December 21, 2018 Best of 2018 The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2018 By The Paris Review Lucia Berlin in Oakland, California, 1975. Photo: Jeff Berlin (© 2018 Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP). 2018 has been a year of fragments, brief episodes, flashes. The seasons, at least here on the East Coast, fractured into kaleidoscopic hot and cold days, which alternated at random. The news was bad, then very bad, then bad, then worse. We were all watching, then no one was watching, then we lay under the covers, lit only by our screens. Was there a summer? Yes, but that’s its own novella, long ago. There was no single narrative. It seems no surprise, then, that many of the books I loved this year are short-story collections. Lydia Millet’s Fight No More fulfilled the voyeur in me, the one who stares into incandescent ground-floor windows of Brooklyn brownstones. In these linked stories, Nina, a realtor, drifts in and out of the lives and homes of strange, estranged Angelenos. She reveals a web of strangers and, in that isolation, shows our shared humanity. In the stories of Some Trick, Helen DeWitt skewers the publishing world, the art world, mathematicians, and computer scientists with an outsider’s cutting wit reminiscent of Paul Beatty and Nell Zink. Reading Lucia Berlin’s Evening in Paradise (and the accompanying volume of memoir and letters, Welcome Home) is like sitting in the back seat of a car driven so fast over broken roads that your teeth rattle and the empty whiskey bottles clank together, while the driver sings the most heartbreakingly beautiful of songs (if that was a terrible metaphor, then please know I’ve written about these books using fewer metaphors here). Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk reinvents the fairy tale in a way I didn’t know could still be done. Her craft feels generous, fluid, inventive: she bends myths and archetypes like balloon animals. And yet for all that sense of play, what she reveals is not lightness but wildness. There is something elemental in her stories, as complicated and tangled as the roots of any ancient tree. I read novels this year as well—Sight, by Jessie Greengrass, flew woefully under the radar, though it’s one of the sharpest, smartest books on motherhood I’ve read in a long time. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman stuck with me far longer than I expected it to, especially for a book so intentionally flat and strange. The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard, was published in 1980, but anyone who knew me this year heard about it. It filled me with a sense of giddiness about the possibilities of literature that I haven’t felt since I was twenty. I followed it up with Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, from 1988, which, though it didn’t siderate me with the same outrageous coup de foudre (but what could?), made the perfect companion to Hazzard. Both books capture a sense of lucid, quiet feminine fury at the world’s limited possibilities, of desire and intelligence bridled but by no means dulled. They felt, I must say, very appropriate to this year. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
December 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Was Holly Golightly Bisexual? By Rebecca Renner Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s The name Holly Golightly is synonymous with sex and sophistication, but viewers may not know as much about her as they think. Audrey Hepburn’s portrayal of the character in the 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with her iconic little black dress, ushered in a new fashion era for women. But the movie also signaled a change in the average person’s attitude toward sexuality. As the 50s became the 60s, sexual mores strayed from the rigid monogamy of the past into the culture that produced key parties, beatniks, and the Free Love movement. Hollywood’s standards lagged behind. The Motion Picture Production Code, which banned such on-screen events as excessive kissing — and please, don’t even talk about sex — came into effect in 1934. Since then, homosexuality had been nodded to in film, but in coded language (a pansy worn on the lapel) or in stereotypical and mocking portrayals, almost always of effeminate men. Lesbians, according to Hollywood, didn’t really exist. By the time screenwriter George Axelrod was adapting Tiffany’s for the screen in 1960, the production code’s grip on American filmmaking was already beginning to loosen, thanks to the competing racy material in foreign films and on television. Axelrod found himself with the challenge of satisfying audiences who wanted movies that reflected their changing attitudes, while still making a movie the tight rules of the Production Code would deem decent enough to release. Read More
December 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Truth About AI: A Secular Ghost Story By Zachary Mason Some of Facebook’s AIs invented their own language, one incomprehensible to humans, at which Facebook’s researchers panicked and were compelled to pull the plug. At least, this was the story I heard on a Vanity Fair podcast. The host seemed deeply disturbed by the thought of these alien, almost Lovecraftian beings taking shape under the blithe gaze of an amoral tech giant. I thought it was probably nonsense — scientists spin the truth all the time. I guessed that the underlying reality was that Facebook scientists had designed a program to evolve some kind of communication protocol which, for whatever reason, become hard to understand; seeking attention, they’d played up the drama to an in-house publicist by glossing the technical details and the publicist over-interpreted it to journalists, whose stories drifted still farther from the facts, until the emerging narrative ended up frightening an innocent podcast host. As it turned out, I was right about the technology, but wrong about how the story got inflated. The Facebook scientists had made a sober and unassuming blog post about their research, which journalists took up and inflated without further encouragement. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the so-called AI Renaissance, which is essentially a cycle of money, hype and fear. Read More
December 20, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: And You Want to Be Liked By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am an older man. My wife died a few years ago and I miss her terribly, but I am happy with my many friends. However, I am bisexual and a much younger man has fallen in love with me. I like him very much but I feel that he deserves to have a more “appropriate” lover than me; still, I don’t want to give him up. Is there a poem that will help me enjoy his company without having to requite his love and also allow me to not feel guilty? Confused Unrequiter Dear CU, There is so much going on in your short letter. I’m so sorry you have to carry your wife’s absence—I very literally can’t imagine what that’s like, I have no experiential referent. I hope you are speaking about all this with an actual professional and not just this silly poet drinking tea at his keyboard. But, since you’ve asked me, I must step in and ask you what exactly you mean when you say the man deserves a more “appropriate” lover than you. Is this man an adult? Do you trust his intelligence? If so, then why should you be the arbiter of what he needs, what he deserves? His desire is not yours to muzzle, neither is yours deserving of muzzling. I give you Eduardo C. Corral’s poem “To Robert Hayden” (I recommend listening to Corral read it through the link, if you’re able). Read More
December 19, 2018 Arts & Culture John Akomfrah, On the Verge By Tiana Reid John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015, video installation. When I get to the New Museum’s survey exhibition of John Akomfrah’s work, “Signs of Empire,” I find myself lying on the floor, a bootleg antianxiety trick I’ve been practicing over the past few weeks in many places: on the hardwood floors of a friend’s apartment, the cold vinyl of my kitchen floors, the mat at the university gym, the bathroom tiles of a church basement. The supine position opens up the thorax, where the heart and lungs live. With the back half of my body in contact with the floor, I am obliged to acknowledge that the ground has not fallen beneath me. In Akomfrah’s sensorium, I feel sonic vibrations thumping up my spine. I would rather feel nothing at all. Vertigo Sea, Akomfrah’s three-screen HD work originally made for the 2015 Venice Biennale and re-presented at the New Museum, is mesmerizing. The viewer should not be able to look away. But an anxious mind does not rest: minutes after watching the film, I pull out my phone, eyes averted. Every smartphone user and exec who pays good money to “unplug” knows that small screens, too, can overwhelm. Read More
December 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Restoring a Family Ghost By Yevgeniya Traps Some months ago, I came across a smattering of random family photographs at my parents’ house. The house had experienced some flooding during Hurricane Sandy, and the pictures, having been rather unsentimentally stored in the garage, were damaged—not terribly, but enough to make them brittle, to make them seem older than they were, to make them somehow strange, like daguerreotypes sold at flea markets. In the pile I found a very old group photo: my tiny maternal grandfather plopped on his mother’s lap, surrounded by people who must have been family but whose identities now seemed irrevocably lost. My mother held the fraying sepia image and lamented not knowing, the family history mostly a blank she could not fill in, the details lost to war and displacement, to evacuation and emigration, to the banalities of everyday life that make it impossible to keep track of the everyday banalities that eventually become history. But history, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so we make do; we make up. We plot against the blank spaces. Frail Sister, Karen Green’s genre-transcendent new book, is just this sort of plotting against: a collage-memoir-epistolary found object willed into the story of a life otherwise lost. Virginia Woolf famously invented Judith Shakespeare, doomed sister of William and a woman of equal talents and missing opportunities, who—abandoned, pregnant, fallen—dies by suicide. Green reanimates her Aunt Constance, a ghost in the family archive. Working with old photos, vintage postcards, stationary, sheet music, newspaper clippings, faded cocktail menus, ration books, military documents, and aerial maps, Green combines and reworks, adding text in snippets and bursts, until—imperceptibly—a story coalesces. In an interview with Art in America, Green describes the book as “an old-fashioned mystery,” hidden in a graphic novel, a memoir, an art book, a biography—though she is adamant that Frail Sister is none of these. I came to think of the work as an immersion, a piece of participatory theater, a way of getting lost among the artifacts of a civilization that eventually shows itself to have been ours all along. Read More