{"id":129850,"date":"2018-10-05T13:39:02","date_gmt":"2018-10-05T17:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129850"},"modified":"2018-10-05T15:09:44","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T19:09:44","slug":"staff-picks-bald-heads-baldwin-and-bruce-labruce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/05\/staff-picks-bald-heads-baldwin-and-bruce-labruce\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Bald Heads, Baldwin, and Bruce LaBruce"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s Wild Milk<\/em><\/a>, one of the book duo released this year by the small press\u00a0Dorothy<\/a>, is a debut story collection that displays just how compelling surrealism can be, even almost a century after the movement itself had its debut. Mark is obviously a talent in the vein of Leonora Carrington, maintaining the strange dreamlike atmosphere of her fiction without losing its sense of substance, using skillfully interwoven images that create tight seams between each story. The slim, square little book, published just this week, is a retreat into the fantastic, poetic, and playful\u2014although every so often, much like in a dream, you catch sight of something you\u2019re almost certain you recognize from waking life. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

During a recent visit home to southwest Scotland, I was given a copy of Barefoot: The Collected Poems of Alastair<\/a> Reid<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0edited by Tom Pow. Originally from Galloway, the itinerant Reid<\/a> left Scotland for New York in his early twenties. He would call this city home for much of his life, and while the book doesn\u2019t yet have an American publisher, countless other copies must have already trickled across the Atlantic. Some will have dropped through letter boxes; others will have been passed from hand to hand before dinner; one, surely, sits on a desk somewhere at his old employer, The<\/em> New Yorker.\u00a0<\/em>While Reid was perhaps better known for his translations, Barefoot<\/em> focuses solely on his original poems. As such, there is an impression of having the poet to ourselves\u2014a sense that as readers, we don\u2019t have to share him. His voice can be stern, though it\u2019s frequently balanced with a smile\u2014you can almost hear it, sometimes, creeping in around Reid\u2019s eyes. It\u2019s both a solemn and joyous collection. I particularly like him on faces\u2014here are three of them: \u201cAge has engraved his face. \/ Cradling his wagged-out chin, \/ I shave him, feeling bone \/ stretching the waxed skin\u201d (from \u201cMy Father, Dying\u201d). \u201cFrom wearing a face all this time, I am made aware \/of the maps faces are, of the inside wear and tear. \/ I take to faces that have come far\u201d (from \u201cWeathering\u201d). \u201cHere, one is grateful to the tolerant landscape, \/ and glad to be known by men with leather faces \/ who welcome anything but questions. \/ Words, like the water, must be used with care\u201d (from \u201cNew Hampshire\u201d). \u2014Robin Jones\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bruce LaBruce\u2019s The Misandrists<\/em> is as NSFW as you can expect a LaBruce movie to be. The plot is a satirical, timely update of Don Siegel\u2019s The Beguiled<\/em> (1971). The setting is an all-girls boarding school run by radical feminist nuns, where men are banned and lesbianism is (wo)mandatory. But there\u2019s some trouble in paradise: one student smuggles an injured male comrade into the basement and makes love to him, and another is outed as an undercover police officer. Plus, the second-wave sisterhood isn\u2019t equipped to handle a trans student. Big Mother (Susanne Sach\u00dfe) declares, \u201cTwo cocks and one cop in the convent. This is not sustainable\u201d\u2014and promptly faints. The film is anything but cheap laughs, however; LaBruce knows his Frankfurt School. The convent\u2019s internal squabbles are the conflicts that dog revolutionary discourse. LaBruce\u2019s satire of radical feminism is affectionate, not polemical. When Big Mother performs a forced penectomy on her male captive, I didn\u2019t agree with the method, but LaBruce\u2019s humane filmmaking maintains some sympathy for her cause.\u00a0This is a new Myra Breckinridge<\/em>, but with Bruce\u2019s satire instead of Gore Vidal\u2019s smirk. This critique transcends itself and becomes aphrodisiacal. The film ends with a classic BLaB\u00a0sequence, a pornographic coda that suggests the visionary, revolutionary potential behind the derided role of pornographer. Enough with the fear and division\u2014wake up and smell the estrogen! \u2014Ben Shields<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Misandrists<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I tried to write this pick last week, but I lacked the essential phrasing in Angela Flournoy\u2019s profile of Barry Jenkins<\/a>: \u201c<\/span>Much of the country, owing to our current political reality and Raoul Peck\u2019s 2016 documentary, \u2018I Am Not Your Negro,\u2019 has recently become better acquainted with a truth black readers grasped long ago: James Baldwin was right about everything.\u201d Earlier this month, I raced to read <\/span>If Beale Street Could Talk <\/span><\/i>before Jenkins\u2019s film adaptation reached theaters on November 30<\/span>. So good, so clear, so honest is <\/span>Beale Street<\/span><\/i> that I wonder how fiction is to surpass it. Ask me the best piece of contemporary fiction I\u2019ve read in the last year\u2014now I would say <\/span>Beale Street<\/span><\/i>. Ask me the best piece of classic fiction I\u2019ve read in the past year\u2014now I would say <\/span>Beale Street. <\/span><\/i>Existing as both an essential work of its time and a timeless work of human truth (and equally timeless American racism), <\/span>Beale Street <\/span><\/i>contains more compelling characters and a more dynamic love of New York than you can find on any debut fiction shelf. How did I let thirty Mother\u2019s Days pass without acknowledging Sharon Rivers? How did I hold tight the confluence of friendship and romantic love before reading about the bond between Tish and Fonny? How did I dwell over scenes of family friction without reading (and rereading) the clash between the Hunts and the Rivers (fiction\u2019s most satisfying use of the word cunt<\/em>)? Baldwin, like the best of writers, knows as much about being a woman as he knows about being a man. \u201c<\/span>But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other,\u201d Baldwin writes, \u201cenables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment\u2014a resentment which hides a bottomless terror\u2014has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man\u2019s imagination makes of her\u2014literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman\u2019s.\u201d Find a copy\u2014you can. They are everywhere. There are many things wrong with this country, but at least we have Baldwin to tell us about it. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

This weekend I finished Heather Havrilesky\u2019s collection How to Be a Person in the World<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0a book composed, in part, of pieces from her Ask Polly advice column at\u00a0The Cut<\/em>. The verdict is in: I consider myself forever changed, inspired to the core; I am suddenly, drastically, blissfully optimistic. Reading this book made me realize that 1) I\u2019m hiding behind a \u201cgovernment-certified, grade-A, consumer-friendly woman,\u201d 2) I\u2019m punishing myself for being mortal, and 3) I deserve better, especially from myself. Havrilesky\u2019s answers: \u201cFuck wondering if you\u2019re lovable.\u201d \u201cStop being grateful for scraps.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t lament and worry endlessly.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not over till it\u2019s over, motherfuckers.\u201d Her cutting humor and rousing advice helped me realize that I need to stop pretending I\u2019m something I\u2019m not and \u201ctell tepid to fuck right off, Kanye-style.\u201d With vicious wit and merciless accuracy, she isolates motivations, redirects anxious and defeatist energy, and delivers specific, usually hilarious, instructions. This Monday, for the first time (ever?), I woke up at\u00a0five\u00a0A.M.<\/small>, drank my coffee, and exercised before going to work. I didn\u2019t tell myself that I was lazy, useless, or running late again. I think it was the best Monday of my life. \u201cThe world has told you lies about how small you are. You will look back at this time and say, \u2018I had it all, but I didn\u2019t even know it. I was at the center, I could breathe in happiness, I could swim to the moon. I had everything I needed.\u2019\u2009\u201d Heather Havrilesky\u2019s new book,\u00a0What If This Were Enough?<\/em><\/a>, came out this Tuesday. Once I have it, I will have everything I need. \u2014Molly Livingston<\/strong><\/p>\n

He had a bald head like a hard-boiled egg roughly peeled, surfaced with dimples, indentations, small flat protuberances like bits of clinging shell, his skin soft, infant, semi-pellucid. The sides of his head bulged over his low-slung ears, in parallel with his jowls, which fell in a wide-embracing arc from his cheeks, giving his face the hourglass silhouette of a cello. His chin was less an anatomical landmark than a lone sail sinking into the ocean\u2014neck effaced by folds of skin, his head seemed a buoy bobbing on the undifferentiated mass of his torso. He had small, delicate hands, small feet prone to attacks of gout, and diffuse, wide-set eyes forever on the teetering verge of merriment. He was not attractive, he knew (his most cherished physical compliment came from a Parisian prostitute who deemed him \u201cpassable\u201d), but in his own proud words \u201cbald, overweight, and gluttonous\u201d\u2014proud because his corpulence was a warrant of his expertise, his experience, his philosophy, and his sensibility. He was A.\u2009J. Liebling\u2014New Yorker<\/em> media critic, war correspondent, boxing aficionado, Francophile, and\u2014as he demonstrates in his final work, the memoir Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris<\/em><\/a>\u2014a champion eater, someone with the rare gift for unalloyed pleasure. Between Meals<\/em> is a temporally ranging elegy for eating and drinking in Paris, primarily devoted to 1926, his first, formative year in the city when he was twenty-two years old, living on an allowance from his father, a successful immigrant furrier, while attending, or neglecting, medieval French literature classes at the Sorbonne. That year set his sensibility and instilled in him the increasingly out-of-fashion notion that pleasure is not a means but an end in itself. The body is not a sculpture to be perfected\u2014Liebling is perfectly horrified at the emerging French interest in dieting\u2014but an instrument to be used. As Liebling decrees at the open of the memoir, \u201cThe primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.\u201d One must first enjoy. Written in the last years of his life, his health failing, unable to travel or indulge as he once did, Between Meals<\/em> itself is an indulgence, Liebling\u2019s demonstration of appetite. As the beloved French pot-au-feu is made of butchery leftovers\u2014tough, inexpensive cuts and marrowbones\u2014so is Liebling making a feast from the very last dregs of his meals, their memory. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

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