TOBI'S DESK

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...

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 ...

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 changi...

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,...

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 ...

Odesa Monument to the Duke de Richelieu. Photograph by Anna Golubovsky.   This story begins more than thirty years ago, in the late eighties. There are poets working at the Odesa newspapers, many of which are faltering. A publisher visits my school classroom. “Who would like to write for a newspaper?” A room full of hands. “Who would like to write for a newspaper for free?” One hand goes up—mine. I am twelve. In the busy hallway of the paper’s office, I meet an old man with a cane, Valentyn Moroz—a legendary Ukrainian-language poet who’s often in trouble with Soviet party officials. He is reading Mandelstam next to me, unable to sit still, unable to read quietly. His voice trembles as he reads a stanza: “Do you hear? Do you hear? This is Mandelstam, this son of a bitch Mandelstam, no one writes better than this son of a bitch Mandelstam. Don’t you know this Mandelstam?” I don’t. Moroz stands up. He takes me by the hand and leads me out of the building to the nearest tram...