March 14, 2023 Diaries Camus’s New York Diary, 1946 By Albert Camus Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, 1943. Photograph by John Vachon. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. March 1946. Albert Camus has just spent two weeks at sea on the SS Oregon, a cargo ship transporting passengers from Le Havre to New York City. He’s made several friends during this transatlantic passage. Sunday. They announce we’ll arrive in the evening. The week passed in a whirlwind. Tuesday evening, the twenty-first, our table decides to celebrate the arrival of spring. Alcohol until four in the morning. The next day, too. Forty-eight hours of pleasant euphoria, during which all our relationships quickly deepen. Mme D. is rebelling against her class. L. confesses to me the marriage she’s headed for is one of convenience. On Saturday, we exit the Gulf Stream, and the temperature turns awfully chilly. Nevertheless, the time passes very quickly, and ultimately, I’m not in such a rush to arrive. I’ve finished preparing my talk. In the remaining time, I gaze out at the sea and chat, mostly with R., who’s really quite smart—and with Mme D. and L., of course. At twelve in the afternoon, we catch sight of land. Seagulls have been flying alongside the boat since morning, hanging above the decks as if suspended and motionless. Coney Island, which looks like the Porte d’Orléans, is the first thing we see. “It’s Saint-Denis or Gennevilliers,” L. says. It’s absolutely true. In the cold, with the gray wind and flat sky, it’s all rather gloomy. We’ll anchor in the mouth of the Hudson but won’t disembark until tomorrow morning. In the distance, Manhattan’s skyscrapers stand against a backdrop of mist. My heart is still and cold, as it is when faced with sights that don’t move me. Read More
March 14, 2023 Home Improvements 169 Square Feet in Las Vegas By Meg Bernhard Photograph by Meg Bernhard. The Las Vegas apartment complex was advertised as a fresh start, a place to reinvent oneself. With only 169 square feet in the so-called “micro-studio,” there was simply no room to bring much of my past life with me. I was not seeking reinvention, but I was looking for cheap rent. I arrived in late afternoon on a warm fall day. New friends had invited me to go camping in Utah and were soon to depart, so I tossed my few belongings into the studio without taking much stock of the space. I did, however, note what I would come to call “the bathroom situation.” Along the apartment’s eastern wall stood the shower and the toilet, both separated from the rest of the space by only a curtain. The only sink was the kitchen sink. Well, I thought, that pretty much eliminates the possibility of anyone staying the night. I showed up to my friends’ doorstep tired and sweaty, and as we chatted, the last member of our camping caravan emerged from his bedroom, hair damp from a shower. I snuck a glance into his room. His room was basically the same size as my entire micro-studio, and contained many more things—paintings from Chile, philodendron cuttings in blue glass vases, and, in the living room, even a large white rug and a recliner. Read More
March 13, 2023 On Poetry The Blk Mind Is a Continuous Mind By Tracy K. Smith Photograph by Thomas Bresson, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. In his poem “After Avery R. Young,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown writes, “The blk mind / Is a continuous mind.” These lines emerge for me as a guiding principle—as a mantra, even—when I consider the work of Black poetry in America, which insists upon the centrality of Black lives to the human story, and offers the terms of memory, music, conscience, and imagination that serve to counteract the many erasures and distortions riddling the prevailing narrative of Black life in this country. Indeed, Black poets help us to consider our past, present, and future not as disparate fragments on a disappearing trail, but rather as a single, emphatic unity: the Was, Is, and Ever-Shall-Be of Black presence and consciousness. The blk mind is a continuous mind. And language is one site where the continuum of Black life can be perceived, where we can hear ourselves talking to one another across generations, landscapes, and the particularities of circumstance. Indeed, Black poets also hurl their voices across other types of borders to remind us that we are living, sighing, and singing in harmony with others elsewhere and with traditions beyond our own. Read More
March 10, 2023 Fiction Season of Grapes By Tennessee Williams Illustration by Na Kim. As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen. It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit. Read More
March 10, 2023 The Review’s Review Morrison’s Infinity Knots: Sites of Memory at Princeton By Adrienne Raphel Handwritten manuscript page from The Bluest Eye, and other Morrison papers. Toni Morrison Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Library. Visiting Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, on exhibit at Princeton University’s Firestone Library from now through June 4, 2023, is like going to a sauna. You enter a warm, windowless space, and as you rotate your way through each experience, you find you’re dunked suddenly into something that barrages the senses—fire-singed early drafts, a detailed map, alternate endings for Beloved, the photograph that inspired Jazz. But it’s also like taking a cold plunge: you’re carried along on the continuous current of Morrison’s voice and work, and you duck out refreshed, tingling, alive with more possibilities than you’d realized there could be. Read More
March 9, 2023 Eat Your Words Cooking with Florine Stettheimer By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica Maclean. The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine. Read More