April 17, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Creations, Croissants, and Crutchfields By The Paris Review Alia Volz. California is rife with personal histories of various sorts—so many that one wonders if there’s anything yet to be discovered about the Golden State. Enter Alia Volz’s new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, a beautiful evocation of the Bay Area in the years before tech bros and big money changed the city. During the wild and woolly seventies, Volz’s mother founded Sticky Fingers Brownies, a company responsible for delivering upward of ten thousand illegal cannabis edibles per month to San Francisco consumers. Like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, this is a narrative about a time that is now gone: San Francisco as circus, where pot was both ubiquitous and as illegal as heroin. Under Volz’s careful attention, all of it—the era, the place, and her own parents—is rendered clear, bright, and beautiful. —Christian Kiefer Read More
April 10, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Angels, IUDs, and Books in Threes By The Paris Review John Prine. The first line of John Prine’s song “Angel from Montgomery” is a sentence that captures the listener with its simple introduction: “I am an old woman named after my mother.” The song played many times during the Louisville-based radio station WFPK’s all-day tribute to Prine, who died Tuesday at age seventy-three. During this airwave vigil, strangers’ voices would speak through the warm fuzz of their cell or landline connection, often to share a memory alongside their song request. One man had been the sound guy at a Prine show in the eighties, meeting him for a moment backstage, just long enough to clock how stoned he was. Another had met him briefly while standing one urinal over in the bathroom at the Bluebird Café in Nashville. A man remembered his daughter calling late one Saturday night during her freshman year of college, tipsy and in tears because nobody at the party she had gone to wanted to listen to her music and she missed home—he stayed up and listened to Prine’s albums with her, letting the music connect them across the miles. I let the station play, and the songs unspooled in randomness. I probably could have opened Spotify, pressed shuffle play on the artist page for Prine, and achieved much the same effect. But this wasn’t the algorithm steering. It was a chorus of stories befitting the man it paid tribute to. —Lauren Kane Read More
April 3, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cositas, Cosmos, and Concerts By The Paris Review Carl Phillips. Photo: Reston Allen. In the poem “Even If Sleep and Death Are Brothers,” Carl Phillips sketches an image: “Of beaten gold—gold beaten / to a thinness like that of paper—a woman’s funeral mask.” It recalls for me John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (in which death is not a “breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat”), a heartbreaking poem about loss and longing. So, too, does Phillips write poetry meant as a balm for wistfulness; in his latest collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, comfort and nostalgia are as closely related as sleep and death. The characters are returning to the places they came from or the places where they had been happy, and stretching briefly backward across time. This happens in small, sensually rich moments, in the titular field or during a swim at a spot from long ago. These are bittersweet poems, lovely homages to the precious penumbral moments when life seems to hang in stasis as we leave behind a past self. —Lauren Kane Read More
March 27, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Puddings, Pastels, and Plano By The Paris Review Still from Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. The coronavirus has thrown a wrench into Aries season, but plans for my March birthday remained unchanged. I watched Autumn de Wilde’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma entirely alone. I am a harsh critic when it comes to film versions of Austen and consider myself a purist—a champion of the Pride and Prejudice BBC miniseries, which culminates in Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy diving into a pond at Pemberley, scantily clad by Regency standards. As far as Emma is concerned, I am a tried-and-true disciple of Clueless and find Cher Horowitz hard to match, even by a silky-skinned, pre-Goop Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 version. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is the perfect Emma, exuding a quiet, even intimidating confidence; her tight blonde curls and perky ruffs are a flawless manifestation of her character. Emma’s world, too, is an appetizing spectacle in de Wilde’s film, the walls of the Woodhouse estate painted in decadent pinks and greens. To match, every inch of the banquet tables is covered in absurd towers of cakes, puddings, and tarts. Against my recent sluggish tendencies, Emma has inspired me to action. I will surely emerge from this quarantine an accomplished lady with a penchant for matchmaking, clad in only hand-stitched ruffs, and always poised for a contra dance. —Elinor Hitt Read More
March 20, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Demons, Decadence, and Dimes By The Paris Review Ladislav Klíma. Prince Sternenhoch is lovelorn, despite his qualities: “Leaving aside my family and wealth, I may boldly say of myself that I am a beau, in spite of certain inadequacies, for example, that I stand only 150 centimeters and weigh 45 kilograms, and am almost toothless, hairless, and whiskerless, also a little squint-eyed and have a noticeable hobble—well, even the sun has spots.” He meets the silent Helga, whom he instinctively loathes and swiftly marries. She opens up, travels as a brigand, finds her métier as a demon, and starts to murder “like a doctor.” Ladislav Klíma’s (1878–1928) The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, styled as the eponymous noble’s edited journals, is a phantasmagoric freak-out, a work of consummate madness. It is gross and wretched; it is a Tinder date in a pandemic. Sternenhoch lives in a succession of ghoulish castles. He transcribes his titters and cackles and—after he is possessed by the spirit of his defenestrated Saint Bernard, Elephant—his barks. He schemes to make a gorilla cry and invests his fortune in a nut. Helga is killed, gains a swift promotion in hell, and visits to torment. Perhaps they reconcile, when she confesses, “My financial outlook is atrocious, my rabbits all died suddenly, and I have come to realize I lack artistic talent.” The truth is impossible to discern: the tale is all delusion, but for Klíma, delusion is all there is. In A Czech Dreambook, Ludvík Vaculík remarks that “Klíma’s horror stories have no more than a poetic effect on me. I can read them last thing at night and then have a nice peaceful bureaucratic dream.” For Vaculík, Sternenhoch might offer no relief from those anesthetic dreams proscribed by the state, but at present I could do with a good night’s sleep. Besides, I was moved. In Klíma’s “Autobiography,” which is appended to this edition—vividly translated, like Sternenhoch, by Carleton Bulkin—he writes of his life spent in “consistent divergence from all that’s human”: he eats only raw flour and raw horse meat, gobbles mice half eaten by cats, and “would glug down bathwater from people with smallpox.” At that, I put the book down and immediately washed my hands. Then I opened it again. —Chris Littlewood Read More
March 13, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spines, Spaniels, and Sparsity By The Paris Review Still from Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return, 1979. I first learned of the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger through her association with Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian writer about whom my colleagues are probably sick of hearing me ramble. Ottinger has directed a few stagings of Jelinek’s plays, and Jelinek herself appears in Ottinger’s 2007 film Prater. But Ottinger is worth seeking out on her own merits. She uses a punk sensibility and a sense of heightened theatrics to create radically feminist films that are wildly stylish—and wildly stylized—in their approach. As luck would have it for those of us in New York, Metrograph is showing a series of her films this weekend. I’ve seen only Ticket of No Return, her 1979 masterpiece depicting one woman’s quest to drink herself to death in West Berlin (it’s much funnier than it sounds), but I’m eager to see more, including 1981’s Freak Orlando, Ottinger’s carnivalesque take on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. —Rhian Sasseen Read More