{"id":98883,"date":"2016-06-03T13:59:43","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T17:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98883"},"modified":"2016-06-04T13:04:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T17:04:08","slug":"staff-picks-white-sands-whit-weiner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/03\/staff-picks-white-sands-whit-weiner\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: White Sands, Whit, Weiner"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From Weiner.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Weiner<\/a><\/em>, man. You\u2019re going to hear a lot of people telling you to see this, so let me offer a meta service and say that you should listen to each and every one of them. The documentary follows Anthony Weiner\u2019s 2013 run for New York City mayor, which ended miserably thanks to an aftershock of the not-quite-sex scandal that had forced him from Congress two years earlier. The film makes a few diligent nods at the suggestion that the sexting scandal obscured more pressing concerns in the mayoral primary. But the real appeal here is characterological. Josh Kriegman, the former Weiner aide who shot the footage, was allowed such intimate access that he ends up, late in the film, incredulously asking Weiner why he granted it. Together with Elyse Steinberg, his codirector, Kriegman presents Weiner as a roiling tumble of contradictions: savvy and reckless, strident and insecure, charming and dickish, and never more serene, it seems, than when he\u2019s watching himself whirl into a rage during a disastrous TV interview. Huma Abedin, Weiner\u2019s wife and one of Hillary Clinton\u2019s closest aides, is in every way her husband\u2019s opposite, and there are moments in the film when her anguish is so obvious that you\u2019re almost rooting for her to show Kriegman, not to mention Weiner, the door. But the camera stays, and so does she. It\u2019s no small accomplishment of this film that you can almost\u00a0imagine why. \u2014Robert P. Baird<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are certain directors whose new movies you skip out of a kind of scared devotion, because the badness of their later work seems to reveal something that was essentially bad about their movies all along. Then there\u2019s the opposite case of Whit Stillman, whose Love & Friendship<\/a><\/em> surpasses his early movies but makes you (or at least me) like them even better. He has never seemed more at home than in the slightly threadbare\u00a0gentility of these country houses\u2014somehow the sets look\u00a0less \u201cperiod\u201d than antique, in a comfortable way\u2014and his characters have never seemed\u00a0so at home in their skin. Tom Bennett\u2019s first scene, playing the amiable idiot Sir James Martin, has brightened my whole week. \u2014Lorin Stein\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Love & Friendship.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

If there\u2019s anything that approximates the enticement of garden life itself, it\u2019s the descriptions, in words and pictures, of individual plants and the stories of their provenances. (Yes, pressed flowers and garden plans thrill me; in my other life, I\u2019m a landscape architect.) Last summer, Yale University Press published Mark Laird\u2019s\u00a0A Natural\u00a0History of English Gardening 1650\u20131800<\/a><\/em>, a mammoth and richly illustrated study of the visual culture of early modern designed landscapes. Laird\u2019s focus isn\u2019t on changing tastes but rather on the cultural and \u201cnatural\u201d community of gardening and \u201cin the sense of an environment that extends into the clouds, down into the soil, and some way beyond the ha-ha and pale of the park.\u201d So there\u2019s tale of the roller, rammer, and mower John Evelyn used in the mid sixteenth century to preserve his close-cropped lawn against the \u201csubversions\u201d of worms and moles; luscious descriptions of the perfumed bowers of mid-eighteenth-century pleasure grounds; detail of the interest in phallus-shaped fungi; and one man\u2019s theory of where clouds go in the evenings.\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is bad advice, but I\u2019ll give it anyway: any writer in need of a story should just get out there and pick up a hitchhiker. Literature may not want for hitchhiking stories, but you can never have too many. The best I\u2019ve read lately is the title essay in White Sands<\/a><\/em>, Geoff Dyer\u2019s new collection of travel writing. He and his wife pick up a guy\u2014\u201cclean and not looking like a maniac\u201d\u2014sixty miles south of Alamogordo, only to pass a sign a minute later: \u201cDO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS \/ DETENTION FACILITIES IN AREA.\u201d From there (and this is the best part) almost nothing happens, allowing Dyer ample time to dissect the odd anticlimax of living out a horror-movie premise. White Sands <\/em>is chockablock with memorable pieces\u2014a trip to Gauguin\u2019s \u201cbabelicious\u201d Tahiti, a stay at De Maria\u2019s Lightning Field<\/i>\u2014but this hitchhiking episode, so loaded with nervous potential, is the one I keep returning to. Dyer\u2019s gift for comic understatement is on display throughout, as when he writes, \u201cI sometimes think that this is all any of us really want from our time on earth: an explanation.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

When I saw that Dwight Garner mentioned\u00a0Babbitt<\/em>\u00a0(a favorite of mine)\u00a0<\/em>in his review of J. Bradford Hipps\u2019s debut novel<\/a>,\u00a0The Adventurist<\/a><\/em>, I promptly moved Hipps\u2019s book\u00a0to the top of my pile. It\u2019s one of the most truly enjoyable novels\u00a0I\u2019ve read in a while. Garner notes that Hipps\u2019s Henry Hurt, a software engineering executive at a struggling cyber security firm, \u201cis no Babbitt; he is far from smug or vacuous; he is not a dupe.\u201d And this is true: where Babbitt is pathetic and narcissistic, Henry is brilliant and empathetic, with a cynical eye for detail that exposes the ridiculous vaudeville of corporate culture. \u201cWhen I see them lined along the catwalk, gazing up with open mouths,\u201d Henry says of men at a strip club, \u201cthere enters my head a blasphemous image of Communion takers at the altar rail.\u201d Most suggestive of Hipps\u2019s talent are the passages that feel like homages to that 1920s golden age\u2014Babbitt\u2019s age\u2014of the businessman\u2019s American Dream: \u201cI know that sigh. In it is captured the entire American romance of moving forward, moving on, a job well done, or not well done, or not done at all, never mind, turn the page, a blank sheet, a fresh start, and\u00a0this\u00a0<\/em>time \u2026\u201d Is that not the most Gatsbian thing you\u2019ve read since\u00a0Gatsby<\/em>\u2019s final page?\u00a0\u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

I feel uncomfortable recommending The Lobster<\/a><\/em>, a bleak, black comedy by the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. The movie\u2019s deadpan humor, coupled with the violence in its absurdist world, makes for a deeply\u00a0<\/em>unsettling and singular experience\u2014one I don\u2019t\u00a0necessarily<\/em>\u00a0want to press on other people. Colin Farrell stars as David, a sad, lonely man who checks himself into a hotel for single people where guests have forty-five days to find a romantic partner; if they don\u2019t find someone, they\u2019re turned into an animal. The film launches you into a meticulously crafted world bulging with desperation. The characters twist their habits to match the personalities of the partners they\u2019re trying to woo, and the effects are often hilarious\u2014one character (Ben Whishaw) gives himself nosebleeds (often painfully) to attract a woman who gets them naturally. The Lobster<\/em> is also grotesque, please note, but this is its greatest strength: that it can be revolting and funny, moving, and morbid at the same time. \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"

From The Lobster.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.\u201d This is the world of Loren Eiseley\u2019s\u00a0The Immense Journey<\/a><\/em>: full of insight and strange wonder for the natural world. The book is a study of human nature and the history of human evolution\u2014in essence a piece of anthropological, archeological writing. And yet Eiseley, a scientist by profession, wrote with a poetic sensibility and lyricism that blurs the line between scientific and novelistic writing; his ambition was aesthetic. Journey<\/em>, with its walks through prehistoric time, is like nothing I\u2019ve read. Its poetic force is grounded in science, and reading it you\u2019re as likely to lose yourself in the rhythm of his prose as in the fantastic energy of Eiseley\u2019s world. \u2014Ty Anania<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last weekend, in a moment of holiday-induced nostalgia, I read Plimpton\u2019s books on baseball, Out of My League<\/a> <\/em>and One for the Record<\/a><\/em>. If sports\u2019 media cycles and commercial aspects leave you jaded, and you can recall feeling awe at athleticism only in a vague haze, these books are for you. Plimpton\u2019s childlike enthusiasm for the sporting life drenches their pages, but beneath the theatrics inherent to \u201cparticipatory journalism,\u201d he writes about baseball\u2019s lore and superstitions with acuity and reverence. (Also fear: Hemingway once wrote that Out of My League<\/em> has \u201cthe chilling quality of a true nightmare.\u201d) It\u2019s enough to make you remember what once \u201ckept you and the others out in the long summer evenings until the fireflies were out and the street lights shining dimly through the pale-silver underside of leaves \u2026 The fact that your team in the brighter hours of the afternoon had lost twenty-four to six and your sister had made eight errors in right field wasn\u2019t important.\u201d\u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weiner, man. You\u2019re going to hear a lot of people telling you to see this, so let me offer a meta service and say that you should listen to each and every one of them. The documentary follows Anthony Weiner\u2019s 2013 run for New York City mayor, which ended miserably thanks to an aftershock of […]<\/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":[3149,6758,375,22620,22623,7470,1761,14,1926,22625,22619,17880,22626,22621,22628,9619,85,883,22624,22627,22618,2979,22622,19687],"class_list":["post-98883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-anthony-weiner","tag-babbitt","tag-baseball","tag-elyse-steinberg","tag-english-gardening","tag-gardening","tag-geoff-dyer","tag-george-plimpton","tag-hitchhiking","tag-j-bradford-hipps","tag-josh-kriegman","tag-lobster","tag-loren-eiseley","tag-mark-laird","tag-out-of-my-league","tag-recommended-reading","tag-sports","tag-staff-picks","tag-the-adventurist","tag-the-immense-journey","tag-weiner","tag-whit-stillman","tag-white-sands","tag-yorgos-lanthimos"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Weiner, Whit Stillman, Geoff Dyer, 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\/2016\/06\/03\/staff-picks-white-sands-whit-weiner\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: White Sands, Whit, Weiner by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 3, 2016 \u2013 Weiner, man. 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