TOBI'S DESK

William Gaddis and David Markson. Courtesy of the estate of William Gaddis. Although William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions , is now regarded as one of the great American novels of the second half of the twentieth century, it was panned upon its publication in March 1955. Among the early few who recognized its greatness was the future novelist David Markson, who read it shortly after it came out, was so impressed that he reread it a month or two later, and then decided to write Gaddis a fan letter. Too depressed by the book’s reviews, Gaddis filed away the letter unanswered. Markson proselytized vigorously on the novel’s behalf over the next six years: he talked the publisher Aaron Asher into reissuing the remaindered novel in paperback, and in his own first novel, Epitaph for a Tramp , Markson included a scene in which the detective protagonist is poking around a literature student’s apartment and finds in the typewriter the conclusion to an essay: “And thus it is my con...

Detail from the title sequence of Peter Chung’s Æon Flux . What is this video ? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White se...

Illustration by Na Kim. We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2023 ASME Award for Fiction . The Review is also nominated in the category of general excellence, with the winner to be announced on March 28. Read the three prizewinning stories—“ Trial Run ” by Zach Williams, “ Winter Term ” by Michelle de Kretser, and ” A Good Samaritan ” by Addie E. Citchens—unlocked this week in celebration. from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/NfSnzyr

Illustration by Na Kim. Fictional wall texts, with thanks to the object labels at the Brooklyn Museum.   A fight over pumpernickel bread results in tragedy. Quinto’s use of burgundy paint for the dried blood on the tip of the foreground figure’s machete is related to the shortage of crimson in the nineteenth-century pallet. Quinto died in Brooklyn in 1901. Gallup Trenton’s wife of forty-two years, Anne Grace Bellington, was his muse and model for works that range from photography to poolside performance. But it was a Memorial Day weekend encounter with his mistress, Pierra de la Fucci, that led to this joyous exploration of romance, foreplay, and the artistic possibilities of plaster of Paris. An artist herself, de la Fucci gifted this sculpture to the Museum after Trenton’s death. The monumental scale of the nude, including its commitment to puckered lips and seductive eye roll, is the embodiment of female power. The wood used to construct this early Dutch cabinet, including...

All images courtesy of Peter Mishler. For our new series “Making of a Poem,” we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Peter Mishler’s “ My Blockchain ” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242. How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about? When “ What even is a blockchain/an NFT? ” was the subject of conversation everywhere you went, I got interested in the technology’s claim that it creates an “immutable record” of each transaction along the chain of a digital asset’s ownership. I wanted to write a series of personal statements that could not erase what preceded them. Then I noticed this idea was also connected to a certain type of statement—made by a certain type of man—that we’ve seen often, recently: a public apology by someone whose behavior grossly outweighs their supposed contrition. No matter how much they try to distance themselves from themselves, the mea culpa still contains some...

Gary Indiana with Ashley Bickerton, circa 1986. Courtesy of Larry Johnson. Do Everything in the Dark was the last of three novels I wrote while mostly living in houses in upstate New York or at the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles. It began as a collaborative book project with a painter, my extraordinary friend Billy Sullivan: I was to write very brief stories to appear beside portraits of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were also friends of mine. The stories would not be directly about the portrait subjects, but fictions in which some quality or characteristic of a real individual was reflected, stories about characters they might play in a film or a theater piece. This project was never entirely certain, the prospective publisher having had an opacity comparable to that of Dr. Fu Manchu, and somewhere in the summer of 2001, Billy and I realized our book was never going to happen. By that time I had written most of what appears as the first third of this novel, t...

Shakira. Wikimedia Commons , Licensed Under CCO 2.0 This week,   the  Review  is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.  Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to  Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos . The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning a...

This week,   the  Review  is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.  In her 1993 memoir  Exteriors , drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the song will end.” This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the impact hardly compares to the “intense, almost painful” feeling produced by the song. “A book offers more  deliverance , more escape, more fulfillment of desire,” she writes. “In songs one remains locked in desire.” The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, other...

Mark Fenderson, An Idyl of St. Valentine’s Day , 1909. Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons . My first real lover was dumb, virile, hilarious—I didn’t trust a word he said. Certainly nothing he recommended. This is why, for years, I stayed away from his favorite book, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian . Until now. I’ve given in, and the epic Western is, predictably, blowing my mind, and, perhaps less predictably, my groin.  I am never sure when carnage might strike—when I might find men whose naked bodies have been “roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes,” when I’ll come across a “charred coagulate” of bodies or a decapitated man whose severed neck “bubbles gently like a stew.” While reading, my muscles stay flexed. Blood pulses through dilated vessels. Awaiting climax, I am in a state of constant tension. Groin on vibrate. I never uncross my legs. This is reading as grotesqu...

Nina Simone, 1967. Wikimedia Commons . This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.  There was a woman who was always explaining to me the structures of the world, of desire, of experience. Her analysis was brilliant. I have never met somebody so sure of the way things work. Between us, they didn’t. In the end, I learned, form was a problem. Well placed constraints can excite; they can also kill. Either way they tend to leave marks. A studied silence, breezy banter—these are not so convincing if she can take you in at a glance and see where you are still mottled from the pressure of her touch. But it is easy to adopt the position of the wounded lover. If you know what love is, like Nina Simone sings it, then you know that you, too, can leave, must have left, someone with lips that can only taste tears. Nina Simone was not the first to sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and her version is not the most famous. That honor pro...

David Byrne, 1978. Photograph by Michael Markos. Wikimedia Commons , Licensed under CCO 2.0. I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much. I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” That’s probably because, although it...

High school lockers in Langley, Virginia. Photograph by Elizabeth Murphy. Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CCO 2.0. Of all the things I didn’t know when I was thirteen, two pained me the most: music and romance. I had no instrument, no boyfriend, no way of predicting, when I dared to accompany  the radio in the car, if my note would match that note. Girls who could sing, I observed, had hookups and breakups, and, even better, the whispered hallway dramas that led from one to the other. I made certain inferences. And yet I didn’t see how to, well, join the chorus. A good ear is innate, isn’t it? You can unwrap a hundred Starbursts with your tongue and still know nothing of kissing. So I kept my crushes to myself. I stopped singing in the shower. But ignorance is good for desire. I don’t doubt the subtle pleasures of connoisseurship, but can it compare to the transcendence of a teenager, luxuriating in her loneliness, who detects in the generic bridge of a Maroon 5 song a messa...