{"id":117666,"date":"2017-11-03T12:50:52","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T16:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=117666"},"modified":"2017-11-03T14:46:27","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T18:46:27","slug":"staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Snoopy, Sappho, and Shikaze"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from 120<\/em> BPM<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In need of a pick me up this week, I went to see a French movie about AIDS.\u00a0<\/small>120 BPM<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is paced like\u00a0an electrocardiogram, a steady bum-bum<\/em> of a heart beat, without any sappy manufactured climax or resolution. Instead, you are plunged into the relentless every day\u00a0lives of the members of ACT UP<\/small>, an AIDS<\/small>-advocacy group in Paris in the 1990s, as they throw blood around the offices of pharmaceutical companies, interrupt high school classes to distribute condoms, and stage die-ins. Rather than romanticize their youth, beauty, and \u201ccoolness,\u201d as a film about ACT UP<\/small> easily could,\u00a0it lingers on\u00a0the group\u2019s\u00a0disorderly planning meetings, their internal feuds and diverging ideologies, their moments of misplaced rage at each other, and the indignities of their slow deaths. It is not a documentary, but it feels so real<\/em>, more real than a documentary ever could\u2014heartbreakingly realistic without ever straining for an overly gritty \u201crealism.\u201d The director, Robin Campillo, and his co-screenwriter, Philippe Mangeot, drew on their own experiences as members of ACT UP<\/small>, and the film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival this year.\u00a0I can\u2019t say that it made me feel better, exactly, but it did leave me\u00a0replenished in that way that an encounter with truly good art can. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was predisposed to love\u00a0Into English<\/a>, <\/em>edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. As I was scanning the ever-changing bookshelf here at the office, I saw the spine, pulled it, and kept pulling, as if I were pulling scarves from a magician\u2019s hat\u2014the book is triple wide in order to accommodate its unique method. Into English<\/em> takes foreign poems from Sappho to Transtr\u00f6mer in their original language and places them beside three different English translations. The effect is that of shoptalk moving back and forth across decades, a kaleidoscopic panorama of minor technical disputes. It is a book that in a diffuse way gets at the bedrock of poetry, a book that alerts a reader to the immense, hidden labor that each word performs in a great poem. In an Anna Akhmatova poem, the shift in register feels tectonic when the first two translations use the word \u201cchill\u201d to describe her chest, and the last switches to \u201cfreezing\u201d\u2014from literary, faintly British reserve to deeply bitter complaint. I don\u2019t know which is truer to the Russian original\u2014probably neither, which is the beauty of the book. Into English<\/em> shows on the page the cloud of uncertainty in which translation exists, and the cloud of uncertainty in which poetry exists, the way each word works simultaneously across multiple vectors in its language and its language alone. Reading across the three translations, I felt the root text like a hum in the back of my head, an English that\u2019s basically unspeakable, and which must be pared down before it can fit in the mouth. In this paring, a translation is a window into the translator\u2019s personality, a pleasure in itself that is lost when a translation is presented singly and therefore authoritatively. For instance, the word \u201cunerh\u00f6rtes\u201d in a Rilke poem becomes \u201clegendary,\u201d \u201cunimagined,\u201d and \u201cfantastic,\u201d respectively. We can see the concept, for which there is no single English word, around which these other words revolve. \u201cLegendary\u201d\u2014there\u2019s your iconoclast, your Bertrand Russell-esque idol smasher. \u201cFantastic\u201d\u2014there\u2019s your poet, your overheated imagination. Into English<\/em> is a book to be meditated on, a book that exposes the vast inner chasms of poetry, a book that demonstrates that a great poem is something one can live in. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Meyerowitz Stories<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

One dark winter,\u00a0a friend nipped downstairs to have a cigarette. The director filming on her street was undeniably Noah Baumbach, and so she called me. I rushed over and got there just in time to\u00a0watch\u00a0the crew drive off. This week, I watched Noah Baumbach\u2019s new film,\u00a0The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)<\/a><\/em>. The phrase adult children<\/em>, which is used over and over to describe the plot, holds all the awkwardness Baumbach is so interested in and captures so\u00a0well in his films. In this one, Harold Meyerowitz is an almost-famous artist, and his children\u00a0become aware that they are all suspended in the same spell of belittled awe. No, it isn\u2019t new, but neither is it old. Adam Sandler, as one of Harold\u2019s sons, made me forget Billy Madison.<\/em>\u00a0Emma Thompson, as Harold\u2019s newest wife, Maureen, delivers a line that levels the entire class of people to which I belong. Faced with donating a wok she never uses to Goodwill, Maureen pauses\u00a0before she says, \u201cYou just have this idea of yourself.\u201d I needn\u2019t have rushed to the set: I was there already. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Michelle de Kretser is a writer I\u2019ve been curious about for a while. I\u2019ve had a copy of her story\u00a0Springtime<\/i>\u00a0<\/a>since it was published as a standalone book last year, and I read it this week\u2014timing, coincidentally, with Halloween. The coincidence is that, despite its title,\u00a0Springtime\u00a0<\/i>is a ghost story. The entire story is similarly upended: Frances moves from Melbourne to Sydney, whose subtropical climate confuses the seasons and produces an untamed natural bounty\u2014\u201chip-high azaleas with blooms as big as fists\u201d and \u201cunkempt shadows in the armpits of trees.\u201d The city\u2019s exoticism\u2014which includes its chaotic streets and a \u201cshifty sun\u201d\u2014sets Frances on her heels. The story\u2019s ghostliness\u00a0is roughly a cubanelle<\/em> on the Scoville scale, but scariness isn\u2019t its pleasure; it\u2019s the stilling of time, the stifling humidity, and Frances\u2019s sidelong observations of her surroundings and the people she encounters. As with the flora, she notices things that are so fully real they transform, smoothly and brazenly, into the unreal. Of a man she meets, Frances says, \u201cHe neither looked nor sounded foreign, but nevertheless brought the possibility to mind.\u201d\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just because Halloween was\u00a0on Tuesday<\/span><\/span>\u00a0doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t still enjoy one more good monster story. The one I have in mind is from issue 28 of\u00a0n+1<\/i>. \u201cBeast Leave<\/a>\u201d\u00a0by Trevor Shikaze is like an episode of\u00a0Black Mirror<\/i>,\u00a0with a better sense of humor.\u00a0In a not-too-far-off future, men are able to take time off work (called \u201cbeast leave\u201d) to build their own personal monsters. This process entails literally stitching together pieces of animals, eventually adding a brain and a heart and bringing the sentient creature to life. Think Dr. Frankenstein in the age of social media. The language around \u201cbeast\u00a0leave\u201d intentionally echoes the language of maternity leave and pregnancy. It\u2019s hilarious satirically, but also doesn\u2019t get too hung up on that point. The whole story is a wild ride of the absurd and grotesque. I loved the voice of the narrator, who is thoroughly charming in his frat-dude demeanor (on his first day building the beast: \u201cI\u2019m so stoked. I put on Blink-182 and crank that shit\u201d).\u00a0I\u00a0went from laughing out loud to screwing my face up in pure revulsion in the span of a page. Settle into a reading chair with a bag of half-price Halloween candy and get your last ghoulish thrill of the year. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joan Didion.<\/p><\/div>\n

Many others have remarked, both on this site<\/a> and elsewhere,\u00a0on the Internet\u2019s campaign to consign Joan Didion to the canon once unironically known as \u201clady writers.\u201d In this\u00a0increasingly popular reading, the most noteworthy aspect of Didion\u2019s work\u00a0is her feminine air. (By such curious interpretations does one come to declare, as I read in The Atlantic <\/i>two or three years ago, that \u201cto truly love Joan Didion \u2026 you have to be female.\u201d) There is something nefarious in this tendency to reduce Didion to an aesthetic\u2014feminine or otherwise\u2014a compulsion to present her delicate sensibilities as the stylish accessory to a privileged, if enviable, passivity, rather than the glass through which she has so keenly perceived the world. Fortunately, her new Netflix<\/i> documentary, The Center Will Not Hold<\/a>, <\/i>which came out last Friday, presents viewers with the full sweep of her work, and refuses to sever the link she has always maintained between her style and her character. It so happens that you do not have to be a woman to love The White Album<\/i>, <\/i>nor a man to love Political Fictions. <\/i>You may, however, have to be an American in 2017 to appreciate the fine aging on \u201cInsider Baseball,<\/a>\u201d which she wrote for The New York Review of Books <\/i>almost thirty years ago:<\/p>\n

It was by 1988 generally, if unspecifically, agreed that the United States faced certain social and economic realities which, if not intractable, did not entirely lend themselves to the kinds of policy fixes people who run for elected office, on whatever ticket, were likely to undertake. We had not yet accommodated the industrialization of parts of the third world. We had not yet adjusted to the economic realignment of a world in which the United States was no longer the principal catalyst for change \u2026 What continued to dominate the rhetoric of the campaign, however, was not this awareness of a new and different world but nostalgia for an old one, and coded assurance that symptoms of ambiguity or change, of what George Bush called the \u201cdeterioration of values,\u201d would be summarily dealt with by increased social control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell<\/strong><\/p>\n

New York\u2019s weather earlier this week gave me the occasion to revisit some of my favorite rainy-day music, the foremost of which is\u00a0Tiny Ruins<\/em><\/a>, the musical creation of the New Zealander Hollie Fullbrook. Her lyrics are often wistful and imaginative, filled with the sort of light longing that feels most appropriate with the rain falling in sheets outside your window. Take \u201cMe at the Museum, You in the Wintergarden,\u201d a song with a peculiar magic to its imagining: \u201cI await the day when I work at the Museum,\u00a0\/ with you across the way in the Wintergardens.\u00a0\/ So young and so warm, we\u2019ll storm, we\u2019ll swarm\u00a0\/ the parks on our lunch breaks, we\u2019ll lie on the lawn\u2014 \/ smile so stealthily, buttery and brief.\u201d Characterized by muted drums and percussions, hushed tones, and the wonderfully smooth singing voice of Fullbrook, the music of\u00a0Tiny Ruins\u00a0<\/em>has a unique quality that is both peaceful and haunting. It makes you feel like closing your eyes and imagining a perfect day, and then alerts you to something slightly sinister in that day. Everything is beautiful, and everything is not alright. \u201cNoise before the dawn lures me up and about,\u00a0\/ Padding on bare feet, quiet as a lover\u2019s doubt,\u201d she sings in \u201cCarriages\u201d\u2014and we never discover just what is making that noise. Instead, the song progresses to a new sequence of self-reflective thoughts: \u201cAll of the trials of my good friends,\u00a0\/ All of the ways to save and make amends\u00a0\/ Strike me at this hour so clear,\u00a0\/ But a thieving sky, she steals me here.\u201d Rainy day or not, listening to\u00a0Tiny Ruins\u00a0<\/em>will make you feel that peculiar sort of ache that we all need to feel every once in a while. \u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Yesterday, a friend gave me a book that had helped her through a difficult time. \u201cJust keep it on your bedside table. It always cheers me up.\u201d For me, at first, Good Ol’ Snoopy<\/em><\/a> had the opposite effect. As the title suggests, this is a selection of comics featuring not the soulful, melancholic Charlie Brown but his \u201clovable\u201d dog. Which is to say, Good Ol’ Snoopy<\/em> represents Charles M. Schulz at his most stridently cheerful\u2014Snoopy doing his dance of glee, Snoopy reveling in the powers of his own imagination, Snoopy showering Lucy with unwanted hugs and kisses, et cetera. I admired the drawing, of course. Chris Ware\u2019s books have helped me appreciate the elegance of the squiggles I took for granted as a kid. But it wasn\u2019t until halfway through the book that a cartoon made me laugh. It was the writing that did it, and the concept. Here, at last, was Snoopy jangled, Snoopy as bit player and stooge. Plus: \u201cDoes rubbing a balloon bother you, Violet?\u201d That one line wiped a thousand gift cards from my memory\u2014and Good Ol’ Snoopy<\/em> had cured another patient. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Halloween is just one day of delicious darkness, but its penumbra engulfs the entire month of October. I have always loved the idea of October as the most speculative of thirty-day stretches, a time when the possibility of ghouls breaking the surface of our waking world seems more likely than ever. And yes, it\u2019s November now, and I mourn the conclusion of the spooky season, but I urge you to read one last tale before you hang up your glow-in-the-dark skeleton tracksuit: Karen Russell\u2019s\u00a0\u201cHaunting Olivia<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0about two brothers who stumble upon a pair of spirit-seeing swim goggles that they then use to search for their sister\u2019s ghost. It is one of my favorite short stories. It isn\u2019t scary, and there are no craggy trees and no howling wind, but the story captures the thrill of bumping up against something that escapes understanding better than just about any other piece of fiction I\u2019ve read. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In need of a pick me up this week, I went to see a French movie about AIDS.\u00a0120 BPM\u00a0is paced like\u00a0an electrocardiogram, a steady bum-bum of a heart beat, without any sappy manufactured climax or resolution. Instead, you are plunged into the relentless every day\u00a0lives of the members of ACT UP, an AIDS-advocacy group in […]<\/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":[22903,31504,31498,19639,31505,11959,31500,204,31509,18179,1146,31499,31512,31511,31501,1362,1800,2565,4904,31502,31506,208,740,2308,31507,26206,31508,21479,31381,31497,4638,3330,31510,31503],"class_list":["post-117666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-anna-akhmatova","tag-beast-leave","tag-billy-madison","tag-black-mirror","tag-blink-182","tag-charles-m-schulz","tag-emma-thompson","tag-frankenstein","tag-good-ol-snoopy","tag-graywolf","tag-halloween","tag-harold-meyerowitz","tag-haunting-olivia","tag-hollie-fullbrook","tag-into-english","tag-joan-didion","tag-karen-russell","tag-kevin-prufer","tag-lucy","tag-martha-collins","tag-michelle-de-kretser","tag-n1","tag-netflix","tag-noah-baumbach","tag-political-fictions","tag-rilke","tag-snoopy","tag-springtime","tag-the-center-will-not-hold","tag-the-meyerowitz-stories","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books","tag-the-white-album","tag-tiny-ruins","tag-trevor-shikaze"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Sappho, Joan Didion, and Snoopy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 discusses Karen Russell\u2019s fiction, Hollie Fullbrook\u2019s songwriting, Noah Baumbach\u2019s film, and more.\" \/>\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\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Snoopy, Sappho, and Shikaze by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 3, 2017 \u2013 In need of a pick me up this week, I went to see a French movie about AIDS.\u00a0120 BPM\u00a0is paced like\u00a0an electrocardiogram, a steady bum-bum of a heart beat,\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-11-03T16:50:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-11-03T18:46:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/bpm-01.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"667\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"Staff Picks: Snoopy, Sappho, and Shikaze\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-11-03T16:50:52+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-11-03T18:46:27+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/\"},\"wordCount\":2251,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/staff-picks-sappho-shikaze-and-snoopy\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/bpm-01.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Anna Akhmatova\",\"Beast Leave\",\"Billy Madison\",\"Black Mirror\",\"Blink-182\",\"Charles M. 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