TOBI'S DESK

Caravaggio, Self-portrait as the Sick Bacchus . Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Pasolini’s pen was preternatural in its output. Collected by the publishing house Mondadori in their prestigious Meridiani series, his complete works in the original Italian (excluding private documents such as diaries, and his immense, largely unpublished, epistolary exchanges in various languages) fill ten densely printed volumes. The twenty thousand or so pages of this gargantuan oeuvre suggest that, in the course of his short adult life, Pasolini must have written thousands of words every day, without fail.  Allusions to painting—and to the visual arts more broadly—appear across the full range of Pasolini’s writings, from journalistic essays to poetry and work for theater and film. The intended destination of the textual fragment below, which remained unpublished during Pasolini’s lifetime, remains uncertain. We know, however, that it was most likely penned in 1974. The “characterological...

In these pages, written in 2021, I seem to have been looking back at earlier notes and journals. The story of Pierre—a French shepherd—is a project imagined decades ago that I still have not given up on. My “theories” are also still interesting to me: for instance, that maybe certain people are more inclined to violence when there is less sensuality of other kinds in their lives.   Lydia Davis’s story collection Our Strangers will be published in fall 2023 by Bookshop Editions. Selections from her 1996 journals  appear in the Review ‘s new Summer issue, no. 244. from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/vJnclb8

Detail from the cover art of issue no. 244: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, London with Ribbon, 2022, ballpoint pen on paper. There’s a thrill of eros to many summer poems. Like in those late-eighties teen movies— Dirty Dancing ,  Say Anything ,  One Crazy Summer —you never know when you’ll see some skin. And so it goes in our new  Summer issue . In Jessica Laser’s dreamy, autobiographical remembrance “ Kings ,” the poet recalls a drinking game she used to play in high school on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer vacations:                                      … You never knew whether it would be strip or not, so you always considered wearing layers. It was summer. Sometimes you’d get pretty naked but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off one sock at a time. Is that easygoing, one-sock-at-a-time feeling what defines the summer fling? Maybe that’s ...

Molecular model of Vitamin B 12 . Licensed under CCO 4.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Three years ago, I biked into a curb and fell on my head. When I got up, I couldn’t remember where I was, so I called an ambulance, which drove me to the nearest hospital, which was apparently one block away. The emergency room doctors told me there was nothing they could do. My eye was swollen, but my face seemed otherwise normal, and they wouldn’t know if anything was wrong with my brain unless they ran a CAT scan, which would expose me to toxic radiation. I asked if there were any nontoxic tests they could run for free. They offered to run a blood panel, which would let me know if I had any STIs. I let them bind my forearm, which had nothing to do with my head. The next day, the doctor sent a message through the hospital’s online portal. My tests were all came back negative, but they had also run a nutrient panel, and I was deficient in B 12 . I started googling. “Fell off bike low B12?” Eve...

Leopoldine Core’s aura photo, courtesy of the author. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “ Ex-Stewardess ” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Often a poem begins wordlessly. It’s as if the text is a reply to some cryptic spot in the back of my brain that I have become attracted to. I’m alerted to the presence of something that isn’t solid. It has more to do with feeling, tempo, scale, and temperature. I’m so focused on that emanating region that, even though I’m using words, my experience —the start of it—is wordless and meditative. How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?) Some poems come quick and others take a while. But maybe the one that took years was easier in the end—I don’t know. Certain poems require...

Oleg Alexandrov, vector space illustration. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . Counterpath Press’s series of now thirteen computer-generated books, Using Electricity, offers a refreshing alternative to the fantasia of terror and wonder that we’ve all been subjected to since the public release of ChatGPT. The books in this series present us with wide-ranging explorations into the potential interplay between human language and code. Although code-based work can be dauntingly hermetic to the noncoder, all computationally generated or mediated writing is the result of two fundamental decisions that remain in the hands of the human author: defining the source text(s) (the data) and choosing the processes (the algorithms or procedures) that operate on them. A text generator like ChatGPT uses brute force on both sides—enormous amounts of text vacuumed from the internet are run through energy-intensive pattern-finding algorithms—to create coherent, normative sentences with an equivocal ...

Photograph of Virginia Woolf with hand on face wearing a fur stole. Public domain, courtesy of wikimedia commons . On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the first time in two years—a small notebook, roughly the size of the palm of her hand . It was a Friday, the start of the bank holiday, and she had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented house in rural Sussex, with her husband, Leonard. For the first time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she “walked out from Lewes.” There were “men mending the wall & roof” of the house, and Will, the gardener, had “dug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia.” Finally, “bees in attic chimney.” It is a stilted beginning, and yet with each entry, her diary gains in confidence. Soon, Woolf establishes a pattern. First, she notes the weather, and her walk—to the post, or to fetch the milk, or up onto the Downs. There, she takes down the number of mushrooms she finds—“almost a record find,” or “enough for a dish...

Margot Bergman’s studio. Photograph courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. Do cups have souls? If you look at Margot Bergman’s portfolio in our Summer issue, you might be tempted to say yes: the cups she has painted, from various vantage points and in bright colors, seem filled with life. Bergman, who was born in 1934, has been painting for nearly her whole life. She is best known for her series  Other Reveries, which features collaborative portraits painted over artworks she has saved from flea markets and thrift stores. Each painting is layered with decisive, bold paint strokes, revealing a face latent with layers of emotions. They are at once beautiful, frightening, humorous, and welcoming. Who knew that cups could contain similarly human emotion? We talked about the joys of painting, the female form, and of course, what drew her to cups in the first place. —Na Kim   INTERVIEWER Much of your work revolves around faces, and especially female figures. When did start...

Cormac McCarthy. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . Photograph by Dan Moore. Cormac McCarthy’s work means a lot to me, though when I try to explain exactly what , I find myself unusually stymied; my affinity for him doesn’t make all that much sense to me. What connection do I have with the landscapes he conjures? What knowledge do I have of the kind of violence that is the subject and the fabric of many of his books? What place do I find in a world that is, among other things, nearly entirely masculine, hostile, rife with true desperation? The answer is none—unlike with much of my reading, I do not seek a mirror in McCarthy’s worldview—and yet there is something in its aesthetic articulation that has always resonated with me. (I have a curious memory of reading The Road over my mom’s shoulder when I must have been about ten.) I have a passage from All The Pretty Horses saved on my desktop, which I have revisited often and send around now and again, and which I cannot quote in ...

In Jameson Green’s studio. Photograph by Na Kim. Earlier this year, the Review c omm issioned the artist Jameson Green to paint a series of writers’ portraits for our Summer Issue—an idea Green came up with after looking through our archives and being particularly intrigued by a portfolio of Picasso’s drawings published in 1987 . What he gave us is a delightful collection of what he calls “head studies,” renderings of famous writers from our archive—some recognizable, some less so—that capture, loosely, something of each subject’s essence. And, like much of Green’s other work, Writers borrows from various art-historical styles—you’ll find, for instance, a Picasso-esque Percival Everett (or is it Edgar Allan Poe?) and Shirley Hazzard in the style of Vincent Van Gogh. Over the phone, we talked about his childhood obsession with cartoons and about the special attention portraits require, and I tried to guess who was who. —Camille Jacobson, engagement editor   INTERVIEWER ...

Jamal with confetti. Rachel B. Glaser. The collective dream is over. Squinting, we walk out of the playoffs and return to Life. Images linger—a giant holding a toddler in a storm of confetti. A shiny, exuberant, mantis-like man standing next to a trophy. The woman who sat courtside wearing red and white gowns. The inexplicable man-made-out-of-Sprite commercial. Duncan Robinson’s tough-guy face. On Monday, after the great battle of Game 5, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA championship for the first time in franchise history. I was introduced to the on-court chemistry between Nuggets stars Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray during the 2020 Western Conference Finals. Though they lost that series in five games to the Lakers (who would go on to win the championship after beating the Heat), they were great fun to watch. I found Murray’s smile infectious. He seemed unselfconscious and comfortable in his body. When he was having fun, I was having fun. In 2021, Jokić received the first of two con...

A draft of the first two pages of “Armed Cavalier.” Courtesy of Richie Hofmann. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Richie Hofmann’s “ Armed Cavalier ” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? As is so often the case for me, the poem began as another poem entirely. I was working on a poetic sequence that interposed my translations of Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets with several short, original haiku-like poems inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. Both artists were interested in beauty and torture. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are experiments in self-portraiture and bondage. In one of Michelangelo’s sonnets, the speaker confesses that, in order to be happy, he must be conquered and chained, a prisoner of an “armed cavalier” (the phrase puns on the name of the object of Michelangelo’s infatuation, Tommaso dei ...