The Paris Review's Blog, page 907

Friday: Me

Gombrowicz in 1965.

We told each other our dreams. Nothing in art, even the most inspired mysteries of music, can equal dreams. The artistic perfection of dreams! How many lessons this nocturnal archmaster gives to us, the daily fabricators of dreams, the artists! In a dream everything is pregnant with a dreadful and unfinished meaning, nothing is indifferent, everything reaches us more deeply, more intimately than the most heated passion of the day. This is the lesson: an artist cannot be restricted to day, he has to reach the night life of humanity and seek its myths and symbols. Also: the dream upsets the reality of the experienced day and extracts certain fragments from it, strange fragments, and arranges them illogically in an arbitrary pattern. Read More »

Perfume, Pikes, and Parsing

HBO has apologized for allowing Game of Thrones to display a decapitated head that bears a striking resemblance to President George W. Bush.
Penning Perfumes: when words make scents.
Choose your Highsmith.
The OED: Not infallible?
The dialectics of Twitter.
Color me royal: what’s on our art editor’s bookshelf.

TPR v. n+1: Vindication

Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7 Total

TPR |0|0|4|0|0|7|X 11
n+1 |0|0|0|1|0|0|0 1

Last Monday afternoon two literary magazines played a softball game. As you can see by the above scoreboard, Team Paris Review won handily. The short version: we played quite well—hitting sharp singles and putting the fun in fundamentals and whatnot—while n+1 was ... not at their best. Whether it was due to the absence of baseball’s most notorious novelist, Chad Harbach, or an off day on the mound by noted scoundrel Marco Roth, “the best goddamn literary magazine in America” (—Mary Karr) lacked its usual vigor and fortitude. Digging deep into the archives, it appears this is a new development: one of the most heartbreaking defeats in TPR softball history came two years ago against this very squad. Our victory, while certainly a boon for all things moral and just, failed to properly quench our thirst for vengeance, leaving us instead with a numb, hollow “meh” feeling, a sensation that, I would imagine, is akin to eating a piece of cake that is neither chocolate nor made out of ice cream.

Read More »

Announcing the Winner of Our Tote Contest!

Last night, our kickoff event at the Strand was red-letter. We laughed (at Amy Warren’s masterful channeling of Dorothy Parker), we cried (at Wallace Shawn’s interpretation of Denis Johnson’s “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking”), and we marveled at the winner of our Strand-Paris Review tote-bag design contest (submitted by Houston’s Roque Strew). Did all the free wine have anything to do with these emotional reactions? We prefer to believe it was due to the overwhelming talent!

Thursday: Me

Witold and Rita Gombrowicz with their dog Psina in Vence, France, 1967.

Should I tell or not? A year ago, more or less, the following happened to me. I stopped in a café on Callao Street to use the bathroom … All kinds of drawings and scribblings were on the walls. Yet the unconscious urge would never have assailed me, like a poisonous dart, if I hadn’t accidentally fumbled across a pencil in my pocket. The pencil turned out to be an ink pen.

Enclosure, isolation, the certainty that nobody would see, some sort of stillness … and the murmur of water whispered: do it, do it, do it. I took out the pencil. I wet the tip. Read More »

Translating, Restoring, Interring

The long, strange history of Dorothy Parker’s ashes.
Translating Emily Dickinson (into modern English).
Thomas Pynchon (finally) allows his books to be sold digitally.
At the newly launched the Slant, Erica Jong talks … well, everything.
The Arizona Department of Transportation turns to haiku for their latest dust-storm PSAs.
Hemingway’s Oak Park childhood home has been purchased. The new owners say they plan a Hemingway-esque restoration.

Watch: Dorothy Parker “Reads”

We have long been intrigued, fascinated, and terrified by the ingenious work by the folks behind Poetry Reincarnations. While the reincarnated Walt Whitman and the Ruined Maid deserve mention, in honor of tonight’s Strand event, we bring you Dorothy Parker “reciting” “One Perfect Rose.”

Tonight! Join Us at the Strand

Don’t miss it! Tonight at 7 P.M., join us for the kickoff of our event series at the Strand, where (in addition to enjoying performances, mingling, and wine) we’ll announce the finalists of our tote-bag contest.

To celebrate our collaboration, we asked you to submit designs for our newest tote bag. And did you deliver! Below, find a few of our favorites! (Thanks, everyone!)

Read More »

Wednesday: Me

A page from Gombrowicz's diary.

Yesterday at the Polish Club, I dropped by right at the end of the steamrollering of my soul and works. The paper that was positive about me was the work of Karol Swierczewski and Mrs. Jezierska read a paper against. A discussion followed at whose conclusion I appeared.

Thomas Mann, an experienced connoisseur in these matters, said that an art that grows in the light of recognition from the very beginning will undoubtedly be different from an art that must win a place for itself with difficulty, and at the price of much humiliation. How would my work have looked if from its very inception it had been crowned with a laurel wreath; if even today, so many years later, I did not have to devote myself to it as to something forbidden, shameful, and inappropriate? Read More »

50 Shades of Wednesday

Familiar-looking cover art.
Bret Easton Ellis wants you to know he is not joking about his desire to adapt 50 Shades of Grey for the screen.
(Someone’s already called dibs on lingerie.)
How said screenplay might read.
Speaking of NSFW: Can you, like Martin Amis, tell which sex wrote which sex scene?
Jennifer Benka is the new executive director of the Academy of American Poets.
A Ray Bradbury Museum? Maybe ...
Speaking of, childhood homes of twenty famous authors.