{"id":97547,"date":"2016-04-29T18:16:58","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T22:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=97547"},"modified":"2016-04-29T20:25:11","modified_gmt":"2016-04-30T00:25:11","slug":"staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Blackass<\/i>, Academic Robes, Floppy Disks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Anil Dash<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a scene in\u00a0The Producers<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>in which Max Bialystock finds Kafka\u2019s\u00a0Metamorphosis<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>as a script and rejects after reading the first line; \u201cIt\u2019s too good,\u201d he complains. I thought of this as I began reading A. Igoni Barrett\u2019s novel\u00a0Blackass<\/a><\/em>, which takes Gregor Samsa\u2019s experience as its starting point: Furo Wariboko wakes to discover that he has metamorphosed from a black Nigerian to a white Nigerian, which is a sort of person who doesn\u2019t really exist. It\u2019s hard to improve on Kafka\u2019s original, but, luckily, that isn\u2019t Barrett\u2019s aim. Furo\u2019s transformation into an impossible creature puts him in a unique position: he is white, and so has a natural power over his black countrymen, and he can speak Nigerian pidgin, which gives him influence with that same group; he is feared and respected. In Furo\u2019s navigation from one of Lagos\u2019s many struggling unemployed young people to a man of privilege and agency, Barrett deftly transmutes him from metaphor into full-fledged character. Barrett also employs a handful of secondary characters who metamorphose in other, less spectacular ways that are likewise tied to issues of race, gender, money, and status. (I thought, too, of Charles Johnson\u2019s\u00a0Middle Passage<\/em>, another novel that mixes reality and the fantastical to great effect.) The freedom that reinvention engenders proves intoxicating. As one character marvels, \u201cI was whoever I wanted me to be.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

I trust you weren\u2019t expecting me to discuss anyone or anything other than Prince this week. I\u2019d like to share three of the many remembrances that have moved me to tears. First is the story of a floppy disk that Prince distributed to the press in 1993<\/a>, when he\u2019d changed his name to the unpronounceable Love Symbol: the disk contained a font allowing journalists to type the glyph in place of his name. (\u201cIt just seemed like a logical thing to do,\u201d his graphic designer said.) Second is an interview with his personal chef, Ray Roberts<\/a>, who reveals Prince\u2019s favorite desserts; while Ray was cooking, he often overheard Prince in diligent rehearsal. (\u201cThe kitchen was adjacent to the sound studio, so the biggest treat of all for Ray was hearing the music, every day, loud and clear in the kitchen \u2026 He says Prince would regularly play three seconds of a song, dozens of times in a row, to get it right.\u201d)\u00a0And the third is D\u2019Angelo\u2019s performance of \u201cSometimes It Snows in April\u201d<\/a> from the Tonight Show this week, which reduced me to a puddle. Sometimes I feel so bad, so bad \u2026 \u2014Dan Piepenbring\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"5th-business\"<\/p>\n

As a teenager I sometimes dreamed of running off to join Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist and scholar, in his magical Massey College, where they told ghost stories every Christmas and wore academic robes to class. Unfortunately for me, Massey College turned out to be a graduate school, but last week I spent a few nights in the magical precincts of Davies\u2019s 1970 novel Fifth Business<\/a><\/em>. This story of a Davies type\u2014a small-town boy, the son of a newspaper editor, who becomes an aficionado of obscure Catholic saints, and of conjuring\u2014is preposterous, acerbic, genial, and dazzling, like its author. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt<\/a><\/em>, a documentary by\u00a0Ada Ushpiz, is currently showing at New York\u2019s Film Forum. An\u00a0entertaining\u00a0look at the controversial\u00a0German-Jewish philosopher\u2019s life and, particularly, her thought,\u00a0Vita Activa<\/em>\u00a0mines a rich trove of primary sources, as well as Arendt\u2019s body of written work.\u00a0But the film\u00a0itself, appropriately enough, is generating a\u00a0different kind of\u00a0controversy: in\u00a0a Medium.com article<\/a>, the Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz takes the filmmaker to task for what he terms \u201cthe cynicism of\u00a0paraphrasing\u201d (a play on Arendt\u2019s famous\u2014and oft-misinterpreted\u2014banality of evil.) In shortening and smoothing some of Arendt\u2019s quotes, writes\u00a0Berkowitz, Ushpiz flies directly in the face of her subject\u2019s ethos:\u00a0\u201cthe ease and deceptiveness with which Ushpiz has chosen to alter the factual reality of Arendt\u2019s words is a direct refutation of Arendt\u2019s insistence on the need to deal with a complicated and messy reality, whatever it may be.\u201d \u2014Sadie Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Allegheny Front, sometimes called the Eastern Continental Divide, is the easternmost ridge of the Allegheny Mountains, and on a good relief map it looks like a night crawler wriggling its way around the eastern seaboard. Matthew Neill Null\u2019s new story collection, Allegheny Front<\/em><\/a>, is set there, and in a way it hews to geologic time. His characters span centuries: from a murdered traveling salesman to a haunted modern-day white-water-rapids guide to young scientists whose equipment is stolen and ruined by locals, every story in the collection gives way to entropy. Some of the stories read like historical fiction in the Faulknerian mode, surrounded by a universal nostalgia without sentimentality. Allegheny Front<\/em> is about the history of a specific place, one that adds up to more than simple Civil War stories, pioneer lore, and weekend camping tales, it\u2019s about the cold passage of eons that might trivialize his character\u2019s stories, were those stories in other hands\u2014these brief flashes of struggle and disappointment are the reasons we consider time at all. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"51aO-P7gR4L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/p>\n

Karan Mahajan\u2019s\u00a0The Association of Small Bombs<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>has a wide blast radius: the narrator remarks on page one, \u201cA good bombing begins everywhere at once.\u201d But Mahajan’s story begins more narrowly, with a terrorist attack in a small New Delhi market that takes the lives of two young boys. The lives of Vikas and Deepa Khurana as they grieve the deaths of their sons, and of Shockie (the bomb maker) as he grapples with his loyalty to the terrorists behind the attacks, read like errant vectors shooting off in all directions from the central event they share. Even singular moments\u2014as when Vikas gets an erection from the smell of pastry in his wife\u2019s hair\u2014feel like tiny explosives. Bombs <\/em>is full of tangents, but it\u2019s so cohesive that I struggle to talk about it without resorting to the language of, you know, bombs. Everything is connected, as Vikas notes at his most forlorn, because \u201cpeople are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a scene in\u00a0The Producers\u00a0in which Max Bialystock finds Kafka\u2019s\u00a0Metamorphosis\u00a0as a script and rejects after reading the first line; \u201cIt\u2019s too good,\u201d he complains. I thought of this as I began reading A. Igoni Barrett\u2019s novel\u00a0Blackass, which takes Gregor Samsa\u2019s experience as its starting point: Furo Wariboko wakes to discover that he has metamorphosed from […]<\/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":[22138,22142,22146,22139,14044,22140,13461,10985,22144,22143,1329,2356,22145,22141],"class_list":["post-97547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-igoni-barrett","tag-ada-ushpiz","tag-allegheny-front","tag-blackass","tag-dangelo","tag-fifth-business","tag-floppy-disks","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-karan-mahajan","tag-matthew-neill-null","tag-prince","tag-robertson-davies","tag-the-association-of-small-bombs","tag-vita-activa"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Blackass, Hannah Arendt, Prince\u2019s Floppy Disks<\/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\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Blackass, Academic Robes, Floppy Disks by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 29, 2016 \u2013 There\u2019s a scene in\u00a0The Producers\u00a0in which Max Bialystock finds Kafka\u2019s\u00a0Metamorphosis\u00a0as a script and rejects after reading the first line; \u201cIt\u2019s too\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-04-29T22:16:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-04-30T00:25:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/prince.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"Staff Picks: Blackass, Academic Robes, Floppy Disks\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-04-29T22:16:58+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-04-30T00:25:11+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/\"},\"wordCount\":1082,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/29\/staff-picks-blackass-academic-robes-floppy-disks\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/prince.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"A. 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