A Piece of Monologue: Literature, Philosophy and the Arts: Truman Capote

2.9.14

Inside The Paris Review: NYC Offices

Two photographers take a look around the iconic literary journal

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Sara Kerens

From Lena Dystant (Selectism):

Part of the “Where They Create” project, photographer Paul Barbera goes inside the offices of legendary literary journal, The Paris Review. 208 issues on from its first in 1953, the magazine was orginally produced by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton, Americans in Paris, the opening statement reading "The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines…" Featuring interviews and work from the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Ezra Pound, V. S. Naipaul, Joan Didion and Truman Capote, the magazine continues to introduce the work of new writers and reevaluate established names. More in our gallery, for the full set of images head here and read an interview with current editor Lorin Stein here. [Read More]

From Claudine Ko (Refinery 29):

In New York City's esteemed literary world, there are parties, and then there are The Paris Review parties. Indeed, as long as the quarterly journal has garnered respect for discovering new writing talent — Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few — it's also been known for its all-night, booze-flowing soirées where society and the counterculture drink from the same bottle of whiskey.

“It’s always been two things at once,” says editor Lorin Stein. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.” And over the decades, the 60-year-old publication has continually attracted an eclectic crowd, from Jackie O, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, to more recently, Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, and the editors of Vice. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

28.8.13

Pen, pencil or typewriter?

Flavorwire on writers' preferences

From Flavorwire:

It’s no secret that writers can be quite particular about their writing tools. Some might call it an obsession or fetish, but the pens, pencils, notebooks, and other implements that authors have used to create their most famous works endlessly fascinates us. After reading an ode to the beloved Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencil, adored for its smooth, firm graphite, we had to find out more about the tools of the literary elite. Take notes, and save your pennies to purchase these writing instruments for yourself. [Read More]

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23.3.13

Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors

Letters from Joyce, Gaddis, Woolf, McCullers and others

A young James Joyce (1902)

Flavorwire has posted a fan letter written by James Joyce to the playwright Henrik Ibsen (link via Johann Gregory):

Honoured Sir,

I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes. [Read More]

The site has also posted letters by William Gaddis (to Don DeLillo), Norman Mailer (to William Styron), Ray Bradbury (to Robert Heinlein), Charles Dickens (to George Eliot), Virginia Woolf (to Olaf Stapledon), W. H. Auden (to James Agee), Carson McCullers (to Henry Miller), George R. R. Martin (to Stan Lee), and William S. Burroughs (to Truman Capote). [Read More]

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8.11.12

First Author Photographs of Famous Writers

Flavorwire compiles a list of their favourite dust jacket photographs

Emily Temple (Flavorwire): 'Authors have to be pretty careful about the photos they choose to have on their dust jackets. Not only is it remarkably easy to fall prey to one of those pesky author photo clichés, but those first baby-faced pictures that grace debut novels might just go down in history — if they’re lucky. To that end, we scoured the web to pull together a few surprising, intense, and charmingly youthful author photos from some of our very favorite authors’ first works' [Read More]

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25.3.12

Writers' Bedrooms

Bedrooms of famous writers, past and present

William Faulkner's bedroom

Apartment Therapy has posted photographs of the bedrooms of famous writers, including William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Sylvia Plath, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Victor Hugo (link via Jennifer Dawn Whitney) [See More]

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17.11.11

Werner Herzog Interview: Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog on Truman Capote, violent crimes and capital punishment

Andrew Goldman interviews Werner Herzog in the New York Times about Into the Abyss, a new documentary film exploring capital punishment in the United States [Read More]

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7.9.11

20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?

Online gallery includes classic novels by Salinger, Heller, Lee and Ellison

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. Design: David Pelham

Flavorwire lists its top 20 book cover designs (link via Susan Tomaselli) [Read More]

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18.7.11

Burroughs vs. Capote

Burroughs placed a curse on Capote for perceived misuse of talent

At Reality Studio, Thom Robinson reveals that William S. Burroughs attempted to place a curse on Truman Capote's writing career: 'Burroughs suggests Capote could have made positive use of his talents, presumably by applying them to the expansion of human consciousness (“You were granted an area for psychic development”). Instead, Burroughs finds that Capote has sold out a talent “that is not yours to sell.” In retribution for having misused “the talent that was granted you by this department”, Burroughs starkly warns “That talent is now officially withdrawn,” signing off with the sinister admonition, “You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.”' [Read More]

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Writers: William S. Burroughs

24.7.09

Photographing America: Henri Cartier-Bresson / Walker Evans

The Guardian reviews a photographic retrospective of American life

Henri Cartier-Bresson's Harlem (1947). Photograph: Magnum Photos

An excerpt from a review of Photographing America, published on The Guardian's website on Monday:

In 2001, Henri Cartier-Bresson reflected on the long moment in the early 1940s when he had briefly considered turning from photography to film-making. "If it had not been for the challenge of the work of Walker Evans," he wrote, "I don't think I would have remained a photographer."

It's this quote that provides the epigraph for Photographing America 1929-1947, a fascinating book that focuses on these two masters of 20th-century photography. Intriguingly, Evans's photographs span the years of the book's title, while Cartier-Bresson's were all taken between the spring of 1946 and the summer of 1947. It is tempting, if not altogether true, to say that Evans is essentially an American photographer (the American photographer?) while Cartier-Bresson is essentially a European one (the European one?) who, for a brief but illuminating period, trained his outsider's eye on America.

Cartier-Bresson arrived in America from the newly liberated France in May 1946 to prepare for his first big American exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That show did not actually open until the following February because the curators, believing that Cartier-Bresson had been killed by the Nazis while attempting to escape from a prison camp, were actually planning a posthumous retrospective when he showed up on their doorstep.

In the interim, Cartier-Bresson took two working road trips to the American Deep South. On the first, undertaken just after he arrived in America, he was accompanied by Truman Capote for Fortune magazine, who would later memorably describe the French photographer "dancing along the pavement like an agitated dragonfly, three Leicas winging from straps around his neck, a fourth one hugged to his eye … clicking away with a joyous intensity, a religious absorption". Unconsciously or otherwise, Cartier-Bresson was following in the footsteps of Walker Evans, who had roamed the American south back in the summer of 1936, when he was on assignment for Fortune with the journalist James Agee. Their story of the plight of three tenant farming families in Alabama during the Great Depression was rejected by Fortune – they thought it too bleak – but, in 1941, in extended form, it became the acclaimed book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans's photographs have since become iconic images of the time. [Read more]

Sean O'Hagan, 'Photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans: America exposed'
guardian.co.uk, 20 July 2009

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