{"id":132605,"date":"2019-01-11T13:33:43","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T18:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132605"},"modified":"2019-01-11T17:47:47","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T22:47:47","slug":"staff-picks-broccoli-puzzles-bot-poetry-and-banana-pudding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/11\/staff-picks-broccoli-puzzles-bot-poetry-and-banana-pudding\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Broccoli Puzzles, Bot Poetry, and Banana Pudding"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Emily Ruskovich.<\/p><\/div>\n

I spent Christmas with my boyfriend\u2019s family in Hudson, New York. Among other goodies, my stocking was stuffed with books, and I squirreled Emily Ruskovich\u2019s Idaho<\/em><\/a> over to the wood-burning stove and ate through page after page as log after log went up in smoke and the iron became too hot to touch. The stove was etched with a MADE IN BELGIUM<\/small> label, but it said America to me, like Idaho<\/em> did: both anesthetizing in their beauty, dangerous and commonplace. Ever since reading Ruskovich\u2019s essay about\u00a0Watership Down<\/em><\/a>, I wanted more. In that piece, she writes about those rabbits like she knows the insides of their den from long personal experience. And Idaho <\/em>does bring us the dear interiors of the animal world, the musky quiet and the secrecy, but Ruskovich also brings human imperfection right to the surface of the novel without the tedium of other contemporary realism. I drove through Idaho, nine years ago now, with the same boyfriend on the way to California. It was beautiful and vast, and we quarreled there for the first time on our cross-country trip. As we rounded the switchback of a pitch-dark park-service road and saw the headlights of a lone pickup, I was terrified again of the land that could kill me quick and of the people who made their home there, who knew it and persisted.\u00a0\u2014Julia Berick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nina Leen captured midcentury America as a time traveler from our era might have. Maybe it\u2019s because she was born in Russia and raised in Europe and so, like Nabokov, arrived here an outsider, sensitive to our corn-fed strangeness. Leen\u2019s subtly subversive black-and-white photographs communicate her charmed bewilderment. You can feel her affection for her subjects, who try to be serious models and hide that they\u2019re having the time of their lives. She turns Norman Rockwell scenarios mysterious and surreal with film-noir publicity lighting. She balances artifice and spontaneity in a way that somehow captures her subjects\u2019 interiority and self-awareness, which is why the images seem to break the fourth wall and wink across time. Take her pictures of the Helena Rubenstein beauty school<\/a>, for example, their performance of midcentury femininity, the aesthetic mix of Frankenstein<\/em> and something like synchronized swimming. Leen practiced fashion photography and portraiture, and she did one inexplicably captivating portrait of a block of ice, but generally speaking, she had two subjects: humans and animals. She had a gift for capturing the charms of each group\u2014though according to Time<\/em>, she was \u201cwell-known for liking animals far more than she liked humans.\u201d An important moment in her life and career came when she discovered the orphan puppy Lucky while on assignment in Texas. Though not as celebrated today as Rin Tin Tin or Lassie, Lucky became Leen\u2019s muse, and\u2014on account of her portraits in Life<\/em>, her film The Lost Dog<\/em>, and her book, Lucky, the Famous Foundling<\/em>\u2014a star was born. If you want to experience the shock of cognition behind the sometimes lobotomized-feeling aesthetic of midcentury Americana\u2014or you just want to see a squirrel modeling dresses or being towel-dried after a bath<\/a>\u2014then \u201cNina Leen\u201d is the Google Image search for you.\u00a0\u2014Brent Katz<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Franny Choi.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

To pass a Turing test, a robot must trick an examiner into believing it is human. It must perform or pass<\/em>,\u00a0which sometimes involves performing errors<\/a> to appear more humanlike. But even the errors are part of a design to make the robot work<\/em>, in the sense of function: achieve what they were designed to achieve. There is something disturbingly teleological about the test\u2014that robots should and will arrive at humanness. Like capitalism, the test is (or at least has become) competitive. It demands that everything and everyone be productive. Franny Choi\u2019s forthcoming poetry collection\u00a0Soft Science<\/em><\/a>\u00a0adopts the Turing test as a structural frame with six \u201cTURING TEST<\/small>\u201d poems spaced throughout the book. The reader might understand Choi as the cyborg taking the test. But if so, she\u2019s a cyborg in revolt, not allowing the examiner to let her pass. What\u2019s more, the examiner is a cyborg, too, as is the reader: \u201cremember\u2009\/\u2009all humans\u2009\/\u2009are cyborgs\u2009\/\u2009all cyborgs\u2009\/\u2009are sharp shards of sky\u2009\/\u2009wrapped in meat.\u201d Choi tells us what we need to hear: that we possess the radical potential of the glitch and the possibility of unbecoming productive machines of capitalism. Do humans \u201cwork,\u201d or are we already broken? Do we want to work? Is unchecked production our ambition? Should we design robots to act like humans, when humans can be so despicable? My favorite poem from the collection describes the life of Chi, from the manga Chobits<\/em>, a broken android whom the protagonist rescues from a trash pile. Choi writes from the android\u2019s perspective, remembering the trash, lamenting, \u201cas if I could rot\u2009\/\u2009as if they didn\u2019t make us\u2009\/\u2009to last & last.\u201d I think Choi wishes we could be allowed to rot and return to the soil. She reminds us elsewhere that it\u2019s okay to wither, to \u201ccommune with miles of darkness,\u201d to reach into our circuit boards and pull ourselves apart. The beginnings of our way out of capitalism will involve such pulling both delicate and violent\u2014tiny hands wrenching, striving for clarity, honest and ruthlessly specific language like what Choi offers up.\u00a0\u2014Spencer Quong<\/strong><\/p>\n

At breakfast, my boyfriend and I huddled over a bowl of tonkotsu<\/em>\u00a0ramen for roughly thirty-five minutes. Does the chili-specked egg go here? Or perhaps she\u2019s closer to the elegant strands of enoki? I\u2019m not describing a cosplay of Tampopo <\/em>but instead\u00a0Areaware\u2019s Little Puzzle Thing jigsaws<\/a>, roughly seventy-piece puzzles depicting different beloved dishes. The Chicago hot dog seems easier, with lots of defining details; the broccoli, a verdant challenge. We began our day without phones or a calming episode of The Sopranos<\/em> but with an honest-to-god workout for our brains. Now we\u2019re dreaming of a dinner party, our long table splayed with tasty puzzle pieces and their edible counterparts. No need for small talk\u2014all our guests would have to do is solve and marvel at the unparalleled cuteness of a 2-D eggplant.\u00a0\u2014Eleonore Condo<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Ishmael Reed\u2019s newest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0the\u00a0Hamilton<\/em> writer\u00a0is in a sort of bardo, but instead of the liminal space between life and rebirth, he is stuck between past and present. Haunting<\/em> had a four-day reading run at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe<\/a>, where the play\u2019s director, Rome Neal, moved through the crowd, alternating between the sound booth and a punch bowl at the end of the bar, from which he served his homemade banana pudding.\u00a0Haunting<\/em>\u00a0is a reading person\u2019s play, obviously the product of extensive research and composed mostly of monologues. The first several come from four ghosts, two black slaves and two Native Americans, who appear to Miranda with grievances about the inaccuracies of his musical. Reed\u2019s play is aware of how sticky historical moralizing can be, taking aim even at itself as the spirits bicker about land rights, and while the script is smart in presenting how the project of correcting one another\u2019s perspective on history can divide when it should unite, it doesn\u2019t pull punches or mince words. Reed makes Miranda his main character not to crucify the man himself (though there are a few Mary Poppins<\/em> jabs) but rather to use him as a way of mirroring our hopepunk<\/a> society, seduced so quickly by easy answers to difficult questions\u2014even more so if those answers come with a catchy hip-hop number. Reed depicts Miranda as a well-meaning pawn in the white capitalist game; he\u2019s repeatedly reminded that Hamilton<\/em> is not his play but his investors\u2019, who care not about making a contribution to history but about their payday (the musical currently rakes in a hundred million dollars a year). Not to spoil anything, but Miranda does ultimately change his way of thinking, and in a final speech, the script offers some suggestions for how Miranda (the real one) could undo some of the harm that Hamilton<\/em> has unintentionally done. The play can start to wax didactic; however, Reed understands the benefit of a spoonful of sugar, and his humor and wit do much to ease the characters off their soapboxes to meet the audience in a place that is smart and unpretentious, critical without cruelty. If you missed the reading, fear not; the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is raising funding to stage a full production of The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda<\/em>\u00a0in May.\u00a0\u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ishmael Reed. Photo: Kathy Sloane.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 visits the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, marvels at Nina Leen\u2019s subtly subversive photographs, and pieces together adorable food 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