June 12, 2025 Rereading Life in Jane Austen’s Goshen By Caleb Gayle C. E. Brock, illustration from Mansfield Park, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. “This is Goshen,” my mother and father would frequently say. The idea—that our home was the equivalent of the Biblical land of Goshen from Exodus—was simple, perhaps, but it said as much about my parents’ perceptions of the outside world as it did about their vision for our home. The world was unfeeling, unsparing, loud, chaotic—or, in their view, simply “evil.” It was in Goshen, after all, that the enslaved Israelites found refuge amid Egyptian brutality. That pursuit of peace shaped their pivotal decision—when I was seven my Jamaican family left New York for Oklahoma. New York was, in some important sense, the world—its sophistication, its temptation, its unapologetic secularism. Oklahoma, by contrast, was in the world but not of it. It offered what my parents craved: stillness. Its flat plains, its grass more often brown than green, and the red-tinged soil of its western stretches conveyed a kind of geographic manifestation of sanctity. Its boringness was its spiritual appeal. Our neighbors prayed over their meals in public. Walmart greeters accompanied their smiles and hellos with unprovoked God bless yous. Oklahoma’s simplicity and relative silence wasn’t just a feature of the move—it was pitched as our family’s saving grace. Read More
June 11, 2025 Rereading How Jane Austen Pulled It Off: On Emma By Jennifer Egan Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1909, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance. Austen’s fourth published novel is the most physically constricted of her works, which makes it also the most virtuosic. Unlike Austen’s other protagonists, Emma Woodhouse never spends a night away from home. That home is in fictional Highbury, “a large and populous village almost amounting to a town,” whose sixteen-mile distance from London might as well be six hundred. There is no sense of change in Highbury—neither past nor immanent; sociological nor technological—but rather of generations quietly living out their lives. The action occurs mostly indoors except for two group outings—one to pick strawberries and another to picnic nearby. The men move about more freely, coming and going on horseback, but the women mostly stay put, and Emma is especially stationary. She seems never to have traveled in her life, and remarks at one point that she hasn’t seen the ocean. Read More
June 10, 2025 Rereading Cents and Sensibility By Sandra Cisneros Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor … If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault. —Jane Austen, from The Letters of Jane Austen How does a woman writer make her own money? How does she find the time to write? As a young woman, I scoured every book-jacket biography trying to decipher this secret. My mother, a Depression baby, gave me sound advice: “Make sure you earn your own money. Especially if you’re married, do you hear me?” I did indeed. Once you’ve been poor, you’re forever hounded by the fear you’ll be poor again. Read More
June 9, 2025 Rereading I Can Read You Like a Book: On Northanger Abbey By B. D. McClay Tinted line drawing by H.M. Brock for Northanger Abbey, 1898. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Once, many years ago, I was listening to somebody I knew describe why a potential romantic partner was an utterly hopeless prospect. He’d signed his email to her with “best,” she kept repeating. Best!—said with deepest disgust. For her, that fact was enough to communicate his unsuitability for human companionship to any sane person. Obviously, it wasn’t really about “best.” She just had no interest in him, and the email signature represented whatever it was that made them incompatible from the jump. But it also was about “best,” a little; it wasn’t just that he’d signed his email that way but that he was precisely the sort of person who would. The process of getting to know another person, whether romantically or for some other reason, consists of small tests. These tests are not deliberate trials—ideally, at least. They’re just little moments in which you think to yourself “Speed up” or “Slow down.” Such tests can be arbitrary (as with email signatures) or imbued with wisdom (tipping well being, among Americans, the universally recognized sign of a good heart). Under the guidance of folk wisdom and our own instincts, we try our best to make judgments about who people are before we know who they are, because once we know, it’s too late for that knowledge to do we any good. And there’s also the other side to this dynamic, which is that we believe that, as we ourselves are complicated individuals of great importance to ourselves, we may not always be accurately represented by such minute interactions. Maybe we miscalculated the tip that one time, or maybe we never sign our emails with “best” but did as a flirty joke, or maybe we were in a bad mood. Even if we jokingly type ourselves, it’s another thing to be typed by others. Toward the end of Jane Austen’s first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, its heroine, Catherine Morland, is faced with just such a puzzle. Her love interest, Henry Tilney, is to host her; his father, General Tilney; and his sister, Eleanor at his home in the nearby village of Woodston. General Tilney has stressed to his son that he is not to take any great pains with the dinner he will serve them; Henry is therefore leaving ahead of the rest of the family to make sure all is in readiness. To Catherine, who doesn’t understand why the mismatch between what the general has requested and what Henry is doing, he explains that his father’s repeated statements that any old meal will do are simply not true. In his absence, Catherine is left to puzzle over “the inexplicability of the General’s conduct … That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?” Read More
June 6, 2025 The Review’s Review The Enemy Is a Bowl of Soup: On Quino’s Mafalda By Julia Kornberg The cartoon character Mafalda, with her massive round head, sixties bob, triangular dress, and black Mary Janes, appears innocent. But this inquisitive girl-against-the-world is no ingenue—Mafalda often fires off sharp, incisive, and cynical observations about the political world around her. In Latin America, the comic strip named after her is legendary: although it ran for only nine years, from 1964 to 1973, this creation of the cartoonist Quino, the pen name of the illustrator Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, captured how a society’s irony and humor survived one of Argentina’s darkest political chapters (a coup d’état initially led by Juan Carlos Onganía that took place between 1966 and 1970 and, later, Juan Domingo Perón’s third government, which oversaw the paramilitary anticommunist project that would set up the state for a dictatorship beginning in 1976). This June, a collection of early Mafalda strips will be published in English for the first time by Archipelago’s children’s book imprint, Elsewhere Editions, and its ideas still sound oddly current. In one famous image, published in 1965, Mafalda ponders her family’s globe. She then leaves, and returns to stick a sign on it that reads WARNING: IRRESPONSIBLE MEN AT WORK. When her mom asks her to dust off the globe, she wonders, “Do I clean all the countries, or just the ones that have dirty governments?” After a while, Mafalda realizes the globe might be sick. She covers it with bandages and brings it medicine. When her friend comes to visit, she asks for silence, out of respect for the convalescent. “Is your dad sick?” her friend asks, and she says no. “Your mom?” Neither of them. It’s the globe, she says, and brings her friend into her room, where Earth is resting peacefully. In later strips and in a similar spirit, Mafalda will debate the war in Vietnam and “play government” with her peers. “Don’t worry,” she exclaims when her mom walks in, “we have lots of policies, but we don’t actually do anything.” Her tiny body contrasts with her grandiloquent statements, both mocking the adult world around her and interpreting its political ideas with genuine concern. Read More
June 5, 2025 Studio Visit Your World Is Your Street: A Studio Visit with Agosto Machado By Nadja Spiegelman Agosto Machado. Photograph by Scott Rossi. Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with books and boxes of files. Colorful printed fabrics are draped over the shelves, concealing most of their contents. In the areas left exposed, there are framed photographs of icons like the Warhol muse Candy Darling and the gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson, arranged around candles and trinkets as if to form small devotional altars. The space is small, but Machado welcomed me in on a late April day. He had laid out a bottle of Evian for me, and a packet of Pepperidge Farm butter cookies. He had rolled his bedroll into the bathtub to make space for us to talk. I gestured at the fabrics hanging over the shelves to ask if they’re for privacy. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s aesthetic. Like makeup.” A Chinese Spanish Filipino American orphan raised on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, he befriended and eventually influenced multiple generations of downtown artists, among them Jack Smith, Peter Hujar, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Machado, who doesn’t share his age (“A lady never tells,” he said), has been a witness to decades of cultural moments in New York: the experimental theater of the early sixties, Warhol’s factory, the Stonewall riot, the AIDS epidemic, the gentrification of downtown Manhattan. He is eager to be of use as an oral historian—to evoke, as his art does, the lives of the artists he has known, many of whom were lost to AIDS. He has always collected the world around him, accumulating protest pins and street flyers, photographs, funeral notices, bits of gems and glitter, a pair of Candy Darling’s shoes. In recent years, Machado has begun delving through his archives to create shrines and altars, like the ones that appear in his portfolio in The Paris Review’s recent Spring issue. Photograph by Scott Rossi. INTERVIEWER You’ve been described as a performance artist, a “Zelig-like icon,” a muse, an activist, and an archivist. It’s difficult to define you, but you define yourself most often as a “pre-Stonewall street queen.” What does that mean to you? AGOSTO MACHADO It came out of the happenstance of not having a regular place to live when I was young. For street queens, your world is your street. Where do you get information? In person, on the street. People would say to each other, Did you hear that place was raided? Do you know who just died? Do you know who’s in the hospital? Do you know who got picked up in Bellevue? And so forth. I was nobody and I had no place to live. I was dependent on the kindness of strangers. That’s a quote from Tennessee Williams. And there were people who, even if all they had was a bag of potato chips, they would share it. INTERVIEWER For The Paris Review, you titled your portfolio Downtown (Altar). Can you tell me about the two pieces by Gilda Pervin? One is a pin, and the other is a rectangular sculpture. They’re made of colorful clay, with bits of wire and marbles and beads stuck into them. How did they come into your possession? MACHADO Gilda Pervin is ninety-one years old now. She came to New York when she was forty-six. She was married and she had children. She wanted to express herself. I had started working with Ethyl Eichelberger, who lived on Spring and Elizabeth. Where the Elizabeth Street Garden is now, there was a vacant lot where people threw garbage and what have you. But on a window ledge nearby, there was an accumulation of these objects. Someone had taken the time to put them there. That was Gilda Pervin. I said, “Whoever this artist is, I hope to eventually meet her.” And those are the pieces she gave me. For forty-five years, I have moved them around in different installations. And now, they’re part of an altar, which is really a shrine. It’s going to be in the museum as one piece. Read More