January 27, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Concentric Circles, Carpenters, Coffee House By The Paris Review From the cover of Alma Thomas, by Ian Berry. “Vincent is a waiter at Coffee House. It’s called just that—Coffee House. The name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, even if the business has.” From its opening lines, Ghachar Ghochar—Vivek Shanbhag’s novella about the secrets of a nouveau riche family in present-day Bangalore—exudes such a sly, ironic charm that it’s easy to forget you’re reading a translation. Ghachar Ghochar introduces us to a master. I can’t wait for his translator, Srinath Perur, to show us more. —Lorin Stein Among the many, many, many reasons to miss the Obamas is their smart and wide-ranging taste in art. They chose three Alma Thomas paintings for the White House, one of which, Resurrection, was placed in the Old Family Dining Room, making it the first work by an African American woman to hang in a public area of the White House. Thomas made Resurrection in 1968, only eight years after retiring, at age sixty-eight, from teaching junior-high art in Washington, D.C., and devoting herself to painting. Resurrection consists of concentric circles of paint daubs, her signature “Alma Stripes,” radiating outward in rainbow colors that are electric with possibility. All of her early works are of a piece—brightly hued and joyous, like oversize pointillist versions of Sister Corita Kent posters. The Studio Museum in Harlem gave Thomas a show last year, which I missed, but a gorgeous catalogue is now available (which makes me doubly sad I missed the show). Alongside NASA’s Apollo missions, Thomas made her Space series, which, though formally similar to the earlier work, seems tempered in mood. Snoopy Sees Sunrise on Earth, from 1971, depicts a globe of color stripes floating on a pale blue-green field: I sense her awe of the cosmic scene, but also perhaps its fragility. “I began to think about what I would see if I were in an airplane,” she explained of the series. “You look down on things. You streak through the clouds so fast you don’t know whether the flower below is a violet or what. You see only streaks of color.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 20, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Blush, Babble, Barbed Wire By The Paris Review From the cover of Ardour. I’ve found much solace in poetry since November, and this week (long live the NEA), it fell on Nicole Brossard’s recent book of poems, Ardour, translated from the Quebecois by Angela Carr, to help give my feelings shape. The book’s koan-like epigraph, by Anne Carson—“think of your life without it”—is apt; the nearly hundred poems in Ardour appear as fragments, but their brevity belies their breadth. Brossard’s poems are often concerned with points or moments of transition (“nightfall” and the horizon appear frequently, as do shifts in light and weather) that, though subtly rendered, can signal profound change. “Dawn does not darken,” she writes, “it has upper-case letters / can elegantly juxtapose / vivid smiles / and wounds, if you like.” The poems are flecked with small violences—bites and barbed wire, a “blow of murmurs”—but I feel saved by their intimacy, partly owing to their diminutive size: they feel like whispered truths, or at least consolations. “Whirlwind i also love / the species knotted in dog days and l’intimité / the very depths of respiration / our ‘us’ enumerated flaming new.” —Nicole Rudick Last week, Giancarlo Di Trapano turned me on to Suicidal Realism, a short memoir by the Canadian painter Brad Phillips. It’s not exactly an edifying book. Phillips’s main themes are drugs and sex, in that order: “People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with.” But Phillips has a watchful intelligence and self-knowledge, and an impatient sincerity, that sneak up on you (or at least, snuck up on me). He doesn’t ask to be liked, even by his groupies, but he does want to communicate: “I’m not interested in the ones who are drawn to the creator of the work, I’m interested in the ones who are drawn to the content.” —Lorin Stein Read More
January 13, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Salukis, Sincerity, Slithering By The Paris Review An illustration from Vice’s Fiction issue, which featured an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s Transit—see what we did there? The 2016 Vice Fiction issue is the best literary magazine I’ve seen this year. Maybe I’m biased. It includes new (and very good) work from a bunch of Paris Review writers, namely Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Tim Parks, Christine Smallwood, Deb Olin Unferth, and Benjamin Nugent—plus our former web editor Thessaly La Force. Oh, and the whole issue is edited by Plimpton Prize winner Amie Barrodale. But it’s not just the stories themselves. I also love the interior art direction—with literal photo illustrations of each story, all in what you might call the Vice house style. It screams sincerity, and it pays respect. —Lorin Stein Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit, which we excerpted last summer, is out next week. Like its predecessor, Outline, it comprises several long, fluid, exactingly rendered conversations. Saying more feels like window dressing, and I worry I’m making it sound like My Dinner with Andre, but here goes. Recently divorced, the narrator’s upheaval has led her to a state of social alertness (not to say vulnerability) that makes others eager to confide in her, to try out hidden versions of themselves. The feeling is of swimming, with blissful immersion, through hours of watery talk. It’s hard to describe a novel like this without making them sound “quiet” or “slight,” but Transit is neither—people speak and people listen, and it is good. In one of the many passages I earmarked, a man explains the elaborate, concerted hunting process of “a shoal of Salukis” as they track birds of prey: “It suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves.” You could think of Transit as the pursuit of that shared state. In its fidelity to the long talk—to the sense of permeation that comes with a lively exchange—it argues that conversation is the ideal vehicle for the sublime. —Dan Piepenbring Read More
January 6, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sisters, Scary Sex, “Sivilization” By The Paris Review From Sisters by a River. Barbara Comyns (1909–92) grew up one of five girls in an old house on the banks of the River Avon. When she was seventeen, her father died; the family was ruined and dispersed. Her first novel, Sisters by a River, is about the lost paradise of their country childhood—a paradise that is often indistinguishable from hell. It is, in other words, a realistic treatment, written (for her own daughters, originally) in a kind of well-bred nursery patois, with the cold gaze of an actual child: “Quite suddenly Chloe and I got a craze for throwing perfectly good things away, it started in the holidays when our other games were rather suppressed. It was always Chloes’s things that were distroyed, we would burn her books slowly, page by page, break her dolls heads off and distroy toys she was really fond of, an awful gleam would come into our eyes and we would tear a teddy bear’s head off, burn it, then throw the body in the river.” —Lorin Stein I snuck away from the office to catch MoMA’s new exhibition “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde.” This show doesn’t make any new claims, and I’ve seen a good bit of the work before, but I never miss a chance to see it again. And each time I do, I’m awed by the exuberance, energy, and freshness in the artists’ approaches to materials and ideas and to the physical and psychic environments of revolutionary Russia. I also never fail to find new connections with more contemporary art. In her linoleum-cut prints from 1917 to 1919, Lyubov Popova layered collage-like, colored shapes to suggest movement and spatial interaction (what she called “painterly architectonics”): I instantly thought of Lee Krasner’s large, hard-edge canvases from the early seventies, where seemingly cutout curvilinear forms dance around one another. In El Lissitzky’s Proun lithographs from 1920—in which various three-dimensional geometric shapes float around one another as though in a group space walk—I see Rammellzee’s “Letter Racers” from the late eighties and early nineties, his galactic graffiti language writ in sculptures composed of found objects spray painted and mounted on wheels and skateboards. “The artist is transformed from reproducer to builder of a new world of forms, a new world of objects,” El Lissitzky wrote. I’ll bet Rammellzee would agree. —Nicole Rudick Read More
December 9, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tests, Tongues, Tinfoil Orbs By The Paris Review Rorschach psychodiagnostics. From the first chapter of The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing, out in February, it seems incredible that no one before Damion Searls has ever written a biography of Rorschach. Born in extreme poverty in the Swiss countryside, in 1884, Rorschach spent most of his professional life in obscurity, working as a psychiatrist in a remote, understaffed insane asylum. It was there that he invented his “psychodiagnostics,” a series of symmetrical multicolored forms (they weren’t really inkblots) that could reveal hidden aspects of the mind. One year later, Rorschach was dead, at thirty-seven, of a ruptured appendix. His early death may have deterred other would-be biographers, but Searls sails past it with style: the second half of his book traces the fortunes of Rorschach’s famous test, which became a household word in America after World War II, when the U.S. Army used it on draftees. Searls uses this unlikely-seeming artifact to illuminate two histories, one scientific, the other cultural, both full of surprises. —Lorin Stein I have a galley of Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection but have put off digging into it partly because it doesn’t come out until March. Given the events at Standing Rock earlier this week, it seemed the ideal moment to read the long, multipart poem Whereas, Long Soldier’s response to President Obama’s signing and delivery, in 2009, of the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Or rather, his lack of delivery: he never read it aloud publicly. Is an apology really an apology if you only write it down and file it away? Long Solider begins sentences, paragraphs, and sections with whereas, the hedging of government-speak that she counters with lines about her childhood, her parents, her tribe, and her daughter. She interweaves these with thoughts of language’s limitations, which she faces again and again, and her weariness—bodily, psychically, culturally—infects the poem: “How much must I labor // to signify what’s real … Really, I climb the back of languages, ride them into exhaustion—maybe pull the reins when I mean go … Stuck, I want off. Let loose from the impulse to note: Beware, a horse isn’t a reference to my heritage.” The personal is political here, and vice versa, and Long Soldier isn’t giving up. “The root of reparation,” she writes, “is repair.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
December 2, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bitterness, Blindness, Backing Vocals By The Paris Review A still from Notes on Blindness. This week I read Teddy Wayne’s Loner, an impressively creepy novel of first love, specifically the unrequited, unwelcome, male dork variety. With a straight A student for his antihero—a Harvard freshman who connives his way into the life of a glamorous classmate—Wayne satirizes the teenage male gaze from within. And he does it without ingratiating himself to the reader. At a moment when so many young writers want to join the ranks of the angels, Wayne’s unfashionable wit, bitterness, and tight focus are a gift. —Lorin Stein This week I’ve been reading Terrance Hayes’s most recent collection, How to Be Drawn, which was published last year. Hayes is also a painter and has said that language is unrelated to the physical act of painting, but in this collection, he lets the two brush up against one another to see what comes of it. Some poems are formally adventurous and most are visually expressive in the way the words jostle and play—“The ladies wear wigs of nots, / knots of nots: would nots, do nots, cannots.” They are Mayakovskian in their gusto, though less extravagant and celebratory; on many occasions, his nimble wordplay and punning slow for moments of clear-eyed observation, as when he says of a friend, “A man can be / so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being, / a flavor indistinguishable from spit.” Many of Hayes’s artworks appear to be portraits, and I imagine that language isn’t absent from the act looking, even if it’s a deeply internal process. Perhaps the best argument for the overlap between poetry and painting comes when he writes, “I care less and less / about the shapes of shapes because forms / change and nothing is more durable than feeling.” —Nicole Rudick Read More