{"id":91464,"date":"2015-10-30T16:37:36","date_gmt":"2015-10-30T20:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91464"},"modified":"2015-10-30T19:26:14","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T23:26:14","slug":"spooky-staff-picks-bat-bombs-phoney-phootey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/30\/spooky-staff-picks-bat-bombs-phoney-phootey\/","title":{"rendered":"Spooky Staff Picks: Bat Bombs, Phoney Phootey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Dorothea Tanning, Guardian Angels<\/i>, 1946, oil on canvas, 48 1\/8″ x 35″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last Halloween we recommended some things that scared us<\/a>. But there are many such things\u2014we\u2019re easily frightened\u2014so this year we\u2019re doing it again. Stay spooky.<\/em><\/p>\n

In college, I took a seminar about female Surrealist artists\u2014Remedios Varo, Unica Z\u00fcrn, Claude Cahun, and Dorothea Tanning, et al. Many of these women\u2019s life stories were harrowing, and their artwork, which often mines frightening psychological territory, is dark, humorous, visionary, and uncanny. It still creeps me out. Dorothea Tanning\u2019s paintings<\/a>, for instance, are full of tattered clothing and deserted hallways. They\u2019re haunted by somnambulant young girls and oddly sentient sunflowers. Her painting Guardian Angels<\/em> scares me whenever I look at it: strange, ragged, winged creatures that look like vicious, plucked chickens swirl and tear at each other, rippling with some obscene energy. Later in life, Tanning made forays into sculpture, fashioning soft, upholstered structures that ooze across the boundary between furniture and human figure. My favorite work of Tanning\u2019s is The Birthday<\/em>, a self-portrait in which she has painted herself stepping through an open door into a corridor that\u2019s full of other doorways. A monster\u2014sort of like one of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz<\/em>\u2014huddles, couchant, at her feet, and her expression is otherworldly. Is she letting this beast in or sending him across another threshold? \u2014Hannah LeClair\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s scary that ESPN would just go and shut down Grantland like that<\/a>\u2014as if the site hasn\u2019t consistently featured some of the best writing around on sports and everything else. And it\u2019s scary to see twenty-two years of misguided sass from the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a> all laid out. But that\u2019s just the media: there\u2019s always something scary afoot. The thing that\u2019s most haunted my dreams lately is a government plot dating back to World War II: the bat bomb. Apparently a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s, convinced the military that it could weaponize hibernating bats by strapping incendiary time bombs to them and packing them by the thousands into large metal canisters. Since so much Japanese architecture comprised paper and bamboo, Adams thought, the bats would cause a real inferno as they flew around Japan in the nighttime. The enemy\u2019s infrastructure would crumble with minimal loss of life. So the U.S. gave it a shot. \u201cIn May 1943, about 3,500 bats were collected at Carlsbad Caverns, flown to Muroc Lake, Calif., and placed in refrigerators to force them to hibernate,\u201d an October 1990 article in Air Force Magazine <\/em>explains<\/a>. \u201cOn May 21, 1943, five drops with bats outfitted with dummy bombs were made from a B-25 flying at 5,000 feet. The tests were not successful; most of the bats, not fully recovered from hibernation, did not fly and died on impact \u2026 in one test, a village simulating Japanese structures burned to the ground \u2026 a careless handler had left a door open and some bats escaped with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a general\u2019s car.\u201d Insert obligatory truth is stranger than fiction<\/em> kicker here, and enjoy your nightmares. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bat bombs. Illustration: Chris Fauver<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cImagine every sound a sigh of but one thing dying and instead of coming one after another it sighs a sigh of all at once. What would that sound like?\u201d That\u2019s the storyteller in Mark Z. Danielewski\u2019s riveting and spooky novella,\u00a0The Fifty Year Sword<\/a><\/em>. At a party one October evening at a ranch in East Texas, the shadowy storyteller arrives to tell a tale to a group of five orphans and brings with him a mysterious box held by five latches. You can see how this is going to go. Still, his story of vengeance and violence isn\u2019t fit for kids. Danielewski, a master of experimental fiction, has set the text like lines of poetry and, with the help of three seamstresses, has punctuated the story within a story with bits of embroidery. The story is also given as a serious of nestled quotations, whose marks are set in various colors indicating various speakers. \u201cWhere no quotations appear,\u201d Danielewski writes, \u201conly the worst should be assumed.\u201d Is it all \u201cphoney phootey\u201d?\u00a0I dare you to find out. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s too easy to cite the latest Republican debate as the most frightening thing I\u2019ve experienced recently, so instead I\u2019ll shamelessly imitate Dan, who last year recommended David Foster Wallace\u2019s \u201cMister Squishy,\u201d and mention another long, multivalent story from\u00a0Oblivion<\/a><\/em>, \u201cThe Soul is Not a Smithy.\u201d Its trapdoor construction positions the narrator as a disinterested participant in his own childhood horror story and an adult inheritor of his father\u2019s quiet, office-bound desperation. In one scene, an elementary school teacher writes\u00a0KILL THEM ALL<\/small>\u00a0<\/small><\/em>over and over on a whiteboard; in another, the characters go to a showing of\u00a0The Exorcist.\u00a0<\/em>But the real terror stems from the narrator\u2019s fears that to understand his father is to pity him, and that to pity his father is to fear for himself a similar quotidian dullness and isolation, in which dreams and waking life alike are arranged in unyielding banality and repetition: \u201cThe nightmares themselves always opened with a wide angle view of a number of men at desks in rows in a large, brightly lit room or hall. The desks were arranged in precise rows and columns like the desks of an R. B. Hayes classroom, but these were all more like the large, gray steel desks that the teachers had at the front of the room, and there were many, many more of them, perhaps 100 or more, each occupied by a man in suit and tie. If there were windows I do not remember noticing them.\u201d\u00a0Rarely are nightmares so harrowing as when they involve desks. Or, during this spookiest of seasons, debate lecterns. \u2014Henri Lipton<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Berlinde De Bruyckere, Romeu<\/i>, 2010.<\/p><\/div>\n

I scare easily and deliberately avoid spooky films, books, and artworks. Nevertheless, they find me. Through an interest in J. M. Coetzee (We Are All Flesh<\/em>), and a recommendation from a friend, the pained and fleshy sculptures of Berlinde De Bruyckere<\/a> sought me out. Her figures of contorted, butchered, deformed, flensed, and inchoate human and nonhuman animals horrify and astound\u2014horripilation par excellence. I only learned what horripilation<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cthe erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear, or excitement\u201d) means two years ago, after coming across it in something by David Foster Wallace;\u00a0just like Dan and Henri, I wince over his Oblivion<\/em>, especially the soul-sickening domestic scene of \u201cIncarnations of Burned Children.\u201d It\u2019s a really short, short story, so I\u2019ll give you the opening sentence and leave it at that: \u201cThe Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child\u2019s screams and the Mommy\u2019s voice gone high between them.\u201d You can read the story here<\/a>, if you must. \u2014Joshua Maserow<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like a lot of people right now, I find Drake\u2019s dance moves pretty scary. (No wonder she\u00a0used<\/em>\u00a0to call him on his cellphone.) In the video for \u201cHotline Bling<\/a>,\u201d with its trippy lights, blank space, and beautiful women, Drake makes his dancing debut, and it\u2019s far from what any of us would expect from a Young Money rapper: it\u2019s stunningly goofy.\u00a0He bobbles his head, he flicks his wrists this way and that. He\u2019s wearing a ribbed turtleneck and using his hand as a telephone, for God\u2019s sake! But what\u2019s even more frightening is how much\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0I like the song\u2014and Drake\u2014after watching the video.\u00a0As Sasha Frere-Jones said in 2011<\/a>, \u201cBy hip-hop\u2019s rules, the twenty-five-year-old \u2026 has done a variety of things backward, but this approach seems only to have made him more popular.\u201d The same still holds true: there\u2019s nothing hard or gritty or aggressively masculine about Drake in \u201cHotline Bling,\u201d and that\u2019s exactly what makes him so endearing in the end. When asked about the video\u2019s choreography,\u00a0its director,\u00a0Director X,\u00a0told\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThat\u2019s him going for it. That\u2019s him doing him. You can\u2019t\u00a0choreograph that.\u00a0That\u2019s just a man dancing.\u201d In last year\u2019s Halloween staff picks,\u00a0Taylor Swift was an automaton<\/a>;\u00a0in this year\u2019s, Drake\u2019s just human. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The very picture of terror.<\/p><\/div>\n

As a parting shot, I might add that this cussing dad<\/a> is pretty scary, too. \u2014D. P.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Halloween we recommended some things that scared us. But there are many such things\u2014we\u2019re easily frightened\u2014so this year we\u2019re doing it again. Stay spooky. In college, I took a seminar about female Surrealist artists\u2014Remedios Varo, Unica Z\u00fcrn, Claude Cahun, and Dorothea Tanning, et al. Many of these women\u2019s life stories were harrowing, and their […]<\/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":[20031,20030,11508,20034,20032,11082,154,20029,20035,1146,20036,20033,20028,20027,883],"class_list":["post-91464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-air-force-magazine","tag-bat-bombs","tag-bats","tag-berlinde-de-bruyckere","tag-bombs","tag-dads","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-dorothea-tanning","tag-drake","tag-halloween","tag-hotline-bling","tag-mark-z-danielewski","tag-scary","tag-spooky","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSpooky Staff Picks: What to See and Read on Halloween<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What\u2019s scaring The Paris Review this Halloween?\" \/>\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\/10\/30\/spooky-staff-picks-bat-bombs-phoney-phootey\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Spooky Staff Picks: Bat Bombs, Phoney Phootey by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 30, 2015 \u2013 Last Halloween we recommended some things that scared us. 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