The Review’s Review:

I have a bad habit of buying gifts for people and forgetting to send them. Over the holidays, I found myself digging through my pile of books looking for something new to read—or old enough to feel that way—when I came across a small poetry book, A Horse with Holes in It, by Greg Alan Brownderville. As I flipped through the pages in an attempt to place it, I realized it was a thank you gift I meant to send to a professor some years back. Selfishly, I’m glad this book never made it to the post office.

Most of the poems take place somewhere deep in the Delta, where Brownderville experiments with themes of religion, love, death, and desire. It’s decidedly Southern Gothic, yet the poet manages to be soulful without being overly serious, “they wept, and said some mystery words / like shahn-die, seconding my gibberish with God’s / because they know. They know honest gospel singing when they hear it.” Like the poet, I spent much of my childhood in Arkansas (and in church) and found myself wide-eyed, wincing, and giggling the whole way through. The fifteenth poem, A Message for the King, was my favorite of the collection:

Tell the king

we cheer him, we love him for these nights.

But before you kiss his face and go,

urge him

not to be too proud not to be too proud not to be too proud.

—Lauren Williams

This past week I had one of the most extraordinary TV viewing experiences of my life: my family sat down to watch an Apple TV+ adaptation of my daughter’s favorite graphic memoir, El Deafo by Cece Bell. El Deafo tells the true story (true except that in the book and show, all the people are humanoid bunnies) of Bell’s grade school years, during which a brain infection causes her to lose most of her hearing. Little Cece is precocious and profoundly alive, and deeply sensitive to others’ perceptions of her newly acquired disability. It’s a story of how to find friendship, of learning whom to trust and how to trust them. What makes the show so extraordinary is that its producers made the decision to design all the sound in the show as Bell would have heard it through her hearing aids. Our ears need to reach for the sound, which is muffled, distant, and well worth pursuing. This is the first instance I can think of—though I’m sure there are others—in which the medium of television has been used to grant access to the charged space of another person’s disability, and in so doing takes us deeper than we could have imagined into Cece’s perspective, to know her, at least a little, as she knows herself. As a bonus, the soundtrack was written and recorded by indie singer/songwriter Waxahatchee. The show affords an unprecedented chance at empathy, making the world simultaneously bigger and much more intimate. —Craig Morgan Teicher

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/33ADBDM

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog