The Paris Review's Blog, page 86

Megha Majumdar, Fiction

Megha Majumdar. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times Notable Book A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal. She is also the editor in chief at Catapult Books. She grew up in Kolkata, India, and now lives in New York. A Burning is her first book.

***

From A Burning:

Even a future movie star is having to make money. One morning my sisters and I are spraying rose water in our armpits, braiding our hair, putting bangles on our arms, and together we are going to bless a newborn. The general public is believing that we hijras are having a special telephone line to god. So if we bless, it is like a blessing straight from god. At the door of the happy family, I am rattling the lock thuck thuck thuck.

“Give, mother,” we are calling so that our voices can be heard deep within the big house. When nobody is coming, I am stepping back and looking up at a window. It is a big house, and the window is covered by a lace curtain.

“Mother!” I am calling. “Let us see the baby, come.”

Finally the door in front of us is opening, and the mother, wearing a nightie that goes only to her calves, her oily hair sticking to her scalp, her eyes looking like she has seen battle, is holding the baby and coming out. Poor woman is yawning like a hippopotamus. I am feeling that maybe I can make the mother cheer up, along with the baby.

So I am taking the baby in my arms, inhaling the milk scent of his skin. My eyes are falling in love with those soft folds in his wrists, the plump inside of his elbows. The others are clapping above the baby, singing, “God give this child a long life, may he never suffer the bite of an ant! God give this child a happy life, may he never suffer a lack of grains!”

The baby is looking surprised, with those big eyes. Maybe he is never coming out on the street before, never feeling the smoke and dust. For sure he is never seeing a group of hijras in our best clothes! He is screaming. His little mouth is opening to show pink gums and pink tongue, and he is screaming in my arms. He is a little animal. We are laughing. He is going to be fine, I am thinking, because he is having no defects, unlike myself.

The mother is looking harassed, and taking the baby inside. We are waiting for the sound of a drawer opening, some cash being counted by mother and father. But what is this, she is going inside a room, where a tap is running and water is falling. From here, over all the sounds of the street, I am hearing one sound clearly: She is washing her hands. She is washing her hands of us.

Meanwhile, the father is coming out in shorts and giving Arjuni Ma, our hijra house’s guru, three thousand whole rupees. He is sliding his glasses down his nose and looking at us from the top. One of my sisters is flirting with him for an old microwave or old TV. He is looking unhappy and pleading, “Where am I having so much, sister? Look at me. New baby and all.”

Me, I am only trying to see what the mother is doing behind him, in the dark corridor, her hands so, so clean.

 

Anaïs Duplan, Nonfiction

Anaïs Duplan. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the newly released book I Need Music; a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion; and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He has taught poetry at the New School, Bennington College, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.

***

From “Making Use of the Mundane: Black Performance & Becoming”:

Growing up, I rationalized my father’s absence with ideas about gender norms. I thought that men, since they are more powerful, didn’t have to have any obligations to other people. I thought that I, too, wanted to not have obligations to other people. I internalized a concept of feminine love as that which either perfectly complements or perfectly emulates the love-object. Both versions are traps.

In certain ways, having power projected onto you is as asphyxiating as having powerlessness projected onto you. The primary difference is that having powerlessness projected onto you puts you into danger that having power projected onto you doesn’t. Having obligations to other people is part of the beauty of being human, but our connections have to be chosen, not imposed. For a long time, I thought the only way to freely choose anything was as a man.

The truth is, freedom is the most mundane thing imaginable but it’s also hard to locate and it’s rarely “pure.” All marginalized people inhabit two worlds at the same time: those of freedom and nonfreedom. Being unfree is different than being in bondage. In bondage, as in the case of enslavement, one’s body is owned by someone else. Being unfree, on the other hand, is what happens after the end of enslavement: one becomes an “emancipated” citizen in the society that used to enslave her and that is still built to do so—without a literal title on one’s body, but still with the power to destroy that body, threaten it, circumscribe it, categorize it, and imprison it.

Should we, “post-bondage,” focus on the ways in which we’re free (free to move, free to buy, free to breathe) or the ways we’re not free (free to move but displaced and shuffled around, free to buy but within a capitalist system in which one used to exist as commodity, free to breathe but in especial danger at all times)? Neither. In order to locate liberation, one has to locate a third space. This alter-space is not “outside of,” “away from” or “other than” our present world. Instead, it is an intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality.

***

From “Paradigms for Liberation”:

Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.

***

From “Blackspace”:

To propel myself is to stand for something else besides this world as a terrible, terrible place. To go further than my idea of myself extends.

There is the happiness I feel within the limits of my current self-conception, then there’s the happiness of seeing my self-conception has fallen apart, yet another time. The former kind of happiness happens when reality aligns with my opinions about how the world ought to be. The latter happens when my beliefs about how the world ought to be are destroyed by an inescapable reality. The latter kind of happiness is always precipitated by intense fear.

When this kind of world-shattering happiness takes place, beauty itself runs out and there’s only after-beauty. Language runs out and there’s after-language. After runs out—

I was taught from a young age it was important to perform. As I work through my taboos, letting go of performance is most difficult.

Even “forward” seems to fall apart. What I am is what is the future.

How Do We Stop Repeating Ourselves?: A Conversation with Caren Beilin

Photograph by Jean-Paul Cauvin.

Caren Beilin’s slim novels are marked by a distinctive dizzying logic—as if she had invented her own variation on realism—that allows the narrators’ imaginations, feelings, locations on earth, and personal symbologies to stretch and twist the plot. In The University of Philadelphia (2014) and Spain (2018), she emphasizes the ways we are trapped within our own realities, but also suggests that these realities can be wondrous and huge. Beilin makes the experience of living seem private, wild, abysmal, and buoyant, and implies that we need other people because without them our inner landscapes would become too overwhelming—they would keep expanding and devour everything. 

Her new novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat (out this month from Dorothy, a publishing project) follows Iris—a creative-writing professor much like Beilin herself—from her receipt of a package of hurtful old letters from her father (detailing criticisms he had of her, ways he blamed her for the family’s problems) through her eventual attempt to escape from her life by portraying a cowherd at an experimental art museum. I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing—so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves. 

For Beilin, our experiences of pain, and our positions within the family and other institutions, do far more than any innate character traits, any supposed God-given individuality, to determine the ways we encounter the world. In Blackfishing the IUD, her most journalistic and essayistic book, she weaves theory with the intimate first-person testimonies of women whose bodies suffered dramatically in the wake of getting an IUD, and she observes with horror, anger, and shock the sudden onset of rheumatoid arthritis in her own body shortly after the procedure. It is a moving, maddening account. 

Beilin was born in 1983 and grew up in Germantown, Philadelphia. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and lives in Vermont. I edited this interview down from a sixteen-thousand-word shared Google Doc.

 

INTERVIEWER

How did writing begin for you? 

BEILIN

I had a typewriter in my room when I was around eight and I positioned it at my window and wrote a captain’s log every morning. I was thinking of my bedroom as my ship. I would take each report and fold it up, seal it with a sticker, and put it in a small silver wicker basket.

INTERVIEWER

There is such a sense of adventure in your sentences, and such playfulness in the way you make up words. Where did that come from?

BEILIN

Writing, for me, was born out of the need to create a language unreadable to my family of origin—unreadable because it was so beautiful! It is difficult for me to write plainly, even when I absolutely want to and see that that would be best, because my original impulse has to do with writing code for a wormhole outside of sadness and abuse. 

INTERVIEWER

You seem very interested in the family as an institution, and you also write about the university, the artist residency, and so on. Your approach to dismantling institutions seems to be not through politics but through humor. Does that seem right to you? 

BEILIN

I would add that friendship is so powerful. Friendship dismantles the family, dilutes and complicates it, forces it to zag or stagger backward, remixes it, causes it to bend, relent, or in some cases disappear. Friendship might expose the family—ever ask a friend to come with you to a family event so that people will be on better behavior? It can help you figure out what is or isn’t tolerable, or show you different speeds of and options for love. It can of course enhance the family in all kinds of ways, too. And I actually like institutionality. But I think a radical thing to do within institutions is to form friendships.

INTERVIEWER

In Blackfishing the IUD, instead of the humor I find in your novels, there is a propulsive rage. Rather than rely on the authority and inventiveness of your own voice, you constantly fold in the sentences of other writers. What was it that called forth such a different style?

BEILIN

I was a desperate reader, at the time—desperately reading listservs and the internet, research studies, literature. I was desperately reading what Isaac Newton, who was into alchemy and died of mercury poisoning, had to say about copper. I was reading hundred-year-old cooking manuals about copper pots. I was willing to do anything to learn why the copper IUD had seemingly instigated an autoimmune reaction that had caused me to be in this much pain and panic. I would read anything, listen to anyone. Deleuze and Guattari had more to say to me, more helpful information about metals and their interaction or assemblage with my body, than my doctors did at that time. Of course, probably the most helpful things I read were the narratives of other people who had been made sick by the IUD, many of whom had become activists and researchers themselves.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a relationship to math, or to the sciences?

BEILIN

I imagine that some of the pleasure I get out of writing is like the pleasure of a mathematician—this growing, immanent arrangement. Crystals, fractals.

INTERVIEWER

How did the almost hallucinogenic form of your novel Spain come about? You write about such mundane things, and yet the form makes the narrative rather dizzying and surreal.

BEILIN

Since I was interested in writing a sort of antitravelogue in which a woman who travels doesn’t learn anything really or immerse herself in a culture or get better in any way, I wanted to express this in the syntax. One of the first sentences I wrote for Spain was, “A fire is like a bunch of daffodils on fire.” I liked this lazy, tautological metaphor. Daffodils are yellow and a fire is yellow, so. A fire is like a fire … I liked refusing to work.

INTERVIEWER

I love that sentence so much. It’s such a good joke about metaphors, about what a writer is called on to do for a reader.

BEILIN

I was supposed to be working on my dissertation for a creative-writing PhD, but as I’d proposed it, it would have been a historical fiction set in antebellum Philadelphia at a time when a series of orphanages for Black children were set on fire. Strangely, I had found evidence for this in tourism guides from that time. People visiting cities wanted to admire the municipal structures, and it was recommended they go see prisons and post offices and orphanages, but there were asterisks next to several of the orphanages for Black children, saying that unfortunately you couldn’t visit them because they’d been burned down. 

I’d proposed to write about this, I’m sorry to say, from the perspective of a Black child. I’m not a very smart person, and when you take that kind of person and put them through a PhD program where it was often emphasized that writing fiction is this awesome act of empathy—the ability a writer has to go into other bodies and beings—and you combine this impression with systems of hazing, punishments, favors, and accomplishments, and tie it all to a little bit of fellowship funding, then what you have is a fairly dumb person proposing to write this book to get ten thousand dollars. So I moved back to Philadelphia with my ten thousand dollars and I was going to do that. 

Fortunately, something kicked in and I couldn’t—I felt disgusted. I felt like, How can I be a writer if it’s actually important to give people privacy, to not, like, go into people? And that is when I thought, I’d better use myself as a subject, as an act of mercy, so that I don’t go prowling around in the bodies of children. I wrote Spain out of horror for what my dissertation was supposed to be, and tried to write about myself, and my own quite uneventful time in Spain, as a way to not bother others. And when I was in Spain, I really resented the imperative to be this immersive, open listener and learner. I thought it was, among other things, a gendered ask, so I worked on a syntax of refusal with these mundane but funny stories from one of the least eventful times in my own life. 

INTERVIEWER

Can you say more about your opposition to the idea that fiction has to be some great act of empathy? 

BEILIN

This idea that the imagination can take you anywhere—into anyone and anything—it thwarts one of the most basic things we learn as children, which is, Don’t touch everything! Don’t touch the stove, it’s fucking hot! I still see classes like “Writing the Other” listed in esteemed creative-writing programs. There is a lot of focus on the individual bound up in that idea, the individuality of this amazing writer with this special capacity for seeing, speaking from, or caring, but also the striking individuality of the characters themselves, this most sincere investment as them as people. I think of characters more as functions—propulsions, concentrations, knots of language. 

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think the academy is so set on this idea of empathy as the most important function of fiction? 

BEILIN

I think it’s hard to sell a humanities education. But if you could convince people that they’re producing empathy, spreading peace, making the world better, that could be something great for the catalog. 

I don’t think the world needs to experience empathy through literary form in order to get better. There are a few things I could say here, but maybe I’d just say the world needs more investigative reporting, and protections for journalists, in order to get better.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think studying literature is good for? What is the most important reason, for you, to write and read fiction? Or why does one publish?

BEILIN

I think it’s about friendship, connection, affinity. And really, to be blatant, it’s anti-suicide. When I read Violette Leduc—when I read her brazen brain full of beaks and throbbing birds, of paradise, when she grinds her elbow into her writing desk, and cycles through worship and renunciation like a demon—I know that it is okay for me to exist. And when a writer friend asks after my work, or shares their work with me, or when they literally shelter me for months or years, I have a place on this earth. Language—pursuing it—can give you a life. Why does literature need to be about teaching the masses how to empathize? That’s not even realistic. Who are these masses who are clumping around pieces of literature, I mean, besides a blatantly fascistic literature? No, the people you will write for will be the people who are seeking you. Your friends, or friends to your mind and your language, maybe even to your cause. That is good enough. 

INTERVIEWER

You do something in your writing that I find very interesting, something that makes me constantly aware that I am reading the work of someone’s imagination, and also aware of how the world itself is a work of imagination. You take certain images—milk, bees, honey, cows, feet—and kind of smear them across the text, so that they appear all the way through it, but bearing different meanings depending on the scenes. It’s like smearing a streak of red over a painting, but instead you’re smearing cows—here they are in a field, here they are sitting on the narrator’s feet, here they are in a concentration camp. It really makes it clear, the way the imagination imprints itself on everything. 

BEILIN

The smear is everything. One of my favorite artists is the musician Jason Molina. I just read a biography of him, Riding with the Ghost. He had his totems, his signs, and it became a kind of joke in his crew. Everything is wolf, moon, tower … over and over. 

In my symbology, there are safe and glorious totems, good things, and there are bad ones, warnings, bad signs. A cow, or a sheep, would always be good, or a sheep. A goat must always be loved, and helped. If a character is reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, they are an agent of evil who may cause harm or disruption. If a character carries with her a book by Richard Brautigan, she is to be trusted. She may pass.

INTERVIEWER

At what age did you understand that you were Jewish, if such a question can be asked? What did it mean to you, at that earliest age?

BEILIN

When I was younger, I looked uncannily similar to Anne Frank. People in middle school called me Anne Frank! I was acutely aware of the Holocaust, that I was a third-generation survivor, and that this actually means something. In my house there was stoicism, silence, bitterness, grievance, reeling, rage, aporia—and everybody worshipped Seinfeld. Seinfeld, to me, is about this generational survival. All the neurosis, pickiness, paranoia, supreme irony, these aftershocks—and the relief, and pleasures, of “nothing.” God bless the coffee shop. 

INTERVIEWER

Revenge of the Scapegoat seems to come out of something that happened to you in real life. Your father had written you some letters when you were young, which deeply pained you then, and he found them and re-sent them to you, years later. Can you tell me a bit about your decision to sublimate the pain of those experiences into a work of art?

BEILIN

I did receive some letters, at the start of the pandemic, in May 2020. When I received this package, I became very sad and tender. It pained me to have this sort of proof—typed!—of the way in which I was antagonized as a kid. People told me to burn them, and to remind myself of all I have in life that has nothing to do with this old dynamic. But in truth, I’d been writing Revenge of the Scapegoat for years, trying things out. The letters gifted me form, a most definite and burning point from which to begin. And a bit of comedy, too. On the acknowledgments page, I thank my dad, for sending me this novel-writing kit. I’m very sincere—thank you. That antagonism is inextricable from how or why I write. And in the process of writing about it, the letters became old and boring—a letdown, even.

INTERVIEWER

You define scapegoat in different ways—what it means to the person in a family who has been scapegoated, and what it means to be told that you are responsible for the way the family is. That’s an insane thing for a parent to claim. However, instead of situating the book in the past, at the moment of scapegoating, you choose to focus on the child who has grown up to recognize the insanity of having been cast in this role. This makes it easier for the story to consider the ways in which not just families but by extension even nations scapegoat people and enjoy scapegoating. It also seems that the burden of being scapegoated would quite naturally make someone into an artist. They are the person on the outside, who has to decode the assumptions of those who are inside—who has to decode their lies.

BEILIN

A lot of family scapegoats do become artists, or tellers of some kind. Their road is difficult but they are forced, at a young age, to hold what they see, to keep a record. Revenge of the Scapegoat begins with Iris, who is upset to receive these letters, but it also begins by talking about the genocide of Indigenous people, and moves into stories of the Holocaust. Genocide is inextricable from the scapegoating mechanism, but where does scapegoating come from? Does it extend outward from families? Or are families that scapegoat mirroring genocides? When I was a teenager and learned about the Palestinian struggle, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how one scapegoated group could turn so neatly around and scapegoat another. If the family is a site where all of these things keep simmering, do we need, as humans, to change the family? How do we stop repeating ourselves? How do we arrive at a different mechanism? These are some of the questions I have.

 

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including, most recently, the novel Pure Colour .

Remembering Richard Howard

Richard Howard receiving the 2017 Hadada Award. Photograph by Matteo Mobilio.

Richard Howard, poet, translator, critic, and poetry editor of this magazine from 1992 to 2004, died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. He was the last of a certain type of literary person, of which I am tempted also to call him the first—I can think of no one like him, except perhaps Robert Browning or Henry James, two of the writers whose work most profoundly animated his life. His approach to literature was both comprehensive and conversational—he lived in the books he loved, all the time, was ever in the midst of talking about them, ever encountering the great writers in his imagination, and reawakening them in poems that staged impossible meetings between literary and historical figures. These were his favorite fantasies: Richard Strauss addressing Arnold Schoenberg, Henry James reviewing a film released in 1942. Such figures (he loved that word) were his toys, and poetry his lifelong playroom, though in addition to the goal of finding and spreading joy in literature, he was committed to stewardship; he made it his business to ensure that the giants of the past weren’t forgotten. His most frequent and vehement complaint about other people was “They don’t read.”

Reading was Richard’s primary occupation. His New York apartment was covered in books, floor to ceiling, interrupted only by a desk, a few places to sit, a bed in a book-lined alcove (which was also home to Mildred, Richard’s life-size stuffed gorilla), and the bathroom, adorned with dozens of small portraits of famous writers, glaring at anyone who dared use the toilet. The kitchen was an afterthought—mostly a place to store kibble for Gide, his eccentric French bulldog, since Richard almost always ate out. I used to care for Gide when Richard traveled, so I was once there on his return from a trip to Europe with his husband, the artist David Alexander; the souvenir Richard was most excited to show off was a gargantuan copy—I think in French, though perhaps in the original Italian—of Leopardi’s Zibaldone, which had not yet been translated into English in its entirety. Finally he could read it! New books were among the major events of his life. By his door was always a growing stack of books to sell to the Strand; at some point David had introduced the rule that for every new book that came in, one had to go out.

I was blessed to spend a lot of time with Richard during the last twenty years of his life. I met him in 2002 at Columbia, where I was his student, then his assistant, his dog-sitter, and eventually his friend. Richard unabashedly played favorites—he was from an older literary world that had always worked that way—and I was lucky enough to be chosen. I’ll never quite understand why he picked me, except that he saw something in my nascent poems, plus he liked underdogs and fixer-uppers, and at twenty-two, I was both—young, sloppy, and eager to live in literature as he did.

It’s difficult to convey now what a towering figure Richard was when we first met. With a mere phone call, he could usher any manuscript into publication. Susan Sontag would call him to complain about literary goings-on, and a constant parade of American literary legends marched through his doors—I met W. S. Merwin on Richard’s couch. His students came, too: he met with us in private, holding our poems up close to his giant circular glasses (of which he had pairs in enough colors to match almost any of his socks), crossing out extraneous words, adding commas, and enjoining us to make our lines neat and even. He preferred poems to be, as he liked to say, “attractive.” To sit with him was to sit in the glorious eye of a thousand-year literary storm, to be guided through its currents, to be invited in and taught how to comport oneself. Richard conceived of poetry as a big tent: he saw a need for many kinds of voices, as his many issues of the Review attest. He was a gatekeeper, an elitist, in the sense that there were tests to pass, passwords to learn, but he believed that anyone could learn them, so long as they weren’t among those who “don’t read.”

Richard is best known for his books of dramatic monologues from the sixties and seventies: Untitled Subjects, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and Two-Part Inventions. In some ways, the prerequisite for appreciating these books might be to read everything Richard had read, which is to say almost everything. Very few people could feel fully at ease in the climate of Richard’s poems, but many can still be deeply pleasurable for those of us with a more limited frame of reference. Those poems revel in Richard’s favorite pastime: verbal improvisation. Richard loved the rhythms and beats and falls of spoken language, the ways clauses could fold sentences back on themselves, twisting like balloon animals. He loved to lecture, in part, I think, because he relished the opportunity to run his words through an obstacle course. Almost all of his dramatic monologues are simulations of lengthy, generous lectures—intimate because they are usually addressed to particular individuals, whom Richard imagines as eager and willing students. As a reader, or as one of Richard’s actual students, one was always trying to live up to the capaciousness of his poems, stretching to know a little more than one did.

My favorites among his poems, in part because I had all the necessary equipment to enjoy them—Richard made it abundantly clear, when I worked briefly as his secretary, that I lacked certain knowledge but he loved me anyway—and in part because they seem to me to embody Richard, the person, more than any of his other work (and please permit me, in tribute to my mentor and friend, this mazelike, Howardian sentence), are the ones in the last book of poems he completed, in 2014, called A Progressive Education.

Instead of characters from literature or history, these poems conjure a group of sixth-grade students from Park School, a progressive school much like the one Richard himself attended in the thirties and forties in Cleveland. For these fictional students, he told me, he borrowed his own grade-school peers’ real names—Judy Anders, Nancy Angrush, Duncan Chu, David Stackover. They speak like adults, if those adults were all Richard. The poems are cast as letters, written in a collective voice by the students to their school’s principal, Mrs. Masters. They report back from a school trip, suggest changes to the curriculum, and try to fathom the disgusting act they learn about in their “Hygiene Concentration”:

… we learned about Sexual Intercourse

between Men & Women.   Some Class members claim

                                                              they knew already

         but according to

Miss Husband, most people know different things

about S.I., yet what Promotes Fulfillment

                                                              in Sexual Life

         (her actual words)

is that everybody should know the same things.

“The whole Class / finds it hard to believe that grownup people / voluntarily subject themselves to such / senseless behavior,” the poem continues. A visit to the Komodo Dragon enclosure at “the Reptile House / of the Cleveland Zoo” suggests an alternative that fits better with the students’ emerging life plans, a “view of a Future / free from the horrors / of Sexual Intercourse”:

                                                                 … one female

         went ahead and laid

a clutch of fertile eggs that managed to hatch

by a process called parthenogenesis—

                                                          which means they don’t need

         S.I. with the males.

(This also happens, one keeper informed us

with certain fish!) Well, what we’d like to know is:

                                                          could Science obtain

         similar results

in humans?

What Richard claimed, and what his poems will claim forever, is a profound sympathy for the questioning mind, in which nothing is ever settled, and which is ever finding and filling gaps in its collection of impressions and facts. This is the Richard I knew and whose memory I will always cherish: mischievous, wringing all the wisdom he could from a playful naivete. During the years he was writing poems in A Progressive Education, around 2010, a visit to his apartment meant a giddy private performance of his latest installment, intoned dramatically in Richard’s slightly high-pitched, nasal voice, suddenly inflected (but hadn’t it always been?) with the searching tones of a child who knew not whereof he spoke, yet knew he was right. These readings were all mischief, Richard practicing his brand of literary subversion.

Richard taught me many, many things; most of all, he believed in the value of my sentences, in their music and meaning. And I am far from alone in my gratitude. In the past day, my social media feeds have filled with snapshots of letters Richard wrote to aspiring poets, kind and hilarious rejection notes, and blurbs like tiny prose poems or mini essays adorning the backs of literally hundreds of books. Richard could be contrary and complex, but fundamentally he was generous: he wanted more poetry in the world; he lived to beckon voices onto the page. The fruits of his labor fill countless bookshelves.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the Review’s digital director and the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey.

What Our Spring Issue Writers Are Looking At

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 ”

Lately, I’ve been spending too much time online. I’m submersed in an infosphere that’s somehow both incredibly hyperbolic, constantly at ignition point, and yet filled with art and writing about art that’s so thin and anodyne that I often think the words unremarkable, content collapse, and press release, on repeat. But each morning I read a piece from Vile Days, Gary Indiana’s collected columns from the three years—1985 to 1988—during which he served as The Village Voice’s art critic, and this is my reprieve.

Indiana always reads real; he never bullshits. “We should distrust ‘great,’” he writes. “According to whom? According to what?” Though his criticism is often harsh, it’s never petty, and is motivated by deeply held beliefs on the role of art in the world. Describing the paintings of Nancy Chunn, he writes: “These works are not didactic; they don’t lay out a program but simply ask us to be conscious that art and life are inextricably connected—that we all live in the same world, which is not a happy place in most places.” Indiana’s column chronicles these connections. He reviews not only the shows on Greene Street and at the Venice Biennale but also the art that hangs in the banks of corporate New York—ChemBank, Chase. There are interviews with Tishan Hsu and Barbara Kruger, punctuated by dispatches on the AIDS crisis and, at one point, his rebuttal to being labeled the “ringleader of a homosexual cartel.”

I don’t recognize most of the works being discussed, and though I’m sometimes compelled to google them, Indiana’s criticism stands alone. He’s a master of the anecdote, the aside: “This doesn’t have anything to do with art,” he’ll say, before going on to describe a fight on the street or a man jerking off in a parked Rolls-Royce on Second Avenue. All of this is written in the rapid-fire sprezzatura that would come to characterize his later novels, prose that takes on the fervor of a fever dream—or perhaps of something closer to the brain on uncut amphetamines.

—Paul Dalla Rosa, author of “I Feel It”

Lately I’ve been thinking about the body; the incredible mystery of it, its peculiarities. Perhaps you’ve considered the incongruities of our bodies, how we all share a limb that’s larger and longer than its counterpart. The ways even our eyes often refuse symmetry: one fuller, alert and curious, while the other appears lazy, cynical, almost sleepy in its modesty. In grade school, we used to trace the outlines of our small hands upon construction paper: an exercise in coordination and creativity. We made a mess with glue and glitter while decorating and coloring our drawn hands, then practiced our counting by the loopy points of the fingertips. I took my project home and asked my mother why my right hand was bigger than the left. The obvious answer might have been that my tracing was more controlled with one hand than the other, but my mother only looked me plainly in the face and told me that’s just how God made us. One side of our body is a lil’ bigger, she said. I remember my confusion, though I didn’t question her at the time: Why would the creator make our bodies so imperfect? 

This line of questioning has remained with me as I’ve aged, buried within the murk of the subconscious. It was only when I started writing fiction that my lingering fixation on the body was brought to my attention. Readers were quick to notice the ways my stories emphasized the body. Characters gazed at their images in mirrors and pools of water. They felt the heaviness of their weight while moving through the world, they disassociated from the body while making love, sometimes they sought means of escaping corporeality altogether. 

For years I’ve collected pictures of the art that’s most inspired me, and those images overwhelmingly capture the absolute beauty and ordinariness of bodies. My favorite compositions are unassuming, quiet celebrations of women merely existing: Nude. Brown. Unfazed by their imperfections or the eyes upon them. I think Archibald Motley, an artist of the Harlem Renaissance, best executes what I aspire to do with the body—on the page, and in personal relationship with my own. His painting Brown Girl After the Bath is exquisite in its ordinariness: the soft pudge of his muse’s belly, the slope and sag of her breasts. Diego Rivera’s Dancer Resting also manages to grasp the fullness and elegance of the feminine form in our most vulnerable and natural states. I’m struck by her hips, her thighs, the fatigue expressed in her eyes. These are profoundly imaginative moments, an artist recreating the art that has been expressed in a multitude of shapes and hues by the ultimate artist.

—Lakiesha Carr, author of “Tomorrows ”

Diego Rivera, Dancer Resting, 1939.

David Wojnarowicz’s Home in the City

David Wojnarowicz, Oct. 22nd postcard, from the Jean Pierre Delage Archive of Letters, Postcards and Ephemera, 1979–1991. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.

David Wojnarowicz’s final home was on the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street on the Lower East Side. He moved in after the prior tenant, his mentor and former lover Peter Hujar, died of AIDS. A few months later, in 1988, David was diagnosed with AIDS himself; he’d die in the Second Avenue apartment four years later at the age of thirty-seven.

Every time I visit the corner across from his apartment, I picture David walking out the door on a cold morning. The puff of his breath, the posture I imagine being poor. The cartoon cow he once spray-painted in the intersection for Peter to see from the window. David’s tall frame in the same arched window, looking for men. “Sometimes I almost fall out the window,” he says in a 1988 tape diary, “trying to watch them walk down the street.” They’re so hot and so sexy, he says, that it makes him laugh. I stand outside what is now a bagel shop and stare at the window where David laughed. 

Last year, I didn’t visit the apartment for six months, because a doctor who worked in the area broke up with me, and I couldn’t bear the idea of running into him, not in the indignity of summer humidity. When I finally walked up Second Avenue again, I stared at every pedestrian, paranoid, looking for a gait I recognized. Somehow David felt about as likely as the doctor to appear. Neither would look exactly as I expected, my memory having shifted their features. The fact that they had each been on this street at some point meant that they’d continue to be there always. I have this sensation in New York sometimes—that time is sedimentary, layering instead of progressing, that it’s all happening at once. 

Untitled (“Friendly Cow” for Peter Hujar), 1982. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.

David grew up in New Jersey and New York, spending some of his adolescence homeless, turning tricks in Times Square. In his twenties, he often crashed with friends or family between apartments, and worked as a busboy. Creatively, David, who became known as a part of a scene of Lower East Side artists that emerged in the eighties, made all kinds of work: photographs, paintings, films, music, essays. In contemporary remembrances, he and his work are nearly always described as angry. Much is made of this rage, as if it were his primary characteristic. David, by his early thirties, was dying unnecessarily, as were many people in his community, and his work radiates a rational fury, a desire to live, a murderous daydream of justice; this was often aimed at politicians who unabashedly called AIDS a punishment for queerness. In Close to the Knives, the memoir published the year before his death, David writes, “I carry this rage in some moments like some kind of panic and yes I am horrified that I feel this desire for murder.” But the feeling is paired with memories of “the faces and bodies of people I loved struggling for life, people I loved and people who I thought made a real difference in the world.” He was constantly saving sick animals. He believed in the value of beauty, even in plague times. His writing and tape diaries are tender, lustful, elegiac, self-critical. 

I love David’s mischievousness, like the time he released a herd of “cock-a-bunnies,” cockroaches with little ears and cottontails glued to them, into a group show at PS1 he hadn’t been selected for, then added the exhibition to his resume. I’m moved by his tenderness, his tone in a journal entry from late 1978 when he describes sleeping with a new lover, Jean Pierre Delage, soon after moving in with his sister in Paris. In the morning, Jean Pierre made breakfast, heating coffee on a camping stove and taking butter and a half loaf of bread from the windowsill. This meal “tasted like food from the banquets of Monarchs,” he wrote, “but EVEN BETTER!”

David’s early photographs are on display in a new gallery show, Dear Jean Pierre: The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence with Jean Pierre Delage, 1979–1982. Included are some from his Arthur Rimbaud in New York series, of Jean Pierre and others wearing a paper mask of the French poet’s face while standing in the cruising grounds of the Hudson River piers, masturbating, shooting up. David felt a deep identification with Rimbaud: their lives paralleled in experiences of parental abandonment, their shared queerness and devotion to their art, and their birth years, which were exactly one hundred years apart. In the photo series, shot in the late seventies, David merges their lives, bringing Rimbaud’s face into the haunts of his own youth. These portraits of fandom are some of David’s best known images.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (J-P Briskets), 1978–1979. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.

But the show centers on David’s letters to Jean Pierre following his 1979 return to New York, after that first stint in Paris. Hundreds of postcards, typewritten sheets, and handwritten notes on the back sides of artwork in glass displays line each wall of the two large rooms. The letters are journal-like in their thoroughness; they chronicle David’s recurring searches for jobs and stable housing, the temporary acquisition of each. David is confused about his future but not about Jean Pierre, he insists, wondering if they should live together in Paris or New York, and when. “I close my eyes and can see you,” David responds to a letter Jean Pierre wrote on the Métro, “I hear the sounds of the train in the station, the lights, the sounds of the doors opening. Hmm …” The letters animate the young David who, decades after his death, I so longed to befriend. He is loving and forthright, attentive to the world around him. “Ça va,” he opens many of the letters, peppering them with his limited French, like the names of the months—maybe by juillet he’ll have the money to visit Jean Pierre. In an early letter, David signs off: “I am in a cafe in Brooklyn right now. Frank Sinatra on the jukebox—a waitress who looks from outer space. Church bells ringing. Take care, love, David.”

“We wrote to each other every day, or almost every day,” says Jean Pierre in French, in a videotaped interview playing in a small room off the main galleries. The letters could take up to three weeks to arrive. Some days, he’d receive more than one, and he’d always respond immediately. This ardent correspondence lasted three years, after which point Jean Pierre and David stayed in touch, but stopped planning for a future together. Jean Pierre saved the letters, he says in the interview, because right until the end—and now he tears up—he thought they might get back together. 

When I returned to the main gallery on the night of the opening, I recognized Jean Pierre from the orange-brown tortoiseshell frames of his glasses among the minglers. I walked over and planted myself next to him, pretending to read a letter in the same glass case. He was wearing a gray herringbone crewneck over a mustard shirt, blue jeans. His hair had gone gray. Jean Pierre was pointing to the last letter, an epilogue of sorts, written in 1991, nearly a decade after the rest. He explained to a man standing next to him that the reference to apartment shopping was nonsensical, years after Jean Pierre had sought an apartment; by this point, David’s mind was going. I lingered for a long time, watching Jean Pierre wave his hands, holding one end of his glasses in his mouth. I didn’t speak to him: I was, in a sense, as proximate to David as I might ever hope to be, with someone who could answer my questions. But to speak to Jean Pierre would have been to turn on a light in the darkroom of my fandom. The exposure of his attention, his opinion, risked ruining something sacred to me, something very intimate that can be sustained only by apartness. That’s what I want out of fandom, if you can call it that—to love without accountability or surveillance. So I just stood there, transcribing his words and gestures in my notebook, until I feared it was becoming obvious, and then I walked out onto the street.

Jean Pierre D. Normandie, France (Male series), 1980. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.

I’d seen David’s letters before. I used to go to his archives in the Fales Library at NYU one afternoon a week before the pandemic, moving through the materials slowly, just an hour or so per trip. Voicemail tapes, mail, journals, his wallet, his glasses. I never made it to the glasses, actually. I was too afraid to reserve them. I asked a mentor of mine who also cared about David what you do once you have them, joking offhandedly about putting them on, which horrified her. To be honest, it would have embarrassed me to sit looking at them in public, in front of the docents and other researchers at the archives. A couple of weeks ago I was reading Garth Greenwell’s novel Cleanness on the train; I had to stop when a man sat next to me, afraid he’d glimpse the sadomasochistic sex scene. I’m sure the man wasn’t looking over my shoulder, but it was too private a moment to share. It would be the same thing, to see the glasses in public.

One night when we were dating, I took the doctor to the corner across from David’s. We’d just eaten at the Jewish deli, bowing towards the space heater they’d installed outside. I’d gone on too long about the genius of a book by Sheila Heti he hadn’t liked. I was always eager to talk about the scene of cock worship directed at a man named Israel, the heavy-handedness of its commentary on worship, the relatable farce. How religiosity can leak elsewhere for those of us prone to it. I defended the novel out of loyalty to the author. The doctor promised to try reading it again. Then I walked with him to David’s corner. We stood staring, and the doctor asked me how I knew when to leave. I said it’s just a feeling, like a long pause, and that’s it. 

“I try talking to him wondering if he knows I’m there, if he sees me,” David writes after Peter’s death. “I know he sees me, he’s in the wind, in the air around me. He covers the field in a fine mist. He’s in his home in the city.”  I don’t think David could see the two of us, the doctor and me, looking at the windows of that same home in our city. But I felt that sensation of time overlapping, that we were all there at once, me with both men, onto whom I’d affixed many projections, many hopes of kindredness.

Dec. 26th postcard, from the Jean Pierre Delage Archive of Letters, Postcards and Ephemera, 1979–1991. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.

I used to do this same exercise when I lived in Berlin, bringing out-of-town guests to Franz Kafka’s old building—“This was his view every morning!”—but I realized after a year that I had the wrong address. I’d brought people to a random building and animated a false history, as if that’s another layer too, the things we imagine to be true, living on top of or below reality.

There was a moment in the archives when a similar fiction ripped. I was reading David’s mail, sifting through postcards from Nan Goldin, bills, faxes from his agent. There was also a letter from a fan. A horny, obsessive letter. The writer dreamt of David three nights in a row. They’d met once and there had been some electric current between them, the man wrote; he was sure they’d fall in love, even at a distance. And in the same cream folder of correspondence there was a draft of David’s response, a generous and measured typewritten note. He understood the velocity of fantasy, the way it can hook us by the belt loop and tug us along. From a distance, he wrote, “You can fill a person up with all associations and projections and myths and desires.” Kindly, he reminded the man of his own human form, the reality of the embodied, actual David. “I don’t know what I represent to you,” says David. “You don’t really know me at all.”

With the letter in my hands, I looked around the room, caught, my cheeks flushing at the reprimand I was taking personally. Embarrassing, the publicness of the moment, like reading Cleanness on the train. So David reached through the decades and caught me by the wrist, calling the bluff of our intimacy. I sat stunned, because there is no remedy for this feeling that no, it would have been different with me—just more projection.

Postcard from the Jean Pierre Delage Archive of Letters, Postcards and Ephemera, 1979–1991. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.

When someone dies, the traditional Jewish condolence is: May their memory be a blessing. This is a sentiment for the living, not the dead. I wonder what warping comes with fandom, when the relationship is mediated by inaccessibility or death; the attachment is some combination of honoring and consuming a legacy. I think of David, dressing his friends in the paper mask of Rimbaud, claiming a lineage in the poet, or the figure he imagined of the poet. I place myself, less because of identification, and more out of simple affection, in David’s wake.  

After all those months away, it felt good to stand on David’s corner again. This time, it was the right apartment, I was sure. There’s a movie theater on the ground floor; it used to be a Yiddish one. I walked by the building and held out two fingers, dragging them along the stone wall till they buzzed from the vibration. And when I turned the corner onto an empty street I held my fingertips to my lips, the way I do after I touch the mezuzah on the doorframe of my apartment, but only when I am alone. I remember so clearly driving home once in high school after a first kiss, through a green light on Vista Street, up the hill, with my left hand on the wheel of my father’s Prius, the fingers of my right hand to my lips, the kiss fizzing and crackling there. And it felt like that, walking down Eleventh Street, the same fingers pressed covertly to my mouth. The same strike of connection.

When I walked back towards the train, I felt a kind of attentiveness. A great mood. I think because of the intimacy, which fascinates me because it’s totally false, and also because I felt a rush of relief to not have seen the doctor, whose gait, it occurs to me now, I can no longer picture. 

 

Hannah Gold is a writer based in Brooklyn. She coedits Berlin Quarterly and teaches writing at Columbia University.

Redux: The Best Time for Bad Movies

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

IMAGE VIA THE PARIS REVIEW ARCHIVES. PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW BY HILTON ALS.

“With a picture that doesn’t work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they’re still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it,” the legendary director Billy Wilder remarked in 1996, in the Review’s first-ever Art of Screenwriting interview. “You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back at you, on prime time, that lousy picture, that thing, is back!” How many filmmakers might have been quietly struggling with similar emotions on Sunday night? We wouldn’t want to speculate, but we certainly did tune in to the Oscars. This week, why not revel in the kind of old-school glamour that’s beyond good or bad? Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Taj Mahal” dissects a cast of Hollywood actors, directors, and other eccentrics; the poet Chase Twichell conjures the anarchic spirit of a darkened theater in the afternoon; and in words and a series of ravishing photographs, Hilton Als allows himself “to dream the kind of movie [he] would make” about James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and his late sister. And don’t miss Wilder’s account of what Claudette Colbert said to her director, Frank Capra, when they wrapped the film that won her the Academy Award …

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Screenwriting No. 1
Billy Wilder

I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I’m broke. I’m going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand. Moreover, they didn’t know what movie writing entailed. You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn’t school themselves. I’m not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists. None of them took it seriously …

Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what’s wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act.

From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996)

PROSE
Taj Mahal
Deborah Eisenberg

Grainy rather than glossy, melancholy sepia lighting, the lighting of loss—the movies Anton ended up making in Europe weren’t too different from the ones he had made in America. There were the misleading clues, the tightening spirals of danger, approaching footsteps, neighbors inexplicably appearing, reflections in mirrors or puddles or windows, obstructed views …

The European movies were as misinterpreted as the American ones had been, and briefly they were as popular. Then audiences in both Europe and America moved on to simpler, noisier, and less troubling movies.

From issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)

POETRY
Bad Movie, Bad Audience
Chase Twichell

Matinées are the best time
for bad movies—squad cars
spewing orange flame, the telephone
dead in the babysitter’s hand.
Glinting with knives and missiles,
men stalk through the double
wilderness of sex and war
all through the eerie
fictions of the afternoon.
The audience is restless,
a wicked ocean roughing up its boats.
It makes a noise I seem to need.

From issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

ART
Director’s Cut
Hilton Als

One book I think about a great deal when I consider all this—movies as escape, stories as reality, race as just one of life’s interesting impossibilities, my sister and her understanding of aesthetics as a trick and a truth—is James Baldwin’s book-length essay The Devil Finds Work. There Baldwin describes his relationship to movies, both as a spectator and as a writer of film scripts. (Spike Lee incorporated some of Baldwin’s original adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X into his scenario for Malcolm X, released in 1992.) I’ve long thought The Devil Finds Work would make a great American movie in the old Columbia Pictures style: Jeffrey Wright or a young Morgan Freeman, say, dressed as Baldwin in a white shirt and tie walking through a museum of pictures and commenting on some of the stills and the stars that mattered to his young gay self: Bette Davis, Sylvia Sidney, and the like.

From issue no. 223 (Winter 2017)

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My Friend Goo

Illustration by Na Kim.

In March 2020 the entire human world was out walking. I, too, was walking, longer and farther than I’d ever gone on foot from my house. When I wasn’t walking, I was watching clips of people walking—of hundreds of thousands of workers laid off in the cities of India and setting out on foot across the country toward home. And I watched clips of people not walking—as in Italy, where, we read, people could not go outside for a month and they stood at their windows and sang. Here in Texas we did not have to walk, but we could if we wanted, and walk we did, everyone out on the street, waving from a distance. I found places near my home I had no idea were there, including a tiny forest a couple of blocks wide, and the Colorado River, which—if I’d ever looked at a map—I would have known was right there. 

I had an old dog and a contemplative husband, who was going through a religious conversion of some kind that he didn’t like to talk about but was clearly changing him in ways neither of us understood and that were making him less familiar to me. He was also taking walks, and at first we walked together. After being in our house all day Zooming in to work a few feet apart, we fought in the open air. We fought about his religious conversion or about the terrible things unfolding around the country. Or else about our families far away and what we should do about them. Once he stomped off, near tears. After that we walked alone. One of us would put on our shoes and say, “I’m going for my own private Idaho!” as we’d taken to calling it, after the movie with the actor who had died young long ago when we were also young.

On my walk, I came upon a landing. I had no real experience with that word as a noun: landing, a place where small boats float to shore and humans come greet them and tug them away. It had a tiny pier, a patch of grass, a bench. I began to go to this landing every day, walking the thirty-odd minutes, stepping out onto the pier, and sitting at the end of it. The little pier was so low it felt like you were on the water itself, levitating over it; like the water was moving all around, pulling you out with it. It was still the early days of living in a worldwide panic. Every day I sat and the sun lowered in the sky, turning the ripples into flashes of red and pink and orange, and slowly the river became a dark blue mass. When the old boathouse on the other shore lit up dimly, I got up and walked back to our house through the tall trees, a few giant cockroaches skittering out of the way. I didn’t feel at home in that house or that neighborhood, and I’m not sure where I’ve ever felt at home, other than Chicago, which was gritty, cold, angry—the opposite of this clean city—and where I’d grown up awkward and nervous.

***

One day, I arrived at the landing to see people scattering, grabbing their belongings and backing away frightened. The landing had been taken over by a wild goose, who was stalking around, honking and chasing the children and dogs. He was as tall as a mailbox, and had an enormous wingspan. His feet made loud flapping sounds on the parking-lot pavement. I tried to meditate on the pier, focusing on the water as I normally did, but the goose was a monster. He came up behind me, hissing, and I hurried away. 

He was there the next time I went. And the next.

One day I saw him paddling alongside a few people with rods. He was diving and fishing, and people shooed him away.

One day I saw him trying to sit next to a young couple snuggling on a bench. He tried to scramble up onto it beside them. The couple fled, distraught.

One day I saw him standing beside an old man smoking a cigarette. The goose’s long neck stretched straight up, high and peaceful. The two of them looked like old drinking buddies. 

What could I do? Slowly I began to befriend the goose. Goo, I called him, after the Sonic Youth song “My Friend Goo,” which meant so much to many of my generation that we will still sometimes chant in greeting, Goo, Goo, Goo, my friend Goo, like code words.

Now when I went to the landing, I no longer focused on the water. As soon as I arrived, I’d look for Goo in the spot he liked to sit, half-hidden in the branches by the water. I’d call to him, “Goo, hey, Goo,” and something in my voice must have calmed him because instead of marching over looking for a fight, he’d come waddling out, softly honking and purring—because he would purr at you, you see, if he liked you, and Goo came to like me.

We’d go on walks together, pacing the grass around the landing. He pecked and squawked at people. We stopped by the water and he’d urge me toward it. When I demurred, he would give a sort of shrug and dive in. We’d continue along, me walking, Goo swimming and diving under the water for fish and moss. We’d go up and down the length of the landing, calling back and forth. At last he’d lead us to his little corner and he’d hop out and do an elaborate grooming dance, purring at me and getting closer and closer until he was only a couple feet away, running his hard beautiful beak along his feathers, twisting his long neck under his wings, and sometimes getting a little stuck, so he had to wiggle his head free. 

We’d walk a little more. He was feisty, the town bully, and I was his sidekick. He’d pick targets, as if to say, See, me and my friend here, we play by the bench on Tuesdays. And seeing as how this is Tuesday … People got very upset. I’d say, “He’s harmless.” I do think he just wanted to make more friends, grow our gang, but they scurried away.

Before I left each night the sun would start to set. We stood together, he and I, on the pier. I looked at him against the water. The ripples captured all the colors of the sunsets and took on their own mysterious colors. And Goo, with his own mysterious iridescent feathers, caught every color at once, tiny rainbows flashing in the gray. He was an African goose, I’d learned from Google: the gray of gray doves, the gray of liquid unpoured concrete, of some rare gray eyes. He was slim and elegant, with orange feet. He had a stripe of soft black running down his neck, and the undersides of his wings were a plushy white. How had he come to be here? I did not know.

Finally I’d say goodbye. He seemed taken enough with the water that he didn’t mind my leaving. I’d walk back under the trees in the coming darkness, the cicadas and crickets singing me home.

 ***

I had a brother, who died of cancer many years ago. If he’d been born today, he would likely have been cushioned by a soft blanket of accommodation letters and cool-nerd cred, but when we were growing up he was simply “difficult.” I followed him everywhere, ditched school with him though I was only in first grade. I crocheted him a Doctor Who scarf. He loved to dance, loved clocks and time. As a teen his favorite mode of travel was a high, jubilant skip, which people, including cops, found suspicious. We skulked around in trench coats. Once we tied up the whole apartment, doorknobs, lamps, and table legs, in knots of string (I don’t remember why, but I do recall our father’s rage). He was irrepressible, hilarious. The year before he died, he accidentally set a classroom on fire doing a magic trick, while working as a substitute teacher.

In the weeks after his death, I dreamed he came back to talk to me. I dreamed it three times. The first time, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, the two of us hanging out, like the old days. The second time I asked him if we could keep meeting like this, but he shook his head sadly. In the last dream, our whole family was there. We were standing outside an amusement park. We could see the rides spinning in the sky on the other side of the wall. He was eager to go back in, but we couldn’t go in with him. We were saying goodbye. He took my sister and me aside. “Listen,” he told us, “don’t forget your other brother.” 

Other brother? What other brother? 

“You have another brother you forgot.”

We forgot our other brother? 

I woke, not knowing who the other brother was and having the feeling that I wouldn’t dream of my brother again, and I’d been right. 

I’ve looked for my other brother ever since, often mistaking animals and humans and even trees for him. I’ve gone off on long terrible detours to follow someone I thought might be him. If they have just the right quality of difficult, just the right balance of unacceptable to most and delightful to me, my mind blinks Mine. The next thing I know they’re in my apartment, piling up their suitcases, their boxes of papers, their musical instruments, or worse, on my floor.

During the early days of the pandemic, my brother came back to me, walked into my dreams, and said hello. 

*** 

I thought about my friend Goo all the time. I looked at pictures and videos of him on my phone on the days I couldn’t make it to the landing, all through late summer, then fall, into winter, as the number of deaths from the pandemic rose, surpassing the number of deaths from other historic catastrophes, mass illnesses, wars—war after war, the New York Times announcing each once we’d exceeded it in casualties, alongside a little history lesson about the battles and the brave soldiers who died for their country long ago.

Then, in Texas, we heard there was going to be a freeze—that it was coming, was nearly here, was upon us—but we didn’t know what that meant. My husband and I smiled and recalled the time they’d closed the university for a bit of snow that had melted away in the sunshine by noon. 

The temperature dropped and I drove to the landing. I’d never seen it so barren and windy. I was the only person there besides Goo, who came out purring. I poured corn, seeds, and chopped vegetables onto the dirt. I hadn’t brought him food before and now I wondered why I had not, and what he liked and whether he was starving and why the simplest things always seemed to slip past me. But he was totally uninterested, stomping over the corn to reach me. He wanted only for us to take our walk. I wasn’t dressed warmly. Goo seemed not to notice the cold. He made his leap into the water and called to me, and I chattered back. At last, when he was out of the water and grooming, I said my goodbyes and pointed again to the food I had spilled on the ground, which he continued to ignore. I made for my car. He flew into a rage, flapping through the park, honking. When I got into my car he wouldn’t let me leave, first blocking the car and then coming around to the window and poking his head in as I lowered the window to beg him to calm down. He attacked my car, pecking it with his powerful beak, making tiny dents that are still there. I apologized again and again. I drove away, leaving him behind me on the deserted landing. As I looked in my rearview he was running across the lot, wings open, beak forward in a gesture of battle. 

 ***

My brother went down fast, once he was diagnosed. He was supposed to live for five years. That’s what I thought the doctors had said—five years—but now I know they’d said “Up to five years,” and we’d heard what we wanted. I thought I had five years. It was thirteen weeks from his diagnosis to his death. In the final week, our family was assembled in the hospital room, collapsed in detritus: sweaters and snacks and extra pillows. He was in pain and getting confused as the cancer spread into his liver and brain, crawling through his body and taking over like a horror-movie alien. I recall he tried to stand, saying, “Let’s just get out of here. Call a taxi, call a cab.” He had tubes attached to him and he was trying to pull them out. We were telling him he couldn’t go anywhere, we were trying to calm him down. That was one moment.

*** 

I couldn’t get to the landing for ten days. This was the Great Texas Freeze of 2021. The grid failed and whole cities fell dark for a week. No heat, no lights, no internet, then no water. The roads were too icy to get away on, and anyway the gas stations were closed. The world is ending, we thought. I remember my husband outside in the yard in his coat, shoveling snow into a bucket. 

When I think of my husband during the first year of the pandemic, I think of him sitting with his head in his hands, crying, because he cried so much. He cried over the people dying; he cried over his religious conversion, over the citizens battling with the police; he cried over our arguments, our new distance from each other during this time—we’d always been so close. For entertainment he watched videos of Donald Trump. It was the only thing that made him laugh. He watched those awful White House COVID press conferences, cackling. He watched Trump’s Facebook videos after the election, the ones with the charts and graphs. He tried to get me to watch with him, but I couldn’t stand it. I hid in the other room.

But during the freeze he was stoic. Our power was flickering, then miraculously stayed on, so he made big pots of food every night, for me and the humans and animals who had come to stay with us, until we ran out of food and our faucets stopped running. Then he got a bucket and went out to fill it with snow.

***

When at last the temperature rose and the streets began to thaw, I walked to the landing to look for Goo. The air was filled with the buzz of chain saws toppling the trees that had been killed by the ice. The landing was still deserted. The ice crystals on the river reminded me of the freezing lake in Chicago and I felt an anchor of homesickness sink through me. Why had I ever left my beautiful city? 

I called to Goo. He didn’t answer. I called again. “Goo!” I yelled. “Hey, Goo!” 

He was gone. I stood on the pier and looked out.

I heard a honk. Then another. 

Him. He sounded far away, behind me. I left the pier and jogged through the parking lot, then up and down the neighborhood streets, calling to him. The sound of him calling back to me seemed to come from everywhere, echoing and drifting. It seemed to come up from under the earth. I followed it to a parking garage and I stood outside it shouting, “Goo! Goo!” He honked back. I ran in. And there he was, on the basement floor, my silly beautiful friend. 

*** 

I’m leaving out a lot.

There were other animals at the landing. Ducks, scooting around in little groups on the water. Dogs chasing objects humans had thrown into the water, a game which, though I knew better, always seemed mean. There were two Egyptian geese who showed up before the freeze and reappeared after. Strange-looking and unfriendly, but dazzling. Goo ignored them like they were stones, but one day after the freeze I brought corn, which he still disdained, and the Egyptian geese came swimming up. They hopped out of the water and ran over. They stood there, gobbling and honking in appreciation. They hung around for a few weeks. One disappeared. Then the other. 

I loved only Goo.

It was after the freeze that I finally touched him. I got down on the ground and beckoned. He came dancing over and let me stroke his long neck, his soft wings. 

*** 

There was another moment. It was the day before my brother died, though we thought we still had another week. Or at least five days. The family was gathered around him, petting him, the way one does—Mom, Dad, sister, me. Grandmother over on the hard hospital sofa. He couldn’t talk much anymore, beyond a few words. He did a strange thing. He took our hands and tugged them toward him and then put them into each other’s hands. He took my hand and put it into my sister’s. He took our mother’s and put it into my mine. He took my sister’s and put it into our father’s. He sped up, moving our hands into one another’s and taking them out again quickly. Mom’s into Dad’s, Dad’s into mine, my sister’s into Mom’s, back and forth, arms crossing over and under, weaving, webbing. It went on and on, him making dissatisfied sighs and sounds and gestures as he worked, like he was trying to get it right, like he was making an arrangement with our hands, drawing a picture with our arms, recreating what he saw in his mind, like we were his art piece, and that art piece was us: hands joined but in constant motion, reaching, grasping, holding on, letting go. 

***

At last, he sank onto the bed. He turned his head to our grandmother, still on the sofa, as witness. He said his last word.

“Grandmother.” 

We always did love our grandmother so much.

 ***

One more thing happened. It was March 2021, a few days before the anniversary of my brother’s death. I had been coming to the landing for a year. I’d gotten into the habit of stretching my arms out and stroking Goo for a moment before I left, never getting too close. I know now that this was a mistake, that I was teaching Goo that he could touch humans. I saw him try to play with them and I reassured them, but they fled, hiding their children behind them. I recall one poor girl whom Goo was adorably pecking. “He just wants to be petted,” I said, but she was frozen in terror, gasping. “I don’t know how to pet a goose,” she whispered.

That day in March, I was sitting on the ground, as was my custom. Goo began to walk around me in circles. He swept his huge wing over me so that I had to duck. He twirled behind my back, then spun around and settled at my feet. He hopped up and twirled around me again, cooing and purring, his wing crossing my face. At one point he lay his long neck and head over my shoulders, then he flapped away, honking. This all lasted maybe ninety seconds, and I went home, singing in my head, Goo, Goo, Goo.

The next time I went to the landing, he wasn’t there. That happened once in a while, but I went back the next day and the next, and couldn’t find him. Goo, my friend, a refugee stranded among humans, had disappeared. I asked people on the landing if they’d seen a goose and they shook their heads. Had someone called Animal Control on an aggressive goose out there attacking people? I went back day after day. The corner where he liked to sit stayed empty.

As the days passed, I wandered out onto the pier, looking at the water. When I turned to look back at the landing, it seemed different. Shaved grass, cement, strangers, SUVs hauling motor boats and Jet Skis. There were more cars on the streets, more noise. But, strangely, spring had come, exultant, haphazard as always. All that had died in the storm was returning, bursting from the ground in uneven stalks, growing inches a day, as if to make up for lost time.

 

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including the novel Barn 8 and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Dress

Illustration by Na Kim.

I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another marriage, on the rebound: someone’s beloved had married someone else, chips were cashed. In this instance, I had hung around with the groom on and off through college, and the bride had once been the girlfriend of the man I left when I met my husband. The Dress was a sleeveless crepe de chine sheath, with a vaguely Grecian scooped neckline composed of interlocking openwork squares, which sounds dreadful but was not. It was sublime. Cut on the bias, it skimmed the body—and, it turns out, it skims everyone’s body: the Dress has been worn to the Oscars three times—in 2001, 2009, and 2018—though not by me.

In 1987, the nominees for Best Picture were Platoon, Children of a Lesser God, The Mission, Hannah and Her Sisters, and A Room with a View. That year, my husband and I had spent our winter honeymoon in Italy, at the pensione in which Lucy Honeychurch feels so fettered in A Room with a View; we’d eaten our tiny breakfasts from pink plates. Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three, including Best Original Screenplay. In those days, I lived in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue with a window that looked out onto the brick wall opposite. In the spring, the wall was covered with morning glories. During those years, my friends and I were eating ramen dry out of the packet and still scrounging, late at night, through the refrigerators of our parents’ apartments—which looked like the apartment in Hannah and Her Sisters—on Central Park West and Riverside Drive, at after-parties that went on long after they should have ended. The movie seemed to us about people inconceivably older than we were, making bad decisions of the kind we would never make. When we thought about our futures it was as if we were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The week I bought the Dress, a friend of mine saw a man jump from an upstairs window and hurtle into the courtyard of her parents’ Riverside Drive apartment below. She was sitting next to her parents, and her brother, with a girl from Ohio whom he planned to marry. No one said a word.

Of the evening of Peter and Sally’s rehearsal dinner I remember little, except that the heel of my shoe detached when I stepped out of the subway on Seventy-Seventh Street, and that the Dress made me feel like Anjelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor, a film that had been nominated for Best Picture the year before. Or, at least, that was the idea. ( “Do I marry her? Do I ice her?” asks Jack Nicholson, as Charley Partanna, in the film’s best lines. “Marry her, Charley,” says Huston, as Maerose Prizzi. “Just because she’s a thief and a hitter doesn’t mean she’s not a good woman in all the other departments.”) For the wedding the next day I wore a sleeveless blue-plaid silk dress of my mother’s, made by Jacques Fath in 1952, which was tight in the waist. I was too hot and the zipper broke. The next year my husband and I had a child, and that spring we took her to Florence, where she fell in love with the pigeons in the piazza by Santa Maria del Fiore, and we discovered that at least four pensiones near the Uffizi claimed to be the one where A Room with a View had been filmed.

But the Dress? Like many things we think belong to us, it’s had a life of its own, like an old lover who resurfaces, now a fish wearing a waistcoat, in dreams. In 2001, extracted from behind a pile of snowsuits and maternity clothes, it went to the Oscars, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, written by Kuo Jung Hsai, Hui-Ling Wang, and James Schamus, which had been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. “What am I going to wear?” Schamus’s wife, Nancy, had asked me as we sat in the Riverside Park playground six months before 9/11, watching two little girls pour cold sand on each other’s head.  A decade later, in the second year of the Obama administration, the Dress walked the red carpet, worn by my friend Margaret, when her husband, the cinematographer Tom Hurwitz, was nominated in the Best Documentary (Short Subject) category, for Killing in the Name, a film about Islamist terrorism. In 2018, my friend Susan, whose husband, André Aciman, wrote the book Call Me by Your Name, came over one afternoon a few weeks before the Oscars to show me and my youngest daughter her outfit: a silk skirt printed with roses, and a shirred black V-neck top. Susan and I pulled a black beaded jacket I had bought at Housing Works out from my closet, and substituted a black silk shell for her top. She wore her own shoes and looked ravishing. From where she was sprawled on my bed, my daughter called, “You should feel like you, not like you’re wearing someone else’s clothes!” Susan looked grim. “I am wearing someone else’s clothes!” she replied. She gave the beaded jacket a gimlet eye. “I think it’s too much.”

“Show her the Dress,” my daughter called back. By now, Susan, who has raised three boys but no girls, was back in her jeans and sweater, ready to go. “I have to get undressed again?” she said, rolling her eyes. The Dress was in a garment bag in the back of the closet, stowed away with a navy-blue evening gown that had been worn only once. “Really?” said Susan. In a moment, the Dress was slipped over her head. “I like it,” she said. “Whose is it?” “Yours,” my daughter said.

When I bought the Dress, I was taking the first steps into the life that would turn out to be my own. By the time it went to the Academy Awards the first time, I’d had a child, gotten divorced, married again, acquired stepchildren, and had another child. In my closet now is a row of dresses I can’t bear to give away: three prom dresses, worn by my three girls; my second wedding dress, a floor-length Edwardian gown made of burgundy velvet, with a jeweled bodice; a fern-green dress embroidered with holly berries, which all of my daughters loathed and called the Christmas Dress; my first Alaïa, impossible to walk in; an apricot dress with a row of twenty-five covered buttons, by Jean Muir, that I wore to my own first rehearsal dinner. The Dress hangs among them.

Last summer, when I told my mother about the Dress, she paused for a minute. Then she said that she, too, had had a dress that went to the Oscars—in the sixties! “Who wore it?” I asked, incredulous. It was hot, and we were eating egg-salad sandwiches. I hadn’t seen my parents in a year. She couldn’t remember. “It was the wife of someone named Marvin, who was in the business,” she said. She turned to my father, who was alive then.  “Was her name Carol?” “No, it couldn’t have been Carol,” he said. “She was too zaftig!” What kind of a dress was it? I asked. My mother smiled. “A little black dress.”

“I have loved you for the last time. Is it a video?” sings Sufjan Stevens in “Visions of Gideon,” at the end of the film version of Call Me by Your Name. Is there ever a last time? Always, it’s hard to tell. “The heart is a very, very resilient little muscle,” says Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters. The last time I wore the Dress was in May four years ago, at a preprom party at the Knickerbocker Club. Parents were invited to see their daughters off to their first soiree—the beginning of another movie: the one in which they go off into their own lives, and we take the long view. We stood looking out on Fifth Avenue, clutching our glasses of wine, sweating a little, so close together in the festive shimmer that another mother spilled a little wine on the Dress when I jostled her with my elbow. Parties used to be like that; perhaps one day they will be like that again. “You must forgive me if I say stupid things. My mind has gone to pieces,” says Cecil Vyse in A Room with A View. From the top of the spiral stairs I could see my daughter in an emerald-green silk charmeuse slip dress, linking arms with her two best school friends. Her date was a boy she’d known since childhood, the son of one of my old friends from college. (I’d asked her if she wanted to wear the Dress. “No!” she said. “I’m saving it for the Oscars!”)

In my household the first question about any party or outing is, What did you wear? After the first lockdown, I left the city for some time, and when I came back, I saw three dresses, the ghosts of yesteryear, hanging on the shower rod in the bathroom—dresses I had worn the week before the background music of New York switched over to the sound of ambulance sirens. Afterward, what did we wear? Leggings and sweaters and T-shirts and sometimes, for days, the clothes we wore to bed. Now, holding our breath a little, we’re going out again, but tentatively. This year, no one has asked to borrow the dress to go to the Oscars. I plan to wear it myself in front of the television. I’ll pair it with my COVID cardigan, a brown, tweedy wool affair I wore almost every day for two years, unless my daughter manages before that to light it on fire—for, as she says of so many things, she never wants to see it again.

For some of us, what we wore connects us to our former selves, but now the world has changed again in terrible ways. In an interview with Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times last week, Vika Kurilenko, a television screenwriter and journalist who escaped Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, with her three children, and whose husband threw himself across their youngest daughter to protect her from flying glass, said, “I left my diaries, my children’s toys, my dresses.”

 

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent book is Two Cities, a collection of essays on Venice and Rome; a novel, Inverno, and Next Day: New and Selected Poems are forthcoming. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale. 

On John Prine, Ferrante’s Feminisms, and Paterson

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 dos Campos

Close readers of Elena Ferrante may already know that her books draw strongly on seventies Italian feminist theory, as formulated by groups such as the Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective: in the third Neapolitan novel, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the narrator, Lenù, even gives a long, impassioned summary of Carla Lonzi’s essay “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” But the second lecture in Ferrante’s new In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, translated by Ann Goldstein, describes in detail the influence of the Bookshop Collective’s theories on female friendship (elucidated in their book Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice) on her fiction. In fact, all of the lectures in In the Margins—originally commissioned by the University of Bologna and delivered publicly in 2021 by an actress and a Dante scholar, in an effort to preserve Ferrante’s anonymity—provide new insight into the novelist’s engagement with writers like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, María Guerra, and Emily Dickinson. It’s a fascinating peek into Ferrante’s process, one that opens up intellectual rabbit holes and as many new questions as it answers.

—Rhian Sasseen, engagement editor

The songwriter John Prine died of COVID-19 in April 2020, at the age of seventy-three. He had contracted the virus while touring for The Tree of Forgiveness, his first album of new music since 2005, and one of his best. Prine’s deceptively simple melodies and lyrics were a conduit for a sort of plainspoken mysticism, and I’d long been in the habit of seeing him perform once or twice a year. I still miss him. 

His death urged fans to reappraise an album released that same March by another great songwriter, the visionary soul artist Swamp Dogg. Swamp Dogg—born Jerry Williams Jr., in 1942—had invited Prine to sing on two of the album’s tracks. They would be Prine’s final studio recordings.

The two singers had been friendly since at least 1972, when Williams had a minor hit with his arresting version of Prine’s “Sam Stone.” Williams’s aesthetic leans more experimental than Prine’s: in his heyday, he sang tender postapocalyptic sci-fi ballads on records with titles like Gag a Maggot. Still, the affinity between Williams and Prine is audible in their duets, recorded when both men were in their seventies, and when neither knew what the next year would bring. 

“Please Let Me Go Round Again” is a classic, comically depressive Swamp Dogg character study: “Oh life, can’t you afford me another chance? / If you let me go ’round again / I’ll build a better mousetrap from a far more better plan.” Williams and Prine are charming, trading lines. It’s a lovely tune. At the end, over a vamp, the two begin to pal around. They start in character:

Williams: I’m scared to bet on myself.
Prine: I’ll bet on you.
Williams: Well, I’ll bet on you. But I done screwed up so much.
Prine: Well, maybe we’ll get a two-for-one. Maybe they’ll give us both another chance.
Williams: At half price.
Prine: We can get a two-headed sweater.
Williams: Yeah! Right!

The exchange doesn’t sound scripted. The laughter and warmth are real. It was “whatever older people call having a ball,” Williams would of the sessions. As the exchange continues, the two drop out of character, speaking sweetly to one another, as if forgetting the microphones. “Hey, man—I want to thank you for that ‘Sam Stone,’ man,” says Williams. Prine replies, “You bet. You got it around to a lot of people, Swamp.” It’s beautiful. Something between them there on record has the power to make the listener feel cared for. Then it’s over. “We were planning on going to his house in Ireland,” Williams said of Prine, in an interview that followed Prine’s death, “and we were going to stay there about a week or so and just write some new shit, you know? His intertwined with mine, you know, the ideas. And it was going to be good, man.” 

—Zach Williams, author of “Trial Run ”