{"id":87082,"date":"2015-06-26T19:26:40","date_gmt":"2015-06-26T23:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=87082"},"modified":"2016-04-03T18:17:50","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T22:17:50","slug":"staff-picks-a-mongoose-civique-and-a-maestro-of-the-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/26\/staff-picks-a-mongoose-civique-and-a-maestro-of-the-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: A Mongoose Civique and a Maestro of the Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Love Wins: Stephen Hiltner, our senior editor, designed this collage in honor of today\u2019s Supreme Court decision.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"heaven\"<\/a>\u201cWriting religious poetry in the twentieth century is very difficult.\u201d So says Czeslaw Milosz in his 1994 interview<\/a> with The Paris Review. <\/em>This, he noted, could be one of the greatest challenges facing the poets of our time: \u201cthe incapacity of contemporary man to think in religious terms.\u201d Twenty years later, Rowan Ricardo Phillips published a poem in our summer 2014 issue that begins \u201cNot knowing the difference between Heaven \/ And Paradise, he called them both Heaven.\u201d That poem appears again in Phillips\u2019 new collection, Heaven<\/em><\/a>. In contemporary poetry, there are few book-length meditations on heaven. It\u2019s strange. What\u2019s more, it\u2019s strange how strange it is: Phillips constantly reminds us that the territory is well charted. His poems pinpoint and stitch together small, disparate nodes of heavenly wisdom scattered through our largely earthbound canon. (Ovid, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, to name a few of the patron saints.) The flow of astronomical allusions, like the subject itself, feels mundane at a glance and somewhat trite to mention. But as Phillips brings them close with the tight scope of his scholarship and lyric observation, they become unfamiliar, and heaven becomes something new, \u201cthis star-seized evening that\u2019s \/ Unreeling and unreals.\u201d \u2014Jake Orbison<\/strong><\/p>\n

I managed to get my hands on a copy of Elena Ferrante\u2019s fourth Neapolitan Novel,\u00a0The Story of a Lost Child<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(out in September), and have been able to focus on little else all week. In this final installment of the story of Elena and Lila, Ferrante delivers some seismic-level surprises that somehow don\u2019t feel contrived, that instead unearth a new internal symmetry beneath the dynamics established in the earlier books. As Ferrante shapes and reshapes her narrative, she watches generations of Italian intellectuals do the same for that of their country, continuously redefining the acceptable terms for political and social engagement.\u00a0When they\u2019re not fixating on Ferrante\u2019s anonymity, reviewers like to talk about \u201cthe inner lives of women\u201d and \u201cfemale friendship\u201d in these novels, as if Ferrante is venturing into entirely uncharted territory\u2014as if women\u2019s interiority hasn\u2019t dominated a good part of the past several hundred years\u2019 fictional output. Maybe Ferrante\u2019s femaleness gets emphasized because we don\u2019t have the vocabulary to describe what is indisputably different about her books, to explain why they read like a revelation to so many readers\u2014this one included. \u2014Rebecca Panovka
<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"1958_Corsair_Daten\"<\/a>The new issue of Cabinet<\/a><\/em> includes Matthea Harvey\u2019s canny meditations on off-white, that most beguilingly impure of colors. Her column taught me some literary trivia. I should have known, but did not, that in the fifties Ford invited Marianne Moore to name its new car. They asked her \u201cto convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design.\u201d (Would that today\u2019s auto execs wrote with such style!) The names Moore suggested<\/a>\u2014Mongoose Civique, Thunderblender, and Pastelogram among them\u2014are poems unto themselves, but Ford opted instead for the prosaic Edsel, and the car proved unappealing to American motorists; it was manufactured for only three years. Moore hid her disappointment well. She even mentions the episode in her 1961 Art of Poetry interview<\/a>: \u201cI got deep in motors and turbines and recessed wheels \u2026 That seemed to me a very worthy pursuit. I was more interested in the mechanics. I am interested in mechanisms, mechanics in general.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"410j4xhqPaL\"<\/a>Thomas Bernhard is the quintessential literary hater, a maestro of the rant renowned for his precisely calibrated shade\u2014usually cast at the artistic pretensions of the Austrian bourgeois. I\u2019ve recently been delving into perhaps his most celebrated novel, Woodcutters<\/em>, structured as a monologue from a bitter and isolated figure. (Though aren\u2019t they all, in Bernhard?) In this case, that figure is an unnamed writer hatefully fantasizing about the attendees of an \u201cartistic party\u201d (as its hosts label it) from the reclusive pose of his \u201cwing chair.\u201d \u201cTheir artistic<\/em> preoccupations<\/em> and their artistic activity<\/em> made them seem somehow unnatural, at least to me: they had an artificial way of walking<\/em>, an artificial way of talking<\/em>; everything <\/em>about them was artificial.\u201d Bernhard delivers fugue-like waves of recursive thought, each level of guilt, regret, and recrimination following the next; his thick folds of self-consciousness accumulate until they collapse, revealing first the narrator\u2019s loss of a friend to suicide, then his abandonment of a former lover at their \u201chigh point,\u201d then empathetic identification with the guest of honor at the nefarious \u201cartistic party.\u201d \u2014Casey Henry<\/strong><\/p>\n

In her foreword to Juan Rulfo\u2019s Pedro P\u00e1ramo<\/a><\/em>, Susan Sontag writes, \u201c[This] is a classic in the truest sense. It is a book that seems, in retrospect, as if it had to be written.\u201d Indeed, since its publication in 1955, the short novel has been recognized as no less than a modern masterpiece, a seminal text in Latin American literature\u2014and one I\u2019ve been meaning to read for a while. The book opens on Juan Preciado, a man returning to Comala, the town of his birth, to meet his father, the wealthy landowner Pedro P\u00e1ramo. From here, the story cracks open to reveal an abundance of characters and narratives from both the past and present. Some are memories\u2014like Pedro and his dying lover\u2014and some are ghosts\u2014like Juan Preciado\u2019s ruthless half-brother\u2014but the narrator treats each with familiarity and a distinct air of respect. In time, through Rulfo\u2019s deft\u00a0handling of language, style, and character, Comala emerges as a surreal representation of Mexico\u2019s modernization, an image-rich depiction of the mood of an era. Sontag\u2019s claim can also be applied to the storytelling itself. The writer conveys\u2014and I certainly came to believe\u2014that his character\u2019s stories had to be written.\u00a0\u2014Jane Robbins Mize<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve recently discovered \u201cIf Our Bodies Could Talk<\/a>,\u201d a video series from The Atlantic<\/em> hosted by the infectious James Hamblin. A former radiologist turned improv comedy student, Hamblin is a senior editor at the magazine, and as a host he\u2019s more Conan O\u2019Brien than Dr. Oz; he keeps a sort of ironic distance from the topic at hand, allowing his guests the space to comfortably do their thing. The effect is conversations that feel more like chats between friends than advice on health. The person behind the camera is producer Katherine Wells, and the show is at its most entertaining when the two banter. He\u2019s funny especially in his pauses, when Wells has tosses him a barb that\u2019s stumped him. In a recent episode, titled \u201cA Rational Defense of Sleeping Alone,\u201d someone off-camera asks him, \u201cWhen was the last time you slept in a bed with another person?\u201d His face is perpetually serene but somehow always expressive, and in this moment you can see in it that he\u2019s working things out. \u201cI\u2019m not saying cuddling is a bad thing. I\u2019m not a monster,\u201d He says. \u201cI just think people should be able to talk about it, that\u2019s all.\u201d \u2014Andrew Jimenez<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWriting religious poetry in the twentieth century is very difficult.\u201d So says Czeslaw Milosz in his 1994 interview with The Paris Review. This, he noted, could be one of the greatest challenges facing the poets of our time: \u201cthe incapacity of contemporary man to think in religious terms.\u201d Twenty years later, Rowan Ricardo Phillips published […]<\/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":[13206,18575,5386,2006,2778,5009,7515],"class_list":["post-87082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-james-hamblin","tag-juan-rulfo","tag-marianne-moore","tag-matthea-harvey","tag-rowan-ricardo-phillips","tag-thomas-bernhard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: A Mongoose Civique and a Maestro of the Rant by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 26, 2015 \u2013 \u201cWriting religious poetry in the twentieth century is very difficult.\u201d So says Czeslaw Milosz in his 1994 interview with The Paris Review. 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