October 13, 2023 The Review’s Review Green Ray, Pepsi-Cola, Paramusicology By The Paris Review The Pepsi-Cola Sign in Gantry Plaza State Park. Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Pepsi-Cola Addict, written in 1981 by the cryptophasic teenager June-Alison Gibbons—who refused most communication with anyone other than her twin sister, Jennifer—is as idiosyncratic as one would expect. Preston Wildey-King—the Pepsi-Cola addict of the book’s title—lives in a tenement with his mother and his sister in Malibu, California. How Preston developed an addiction to Pepsi is unknown. This omission begs interpretation—readers must make their own projections onto Pepsi-Cola. Is it a sweet elixir that dulls the bitter taste of Preston’s fleeting childhood? Or a symbol of American overconsumption and excess? Gibbons doesn’t provide an answer, leaving us with a plot point as perplexing as the addictions we see every day. Sometimes a can of Pepsi is just a can of Pepsi. —Troy Schipdam, reader Read More
October 13, 2023 Arts & Culture Ask Me About God: On Ye West By Harmony Holiday Screenshots from “Donda Studio Session for Hurricane (2021).” After a nearly scandal-less summer of 2023, in the caustic August light, Ye West was spotted on a small boat in Venice, Italy, with his ass half out. His new wife had been giving him a blowjob in public. There were other patrons on the boat—it might have been a water taxi helping them from one place to the next. The couple appeared to be performatively oblivious to their surroundings. The boat became their black backstage, a transparent curtain between performance and private life, and it put me in the mind of Ye’s 2021 live performances leading up to the release of his tenth studio album, Donda. For at least one week, he lived beneath the Atlanta stadium where he was hosting the first two public listening parties to debut the album, which was still unfinished. The third performance, in Chicago, Ye’s hometown, also featured the installation of a replica of his childhood home, which he set on fire on stage, leveraging his Promethean dream against the serenity of fantasy. The album itself is not just an elegy for his mother, his martyr; it’s also one for him. He enacts his ego death by it, asks for forgiveness in advance, and retreats, “Off the Grid.” He’s ready to exercise his right to disappear into the next myth even as the old myth is not quite finished with him, not yet obsolete. In the Chicago version of this live listening show, he remarries Kim Kardashian and they walk offstage while the make-believe house keeps burning. Everything, even his family, is a prop on this set. This myth will not stop burning. And while Donda seems to genuflect and repent the loss of the maternal figure, the loss of the womb itself, the lack of access to that primal source of solace, there’s one line on the album that stands out to me as its deeper vendetta: “a single black woman you know that she petty.” Here, he denigrates the same power he uplifts. This is the same mother he laments; he’s hashing out lingering resentments. He’s just unsentimental enough to make a masterpiece that vacillates between grief and backlash. My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence; the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy. Read More
October 11, 2023 A Letter from the Editor A Fall Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Detail from the cover art of issue no. 245, Joeun Kim Aatchim’s Piggyback (Amused), 2019. Among the numerous accolades I received as a high school student was the honorific, awarded by the Hinsdale Central class of ’95, of worst driver. There’s something about cars, and driving culture at large, that’s never wholly agreed with me. Even now, when an Infiniti cuts me off on the freeway, I’m tempted to ram it in the name of eternity and of all language art. Nevertheless, Olivia Sokolowski’s racy poem “Lover of Cars,” published in the new Fall issue of the Review, came to me as a revelation—a revved-up paean to “all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500s / and San Remo Green Beemer i4s” in the showroom of the author’s imagination: I want to wrap my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral down a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo the color of my innerlip I want to slip deep as a splinter in a black Countach What I love most about this swerving verse is how Sokolowski taps the brakes on her own autoerotic fantasy (“but that’s for when I graduate / from Honda Girl”). “Lover of Cars” made me wonder if the same hapless instructor at Hinsdale Central taught us both driver’s ed and sex ed for a good reason—the point of each course being to prevent a life-altering accident. You can learn more about how “Lover of Cars” came down the assembly line in this month’s Making of a Poem; it makes me wish Infiniti or Honda would name a vehicle after Sokolowski’s poetic alter ego, Olivia+. In fact, any number of our Fall issue contributors could have an automobile named in their honor. The Bei Dao would make a revolutionary electric vehicle; we hope you’ll feel as transported as we were by our extended excerpt from the author’s long-awaited poetic autobiography, propulsively translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. And it’s easy to imagine packing the family into a Jolanda Insana for a long weekend; as the late poet writes, in Catherine Theis’s plucky translation from the Italian, “the streets of the sublime are endless.” The de la Torre and the Tanaka, too, sound like high-performance vehicles. Not that all poems have to be GTI. Nora Claire Miller’s “Rumor” is more likely to derail you, while Katana Smith’s poetic still life “& Nothing Happens” stops time altogether; D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” shows how poetry and weather can “turn on a dime.” At the risk of driving my extended metaphor too far, I can’t resist ending with a little story about poetry and cars. The Ford Motor Company once invited Marianne Moore to float possible names for a new sedan. Ford ultimately rejected all of Moore’s suggestions tout court, including the Bullet Lavolta, the Intelligent Whale, the Mongoose Civique, and the Utopian Turtletop, but I’d take any of her recommendations over the marketing department’s choice: the Edsel. Srikanth Reddy is the Review‘s poetry editor.
October 11, 2023 Bulletin Tobias Wolff Will Receive Our 2024 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Photograph by Elena Seibert. In an interview published in The Paris Review no. 171 (Fall 2004), Tobias Wolff pinpointed the radical power of a well-written story. “Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.” The Paris Review has always sought out just this kind of writing, of which Wolff’s own body of work is an extraordinary example. We are thrilled to honor him with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Vivian Gornick. Read More
October 10, 2023 Car Crushes Alpine White BMW M4 Convertible, Fiona Red Leather Interior By Sophie Madeline Dess BMW of Mountain View Geniuses, “Tour the 2023 M4 Competition xDrive Convertible in Alpine White | 4K.” “I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral down / a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on. I am not only a horrible driver but also a very confident one. I’ve never owned a car. I shouldn’t. Yet I’ve got an unaccountable and unyielding desire for a vehicle I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen. I want—have always wanted, with an impractical seriousness that astounds me—an Alpine White BMW M4 two-seater convertible with a perforated Fiona Red leather interior. I can’t help myself. I want to get inside one so bad, and I want to ride it so slow, and I want to ride it fast, and I want to feel my feet thrill at being suspended only 120 mm above ground, at the threat of my toes being shredded into pavement. I want to park it and feel the brutal throb of my revving. I want to feel the car’s restraint, for to drive it at all is to tame it—it’s to feel 503 horses latent in the softest touch of gas. Read More
October 10, 2023 On Poetry Making of a Poem: Olivia Sokolowski on “Lover of Cars” By Olivia Sokolowski An alternate ending to “Lover of Cars.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Olivia Sokolowski’s “Lover of Cars” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245. How did writing the first draft feel to you? I’ve been into cars since I was around fifteen and daydreaming of nineties Jaguars, but somehow, I’d never written much about them. Along the I-75 last winter, noticing and cataloguing the steady stream of cars along the meridian, I decided it was time to convert my obsession into a poetic one. Prompts are normally tough for me—I feel put on the spot and all my good images flee. But when I set out to write about cars, the task-poem turned out far better than I imagined. Perhaps because the topic is so rich—cars not only engage all of our senses but are also thoroughly ingrained in our cultural and personal histories. I surprised myself with the veer toward a family/coming-of-age narrative. The more luxurious bits, like dreaming of an otherworldly Audi or joyriding through Cinque Terre, were just plain fun to write. I lived vicariously through my speaker. Read More