October 6, 2023 The Review’s Review Dare to Leave a Trace: On A City of Sadness By Michelle Kuo Yidingmu Police Station, Taipei, the morning of February 28, 1947. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was digitally restored and rereleased in theaters across Taiwan earlier this year. Running two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the melancholic art-house film shows in painstaking detail the dissolution of a Taiwanese family prompted by political regime change following World War II. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered Taiwan; soon after, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party (KMT) would retreat from China to the island, violently suppress native uprisings, and officially claim the island as its own in 1949. “This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese and then the Chinese. They all rule us but none take care of us,” one of the film’s protagonists says in Taiwanese, a language that the KMT banned from schools. The English subtitles were less subtle: “They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.” Read More
October 5, 2023 Eat Your Words Cooking with Madame d’Aulnoy By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica Maclean. The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The cooking is extreme. In one story, “Finette-Cendron,” a Cinderella figure, pleases her fairy godmother by baking her a cake with “two pounds of butter”; later, she serves her a feast made from two chickens, a cock, and “two little rabbits that were being fed up with cabbage.” In another story, “Belle-Belle,” a cross-dressing girl kills a dragon after getting him drunk on a lake-sized wine cocktail spiced with “raisins, pepper, and other things that cause thirst.” In a third, “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” a princess brings her shipwrecked sweetheart “four parrots and six squirrels cooked in the sun,” along with “strawberries, cherries, raspberries, and other fruit,” served on plates of stone, and using large, “very soft and pliable” leaves as napkins. Lest anyone find d’Aulnoy’s repasts and their power unrealistic, the opposite is true, as I discovered while attempting to re-create the food with my friend Celia Bell, whose novel, The Disenchantment, published this May, was inspired by d’Aulnoy’s life and work. Read More
October 4, 2023 On Painting Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan By Laure Adler Photograph courtesy of Nightboat Books. She would say that driving a big car on a highway crossing the American desert was like doing calligraphy in her notebooks. She said that if you look at a mountain carefully and faithfully each day, you can become its friend. And this is what happened to her. Each thing that existed in the world provoked her curiosity, and often her wonder. She was never weary and always alert, as if to be alive were in itself such a stroke of luck that nothing must be let go of. She loved wild buttercups and blood-red anemones. She was friends with the flowers too. Born in 1925 in Beirut, Etel Adnan was a poet and an artist. (A portfolio of her work appeared in the Review in 2018.) She died in Paris in 2021. I met her nine years ago in somewhat worldly circumstances, surrounded by famous artists and important gallerists. Everyone was talking but her. She had planted herself with her back to the crowd, facing an enormous fireplace. And she watched the fire without moving. She watched it with such intensity I didn’t dare approach her. I had read some of her writing: remarkable poems, and an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that had impressed me with her point of view on the world. Here was an artist, to be sure, but as young people say these days, “not just that.” It was this “not just” that I wanted to understand. I first came to Etel to ask questions. Very soon I was coming back to see her, to be with her, to be in the delight of being with her. Read More
October 3, 2023 Bulletin Correction By The Paris Review On October 3, 2023, The Paris Review published “Free Everything,” an essay by Miranda July, on the Daily. We were not aware that the essay had previously run in The New Yorker, and have removed it from our website. We regret the error. The original piece can be found here.
October 2, 2023 On Children's Books On Peter Pan By Laurie Stone Scene from Mabou Mines Peter and Wendy with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine. I remember reading Peter Pan as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie—based on J. M. Barrie’s story. It turned me on. I’m six or seven, and I’m flipping through the pages, and there’s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He’s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for. All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another—when we’re children and when we’re old. It doesn’t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children—and often female humans along with them—start out sexually “innocent,” I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity. Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can’t really be contained. What to call the feelings you don’t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn’t have spoken about. It wasn’t because I was masturbating. I didn’t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I’d had sex. I’m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, “If he can do that, so, probably can you.” Read More
September 29, 2023 The Review’s Review The Language of Lava Lamps By Nora Claire Miller Photograph courtesy of the author. In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic. Read More