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theparisreview: Writes filmmaker Tom Bean, “George’s first...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:42 -0400

Writes filmmaker Tom Bean, “George’s first piece of ‘participatory journalism’ was to pitch in a baseball all-star game at Yankee Stadium in 1958. He wrote about his experience for Sports Illustrated and then expanded the piece into a book called Out of My League, which he got his friend and mentor Ernest Hemingway to blurb (Hemingway called the book ‘Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived’). This is the event that launched George’s career as a writer. One of our goals for the movie was to have George narrate as much of his own story as we could (cobbled together from interviews, TV appearances, and speeches), and I think this scene serves as a good illustration of that approach.”

Plimpton! opens May 22 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center.

largeheartedboy: “The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature”...

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:01:21 -0400

largeheartedboy:

“The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature” print from Pop Chart Lab lists famous drinks from books and movies, complete with recipes.

Would You Want to Be Friends With Humbert Humbert?: A Forum on “Likeability”

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:30:17 -0400

newyorker:

Our Page-Turner blog asked a group of novelists how often the question of likeability has been posed about their characters: http://nyr.kr/16CpZCS

Illustration by Roman Muradov

theparisreview: “Last night, I turned to an old favorite, Bring...

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:01:27 -0400

theparisreview:

“Last night, I turned to an old favorite, Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven’s memoir of his years in Hollywood. Niven had a successful second act as a raconteur and author, and his wit and urbanity are well known. But what I’ve always liked is how kind and generous he is about fellow actors: without ever resorting to gossip, he manages to give us fully-realized portraits of icons like Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. My favorite is the chapter on Fred Astaire, who comes off as modest and down-to-earth. Both men were widowed young, and their close bond is palpable. Niven also relates, amusingly, that Astaire was shy about dancing socially, and apparently embarrassed his daughter Ava at a school father-daughter dance with his ineptitude.”

Read more of what we’re loving this week, including Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special and Emily Witt on sex in San Francisco.

anticipatedstranger: Gertrude Stein by Andy WarholGertrude...

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:42:38 -0400

anticipatedstranger:

Gertrude Stein by Andy Warhol
Gertrude Stein by Francis Picabia

theparisreview: In a note to Fitzgerald, Hemingway shows he was...

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:30:42 -0400

theparisreview:

In a note to Fitzgerald, Hemingway shows he was better at being aggressive than passive-aggressive.

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

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Thu, 16 May 2013 14:01:13 -0400

oldloves: Bill Murray on Gilda Radner: “Gilda got married and...

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:02:02 -0400

oldloves:

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live

millionsmillions: “Would I have carried myself with the same...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:50:41 -0400

millionsmillions:

“Would I have carried myself with the same swagger, or faced adversity with such feminine resolve, without Albertine as my guide?…I was drawn to a striking, remote face—rendered violet on black—on a dust jacket proclaiming its author ‘a female Genet.’” Patti Smith’s favorite little-known book.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scaredykat/328174549/

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:49:04 -0400

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scaredykat/328174549/:

girls girls girls

If only the ladies were actual MLS holders. Speaking of Girls, Girls, Girls, Vince Neil has a brand new tattoo parlor on the Las Vegas strip and somehow that’s more disturbing than stripper “librarians.”

50 Incredible Tattoos Inspired By Books

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:01:35 -0400

50 Incredible Tattoos Inspired By Books:

radiocontrolledsalsa:

While I’m not looking for any new ink at the moment, some of these are pretty spectacular ideas.

On Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:45:17 -0400

By Joanna Klink

As I sit here at my desk in Northwest Portland, in a lime-green apartment full of skylights, sandwiched between Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books, reading the dynamic and very brave poems my grad students at Portland State are writing—I find myself thinking, in the most basic terms, about what it means to be instructed by a poem. What are we talking about when we say we turn to poems for instruction?

Richard Hugo is the presiding poet-spirit in the M.F.A. program where I usually teach, The University of Montana. From my (weirdly sunny) perch here in Oregon, casting a long glance back at my home state, I want to consider one of Hugo’s most-celebrated most-anthologized poems, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” from his 1973 volume The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, in the hope of finding some provisional answers.

The poem opens with “You might come here Sunday on a whim.” (you can read the entire poem at the end of this post) The “you” in that first line seems to be a visitor, not unlike the poet himself, who, in his essay “The Triggering Town,” recommends to fellow poets that it might help “to use scenes (towns perhaps) that seem to vivify themselves as you remember them but in which you have no real emotional investment other than the one that grows out of the strange way the town appeals to you, the way it haunts you later when you should be thinking about paying your light bill.”

Continue reading →

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Wed, 15 May 2013 14:01:27 -0400

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Tue, 14 May 2013 17:01:34 -0400

The Maggie Nelson Seminar – Exercise #3: Poem(s)

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:48:30 -0400

We hope you have enjoyed the Tin House Seminar: Maggie Nelson thus far. For those of you new to class, read a full description of the project.

Last week, the seminar read The Red Parts: A Memoir and completed the second writing assignment. If you didn’t get a chance to read The Red Parts this week, these supplements will get you up to speed (and really make you want to carve out the time to sit down and read Nelson’s haunting memoir about the murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, in 1969:

Eve Conant, “A Death in the Family,” The New York Times Book Review

Kimberly Young, “Interview with Maggie Nelson,” Chapparal Review

Wayne Koestenbaum and Maggie Nelson in The Poetry Project Newsletter

This week, the class has focused on The Latest Winter and Shiner. Read the reviews here: Jordan Davis, The Latest Winter in The Constant Criticand David Gunton, Shiner in Jacket #19.

Exercise #3: Poem(s)

Pick two poems from Shiner, The Latest Winter, and/or Something Bright, Then Holes. Identify an element in each poem that you’d like to play with in your own work. The element can be macro (a particular approach to subject matter, a certain kind of voice, a pattern of repetition, a strategy of ligature, etc) or it can be at the level of the sentence (syntax, orthography, lineation, acoustics, diction, etc). Drawing upon both of the elements you’ve selected, write 2-3 pages of poetry (a single poem, or two, or several—up to you).

duttonbooks: kateoplis: Shiba Ryotaro library | Tadao...

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:13:39 -0400

duttonbooks:

kateoplis:

Shiba Ryotaro library | Tadao Ando

Get a load of this library.

theparisreview: “[Chatwin]’s making you feel the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:13:21 -0400

theparisreview:

“[Chatwin]’s making you feel the contradictions, the exhausting contradictions, that make a place.”

Reading In Patagonia in Patagonia

Photo via

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Tue, 14 May 2013 14:01:12 -0400

someforeignletters: Maurice Sendak: The Moon Jumpers, 1959

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:28:55 -0400

someforeignletters:

Maurice Sendak: The Moon Jumpers, 1959

theparisreview: The sun is a drum ...

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:22:53 -0400

theparisreview:

The sun is a drum
the moon is a cymbal
The flow of time is caught in a cup.

Cupful by
cupful by
cupful time
is cut; if not,
we should choke.

By night in the northern quarter the Dipper
or Northern Ladle or Bushel Measure
turns like the hand of a clock measuring time
although no punctuating tick or tock
notches its arc, sunset to sunrise.

Its handle divides the year into seasons,
pointing towards earth at dusk in autumn,
upward at dusk in spring, in winter
twilight west, in summer east.

And so it is and was and shall be
but not world without end (and neither
was it so from the world’s beginning).

—Mary Barnard, from “Song for the Northern Quarter”
Art Credit Christopher Pratt