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
February 24, 2022 The Review’s Review Real-Time Historicization By The Paris Review The K’alyaan Totem Pole of the Tlingit Kiks.ádi Clan, erected to commemorate those lost in the 1804 Battle of Sitka; photograph by Robert A. Estremo, copyright © 2005. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This week, as Russia formally invaded Ukraine, I thought of the Battle of Sitka, another military operation Russia initiated against a smaller autonomous stronghold, in this case the Kiks.ádi, a clan of the Indigenous American Tlingit people. I learned of the battle in Vanessa Veselka’s essay “The Fort of Young Saplings,” which was published by The Atavist in 2014 (I’d recommend the version printed in their Love and Ruin anthology). Both the Kiks.ádi and the Russians claim that they won the battle. Veselka’s essay investigates the problems this battle raises regarding historicization, the interpretation of events, and national identity formation. (She also questions whether a crucial Tlingit tactic of the Battle of Sitka influenced General Mikhail Kutuzov’s withdrawal from Moscow during the War of 1812, a series of events Tolstoy dramatized in War and Peace.) Read More
February 17, 2022 The Review’s Review Ye’s Two Words By The Paris Review A red planet in the foreground with a green planet in the distance, set in a starfield. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock. In the wee hours of this morning, Ye shared a flurry of Instagram posts. There were videos advertising his proprietary Stem Player, which he claims will be the only place fans can listen to DONDA 2, the album he plans to release next week. “Go to stemplayer.com to be a part of the revolution,” he wrote. The Stem Player, which allows users to remix music by manipulating stems, or the individual, elemental parts of a song, is a disc covered with what looks like semitranslucent tan silicone, featuring blinking multicolored lights that correspond to the tempo and other aspects of a currently playing track. Its design is of a piece with Ye’s Yeezy aesthetic: earth tones complemented by bright hues, like a Star Wars scene set in Tatooine. His posts recall George Lucas’s series in their narrative messaging as well: Ye highlights the battle between an evil empire—in this case, the music and tech industries—and an intrepid revolutionary, himself. “After 10 albums after being under 10 contracts,” Ye explains, he is ready to control the means of distribution. “I turned down a hundred million dollar Apple deal. No one can pay me to be disrespected. We set our own price for our art. Tech companies made music practically free so if you don’t do merch sneakers and tours you don’t eat … I run this company 100% I don’t have to ask for permission … I feel like how I felt in the first episode of the documentary.” Read More
February 11, 2022 The Review’s Review Mathematics of Brutality By The Paris Review Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,” goes Mao’s famous dictum. “A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.” The aftereffects of this kind of violence on a nation’s citizens is the subject of the South African writer C. A. Davids’s new novel How to Be a Revolutionary, out from Verso this month. In chapters that crisscross between present-day Shanghai, apartheid-era Cape Town, Beijing during the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests, and a series of McCarthy-era letters from Langston Hughes to a South African friend, Davids follows the friendship of Beth, a South African diplomat, and Zhao, a Chinese writer, as they come to terms with the moments of betrayal, naivete, and political cowardice in both of their pasts. Read More
February 4, 2022 The Review’s Review Out of Time By The Paris Review TGV 9576 // Munich – Strasbourg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For years, John Edgar Wideman has been dropping simple words from his sentences. Here’s the opening line from “Nat Turner Confesses,” featured in his collection American Histories: “Nat Turner no stranger to me.” Why not “Nat Turner is no stranger to me”? Various answers to that question. Wideman’s prose has long had a breathless, out-of-time quality to it, which becomes more pronounced as he gets older. Wideman, a Pittsburgh-raised writer as versatile and openly ambitious as his late friend, the underappreciated Chicago author Leon Forrest, is now eighty years old. He has published four books with Scribner in the last six years: Writing to Save a Life and three short story collections featuring old and new work—American Histories, You Made Me Love You, and Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone. Read More