April 21, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Meta, Menudo, Mandates By The Paris Review Camille Claudel. Jim Harrison, who died last year at seventy-eight, was a gourmand with a trencherman’s appetite—food comes up in his Writers at Work interview several times. Though he evokes an atmosphere of overindulgence, the man was sensible and had rules for his dinner guests, the first being very practical considering: “No one is allowed to use cocaine before the meal when I cook … Cocaine creates a sort of bubblegum nimbus that slaughters the palate and sensuous capacities, in addition to shrinking the wee-wee and tearing holes in the social fabric.” Jane and Michael Stern once described Harrison’s food writing as a “combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah.” The years didn’t change him, evidenced by the new, posthumous A Really Big Lunch, a collection of essays from the 2000s in which Harrison goes on about “left-leaning, spit-dribbling, eco-freak readers” who wouldn’t want to eat freshly killed meats and suggests that Ronald Reagan “eat my menudo in order to regain the foreign affairs advantage.” He compares a red wine from Chateau Grillet to the “seductive quality of the minute hairs on the back of a woman’s thigh in high summer” and reminds us that of all the animals, man alone cooks. The collection is chockablock with these zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue. —Jeffery Gleaves Craig Morgan Teicher is fast becoming one of my favorite contemporary poets. In his new collection, The Trembling Answers, I love that he recognizes small moments of wonder in the quotidian without trying to have those moments transcend the workaday world. So, for instance, he thinks on “high school nights // spent grieving high school nights—they stick / in the heart like sharp bones, / clog the way like / artery-fat.” There is also an overriding sense in his poems that the life he once imagined for himself is not exactly the one he now leads. Who doesn’t gaze into a mirror with their younger self and see dissatisfaction looking back while, in turn, trying to elicit an understanding that the future they behold, though spare and sometimes troubled, is on balance pretty terrific. Teicher’s poems transpire in a “plain mood,” during “eventless afternoons,” and end “on a low / note, or so tonight would have it,” nights when “I put the kids to bed. I did the dishes.” These humdrum moments contain both contentment and regret—the latter, “the hooks that won’t come out.” This is a book about facing, daily, “this one life that is all I am.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 14, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Conduits, Cockroaches, Colored Paper By The Paris Review From Ben Gijsemans’s debut graphic novel, Hubert. It seems silly to ask, but did you know that there were loads of women making art in the postwar era, before the advent of the feminist movement, women who were central to the development of various abstract idioms but who were largely marginalized in male-dominated conversations about abstraction? Surprising, but not surprising, right? MoMA’s new show, “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,” which opens tomorrow, seeks to rectify this omission by gathering some fifty artists and more than a hundred paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, and fiber works made between the end of World War II and the late sixties. One of my favorite paintings is there: Lee Krasner’s Gaea, a large canvas on which pink and white ovoid shapes burst out of a dark purple background. I discovered Eleanore Mikus’s gluey white canvas, from which indistinct shapes begin to surface, like forms from a block of marble; Anne Ryan’s small, profound collages made from colored paper, sandpaper, cloth, string; Magdalena Abakanowicz’s imposing, animate yellow-orange woven sisal wall piece; and so many more—room after room of stunning, brilliant work. —Nicole Rudick Constance DeJong’s novel Modern Love turns thirty this year, and it’s out in a striking new facsimile edition from Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse. The book comes kicking and screaming from a vortex of polyphony. Its two hundred pages wander from the downtown New York of the seventies to India to Oregon to Spain in the time of the Armada; it declaims on everything from Elizabethan fashion to the joys of cohabiting with cockroaches, with a long passage that’s straight-up science fiction. All of this should induce vertigo, or at the very least whiplash; instead the novel enshrouds the reader in a kind of patchwork quilt, comfortable even as it frays at the edges. Seemingly frenetic, Modern Love is ordered with great care; beneath its constant digression it settles into a ruminative, almost stately pace, encouraging capacious feeling on anxiety, sex, death, and work, often all at once. “I’m fanatical about sequence,” DeJong told Bomb recently, “and how sense and meaning can be made from a system of order that isn’t recognizable as alphabetical, chronological—one that has a different mechanism to the structure. That has always been fuel for my writing, and it has never gone away.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
April 7, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mediums, Midtown Hotels, McGoorty By The Paris Review Still from Mediums. After our Spring Revel this week, I woke up feeling like garbage’s garbage. To ease the pain, I reached for Robert Byrne’s McGoorty: A Pool Room Hustler, a biography as greasy as a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich and just as good for my hangover. First published in 1972, this profane picaresque does a nice little cradle-to-grave number on Danny McGoorty, a real live Chicago pool shark, earthy and sly and often in extremis. In the twenties, he went from billiard room to billiard room, conning and swindling his way to a small fortune; in the thirties, he was a boxcar hobo; in the forties, he went pro and sobered up long enough to win a pool championship. What else do you need to know? Luc Sante reissued McGoorty some years back as part of his Library of Larceny series, but it seems to have fallen out of print again. Won’t someone please rescue McGoorty? He is unrepentantly ripe. As early as page three, he begins his prurient boasting about “broads”: “I was seventeen years old before I was able to get my finger damp enough to turn a page. Once I got started, though, I became quite the little cocksman.” No doubt, McGoorty. No doubt. —Dan Piepenbring I’ve been reading Sarah Gerard’s new collection, Sunshine State, and trying to figure out why I’m so intrigued by the way she writes about the confident naïveté of youth. There’s little to admire in, say, a blissed-out appreciation of a dubious guy in parachute pants, but Gerard, writing in the essay “Records” about her senior year of high school, sets sections about pursuing vocal performance at her arts magnet school, with an eye toward a professional singing career, against drugged-out nights doing next to nothing. The contrast feels both irreconcilable and credible. Gerard’s prose is unlabored, flatly observational, and the interwoven mini stories are at once tender and cold, exhilarating and regrettable—each undermining the one that precedes it. In the best of these sections, almost a stand-alone story, Gerard travels to New York, from Florida, with her parents to visit colleges. She sneaks out of their midtown hotel at night and falls immediately prey to a pair of questionable older men. Seeing her camera, they tell her they shoot for National Geographic. It’s clear to the reader they do not; Gerard, at seventeen, is wide-eyed. They coerce her into taking a photograph of a couple arguing outside a bar. When she develops the photo home, she feels “afraid and ashamed looking at it, knowing this is not a picture I wanted to take; that I took it only because I was told to.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
March 31, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sorceresses, Sidewalks, Suturing By The Paris Review From Taipei Story. When I hopped over to BAM recently to see Edward Yang’s 1985 Taipei Story, I didn’t realize that I was about to encounter one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen this year. Taipei Story is a stunning and fluid masterpiece about a couple, Chin (Tsai Chin) and Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien), slowly drifting apart in an increasingly modern Taiwan. They make vague plans to move to America, but they fall through—neither one of them can seem to stop giving money to their struggling friends and family. The movie is sewn through with glorious slow images: of Taiwan’s new, monotonous high-rises (“I can’t tell anymore which ones I designed and which I didn’t,” says Chin’s architect lover); clogged highways; active night markets and cozy karaoke bars. Everything is bent in a glacially paced Weltschmerz. The biggest bummer (spoiler, sorry): when Lung dies, stabbed at the end by a young admirer of Chin’s. It happens so casually, in a muffled street scuffle, that it just seems like another quiet moment in this drifting, sad story. But Yang has flipped the tragedy switch: after his attacker flees, Lung starts to walk away, then stops, pulls back his jacket, and looks at a dripping, red orb on his white dress shirt. He limps down the empty, tree-lined parkway, hoping for a cab. It never comes. —Caitlin Love I watched A Perfect Couple (1979) from start to finish before I realized it was a Robert Altman movie. I should’ve known: it’s a bonkers rom-com including an assault with a fireplace poker, a very horny veterinarian, and a tender moment in the ER, with the doctor interrupting to say, “I don’t think you two should be kissing while I’m suturing.” Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play star-crossed lovers with troubles at home. He, well into his forties, still lives in the baroque family mansion, where his tyrannical Greek father presides over creaky, oppressive family dinners. She’s a backup singer in Keepin’ Em Off the Streets, a Delaney and Bonnie–ish rock revue whose asshole bandleader insists on grueling, interminable rehearsals, after which the band repairs to the hip loft where they cohabit in promiscuous, cultlike harmony. Altman’s arch, cynical side is here in abundance—he makes love seem like an apocalypse, the sort of thing you’d undertake only if the drugs stopped being fun. But almost in spite of himself, he ends up with a winsome story about trapped people looking for life’s fire exits. (He also sneaks in one of the earliest examples of a happy gay couple in all of cinema.) The sets, designed by regular Altman collaborator Leon Ericksen, are at once airy and labyrinthine, giving the camera plenty of holes to plumb and baubles to dwell on. And the script is quietly lacerating: when Dooley advertises himself for a video-dating service, he stammers, “I’m interested in having a relationship that’s, uh … well I don’t like to say meaningful, because everybody says meaningful.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
March 24, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Crusaders, Complaints, Competition By The Paris Review From Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir. José Maria de Eça de Queirós, where have you been all my life? Dead, obviously—the man died in 1900 at the age of fifty-five—but his novels are acknowledged as classics in his native Portugal, and by well-educated people the world over. As readers of the Daily may remember, I tore through my first Eça book a few months ago. And now Margaret Jull Costa has translated The Illustrious House of Ramires, his last novel, about a provincial aristocrat—a dreamer and amateur historian—who tries to write a novella based on the exploits of his Crusader ancestors. Comedy and mayhem ensue. As in The Crime of Father Amaro, Eça’s tone shifts from light to dark, from tender irony to horror, then back again, in a single page, almost in a sentence, as Ramires—like a fin de siècle, Portuguese Quixote—tries to re-create the chivalry of his forbears. The plot is full of surprises, but even when our hero is just sitting at his desk, dreaming up deeds of valor, Eça takes us inside the fantasy, until we start to wonder whether Ramires has crossed the fine line between idiocy and genius. It’s rare to find such a thrilling portrait of the writer at work. —Lorin Stein The other day, I picked up Letters to His Neighbor, a collection of Marcel Proust’s notes to Marie Williams, the women who lived above him at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Translated from the French by Lydia Davis, the letters begin in 1908 and span some eight years of sincere pleasantries (“I think of you all the time”) and gentle complaints (“like all those who are ill I have learned to spend my life surrounded by ugliness”). In true Proustian fashion, the prose is winding, musing on everything from the properties of imagination (“when one is endowed with [it], as you are, one possesses all the landscapes one has loved … ”) to the Great War, which claimed Williams’s brother in 1915. Above all, Proust writes about the noise coming from the Williams’ floor, which disturbs him greatly; he’s always asking “that there not be so much [of it] tomorrow.” You’d think that would limit their correspondence, but Proust is a charmer: he showers Mrs. Williams with small gifts, like flowers and books and pieces of music; it’s no wonder the exchange lasted nearly a decade. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
March 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Codes, Contracts, Coffee Stains By The Paris Review From Terms and Conditions. In his new book, the pop-conceptual curiosity Terms and Conditions, R. Sikoryak reproduces the styles of more than a hundred other cartoonists—including Marjane Satrapi, Steve Ditko, Raina Telgemeier, Edward Gorey, and Peyo—one per page, to adapt the text of iTunes’ Terms and Conditions, “the contract everyone agrees to but no one reads.” I can’t say I read it in this form either, but it does make the text occasionally more intriguing, if not readable, highlighting certain phrases in the document that would otherwise remain a haze of letters. Given its own caption box, the line “To agree to these terms, click ‘agree.’ If you do not agree to these terms, do not click ‘agree,’ and do not use these services” reads like a middle finger to the (potential) user. A turtlenecked Steve Jobs populates each comic in the style of the page (as Popeye, Homer Simpson, Ziggy, Wolverine); Sikoryak, too, disappears into these other idioms, and though the parody is impressive, each style remains a simulacrum, lacking the soul of the original. But maybe this is partly the point. Even if it were Ernie Bushmiller at the pen, is it still Sluggo if he tells Nancy, “You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, transfer, redistribute, or sublicense the Licensed Application”? Sikoryak hasn’t attempted to match the action in the panels to the language, so the legalese can’t leech significance from the art. The text becomes a lorem ipsum—placeholder copy that is seen but never read. —Nicole Rudick After reading Fleur Jaeggy’s “Agnes” in our current issue, I got ahold of her collection I am the Brother of XX, out in July. Gini Alhadeff, who translates it from the Italian, does a wonderful job binding these twenty-one fictions about family life into a cohesive psychology: each offers a dark, uncompromising perspective on the covenants of mother-, brother-, and sisterhoods. In the title story, a young brother claims his sister’s concern for his academic well-being is the work of obsessive espionage; in “The Heir,” an old woman adopts a homeless girl and redrafts her will so that her daughter will receive her entire estate, only to be burned alive by this new heiress: “She wanted the destruction of that woman who was good to her. To destroy for the blasted glory of it. She doesn’t want money. But to destroy. Should she have to answer to a ridiculous why?” And that’s only the first time we see a daughter burn down her parents’ house in XX. This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over. —Daniel Johnson Read More