{"id":76118,"date":"2014-08-29T15:00:12","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T19:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76118"},"modified":"2014-09-08T17:07:21","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T21:07:21","slug":"staff-picks-pop-rock-and-bear-hock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/29\/staff-picks-pop-rock-and-bear-hock\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Pop, Rock, and Bear Hock"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"From<\/a>

From Barry Guy\u2019s Witch Gong Game ll\/l0<\/em> (1993).<\/p><\/div>\n

John Swartzwelder has written more Simpsons<\/em> episodes than any other writer (fifty-nine in total). He\u2019s also one of the most eccentric writers in the business: one story goes that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cwhen he could no longer smoke in restaurants, he bought his favorite booth from his favorite diner and had it installed in his home.\u201d Since leaving The Simpsons<\/em> in 2003, he has self-published a novel each year, all of which are available on his Web site<\/a>. After reading his first novel, The Time Machine Did It<\/em>, I\u2019m not surprised that Swartzwelder is the same person who\u00a0introduced now-classic Simpsons<\/em> characters such as Cletus Spuckler, Stampy the Elephant, and the three-eyed fish Blinky (who has now become a symbol among pundits for nuclear waste and wildlife mutation). The novels are pure screwball, honoring\u00a0the comedies of the Marx Brothers and Preston Sturges as Swartzwelder dismisses any narrative rule for laughs. In The Time Machine Did It<\/em>, a private detective named Frank Burly (\u201cto give prospective clients the idea that I was a burly kind of man … and who would be frank with them at all times\u201d) finds himself traveling through time for a supposed multimillionaire who wakes\u00a0up one day to find that everything he owns\u00a0is\u00a0gone. The plotline includes a homemade time machine and a town taken over by criminals, but why the novel works is the simple fact that it never takes itself too seriously. \u201cOn an impulse I mooned most of the 1950\u2019s as I went by. I don\u2019t know what makes me do these things. I guess it\u2019s just part of my charm.\u201d \u2014Justin Alvarez<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In outline, it reads like something made up by Roberto Bola\u00f1o: an Austrian writer crosses America, wracked by nightmares and visions and pursued by his mysterious, estranged wife. Peter Handke\u2019s 1972 novella\u00a0Short Letter, Long Farewell<\/em><\/a>\u00a0helped inspire the American \u201croad movies\u201d\u00a0of Wim Wenders, and if Bola\u00f1o didn\u2019t know the book, there is a strong family resemblance. As the critic Wayne Koestenbaum put it, the two writers share an \u201cability to sound sane (though vacant-souled) about insane circumstances,\u201d whether these involve a desert sunset or a restaurant serving bear hock\u00a0\u00e0 la Daniel Boone.\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

That Olivier Messiaen\u2019s \u201cQuartet for the End of Time\u201d is, in part, a transmutation of birdsong into\u00a0lines of music has oddly come up several times over the past month, in the course of putting together the Fall issue and elsewhere. At the same time, I\u2019ve found myself returning periodically to Music & Literature<\/em><\/a>\u2019s impressive fourth issue to gaze at the work of British composer Barry Guy, whose graphic scores are translations of sensory experiences relating to literature, painting, and architecture and visual reflections of movement, energy, and pitch. So it felt like the stars had fully aligned when I read Christian Wiman\u2019s \u201ctranslations\u201d of Osip Mandelstam, from a small collection called Stolen Air<\/em><\/a>. Instead of faithfully translating Mandelstam\u2019s poems, Wiman has created versions of them: though some closely resemble the originals, others, he says, are \u201cliberal transcriptions\u201d and \u201ccollisions and collusions\u201d between the two poets. Wiman sought to get at the sound<\/em> of Mandelstam\u2019s language, its music, without having any knowledge of Russian but feeling buoyed by Mandelstam\u2019s notion of a poet\u2019s \u201csecret hearing.\u201d And so we get silvery, jostling lines like \u201cI love the early animal of her, \/ These woozy, easy swings\u201d and \u201cBetter to live alluvial, \/ Better to live layered downward, \/ To be a man of sand, of hollows, shallows \/ To cling to sleeves of water \/ And to let them go\u2014\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong> <\/p>\n

During my subway rides\u00a0this summer I\u2019ve been working my way through\u00a0Leonard Michaels: The Collected Stories<\/em>, a marvelous compendium of his\u00a0short fiction from 1969 to 2000\u2014epigrammatic stories that are inimitably raw and perspicacious. My favorite thus far, and probably among the most anthologized, is \u201cMurderers,\u201d a three-and-a-half-page outr\u00e9 narrative, from 1975, about four adolescent boys who sneak onto a Brooklyn rooftop to spy on their rabbi and his wife. They watch as the couple dances and, shortly afterward, makes love, with the great metropolis in the background. Phillip Liebowitz, the narrator, reflects, \u201cI could tantalize myself with this brief ocular perversion, the general cleansing nihil of a view. This was the beginning of philosophy. I indulged in ambience, in space like eons \u2026 How many times had we risked shameful discovery, scrambling up the ladder, exposed to their windows\u2014if they looked. We risked life itself to achieve this eminence.\u201d The musings of young Phillip erase all shame in the boys\u2019 watching, so that we\u2019re left wondering what, if anything, was shameful to begin with. Certainly not the \u201cthe Statue of Liberty putting the sky to the torch\u201d nor \u201cthe shimmering nullity, gray, blue, and green murmuring over rooftops and towers\u201d nor \u201cthe view of the holy man and his wife.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pop Sonnets<\/a>, a Tumblr devoted to rewriting the choruses of pop songs as Shakespearean sonnets, has been making the rounds on social media lately. Each entry is charming and razor sharp in its appropriation of Elizabethan tropes and terminology. For the uninitiated, sample the concluding couplet of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s \u201cSingle Ladies\u201d: \u201cIf you truly did wish to win my hand, \/ you should have graced it with a wedding band.\u201d Pop Sonnets is notable not only for its fun rhymes but for its design, which channels the original typesetting of the 1609 version of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets, heightening the juxtaposition of old and new, high and low. Sarah Werner at\u00a0The Collation\u00a0<\/em>(the blog of the Folger Shakespeare Library) provides some\u00a0smart analysis<\/a>\u00a0of sonnet typography and what makes the styling of Pop Sonnets feel authentically \u201cold timey.\u201d \u2014Chantal McStay<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earlier in June, I stumbled upon a Banksy graffito\u00a0near Borough Market\u2014an ape bearing a sandwich board<\/a>\u00a0that read\u00a0\u201cLaugh now, but one day we\u2019ll be in charge.\u201d Banksy\u2019s\u00a0satirical work has gained widespread media acclaim, and\u00a0his recent work, Mobile Lovers<\/em><\/a>, sold for \u00a3403,000 despite being situated on a public wall in Bristol. As the press stimulates interest in this anonymous artist who communicates strictly through his work and e-mail, I, like many others, couldn\u2019t help but notice his outright appropriation of the Parisian graffiti artist Blek le Rat. Revolutionizing street graffiti in the eighties\u00a0with his stenciling technique and politically oriented works, Blek le Rat had a colossal influence on subsequent graffiti artists\u2014notably Banksy, who practically replicated his work\u00a0TV Helmet<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and included Blek\u2019s signature tag of a rat in his own murals. According to Banksy, \u201cEvery time I think I\u2019ve painted something original I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only 20 years earlier.\u201d Yet the notoriety that seemingly bypassed Blek le Rat and has clung to Banksy can oddly enough be attributed to the latter\u2019s\u00a0ventures outside graffiti. Banksy brought a rebellious and seditious nature to his graffiti at a degree unmatched by Blek le Rat, from surreptitiously hanging his works in New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum to setting up a statue of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner in Disneyland. \u2014Luc Lampietti<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!\u00a0Unbelievable!<\/em>\u201d\u00a0<\/em>So begins the chorus of Kate Bush\u2019s 1978 hit, (unsurprisingly named)\u00a0\u201cWow<\/a>.\u201d Well, this week certainly marked an unbelievable event in the calendar of every Bush enthusiast: the start of her sold-out tour in the UK, her first tour\u00a0in thirty-five years. And she certainly did not disappoint, judging from the reports of giant paper airplanes, chain saws, and bird-masked figures that filled the Hammersmith Apollo\u00a0on Tuesday. The theatrical staging of her latest performance only strengthens the impression I have had of her since my first encounter with\u00a0Wuthering Heights<\/a><\/em>\u2014as a singer who not only performs her songs but also dramatizes them into fantastical narratives that can transport the listener from \u201cthe wiley, windy moors\u201d to the futuristic science labs of\u00a0Experiment IV<\/a><\/em>. Her flexibility and creativity as an artist mean that her tour has, inevitably, exploded onto the scene like\u00a0\u201ca rubber band bouncing back to life<\/a>.\u201d \u2014Helena Sutcliffe<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Swartzwelder has written more Simpsons episodes than any other writer (fifty-nine in total). He\u2019s also one of the most eccentric writers in the business: one story goes that\u00a0\u201cwhen he could no longer smoke in restaurants, he bought his favorite booth from his favorite diner and had it installed in his home.\u201d Since leaving The […]<\/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":[2552,15133,12887,11886,9924,15131,6386,15136,2225,46,15132,15134,3395,15135,165,24,948,962,6505,530,11870,2474],"class_list":["post-76118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-banksy","tag-barry-guy","tag-beyonce","tag-blek-le-rat","tag-christian-wiman","tag-folger-shakespeare-library","tag-graffiti","tag-john-swartzwelder","tag-kate-bush","tag-music","tag-music-literature","tag-olivier-messiaen","tag-osip-mandelstam","tag-peter-handke","tag-poetry","tag-roberto-bolano","tag-shakespeare","tag-sonnets","tag-the-simpsons","tag-translation","tag-wayne-koestenbaum","tag-wim-wenders"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Pop, Rock, and Bear Hock by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 29, 2014 \u2013 John Swartzwelder has written more Simpsons episodes than any other writer (fifty-nine in total). 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