November 18, 2016 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked five contributors from our Fall issue to write about what they’re reading. From Dispatches. Alexander Kluge, the German writer-philosopher-filmmaker, was in town last month, and his visit prompted me to pick up Dispatches from Moments of Calm, a collaboration with the artist Gerhard Richter. It’s a book of short stories, essays, and parables, each about the length of a newspaper article, many paired with photographs. Indeed, that was how they first appeared, in Die Welt on October 12, 2012, on a day when the editors traded their thirty pages of news for whatever Kluge and Richter would give them. The resulting dispatches are various. There is a story about a five-year-old boy who just misses striking his head on the pool ladder when he leaps into the water, just misses concussion, and drowning, and never knows it; a story about a couple that sets up their projectors outdoors, after the Lebanese Civil War has reduced their theater to rubble, and shows movies with sound tracks that mix with the sound of battle; a story about the Italian waiters who died on the Titanic and the fiancées they left behind in the Abruzzi, whom local custom forbids seeking husbands in an adjacent town. There are meditations on cities and photographs and species extinction and survival. When I read it, I didn’t foresee my present traumatic relation to the newspapers, and today is no moment of calm. But Kluge’s mosaic doesn’t feel like a refuge so much as a reminder of the real world, the whole real world, surprisingly connected to itself, as full of thought as of accident, all of it worth living in, and worth (though Kluge is patient and irenical) a fight. —Jeff Dolven (“The Art of Poetry No. 101: J. H. Prynne”) I’ve been reading Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil. The recent election is just the latest example of how our algorithm-driven media world—from faulty polling to fake news on social media—has become a threat to democracy. But O’Neil, a former hedge-fund quant turned Occupy activist, shows how pervasive and powerful and ultimately unaccountable misused data is across our lives. The book is not math heavy, but written in an exceedingly accessible, almost literary style; her fascinating case studies of WMDs—ranging from teacher evaluations to fast-food-staff scheduling to crime prediction to global-financial crises—fit neatly into the genre of dystopian literature. There’s a little Philip K. Dick, a little Orwell, a little Kafka in her portrait of powerful bureaucracies ceding control of the most intimate decisions of our lives to hyper-empowered computer models riddled with all of our unresolved, atavistic human biases. It’s a little terrifying to read her accounts of the human costs of Big Data improperly deployed—jobs lost, lives damaged, insurance denied, opportunities foreclosed—but also frightening to see how deeply our society has already invested in this pseudoscience, what she calls “digital phrenology.” Seemingly abstract and benign mathematical models might be the powerful tool ever for reifying and exacerbating existing structures of inequality—but there’s some power in knowing how to spot a WMD and defuse it before it explodes. And it turns out they’re everywhere. —Chris Jackson (“The Art of Poetry No. 100: Ishmael Reed”) Read More
November 11, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Léger, Loving, LSD By The Paris Review From Barbara, Wanda (c) The Estate of Barbara Loden. Courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive. The last couple of days, with work as my excuse, I’ve been losing myself in our back issues. This morning I was moved by a poem I haven’t read in years, “The Mutes,” by Denise Levertov, first published in 1965: “Those groans men use/passing a woman on the street/or on the steps of the subway…” Then, in our summer 1966 issue, I found a letter from Allen Ginsberg describing his first acid trip, at Big Sur, on the same day that LBJ underwent gallbladder surgery: “President Johnson went that day into the Valley of Shadow operating room because of his gall bladder & Berkeley’s Vietnam Day Committee was preparing anxious manifestoes for our march toward Oakland police and Hell’s Angels. Realizing that more vile words from me would send out physical vibrations into the atmosphere that might curse poor Johnson’s flesh and further unbalance his soul, I knelt on the sand surrounded by masses of green bulb-headed Kelp vegetable-snake undersea beings washed up by last night’s tempest, and prayed for the President’s tranquil health.” —Lorin Stein An excerpt of Nathalie Léger’s new book Suite for Barbara Loden appears in our Fall issue. It’s one of my favorite pieces, a multigenre portrait of Léger, Loden, and Wanda (the titular subject of Loden’s 1970 film, which Loden wrote and directed and in which she stars). Léger sets out to write a short notice of Loden for an encyclopedia but quickly becomes mired in the task. How do you describe a person you don’t know? What constitutes their essentialness? And how do you tell their story simply? Since closing our Winter issue last week, I’ve taken up the rest of the book, and I’ve found it to be one of the most affecting stories I’ve read in a long time. A mix of observation, recitation, and imagination, Suite persists in the idea that no single perspective is sufficient in gaining an understanding of a person, and also, perhaps, that no accumulation of perspectives is sufficient either. “There I am,” Léger writes, “still unable to grasp the truth of this life in its official version, the version that is both overloaded and sparse. Born. Died. In the distance the barking of a dog and the sound of trucks maneuvering: the only illusion of reality, the only depth.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
November 4, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Borscht, Barns, Blazes of Greatness By The Paris Review The closest I’ve come to visiting Ukraine is binging on late-night pierogies at Veselka, where I arrived so drunk you could’ve told me I was in Kiev. I’ve had a much richer (and largely more sober) experience with Sophie Pinkham’s Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, the best travel book I’ve read this year—it’s a funny, alert, and more vital account of life there than any you’ll find in the media. Pinkham has a gift for portraiture; even the people she meets in passing feel alive on the page. In an excerpt on the n+1 site, she hikes and camps on the Crimean cape of Meganom, where naked Moldovan hippies spend the summer playing panpipes and living off the land. Pinkham tries to cross the chasm between her life and theirs: “I had never been so acutely aware of my lack of the basic skills that have allowed people to keep themselves alive for millennia,” she writes. “I met a six-year-old who could make borscht; her twelve-year-old brother could dive for mussels. Neither could read—but what good was reading when you were hungry for dinner? The children reminded me of deer, slim and agile, with caramel limbs and sun-bleached hair. They almost never cried, probably because no one would have listened.” —Dan Piepenbring “Richard Howard was once asked how he would translate the French word x—a recherché term intended to stump the Master—and responded, ‘I don’t translate words.’ On the one hand, this is clearly untrue. All translators spend a great deal of time fretting over their choice of words. On the other hand, it is exactly right.” In the current issue of Public Culture, our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, makes a case for nonliteral translation. His main exhibit: the crummy (but literal) New York Times translations of Osama bin Laden’s famous eloquence: “The effect of the Times’ translations, which toggle between barely grammatical speech and weak imitations of rhetorical commonplaces, is to confirm the idea of bin Laden, and of Arabic speakers more generally, that many Times readers already had—that of a strange and potentially deranged exotic, whose speech shows no ability to connect one thought to another. And in this way Arabic itself gets represented as an untranslatable language, which has pretty much been its historical fate in English.” —Lorin Stein Read More
October 28, 2016 This Week’s Reading Spooky Staff Picks: Smelly Ghosts and Sex-crazed Catholics By The Paris Review From the cover of The Crown Derby Plate. Almost a year ago, old friends gave me a big fat Portugese novel I’d never heard of, which promptly burrowed its way under a stack of old New Yorkers and stayed hidden until a month ago. It was a buried treasure. To get an idea of The Crime of Father Amaro, by Eça de Queirós, imagine a Trollope novel—early 1870s, cathedral town, church politics, Tories v. Whigs—except that everyone’s super Catholic, and sex crazed, and with the added difference that the author can’t ever quite decide whether he’s writing a bawdy comedy or a satirical tragedy, and so ends up writing both. This wavering tone must have been hard to translate, but Margaret Jull Costa’s 2002 translation makes it look easy. The Crime of Father Amaro is the best novel I’ve read this year. —Lorin Stein Biblioasis is reviving an apparent tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmastime through a quintet of booklet-size publications, each containing a spooky story and designed and illustrated by the cartoonist Seth. It’s a lovely little set, with tales by Dickens, Wharton, A. M. Burrage, Marjorie Bowen, and M. R. James, but I haven’t saved them for Christmas (no one tells me what to do). I’ve already torn through the Burrage and Bowen, and while they aren’t bloodcurdling, they’re lots of fun. Burrage’s One Who Saw relates the tale of a man lured by the specter of a desolate woman in an ominous hotel garden. He describes his irresistible attraction to her as being akin to “starting on a voyage, feeling no motion from the ship, and then being suddenly aware of a spreading space of water between the vessel and the quay.” Bowen’s tale, The Crown Derby Plate, involves a dumpy, smelly spirit who won’t relinquish his beloved china collection. It’s not exactly a nail-biter, but Bowen manages an eerie description of wasted wintry marshes—“olive-brown broken reeds were harsh as scars on saffron-tinted bogs”—that bears the uncanniness of a Charles Burchfield landscape. —Nicole Rudick Read More
October 21, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mortar, Machine Guns, Manuscript Porn By The Paris Review Marc Yankus, Haughwout Building, 2016. When the paleologist Christopher de Hamel first conceived Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, he wanted to call it Interviews with Manuscripts, but his publisher wouldn’t let it fly. His pitch, eccentric though it may be, was that encountering texts like The Copenhagen Psalter and The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre in their original forms, deep in the bowels of the world’s most esoteric and inaccessible libraries, is not unlike interviewing famous celebrities in their current homes. “The idea of this book, then,” he writes in the introduction, “is to invite the reader to accompany the author on a private journey to see, handle and interview some of the finest illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.” For how seriously De Hamel takes the premise—and he takes it, like, aggressively seriously—Meetings can feel, somewhat hilariously, like big-league manuscript porn: “As you sit in the reading-room of a library turning the pages of some dazzlingly illuminated volume,” he says, “you can sense a certain respect from your fellow students on neighboring tables consulting more modest books or archives.” Each of the book’s twelve studies is meticulously researched, and De Hamel showcases them with such self-evident joy that they’re irresistibly immersive. —Daniel Johnson We featured a portfolio of the artist Marc Yankus’s “Secret Lives of Buildings” series in our Winter 2014 issue. Last week, Yankus packed the newly relocated ClampArt gallery for his fifth solo show, up through November 26. His new work furthers his obsession with New York’s architecture; once again, Yankus plays with geometry, texture, and ornament, tricking the eye with his masterful and often painterly attention to brick and mortar—obsessively blurring the lines between photography and illustration. Yankus seems to bring out the very best in these buildings, some that we’re so familiar with that we have ceased really seeing them. His work asks us to take a second look—and the images are imbued with optimism and splendor at a time when it’s often difficult to feel uplifted. Yankus has left behind the sandpaper tones and textures from his last body of work, introducing more light through a whitewashing effect. The sheer scale of some of the prints gives the impression that you could easily step, like Alice through the looking glass, from the gallery floor into one of Yankus’s deserted streets. —Charlotte Strick Read More
October 14, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Murderous Teens, Mechanical Cities, Message Boards By The Paris Review The first thing—maybe the only thing—we all learn about art history is that standards of beauty change. The ideal body gets fatter or thinner, different body parts get emphasized or flattered away—and the fashions of the time serve this ideal. At least, that’s how we usually think. Recently I’ve gone back to Anne Hollander’s 1978 masterpiece Seeing Through Clothes, which turns that way of thinking on its head. When we look at a nude body, Hollander argues, we are always seeing the clothes that aren’t there, whether we know it or not. The big pregnant-looking belly on an early Renaissance Eve is meant to support the heavy woolen gathers of a gown. The “unaccountable hummocks of flesh” on a Rubens nude evoke the satin she doesn’t have on. Whether Hollander writes about dresses or men’s tailoring or classical drapery, she leads us, like no other historian I’ve read, into the erotic imagination of the past. Seeing Through Clothes blew my mind when I first read it twenty years ago, and now it’s keeping me up late all over again. —Lorin Stein One day during Salvador Dalí’s first visit to New York City in 1934, he woke “at six in the morning … after a long dream involving eroticism and lions.” He was surprised by the insistence of the lions’ roars—the savage cries of his dreams, which were so different than what he expected in a “modern and mechanical” city. Reading this, I thought of the Surrealist master dreaming of great orange cats roaring in his ears. But the roars weren’t in his imagination: he and his wife, Gala, were staying near the Central Park Zoo, and he discovered at breakfast that the sounds were real. It’s amusing to read Dalí’s impressions of the city, which he gives in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. During his stay, he hops from one cocktail party to another, drinks in a Harlem night club, attends a “surrealist ball,” visits an exhibition of his works, and does a fine bit of walking “all alone in the heart of New York.” Here’s his take on the city’s skyscrapers: “Each evening [they] assume the anthropomorphic shapes of multiple gigantic Millet’s Angeluses … motionless and ready to perform the sexual act and devour one another, like swarms of praying mantes before copulation.” —Caitlin Love Read More