{"id":133737,"date":"2019-02-15T14:05:33","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T19:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133737"},"modified":"2019-02-15T15:16:29","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T20:16:29","slug":"staff-picks-medusa-magic-and-moshfegh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/15\/staff-picks-medusa-magic-and-moshfegh\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Medusa, Magic, and Moshfegh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

T Kira Madden. Photo: Jac Martinez.<\/p><\/div>\n

T Kira Madden is magic. In her forthcoming memoir\u00a0Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls<\/em><\/a>, she uses language new and strange but always devastatingly right. One of my favorite lines describes weather not unlike our recent New York squalls: \u201cIt\u2019s a nickel-slapping kind of rain, a silver bounce to it. It is not cold enough to snow.\u201d Such sentences, in their brevity and clarity, whirl the reader through this book. Whether in a loud coffee shop or our lively office, I found myself completely ensconced. Other books might possess similar powers\u2014to steal a reader\u2019s attention entirely\u2014but I do think this memoir\u2019s pull is uniquely sonic. \u201cNickel-slapping\u201d and \u201csilver bounce,\u201d for instance, possess that ear-thrum of diving underwater. I\u2019m thinking also of Madden\u2019s dialogue: she captures that particular blend of impatience and tenderness unique to conversation among family. From a flippant \u201cabso-fucking-lutely<\/em>\u201d\u00a0to the most thudding words and exchanges, Madden reveals the taut vulnerability in everyday speech, the feeling that we always say either too much or too little\u2014our fear, but speaking anyway.\u00a0\u2014Spencer Quong\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I encourage readers in and near Los Angeles to spend some time with Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s 1\/4 Mile<\/em><\/a>, which is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through June 9. This is the first time the massive work has been displayed in its entirety\u2014when the piece was last on view, in Beijing in 2016, a few panels were omitted by the censors\u2014and the effect is stunning. The two furlongs of panels and a scattering of assemblage sculptures weave through the top floor of LACMA\u2019s Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Progressing through the piece, you can observe not only the artist\u2019s huge range of influences and enthusiasms (pop culture, printed fabrics, rocket ships, birds, and all manner of flying things) but also seventeen years of artistic development. You can see just when he switched from direct transfer to screenprinting, when he traveled to Mexico, when he was feeling particularly painterly. You could get lost in the details for days, but give yourself at least an hour to revel in the windswept fabrics and the canny group portrait, which includes, in outline, the artist himself.\u00a0\u2014Emily Nemens<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Alexander Runciman, Perseus and the Sleeping Medusa<\/em>, 1774.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are only a few days left to see the Met\u2019s exhibition \u201cDangerous Beauty: Medusa in Classical Art<\/a>,\u201d which closes on February 24. Luckily, it isn\u2019t as overwhelming as most of the museum\u2019s shows\u2014you enter the Greek and Roman galleries, climb a flight of stairs, and then enter a single room, in which a few carefully chosen objects illustrate how the figure of Medusa has changed over time. The artworks run the gamut from thousand-year-old antefixae and vases to first-century cameos to, presiding from one corner, a dress from the Versace fall\/winter 1992 collection. The central theme is the relationship between beauty and monstrosity, desire and fear: How did Medusa, along with her cousins Scylla and the Sirens, become a beautiful woman, the snakes of her hair neatly coiled? For whatever reason, I prefer the bearded, tusked, lolling-tongued Medusa to her lovelier later incarnations, but together the items hint at a more important question. Whatever she is in the eye of the beholder, what does Medusa think of herself? Does she believe herself a monster at all? Who gets to define beauty or hideousness; who gets to name you monster?\u00a0\u2014Hasan Altaf<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I stumbled across Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s profile of Whoopi Goldberg<\/a> in Garage<\/em> this week, I thought I was dreaming. Roasting chestnuts in Whoopi\u2019s New Jersey home\u2014which is seemingly filled with commemorative saltshakers\u2014both women exude a self-assurance I love and envy. For Whoopi, maybe it can boil down to her EGOT<\/small> energy, but Ottessa\u2019s unabashed admiration is equally enthralling. In describing Whoopi, Ottessa often captures herself: at one point, she writes, \u201cWe should all be grateful that her genius is so accessible.\u201d They are different from the women who typically dominate their fields, offering forms of beauty that seem to exist \u201coutside of any mundane binary.\u201d Charlie Engman\u2019s photos of Whoopi command the center of the page, and I wish I could stretch my computer screen, as if that could somehow do justice to the vibrancy of Whoopi\u2019s image. I\u2019m thinking of buying a print copy of the magazine to hang on the wall; I want to hold the photos in my hands. It\u2019s a joy to realize two people you love also love each other. Perhaps I can\u2019t go as far as saying this about Whoopi and Ottessa\u2014who knows what\u2019s formulated for the purpose of such compelling journalism\u2014but every time I reread this profile, I marvel at the outlandish possibility that such a thing could happen and exist in front of me, and I feel what might be hope.\u00a0\u2014Nikki Shaner-Bradford<\/strong><\/p>\n

The only problem with Ross Gay\u2019s The Book of Delights<\/em><\/a> is that the so-called delights\u2014miniature essays on what brings him joy\u2014are too dear. What I mean is that sometimes they are just too much, by which I mean just enough and yet so much that when you\u2019ve finished reading one, you don\u2019t fully want to move to the next. Instead, you want to wait and wait because you\u2019re so filled with unexpected tenderness that you might drop, like the \u201csun-blushed fruitlets\u201d in the pear tree or the \u201cblur of light\u201d hummingbird, \u201cits beak neck-deep into the honey suckle just behind my new friend\u2019s head, its wings almost moaning, the sound of its slurping nearly audible.\u201d Gay\u2014who set out to catalogue, one per day, a year\u2019s worth of the things that delight him\u2014is a poet and a professor at Indiana University as well as some kind of magician at the Bloomington Community Orchard. So suffice it to say Gay delights in nature, and this delight is contagious. Something trickier and more surprising is that Gay loves people, too. He finds tenderness for friends and family (e.g., his mom, for letting him watch The Exorcist<\/em> at age nine) and strangers (the fifteen-year-old \u201cin her preripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens\u201d whom \u201cyou better believe I high-fived,\u201d the flight attendant \u201cwho called me baby three times in one interaction during which she gave me a cup of seltzer and two bags of pretzels\u201d). When my beloved read me delight no. 40, I cried so hard he had to put the book down and give me both his arms, and I really got a lot out of my system\u2014tears and everything else. But Gay doesn\u2019t live in a dream world; his talent is finding all the little sticky and unsticky daydreams in this one. The project, recording daily delight, is one he continues to rediscover throughout the year. In delight no. 83,\u00a0Gay writes about the cultural system of conflating blackness with suffering and, in so doing, covering up who causes and perpetuates that suffering. \u201cAnd the delight?\u201d he adds. \u201cYou have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight. Daily as air.\u201d There are so many good entries, about lightning bugs and roller skates and Botan Rice Candy. \u201cIt\u2019ll get better,\u201d Gay says to a stranger in delight no. 61\u2014which is also the point of the delights, maybe, or the point of sharing them. Gay gives us his optimism, goodness, faith, delight, at the risk of it not always being what we\u2019re ready to hear\u2014but hoping it might help.\u00a0\u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ross Gay. Photo: Natasha Komoda.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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