November 13, 2024 On Things Kevin Killian’s Amazon Reviews, Part 2 By Kevin Killian Amazon Prime van in Milan. Photograph by Saggittarius A, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Kinsey (2004) dir. Bill Condon ★★★☆☆ Biopics Are Always a Little Disappointing … February 10, 2005 No matter how well scripted, they’re hidebound by having to stick to the outward facts of their subject’s life. I haven’t seen a good one since Lady Sings the Blues and even that wasn’t awfully good, though it was fascinating. So is Kinsey, I expect, though people don’t seem to want to go to it. My friend Wayne and I went last night and three women sitting behind us and to the left were laughing at themselves and their own naïveté because, as it turned out, they had come to the theater thinking they were seeing Kinsey Millhone, the Sue Grafton heroine, brought to life by Laura Linney. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when they discovered they were in for a picture showing how America gradually opened up to the idea of sex when supported by science. Another rule of thumb is most movies starring John Lithgow and Veronica Cartwright as the parents are probably going to be pretty overplayed. This was the case here. Seeing this movie was like going into a time tunnel of the cinema—so many of the actors haven’t been in an A movie in ages. Timothy Hutton, Lynn Redgrave, John Lithgow, Katharine Houghton (the young girl from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, now looking unimaginably aged), and even Chris O’Donnell from the Batman movies. How did he get another job? He’s looking good. But Peter Sarsgaard provokes most of the attention by slipping out of his clothes in a cheap hotel room and heading for the shower. Kinsey doesn’t know which way to look but you can see where his eyes are straying to. Peter Sarsgaard isn’t the luckiest guy in the size department, but he’s got nothing to complain about, and once his pants come down, you can predict what’s going to happen through the rest of the movie. I wonder if the real Clyde Martin is still alive? If so you’d think he’d ask for someone with a bigger endowment to play him. Oh well, he (Sarsgaard) is extremely good in the movie and many fans will beat a path to his door. Read More
November 12, 2024 On Things Kevin Killian’s Amazon Reviews, Part 1 By Kevin Killian Amazon Prime delivery van in West Acton. Photograph by David Hawgood, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Going Once: A Memoir of Art, Society, and Charity by Robert Woolley ★★★☆☆ A Bygone Era in Auctioneering January 5, 2005 I feel sorry for the people who came to him during one of Sotheby’s Antiques Roadshow–style days, for he was withering when confronted with the junk people offered him off of Aunt Tillie’s mantelpiece. He is fairly fearless when it comes to painting a portrait of himself as the ultimate New York society queen. Poor guy died of AIDS not long after this book was published, and I still find it enjoyable. It seems as though a lot of Sotheby’s secrets went to the grave with him, for he certainly knew where most of the bodies were buried. His account of the Andy Warhol estate auction is mind boggling, so you will forgive him his gaucheries and his nonstop bitchiness. Another good story is how he auctioned off (for charity) the services of David Hockney, who volunteered to paint your swimming pool, and how the film producer Lester Persky had to be shamed into bidding for what was on the face of it an incredible bargain. We all love auction stories, for they remind us that maybe someday we will find a bargain worth bragging about, whether in the world of the decorative and visual arts, or in romance, as I did when I married my present wife. Read More
November 8, 2024 The Review’s Review On Augusto Monterroso’s The Gold Seekers By Matt Broaddus From Ayé Aton’s portfolio Afrika in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review. Courtesy of MARCH and the Estate of Ayé Aton. Photograph by Cary Whittier. Augusto Monterroso’s The Gold Seekers is a fun mix of personal archaeology and literary autobiography in an erudite yet concise package. I love a short book full of rabbit holes for me to follow long after I’m finished, I love reading in translation, and I love prose that doesn’t conform to any particular genre. The Gold Seekers fits the bill. On the surface, it’s a memoir of the Guatemalan writer’s bohemian childhood through the twenties into the thirties. But the narrative of Monterroso’s early life occasionally strays into his later years or departs entirely from his material existence to ruminate on literature, film, Central American history, obscure Italian poets, and much more. The memoir, with its detours and vignettes, reads like a book of experimental essays, the unifying subject matter being Monterroso’s excavation of the people and events that helped him form an early idea of himself, an idea inherently tied to taste—how he relates to his world through his developing sensibilities and ethics. The sections on Central American history contextualize Monterroso’s later self-theorization as an “ignored” writer whose political exile in Mexico from his adopted Guatemala rendered him a “citizen of nowhere,” seemingly unnoticed by the wider literary establishment despite the fact that he became a favorite of writers like Calvino for his imaginative yet succinct short stories. Monterroso’s memoir is also characteristically slim; the turns of his capacious mind are rendered from Spanish into lyrical English by the translator Jessica Sequeira, and the whole book, including a foreword by Enrique Vila-Matas and a translator’s note by Sequeira, totals under a hundred and fifty pages. Read More
November 8, 2024 The Review’s Review On Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s BLK WTTGNSN By Benjamin Krusling Otis Houston Jr., Untitled Cellphone Photograph (2022), from issue no. 240 of The Paris Review. Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York. I love density. Compression is nuclear. Big family, small house—no room (Jeezy). Used to act up when I went to school—thought it was cool, but I really was hurt (Meek Mill). Free Gaza, we on the corner like Israelites (Earl Sweatshirt). It’s opaque / and then it is violent (Ibrahim, “Wittgenstein Tried to Warn Us About Lions”). Poetry is a drama of gaps and leaps but also of gather and charge. One can’t be too precious about it. BLK WTTGNSN, Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s forthcoming collection from Tiger Bark Press, is density itself, a kind of reconstructed surrealist epic of black critique that overwhelms with its range and slices with its imagination. Ibrahim’s work has refreshingly little to do with the platitudinous, overly carved (to use my friend S.’s phrase) contemporary poem that sometimes goes viral when bad things happen and people want to confirm their confusion or mystify their position. This book is bold, serious, and so funny, even when it flows like blood and smoke. Read More
November 5, 2024 Diaries Philadelphia Farm Diary By Joseph Earl Thomas Elana the goose. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas. September 1, 2024 Elana thinks the world is coming to an end, but I remind her how this is a fundamental problem of perspective. She is both right and wrong, and so am I. Elana, insofar as I can tell, contains the multitudes most other three-year-old Sebastopol geese and humans above the age of thirty lack. When I open the coop, this Amish-made shed, painted blue with little herb planters beneath the windows, she tawdles out, screaming, as geese often do. Her adopted babies (three gray “African” geese) and a duck trio waddle out after her; they test their lungs against the air, honking and such over the sounds of slow traffic on Penrose Avenue, the warblers waiting to share their food, four dogs barking on the other side of the yard, those big black vultures competing for pool water, and my neighbor’s white cat, everybody’s nemesis, lurking at the edges of our fence and licking its lips at the thought of baby birds. The nearly last living rooster is sexually tepid, but eager for food, guiding all thirteen hens to the snacks I’ve dispensed, clucking them over to what he’s “found.” Elana grooms my pants leg, then unties my retro number 8s as if desperate to return to summer, to the sandals that ferried my bright green bare toenails out to her like so many flecks of potential vegetation. Failing, she looks up at me quizzically, or, like, Where the fuck is my food, nigga? Read More
November 1, 2024 Bookmarks A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Kathryn Davis’s Versailles (Graywolf): I was a pretty girl; I glittered like the morning star. My red lips would open and it was anyone’s guess what would come out. A burst of song. Something by Gluck, a pretty girl in pain maybe, impaled on the horn of the moon. The Kings of France, starting with Charlemagne. A joke. Read More