{"id":89708,"date":"2015-09-11T14:55:47","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T18:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89708"},"modified":"2015-09-11T16:01:07","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T20:01:07","slug":"staff-picks-yeltsin-and-yelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/staff-picks-yeltsin-and-yelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Yeltsin and Yelling"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"theylive\"<\/a>

From They Live<\/i>, 1988.<\/p><\/div>\n

We published Padgett Powell\u2019s \u201cBoris Yeltsin Spotted in a Bar\u201d in our Summer issue<\/a>. It spoke to me, but I don\u2019t know why. It\u2019s basically a list of items you\u2019d find in a well-stocked hardware store, followed by a meditation on a drunk spouse, followed by the appearance, in an American bar, of someone who may or may not be the deceased Russian statesman. But its narrator, with his digressive style, is lonely in a way that makes him obsessed with everyday mysteries, and he felt very alive to me, in his mania. That story is from Powell\u2019s new collection, Cries for Help, Various\u00ad<\/a>, <\/em>where\u2014be still my beating heart\u2014it sits among a Yeltsin trilogy, rounded out by \u201cYeltsin Dancing\u201d and \u201cYeltsin and Canaries.\u201d As with the rest of Cries for Help<\/em>, these stories are at once absurd and plaintive; they generate the kind of curiosity you feel when you see one boot sitting in the middle of the street, or the same stranger in three different neighborhoods in a day. Critics sometimes dismiss Powell\u2019s fiction\u2014as with Barthelme\u2019s before him\u2014as directionless riffing, but these aren\u2019t non sequiturs: his sentences gather pathos as they accumulate. He\u2019s hidden a lot of sadness in such a funny book. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last weekend, I rewatched\u00a0John Carpenter\u2019s 1988 film\u00a0They Live<\/em>, a subversive and satirical take on capitalism. Midway through the film, with the planet in jeopardy, two protagonists engage in an exhausting six-minute fight; one has insisted that the other don sunglasses that allow him to see Earth\u2019s invading aliens. I see now that the scene is an astute comment on human nature: even when the future of the planet is at stake, people can\u2019t be trusted to make the right decisions. This realization comes only from having read Lee Billing\u2019s essay at Nautilus<\/em><\/a> about digging into Stanislaw Lem\u2019s early sixties\u00a0philosophical tract,\u00a0Summa Technologiae<\/em>. The book\u2014which sounds dense but also brilliant\u2014examines questions about our relationship with technological advances, such as \u201cWhere are the absolute limits for our knowledge and our achievement, and will these boundaries be formed by the fundamental laws of nature or by the inherent limitations of our psyche?\u201d In Lem\u2019s appraisal, the potential obsolescence of the human race will be determined by the unpredictability of human behavior\u2014an unpredictability he experienced firsthand as a Polish Jew in World War II: \u201cWe were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised \u2026\u00a0Some saw its shadow, or thought they did, but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute, ran with enthusiasm, devotion\u2014to secure, to appease, to tame the future.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick
<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Cassandra-at-the-Wedding_2048x2048\"<\/a><\/strong>My mother is getting married in a few weeks, so I thought I\u2019d finally read Dorothy Baker\u2019s 1962 novel, Cassandra at the Wedding<\/a><\/em>. The book, which spans a couple of days in the Sierras, is about a set of twins: Jude, the more conventional of the two, is to be married, and Cass, a gay, crass, slightly unhinged academic, is determined to set the whole thing aflame. (Don\u2019t worry, I didn\u2019t get any ideas.) What unfolds is a cocktail of witty banter, asphyxiating neurosis, and the absurd effects of love. My favorite moments are the small caesuras from all the commotion\u2014the ones where Cassandra thinks of her childhood cat, Tacky, \u201chow understanding, how feline, peaceful and deep\u201d he was; where she remembers all the sex she had as her \u201cRimbaud phase\u201d; where she imagines how pleasurable it\u2019d be to have a bat caught in her hair: \u201cI\u2019d talk to it in a low, calm voice, tell it to relax, and trust me \u2026 It would lie there resting, probably reflecting that peoples\u2019 hair isn\u2019t so bad as bats have always been taught to believe.\u201d Baker thought her own work was \u201cnot quite good enough<\/a>,\u201d this book proves the very opposite. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

Several months ago I stumbled upon John Berger\u2019s slim volume of essays and poems, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos<\/a><\/em>. Like an earworm, the title worked its way into my mind, and I knew I had to read it. The book is divided into two parts, \u201cOnce\u201d and \u201cHere,\u201d the two poles around which Berger\u2019s meditations about time and place revolve, propelled by memory and a sense of homesickness. His writing\u2014restrained but always tending toward the lyrical\u2014walks the borderland between poetry and prose. Reading news of the waves of migrants reaching Europe has reminded me of Berger; he\u2019s written extensively on migration in books like A Seventh Man <\/em>and the trilogy Into Their Labours<\/em>. \u201cIn a railway station,\u201d he observes, \u201cthe impersonal and the intimate coexist.\u201d As I read articles like the dispatches from Anemona Hartocollis\u2019s reporter\u2019s notebook<\/a> in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> and picture the German railway stations welcoming those who\u2019ve made the arduous trek through Hungary, I recall what Berger writes in And Our Faces<\/em>: \u201cTo the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice or a set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived.\u201d \u2014Hannah LeClair<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Fat_City_2048x2048\"<\/a>I\u2019d put Leonard Gardner\u2019s Fat City<\/em><\/a>, newly reissued, in my mental TBR pile despite having never seen an actual copy; I guess I just liked the title. With aspects of western and noir, it centers on two men in a small boxing circuit in Stockton, California, in the late 1950s: one is a young, promising newcomer, and the other (you guessed it) a washed-up old-timer who drinks more than he boxes and hopes to get one more break so he can use the money to win back his ex-wife\u2014then everything will be okay again. The two, and rest of the book\u2019s characters, are shitty to everyone\u2014to women, to minorities, and above all to themselves\u2014but Gardner has a lot of love for these people, who seem to have rarely felt it. The plot is predictable, but Gardner is adept in certain modes. He does self-reproach especially well: you feel it often with his characters as they yell at girlfriends, drink themselves to sleep, and generally squander the brighter future they spend so much time hoping for. They seem exactly like folks I\u2019ve known: not characterizations of folks I\u2019ve known, but those exact folks. Fat City<\/em> is a dismal testament to blind endurance. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We published Padgett Powell\u2019s \u201cBoris Yeltsin Spotted in a Bar\u201d in our Summer issue. It spoke to me, but I don\u2019t know why. It\u2019s basically a list of items you\u2019d find in a well-stocked hardware store, followed by a meditation on a drunk spouse, followed by the appearance, in an American bar, of someone who […]<\/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":[19407,573,16399,19408,18317,53,883,15294],"class_list":["post-89708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-dorothy-baker","tag-john-berger","tag-john-carpenter","tag-leonard-gardner","tag-padgett-powell","tag-reading","tag-staff-picks","tag-stanislaw-lem"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Padgett Powell, John Berger, and More<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review is reading this week.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/staff-picks-yeltsin-and-yelling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Yeltsin and Yelling by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 11, 2015 \u2013 We published Padgett Powell\u2019s \u201cBoris Yeltsin Spotted in a Bar\u201d in our Summer issue. 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