In Duck Soup, Groucho Marx gets locked in a bathroom by Harpo, leading him to shout, “Let me out of here! Hey, let me out of here! Or throw me a magazine!”
For reasons I won’t bother to mention, a shelf in our downstairs bathroom contains a number of essay collections (Orwell, Rosenbaum, Amis) and three volumes of the Paris Review Interviews. The latter is a new series, collecting many of the same interviews as PR’s old Writers at Work editions. I haven’t gotten around to scanning those oldies into the library, but I think I have 4 or 5 of those old volumes from the ’70s and ’80s.
The new volumes cover broader periods of time, since there’s a lot more to choose from (and maybe some of the writers they once interviewed have fallen from memory). For this week’s 0-fer, I 0-fer up the roster of the Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1
- Dorothy Parker (1956) – 0-fer, embarrassingly enough
- Truman Capote (1957) – 0-fer (previously mentioned)
- Ernest Hemingway (1958) – read maybe too much of him
- T. S. Eliot (1959) – read him
- Saul Bellow (1966) – read him, but not enough
- Jorge Luis Borges (1967) – read lots of him
- Kurt Vonnegut (1977) – read a bunch of him. In college.
- James M. Cain (1978) – read him
- Rebecca West (1981) – 0-fer
- Elizabeth Bishop (1981) – 0-fer
- Robert Stone (1985) – 0-fer
- Robert Gottlieb (1994) – wh0-fer?
- Richard Price (1996) – read lots of him
- Billy Wilder (1996) – I’ve seen a bunch of his movies
- Jack Gilbert (2005) – wh0-fer?
- Joan Didion (2006) – 0-fer
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