August 5, 2022 At Work If Kim Novak Were to Die: A Conversation with Patrizia Cavalli By Annalena Benini Patrizia Cavalli. Photograph by Mario Martone. I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de’ Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: “Do not move! If you move anything, I’ll kill you.” Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli’s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet.” More than fifty years later, Cavalli’s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief—all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry. When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak—some of them her own. Read More
August 3, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2001 By Nell Zink June 5, 2001 When I wrote this, I was living full-time in an idyllic southwest German university town where I had been a familiar figure since the eighties, spending money saved up from fifteen years of menial work elsewhere while sharing a small apartment with two other women. My last job had involved documenting C++, so people were leaning on me to learn to code. Read More
August 1, 2022 First Person The Discovery of the World By Clarice Lispector Clarice Lispector at work. Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente. In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas will be published in English by New Directions this September. As her son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas. July 6, 1968 The Discovery of the World What I want to tell you is as delicate as life itself. And I want to use the delicacy that exists inside me along with the peasant coarseness that is my saving grace. As a child and, later, as an adolescent, I was precocious in many things. In sensing an atmosphere, for example, in picking up on someone else’s personal atmosphere. On the other hand, far from being precocious, I was incredibly backward as regards other important things. Indeed, I continue to be backward in many areas. And there’s nothing I can do about it: it seems there is a childish side of me that will never grow up. Read More
July 29, 2022 The Review’s Review Ghosts, the Grateful Dead, and Earth Room By The Paris Review “The Ghost in the Stereoscope,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. When my wife was giving birth to our child, she saw—waiting at the door of the delivery room—her grandmother, my grandmother, and the grandmother of our sperm donor. In daily life all three of these women are dead. In the delivery room my wife’s grandmother was a reassuring presence, my grandmother—and here my wife is likely influenced by my own childhood reports—held herself at some distance, and our donor’s grandmother held a sign in the style of the airport pickup, welcoming our child. Never before had my wife felt the presence of the dead, but in the months of our baby’s babyhood they have been a recurring presence: a tiny man dressed in rags, muttering Latin by our baby’s bed; a man rocking in our nursing chair whom she first identified as my grandfather, then my father. I am scared of the dark and do not take the pleasure she takes in these appearances. But if there is satisfaction to be had from her morning announcements, it is the way they keep present, alongside the dead, David Ferry’s poem “Resemblance,” from his 2012 collection, Bewilderment. In the poem, the speaker describes seeing his dead father in a restaurant in Orange, New Jersey: It was the eerie persistence of his not Seeming to recognize that I was there, Watching him from my table across the room; It was also the sense of his being included In the conversation around him, and yet not, Though this in life had been familiar to me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where were we, in that restaurant that day? Had I gone down into the world of the dead? Were those other people really Shades of the Dead? We expect that, if they came back, they would come back To impart some knowledge of what it was they had learned Except for the man muttering Latin, none of the dead speak to my wife. She knows what she needs to know from their presence, from the fact that they’ve come to be near our child. Where she feels clarity and reassurance, I feel, as I do about most things, bewildered. “Unable to know is a condition I’ve lived in / All my life,” Ferry writes in the poem. Earlier in the book he quotes a letter Goethe wrote a friend whose son had died: “It’s still, alas, the same old story: to live / Long is to outlive many; and after all, // We don’t even know, then, what it was all about.” —Harriet Clark, author of “Descent” Read More
July 28, 2022 Arts & Culture The Face That Replicates By Katy Kelleher Collage of Norman Rockwell, “Girl at Mirror,” 1954. Licensed under CC0 4.0. Sylvia refused to wear her glasses, which is why she saw me everywhere on campus. It seemed like it was every day that she’d come to our dorm’s living room and tell me about the not-Katy. “I yelled at her again,” she sighed, flopping onto the worn couch. “It wasn’t you.” It never was. There wasn’t only one not-me. There were several other girls on our small liberal arts campus who had dirty-blond hair and shaggy bangs, girls who wore knee-high boots and short skirts, low-rise jeans and V-neck sweaters and too many tangled necklaces. In 2005, I didn’t stand out. I still don’t. My face, I suspect, is rather forgettable. I’m neither pretty enough to be remarkable nor strange enough to be interesting. This is true for the majority of people, though I have wondered if I have “one of those faces” that is particularly prone to inducing déjà vu. Some people seem like permanent doppelgängers. I became hypervigilant, on the lookout for not-mes that were also, sort of, me. Read More
July 27, 2022 Studio Visit Infinite Dictionaries: A Conversation with Marc Hundley By Na Kim Marc Hundley. Photograph by Na Kim. Marc Hundley, whose portfolio of posters appears in the Review’s Summer issue, first moved to New York City in 1993 to model for Vogue with his twin brother, Ian. They were twenty-two and modeling was a means to an end—funding what Hundley calls their “club kid” lifestyle. As their final job in the industry, Marc and Ian walked Comme des Garçons runway shows in Paris and Tokyo alongside the supermodel Linda Evangelista, for a payout of two thousand dollars each. The two brothers then moved from Manhattan to the apartment in Williamsburg where Marc still lives. In the late nineties, he worked as a carpenter and still-life photographer before beginning to make T-shirts and posters for his friends in the downtown club scene, which led him to an interest in text-based art. His prints and drawings often take the form of flyers that play with the associative potential of text and imagery. He still works across various disciplines including graphic design, carpentry, photography, and fine art. Hundley’s portfolio for the Review’s Summer issue constitutes something like a diary of several weeks he spent exploring the magazine’s archives this spring. The posters he created connect imagery and text in unexpected ways: each includes a particular phrase that caught his eye and pays homage to a work of art found in the same issue. (Four of these posters are now available to purchase in the Review’s online store.) In June, we sat down in his large studio in Bed-Stuy on chairs he had built. We shared a bottle of natural wine and talked about his work, the intimacy of being a twin, and how to write a love letter to a stranger. Read More