{"id":142989,"date":"2020-02-21T17:40:41","date_gmt":"2020-02-21T22:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142989"},"modified":"2020-04-07T13:29:04","modified_gmt":"2020-04-07T17:29:04","slug":"staff-picks-menace-machines-and-muhammad-ali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/21\/staff-picks-menace-machines-and-muhammad-ali\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Menace, Machines, and Muhammad Ali"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Anna Kavan.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anna Kavan\u2019s short story \u201cIce Storm\u201d begins in winter, with the narrator leaving Grand Central Terminal to visit friends in Connecticut, to clear her head and make a decision (about what, is left unspecified). They can\u2019t understand why she has chosen to leave her \u201cnice warm Manhattan apartment\u201d for the relentless chill of the country. A similar question: Why would we leave the warmth of a relatively comfortable life to enter fiction like Kavan\u2019s, which is often fraught and frigid? Her masterful lucidity and dispassionate tone\u2014on display in Machines in the Head<\/em><\/a>, a collection of Kavan\u2019s short fiction, out this week from NYRB Classics\u2014is a journey into the cold to clear your head. Unlike her most popular work, the excellent novel Ice<\/em>, which skids along planes of disrupted reality, these stories (selected from the span of her writing life) are tighter and more focused. The psychological reality of her characters is rendered sharply: in the title story, the narrator awakens \u201cjust in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing hem of sleep as, like a dark scarf maliciously snatched away, it glides over the foot of the bed and disappears in a flash under the closed door.\u201d Her narrators are often faceless, unnamed, and ungendered; rather than being alienating, this instead asks you to imagine your way inside. Her narratives are uncanny enough to ultimately forge a safe distance, but her characters familiar enough to make one understand anew what it means to wake up and be unable to fall back asleep, or feel unable to decide one\u2019s future. \u2014Lauren Kane\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dan Bejar of Destroyer, christened by Pitchfork<\/em><\/a> as \u201cindie rock\u2019s most lovable curmudgeon,\u201d is the only performer for whom I\u2019ve considered becoming a groupie. Sometimes he takes the stage with an acoustic guitar and a set list scrawled on ripped notebook paper; other times, it\u2019s with a tambourine and beer, leading a full band, saxophone and all, in thirteen-minute anthems. Bejar revels in understated theatricality, which is once again in full bloom on his latest album, Have We Met<\/em><\/a>, released in January. On his 2017 record, ken<\/em><\/a>, Bejar joyously embraced the hearty beats of eighties pop, and Have We Met<\/em> begins in a similar register, though one a bit more electronic in tone (an aesthetic change of which I was initially skeptical). The music here remains steeped in a literary and geographic nostalgia familiar to Bejar\u2019s listeners; his lyrics depict locales of Vancouver past and present, endowing his highly poetic world with a sense of realism. The track \u201cUniversity Hill<\/a>\u201d is named for Bejar\u2019s childhood neighborhood, though his recollections of the place seem more haunted than anything. He narrates the scene of some grim execution, but the opening lines conjure the memory of a loving mother or a beloved:<\/p>\n

And when they come
\nto round us up
\nto gather us up
\nshadow and air
\nI think of you standing there
\nlovely in the light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As one comes to expect from Bejar, it is as unnerving as it is soothing. \u2014Elinor Hitt<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury. Photo: Ryan Hafey \/ Premier Boxing Champions.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The old adage \u201cstyles make fights\u201d will be put to the test tomorrow night, when the most proficient boxer in the heavyweight division confronts its most powerful puncher, in the most eagerly anticipated rematch<\/a> of recent decades. Tyson Fury assumes the role of \u201cboxer,\u201d and not since Muhammad Ali has a heavyweight been so light on his feet or so elusive. An exponent of the \u201csweet science,\u201d he fights according to boxing\u2019s original tenet: hit and don\u2019t get hit. Meanwhile, his opponent\u2014Deontay Wilder, the World Boxing Council champion\u2014has been touted as the fiercest puncher since Mike Tyson, since George Foreman, or perhaps even in the history of the sport. (A record of forty-three fights and forty-one knockouts corroborates this. Of the two challengers who went the distance, the first, Bermane Stiverne, was knocked out in the first round of their rematch. The second opponent to hear the final bell was Fury, and he ended up on the canvas twice in their first fight.) Observers seem to agree: Fury will either win on points, or Wilder will win by knockout. Fury, ever the contrarian, has predicted a knockout in round two. His new trainer\u2014if we are to believe what we have been told\u2014has been helping him to sit down on his shots, and while it is true that Fury isn\u2019t the hardest puncher in the division, nor is he as feather-fisted as his opponents like to make out. Fury stands six-foot-nine and weighs in at (reportedly) somewhere around two hundred seventy pounds; it would be a mistake for Wilder to think he can walk through Fury\u2019s punches. As they say in heavyweight boxing: if you get hit, you stay hit. On the other side of the ledger, it\u2019s worth noting that Wilder isn\u2019t as flawed a boxer as his detractors like to pretend. It is true that he windmills his punches once he\u2019s got his opponents hurt, but he has a hard, effective jab when he chooses to use it, as well as that fearsome right. Far better \u201ctechnicians\u201d have tried to land clean on Fury and failed, though Wilder did precisely that in the first fight\u2014not once but twice. This isn\u2019t luck. As Joyce Carol Oates puts it in her book On Boxing<\/em>: \u201cLife is hard in the ring, but, there, you only get what you deserve.\u201d Should Wilder win, it will confirm what he has told us all along: that he truly is the \u201cbaddest man on the planet.\u201d Should Fury win, it will cap a remarkable comeback, following, as it does, his much-publicized depression, weight gain, and years away from the ring. There have been rumblings of some vague difficulty in the Fury camp. Let\u2019s hope there is no truth to this, because tomorrow we\u2019ll see a spectacle all too rare in boxing: the best fighting the best. \u2014Robin Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n

In many of Gustave Roud\u2019s (1897\u20131976) self-portraits<\/a>, he appears as a shadow pitched against the fields, or cast toward the men who work the land. However, Roud\u2019s subtle presence, and the quiet composition of these photographs, is no preparation for the ecstatic intensity of his writing, now, for the first time, available in English, in a luminous translation by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds. In his prose works Air of Solitude<\/em> and Requiem<\/em><\/a>, Romandy is a place of rapture and reverie, through which he wanders alone in awe, like an exile in Eden. \u201cWhat have I been doing here for hours on end among the snares of time and absence, laughable summoner of shadows, a shadow myself in the kingdom of my dead,\u201d he wonders. Every scene becomes an unwitting show: the glow of a man\u2019s bare chest in the sun; the song of a cuckoo; the unfurling of a flower. The laborers shape the scene, as Roud, the sole spectator, gazes on at the theater of the seasons, all words \u201cundone like a vain foam.\u201d \u2014Chris Littlewood<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps no other rap album bottles an aesthetic as well as Mobb Deep\u2019s masterpiece The Infamous<\/em><\/a>, which I\u2019ve found my way back to again this week, as I have many times over the course of my life. The second LP from the rapper Prodigy and the MC-producer Havoc plays out in New York\u2019s Queensbridge public-housing development, which in Mobb Deep\u2019s music becomes a kind of perverse snow globe: it is seemingly always winter, not a single soul is to be trusted, and the slightest misstep can get you killed. These stakes are established right from the start; a promise to shoot \u201cin all the shows and even at the hoes\u201d on the first track is underscored almost immediately by \u201cThe Infamous Prelude,\u201d a two-minute intermission wherein Prodigy humorlessly affirms that none of his tough talk is empty bluster: \u201cThere\u2019s a good chance your ass is gonna get shot, stabbed, or knuckled down\u2014one out of the three.\u201d This unrelenting seriousness, this haze that never lifts, is exactly why I love The Infamous<\/em>. Prodigy, especially, plays the dead-eyed street nihilist well; he is effortlessly menacing, clicking threats together like Lincoln Logs. On \u201cShook Ones (Part II),\u201d he taunts his opponents: \u201cI can see it inside your face: you\u2019re in the wrong place\u2009\/\u2009Cowards like you just get their whole body laced up\u2009\/\u2009With bullet holes and such\u2009\/\u2009Speak the wrong words, man, and you will get touched.\u201d The thing about a snow globe, though, is that you can\u2019t escape. There is seemingly no way out for our protagonists, who live one day at a time, dodging corrupt cops, piecing together jobs, and finding relief in substances and revenge: \u201cAs long as I send your maggot ass to the essence,\u201d Prodigy raps at one point, \u201cI don\u2019t give a fuck about my presence.\u201d The production throughout the album is appropriately dour: crackling piano loops, unplaceable sirens, and drums that hit like a series of blows to the head. I\u2019ve yet to find a more perfect marriage of beats and rhymes, of gleam and grit, of pure art and utter hopelessness. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mobb Deep.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 reads Anna Kavan, listens to Destroyer, and preps for the big fight.<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-142989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Menace, Machines, and Muhammad Ali by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 reads Anna Kavan, listens to Destroyer, and preps for the big fight.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/21\/staff-picks-menace-machines-and-muhammad-ali\/\" 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