January 13, 2025 Dispatch The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden By Jasper Nathaniel Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie. A 1,650-pound American bucking bull named Man Hater paused at the entrance to the Madison Square Garden floor and fixed me with his dark, soulful eyes. “Hi, puppy,” I said. A bearded wrangler scoffed. “That’s no puppy.” Before opening night of the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden, on January 3—the eighteenth annual such event and first to sell out all three days—a small press corps had gathered by the tunnel to watch the athletes arrive. Not the human athletes but their bovine counterparts, which plodded up the corridor, chased by a mounted cowboy chanting in a low voice. The bulls advanced with the sheepish dignity of prizefighters in ill-fitting suits. In a few hours, these animals would try to buck their riders, who would try desperately to stay on for eight seconds—the basic drama of a rodeo. A popular myth claims rodeo bulls are compelled to buck by a strap wrapped around their testicles, but as any spectator can observe, these are clearly swinging free. “Take a rope, tie it around yours, and pull it up tight—and see how high you can jump,” says Chad Berger, a livestock contractor, in a Professional Bull Riders (PBR) promotional video meant to dispel this misconception. The real instigator is a strap wrapped around the bull’s flank—an annoyance that provokes an animalistic urgency to get it off, a response I know well, having once attempted to put pants on my dog for Halloween. “It’s basically like if I tickle your armpits—that’s about what it does to them bulls,” Berger says. Madison Square Garden’s three-day Monster Energy Buck Off, I learned, would be fueled by a tickling of the bulls. Read More
January 10, 2025 The Review’s Review On Najwan Darwish By Alexia Underwood Ann Craven, Moon (Paris Review Roof, NYC, 9-19-24, 8:40 PM), 2024, 2024, oil on linen, 14 x 14″. “No one will know you tomorrow. / The shelling ended / only to start again within you,” writes the poet Najwan Darwish in his new collection. Darwish, who was born in Jerusalem in 1978, is one of the most striking poets working in Arabic today. The intimate, carefully wrought poems in his new book, , No One Will Know You Tomorrow, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, were written over the past decade. They depict life under Israeli occupation—periods of claustrophobic sameness, wartime isolation, waiting. “How do we spend our lives in the colony? / Cement blocks and thirsty crows / are the only things I see,” he writes. His verses distill loss into a few terse lines. In a poem titled “A Brief Commentary on ‘Literary Success,’ ” he writes, “These ashes that were once my body, / that were once my country— / are they supposed to find joy / in all of this?” Many poems recall love letters: to Mount Carmel, to the city of Haifa. To a lover who, abandoned, “shares my destiny.” He speaks of “joy’s solitary confinement” because “exile has taken / everyone I love.” Irony and humor are present (“I’ll be late to Hell. / I know Charon will ask for a permit / to board his boat. / Even there / I’ll need a Schengen visa”), but it is Darwish’s ability to convey both tremulous wonder and tragedy that make this collection so distinct. Read More
January 9, 2025 Letters The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey By Edward Gorey Tom Fitzharris and Edward Gorey met one afternoon in 1974 when Fitzharris, long a fan of Gorey’s books and illustrations, bumped into him outside of the Town Hall, the performance space in Midtown Manhattan. Gorey—in his trademark fur coat, long beard, and sneakers—was immediately recognizable. The two struck up a brief but intense friendship. When Gorey was in New York, they met frequently, especially to go the ballet—Gorey planned his time in the city around the New York City Ballet’s performance schedule. His summers were spent in Cape Cod. It was in August of that year that Gorey began sending Fitzharris mail, richly illustrated both inside and out. Reproduced below are four of the fifty notes, quotations, and letters Fitzharris received over the course of their correspondence. Read More
January 7, 2025 Document A Diagram of My Life By Gerald Murnane GERALD MURNANE WITH HIS WIFE, CATHERINE, IN BENDIGO, 1989. In his Art of Fiction interview, published in our new Winter issue, Gerald Murnane shows his interlocutor, Louis Klee, the chart he used until the mid-sixties to map out the major events and memories of his life—including his birth, James Joyce’s death, his childhood moves around the suburbs of Melbourne, the advent and return of personal crises (“nihilism,” “disaster,” “recover,” and “back to nihilism,” in one short stretch of 1960), his discovery of the writer and theologian Thomas Merton, his forays into poetry, and his courtship with the woman who would become his wife. From our interview: MURNANE Now, see this colored chart? Represented by about twenty-five colored lines is a diagram of my life. Gray is for vagueness. Everything, for me, has to be put in diagram or spatial form. The chart is a means of remembering. “88 River Street South,” that’s my address. Now, there’s when I met my wife. I knew her at teachers’ college a bit. We weren’t interested in each other then. But I met her again at the start of ’64. “C.L. 1”—that means the first time we went out together, in the middle of ’64. See there? INTERVIEWER Yep. MURNANE Right. And then all these lines are events in our courtship. And our courtship was a bit rocky. We separated at one time—it was her choice. And then, “Engagement to C.M.L.” All of them from then on are “C.M.L.” “At Brunswick with C.M.L.” “Marriage to C.M.L.”—then I abandoned the chart. INTERVIEWER Why is that? MURNANE Let’s say I’d struggled, as a person, to find out what the whole thing was about, and then I found somebody I was able to talk to, found someone to listen to me. I thought my troubles were all over. A friend of the Review, Matt Benjamin, made the six-hour drive from Melbourne to Goroke, the rural town in Australia’s West Wimmera plains where Murnane lives, to scan the pages below. Read More
January 6, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hua Xi on “Toilet” By Hua Xi For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Hua Xi’s poem “Toilet” appears in the new Winter issue of the Review, no. 250. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? While I was writing this poem, I was going back and forth from the U.S. to China to take care of a family member. There was a lot of “going” in my life. I was thinking a lot about things that would be “gone” soon. I think the word go has a lot of depth. It means to go somewhere and it also means to use the bathroom. People will say “I need to go” to excuse themselves politely in a social setting. There’s a feeling of freedom associated with the term that’s somewhat illusory, since the verb by itself, lacking an object, does not actually “go” anywhere at all. Read More
January 3, 2025 Bookmarks Battling Pictures, Equality, Inequality, and Vivien Leigh By 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 often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, funny, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Antonio di Benedetto’s novel The Suicides, originally published in Spanish in 1969 and newly translated by Esther Allen (NYRB Books): Leaning forward, I scrutinized the photos. Each showed a human body, fully clothed, lying on the ground. “I see that all three are dead,” I said. “That’s not a particularly clever response.” I could tell the biting tone was a warning. I needed to see better, and faster. Read More