February 7, 2023 Home Improvements The Smoker By Ottessa Moshfegh Photograph by Ottessa Moshfegh. This one time, my dad bought me a house in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a two-story fake Colonial with yellow aluminum siding on Hawkins Street. We bought it from the bank for $55,000; it was one of many properties under foreclosure in the city in 2009. Dad and I had spent a few days driving around and looking at these houses. In one driveway, I found a dirty playing card depicting the biggest penis I could ever imagine—I still have it. In one basement, the realtor had to disclose, the former owner had tied his girlfriend’s lover to a chair, tortured him, and then shot him in the head. The man who had lived in my house on Hawkins Street had owed more on the house than it was worth. It was in an undesirable part of town, or so I was told, but I loved the neighborhood. The houses were small. There was a permanent lemon icee stand a block away. I was about twenty steps away from a bodega that functioned as the neighborhood grocery store. My next door neighbor was an elderly lady from Portugal who spoke almost no English and yet complained to me about all the dogshit in my backyard while bragging about the tomatoes in her garden, which looked exactly like her breasts beneath her housedress, heavy and sliding. We were separated by a chainlink fence. Read More
February 6, 2023 Syllabi Quiet: A Syllabus By Victoria Adukwei Bulley For most of my life, I took quiet to mean a kind of shortcoming. I had heard it used too many times as a description of how others saw me. But then I realized that in the work of writers I love deeply are many kinds of quiets—those of catharsis, of subversiveness, of gaping loss or simple, sensual joy. I came to think of quiet not as an adjective or verb or noun, but as a kind of technique. The books I chose for the syllabus below expand how we think about black expression, intimacy, interiority, and agency; about black quietude. I began with the work of Kevin Quashie, whose voice, like a tuning fork, set a tone for my reading of other books. For the nonfiction books on this list, I looked for thinkers who are deeply attentive to the everyday. For fiction and poetry, I selected writers who allow us to glimpse more clearly our own selfhoods via the unknowability of others. In all cases, these are books that are richer for asking us to listen more deeply. We might return from each one dazzled, dazed even, but always with renewed, sharpened perception. Read More
February 3, 2023 The Review’s Review On Hegel, Nadine Gordimer, and Kyle Abraham By The Paris Review Gianna Theodore in Kyle Abraham’s Our Indigo: If We Were a Love Song. Over the past year I have read and reread Angelica Nuzzo’s book Approaching Hegel’s Logic, Obliquely, in which Nuzzo guides the reader through Hegel’s Science of Logic. Nuzzo presents the question of how we are to think about history as it unfolds amid chaos and relentless crises. How, in other words, are we to find a means to think outside the incessant whirr of our times? The answer she provides is one I find wholly satisfactory: it is through the work of Hegel that we are best able to think about and think through the current state of the world, precisely because his work is itself an exploration of thinking—particularly Science of Logic, as Nuzzo eloquently explains: Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic is the only one that aims at—and succeeds in—accounting for the dynamic of real processes: natural, psychological but also social, political, and historical processes. It is a logic that attempts to think of change and transformation in their dynamic flux not by fixating movement in abstract static descriptions but by performing movement itself. By tracking the movement of the mind, a movement that is incessant and fluid, we are best equipped to study the crises of our time as they occur. In particular, we are best able to examine and analyze the structure of capitalism itself, a structure which is formed by exchange value and is thus a system of infinite repetition and reproduction. A system of infinite plasticity—appropriating everything it comes in contact with. A system, in other words, akin to that of the mind. Hegel does not merely explain how the mind works but enacts its very movement. He places us in the center of its whirr. —Cynthia Cruz, author of “Charity Balls” Read More
February 2, 2023 At Work Space for Misunderstanding: A Conversation between A. M. Homes and Yiyun Li By A.M. Homes and Yiyun Li Photograph of A. M. Homes by Marion Ettlinger. Photograph of Yiyun Li by Basso Cannarsa/Agence Opale. A few times a year, the writers Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes sit down to lunch. As friends, they often find themselves talking about almost anything but writing. Often, though, as they ask each other questions, something interesting and unexpected happens: “The thin thread of a story might be unearthed,” Homes recently told us, “or the detail of a recent experience, or a gnawing question one finds unanswerable. Somewhere between the menu, the meal and the coffee, maybe the story begins to form.” Last year, Li and Homes both published new novels. In Li’s The Book Of Goose, she tells the story of a complex friendship between Agnes and Fabienne, farm girls, who each have been in some way neglected by their families. Homes’s latest book, The Unfolding, is a political satire that explores the fault lines of American politics within a family. At the end of the year, the two friends sat down for one of their lunches—and what follows is a bit of what they talked about. HOMES Funnily enough, as colleagues and friends, one of the things that we never talk about is writing. LI Once in a while I will tell you a story or say something has happened, and you’ll say, “Write that into a story.” That has happened three times. Particularly with the story “All Will Be Well,” as I explained in an interview with The New Yorker: “Sometimes it needs a nudge from another person. I was talking with my friend A. M. Homes one day, and I told her about this practice in California, where we were asked to send care packages to our children’s preschool with a letter, in case of a catastrophic earthquake. She said, ‘You have to write a story about that.’ It had not occurred to me until then, and it turned out that there was a place for the care package in a story.” I think you have a specific talent for saying, “Well, that’s an idea.” There’s an expansiveness to the way you look at the world. Do you look through a telescope or a microscope? Where does it come from? Read More
February 1, 2023 Culture Diaries Postcard from Hudson By Laurie Stone Belted Galloway. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. The other day we went to Albany so I could return all eight items I had bought online from Athleta. The store was in a giant mall that smelled tragically of Cinnabons. The Cinnabons reminded me of the TV series Better Call Saul, which is set in part in a Cinnabon shop, and the way Saul Goodman was unable to resist pulling a con. He missed his old life. Jail was preferable to feeling unknown to himself. The clothes in the store were made of fabrics that were “what is this?” and “no.” And there were mirrors, unlike in our house. Richard said, “Let’s go to the Banana.” He wanted a cashmere sweater. There were two he looked great in, and it made me so happy for someone to look good in clothes I said, “Buy both.” He said, “I don’t deserve them.” I said, “No one deserves anything. You are beautiful. Beauty is its own whatever.” One of the sweaters had a soft hoodie thing, and Richard liked walking around in the house in it. The hood came down a little low. I said, “You’re getting a seven dwarfs thing happening with the hood.” He pulled it back a little, and it was perfect. Read More
January 31, 2023 Arts & Culture All Water Has a Perfect Memory By Jordan Amirkhani I have seen the Mississippi. That is muddy water. I have seen the Saint Lawrence. That is crystal water. But the Thames is liquid history. —John Burns, quoted in the Daily Mail, January 25, 1943 In the upper left quadrant of Minnesota, a small winding brook and its bubbling waters form the beginnings of a journey from north to south, catching streams and tributaries along its track through the heart of North America toward the Gulf of Mexico. The name given to this massive system made of more than 100,000 waterways is the Mississippi River, a riparian sweep with a drainage basin touching approximately 1.2 million square miles, or 40 percent of the continental United States. With sand and silt ever flowing toward the river’s mouth, a wild wetland of marshes, swamps, and bayous reigns, turning solid land into sponge in the vast network of alluvial floodplains known as the Mississippi Delta. Just under one hundred miles from the Mississippi’s mouth, the river takes a sudden turn southward, snaking east and then north in a final return to its southeasterly course. In this crescent-shaped curvature between river, lake, and gulf lies New Orleans, named after Philippe I, duc d’Orléans by the French Canadian naval officer and colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. In his correspondence with Philippe, Bienville described this magnificent system of watercourses as “filled with a mud as deep as its oceanbed” yet “unmistakably Divine” for its navigational and commercial potential. Through royal decree, Bienville was granted two parcels of land for the establishment of a “new France in this riverside”—land financed by France’s first colonial trading corporation, the Mississippi Company, and cleared and worked by the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana. Read More