June 18, 2025 On Dance Rehearsal Scenes By Diane Mehta The New Chamber Ballet in rehearsal. Photo by Diego Guallpa. Three dispatches from the New Chamber Ballet’s poet in residence, Diane Mehta, who has observed their rehearsals nearly every week for the past year and a half. 1: The Lift In the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet. This is the prelude to the enormous tension that comes next. The lift, when it comes, originates in the deepest part of the hips and resembles the ritualistic crouch of a sumo wrestler. The lifter’s thighs look enormous, but she is slim. She plants her legs below her shoulders and extends her arms. The trick is to hold up the rear without sticking it out so that the dancer being lifted settles onto the lifter’s back without a hitch. The memory of the playful lean in the beginning returns. Read More
June 17, 2025 At Work Catching up with Geoff Dyer By Sophie Haigney Young Geoff Dyer and a lawnmower. Photograph courtesy of Geoff Dyer. Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There’s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-age story, which, with a few detours, follows Dyer’s early life until he reaches the age of eighteen, in the world of working-class Gloucestershire of the sixties and seventies. Any readers hoping for shocking revelations about the author’s childhood will not find much to titillate them. But of course from another point of view, everything happens. Dyer—has written many books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Jeff in Venice, and most recently The Last Days of Roger Federer—describes in great detail the period in which he became himself, in all the erudition, playfulness, and creativity we might already be familiar with. (Out of Sheer Rage, nominally a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, is essential reading for any writer of nonfiction: a funny, moving account of the creative process in its frustrations and joys.) In Homework, Dyer turns his attention to his early life, down even to the accessories his Action Man figurine wore: “the plastic lace patterns on Action’s boots; the khaki elastic strap of his carbine; the little buckle on the helmet strap and the plastic niche into which it was anchored; the genetic logo embossed on his back: Made in England by Palitoy under Licence from Hasbro © 1964.” Even more impressive is Dyer’s ability to give narrative life to this archive of detail, half a century later. His mother and father are sharply drawn characters, along with the rest of the family. “It was said of Joe that if you filled a bath with beer he’d drink it,” Dyer writes about an uncle. “(I heard this said many times. In Shrewsbury few things were said only once. Everything was repeated over and over.)” Anecdotes are recycled, gaining a kind of mythic status, like “little Audrey Stanley” who used to work with his mother in the school canteen. With these repeated sayings and formulations and anecdotes Dyer conjures something deeper than detail: the lost world of his childhood, but also the lost world of the particular time, place, and class he inhabited. (“Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening,” E. P. Thompson writes, a quote Dyer includes as a postscript to the book, for indeed, it is something that happened to him.) Dyer’s Art of Nonfiction interview appeared in The Paris Review in 2013. We caught up on the phone a few weeks ago about Homework—and about how he managed to render childhood without being boring. INTERVIEWER This is a highly detailed, specific memoir about your early life, but also one that describes a bygone era in a particular time and place. How did you balance those two threads, of the personal and social history? GEOFF DYER One of the earliest impulses I had was to do something like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a kind of generational autobiography. I thought it would be cool to do a Gloucestershire, English version of that French book. It ended up being quite different, but the key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in. Also, there are no great revelations. I haven’t discovered I have an illegitimate brother. There’s no abuse. It’s just my story, which is pretty uneventful. But it contains a larger social history of England and a particular phase of English life which I believe is worth preserving. It was my wife who kept saying that I should write this book for that reason, not just out of self-indulgence. The paradox, and it’s a well worn one, is that I could write this larger social history only by telling my own story. When I was discussing this with my American editor, he said, “Should you have an introduction that makes it clear that this is really a book about class?” And I said no, because every detail in the book is so steeped in class. However microscopically, if you look at the evidence, it’s all there. Read More
June 16, 2025 The Review’s Review “Everything is Enchanted”: Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens By Charlie Fox Left: Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas in Taxi, 1979. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Right: Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, 2009. AP Photo/Danny Moloshok. Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens both appeared on the hit TV show The Dating Game, but not as themselves. If you had tuned in on a Wednesday night in 1978, you might have seen a rather weird bachelor amid the usual roll call of dudes with disco medallions. While the other contestants were all throwing scripted innuendos at one lucky lady, there was Andy Kaufman! Except it wasn’t him, not exactly. He had shown up as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character, Latka Gravas, whom he would soon make famous on NBC’s show Taxi (1979–1983. But no one knew who that was yet. On the show, it all got pretty discombobulating. He was grinning like a boy who’d just discovered what fire could do to his Action Man; he deliberately misunderstood the jokes, and squealed “I won!” when he didn’t win, all somehow earning him the gleeful indulgence of the studio audience. What the hell was that? A year later, a certain Pee-wee Herman was on the same show, a then-unknown overgrown boy in a glen plaid suit and red bow tie, played by a twenty-seven-year-old actor called Paul Reubens. Looking like Buster Keaton’s unhinged son, sounding like a hyperactive imp on a sugar high, he had the audience giggling like drunk hyenas soon, too. Crashing The Dating Game wasn’t some sort of elaborate scheme Andy and Paul hatched together, but it’s nice to think about them in split screen: two cartoonish instigators of live-action anarchy, tricksters without any malicious purpose, making comedy out of these unusual characters. It’s a good time to investigate the paradoxes and special strangeness of Kaufman and Reubens, who are oddly alike in some ways and so different in others. Two fascinating new documentaries try to puzzle out the stories of these two much-missed entertainers. (Reubens died at age seventy after a battle with cancer long-kept secret, in 2023; Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, when he was just thirty-five.) Matt Wolf’s Pee-wee as Himself and Alex Braverman’s wacked-out portrait of Kaufman, Thank You Very Much, provide the best accounts of what powered their singular shenanigans, not to mention the trouble they got themselves into once they crash-landed in the world of showbiz. Read More
June 13, 2025 The Review’s Review Miss Bingley’s Burberry Bikini By The Paris Review Mia Goth’s eyes look naked. In every image, no matter how many times this face is reproduced, the vulnerability startles. Doe-eyed, doll-eyed, fair brows, hardly any visible lashes, she is sweetness in a rancid world and, in Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Emma, my favorite Harriet. She may deviate from some of the specifics of the Harriet that Jane Austen writes in Emma. Her eyes are brown, whereas Harriet’s are blue. Goth is not plump, but she is soft. It’s through Harriet that Austen writes the soulfulness that undercuts her story’s satire. This is what Goth delivers—Harriet’s “flutter of spirits.” Being a Regency-era gentleman’s “natural child,” Harriet never had the privilege of innocence. Not knowing whose daughter she is, she has had to be okay with the unknown—a foil to Emma’s need to be in control. Goth shares a likeness with Brittany Murphy, whose Tai is Harriet’s proxy in Clueless. Both actresses are bubbly, blissful, but present to the universe’s darkness—it’s not the same as being naive, even if the qualities are sometimes confused. While there’s no bloodshed in de Wilde’s costume drama, Goth brings something from her scream queen résumé: her ability to edge between purity and madness. She plays Harriet with an openness to the intensity of desire and an appreciation of its absurdity There’s a tabloid soap opera that Goth’s casting conjures, her real-life entanglements mirroring an Austenian plot tailor-made for TMZ. In 2018, seventeen months before the Emma remake’s release, when Goth was promoting a film with Robert Pattinson, their respective exes Shia LaBeouf and FKA twigs were in the news for being photographed together. “Awkward,” reported People. LaBeouf and FKA twigs eventually broke up (there’s an ongoing lawsuit about his alleged abuse of her), and LaBeouf and Goth got back together. Today, they’re married. Like Harriet, maybe Goth could have played her hand differently and landed a better match. Harriet wedded a farmer, Goth a canceled movie star. On both fronts, you could say, in the end love won—but at what cost? Austen is a cynic, after all. —Whitney Mallett Read More
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