{"id":106510,"date":"2017-01-06T15:41:18","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T20:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106510"},"modified":"2017-01-06T16:17:37","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T21:17:37","slug":"staff-picks-sisters-scary-sex-sivilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/06\/staff-picks-sisters-scary-sex-sivilization\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Sisters, Scary Sex, \u201cSivilization\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From Sisters by a River<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Barbara Comyns (1909\u201392) grew up one of five girls in an old house on the banks of the River Avon. When she was seventeen, her father died; the family was ruined and dispersed. Her first novel, Sisters by a River<\/a><\/em>, is about the lost paradise of their country childhood\u2014a paradise that is often indistinguishable from hell. It is, in other words, a realistic treatment, written (for her own daughters, originally) in a kind of well-bred nursery patois, with the cold gaze of an actual child: \u201cQuite suddenly Chloe and I got a craze for throwing perfectly good things away, it started in the holidays when our other games were rather suppressed. It was always Chloes\u2019s things that were distroyed, we would burn her books slowly, page by page, break her dolls heads off and distroy toys she was really fond of, an awful gleam would come into our eyes and we would tear a teddy bear\u2019s head off, burn it, then throw the body in the river.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

I snuck away from the office to catch MoMA\u2019s new exhibition \u201cA Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde<\/a>.\u201d This show doesn\u2019t make any new claims, and I\u2019ve seen a good bit of the work before, but I never miss a chance to see it again. And each time I do, I\u2019m awed by the exuberance, energy, and freshness in the artists\u2019 approaches to materials and ideas and to the physical and psychic environments of revolutionary Russia. I also never fail to find new connections with more contemporary art. In her linoleum-cut prints from 1917\u00a0to 1919, Lyubov Popova layered collage-like, colored shapes to suggest movement and spatial interaction (what she called \u201cpainterly architectonics\u201d): I instantly thought of Lee Krasner\u2019s large, hard-edge canvases from the early seventies, where seemingly cutout curvilinear forms dance around one another. In El Lissitzky\u2019s\u00a0Proun<\/em>\u00a0lithographs from 1920\u2014in which various three-dimensional geometric shapes float around one another as though in a group space walk\u2014I see Rammellzee\u2019s \u201cLetter Racers\u201d from the late eighties and early nineties, his galactic graffiti language writ in sculptures composed of found objects spray painted and mounted on wheels and skateboards. \u201cThe artist is transformed from reproducer to builder of a new world of forms, a new world of objects,\u201d El Lissitzky wrote. I\u2019ll bet Rammellzee would agree.\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

El Lissitzky, Troublemaker<\/i>, 1923.<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the holiday, I read Arlene Heyman\u2019s debut story collection,\u00a0Scary Old Sex<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0Heyman, a psychiatrist on the Upper West Side, took thirty years to finish the book; her medical career always came first.\u00a0<\/em>The finished product is dark and heartbreaking. Some of these stories are so dense with the interior registers of her characters that they feel like photographs oversaturated with color: they\u2019re older, anxious folk, and they grapple with their mortality by flooding each moment with desperate consciousness. Much of their anxiety is dedicated to disrupting their routines with sex, but this somewhat backfires. Sex becomes routine, even if it still enlivens them: \u201cIt has become a little like brushing and flossing,\u201d one woman thinks, \u201csomething almost hygienic, good for you. Yet there is passion in it, too, it erupts right out of the schedule. You do it with regularity to show you are a human being, that you are civilized and can still become ecstatic.\u201d For them, sex (and everything else) is about defying death. They face their abysses with passion, hilarity, and a very real, quiet terror. But they are alive, alive, alive\u2014they won\u2019t let you forget it.\u00a0\u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ask me if I\u2019d like to read a sequel to Mark Twain\u2019s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> and I\u2019ll tell you no, unless, of course, it was written by the puckish myth-puncher Robert Coover. He begins Huck Out West<\/em><\/a> during the Civil War, several years after Twain\u2019s Adventures<\/em> ends, when Huck and Tom Sawyer head west from Missouri in search of adventure. The two work for the Pony Express; they end up scouting for the Union and Confederate armies alike before Tom leaves Huck, choosing marriage and \u201csivilization\u201d over their free, loose life. Huck stumbles into every Western myth imaginable\u2014he drives cattle, prospects for gold, and is held in captivity by Indians. It\u2019s fitting that Coover channeled Twain: neither holds the human race, as a group, in high esteem, and both use a kind of burlesque to describe our worst inclinations. Coover\u2019s Huck is understatedly wise, hilarious, and loveable; Tom, on the other hand, is a hellion who \u201clove[s] a good hanging.\u201d In an early part of the book, he tells Huck that an out-and-out lynching is \u201conly a kind of participatory democracy\u201d: a grimly satirical statement that, looking at the year to come, may retain a startling prescience. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

The philosopher Derek Parfit died this week. Courtesy of his two-part 1998 essay in the London Review of Books<\/em>, I spent my morning wrestling with fundamental questions of ontology: \u201cWhy anything? Why this?<\/a>\u201d I won\u2019t pretend to have digested the finer points of his arguments, but as he made various inquiries into the existence of the universe\u2014the All Worlds Hypothesis, the Null Possibility\u2014I found that I\u2019d never considered the ramifications of nothingness in such detail. Even if there were nothing, Parfit writes, \u201cthere would still have been various truths, such as the truth that there were no stars or atoms, or that nine is divisible by three \u2026 But why would nothing <\/em>have existed? Why would there have been no stars or atoms, no philosophers or bluebell woods?\u201d He offers a compelling defense of asking such questions in the first place: \u201cI am reminded here of the aesthetic category of the sublime, as applied to the highest mountains, raging oceans, the night sky, the interiors of some cathedrals, and other things that are superhuman, awesome, limitless. No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 is reading this week.<\/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":[26562,26567,7033,8892,8064,26565,26573,26574,26571,26568,26564,759,14984,26563,1766,705,3231,20591,7403,26569,8802,26171,26566,8225,26561,9464,8754,347,26570,26572],"class_list":["post-106510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-revolutionary-impulse-the-rise-of-the-russian-avant-garde","tag-arlene-heyman","tag-barbara-comyns","tag-childhood","tag-derek-parfit","tag-el-lissitzky","tag-existence","tag-existential","tag-huck-fin","tag-huck-out-west","tag-lee-krasner","tag-london-review-of-books","tag-lrb","tag-lyubov-popova","tag-mark-twain","tag-moma","tag-museum-of-modern-art","tag-ontology","tag-philosophy","tag-robert-coover","tag-russian","tag-russian-avant-garde","tag-scary-old-sex","tag-sisters","tag-sisters-by-a-river","tag-the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn","tag-tom-sawyer","tag-upper-west-side","tag-western-myth","tag-why-anything-why-this"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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