March 4, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Chauffeured Cadillacs, Constant Motion, Cosmic Timewarp Deathtrips By The Paris Review Ever since Mike Nichols died in 2014, I’ve wished and wished we had interviewed him in the Review. The HBO documentary Becoming Mike Nichols—an eighty-minute interview conducted by his friend Jack O’Brien—only sharpened my regret. Nichols wasn’t just one of the most important and wide-ranging directors of the last century (and half of the pioneering comedy duo Nichols & May), he was a brilliant explainer of what he did. He and O’Brien discuss his earliest stage productions (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple) and the filming of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, giving glimpses of his childhood and education and his comedy routines. I could have watched them talk for hours. —Lorin Stein Read More
February 26, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: China, Children, Church By The Paris Review Gary Panter. Printed Matter, one of the best art bookstores on earth, recently moved into spacious new digs, which means their legion of artists’ books, posters, zines, and whatnot has room to breathe. So, too, do their exhibitions—great news for the current show, “The Rozz Tox Effect,” an astonishing survey of publications produced by Gary Panter over the past forty-four years. On view (and for sale) are issues of Slash and Raw and Wet, copies of Jimbo books, Pee-Dog zines, a Screamers print, the stunning comic Alamo Courts from 1977, and much more. What makes this exhibition deeply weird is the ridiculous amount of Pee-Wee Herman ephemera Panter has culled from his own collection: lunch boxes, children’s clothes, coloring books, Colorforms, suspenders, dolls, and placemats—all manner of commercial objects he helped create as an extension of his role as set designer for the show. Panter’s output is voluminous and kaleidoscopic, and yet I’m constantly reminded how it’s all of a piece, sprung from the mind of one man. —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 19, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Chicago, Dublin, The House of Fiction By The Paris Review I watched Spike Lee’s new film, Chi-Raq, last weekend, and although I agree with some reviewers that it’s an occasionally messy affair—one that pushes beyond the bounds of its source material, Aristophanes’s rowdy comedy Lysistrata—the film aims both to be capacious in subject and to speak to a wide audience, so how could it be anything but fulsome and exuberant? Lee and his cowriter Kevin Willmott set the stage in gangland Chicago and address gun and police violence, institutional racism, poverty, masculinity, and sexuality. If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Lee wants to show how these elements are inextricably linked, and he spares no one in indicting America’s self-perpetuating culture of violence. There is a lot to like about this film, not least its hopeful ending (fantastic but not naive) and its fully realized depiction of women as intellectual and sexual beings. (Really, the female characters are incredible. Pay attention, Hollywood.) —Nicole Rudick I’ve spent the last weeks under the spell of the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane. Readers of the Review will get to sample Murnane’s newest work in our Summer issue; in the meantime, I recommend his 2014 novel/treatise/manifesto A Million Windows, which comes to the U.S. this spring. Inspired by Henry James’s remark that “the house of fiction has not one window, but a million,” Murnane leads us through a rambling country estate where various narrators struggle to uncover the “true fiction” that underpins their existence. They also debate the legacy of previous tenants—James, Hardy, Proust, Woolf, Carver, et al—and spin fragmentary stories within stories, all the while elaborating a subtle and passionate argument about what fiction is and ought to be. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. Murnane is a writer of such precision and irony that one hesitates to describe A Million Windows except to say that it will fascinate (and amuse and provoke) anyone who has driven past that house “of two, or perhaps three, storeys,” and wondered what exactly was going on inside. —Lorin Stein Read More
February 12, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Critical Features and Substitute Teachers By The Paris Review From the cover of Albert Angelo. One pleasure of living where I do is the giveaway table, where tenants leave unwanted CDs, cassettes, salt-and-pepper shakers, et cetera, and especially books. These tend to be romance novels or thrillers, but the other week someone left the second edition of August Kleinzahler’s Cutty, One Rock—a book I’d given away many times and had eventually forgotten to replace. My wife let me read the title essay aloud, even though I kept slipping into my version of a New Jersey accent (bad, bad). Then, maybe three days later, on the same table, I found a copy of B. S. Johnson’s 1964 novel Albert Angelo. It was crazy—I’d been meaning to read B. S. Johnson for years. If I had come across any of his novels in a bookstore, I’d have bought them. This one’s about a beleaguered substitute teacher in a London slum, a subgenre (the bitter teacher novel) I especially enjoy. Obviously these books—the old favorite and the object of curiosity—have been two clicks away, but serendipity beats intention every time. —Lorin Stein Read More
February 5, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Lunar Landscapes, Washerwomen, File Formats By The Paris Review Peter Hujar, William Burroughs, reclining, 1975. Of all the things I’ve read about Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, the most poignant has to be Elif Batuman’s essay in this week’s New Yorker—about Houellebecq’s novel, but also (and mainly) about her experience as a woman and journalist in Turkey, unexpectedly drawn to the idea of leading an observant Muslim life: “Houellebecq’s vision of an Islamic state, for all its cartoonishness, has a certain imaginative generosity. He portrays Islam not as a depersonalized creeping menace, or as an ideological last resort to which those disenfranchised by the West may be ‘vulnerable,’ but as a system of beliefs that is enormously appealing to many people, many of whom have other options.” —Lorin Stein Dan has already covered the Peter Hujar show that’s up at Paul Kasmin, but I can’t resist talking about it again. Hujar’s portraits, particularly the close-ups that are on view here, are compelling: looking at faces that are, often, looking back at us; rarely do we have such an opportunity to study the details of another’s visage, and the longer I look, the more foreign they appear, like lunar landscapes instead of human faces. Maybe that’s why the subjects I recognize easily—Warhol, Sontag, John Waters, Quentin Crisp, Burroughs—are less captivating than those I don’t: Paul Thek, whose head is cocked curiously as he stares agape into the camera; John Heys in Lana Turner drag in 1979 and then again, in 1985, as himself; Rene Ricard, naked, his legs pulled to his chest, head in hand. Of the two portraits of David Wojnarowicz in the show, I spent the most time in front of the one in which his hand obscures most of his face, so that, instead, I examine the tidy curve of his fingernails and the length of his collarbone (and think of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ram’s Head with Hollyhock). —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 29, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bears, Bellies, Blackmail By The Paris Review Mickalene Thomas, Lovely Six Foota, 2007, color photograph. The first entry in New York Review Books’s new comics series is Mark Beyer’s Agony, a graphic novel about two regular working people just trying to get by and the ceaseless horrors visited on them. Amy and Jordan endure acid baths, bear and monster attacks, unemployment, boring friends, prison beatings, armed robbery, an apartment flooded with blood, and deaths in the family, among other cataclysms; they bear it all with the same gaunt, anxious expressions, and usually they speak only in affectless expository sentences. E.g.: “I’ve been swallowed by the same fish that ate Amy’s head, and my legs have been bitten off. I’ve got to get out of here!” As Colson Whitehead writes in the introduction, how hard you laugh at all this depends on “how you feel about relinquishing the logic of realism in favor of the logic of undying despair.” I couldn’t get enough of their misery: I finished it in one sitting and flipped back to the beginning. —Dan Piepenbring My traveling companion these days has been the late poet Frank Lima and his newly collected Incidents of Travel in Poetry. The book, beautifully culled by editors Garrett Caples and Julien Poirier, comprises the breadth of Lima’s work, from his early poems written as a heroin-addicted New York School outsider to his later surrealistic ones informed by freewriting. Many are autobiographical, making this one of the heavier, more affecting collections I’ve read in a while. His poems are laced with incest and smack and guns: he writes of his stay on Hart’s Island, where he tries to get clean, and of his mother who, “when I awoke … was a warm mist hovering, suspended over me, / naked, / … sweeping my body away / into the cumulus clouds / of black pubic hair.” Lima’s verse is uninhibited and unafraid; he writes with pungent frankness. My favorite lines, though, are the playful, tender ones. From “morning sara”: “I am hungry and go thru your underwear / give me some hot soup or / I’ll suck on the curtains!”; from “Mi Tierra”: “When I touch you / I see Utah / your flat white sandy belly / the powdered dust devils in your navel / the white nipples of the Rocky Mountains.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More