{"id":74581,"date":"2014-07-25T17:45:25","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T21:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74581"},"modified":"2014-07-25T17:43:34","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T21:43:34","slug":"what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: Algiers, Aliens, Adulthood"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_74589\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/201401-omag-longstoryshortalien-949x534.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-74589\" class=\"wp-image-74589 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/201401-omag-longstoryshortalien-949x534.jpg\" alt=\"201401-omag-LongStoryShortAlien-949x534\" width=\"600\" height=\"359\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/201401-omag-longstoryshortalien-949x534.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/201401-omag-longstoryshortalien-949x534-300x179.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-74589\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">George Saunders talks to an alien. Detail from an illustration by Thomas Allen, in <i>O, the Oprah Magazine<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I went on vacation planning to read <em>Tristram Shandy<\/em>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/08\/readers-guilt-toadstools\/\" target=\"_blank\">at last<\/a>.\u00a0Instead I read Frank Kermode on \u201cModernisms,\u201d most of <em>The Rise of the Novel<\/em> (including the chapter on <em>Tristram Shandy<\/em>), and half the <em>Selected Poems<\/em> of Howard Moss. Total reading time: not much. But it was choice. Then I got home and found <em>The New Yorker<\/em> in my mailbox. Greg Jackson\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2014\/07\/21\/wagner-in-the-desert\" target=\"_blank\">Wagner in the Desert<\/a>\u201d is the best fiction debut they\u2019ve published in years. The story belongs to an ancient genre: young, rich people hole up in a country house to avoid the plague. In this case, the country house is a rental in Palm Springs, the plague is adulthood, and the hosts are a Hollywood couple about to start fertility treatments, hoping to get their ya-yas out in a mindful, caring way.\u00a0Jackson knows his antecedents. He has metabolized Ben Lerner and David Foster Wallace. He can throw in a blank verse, like Melville, to heighten a scene. He even steals, without attribution, from Kenny Rogers. I read \u201cWagner in the Desert\u201d my first night back, fell asleep, and dreamed I was in the story (and also back in elementary school, getting a lesson in the story) then woke up and read it again, with no diminution of enjoyment. \u2014<strong>Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been reading Adam Shatz\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/180663\/writers-or-missionaries?page=0,3\" target=\"_blank\">very smart account<\/a> of how reporting on the Middle East cured him of political romanticism. I suspect he\u2019s not alone in this experience: \u201cWhen I finally began to spend time in the place about which I had pontificated for so long, I discovered that I was much more interested in what the people I met had to say than in my own views.\u201d My favorite parts are Shatz\u2019s trips to Algiers\u2014\u201ca city I knew mostly from Gillo Pontecorvo\u2019s film\u201d\u2014and his interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It\u2019s a sobering essay, and a timely one for this low point (after a very high one) in the history of the region. \u2014<strong>Robyn Creswell<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In this month\u2019s <em>O, The Oprah Magazine<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oprah.com\/oprahsbookclub\/George-Saunders-Short-Stories-to-Read\" target=\"_blank\">George Saunders explains to a space alien<\/a> what it means to be human. His explanation takes the form of a series of short-story recommendations, of course. Drawing on diverse selections from Chekhov to Hemingway to Lahiri, he covers the basics of love, loneliness, greed, kindness, death, and empathy. The essay\u2019s a gem, a genuine love letter to reading as a noble pursuit. Saunders says it best: \u201cShort stories are the deep, encoded crystallizations of all human knowledge. They are rarefied, dense meaning machines, shedding light on the most pressing of life\u2019s dilemmas. By reading a thoughtfully selected set of them, our alien could, in a few hours, learn everything he needs to know about the way we live. Except how it feels to lose one\u2019s car in a parking garage and walk around for like three hours, trying to look as if you know where you\u2019re going, so the people driving by\u2014who have easily found their cars, having written the location on their wrists or something\u2014don\u2019t think badly of you. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a short story about that yet.\u201d \u2014<strong>Chantal McStay<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Another thing I did on vacation was see <em>The Shining<\/em> for the first time in a couple of decades. This, unfortunately, was the director\u2019s cut, in which Jack Nicholson has several long, boring conversations with ghosts. But even the scary parts weren\u2019t scary anymore. To hear J.\u2009D. Daniels tell it\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flaunt.com\/art\/saw-number-15-gold-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">in the new issue of <em>Flaunt<\/em><\/a>, I\u2019d rather have seen the documentary <em>Room 237<\/em>\u2014at least, if I got to see it with J.\u2009D. Daniels: \u201c<em>Room 237<\/em>\u00a0is about unhinged Stanley Kubrick fanatics \u2026 Each of them thinks\u00a0<em>The Shining<\/em>\u00a0is a coded message. One participant believes\u00a0<em>The Shining\u00a0<\/em>is Kubrick\u2019s confession that he helped <small>NASA<\/small> fake the Apollo 11 moon landing. Have you seen\u00a0<em>The Shining<\/em>? It\u2019s about an axe murderer. It\u2019s about 145 minutes long.\u201d \u2014<strong>L.S. <br \/><\/strong><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, just behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu\u2014but his writing is generally neglected. Gibran\u2019s most renowned work is <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Prophet-Kahlil-Gibran\/dp\/1614270627\" target=\"_blank\">The Prophet<\/a><\/em>, a collection of twenty-six prose poems that delve into philosophy, spirituality, and religion. <em>The Prophet<\/em> has sold widely since its publication in 1923, but its inspirational voice has precluded it from critical acclaim. Some find Gibran\u2019s poetry preachy and moralizing, but I find it plenty enlightening\u2014it\u2019s hard to object to the melodic, cosmic of mysticism of a line like \u201cThat which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014<strong>Yasmin Roshanian<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been reading Iris Murdoch\u2019s essays \u201cThe Sublime and the Good\u201d and \u201cThe Sovereignty of the Good,\u201d in which she contends, as so many do, that man is an essentially selfish creature; his narcissism distorts and thwarts reality. Murdoch\u2019s elegantly simple prescription is to get the self to stop thinking about the self simply by looking around: at paintings, at ladybugs that land on us, et cetera. This type of basic observational experience, she maintains, is important for our moral lives\u2014through it we cultivate a sensitivity to the particularities of the other. And once we have that, Murdoch says, we might become better people. \u2014<strong>Parker Henry<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went on vacation planning to read Tristram Shandy,\u00a0at last.\u00a0Instead I read Frank Kermode on \u201cModernisms,\u201d most of The Rise of the Novel (including the chapter on Tristram Shandy), and half the Selected Poems of Howard Moss. Total reading time: not much. But it was choice. Then I got home and found The New Yorker [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[8191,970,14746,7514,811,5709,1161],"class_list":["post-74581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-adam-shatz","tag-george-saunders","tag-greg-jackson","tag-iris-murdoch","tag-j-d-daniels","tag-kahlil-gibran","tag-stanley-kubrick"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What We\u2019re Loving: Algiers, Aliens, Adulthood by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 25, 2014 \u2013 I went on vacation planning to read Tristram Shandy,\u00a0at last.\u00a0Instead I read Frank Kermode on \u201cModernisms,\u201d most of The Rise of the Novel (including the\" \/>\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\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What We\u2019re Loving: Algiers, Aliens, Adulthood by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 25, 2014 \u2013 I went on vacation planning to read Tristram Shandy,\u00a0at last.\u00a0Instead I read Frank Kermode on \u201cModernisms,\u201d most of The Rise of the Novel (including the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-07-25T21:45:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/201401-omag-longstoryshortalien-949x534.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"359\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"What We\u2019re Loving: Algiers, Aliens, Adulthood\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-07-25T21:45:25+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/\"},\"wordCount\":931,\"commentCount\":4,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/what-were-loving-algiers-aliens-adulthood\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/201401-omag-longstoryshortalien-949x534.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Adam Shatz\",\"George Saunders\",\"Greg Jackson\",\"Iris Murdoch\",\"J. 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