The Paris Review's Blog, page 898
July 26, 2012
A Rosier Crucifixion: The Erotic World of Henry Miller
Henry Miller has just been laughed at for rhapsodizing about Walt Whitman. He’s sore. A woman enters the apartment. Henry drags her into the bathroom. He fastens his “lips to her red mouth.”
“Please, please,” she begged, trying to squirm out of my embrace. “You’ll disgrace me.” I knew I had to let her go. I worked fast and furiously. “I’ll let you go,” I said, “just one more kiss.” With that I backed her against the door and, without even bothering to lift her dress, I stabbed her again and again, shooting a heavy load all over her black silk front.
I closed my copy of Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion restored my tray table to its upright position, and avoided eye contact with the gaunt elderly woman in the aisle seat as I squeezed past her legs. Read More »
TPR vs. Vanity Fair: The Sense of an Ending (With Pictures!)
Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7 Total
TPR |1|0|0|1|3|2|0 7
VF |3|0|1|0|0|1|1 6
Last Tuesday marked the end of this summer’s softball season, and The Paris Review went out in style, coming from behind to take a spirited contest from arch nemesis (one of many, surely) Vanity Fair. It was a contentious affair, bookended by two controversial calls: a play at home plate in the first, and a play at first in the bottom half of the seventh. Due to superior oratory skills (and truth), the former went our way, resulting in a TPR run; due to the notion that a team cannot possibly be right twice in the same game, the latter went to Vanity Fair. (It ultimately only provided a brief respite from the inevitable.) Between the spats were many cheers, a few tears, and a lengthy discussion on the virtues of run-on sentences (decidedly none at all).
Instead of prattling on, I now present a gallery of photos, taken and curated by TPR’s own Alyssa Loh.
Before I go, a quick note to my teammates: Hell of a season. I’ll see you when I see you.
The Paris Review: fashionable on the field and off.
Noah and Justin
The lineup
Kara
Team TPR (2012)
Helpmeets, Field Guides, Burning Questions
“Few couples have had as complicated and even posthumous a relationship as Friderike Burger and Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer who was and continues to be one of the most widely translated German-language authors in the world.”
The eternal question, really: What would happen if fonts were superheroes?
The other eternal question: What would happen if great authors were Olympics commentators?
Vote for the best YA novel ever written.
A field guide to the American blurb. An endangered species?
The Man-Booker long list is announced.
Oh no! Citing rising operating costs, the Bowery Poetry Club joins the list of closing literary landmarks.
July 25, 2012
The Finalists: Win a Bicycle Contest
Our inbox runneth over! We asked you to describe the facing image in three hundred words—in the style of Ernest Hemingway, P. G. Wodehouse, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Bishop, or Ray Bradbury—and some two hundred of you did just that. We had hoped to announce a winner yesterday, but it took us this long just to read through all the manly terseness, Jeevesian whimsy, California deadpan, villanelles (“Write it! Pedal faster”), and Martiana. Plus a surprising number of entries that went their own way and ignored the “in the style of” part of the contest—thereby forfeiting the chance to win a bicycle but showing impressive powers of imagination when it comes to devils and flappers on wheels.
Scroll down to read excerpts from our finalists. And again, many thanks to Velojoy and Hudson Urban Bicycles!
The Drones’ First Annual Charity Tour De Blandings and Fancy Dress Ball took a wrong turn when Freddie Widgeon and Billie Mainwaring arrived. Somehow each had misread the invitation and got the idea that the cycling was fancy dress. Billie came as a “Muse of Modern Dance,” all chiffon and gauze and trailing scarves. Isadora Duncan on a velocipede. Freddie had on a fearfully complete devil’s costume, though how he’d pedal in those hoof-shaped boots got right past me.
—Elliot Nesterman
112 Greene Street
Exterior of 112 Greene Street. Photo by Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone.
I met with Jessamyn Fiore in the air-conditioned back offices of David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery in late June to discuss her new book, 112 Greene Street , a series of interviews with artists who helped found or were associated with the eponymous location, one of the first alternative art spaces in New York City. Opened in 1970 by artists Jeffrey Lew, Alan Saret, and Gordon Matta-Clark, 112 Greene Street served not as a commercial gallery but as a space in which artists could create and exhibit works collaboratively. Their participation in the burgeoning SoHo art scene also included cofounding FOOD, a pay-what-you-wish restaurant known for its delicious soups. Back then, the neighborhood more closely resembled a small village, rather than the glamorous, high-end shopping district it is now, and all of the artists associated with 112 Greene Street who were interviewed by Fiore remember that communal period fondly.
Fiore has a direct lineage to the groundbreaking gallery: her mother, Jane Crawford, was married to Gordon Matta-Clark, who died from pancreatic cancer in 1978 at age thirty-five. Known for his daring “building cuts”—literal dissections of buildings slated for demolition—Matta-Clark was, by all accounts, charismatic and widely admired and loved. Fiore herself ran a nonprofit art gallery in Dublin for several years before relocating to New York, where she curated an exhibition at Zwirner about 112 Greene Street last winter. She is warm, easygoing, and candid; it’s easy to see why the artists, whom she considers her friends, would trust her to preserve their memories in print.
Rare Books, Sharks, and Ink
Terrible beach reads.
At UVA, rare-book school is in session.
Journalist (and former Paris Review editor) Philip Gourevitch on editing, writing, and his work on genocide.
Famous writers and their tattoos.
Sergei Dovlatov featured on Russian radio. (In translation!)
The sad fate of Dawn Powell’s journals.
July 24, 2012
Advice to a Young Illustrator
In 1961, a thirty-three-year-old Maurice Sendak wrote his editor, Harper & Row’s Ursula Nordstrom, about his self-doubts as a writer. Letters of Note presents her response. It is full of great advice, but we especially love this:
The great Russians and Melville and Balzac etc. wrote in another time, in leisure, to be read in leisure. I know what you mean about those long detailed rich novels—my god the authors knew all about war, and agriculture, and politics. But that is one type of writing, for a more leisurely time than ours. You have your own note to sound, and you are sounding it with greater power and beauty all the time. Yes, Moby Dick is great, but honestly don't you see great gobs of it that could come out? Does that offend you, coming from a presumptuous editor? I remember lines of the most piercing beauty (after he made a friend there was something beautiful about “no more would my splintered hand and shattered heart be turned against the wolfish world.”) But there are many passages which could have been cut.
Presciently, she added:
33 is still young for an artist with your potentialities. I mean, you may not do your deepest, fullest, richest work until you are in your forties. You are growing and getting better all the time.
No kidding: Sendak would write Where the Wild Things Are two years later, and the rest is children’s-book history!
Dogs, Scientologists, and Ipanema
Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, Ipanema
“The Girl from Ipanema” is fifty! (Not the real one—she’s sixty-seven—but the bossa nova classic.) It is the second-most-covered song, after “Yesterday.”
A graduate student at King’s College London has discovered a previously unknown 1909 short story by Katherine Mansfield in the university library. Read an excerpt from “A Little Episode” here.
What these writers think about when they think about running.
What Maira Kalman thinks about herself.
The most beloved dogs in literature? We think Nana Darling was robbed.
Portrait of the artist as a young Scientologist: a 1969 BBC interview with a teenage Neil Gaiman, then a believer.
July 23, 2012
Letter from India: The Best Restaurant in the World
My friend edits a travel magazine. She lets me review hotels. This means that I can stay at nice hotels free in return for a short review. (The magazine doesn’t pay either; it’s done “on trade.”) I can write four or five hotel reviews a year. Whenever I suggest more, my friend (who is a close friend of more than ten years) goes silent.
I recently arranged to stay at the Hotel in Delhi for two nights on trade. Rooms there start at six hundred dollars, and (uncharacteristically) they included everything—food, minibar, spa, airport pick-up and drop-off—in the trade. I mean it was all, to use their very polite and reassuring word, complimentary. Alcohol would have cost, they did say, but I am not a person who drinks anymore. I recently lost my privileges.
The thing about a free hotel stay is that you pay in time, in tours, and in the unspoken requirement that you ask questions, feign amazement, and jot notes about wall hangings, historic meetings, and persons who have sat in so-and-so chair. (“How do you spell that name? So wonderful. So he really sat here? May I sit?”)
The Paris Review's Blog
- The Paris Review's profile
- 305 followers
