July 27, 2023 Happenings August 1–7: What We’re Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Charlie Saikley Six-Man Volleyball Tournament. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 3.0. Soon it will be August in New York City, a period when everyone is theoretically out of town—they’re always saying this, anyway, in books like August by Judith Rossner. This is mostly a fiction, that everyone’s at their country house and everything is shutting down, but it’s sort of fun to imagine; who doesn’t secretly enjoy having fun while others are away? For the month of August, the Review is trying a little experiment—highlighting some things that are going on during this supposedly quiet month. Every week, we’ll be compiling roundups of cultural events and miscellany that the Review’s staff and friends are excited about around town. (And maybe, occasionally, out of town.) We can promise only that these lists will be uncomprehensive, totally random, and fun. F. W. Murnau’s Faust, introduced by Mary Gaitskill at Light Industry, August 1: Gaitskill, who was interviewed for the Spring issue of the Review, will be introducing this 1926 silent film, which, like many flops, is now a cult classic. Gaitskill saw a clip of the film online years before she had read Goethe’s novel, though she knew the basic outlines of the story of the scholar who made a pact with the devil. “That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone,” she told Light Industry. Read More
July 26, 2023 Eat Your Words Cooking with Elizabeth David By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. Elizabeth David considered herself “not a writer really you know, but only a self-made one”—primarily a cook. And she wasn’t a typical writer, even within her chosen genre of food writing. David abhorred the arty and artificial, kept her private life to herself, and made concessions to her audience only when it suited her values. Her voice, especially in her journalism, is acerbic—she was a woman who liked to eat well, and didn’t care what you thought of that. And yet she has been England’s most influential food writer since the peak of her career in the fifties, and she remains a household name in the UK. Her groundbreaking works, A Book of Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, and simply Italian Food, all published just after World War II, introduced the English to those cuisines. And her prose has the kind of precision and shimmering energy that makes one want to cook. I recently read the NYRB Classics edition of David’s Summer Cooking. I wanted to cook from David, and to understand the secret of her lasting appeal. Summer Cooking is considered David’s most casual, personal, and playful work. It was written after the intense, yearslong labor of Italian Food and contains many of her perennial themes: fresh, seasonal ingredients, bright flavor, and simplicity. In the postwar England in which she launched her career, food was still rationed. People rarely saw meat and couldn’t get eggs or cream. Cans, powders, and substitutes were common. It was neither practical nor socially acceptable to be interested in what you ate. David drew on her experiences traveling and living abroad during the war, in France, Greece, and Egypt, where even basic meals were flavorful and fresh, to effect a massive shift in this thinking. In Greece, Artemis Cooper writes, David lived on “bread, olive oil, olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine” and knew their intense joys. In Summer Cooking she applied the lessons she’d learned abroad to what was available in the English countryside, during its brief, wonderful production of “new peas,” “fresh little carrots,” “delicate courgettes,” “fresh green chives, chervil, tarragon, parsley,” “purple sprouting broccoli,” “tender little string beans,” crabs, trout, Cornish lobsters, damson plums, blackberries, gooseberries, and more. Read More
July 25, 2023 First Person Friendship By Devon Brody Illustration by Na Kim. He texted me something during staff meeting. I didn’t answer until it was over and I had closed my computer and wasn’t looking at him anymore, and then I told him not to text me, please, for these weeks, like we had said. Then I was upset, and I drove to the other side of the lake, where I parked outside a trailer. It was for work: my job required me to interview people, usually showing up unannounced to where it was possible they lived, or didn’t. A teenage girl opened the door. She was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt with purple sleeves, and her dog was black or dark gray with white on its face. It didn’t make noise as it went around her legs in the doorframe. I turned around, and it bit into the back of my calf. I yelled for a while, and then I was on the ground. Nothing hurt. I put my finger in its mouth to get it to let go, but it bit it. I screamed louder until I realized there wasn’t a point to screaming, because the girl was already hitting the dog with something, maybe a chair, and there was no one else to alert. Then I was free, and the door to their trailer was open, and then I was inside, and I had closed the door behind me. Then I was leaning on the arm of their green couch, and then I was sitting on the seat of another, whose color I don’t know, because I was looking at the small lakes of blood on the floor. They were already congealing, and inside the pools were small flecks of white. I realized they were my fat when I saw similar pieces on the thighs of my jeans. Read More
July 21, 2023 The Review’s Review Lost Letters By Caleb Crain Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Auckland Museum. Licensed under COO 4.0. My story in the Summer issue of the Review starts with a character receiving a letter from a boyfriend of twenty-five years ago, and one of the Review’s editors, in search of recommendations for this column, asked if I’d like to write about a piece of epistolary fiction that inspired me. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a particular inspiration, is the thing, and when the editor’s email arrived, I had a flu and a few degrees of fever, so I put her request aside and got back on my sofa and under my blanket, returning to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which Elizabeth Bowen wrote during World War II. My husband gave me the book more than a decade ago, and for some reason, it was finally calling out to be read. The first stories in the book are sketches of Londoners dislodged from their identities by aerial bombings. A recent New Yorker article about disaster care describes the small items of function and decoration in people’s lives—pencil sharpener, teakettle, photo in a frame—as the “furniture of self,” and many of Bowen’s characters find themselves feeling uncanny and disenchanted after the loss of items that once made up their context and setting. In the middle stories, Bowen goes at the problem from the other end, writing about people unsettled by the unexpected return of things that once gave them context. A woman inherits a skeleton clock that she is told she cared for passionately as a child but has no memory of. Another woman, in a nightclub on a boozy date, hears a dance tune that her father used to try to sing. And in the title story, “The Demon Lover,” a third woman, returning to her bomb-cracked, boarded-up house to rescue a few items, finds a letter from the man she was engaged to during World War I—twenty-five years prior. Read More
July 20, 2023 First Person Kim Kardashian Landline Dreamscape By Sarah Miller Yellow telephone. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0. Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own. Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too. Read More
July 19, 2023 Overheard The Final Dead Shows: Part Three By Sophie Haigney Black-and-white Bobby. Photographs by Sophie Haigney. Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run. Read More