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
June 4, 2025 First Person 1988–? By Eileen Chang Zhang Ailing in 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The old-time Overseas Chinese call Los Angeles “Luo Sheng.” It’s a phonetic transliteration, just like “Lo Shan,” the shortened form of “Lo Shan Ji” [Los Angeles]. But when it’s cut to two syllables, with “Sheng” at the end, those not familiar with the term could think it refers to a U.S. state—a short form of Louisiana, maybe? This city does cover a huge area, though it’s not as big as a state. It’s famous for being a “Mecca of Car Culture,” lots of cars, late models, everywhere—everyone has a car, hence the terrible bus service. It’s bad in the city, even worse in the suburbs. Here on this main route in a little satellite city, the bus stop was stagnant, no one had come for half an hour, maybe longer. Peering down the road, craning to spot an approaching bus, all you could see was a stretch of scenery, the upper swathe filled with commanding mountain ridges, rising and falling, which the yellow-green of Southern California’s steady, year-round climate, warm and dry, shimmered into the hazy blue of afternoon sky. Up on those hills, there were no houses yet, this valley being quite far from the city; and even among the trees, there were none of the little white houses that dot the hills in closer suburbs. There was only that high hill stretching up and out all in one color, a lightly yellow vegetation green, then the sky behind the hill, in a blue that wasn’t very blue. The Spaniards, when they’d first landed and looked at this empty mountain, had probably seen the very same thing. Read More
June 3, 2025 First Person A Return to the Frontier By Eileen Chang Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat Western clothes approached me. “You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?” he said in English. I had seen many photographs of the blond Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a woman’s inability to disbelieve a compliment, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there were those glasses. “No, I am sorry,” I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers. It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her. “Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?” I asked my friends Mr. and Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all. “No, we haven’t heard,” Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. “Um,” he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, “There’s a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. He’s not quite sane.” I laughed, then went under Formosa’s huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe. “How does it feel to be back?” Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me. “It feels like dreaming.” And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, “But it’s not possible!” Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, “But you are ghosts.” Read More
June 2, 2025 Bookmarks Nadja and Britney By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Mark Polizzoti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (NYRB Classics): A certain attitude toward beauty necessarily results from this, beauty that is conceived here solely in terms of passion. It is in no way static, in other words encased in its “dream of stone,” lost for mankind in the shadow of Odalisques, behind those tragedies that claim to encompass only a single day; nor is it dynamic, in other words subject to that rampant gallop after which there is only another rampant gallop, in other words more scattered than a snowflake in a blizzard, in other words determined never to let itself be embraced, for fear of being confined … It is like a train ceaselessly lurching from the Gare de Lyon, but that I know will never leave, has never left. It is made of jolts and shocks, most of which are not significant but which we know will necessarily bring about a huge Shock … The morning paper can always bring me news of myself: From Jeff Weiss’s Waiting for Britney Spears (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir of his time as a tabloid journalist: Love bludgeons me before I fully understand what it means. It requires only a caramel-blonde whip of hair, a harem dancer hip shimmy, a lashing of apricot arms, a dizzying 360-degree whirl, and a graceful floor slide. I saw the sign, an immaculate conception, a fated tarot. Only a higher power could have blessed me to bear witness to the taping of the “… Baby One More Time” video. Read More
May 30, 2025 The Review’s Review Cathedrals of Solitude: On Pier Vittorio Tondelli By Claudia Durastanti Courtesy of Zando Projects. As it so happened, I was visiting a college on the East Coast a few years ago to talk about contemporary Italian literature. Right before my lecture, a small group of comparative literature students approached me with what I could see were a bunch of badly printed photocopies. They wanted to know why the work of “the greatest Italian author after Pasolini’s death” was no longer available in English. The author was Pier Vittorio Tondelli and the photocopies were of the first English-language edition of the novel Separate Rooms, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1992. I had no good answer for them. At that time Luca Guadagnino was not yet the internationally recognized director he is today, and his decision to turn Separate Rooms into a film starring Josh O’Connor was yet to come. Had I known, that would have been the most honest answer: that it would ultimately take a high-end adaptation—which is still in progress—to resuscitate Tondelli’s work in English. (Separate Rooms was reissued in translation this year by Zando in the U.S. and Sceptre in the UK.) In many ways, the question posed by those students seemed to put Tondelli on too much of a pedestal: after Pasolini’s death there have been many great Italian authors—Claudio Magris, Daniele Del Giudice, Fleur Jaeggy, and Gianni Celati, to name a few. But they are being constantly claimed and reclaimed, while for a long time it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of Tondelli, including myself, only to hide it somewhere. Read More