{"id":75509,"date":"2014-08-15T16:50:27","date_gmt":"2014-08-15T20:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75509"},"modified":"2014-08-18T11:58:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-18T15:58:29","slug":"staff-picks-desert-bus-desert-islands-du-maurier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/15\/staff-picks-desert-bus-desert-islands-du-maurier\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Desert Bus<\/i>, Desert Islands, du Maurier"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"IMG_0758\"<\/a>

Desert Bus<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Desert Bus<\/em> (1995) has gained a reputation as the worst video game ever made<\/a>, but as an act of culture jamming\u2014and a comment on a medium that often panders to our basest fantasies\u2014it\u2019s probably the best<\/em> video game ever made. Conceived by the illusionists Penn and Teller, of all people, and intended for release on the short-lived Sega CD console, Desert Bus<\/em> never reached shelves, but its concept is so staggeringly mundane (\u201cstupefyingly like reality,\u201d as Penn Jillette puts it) that someone eventually saw fit to leak it. Your goal is to drive a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas: an eight-hour journey, conducted in real time. Is there any traffic to negotiate? No. Can you pause the game? No. Are there even passengers<\/em> on the bus? No. Can you speed, at least? No. You can\u2019t go any faster than forty-five miles an hour, and your bus always lists to the right, so you have to be vigilant in steering\u2014no falling asleep at the wheel. If you veer off course, the bus will stall and you\u2019ll have to wait for a tow truck to bring you back to Tucson, a humiliating defeat that also unfolds in real time. For the successful completion of this arduous journey, the player receives \u2026 one point. Then you get to make the return trip, another eight hours, for another point. Today, Desert Bus<\/em> is available on smartphones<\/a> for a mere ninety-nine cents, meaning it\u2019s possible to drive the virtual bus from Tucson to Vegas while you\u2019re on a real bus from Tucson to Vegas. The existential despair induced by such a pursuit may well sunder our universe\u2014but it would be so cool<\/em>. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

Picking up a paper this morning, it suddenly struck me that Napoleon (whose 245th birthday falls today) must be one of the few people who\u00a0actually\u00a0<\/em>experienced that age-old question: \u201cIf you were stranded on a desert island, what would you read?\u201d Confined to the (not quite desert) island of St. Helena, Napoleon\u2019s top ten included Homer\u2019s The Iliad<\/em>, Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>and Sophocles\u2019s\u00a0Oedipus Rex. <\/em>But according to his biographer, Vincent Cronin, Napoleon\u2019s number one was Paul et Virginie<\/a>, <\/em>an eighteenth-century love story by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in which the heroine is sent to be educated in France and (spoiler alert) drowns in a shipwreck on her way back to Mauritius. Napoleon allegedly loved anything that resonated with his own position\u2014anything featuring, that is, an exile, a separation from a lover, or a life of confinement. How interesting that, in a situation that seems to cry out for the use of literature as escapism, he found release in books of captivity. \u2014Helena Sutcliffe<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sadie Stein recently turned me on to Daphne du Maurier\u2019s 1951 novel, My Cousin Rachel<\/a><\/em>. As you might guess from the title, this later book shares certain ingredients with du Maurier\u2019s 1938 blockbuster,\u00a0Rebecca<\/em>. There\u2019s a grand estate in Cornwall, a suspicious death, an innocent orphan, and a femme fatale. In My Cousin Rachel,<\/em> however, we get to meet the lady in question: a Cornish-Italian beauty with a shady past. Also, the orphan is a man, a twenty-four-year old virgin in love with the memory of his dead male cousin \u2026 who looked exactly like him. In Rebecca<\/em>, du Maurier\u00a0invented a genre\u2014romantic suspense. My Cousin Rachel<\/em> is a creepier, campier book. What makes both novels convincingly romantic, and actually suspenseful, isn\u2019t their lurid plots, but how well du Maurier depicts the fear of abandonment.\u00a0That\u2019s what scares her protagonists\u2014that they might lose the mysterious, dangerous love objects who have put them in touch with their own loneliness. As Sadie warned me, My Cousin Rachel<\/em> is no Rebecca<\/em>. But it\u2019s close. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some years ago, I bought a copy of The Song of Igor\u2019s Campaign<\/a><\/em>, translated by Bill Johnston,\u00a0from Ugly Duckling Presse at the New York Art Book Fair, but I never got around to reading it until now. I wanted the chapbook for its content, but also for its materials. It\u2019s a small, limited-edition letterpress booklet: the thick cotton cover, hand torn by Johnston, is covered with ink-blue birds in flight, a photolithograph by Yulya Deych; and the pages are bound with red cord. It\u2019s more treasure than book, which is fitting for the story it holds. Composed sometime in the late twelfth century (though some claim the poem is a fabrication from the eighteenth century), the Song<\/em>\u00a0describes Prince Igor of Chernigov\u2019s campaign, in 1185, against the nomadic Polovtsians, who roam the steppes. Things go poorly for Igor, but the tale overlays action sequences, both thrilling and terrible, with descriptions of the natural world, to stunning effect, as when Igor escapes from captivity:<\/p>\n

\n

Prince Igor leapt into the reeds
With the agility of an ermine,
Like a white duck into the wear.
Then he leapt up on his swift horse
And down again, running like the whitefoot wolf.
He hurtled towards the Donets meadows,
Soaring like a falcon beneath the mists,
Killing geese and slaying swans
For morning, noon, and evening meals.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Nicole Rudick
<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first came across Ring Lardner\u2019s name in The Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, wherein Holden says Lardner knocks him out. When I noticed Lardner mentioned again in Franny and Zooey<\/em>, I picked up a copy of his collected short stories<\/a>\u2014I like to read my favorite writers\u2019 favorite writers. A sportswriter by trade, Lardner has an impeccable ear for dialogue, and damn it, he can put a big brass button on a scene. He was revered by many Lost Generation greats\u2014a young Hemingway wrote stories under the name Ring Lardner, Jr.\u2014and there\u2019s something classic in stories like \u201cAlibi Ike\u201d and \u201cMr. And Mrs. Fix-It\u201d; it\u2019s puzzling that they haven\u2019t endured. In the hysterical \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe,\u201d we glimpse a precursor to a young woman like Salinger\u2019s Muriel Glass through Lardner\u2019s eighteen-year-old narrator: \u201cAnd she says she was only engaged once while I have been engaged at least five times a year since I was fourteen, of course it really isn\u2019t as bad as that and I have really only been really what I call engaged six times altogether, but is getting engaged my fault when they keep insisting and hammering at you and if you didn\u2019t say yes they would never go home.\u201d \u2014Chantal McStay<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desert Bus (1995) has gained a reputation as the worst video game ever made, but as an act of culture jamming\u2014and a comment on a medium that often panders to our basest fantasies\u2014it\u2019s probably the best video game ever made. Conceived by the illusionists Penn and Teller, of all people, and intended for release on […]<\/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":[15001,15002,2842,14998,15000,14999,15004,15003],"class_list":["post-75509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-bernadin-de-saint-pierre","tag-bill-johnston","tag-daphne-du-maurier","tag-desert-bus","tag-napoleon-bonaparte","tag-penn-and-teller","tag-ring-lardner","tag-the-song-of-igors-campaign"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Desert Bus, Desert Islands, du Maurier<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week\u2019s staff picks, including the worst video game ever made, Napoleon\u2019s desert island reads, and Salinger\u2019s Ring Lardner.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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