{"id":118785,"date":"2017-12-01T14:10:05","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T19:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118785"},"modified":"2017-12-06T15:24:12","modified_gmt":"2017-12-06T20:24:12","slug":"staff-picks-nerds-necromancers-new-wave-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/01\/staff-picks-nerds-necromancers-new-wave-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Nerds, Necromancers, and New Wave Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of American Nerd<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In American Nerd: The Story of My People<\/em><\/a>, Benjamin Nugent weaves a web of surprising cultural connections\u2014from Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em>, to nativism, to the use and abuse of Morse code\u2014to explain the advent of the nerd in the late twentieth century. As the subtitle suggests, Nugent also reports firsthand on the connections that hold nerds together: \u201cIt was no coincidence, I think, that we generally came to D&D from home lives that tended toward the unpredictable and confounding … In the fantasies we made together, you weren\u2019t always king, but you could always point to him.\u201d Ten years after it was first published, American Nerd<\/em> remains absorbing, touching, entertaining and, to this reader, enlightening even at its most offhand (e.g., \u201cA pretty good definition of sci-fi … is fiction that focuses exclusively on monumental events: plagues, comets, interspecies wars, the return of the dinosaurs.\u201d) Highly recommended for fans of Stranger Things<\/em>. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ah, yes. It\u2019s that time of year once again. Say it with me now: it\u2019s black-metal season. When the sky is gray and the cold claws at my flesh, I bundle myself in layers of distortion.\u00a0Ash Borer\u2019s self-titled album<\/a>, which thunders and howls, is my go-to November music. Nothing better reflects this miserable, wonderful weather. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>If, like me, you love gothic horror, chances are you\u2019ve run through a lot of duds. For every Turn of the Screw <\/i>or\u00a0<\/i>Daphne du Maurier, there are a few dozen mediocrities set in\u00a0nineteenth-century madhouses on the Yorkshire moors. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I’ll totally read those, too (UK bookstores are much stronger on this genre and I stock up when I\u2019m there), but it\u2019s like finding a pearl in an oyster shell when you stumble upon something legitimately scary. John Harwood\u2019s The Seance<\/i><\/a> is just that: it\u2019s a story of a mysterious mansion once inhabited by reclusive necromancers, and that of the young woman who inherits the decrepit estate. Beyond possessing the necessary scariness factor, the book is also assured, graceful, and avoids many of the usual historical-novel pitfalls. Although Harwood’s devotion to the classics is evident\u2014you can see the Bront\u00ebs, and the M. R. James, in there\u2014the voice never feels forced, and his easy mastery of detail and dialogue draws you in rather than breaking the spell. Proof: I literally read it all\u00a0in one night and had a really scary hour between the time I finished the book and the sun rose. \u2014Sadie Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Bianca Stone.<\/p><\/div>\n

A M\u00f6bius strip is a surface with only one side and one boundary. The easiest way to envision it is to imagine twisting a band of paper once and then taping the ends together. The title of Bianca Stone\u2019s forthcoming collection,\u00a0The M\u00f6bius Strip Club of Grief<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0plays on the concept of this loop, which she writes, \u201ccannot be \/ its own mirror image.\u201d In this collection, the M\u00f6bius\u00a0strip works as a metaphor for\u00a0the unknowability of the afterlife, though the work is\u00a0counterintuitively set in the bawdy, bodily space of a strip club. This combination is fantastically unsettling and sparks a serious meditation on grief and family, from a distinctly feminine perspective. Although Stone is working with a concept (one poem is called \u201cA Topography of MSCOG\u201d), there is nothing gimmicky or contrived about the poems in her imagined postmortem world. She populates her poems with characters that range from Emily Dickinson to her grandmother, and the result is the feeling that we are witnessing a soul\u2019s intimate reckoning with life. Many poets have attempted to\u00a0imagine the afterlife, and Stone\u2019s addition to the tradition disrupts it in the best way: she is our Virgilian guide through a wildly conceived purgatorial landscape. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Ryszard Krynicki and his cat.<\/p><\/div>\n

Born in a Nazi labor camp in 1943, Ryszard Krynicki came of age as a poet in the Communist Poland of the 1960s and \u201970s, which were\u00a0characterized by stifling repression and state propaganda. He was part of the New Wave, a group of young poets who saw their poetry as a form of resistance\u2014\u201cposthumous children of the cruelest of wars \/ living in a time of cruel peace,\u201d as he puts it in a poem from Our Life Grows. <\/em>Recently reissued by New York Review Books<\/a>, the collection was originally published in France in 1978 (Krynicki was placed on a complete publication ban in Poland in 1976). Krynicki, like other New Wave poets, was silenced in his country, forced underground or abroad. As Adam Michnik describes it in the afterword, Krynicki and others \u201cchose nonexistence\u201d rather than acquiescence. Much of Krynicki\u2019s poetry deals with the need\u00a0to speak out in response to evil\u2014to do what your age requires of you. As he writes in \u201cYou Came Down On One Side\u201d: \u201cdon\u2019t think that the time \/ in which it falls to us to live \/ is just a noncommittal tryout \/ in the theater of the future.\u201d With\u00a0its simplicity and insight, Krynicki\u2019s poem \u201cNo need\u201d is one of the most stunning poems of resistance that I\u2019ve read:<\/p>\n

No need to look for them,
\nThey will be found, slaves
\ninclined to wield a power
\nthat only love<\/p>\n

and a fatal disease
\ncan have over us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These poems are\u00a0urgent yet timeless, despairing yet hopeful\u2014and instructive, valuable looks into the long slog of resistance. \u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ditmas Lit<\/a>\u00a0is a monthly reading series in the back of a bar called Hinterlands. The chairs fill up, and so about half the audience sits on the floor, drinking. There\u2019s no representative style. One minute it\u2019s erotic poetry, the next it\u2019s a story called \u201cPancake Spring<\/a>\u201d about the millennial granddaughter of IHOP<\/small>\u2019s founder, who inherits the IHOP<\/small> Twitter account and, rather than sell it back to corporate, decides to use it as a megaphone to start a revolution. What unifies the events is the sense of occasion. D. L. readers appreciate that if you\u2019re going to schlep to a bar on a Wednesday<\/span><\/span> night and have a piece read to you, rather than read it yourself in bed, as God intended, then the experience may as well feature some element of showmanship. They choose work they\u2019re excited about. They speak into the microphone. They bring it<\/i>. Past readers include Sarah Gerard, Zack Graham, Rebecca Schiff, Ben Lasman, <\/i>Donika Kelly, One Story<\/i>\u2019s\u00a0Lena Valencia, and the event\u2019s founders, Rachel Lyons and Sarah Bridgins. December 6\u00a0is their one-year anniversary show. Get there early and snag a chair, or arrive late and feel like a kid again. \u2014Brent Katz<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Don\u2019t let the subtitle put you off. Kathleen Hill\u2019s She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels<\/em><\/a> is spellbinding. Mainly it describes Hill\u2019s years in the 1960s\u2014teaching English in Nigeria, as a young wife and mother, then later in the French countryside\u2014and examines her life through the lens of her\u00a0late-night\u00a0reading: Things Fall Apart<\/em>, or Portrait of a Lady<\/em>, or Diary of a Country Priest<\/em>. The last chapter jumps ahead to New York City in the 1980s, where Hill found herself reading Proust out loud to the formidable critic Diana Trilling,\u00a0who was\u00a0then in her eighties, widowed, and nearly blind. Throughout, Hill writes with great elegance, clarity, and soul, but one passage leapt out at me for personal reasons. It describes the seating arrangements in the Trillings\u2019 apartment on Claremont Avenue, but it also describes\u2014just as accurately\u2014the style we\u2019ve been trying to achieve in the recording studio for The Paris Review Podcast<\/a><\/em>: \u201cA listener needs room to be alone in the expanding world of the story. And a voice telling a story requires space if it is to assume the anonymity of a voice crying in the wilderness, requires at least the illusion of speaking beyond time and place.\u201d This is no mere book-lover\u2019s memoir, for it too gives the illusion of speaking beyond time and place, from across a quiet room and decades of thoughtful living. \u2014L. S.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Benjamin Nugent weaves a web of surprising cultural connections\u2014from Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein, to nativism, to the use and abuse of Morse code\u2014to explain the advent of the nerd in the late twentieth century. As the subtitle suggests, Nugent also reports firsthand on the connections that hold […]<\/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":[31959,31958,13422,31956,6991,31961,31954,31953,31960,31955,31957],"class_list":["post-118785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-american-nerd-the-story-of-my-people","tag-ash-borer","tag-benjamin-nugent","tag-bianca-stone","tag-john-harwood","tag-kathleen-hill","tag-our-life-grows","tag-ryszard-krynicki","tag-she-read-to-us-in-the-late-afternoons-a-life-in-novels","tag-the-mobius-strip-club-of-grief","tag-the-seance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Nerds, Necromancers and New Wave Poetry<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 stays up reading 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