{"id":146663,"date":"2020-08-07T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=146663"},"modified":"2020-08-07T10:41:36","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T14:41:36","slug":"what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-summer-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/07\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-summer-3\/","title":{"rendered":"What Our Contributors Are Reading This Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Contributors from our Summer issue<\/a>\u00a0share their favorite recent finds.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently, I was inspired by the poet Solmaz Sharif to revisit June Jordan\u2019s collection of essays, Civil Wars<\/em><\/a> (1981). At a time when courting sickness and death is described by the president as \u201copening up,\u201d or else framed as a concern about the education of children, when the attorney general defines peace as submission to police force, and when some voices, in the midst of a genuine emergency, are petulantly and nebulously complaining about \u201cforces of illiberalism\u201d and \u201ccancel culture,\u201d it\u2019s been refreshing to revisit Jordan, who cuts through all the nonsense to show what is truly at stake with the politics of language and calls for polite civility. If you\u2019re interested, maybe begin by checking out this excerpt from \u201cWhite English\/Black English: The Politics of Translation\u201d:<\/p>\n

They all\u2014all them whitefolks ruling the country\u2014they all talk that talk, that \u201cstandard (white) English. It is the language of the powerful. Language is political. That\u2019s why you and me, my Brother and my Sister, that\u2019s why we sposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law\u2026<\/p>\n

See, the issue of white English is inseparable from the issues of mental health and bodily survival. If we succumb to phrases such as \u201cwinding down the war,\u201d or if we accept \u201cpacification\u201d to mean the murdering of unarmed villagers, and \u201cself-reliance\u201d to mean bail money for Lockheed Corporation and bail money for the mis-managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad, on the one hand, but also, if we allow \u201cself-reliance\u201d to mean starvation and sickness and misery for poor families, for the aged, and for the permanently disabled\/permanently discriminated against\u2014then our mental health is seriously in peril: we have entered the world of doublespeak-bullshit, and our lives may soon be lost behind that entry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or maybe this, from the titular essay:<\/p>\n

Most often, the people who can least afford to further efface and deny the truth of what they experience, the people whose very existence is most endangered and, therefore, most in need of vigilantly truthful affirmation, these are the people\u2014the poor and the children\u2014who are punished most severely for departures from the civilities that grease oppression.<\/p>\n

If you make and keep my life horrible then, when I tell the truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look good or, God willing, feel good to you, either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Jamel Brinkley<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from video of performance Paj\u00e9 On\u00e7a Hackeando a 33\u00aa Bienal de Artes de S\u00e3o Paulo \u00a9 Denilson Baniwa<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reaching for my mask along with the standard phone-wallet-keys when I venture out for groceries or remember that it\u2019s healthy to go outside (mostly), I keep thinking of artist Denilson Baniwa\u2019s series \u201cRitual Masks For a World In Crisis<\/a>,\u201d part of a quarantine-era commission of 125 artists by the Instituto Moreira Salles<\/a>\u00a0in Brazil, with an essay\u00a0translated here<\/a> by Tiffany Higgins. In these eight self-portraits, Baniwa mixes the surgical or hand-sewn pleated masks and bandannas that have become our new everyday around the world with woven crowns, feather headdresses, baskets, and jaguar heads that evoke Indigenous forms of protection and communication with the invisible world. These ritual masks are a way to negotiate with the God of Maladies, the code name he offers so as not to give away the Amazonian Baniwa people\u2019s name for the spirit who takes the form of a sloth. The bright headdresses and face coverings with cheerful patterns like potted succulents and diamonds with stars morph from photo to photo, while Baniwa wears the same white T-shirt with his own silk-screened design, a stylized roaring jaguar with the words, \u201cFloresta de p\u00e9, fascismo no ch\u00e3o<\/i>,\u201d a slogan seen and heard at Indigenous rights protests, which translates roughly to, \u201cUp with the forest, down with the fascists.\u201d Some of the headdresses trade the usual feathers and thread for electrical wire and the jagged teeth of long, thin hacksaw blades broken in pieces to form crowns and a halo. These unexpected juxtapositions shape the playful, absurdist, and activist tone of Baniwa\u2019s work, which mixes memories of his people\u2019s traditions from the Rio Negro region of the northwestern Amazon with the modern-day artifacts and practices of an artist based in Rio de Janeiro. Before the pandemic, Baniwa walked the streets and museums of\u00a0S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a>\u00a0and sites like the\u00a0Biennale of Sydney<\/a>\u00a0with a mask and cape as the Paj\u00e9 On\u00e7a, a powerful shaman who takes the form of the spotted jaguar, a figure that appears throughout Baniwa\u2019s street murals, wheat-paste posters, museum installations, and performances, displayed on\u00a0his site<\/a>\u00a0and on\u00a0Instagram<\/a>. COVID<\/small>-19 has hit communities in the Amazon especially hard, with the widespread loss of loved ones, elders, artists, healers, and shamans, like Feliciano Lana<\/a>, the Desana artist whom Baniwa cites as a major influence, and\u00a0V\u00f3 Bernaldina<\/a>, a spiritual and political leader of the Macuxi people. For Baniwa, it brings up memories of plagues brought by past colonizers, and the ways Indigenous people had to update their sacred rituals to include vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines that intervened with the unseen world. The present mask and hand-washing rituals are yet another update. He writes, \u201cMay the God of Maladies see that we are fulfilling all the rituals, and soon be soothed. May our people survive this, one more end of the world.\u201d \u2014Katrina Dodson<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

These days I have been enfolded in Adeeba Talukder\u2019s beautiful collection of poems, Shahr-e-Jaanaan, City of the Beloved<\/em><\/a>. Like a graceful arabesque the collection soars into Urdu poetry and swerves back into English. Lines like these leave me breathless: \u201cLonging, air spent \/ travels the length of age, then receives \/ a faint reply: \/ You have a conquered a curl, at last.\u201d Talukder\u2019s poetry captures the exquisite pain of the lover; the Urdu ghazal glimmers behind the English and invites me to dwell in both worlds. Walking alone in empty streets, I\u2019m drawn to her contemplations on loneliness and companionship, \u201cCome walk with me \/ by the lake\u2019s empty benches. \/ Tell me, dressed in roses \/ we need some air.<\/em>\u201d Her collection of poems has been my companion and my lover, the one I reach out to when I need a place to breathe. \u2014 Krupa Shandilya<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Possibly out of a desire (or need) to escape the modern, COVID<\/small>-ridden world, I\u2019ve been revisiting Jane Austen. With no happy ending to our current situation in sight, I\u2019ve found her novels enormously reassuring, knowing that everything will come right and love will triumph. I\u2019ve also been luxuriating in her prose, so witty and so wise, and taking particular pleasure in the most awful of her characters: the vain, snobbish Sir Walter Elliott, the splendidly egomaniacal Mrs. Elton, and, of course, the obsequious Mr. Collins. There is something so delicious and, yes, so unflinching, about her depiction of these fools, and I found myself wishing she were alive today to sharpen her quill on some of our present-day and all-too-present imbeciles. A thought to savor. And which novel to choose as a starting point? For no particular reason, I started with her last novel, Persuasion<\/em><\/a>, and ended with her first, Northanger Abbey<\/em><\/a>, as if reading her work on rewind, from the more sober tale of twenty-seven-year-old Anne Elliott reencountering a lost love to seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland discovering love for the very first time. And not a mention of viruses.<\/p>\n

And still safely in the past, but at least in the twentieth century, I\u2019ve been watching the thirties Marseilles Trilogy<\/a> based on the plays by Marcel Pagnol. Many of the actors had already appeared in the plays on stage, which gives the movie a real ensemble feel. Just superb. \u2014Margaret Jull Costa<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There were two problems with the Great War\u2019s dead on the Western Front: how to handle the bodies and how to handle the absence of bodies. The number of Great War dead was so enormous that a decision was made to bury them where they had fallen. Families could not bring their soldier home. The Imperial, and now Commonwealth, War Graves Commission, was founded in 1917 to locate and record the last resting places of fallen soldiers. After the Armistice, it cleared the battlefields of the dead and designed and built hundreds of cemeteries and memorials. By 1921 records indicated that hundreds of thousands of bodies were still missing\u2014drowned in mud or vaporized by artillery shells. These missing continue to haunt families, historians, and, for some reason I don\u2019t fully understand, me. They lie at the center of my recently published long poem, Salient<\/em><\/a>. Every year some emerge, one by one or in small clusters, when a new building needs a foundation or a highway needs a new off-ramp.<\/p>\n

In 2008 hundreds of them, mostly Australian, were found in mass graves just south of Pheasant Wood near Fromelles, France. The fierce fighting at Fromelles on July 19\u201320, 1916, was just a sideshow in the Battle of the Somme. But for the efforts of a retired and persistent Australian schoolteacher, clear documentation of these graves would have remained lost in German and British archives. Hundreds is a big number. For the first time in decades the CWGC had to build a whole new cemetery. How could no one have found these men for ninety years?<\/p>\n

In support of my disbelief, I offer you the British trench map below, from late July 1916. I have marked the location of the graves:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The graves are located at 36 SW 2 Radingham N.17.c.3.1 on British trench maps of the time.<\/p><\/div>\n

Maps were constantly updated from intelligence reports. Doubtless the map revision had been based on aerial photos like this one, below, from September 1916, showing that five of the eight large pits have been filled in:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Lost Legions of Fromelles<\/em><\/a> is Peter Barton\u2019s highly granular answer to my question and reads like a detective thriller filled with courage, tragedy, politics, good intentions, prisoners, spies, and evidence hidden or overlooked, all in the context of unimaginable and now invisible carnage. Barton also includes a gripping description of the July 1916 battle, and its predecessor of 1915, pushing back against parts of the classic Australian narrative using German sources. Fromelles was a catastrophic defeat, seared, like Gallipoli, into Australia\u2019s psyche. Now we have a clearer picture of what happened, and, in 2010, two hundred and fifty of the men who went missing at Fromelles were interred with full military honors. Through DNA tracing, many families have been reconnected with a grandfather or great uncle. There are still another fourteen hundred men missing on that ground. The Fromelles Project<\/a> continues its work. \u2014 Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Can I recommend my friend, Bill, the Shakespeare professor from Chicago? Two years ago he came to Jersey City to see his new granddaughter. Afterward I met him over at the piers. \u201cWhat\u2019s new, Bud?\u201d he asked. For half an hour, I told Bill some lame bullshit about my construction job and he kept laughing and slapping his knee. Finally I said, \u201cWhat\u2019s new with you, Bill?\u201d He looked at me seriously, \u201cI had a stroke.\u201d He\u2019d collapsed in his kitchen three weeks before, couldn\u2019t reach the phone and his wife had just left in the car. So Bill made peace with death. Luckily his wife had forgotten the grocery list and she came back and found Bill on the floor and called an ambulance and he got to the hospital and made a complete recovery. Thank God. On the piers that day Bill then gave me a literary intervention. Drop everything, read D<\/em>on Quixote<\/em>, and Madame Bovary<\/em>, and all of Virginia Woolf and on and on. \u201cYou can\u2019t just read junk food, Bud. You have to read the best to see where the ceiling is.\u201d Since it sounded like the man\u2019s dying wish, I lied and said I would read these \u201cbetter\u201d books. Well, the next month he called my bluff and I received a huge box in the mail, random classic paperbacks, marked up and dog-eared. Thanks Bill, I loved the books so much I\u2019m recommending everyone who reads The Paris Review<\/em> should become your pal. Recently, I made the mistake of posting a picture of a Nabokov novel I liked (which Bill hadn\u2019t recommended, by the way). He commented, \u201cLIFE IS TOO SHORT FOR BAD BOOKS<\/small>!\u201d Maybe it used to be, but now we\u2019re in a pandemic. There\u2019s nothing but time. Last month I binged six whole seasons of Columbo<\/em> (my favorite show) starring Peter Falk (my favorite actor). Bill saw one of my social media posts about that and commented I should read Crime and Punishment<\/em>. \u201cGo right to the source!\u201d Shit, why did the source have to be a doorstop Russian novel? Anyway, I read it and loved it. Turns out Columbo<\/em> is a thousand percent based on Crime and Punishment<\/em>. It\u2019s structured just like the novel, and inspector Porfiry Petrovich is the nearly same character famously played by Falk, right down to the mannerisms and the way he antagonizes the murderer. Just amazing. Thanks again, Bill. Hope you\u2019re doing good today. Miss ya, man.<\/p>\n

But Bud, wait, what are you recommending? Be more specific, please.<\/p>\n

Hey! Start with these these five episodes of Columbo<\/em>\u2014\u201cSuitable for Framing\u201d (1971); \u201cThe Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case\u201d (1977); \u201c\u00c9tude in Black\u201d (1972); \u201cA Stitch in Crime\u201d (1973); \u201cThe Most Crucial Game,\u201d (1972) and then read Crime and Punishment <\/em>by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.\u00a0 \u2014Bud Smith<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Installation view, Why Is It Hard to Love?<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

What I would like to recommend is what most of you will not see. Vilnius has a new museum for contemporary art<\/a>: MO, the brainchild of Danguol\u0117 and Viktoras Butkus, scientists turned art collectors. The building was designed by Daniel Libeskind, opened in 2018, and the collection is devoted to contemporary Lithuanian art. Located in the center of the city, on the edge of Old Town, the building has a bright white edifice that juts like the prow of a ship over Embankment Street (as Robert Hass translated the name of Pylimo Street in Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz\u2019s poetry, so I leave the literary connection). Underneath this majestic bow, a staircase climbs to an amphitheater that hosts regular readings of contemporary Lithuanian poetry. There is a sculpture garden to the side, providing pleasant green space. The present exhibition (on view into January 2021) is the first curated by international artistic celebrities: the British filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, and his wife, the Dutch artist, Saskia Boddeke. They have created an immersive experience<\/a> in the third-floor primary exhibition hall where the sound and lighting effects spill out from their two video installations and envelop the selection of paintings branching through the space, all to the theme of Why Is It Hard to Love?<\/em> The visitor turning from the winding stairs is greeted by the two showstoppers: Monika Furmana\u2019s three-meter-high painting in oil and spray paint, The Tree of Life<\/em>, and then, through a dark cleft, the curators\u2019 video installation, Number 34 is Missing!<\/em>, replete with dark reflecting pool and stacked chairs arcing through the air. (A limited look at various pieces is available here.<\/a>) The exhibit answers \u201cWhy is it hard to love?\u201d in many different ways, with alienation, inequalities, social differences, and prejudices all having their say, and yet, as those first pieces make clear, the struggle to love is also a path to both self-discovery and greater meaning. You would do well to have MO Museum on your itinerary when you are able to visit Vilnius. \u2014Rimas Uzgiris<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Explore the contents of our summer issue, and consider subscribing to <\/em>The Paris Review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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