June 24, 2022 The Review’s Review On Hannah Black’s Pandemic Novella, Barthelme, and Pessoa By The Paris Review Blue jellyfish. Photograph by Annette Teng. Licensed under CC BY 3.0. Hannah Black’s novella Tuesday or September or the End begins in the early months of 2020, on the heels of a strange discovery: an alien object, oak-tree-like but seemingly machine-fabricated, has materialized on the shore of Jones Beach. According to the frenetic narrative of the news, one that chokes everyday life, it would seem that everyone in America is obsessed with the possibility of alien contact. But Bird initially has no interest in the strange object; she is a communist who would rather “talk about her feelings,” while her boyfriend, Dog, a social democrat, tries to “embrace popular feeling”—he is “among the enraptured many.” In March, after COVID is recognized as a legitimate threat to life, the couple is separated without ceremony or passion. They seem uninterested in reuniting until riots following the murder of George Floyd turn into a revolution: all prisoners are released, and Rikers falls into a sinkhole. In the real-life early months of 2020, it was assumed—at least by magazine editors, and the writers they commissioned—that collective grief was best understood through a process of individual accounting: reflections on how one spent or wasted or optimized their newfound free time. “Pandemic diaries,” as these reflections became known, promised to do the work of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Today, they have altogether disappeared. Tuesday or September of the End bears many of the superficial marks of the genre; the events of the book are demarcated by the months in which they occur, and, as Black told BOMB, it is “a fictionalized version of the first six months of 2020 … as if you can fictionalize time itself.” But while the diary fixates on the ordinary, attempting to derive collective meaning from individual routine, Black’s novella mobilizes an absurd and unlikely third party whose arrival signals a break from the anesthetizing qualities of contemporary life. Humanity submits “itself as an object of study” for the aliens, who interview people one by one; the aliens, in turn, suffer from “the introduction of the concept of prison,” but are “deeply healed by riot.” I was so compelled by their psychology, which enables the couple and all of the other humans they live among to feel collective liberation as something tangible, inevitable, and already arising. —Maya Binyam, contributing editor Read More
June 23, 2022 On Leonard Cohen A Brighter Kind of Madness: On Leonard Cohen By Ottessa Moshfegh Leonard Cohen. Photograph by Rama. Licensed under CCO 2.0. To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm our appointment. I feel bad for this guy now. He was kind of clueless and innocent, and I tried to horrify him at every session with more and more outlandishly irreverent thoughts about life. I’m not sure why I did this—maybe just for my own entertainment. He used to tell me that he could decipher my moods based on my outfits—he could determine when I was depressed or activated or hadn’t been sleeping based on the color combinations I chose. This was a very confused, manic period for me, and I had developed a practice of dressing that followed something like an equation. One garment had to be the equivalent of garbage; disgusting T-shirts and track pants fit into that category. One garment had to be opulent and luxurious, like a sequin blazer or buttery leather pants. And one garment had to be ironic. This was the hardest category to fulfill because it was so subjective. Read More
June 23, 2022 On Nature The Plants Are Watching By Elvia Wilk Venus Fly Trap. Photograph by Bjorn S. Licensed under C.C.O 3.0. Tell Us What You Know One day in 1966, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster was feeling silly. On a whim, he tried clipping a polygraph wire to the leaf of a common houseplant. A polygraph, or lie detector, is typically hooked up to a person to measure factors like increased heart rate and skin moisture, in order to determine whether the subject is truthfully responding to questions. A needle corresponding to physiological changes registers a line on paper; the line will supposedly spike if a person lies. Polygraphs are finicky instruments and their reliability has been repeatedly debunked (simply being attached to one can be enough to make your heart rate jump), but they do successfully measure fluctuations in an organism’s physical state. Backster thought he might be able to incite a spike in the line of the lie detector if he somehow excited or injured the plant. He decided he might set one of its leaves on fire. But as he sat there, contemplating burning the plant, the polygraph needle jumped. Backster—who in his free time was also an acid-dropping astrologist—noted that the spike was identical to the kind elicited by a human fright response. He quickly jumped to the conclusion that the plant could experience emotions like a sentient being. And since he had only contemplated hurting the plant, he also concluded that the plant could sense his thoughts. The plant was a mind reader. Over the following decades Backster cleaved ever tighter to a theory he developed called “primary perception,” which he believed to be a form of consciousness embedded in the cells of all living beings that, at least in the case of plants, gave them a profound sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. If it had not been the sixties, perhaps his work would have been relegated to the shelves of pseudoscience, but he hit a nerve of the Whole Earth generation with its burgeoning environmental movement. Like Backster, a certain set was already primed to believe in communion with plants in the form of, say, ingesting psilocybin or peyote. Backster became a figurehead for a cultural fascination with plant consciousness. His findings about the ability of plants to sense danger, read emotion, and communicate were publicized widely, notably in the still-popular book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, but also on TV shows. His ideas were adopted by the Church of Scientology, and eventually even made it back to the CIA, which invested in its own research about plant sentience. Read More
June 22, 2022 Re-Covered Re-Covered: A Sultry Month by Alethea Hayter By Lucy Scholes Thames embankment, London, England. Photochrom Print Collection, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. One hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday, June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon—sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin—locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London’s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest anyone could remember: that day, thermometers in the city stood at ninety degrees in the shade. Despite the heat, that morning Haydon had walked to a gunmaker’s on nearby Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He spent the rest of the day at home, composing letters and writing a comprehensive, nineteen-clause will. That evening, only a few streets away in Marylebone, Elizabeth Barrett penned a letter to her fiancé, Robert Browning. The poets’ courtship was still a secret, but they wrote each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. Like everyone else, Elizabeth was exhausted by the weather; earlier in the month she had complained to Browning that she could do nothing but lie on her sofa, drink lemonade, and read Monte Cristo. “Are we going to have a storm tonight?” she now wrote eagerly. And, indeed, as dusk turned to darkness, the rumbles of a summer tempest began. By ten o’clock, Londoners could see flashes of lightning on the horizon. Back in Burwood Place, meanwhile, passing her husband’s studio on her way upstairs to dress, Mrs. Mary Haydon tried the door, but found it bolted. “Who’s there?” her husband cried out. “It is only me,” she replied, before continuing on her way. A few minutes later, Haydon emerged from his studio and followed her upstairs. He repeated a message he wanted her to deliver to a friend of theirs across the river in Brixton and stayed a moment or two longer, then kissed her before heading back downstairs. Once again alone in his studio, he wrote one final page that began, “Last Thoughts of B. R. Haydon. ½ past 10.” Fifteen minutes later, he stood up, took the pistol he had bought that morning, and, standing in front of the large canvas of an unfinished current work in progress, “Alfred and the First British Jury”—one of the grand historical scenes he favored but brought him few admirers—shot himself in the head. Read More
June 21, 2022 Diaries Solstice Diaries By Ellyn Gaydos Last night I hit a deer, a fawn actually. Just a ragged thing still with its spots, it could’ve been born that day. Its mother stood on the side of the road. I saw her first and only the fawn when it was too late, my own new child in the backseat. I was immediately seized with the guilt that I shouldn’t be there and the deer should, that I was in the wrong place throttling a car through the woods. The next day at the farm where I work the lettuces were missing their hearts, the best, sweetest part eaten by deer. It is getting to be summer when things like this happen. Read More
June 16, 2022 First Person Corpsing: On Sex, Death, and Inappropriate Laughter By Nuar Alsadir Illustration by Na Kim. We were sitting at a long table, images and diagrams projected onto the wall behind us, while the audience faced us in silence. I was part of a panel on hoarding, along with another psychoanalyst and a memoirist. As I gave my presentation, audience members went about their business as though they were invisible, like people in cars sometimes do. One person directly in front of me scrolled and typed on her iPhone. Another stood up, walked to the back of the room to get a drink, then returned to his seat and rummaged through his bag. I became aware of my attempt to block out these actions, to pretend not to see what I was seeing. At one point, I must have turned my head in the direction of my lapel mic because suddenly the volume shot up. I was explaining the concept of horror vacui, or the fear of emptiness, pointing to the part it played in the aesthetics of the Victorian era, causing every surface to be covered with tchotchkes, and in sex, leading some men to dread a sense of post-coital emptiness so much that they stave off—and this is when it happened—ejacuLATION. Read More