Book Club 2025: The Paris Review #13

This is from 1956, when the Paris Review was still being published in Paris. It was a much slimmer affair back then — just 140 very thin pages.

The longest piece here is “Letters From An American Prisoner” by James Blake. It’s a series of letters from Blake (who was incarcerated at the time) to two different friends (one called Bud and the other is wholly unnamed). It’s an extraordinary series of letters — there’s a prison escape, and also lots of (voluntary and not) prison sex, so I assumed that it was all fiction.

But it’s not!

James Blake (1922 – February 20, 1979) was a jazz musician and petty thief who became a literary sensation in the 1950s when he published his letters in the Paris Review.

And he went back into jail after the stint described in his letters here:

“It was his first experience at doing time, and although Blake was absolutely out of character as a criminal type and, by his own admission, the world’s most inept burglar, he discovered that confinement offered such sovereign satisfactions and fulfillments that he caused himself to be incarcerated at the Jacksonville jail or, even more happily, at “The Joint,” the Florida State Penitentiary at Raiford, for 13 of the next 20 years.

Geez.

Among other notable texts is a the story of a wrestler who tries to become a journalist…

… and a very witty interview with Dorothy Parker (who resents being called witty).

The poetry in this issue is mostly pretty obscure.

And there’s a guide to restaurants and sightseeing tips and stuff.

This is the first issue of The Paris Review from the 50s I’ve read, and I don’t think it’s quite found its footing yet. I mean, most of the stuff in this issue is pretty good, but there’s only a couple of outstanding pieces.

The Paris Review #13 (1956) (unrated on Goodreads)

The Tilda Swinton Checklist

After a pretty random decision to see all films Tilda Swinton had appeared in, and a basic run-through and then a mopping-up weekend, and then doing a Swinton week every summer every since, I’ve basically seen all the Swinton films that are kinda available.  (In some form or other.)

This post is a place-holder article I’ll just be editing to keep track of what films I still have to seek out.  Because it makes more sense to do that on a blog than in a text file.

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You know.

The films with “-” in the first column are the ones I’ve yet to watch. “=” is “ordered” and “+” is arrived.

* 1986: Caravaggio
* 1986: Zastrozzi: A Romance
* 1986: Egomania
* 1986: Caprice
* 1987: Aria
* 1987: Friendship’s Death
* 1988: The Last of England
* 1988: L’ispirazione
* 1988: Degrees of Blindness
1988: Das andere Ende der Welt
* 1989: Play Me Something
* 1989: War Requiem
* 1989: Cycling the Frame
* 1990: The Garden
* 1990: Your Cheatin’ Heart
* 1990: Fruits of Fear
* 1991: Edward II
1991: The Party: Nature Morte
1992: Man to Man: Another Night of Rubbish on the Telly
* 1992: Orlando
* 1992: Shakespeare: The Animated Tales
* 1993: Wittgenstein
* 1993: Blue
* 1993: Das offene Universum
+ 1994: Remembrance of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies
* 1994: Visions of Heaven and Hell
* 1994: Glitterbug
* 1996: Female Perversions
* 1997: Conceiving Ada
* 1998: Love is the Devil
* 1999: The War Zone
* 1999: The Protagonists
* 2000: The Beach
2000: The Dilapidated Dwelling
* 2000: Possible Worlds
* 2001: The Deep End
* 2001: Vanilla Sky
* 2002: Teknolust
* 2002: Adaptation.
+ 2002: Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory
* 2003: Young Adam
* 2003: The Box
* 2003: The Statement
* 2004: Derek Jarman: Life as Art
* 2005: Thumbsucker
* 2005: Constantine
* 2005: Constantine (Video Game)
* 2005: Broken Flowers
* 2005: The Absent Presence
* 2005: The Somme
* 2005: Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
* 2006: Stephanie Daley
* 2006: Galápagos
* 2006: Deep Water
* 2007: Sleepwalkers
* 2007: Faceless
* 2007: Strange Culture
* 2007: The Man From London
* 2007: Michael Clayton
2007: Schau mir in die Augen, Kleiner
* 2007: Hitler’s Favourite Royal
* 2007: Derek
* 2008: Julia
* 2008: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
* 2008: Burn After Reading
* 2008: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2008: Requiem for Jarman
* 2009: The Limits of Control
* 2009: The Invisible Frame
* 2009: Io sono l’amore
* 2010: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Trader
* 2010: Climate of Change
* 2010: Spur der Bären
* 2011: Genevieve Goes Boating
* 2011: We Need To Talk About Kevin
* 2011: Women War & Peace
* 2011: Cinema is Everywhere
* 2011: Making it In Hollywood
+ 2013: Amore carne
* 2012: Moonrise Kingdom
* 2012: Getting On
* 2012: Radioman
* 2013: The Stars Are Out Tonight
* 2013: Only Lovers Left Alive
* 2013: When Björk Met Attenborough
* 2013: Snowpiercer
* 2013: Death for a Unicorn
* 2013: The Zero Theorem
* 2014: The Grand Budapest Hotel
2014: Antarctica 3D: On the Edge
* 2014: Travelling at Night with Jim Jarmusch
* 2014: The Gospel According to St. Derek
* 2014: Trainwreck
* 2015: Dreams Rewired
* 2015: A Bigger Splash
* 2015: B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989
* 2016: Hail, Caesar!
* 2016: Letters from Baghdad
+ 2016: Phantom of the Universe: The Hunt for Dark Matter
* 2016: Doctor Strange
* 2016: The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
* 2017: async – first light
* 2017: Okja
* 2017: Letters From Generation RX
* 2017: War Machine
* 2017: Last and First Men
– 2017: Tania Libre
+ 2018: Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema
* 2018: Isle of Dogs
* 2018: Suspiria
* 2019: The Souvenir
* 2019: Avengers: Endgame
* 2019: What We Do In The Shadows: The Trial
* 2019: The Dead Don’t Die
* 2019: The Personal History of David Copperfield
* 2019: Uncut Gems
* 2020: Story and the Writer
* 2020: The Human Voice
* 2021: Memoria
* 2021: The French Dispatch
* 2021: The Souvenir: Part II
+ 2021: The Dong with the Luminous Nose
+ 2021: The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
* 2021: What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?
= 2022: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
* 2022: The Eternal Daughter
* 2022: Three Thousand Years of Longing
= 2023: The Killer
+ 2023: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
+ 2023: Asteroid City
+ 2023: Problemista
+ 2023: All Kinds of Love
= 2024: The Room Next Door
= 2024: The End
+ 2024: The Boys
+ 2024: Fantasmas
– 2024: Impulse: Playing with Reality
– 2024: The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze
– 2024: A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things