March 7, 2023 On Poetry My Royal Quiet Deluxe By Matthew Zapruder Matthew Zapruder’s Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter and a typewritten draft of a 2018 poem. Photographs courtesy of Zapruder. When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack. I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room. I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. Use a computer. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Nothing was being added by my writing. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. Death is sad. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it. Read More
March 6, 2023 First Person On Novocain By Michael Clune From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.” Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength. This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes. Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.” Read More
March 6, 2023 The Revel Announcing the 2023 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prize Winners By The Paris Review Photograph of Harriet Clark by Joshua Conover; photograph of Ishion Hutchinson by Neil Watson. We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo. Read More
March 3, 2023 The Review’s Review Three Favorite Lyricists By The Paris Review Three white-tailed deer. Courtesy of National Geographic. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then “Another night I’m in the magic mirror / Another night engaged in seeing signs,” it felt like, well, a sign. Symbols, like mirrors, are roads to the other side; I have always been obsessed with looking for and in both. Though both of my trips actually happened, their allegorical affinity made them each less real, and harder, somehow, to return from. Seeing yourself through reflections can be a way of playing dead, of getting lost where you are not; in Full Moon Mystery Garden, it is also a way to get found. The album’s sigillic scenery is almost too familiar: black cat, black Polo, moon, mountain, mirror. But Wicca has an uncanny ability to show us what are basically gothic stock images under a strange new light, reanimating them. If similarly symbolically-hyperactive Bladee’s falsetto makes incantations out of normal nouns, Wicca’s hoarseness brings the otherworld to earth: rural Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island. That’s magic, I guess—or music. Wicca’s older work is equally lyrically brilliant, but more claustrophobic: words are exchanged in bedrooms, in clubs, over text, in bad relationships. Now, he’s alone in a car looking out, “the twilight on repeat.” The album, which has four different songs with the word moon in the title, drives you along a kind of psychogeographic cul-de-sac, a looping map of road signs that seem to occur in too many places at once—the same way certain American towns all look the same, the way they all have a Main Street, a Crescent Street, and trees at their edges. Ex–emo teens will recognize the landscape. The album’s frequent refrain—“In one mile, turn left on Garden Avenue”—is spoken by a female GPS. Though he knows what road he’s on (“Dark Region Road”) and where he’s going (the “portal through the pines,” “Hickory Grove”), he still needs directions: a voice from elsewhere, an image out there that lets him recognize what he already knows. Funny how another person’s words can lead you gradually back to a place where your self and your world coincide—to life. “The meadow isn’t that far away,” and the mystery, meanwhile, is here. I was on a back road by myself In Waverly Township Totally immersed in where I was and what I felt Amazing how a simple drive Can open my eyes To what is out there —Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor Read More
March 2, 2023 Home Improvements I Love Birds Most By Kate Riley Photograph by Kate Riley. Given a space to inhabit unobserved, I will immediately convert it into a physical representation of the inside of my brain. My annual trip to the old Zillow listing for the farm I bought eight years ago leaves me stunned every time: it was once the kind of house one could list on Zillow! Now it is mine; I have filled the walls with pictures,hung the surplus ones on the ceiling, crowded every surface with dioramas and precarious unidentifiable objects that look like chess pieces from outer space. There is nowhere to sit in the house except on the floor with the dogs (and, every hatching season, with the emu chicks who run figure eights around the obstacle art). Like my brain, it’s a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Read More
March 2, 2023 Diaries Things That Have Died in the Pool By Isabella Hammad Photograph by Isabella Hammad. This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank. Wednesday, May 20, 2020 My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live. I looked at the objects in the house the titles of the books strange incandescence from the windows Thursday, May 21, 2020 I feel, what is the point of anything going places seeing people doing anything just ways to pass the time Read More