The Paris Review's Blog, page 867
December 6, 2012
Scary Children Reading, and Other News
Even terrifying people love books.
“A bedbug had crawled out of a copy of True Blood while she was reading it.” When library books get bedbugs.
“It is awful to think I’ll probably be regarded as some sort of authority on Brazil the rest of my life.” Benjamin Moser on Elizabeth Bishop and her adopted homeland.
Might selling used books become illegal?
“Al and the TAs are like reality-show TV contestants: regular people who suddenly have a huge audience.” Elliott Holt takes an online literature course.
December 5, 2012
The Paris Review Mug: Now for Sale!
When we announced our special mug offer, cries were heard across the land: We already subscribe! We want to give the mug as a gift! We want two, three, four! Rest easy: the special-edition Paris Review diner mug is now available to everyone, for all your coffee-drinking and gift-giving needs.
One side features our logo in black; the other, praise for the magazine from Newsweek in 1953: “The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time.” We at the TPR offices can vouch for it. Supplies are limited. Buy it now!
Vispo
Amanda Earl, Sun.
The Paris Review’s interviews have long featured single manuscript pages from among the subjects’ writings. They are meant to show the author at work, his or her method of self-editing, of revision—an illustrative supplement to the process described at length in the conversations. To me, though, they always exist first as instances of visual artistry. The particularities of each writer’s markings are immediately perceptible: the way Margaret Atwood’s handwritten lines appear impatient and vital in contrast with the prim logos of the SAS Hotel stationery on which she penned a poem; the way Yves Bonnefoy’s long, spidery insertion lines give physicality to the pallid rows of words; the way David McCullough’s xed-out typewritten phrases become so many tiny, busy intersections. In the same way, I’ve always found the looping inscriptions of Cy Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings, in particular Cold Stream, to be a kind of magic—the secret scribblings, writ large, of a mind at work. (It’s no coincidence that Twombly worked as a cryptographer in the army.)
I’m struck by the frequency, in Paris Review interviews, with which authors describe writing as being a visual activity. John Edgar Wideman imagines his drafts as “palimpsests.” Don DeLillo finds that “the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality … They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.” Read More »
We Have a … Winner? (NSFW-ish)
The votes are in, the people have spoken, and the winner of the 2012 Bad Sex in Fiction Award is Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, for her novel Infrared. Here is the publisher’s description:
Award-winning author Nancy Huston follows her bestselling novel, Fault Lines, winner of the Prix Femina, with an intensely provocative story about a passionate yet emotionally-wounded woman’s sexual explorations.
After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects.
William Styron in Letters, Part 3
William and Rose Styron.
To Norman Mailer
June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy
Dear Norman:
I note that you began your last letter: “I’ve been kind of depressed lately,” and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I’ve been both depressed and elated since you last heard from me—elated at having just married a most admirable girl (perhaps you’ve gotten an announcement) and depressed because for roughly your own sort of reasons—an inability to get going again at this writing game. To complicate the situation, a few days ago, barreling down the Autostrada in an effort to catch up with Irwin Shaw’s Ford convertible (we had been on a two-car picnic at Angio) I smacked into a motorscooter going full tilt and glued an Italian all over the front end of my car. The guy was made of brick and will survive with nothing more than lacerations, and fortunately for the legal end of the thing it was his own fault (he was a moron, for one thing, and for another had been driving with a glass eye) but such incidents always leave me spookily aware of just how vulnerable we all are. Perhaps they’re valuable as such from an ah-tistic point of view, but I doubt it.
Pelican Art, and Other News
Pelican porn: a celebration of their amazing paperback art.
Porn-porn. In libraries.
Watch Jeannette Winterson talk about her Lancashire childhood, on location.
Meet Small Demons, the literary search engine.
The unfinished David Foster Wallace dictionary.
December 4, 2012
The Rise and Fall of Dandy
On December 4, 1937, the first edition of children’s comic book The Dandy was published, also marking the first known use of the speech bubble. Today, the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, marks the final print edition of The Dandy. The speech bubble lives on!
Reading the Viaduct
Starting out for the southern end of the Reading Viaduct means walking alongside a live railroad track, vigilant for the sound of a CSX freight train approaching from behind. Your destination is the mouth of an abandoned tunnel, which will pull you into stretches of almost total darkness thirty feet below ground. You aren’t headed for the tunnel because you love tunnels, but to glimpse the diversity of landscapes that makes up Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct before it becomes the city’s answer to New York City’s Highline. You are there for the tunnel as much as for what’s on the other side: the promise of meadowland and prairie hiding in plain sight.
The Reading Viaduct may one day become a linear park transecting downtown Philadelphia. Should that happen, the Viaduct would be like no other park in the world. The three-mile stretch runs thirty feet underground at one end and emerges as an elevated line thirty feet above street level on the other. Since the 1980s, it has been abandoned. Sections of the Viaduct may undergo development as early as next year. Read More »
WPA Wants You to Read
Melville House has a terrific slide show of WPA posters about books and reading. (The Library of Congress has even more!) The art is inspiring enough; the sentiments behind it, even more so. A few of our favorites, below.
William Styron in Letters, Part 2
Rose Burgunder and William Styron.
To John P. Marquand, Jr.
April 17, 1953 Rome, Italy
Dear Jack:
I received your telegram, and I must say that Rose and I feel that there would be nothing more delightful than to play Byron with you for a while, and we were especially intrigued by the line which said a special tour was being arranged, or would be arranged, “in our honor,” which conjured up visions of open, bullet-proof sedans, police escorts, and jonquils being thrown into our faces by a frantic populace. It would indeed be nice. But we have talked this thing over and have decided that in view of the fact that we will probably be getting married within the next few weeks, and that Rose’s brother and wife are expected at any moment, it would put a strain on our nervous resources to come, at least my nervous resources, already depleted by a soggy, constant drunkenness brought on in part by the prospect of marriage, by insomnia, by clots, and by a general spiritual enervation resulting from the realization that already, going on 28, I am a wash-up as a writer and fit only to do the “Recent & Readable” part of the book section in Time. In other words, I will be going through a crisis this spring and although I don’t doubt that Greece is an excellent place to weather such a storm, I hope you can understand my position. I hope also, by the way, that when you finish diddling your Greek lady-in-waiting you will come back to Rome in time to take part in the shoddy ceremony which is due to be enacted in the city hall. That will be some time toward the end of this month, no doubt, or the first week or so in May.
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