{"id":103011,"date":"2016-09-23T13:59:03","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T17:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103011"},"modified":"2016-09-23T14:27:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T18:27:33","slug":"staff-picks-border-towns-brylcreem-backstairs-intrigue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/23\/staff-picks-border-towns-brylcreem-backstairs-intrigue\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Border Towns, Brylcreem, Backstairs Intrigue"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 1978. \u00a9 Alex Webb \/ Magnum Photos, via Aperture.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve long felt that the best recommendations for photographic work come from other photographers. From\u00a0Aaron Stern and Jordan Sullivan<\/a>\u00a0I learned about the work of Alex Webb, who, as luck would have it, has a\u00a0show of photographs at Aperture<\/a>\u00a0right now. On view are Webb\u2019s photographs from Mexico taken between 1975, when Webb was twenty-three, and 2007. He shot the images on the streets, in border towns, but it doesn\u2019t feel right to call this street photography: there\u2019s a theatricality to some of the photographs, but subdued, without the performative pomp of much American street work. One depicts a scene of mourning in which three anguished women are momentarily frozen in classical poses as they lament over a man\u2019s body. Another shows a deserted boulevard of buildings under construction shot from an elevated perspective; the rocky terrain and buildings are mainly white, but in the foreground is a cardboard box from which an array of colorful women\u2019s shoes bloom like a desert flower. There\u2019s a sense of precariousness in many of these photographs, but it\u2019s frequently offset by Webb\u2019s brilliant use of color\u2014acid green, sky blue, dusty rose\u2014which light up each moment like a small celebration. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

I recently dove into C. K. Williams\u2019s final collection of poetry,\u00a0Falling Ill<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(which will publish posthumously early next year), and I\u2019m in awe of it. As the title implies, it\u2019s an unflinching chronicle of what it\u2019s like to die, from terminal diagnosis\u2014for Williams, the \u201calliterated appellation\u201d\u00a0multiple myeloma\u2014to the difficulty of waking, to the things one says to oneself as the illness takes over, things like,\u00a0Am I still here<\/em>,\u00a0Catch your breath<\/em>,\u00a0Are you ready<\/em>.\u00a0Williams writes carefully, matter-of-factly, of death\u2019s crippling seizure: the pops and farts and groans his body makes in defiance of him, the fear that has \u201coutwitted me again \/ changed its costume sharpened its knives.\u201d The book is slender, with fifty-two poems: one per page, each five stanzas of three lines apiece. Williams voids every poem of commas and periods as if to weave his unself-conscious urgency and unease into the very fibers of the collection. The last poem, \u201cFarewell,\u201d leaves us with these indelible, inconsolable words: \u201cthere must be \/\/ a way to cry goodbye aloud to leave you \/ these inadequate thanks without resorting \/ to rending farewell oh dear heart farewell\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"purgatorio\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a moving section early in John Haskell\u2019s\u00a0American Purgatorio<\/a><\/em>, the narrator stands in his backyard garden with shears in his hand. His wife has recently disappeared, and he worries, delusionally, that she\u2019s been kidnapped, but already dark signs are emerging that her absence is by design: a receipt in her desk for a car tune-up, a map with felt-tip marker lines between New York and California. He doesn\u2019t yet believe she\u2019s left him, as he stands, helpless in his denial, surveying his bulbs and hydrangeas; pruning this verdant sanctuary will keep the plants beautiful and from dying. So he holds the clippers \u201cto save something. To be rid of pain and fear, which was\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>pain and\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>fear, and although I anthropomorphized the dumb green garden, it was my own dull gnawing that was gnawing me \u2026 Since I couldn\u2019t cut that, I turned to the plants.\u201d What happens is devastating: he ruins the garden methodically, prunes \u201cto death every plant I ever cared about.\u201d Each page of Purgatorio<\/em> rocks with a\u00a0similar, ironic pathos\u2014the narrator fighting for control and the truth, not realizing that he doesn\u2019t have access to either. \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was unfamiliar with the word feuilleton <\/em>(a short literary composition often having a familiar tone and reminiscent content\u2014think of The\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Talk of the Town) before I read Robert Walser\u2019s newly translated collection of them, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories<\/a><\/em>. These eighty-one brief sketches are catalogued as short fiction, but read more like flash essays, or brief, beautifully composed diary entries. My favorite is a single-page bomb of joie de vivre titled \u201cRemember This\u201d: \u201cRemember how you rejoiced at the sweet, fresh green spring, how enchanted you were by the silver-white, sky-blue lake, how you greeted the mountains, how you found everything beautiful that encountered you and you encountered, how you were enfolded by a splendidly vast, undisturbed freedom, and how happy you were in its embrace.\u201d When Walser isn\u2019t laying on his unflagging enthusiasm, he\u2019s gleefully injecting novella-sized plots into two-page character sketches, like this one from \u201cThe Red Leather Pouch\u201d: \u201cShe was, confidentially speaking, a spy. In certain times certain persons are entrusted with a mission. The spy had been assigned by such and such government to pry from certain hands a little pouch with letters, sketches, etc. What backstairs-intriguishness I\u2019m bringing into this!\u201d \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"sixtiespeople\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nursing a cold last night, I stayed up too late reading Jane and Michael Stern\u2019s Sixties People<\/a> <\/em>(1990), a kind of material history of that decade of decades. The Sterns, who were interviewed in the magazine last year<\/a>, devote every chapter to a different archetype: there are playboys, of course, as well as perky girls, hippies, and, perhaps most profitably, young vulgarians, those inscrutable teens in pancake makeup and pussycat blouses. From a profusion of dusty ad copy and forgotten proper nouns (Brylcreem, Sansabelt, the Watusi), the Sterns have assembled a witty, astute collection of essays in the guise of a novelty book. Not to damn them with faint praise, but no one has ever written so well about hairdos: there\u2019s a three-page disquisition on the beehive that says more about the era\u2019s gestalt than any documentary could. \u201cEach of the people we describe in this book had a distinct idea of what a better world would be,\u201d the Sterns write in their introduction. \u201cSome wanted to save it; others wanted to blow it up; a few just wanted to find a pair of fun pantyhose.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

Regina McBride\u2019s Ghost Songs<\/a><\/em> is a haunting memoir of her grief at eighteen, when both of her parents died within months of each other, both by suicide. It gets more complicated when we learn that McBride was raised Irish Catholic, with the ironclad belief that suicide is an unforgivable sin: she\u2019s further tormented by the idea that her parents are now forever trapped in a world between the living and the dead, and she sometimes sees them as apparitions. Her journey toward recovery takes her from New York to the desert of New Mexico and finally to the shores of Ireland, where she is able to reconcile the events that happened to her and to her parents. The magnitude of the author\u2019s grief is at times overwhelming; there\u2019s an unerring sense of distress and disorder. By the end of the book, we\u2019ve pieced together her life\u2014I felt an odd, poignant sense of calm with her when, in the final pages, she sits in a caf\u00e9 in Dublin. \u2014Nollaig O\u2019Connor<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve long felt that the best recommendations for photographic work come from other photographers. From\u00a0Aaron Stern and Jordan Sullivan\u00a0I learned about the work of Alex Webb, who, as luck would have it, has a\u00a0show of photographs at Aperture\u00a0right now. On view are Webb\u2019s photographs from Mexico taken between 1975, when Webb was twenty-three, and 2007. […]<\/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":[22706,22714,6777,16328,19155,2186,10672,364,24729,24730,24734,24731,9864,20342,5863,22705,635,20343,100,7221,165,24733,2283,24732,13512],"class_list":["post-103011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-aaron-stern","tag-alex-webb","tag-american-purgatorio","tag-aperture","tag-c-k-williams","tag-death","tag-dying","tag-essays","tag-falling-ill","tag-feuilleton","tag-ghost-songs","tag-girlfriends-ghosts-and-other-stories","tag-jane-and-michael-stern","tag-jane-stern","tag-john-haskell","tag-jordan-sullivan","tag-memoir","tag-michael-stern","tag-photography","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-regina-mcbride","tag-robert-walser","tag-sixties-people","tag-the-sixties"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Alex Webb, C. 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