March 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bobby, Janelle, and Romeo By The Paris Review Like most people who live in New York, I’m always threatening to move to Los Angeles, and like most people who live in New York, I likely never will. This winter, however, I almost made a visit. The impetus was an exhibit of Ellen Gallagher’s at Hauser & Wirth. The deterrent was the thought of taking the A train from Harlem to JFK. Luckily for me, and for people everywhere thwarted by inertia and a lack of cheap flights, Hauser & Wirth published Accidental Records, a catalogue of paintings, photographs, collages, and texts meant to accompany the show. In it, Gallagher patches together a series of strange seascapes populated by ruled lines, whale fins, and teeny, tiny spores. The images appear unpeopled but evoke a population that’s been willfully forgotten. In the liner notes to their 1997 album, The Quest, the Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya writes, “During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?” The Drexciya myth is one that’s been taken up by a number of black artists, Gallagher included. In Accidental Records, she creates the imagery for a world in which these mothers and sea babies, dead or unborn, were able to survive. —Maya Binyam Read More
February 23, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Hooks, Twizzles, and Symphonies By The Paris Review bell hooks. In a compelling and widely read New York Times editorial published Thursday, “The Boys Are Not All Right,” Michael Ian Black argues that the blame for our society’s gun-violence epidemic lies, at least in part, with our broken standards of masculinity. While feminism has expanded the definition of womanhood, he writes, no commensurate movement has helped boys to reimagine what it might mean to become men: “I think we [men] would benefit from the same conversations girls and women have been having for these past 50 years.” Black is correct that masculinity has failed to evolve, but conversations about that failure have in fact been happening for some time. One person who has consistently tried to break the silence is bell hooks. In her 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks, like Black, criticizes what she interprets as an intellectual and cultural silence on the subject of men. “Feminist theory has offered us brilliant critiques of patriarchy,” she writes, “and very few insightful ideas about alternative masculinity, especially in relation to boys.” In personal, approachable prose, she examines how both women and men perpetuate a patriarchal model of masculinity—albeit to disparate reward—and explores “what the alternative to patriarchal masculinity might be.” Fourteen years later, it strikes me that the continued paucity of such alternatives stems less from a lack of answers than from an unwillingness to ask the question. —Spencer Bokat-Lindell Read More
February 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tattoos, Death Grips, and Love Letters By The Paris Review I’ve long admired Eddie Martinez’s wild, colorful abstractions, but until now, I’d never seen them in person. This week, I saw half of a show at two New York locations of the gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash. In Chelsea, a block from our office, is a suite of big paintings called “Love Letters.” Each of the roughly half dozen canvases are painted on oversize reproductions of personal letterhead: “Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez” lines the top of each “page,” and their address runs along the bottom. Moyer is Martinez’s wife, so these paintings could be playful messages to her, as though doodled in a moment of affection on a handy piece of paper. Humor runs throughout Martinez’s work: the pun “fine ants” appears in one painting, and his last show at the gallery was titled “Samoneye.” (Get it? “Sam and I”? I love puns.) Drawing is also an essential part of his work. These paintings are based on Sharpie drawings (some five hundred such drawings fill a wall in Martinez’s studio) blown up in size and then rendered in layers of form and color. Floral and cartoon figures and bulbous, Guston-y shapes are camouflaged behind scribbles of brushwork and slashes of spray paint in gray-blue, vivid red, and mustard yellow. Admiring the lines and dripping fields of color almost feels like watching Martinez in action. —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Rachel Lyon, Radiohead, and Richard Pryor By The Paris Review Karin Tidbeck. Karin Tidbeck’s collection Jagannath strings together a chain of eerie vignettes where the fantastic creeps in from a place just outside your peripheral vision, subtly seeping into a reality you thought you recognized. Tidbeck translated these herself from her native Swedish, and the end result is a clear, succinct prose style that makes for a crisp blank canvas so that the strangeness of her plots and ideas stands out against a clean background. These stories are quick and varied, though Tidbeck deftly navigates each shift between narratives, keeping the reader hooked with swift, absorbing plots and empathetic, human characters. They often arrive at their endings unresolved but satisfying, and rarely ever in a place you thought they would take you. —Lauren Kane Rachel Lyon. Photo: Debra Pearlman. I read a draft of Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, in 2014. The finished book, published this week by Scribner, has evolved and changed, but the essentials were in place from the beginning. The story is told in crisp, clicking, photographic prose and has the narrative momentum of a thriller, though the question isn’t what tragedy will befall the main character but what that character will do with a tragedy once it’s happened—and, most interestingly, happened to someone else. The story is set in DUMBO in the eighties. Pipes leak. Artists squat. Developers are only just beginning to arrive. The central character is the struggling photographer, Lu Rile. Rile happens to be taking a self-portrait in her apartment as a neighbor’s child falls to his death outside her window. She catches the moment and ends up with the image of a lifetime. Now she must decide what to do with it. She harbors the secret as she comforts the child’s mother. They become increasingly close, but all the while, Rile is developing the film in her apartment right downstairs, in her makeshift darkroom, adjusting its size, trying out different versions—Lyon makes this process especially thrilling—creating the work of art that she knows could lift her from obscurity into the amoral splendor of the eighties art world. For those of us who have loved this novel for years, this week feels like something out of its pages. Finally, the secret is out. —Brent Katz Read More
February 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Phillips, February, and Fake News By The Paris Review A banner depicting Joice Heth, by the artist Mark Copeland. When a review copy of Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News landed on my desk, I turned to Nadja and said, This book is going to win the Pulitzer Prize. Bunk is a barefisted reckoning with American culture, an extension of sorts of Young’s whip-smart book-length essay The Grey Album that coils, swerves, and diverts out at right angles from itself. It begins with a seemingly benign look at Joice Heth, a black woman whom P. T. Barnum added to his sideshow and claimed to be the 161-year-old nursing maid of George Washington. The question is, Was Heth in on it? Was she paid for this? And even if she was, was Barnum’s humbug—something designed to deceive and mislead—essentially a co-opting of black pain and suffering? How does that change when we discover that Barnum actually bought her from another showman? Young’s inquiry spins out from there and looks at the outrageous headlines of nineteenth-century penny papers, fake memoirs, false reporting, and the unmistakable Americanness of the hoax—which is essentially a performance, one the viewer willfully participates in, as disingenuous as it is. Young is a pure essayist in the vein of Emerson and Montaigne. Reading Young, you feel like you’re making connections along with him, and it’s exciting, at times flabbergasting, to peel back the layers of the American psyche together. Bunk was long-listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. I stand by my prediction of Young’s Pulitzer, and am taking bets. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
January 26, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sinners, Slavery, and Shults By The Paris Review Adrienne Kennedy and her son in 1970. Photo: Jack Robinson On Sunday, I’ll be in the audience of Adrienne Kennedy’s latest play, He Brought Her Home in a Box. To prepare for it, I thought I’d revisit a few of the playwright’s earlier works, such as Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, and A Lesson in Dead Language. These one-act plays, along with Kennedy’s interwoven commentary, are bound together, among others, in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. The compendium offers a glimpse into the mind of a remarkable dramatist. Surreal, lyrical, and fragmentary, her plays are beautifully merciless in the ways they explore racism, colonialism, womanhood, and the violence inherent in each. In them, time is nonlinear, and characters shift between a multitude of selves. (Take The Owl Answers, for instance, in which there is “she who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the bastard who is the owl.”) To parse Kennedy’s exquisite experimentalism demands readers give themselves over entirely to the experience of her plays, perhaps reading them again and again. As she tells us in the book’s preface, “The days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head.” And that’s precisely what these are: images of torment, in sequence, that will leave you feeling as though you’ve just woken from a nightmare. I’m eager to see what she’s dreamt up this time. —Caitlin Youngquist What makes the loss of Ursula K. Le Guin so much harder to bear is that she was writing only recently. In 2010, she started a blog, and last year, some of those nonfiction posts were collected as No Time to Spare. My husband and my mother both read it and loved it, and on Tuesday, all excuses dissolved in grief, I opened the book and went straight to the cat chapters. A cat is a question that does not require an answer, so Le Guin, who spent her writing life investigating questions that needed addressing, here writes only of appreciation and affection. Is it any surprise Le Guin was a cat person? “If I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog,” she quips. Pard is her feline subject, a lively, mousing tuxedo, and she observes his cat behavior plainly and openly with love: “If I dribble him water in the washbasin he closes the stopper, thus creating a water hole where savage panthers may crouch in wait for dik-diks and gazelles, or possibly beetles. Then we go downstairs—one flying, the other not.” The last cat chapter ends with a devotional doggerel and a small, mischievous feline portrait. “His breed is Alley, his name is Pard,” she writes. “Life without him would be hard.” —Nicole Rudick Read More