{"id":136022,"date":"2019-05-17T13:00:20","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T17:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136022"},"modified":"2019-05-17T14:20:28","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T18:20:28","slug":"what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/17\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"What Our Contributors Are Reading This Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Paul Beatty. Photo: Hannah Assouline.<\/p><\/div>\n

No American novelist riffs like Paul Beatty. His superlative novel Slumberland<\/em><\/a> established his comic mastery years before he won the Man Booker Prize in 2016. Set in Berlin just before (and after) the fall of the Wall, Slumberland<\/em> is the picaresque tale of Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, a Los Angeles native on a quest to find the Schwa, a mysterious East Berlin Schallplattenunterhalter <\/em>who can \u201cratify\u201d our narrator\u2019s perfect beat. True to the genre of expatriate lit, DJ Darky leverages the wisdom afforded an outsider\u2019s perspective, as Germany\u2019s multikulti<\/em>\u00a0breeziness becomes a lens on race relations in the U.S., and on othering more generally. The novel exploits the tragicomic potential of the reversals, slurs, and embarrassments that might befall a black man in Berlin\u2014a \u201cjukebox sommelier\u201d with a penchant for tanning booths, our narrator eventually endeavors to rebuild the Wall\u2014but the boldest joke might be subtly, cheekily metafictional: forget dancing about architecture, Beatty\u2019s written a syncopated novel about sound.<\/p>\n

I picked up\u00a0Slumberland\u00a0<\/em>after finishing the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han\u2019s book-length essay The Agony of Eros<\/em><\/a>. Though very different in tone, together the two make a kind of contrapuntal harmony. Like\u00a0Slumberland<\/em>, The Agony of Eros<\/em> is rife with asides on Heidegger and porn. But where DJ Darky eventually aims to make otherness \u201cpass\u00e9,\u201d Eros\u00a0<\/em>takes the opposite tack. Han is concerned with preserving the idea of the Other as a check on contemporary narcissism, according to which \u201ceverything is flattened out into an object of consumption.\u201d In other words, by acknowledging the sovereignty of another person as other<\/em>, not mine<\/em>\u2014by resisting the temptation to translate difference into familiar, \u201cconsumable\u201d terms\u2014we delineate a limit on the Self. It\u2019s as earnest and compelling a diagnosis for social malaise, romantic or otherwise, as any I\u2019ve come across. But as we search for a cure, I\u2019m reminded of another impulse behind Slumberland<\/em>: often it\u2019s in the face of despair that we reach for the joke. \u2014J. Jezewska Stevens\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I fetishize Iceland and grew up playing three-handed hearts with my parents, so it makes sense that my go-to online time-waster would be cardgames.io<\/a>,\u00a0a free, ad-driven website programmed by\u00a0Einar Egilsson<\/a>, an Icelandic geek with a twenty-four-karat sense of humor<\/a>. Of the thirty-odd diversions on his site, my favorite is the three-handed Icelandic trick-taking game called\u00a0Manni<\/a>, of which there exist many local and regional variations. (Manni\u00a0<\/em>is the indefinite dative singular of\u00a0ma\u00f0ur<\/em>, which, according to Einar, translates to something like\u00a0chap<\/em>; it\u2019s the name given to the pile of cast-off cards collected before each hand begins.) Six possible hands are chosen by a card draw; with several layers of randomness and bizarrely complex scoring rules, it\u2019s not exactly blackjack, so it\u2019s a good game to play while slightly distracted. The majority of Einar\u2019s customers are American (and, charmingly, he\u2019s named the built-in opponents Mike and Bill), but I like to pretend I\u2019m in a Reykjavik bar with my imaginary friends Th\u00f3r and A\u00f0alfr\u00ed\u00f0ur, shouting \u201ck\u00fakalabbi<\/a><\/em>!\u201d whenever I lose. \u2014Sarah Manguso<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

My wife is a choreographer and dancer, which means I have seen more dance in the past few years than most people will in a lifetime. Fortunately for me, I love dance. I do! But I wasn\u2019t always such a fan. For most of my life, I hadn\u2019t experienced much dance beyond The Nutcracker<\/em>, and so I didn\u2019t know how to enjoy it. I was always looking for (and never finding) the hidden story behind the movement. Well now I am here to gently tell my younger self: wrong, wrong, wrong!<\/em> I find that most dance is best enjoyed the way you might enjoy a poem, painting, or piece of performance art\u2014not by searching for some literal narrative, but by appreciating the emotional experience the art elicits. Lately I have become particularly obsessed with short dance films, in large part because my wife has been choreographing a series of them with her sister, who is a director. Their very latest, \u201cYellow<\/a>,\u201d is five gorgeous minutes of emotional entanglement set in the swaying heart of a California superbloom. Experience the film and enjoy, allowing the movement, the colors, and the score to wash over you at once. \u2014Nick Fuller Googins<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Gina Beavers, Cake<\/em>, 2015, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and GNYP Gallery. Photo accessed on http:\/\/www.moma.org<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the current culture of Instagram boasting, which promotes braggarts, narcissists, and exhibitionists (all words that once suggested something negative), Gina Beavers puts up an uncomfortable mirror to us all. Her physical and visceral paintings in \u201cThe Life I Deserve<\/a>\u201d at MoMA PS1 show us our recent behavior in a way that is brutal and unforgiving. \u201cMakeup tutorials,\u201d \u201cfood porn,\u201d and \u201cselfies\u201d become the framework and titles of works in the show. She manipulates her wide array of materials to transform the subjects into something grotesque and desperate. Meat seems deader, makeup feels like caked-on plaster, and flesh feels thick and clumsy. Through formal shifts she transforms the content of these images into uneasy, powerful work. Finally, something good to come from social media. \u2014Francesca DiMattio<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Lucas de Lima\u2019s recent poems in the Brooklyn Rail<\/em><\/a> touched the middle of me. Perhaps this is because what is inside of the body appears on the outside: a \u201csubsurface\u201d turned \u201cinside out\u2009\/\u2009with a finger & traced.\u201d This is an intestinal, sexual, and biographical form of writing that wakes me up from a deep slumber. What I also love about de Lima\u2019s work is the rotating channel he makes between shit and magic: the sun a kind of hole, and the body\u2019s hole a \u201cpierced horizon.\u201d \u201cSomehow i have to stay human as i bottom in the dark,\u201d de Lima writes, evoking the tenderness and violence that is a hallmark of his poetry, its vegetal-animal animosities and pleasures. In the tricortical territory of Cosmic Bottom<\/em>, we investigate what it is \u201cto become rosebushes, emitting shades of red.\u201d We meet \u201ca horse who swallows &\u2009\/\u2009doesn\u2019t want to breed.\u201d These poems had the effect (for me) of engravings made on a slaughterhouse floor, a connection already made by Rimbaud, yet brought to the present and erected on a livid verge by Lucas de Lima, who \u2026 well, here you go:<\/p>\n

i only shed light for the most missionary of tops, he who unearths me
\nlike rilke whispering
\nyou must charge your hole.
\nyou must give them life.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Bhanu Kapil<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I first discovered\u00a0Bhanu Kapil\u2019s blog<\/a>, then titled Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?<\/em>, in 2009, when I was an unpublished writer living in Akron, Ohio, looking for a kindred community of writers. I still remember the thrilling intensity and energy of her sentences in these notes on the life of a writer, and toward her novel that became Ban en Banlieue<\/em><\/a>. In the past few months\u2014feeling mournful for that time when so many writers I love were writing to each other in what seemed like a free space, resistant to capitalism, semianonymous\u2014I have returned to Kapil\u2019s near-daily meditations. They are both performance and erasure of the writing self, fragments toward the ongoing practice and project of literature that incubates and continues the books. More recently Kapil\u2019s blog, now named The Vortex of Formidable Sparkles<\/em>, has meditated upon the racism and alienation of creative writing institutions and communities, precarity and care labor, and the devastating shards of the ghosts of family and personal histories (as do her ghost stories<\/a> in the Spring issue of The Paris Review<\/em>), and all throughout writing so beautifully the ephemerality of her daily life. After a decade of reading her work, I am certain that Bhanu Kapil is one of our greatest living writers: her books, performances, and blog actively interrogate and resist structures of power and coloniality, in modes at once playful, angry, and tender. \u2014Kate Zambreno<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Khaneh Siah Ast (The House Is Black).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

My family moved to America when I was two and a half, and my brother, who was seven years older than me, was immediately thrust into English-speaking schools. My parents banned speaking Farsi in the household as a way to accelerate his acclimation, and as a consequence, our Farsi stagnated and wore away from disuse. Recently, I have thrown myself into (re)learning Farsi. I can\u2019t go back to Iran, for a variety of reasons, so instead I have software, workbooks, podcasts, flashcards, and regular conversations with native speakers.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite parts of this process has been immersing myself in Iranian cinema, slowly moving through the titans of Persian film\u2014Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Farhadi, Milani. Right now, the movie I can\u2019t stop thinking about, the one I have been writing and painting and dreaming about, is Forough Farrokhzad\u2019s 1963 masterpiece \u201cKhaneh Siah Ast<\/a>\u201d (\u201cThe House Is Black\u201d). Farrokhzad is arguably the greatest Persian poet of the twentieth century, and this, her only film, takes us into the Bababaghi Hospice leper colony in northern Iran. The whole documentary is only about twenty minutes long, but in that time we see dozens of the residents as they play, sing, smoke, get medical treatment, and go to school. The footage is gorgeously overlaid with voiceovers from Farrokhzad\u2019s own poetry, as well as bits taken from the Quran and the Old Testament. In one rending scene, a teacher asks a boy why we should be grateful to have mothers and fathers. The boy responds, \u201cI don\u2019t know. I have neither.\u201d Stymied, the teacher moves to another boy, asks him to name a few beautiful things. He replies: \u201cThe moon. The sun. Flowers. Playtime.\u201d The teacher then asks a third boy\u2014who, like many of the other children in the room, is visibly marked by leprosy\u2014to name a few ugly things. He responds: \u201cHand. Foot. Head.\u201d \u2014Kaveh Akbar<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I see a bandwagon, I run the other way. And yet: I\u2019ve been reading Bette Howland, whose stories have been recently \u201crediscovered\u201d and collected in a book called Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage<\/em><\/a>, published earlier this month by A Public Space Books. As a writer who prides himself on having been born and raised in Chicago (okay, born at Michael Reece, raised in Highland Park, shoot me, my parents wanted a lawn) \u2026 As I was saying, as a writer who prides himself on having been born in Chicago and who still curses his parents for relocating to the infernal suburbs (which is like being born on Saturn and exiled to a ring of Saturn) \u2026 Anyway, yes, I was saying, as a writer, et cetera, et cetera, I\u2019m more than a little ashamed that I hadn\u2019t come across Howland before. All those years of scouring the great city\u2019s bookstores, and I never, ever, found Bette Howland? How is it possible? And yet writers get drowned out, don\u2019t they, by all the noise. Voices that aren\u2019t silent, that were never silent, go unheard nonetheless. I\u2019m a little uncomfortable with the idea of rediscovery in the first place. At what point does a writer go from being a writer to being a rediscovered writer? Weren\u2019t Bette Howland\u2019s words here all along? She\u2019s not some brontosaurus dug up out of the loam by archeologists from the Field Museum. Is loam<\/em> the right word? Anyway, she was a writer who wrote stories, living stories, whether they were being read or not for the past couple of decades. How good are they? I have two examples out of ninety thousand I could give.<\/p>\n

What the family needed was some fresh stock, \u201chybrid vigor.\u201d They were \u201csick of their washed out New England blood.\u201d Thus Papa, thrilled at the prospect of having a Jewish daughter-in-law breeding with the race\u2014for he believed that all Jews were cultured, cosmopolitan, intellectual, and rich. I had never run into this wacky Puritan Jew-worship before, for obvious reasons: I didn\u2019t fit the description and I didn\u2019t know anybody who did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This a quote from Howland\u2019s glorious story \u201cBlue Chicago,\u201d and it captures a phenomenon I haven\u2019t quite seen expressed so succinctly. Call it anti-Semitism with a positive spin. All the creepier for being an unwelcome, backhanded compliment. You people really do excel, don\u2019t you!\u00a0 Except, it\u2019s not true for Howland\u2019s character and her character\u2019s family, having come from, as she says, a family of failures, and it\u2019s never been true for Jews in general. To take away our right to be failures is to take away our humanity. I know this up close. My own family of Jews specializes in going out of business.<\/p>\n

Second example: Howland on loneliness. It\u2019s been covered, true, but aren\u2019t we, every moment, in need of another iteration? This, from the story \u201cAronesti,\u201d just after a lonely guy has hung up the phone after trying to engage someone who\u2019d called the wrong number in a conversation. Remember wrong numbers? When you picked up the phone and there was just this person on the other end that could have been anybody?<\/p>\n

Maybe eternity was like that. Disembodied voices. \u201cWho are you? Who are you? Is that you? Where are you?\u201d Nice thought. You could look a long time. If you wanted someone. Oh God, he wanted someone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Buy this book. If there\u2019s a Howland bandwagon (and there should be), hold me a seat, or I\u2019ll stand. No problem, I\u2019ll stand. And yet: Can I insist? She\u2019s not a rediscovery. It\u2019s incumbent on us to listen to the voices who have been speaking all along. We just haven\u2019t been paying enough attention. Melville tells us that Ishmael swam through libraries. And Melville knew something about this, having not been rediscovered until he was long dead! Had I swum through the H<\/em>\u2019s at the Harold Washington Library on South State Street, I\u2019d have found Howland years ago. It\u2019s on me that I didn\u2019t. \u2014Peter Orner<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bette Howland. Photo courtesy of Howland\u2019s estate.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read the Spring 2019 issue, featuring work from these contributors and others.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Spring contributors\u2014Kaveh Akbar, Peter Orner, Kate Zambreno, and more\u2014share their favorite poetry, prose, and free card-game websites.<\/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":[53976,53973,6397,15964,53300,53950,12,53977,22862,29388,53949,53958,18109,938,17818,53963,55,53952,53956,53969,6381,1499,53971,7651,247,4383,53960,53955,1822,10911,4746,53972,53967,53974,504,53962,27006,53968,53957,53970,30788,17241,53966,53975,23696,1821,53953,12707,53951,53954,53961,53965,53964,53959],"class_list":["post-136022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-public-space-books","tag-bababaghi-hospice","tag-berlin","tag-berlin-wall","tag-bette-howland","tag-bhanu-kapil","tag-blog","tag-blue-chicago","tag-brooklyn-rail","tag-byung-chul-han","tag-calm-sea-and-prosperous-voyage","tag-cardgames-io","tag-cards","tag-chicago","tag-choreography","tag-cosmic-bottom","tag-dance","tag-dj","tag-einar-egilsson","tag-farhadi","tag-farsi","tag-food-porn","tag-forough-farrokhzad","tag-games","tag-germany","tag-ghost-stories","tag-gina-beavers","tag-heidegger","tag-iceland","tag-instagram","tag-iran","tag-khaneh-siah-ast","tag-kiarostami","tag-leprosy","tag-literature","tag-lucas-de-lima","tag-makeup-tutorials","tag-makhmalbaf","tag-manni","tag-milani","tag-moma-ps1","tag-paul-beatty","tag-persian-film","tag-quaran","tag-rediscovery","tag-reykjavik","tag-schallplattenunterhalter","tag-selfies","tag-slumberland","tag-the-agony-of-eros","tag-the-life-i-deserve","tag-the-vortex-of-formidable-sparkles","tag-was-jack-kerouac-a-punjabi","tag-yellow"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat 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