When Tina Brown used to be faaaaaahbulous, she had legendary party planner Robert Isabell plan her parties for her unsuccessful magazine(s). Isabell died earlier this week, but that didn't stop Brown from eulogizing...the ragers he threw for her.

Vanity Fair editor and Spy founder Graydon Carter reviewed a biography of Paris Review editor George Plimpton in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday. ("I could have been a contender [to be a Great Male Author]," Plimpton once said, "If I hadn't done the Paris Review...) Carter revealed both his admiration for "George," as well as the fact that that when casting agents are scouting around for a "patrician type to play an editor ," Plimpton also had him beat—the secretly Canadian Carter was only the third choice for such a character:

Legendary literature magazine The Paris Review is still publishing, you know, despite the death of founding editor George Plimpton and the requisite identity crisis that followed changes introduced by new editor Philip Gourevitch (color photos! shorter poems!). One thus far unmentioned change: while the magazine used to be put together entirely by a small crew of Plimpton friends, protégés, and well-groomed young acolytes (Yale-graduate interns and "editorial assistants" who'd use the magazine's famous parties to establish themselves in the literary scene, such as it was), now their staff is branching out a bit from that rarefied Ivy League lit-mag milieu. At least in the case of the notorious American Apparel Model Paris Review intern.

Journalist and legendary party-thrower George Plimpton wasn't one of the original founders of litmagazine the Paris Review, corrects Immy Humes, daughter of H.L. "Doc" Humes. The so-called "hipster visionary neo-prophet" was among the original "instigators" of the publication. Plimpton, the first editor in chief, arrived shortly thereafter. Well, whatever! She's pluggin' a movie about her dad. [WNYC]

Doree and Nikola headed to the Puck Building last night for a Paris Review fundraiser. Their account, and photos, follow.
There are certain ways that one announces one's place in the social pecking order. Dalton or Spence. Summers in Nantucket, winters in Palm Beach. Really all out is the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For those truly interested in becoming a part of the literary establishment, there is the Paris Review and its annual gala. Most parties for the quarterly literary journal take place at its offices in Tribeca and are generally attended by the expected assortment of nattily attired lower-level publishing types and a couple of famous writers enticed by the free drinks or the comely assistants who drink too many of them. But the Revel, as the annual benefit is called, is an entirely different animal. Tickets started at $500 and one was welcome to purchase a table for $50,000, which is the annual salary of two assistants.

To promote the paperback release of his book The Areas of My Expertise, professional gadabout and omniversal adept John Hodgman mined some very obscure adverto-literary history. Hodgman's new print shill at right is an "homage" to an ancient ad for the long-extinct Intellivision video game console that inexplicably featured an endorsement from Paris Review editor George Plimpton. Larger versions after the jump.

It's SARS Day at the Observer, apparently. (At Gawker, two = trend.) More celebs are asked about SARS:
· Writer Bret Easton Ellis: "Is it on 25th Street?"
· Paris Review founding editor, George Plimpton: "I m certainly going to turn away from anybody coughing, I know that...And there go all the doorknobs. Irving (Swifty) Lazar couldn't open doorshe was famous for that. Opened doors with handkerchiefs."
· Publicist Maggie Gallant says SARS isn't her biggest fear: "Here's what I'm afraid of, and it happens to me all the time...It never fails: When I'm looking like shit, I run into people all the time. It happened to me today; I got busted in Victoria's Secret. Ugly trashy lingerie, and I ran into someone I hadn't seen in five years! It was very upsetting. That s what I hate about New York, and that's what scares me: I'm scared to leave my house without full makeup and hair. I have my reputation to uphold"
A bug's life [Observer]

The New Yorker notes that the Paris Review and Playboy both turn 50 this month. (But being the New Yorker, the article is 5% Playboy and 95% Paris Review.) The article notes that Paris Review back issues were supposed to be transferred from founding editor George Plimpton's mother's garage to a warehouse in the Bronx, but there was a "rat problem." The rats had apparently eaten through several volumes. [Ed. noteThere will be no mention of metaphors or indigestion in this post.]
A little old magazine [New Yorker]