July 21, 2025 At Work The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin By Joshua Cohen Vladimir Sorokin. Photograph by Maria Sorokina. My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline—they started in my childhood, when I completely failed to learn Russian, and though an inability to function in a writer’s original language has never stopped me and shouldn’t stop anyone from pronouncing upon a translation, I admit that in my maturing years I ran into compounding difficulties, including the facts that I’ve never lived and written in a country that proscribes me, that I’ve never had to leave the country of my language and gone to settle abroad, that I’ve never had to live up to or live against a new identity projected onto me in exile as something of an artist-spokesman for political opposition, and—believe it or not—that I’ve never been mistaken for a one-man repository or symbol-embodiment of my literary culture, which happens to be one of the foremost literary cultures in the history of the world. It’s so much easier, I’m realizing now, to introduce a book by a writer who stayed at mediocre home, surrounded by his more-or-less admiring publishers who publish him, and his more-or-less admiring readers who read him; it’s so much easier, in other words, to introduce a book by a writer who is dead, which is admittedly how I feel sometimes, in my shut-into-my-apartment-and-English existence. Read More
July 18, 2025 On Psychoanalysis For a Little Fresh Air … By Jamieson Webster James Webster flying over Mount Fuji. In a dream someone says to me, “You have been left in the dust.” An idiom for being left behind, outdone, but I hear it literally. I’m covered in dust and left there. It’s in my lungs. I am allergic to dust mites. I also remember its biblical twin: “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” Another one bites the dust. “Let me remind you that the word pollution, with its religious and medical origin, first meant desecration of places of worship by excrement, and later the soiling of sheets by ejaculation, usually from masturbation,” the philosopher Michel Serres writes. I’ve been wondering about the relationship between dreams and trash lately as I listen to patients. What parts of ourselves do we leave lying around? Lacan was increasingly preoccupied by the residue, or waste, excreted by our will to representation. Our excessive mental efforts score the earth in both senses of stain and scratch. This thought seems to go along with the increasing volume of pollution, of trash, of civic ill will, that marks the extension, as Serres writes, “of appropriated space … and also the increase in the number of subjects of appropriation—individual, family, nation.” Either we are still animals marking territory, or we have exceeded the animal realm by attempting to mark all territory—sea, earth, air, and even outer space. My friend laughed at the idea that we were excited by a trace of water on Mars. “There’s so much water here!” she exclaimed. Serres calls for universal dispossession before the war of all wars begins. No one willingly gives up ownership of anything, I think. Sacrifice, if we are to make it, requires some kind of structure that wills us toward it. Freud, for his part, was interested in the expansion outward of the ego by day and its recoiling at night in dreams. I think of patients who have tried to tell me that dreams are just the brain cleaning up trash. This isn’t possible. Not because I believe in dreams, but because we don’t even know what to do with real trash. Better interpretation: a reaction to the act of nocturnal emission. A universal tendency toward debasement in the sphere of dreams. Read More
July 17, 2025 First Person The Same Damned Thing Over and Over By J. D. Daniels Photograph courtesy of J.D. Daniels. I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life. More than once she said to me, “You say that you feel trapped in your past, and everything is repeating. I don’t understand that. Everything feels new to me, all the time,” and she struck a heroic pose, despite the fact that we had already had this argument forty times. Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment, we now present, snarling at each other, the world’s smartest ants. “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” Not as impressive as it seems, because those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. It’s the only thing that ever happens: the past repeats itself. Everyone is condemned to repeat the past. The question is whether you are able to admit it or not. My mamaw used to say, “I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.” Read More
July 15, 2025 Diaries Driving Academy Diary By Nicolaia Rips A dog who cannot drive. Photograph by Nicolaia Rips. August 19, 2024 My twenty-sixth birthday. A sad one. My godfather, Tom Crisp, is dying in a hospital in Morningside Heights. I want to focus on anything else, so I focus on this: I do not have my driver’s license. I promised myself at sixteen that before I turned twenty-six I would get my driver’s license, vowing that I wouldn’t end up one of those cautionary New York tales of gelded thirty-year-olds crammed into the bucket on a road trip. At the time, I felt a decade was more than generous. I was so optimistic at sixteen that I was the first of my friends to get my learner’s permit, which I then renewed beyond the point of propriety. A twenty-six-year-old is a foreign agent to a sixteen-year-old: someone who bears a vague resemblance to you. It is someone to punt your problems to—someone who passed their driving test. August 26 My godfather Tom passes away. September 1 I enroll myself in a driving academy and ride an electric Citi Bike over the Brooklyn Bridge to Hasidic Williamsburg. There, I am confronted by a store that advertises tax returns, copies, faxing, and legal services. There is no mention of driving. Not one to judge a business by its sign, I double-check the address. This cannot be the right place, but somehow it is. The class costs $400. It was the cheapest class I could find that wasn’t out of the back of a van. Included in the course: three driving lessons, access to the mandatory five-hour class, and, at the end of it all, you are ferried to your road test by one of the school’s instructors. My teacher, Fernando, guides me through the wide lanes of Williamsburg, sporadically directing me to pull over, turn left, turn right, parallel park, or make a three-point turn. I keep forgetting which pedal is gas and which is the brake, so I resolve to just go really slow. Fernando’s complete lack of anxiety is bone-chilling. Read More
July 11, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Eugene Ostashevsky on “Falling Sonnet XI” By Eugene Ostashevsky The second draft of “Falling Sonnet XI.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Eugene Ostashevsky’s “Falling Sonnet XI” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252. How did you come up with the title for this poem? This is the eleventh poem in a series called Falling Sonnets. They are “sonnets” in the sense that each has fourteen lines with a Petrarchan logical structure, although without meter or rhyme. Right now, there are twelve, although I would prefer to have fourteen. The series reacts to one of the wars currently being fought. I’d prefer not to name which one—as soon as you do, the poem’s reception depends on how readers feel about the war rather than on anything having to do with the poem. Four other poems from the series have recently appeared in n+1. My most recent book is called The Feeling Sonnets, and sections in it are called “Fooling Sonnets,” “Feeding Sonnets,” and even “Leafing Sonnets.” When I finished, I wanted to stop writing these sonnets, which aren’t real sonnets, anyway. But I was too busy to lay aside enough time to develop a new form for a new book, so I kept writing them, much to my chagrin. This is why I call my new sonnet book “The Failing Sonnets,” and a part of it is a cycle called “The Falling Sonnets,” because it reacts to a war that feels as if it had my name on it and that destabilizes my sense of self in unpleasant ways. Read More
July 9, 2025 Document An Account of the Catastrophe at the Flower Show By Tom Crewe Seven or eight years ago, a friend showed me a tatty packet of odd papers he’d picked up for six pounds at a sale. It looked just like it does in this picture. Most of the papers are an English translation of a sixteenth-century letter written by a French Protestant. I still haven’t read it. What got my attention right away was the remarkably pristine purple invitation to a flower show taking place on July 27, 1891. Read More