Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.
—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor
From Opera Fever (Wave Books), a new poetry collection by Chelsey Minnis:
What should be said in poems. .
A bubbly ambivalence. . .
Or a mirror seen through bullet holes?
From Roland Betancourt’s Disneyland and the Rise of Automation (Princeton University Press), a description of the path of a churro through the Anaheim amusement park:
Eventually, the churro reaches the edge of the conveyor and violently slides down a makeshift ramp, depositing itself into a metal gutter alongside other churros kept tepid by the heat of the oven above.
Noticing a vacant oven and an ever-emptying hold of warmed confectionary snacks, a solitary Disneyland cast member briefly pauses sales to open a large cardboard box from the back. Emblazoned in muted green against the sandy-brown cardboard is the logo for Tio Pepe’s Churros Pastry Stix. With haste, the opened box is unloaded into the cart’s food-storage drawers below the conveyor belt oven and cinnamon-sugar baths. The bottom drawer contains multitudes of churros in large, transparent plastic bags, while the top drawer holds the naked churros ready to be warmed up. With an equally frantic energy, the cast member grabs a half-dozen churros from the top drawer with her tongs and tosses them into the opening of the oven’s conveyor. The slapdash mound of churros sort themselves as they churn into the oven, like flour being sifted from a hopper into an automated production line. Now, those new churros will go through the same mechanical procession themselves. As park guests purchase their churros, the cast member plucks a churro from the warming tray with a pair of tongs and tosses it in a trough of cinnamon sugar. With the flick of the hand, the employee takes the churro from its sugary bath and hands it over, cradled in wax paper, to the waiting child.
From a 1947 news article reproduced in Tosquelles: Healing Institutions (Semiotexte), a collection of writings by and about the Marxist analyst Francesc Tosquelles, edited by Joana Masó and translated from the French and the Catalan by Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem:
The dances at the Châlons asylum are very much favored by the police of the prefecture, who go to them with their families. There is one per month. For Mardi Gras and Mid-Lent, the patients are disguised. To be sure, only the “inoffensive” are authorized to attend. One frequently sees them dancing with the surveillance staff.
From Ben Lerner’s Transcription (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):
“The last time my father was in this house, it was full of candy. If you opened a drawer: Hershey’s Kisses, marshmallows, every kind of Haribo gummy—bears, peaches, Sour Streamers, snakes. Blues and pinks that don’t appear in nature. Save in instances of aposematic coloration. Cupboards stuffed with cookies. You couldn’t find a slice of sandwich bread for all the chocolate chip muffins, babka, pastry. The fridge was stocked with yogurts that contained more sugar than ice cream, and the freezer was stocked with ice cream. It was like a fairy tale, one that featured evil stepparents, witches.”
“A German fairy tale.”
“Set in L.A. Because how could real parents preside over such a home?”
From Ananda Devi’s All Flesh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman:
It weighed twenty-two pounds and eight ounces: hardly an excessive weight for a baby elephant; certainly a record for a baby human.
From Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling (Doubleday), on the prosperity of the religious leader Aga Khan:
With billions of dollars in assets and business interests ranging from insurance to airlines to hospitality, the Aga Khan had a staff of 150; split his time between a château in France, a villa on Lake Geneva, a private island in the Bahamas, and other properties around the globe; and ferried between those homes in a fleet of Mercedes and a Gulfstream jet. He owned some six hundred horses, which he stables at estates in Ireland and Normandy. Though he shunned publicity, he was a fixture in gossip columns because of his colorful family (his father, a famous lothario, married Rita Hayworth). … The home he purchased for his family was a rambling Tudor-style mansion on a leafy plot of land. On the grounds he installed a miniature train that traveled on a track around the garden and was sturdy enough to carry small children. The house was furnished with English antiques, and many pictures of the Aga Khan were joined by shots of Abdul with his close friend Mrs. Thatcher. By Abdul’s own account, he worked incessantly. As a parent, he was stern, demanding, and formal. When it came to spending time with his children, his preferred activity was to play Monopoly. “We play that a lot,” he acknowledged to an interviewer. But he rarely went in for more frivolous forms of popular entertainment. Akbar later told a friend that his father had taken him to the movies on only one occasion; it was Big, the 1988 film in which Tom Hanks plays a boy who is so impatient to be an adult that he makes a wish and suddenly becomes one overnight. Both Akbar and his father wore a suit and tie for the excursion.
Actual dialogue in Jay McInerney’s See You on the Other Side (Knopf):
“Yes, let’s by all means talk about Biden,” Russell said.
“Talk about pulling a Lazarus. Fucking guy was dead in the water before Tuesday. His old pasty white face looking more and more like that of a drowned man. Suddenly saved by the Black folks.”
“Now maybe we won’t have to feel the Bern,” Whitlock said.