{"id":97285,"date":"2016-04-22T14:25:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T18:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=97285"},"modified":"2016-04-22T15:48:46","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T19:48:46","slug":"staff-picks-unspooling-erupting-and-recoiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/22\/staff-picks-unspooling-erupting-and-recoiling\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Unspooling, Erupting, and Recoiling"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An<\/a>

An image of Tambora taken by the Space Shuttle in 1992, with a view of the caldera produced by the 1815 eruption.<\/p><\/div>\n

On a sad, sad morning, thanks to J. J. Sullivan for sending us this 1989 cover<\/a> of \u201cWhen You Were Mine,\u201d by the Blue Rubies. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since Mary Ruefle\u2019s 2008 book Most of It<\/em><\/a>, I\u2019ve watched for a second collection of her short prose. So I was pleased when we published two such pieces from her upcoming book, My Private Property<\/em><\/a>, in our Spring issue<\/a>. (NB: they\u2019re nestled under Poetry, but as Ruefle told me over the phone, she doesn\u2019t think them poems, per se.) I\u2019ve since gotten my hands on a galley of that book and have read it twice over: Ruefle is as good as ever. In forty-one ambrosial bits, she muses on everything from programs littering a concert-hall floor to menopause to what a bird might think as it watches a woman die. Many of these begin simply\u2014with a golf pencil or a string of Christmas-tree lights\u2014but they unspool into larger existential meditations, on language and death, on creation and sadness and boredom; some are even doused in whimsy. Ruefle\u2019s is a soothing, enlightening voice\u2014always playful, always gentle, and always unfettering some ineffable truth. There\u2019s a closeness I feel toward her as I read this book, as if she\u2019s telling me all the secrets of this world\u2014or at least of hers\u2014and that I\u2019d be wise to listen. \u201cAnd if you sleep through a truth,\u201d she writes, \u201cyou will wake at the bitter end.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

This summer marks the bicentennial anniversary of \u201cFrankenstein\u201d\u2014not the book itself, but the spoken nub of the story, which Mary Shelley first narrated by firelight in Switzerland in the summer of 1816. The eighteen-year-old Shelley had traveled with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, their infant son, and Mary\u2019s stepsister to the shores of Lake Geneva. Their idea was to spend the season with Lord Byron, far from the dreary chill of London. This part of the story is well-known: incessant rain confined the group to the house, and to fight off cabin fever, they each wrote a ghost story. Shelley summoned the tale of Frankenstein, whose frequent confusion with his nameless creation became a great gift to two centuries of pedants, and, lately, to Twitter<\/a>. What I learned this week, however, from a recent episode<\/a> of In Our Time,<\/em>\u00a0Melvyn Bragg\u2019s indispensable BBC radio show, is that the bad weather that night had its own traceable origin. A year before the Lake Geneva gathering, the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history occurred in Indonesia. The explosion, of a mountain called Tambora, threw thirty-eight cubic miles of rock, ash, and magma into the air. The airborne cloak of sunlight-reflecting ejecta circled the globe and was ultimately responsible for the \u201cungenial\u201d weather of 1816, which became known as the Year Without a Summer. Tambora\u2019s explosion likely killed some seventy thousand people, so it was hardly the innocuous butterfly of classic chaos theory. Still, we can guess that Shelley might have appreciated, at some level, the distant and violent origins of her tale. \u201cEvery thing must have a beginning,\u201d she wrote in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein<\/em>, \u201cand that beginning must be linked to something that went before \u2026 Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.\u201d \u2014Robert P. Baird
<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"136709\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

I enjoy a good piece of science fiction, and I find it a shame that people recoil at the label. This week, I read a novel that offers some degree of defense for the \u201csci-fi\u201d branding: Olaf Stapledon\u2019s Star Maker<\/a><\/em>, which was published in 1937. It\u2019s a wonderful philosophical experiment that tackles the billion-year history of life in the universe, a serious and often awe-inspiring work of imagination. For those who doubt the merit of science fiction as high literature, a more recent edition includes glowing reviews from Borges, Doris Lessing, and Virginia Woolf, and in his introduction, Arthur C. Clarke calls Star Maker <\/em>\u201cthe most wonderful novel I have ever read.\u201d The language, at times, may be overly scientific, but the sheer power of Stapledon\u2019s imagination is enough to keep me engaged. By examining life in the grand scale, he\u2019s able to offer original and poetic insight into the broad topics of life and death, coexistence, community, and romance.\u00a0\u2014Ty Anania<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know the Review<\/em> serialized Chris Bachelder\u2019s The Throwback Special<\/em><\/a> over the past four issues, but I\u2019ve only just gotten to read it in full. The stage: twenty-two men gather at a hotel to reenact \u201cthe most shocking play in NFL history,\u201d when Lawrence Taylor shattered Joe Theismann\u2019s leg. Really, though, the novel is about the lives of these individuals outside this annual ritual: sunken businesses, spoiled children, failed marriages, loneliness. The moments of deepest empathy are so effective because they\u2019re at once solemn and, given the book\u2019s premise, hilariously idiosyncratic. You\u2019d never think of a continental breakfast as something profound, but to Bachelder and his characters, it is: \u201cUnbeknownst to the men, this was what they came here for, every year \u2026 Halfway through their lives\u2014considerably more than halfway, in several cases\u2014the men knew nothing of their own vast contentment.\u201d The point, here, as is true for the entire novel, is that this tradition is hardly about football; the tradition is simply about tradition, and how it allows us to fully realize the self without needing to understand it. Just consider the cathartic moments immediately following the completed reenactment (their best yet): everyone gathered in a hotel room, embracing one another as fanatics might after a pilgrimage, all of them \u201cwild with frantic relief.\u201d I finished the novel on the outdoor subway platform at Broadway Junction; below me, twilight descended on the Callahan-Kelly football field, where I could still hear men shouting in the dark. \u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Depending on your age, the late nineties were either a last gasp for children\u2019s cartoons or a renaissance. No show encapsulates the epoch more than Animaniacs<\/em><\/a>, which was just made available in full on Netflix. A pastiche of comedic tropes\u2014from the Marx Brothers to Seinfeld<\/em>\u2014the show centers on the Warner brothers Yakko and Wakko and their Warner sister, Dot, who were created in the thirties by the Warner Bros fledgling animation department, \u201cran amok throughout the studios\u201d before being captured and locked away in the water tower, and only escaped in 1993. At its best, Animaniacs<\/em>\u00a0is an instruction manual for comedy writing\u2014sometimes literally, as when the Warners conclude a multigenre gag by referring to a book titled Acme Comedy Theory<\/em>. Animaniacs<\/em> skewered the tired gags of children\u2019s cartoons, paving the way for shows like The\u00a0Powerpuff Girls<\/em> and even the brilliant Adventure Time<\/em>, but it never takes itself so seriously as to put itself above being the butt of its own jokes. At the end of one episode, Dot asks, \u201cSo what have we learned?\u201d And Yakko responds, \u201cIf at first you don\u2019t succeed, blame your parents.\u201d \u2014Andrew Jimenez<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Animaniacs-3\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a sad, sad morning, thanks to J. J. Sullivan for sending us this 1989 cover of \u201cWhen You Were Mine,\u201d by the Blue Rubies. \u2014Lorin Stein Since Mary Ruefle\u2019s 2008 book Most of It, I\u2019ve watched for a second collection of her short prose. So I was pleased when we published two such pieces […]<\/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":[22048,8267,22049,134,18315,12071,204,22046,10366,10258,22045,740,22044,165,1329,200,883,4660,19524,22047],"class_list":["post-97285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-animaniacs","tag-arthur-c-clarke","tag-blue-rubies","tag-cartoons","tag-chris-bachelder","tag-doris-lessing","tag-frankenstein","tag-in-our-time","tag-mary-ruefle","tag-mary-shelley","tag-melvyn-bragg","tag-netflix","tag-olaf-stapledon","tag-poetry","tag-prince","tag-science-fiction","tag-staff-picks","tag-the-marx-brothers","tag-the-throwback-special","tag-volcano"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Prince, Mary Ruefle, and Mary Shelley<\/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\/2016\/04\/22\/staff-picks-unspooling-erupting-and-recoiling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Unspooling, Erupting, and Recoiling by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 22, 2016 \u2013 On a sad, sad morning, thanks to J. 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