October 5, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bald Heads, Baldwin, and Bruce LaBruce By The Paris Review Photo: Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk, one of the book duo released this year by the small press Dorothy, is a debut story collection that displays just how compelling surrealism can be, even almost a century after the movement itself had its debut. Mark is obviously a talent in the vein of Leonora Carrington, maintaining the strange dreamlike atmosphere of her fiction without losing its sense of substance, using skillfully interwoven images that create tight seams between each story. The slim, square little book, published just this week, is a retreat into the fantastic, poetic, and playful—although every so often, much like in a dream, you catch sight of something you’re almost certain you recognize from waking life. —Lauren Kane During a recent visit home to southwest Scotland, I was given a copy of Barefoot: The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid, edited by Tom Pow. Originally from Galloway, the itinerant Reid left Scotland for New York in his early twenties. He would call this city home for much of his life, and while the book doesn’t yet have an American publisher, countless other copies must have already trickled across the Atlantic. Some will have dropped through letter boxes; others will have been passed from hand to hand before dinner; one, surely, sits on a desk somewhere at his old employer, The New Yorker. While Reid was perhaps better known for his translations, Barefoot focuses solely on his original poems. As such, there is an impression of having the poet to ourselves—a sense that as readers, we don’t have to share him. His voice can be stern, though it’s frequently balanced with a smile—you can almost hear it, sometimes, creeping in around Reid’s eyes. It’s both a solemn and joyous collection. I particularly like him on faces—here are three of them: “Age has engraved his face. / Cradling his wagged-out chin, / I shave him, feeling bone / stretching the waxed skin” (from “My Father, Dying”). “From wearing a face all this time, I am made aware /of the maps faces are, of the inside wear and tear. / I take to faces that have come far” (from “Weathering”). “Here, one is grateful to the tolerant landscape, / and glad to be known by men with leather faces / who welcome anything but questions. / Words, like the water, must be used with care” (from “New Hampshire”). —Robin Jones Read More
September 28, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Museum Heists, Midsixties Teens, and Munchesque Prisoners By The Paris Review Photo: Lucas Marquardt. Ada Limón’s poetry is like staring into a cloudy night sky and searching desperately for any signs of a star. Just when you’re about to give up, you find a single pinprick in the dark, enough light to remind you that something’s out there. With each poem in her new collection, The Carrying, Limón counterbalances her most paralyzing fears with her ability to find small twinges of hope. Much of Limón’s pain originates in her body: her twisted spine, her inability to conceive. “What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?” she despairs in “The Vulture and the Body.” But Limón’s pain supersedes the physical; through verse, her body becomes a simulacra of the political dread that has been sowed across the country. In the chilling lines of “A New National Anthem,” Limón wonders, “Perhaps / the truth is every song of this country/ has an unsung third stanza, something brutal / snaking underneath us … ” The only way Limón can face the overwhelming aspects of her existence is with her most personal comforts. She grows tomatoes in her garden. She finds beauty in dandelions and leaves. She relies on the durability and the persistence of nature. Each poem is a widening lens of the world, an unburdening of the things we carry deep within ourselves. “Look, we are not unspectacular things,” she reminds us. “We’ve come this far, survived this much.” —Madeline Day Read More
September 21, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Book Festivals, Benefactors, and Broken Buttonholes By The Paris Review Terrance Hayes’s abiding interest in Etheridge Knight has perhaps long been established, but Wave Books just this month published To Float in the Space Between, a multifaceted, multi-genre work that ultimately lands somewhere between biography and criticism. Hayes’s meditation on Knight’s legacy and impact on American poetry and the Black Arts Movement is conveyed dynamically and with emotionally weighted nuance through excerpts, criticism, anecdotes, and illustrations. The true pleasure of this book is the perennial one of being allowed the clearance to standby and listen as a brilliant poet thinks deeply and at length about another brilliant poet. —Lauren Kane Read More
September 14, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Butt Fumbles, Bounty Hunters, and Black-Market Auctions By The Paris Review Where do I start with The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl? The latest film from Masaaki Yuasa is a beautifully bonkers, Ulysses-esque rendering of a single night in Kyoto. Its shapeless, sneaky plot—plot? nested series of absurdities?—follows the titular girl on her quest to drink everything in town. Simple, right? In this world, though, a single night can be turned sideways, shaken out like a picnic blanket, transformed by the light, accordioned out to reveal endless mysteries nestled in the interstices between minutes and moments. The difficulty in describing this movie is that something new is always happening, and it is always happening in vivid color. The preppy director of the school festival runs a complicated surveillance system that follows students’ every action from birth. A man named Don Underwear refuses to change his skivvies until he once again meets the woman of his dreams—with whom he locks eyes at the exact moment apples fall from trees and bonk both of them on the head. A tiny god with an ice cream cone raids a black-market literary auction and frees the books, which take to the air, scatter like pigeons, and alight on the shelves of a nearby used-book fair. I left the theater certain that everything is connected and life is beautiful—the sorts of platitudes you think when you’ve somehow stumbled your way into that rarest of things: a perfect night out. Roll your eyes all you want—you’ll thoroughly understand my joy once you’ve experienced the rush of a single long, short night bouncing around in Masaaki Yuasa’s head. —Brian Ransom Read More
September 7, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dubbing and Pill Popping By The Paris Review While watching Dario Argento’s engrossingly decadent, nonsensical, phantasmagoric ballet-school horror film Suspiria at the IFC Center, the scales fell from my eyes. I had previously come to accept as an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that the great Italian films produced in the forty years after the Second World War—films by Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, De Sica, and Argento—had all their dialogue dubbed in post-production, with no concern for fidelity to the acoustical environment or the movement of the actors’ mouths. Whispers are deafening; sentences careen blithely on after an actor’s face has gone still; an actor’s mouth plainly repeats the same word over and over as the soundtrack magically produces the most varied eloquence. I assumed it a national quirk, like the French and their reverence for Jerry Lewis, and the price of admission to these masterpieces—to their sensuousness, their mixture of pitiless realism and old Hollywood glamour, their feel for the physicality of actors. Then, with Suspiria—in which these qualities are raised to the nth degree, in which pure style is predominant over any narrative coherence—I realized the atrocious dubbing, the flagrant lack of concern for dialogue, is inextricable from the very things that make these movies uniquely great. In essence, the Italians continued to make silent films deep into the sound era, with all the lost qualities inherent to silent film. The decoupling of dialogue from filming seemed to unchain the camera of the Italian filmmakers, free to roam at will, free to hold and hold on faces, waiting for the slightest barometric shift. In Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, far more information is conveyed by the choreography of two characters following each other through an apartment than by dialogue. The Italian film stars of the era—Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren, etc.— are so vivid in memory precisely because their voices are indistinct. Compare them to a star like Humphrey Bogart, whose voice is so famous, and whose iconic moments—“Here’s looking at you, kid”—are so often bound up with dialogue. The aura of the Italian stars is visual, a silent luminosity adhering to them like the saintly halos in an icon. As the faded silent film star Norma Desmond says, contemptuously, in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue—we had faces!” —Matt Levin Read More
August 31, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Wedding Woes and Mutual Hatred By The Paris Review This summer I visited my ancestral home, which is loosely defined as Cleveland, Ohio and tightly defined as any room holding my Great Aunt Laura. She maintains not only my family history (the memory of my great grandmother staying up late playing solitaire, for example) but also a more general understanding of four generations of life in Cleveland. In the hours I wasn’t rapt around her table, I was reading Dorothy West’s The Wedding. Turned on to West by The Paris Review’s Feminize Your Canon column, I tore through her novel of a late-summer wedding. Set within a carefully cultivated black upper-class community in Martha’s Vineyard, The Wedding is the story of the much anticipated nuptials between a daughter of a respected family and the white jazz pianist with whom she has fallen in love. West’s sympathies are teasingly veiled. Through her characters, who span generations and therefore approach the couple’s union differently, she suggests a certain difficulty but not impossibility of judgement. The Wedding certainly has enough heartbreak and suspense for a beach-read, but West is a sociologist of the first order. Though they are given little credence, writers (and aunties) know better—history is always complicated. The Wedding published in 1995 when West was eighty-seven is a beautiful novel and a record worth keeping close. —Julia Berick If you scroll too deep into the Internet, it’s easy to feel like the world is ending. The Polar Ice Caps are melting and Trump is gushing toxic tweets. Olivia Laing’s debut novel, Crudo, is a merciless catalogue of the political and personal anxieties that plague us, breathlessly recounted by a middle-aged writer named Kathy who bears an undeniable resemblance to late punk-poet Kathy Acker. In the seemingly cataclysmic summer of 2017, Kathy is about to be married to a man twenty-nine years her senior. But instead of planning her wedding, she spends her days swiping through social media and bemoaning the omnipresent panic brought on by an endless onslaught of information. “Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore the atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own.” Though the plot itself is sparse, Kathy’s narrative tumbles along at breakneck speed; it’s uncomfortably crowded with Kathy’s wedding woes, her reactions to political events, and the gossip of the boring, heterosexual couples that Kathy encounters during her vacation in Tuscany. It’s less a novel than a single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing. —Madeline Day Read More