{"id":122129,"date":"2018-03-02T14:20:36","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T19:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=122129"},"modified":"2018-03-02T16:43:17","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T21:43:17","slug":"staff-picks-bobby-janelle-and-romeo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/02\/staff-picks-bobby-janelle-and-romeo\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Bobby, Janelle, and Romeo"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

 <\/p>\n

Like most people who live in New York, I\u2019m always threatening to move to Los Angeles, and like most people who live in New York,\u00a0I\u00a0likely never will.\u00a0This winter, however, I almost made a visit. The impetus was an exhibit of Ellen Gallagher\u2019s at Hauser\u00a0& Wirth. The deterrent was the thought of taking the A train from Harlem to JFK. Luckily for me, and for people everywhere thwarted by inertia and a lack of cheap flights, Hauser\u00a0& Wirth published\u00a0Accidental Records<\/i><\/a>, a catalogue of paintings, photographs, collages, and texts meant to accompany the show. In it, Gallagher patches together a series of strange seascapes populated by ruled lines, whale fins, and teeny, tiny spores. The images appear unpeopled but evoke a population that\u2019s been willfully forgotten. In the liner notes to their 1997 album,<\/em> The\u00a0<\/em>Quest<\/em>, the Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya\u00a0writes, \u201cDuring the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?\u201d\u00a0The Drexciya myth is one that\u2019s been taken up by a number of black artists, Gallagher included. In\u00a0Accidental Records<\/i>, she creates the imagery for a world in which these mothers and sea babies, dead or unborn,\u00a0were\u00a0able\u00a0to survive. \u2014Maya Binyam\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

Ever since I read Joseph O\u2019Neill\u2019s first novel, the PEN\/Faulkner Award\u2013winning\u00a0Netherland<\/a><\/i>, I have eagerly sought out his\u00a0careful language. A\u00a0novelist of manners, like James and Wharton before him, he\u00a0perfectly\u00a0captures\u00a0the feeling of obligation to social graces. His meticulous characters\u00a0are consumed by the consequences of their inaction or with the injustice of the invasive demands made on their lives. This week, reading his\u00a0forthcoming\u00a0collection of short stories,\u00a0Good Trouble<\/i><\/a>, I found comfort in his\u00a0cynical humor. In \u201cThe Trusted Traveler,\u201d the narrator is concerned with how to handle a former student who annually invites himself over to dinner. The narrator cannot remember ever having taught the student, and his expression of distaste for the entire process, his dismay with the man\u2019s forced acquaintance, is actually very satisfying to read. I, too, am often similarly powerless to resist such encounters, and yet, as a former student of Joe\u2019s, I also felt a little \u201cThe Referees,\u201d first published\u00a0in The New Yorker<\/em>, had me laughing throughout\u00a0at the trials of poor Robert, who can\u2019t manage to convince anyone he knows to write him a character reference for a co-op application. As an antisocial New Yorker, I found myself uncomfortably represented\u00a0and yet\u00a0certainly successfully amused.\u00a0\u2014Molly Livingston\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been eyeing\u00a0New Poets of Native Nations<\/a><\/i>\u00a0amid the stacks on my desk, and though it doesn\u2019t publish until July, I decided not to wait. I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t: I think I\u2019ve discovered some of my favorite new poets. The editor, Heid Erdrich, notes in her introduction that a comprehensive anthology of Native American poetry hasn\u2019t been published since 1988; she selected twenty-one poets whose first books of poetry appeared after 2000, when, she says, poets of Native nations began publishing in greater numbers. It\u2019s fair to characterize this moment as a Renaissance, but what constitutes this new prominence? Is it that more Native poets are writing or that publishers (some of them) are taking greater notice? In any case, this book is an ideal starting point. I\u2019m enamored of the circularity, like a game of musical chairs, in Gordon Henry Jr.\u2019s \u201cHow Soon\u201d: \u201cThen story goes from in a rainfall \/ to sister walking a field \/ browned autumn. And when she arrives \/ winter has come, so the old man \/ rises from his chair, picks up matches, pipes and tools, and \/ walks out to begin again.\u201d The clipped yet fulsome imagery in Julian Talamantez Brolaski\u2019s \u201cHorse Vision\u201d: \u201ctime is a thing that gets spent, like youth, $ and desire \/ n\/t so lovely as a cardinal against the snow \/ or a tree w\/ fruit on it.\u201d The gluey pleasure in tripping through Tacey Atsitty\u2019s “Nightsong\u201d: \u201cLook \/ down at your wrists, \/\/ down here where \/ the thick laps \/\/ the lips.\u201d My favorite may be Margaret Noodin\u2019s poems composed in Anishinaabemowin and English, side by side. The lines are\u00a0shards\u00a0of thought, keen and unblinking: \u201cIt\u2019s easy to change our minds \/ to look through a window, fall into a lake \/ it\u2019s harder to quit, \/ to wait or step off the main path \/ to discover a joyful life.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

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I know nothing about ballet. I\u2019ve maybe, maybe<\/i>\u00a0seen The Nutcracker<\/i>\u00a0live, though I’ve seen the one with with Macaulay Culkin\u00a0countless times on VHS. Other than that and my cousins\u2019 dance recitals \u2026 nothing. If this angers you, keep scrolling. If you\u2019re still here and willing to bear with my basic insights, let me tell you about Romeo and Juliet<\/i><\/a>, a tiny dance production you\u2019ve likely never heard of, which just finished up a timely February run at the New York City Ballet. Last Thursday, after scarfing down disappointing lime-tinged ravioli in Flatiron, my older brother and I rushed up to Lincoln Center. We were a few minutes late, so we missed the first couple scenes, but this made little difference. The beauty of a wordless art form is the ease at which one can dip in and dip out. And as soon as we took our seats, I was immersed. First of all, which one was Romeo? The guy with the goatee? No, no, couldn\u2019t be. The little purple guy, twirling and twirling and twirling? Absolutely not. Too boisterous. Clearly the comic relief. I didn\u2019t settle on a Romeo until the second act, but in the murkiness of those first forty minutes, I was able to throw plot aside and focus on the artistry of the movement. What a thrill it is to see these lithe superhumans toss each other around, to hear the satisfying thump of their feet on the stage. And the music! It swelled and swirled, enveloping the performers’ movements and somehow emphasizing them, drawing near-visible bold lines around their limbs. I get it now. I get why there\u2019s a dance section in The New Yorker.\u00a0<\/i>I barely remember Shakespeare\u2019s original, but as an introduction to a medium, the ballet version of\u00a0Romeo and Juliet<\/i>\u00a0is perfect. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

The cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9 genre had its genesis in the late fifties, when cameras became small enough, light enough, and quiet enough to follow moving subjects with the plausibility, or willed delusion, that they could become the proverbial fly on the wall. There was the illusion that they were capturing \u201ctrue\u201d life, or at least approaching it asymptotically. It\u2019s debatable whether such a complete forgetting of the observer is possible, though it might be\u2014Richard Nixon, after all, installed his own automatic taping system and gradually became so used to it that he would say seemingly anything <\/em>in its presence. All of my favorite cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9 films have scenes\u00a0that rush headlong into the ethical dimensions of this aesthetic possibility. That is, they feature moments of such seeming nakedness that the viewer asks, Have they truly forgotten the camera? If they have forgotten, is it ethical to watch these intimacies? The question that occurs to me most often is,\u00a0Why <\/em>are the subjects letting them film this? The documentaries The Queen of Versailles <\/em>and Weiner, <\/em>in which documentarians were filming as humiliating events broke over their subjects, are overflowing with these moments of queasy frisson. The moment, though, that I am most haunted by comes from a short documentary, Jingle Bells<\/em><\/a>, made in 1964 by a pioneer of cinema verit\u00e9, D. A. Pennebaker. In the short, he follows Bobby Kennedy as he campaigns for Senate in New York City around Christmastime. Bobby\u2019s brother is dead. He goes to multiple public schools to sing \u201cJingle Bells\u201d with the students. Sammy Davis Jr. meets them outside at one point\u2014Bobby stands there glumly and impatiently, saying nothing. His son, riding in a car, asks why JFK Airport is so far from the city. In the final scene, Bobby is at another school, singing again, and the camera zooms in and stays on him as his expression revolves\u2014when others are looking at him, he grins and sings; when he believes himself unwatched, his face sets into a pained, sunken-eyed, narcotized mask. Grief hovers about him like a mist, almost visible. The question of the veracity of what we are seeing, and whether we have the right to see it, hovers there too. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

I follow the work of Janelle Mon\u00e1e close to religiously, so when I saw that she had dropped two new music videos, one of which stars her rumored girlfriend\u2014Tessa Thompson, the love of my life\u2014in a romantic role, I very nearly fainted. \u201cMake Me Feel<\/a>\u201d\u00a0and \u201cDjango Jane<\/a>\u201d\u00a0are singles taken from Mon\u00e1e\u2019s upcoming album,\u00a0Dirty Computer<\/em>,\u00a0expected in April. They\u00a0are drastically different tracks. The first is, as the lyrics have it, an \u201cemotional, sexual bender\u201d in which Mon\u00e1e channels her late mentor, Prince. The second is a fast-paced feminist rap\u00a0that depends on wordplay. Though I\u00a0love both of these tracks, the first Mon\u00e1e has released since she switched gears to kickstart\u00a0her acting career, I was even more taken with\u00a0the trailer for the \u201cemotion picture\u201d that\u00a0will accompany\u00a0Dirty Computer<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0\u201cThey drained us of our dirt, and all the things that made us special,\u201d Mon\u00e1e drawls over flickering images, some from \u201cMake Me Feel\u201d and others unfamiliar and violent. It teases a return to Mon\u00e1e\u2019s decade-spanning Metropolis storyline, and it gives me chills every time I watch it. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re not able to get to sleep, it\u2019s important to at least have good company. This week, I was awake into the early hours of the morning with Carly Joy Miller\u2019s forthcoming collection,\u00a0Ceremonial<\/a>. <\/i>The\u00a0current of language\u00a0swept me up and\u00a0carried me with seductive grace. I found myself rereading phrases, sentences, and entire poems, eager to experience again how the words were strung together. This fluid linguistic elegance seems counterintuitive, as there is something unbridled at the heart of these poems. They are peopled with spitfire girls in tune with the wilderness of their surroundings. There\u2019s an edgy magic to these characters and these verses, a fable-like quality that still\u00a0captures the moxie and fire that simmers underneath female coming-of-age. It\u2019s just the thing for when\u00a02 A.M.<\/small><\/span><\/span>\u00a0comes knocking. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Like most people who live in New York, I\u2019m always threatening to move to Los Angeles, and like most people who live in New York,\u00a0I\u00a0likely never will.\u00a0This winter, however, I almost made a visit. The impetus was an exhibit of Ellen Gallagher\u2019s at Hauser\u00a0& Wirth. The deterrent was the thought of taking the A […]<\/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":[33185,33183,5075,33178,33179,33181,33186,33184,25596,33180,9163,4885,33182,25780],"class_list":["post-122129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-accidental-records","tag-anishinaabemowin","tag-bobby-kennedy","tag-carly-joy-miller","tag-ceremonial","tag-cinema-verite","tag-ellen-gallagher","tag-good-trouble","tag-janelle-monae","tag-jingle-bells","tag-joseph-oneill","tag-lincoln-center","tag-new-poets-of-native-nations","tag-romeo-and-juliet"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Bobby, Janelle, and Romeo by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 discovers favorite new poets, 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