May 2, 2023 Home Improvements An Egyptian Vase By Jago Rackham Photograph by Jago Rackham. On the top of our fiction bookshelf is an alabaster vase. Its rim is broken. Inside it is a single dried flower, and beside it a faux peach, under a large bell jar. The vase is Egyptian and three thousand years old. I broke its rim a few years ago. Each time I reach for a novel I am reminded of the power of carelessness to undo eons of completeness. At thirteen I was sent to Lo’s school. Lo’ is my fiancée. We have been engaged since we were twenty-one and we are now both approaching our thirties. We “got together” soon after I joined the school and have been near constantly in one another’s presence since then. Like a medieval romance—somewhat creepy, somewhat sweet. Read More
May 1, 2023 On Books “The Dead Silence of Goods”: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore By Adrienne Raphel Interior of the Wal-Mart supercenter in Albany. Photograph by Matt Wade, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 3.0. The first and only time I went to the Walmart in Iowa City was surreal. When I was in high school, my parents’ business-oriented small press had published a book called The Case Against Walmart that called for a national consumer boycott of the company; the author denounced everything from the superstore’s destruction of environmentally protected lands to its sweatshop labor to its knockoff merchandise. So by the time I made a pilgrimage out to the superstore at age twenty-one, I hadn’t stepped in a Walmart for nearly a decade, and it had acquired this transgressive power—the very act of crossing the threshold was as shameful as it was thrilling. Immediately, I sensed the store’s anonymizing power: outside, I was nearby the Iowa Municipal Airport, en route to the Hy-Vee grocery store; inside, I was anywhere. I didn’t know what I expected, but it was wonderful, and terrible, and weird, and empty, but also full of stuff. In the real world, I was allergic to animals, but I found myself hypnotized in the pet aisle: snake food, dry cat food, wet cat food, Iams, I am what I am. Each shade of paint chip in the Benjamin Moore display bouquet was more erotic than the one before. Primrose Petals, I Love You Pink, Pretty Pink, Hot Lips. Everything was too bright, oversaturated, illuminated in fluorescent Super Soaker–level high beams. I wasn’t high; I didn’t need to be. I barely saw another human, but the accumulation of things constituted many lifetimes of living. I was in a mass graveyard—a place defined by, as Annie Ernaux puts it, “the dead silence of goods as far as the eye could see.” From November 2012 to October 2013, in Look at the Lights, My Love—published in 2014 in France and in 2023 in an English translation by Alison L. Strayer—Ernaux recorded her visits to the Auchan superstore in suburban Cergy-Pontoise, an hour northwest of Paris. Like all of Annie Ernaux’s works, Look at the Lights plays a formal sleight-of-hand in the best way, with the feel of a dashed-off journal but the felt experience of a deeply philosophical meditation on the nature of shopping, voyeurism, late-stage capitalism, class, race, and desire. Read More
April 28, 2023 The Review’s Review Michael Bazzett, Dobby Gibson, and Sophie Haigney Recommend By The Paris Review Pete Unseth, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I don’t usually write to music. I’m too susceptible; I find it can give what I’m writing a false, unearned resonance, like slipping a poem into Garamond to make it “better.” But there are two songs that are rhythmic enough, each in their own way, that I sometimes put on a loop when I’m revising. There’s something about the cadence and the breath in them that works for me, that creates a kind of chamber that keeps the outside world at bay. And though I’ve heard “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (a quote so apt, it’s attributed to no less than a dozen people), here goes: “Spiegel im Spiegel,” 1978—Arvo Pärt The piece—in English, “Mirror in the Mirror”—begins with a simple ascending arpeggio, little triads that subtly alter, reflected back and forth like light on water, a mirror looking into a mirror. The melody stretches over and through the scales, extending like a long breath. The left hand on the piano arrives, eventually and sparingly, to ground the upward yearning, trees reaching toward light from the roots. The work is minimal in its composition, yet never fails to tug me out of my momentary preoccupations into a broader sense of time, drawing me into eternity through the little window of now. There are many beautiful recordings, but Angèle Dubeau’s version is a good place to begin, I think. If you put it on and close your eyes, everything will soon feel softer. “Fleurette Africaine,” 1962—Duke Ellington Mingus starts the song with a spiraling, skeletal stuttering on the upright bass, a sleeping animal rousing itself, a little tousled. It’s all very organic, the rise and fall of a breathing body. Ellington’s piano wanders in, elegant, stately. Max Roach’s drumming is the nest—he drums around the song as much as into it—weaving the thatch that holds the bird that sings the song. —Michael Bazzett, author of “Autobiography of a Poet” Read More
April 27, 2023 Categories Are You Thunder or Lightning? By Sophie Haigney Sixteenth Century Engraved sun and moon image. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I have always liked categorical statements that are obviously wrong. When someone says to me “This is the way the world works,” I get very excited, even though of course nobody knows how the world works. Or, even better: “There are only two types of people in the world.” This statement is usually followed by two binary qualities that could be used to define and divide all of humanity. Such a proposition is clearly ridiculous and, to me, deeply appealing. This is perhaps why my favorite game is called Dichotomies. The game originated because my friends and I are always talking about our other friends. One night my friend Nick and I began idly categorizing people we knew, somewhat arbitrarily, as either thunder or lightning. We knew immediately who was which: Nick and I are both lightning. Our friend Ben: thunder. Alex: lightning. Graham: thunder. Lily: thunder, though maybe she has a bit of lightning too? We discussed and debated. This dichotomy is a good one in part because of its ambiguity; not everyone interprets it quite the same way, but everyone has a strong instinct for what each category might mean, and a sense of who might be which. Our attempts at categorizing people opened up some interesting questions: Was so-and-so outgoing, or actually quite shy? Did he make a big impression at first, or grow on you later? Was there a certain kind of power in being thunder and a different one in being lightning? Which would you rather be? And why was it so easy to tell the difference? Read More
April 26, 2023 On Books Who Was Robert Plunket? By Danzy Senna President Harding with pet dog Laddie being photographed in front of the White House. National Photo Co., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I might not have read a single truly funny novel that year if my friend hadn’t stopped by my Los Angeles porch one afternoon carrying an out-of-print copy of Robert Plunket’s comic masterpiece, My Search for Warren Harding. We were in the worst of days—the depths of the pre-vaccine pandemic—and our world was on fire, both literally and figuratively. The copy of the novel that my friend, the writer Victoria Patterson, handed over to me looked the way we all felt in those days: yellowing, battered, dusty from too long in storage. Tory bellowed through the muffling fabric of her N95 mask that it was one of her favorite novels—and really fucking funny. I needed funny. I opened the book a few weeks later—and despite my allergic reaction to the mold in the edition, kept reading for the next 256 pages. When I was done, I sat in a kind of silent, focused delight. I held in my hands one of the best, and most invigorating books I’d read in years, and certainly the funniest—and yet, how was it out of print? Why had I never heard of this novel before now? (Later I learned Tory had actually written an excellent piece about it for Tin House magazine in 2015.) Why had it disappeared so fully from the literary landscape? And what did that say about this literary landscape if it could bury a book like this? Most intriguingly: Who was Robert Plunket? Read More
April 24, 2023 Fiction Inertia By Kate Zambreno Michael Raedecker, solo 2021. Courtesy of the artist. In a novel that she had been trying to read the night before, she’d read the description of a late spring day as a glittery day, and she thought of that as she was walking with her daughters, and the dog, up through the boulevards. It was turning from a warm into a hot day, even though it was still morning, and not yet summer. The dog was panting, and they took a break, to drink their bottles of water thrown underneath the stroller. There was something filmy to the skin of her daughters, she had dressed them that day in their lightest clothes, and later, she had promised, they could put on their swimwear at the local splash pad. Before leaving she had quickly pulled their hair off their faces, and now they kept on taking off their hats and handing them to her, and she would throw them in the bottom of the stroller. They needed to get their hair washed tonight, she observed, as she looked at them, their curls greasy with sunscreen. The children had decided they wished to dress alike, or in corresponding colors, and today they were wearing shades of yellow. They were mostly quiet, strolling down the street, the older daughter riding on the attached wooden platform with wheels that trailed behind the stroller that they called the skateboard. She had found a piece of dark yarn and was finger-knitting with it, which she loved to do, or tying a piece of yarn into knots, or wrapping it around and around a stick. It was beginning to be the kind of heat in which one went about in a daze. Sometimes the children wanted to get out to walk and she would hold their hands while their father pushed the stroller, which was laden with provisions for the day. It was such a beautiful walk that morning. The green of the bushes and the trees at this time of year seemed lush and overgrown. Because of this green canopy they were in the shade most of the time, until they had to cross major streets and intersections. She felt that they were walking in a bright encroaching greenness, and had the sensation that they were alone with the trees and the gardens. When she got home she was supposed to work on an essay she had been commissioned to write, on an artist who painted landscapes that felt wild and overgrown like this while remaining strangely suburban. His green paintings felt like they were set in the middle of a forest, often enhanced with black glitter, iridescent beads, and black and green embroidery. There were no figures in his paintings, although there was a narrative, however mysterious, and suggestions of places where children were once playing, or, perhaps, of the abandoning of these spaces, for an unknown reason. There were cars parked outside with their doors left ajar, pairs of tents and treehouses, chairs overturned. This interested her more and more, the strangeness of an emptied landscape, and how then to write of this emptiness. Read More