April 8, 2024 First Person Hands By Gil Cuadros Photograph by Edna Winti. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0 Deed. I am prepared. I have had my will drawn and notarized. I’ve given away old books from my library that I will never read again. I’ve gotten rid of porno magazines and cock rings, things that would be difficult or compromising for my beloved to discard. Mother has all my baby pictures I stole. I have paid for my cremation. I carry a pocket full of change to give to panhandlers. My elementary catechism has returned; those who help the lowliest … Marcus says he just doesn’t understand me sometimes, says he has dreams for us, a home we will build together, but it seems to him I’m giving parts of my life away. I sit quietly at the deli booth, staring at my unfinished sandwich. It is rare now for me to be hungry; the bones in my face have become more distinct. It is when I don’t respond that he gets annoyed, but I can’t help it. I don’t want to change his feelings or argue the probabilities. I don’t believe I have long; my blood has turned against me, there is no one here to heal me. The sunlight from the window pours heavily onto his face, rugged and aged. Myself, I have to stay away from the sun; my face discolors from all the medications I take. Read More
April 5, 2024 Dispatch The Locker Room: An Abercrombie Dispatch By Asha Schechter A&F Hong Kong store opening, 2012. 製作, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. In May of 2005, discontent with my job as a photo editor at a women’s magazine, I accepted an offer from a friend who did Bruce Weber’s casting to interview for a photo assistant position with him. At the time, Weber was doing the photography for Abercrombie & Fitch, working in tandem with the CEO, Mike Jeffries, to resurrect the brand. The photographs, in tonally rich black-and-white or vivid color, showed cheerful, cartoonishly chiseled, (mostly) white people frolicking, washing dogs, and generally playing grab-ass. They hearkened back to the scrubbed cleanliness of the fifties (with a sprinkle of Leni Riefenstahl); everybody looked like they had gotten a haircut the morning of the shoot. My friend described the photo assistants as a group of young men who traveled the world with Weber, making big money. On breaks, they’d show off for the models by playing shirtless football on the beach or jumping off cliffs into narrow pools of water. This seemed better than sitting at my desk arranging catering or reassuring Missy Elliott’s team that the mansion where we were going to photograph her did in fact have air-conditioning. Read More
April 4, 2024 On Poetry Making of a Poem: Eliot Weinberger on “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees” By Eliot Weinberger Anne Noble, The Dead Bee Portraits #2. Courtesy of the artist. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 247. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? First, I doubt it qualifies as a poem. It starts out as a simulacrum of a poem and then turns into an essay—or at least what I consider to be an essay, which is sometimes mistaken for a poem or a prose poem. Its origin was a letter I received out of the blue from a photographer in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Anne Noble, whose work includes portraits of dead bees, some done with such devices as electron microscopes and 3D printers. She knew my collaboration with the Maori painter Shane Cotton (the essay “The Ghosts of Birds”) and asked me to write a text for a catalog of her photographs she was preparing. At the time I wasn’t able to help, but a few years later—long after the catalog had been published—I found it was finally the moment to get to the bees. Read More
April 3, 2024 At Work A Sense of Agency: A Conversation with Lauren Oyler By Sheila Heti Photograph by Carleen Coulter. The one time I met Lauren Oyler in person was in New York in the spring of 2018. I had been closely following her work as a critic and admired her intelligence and fearlessness. That exuberant night, she sat mostly quietly, with a look of anger, through a long evening at a bar, which ended late, outside a pizza restaurant, over greasy slices. She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, who was the reason I was there. The next day, I learned that after they had gone home, she had dumped him. All of this made a deep impression on me. Not pretending to be having a good time. Some sort of power she embodied, just sitting there stonily. I have a terrible memory, but I remember that night—and her at the center of it—so vividly. That spring, it seemed like everyone was talking about her hyperarticulate critiques of Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, and Zadie Smith. She was unafraid to use the full force of her critical eye to scrutinize even those artists who were mostly widely praised. Several weeks after we met, she wrote a defense of my novel Motherhood in The Baffler, responding to various prominent American female critics who had negatively reviewed the book. I wrote to thank her, and in the years since, we developed a correspondence and a friendship. Three years ago, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, about a young woman who flees to Berlin and interrogates her relationships and herself, while a Greek chorus of ex-boyfriends occasionally chimes in with corrections to her self-mythology.Her new book of essays, No Judgment, contains six pieces, all written specifically for the book. She thinks about the history of criticism in the form of star ratings on Goodreads; about gossip and anxiety. I was struck by the pleasure vibrating from these essays; the evident joy she takes, and freedom she feels, in writing and thinking in the essay form. I was eager to ask her certain questions outside the structure of our friendship. She is a critic I admire, with strengths that feel different from my own; in other words, someone to learn from. INTERVIEWER I want to begin by asking you generally about the pleasures of writing—when did you discover them? LAUREN OYLER The first things I remember writing were journals and daily writing assignments in school, and then there were the private blogs I kept as a teenager. I think I wrote those online just because I preferred to write on the computer as soon as that was available. I was always a good typist and it was the dawn of the social internet, but I kept the blogs locked, or whatever we used to say, so the point was just that I wanted to be able to write fast and emotionally while talking to people on AIM at the same time. I don’t know if I found the pleasures of writing uncomplicated, even at the time—writing was a compensation prize for the various anxieties and miseries I experienced, and I kind of still feel that way. I wanted to be a painter, which I am not naturally talented at, but I always had a natural talent for writing and a unique relationship to language, and for some reason I kept developing it. You’re not supposed to say this—you’re supposed to say, “I am so lucky to have a career, I am no better than anyone else.” I know many very naturally talented people who aren’t ambitious, and I admire and sometimes envy them, but I have been very ambitious since I was fourteen years old. I don’t know why. Read More
April 2, 2024 First Person Inheritance By Hebe Uhart Hebe Uhart. Photograph by Agustina Fernández. Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read the first in the series here. When I used to take walks along Bulnes Street and Santa Fe Avenue, a certain boutique would catch my eye. It always displayed the same series of colors: beige, dusty rose, baby blue—a small array of colors, and always the same ones on rotation, never a red or a yellow. Everything behind the display window was elegant but hidden in shadows; this included the owner, who seemed determined to fulfill her duties despite having so few customers. The owner’s silent manner and desire to go unnoticed (as if showing one’s face were distasteful) led me, in one way or another, to this idea: she must have inherited her taste in clothing from her mother, and she was making sure to carry on its legacy. Well done, well done on that display window, but with so few customers, the shop was doomed. Read More
March 29, 2024 The Review’s Review I Love You, Maradona By Rachel Connolly Photograph by Rachel Connolly. While reading Maradona’s autobiography this past winter, I found that every few pages I would whisper or write in the margins, “I love you, Maradona.” Sadness crept up on me as I turned to the last chapter, and it intensified to heartbreak when I read its first lines: “They say I can’t keep quiet, that I talk about everything, and it’s true. They say I fell out with the Pope. It’s true.” I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope. I started reading El Diego: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Footballer, ghostwritten by Daniel Arcucci and translated to English by Marcela Mora y Araujo. He said reading it was the most fun he’d had with a book. I came to El Diego with basically no knowledge of Maradona or even of soccer. I would have said I hated soccer actually. I hate the buzzing noise the crowds make on the TV. But from the very first page I found Maradona’s voice so addictive and original that reading El Diego felt like falling in love. Read More