The Paris Review's Blog, page 923

World Book Night, Shakespeare Day

Happy birthday, Shakespeare! Talk to us about cities.
Are writers exploited?
The seventeenth annual Los Angeles Festival of Books took place last weekend. Check out the fantastic lineup.
A roundup of women’s travel diaries through the ages.
Busloads of librarians and book-vending dogs! How did you celebrate World Book Night?

Exit Art, 1982–2012

Jeannette Ingberman and Papo Colo in front of the gallery's 578 Broadway location.

Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman founded Exit Art in 1982 as a space for "unusual" art, which is saying a lot given that this was a time when artists were bisecting public plazas with giant panels of unfinished steel, using subway trains as canvases, and performing year-long pieces that consisted of never going indoors. That February, Papo and Ingberman curated their first exhibition, "Illegal America." The show explored the ways in which the practice of art had occasionally run afoul of the law, from Charlotte Moorman playing cello in the nude to Chris Burden ordering his assistant to shoot him in his arm. The catalogue consisted of a series of artists' statements housed in a box, which was sealed shut. In order to open it, you had to tear through a dollar bill glued across the flaps—an illegal act, albeit of the mildest kind.

Exit Art's mandate was clear from the very beginning: the brash claim that they represented an "exit" from the traditional art world; a neck-and-neck passion for politics and aesthetics; that gag of a catalogue, the kind that implicates gallerygoers as more than passive collectors of names on placards. Yet their remarkable, thirty-year existence on the fringes will soon come to an end. Read More »

The Smell of Books; the Power of 'Wuthering Heights'

The Department of Justice is suing several large publishers, plus Apple, for alleged price collusion on e-books.
How not to squander a book advance: a primer from Emily Gould. (Hint: leather vests don't count as investments, whatever the lady at the shop may say.)
Meanwhile at the Awl: how not to ruin a book tour. Servicey!
Wuthering Heights … home of wind turbines? Concerns over wind farms in Brontë country.
While rhapsodizing about the "smell of books" is something of a personal peeve, this video, in which University College London chemists analyze the distinctive perfume, is interesting. Apparently, the bouquet is "a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness."
Welcome to the Storyverse.
Günter Grass speaks out on his ban from Israel.

Dear Don Draper, Stop Ignoring Me

Dear Don Draper,

I worry that you may not be getting these letters. I have yet to receive a response, and after seeing last night's episode, I'm convinced that either the mail isn't arriving or you're willfully ignoring my advice. Especially the stuff about smoking. I mean, cancer is one thing, but watching you light up with a hundred-plus fever and a hacking cough made my own tonsils burn and balloon.

The bad news from the future is there's still no cure for the common flu. Or maybe there is but Big Pharma won't let us have it. However, we do know this: despite what your ads may say, cigarette smoke doesn't soothe a sore throat. Shocking, I know. Try some Halls and a neti pot.

Read More »

A Badjohn in Harlem: An Afternoon with Earl Lovelace

Readings take place in bookstores, bars, even laundromats, yet an old-fashioned home salon is a rare and special thing nowadays. In Harlem, especially, the living-room salon evokes a storied past of the 1920s Renaissance soirées of writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. When you step into the grand, rambling Graham Court apartment of poet Quincy Troupe and his wife, writer Margaret Porter Troupe, you are immediately transported to a vibrant, sun-drenched world of creativity. One room has been turned into a gallery of contemporary artwork inspired largely by the African diaspora (together the Troupes edit the NYU journal Black Renaissance Noire); a large sitting room, where a makeshift table/bar has been set up, is crowded floor to ceiling with books; while the living room, with rearranged sofas and twenty or so folding chairs, has been transformed into an intimate space for the day's honored guest and audience. And all around, there are sweeping views across the Harlem rooftops and off into the hazy distance.

On a recent Sunday, the great Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace was in town to be feted at the Troupe's Harlem Arts Salon. The house was packed and festive, and the wine was flowing. I remember first discovering Lovelace in the late eighties—and I still have my worn copies of The Wine of Astonishment and A Brief Conversion and Other Stories to prove it. These books were wonders in themselves: sleek, colorful paperbacks published by the beloved imprints Aventura's Vintage Library of World Literature and the Heinemann Caribbean Writers series. Yes, Lovelace—his name, too, had its own special ring—evoked a whole world, a vision of Trinidad and the Caribbean that was bursting with life, with its own rhythm of dreams and vexed sorrows, its calypsonian sages and steel-pan virtuosos, its gurus and Garveyites and badjohns, or street-corner rebels. Lovelace was a revelation (as was his compatriot Sam Selvon, whose short story "My Girl and the City" still sends thrills through me), and over the years, I suppose, I've missed him without even realizing it. Read More »

Happy Birthday, Gatsby; Good-bye, Britannica

The eighth installment of Kramers Ergot moves toward (cerebral) genre.
Rule Britannia: An appreciation of the legendary eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
This Rizzoli boutique is far more lovely than one would expect a department-store bookstore to be.
What are the most frequently shoplifted books? Crowdsourcing the answer!
Guess who "enjoys working with Amazon"? Robert Gottlieb, that's who.
On the "Dark Lady of American Letters": Margaret Fuller was a divisive figure due to "the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others … The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."
Bookish weddings.
Happy belated birthday, Great Gatsby.

Terry Winters

Terry Winters works on the fifth floor of a Tribeca walk-up. It is a steep climb, but the space is serene and open, decorated with a few large Nigerian ceramics, a framed Weegee photograph, and of course Winters's own drawings and watercolors (he does his oil painting in a studio in the country). It is also remarkably free of clutter for an artist who describes himself as an "image junky." Winters spends a lot of time here—"I try to show up for the job," he remarks when I ask him about his daily practice—though he does not have much by way of routine, allowing the needs of the project to shape his day.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Winters's first solo show at the Sonnabend Gallery. Now represented by Matthew Marks, Winters's work continues to be informed by the ideas that animated his very first exhibition. One constant—besides his New York studio, where he has worked from the very start of his career—has been his use of found images, which he faithfully collects and assembles into collages that serve as miniature laboratories for future paintings. But the collages, with their layers and juxtapositions, their invocation of modern technology (several feature visible URLs, linking to universities and laboratories) and natural forms, are also lovely in their own right. Read More »

Scandals, Contests, and Noms de Guerre

RIP Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental novelist who has died at eighty-nine. Quoth the New York Times, she had "the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others."
The ALA's list of 2011's most-challenged books includes To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hunger Games, and My Mom's Having a Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler.
Amazing movie-title stills.
England's poet laureate takes on the Pendle Witches. "This was a grisly affair, even by the debased standards of the day, with two of the women hanged at Lancaster castle aged over eighty and blind, another probably driven mad by a disfigured face with one eye lower than the other, and all ten convicted largely on the evidence of a nine-year-old child."
You surely know O. Henry's real name, and the pen names of the Brontes … but there are some real surprises on this !
At the New York Public Library, Thoreau goes digital.
Ninety-six-year-old Herman Wouk's latest novel, The Lawgiver, chronicles the making of a movie about Moses via "letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages."
A literary tattoo showdown.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. contest rewards the winner, appropriately, with classic pulp.

RIP Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental novelist who h...

RIP Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental novelist who has died at 89. Quoth the NY Times, she had "the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others."
The ALA's list of 2011's most-challenged books includes To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hunger Games, and My Mom's Having A Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler.
Amazing movie title stills.
England's poet laureate takes on the Pendle Witches. "This was a grisly affair, even by the debased standards of the day, with two of the women hanged at Lancaster castle aged over eighty and blind, another probably driven mad by a disfigured face with one eye lower than the other, and all ten convicted largely on the evidence of a nine-year-old child."
You surely know O. Henry's real name, and the pen names of the Brontes...but there are some real surprises on this !
At the NYPL, Thoreau goes digital.
96-year-old Herman Wouk's latest novel, The Lawgiver, chronicles the making of a movie about Moses via "letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages."
A literary tattoo showdown.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. contest, appropriately, rewards the winner with classic pulp.

Secret Gardens

It is nearly impossible to imagine the best-selling authors of today living in Downton Abbey grandiosity. Stephen King as the Earl of Grantham? J. K. Rowling as the Lady of the manor? Yet for Frances Hodgson Burnett, the wild popularity of her prolific literary output made such a home her reality for nearly a decade—where an overgrown, neglected garden inspired the Victorian author's most enduring work, The Secret Garden. That she is now solely regarded as a children's book author would have stupefied her, for she produced fifty-two novels and thirteen plays, the majority written for adults. When Burnett moved into Great Maytham Hall in Kent, she was a far more popular success than her cohort Henry James, who lived down the road; with her plays bringing in more than a thousand dollars a week, she was her era's equivalent of Rowling.

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