{"id":127102,"date":"2018-06-29T13:00:42","date_gmt":"2018-06-29T17:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127102"},"modified":"2018-06-29T14:39:45","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T18:39:45","slug":"staff-picks-trick-mirrors-summer-beers-and-bedazzled-pianos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/29\/staff-picks-trick-mirrors-summer-beers-and-bedazzled-pianos\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Trick Mirrors, Summer Beers, and Bedazzled Pianos"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: M. Sharkey<\/p><\/div>\n

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All of the essays in Alexander Chee\u2019s marvelous collection\u00a0How to Write an Autobiographical Novel<\/em><\/a> are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled \u201c1989,\u201d the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an AIDS<\/small> protest in San Francisco\u2014his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block traffic; they are immediately surrounded by riot police, who begin to brutally drive them off. Chee climbs atop a newspaper box, with a view to the scene, and describes the rise and fall of batons with dispassionate shock, eventually climbing down from his perch to rescue a beaten friend. \u201cThis is the country I live in,\u201d he realizes in closing. And I thought instantly of Pierre Bezukhov, in\u00a0War and Peace<\/em>, atop a knoll, observing the horrors of the Battle of Borodino. In shock and fear, he plunges down the slope and thinks, \u201cNow they will be horrified at what they have done!\u201d They aren\u2019t, of course, and this seems to be the same conclusion Chee comes to: the feeling of incredulousness that violence and death are served up so openly\u2014in a field, in a street\u2014before so many watching eyes. Chee\u2019s essay takes place during an AIDS<\/small> protest but with other details it could easily be about the Holocaust, the Syrian war, or the United States, ca. 2018. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ben Marcus needs no introduction as an exceptional composer of short stories, although I could certainly reallocate all of those needless words toward lauding his forthcoming collection,\u00a0Notes from the Fog<\/em><\/a>. Each story is quietly eerie with electric characters who move through settings that look and sound exactly like our reality but are subtly disoriented, as if in a trick mirror. In the first story, \u201cCold Little Bird,\u201d an achievement of psychological writing, a father drives himself mad (or is driven mad?) by the sociopathic cool of his child, whose precocious and evil mastery of gaslighting left me with a kind of awe I haven\u2019t felt since I first read\u00a0The Turn of the Screw<\/i>. The collection doesn\u2019t come out until August, but you can read the title story in our Summer issue<\/a>.\u00a0\u2014Lauren<\/span>\u00a0Kane<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

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When the physical design of a piano is \u201cfancy,\u201d that often means it is Viennese. Liberace\u2019s rhinestone-bedazzled pianos, for instance, take eighteenth century Viennese decadence, cover it in glue, and roll it around on the Vegas strip. My new favorite piano\u2014the Neo-Zapotec Piano<\/em>, designed by Mexican polymath Antonio Pe\u00f1afiel\u2014breaks from this Viennese tradition of fanciness. I saw it at the exhibition \u201cFound in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915\u20131985<\/a>,\u201d which ran at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through April. It\u2019s a piano that you can almost read like a book. In the words on its little plaque read, \u201cEvery inch proclaims the glory of the Zapotec civilization, with references to painted screenfold manuscripts, tomb sculptures, jewelry and archaeology.\u201d When not carving intricate pianos, Pe\u00f1afiel was an archaeologist and a doctor\u2014he organized the first Mexican census. Seeing the Neo-Zapotec Piano<\/em> in person, I couldn\u2019t help but feel that instrument design, as a field, is still in its infancy, especially now that so much music is produced \u201cin the box,\u201d and sounds are so easily untethered from physical instruments (midi packs, samples.) Instrument makers and visual artists have an opportunity: the world is dividing between formless files in the cloud and special, one-of-a-kind physical objects. The future is not just a narrow Viennese vision of fanciness. A piano can be anything. \u2014Brent Katz<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like the glittering play of light from a chandelier (as one character, Linnea, might say), or like the blinking cursor on a computer screen (as another, Sigrid, might counter), the novel\u00a0Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life<\/a><\/em>\u00a0flickers. Jumping between characters and consciousnesses, Gunnhild \u00d8yehaug\u2019s novel follows three women\u2014Sigrid, Linnea, and Trine\u2014as they navigate their ambitions, their relationships, their ideas of art, and their thoughts on almost everything else. The reader never knows where \u00d8yehaug\u2019s next page will go. With hilarious poignancy, she laces in all of the little pieces of the world that by design or, more often, by coincidence, factor into the women\u2019s stories. The result is that this novel, though revolving around the stories of three women, feels like a story about the whole, hard, ridiculous world. \u00d8yehaug weaves her characters and their world together into a novel that feels as much like a real picture of inner life as it does an author\u2019s beautiful game. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Simeon Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene<\/em>, 1864.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

During weeks like this one, I\u2019m grateful for\u00a0Anne Carson<\/a>\u2019s careful translations of Sappho in\u00a0If Not, Winter<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0Perhaps enough has been said about the ancient Greek poet\u2014I won\u2019t add much more.\u00a0Like the brackets Carson uses to indicate missing text, Sappho\u2019s words have punctuated the events of my life over the past few months. I read a fragment in the morning\u2014then go to work, rage against the day, shop for groceries, navigate the woes of missed packages, call my parents, watch\u00a0Vanderpump Rules<\/em>\u2014and return to the same fragment right before bed. I don\u2019t meditate, but imagine this ritual has similar benefits. Immersing myself in the distant past and the scattered white sea of the page, I\u2019m able to access something detached from modern chaos. Some of these pages have only two words. At first, I didn\u2019t know how to read them, but Anne Carson is such a gifted guide that I learned quickly. I breathe, feel the spaces, lean into the lost rhythms of the words I\u2019ll never know, and ruminate on what\u2019s there, letting each line bloom off the page like a body coming up out of water. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fuck the Olympics\u2014every four years the world watches soccer and it really<\/em> matters. Throughout the city, tailors and taxi-cab drivers screen Mexico vs Sweden. In my local hardware store the other day, I heard a customer ask an employee where he was from.<\/p>\n

\u201cMEXICOMEXICOMEXICO,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cI\u2019m from Ireland,\u201d she replied.
\n\u201cMaybe next year,\u201d he said encouragingly.
\n\u201cThis is for the pride parade,\u201d she said of the item she was buying. \u201cI hope you win. That\u2019ll give Trump a kick in the pants.\u201d<\/p>\n

The degree to which f\u00fatbol matters has been spoken about by brighter minds than mine (Simon Critchley and George Orwell come to mind) but anyone can catch the bug. If you like speed or sport or drama or the ancient clash of kingdoms, or an occasion for a summer beer, you already like soccer. Tune in, the world is already watching. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  All of the essays in Alexander Chee\u2019s marvelous collection\u00a0How to Write an Autobiographical Novel are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled \u201c1989,\u201d the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an AIDS protest in San Francisco\u2014his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block […]<\/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":[2126,3401,7647,18104,34546,34550,34548,34547,4714,34549,89],"class_list":["post-127102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alexander-chee","tag-anne-carson","tag-ben-marcus","tag-gunnhild-oyehaug","tag-how-to-write-an-autobiographical-novel","tag-if-not-winter","tag-neo-zapotec-piano","tag-notes-from-the-fog","tag-sappho","tag-wait-blink","tag-world-cup"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Trick Mirrors, Summer Beers, and Bedazzled Pianos by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of 'The Paris Review' swaps meditation for Sappho and reads pianos as if they were books.\" \/>\n<meta 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