April 5, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Smells, Films, and Flames By The Paris Review It is wrong to kvell, but according to both Adam Shatz and Yasmine El Rashidi, our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, has knocked it out of the park with his translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s modern Egyptian classic That Smell and Notes from Prison. Unlike writers better known in the West, says El Rashidi, Ibrahim “has continuously reinvented the form and language he uses in his work, while probing deeply into the underlying tensions running through Egyptian society. Creswell’s new translation of the novel finally allows English language readers to appreciate these qualities … Despite the differences of syntax between Arabic and English, the translation retains the tone, the vocabulary, and the pared down and staccato rhythm of the original.” We take her word for it. —Lorin Stein On paper, Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell and Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color could not be more different, but they made for a nice double feature this past weekend at New Directors/New Films. Both films raise questions about identity and the ownership of memory. Both throw conventional narratives out the window. And when I walked out of each, not all my questions were answered, but maybe that’s the point: life’s complex, and some things unanswerable are still worth exploring. —Justin Alvarez In Lars Iyer’s Exodus, the friendship between two minor academics, Lars and W., is founded not on shared interest but on a shared sense of failure, self-laceration, and gin. Together Lars and W. bemoan the state of the academy and the seeming impossibility of philosophy, but I laugh loudest when W. bemoans the state of Lars: “‘The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves,’ W. says, reading from his notebook. To hate ourselves: what a task! He’ll begin with me, W. says. With hating me. Then he’ll move on to hating what I’ve made him become. What I’ve been responsible for. Then—the last step—he will have to hate himself without reference to me at all.” For even more Lars and W., also read Spurious, the first book in Iyer’s trilogy. —Brenna Scheving Read More
March 29, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Dancing Horses, Critical Fashion By The Paris Review For reasons I don’t begin to understand, Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith used to be required reading in American high schools. My own copy (1905) is a schoolbook edition, complete with suggestions for extra credit (“The teacher should know Thackeray’s English Humorists, D’Arblay’s Diary and Letters, Dobson’s Eighteenth Century Vignettes,” and four other books you’ve never heard of). It is hard to believe that such a fascinating biography was ever taught to kids. What did they care about the economics of Grub Street, or the incredible elegance with which writers once knew how to break a contract? Irving and Goldsmith both did plenty of hack work—a term Irving uses without prejudice—but this is clearly a labor of love and obsession. And it’s that rare thing in literary history: a penetrating essay by a great humorist, whose work is still just within our reach, about another who stands outside the pale. —Lorin Stein For many of us, fashion is a tricky thing: while both the way people choose to dress themselves and the art form are fascinating, the intersection can be, to say the least, problematic. Enter Fashion Projects, a journal devoted to critical discourse in fashion. If that sounds oxymoronic, try issue 4, out now: an interview with Judith Thurman, Jay Ruttenberg on Bill Cunningham, and fashion criticism as political critique are just a few things it takes on. —Sadie Stein Read More
March 22, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Romanian Cinema, African Art By The Paris Review For three years—ever since it came out—people have been recommending this unusual family history, by a potter named Edmund de Waal, all about the fate of a collection of Japanese miniatures whose owners migrated from Odessa to Paris to Vienna. And for three years I took their word for it. Because really, a book about somebody’s heirlooms? Then one night last week, all keyed up from three hours of House of Cards, I pulled down The Hare with Amber Eyes (a gift copy), hoping it would put me to sleep. Fat chance. I’d expected charm, but here was astringent wit, quiet erudition, just the necessary amount of first person, and an unromantic, sharply observed, very poignant account of a Jewish family’s rise and fall between the Belle Epoque and World War II. From House to Hare: from the frying pan into the fire. —Lorin Stein I debated recommending the Romanian film Beyond the Hills, not because it isn’t terrific—a fact that will come as no surprise to anyone who saw director Cristian Mungiu’s first feature, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—but rather because so many critics have done it more justice than I ever could, and because I found watching it so harrowing an experience. Loosely based on a real-life 2005 case of an exorcism in a Moldavian monastery, the film is a horror movie, a romance, a character study, and, most of all, the kind of true tragedy we normally don’t see, or feel. It’s long and slow paced, but utterly riveting; I came out of the theater completely shell-shocked. I don’t think I could sit through it again, but you’ll be making a mistake if you don’t see it while you can. —Sadie Stein Chimurenga is a difficult magazine to define: a collection of African art, comics, journalism, and photography, every edition looks entirely different (to give you an idea of its inscrutability, the October 2011 edition was set in May 2008). The founder is also a DJ who runs a jazz bar, and sometimes hosts twenty-four-hour secret jam sessions. There are no invites and no posters; the Chimurenga motto is “who no know go know.” Their latest venture is Chimurenga Chronic, a “pan-African quarterly print gazette” that deals in everything from art and faith to dirty deals and cricket stars. (To get a sense of its sweep, try “The Last Words of Fela Anikulapo Kuti” and the interactive comic strip.) Print availability is another matter: Chronic was due out on the streets “now-now,” which in South Africa translates roughly to “it’ll be out when it’s out, which will probably be soon, we can’t say exactly when, but we know you want to keep your eyes peeled for it. And it might already be out, so look sharp.” —Olivia Walton Read More
March 15, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Porto Pim, Montana, Cat Pianos By The Paris Review I am currently in Missoula, attending a conference at the University of Montana. At a welcome reception last night (in which we were treated to, among other things, some delicious bison meatballs), one title kept cropping up in conversation: John Williams’s Stoner. Why has this 1965 novel of loneliness and small lives acquired such a cult following? As one professor put it, “It captures academia perfectly.” (And since it’s one of my favorites, I felt at home right away.) —Sadie O. Stein Thank you to John Glassie and Writers No One Reads for highlighting Athanasius Kircher, the seventeeth-century Jesuit priest and polymath who gives a whole new definition to “Renaissance man”: author, inventor, curator, Mount Vesuvius climber. While most of his ideas—covering more than seven million words, in Latin—are dead wrong (universal sperm, the hollowness of mountains), his poetic “translations” of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions are masterpieces of expression. On a section of an Egyptian obelisk now in Rome’s Piazza della Minerva, Kircher wrote: Supreme spirit and archetype infuses its virtue and gifts in the soul of the sidereal world, that is the solar spirit subject to it, from whence comes the vital motion in the material or elemental world, and abundance of all things and variety of species arises. Unfortunately, he only wrote one book of fiction (1656’s Ecstatic Journey), and while most of his work is long forgotten, he was an influence on such writers and artists as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and Marcel Duchamp. Not bad for someone who invented an instrument called the cat piano. —Justin Alvarez Read More
March 8, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Underwater Photography, Semicolons, Rimbaud By The Paris Review When I was a teenager, I had a series of dreams in which I would attempt to do the most banal tasks underwater: eat breakfast, cut my toenails, read a book whose waterlogged pages would always stick together. I never really thought much about the dream’s implications—Was I suffocating under life’s demands? Or was it just something I ate?—until I stumbled on Bruce Mozert’s 1950s underwater photography. Using a self-constructed underwater camera, Mozert spent his career shooting underwater portraits for numerous lifestyle magazines—entirely without digital manipulation. (One Mozert trick was “using baking powder to create the powdery ‘smoke’ coming out of the underwater barbecue.”) Why would a photographer devote his life to such a niche? Some things (like the genesis of my dreams) are better left unanswered. —Justin Alvarez I’m impressed by a twenty-eight-page examination of “The Endangered Semicolon” in the debut issue of Apology, Jesse Pearson’s new quarterly. It’s disheartening, though, to read that the semicolon is in decline, not least because it is my favorite punctuation mark—a fact that displeased Matt Sumell, who cheerfully rejected the suggested use of semicolons in his story for issue 200 (save two) and who wrote me recently with the sole purpose of informing me that he still doesn’t use semicolons. I pity him and Alexander Theroux, who bemoans in Apology the semicolon’s typographical imbalance (neither a colon nor a period) and its existence as a tentative mark, an “illicit and uneasy compromise.” Let others have the em dash, the period, the showy exclamation point. I’ll keep the semicolon, so adept at capturing a particular cadence, a curt melody. —Nicole Rudick Read More
March 1, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Ackerley, Reichl, Loy By The Paris Review There are moods in which even a used bookstore can defeat you, when you can’t imagine why anyone ever bothered, when every first sentence is an effort and a rebuke. Next time you find yourself in that mood, look under A for Ackerley (J. R.). His memoir My Father and Myself is a masterpiece of calm self-hatred. My Dog Tulip is the unforgettable true story of how he gave up on human beings and fell in love with a German shepherd. But the book I needed, and found, the other night is Ackerley’s one novel, We Think the World of You. This too is a dog book. Without having yet read the introduction (I’m a few pages from the end), I suspect it too is autobiographical. Set in London just after the war, it concerns a middle-aged gay man, desperately in love with a young prison inmate, who transfers his overbearing affection to the man’s dog, Evie. Ackerley was, by all accounts, including his, an unpleasant guy. The magic is how clearly he sees himself, with a clarity almost amounting to forgiveness. He is also very funny. Four chapters in, behind two pints at a quiet bar, I felt ready to face the world. —Lorin Stein I still mourn the loss of Gourmet—the exquisite photography, like eighteenth-century still lifes; the insane, days-long dinners that I never intended to prepare—but I’m grateful to have been directed to Ruth Reichl’s Twitter feed. Her entries are haikus of deliciousness: “Gray. Rain coming. Curled up with the cat, a book, and a comforting bowl of lemon rice soup. Edible sunshine.” “So cold! Tiny tug shoves a big black boat up the river. Bowl of butter-toasted oatmeal. Almonds. Apricots. Brown sugar. Heavy cream. Warmer.” “Cold. Sunny. Blue Tiepolo sky, dappled with clouds. Fluffy pancakes. Lace-edged fried eggs from Barry’s hens. Smoky bacon. Maple syrup. Yes!” —Nicole Rudick Read More