TOBI'S DESK

Maryanne Amacher, one of the subjects of Sisters with Transistors . Photo: Peggy Weil. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures. Such care is taken with the visual and aural elements of Lisa Rovner’s Sisters with Transistors , a new documentary profiling women composers from the early days of electronic music, that watching it feels more like observing a cinematic poem than a cut-and-dried work of nonfiction. Featuring a voice-over by Laurie Anderson alongside decades’ worth of rare archival footage, the movie examines the careers of ten women—Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos—and the gender disparity that has led to so many of them being overlooked, forgotten, or outright erased from the history of electronic music. The relationship between art, humans, and machines is one I find constantly fascinating, and Sisters with Transistors is filled with moments that explor...

National Poetry Month is almost over, but the second series of Poets on Couches continues. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances. “ States of Decline ” By Taylor Johnson (Issue no. 228, Spring 2019) The room is dying honey and lemon rind. Soured light. My grandmother sits in her chair sweetening into the blue velvet. Domestic declension is the window that never opens— the paint peeling, dusting the sill, and inhaled. It is an american love she lives in, my grandmother, rigored to televangelists and infomercials. Losing the use of her legs. Needing to be turned like a mattress. No one is coming for her. The dog is asleep in the yard, her husband, obedient to the grease and garlic in...

Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé. In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played at such an early age. What my father was into sent him to his early grave. Then mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays … Trouble was my ball and chain.” And then, after a pregnant pause—“Black Thought is what that all became.” Despite almost three decades of recorded material and myriad rhymes, Black Though...

Every year, the  Paris Review Board of Directors gives awards to recognize remarkable contributions to literature. One of these, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, is a $10,000 award that celebrates an outstanding story published by an emerging writer in the magazine in the previous calendar year. The winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize for Fiction is Eloghosa Osunde , for her story “ Good Boy ,” which appeared in the Fall 2020 issue. In commemoration of this year’s Plimpton Prize, we’re presenting a taped conversation between Osunde and the artist and writer Akwaeke Emezi, introduced by managing editor Hasan Altaf. The video, which appears below, will be available to stream on our YouTube channel from April 28 to May 11. And don’t forget: readers are also invited to stream a special free screening of PBS’s American Masters documentary N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear , which will be available until Friday, April 30. Momaday is the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented e...

Copyright © 2021 by Shary Flenniken. I don’t know how old I was when I first read Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie , but I definitely wasn’t old enough. I was a precocious reader and pretty sex-obsessed for a child, and my parents would buy National Lampoon every now and again and leave it where it could fall into my unsupervised little hands (parenting was a different animal entirely in 1984, kids). I couldn’t have been more than seven, but the experience is as clear and vital as if it happened yesterday: here was something that looked friendly and kidlike, but it was dangerous. It was confusing, it was weird, and it was very, very hot.   Copyright © 2021 by Shary Flenniken.   By the time I came of age, I had put National Lampoon on my mental back burner. I wouldn’t say I forgot about Trots and Bonnie , but I’d stored it away deep in my subconscious, where it formed a bedrock of my sensibility I wouldn’t recognize until years later. When I reacquainted myself wit...

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 . Allen Ginsberg, ca. 1979. Photo: Michiel Hendryckx. This week at The Paris Review , as National Poetry Month winds down, we’re continuing to celebrate Poets at Work , our latest anthology of interviews. Read on for work by three of the writers included in the book: Allen Ginsberg’s Art of Poetry interview , an excerpt from Susan Howe’s “Defenestration of Prague,” and Derek Walcott’s poem “ The Light of the World .” You can also read Paris Review poetry editor Vijay Seshadri’s introduction on the Daily . If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review ? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or,...

In her new monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment will be published in advance of the full moon. Edvard Munch, Måneskinn (Moonlight), 1895, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 43 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. An electric blue dusk in an April eight years ago, and a fat full moon was showing off above the trees. I was away from home and walking to a bar to celebrate something privately, and I paused on my way to watch the moon move, its blond glow shifting bonier as it tracked its path higher into the coppery blue. “Beautiful night,” said the bartender when I took a seat. “Beautiful night, beautiful moon,” I said. He poured my drink and an older gentleman on the stool to my right leaned toward me and asked with a sticky blue cheese voice, “What does a young woman like you think of the full moon?” I laughed. Was he asking me if my womb was throbbing? What does anyone think of the full moon? I told...

Still from Lili Horvát’s Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time , 2020. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment. Lili Horvát’s Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time was Hungary’s entry to the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category, but unfortunately it wasn’t selected. Horvát’s second feature (named after a 1972 underground experimental theater piece) is a sophisticated puzzle of a film, filled with questions concerning the nature of desire, memory, and the human brain. Opening with a quote from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” the film follows Márta, a highly successful Hungarian brain surgeon living in New Jersey, who returns to Budapest after an unexpected affair with János, a fellow brain surgeon, at a conference. Filled with anticipation, she waits for him at their designated meeting spot, only to be stood up. Worse yet, when she tries to confront him, he claims to have no idea who she is. Did Márta imagine the whole affa...

Passengers boarding an ocean liner, 1925. Photo: Australian National Maritime Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. It was for convalescent reasons that I lately undertook a resolutely up-market Mediterranean cruise, with a Greek classical bias, and since I thought of such a cruise generically as being a kind of packaged aging process, at first I decided for literary purposes to rename our ship the Geriatrica. Later I changed my mind. It was perfectly true, though, as I had foreseen, that we formed a venerable passenger list, and sunset intimations were soon apparent. Hardly had we left the quay than a charming American Senior Citizen approached me as I stood at the rail, and said that since she heard I wrote books, she thought I might be amused by her favorite quotation from Groucho Marx. “It goes like this,” said she. “‘Next to a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, but inside it’s too dark to read anyway.’ Isn’t that hilarious? I just love it.” I laughed politely, but I could not help t...

Photo: Jenna Moore. Jonathan Meiburg was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1976 and grew up in the southeastern United States. In 1997, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked an enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Meiburg explores these passions in his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature , which traces the evolution of the wildlife and landscapes of South America through the lives of the unusual falcons called caracaras. Like the omnivorous birds at the heart of his book, Meiburg is more generalist than specialist. He’s written reviews, features, and interviews for publications including The Believer ,  Talkhouse , and The Appendix , on subjects ranging from the music of Brian Eno to a hidden exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History. He also conducted one of the last interviews with Peter Matthiessen. But he’s best known as a mu...