April 10, 2023 First Person On Fantasy By Sophia Giovannitti Photograph by Iflwlou (拍攝), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Steak is like sex, is like art: bloody; gets you high; is disgusting if you think about it for too long. And blue steak, then, is like sex work: a carefully crafted artifice that allows for the presentation of something ostensibly raw to the consumer, without the risks of actual raw consumption. The person who orders blue steak feels it as real, and animal, though it is sanitized, and carefully so. In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience. Read More
April 7, 2023 On Religion The Mother of the Mother of the Virgin Mary By Marta Figlerowicz Sixteenth-century icon depicting Emerentia, Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus Christ. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons. “Saint who?” I asked. “Eh-meh-ren-tsya,” Olga Tokarczuk repeated. Saint Anne’s mother. I was nonplussed. The mother of the mother of the Virgin Mary? Tokarczuk blew out cigarette smoke at high speed, then inhaled with excitement and impatience. I needed a lesson. We were midway through a nine-hour-long exchange about her life and writing, the edited version of which you can read in the Review’s Spring issue. Throughout our conversation, I often felt that, like her books, Tokarczuk’s speech requires footnotes and annotations. Tokarczuk researches her short stories and novels with academic intensity. She digs up forgotten, esoteric myths and legends and shows how this esoterica is woven into the warp and woof of European culture. Beneath a Europe of rational, religious, racial, and ethnic dogmatisms, she unveils a continent rife with ethnically and linguistically syncretic visionaries, mystics, and half-pagan storytellers. There is a hopefulness to these counterhistories that puts its faith in humanity’s capacity for creativity and imagination—in the loosening and intermingling of top-down stereotypes and norms by collective acts of retelling and elaboration. Emerentia, Tokarczuk explained to me, was one such esoteric discovery that she wove into her latest novel, Empuzjon, which has yet to appear in English. Read More
April 7, 2023 The Review’s Review On Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers By Deborah Feldman Still from Hungry Hearts, an adaptation of a novel by Anzia Yezierska. Courtesy of Goldwyn Pictures. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I had recently begun attending Sarah Lawrence College when Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers was first introduced to me. I was twenty years old, but as a married Orthodox Jewish woman with a one-year-old child to show for myself instead of a high school diploma, I had been enrolled in the continuing education program for one year in order to prepare for proper matriculation. The blunt hairline of my voluminous wig paired with my over-the-knee skirts would have been enough to render me the exotic outsider to my worldly classmates even if I hadn’t revealed my heavy accent or my ignorance of basic cultural references. So when an older classmate who hadn’t previously made much effort at conversing with me thrust the worn paperback into my hands, I was caught unawares by her sudden attention. “Maybe you’ve already read it, but I thought, just in case …” Eyeing the title and the unfamiliar name of the author, I shook my head in bemusement. “Is this some famous classic,” I asked, “some essential part of the canon I’ve missed and need to catch up on?” She laughed. “Not really,” she answered. “But back when I was in college the first time around, some acquaintances of mine were instrumental in its republication, so that’s how I know about it. I came across it again recently while I was spring cleaning, but you know how it is with coincidences. They rarely are. I thought of you immediately; I felt strongly that this book was meant for you.” Taking that portentous statement on its merit, I began to read the book the same day, parking my car on the side of the road on the way home from class for as long as I had until my husband returned from work, reading behind the steering wheel instead of on my sofa for the sake of peace and privacy. Even today I cringe when remembering the experience. As I read about the impoverished Orthodox protagonist suffering through the deprivations of the Lower East Side tenements while dreaming of dignity and education, I felt as if my classmate, in handing me the book and saying it was “meant for you,” had in effect publicly shamed and exposed me—had lumped me together with the novel’s Sara Smolinsky into the category of awkward, vulgar greenhorn. The woman who had seemingly seen right through me might have had good intentions, but she had grown up in a posh Massachusetts town, had a hyphenated last name, and lived in a historic mansion in the most expensive town in Westchester with a handsome husband who was a big name in finance. She was, in fact, exactly like everyone else around me in college at the time: well-educated, privileged, and refined. On top of that she was adorned with the garlands of enlightenment, studying feminism and women’s literature after having spent the last two decades raising her sons. So of course her gesture did not feel welcoming at all; it felt pointed and exclusionary, a humiliation akin to what the novel’s protagonist, too, experiences among her college classmates. Read More
April 6, 2023 On Film It’s Nineteen Seventy-Nine, Okay By J. D. Daniels Artistic rendering of a double black hole, 2015. ESA/Hubble. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0. It has been more than ten years since I wrote these words for this magazine’s website: “At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab’s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick—about Robur’s doomed enterprise in Verne’s Maître du Monde—about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole.” And now maybe we can approach the same topic from a different angle, as the contortionist said on prom night. Refuse to accept that it is your fate to refuse to accept your fate. The only way not to be driven insane by it is to be insane from the outset. The Black Hole, 1979. It amazes me that a group of people could make a movie about being afraid of a hole, being attracted to a hole, feeling excited and curious about going into a hole, feeling concerned that, while on the one hand it might not be such a good idea to go into the hole, on the other hand maybe all the best things in life will become possible only after you have gone into the hole, and so on. It’s not the feelings that amaze me; I feel them all myself. It’s the idea that $20 million and a crew of more than a hundred crew members should have been devoted to dramatizing, over ninety minutes, an idea that any healthy child could express in a single simple sentence. Go ahead, smart guy, write that sentence. Read More
April 4, 2023 Home Improvements Full-Length Mirror By B. D. McClay Mirror piece, 1965. Art & Language. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. My thirty-fourth year was meant to be a winner. I would drink less, I would eat better, I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies. I would, in short, live up to my potential. All my life I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye the other me, the one who rises early, sleeps well, spends responsibly, works hard, shines with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and never lets anybody down, the bitch. Well, no longer. Thirty-three! Otherwise known as the Jesus year: thirty-three being the very age Jesus Christ got his show on the road. If it was good enough for the Son of God, surely it was good enough for me. Being simply human I didn’t expect a dove from heaven—just a little self-actualization, a shimmer of success, a whiff of recognition. Nothing big. In retrospect, it might have been better to dwell on the how of Jesus reaching his potential (i.e., death) and not so much the when. But I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have made a difference: almost precisely a month after reaching this momentous age, I was throwing up a yellow substance I didn’t like the look of into every available receptacle. Scripture is silent on whether this ever happened to Jesus, but since he participated in humanity in all its fullness, maybe it did. Read More
April 3, 2023 Rereading On Mary Wollstonecraft By Joanna Biggs Detail from John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790–1. Public domain. Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere. Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: Was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but that life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but I was jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life. Read More