The Paris Review – Staff Pick: Rivers, Rituals and Rainy Days

For me the sentence Stream of consciousness has always conjured up water as if this stream were something external, a river into which a writer or a book plunged the reader. When it comes to Clarice Lispector, it feels more like thinking of blood: she’s the type of writer who doesn’t so much immerse you in anything else as get into your veins and change you from the inside out. Her latest novel, published in English by New Directions, is A lesson or the book of joys (translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler), and the confection of the title is a feint; Lispector’s needle is sharp, she pockets it like an expert, she knows exactly how much to give you – “A human’s most pressing need is to become human” – so that you keep coming back for more to experience. – Hasan Altaf

My college professor, Aaron Fogel, wrote a poem about a man who had never heard of Frank Sinatra. It is a wonderful poem about omnipresence and chance and the losses associated with life. The idea is that the man happens to be out of the room or looking elsewhere every time Sinatra is played when Sinatra appears in a headline or on TV. I thought about it when I first heard Mac Miller, a full year after his last album came out. For almost everyone else, the talented rap artist, who died in 2018 at the age of 26, was hard to miss. His early albums did well, especially in my cohort at the time – middle-class white college students – but as his audience grew and grew, so did he. Starting with 2016 The divine feminineMiller’s sound and themes became more complicated, as did his collaborations: this album features, among others, CeeLo Green, Anderson Paak, Kendrick Lamar and Ariana Grande, a pop singer on a completely different level of fame. Working with Grande became a romance that broke out in the spring of 2018. Six months later when he was promoting his album swimMiller was found unresponsive in his California home. With appearances on large networks, several printed interviews, and a young, gossip-hungry audience already trained on every move, his sudden death left considerable gaps into which all kinds of projections could play. I skipped all of that and started with Circles, a posthumous album that was released in January 2020 just before we really needed it. Unfinished at the time of Miller’s death, but completed by composer and producer Jon Brion. Circles is amazingly beautiful and excruciatingly promising. It’s dynamic but consistent in register and shows Miller’s talent and flow. The comforting inability to pick a favorite makes it an album to repeat even though “Blue World” stands out (Obama agrees). From the relative vacuum of CirclesI slowly got into Miller’s earlier work. As I stepped into the earlier albums, I found additional joys and listened to the more public story about a musician who sparked several million fantasies. Can you hear “Stay” from The divine feminineWithout thinking about the Twitter storm that occurred when his megawatt ex called their relationship toxic? There’s one particularly exhilarating sequence on the swim Track “Hurt Feelings”: “Driving with your eyes closed, missing all the signs / turning the ignition on, I was driving and sitting pretty / listening to Whitney and whipping around town.” It’s a counterbalanced sense of self that is all too easy to grieve. I know that I’ll be late for the party, the grave, the memorial, but this year it seems appropriate to listen to music with a kind of swing door quality. Elegiac? Yes. Cheering? Also yes. – Julia Berick

Still from Cecilia Mangini Divino Amore (1963). Courtesy of Another look.

I had never heard of the Italian filmmaker Cecilia Mangini, but when Another lookThe London-based feminist film magazine, founded in 2016 by Daniella Shreir, tells me to watch something, I listen. Through Monday, March 22nd, the magazine is offering eight free screenings of Mangini’s work on its new, beautifully designed, irregular streaming site, Another Screen. Mangini, who worked frequently with Pier Paolo Pasolini and died earlier this year, was a subversive documentary filmmaker of everyday life and traditions in 20th century Italy. Many of the films in this retrospective are short, eleven-minute excerpts from vanished rituals and communities that are often haunted. Stendalíreports from 1960 on a female mourning ritual among the ethnic Greek communities in southern Puglia; 1963s Divino Amore This is followed by a night pilgrimage to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore near Rome. The program includes an insightful essay on Mangini’s work by the writer and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue and an interview with Mangini by Gianluca Sciannameo (translated from Italian by Livia Franchini). An absolute pleasure. – Rhian Sasseen

For twenty years I have been following the music of Gillian Welch – the duo of songwriters Welch and David Rawlings, their partner for life, harmony and lead guitar. During this time, the duo have honed a brand of folk that brings together strands of American music from the past and sounds like nothing else. Their voices, sung and on guitar, are so intertwined that it is impossible to analyze them – every sound comes from both, like a soft chorus from somewhere out of time. They just won a Grammy for the album with the covers they did in Lockdown. All the good timesand it’s deep and dark and wonderful – but I’m not a staff picking it this week. They also released around the same time Boot # 2: The Lost Songs, a box of forty-eight unreleased songs written and recorded over a weekend in 2002 to inform Welch of the material she owed on her publishing contract. The original tapes were saved in March 2020 after a tornado hit their Nashville recording studio. There’s a hell of a lot more here than any reasonable listener can digest in a reasonable amount of time, but of course all is well. I recommend turning these discs only when there is a rainy mood. one or two songs always seem to rise to the surface and clear. Right now I’m excited about “City Girl” which is about the middle of side E of the vinyl. I know I will find this music for years to come. It feels as old as forever and always has something new to tell me. – Craig Morgan Teicher

I turned to Kevin Prufers The art of fiction because I am not in favor of the static image in poetry. In his latest edition of Four Way Books, Prufer conveys images in motion, in flow, not transformed by his lens, but spied on in the process of change, a lens not like that of photography but that of cinema. If The art of fiction If it were a film, action would be more than directing. The camera would move with deliberate focal points, the scenes with subtle match cuts. The music would never swell or fade under our reach. All lighting would be natural, although at times it might encourage us to turn or blink. The staging would teach us history. When the text gives language to the inhuman – a drone, a trough of poisoned pig feed, a leopard, a bottle of vodka, the “ever-increasing blackness” of a room – your words come to us through soft focus or relief. And Cinema Verité would register everything else, bold and crisp like a document, hand-held or rendered over the shoulder, real in a way that makes us forget we’re seeing something made, real in a way that shows both truth and fiction and make us wonder what we do when we sit there in the dark just looking for differences. Start with “I Have Voted” or “The Newspapers”, both of which appeared in the fall 2019 issue. – Christopher Notarnicola

Kevin Prufer. Photo: Emy Johnston. Courtesy Four Way Books.