April 12, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Horses, Heaney, and Hypebeasts By The Paris Review Still from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies. Courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music. You’ve probably seen Daisies, Věra Chytilová’s dizzying 1966 masterpiece, especially if you were a young woman in the early aughts browsing LiveJournal or Tumblr, where screenshots of its two heroines dancing, throwing food, and declaring themselves “spoiled” abounded. But it’s difficult to find the rest of Chytilová’s films. Over the years, I’ve seen only two: the aforementioned Daisies and 1963’s Something Different, available via the Criterion Collection. That’s why I’m excited to spend the next few days essentially living inside the Brooklyn Academy of Music for their series “The Anarchic Cinema of Věra Chytilová.” What does a teen horror movie–meets–metaphor for authoritarian repression look like under a director like Chytilová? Or a comedic critique of the aging male libido? I guess I’m going to find out this weekend—and maybe you will, too. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 5, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bangs, Barbie, and Bodies By The Paris Review Charif Shanahan. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths. I worry that I never quite say what I mean. I think about this especially when talking (and writing) about books. Using language to describe other language is a strange task—the overlay of text on text makes it difficult to distinguish between what is true, what is deeply felt, and what only appears to fit. In moments of particular disorientation, I find myself returning to the poem “Song” by Charif Shanahan, and these particular lines: “I need to learn / not how to speak, but from where.” Here, I remember that my language has not appeared out of thin air. My parents’ voices, the landscape of my hometown, the local pronunciations, the topics and issues that were revealed and concealed by my neighborhood, my class—an abridged list of the many things that inflect my ideas and word choice. Remembering these tethers makes me imagine what tethers I might cast forward. I love “Song” and the collection it belongs to, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, for how they remember and remind us of the bodies and voices that reach us at every turn. There’s the loneliness of walking at night and passing the sounds and lights of a gay bar; there’s more immediate physical touch, a man “slipping the tongue / through the body’s shutters”; there is violent homophobia and racism, everywhere. Shanahan never makes anything mundane or belittled by comparison. He allows space for much to be consequential. People and things, violent or kind, arrive and inflect, whether by inches or miles. When I read Into Each Room, I feel so precisely situated in a constellation. Whether the individual strands are clear or obfuscated, I am sure there is a web around me. I am beginning to understand, too, that it’s possible to cast out from here with intention. I look around and see if my words are beginning to build a where that I want to be a part of, and continue speaking into. —Spencer Quong Read More
March 29, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spells, Cephalopods, and Smug Salads By The Paris Review Sarah Moss. Around Christmastime, which seems as far away as the late Iron Age by now, there were whisperings of a book that was as yet hardly known on our shores: Ghost Wall. The slim novel by Sarah Moss is about a small knot of students doing extracurricular research credits for their college archaeology course by living like Iron Age Britons for a few summer weeks. They are joined by an amateur enthusiast and his family, and I set the book down at first for being too pedantic. Even the fierce loyalty of our grade school narrator toward her father can’t hide her nascent skepticism—or is it the author’s?—regarding his monomaniac devotion to a pure British past. A large portion of contemporary writing is a critique of the bourgeois condition: comfortable linen tunics, smug salads, and sparkling résumés. Ghost Wall left me feeling fine about food co-op bulletin boards and Dan Barber books, but the real treat of the novel is the fucking desecration of all men. The men in the book are bad—all of them. They are bad because they are abusive or objectify women or are complicit in these crimes. They are undeniably bad, and it is women who plot and pilot their escape and the rescue of other women, and it is women who provide nourishment, comfort, and, in the distance, the sweet, warm light of sexual gratification—finally. —Julia Berick Read More
March 22, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Moscow, Misunderstandings, and Money Mark By The Paris Review Fyodor Alekseyev, View of Lubyanka, ca. 1800. I’d encourage all to check out the Moscow-focused second issue of the new quarterly Stranger’s Guide. Under the leadership of the Lapham’s alum Kira Brunner Don, the magazine travels to a different city or region with each installment. Rather than gawking and gushing in the travel-section mode, it commissions new work by writers and photographers from that place alongside contributions from a few roving and travel-savvy authors. Although I’m partial to the compact trim size of The Paris Review, the oversize format of Stranger’s Guide is ideal for its luscious photo spreads (I’m a fan of Vladimir Markovich’s pictures of renovating Moscow and the creepy museums captured by Lily Idov), and its features go deep into subcultures that, until now, only the luckiest of strangers might discover. Plus, new place-based fiction—this time by Lara Vapnyar—contextualizes a community through another lens. —Emily Nemens Read More
March 15, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Passion, Portals, and Premature Presents By The Paris Review T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” I’ve spent a lot of time guddling around the Daily archive of late. There are many joys attendant to this, not least the expansion of that tragic category, Literature I Should Already Be Familiar With. This rapid multiplying of “known unknowns” is the reason I’m reading a Christmas poem, T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” in March. Casey N. Cep’s Daily article does a perfect job of describing the history behind Faber’s Ariel Poems series, to which Eliot’s piece belongs, so I’ll direct you there instead of rehearsing it here. Perhaps after reading, you’ll do as I did and buy yourself a springtime Christmas present: one of the slim original pamphlets from 1954. They’re beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I can’t really justify holding on to it—I know my Christmas-loving mother would appreciate it far more than I do. Reluctantly, next December, I’ll give it away. Thank heavens it’s not yet April. —Robin Jones Read More
March 8, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Peasants, Postpartum, and Palestine By The Paris Review Kate Colby. Photo: Caroline Larabell. Kate Colby’s Dream of the Trenches is the book I never knew I needed. I wrote last week about my love for fiction about women interacting with art, and Colby’s unique blend of poetry, essay, and autofiction offers yet another angle on that conversation. She considers works by writers such as Ben Lerner and Virginia Woolf while incorporating her meandering thoughts into the ongoing narrative of “Driving to Margaret’s Mother’s Memorial Service.” In a stream of consciousness that roves I-195, Colby contrasts her literary critique with truisms and memories that careen the reader into questions about the nature of language. At the beginning of these musings, Colby notes that “writers tend to be preoccupied with what makes everything unique, but I get hung up on the countless ways they clump.” Language and life congeal throughout Dream of the Trenches, spanning topics from motherhood and middle age to metaphysical literature. Colby makes tongue twisters out of her inquiries, with exquisite turns of phrase such as “time let go and oblivious to dog hair.” She’s the kind of writer who notices both the windshield and the speck of dust on it, and Dream of the Trenches is the kind of book that places them side by side and says, Look. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More