Archive for June, 2011

© Greg Gorman

To mark the paperback publication of Role Models, John Waters answered a few questions about taste, the art world, and death. The interview was conducted over the phone just before Waters’s trips to the Walker Art Center in Minnesota and the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee.

-Ryan Chapman

Chapman: What is taste, and what do people mean when they say something is in bad taste?

John Waters: Taste is style, and to know bad taste of course you have to have been taught the rules of the tyranny of good taste so you can yearn to break them. I thank my mother every day for teaching me proper table manners—which fork to use, all that stuff—even though it lead to a career that humiliated and embarrassed her. But she’s grown quite used to it and proud over the years.

You have to have some taste. I think Diana Vreeland said bad taste is better than no taste. Taste is how you describe yourself. It’s how you present yourself to the world. It’s about humor . . . Everyone is a curator of their own life: what they have around them, what they read, what they watch. So everybody, no matter what—even the most deranged homeless person—has taste. They know which bottle they want to collect more, which shopping cart they want to fill. Everyone has taste and it’s how you define yourself against the world. (more…)

At BookExpo America, the annual conference for booksellers, librarians and publishers, novelist Jeffrey Eugenides previewed The Marriage Plot, his much anticipated follow-up to Middlesex. (Astute Work in Progress readers may remember his conversation with editor Jonathan Galassi from our debut issue.)

The author shared the stage with Mindy Kaling, Diane Keaton, and Charlaine Harris. (more…)

Charles Drazin is a lecturer on cinema at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous books include The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s and In Search of The Third Man.

This “canon” of French films is a list not of personal favorites (although some of them are) but of films that I think serve to illustrate some of the key themes of French Cinema. All of them, I hope, bring out the idea that the true importance of the French cinema is the degree to which it inspires and informs our own cinema—“our” meaning specifically the English-speaking cinema. (more…)

Last month we debuted our Longreads page, where we’ll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) A few recent highlights:

• “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” by Jonathan Franzen, in The New York Times, adapted from his Kenyon College commencement address
• “Daughter of California” by Edie Meidav, author of the forthcoming novel Lola, California, in The Millions
• “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of the forthcoming essay collection Pulphead, in The New York Times Magazine
• “‘A Frightening Time in America’: An Interview with David Foster Wallace” by Ostap Karmodi in the New York Review of Books blog