The Paris Review's Blog, page 924

Smokable Songbooks, Controversial Vodka

Lindsay Gibbs's Titanic: The Tennis Story recounts how tennis players and Titanic passengers Dick Williams and Karl Behr met on a rescue ship and went on to become Davis Cup partners—as historical fiction. Unfortunately, the subjects' descendants aren't thrilled about the novel, particularly by the fact that the launch party will be sponsored by Iceberg Vodka. The words in poor taste were bandied.
Snoop Dogg has released a smokable book. That is all.
"The first time I went to [the British National Science Fiction Convention], all I could see was a sea of white, male faces ... I found it very disheartening, and I knew I could either go away and never go to another con or try to do something about it."
After writing a poem critical of Israel, Günter Grass has been banned by that country's Interior Minister.
In honor of the Mets' fiftieth, you can get e-versions of Jimmy Breslin's Queens-centric classics.
In honor of the Mets' sweep, you can read The Paris Review interview with die-hard Mets fan P. G. Wodehouse.
Cartoonist Christoph Niemann draws the books on his nightstand.

Music of the Heart?

disclosures about her boyfriend's domestic violence) and even more so when you think that Phil Spector masterminded the arrangement. Public outcry ultimately forced Spector to pull the record.

Grizzly Bear is only one of the recent bands to cover the song (it was a Hole staple, too) and make us wonder if some things, even today, can't be safely padded with irony.

Drinking with Carp

My dear Editors,

This weekend is slated for sun. I would like to celebrate out on my fire escape, with a cocktail and a mean read. For the optimistic lush, what combination is best?


Sincerely,

Sauced

I mean, if you want drinking without considering consequences—which is to say, not The Lost Weekend or Under the Volcano—I guess you can't top the beats: Big Sur, On the Road, any Bukowski. If you want your whiskey straight up, try The Long Goodbye. How can you go wrong with a novel that begins, "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox, he was drunk." That said, the only story I can think of that deals specifically with a warm-weather drink is Roald Dahl's Pimm's-featuring "Georgy Porgy," which no one could call soothing.

How is one to live in a post-Revel world?

Why, with the stacks of past Paris Review and New York Review of Books issues the event celebrated, of course! (A few vitamin C tablets and gallons of water never hurt, either.)

What should I give my seven-year-old daughter to read for Passover?

The Carp in the Bathtub. But NB: she will never eat gefilte fish again.

Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.

Vote for TPR in the Final!

Thanks to our fan loyalty, we have made it to the finals in the. But can we take down worthy rival Georgia Review? It's a clash of the Titans! But our money's on our readers. Vote now!

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Wilmington, NC

A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows.This is the back view from my office. It's raining. You can see a wall of the old garage (which still has a deep oil pit inside, from when more people worked on their own cars). The magnolia that hangs over the backyard is blooming. When it does, we open the door to the sleeping porch upstairs, and the whole house fills with the smell. My wife will cut one of the flowers and let it float in a bowl of water on the kitchen table. Magnolias drop hundreds of large seed pods once a year—they come crashing down from the tree. I'm always worried one of them is going to land on somebody's head (they're heavy enough to hurt). We spend about a month just picking them up. They look like brown-green grenades but are bursting all over with bright red seeds. The leaves, when they turn brown and fall, are hard and brittle. That's a problem down here, because tiny pools of water form on them, and the mosquitoes lay eggs there. You have to pick them up fast. In short, a big magnolia is a lot of work, but I would never get rid of this one. The week or so of blossoming is worth everything. Also, the branches cover the whole brick path from the back door to the driveway. Even in a heavy storm, you can just walk along dry. Sometimes I pat the tree's trunk and thank it for that, or just to say hello. Once, when we first got home from a trip of two months, my daughter—who was four at the time—hugged the tree long and fiercely, saying nothing, before she ran inside. I think it's sort of the guardian of the house.

—John Jeremiah Sullivan

Staff Picks: Tea Cakes and Putin and Vets, Oh My!

"Some poems smack of a gentility one would like in some moods to smack out of them." Even before I read that sentence—about the sainted Elizabeth Bishop!—I knew Maureen McLane was the poetry teacher for me. Her first book of criticism, My Poets, is the survey course of my dreams: a long, loving argument with and about everyone from Chaucer to Gertrude Stein. As befits her subject, McLane is both plainspoken and lyrical, falling at times, as if naturally, into verse as clear as her prose. —Lorin Stein

I remember a college professor commenting that he was never sure Stephen Crane "knew what he was doing" when he dropped all sorts of clues and oddness into his stories. I had the same thought while reading Barbara Comyns's 1959 book, The Vet's Daughter. Does all this strangeness serve a purpose? Does the bizarre ending mean something? Whether the answer is yes or no, I still enjoyed the novel more than anything I've read in months, and I've already ordered the rest of her books. —Sadie Stein

Robert Caro—never disappointing—had a particularly good piece in the April 2 edition of The New Yorker, on John F. Kennedy's assassination but from LBJ's perspective. It's a bizarre and fascinating tale of how history is formed both by monumental events and by intimate details. And that famous photograph of his swearing in—as he stands grim-faced and flanked by Lady Bird and Jackie—will never look the same to me again. —Nicole Rudick

It wasn't the intimidating length or experimental style that had me wondering, Wait, what?, when reading Finnegans Wake. It was my damned curiosity about the "careful teacakes" that Joyce introduces. My foodie heart salivated at the thought—where do I get one of those? Luckily, I stumbled upon A Trifle, a Coddle, a Fry: An Irish Literary Cookbook last weekend and was thrilled to find a recipe for these mysterious treats alongside sixty-six other recipes gathered from food references in the writing of twelve Irish authors, including Beckett and Shaw. Crack it open for a satisfying literary and gastronomic adventure, and let the sating begin. —Elizabeth Nelson

Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin has kept me up the last three nights. —L.S.

This week I attended a reading of Dante's Inferno inside Saint John the Divine cathedral, a massive Gothic-revival church near Columbia University. If you missed it, mark the date. It happens annually on Maundy Thursday (which, for those needing to brush up on their Christian calendar, commemorates the day of the Last Supper). It was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. A wooden pew is really the only place one should learn about Hell. —Allison Bulger

LOL Cats

Out of Print is a new series in which we feature our favorite library discards, used-bookstore finds, and family hand-me-downs.

Circa 2002, I forced my eighteen-year-old brother to drive me to a church basement in the outer suburbs of Chicago to watch a community-theater production of a play about the life of poet Stevie Smith. As I recall, we got into a screaming fight on the way there, and he further enraged me by falling asleep during both acts and leaving the theater several times for cigarette breaks. In truth, the show was abysmal, and in retrospect–given the number of soliloquies by a lead with a highly unconvincing British accent and very distracting Dutch-boy wig–his behavior was downright saintly.

All of which is to say, I was obsessed with Stevie Smith. I liked her idiosyncratic verse and her strange novels; I was interested in her latter-day career as a beatnik cult figure; I loved the book of her collected sketches, Some Are More Human than Others. But the root of my obsession was a little-known text I'd picked up in a London charity shop, 1959's Cats in Colour.

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Dear Don Draper, Relax Already

Dear Don Draper,

I just got off the phone with my mother, and she's a bit upset. This is not your fault, I know. Mothers! You never really had one, so let me explain. They're a complicated bunch, prone to outbursts of emotion. Always clutching their chests like their hearts are exploding; always assuming any discoloration is cancer.

For example, your ex-wife, one of the worst mothers around. One minute she's slinkily horny, and the next she's screaming at Sally for no reason. One minute she's stuffing her face with Bugles—they still have those by the way—and the next she's convinced that she's dying, ruining your fun by forcing you to face mortality. See what I mean? And Betty's not even Jewish!

Speaking of Jewish: my mother. "Daddy and I almost plotzed," she tells me, "when that Jewish father said that ridiculous prayer. I mean, they could have had a normal Jewish person. You know, someone who went to NYU or Parsons even. Not some schlub in a madras jacket."

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Vote for TPR in the Tournament of Lit Mags!

Final 4 Bracket

Dear readers,

This is a matter of honor. If you love and believe in The Paris Review, now is the time to show what our fans are made of. We are currently in the Final Four of the Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour Tournament of Literary Magazines.

As they explain,

"[Oxford American] will now take on another program with a shining pedigree, The Paris Review, in what promises to be a battle of titans. The surprises this year are all on the other side of the bracket. Many thought that the Georgia program had grown too old and could never return to its glory days under coach Lindberg, but their execution has been flawless, and they play a measured style that has everyone buzzing about the old days. The real Cinderella story of the tourney, however, has been Ecotone, a tiny program that, thanks in part to the recruiting pull of recent grad (and power forward) Edith Pearlman, has made a surprising run, littering the courts with higher seeds."

You know what to do. (If you don't, it's vote in comments.) You gotta believe.

Walk Like Updike, Live Like Lowell, Eat Your Words

[image error]John Updike predicted New York's newly announced 6 1/2 Avenue in a 1956 New Yorker article: "As a service to readers who are too frail or shy for good-natured hurly-burly, we decided to plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue."