January 31, 2023 Arts & Culture All Water Has a Perfect Memory By Jordan Amirkhani I have seen the Mississippi. That is muddy water. I have seen the Saint Lawrence. That is crystal water. But the Thames is liquid history. —John Burns, quoted in the Daily Mail, January 25, 1943 In the upper left quadrant of Minnesota, a small winding brook and its bubbling waters form the beginnings of a journey from north to south, catching streams and tributaries along its track through the heart of North America toward the Gulf of Mexico. The name given to this massive system made of more than 100,000 waterways is the Mississippi River, a riparian sweep with a drainage basin touching approximately 1.2 million square miles, or 40 percent of the continental United States. With sand and silt ever flowing toward the river’s mouth, a wild wetland of marshes, swamps, and bayous reigns, turning solid land into sponge in the vast network of alluvial floodplains known as the Mississippi Delta. Just under one hundred miles from the Mississippi’s mouth, the river takes a sudden turn southward, snaking east and then north in a final return to its southeasterly course. In this crescent-shaped curvature between river, lake, and gulf lies New Orleans, named after Philippe I, duc d’Orléans by the French Canadian naval officer and colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. In his correspondence with Philippe, Bienville described this magnificent system of watercourses as “filled with a mud as deep as its oceanbed” yet “unmistakably Divine” for its navigational and commercial potential. Through royal decree, Bienville was granted two parcels of land for the establishment of a “new France in this riverside”—land financed by France’s first colonial trading corporation, the Mississippi Company, and cleared and worked by the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana. Read More
January 30, 2023 Home Improvements The Couch Had Nothing to Do with Me By Maya Binyam Years ago, while on assignment, I interviewed a man who spent what felt like hours showing me pictures of the various couches he was thinking of purchasing for his new home. The couches were ridiculous and abstract, as if the practical thing had been replaced with the idea of itself. They were long and narrow and metallic, or otherwise bulbous and overstuffed, like flesh permanently impressed by the tight grip of a corset. I thought he was deploying the couches as a kind of symbolic shorthand–to indicate to me his wealth and his taste, which obviously exceeded my own. Now, years later, as I find myself in the midst of furnishing my own new home, I recognize in our exchange the telltale signs of a psychology that has been corrupted by the existential problem of populating an empty space. Obsession, fixation, compulsive confession: these weren’t the symptoms of a big ego–they were the symptoms of an ego that was being dissolved by interior design. Read More
January 27, 2023 The Review’s Review Intuition’s Ear: On Kira Muratova By Timmy Straw Still from Anya Zalevskaya’s Posle priliva (2020). Courtesy of the director. In the fall of 2019 I was newly living in the Midwest. In my free time, I’d take long, aimless walks, trying to tune to the flat cold of the place. On one such walk I got a call from my friend Anya Zalevskaya; she was in Odesa, she said, working on a film, a documentary about the Ukrainian (but also Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet) director Kira Muratova. When Anya called, it was almost midnight in Odesa. She was sitting on a bench by the Black Sea; I could hear the waves, the inhale of her cigarette. What film of Muratova’s should I watch first? I asked her. Ah, she said, The Asthenic Syndrome, for sure. 1990’s The Asthenic Syndrome takes us to Odesa, too, but this is an Odesa at the fraying edge of a Soviet time-space where, significantly, we never see the sea. The film is shot in places that suggest a borderland, an edge, a wobble: construction sites, mirrors, photographs, headstones, film screenings, cemeteries, a dog pound, a hospital ward, a soft-porn shoot. This in-between sense is temporal, as well: Muratova notes that she “had the great fortune of working in a period between the dominance of ideology and the dominance of the market, a period of suspension, a temporary paradise.” As with the asthenic syndrome itself (a state between sleeping and waking), the film is a realization of inbetweenness, an assembly of frictions and crossover states we feel through form: through Muratova’s use of juxtaposition; through her uncanny overpatterning of echoes and coincidences; through the shifts of register between documentary and opera. The film doesn’t proceed so much as weave itself in front of us, in a dazzling ivy pattern of zones and occurrences. You could call it late-Soviet baroque realism. Read More
January 26, 2023 On Music On the Bus with Pavement: Tour Diary By Mina Tavakoli Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records. One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder. A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” Read More
January 24, 2023 Diaries Diary of Nuance By Adam Thirlwell In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page. The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life. Life! I missed life very much. Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another. La Perdida, O Pando 2018, citrusy, salt, chamomile, then what? A thin mineral sourness. Codello grapes. I hate all descriptions. Maybe this will become all names and nouns. / Chanel’s Cuir de Russie—ylang and jasmine and iris, which somehow produces the illusion of leather. But then there’s also Rien by État Libre d’Orange, aldehydes then frankincense, incense, labdanum, which also produces leather but this one somehow fizzing, like it’s at a level above reality. I have no idea how to write this. I wonder if you could do an essay on perfume writing as an example of the problem (impossibility) of all criticism: something abstract infected by people’s associations (the mad online reviews of Rien, which seem to be describing a perfume that’s completely different to the one I’m smelling). Read More
January 23, 2023 Home Improvements His Ex-Wife’s Plates By Holly Connolly In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction. The second time I met my boyfriend, S., he told me he was getting divorced. I thought, Great. I liked the way it sounded. We were in our late twenties and so it made him and by extension me seem original, and I like people who have made mistakes. To me the marriage sounded unserious, and therefore unthreatening: it was a visa marriage, granted one that came out of a relationship. They met at work, were married after about a year, and divorced bitterly after fewer than three. I have never met his ex-wife but initially I pictured someone stylish and ethereal, and he had said she was a bit older so she was perhaps intimidating in that sense but, ultimately, good company. The problems started with her stuff. For a brief period before they broke up, they both lived together in the house where he, and now sometimes I, live. Meaning that, as a result of the divorce happening long-distance in a kind of pandemic limbo period, and us meeting very soon after it, for the early stretch of our relationship many of her things were still in the house just outside of Belfast. Read More