Staff Picks: Beach Brain, Polychromatic Plumage
June 5, 2015
From
the cover of the Talk reissue.
In
1965, Linda Rosenkrantz summered in East Hampton—as one does, I guess—and had
the good sense to bring a tape recorder with her. On the beach, she logged
hours of her banal, brilliant conversations with two friends; in 1968 she
published the transcripts as a novel, Talk, to be reissued next month. In many ways the
book is as exasperating as you’d expect: Linda and her friends, all approaching
thirty, seldom entertain thoughts beyond themselves or their coterie. They
gossip about fucking and psychoanalysis; pubic dandruff is among their more
elevated concerns. And there are moments when you can hear them ham it up for
their imaginary audience, affecting even more weariness, intellect, and
neurosis than they’ve already claimed. But who cares? Even at its most vapid, Talk
captivates: it’s funny, honest, and not infrequently heartbreaking, and it
still feels weirdly provocative almost fifty years later. The dialogue captures
the sun-brained rhythm of beach talk better than anything I’ve read. —Dan
Piepenbring
Amelia
Gray’s last novel, Threats, was a weird and wonderful book set on
the outskirts of reality. Her new story collection, Gutshot, is an episodic version of the same strange
locale, one populated by a convulsive puker, a Brobdingnagian snake, and a
couple who trap a woman in the air ducts of their house. It’s a place where
“the sun beats the shit out of a dirty road called Raton Pass [and] the closet
thing to a pair of matching earrings is a guy named Carl who punches you in the
head with his fist.” The characters are all misfits of one kind or another, and
they are dedicated to their stories even when they don’t seem to want to be a
part of them. The title story (my favorite) reads like a shaggy-dog story,
except that the ending is unexpectedly moving and meaningful. The membrane
between Gray’s stories and our reality is often thin; it's sometimes breached
by a pinhole, as in “Viscera,” in which the skin flakes and spittle of a
paper-factory employee drift into the pulp, “baking the genetic evidence of his
future heart disease into this very page, which you are touching with your
hands.” —Nicole Rudick
“What
can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, about a crime committed in a book?” Kamel
Daoud writes in The Meursault Investigation, his retooling of Camus’s The
Stranger. Daoud turns Camus’s fiction into fact, implying that within his
fictional world, The Stranger was penned by an unrepentant
murderer and canonized nonetheless. Harun, the brother of the unnamed “Arab”
killed by Camus’s narrator, goes off on a book-length barroom screed against
the man who murdered his brother and has been all but exonerated by high school
curricula across the globe. The novel contains a powerful critique of
colonialism, but it’s also a brilliantly executed slap in the face to a
literary-academic establishment that treats writers as celebrities and
celebrates literature as “challenging” to avoid being challenged by it. (So now
let’s all do the only reasonable thing and celebrate The Meursault
Investigation.) —Rebecca Panovka
Readers
of the Daily who paid attention in chemistry class will
probably remember Tom Lehrer—or at least the tune of his, “The Elements,” that allowed for one of the more
humanizing moments in an often tedious grade-school science curricula. I
recently revisited some of his work (“Vatican Rag” is a personal favorite) and afterward
went off in search of his New Yorker profile—only to
find, to my surprise, that it doesn’t exist. In fact, there’s been
very little written about the man; BuzzFeed seems to have published one of his only profiles—and this for a prodigy who entered Harvard at
the age of fifteen, achieved unlikely success with his darkly humorous and
satirical music, and retired from touring in his early thirties, having sold
hundreds of thousands of records. (Weird Al Yankovic, who claims Lehrer as one
of his two living idols, has called him “the J. D. Salinger of demented
music.”) If satire rings your bell, then run off and spend some time with
his oeuvre. You won’t be disappointed—and you may, like Daniel Radcliffe,
end up committing some of his spectacularly
tedious lyrics to memory. —Stephen Andrew Hiltner
In
a couple of weeks, I’ll set off for Charles Town—a small Maroon village in
Portland, Jamaica—where I’ll attend the seventh annual International Maroon Conference. So it was with great pleasure
that I found Nicola Lo Calzo’s photographs of the French Guiana and
Suriname Maroons, introduced by Hilton Als, in the pages of this week’s New Yorker. For those less familiar, the Maroons are descendants of an insurgent group of
slaves who built autonomous communities in rural pockets of Africa, South
American, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, Europe, and the U.S. “Obia,” Lo Calzo’s most recent project, looks inside Maroon culture today.
Comprising the portfolio are some of the most vibrant photographs I’ve seen in
a while: there’s one of a Ziploc bag holding an embalmed parrot, its
polychromatic plumage a near-perfect rainbow; its body, according to Maroon
tradition, is a vessel for spirits. But the photograph I’m most fond of is of a
young Ndyuka woman wearing a Marilyn Monroe shirt with pink,
floral shorts, fingernails painted to match, and the word swag hanging
from her necklace. As Als attests, “Lo Calzo takes as his great subject the
meaning that a photographer’s eye can draw from the African diaspora, all those
disappeared bodies brought back to life by their living and breathing
descendants.” See more of his work here. —Caitlin Youngquist
Hans
Ulrich-Obrist, the manic Puck of the curatorial world, has been panned and
praised alike for his omnivorous interests in interview subjects. A new
compendium of his talks with modern musicians, A Brief History of New Music, aligns selected artists ranging
from Boulez to Kraftwerk in an echo chamber, framing their responses around
specific artistic loci. Obrist conjures questions like a pop-theoretical Magic
8 Ball: What of Duchamp’s comment that the spectator does at least 50 percent
of the work? How about Bakhtin’s conception of Dostoyevsky’s polyphony? He’s
especially fond of asking about artists’ “unrealized” or impossible
projects—their “Kubla Khans.” Brian Eno describes the possibility of quiet
clubs, or clubs “where nothing much happens.” Elliott Carter apparently wanted
to write an opera about suicide cults like the Order of the Solar Temple. At
its best, A Brief History is an antic, organic collection of esoteric
and overlapping reflections, shaking loose digressive gems like a late-night
conversation. —Casey Henry
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/05/staff-picks-beach-brain-polychromatic-plumage/
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