{"id":120812,"date":"2018-01-26T13:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T18:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120812"},"modified":"2018-02-02T11:33:11","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T16:33:11","slug":"staff-picks-sinners-slavery-shults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/26\/staff-picks-sinners-slavery-shults\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Sinners, Slavery, and Shults"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Adrienne Kennedy and her son in 1970. Photo: Jack Robinson<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

On\u00a0Sunday<\/span><\/span>, I\u2019ll be in the audience of Adrienne Kennedy\u2019s latest play,\u00a0He Brought Her Home in a Box<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0<\/i>To prepare for it, I thought I\u2019d\u00a0revisit a few of the playwright\u2019s earlier works,\u00a0such as\u00a0Funnyhouse of a Negro<\/i>,\u00a0The Owl Answers<\/i>, and\u00a0A Lesson in Dead Language<\/i>. These one-act plays, along with Kennedy\u2019s interwoven\u00a0commentary, are bound together,\u00a0among others, in\u00a0The\u00a0Adrienne Kennedy Reader<\/a><\/i>. The compendium offers a glimpse into the mind of a remarkable dramatist. Surreal, lyrical,\u00a0and fragmentary, her plays are beautifully merciless in the ways they explore racism, colonialism, womanhood, and the violence inherent in each.\u00a0In them, time is nonlinear, and characters shift between a multitude of selves. (Take\u00a0The Owl Answers<\/i>, <\/i>for instance, in which there is \u201cshe who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the bastard who is the owl.\u201d) To parse Kennedy\u2019s exquisite experimentalism demands\u00a0readers give themselves over entirely to the experience of her plays, perhaps reading them again\u00a0and again.\u00a0As she tells us in the book\u2019s preface, \u201cThe days when I am writing are days of images\u00a0fiercely pounding in my head.\u201d And that\u2019s\u00a0precisely what these are: images of torment, in sequence, that will leave you feeling as though you\u2019ve just woken\u00a0from a nightmare. I\u2019m eager to see what she\u2019s dreamt up this time. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

What makes the loss of Ursula K. Le Guin so much harder to bear is that she was writing only recently. In 2010, she started a blog, and last year, some of those nonfiction posts were collected as\u00a0No\u00a0Time to Spare<\/i><\/a>. My husband and my mother both read it and loved it, and\u00a0on Tuesday<\/span><\/span>, all excuses dissolved in grief, I opened the book and went straight to the cat chapters. A cat is a question that does not require an answer, so Le Guin, who spent her writing life investigating questions that needed addressing, here writes only of appreciation and affection. Is it any surprise Le Guin was a cat person? \u201cIf I wanted to be the center of the universe I\u2019d have a dog,\u201d she quips. Pard is her feline subject, a lively, mousing tuxedo, and she observes his cat behavior plainly and openly with love: \u201cIf I dribble him water in the washbasin he closes the stopper, thus creating a water hole where savage panthers may crouch in wait for dik-diks and gazelles, or possibly beetles. Then we go downstairs\u2014one flying, the other not.\u201d The last cat chapter ends with a devotional doggerel and a small, mischievous feline portrait. \u201cHis breed is Alley, his name is Pard,\u201d she writes. \u201cLife without him would be hard.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from It Comes at Nigh<\/em>t<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

With the Oscar nominations finally out, the contingent of responsible gamblers in our office is abuzz, determining what was best and what was snubbed. And even with\u00a0Get Out\u00a0<\/i>on the Best Picture list, even with\u00a0Blade Runner 2049<\/i>\u00a0in the running for Best Cinematography, I can\u2019t dash the feeling that my favorite of 2017,\u00a0It Comes at Night<\/a><\/em>, was robbed. Amid a bumper crop of great movies, Trey Edward Shults\u2019s tense indie horror flick stood tall above the rest for its unrelenting bleakness. The film opens with a shot of two people in hazmat suits lugging a body out into the woods and then burning it. Somehow, by the ending, things are even more desperate, more hopeless. (I\u2019m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s\u00a0diagram of a typical Kafka story<\/a>.) Like the driving force behind a lot of good art, the seed of this movie is miscommunication and the ways it summons tension out of nowhere and warps our worlds into things unrecognizable. In the final twenty minutes, my mouth dried out\u2014my jaw had literally dropped and remained open through to the credits. You could have landed a mosquito drone on my fat, popcorn-crusted pillow of a tongue. If you are having a good day, do not go see this movie; it will thoroughly ruin it. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jia Tolentino with her dog, Luna. Photograph: Matt Licari<\/p><\/div>\n

Jia Tolentino\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in The New Yorker<\/em> yesterday that \u201cevery woman I know has been anticipating a backlash since about thirty seconds after the Weinstein story broke.\u201d Slightly harder to anticipate, perhaps, was the clumsy\u00a0and in many cases spectacular vacuousness that would lend the backlash its force, the febrile polemics and downright lazy thinking it would marshal\u00a0under\u00a0the\u00a0banner of measured argument. We saw, for example, the requisite invocation, never far from conversations about feminism, of\u00a0McCarthyism<\/a>. We saw a confused essay about a coercive sexual encounter\u00a0denounced<\/a>\u00a0as \u201ca public conviction\u201d that left the #MeToo movement \u201ccompromised.\u201d We saw Mathilde Krim, a pioneering AIDS researcher who died this month, resurrected in a\u00a0call<\/a>\u00a0to acknowledge unsung female achievement, and then used as\u00a0a rhetorical prop\u00a0to\u00a0swat away the concerns of women now voicing additional\u2014and therefore, because the framing required it, incompatible\u2014visions of progress. \u201cI have been confused by the tone of all of these pieces,\u201d Tolentino writes, \u201cwhich seem far more inflamed, over-generalized, and fatalistic than the relentlessly nuanced and self-interrogative essays that have actually delineated #MeToo.\u201d Immediately after reading the article, I sent it to a running group text I have with my friends. We had discussed some of the pieces Tolentino mentions, pieces we agreed were less interested in interrogating a problem than striking a pose in corrosive bad faith. The trouble, Tolentino suggests, is that the cannonade of half-baked hot takes works to occlude even a modest accounting of the complicated questions at hand: \u201cWhat are the parameters in which we should hold people responsible for more extreme versions of their behavior?\u201d And even if everyone agreed on those parameters, what would a truly just way of enforcing them look like? Those questions, backlash notwithstanding, remain, and deserve a more serious attention. It is fortunate that we have\u00a0writers like Tolentino to explore them. \u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

I\u2019ve been trying to figure out how to prepare myself to watch the State of the Union. I thought of listening to every one of\u00a0NPR\u2019s\u00a0Up First<\/i><\/a>\u00a0episodes for as far back as I could go, but I didn\u2019t trust myself to make sense of 2017\u2019s contradictory words and actions on my own. I turned instead toward where\u00a0Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a>\u00a0has often pointed: a history lesson from the seventies. Edmund Morgan examines the simultaneous growth of slavery and of ideals of freedom in early colonial Virginia in his article\u00a0\u201cSlavery and Freedom: The American Paradox\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(and in much greater depth in his book\u00a0American Slavery, American Freedom<\/a><\/i>\u00a0if you\u00a0have the time to read four hundred fifty pages before January 30). \u201cIt has been tempting to dismiss Jefferson and the whole Virginia dynasty as hypocrites. But to do so is to deprive the term \u2018hypocrisy\u2019 of useful meaning. If hypocrisy means deliberately to affirm a principle without believing it, then hypocrisy requires a rare clarity of mind combined with an unscrupulous intention to deceive. To attribute such an intention, even to attribute such clarity of mind in the matter, to Jefferson, Madison, or Washington is once again to evade the challenge. What we need to explain is how such men could have arrived at beliefs and actions so full of contradiction.\u201d Morgan does not excuse Jefferson, Madison, or Washington of their investment in slavery. Rather, what follows is a revelation of the perhaps unconscious purpose of their contradictory proclamations: to appease one group at the expense of another, while in truth providing negligible support to either. Morgan\u2019s nearly fifty-year-old words are helping me prepare to make sense of nonsense. \u201cTo explain the origin of the contradictions does not eliminate them or make them less ugly. But it may enable us to understand a little better the strength of the ties that bound freedom to slavery, even in so noble a mind as Jefferson\u2019s. And it may perhaps make us wonder about the ties that bind more devious tyrannies to our own freedoms and give us still today our own American paradox\u201d\u2014and still today, in 2018, our own American paradox. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Morgan Parker. Photograph:\u00a0Kwesi Abbensetts<\/p><\/div>\n

I would follow Morgan Parker anywhere, including from the pages of our Winter 2017 issue into those of the latest\u00a0Harper\u2019s<\/em>. \u201cThe High Priestess of Soul\u2019s\u00a0Sunday<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Morning Visit to the Wall of Respect\u201d and \u201cNow More Than Ever\u201d verbalized an anger and a sadness that I wasn\u2019t quite aware lived somewhere outside me. Parker is never morbid, and every poetic insight carries her signature \u201cI\u2019ll figure it out\u201d tone.\u00a0In Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Parker\u2019s \u201cThe Black Saint & The Sinner Lady & The Dead & The Truth<\/a>\u201d\u00a0has my emotions once again roiling. \u201cSoon my photosynthesis \/\u00a0<\/span>will complete, and I will be the gap \/\u00a0<\/span>between Angela Davis\u2019s teeth. Do you ever \/\u00a0<\/span>love something so much you become it?\u201d she writes. As I read these lines, I became\u00a0a poetic stanza, repeating to myself, Do you ever love something so much you become it?\u00a0<\/em>Very few poets have ever made me wish\u00a0to curl up inside their lines as consistently as Parker does.\u00a0I read her, and I crave the stability and the confidence of her voice. \u201cPlease \/ Don\u2019t make me repeat myself,\u201d this poem concludes, a plea and an assertion of legibility\u2014open up, and you can feel it too. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Image from How to Be Perfect<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Like most erstwhile English majors, I treasure\u00a0my copy of Strunk and White\u2019s\u00a0The Elements of Style<\/i>\u2014specifically,\u00a0the edition\u00a0adorned with illustrations by Maira Kalman. I am adding to my catalog of valued guidebooks\u00a0How to Be Perfect: An Illustrated Guide<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0by Ron Padgett, with pictures by Jason Novak. Each page presents advice that rotates through the practical (\u201cPlan your day so you never have to rush\u201d), the absurd (\u201cSee shadow puppet plays and imagine that you are one of the characters or all of them\u201d), the existential (\u201cKnow that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire to be loved, perhaps, or not to die\u201d), and just straightforward good manners (\u201cBe nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly\u201d). Novak\u2019s characters are wide-eyed and relatable, and his scenes are an excellent complement to the eclectic eccentricity of Padgett\u2019s map to impeccability. A dear friend and I recently flipped through the compendium over beers (even though Padgett prescribes water); while neither of us admits to having attained perfection, we agreed that this was a book that could only lead a person to improvement. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  On\u00a0Sunday, I\u2019ll be in the audience of Adrienne Kennedy\u2019s latest play,\u00a0He Brought Her Home in a Box.\u00a0To prepare for it, I thought I\u2019d\u00a0revisit a few of the playwright\u2019s earlier works,\u00a0such as\u00a0Funnyhouse of a Negro,\u00a0The Owl Answers, and\u00a0A Lesson in Dead Language. These one-act plays, along with Kennedy\u2019s interwoven\u00a0commentary, are bound together,\u00a0among others, in\u00a0The\u00a0Adrienne Kennedy […]<\/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":[32721,32718,32714,32724,20453,32713,25053,5410,32716,4655,30904,136,32715,32727,32712,32725,12090,24191,3020,32720,15381,21343,32711,28450,32722,6910,32723,8015,683,32719,8016,32726,40,32717,2292,3989],"class_list":["post-120812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-metoo","tag-a-lesson-in-dead-language","tag-adrienne-kennedy","tag-american-slavery-american-freedom","tag-angela-davis","tag-blade-runner-20149","tag-edmund-morgan","tag-franz-kafka","tag-funnyhouse-of-a-negro","tag-george-washington","tag-get-out","tag-harpers","tag-he-brought-her-home-in-a-box","tag-how-to-be-perfect-an-illustrated-guide","tag-it-comes-at-night","tag-james-madison","tag-jason-novak","tag-jia-tolentino","tag-kurt-vonnegut","tag-mathilde-krim","tag-mccarthyism","tag-morgan-parker","tag-no-time-to-spare","tag-now-more-than-ever","tag-npr-up-first","tag-ron-padgett","tag-slavery-and-freedom-the-american-paradox","tag-strunk-and-white","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-adrienne-kennedy-reader","tag-the-elements-of-style","tag-the-high-priestess-of-souls-sunday-morning-visit-to-the-wall-of-respect","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-the-owl-answers","tag-thomas-jefferson","tag-ursula-k-le-guin"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Sinners, Slavery, and Shults<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 discusses Morgan Parker\u2019s poetry, Adrienne Kennedy\u2019s new play, and Ursula K. 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