January 27, 2022 First Person Crush By Kathryn Davis Still from The Seventh Seal courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream, and as a disc set. We’re in a room on the ground floor of a hotel, the bed facing a wall of curtained windows that in turn faces the street. It is nighttime. Rain is coming down, steadily, reflectively, a stream of passersby visible through the curtains, which are sheer. Everyone is moving in the same direction, bent slightly forward and holding an umbrella, from left to right, the good direction, from past to future, the opposite of where Death leads the knight and the squire and the monk and the smith and the mute in their final dance against the backdrop of time in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The umbrella is the canopy of the heavens; the rain is never going to let up. We can see the passersby but they can’t see us, though Eric has turned a light on above his side of the bed. Read More
January 26, 2022 Redux Redux: Functionally Insane By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. In a new essay published on The Paris Review Daily, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra explores how a lifetime of cluster headaches led him to seek relief in the hallucinogenic mushroom teonanácatl. He learns an important lesson: always wait before redosing. In the spirit of experimentation, this week’s Redux riffs on writing under the influence. Read on for Hunter S. Thompson’s hard-won advice about which drug a writer should avoid, in the Art of Journalism No. 1; a hazy afternoon in J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?”; Anne Waldman on the body as “just a bundle of drugs” in “How to Write”; Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 letter to the editor, regarding his experiences with LSD and psilocybin; and a portfolio of Nancy Friedemann’s loopy text-based drawings, as well as a sculpture. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1 Issue no. 156 (Fall 2000) INTERVIEWER How do you write when you’re under the influence? THOMPSON My theory for years has been to write fast and get through it. I usually write five pages a night and leave them out for my assistant to type in the morning. INTERVIEWER This, after a night of drinking and so forth? THOMPSON Oh yes, always, yes. I’ve found that there’s only one thing that I can’t work on and that’s marijuana. Even acid I could work with. The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Either you function or you don’t. Functionally insane? If you get paid for being crazy, if you can get paid for running amok and writing about it . . . I call that sane. Read More
January 20, 2022 The Review’s Review Back to the Essence By The Paris Review Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty years. The fact that you could make something that good and decide not to put it out says everything about Mobb Deep’s seat in the pantheon. The whole thing is a kniving, wintry blast of phonetic artistry, but the last lines are Shakespearean. The rapper is Prodigy, a twenty-year-old Albert Johnson the Fifth (Albert the Third was Albert J. “Budd”Johnson, a major early bebop saxophonist who came out of Dallas and got his break recording with Louis Armstrong in the early thirties). Prodigy will die in his early forties from problems related to sickle-cell anemia, but at the moment he’s talking about his home ground in the vast housing projects of Queens. The song is a warning to would-be intruders or, in Big Noyd’s words, “motherfucking violators.” In six seconds Prodigy draws an eerie picture of cops surveilling the block: “As jakes look over the hill, their eyes see nothing but nighttime,” while in the buildings, “due murders” happen “at an unseen right time.” Whoever is being spoken to fails to listen and gets “two to his dome so his last thought is hot.” At that point the story needs to make a pivot from “Be careful or you’ll get killed” to “You weren’t careful and now I’ve been forced to shoot you.” Prodigy: You came as a whole But you’re leaving In incomplete pieces And didn’t expect to meet Jesus In your adolescence Sending you back to the essence So you can feel at home And safe in God’s presence Whole, home. He murders you, and he blesses you. Even in the act of taking your young life, he retains the power to confer his blessing on you, and gives it. That’s how far above petty bullshit he’s hovering. Chills. —John Jeremiah Sullivan Read More
January 19, 2022 First Person Teonanácatl By Alejandro Zambra Illustrations by George Wylesol. Teonanácatl. That’s what the Aztecs used to call the mushroom known today as pajarito, or “little bird.” My friend Emilio recommended it as a treatment for my cluster headaches, and he got me a generous dose in chocolate form. I stashed the squares in the fridge and awaited the first symptoms with resignation, though I sometimes fantasized that the mere presence of the drug would keep the headaches at bay. Sadly, soon enough I felt one coming on, and it was the very day we had planned a first-aid course. My wife Jazmina and I had just had a child, and after attending a clumsy, tedious introduction to first aid, we’d decided to call in a doctor, and ended up inviting other first-time parents to an exhaustive four-hour program that would take place at the house next door. But in the very early dawn of the designated day, I woke up with that intense pain in the trigeminal nerve that for me is the unequivocal sign of an imminent headache. My wife proposed that I forget about the course and stay home to take pajarito. Read More
January 18, 2022 The Moon in Full Wolf Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor), by Odilon Redon, 1880 1. How did you hear about planet Earth? Read More
January 18, 2022 Redux Redux: Conceptual Baggage By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. CHARLES JOHNSON IN HIS OFFICE, WITH HIS GRANDSON EMERY, 2016. “The question,” writes Emmanuel Carrère in “Exhaling,” a new piece of prose in our Winter issue, “is whether there’s an incompatibility, or even a contradiction, between the practice of meditation and my trade, which is to write.” Carrère isn’t the first to explore meditation, and the tension between silence and setting down words, in The Paris Review. Read on for Charles Johnson’s youthful experiments in meditation in his Art of Fiction interview, a lecture by a famous Buddhist in Danielle Dutton’s short story “Somehow,” a sudden interruption at a Buddhist monastery in Marilyn Chin’s poem “Lantau,” and a return to mindfulness as you focus on Jacques Hérold’s portfolio of pen and ink drawings. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239 Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018) Let’s start with the fact that fuzzy-bunny Buddhism doesn’t often talk about what it’s all really about—that it’s a preparation for death. Buddhism begins with that young prince leading his sheltered life and seeing the four signs. He sees an old man, he sees a sick man, he sees a dead man, and he sees a holy man. And he realizes unequivocally, categorically, That’s me. I’m going to get old, I’m going to get sick, and I’m going to die. So how do I deal with this? Buddhism is about letting go of a lot of conceptual baggage, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—you let that go and there’s a sense of liberation and clarity. Read More