April 8, 2022 The Review’s Review Sheila Heti and Kathryn Scanlan Recommend By The Paris Review Kathryn Scanlan’s copy of Kathi Hofer: “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village. Kathi Hofer: “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, published last year by Leipzig’s Spector Books, is a nice-looking hardback about the vernacular art environment Tressa Prisbrey built in Santa Susana, California, a former railroad town now incorporated into Simi Valley. The volume was compiled, introduced, and translated into German by Hofer, an Austrian artist who first encountered Prisbrey’s pencil assemblages in an exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library. Prisbrey, the daughter of German immigrants, was married at fifteen to a man almost forty years her senior; they had seven children together before she left him and began an itinerant life with her kids in the late twenties. When she finally settled in Santa Susana in 1946, she met her second husband, and together they bought a plot of land, about a third of an acre in size, which they leveled and was where they parked their trailer after removing its wheels. Prisbrey began building the Bottle Village in 1956, at the age of sixty. Looking for a way to improve the property—to “make it pay”—she chose bottles as a building material because there were plenty of them around, and made daily trips to the local dump to collect other materials. She planted cacti everywhere—hundreds of varieties—because they are “independent, prickly, and ask nothing from anybody” and because, she said, “they remind me of myself.” Her sons handled roofing and doors, but otherwise, every structure in the Bottle Village—sixteen houses total—was built by Prisbrey. For years, she gave guided tours for a small admission fee, and children were often preoccupied by Prisbrey’s white cat and her kittens, who had their own Prisbrey house made from the nose of a plane and whom Prisbrey combed with food coloring: pink, green, and yellow animals roamed the place. She left it, finally, in 1982, at the age of eighty-six, and died in 1988. But the site, though in disrepair, remains and is protected as a historical landmark. Hofer’s book—an elegant intervention and homage—includes texts, color photographs of the Bottle Village, and a facsimile edition of the essay Prisbrey wrote about her creation in 1960, which she published as a pamphlet and gave (or mailed) to anyone who asked. Reading Prisbrey’s charming, conversational descriptions of her village, you get a sense of what it might’ve been like to tour it with her, and how important that social aspect was to the project. “Oh, this is an interesting place to see,” she says, “and you hear such funny things, too.” —Kathryn Scanlan, author of “Backsiders” Read More
April 1, 2022 The Review’s Review What Our Spring Issue Writers Are Looking At By The Paris Review Image © Ra Boe / Wikipedia, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0 . Gary Goldschneider compiled the character traits of over fourteen thousand people to create The Secret Language of Birthdays. This bible was Goldschneider’s crowning achievement, though he had others. A self-described “personologist,” he was also a pianist notorious for marathon performances: he played all of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas, in chronological order, in one sitting (twelve hours), and all of Mozart’s sonatas in one sitting (six hours, three water breaks). The Secret Language of Birthdays follows the same gloriously logical yet irrational ordering principle of this kind of marathon performance. The 832-page volume devotes two-page spreads to every single day of the year. Goldschneider’s pronouncements rely heavily on the twelve zodiac signs—indeed, the book’s introduction provides the layman with a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of sun-sign astrology—and so the year begins on the first day in Aries, and the vernal equinox. Each day gets an enchanting definite article; August 24 is not just any old Day of Astute Examination but the day, the only one that could possibly be thus. Each spread presents an equitable overview of the personality traits of people born on that day. Take mine (thanks for asking!): I’m December 16, the Day of Soaring Imagination. The description of those born on the day begins with the positive—“among the most imaginative people”—but doesn’t fail to offer the flip side: “December 16 people are not the easiest to live with … some born on this day must be in their own world to work effectively.” The back-and-forth continues, in a Dagwood-sized compliment sandwich. Ultimately, “the highs of laughter and the depths of deep silence are all colors found on the December 16 palette.” Goldschneider also presents celebrities born on your day, as well as a tarot card and a mantra (“The storms of life eventually blow over”). An interactive web version of the book is explorable here. During the pandemic, the birthday book became one of my trusted methods of marking time. Hours felt oversignified, weeks became muddled, but the book’s Days—whose defining characteristics existed vertically through the years, like a tree trunk’s rings—gave the calendar a symbolic consistency that had nothing to do with anything going on yet was always oddly relevant. My friend unexpectedly went into labor on February 4, the Day of the Curveballer, and it blew straight through February 5, the Day of Quiet Eloquence; she birthed her son on February 6, the Day of Popularity. (“A popular kid?” she lamented.) The book has both the joy of revelation and the comfort of continuity. In high school, my Latin teacher sometimes began our class by opening an almanac and recounting what had happened on that day in history. The moral of the story, always: Nihil novum sub sole. Nothing new under the sun. —Adrienne Raphel, author of “Felix by Proxy” Read More
March 25, 2022 The Review’s Review On John Prine, Ferrante’s Feminisms, and Paterson By The Paris Review Historical diorama of Paterson, New Jersey, in the Paterson Museum, licensed under CC0 1.0. Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson is set in Paterson, New Jersey, the city that is also the focal point for William Carlos Williams’s modernist epic Paterson, a telescoping study of the individual, place, and the American public. Paterson is home to—and the name of—Jarmusch’s hero, a bus driver and a very private poet, played brilliantly by Adam Driver. He lives with his ditzy but extremely loving wife, Laura, who is obsessed with black-and-white patterns and becoming both a country-and-western singer and Paterson’s “queen of cupcakes.” Like much of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, the film is a celebration of ordinary life. Every day in Paterson’s life is the same. He wakes at the same time each morning, kisses his wife, eats a bowl of Cheerios, goes to work, listens to his colleague moaning about his life, sits in the same picturesque place to have lunch and write his poems, comes home to have supper with his wife, goes to the bar. And he’s not interested in being published. His pleasure is in the writing, and in seeing poetry in the everyday. As Carlos Williams writes: “no ideas but in things— / nothing but the blank faces of the houses / and cylindrical trees …” One of my favorite scenes in the film is Paterson’s encounter with a little girl who is writing a poem while waiting outside the bus station for her mother and sister. When she reads him some of her work, his response is respectful, tender, and genuine. The whole film is suffused with this gentle respect. The only fly in the ointment is Marvin, Laura’s bulldog, who hates Paterson (perhaps because Paterson leaves him outside the bar when they go on their evening walks?). After Marvin wreaks revenge on his poems, a bereft Paterson visits his usual writing spot. There he meets a Japanese poet and fellow Williams fan, who makes him a gift of a new notebook. “Sometimes empty page presents most possibilities,” he says, before leaving with an enigmatic “Aha.” And Paterson begins to write again. In the midst of the ongoing evils of our time, it is a balm to be immersed in the entirely unsaccharine Paterson. It is a privilege to appreciate how sweet it can be when everything—the good and the ordinary—stays the same. —Margaret Jull Costa, cotranslator of “Three Sonnets” by Álvaro de Campos Read More
March 18, 2022 The Review’s Review Parables and Diaries By The Paris Review Viktoras Kapočius, Jonas Mekas visiting Biržai, Lithuania, 1971, licensed under CC BY 4.0. On a recent hungover Sunday, I agreed to meet an old college friend uptown at the Jewish Museum to see their installation “Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running.” Trying not to betray my impairment, I sat down with relief in the black-box room, ready for the cameras to roll. After all, the movies have always been a refuge for the weary—for when you’d still like to feel something but you can barely move. Across a rough semicircle of twelve screens, Mekas’s intimate, nearly five-hour epic of his personal life, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, flooded the darkness. Each screen was devoted to a different segment of the film, creating an anarchic jumble of sound and image: Central Park picnics, Cape Cod swimming, a cabin in the green woods, flowers in the breeze, the waves of the sea, grass, Mekas playing the accordion, wine and dinners, the city in the snow. Letting it all wash over me, I felt moved, and restored to the fullness of experience. Read More
March 10, 2022 The Review’s Review Do Not Et Cetera By The Paris Review DIY miniature dollhouse, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0. “Living in America during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream,” writes David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives, “that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can’t shake yourself from the hallucination.” The political subterfuge of the Reagan years is the subject, too, of Maxe Crandall’s recent poem-novel, The Nancy Reagan Collection. Published by Futurepoem in 2020, it’s a mercurial archive of the Reagans’ silence on AIDS and the era’s innumerable other devastating failures, among them Iran-Contra and the expansion of the war on drugs. In high-camp imagined encounters with Nancy Reagan, Crandall deftly traces the era’s iconography of concealment—Nancy in her immutable trademark red, her high-necked collar, her tartan blazer, her little nautical blouse, her gloves—as he lists the names of friends and public figures dead from AIDS and its complications. Grief and rage churn at the center of these encounters, each of them shaped by speculative archival work and a biting queer sensibility. It’s a beautifully inventive experiment in historiography and a reminder of the enduring political aesthetics of obfuscation and silence: the particular politeness that meets with mass death. And like everything Futurepoem puts out, as an object it’s gorgeous—bright red, impossible to miss. —Oriana Ullman Read More
March 3, 2022 The Review’s Review Vesna By The Paris Review Ukrainian ethno band DakhaBrakha on its concert in Lviv. Photo by Lyudmyla Dobrynina, Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons. I have been thinking often of the 2017 anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The collection includes nine poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, who grew up in Luhansk, one of the regions taken by Russia-backed separatists in 2014. Her poems of that period bear witness to the decomposition of a country, a region, an identity, and language itself. Her words break apart under the pressure of violence: “my friends are hostages / and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk / to pull them out of the basements.” Now Yakimchuk is in Kyiv, working to help defend the capital as Russian shells fall. When the invasion began, she was already trained in military-style first aid and well stocked with supplies; she donated much of her store of gasoline to the local Territorial Defense Forces for Molotov cocktails. She has been documenting her experience on social media and in frequent interviews. Read More