The Paris Review's Blog, page 873

Daydream Believer

The daydreaming thing was my brother’s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. The fifth year wasn’t because he was dim; as an architecture major he was required to stay ten semesters. Sometime in that span, on one of our eight-hour family trips from New Jersey to drop him off or pick him up, my parents took me to Luray Caverns. I must’ve been about eleven years old.

God almighty! Who knew they kept all that stuff underground? I was agog! Great dripstone formations that looked like melting candles. Stalactites and mites the shades of fall vegetables and seashells. If Luray wasn’t exactly the hidden world I’d been looking for, it was something close: it was the key that freed my imagination from my own experience. (About three or four years earlier I’d sat straight up in bed one night, shaking from the sudden, unwished-for understanding that one day I would die and there would be no more me on earth. I understood this not only as a personal catastrophe but a tragedy for the world as well. What would it do without me? That moment, I think, paved the way for my imagination to gallop ahead of my life in the here and now. It prepared me for Luray.)Read More »

When Poets Cook, and Other News

“Few poets, it would seem, are willing to claim as favorite any old run of the mill standard recipe.” When poets cook.
Dream homes built for books and the nerds who love them.
The Institute of Egypt in Cairo, which suffered damage and losses last December, has been given four thousand rare books.
“The reason we decided to do handmade books, sewing them instead of having them stapled, is because we wanted to make durable books that would be precious. When you get a Crumpled Press book, you can feel that it was handmade by somebody, you can feel slight irregularities in it. It’s a precious object that you’re not going to throw away. So if I make 250 or 1,000 copies, those books are going to carry on.”

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Act Fast: Offer Will Not Last!

This Friday, November 16, is your last chance to take advantage of our special mug deal!

If you’ll recall, one side of this classic diner mug displays our logo. The other side (not pictured here):

“The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental fiction in a long time.” —Newsweek, 1953

It’s yours with a one-year subscription or renewal; your subscription will begin with our winter issue.

Order now! Offer good for U.S. addresses only.

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Refusing Heaven

The fall I moved to Washington from Nashville, Tennessee, the poet Jack Gilbert gave a reading at the Library of Congress. During my first days in the city, Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven had become for me something of a vade mecum. On wobbly Metro rides to and from work (my first experience with public transportation), I read and reread the book, drawn to its fierce, lapidary verses as a kind of antidote to homesickness and the political blather emanating from Capitol Hill.

The poems trembled in my hands on the train yet somehow steadied me. Gilbert’s lines might have come from any continent in any century. They wouldn’t have seemed so out of place scrawled on papyrus or etched in stone.

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In Dalí’s Surreal Home

In January, Open Culture ran this terrific tour of Salvador Dalí’s house on the Costa Brava, where he lived from 1930 to 1970 and hosted much of the modern world. As author Joseph Pla described it,

The decoration of the house is surprising, extraordinary. Perhaps the most exact adjective would be: never-before-seen. I do not believe that there is anything like it, in this country or in any other…. Dalí’s house is completely unexpected…. It contains nothing more than memories, obsessions. The fixed ideas of its owners. There is nothing traditional, nor inherited, nor repeated, nor copied here. All is indecipherable personal mythology…. There are art works (by the painter), Russian things (of Mrs. Gala), stuffed animals, staircases of geological walls going up and down, books (strange for such people), the commonplace and the refined, etc.

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Secret Doctrines

Theosophy Hall of the United Lodge of Theosophists on East Seventy-Second Street in Manhattan is one of those strange, wonderful, time-warp spaces you can find all over the city, if you know where to look. From threadbare armchairs in the lobby to a library of occult books in the basement, it’s the kind of place that hasn’t changed in decades. It could be a museum, if someone hung a velvet rope.

I was at the ULT on a recent Wednesday evening to attend the weekly study group on The Key to Theosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. My interest had been piqued by a new biography, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality, by Gary Lachman, who (for those interested in such trivia), was the bassist for Blondie before reinventing himself as a writer on occult topics. A man in a brown sweater vest and a silver-haired woman wearing gold-rimmed glasses led the discussion from a semi-circular stage that, under pink and purple lighting, looked like an old-fashioned science fiction set. With the ancient furnishings, solemn proceedings, and casual talk of 1,500-year reincarnation cycles, the scene was delightfully weird.Read More »

The Word of the Year, and Other News

Oxford American Dictionaries have chosen the word of the year: GIF. The rationale? “The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned twenty-five this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier.”
The NYPL celebrates the pick thusly.
Biographers falling for their subjects: an occupational hazard?
“Any biography of a living, breathing and active figure who’s still at the height of his powers is going to have to strike a delicate balance between access and objectivity ... It can be very tricky, and it requires real finesse.”
Speaking of: the ten grumpiest authors in literary history.

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Jack Gilbert, 1925–2012

“Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?” —The Art of Poetry No. 91

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In Which Philip Roth Gave Me Life Advice

A bialy.

Roughly two weeks ago in the dining room of a Jewish deli on the Upper West Side (whose name, for legal reasons, must remain undisclosed) I served Philip Roth his usual nova, eggs, and onions (egg whites only); a bialy (hold the cream cheese and butter); and a large, fresh-squeezed orange juice. He was once a more regular patron, but I hadn’t seen Roth at the deli for nearly a year—he does reside in Connecticut—and during the last two months I’d been looking forward to his arrival with heightened anticipation. With my debut novel, Balls, now published, I would conquer my nerves and give him a copy. Sure, many months before I had heard him say in an interview that he no longer read fiction. But his reading the book was not the point: having worshiped at the Roth altar for more than half of my thirty-three years, it was simply something that had to be done. And here was my chance.

He was seated alone at a table, reading on an iPhone and awaiting his check. I approached Roth with less trepidation than I had anticipated, given that in past years, the author’s presence had been enough to make me physically ill and render my hands so shaky that I would drop plates, spill coffee, trip on air. He looked … well, he looked like Roth: ruddy skinned, dark eyes stoical, bushy eyebrows untamed, shoulders back in a noble posture.Read More »

A Letter from Gary Shteyngart’s Dog

The following letter was sent by Gary Shteyngart’s dog to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Dear BAM,

Last night, while my favorite human Gary Shteyngart was dripping gherkin juice and pickled cod balls onto his green polyester shirt, I noticed a tear trickling down his face. I peered over his slumped shoulder and saw on the interwebs that in a couple weeks, some famous people are gathering at BAM to make fun of him. Not only that, you monsters are actually selling tickets to the public for this public humiliation of my friend. BAM staffers, I say to you: this small, furry excuse of a human being already suffers terrible asthma, an overabundance of gnarled body hair, and bouts of midnight gas. He has trouble buttoning his own shirts, doesn’t own a comb, and bribes his own MFA students to write his books. His hardship started years ago, first as a young Russian émigré tortured at Hebrew School, when he arrived in America speaking no English with a mere two shirts and a bear coat, and then again at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, when his fellow immigrant teens would sabotage his Bunsen burner to get ahead. He struggled to make money in his 20s by writing grants for programs like “Torah Tots,” attempting to secure foundation money for the important purpose of introducing 3-year-olds to the murders and rapes of the Old Testament. In short I say to you, hasn’t Gary suffered enough? Why must you persecute him more? And also will this be live streamed on the web, so I can watch from the comforts of my luxury dog crate?

Sincerely,

Felix the Dachshund

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