{"id":87618,"date":"2015-07-10T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T16:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=87618"},"modified":"2015-07-10T16:39:19","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T20:39:19","slug":"staff-picks-moaning-sobbing-trolling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/10\/staff-picks-moaning-sobbing-trolling\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Moaning, Sobbing, Trolling"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Oksana

Oksana Baiul, after her Olympic gold medal\u2013winning performance in 1994.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"unnamed\"<\/a>Just yesterday, I snuck an advance-reader\u2019s copy of Lorenzo Chiera\u2019s\u00a0Shards: Fragments of Verses<\/a><\/em>, translated from the Italian by Lawrence Ferlinghetti,\u00a0<\/em>off a colleague\u2019s bookshelf and devoured it on my subway ride home. The pocket-size book comprises delicious morsels of twelfth-century verse by an otherwise unknown fellow from Testaccio. Though the fragments\u2014plucked from scratches on parchment paper or fiber sacks\u2014are no more than a few lines each, they brim with raunch and grime and love. Chiera breathes sex into most verses, which are bound to make one blush with either delight or despair. Some read as playful winks, others as moans, and still\u00a0others as desperate, carnal prayers. \u201cHearing Chiera for the first time,\u201d Ferlinghetti writes\u00a0in his introduction, \u201cwe soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years \u2026 He\u2019s vulgar. He\u2019s mad. He\u2019s uncouth. Yet he is innocent.\u201d Here\u2019s a little taste of Chiera himself: \u201cSexy Nonny \/ in her silk nun\u2019s habit \/ behind the arras \/ of the cult of the Virgin \/ stuck her tongue in my mouth \/ when I was fourteen \/ Made me cream.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve never read any fan fiction, and I never made it all the way through Pretty Woman,<\/em> so devotees of either may take this recommendation with a grain of salt, but I loved Michael Friedman\u2019s novel\u00a0Martian Dawn<\/a><\/em>, all about a couple of movie stars (viz Richard and Julia) whose off-screen romance is strained by a visit to the Red Planet. No doubt half the jokes went over my head. It didn’t matter. Friedman\u2019s urbane silliness and \u00e9lan hark back to the glittering twilight of high camp\u2014without seeming to hark back. Hats off to Little A for reissuing Martian Dawn and Other Novels<\/em>. I didn\u2019t know anyone could still make it look so easy to have so much fun on the page. \u2014Lorin Stein\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Lorin once asked me which novels had made me cry. I could only name one at the time, but now I have two books on my list. The new addition is Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s The Small Backs of Children<\/a><\/i>. I have never felt so wrung out by a novel and yet simultaneously invigorated. I mean all of this in recommendation: it\u2019s a terrifically good novel and powerfully written, and it\u2019s refreshing to be punched in the gut by a book now and then. The narrative follows a handful of women named only by their relation to art\u2014the writer, the poet, the performance artist, the photographer (a trio of men\u2014the filmmaker, the playwright, and the painter\u2014exist mainly on the periphery)\u2014as they by turns photograph, mourn, and track down a young girl in war-torn Eastern Europe. Yuknavitch is also the author of a memoir about grief and sexuality, and her novel draws to great effect\u00a0on the fraught overlap between women\u2019s bodies\u00a0and minds. But all agency in this novel belongs to women, and art is ever their recourse. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1994, at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, figure skater Oksana Baiul\u2014then only sixteen\u2014became the first athlete from independent Ukraine\u00a0to win a gold medal. After her final\u00a0routine, overwhelmed by the anticipation of her score, Baiul was handed a bouquet of flowers and a teddy bear and was then shown sobbing on camera\u00a0for what feels like an eternity<\/a>. It\u2019s a memorable moment in Olympic history, one in which a young nation\u2019s aspirations are expressed through an unlikely adolescent hero. It\u2019s also the (unlikely) focus of a fascinating\u00a0new short film<\/a>\u00a0(currently\u00a0playing in New York at IFC<\/a>) written and directed by Kitty Green. Green, an Australian filmmaker, summoned a handful of Ukrainian girls\u2014variously impacted by Ukraine\u2019s ongoing conflict with Russia\u2014to audition for the role of Baiul. She dressed them up in lacy pink costumes, sat them in front of a camera, and, after a brief series of warm-up questions, asked them to enact the scene of Baiul\u2019s breakdown. The film, The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul<\/i>,\u00a0is utterly transfixing, especially as the ridiculous pomposity of the makeup, costumes, and bouquets begins to bleed away in the face of the girls\u2019 raw and genuine emotions. While many questions are left unanswered\u2014Did Green initially set out to capture these moments? Were the girls aware that their auditions would provide the material for the film?\u2014it becomes clear that the premise serves (cleverly, if circuitously) as a window into the psyche of children marred by the threat and the actualization of war.\u00a0\u2014Stephen Andrew Hiltner<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Ah, Wimbledon, the close-cropped grass, the all-white rule, the thwack of racket against ball, and the wonderland-like madness. Louisa Thomas\u2019s recent essay in Grantland<\/em>, \u201cAdventures in Wonderlawn<\/a>: Living the Surreal Life at Wimbledon,\u201d playfully thumbs its nose while gaping in awe at the Victorian facade of the legendary courts. Ever since David Foster Wallace published his now-famous tennis essays, it\u2019s been fun to watch, and enjoyable to read, sportswriters one-up each other in metaphor and essayistic lens when writing about tennis. It\u2019s impressive to read Thomas mimic Lewis Carroll and paint Wimbledon as genteel and fey: \u201cWimbledon Hill Road climbs a hill to Wimbledon. To get to the church, take Church Road. The Common is\u00a0the field open to all. The green grass is English grass, and the leaves on the trees wave like little flags.\u201d It\u2019s enough to make me wish I were\u00a0there, even though Thomas has\u00a0convinced me that none of it is real.\u00a0\u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"cover-issue-19\"<\/a>Last weekend, I came across Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz\u2019s anthology The Little Magazine in Contemporary America<\/em><\/a>, a collection of essays written by members of the \u201clitmag\u201d community today\u2014a community that includes the likes of Dave Eggers, Keith Gessen, <\/span>Bomb<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Bitch<\/em>, and\u00a0<\/span>Poetry<\/em>. At large, they discuss the contemporary significance of the little magazine by describing their own experiences creating, publishing, and perpetuating journals. I tend to agree with <\/span>Stephen Burt\u2019s takeaway<\/a> in <\/span>The New Yorker <\/em>(featured this week on the<\/span>\u00a0Daily<\/em>): new magazines must be exactly that\u2014<\/span>new\u2014<\/em>and, better yet, necessary. The essayists\u2019 prose isn\u2019t perfect, and the collection isn\u2019t comprehensive, but Morris and Diaz\u2019s anthology is nevertheless a thoughtful and much-needed champion of the vitality and creativity of literary journals today. <\/span>\u2014Jane Robbins Mize<\/strong><\/p>\n

I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie\u2019s story \u201cThe Shivering\u201d in\u00a0Africa39<\/em><\/a>\u2014an excellent anthology of short stories by young sub-Saharan African writers\u2014and followed it back to her collection\u00a0The Thing Around Your Neck<\/a>.<\/em> Adichie has been (softly) criticized for straining to make political points, but her stories are driven by characters, not global events, and she manages to integrate broad social commentary with fine-grained analysis of interpersonal relationships in a way that brings out the equivalence between the two in lived experience. In one story, she questions the image of multicultural tolerance projected by an African American painter who cites \u201cthe motherland\u201d as a chief inspiration. In another, she lampoons a British editor who convenes a workshop for African writers, only to dismiss most of their work for failing to engage with the large-scale strife that, in his view, characterizes the continent; his notion of an \u201curgent\u201d story, Adichie writes, \u201creads like a piece from\u00a0The Economist<\/em>\u00a0with cartoon characters painted in.\u201d Adichie doesn\u2019t write those kinds of stories. And she challenges the expectations of the readers who, like the British editor, might turn to the fiction of a Nigerian-born writer for the human drama behind world-news headlines. \u2014Rebecca Panovka<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last weekend, watching fireworks bloom over the small town where I grew up, I felt a sheepish kind of patriotism that occurs to me only once a year\u2014so I picked up Joe Brainard\u2019s\u00a0I Remember<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>a book that advances like a long Fourth of July parade. The book\u2019s form\u2014all short passages that begin with the phrase \u201cI remember\u201d\u2014is incredibly obvious, but also not, and it would drive any sensible writer insane with jealousy. Dan Chiasson, in his own sheepishly patriotic poem, \u201cBicentennial,\u201d\u00a0which first appeared in the magazine<\/a>, wrote of a \u201cwish to get caught up in something \/ Precisely unlike a poem, unlike writing \/ For its straightforwardness, its power \/ That is not the power of half secrecy \/ \u2026 something enormous\u00a0 \/ And potentially dangerous.\u201d\u00a0I Remember<\/em>\u00a0might just be that something.\u00a0(Chiasson seems to agree<\/a>.) The book reads to me like both a distillation and a dismissal of the whole writing enterprise; it\u2019s like everything I\u2019ve ever read and, in that likeness, unlike anything. Though physically slim, the book gestures always toward the infinite morass of memory\u2014Brainard could go on forever. We all could. I can imagine that, at some point in the future, all writing will look like Brainard\u2019s: a steady listing of the facts, governed and driven only by the easy movement of the mind. \u2014Oliver Preston<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"KanyeWestBretEastonEllis\"<\/a>Though he\u2019s on a sabbatical from fiction, Bret Easton Ellis isn\u2019t avoiding controversy. The Internet has been aglow over his opinions about \u201cGeneration Wuss<\/a>\u201d and its sensitive \u201csnowflakes,\u201d and the literary community often scratches its head over his trollish comments about his \u201caesthetic\u201d preference for Sharknado <\/em>over Fruitvale Station<\/em>. These opinions have now been formalized in Ellis\u2019s recent venture, the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast<\/a>. Ellis opens with a scripted rant in the vein of his anti-\u201csnowflake\u201d Op-Eds, then jumps abruptly into questioning the guests. Yet Ellis\u2019s pulse of notoriety and danger elicits both commerisating and gossipy divulgences from his guests. Matthew Weiner used to wear eyeliner and affect the use of a cane at private school. Jonathan Ames used to frequent Ellis\u2019s celeb-studded New York parties, \u201csober\u201d and \u201cscared,\u201d and once asked Diane von Furstenberg, \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d after which he was pointedly ignored for the rest of the night. Ellis\u2019s participation in the perpetually-in-outcry status of modern culture is worth the price of admission alone, though having guests like Marilyn Manson discuss crying during The Notebook <\/em>and Ariel Pink talk the \u201cevil\u201d of Frank Sinatra doesn\u2019t really hurt. \u2014Casey Henry<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just yesterday, I snuck an advance-reader\u2019s copy of Lorenzo Chiera\u2019s\u00a0Shards: Fragments of Verses, translated from the Italian by Lawrence Ferlinghetti,\u00a0off a colleague\u2019s bookshelf and devoured it on my subway ride home. The pocket-size book comprises delicious morsels of twelfth-century verse by an otherwise unknown fellow from Testaccio. Though the fragments\u2014plucked from scratches on parchment paper […]<\/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":[35,828,7758,16743,280,666,154,71,9916,79,18726,6870,12374,18732,5867,594,18733,18727,1491,13045,15888,18728,8014,165,200,18731,18708,288,3045,2663],"class_list":["post-87618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-art","tag-bret-easton-ellis","tag-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie","tag-crying","tag-dan-chiasson","tag-dave-eggers","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-fiction","tag-figure-skating","tag-film","tag-i-remember","tag-joe-brainard","tag-jonathan-ames","tag-kitty-green","tag-lawrence-ferlinghetti","tag-lewis-carroll","tag-lidia-yuknavitch","tag-lorenzo-chiera","tag-louisa-thomas","tag-matthew-weiner","tag-michael-friedman","tag-oksana-baiul","tag-olympics","tag-poetry","tag-science-fiction","tag-sport","tag-stephen-burt","tag-tennis","tag-ukraine","tag-wimbledon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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