{"id":107154,"date":"2017-01-27T17:44:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T22:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107154"},"modified":"2017-04-13T12:01:15","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T16:01:15","slug":"staff-picks-concentric-circles-carpenters-coffee-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/27\/staff-picks-concentric-circles-carpenters-coffee-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Concentric Circles, Carpenters, Coffee House"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From the cover of Alma Thomas<\/i>, by Ian Berry.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cVincent is a waiter at Coffee House. It\u2019s called just that\u2014Coffee House. The name hasn\u2019t changed in a hundred years, even if the business has.\u201d From its opening lines, Ghachar Ghochar<\/a><\/em>\u2014Vivek Shanbhag\u2019s novella about the secrets of a nouveau riche family in present-day Bangalore\u2014exudes such a sly, ironic charm that it\u2019s easy to forget you\u2019re reading a translation. Ghachar Ghochar<\/em> introduces us to a master. I can\u2019t wait for his translator, Srinath\u00a0Perur, to show us more. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Among the many, many,\u00a0many<\/em>\u00a0reasons to miss the Obamas is their smart and wide-ranging taste in art. They chose three Alma Thomas paintings for the White House, one of which,\u00a0Resurrection<\/em>, was placed in the Old Family Dining Room, making it the first work by an African American woman to hang in a public area of the White House. Thomas made\u00a0Resurrection<\/em>\u00a0in 1968, only eight years after retiring, at age sixty-eight, from teaching junior-high art in Washington, D.C., and devoting herself to painting.\u00a0Resurrection<\/em>\u00a0consists of concentric circles of paint daubs, her signature \u201cAlma Stripes,\u201d radiating outward in rainbow colors that are electric with possibility. All of her early works are of a piece\u2014brightly hued and joyous, like oversize pointillist versions of Sister Corita Kent posters. The Studio Museum in Harlem gave Thomas a show last year, which I missed, but a gorgeous catalogue is now available<\/a> (which makes me doubly sad I missed the show). Alongside NASA<\/small>\u2019s\u00a0Apollo<\/em>\u00a0missions, Thomas made her Space series, which, though formally similar to the earlier work, seems tempered in mood.\u00a0Snoopy Sees Sunrise on Earth<\/em>, from 1971, depicts a globe of color stripes floating on a pale blue-green field: I sense her awe of the cosmic scene, but also perhaps its fragility. \u201cI began to think about what I would see if I were in an airplane,\u201d she explained of the series. \u201cYou look down on things. You streak through the clouds so fast you don\u2019t know whether the flower below is a violet or what. You see only streaks of color.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

I found Ian McGuire while piecing together our new digital archive: his story \u201cThe Red Monk<\/a>\u201d appears in our Spring\u2013Summer 2001 issue. His first novel,\u00a0The North Water<\/a><\/em>, wouldn\u2019t debut until\u00a0fifteen years later, in the spring of 2016. The story is about the six-month expedition of the\u00a0Volunteer<\/em>, a ship coughed out to sea in the last gasp of the whaling industry, just as the reliance on blubber is giving way to coal oil. It\u2019s an ill-manned vessel populated with villains and fugitives\u2014two in particular: Patrick Sumter, an Irish field surgeon, and Henry Drax, a brutish harpooner\u2014who rape, murder, and steal from each other on the journey. While a novel like\u00a0Blood Meridian<\/em>\u2014to which, along with\u00a0Moby Dick\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Heart of Darkness<\/em>, McGuire\u2019s debut alludes often\u2014suggests existential and metaphysical purpose to nihilistic violence,\u00a0The North Water\u00a0<\/em>makes no effort to elevate its characters\u2019 brigandage. The worst of these men possess virtually no interiority, no emotion. They act on primal impulse and greed, and any abstract explanation to their degeneracy is supplanted by McGuire\u2019s impressive and relentless focus on the physicality of whaling expeditions: the slimy resin of blubber, the stink of a grown man\u2019s shit, the taste and gelatinous texture of a seal\u2019s eyeball. It\u2019s a terrifically grotesque novel with the thrilling inertia of adventure\/survival narratives; once I started it, I had a hard time stopping.\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the train to work the other day, I reread Sonia Sanchez\u2019s book-length poem Does Your House Have Lions?<\/em><\/a> (1997) and was reminded of what a masterly talent she is. Lions<\/em>\u00a0is an epic, torturous and ravishing, about Sanchez\u2019s brother, who decades ago died from AIDS. Sanchez writes of his youth: the estrangement of his father, his move from the South to New York City, the revelry he sought there. Throughout the poem, a choir of voices speaks, bringing a full picture into view. We hear from the father (\u201cand my son\u2019s body blood-stained red \/ with country-lies, city-lies, father-lies, mother-lies\u201d), from the ailing brother (\u201cO forgive me tremor \/ O forgive me rumor \/ O forgive me terror\u201d), even from their family\u2019s ancestors. Still, the lines I find most harrowing, brimming with the most love and the most sorrow, are Sanchez\u2019s own:<\/p>\n

and the days rummaging his eyes
\nand the nights flickering through a slit
\nof narrow bars. hips. thighs.
\nand his thoughts labeling him misfit
\nas he prowled, pranced in the starlit
\ncity, coloring his days and nights
\nwith gluttony and praise and unreconciled rites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine a cutthroat dance competition with no sensationalism or vanity, a challenge so detached from spectacle that the media hardly covers it: that\u2019s the national Malambo contest, held for centuries in the Argentinean village of Laborde. Leila Guerriero\u2019s A Simple Story<\/a> <\/em>taught me all about it. The Malambo is an arduous dance, especially performed at length, as it is in Laborde; it demands rigorous training and peak physical condition, and its practitioners embrace an almost priestly regime of asceticism and self-denial. For their troubles, they get \u2026 the pleasure of a job well done. The victor in Laborde, as Guerriero explains in her canny book, receives no cash prize and only a modest trophy. What\u2019s more, he agrees never again to participate in the contest, effectively ending his career at its zenith so others can have a shot. It\u2019s so unlike anything in the U.S.\u2014to marry success to sacrifice; to pursue ritual for its own sake\u2014that it feels instructively alien. Hats off to Guerriero, who aimed \u201cto tell the story of the festival and to try to understand why people would want to do such a thing: to rise to greatness only to immediately succumb.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was saddened to hear about the passing of the historian and former California state librarian Kevin Starr<\/a> last month. Starr is best known for his eight-volume series Americans and the California Dream<\/a><\/em>, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Running to thousands of pages, the books posit that the elusive American Dream is most fully inhabited by California, which is, after all, America\u2019s golden \u201cPromised Land.\u201d When he was young, Starr dreamed of being a \u201cliterary man\u201d; as a result, his work paid close attention to cultural movements, shifting public sentiments, and new artistic aesthetics, often turning to biographical sketches of the large personalities that embodied all three. The time of the bespectacled, bow-tied historian may have come to its end when we lost Starr. Back when California was broke in the early 2000s\u2014mostly due to a horribly gridlocked state legislature\u2014I saw him at small bookstore in that crazy, beautiful, \u201cNuclear Free\u201d county of Marin, where I heard him say, \u201cHistorically, California politicians from both sides of the aisle used to retreat to smoke filled backrooms and make deals with each other\u2014some well intentioned, some not\u2014now, with so much ideological motivation, they don\u2019t even do that anymore.\u201d An observation I\u2019ve thought of often since then. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from The Detectress<\/i>, via the Museum of Modern Art.<\/p><\/div>\n

This Monday,<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0I rushed through the rain to see \u201cEthnic Profiling: Stereotypically Speaking<\/a>\u201d at the Museum of Modern Art. A collection of six comic shorts from the silent era, the presentation is a part of \u201cCruel and Unusual Comedy,\u201d a month-long series on early twentieth-century slapstick.\u00a0The movies here\u2014among them Oh, Sammy! <\/i>(1913), which depicts a romance in a Jewish sweatshop, and Do Your Stuff <\/i>(1923), <\/i>which\u00a0<\/i>displays a foray into Chinatown\u2014turn Schadenfreude on its head. Each sharply examines our regard for marginalized bodies. Overt stereotypes create a productive discomfort: prosthetic noses and taped back eyes made me cringe, but they also pushed me to reconsider the historical context.\u00a0Presented alongside MoMA<\/small>\u2019s exhibition \u201cMaking Faces: Images of Exploitation and Empowerment in Cinema,\u201d \u201cEthnic Profiling\u201d challenges audiences to engage with the ethics of performance, which, in light of recent events, raises questions still very much alive today. \u2014Madeline Medeiros Pereira<\/b><\/p>\n

An affluent businessman with a wayward relationship to the truth has risen to power, dragging his murky business dealings into the public sphere: it sounds like a Gaddis novel. I\u2019ve been thinking of Carpenter\u2019s Gothic<\/a><\/em> (1985), one of his shorter books, which takes place entirely in one house\u2014and describes such an overlap between business and government. A character named Paul, a Vietnam vet who married into money, is caught in an ethics scandal as the bagman paying off politicians for his father-in-law\u2019s business. Paul is not lovable; he is angry, gruff. Believing in the American ideal of the self-made man, he tries to forge a path in his wife\u2019s family\u2019s business, often telling his well-heeled spouse that he\u2019s \u201cgetting things lined up.\u201d But Paul is simply not powerful enough to effect change in his world; there are, Gaddis seems to say, only a select few who can pull the meaningful strings, and the pathos of Carpenter\u2019s Gothic <\/em>comes from this brute fact: Paul is not one of them. As a study of the perceptions of power\u2014of its movers and shakers\u2014the novel remains all too applicable. \u2014Noah Dow<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the staff of The Paris Review 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":[26990,25687,21455,26983,28330,26993,35,17,26997,55,26996,26988,26994,71,26982,7711,26986,26992,26989,26991,705,81,747,26995,13808,67,165,9619,26998,14574,26987,883,26985,26984,26981,5659],"class_list":["post-107154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-simple-story","tag-abstract-painting","tag-abstraction","tag-alma-thomas","tag-alma-woodsey-thomas","tag-americans-and-the-california-dream","tag-art","tag-books","tag-carpenters-gothic","tag-dance","tag-do-your-stuff","tag-does-your-house-have-lions","tag-ethnic-profiling-stereotypically-speaking","tag-fiction","tag-ghachar-ghochar","tag-harlem","tag-ian-mcguire","tag-kevin-star","tag-leila-guerriero","tag-malambo","tag-moma","tag-movies","tag-novels","tag-oh-sammy","tag-painters","tag-painting","tag-poetry","tag-recommended-reading","tag-short-films","tag-silent-films","tag-sonia-sanchez","tag-staff-picks","tag-the-north-water","tag-the-studio-museum","tag-vivek-shanbhag","tag-william-gaddis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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