{"id":122496,"date":"2018-03-09T13:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T18:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=122496"},"modified":"2018-03-09T16:35:17","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T21:35:17","slug":"staff-picks-berger-brock-broido-and-beauman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/09\/staff-picks-berger-brock-broido-and-beauman\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Berger, Brock-Broido, and Beauman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

John Berger<\/p><\/div>\n

When asked to describe my literary interests, I used to say that John Berger was the first white man I loved, and also the last. Now he\u2019s dead, but his final book is forthcoming. In May, Notting Hill Editions will publish\u00a0Smoke<\/i><\/a>, Berger\u2019s illustrated elegy to cigarettes. If \u201ccollaborative consumption\u201d\u2014 a lifestyle whose transactions include co-working, co-living, and ride sharing\u2014is a poorly disguised marketing campaign designed to sell old habits of communal living\u00a0to millennials with new income,\u00a0Smoke<\/i>\u00a0imagines a reciprocity that\u2019s for real. In fable-like prose, Berger describes a community of men, women, and children who pass around cigarettes, lights, and worldviews. When their habits are declared deadly, and they themselves are declared murderers, they retreat into the shadows. Though their love is illicit, they meander toward old haunts, where they are \u201chappy,\u201d in Berger\u2019s words, \u201cto encounter one another as outlaws.\u201d \u2014Maya Binyam<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the site of a newly discovered temple deep in the jungle of Honduras, two groups of Americans enter a standoff that lasts nearly two decades. The first\u00a0group, arriving from Hollywood to shoot a film, finds the second, sent by a Rockefeller-like tycoon character to dismantle\u00a0the temple and bring it stateside piece by piece, camped out by the half-deconstructed ruin. Both groups have hired the same locals to help them. The characters in Ned Beauman\u2019s\u00a0Madness Is Better Than Defeat<\/em><\/a>\u00a0are, to the reader\u2019s delight, haplessly out of place, and, it would seem, doomed. Take Jervis Welt, a film-theory teacher from Southern California who\u2019s been sent on this mission by an enigmatic, Howard Hughes\u2013like, Hollywood mogul\u00a0(he has never directed a movie before). Before long, both groups become entangled with black-hat CIA operatives out to use them for their own geopolitical purposes and an ex\u2013Nazi officer on the run. If some of this sounds familiar, it\u2019s because it is. Beauman\u2019s layered treatment of familiar archetypes surges at you like a Pynchonesque detective novel with the slow-building surreality of Benjamin Willard in\u00a0Apocalypse Now<\/em>.\u00a0Madness<\/em>\u00a0is a thrilling, dark, comedic romp through the jungle. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been unusually popular on the subway this week with Ted Scheinman\u2019s\u00a0Camp Austen<\/i><\/a>\u00a0in hand. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s the cover\u2014which features an eighteenth-century man elegantly roasting marshmallows\u2014or if the subway riders who peered over my shoulder, or asked\u00a0me outright where I had found such a precious object, had caught a couple sentences of Scheinman\u2019s charming prose<\/a>.\u00a0Camp Austen<\/i>\u00a0is Scheinman\u2019s telling of the first-ever North Carolina Jane Austen Summer Camp, a four-day conference\/reenactment\/extravaganza. It is a hard task to add to the\u00a0legion of books on Austen\u2019s work, and an even harder one to write a book an Austen fan would choose over simply rereading Austen\u2019s own. But Scheinman\u2019s contribution is not really so much about Austen\u2019s work or its reception; it is about the fun of totally, shamelessly, and ridiculously indulging in one\u2019s infatuation with literature. The constant weaving in of Austen\u2019s lines or of the words of her critics is part of that indulgence; Scheinman just does it a whole lot better than many of the rest of us would.\u00a0His\u00a0deeply loving and mocking voice feels wonderfully relatable to this twenty-first-century Austen fan. (Most of the time\u2014I do think he may thrill in the exceptionalism of his male Janiesm more than some, or at least one, of his readers will.) But ultimately,\u00a0Camp Austen<\/i>\u00a0is not about one man or one fan or one Jane Austen Summer Camp. It is about the delight of loving great books, and it is itself a delight. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes<\/a> in literature for 2018 were announced this week, and I was thrilled to see poet Lorna Goodison on the eight-person list. Goodison\u2019s poems are lovely lyric things which the poet removes painstakingly from her body and lays onto paper. My favorite of her poems also do the extra work of pulling the stress right out of my body. Her poems often give finite directions for finding the peace she calls \u201cheartease,\u201d a place of individual and communal relief.\u00a0\u201cIf we mix a solution\/ from some wild bees\u2019 honey\/ and some search-mi-heart extract,” she writes in \u201cHeartease III,\u201d included in her Selected Poems<\/a><\/i>, and plant the \u201cundivided ever-living healing trees,\u201d the heartease will follow. Consistently\u00a0lovely, consistently\u00a0natural, consistently interwoven, and maybe, for you as well as me, a deep breath of spring air as we wait for it to arrive. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Henry James is maestro of the semicolon (as Truman Capote once called him<\/a>), then Clarice Lispector is maestra of the adverb. In\u00a0The Chandelier<\/i><\/a>, things fatten stickily, bump brusquely, and destroy puzzlingly. The effect is not inchoate, as it might be in the hands of a lesser craftswoman, but rather one of intense precision. Lispector\u2019s amplified actions are just one example of the mastery exhibited in her second novel, which is a nuanced internal portrait of a woman’s life. Of course, that this linguistic prowess comes through in English is due to Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards, whose translation will be published by\u00a0New Directions at the end of March. Although Lispector has been stamped with the\u00a0nickname \u201cHurricane Clarice,\u201d there is something quiet amid all the turmoil raging within the main character, Virginia. Moser notes that it is \u201cperhaps [Lispector\u2019s]\u00a0strangest and most difficult book,\u201d and indeed, she\u00a0makes you work through almost every moment, crafting pages of text with nary a paragraph break or hint of dialogue in sight, only Virginia\u2019s labyrinthine interior monologue. The woven layers of thought can consume you like a fog, but there is nothing languid about it. The psychological realism is an energetic shedding of selves, a reminder that identities are Heraclitian, never the same in one instance as they were in the last or will be in the next. The work is worth it\u2014experiencing this amount of complexity, depth, and attention bestowed upon the consciousness of a woman\u00a0is moving in its rarity. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

Lucie Brock-Broido<\/p><\/div>\n

I think about Lucie Brock-Broido often. I have always thought of her as existing\u00a0on a satisfyingly different plane than the one I am on, which is one of many things her recent death won\u2019t change. Her poetry uses a set of senses mere mortals cannot access. Her poetry travels time; it comes from the Medici court by way of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stay, Illusion<\/em><\/a> is my favorite of her collections. I once attended a reading of hers in Boston, where her mane of hair had enough sorcery to magic the whole room. Her poems were spells and they magicked us away. Trying to select just a line or two to demonstrate this alchemy is difficult\u2014I want to include\u00a0entire poems. \u00a0The title of one of my favorites, \u201cInfinite Riches in the Smallest Room,\u201d is an apt description\u00a0of her work.<\/p>\n

preventing more bad biological accidents
\nFrom breeding-in. I have not bred-
\nIn. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not
\nBlow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.
\nThe flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.
\nBlue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon
\nDie as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down
\nIn the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

In Nigeria, in the seventies, most musicians couldn\u2019t afford to buy the newest analog synthesizers from Europe and the United States. William Onyeabor could. He was a reclusive businessman who lived in a three-story mansion. The cover of his album Anything You Sow<\/a><\/em> shows him dressed like a Texas oil tycoon, surrounded by expensive synthesizers. Onyeabor had a wealth that was self-made: he built his own studio, started his own label, and pressed his vinyl in his own manufacturing plant. As a musician, he was very difficult to work with and preferred to work alone as much as possible. Outside the studio, he ran a semolina mill and was named 1987\u2019s West African Industrialist of Year. I recommend starting with the compilation album\u00a0Who Is William Onyeabor?<\/a><\/em> and the short documentary\u00a0Fantastic Man<\/a><\/em><\/span>, though I\u2019m currently obsessed with the song \u201cWhen the Going Is Smooth & Good,\u201d which isn\u2019t on that compilation. His songs mix African polyrhythms, funky guitar, dance music, R&B, and plainspoken lyrics (I can\u2019t think of a songwriter whose lyrics have fewer metaphors and similes). Song after song, Onyeabor\u2019s sense of wonder and his pioneering spirit come through the fourth wall like an infectious smile over the phone. Plus, of all the dual professions, like writer-director, or model-actor, is there any cooler than Funk musician-businessman?\u00a0\u2014Brent Katz<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

\u201cHow do you survive when they place a god inside your body?\u201d This is the central question of Akwaeke Emezi\u2019s ground-shaking first novel, Freshwater<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i>But the real question is whose survival, and whose body, is at stake? Freshwater<\/i>\u00a0follows the life of Nigerian-born Ada as she comes to the United States, where she has her first tormented love affairs and her first suicide attempts. But most of the action of the story takes place inside the marble room of Ada\u2019s mind. It is narrated in alternating chapters by the Ogbanje<\/em>, the Igbo gods born inside of her. As Emezi explains elsewhere, \u201cIgbo ontology explains that everyone is in a cycle of reincarnation anyway\u2014you are your ancestor, you will become an ancestor, the loop will keep looping within the lineage.\u00a0Ogbanje<\/em>, however, are intruders in this cycle, unwelcome deviations. They do not come from the lineage; they come from nowhere.\u201d When Ada names the spirits in her mind (till then, a formless we<\/i>), they acquire distinct personalities. In a moment of traumatic rape, As\u1ee5ghara is born, and she, in her rage and reckless disregard for human life, takes center stage. The relationship between Ada and As\u1ee5ghara is as intense and abusive, loving and tormented as that of any sisters or lovers. Emezi has written about her<\/a> own experience with gender dysphoria and coming out as transgender, but the narrative in Freshwater <\/i>does not feel like a metaphor. It is a battle for a body and a soul, and the stakes are high. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Barrett Swanson\u2019s essay \u201cMidwestern Gothic<\/a>\u201d appears in the latest issue of The Believer<\/i><\/a>, and it\u00a0reminds me why I loved the on-again, off-again West Coast literary journal in the first place. The piece begins as something of a murder mystery. The body of Swanson\u2019s high school best friend has turned up on a riverbank, and though the police have ruled it an accidental drowning, Swanson can\u2019t help feeling that something more sinister is afoot. Grasping for an explanation, he tumbles down a black hole of Internet obsession. He trawls message boards for information about the Smiley Face Killers, a possibly fictitious gang suspected of killing dozens of young men across the belly of the country. From here, Swanson swerves, outlining the historical factors that have shaped our current hotbed of tinfoil-hatted hunches and examining what makes conspiracy theories so alluring. \u201cConspiracy theorists are not wrong to believe that their lives are at the mercy of a vast matrix of obscure forces,\u201d he writes. \u201cBut the forms in which they perceive those forces\u2014everything from false-flag operations by renegade governments to the sinister dealings of corporate entities to surreptitious invasions by extraterrestrials\u2014are usually deluded.\u201d In the absence of meaning, the brain grasps and gropes blindly. It\u2019s much easier to blame an individual\u2014or a vague personification, such as \u201cthe media\u201d or \u201cglobalization\u201d\u2014than it is to engage with uncertainty. In his own story, Swanson never finds the truth or the closure he\u2019s looking for, and his grief trails behind him like a drift of smoke. But his articulation of how conveniently the mind contorts itself to construct a false narrative is beautiful and urgent in this era of Loose Change<\/i>\u00a0and InfoWars. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Shiva, lord of destruction and transformation in the Hindu trimurti, is commonly depicted as Nataraja, lord of the dance, beating the rhythm of the universe. Inscribed in a circle of cosmic fire, Shiva\u2019s leg, athletically tensed, lifts and wraps across his torso and his long matted hair fans out in all directions in a rigid halo\u2014he is arrested in the exuberance of the dance itself, spinning and spinning,\u00a0<\/i>sustaining the cosmos. Certain things seem to have been made in a flush of feeling which remain forever urgent. Such are the twelfth-century South Indian devotional poems called\u00a0vacanas<\/i>, composed by\u00a0Virasaiva\u00a0<\/i>poet-saints, and collected and translated by the encyclopedic Indian poet and scholar AK Ramanujan in\u00a0Speaking of Siva<\/i><\/a>. The Virasaiva sect proclaimed Shiva as the supreme deity and emphasized a direct relationship with him, scorning what they saw as the inaccessibility and ritualism of Brahmin-gated worship, much like Protestantism vis-\u00e0-vis Catholicism. Accordingly, the\u00a0vacanas\u00a0<\/i>are composed in free verse, in the vernacular Kannada language rather than the traditional Sanskrit, and are addressed to a personal Shiva. Each poet-saint refers to Shiva by a private name\u2014\u201clord of the meeting rivers,\u201d \u201clord white as jasmine,\u201d \u201clord of Caves\u201d\u2014and this privacy proves liberating. Delight, ardency, and subjective experience, not rectitude, are the operative concerns. The poems revel in an air of radical, taboo-affronting freedom:\u00a0Shiva as transcendence of convention. One\u00a0vacana\u00a0<\/i>presents him as adulterous lover: \u201cHusband inside, \/ lover outside. \/ I can\u2019t manage both.\u201d Another disdains physical worship: \u201cWith a whole temple \/ in this body \/ where\u2019s the need \/ for another?\u201d Another opens with this threat, a giddy mystical fantasy of masochism: \u201cHe\u2019ll grind till your fine and small. \/ He\u2019ll file till your color shows.\u201d Some are riddle poems, mischievous surrealities: \u201cHe has a body, no head, this ape: \/ legs without footsteps, \/ hands without fingers; \/ a true prodigy, really.\u201d Many end in simple exclamation: \u201cClutch me close \/ and play your thirty-two songs \/ O Lord of the meeting rivers!\u201d Each\u00a0vacana\u00a0<\/i>is a little skip of ecstasy at sunrise, a paradox smiled at in the street, a coruscating doubt, a hushed comfort at dusk. Like Shiva Nataraja\u2019s dance, the\u00a0vacanas<\/i>\u00a0are flickering intensities captured\u00a0in media res<\/i>\u2014reading them today, they still move. They have always moved. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When asked to describe my literary interests, I used to say that John Berger was the first white man I loved, and also the last. Now he\u2019s dead, but his final book is forthcoming. In May, Notting Hill Editions will publish\u00a0Smoke, Berger\u2019s illustrated elegy to cigarettes. If \u201ccollaborative consumption\u201d\u2014 a lifestyle whose transactions include co-working, […]<\/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":[33253,33112,1464,5004,33254,300,573,33256,7776,33260,33259,14157,2955,33257,658,33258,15009,2705,33255],"class_list":["post-122496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-barrett-swanson","tag-camp-austen","tag-cigarettes","tag-clarice-lispector","tag-infowars","tag-jane-austen","tag-john-berger","tag-lorna-goodison","tag-lucie-brock-broido","tag-madness-is-better-than-defeat","tag-ned-beauman","tag-smoke","tag-summer-camp","tag-ted-scheinman","tag-the-believer","tag-the-chandelier","tag-the-midwest","tag-truman-capote","tag-windham-campbell-prizes"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Berger, Brock-Broido, and Beauman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of 'The Paris Review' reads about cigarettes, conspiracy theories, and summer camp for adults.\" \/>\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\/03\/09\/staff-picks-berger-brock-broido-and-beauman\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Berger, Brock-Broido, and Beauman by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 9, 2018 \u2013 When asked to describe my literary interests, I used to say that John Berger was the first white man I loved, and also the last. 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