September 18, 2024 Diaries Dreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville By Christopher Bollas From Six Drawings by Robert Horvitz, a portfolio published by The Paris Review in 1978. The following entries came from notebooks the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas kept between 1974 and 1977. These notebooks were not written or edited for publication–Bollas says they were more like “mental scratch pads where the author simply writes out what he is thinking in the moment without, ironically, thinking about it.” The entries touch on things Bollas was reading at the time, scenes he saw in London, what he was observing in patients–and, more often than not, the ways these all intersected in his thoughts. We selected these entries in part because they cover a period of time when he was reading and thinking on and off about the work of Herman Melville, alongside many other questions about character, the self, and others. Undated entry, 1974 Let us imagine that all neuroses and psychoses are the self’s way of speaking the unspeakable. The task of analysis is to provide an ambience in which the neurotic or characterological speech can be spoken to the analyst and understood. It is not so much [a question of] what are the epistemologies of each disorder but what does psychoanalytical treatment tell us about them? We must conclude that it tells us that all conflict is flight from the object and that analysis restores the structure of a relation so that the patient can engage in a dialogue with the object. Read More
August 28, 2024 Diaries A Rose Diary By Walt John Pearce The rose bush farthest to the right. Photographs courtesy of the author. April 12, 2024 I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the way that they crawled and in the way that they chewed on the petals. The blooms barely smelled like anything at all. The bush all the way to the right never bloomed and its leaves stayed small like fingernails. The lack of frequent blooms made every bloom feel like a gift. Now these bushes are more established and it is their second year. With another year come more established roots and with more established roots come more frequent and beautiful blooms. All of the rose experts and all of the expert rose gardeners agree on this. I prune the five bushes from last year down to the minimum. I take my clippers and trimmed off any long leftover shoots or old growth that shows signs of disease. This will help the bushes conserve energy and produce healthy and strong shoots. The five bushes from last year look like five bunches of sticks in the ground. This season is sure to produce beautiful blooms. April 13, 2024 Last year I planted three English shrub rosebushes and two hybrid tea rosebushes. This year I would never plant a hybrid tea rose. I know now that hybrid tea roses are tacky with their supermarket physique and their lack of a formal aroma. The hybrid tea rose is a Valentine’s Day card from the Dollar General and the hybrid tea rose disgusts me. Instead I will plant four new English shrub rosebushes. The English shrub rose is closer to an old garden rose or even a wild rose than a hybrid tea rose or God forbid a floribunda. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century nobody in England was that interested in old garden roses and roses that looked wild or rough. Most of these old plants would bloom only once a year, which was not enough for the greedy Victorians, who wanted fat roses to put on their tables and on their dressers. The hybrid tea rose was created and when most people see a rose in a romantic comedy they are probably looking at some version of a hybrid tea rose. Hybrid tea roses bloom many times throughout the season and they can be bred in a large variety of colors, which was very impressive to the gluttonous Victorians and their French counterparts. What the hybrid tea rose gained in abundance it lost in charm and in romance and in fragrance. Most hybrid tea roses don’t smell like anything at all. The old style of roses fell out of fashion and gardens were filled with hybrid tea roses and their demented and mutated siblings. Roses started to look less like something Rilke would cry over and more like something Oscar Wilde would use as a pattern on his silk smoking jacket. Luckily, sometime around 1950, another British guy said enough was enough, and David C. H. Austin started to work to cultivate roses that bloomed more than once a season yet had a strong and decadent fragrance and looked and felt more like an old English garden rose. Thanks to Mr. Austin these roses are now widely available and beautiful gardens around the world can be filled with roses that look like real roses and the smell of roses can be inhaled all over the world including on my own property. I preordered all of my roses online in January from David Austin Roses and there is a wonderful variety of amazing and beautiful roses available as well as many helpful guides for planting and care. It can be overwhelming to browse the David Austin Roses website due to the number of choices. I try to stay focused when I am choosing my roses and I try to not think too hard. I try to just trust my gut. In mid-April, the roses that I preordered are delivered bare-root and when you open up the box it looks like you were mailed a box of wet sticks. Read More
March 13, 2024 Diaries Backyard Bird Diary By Amy Tan All illustrations by the author. September 16, 2017 While watching hummingbirds buzz around me, I recalled a fantasy every child has: that I could win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me. I imagined tiny avian helicopters dining on my palm. To lure them, I bought Lilliputian hummingbird feeders, four for $10. Hope came cheap enough, but I was also realistic. It might take months to gain a hummingbird’s interest in the feeder and for it to lose its fear of me. Read More
February 26, 2024 Diaries July Notebook, 2018 By Daniel Poppick Jacques Hérold. From a portfolio in issue no. 26 of the Review (Summer–Fall 1961). Parable of the Movie “I like your movie. I can tell that horror is a big influence.” “Thank you, yes, I love horror movies.” “Oh, I didn’t mean horror movies. I meant horror.” “Thank you again. The feeling of horror itself also happens to be one of my biggest influences.” “You’re welcome. But I didn’t say anything about a feeling.” “I beg your pardon, but what kind of horror is neither a movie nor a feeling?” “Me.” “But we just met. You didn’t influence my movie at all.” “Well then. I take it back.” Read More
June 29, 2023 Diaries Diary, 2021 By Lydia Davis In these pages, written in 2021, I seem to have been looking back at earlier notes and journals. The story of Pierre—a French shepherd—is a project imagined decades ago that I still have not given up on. My “theories” are also still interesting to me: for instance, that maybe certain people are more inclined to violence when there is less sensuality of other kinds in their lives. Read More
June 13, 2023 Diaries War Diary By Alba de Céspedes Alba de Céspedes, 1965. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies, and the Germans, who had already occupied the north of Italy, immediately moved to take over the rest of the country. Just days later, they invaded Rome. Meanwhile, British and American forces had landed in the south and were slowly moving northward. The writer Alba de Céspedes and her companion (and later her husband), Franco Bounous, were living in Rome. De Céspedes had been jailed briefly by Mussolini for antifascist activities; Bounous was a diplomat and did not want to collaborate with the Germans. As conditions in the city worsened, becoming more chaotic and more dangerous, de Céspedes and Bounous decided to leave. On September 23, “secretly, at night,” they departed, “each with a suitcase,” de Céspedes wrote to her mother, “thinking we’d be gone a few days, that Rome would soon be liberated.” They escaped to a village in Abruzzo, east of the city, where they expected they would be able to wait in tranquility. But the Germans showed up, and they fled again, to a tiny village in the mountains nearby, Torricella Peligna. This diary recounts the days between October 18, when they had to flee Torricella and go into hiding in the woods, and November 19, when they decided to try to get through the German lines to reach the safety of the Allied-occupied zone. De Céspedes later wrote, “Life had gradually become more unbearable, the Germans were coming at night, too. So we decided to risk it all and cross the lines, reaching the Anglo-American troops. And safety. We did that, walking at night, November 20” Guided by a local farmer, Fioravante, they managed to cross the Sangro river, which marked the German front line, and arrive in the Allied zone. From there they were taken in a farm cart to Bari, where de Céspedes began broadcasting for the antifascist station Radio Bari. Eventually she and Bounous moved to Naples and, finally, returned to Rome, after it had been liberated by the Allies in June of 1944. —Ann Goldstein, translator October 18, 1943 We were still asleep this morning, sheltering in the dusty, desolate tax office in Torricella, when we heard frantic knocking at the door. The pale face of Carmela, the girl from downstairs, appeared, animated by a new fear: “Quick, get out right away, the Germans have surrounded Lama dei Peligni and taken the men, all of them. Now they’re on their way up here.” We dressed in a few minutes, maybe three or four, not even taking the time to grab some clothes, and we were gone, Franco, Aldo, and I, rushing down the stairs. Someone was already shouting, “Here they are, you can hear the truck.” We hurried along narrow stony streets, running amid other people running, me wanting to stop and catch my breath, then thinking, I have to make it, I don’t want to leave the others, and I kept running, with a stitch in my side. Some young people were fleeing with their few possessions salvaged in a basket, and we all looked to see if the white ribbon of the main road was stained with the yellow of German cars. Ears strained to the faintest hum. Squatting below the level of the main road, we let some armored vehicles go by, then we ran, crossing it quickly, almost in a leap, and were finally on a path through the fields. Aldo said: “We have to get to the Defensa woods, no one will come and look for us over there.” In less than three hours we had found shelter on Trecolori’s farm, an isolated place at the edge of the big woods. Trecolori is a sly, monkeyish old farmer who lived in Pennsylvania for twelve years. He didn’t have room for us; already, there were numerous relatives around the hearth who had come from nearby villages to escape the raids, some sitting on sacks of flour, others crowded on the floor, looking at us silently. “You can sleep in a stable, five hundred meters from here. Anyway, it’s just for one night.” Read More