{"id":100003,"date":"2016-07-01T14:34:48","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T18:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100003"},"modified":"2016-07-04T16:16:37","modified_gmt":"2016-07-04T20:16:37","slug":"staff-picks-urine-colored-stains-tortoiseshell-cats-grimy-mirrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/01\/staff-picks-urine-colored-stains-tortoiseshell-cats-grimy-mirrors\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Urine-colored Stains, Tortoiseshell Cats, Grimy Mirrors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From John Aubrey: My Own Life<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

When John Aubrey died in 1697, he left us with his Brief Lives<\/em>, a collection of short biographies whose candor and color exploded the genre. As keen as his eye was, Aubrey seldom turned it on himself. Ruth Scurr\u2019s John Aubrey: My Own Life<\/a><\/em>, out last year in the UK and soon to cross the Atlantic, is an imaginative corrective: an autobiography assembled with care from remnants of Aubrey\u2019s letters, manuscripts, and books. Against the turmoil of Restoration-era England, his sensitivities and proclivities make him an empathetic, surprisingly modern figure; unique for his time, he was fascinated with preservation, often pausing on horseback to sketch ruins or glasswork. Not infrequently, his writings find him distraught at how few of his countrymen appreciate the mundanities of their world. Scurr\u2019s diary is a generous document of his life, and better still it demonstrates the easy beauty of his prose. \u201cI am so bored, so alone,\u201d he writes early on, yearning to leave rural life for Oxford or London. \u201cMy imagination is like a mirror of pure crystal water, which the least wind does disorder and unsmooth.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been meaning to read Jennifer Grotz\u2019s new collection of poems,\u00a0Window Left Open<\/a><\/em>, for months; when I pulled it from the shelf last weekend I near expected to devour it whole. Instead, I read the first couple poems, then closed the book until the next morning, when I did the same. I\u2019ve been like this all week, dipping in and out of Grotz\u2019s poetry. But my pace is proof of how fond I am of it:\u00a0Window Left Open<\/em>\u00a0is a trove of morose and arresting moments that begs its reader to linger over it, to steep in its quiet gloom\u2014the lonesomeness and despondence of the everyday. Grotz is an impeccable observer, too. (\u201cI myself was \/ the hungry lens,\u201d she writes.) One narrator watches the \u201clongsuffering\u201d cows in the forest, steam coming from their nostrils; another notices a student\u2019s stomped-out cigarette on the library\u2019s steps, \u201cexcreting urine-colored stains into the snow\u201d; another prays for the apples that cling to their branches before the wind takes them to the ground. Grotz laces even the most benign occasions with beautiful devastation. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"51FPbbyBtKL\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This week, I read Leopoldine Core\u2019s collection of stories,\u00a0When Watched<\/a><\/em>, out in August. Core\u2019s prose isn\u2019t fancy, but it\u2019s gemstone smooth, and that\u2019s its most important quality: the writing is a seamless, nearly translucent vehicle that connects us to the tangled brushwork of her characters\u2014their sorrows and desires and their so many attempts at striving for human intimacy more profound than strained conversations. Most of these stories are about two individuals engaged in some long-term, nameless intimacy, who struggle to embrace one another when they\u2019re physically together\u2014during sex, car rides, steak-house dinners, nights at motels\u2014and celebrate each other\u2019s suffering only in solitary thought. Almost every narrative is a quest between partners to be totally vulnerable with each other; most never succeed, and when they do, the epiphanies can be unpleasant. Perhaps the most powerful scene is in \u201cHistoric Tree Nurseries,\u201d when two female lovers, fifty-nine-year-old Frances and twenty-five-year-old Peanut, embark on a road trip to purchase a Chihuahua named Tony from a breeder in Ohio. On the way back, they stop for tacos and eat outside while swarms of travelers from the parking lot approach them and ask to play with Tony. It is, Frances and Peanut realize, the first time strangers have gazed in their direction without scrutinizing their queerness; finally, with Tony running interference, they feel as if they own something beautiful.\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>As late as last week, I had never heard of Kenneth Cox. I expect I wasn\u2019t alone, even though Thom Gunn once said that he\u2019d \u201clearned more from Kenneth Cox\u2019s essays than from any other living critic of twentieth century poetry,\u201d and Eliot Weinberger had praised him as \u201cthe model for how criticism would be written if there were anyone other than Cox who could write it.\u201d\u00a0Who was he? By the time Cox died, in 2005, the question was a familiar one. He\u00a0did not publish his first essay\u2014his first anything\u2014until he was fifty years old, more than three decades after he\u2019d complained to Ezra Pound that he was \u201cnot allowed to do the work I want to do owing to my age, finances, obscurity, and the fact that I have been marked out for an occupation I abhor.\u201d The occupation that Cox had abhorred was journalism, and the fear that he had confessed proved prescient: after working with distinction as a code breaker in Britain\u2019s Intelligence Corps during the war, he went on to a career at the BBC. But once that first essay, on Basil Bunting, arrived in 1966, it was soon followed by others, on Robert Creeley, Lorine Niedecker, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Wyndham Lewis. Not everything was easy thenceforth\u2014a collection of essays he\u2019d long hoped to publish didn\u2019t appear until he was eighty-five, and then at his own expense\u2014though you would hardly know it from his style. Even his earliest essays are marked by a confidence, precision, and erudition that could only come from a lifetime of extraordinarily acute reading. Kleinzahler\u2019s afterword to\u00a0The Art of Language<\/a><\/em>, a new selection of Cox\u2019s criticism from Flood Editions, suggests that \u201cas pure writing\u2014literature, if you will\u2014his essays deserve to be read and reread as one would those of William Hazlitt or Joseph Mitchell. They refresh and delight. They are a tonic for the mind and are best approached in the morning hours; one\u2019s entire day will be the better for it.\u201d I\u2019ve only been following the prescription for a few days so far, but already I can heartily recommend the cure. \u2014Robert P. Baird<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Sachs-Tea-Ceremony-Noguchi-Purification-Ritual\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I finally managed this weekend to make it out to the Noguchi Museum for Tom Sachs\u2019s exhibition, \u201cTea Ceremony<\/a>,\u201d the first show at the museum by an artist other than Noguchi. Though at first glance the two are on odd couple, they share a spiritual thread. Sachs\u2019s art is sci-fi inspired, in the vein of\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u2014life imagined beyond Earth, but without the pristine, utopic shine typical of space fantasy. This is Sachs\u2019s greatest distinction from Noguchi, whose sleek and organic sculptures feel like they\u2019ve been pulled out of an alien world. Sachs\u2019s work is makeshift, and\u00a0his structures, built from bits of construction material and Con Ed barriers, trumpet their craftiness: a\u00a0TIE-fighter built out of an old basketball, for example. But this great difference is likely what gives the pairing its sense: amid Noguchi\u2019s alien-like architecture, Sachs\u2019s work brings an all-too-human touch. This relationship plays itself out in the tea ceremony, around which much of his exhibition is centered. Sachs takes the traditional practice of the ceremony as a kind of natural, fixed landscape, and tries to find a modern, futuristic iteration that captures the influence of human activity. \u2014Ty Anania<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published in 1970 and set in 1919, J. G. Farrell\u2019s\u00a0Troubles<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>tells the story of Major Brendan Archer who\u2014after recovering from \u201cshell-shock\u201d suffered during World War I\u2014travels to Ireland to \u201cclaim his bride,\u201d Angela Spencer, whose family owns a once-glamorous hotel (the Majestic) in Kilnalough. The hotel foyer has a \u201cshabby magnificence,\u201d arrayed with \u201cdusty gilt cherubs, red plush sofas and grimy mirrors.\u201d The only regular guests are a gaggle of old, withered women who send rumors and cackles throughout the hotel\u2019s unlit hallways and empty, stale rooms. The major\u2019s first suite has a decaying sheep\u2019s head in the nightstand and no sheets (the latter almost a greater affront to early twentieth-century standards of hospitality\u2014certainly the major is more obsessed with having no sheets than he is with the head). His greatest friend is a tortoiseshell cat who lives in the Imperial Bar. All of this amid uprising in Ireland, Victory and Peace Day parades, nervous headlines in the\u00a0Irish Times<\/em>, and marvelous similes: an apple has begun to \u201coxidize and turn brown, like an old photograph or love-letter\u201d; silence collects between the tables in the dining room \u201cin layers like drifts of snow.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"92aa0470322611e5b50a47ca964cfcbf_big\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m (masochistically?) looking forward to digging through Princeton University Press\u2019s new edition of Alexander Pope\u2019s famous prose poem\u2013cum-epistle, \u201cAn Essay on Man<\/a>.\u201d The introduction, by the editor Tom Jones, fills the first half the book, and his footnotes on the text dominate the second\u2014an ideal setup for an\u00a0antibeach read. I don\u2019t mind an essay on man\u2019s relationship to God if it\u2019s rambunctious, and so far Pope\u2019s philosophical inquiry is akin to\u00a0an elbow thrown in a mosh pit\u2014still, in a sense, as divisive now as it was during the Enlightenment. Because the Fourth of July is right around the corner, I must note that Abraham Lincoln was a great admirer of Pope\u2019s work and thought that \u201cEssay on Man\u201d contained all the religious instruction necessary in life. So that\u2019s it, folks, even honest Abe agrees: \u201cWhatever IS, is RIGHT.\u201d \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When John Aubrey died in 1697, he left us with his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographies whose candor and color exploded the genre. As keen as his eye was, Aubrey seldom turned it on himself. Ruth Scurr\u2019s John Aubrey: My Own Life, out last year in the UK and soon to cross the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[4478,23079,2696,18397,23077,17285,9619,23076,23078],"class_list":["post-100003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alexander-pope","tag-j-g-farrell","tag-jennifer-grotz","tag-john-aubrey","tag-kenneth-cox","tag-leopoldine-core","tag-recommended-reading","tag-ruth-scurr","tag-tom-sachs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: John Aubrey, Leopoldine Core, Jennifer Grotz<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review is reading this week.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/01\/staff-picks-urine-colored-stains-tortoiseshell-cats-grimy-mirrors\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Urine-colored Stains, Tortoiseshell Cats, Grimy Mirrors by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 1, 2016 \u2013 When John Aubrey died in 1697, he left us with his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographies whose candor and color exploded the genre. 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