{"id":125089,"date":"2018-05-11T13:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T17:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125089"},"modified":"2018-05-11T12:12:32","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T16:12:32","slug":"what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/","title":{"rendered":"What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

In place of our staff picks this week, we\u2019ve asked contributors from our Spring issue<\/a> to write about what they\u2019re reading, looking at, and listening to this month.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Hereditary<\/em>,\u00a02018.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

For months now, I have been waiting anxiously for the movie\u00a0Hereditary<\/i><\/a>\u00a0to come out. It\u2019s supposed to be out on June 8, but I keep hoping that this is a publicity joke and that it will come out sooner. Like everyone else, I found out about the movie back in January, when they showed it at the Sundance Film Festival, and the audience lost their minds and reported back to the Internet. Everyone who has seen it has said that it is some sort of love child between Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/i> (excuse the pun) and The Shining<\/i>, maybe with some of The Exorcist<\/i> thrown in. I don\u2019t know how this could even be possible, but please count me in. As the weather grows warmer, the flowers bloom, and the date grows nearer and nearer to its release, I get even more lovesick and pathetic with longing to see it. I watch its trailers every day, sometimes many times, and have even watched the horror-fan YouTube videos people have made doing close readings of the trailers. I have theories about the movie I have written in several notebooks, and then crossed out most of them. I have visited the Etsy site the movie\u2019s production company has made with beautifully odd dolls that one of the main characters, a supernatural child named Charlie, has made, a hundred times, hoping that they will list more for sale (the dolls sold out immediately). I wait and wait until June 8, begging most people I know to go see the movie with me, but knowing I will probably end up going alone, crying in the dark. Why am I so excited? It\u2019s such an awful time right now. And I get so sick of things\u2014books, movies, poems\u2014that are hailed as great but have no source of catharsis. I want to burn and feel better. I really hope Hereditary <\/i>lives up to the hype. I don\u2019t know. I have faith. \u2014Dorothea Lasky<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lately, I can’t stop writing love poems. I write a short story\u2014it\u2019s a love poem. I start a new novel\u2014long love poem. Sonnet, sestina, triolet: love poem, love poem, love poem. Maybe this is why \u201cIt’s Raining in Love<\/a>\u201d by Richard Brautigan keeps playing in my mind. I think I accidentally memorized it twenty years ago. It\u2019s a kicky, self-conscious poem right from its opening stanza (\u201cI don’t know what it is \/ but I distrust myself \/ when I start to like a girl \/ a lot\u201d), and I adore the speaker for how cooly he winces at his crushing (\u201cIt makes me nervous,\u201d he declares). All that\u2019s A+, but then Brautigan goes on to discuss how crucial inconsequential questions become when you\u2019re in love. Everything is code, sign, weather\u2014even the weather, especially rain:<\/p>\n

\u00a0If I say, \u201cDo you think it\u2019s going to rain?\u201d
\nand she says, \u201cI don’t know,\u201d
\nI start thinking : Does she really like me?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rain, the speaker asides, shouldn\u2019t be so weighty; it happies slugs, it\u2019s a means of \u201cprogramming flowers.\u201d \u201cProgramming flowers\u201d\u2014! Did Brautigan proactively reclaim the word \u201cprogramming\u201d? I adore<\/em> that. So affectedly casual elsewhere, when Brautigan starts \u201cprogramming flowers,\u201d he slides into rhapsody, reminding me how, enthralled by a lover, we all might become so programmed to bloom. \u2014JoAnna Novak<\/strong>
\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

Last July, Senator John McCain was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. His illness has provoked a near tedium of pundits, friends, fans, and foes to measure each day\u2019s news\u00a0against the legendary maverick\u2019s heroically storied, oft-told life and career in public service. With each passing week, the commentaries grow ever more elegiac, occasionally dancing up to the line of the mythic. But then there\u2019s the indisputable (and, really, unfathomable) fact of McCain\u2019s captivity and character in Vietnam, to say nothing of his recent criticisms of the Trump administration. Because all that crazy POW shit? It actually happened. David Foster Wallace\u2019s account of covering McCain\u2019s 2000 bid against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination, commissioned by\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0published in book form under the conspicuously un-Wallacian title\u00a0McCain\u2019s Promise<\/em><\/a>, is not only an ingenious deconstruction of the symbiotic relationship between campaigns and the media but one of the shrewdest meditations on the McCain mythos I\u2019ve read. In it, Wallace muses on the fine line separating great leaders from great salesmen and puzzles over the candidate\u2019s apparent contradictions, that befuddling coexistence of candor and calculation in McCain\u2014by varying accounts a brilliant, loyal, temperamental, spirited, acerbic, optimistic, ambitious, thoughtful, combative, witty, and mischievous man. Wallace wants to know: Is he for real?\u00a0 In the end, this politician\u2014with whom the author shares absolutely zero views\u2014seems to win the interior war between DFW\u2019s \u201cneed to believe and [the] deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0For all the accusations of pandering, and all the policies Wallace cannot bring himself to even try to understand, he finds his thoughts<\/p>\n

Returning again and again to a certain dark box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain\u2019s refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs\u2019 cameras in that box, no aids or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Insightful, humorous, provocative, hopeful and, despite its age, relevant. \u2014Cary Goldstein<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sun Xun, Time Spy<\/em>, 2016, woodcut painting. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Currently on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Sun Xun\u2019s Time Spy<\/a><\/em> is an enigmatic 3-D animation created out of ten thousand individual hand-carved woodcuts. So, to reiterate: woodblocks, animated, in 3-D. I\u2019ve never seen anything like it. An homage to the German printmaker Albrecht D\u00fcrer, the Japanese woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai, and the French filmmaker Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s, Time Spy<\/em>\u00a0is a trippy, hyper-kinetic collage of pulsing black-and white-images. There\u2019s an owl that sort of eats itself, a crow with a camera head, a giant blinking eye with a planet for an iris. According to the artist, it\u2019s a meditation on time, but there\u2019s no story to follow. Instead, there\u2019s the feeling, one I love, of a story just out of reach. It\u2019s maybe about clocks, but also about the universe, then a hand reaches out of the sky to scoop air from the front of a dilapidated mansion. I\u2019ve never found 3-D all that exciting (except when I was a kid clicking through View-Master images of dinosaurs and geysers), but there\u2019s something so compelling about the dimensionality of Time Spy<\/em>. On the one hand, it\u2019s delightful\u2014a huge nose juts into the room and just sits there\u2014but also the way Sun uses 3-D makes you question why certain images step forward and others fade (so you do think about time and memory and history). Come to Saint Louis by August 12\u00a0<\/span>to see it for yourself; while you\u2019re here, I also recommend the curry at Fork & Stix, coffee and rolls at Blueprint, and the Bell Tree near the reflecting ponds at the botanical gardens. \u2014Danielle Dutton<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Instructions for the underworld.<\/p><\/div>\n

On a visit to the Getty Villa<\/a> last month, I came upon this tiny bit of hammered gold on which some fourth-century B.C.<\/small> Thessalonian had engraved a verse dialogue:<\/p>\n

Initiate: I am parched with thirst and perishing!
\nEver-Flowing Spring: Then come drink of me, the Ever-Flowing Spring, on the right\u2014a white cypress is there. Who are you? Where are you from?
\nInitiate: I am the son of Earth and Starry Heaven. But my race is heavenly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This artifact was labeled INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE UNDERWORLD<\/small>, a genre unto itself, found in tombs from Greece to Southern Italy to Sicily. The speaker is an initiate of the cult of Dionysos and Orpheus. The Spring is something like eternal life, or the source of poetry, if you will. The white cypress is pure oxymoron: normally, the cypress is the funereal tree, the darkest one in a landscape. This reminds me of Auden\u2019s \u201cIn Praise of Limestone<\/a>,\u201d whose ending goes: \u201cwhen I try to imagine a faultless love \/ Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur \/ Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.\u201d A faultless love; a heavenly race; whatever our failings, or whatever has failed us, there is always the promise of an imagination that transcends history and keeps poetry alive. This is a fact\u2014a tiny one, but worth writing on a sheet of gold. \u2014Ange Mlinko<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A \u201cbook report\u201d on Jamel Brinkley\u2019s A Lucky Man<\/em>,\u00a0by Chia-Chia Lin<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

As a new mother, I find myself reading more greedily. Give me something that will tide me over, through the long nights, through the repetition. I found solace in the stories of Jamel Brinkley\u2019s A Lucky Man<\/em><\/a>, in which the characters wear their roles like stiff casts: son, brother, husband, man. Brinkley shows us the small yet pivotal moments when cracks form in that brittle plaster, when the sum of each character\u2019s chaotic, exuberant, writhing experiences can no longer be contained. Even a minor character\u2019s voice has this aliveness: \u201cThere was something of the ocean in it, or below it, a quality like sonar, like the wailing of the many drowned and gone.\u201d \u2014Chia-Chia Lin<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently, while I was driving in the car with my baby, Beethoven\u2019s Moonlight Sonata<\/i><\/a> <\/i>came onto the radio. Glenn Gould was playing. I turned the volume up, partly because I have fond memories of playing the piece as a child and partly because it seemed the kind of music that would please an infant. Gould plays in his characteristically cold way: virtuosic yet restrained. The way he plays the sonata\u00a0<\/i>is so disaffected it\u2019s almost petulant\u2014one has the impression he hates the piece. The overall effect is strangely tantalizing. I find myself willing him to play louder or faster. It\u2019s a piece I know well\u2014we all know it too <\/i>well\u2014yet I find the piece is so affecting that, as it ends, I wish that there was somehow more of it. \u2014<\/i>Katharine Kilalea<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In place of our staff picks this week, we\u2019ve asked contributors from our Spring issue to write about what they\u2019re reading, looking at, and listening to this month.     For months now, I have been waiting anxiously for the movie\u00a0Hereditary\u00a0to come out. It\u2019s supposed to be out on June 8, but I keep hoping […]<\/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":[34042,1260,34044,10459,34046,34045,34041,34043,34047,34048,2160],"class_list":["post-125089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-lucky-man","tag-beethoven","tag-getty-villa","tag-glenn-gould","tag-in-praise-of-limestone","tag-instructions-for-the-underworld","tag-jamel-brikley","tag-monlight-sonata","tag-sun-xun","tag-time-spy","tag-w-h-auden"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Our Contributors Are Reading This Month by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 11, 2018 \u2013 In place of our staff picks this week, we\u2019ve asked contributors from our Spring issue to write about what they\u2019re reading, looking at, and listening to\" \/>\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\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 11, 2018 \u2013 In place of our staff picks this week, we\u2019ve asked contributors from our Spring issue to write about what they\u2019re reading, looking at, and listening to\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/\" \/>\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=\"2018-05-11T17:00:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/hereditary.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"970\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"545\" \/>\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=\"9 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\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-05-11T17:00:03+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/\"},\"wordCount\":1811,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-month\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/hereditary.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"A Lucky Man\",\"Beethoven\",\"Getty Villa\",\"Glenn Gould\",\"In Praise of Limestone\",\"Instructions for the Underworld\",\"Jamel Brikley\",\"Monlight Sonata\",\"Sun Xun\",\"Time Spy\",\"W. 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