January 15, 2025 Diaries Spanish Journals By Catherine Lacey Photograph by Catherine Lacey. I kept this notebook during my first intensive period of studying Spanish in Oaxaca in November of 2022. I didn’t know then that this study would soon be interrupted by almost two years in New York. As I looked through it more recently, it became clear how cheerfully deranged the early days of learning a new language appear from even the slightest distance. I am, you are, he is, we are, they are. I am a student. I am a writer. He is Mexican. She is a pilot. I was stupid. She was a pilot I was a marathoner until my accident. Yesterday was Monday. I am not accustomed to it. I am tired. I am happy. I am learning Spanish. That woman is never angry. Where are your friends? The soup is very hot. They are afraid of my cat! Why? I don’t know. They have to do the shopping today. We have to go home. I have to work now. I have to see him this afternoon. Read More
January 14, 2025 The Review’s Review Glimmer: In Siena By Cynthia Zarin Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new. In Umbria, the landscape is mist and the hills are often in shadow, the luminous inner life is a long let-out breath, but as the train trundles into the province of Siena, the light sharpens like a scalpel, and the shadows disappear. The usual bustle at the station. Then, a stone’s throw from the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo—which erupts in July with the running of the horses in the Palio—the Pinacoteca Nazionale is housed in two adjacent palazzos. On four floors, it holds the most important collection of Sienese paintings in the world. The core of the collection was assembled by two abbots, Giuseppe Ciaccheri and Luigi de Angelis, painting by painting, between 1750 and 1810. They knew, somehow, that these unfashionable, strange, mystical, transfixing pictures, which hovered between Byzantine art and abstraction, painted in the margins of the history of art, many salvaged from triptychs and altarpieces that had been sold, dismantled, or lost, were worth saving. On that first visit the galleries were nearly empty. I had been brought up on twentieth-century painting—my grandfather had taken me on Saturday mornings to what was then called the Modern, but I had very little idea of painting as narrative. The only picture I knew that had the quality of continually happening in time was Picasso’s Guernica. But that is another story. Here in Siena was one chapter after another of a different story: the Annunciation, the Madonna and child, miraculous episodes, the Cross, the eternally mystifying Second Coming, the Assumption. There were the perplexing lives of the saints. Each figure was aglimmer, as if these narratives were continually occurring, unfolding even then as we looked on. My own understanding of these stories was limited—it amounted to being taken to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue and listening to my father sing carols in the car. But I knew, even as I arrived from that distance, that these paintings from the trecento were ones to which from now on my attention would be directed. Later, when my first child was born—who grew up to become a painter—one of the first places I took her was to see the Italian paintings at the Met, where she fixed her eyes on the gold light. Read More
January 13, 2025 Dispatch The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden By Jasper Nathaniel Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie. A 1,650-pound American bucking bull named Man Hater paused at the entrance to the Madison Square Garden floor and fixed me with his dark, soulful eyes. “Hi, puppy,” I said. A bearded wrangler scoffed. “That’s no puppy.” Before opening night of the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden, on January 3—the eighteenth annual such event and first to sell out all three days—a small press corps had gathered by the tunnel to watch the athletes arrive. Not the human athletes but their bovine counterparts, which plodded up the corridor, chased by a mounted cowboy chanting in a low voice. The bulls advanced with the sheepish dignity of prizefighters in ill-fitting suits. In a few hours, these animals would try to buck their riders, who would try desperately to stay on for eight seconds—the basic drama of a rodeo. A popular myth claims rodeo bulls are compelled to buck by a strap wrapped around their testicles, but as any spectator can observe, these are clearly swinging free. “Take a rope, tie it around yours, and pull it up tight—and see how high you can jump,” says Chad Berger, a livestock contractor, in a Professional Bull Riders (PBR) promotional video meant to dispel this misconception. The real instigator is a strap wrapped around the bull’s flank—an annoyance that provokes an animalistic urgency to get it off, a response I know well, having once attempted to put pants on my dog for Halloween. “It’s basically like if I tickle your armpits—that’s about what it does to them bulls,” Berger says. Madison Square Garden’s three-day Monster Energy Buck Off, I learned, would be fueled by a tickling of the bulls. Read More
January 10, 2025 The Review’s Review On Najwan Darwish By Alexia Underwood Ann Craven, Moon (Paris Review Roof, NYC, 9-19-24, 8:40 PM), 2024, 2024, oil on linen, 14 x 14″. “No one will know you tomorrow. / The shelling ended / only to start again within you,” writes the poet Najwan Darwish in his new collection. Darwish, who was born in Jerusalem in 1978, is one of the most striking poets working in Arabic today. The intimate, carefully wrought poems in his new book, , No One Will Know You Tomorrow, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, were written over the past decade. They depict life under Israeli occupation—periods of claustrophobic sameness, wartime isolation, waiting. “How do we spend our lives in the colony? / Cement blocks and thirsty crows / are the only things I see,” he writes. His verses distill loss into a few terse lines. In a poem titled “A Brief Commentary on ‘Literary Success,’ ” he writes, “These ashes that were once my body, / that were once my country— / are they supposed to find joy / in all of this?” Many poems recall love letters: to Mount Carmel, to the city of Haifa. To a lover who, abandoned, “shares my destiny.” He speaks of “joy’s solitary confinement” because “exile has taken / everyone I love.” Irony and humor are present (“I’ll be late to Hell. / I know Charon will ask for a permit / to board his boat. / Even there / I’ll need a Schengen visa”), but it is Darwish’s ability to convey both tremulous wonder and tragedy that make this collection so distinct. Read More
January 9, 2025 Letters The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey By Edward Gorey Tom Fitzharris and Edward Gorey met one afternoon in 1974 when Fitzharris, long a fan of Gorey’s books and illustrations, bumped into him outside of the Town Hall, the performance space in Midtown Manhattan. Gorey—in his trademark fur coat, long beard, and sneakers—was immediately recognizable. The two struck up a brief but intense friendship. When Gorey was in New York, they met frequently, especially to go the ballet—Gorey planned his time in the city around the New York City Ballet’s performance schedule. His summers were spent in Cape Cod. It was in August of that year that Gorey began sending Fitzharris mail, richly illustrated both inside and out. Reproduced below are four of the fifty notes, quotations, and letters Fitzharris received over the course of their correspondence. Read More
January 7, 2025 Document A Diagram of My Life By Gerald Murnane GERALD MURNANE WITH HIS WIFE, CATHERINE, IN BENDIGO, 1989. In his Art of Fiction interview, published in our new Winter issue, Gerald Murnane shows his interlocutor, Louis Klee, the chart he used until the mid-sixties to map out the major events and memories of his life—including his birth, James Joyce’s death, his childhood moves around the suburbs of Melbourne, the advent and return of personal crises (“nihilism,” “disaster,” “recover,” and “back to nihilism,” in one short stretch of 1960), his discovery of the writer and theologian Thomas Merton, his forays into poetry, and his courtship with the woman who would become his wife. From our interview: MURNANE Now, see this colored chart? Represented by about twenty-five colored lines is a diagram of my life. Gray is for vagueness. Everything, for me, has to be put in diagram or spatial form. The chart is a means of remembering. “88 River Street South,” that’s my address. Now, there’s when I met my wife. I knew her at teachers’ college a bit. We weren’t interested in each other then. But I met her again at the start of ’64. “C.L. 1”—that means the first time we went out together, in the middle of ’64. See there? INTERVIEWER Yep. MURNANE Right. And then all these lines are events in our courtship. And our courtship was a bit rocky. We separated at one time—it was her choice. And then, “Engagement to C.M.L.” All of them from then on are “C.M.L.” “At Brunswick with C.M.L.” “Marriage to C.M.L.”—then I abandoned the chart. INTERVIEWER Why is that? MURNANE Let’s say I’d struggled, as a person, to find out what the whole thing was about, and then I found somebody I was able to talk to, found someone to listen to me. I thought my troubles were all over. A friend of the Review, Matt Benjamin, made the six-hour drive from Melbourne to Goroke, the rural town in Australia’s West Wimmera plains where Murnane lives, to scan the pages below. Read More