November 18, 2021 Lookbook Dreams in First-Person Shooter By Miles Lagoze Still from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman. A few weeks before our unit’s operation started, Lance Corporal Loya and I stood over a wadi, waiting for each other to throw our cameras down into its dusty, hollow trench. Wadis—the streams or natural ravines that farmers in the region often used as irrigation canals—were our generation’s rice paddies; they were everywhere in Helmand Province. When they weren’t wet, it was comforting to climb inside them—womblike slits in the ground to curl up in and shoot out of. They were the last thing some of us would see before dying. Like feudal tendrils etched across the fields, the wadis in the Sangin Valley were fed by the Kajaki Dam, which provided the area with a (very) limited source of electricity. It was also the main source of water for all the nearby poppy fields. This was September 2011, and guys were already talking conspiracy theories about how the pharmaceutical industry was behind the war, how they were funding the whole thing with the aim of getting us hooked on opioids once we got back to the States all fucked up and traumatized. Read More
November 18, 2021 A Letter from the Editor With Cherries on Top By Emily Stokes You may notice that we’re looking a bit different today. Last week, we sent the Winter 2021 issue to Prolific, our new printer in Canada, and it looks a bit different, too. The design was inspired by the minimalism of older issues of the Review—among them no. 56, published in 1973, which I have been carrying around for the past few months. The table of contents is enticing: poetry by Anne Waldman and Alice Notley; “Emmy Moore’s Journal,” featuring one of Jane Bowles’s “odd, half-unworldly, off-kilter heroines,” as Lydia Davis put it in our anthology Object Lessons. But I am possessive of my copy for another reason. This summer, when our designer, Matt Willey, first visited the Review’s Chelsea office, he and I were immediately drawn to issue no. 56 as an object. We liked the book’s trim size, small enough that you could hold it open in one hand, and the type, which though not big was surprisingly legible, dark and fat. The paper felt intimate—textured in a way that seemed to ask to be dog-eared, or even scribbled on. And we loved the cover, which featured a geometric artwork by the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner. Read More
November 17, 2021 First Person My Father’s Mariannes By Aisha Sabatini Sloan Lester Sloan in Paris. Photo: Aisha Sabatini Sloan My father is lingering a bit too long on the subway platform. The doors of the train are about to close when I grab him by the lapels and pull him onboard. I must be shouting, “Dad, come on,” because when the doors slam shut my ears are ringing with the sound of my own voice, and everyone on the train is staring at us. I feel flush with shame. We ride in silence. I’d surprised my father with two tickets to Paris, a chance for him to be a stylish photographer in his favorite city again. To put on a new suit and tie and retell his favorite stories. To hit the streets after a good rain, when the cobblestones refract the light like so many scattered gems. But he is in his late seventies. He walks more slowly now, has trouble remembering the last time he took his insulin. His arthritis has made it harder for him to negotiate the f-stops on his camera. I become the parent on the trip, and my concern becomes monotonous: Dad, watch out, you’re going to bump into someone. Dad, don’t follow her down the alley, that’s stalking. Dad, don’t put that glucose strip on the table. So far our days have been beset by unexpected detours. My father wanted to stand in the middle of Hotel de Ville and reminisce about the summer we spent there watching the World Cup on a giant screen in an enormous crowd. He wanted to echo the sound of a passing siren by shouting “Tambourine, tambourine” into the wind. I trailed behind him as he followed a woman with his camera because she was wearing red shoes, and, Oh look, that looks so good against the graffiti. Read More
November 16, 2021 Redux Redux: Backwards and Upside Down 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. BLAISE CENDRARS, CA. 1907, PHOTOGRAPH BY AUGUST MONBARON. This week at The Paris Review, we’re looking in the mirror. Read on for Blaise Cendrars’s Art of Fiction interview, Shruti Swami’s short story “A House Is a Body,” Sharon Olds’s poem “I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror,” and Melissa Febos’s essay “The Mirror Test,” paired with a selection of photographs by Francesca Woodman. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Blaise Cendrars, The Art of Fiction No. 38 Issue no. 37 (Spring 1966) A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors. Read More
November 12, 2021 The Review’s Review Moral Suasion By The Paris Review I am not sure I will ever agree with the viability of the political trajectory traced in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; I don’t think we are going to survive by successfully convincing an administrative class—through science or terror or moral suasion—to administer the world better until climate collapse is averted. But so what? You don’t read books because they say what you already believe. You read books because they take the problem seriously, take the world seriously, don’t counterfeit the dimensions of the predicament. Or, those are at least some reasons to read books, and The Ministry for the Future is one of very few that satisfy those imperatives for me. Interestingly, his books, including this one, are often classified as “Hard SF,” meaning they are based in careful and arguably wonky extensions of hard science. Yes and no. Certainly they take science very seriously, and Robinson is wildly erudite and engaged in such matters. But Robinson’s books have over the last decade increasingly understood that the underlying problem is not science, and therefore has no scientific solution; it lies in political economy, and a sustained change that might preserve the possibility of human flourishing has to happen there. I think that should complicate the categories a little. In any regard, the book is real thinking and real invention, operating at the scale of the whole, which is really the place to be these days. —Joshua Clover Read More
November 10, 2021 On Music Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich By Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman’s song “Roadrunner.” Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock ’n’ roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock ’n’ roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out. Read More