{"id":113567,"date":"2017-08-04T13:02:17","date_gmt":"2017-08-04T17:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=113567"},"modified":"2017-08-11T12:33:44","modified_gmt":"2017-08-11T16:33:44","slug":"staff-picks-pinkies-plays-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/04\/staff-picks-pinkies-plays-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Pinkies, Pain, Plays"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From And She Would Stand Like This<\/em>. Photo by\u00a0Ahron R. Foster.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lately, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has been researching the early formation of the blues, in the years 1870 to 1910. His studies led him to an old newspaper from his own town in North Carolina, but nearly every edition of the paper had vanished. Now he and his colleague Joel Finsel have\u00a0organized a group of middle schoolers<\/a>\u00a0to find and transcribe surviving copies. In John\u2019s words: \u201cThe\u00a0Wilmington Daily Record<\/em>, a seminal African American newspaper (the offices of which were torched during a violent white-supremacist uprising here in 1898), has always been known to history and considered important, either inspiring or infamous depending who was talking. But for all practical archival purposes, it didn\u2019t exist. You couldn\u2019t read it, even if you had access to the fanciest academic databases and things. That was a very specific historical problem that we set out to solve. And we did find some copies<\/a>. The most exciting moment was when Jan Davidson, the historian at our local historical museum, realized she had three copies of the paper in the basement of the museum!\u201d John\u2019s discoveries haven\u2019t been limited to Wilmington. He recently struck gold in Indiana, too: \u201cI knew that the songwriter Paul Dresser had once been in love with a woman named Sal, an Indiana madam, and that she\u2019d inspired his famous song \u2018My Gal Sal,\u2019 which I wanted to know more about for\u00a0a piece about Dresser<\/a>\u00a0that ran in the Sewanee Review<\/em>. Anyway, as I\u2019m reading around in the Evansville Courier and Press<\/em> for the 1870s and eighties, I start seeing references to \u2018bagnios,\u2019 one of the period euphemisms for brothels, and then to a person called Sallie Davis, who supposedly kept the nicest one in town, and finally to \u2018Sal\u2019s place,\u2019 as shorthand for the same establishment. On further inquiry, the woman\u2019s real name turned out to be Annie, just like Paul Dresser\u2019s brother had always said it was,\u00a0the brother being Theodore Dreiser<\/a>.\u201d \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Friday night, I was in the presence of realness, fierceness, and royalty. I sat front row for And She Would Stand Like This<\/a><\/em>, a theatrical retelling of Euripides\u2019s The Trojan Women<\/em> by Harrison David Rivers. Making use of drag and ball culture, the play, directed by David Mendiz\u00e1bal, reimagines the Trojan women as black and Latinx queer men and transgender women. It\u00a0is set in a hospital waiting room, where an unnamed virus ambiguously fills the role of the warring Greeks, pitiless and destructive. By leaving the virus unnamed, Rivers renders timeless the early days of AIDS<\/small>, reminding those who need reminding that there are still waiting rooms where doctors face queer and transgender populations with uncertainty, especially when these patients are people of color. The play beautifully complicates the essential trauma of kinship, love, and belonging with several times the body glitter and melanin of Judith Butler\u2019s Antigone\u2019s Claim<\/em>. Rivers and the talented cast use chorus, repetition, and performance to their highest level of impact. The play turns masterfully on its platform stilettos, delivering triumphant choreography by the supreme Kia LaBeija<\/a> and somber tragedy worthy of, well, the ancient Greeks. Performances are through Sunday, but RuPaul has already tweeted an endorsement, so act fast. \u2014Julia Berick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marcus Wicker is a name I\u2019ve been hearing a lot lately. So when I was given his forthcoming collection of poems,\u00a0Silencer<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0I promptly moved it to the top of my reading list. Though only sixty-nine pages, the book is a force to be reckoned with. In it, Wicker writes\u2014at times with fury, at others with tenderness and sorrow\u2014of\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0America. As a black man in his thirties living in Indiana, he contends with the underhanded racism of fellow partygoers (\u201cGosh, you\u2019re<\/em>\u00a0\/\u00a0just so well spoken!<\/em>\u201d says a moneyed woman from Connecticut), conjures the latent, historical threat of trees (they \u201cfuck with me \/ Something gnarly\u201d), wrestles with his faith in God (\u201cIf in his image made are we, then why \/ the endless string of effigies?\u201d). Over and over, Wicker\u2019s rage alchemizes into a stunning rhythmic lifeblood that gives pulse to every verse. And yet, woven throughout the collection are gentler lines, too, ones of warmth and of love, that will break your heart twice over. From \u201cPlea to My Jealous Heart\u201d: \u201cWhen my lover locks our pinkies in a crowded art gallery, I praise the body, praise \/ every kissable knuckle, every painstakingly etched wave in a fingerprint.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

After Fernando Pessoa died on November 30, 1935, the text that would become The Book of Disquiet<\/em><\/a> was found on scraps of paper in a trunk alongside thousands of poems, letters, and journals attributed to various authors. Pessoa spent his lifetime inhabiting the minds of and writing as his various alter egos\u2014or heteronyms, a kind of personae\u2014but this \u201cautobiography,\u201d written under the name Bernardo Soares, is his most striking. Since its first publication, in 1983, editors made their own decisions about the order in which the fragments should appear and even which to include. New Directions will publish the first English translation of the entirety of The Book of Disquiet<\/em> in chronological order, or, as close to the real Pessoa\u2019s biography as possible. It seems a chance worth taking. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

So Many Olympic Exertions<\/em><\/a>\u2014the debut novel by our \u201cmollusk correspondent<\/a>,\u201d Anelise Chen\u2014is out this month from Kaya Press. The narrator, a graduate student trying to piece together a dissertation on sports, has just learned that a brilliant friend from college has committed suicide. She\u2019s preparing for an academic conference, and the winter Olympics hum in the background. Though she and the friend had lost touch in recent years, his death agonizes her and she begins to wonder about the point of life, and how someone builds a good life in the first place. The metaphoric stitching in a book about sports and grief is, naturally,\u00a0pain\u2014and how humans endure so much of it. \u201cTake this dyad,\u201d she writes early on. \u201cThere are those who can endure pain (athletes), and those who cannot (non-athletes). Those in the first category are sanguine and indestructible \u2026 Those in the latter category lose something\u2014a competition, say, her keys, a friend\u2014and remain lying in a prone position for many hours.\u201d When do people decide to give up? How can \u201cone throw oneself confidently down a mountainside \u2026 for the fulfillment of one, deeply meaningful goal?\u201d Where does our meaning lie? These are just a few questions our narrator\u2014named, winningly, Athena\u2014wants to answer in this small, excellent book. \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been the type of person who pays attention to translators, but Megan McDowell, whom we\u00a0interviewed<\/a>\u00a0last week\u00a0on\u00a0The Paris Review Daily<\/em>, changed that. Her translation of Alejandro Zambra\u2019s\u00a0Multiple Choice<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>reads incredibly smoothly, an impressive feat considering the acrobatic and electric nature of Zambra\u2019s style. The book looks like a gimmick\u2014a send-up of standardized tests, the story is told in a series of questions and bubbled answers\u2014but is actually a\u00a0slim volume crammed full with linguistic jokes and chillingly beautiful vignettes.\u00a0Multiple Choice\u00a0<\/em>is\u00a0<\/em>the literary equivalent of a procession of ants carrying an elephant: tiny stories punching at the weight of novels a thousand times their size. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Christopher Nolan\u2019s Dunkirk<\/em> continues to captivate moviegoers across the nation, I thought I\u2019d venture back into his career to see Following<\/em><\/a>, his first feature. The hour-long film follows Bill, an aimless man \u201cin between jobs\u201d who eventually becomes involved with a dangerous crew. We first meet Bill talking to a police officer about his habit of following people. \u201cI just wanted to see where they went, what they did,\u201d he tells the officer innocently. Bill imagines this activity as a pursuit of knowledge; he seeks to understand how all sorts of people live their lives, like the character studies of a young writer. As odd as it seems, the viewer (or this viewer, at least) sympathizes with him, with the loneliness evident in his speech and demeanor. Things take a turn when the mysterious Cobb confronts him in a caf\u00e9, bringing Bill under his sway. The film is eerie and tight, evidencing the development Nolan had to undergo as a director to create the grand-scale narratives he is known for today. It\u2019s also nostalgic, at times more reminiscent of Hitchcock than some of Nolan\u2019s more recent work. As the comically outdated description on Rotten Tomatoes<\/em> puts it, \u201cThis first feature heralds in Christopher Nolan a promising new talent at the indie film scene.\u201d A promising talent, indeed\u2014though perhaps Nolan\u2019s sights were already set far beyond the indie scene.\u00a0\u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jeremy Theobald as \u201cThe Young Man,\u201d in Following,<\/em> directed by Christopher Nolan.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Lately, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has been researching the early formation of the blues, in the years 1870 to 1910. His studies led him to an old newspaper from his own town in North Carolina, but nearly every edition of the paper had vanished. Now he and his colleague Joel Finsel have\u00a0organized […]<\/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":[9797,14735,29936,28346,25816,4864,29931,23867,491,11328,22769,79,29934,29928,29938,1577,20294,29932,29933,29929,29588,81,46,8014,29937,432,7221,165,6661,9771,29930,27362,6946,29935,44,3888,530],"class_list":["post-113567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alejandro-zambra","tag-ancient-greece","tag-and-she-would-stand-like-this","tag-anelise-chen","tag-antigone","tag-autobiography","tag-bernardo-soares","tag-blues","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-euripides","tag-fernando-pessoa","tag-film","tag-harrison-david-rivers","tag-heteronyms","tag-joel-finsel","tag-john-jeremiah-sullivan","tag-judith-butler","tag-kia-labeija","tag-latinx","tag-marcus-wicker","tag-megan-mcdowell","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-olympics","tag-paul-dresser","tag-play","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-racism","tag-research","tag-rupaul","tag-sewanee-review","tag-the-book-of-disquiet","tag-the-trojan-women","tag-theater","tag-theodore-dreiser","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Fernando Pessoa, Anelise Chen, and Warring Greeks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review is reading this week.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/04\/staff-picks-pinkies-plays-pain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Pinkies, Pain, Plays by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 4, 2017 \u2013   Lately, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has been researching the early formation of the blues, in the years 1870 to 1910. 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