Tag Archives: The Paris Review

EDMUND WHITE ON JEAN GIONO

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“Recently I wrote a note to accompany Paul Eprile’s translation of Jean Giono’s MELVILLE, which quickly evolved into a novel that has nothing to do with the historical neurasthenic and queer-leaning Herman Melville and everything to do with Giono himself.

“Giono was deeply influenced by American writers… [He] first discovered Walt Whitman in French [and] later studied the ‘American Homer’ in English. He loved Whitman’s all-embracing egalitarianism and his pantheism, and the first part of Giono’s œuvre obviously owes a debt to this passionate revolutionary figure. In Hill, his first novel, Giono tried to illustrate two very Whitmanesque truths:

‘The first of these truths is that there are people, simple and nude; the other is that this earth fleeced [entoisonnée] with woods… this living earth, exists without literature.’

“Cutting down on metaphor and simile (he could never altogether forego them) must have been painful for Giono, so naturally gifted with that kind of eloquence. As Aristotle suggest in The Rhetoric, metaphor is one of the greatest ornaments of writing but also the one no one can learn.” — Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice

White’s blend of memoir and literary criticism is out now.

 

EDMUND WHITE, THE UNPUNISHED VICE: A LIFE OF READING (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Top image credit: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Above: Edmund White and Zadie Smith at a writers’ festival in Florence, 2017. Image credit: Édouard Louis‘ Twitter.

Below, from left: Bernard Buffet, Jean Giono, and Pierre Bergé in Manosque, June 16, 1950. Image credit: Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Paris.

FREDERICK WISEMAN IN CONVERSATION

“I like to think I know what works for me… I’ve learned to be quite hard on the material… Editing is always a manic-depressive special—moments when you overestimate what you have and moments when you underestimate, but neither is usually true.” — Frederick Wiseman*

Wiseman—one of our greatest documentarians—will talk about his new film MONROVIA, INDIANA this week at the 56th New York Film Festival.

The following weekend Wiseman will join Richard Brody (author of Cinema is Everything: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard) in conversation at The New Yorker Festival.

MONROVIA, INDIANA

Sunday, September 30, at noon.

Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, New York City.

Monday, October 1, at 6:30 pm.

Howard Gilman Theater, 144 West 65th Street, New York City.

 

FREDERICK WISEMAN IN CONVERSATION—NYFF LIVE TALK

Monday, October 1, at 7 pm.

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater, 144 West 65th Street, New York City.

 

FREDERICK WISEMAN TALKS WITH RICHARD BRODY

Saturday, October 6, at 10 am.

SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, New York City.

*Paris Review interview

Frederick Wiseman. Photograph by Corbin Smith.

HILTON ALS AT LAXART

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Hilton Als will present a new, unpublished text that is part of his ongoing body of work investigating various narratives of race and gender. The reading will be followed by a conversation between Als and poet Robin Coste Lewis,” an essayist and the Poet Laureate of the City of Los Angeles.*

(A conversation with Als will be published later this year in the forthcoming print issue of PARIS LA.)

 

HILTON ALS, Friday, June 29, at 7:30 pm.

LAXART, 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles.

laxart.org/events/hilton-als

See Hilton Als recent interview with Lisa Cohen in The Paris Review:

theparisreview.org/hilton-als-the-art-of-the-essay

Above: Hilton Als at The Artists Institute in 2016.

Below: Als. Image coutesy of the Steven Barclay Agency.

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LESLIE JAMISON AND MAGGIE NELSON AT SKYLIGHT

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This weekend at Skylight, Leslie Jamison and Maggie Nelson will discuss THE RECOVERING, Jamison’s acclaimed examination of alcoholism—her own, and that of writers such as Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson (Lost Weekend), John Berryman, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson.

 

LESLIE JAMISON and MAGGIE NELSON, Sunday, April 15, at 5 pm.

SKYLIGHT BOOKS, 1818 North Vermont Avenue, Los Feliz, Los Angeles.

skylightbooks.com/leslie-jamison-maggie-nelson

Jamison interviewed by Chris Kraus in Paris Review:

theparisreview.org/interview-with-leslie-jamison

Kraus interviewed by Jamison in Interview:

interviewmagazine.com/chris-kraus

Jamison’s Literary Hub interview with Kristen Martin:

lithub.com/interrogating-sentimentality-with-leslie-jamison

 

Leslie Jamison.

DUNCAN HANNAH’S DIARIES

A New York Dolls costume party at the Waldorf, a Roxy Music concert at the old Academy of Music and after-party in Larry Rivers’ loft, Lou Reed’s scatological proposals in Max’s back room… It was all part of artist Duncan Hannah’s young New York life in the early 1970s.

Naturally, he kept a diary:

“Patti Smith told me she put me in a poem. She started a week’s residency [in The Paradise Room] at Reno Sweeney. I go every night and sit at the bar nursing a beer, watching it on the closed-circuit TV, because I can’t afford the cover charge. One night I had the misfortune to be joined by Bette Midler, who said through mouthfuls of food, ‘Gawd, what is this? Who does she think she is? Bob Dylan? Laura Nyro? Lawrence Ferlinghetti? This stuff went out of style in the ’50s!’

“Unable to contain myself, I turned to her and said, ‘Well, you went out in the forties, and I wish you’d stayed there’…

“Television play every night at a biker bar on Bleecker and [the Bowery], called CBGB. The decor is neon beer signs and giant blowups from bygone theatricals… Television have only one set’s worth of songs, so their second set is the same as the first. Only a couple dozen people show up, but there’s a real rough excitement to this band…

“Reading about alcoholism in Time magazine. I fit the profile. I am unable to choose whether I drink or not, and if I do, I’m unable to stop…”

 

From Duncan Hannah, “Diaries, 1973–1974,” excerpt from The Paris Review 223 (Winter 2017): 173–204.

A more complete selection of Hannah’s diaries will be published in spring, 2018 as 20th-Century Boy—Notebooks of the Seventies (Knopf).

See: John Leland, “From CBGB to the Galleries of the Met,” New York Times, May 6, 2016:

nytimes.com/duncan-hannah

Television singer-songwriter-guitarist Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith in the early 1970s, New York City.

(Verlaine’s childhood friend Richard Hell—also in Hannah’s diaries—was the band’s bassist, but left before they recorded their first album.)

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