February 16, 2024 The Review’s Review Porn: America Moore, Chloe Cherry, Bianca Censori, Maison Margiela By The Paris Review Screenshot of Baz Luhrmann’s movie for the Maison Margiela Artisanal Collection. America has a perfect round ass. We watch her mount a McMansion staircase from a low angle, the framing as deliberate as it is haphazard. The camera is handheld. America has been ironing; the green polo shirt she was pressing, however, looks like it was made from the kind of polyester blend that’s spared wrinkles no matter how badly you treat it. She carries the green shirt in one hand. With the other she grips the metal railing for balance. Her stilettos click loudly on the terra-cotta tile. Each step is measured. In the background, a sparse but funky beat. The home in which America Moore performs is Mediterranean, or maybe Tuscan. The walls are a luscious cream with butterscotch undertones. Iron balusters with rounded knuckles adorn a winding staircase spanning at least three floors. The statement windows flanking the staircase are tall, narrow, and arched. The camera struggles to compensate for the sunlight beaming through them, resulting in blown-out portions of the image. America disappears momentarily behind a support beam that’s been drywalled over and painted the same tea-stained-paper shade as the walls. There’s a potted fern at the edge of the frame. The action between America and her costar remains contained to the staircase, though we catch glimpses of a living room suite beyond the fern. Two cream sofas with wooden feet are arranged opposite each other, creating a conversational setup. Between them is an oval coffee table placed on a rectangular area rug that’s an ebony shade of brown. In some frames, in which just a corner of the rug is visible, it could be mistaken for soil strewn on the tile floor. It’s difficult to discern the material of the coffee table, as one of the decorative objects resting on it produces a glare that obscures most details. Perhaps it’s polished mahogany. The configuration of furniture positioned to face the table includes a Biedermeieresque upholstered stool the performers also avoid, though it is perhaps the piece that would best accommodate a scene. We know America doesn’t live here. Most likely someone has rented the house for the shoot. —Whitney Mallett Read More
February 14, 2024 First Person My Year of Finance Boys By Daniel Lefferts Sg1959, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the hedge fund analyst knew me better than I knew myself. It was his job to predict distant developments, covert motives, hidden risks, and shortly into our brief relationship he turned his powers of divination on me. After I told him I was writing a novel about finance, he suggested that I’d been drawn to him partly for mercenary reasons: that I was, in a word, dating him for research. He took it in stride—he lived and breathed all things mercenary—but he did issue a polite warning. “Never put anything I tell you in writing,” he said. I’d like to think that, in his predictive genius, he also knew I would eventually ignore this warning. Read More
February 14, 2024 First Person Ash Wednesday By Sophie Haigney From “Longing,” Prabuddha Dasgupta. From the Spring 2012 Issue of The Review. I like the ashes on Ash Wednesday. I am at best a lapsed Catholic though it would be more accurate to say that I never really began, just that I was raised against the backdrop of already-faded-Catholicism and its associated traumas, now transmuted and passed on in their mysterious ways to me. I inherited also the pining and the predilection that many Americans have for certain things to do with Ireland. In San Francisco, I used to drink afternoons after I got off work at an Irish bar in Noe Valley, the Valley Tavern, or a different Irish bar downtown, the Chieftain, or sometimes come to think of it an Irish bar on Guerrero with big windows where my friend Graham and I used to like to watch the rain. San Francisco is a more Catholic city than most people think, and more Irish too. More Irish American, which is really what I am talking about: girls in red school uniforms and tennis shoes outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart, looking forward to football games Friday nights at St. Ignatius, the high school by the church where my feet were washed as a kid on Holy Thursday. The gold beads strewn on the street after St. Patrick’s Day parades, orange-and-green bumper stickers for a united Ireland overlaid with 49ers insignia. There are things like that everywhere, I know. But then there is the way the fog rolls in in the afternoon, bone-chillingly damp, and the washed-up light on the pink facades in the Richmond, the looming lonesome palm trees lining the meridians. And the illuminated signs for old-school strip clubs as you drive into North Beach and the Tenderloin—or the one I always liked that read JOEY’S ICE CREAM ESPRESSO SAUSAGE WASH AND DRY. Now I have lost the thread of religion. Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again. I have a memory of dust motes floating around in a shaft of light and trying to catch them in my hands, one long afternoon, or maybe many afternoons, or never. It’s just an image. Read More
February 13, 2024 First Person Fun By Jeremy Atherton Lin Photo by Kelly from Pexels. When I was another boy, I was the boy next door. He was Jase, short for Jason: generic, but with a nickname just off enough to seem real. My lover—I call him Famous, which he is to me—became Jase’s best friend, Chris, a name that needs no explanation. Jase and Chris weren’t quite boyfriends, not like we were in real life, in which we worked very hard to be boyfriends. In real life, we had to stay below the radar of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We had to figure out what domestic meant, as in home and as in argument. We were known to many for being adorable and codependent. IRL, we were gay. Because the way we were identified became an identity. Maybe that’s how it works, for me anyway: I don’t seek out identity but consider my position and articulate it like a mime feels their box. Online, I could shake it off altogether. Read More
February 9, 2024 The Review’s Review Ananda Devi and Callie Siskel Recommend By The Paris Review John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining every page. Perhaps the identity crisis of the narrator—“I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable”—had transferred to me. Or perhaps the clarity of her sentences left me defenseless. I was instantly immersed. Like all of Kitamura’s fiction, Intimacies is about the psychic effects of inhabiting another person’s mind. The novel explores the narrator’s complicity as she voices the words of a war criminal and the personal crises of those around her. Can channeling others shape (or erase) our sense of self? And how does private grief deepen or prime a precarious selfhood? Even when she interprets the words of a victim, she concedes “the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.” My poems in the Winter issue of the Review grapple with the boundary between self and other, image and reflection. I wrote “Echo” not long after finishing Intimacies. Echo, whom the goddess Hera silences, is left repeating the last words of the object of her love, Narcissus. The effect is a kind of trailing-off, a depreciated self. Though Kitamura’s narrator also feels depreciated (“I realized that for him I was pure instrument”), the novel’s stunning end reconstructs the first person. Intimacies is that rare novel that, fittingly, reverberates in your mind. —Callie Siskel, author of “Narcissus,” “Echo,” and “The Concept of Immediacy” Read More
February 8, 2024 A Letter from the Editor A Winter Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Illustration by Na Kim. In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.” Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window. Read More