{"id":110851,"date":"2017-05-12T17:18:07","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T21:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110851"},"modified":"2017-05-18T12:50:59","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T16:50:59","slug":"staff-picks-serpents-slinkies-online-shopping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/12\/staff-picks-serpents-slinkies-online-shopping\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Serpents, Slinkies, Online Shopping"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From the poster for Obit<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last week, I stayed up late every night reading the galleys of Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s study The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve<\/a><\/em>. I have already recommended it\u2014at possibly tedious length\u2014to my uncle, my shrink, our Southern Editor, and Sadie, who is reading it now. Greenblatt begins his history with the sensible, but to me startling, question of why the ancient Hebrews bothered to make up a creation story at all. (Really\u2014wouldn\u2019t it have made more sense to just start with Abraham?) He shows that, right from the beginning, people have found the story peculiar\u2014that magical trees and talking snakes were by no means a\u00a0thing,\u00a0<\/em>even during the Babylonian exile, and that lots of people wondered where exactly Moses was getting his facts. From the shaping of the Torah to early allegorical readings of the story, Jewish and Christian, to the radical reinterpretation of the Fall by Saint Augustine, Greenblatt shows how often the story of our first parents, and its meaning, have been up for debate\u2014and how, as Adam and Eve became more and more familiar, more and more human, thanks partly to Renaissance art and Paradise Lost<\/em>, they grew harder and harder to believe in. The story ends, inevitably, with Darwin, and with Greenblatt in Uganda observing chimpanzees. It is compelling at every turn, right down to the appendix, comprising legends of the fall, e.g., this, from the medieval theologian Duns Scotus: \u201cAdam saw perfectly clearly that his wife had been deceived and that the serpent had lured her into a trap from which she could not now escape. She will have to die, he thought, and God will offer to create a new companion for me, either from another one of my ribs or from some other source. But I do not want a new companion. I want this one and only this one. There is but a single way in which I can remain with her, and that is by conjoining my fate to hers. We will live\u2014and when the time comes, we will rot\u2014together.\u201d \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the time of his death, in 2005, the legendary curator Walter Hopps was at work on a memoir with Anne Doran and Deborah Treisman; he\u2019d worked with both during a later phase of his career as art editor of Jean Stein\u2019s quarterly,\u00a0Grand Street<\/em>. The memoir,\u00a0The Dream Colony<\/a><\/em>, will finally be published next month, shaped by Treisman but unfinished: Hopps left off in 1987, at his founding, with Dominique de Menil, of the Menil Collection in Houston. But the ground he managed to cover is considerable. It\u2019s hard to overestimate Hopps\u2019s influence on the shape of twentieth-century art: he championed the work of countless artists, among them Ed Ruscha, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Anne Truitt, Robert Irwin, and Frank Lobdell as well as the Hairy Who and underground comix; he was an early supporter of Pop, and he found work produced in the middle of the country to be as worthy of consideration as that made on the coasts. But in his buoyant memoir, he often recounts the details of his many astounding accomplishments as a series of escapades. Among my favorites is Hopps\u2019s narration\u00a0of a concert given at the Pasadena Art Museum by John Cage, who ground vegetables in a micced blender and then drank the concoction (he was accompanied on piano by David Tudor). The painter Clyfford Still, an elder statesman at that point, listened to the \u201cinteresting concert\u201d and then relayed a note: \u201cPlease convey my compliments to Mr. Cage, even though our aesthetics are committed to their mutual destruction.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the cover of Dream Colony<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Granta<\/em>\u2019s given over their latest issue to the Best Young American Novelists<\/a> (won\u2019t someone please start a band by that name already?), which is how I learned about Halle Butler. Her story \u201cThe New Me<\/a>\u201d won me over from its first paragraph: \u201cFeeling pretty good!\u201d just hanging out there all by itself. Not a lot happens in the story: one woman goes over to another\u2019s place, they drink IPAs delivered by an online grocer; they look at new work clothes the narrator has all picked out in open tabs on her laptop; they switch to cooking sherry and fail to meaningfully converse; the next morning, walking around the park in a drunken haze, the narrator\u2019s mistaken for an indigent person. All the while, she\u2019s trying and mainly failing to convince herself she\u2019s on the cusp of a reinvention. Butler writes in a grim, stinging deadpan that reminds me of the voice I use at the mirror when I\u2019m staring down a daylong hangover\u2014something her narrator does on the reg. She wants intimacy; instead she gets \u201cSarah talking about her fabled student loans again while I pulled the trigger on some new dresses for my new lifestyle. Some garbage stories about people I don\u2019t know, flaccid pickings at gossip, rote monologue, hollow martyrdom.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ever since I read\u00a0Alex Ronan\u2019s Daily <\/em>interview with<\/a>\u00a0Margalit Fox<\/a>, I\u2019ve hoped for another glimpse inside the minds of\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0obituary writers. So when I heard about Vanessa Gould\u2019s latest documentary,\u00a0Obit<\/a><\/em>, I rushed to see it. The film, one of the most endearing\u2014and, perhaps surprisingly, uplifting\u2014I\u2019ve seen in awhile,\u00a0follows the paper\u2019s necrology\u00a0department as they piece together the lives of the recently deceased: everyone from\u00a0William P. Wilson<\/a>, who not only negotiated the terms for the 1960 presidential debate but who also applied the makeup that\u00a0gave Kennedy his \u201cunflappably cool\u201d look onscreen; to\u00a0Betty James<\/a>, the woman who thought up the name for her husband\u2019s new toy\u2014Slinky. The sweetest parts of the film, though, are the interviews with the writers themselves\u2014Bruce Weber, William Grimes, and Fox, among others\u2014all of whom take seriously the task of celebrating their subjects, breathing life and humor into their work. As Fox tells us, \u201cObits have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life.\u201d The same is true of Gould\u2019s remarkable film.\u00a0\u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Krystyna Skarbek.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ever since Simon & Schuster reissued L.A. Woman<\/em><\/a> in 2015, Eve Babitz\u2019s titles have been steadily marched<\/a> back<\/a> into print\u2014and lucky for us, the trend continues this July, when her 1979 novel,\u00a0Sex and Rage<\/em><\/a>, hits the shelves with an appropriately retro cover. Jacaranda, the novel\u2019s young protagonist, is \u201ca native Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves\u201d who plunges headlong into L.A.\u2019s party scene, which she describes as \u201cliving on a drifting, opulent barge where peacock fans stroked the warm river air and time moved different from the time everyplace else.\u201d She sleeps with moguls, snorts every available drug, and hardly works until, at the age of thirty, she tires of her purposelessness, recognizes her drinking problem, and heads to New York to start anew\u2014only to find that shallowness pervades everywhere. The entirety of Sex and Rage<\/em><\/a>, in fact, is a kind of pushback against the notion of Southern California\u2019s banality and vanity: it gives great merit to simple beauty and solitude, and does its part to redeem the SoCal lifestyle. I agree with Dwight Garner\u2019s assessment from last week: \u201creading Eve Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown \u2026 going sixty miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.\u201d \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

Krystyna Skarbek, the first and longest-serving female spy for the British during World War II, was finally honored in London this week. Skarbek was beautiful, resourceful, and Polish\u2014a fact she concealed under her alternate name, Christine Granville. Her remarkable list of achievements includes skiing out of occupied Poland with key evidence of the Nazis\u2019 intention to invade Russia hidden in her gloves. Reading about her in Mark Brown\u2019s recent\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/em>article<\/a>, I, too, wondered how on earth I\u2019d never heard of her\u2014how Churchill\u2019s \u201cfavourite spy\u201d could possibly slip so far into obscurity. Characterized as \u201cno longer wanted\u201d after the war, Skarbek\u2019s story is an apt reminder of the vicissitudes of political favor, particularly as it pertains to women. Needless to say,\u00a0The Spy Who Loved<\/em>, Clare Mulley\u2019s 2012 biography of Skarbek, is next on my list. \u2014Madeline Medeiros Pereira<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s staff picks: Stephen Greenblatt, Eve Babitz, Halle Butler, and 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