{"id":121910,"date":"2018-02-23T13:20:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T18:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121910"},"modified":"2018-02-23T15:25:42","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T20:25:42","slug":"staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Hooks, Twizzles, and Symphonies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

bell hooks.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In a compelling and widely read New York Times<\/em> editorial published Thursday, \u201cThe Boys Are Not All Right<\/a>,\u201d Michael Ian Black argues that the blame for our society\u2019s gun-violence epidemic lies, at least in part, with our broken standards of masculinity. While feminism has expanded the definition of womanhood, he writes, no commensurate movement has helped boys to reimagine what it might mean to become men: \u201cI think we [men] would benefit from the same conversations girls and women have been having for these past 50 years.\u201d Black is correct that masculinity has failed to evolve, but conversations about that failure have in fact been happening for some time. One person who has consistently tried to break the silence is bell hooks. In her 2004 book\u00a0The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love<\/a><\/i>, hooks, like Black, criticizes what she interprets as an intellectual and cultural silence on the subject of men. \u201cFeminist theory has offered us brilliant critiques of patriarchy,\u201d she writes, \u201cand very few insightful ideas about alternative masculinity, especially in relation to boys.\u201d In personal, approachable prose, she examines how both women and men perpetuate a patriarchal model of masculinity\u2014albeit to disparate reward\u2014and explores \u201cwhat the alternative to patriarchal masculinity might be.\u201d Fourteen years later<\/span><\/span>, it strikes me that the continued paucity of such alternatives stems\u00a0less from a lack of answers than from an\u00a0unwillingness to ask the question. \u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The press materials dub Eleanor Davis\u2019s\u00a0Why Art?<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>a manifesto, and I wouldn\u2019t know what to call it otherwise except to say that it, like art itself, defies easy categorization. The book (which, though filled with word balloons and pictures, is neither quite a comic nor not-a-comic) begins as a tongue-in-cheek primer on what <\/i>is\u00a0<\/i>art. It informs us that the most important categories are color <\/i>(orange art, blue art, and blue-and-orange art) and size, but the seeming simplicity quickly devolves into categories such as mask artworks (God masks, ugly masks, and wolf masks) and mirror artworks and edible artworks and container artworks. From there, the book only gets stranger. Characters and narrative emerge, the book spills into bold, moving full pages of black and luscious double-page illustrated spreads. The world is ripped apart by natural disaster, put back together by artists, and intentionally ripped apart again as one of the characters screams, \u201cShow us how to save ourselves.\u201d The question of what\u00a0<\/em>is\u00a0art\u00a0remains perpetually unanswerable beyond Supreme Court Justice Stewart\u2019s \u201cI know it when I see it\u201d definition for obscenity, but Why Art? <\/i>answers its titular question so powerfully that it will leave you parched and running toward the closest museum. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

\u201cStanding Still Lifes\u201d at the Gagosian Gallery.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

As a young artist, Tom Wesselmann (a forefather of the American Pop art movement that took hold in New York in the early sixties) feared that he might spend his career as a miniaturist. Fortunately enough for us, eventual success afforded him the space required to create the monumental works on view through this Saturday at the Gagosian Gallery. \u201cStanding Still Lifes<\/a>\u201d unites nine of these joyous pieces, exhibited together for the first time. Each work is composed of multiple staggered canvases that create an unexpected illusion of two-dimensional space. The everyday objects in his massive compositions, rendered at\u00a0ten times their familiar size and painted in strikingly vivid color, are imbued with both wit and light. Gazing up at them, the viewer feels a bit like Alice in Wesselmann\u2019s dreamland. The artist favored gleaming surfaces, whether they be a glowing, ripe orange, a shimmering jar of cold cream, or a reflective silver house key; he polished each massive shaped canvas until it shined. An intimate section of the gallery is devoted to Wesselmann\u2019s process, and it\u2019s not to be missed. It features a looping video, delightful maquettes, sketches, and notebooks with the artist\u2019s thoughts on color, in his own expressive hand. \u2014Charlotte Strick<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Diana Athill.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is plenty to be done this week at The Paris Review<\/em>. As late nights at the office turned into working from home, turned into working from the gym, I picked up a bedside book to prevent any working from bed. It turned out that it was just the inspiration I needed to wake up and do it all again. Stet<\/a>,<\/em> by the beautifully direct Diana Athill, is a chronicle of life in publishing. The woman is a marvel of honest self-reflection with a fine memory for joy. She\u2019s clear about what she\u00a0doesn\u2019t like\u2014placing advertisements, working on cookbooks (except with Elizabeth David)\u2014and what she\u00a0does\u2014doing painstaking edits on crushingly difficult books. Athill, at eighty, proudly includes favorite personal mentions in acknowledgements from books published decades before. As a young person in the book industry, there is nothing sweeter than the permission she gives to enjoy and take pride in working with the words you admire. Athill is frank about the eccentricities of her colleagues and the times she minded being a women in the office and the times she didn\u2019t. The list of writers\u00a0published under her direction\u00a0is impressive (Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul), but it is the ones I hadn\u2019t heard of that are the most exciting. Some of these books might be out of print in the U.S., but don\u2019t think that will stop me from tracking them down and reading them. I\u2019ve learned to trust a good editor. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

My poor, frail, introverted heart sometimes needs a rest from this crowded city and its aggressively man-made landscape. Enter Aminatta Forna’s lovely novel\u00a0Happiness<\/i><\/a>, forthcoming soon\u00a0from Grove Atlantic. Even the novel\u2019s cover is\u00a0a welcome decentering of the manufactured\u2014I didn\u2019t notice the cityscape set back from the snow-blanketed, winter-dressed trees until well into my reading of the novel. By that point, I was well accustomed to Forna\u2019s depiction of urban humankind as one element of a diverse and interlocking ecosystem. This is true both in the structure of her novel, which often dips into chapters\u00a0that follow animals rather than people, and in its story. Jean, an American wildlife researcher, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, run into each other several times on the streets of London and eventually embark on a search for Attila\u2019s missing nephew. Though the scope of the book widens exponentially page to page, it never loses its gentle tone nor its kind and scientific treatment of each member of the animal kingdom\u2014including, but not limited to, the humans. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

This week, I\u2019ve been waking up early to spend my mornings with Jenny Xie\u2019s first collection of poetry, Eye Level<\/i><\/a>. The small compendium comprises four breathtaking sections. In them, Xie shepherds us from one corner of the world to another: from Hanoi (the capital of Vietnam) to Wat Langka (a Buddhist temple in Cambodia); from Corfu (an island off the coast of Greece) to a\u00a0noodle shop on\u00a0East Broadway\u00a0(in Chinatown). We witness motorbikes cruising past, women perched sidesaddle; we\u2019re told the old wives\u2019 tales on which, to borrow a phrase from Xie, the poet was fed; we can almost taste the ground pork made by a woman who had once crossed an ocean to begin her life anew. Yet\u00a0despite Xie\u2019s wide-ranging adventures,\u00a0we remain burrowed in the mind of this magnificent poet, who\u00a0braids in the lonesomeness and sorrow of being unmoored and on your own.\u00a0By the collection\u2019s end, Xie has beckoned me to her side and soothed my own sadness, which her poems drew out of me from the start.\u00a0Take these few lines from \u201cExile,\u201d in which Xie uncovers the beauty of pain: \u201cTo pain, which cleans \/ out everything: \/ the fantasies that wouldn\u2019t take, \/ ancient mistakes.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s no wonder Juan Felipe Herrera selected Eye Level<\/i> as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

Caroline Goulding.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Springfield Symphony Orchestra of Springfield, Massachusetts, performed its first concert in 1944. My grandparents have been going since 1959. I had the pleasure of joining them this month, and I could soon see that they are not alone in their long-held loyalty to the SSO. Though the atmosphere is quite jovial, the SSO, the largest Massachusetts symphony outside of Boston, is no laughing matter. When the director encouraged the audience to like the SSO on Facebook, the conductor leaned into the mic: \u201cAnd you can like me too!\u201d Laughter erupted among the light-haired crowd. But any leftover laughs or little coughs or shifting tushes came to an abrupt halt the moment the soloist\u2019s bow met the strings of her violin. Just the endurance needed to head an orchestra through Vivaldi\u2019s Four Seasons<\/i> would have kept me quiet. But something more was required to hold the silence in this veteran audience, and whatever that something was, Caroline Goulding<\/a> had it. Goulding debuted at thirteen with the Cleveland Orchestra and has since performed with orchestras all over the country and internationally. This year, at twenty-five, with a Grammy-nominated recording under her belt, she is releasing her third album and gracing the West Coast with her tush-stilling performances. She will be playing Brahms in Portland on March 4<\/span><\/span> and Bruch in Long Beach on March 10<\/span><\/span>. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

Speed skating at the 2018 Olympics.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the great pleasures of the Olympics is the opportunity it affords to become briefly absorbed in obscure sports. HD Cameras and broadcast commentary invade these hermetic communities for two and a half weeks, and it astonishes me every time how quickly I invest in the rivalries, the Great Ones, the etiquette, and the oddities. Watching table tennis at the 2016 Rio Olympics, I could not get over the fact that the players had to retrieve their own balls. Seeing\u00a0a great Chinese champion drop to his knees and sweep his arm blindly under the scorer\u2019s table, as I have done so often under couches and cabinets, became more engrossing than the match itself. Last month, I would\u2019ve guessed that ice dancing was a sarcastic nickname for figure skating, but last week, as I watched the dominant Canadian pair Virtue and Moir\u2014they of the flawless twizzle (a term I learned an hour prior)\u2014strut around before their program, smirking at each other like the power couple villains in an eighties high-school movie, I wanted nothing more than to see them taken down a peg. My absolute favorite winter sport, though, is relay speed skating. Where so many Olympic sports are essentially lonely, with demarcated lanes and sequences of solo performances, relay speed skating is collective anarchy. It goes like this\u2014the racers complete a lap, their relay partners shadowing them in a central ice holding pen, and when it is time to switch, the partners fall in ahead of the racers, and the racers, in lieu of a baton pass, shove <\/em>their partners forward, then fade away to the holding pen, ready to reenter at the next lap. Pileups are frequent and spectacular\u2014the racer slips, the partner stumbles, or, possibly intentionally, the partner careens into the competition like a rubber-suited bowling ball. It is not so much a test of physical prowess as a mental and emotional gauntlet, an athletic strobe light. The three-thousand-meter women\u2019s final on Tuesday night ended with so many crashes and disqualifications that the Netherlands won bronze despite not participating in the race at all. Such is relay speed skating, which I love and will forget about within the month. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In a compelling and widely read New York Times editorial published Thursday, \u201cThe Boys Are Not All Right,\u201d Michael Ian Black argues that the blame for our society\u2019s gun-violence epidemic lies, at least in part, with our broken standards of masculinity. While feminism has expanded the definition of womanhood, he writes, no commensurate movement […]<\/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":[33068,3831,33063,2389,8734,33065,16014,33069,33067,7599,4444,18492,33057,8014,33059,33061,33062,33064,33071,33070,33060,33056,33058,976,176,33066],"class_list":["post-121910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-aminatta-forna","tag-bell-hooks","tag-caroline-goulding","tag-diana-athill","tag-elizabeth-david","tag-eye-level","tag-gagosian-gallery","tag-grove-atlantic","tag-hanoi","tag-happiness","tag-jean-rhys","tag-juan-felipe-herrera","tag-michael-ian-black","tag-olympics","tag-pyeongchang","tag-scott-moir","tag-speed-skating","tag-springfield-symphony-orchestra","tag-standing-still-lifes","tag-stet","tag-tessa-virtue","tag-the-will-to-change","tag-tom-wesselmann","tag-v-s-naipaul","tag-vietnam","tag-was-langka"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Hooks, Twizzles, and Symphonies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 discusses the Olympics, Aminatta Forna\u2019s new novel, Vivaldi, and toxic masculinity.\" \/>\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\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Hooks, Twizzles, and Symphonies by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 23, 2018 \u2013   In a compelling and widely read New York Times editorial published Thursday, \u201cThe Boys Are Not All Right,\u201d Michael Ian Black argues that the blame\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/\" \/>\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=\"2018-02-23T18:20:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-02-23T20:25:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/71na90wkzl-copy.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"833\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"490\" \/>\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=\"10 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"Staff Picks: Hooks, Twizzles, and Symphonies\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-02-23T18:20:37+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-02-23T20:25:42+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/\"},\"wordCount\":1986,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/staff-picks-hooks-twizzles-symphonies\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/71na90wkzl-copy.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Aminatta Forna\",\"bell hooks\",\"Caroline Goulding\",\"Diana Athill\",\"Elizabeth David\",\"Eye Level\",\"Gagosian Gallery\",\"Grove Atlantic\",\"Hanoi\",\"happiness\",\"Jean Rhys\",\"Juan Felipe Herrera\",\"Michael Ian Black\",\"Olympics\",\"Pyeongchang\",\"Scott Moir\",\"speed skating\",\"Springfield Symphony Orchestra\",\"Standing Still Lifes\",\"Stet\",\"Tessa Virtue\",\"The Will to Change\",\"Tom Wesselmann\",\"V. 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