December 2, 2021 Look #nyc #adayinmylife By Taylore Scarabelli Screenshot from “Restaurant Reviews: Lucien” video by @theviplist Earlier this year I was obsessed with watching movies set in New York: campy comedies like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours felt like a night out when I was still hiding at home; erotic thrillers like A Perfect Murder and Dressed to Kill made the city seem more enticingly dangerous than it was during lockdown. As New York reopened, I stopped watching movies and started going out. Dining at restaurants, once a luxury, felt like a necessity—a way of re-entering the fantasy world of New York that I had streamed over the past year. It didn’t matter where I was going or who I was dining with. I just wanted to be out and around people, to feel like a main character living in New York City. Read More
December 1, 2021 Humor When You Misread the Title of a New Yorker Article Called “Going Home with Wendell Berry” as “Going Down On Wendell Berry” By Lulu Miller © Gorilla /Adobe Stock First you tease his hand-knit sweater with your greener thumb. You nudge it into that snail burrow beneath the wool. It is warm against Wendell Berry’s belly, and you consider leaving your thumb there forever. He would not mind. He would ask only that you join him at first light to hoe the earth, and not comment as he crumbles a pinch of soil between his fingers, and not ask how it is, exactly, that the particles fall in such perfect slo-mo. He would ask only that you join him under the hand-wrought pergola at the foot of his radish bed as he sips sugarless lemonade and pays gratitude to the clouds and the mycorrhizal network. He would ask only that you not try to his read his lips as they involuntarily mouth the objects of his gratitude. You think you catch him mouthing “Doritos,” but as you start to ask, he catches your eye in a steely way that tells you to back off. Read More
December 1, 2021 Rereading On the Alert for Omens: Rereading Charles Portis By Rosa Lyster Annotated pages from the author’s copy of The Dog of the South About a month ago, this man dropped an orange peel on me, deliberately, from the third-floor window of a pink apartment building on Bohdana Khmelnytsky Street in Kyiv, Ukraine. If you would like to picture the scene, you should imagine a man with the same shape of head and beard as Karl Marx, dressed in a high-necked white garment that sits at the intersection of “mystic” and “physician,” eating an orange and staring directly into the tired eyes of a woman who is wearing an ankle-length black coat that makes her feel like a corrupt but dignified old banker and big shiny black shoes that make her feel like a powerful car. I was on my way to the A. V. Fomin Botanical Garden a few streets away, and it was early enough in the morning that I had nothing in my head except the thought of how much I loved my shoes. I’d been gazing down at them as I walked, gloating over them in a way that was Rumpelstiltskinesque, when I realized someone was staring at me, hard, so I looked up and there was this man, in the pink building across the street, eating his orange with glazed conviction and giving off an aura of Rasputin. Read More
November 30, 2021 In Memoriam The Fourth Rhyme: On Stephen Sondheim By Adrienne Raphel a letter to the author from Stephen Sondheim. In the late fifties, Stephen Sondheim, who died last week aged ninety-one, performed a song from the not-yet-finished musical Gypsy for Cole Porter, on the piano at the older composer’s apartment. As Sondheim recalls in Finishing the Hat, his mesmerizing and microscopically annotated first collection of lyrics, Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy—in which Sondheim’s words accompanied music by Jule Styne—had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio “Together.” “It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,” he writes, to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!” Read More
November 30, 2021 Redux Redux: Each Train Rips 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. Jan Morris © David Hurn. This week at The Paris Review, we’re traveling via plane, bus, and foot. Read on for Jan Morris’s Art of the Essay interview, Anuk Arudpragasam’s short story “So Many Different Worlds,” Sarah Green’s poem “Vortex, Amtrak,” W. S. Merwin’s essay “Flight Home,” and a portfolio of art by Paige Jiyoung Moon. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Jan Morris, The Art of the Essay No. 2 Issue no. 143 (Summer 1997) I’m not the sort of writer who tries to tell other people what they are going to get out of the city. I don’t consider my books travel books. I don’t like travel books, as I said before. I don’t believe in them as a genre of literature. Every city I describe is really only a description of me looking at the city or responding to it. Read More
November 29, 2021 History White Gods By Anna Della Subin Jose Chávez Morado mosaic mural El Retorno de Quetzalcóatl, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico of Mexico City. Photo by Eva Leticia Ortiz. “We were superior to the god who had created us,” Adam recalled not long before he died, age seven hundred. According to The Apocalypse of Adam, a Coptic text from the late first century CE, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945, Adam told his son Seth that he and Eve had moved as a single magnificent being: “I went about with her in glory.” The fall was a plunge from unity into human difference. “God angrily divided us,” Adam recounted. “And after that we grew dim in our minds…” Paradise was a lost sense of self, and it was also a place that would appear on maps, wistfully imagined by generations of Adam’s descendants. In the fifteenth century, European charts located Eden to the east, where the sun rises—an island ringed by a wall of fire. With the coordinates in their minds, Europe’s explorers could envisage a return to wholeness, to transcendence, to the godhood that had once belonged to man. Read More