{"id":87894,"date":"2015-07-17T12:20:58","date_gmt":"2015-07-17T16:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=87894"},"modified":"2016-04-03T18:18:39","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T22:18:39","slug":"staff-picks-coates-cartels-caesar-cigarettes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/17\/staff-picks-coates-cartels-caesar-cigarettes\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Coates, Cartels, Caesar, Cigarettes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"slashmag\"<\/a>

Covers of Slash<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are writers you know about and writers you read. Before I heard him speak, Ta-Nehisi Coates was only the former to me\u2014he came to my school and spoke to a packed auditorium about American self-conception, idealism, and his role in dislodging us from it. This week I\u2019ve been sprinting through his amazing new book, Between the World and Me<\/a><\/em>. A mixture of personal and cultural, critical and historical, the book is written entirely to Coates\u2019s son, a teenager today. It seems that nearly every<\/a> comment<\/a> on Coates <\/a>is excerpting him, lauding him, or calling him<\/a> James Baldwin<\/a>, and these staff picks are short, so I hope to get away with simply nodding my head. Yes, rewarding and complex; yes, generous and intimate; yes, \u201crace is the child of racism, not the father.\u201d Yes, an easy book to know about, but a better one to read. One of my clearest memories of his speech was the final question and answer. Someone\u2014an older woman, a professor, I figured\u2014stood up to thank him and asked something like \u201cHow do we get these young people to listen to you?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m a writer,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not my job.\u201d \u2014Jake Orbison<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"gamelife\"<\/a>Anyone who came of age in the eighties or nineties will grok Gamelife<\/a><\/em>, Michael Clune\u2019s memoir about the computer games of his childhood. But I hope others\u2014those who dismiss gaming as merely narcotic or those who regard old games as curios\u2014will read it, too. Clune captures not just the palm-sweating, self-flagellating thrill of early PC games but their talismanic role in the life of the mind. With their primitive, repetitious designs, these games provided a grammar for children, a way of apprehending the world\u2014I remember feeling it myself, that scary, precarious sense of empowerment, the way reality seemed to bend to accommodate the airtight logic of Pirates! <\/em>or Wolfenstein 3D<\/em>. Games, Clune writes, teach us the rules for being alive \u201cin a way nothing else can. They teach us about death, about character, about fate, about action and identity. They turn insights into habit. The habits bore through our defenses. Computer games reach us.\u201d His memoir is also a sharp portrait of post-Reagan America, when communism was vanquished, history was over, and the shopping center was enshrined in the national imagination. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the\u00a0sophistication of Joaqu\u00edn \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s escape<\/a>\u00a0last week from a maximum-security prison isn\u2019t enough to convince you of the influence (and the reach) of Mexico\u2019s drug cartels, then Matthew Heineman\u2019s documentary\u00a0Cartel Land<\/a><\/em> will. The film focuses on the leaders of two vigilante groups dedicated to fighting off the cartels\u2014one in the United States (Arizona Border Recon, led by Tim Foley) and one in the Mexican state of Michoac\u00e1n (Autodefensa, led by Jos\u00e9 Manuel Mireles).\u00a0Cartel Land<\/em>\u00a0makes no attempts to tell a sanitized or digestible version of the truth; it\u2019s rife with ambiguity, complicity, racism, and brutality. But from all the confusion emerges a compelling\u2014and impressively crafted\u2014narrative arc, one in which resistance, in all its forms, takes center stage amid unimaginable, and seemingly unconquerable, corruption. \u2014Stephen Hiltner<\/strong><\/p>\n

We all love war narratives, those Homeric masterpieces that deliver timeless truths\u2014but Sam Sacks\u2019s piece in the latest issue of Harper\u2019s,<\/em> \u201cFirst-Person Shooters<\/a>: What\u2019s missing in contemporary war fiction,\u201d takes no prisoners. Sacks admits that \u201cwar is hell, but its themes make critics purr\u201d; he bemoans the genre\u2019s \u201cself-involvement,\u201d its nearly identical perspectives \u201cof individual soldiers who can\u2019t comprehend what they\u2019ve experienced,\u201d and its facile emphasis on \u201cpersonal redemption.\u201d Nearly all contemporary war fiction, he reminds us, has been \u201ccultivated in the hothouse of creative-writing programs. No wonder so much of it looks alike.\u201d His argument is less about war stories and more about competent fiction, the kind that\u2019s lauded for its subject matter and honesty but amounts to simple confession. Takedowns are usually banal, and it\u2019s easy to hit the biggest targets, but this is an important piece: \u201cone of the jobs of literature,\u201d Sacks writes, \u201cis to wake us from stupor. But in matters of war, our sleep is deep, and the best attempts of today\u2019s veterans have done little to disturb it.\u201d \u2014Jeffery Gleaves
<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"1_-_Autodefensa_member_standing_guard_in_Michoaca\u00a6\u00fcn,_Mexico,_from_CARTEL_LAND,_a_film_by_Matthew_Heineman_2880_1620_85\"<\/a>

A still from Cartel Land<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThis guy, whose early music with his band has instigated most of the present punk mentality, this guy who in concert behaves like a possessed puppet has just released the most formal, esoteric, subterranean album you\u2019re bound to hear for some time.\u201d This is from a review of Iggy Pop\u2019s album The Idiot<\/em>, but it strikes me as an apt description, too, of the publication in which the review appeared: Slash<\/em>. I\u2019m familiar with the covers of Slash<\/em>\u2014even if you\u2019ve never seen them, you\u2019ll know them when you do\u2014but I\u2019ve never glimpsed inside an issue until now. Archivist Ryan Richardson recently put the entire twenty-nine-issue run of the LA punk zine (published from 1977 to 1980) online<\/a>, and I\u2019m frankly surprised by how professional it looks, how nicely designed and well written, while still maintaining a zine aesthetic. Even the ads are handsome. For me, though, the best parts of Slash<\/em> are Gary Panter\u2019s incomparable Jimbo<\/em> comics, which made their debut in the magazine. Jimbo even made the cover, in August 1979, where he chided, \u201cThe world don\u2019t deserve this good of a magazine!!\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

The smell of lit tobacco occasionally drifts through the Paris Review <\/em>office, reminding me of Luc Sante\u2019s essay \u201cOur Friend the Cigarette,\u201d collected in Kill All Your Darlings<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019m not a smoker, and yet when I read Sante I find myself nodding along.\u00a0Sante reminds of the cigarette\u2019s once guiltless, universal status in our culture, from the\u00a0prison yards\u00a0to the mouths of Diana Vreeland and Jean-Paul Belmondo.\u00a0He traces the more intimate joys of smoking, too\u2014the tiny details a nonsmoker would never think of, like the m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois\u00a0of hand, mouth, and lungs that ignites that delicious rush to the head; the way an ashtray functions as a sepulcher for the fallen ones; the distinction between the thumb\u2013index finger hold and the fork method. For Sante, the cigarette confers power and serves as punctuation, accessory, and friend. \u201cCigarettes, like zoological parasites,\u201d he writes, \u201care the secret sharers of countless lives, of moments of impenetrable intimacy. They have witnessed romance, rage, epiphany, confusion, elation, despair, serenity, chaos.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"sleeperhold\"<\/a>I\u2019ve been reading Jibade-Khalil Huffman\u2019s stunning, strange new collection,\u00a0Sleeper Hold<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Aside from writing poems, Huffman is also a\u00a0visual artist<\/a>, though to say \u201calso\u201d is maybe redundant: his work in text, projection, and collage shares an open border with his poetry. Many will reach for the word collage<\/em> to describe Huffman\u2019s odd, vernacular poetry\u2014his contortions of register, his straight-faced (even solemn!) allusions to celebrities like Cedric the Entertainer, his ever-right-branching sentences\u2014and I\u2019m tempted to do the same. But I have the sense that collage<\/em> is most often used to describe bad found poetry, which\u00a0Sleeper Hold\u00a0<\/em>decidedly isn\u2019t. A better point of comparison might be specifically\u00a0Huffman\u2019s<\/em> collage<\/a>. The forms in his collage are miraculously edgeless; as an artist he seems more interested in conflation and ambience than contrast. It\u2019s the same in his poetry. Huffman\u2019s guiding principle is elision: his sentences and subjects elide quietly into each other and into the ether, the white of the page exerting a nearly physical force on the language that passes through it. \u2014Oliver Preston<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now in its twentieth season, The Drilling Company\u2019s Shakespeare in the Parking Lot<\/a> program produces eclectic adaptations in, yes, an active Lower East Side parking lot, where the action could be interrupted at any time by a car entering or leaving the performance space. In 2010, they staged Julius Caesar<\/em> as a fight for control of a city school system, with women playing Antony, Brutus, and Cassius; this year, the director Hamilton Clancy reimagines As You Like It<\/em> in the Victorian era, with the Forest of Arden as a steampunk fantasy world \u201cwhere lovers can be free.\u201d Clancy turns the fight between Orlando and Charles into a slow-motion boxing match. The venue lends an improvisational feel to the performances, challenging the actors to stay true to the script while submitting to the\u00a0peculiarities of, well, the parking lot. \u2014Andrew Jimenez<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"the-tribe-cannes-2014\"<\/a>

A still from The Tribe<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

This week in movies about deaf prostitution-ring operators: The Tribe<\/a><\/em>, written and directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy.\u00a0The film made a splash at Cannes last year because its dialogue consists entirely of sign language, without subtitles; it toys with silence and alienation in unprecedented ways, tracing the crimes and misanthropic diversions of a criminal gang at an all-deaf school. Even if the novelty dims around the half-hour mark, and the more transgressive moments are couched in stretches of unexplained action\u2014sweeping shots of processional, athletic winter-wear attired Eastern Europeans are interrupted by glares of violence or sex, as in Gaspar No\u00e9\u2019s Irreversible<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s fascinating to watch a young inductee into the deaf school fall under the sway of his compromised classmates, all through sheer gesture. \u2014Casey Henry<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are writers you know about and writers you read. Before I heard him speak, Ta-Nehisi Coates was only the former to me\u2014he came to my school and spoke to a packed auditorium about American self-conception, idealism, and his role in dislodging us from it. This week I\u2019ve been sprinting through his amazing new book, […]<\/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":[18825,17,18827,18828,18826,18835,454,18824,18823,81,18837,18833,18832,53,18829,18836,18831,18834,683,18838,18830],"class_list":["post-87894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-between-the-world-and-me","tag-books","tag-cartel-land","tag-el-chapo","tag-gamelife","tag-jibade-khalil-huffman","tag-luc-sante","tag-matthew-heineman","tag-michael-clune","tag-movies","tag-myroslav-slaboshpytskiy","tag-our-friend-the-cigarette","tag-punk-rock","tag-reading","tag-sam-sacks","tag-shakespeare-in-the-parking-lot","tag-slash","tag-sleeper-hold","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-tribe","tag-war-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Coates, Cartels, Caesar, Cigarettes by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 17, 2015 \u2013 There are writers you know about and writers you read. 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