campbell Scott will be helming Didion’s  Book of Common Prayer .
Remember these words:  sub-compact publishing . You are witnessing the future.
Not ready for the future? Here’s Virginia Woolf’s bread recipe!
Ten things not to say after sex, according to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Finnegans Wake is selling like gangbusters in China.

 

 

 

 

Going Soft

In Rome, I was cocky and competitive and altogether my usual self because the apartment we’d rented for the night was completely white—sheets, pillows, towels—and much bigger than expected, with a cow’s head mounted on a wall and great, familiar coffee and I might as well have been in Istanbul or Moscow or New York or the many other places I had lived and worked, and I was thinking, after all that, how hard could Italy be? What’s the big deal? Yet that concern about experience or mastery or difficulty was to miss an essential point. That a good thing doesn’t have to be hard.

At the pub downstairs, the guy my wife knew knew from Baghdad was telling my wife how to get into Syria. I sighed, feeling everything retighten. A light rain fell as we passed through the piazza, and I saw cops and I stared at their guns. Under heat lamps, we hefted tall glasses of blood-dark wine and when we ordered the final carafe, all this big talk about the usual terrible things, there was nothing to do but float home on a red river. Read More »

Nevermore

On this day in 1845, “The Raven” was published in the New York Evening Mirror. It obviously follows that we should bring you a recording of Christopher Walken reading Poe’s poem.

The Worst Best Coloring Book Ever

For the literary child—or inner child— in your life!

Norman Mailer

Joan Didion

Gore Vidal

Joyce Carol Oates

James Baldwin

Back on the Shelf: At the Seminary Co-op

Brian Koprowski, Chicago Theological Seminary, University of Chicago.

Nostalgia is a dangerous feeling to indulge. It transforms other people, including old versions of one’s self, into figures whose lone purpose is to lend texture and credence to a diorama of the past. And just as an elementary-school diorama of, say, a Roman frontier fortress, no matter how meticulously researched and constructed, can never convey the totality of what it would have been like to stand sentry in Germania circa 70 A.D., so the version of the past constructed by nostalgia is a distortion, albeit one that relies upon memory (itself a kind of distortion, as neuroscience tells us) and experience to weave what is in essence a fairy tale.

Nostalgia’s refractions aren’t limited to people, of course. Its influence extends to places, too, refusing to acknowledge that places have presents and futures—presents and futures that often don’t involve one’s self, hence the willingness to ignore them—but only pasts: your pasts. Whenever I visit the University of Chicago, for instance, Hutch Courtyard is never Hutch Courtyard, a pleasant flagstone enclave that’s served as a favored warm-weather gathering spot for generations of undergraduates, but instead the place where I sat reading Moby-Dick when I learned that my grandmother had died. That’s it. All of the hopes and dreams, joys and fears toted through that spot by millions of human beings for more than a century, brushed aside by my solipsistic longing for a past that wasn’t nearly as honey colored in the living as it is in the remembering. I recall seeing a picture of Prince Charles passing through Hutch Courtyard during a 1977 visit and thinking, There’s Prince Charles walking right by the spot where I was when I heard that Grandma died. Nostalgia, which presents the past as a meadow of boundless possibility, is actually quite constricting. Read More »

O Tempora! And Other News

If you’re not Pride and Prejudiced out, here’s a playlist. (We think it should end with “Chapel of Love,” but that’s a matter of opinion.)
Barnes & Noble will be downsizing, closing twenty stores a year for the next ten years. (Did you know they had that many stores?)
In related news, the Globe and Mail is, depressingly, slashing its books section. That’s right: “Slashing.”
At least the word puberty is no longer censored! Judy Blume on the bad times.
It would seem that Harry Potter, like the Bible, can be used to support any argument.