TOBI'S DESK

“Here lived Peter Eckermann, Goethe’s Friend, in the Year 1854” (plaque honoring Eckermann in Ilmenau). Photo by Michael Sander, via Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . Johann Peter Eckermann was born in 1792. In 1823 he sent Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a collection of his essays about the writer’s works, and he became Goethe’s literary assistant till the latter’s death in 1832. The following is an entry from Eckermann’s diary that recounts one of their early meetings. Thursday, September 18, 1823 Yesterday morning, before Goethe left for Weimar, I was fortu­nate enough to spend an hour with him again. What he had to say was most remarkable, quite invaluable for me, and food for thought to last a lifetime. All Germany’s young poets should hear this—it could be very helpful. He began by asking me whether I had written any poems this summer. I said that I had written a few, but on the whole had not felt in the right frame of mind for poetry. To which he replied: Bewa...

Nature × Humanity: Oxman Architects at SFMOMA. Photograph by Matthew Millman. If you went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this spring you could see a big small thing: a model that imagines what Manhattan will look like in four hundred years. Man-Nahāta is not one model, actually, but four that hang in a square. Starting at the bottom left and going clockwise, the installations imagine the borough at one-hundred-year intervals in the future, beginning in 2100. Emergence , the first in the series, is a grid of streets and skyscrapers, except for where an organic glassy form appears near Midtown, black and yellow and blue lit from below—awful. In Growth , which envisions the year 2200, the translucent structure expands in concentric, overlapping shapes and colors like a spirograph: an almost periwinkle blue at the edges ripples into amber toward the center, where it calcifies into hills. By Decay , representing 2300, this substance has flowed back to its source, le...

Sentence diagram of the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo . Craig Butz, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . From Stoner by John Williams: And so he had his love affair. And: In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. These two sentences, pages apart, are both perfect. It should be obvious why, but perhaps they are more perfect because the first precedes the second, and the second is a kind of cracking open of the first or maybe a kind of blooming, grammatically and otherwise. —Sophie Haigney, web editor And more of our favorite lines from our recent reading: From “ The Shawl ” by Cynthia Ozick :   She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they...

Photograph by Erica MacLean. I am a baker of pies and a believer in pleasures, but also the kind of killjoy who can’t take a rom-com in the spirit it’s intended. Hence my fraught relationship with Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I remember—from 1983, the year the book was published—it being marketed as a “hilarious” comedy about a woman cooking her way out of a broken heart at the end of a marriage. Heartburn was a cultural sensation in the suburbs of my youth, such that I recall my mother cackling over the film adaptation and criticizing Meryl Streep’s looks—not pretty enough! The story was said to be inspired by Ephron ’ s divorce from Carl Bernstein and has always been considered a delicious revenge plot by a spurned woman upon a cheating man. Ephron had a dazzling career as a trailblazer for women in journalism, and she wrote many of the greatest movies of all time, including When Harry Met Sally . She was a master, so my cavils over  Heartburn ‘s myths about romance will be br...

On the evening of August 9, the staff of The Paris Review welcomed a special guest: Loudon Wainwright III, who came with guitar and banjo in hand, ready to perform on a makeshift stage in front of our bookshelves and plants. (We rearranged the furniture a bit before he arrived, and ordered pizza.) Wainwright played both classics and songs from his new album, Lifetime Achievement , accompanied on occasion by his longtime friend and collaborator Joe Henry. His rendition of “New Paint,” first released in 1972, was especially striking. You can watch it in full here , along with a performance of the Lifetime Achievement highlight “ How Old Is 75? ” from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/odJQWw0

Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight , 1960. There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night. In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom. And I can’t not-work in peace either: if I leave in July I consider myself traveling but if I leave in August I am just leavi...

Clarice Lispector. Photo courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente. In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority . Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas , which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas,  the final installment in a series . March 13, 1971 Animals (I) Sometimes...

Charles Etienne Pierre Motte, The Surroundings of Dieppe , 1833, licensed under CC0 1.0 , via Wikimedia Commons . François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was born in Saint-Malo, on the northern coast of Brittany, the youngest son of an aristocratic family. After an isolated adolescence spent largely in his father’s castle, he moved to Paris not long before the revolution began. In 1791, he sailed for America but quickly returned to his home country, where he was wounded as a counterrevolutionary soldier, and then emigrated to England. The novellas Atala and René , published shortly after his return to France in 1800, made him a literary celebrity. Long recognized as one of the first French Romantics, Chateaubriand was also a historian, a diplomat, and a staunch defender of the freedom of the press. Today he is best remembered for his posthumously published Memoirs from Beyond the Grave .   Sojourn in Dieppe—Two Societies Dieppe, 1836; revised in December 1846. You know...