{"id":115910,"date":"2017-09-22T13:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T17:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115910"},"modified":"2017-09-22T16:45:48","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T20:45:48","slug":"staff-picks-pranks-prints-and-penises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/staff-picks-pranks-prints-and-penises\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Pranks, Prints, and Penises"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Belkis Ay\u00f3n, La cena (The Supper)<\/em>, 1991.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last Saturday<\/span><\/span>, my roommate took us to El Museo del Barrio to see \u201cNKAME,\u201d a haunting retrospective of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ay\u00f3n. It is a show of paradoxes, crackling with stillness and intricate in its simplicity.\u00a0Ay\u00f3n\u2019s work\u00a0merges elements of Christian narrative with that of\u00a0the founding mythology of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society Abaku\u00e1 to establish an independent and forceful iconography of\u00a0her own. Her prints are populated by androgynous, ghostly figures, featureless save for the almond-shaped eyes that peer out from their canvases in a resolute, subtly confrontational stare.\u00a0One piece reimagines Da Vinci\u2019s The Last Supper<\/i>, but many of the scenes are more deliberately abstract, and those are the ones that are the most viscerally evocative. The show includes one of her color prints, but the rest are the result of her midcareer decision to work only in grayscale.\u00a0Ay\u00f3n\u2019s\u00a0true virtuosity is in her command of this palette, and the nuance of patterns she weaves into her prints is captivating. These\u00a0patterns imbue the stillness of her scenes with a buzzing energy just below the surface, underscoring the archetypal uncanniness of her hybrid mythology.\u00a0It was my roommate\u2019s third time seeing the\u00a0exhibition, and it is certainly one to pull you back again and again. Spend time with each print; the experience of each is a slow, mysterious revelation of masterful detail. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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

At the Symphony Space book sale a couple weeks ago, a peculiar dust jacket caught my eye. It was a portrait of a man bent soulfully over an anthropomorphic cello\u2014the tuning pegs made a scowling face\u2014while a small pink horse peeked out from under his\u00a0coat, wincing. There was a note: \u201cIf this jacket (the author painted it himself) is too strong for you, take it off. There\u2019s a conservative jacket for conservative people underneath.\u201d I looked underneath. It was true, there was a gray one\u00a0underneath with an all-type design. \u201cWow, what an asshole,\u201d I remarked to Sadie, showing her the two dust jackets, and I bought the book. It was Mine Enemy Grows Older<\/em>, a 1958 memoir of opioid addiction and recovery by a Life<\/em> magazine editor named Alexander King, who apparently had a second career as a regular guest on The<\/i>\u00a0Jack Paar<\/em>\u00a0Show<\/i>. You can\u2019t judge a book by its covers. King may indeed have been an asshole\u2014as a memoirist he\u2019s garrulous, preening, and self-absorbed\u2014but he also happens to be very funny, a sort of missing link between S. J. Perelman and William Burroughs: \u201cMost of the hotels in that neighborhood look as if they had come down in the world, and they probably have. Not the Minnetonka. That hostelry was originally conceived as a horror and has so maintained itself through the years. I suspect it has even improved a little, since it has a certain soothing, gray-green, dirt patina that cannot be inaugurated, it has to accrue. In the lobby, which smells like a neglected men\u2019s room, there are four ossified palms, whose roots are permanently embedded in cigarette butts.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nathan for You<\/i>, Comedy Central\u2019s show about a traveling business expert who helps mom-and-pop operations keep up in the modern world, returns for a fourth season next week, and it is painfully funny. The premise is this: the comedian Nathan Fielder, playing a caricature of himself, dreams up outlandish ideas to rejuvenate failing small businesses. At his prompting, a realtor enlists priests to perform exorcisms to ensure her properties are\u00a0verifiably free of ghosts, a gas station offers fuel at the cheapest price in the area (but only after the customer has deposited a rebate slip in a hidden mailbox at the top of a mountain), and a coffee shop rebrands itself as Dumb Starbucks. Fielder\u2019s absurd conceptions are a perfect send-up of capitalism. It\u2019s a reality show in the sense that the business owners are real-life people who own real-life businesses and Nathan is the only one in on the joke, but calling it such feels reductive. What elevates Nathan for You<\/i> above the average prank show is the through line of the main character, a careful study that Fielder has built over the past three seasons. The character Nathan projects confidence, but he is perpetually lonely, constantly seeking ways to befriend his clients\u2014to transcend the professional realm and enter the personal\u2014and repeatedly faces rejection. Nathan\u2019s tender, misunderstood, tragic figure makes this the best show on television. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

A portrait of Guillermo Cabrera Infante by Oto Vega Ponce.<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a scene in Guillermo Cabrera Infante<\/a>\u2019s posthumously published memoir, Map Drawn by a Spy<\/a><\/em>, that might have something to do with midcentury Cuban citizenship. The protagonist leaves his daughters in front of the television and runs to the bathroom because \u201che felt a torrid burning in his loins.\u201d There, he pulls down his pants to find that \u201chis groin and penis were covered in fungus.\u201d But fear not, dear reader, \u201che had had this sort of fungus before.\u201d Ten pages later, he tears off his clothes to sleep with his parents\u2019 neighbor Leonora Soler. (Again, don\u2019t worry! When he\u00a0checks later, the fungus is gone, and what a relief\u2014he would have \u201cbeen very unhappy had he given it to [her]\u201d). This book, found in an envelope after his death in 2005, is an autobiographical account of Infante\u2019s return from his diplomatic post in Brussels to his dying mother\u2019s house in Castro\u2019s Cuba. Once on Cuban soil, he\u2019s told he\u2019s not allowed to leave\u2014cue a shrouded, Kafkaesque bureaucracy and inevitable paranoia. Infante was no super fan of the revolution, and three years abroad confirm his suspicions: Havana is crumbling, food is scarce, Cubans walk about like zombies. Map Drawn by a Spy<\/em> is about patriotic delusion. Infante\u2019s Cuba, the one he would leave shortly after the events recounted in Maps<\/em>, is soaked with nostalgic sadness and wary citizenry\u2014everyone misses the old days but can\u2019t say it; they hope the future will be better but won\u2019t\u00a0bet on it. Paired with Infante\u2019s best known novel, Three Trapped Tigers<\/a><\/em>, often celebrated as the Cuban Ulysses<\/em>, Maps<\/em> shows a portrait of the artist as a future dissenter, a writer in exile before he\u2019s ready to admit it. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

After enjoying a slow and savory read through our Fall issue, you\u2019d do well to pick up the latest copy\u00a0of Tin House<\/em>, themed \u201cTrue Crime.\u201d The editorial staff of Tin House<\/em> sees it\u00a0as a form of resistance. As the editor Rob Spillman writes, \u201cWhere there is friction, there is fire. We hope that this incendiary issue burns clear and bright.\u201d In the takes on true crime from its writers, the issue is a big success. There is real reckoning done in these pages: with histories personal and national, with hurts internal and systemic. Stories from Tayari Jones and Karen Shepard and essays from H\u00e9ctor Tobar and Justin St. Germain deserve mention, but the highlight of the issue is its poetry. Matthew Zapruder, Terrance Hayes, and Claire McQuerry, among others, contribute poignant and timely work. I found Hafizah Geter\u2019s \u201cTestimony\u201d series particularly moving: four poems, one each for Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland. The last lines for Tamir Rice are some of the most affecting I\u2019ve read in a long time:<\/p>\n

Mr. President, it took one whole day
\nfor me to die and even though I\u2019m twelve and not afraid of the dark
\nI didn\u2019t know there could be so much of it
\nor that there would be so many other boys here
\nand so many names to remember.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Lynda Barry\u00a0has, as she says, \u201cworked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found they are much the same.\u201d This week, she can add advice columnist<\/a> to that list. I once had the privilege of taking an hour-long class with\u00a0Ms. Barry. As a teacher, she is unparalleled. Under her direction, students complete\u00a0creative assignments designed to get pen moving across paper. In the brief sanctity of her classroom, adults\u00a0set aside anxiety and self-doubt in order to\u00a0rediscover the childlike magic\u00a0of watching marks appear on paper. As each student shares their work, Barry places her hand on their shoulder, looks deep in their eyes, and says, always, to each one, Good. Barry expends so much warmth and energy in her teaching that I have long wondered where she replenishes herself. This week, I found a clue in\u00a0her blog post about her work with four-year-olds<\/a>. She goes\u00a0straight back to the source. In her post, she shares in her \u201cfour-year-old co-researcher\u2019s\u201d wonder at the discovery that letters make sounds and sounds make words. Barry finds herself reading the word B-B-T-S-A-A-A-B-B-B<\/em>\u00a0aloud. It\u2019s a word because they\u2019ve all decided it\u2019s one. There is also a squiggle that becomes a storm, a jumble of nonsense that becomes a joke. I loved this reminder that everything can be anything, as long as we name it, and that that absurdity is not meaningless\u2014it\u2019s the most meaningful thing there is. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Andrew O\u2019Hagan\u2019s name appears on any new issue of the\u00a0London Review of Books<\/em>, I ready the reading chair. So when I came upon The Secret Life: Three True Stories<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(out next month), I could already imagine the nights ahead. I had already read two out of the three long-form pieces that comprise the collection,\u00a0all investigations of the self in the Internet age, in the LRB<\/em>, but the introduction alone is\u00a0worth the price of admission. In half a page, O\u2019Hagan conveys what I have been striving to articulate about the Internet in more prickly, cantankerous rants for the past four years. Everyone is a fiction writer, O\u2019Hagan explains, now that we have the Internet: \u201cIn\u00a0a sense it gave the tools of fiction-making to everybody equally.\u201d He is claiming something more bitter and more sad than Donna Haraway does in A Cyborg Manifesto<\/em> about the Internet allowing for the uncoupling of the mind from the body others see. In the collection, O\u2019Hagan deep dives into an almost autobiography of Julian Assange (he was hired to be the ghostwriter for the book that never was), into the dark web, and into the smoke screens of Bitcoin origins. He follows men and women who have, in various ways, nearly disappeared into the Internet. You\u2019ll catch yourself trying to recount the twists and turns like it\u2019s a slick new miniseries, but hold on to your blue pill, friends, this collection is nonfiction. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Saturday, my roommate took us to El Museo del Barrio to see \u201cNKAME,\u201d a haunting retrospective of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ay\u00f3n. It is a show of paradoxes, crackling with stillness and intricate in its simplicity.\u00a0Ay\u00f3n\u2019s work\u00a0merges elements of Christian narrative with that of\u00a0the founding mythology of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society Abaku\u00e1 to […]<\/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":[30705,30707,30709,30719,30706,16502,30713,30717,30710,3877,1459,30714,26110,30708,30712,30711,30704,30716,30718,14465,30720,30715,2191],"class_list":["post-115910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-abukua","tag-afro-cuban","tag-alexander-king","tag-andre-ohagan","tag-belkis-ayon","tag-el-museo-del-barrio","tag-guillermo-cabrera-infante","tag-hafizah-geter","tag-jack-paar","tag-life-magazine","tag-lynda-barry","tag-map-drawn-by-a-spy","tag-matthew-zapruder","tag-mine-enemy-grows-older","tag-nathan-fielder","tag-nathan-for-you","tag-nkame","tag-rob-spillman","tag-tamir-rice","tag-the-london-review-of-books","tag-the-secret-life-three-true-stories","tag-three-trapped-tigers","tag-tin-house"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Pranks, Prints, and Penises<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 is reading, watching, and looking at 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\/09\/22\/staff-picks-pranks-prints-and-penises\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Pranks, Prints, and Penises by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 22, 2017 \u2013 Last Saturday, my roommate took us to El Museo del Barrio to see \u201cNKAME,\u201d a haunting retrospective of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ay\u00f3n. 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