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The closest I\u2019ve come to visiting Ukraine is binging on late-night pierogies at Veselka<\/a>, where I arrived so drunk you could\u2019ve told me I was in Kiev. I\u2019ve had a much richer (and largely more sober) experience with Sophie Pinkham\u2019s Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine<\/a><\/em>, the best travel book I\u2019ve read this year\u2014it\u2019s a funny, alert, and more vital account of life there than any you\u2019ll 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 <\/em>site<\/a>, 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: \u201cI had never been so acutely aware of my lack of the basic skills that have allowed people to keep themselves alive for millennia,\u201d she writes. \u201cI met a six-year-old who could make borscht; her twelve-year-old brother could dive for mussels. Neither could read\u2014but 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.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cRichard Howard was once asked how he would translate the French word\u00a0x\u2014<\/em>a recherch\u00e9 term intended to stump the Master\u2014and responded, \u2018I don\u2019t translate words.\u2019 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.\u201d In the current issue of\u00a0Public Culture<\/a>, our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, makes a case for nonliteral translation. His main exhibit: the crummy (but literal) New York Times<\/em>\u00a0translations of Osama bin Laden\u2019s famous eloquence: \u201cThe effect of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2019 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\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0readers already had\u2014that 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.\u201d \u2014Lorin Stein\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The only people, I imagine, who don\u2019t like Dwight Garner\u2019s reviews are the writers who get zinged in them. Like Marina Abramovic, whose memoir receives blistering treatment in Garner\u2019s latest<\/a>. It sounds as though\u00a0Walk Through Walls<\/em>\u00a0is an easy target\u2014an advance version of the book inspired the hashtag #theracistispresent\u2014but still, in Garner\u2019s hands, even taking an obvious flop to task is a lesson in panache. \u201cI knew I was going to dislike Ms. Abramovic\u2019s memoir on Page 10,\u201d he admits early on.\u00a0\u201cA tolerance for a certain amount of pomposity is a prerequisite for keeping up with\u00a0serious art; otherwise you\u2019re always sitting at\u00a0the short table and using the plastic cutlery. In Walk Through Walls<\/em>, Ms. Abramovic pushes this tolerance to its limits.\u201d\u00a0Later,\u00a0Garner bemoans the book\u2019s \u201cimplicit injunctions to warm one\u2019s hands on the blaze of her greatness.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s perhaps mean-spirited of me to say, but one\u2019s hands are satisfyingly warmed on the blaze of Garner\u2019s words.\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n From the mezzanine of the Broadhurst Theatre, I watched Jack O\u2019Brien\u2019s revival of\u00a0Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur\u2019s\u00a01928\u00a0play<\/a>,\u00a0The Front Page<\/a><\/em>. It was sensational.\u00a0Not only does it star a phenomenal cast, with Nathan Lane, John\u00a0Slattery, John Goodman, and Robert Morse (whom my mother remembers as the cutie from the 1967 musical\u00a0How to Succeed in Business<\/a><\/em>), but\u00a0it\u00a0comprises three acts of some of the wildest, funniest, raunchiest\u00a0banter I\u2019ve heard in a while.\u00a0The premise: Chicago newspapermen hang around an office in the city\u2019s criminal-courts building, running their mouths and generally making asses of themselves as they wait for the news to roll in. And boy, does it. But it\u2019s the play\u2019s loud, outr\u00e9 characters, rather than its action, that makes it so good:\u00a0there\u2019s a\u00a0germophobic poet who swats the others with his umbrella when they get too close, a German policeman who\u2019s always lurking around, a sheriff who willfully offers his gun to a convicted murderer. The hardest hitters, though,\u00a0are Slattery (as the wily reporter Hildy Johnson) and Lane (his boss) whose chemistry onstage is magic. As\u00a0Frank Rich wrote<\/a>\u00a0in 1986<\/a>,\u00a0The Front Page<\/em>\u00a0\u201cstill ticks louder and faster and funnier than equivalent Broadway contraptions manufactured a decade or two decades after it.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n The Front Page<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n I\u2019m having trouble describing Kelly Reichardt\u2019s new movie,\u00a0Certain Women<\/a><\/em>, without crooning, lamely, that \u201cit\u2019s\u00a0beautiful<\/em>.\u201d Set in Montana, the film is a still and gentle look at three women whose story lines are split into virtually unconnected chapters. None of the women seem to be at the biggest crossroads of her life, just somewhere in the middle of the big human mess. Laura (Laura Dern), a lawyer, struggles with a desperate client; Gina (Michelle Williams) is building a house; Jamie (Lily Gladstone) falls in love with Beth, a young law-school graduate (Kristen Stewart). The art of these characters is in their gestures: they all smile and frown and furrow their brows and blink and stare, quietly moving through their lives. Each of these actresses is at her best, but I loved Lily Gladstone, whose character is the focus of the last chapter. Her world is defined by the monotony of ranch life: she tends horses, opening the barn and feeding and watering her wards, gathering hay, over and over and over. Her story is marked by an inarticulate loneliness\u2014she barely speaks. \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m convinced you can be anything with a name like Jericho Parms. In her debut essay collection, Lost Wax<\/a><\/em>, Parms makes a study of liminality, looking at the multiple things she is, existentially and literally. The title essay, which borrows from the lost-wax casting method used by sculptors, examines the impossibility of ideal forms; it features Roman statues, an older couple Parms met in New Mexico, and, mostly, the essential failures of human relationships. \u201cI\u2019m puzzled by how often we revere and repudiate the examples set before us,\u201d she says: \u201cThe Romans never hesitate to adept their own forms from existing Greek works \u2026 yet somehow, I became beholden to the legacy of my parents\u2019 marriage, upholding their free-spirited ideals even when I knew those ideals had failed them.\u201d Parms is at her best when she\u2019s wound up and evoking specificity out of abstraction: \u201cHere, Cupid, Here, Psyche. Here, too, I\u2019m reminded of a Polaroid of my parents.\u201d Her writing has a lyric quality that fans of Lia Purpura and Maggie Nelson will enjoy. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n Still from Certain Women.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n Buried somewhere in the deluge of\u00a0heartstring-yanking reporting<\/a>\u00a0surrounding the Chicago Cubs\u2019 Series win is\u00a0this ESPN feature<\/a> by\u00a0Bradford Doolittle and Luke Knox,\u00a0which breaks down every roster move made by Theo Epstein since he was hired as the Cubs\u2019 president of baseball operations in 2011. It weighs each transaction by its current Wins Above Replacement (WAR<\/small>) rating\u2014otherwise known as the newest sabermetrical gold standard for measuring baseball production\u2014and, taken together, they arrange themselves into a comprehensive, curse-breaking flowchart. Theo, referring to his role in leading the Boston Red Sox to a World Series win in 2004, said himself, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in curses, and I guess I played a small part in proving they don\u2019t exist, from a baseball standpoint.\u201d This feature exposes curses for what they are\u2014simple but sometimes monumental empirical obstacles. And it still manages, somewhat boyishly, to lionize Theo as a legendary wizard who conjures numerical value where, before, there was none. \u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The closest I\u2019ve come to visiting Ukraine is binging on late-night pierogies at Veselka, where I arrived so drunk you could\u2019ve told me I was in Kiev. I\u2019ve had a much richer (and largely more sober) experience with Sophie Pinkham\u2019s Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, the best travel book I\u2019ve read this year\u2014it\u2019s a […]<\/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":[22649,375,25560,25568,17820,25562,12176,2814,364,25566,25565,3182,25317,25563,25567,25569,269,22929,3177,81,25564,747,14432,25570,53,24582,477,2003,278,447,4122,7748,85,883,25561,4213,530,5143,12493,3045,25559,1116],"class_list":["post-104539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-arabic","tag-baseball","tag-black-square","tag-bradford-doolittle","tag-broadway","tag-certain-women","tag-chicago-cubs","tag-dwight-garner","tag-essays","tag-jericho-parms","tag-john-slattery","tag-kelly-reichardt","tag-kristen-stewart","tag-lily-gladstone","tag-lost-wax","tag-luke-knox","tag-magazines","tag-marina-abramovic","tag-michelle-williams","tag-movies","tag-nathan-lane","tag-novels","tag-plays","tag-public-culture","tag-reading","tag-reading-recommendations","tag-reviews","tag-richard-howard","tag-robyn-creswell","tag-russia","tag-sabermetrics","tag-sophie-pinkham","tag-sports","tag-staff-picks","tag-the-front-page","tag-theatre","tag-translation","tag-travel-writing","tag-travelogues","tag-ukraine","tag-walk-through-walls","tag-world-series"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/publicculture.jpg\")
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