{"id":92200,"date":"2015-11-20T16:38:44","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T21:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92200"},"modified":"2015-11-20T17:17:50","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T22:17:50","slug":"staff-picks-conspiracy-camaraderie-catsup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/20\/staff-picks-conspiracy-camaraderie-catsup\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Conspiracy, Camaraderie, Catsup"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of The Mark and the Void<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Two days ago I gathered up a big stack of submissions to read over lunch \u2026 but I also took our brand-new office copy of Mary Beard\u2019s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome<\/a><\/em>. Just in case I ran out of stuff to read, was my ridiculous thinking. The next time I looked up, an hour later, I was late for a meeting and deep in the heart of the Catiline conspiracy, and hadn\u2019t even asked for the check, or looked at a single short story. I\u2019ve promised myself I won\u2019t open the book again until Thanksgiving. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1917, a Yale professor of public speaking named Grenville Kleiser published Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases: A Practical Handbook of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, and Oratorical Terms, for the Embellishment of Speech and Literature, and the Improvement of the Vocabulary of Those Persons Who Read, Write, and Speak English<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019m about two thousand useful phrases in, and let me tell you, this thing moves<\/em>. It reads like an epic poem written in concert at the stuffiest dinner party in New Haven history. Of especial utility is section seven, on \u201cLiterary Expressions,\u201d full of well-wrought piffle fit for the impending holiday-party season. You\u2019ll want to commit \u201cA campaign of unbridled ferocity\u201d to memory. And \u201cThe nameless and inexpressible fascination of midnight music.\u201d And \u201cShe bandies adjectives with the best.\u201d And \u201cA shadow of melancholy touched her lithe fancies, as a cloud dims the waving of golden grain\u201d\u2014plenty of occasions to put that one to good use. And (last one, I promise, though I\u2019m going to have to devote a whole post to these some day) \u201cThe multiplicity of odors competing for your attention.\u201d With these and roughly 14,995 other phrases at your disposal, you\u2019ll be able to aggravate and annoy even your closest friends. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

As advertised.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s daring to begin a novel with the words \u201cIdea for a novel\u201d; it\u2019s also surprising that it\u2019s taken this long for someone to do it. Credit the Irish novelist Paul Murray, whose\u00a0The Mark and the Void<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is a playful yet probing DeLillo-esque in-joke masquerading as a foray into the liminal world of international banking. You don\u2019t really need to know anything about banking in order to follow the plot or to get the jokes: Murray clearly envisions his reader as a degree-holder in literature, not economics. (The main character inside the frame narrative, Claude, has an academic interest in simulacra; Murray himself is a character, self-parodied as a feckless sufferer of writer\u2019s block whose first book,\u00a0For Love of a Clown<\/em>, was about a clown; et cetera.) Winking glibness abounds, but there is also compassionate insight: \u201cHere, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests \u2026 wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia \u2026 their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punching-bag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate difference.\u201d \u2014Henri Lipton<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Bowie is releasing a new album\u2014his twenty-fifth\u2014in January, called\u00a0Blackstar.<\/em>\u00a0Yesterday he revealed a ten-minute video of the album\u2019s eponymous lead single.<\/a> Bowie is sixty-eight and still more avant-garde than any living pop star. His pipes aren\u2019t as strong as they once were, but his creative mind is as sharp as ever. The video, directed by Johan Renck and made in close collaboration with Bowie, is science-fiction-voodoo-cult brilliance\u2014with Guillermo del Toro\u2013esque costuming, dance moves reminiscent of Merce Cunningham, and fake, weird sets \u00e0 la Mike Kelley. In the oblique lyrics, Bowie works in sly references to Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust, and the music is a m\u00e9lange of electronic samples, live jazz tracks, drum and bass rhythm, and minimalist melody. But Bowie\u2019s voice is the most stunning element. He appears as Aleister Crowley\u2013style prophet (or madman, or both) and sings in a kind of processed susurration. I really don\u2019t know how else to describe it\u2014it\u2019s beautiful and singular. It\u2019s Bowie. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

M.F.K. Fisher.<\/p><\/div>\n

Next week, with its family nostalgia and elastic waistbands, will bring a wave of tasty sentiment through the country. M. F. K. Fisher\u2019s 1968 essay \u201cOnce a Tramp, Always \u2026<\/a>,\u201d which first appeared in The New Yorker<\/em>, is a sort of shameless basting in gastro-memory, and a great pre-Thanksgiving read. It takes its name from Mark Twain\u2019s travel book, A Tramp Abroad<\/a><\/em>; both authors share a curious longing, apparently, for \u201cmashed potatoes with<\/em> catsup.\u201d Fisher explores the relation of memory to appetite: the mere memory of the perfect potato chips she\u2019d eaten some thirty years earlier were enough to sate her desire, but, conversely, she never quite had enough caviar to pacify her craving for the stuff. It\u2019s a wonderful, often funny essay on childhood eating and the meting out of sensual pleasures, one that may give license to an annual, ritual gorging. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

Astra Taylor\u2019s documentary Examined Life<\/a><\/em> (2008) is a breezy, enjoyable attempt to bring philosophy down from its patrician perch to the hurly-burly of daily life. Taylor recruits eight contemporary thinkers\u2014Cornel West, Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Zizek, Peter Singer, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah\u2014to talk fundamental questions. Given the Olympian cast, it is a little disappointing that the film fails at its primary task: apart from Appiah, Butler, and Singer, no one is able to frame their ideas in ways that show how philosophy applies to all our lives in equal measure. All the same, it fails pretty well. There\u2019s a lot of joy in these denizens of the seminar room putting their ideas into conversation with public spaces. Hardt bumps into a rock while boating and talking about revolutionary politics in Central Park. Singer talks about the ethical obligations of the rich to the poor surrounded by the glitz of Fifth Avenue. And in Tompkins Square Park, Ronell explains how \u201canxiety is the condition of ethicity\u201d as a man on a bench looks up, with annoyance, from his newspaper. \u2014Joshua Maserow<\/strong><\/p>\n

At my parents\u2019 house, I picked up my childhood copy of Louise Fitzhugh\u2019s Harriet the Spy<\/a><\/em>. I must have read it once\u2014what else would have inspired a relatively sedate child to snoop around neighbors\u2019 backyards?\u2014but I don\u2019t remember making it to the second half, which is darker than I expected. When her friends and classmates get ahold of her spy notebook and discover the unflattering but truthful observations she\u2019s recorded about them, they ostracize her; she becomes uncompromising and even hateful. What I find most compelling about the book now is the way Fitzhugh describes Harriet\u2019s visceral, compulsive need to write. Without her notebook, Fitzhugh writes, \u201cThe thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down.\u201d As for the moral of the story, there really isn\u2019t one. Spies can be scathing and vengeful but, Harriet discovers, it pays to learn how to be resilient and accommodating\u2014to fly under the radar. Even if I didn\u2019t completely understand that at age eleven, I think it sank in anyway. \u2014Hannah LeClair<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two days ago I gathered up a big stack of submissions to read over lunch \u2026 but I also took our brand-new office copy of Mary Beard\u2019s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Just in case I ran out of stuff to read, was my ridiculous thinking. The next time I looked up, an hour […]<\/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":[13253,20293,12310,8868,2911,20292,20294,20297,20298,9138,20296,9987,20295,739,19831,53,334,883],"class_list":["post-92200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-ancient-rome","tag-astrid-taylor","tag-avital-ronell","tag-cornel-west","tag-david-bowie","tag-grenville-kleiser","tag-judith-butler","tag-kwame-anthony-appiah","tag-louise-fitzhugh","tag-m-f-k-fisher","tag-martha-nussbaum","tag-mary-beard","tag-michael-hardt","tag-paul-murray","tag-peter-singer","tag-reading","tag-slavoj-zizek","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Mary Beard, David Bowie, M.F.K. 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