January 27, 2025 At the Gym Cruising at the LA Fitness By Danez Smith Entryway to an LA Fitness. Photograph by Mike Mozart, via Wikimedia Commons. . Licensed under CC BY 2.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. Before the sweat, before the bench press, before the sauna, before the shower, before placing my hand around a man, inside a man, around his throat so desperate for my hand, I take off my ring. While walking up to the doors of LA Fitness, I tuck the proof of my husband into my fanny pack. *** I’ve been to LA Fitness franchises in Philly, in Portland, in Atlanta, in Chicago. Everywhere you go, you enter the same space: there are the same inoffensive beige carpets; the same large stock photos of the same white man and woman, who, like static, photocopied gods, with their quaint and creepy smiles, watch over you from the walls; the same words, like success and motivation, floating between them. This is what we are here to aspire toward: to be successful, to be in shape, to be sculpted into something worth being wanted, something out of Hollywood, something boring, sexy, white, and American. Read More
January 24, 2025 On Books Small-Town Sex: Colm Tóibín on John Broderick By Colm Tóibín Pilgrims kneeling before the shrine of our Lady of Lourdes, via Wikimedia Commons and the Wellcome Collection. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. It must have been clear, as John Broderick wrote his first novel, The Pilgrimage, that it would be banned by the Irish censorship board. (This was almost a badge of honor at the time for Irish writers. Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy was banned in 1958, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls in 1960 and John McGahern’s The Dark in 1965, joining books by Balzac, Hemingway, H. G. Wells, and many others until the law was reformed in 1967.) His 1961 exploration of religiosity and sexuality is fearless and frank and sometimes comic. In the opening chapter, we hear the devout Glynn family—husband Michael, wife Julia, nephew Jim—conclude their plans for a pilgrimage to Lourdes. In the last paragraphs of the chapter, the visiting priest, chief promoter of the trip, “loosened the cord of his habit, and belched.” And then: “He belched again and then made the sign of the cross hazily in the air.” Soon afterward, Julia Glynn, in the guise of the faithless wife, goes to her bedroom “where her nephew was already waiting for her.” Read More
January 23, 2025 Document James Baldwin in Istanbul By Osman Can Yerebakan At the peak of his literary fame, James Baldwin yearned for seclusion. He found it in Istanbul, where he lived on and off between 1961 and 1971. Baldwin was suffering from writer’s block when he arrived in the Bosporus-divided city thirteen years after settling in Paris. Soon after, he completed Another Country, a manuscript that had long been haunting him. In Istanbul, the author found the time and inspiration for some of his career-defining works, and he later wrote about the city in an unfinished novel. He also made friends, among them Sedat Pakay, a young engineering student and amateur photographer who was twenty years his junior. The pair met through a mutual friend at a party in 1964. The younger man, then a member of his university’s photography club, offered to shadow Baldwin with his camera. Baldwin accepted. Over the next several years, Pakay accompanied Baldwin as he wandered across Istanbul, producing a series of photographs as well as an eleven-minute-long film, James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973), that document Baldwin’s time in the city. Pakay’s photographs of Baldwin are currently on view in Turkey Saved My Life: Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961–1971, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. The show was co-curated by Atesh M. Gundogdu, the director of Artspeak NYC, along with the library’s Cora Fisher and Lászlo Jakab Orsós, and it occurs in the middle of what would have been Baldwin’s one hundredth year. (He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three.) The pictures displayed narrate Baldwin’s unlikely bond with a young man from Turkey who had a discerning lens. From 1966 to 1968, Pakay lived in the United States, where he had enrolled in an M.F.A. program in photography at the Yale School of Art. During this time, he kept up a correspondence with Baldwin. Today, Pakay’s letters are in the collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The archive is a donation from Pakay’s widow, Kathy, and their son Timur. Below are six photographs from Turkey Saved My Life, which runs through March 15, 2025. Baldwin working on his novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, 1965. Read More
January 22, 2025 On Poetry Prof. Dr. A. I. in Conversation with Tadeusz Dąbrowski By Piotr Czerski Tadeusz Dąbrowski on stage at the Shakespeare Theatre in Gdansk, Poland. After the poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s latest book, W metaforze (In metaphor), was published in Polish last year, he wanted to conduct an experiment. Dąbrowski’s collection of short essays, illustrated by Henryk Cześnik, analyzes a hundred or so metaphors drawn from the poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Adam Zagajewski, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Seamus Heaney, and Nelly Sachs, among others. Rather than be interviewed about the project by another writer, Dąbrowski decided he wanted to speak to an artificial intelligence, live, in front of an audience. This posed some technical challenges. While conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT have become both more sophisticated and popular in recent years, no public-facing software existed that could conduct a live interview. Piotr Czerski, a programmer and fellow poet, agreed to design a custom system for the event—a nontrivial task. His final “Prof. Dr. A. I.” Frankensteins (1) Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (to “hear” Dąbrowski’s spoken answers and convert them into text), (2) a large language model (LLM), specifically Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet (to generate questions in response to Dąbrowski’s answers), and (3) ElevenLabs’s AI Voice Generator (to read aloud the interview questions). The LLM had been fed the contents of Dąbrowski’s book and a series of prompts, written by Czerski, on which it modeled its interview questions. Several moments in the conversation were intentionally designed by Czerski—like the inclusion of an Easter egg (you’ll see!) and the system’s breakdown at the end of the twenty-minute event—but the rest of the conversation was generated in real time at Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre. The resulting interview—originally conducted in Polish and here translated into English by Claude 3.5 Sonnet (which was given a prompt to preserve the original tone of voice)—is thoughtful and wide-ranging. Dąbrowski and Prof. Dr. A. I. discuss, among other things, individual poets’ access to the universal and the power of poetry to disturb our relationship to language. They touch on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Blanchot, and Gaston Bachelard along the way. There were a couple of hiccups, as when Prof. Dr. A. I. included stage directions in its speech; when it concluded a joke with the word laughter, the audience did, in fact, laugh. Read More
January 20, 2025 First Person My Cat Mii By Mayumi Inaba Photograph by Revolution will, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny-tiny baby kitten. Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck inside the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y. neighborhood of Fuchū City in western Tokyo. In which direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I’d followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first, I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot. The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life. She had sharp, pointy ears, innocent glistening eyes, and a pink slit of a mouth, and she was puffing her body up as much as she could to stop herself from falling, looking down at me fearfully. It was obvious that she hadn’t dropped there out of nowhere or climbed up by herself, but had been put there deliberately, out of malice or mischief. “Come with me …” Read More
January 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Emily Osborne on “Cruel Loss of Sons” By Emily Osborne An early draft of a stanza of “Cruel Loss of Sons.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. A selection from Emily Osborne’s translation of Egill Skallagrímsson’s “Cruel Loss of Sons” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 250. What was the challenge of this particular translation? The poetry of the Icelandic and Norwegian skalds, or poets, from the Viking Age—the late eighth to mid-eleventh century C.E.—is notoriously challenging to translate. It was composed orally and passed down orally for generations before being written down in manuscripts. As a result, in the extant manuscripts and runic fragments found on sticks that preserve the poetry, we find variations in redactions, illegible or illogical word choices made by scribes, and frequent references to obscure myths and cultural traditions. Simply understanding a skaldic poem requires a fair amount of background scholarship. The skaldic practice of using compound kennings, in which metaphors and symbols are substituted for regular nouns, adds another layer of complexity. For instance, in this poem, Egill calls his head the “wagon of thought,” his mouth the “word-temple,” and Odin the “maker of bog-malt.” Above and beyond gleaning the literal meaning of words, a translator must also be able to understand the frequent and surprising tone shifts that add shades of insinuation or emotion. Statements that seem illogical could be ironic or expressing litotes. In “Cruel Loss of Sons,” I found it particularly difficult to interpret Egill’s tone when he speaks of his strained relationship with his patron god, Odin, and the other gods after the death of his sons. In lines such as these, the emotions communicated are ambiguous: “I was on good terms / with the spear-god, / trusted in him, / tokened my loyalty, / until that trainer / of triumphs, champion / of chariots, cut cords / of closeness with me”; and “I’d scuffle with / the sea-god’s girl.” Is the poet indicating betrayal? Sorrow? Defiance? Incredulity? Anger? Self-deprecation? Absurdity? When translating, it can be hard to avoid pinning down the tone too neatly. My task with this poem was to allow grief to carve out its own emotional track. Read More