January 27, 2023 The Review’s Review Intuition’s Ear: On Kira Muratova By Timmy Straw Still from Anya Zalevskaya’s Posle priliva (2020). Courtesy of the director. In the fall of 2019 I was newly living in the Midwest. In my free time, I’d take long, aimless walks, trying to tune to the flat cold of the place. On one such walk I got a call from my friend Anya Zalevskaya; she was in Odesa, she said, working on a film, a documentary about the Ukrainian (but also Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet) director Kira Muratova. When Anya called, it was almost midnight in Odesa. She was sitting on a bench by the Black Sea; I could hear the waves, the inhale of her cigarette. What film of Muratova’s should I watch first? I asked her. Ah, she said, The Asthenic Syndrome, for sure. 1990’s The Asthenic Syndrome takes us to Odesa, too, but this is an Odesa at the fraying edge of a Soviet time-space where, significantly, we never see the sea. The film is shot in places that suggest a borderland, an edge, a wobble: construction sites, mirrors, photographs, headstones, film screenings, cemeteries, a dog pound, a hospital ward, a soft-porn shoot. This in-between sense is temporal, as well: Muratova notes that she “had the great fortune of working in a period between the dominance of ideology and the dominance of the market, a period of suspension, a temporary paradise.” As with the asthenic syndrome itself (a state between sleeping and waking), the film is a realization of inbetweenness, an assembly of frictions and crossover states we feel through form: through Muratova’s use of juxtaposition; through her uncanny overpatterning of echoes and coincidences; through the shifts of register between documentary and opera. The film doesn’t proceed so much as weave itself in front of us, in a dazzling ivy pattern of zones and occurrences. You could call it late-Soviet baroque realism. Read More
January 26, 2023 On Music On the Bus with Pavement: Tour Diary By Mina Tavakoli Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records. One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder. A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” Read More
January 24, 2023 Diaries Diary of Nuance By Adam Thirlwell In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page. The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life. Life! I missed life very much. Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another. La Perdida, O Pando 2018, citrusy, salt, chamomile, then what? A thin mineral sourness. Codello grapes. I hate all descriptions. Maybe this will become all names and nouns. / Chanel’s Cuir de Russie—ylang and jasmine and iris, which somehow produces the illusion of leather. But then there’s also Rien by État Libre d’Orange, aldehydes then frankincense, incense, labdanum, which also produces leather but this one somehow fizzing, like it’s at a level above reality. I have no idea how to write this. I wonder if you could do an essay on perfume writing as an example of the problem (impossibility) of all criticism: something abstract infected by people’s associations (the mad online reviews of Rien, which seem to be describing a perfume that’s completely different to the one I’m smelling). Read More
January 23, 2023 Home Improvements His Ex-Wife’s Plates By Holly Connolly In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction. The second time I met my boyfriend, S., he told me he was getting divorced. I thought, Great. I liked the way it sounded. We were in our late twenties and so it made him and by extension me seem original, and I like people who have made mistakes. To me the marriage sounded unserious, and therefore unthreatening: it was a visa marriage, granted one that came out of a relationship. They met at work, were married after about a year, and divorced bitterly after fewer than three. I have never met his ex-wife but initially I pictured someone stylish and ethereal, and he had said she was a bit older so she was perhaps intimidating in that sense but, ultimately, good company. The problems started with her stuff. For a brief period before they broke up, they both lived together in the house where he, and now sometimes I, live. Meaning that, as a result of the divorce happening long-distance in a kind of pandemic limbo period, and us meeting very soon after it, for the early stretch of our relationship many of her things were still in the house just outside of Belfast. Read More
January 20, 2023 The Review’s Review Isabella Hammad, Elisa Gonzalez, and Peter Mishler Recommend By The Paris Review Katana. Photo by Kakidai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Last week, I watched my first Kurosawa movie: Kagemusha, or Shadow Warrior. One of Kurosawa’s final productions, Kagemusha takes place in sixteenth-century Japan and tells the story of a thief who looks uncannily like Shingen, the leader of the Takeda clan, and who is employed to impersonate him in the event of his death to keep the clan together and protect it from its enemies. Shingen dies: enter the shadow warrior. This three-hour insight into feudal Japan, its structures of power, and the paradigm shift enacted by the introduction of guns onto the battlefield in the Sengoku period is mesmerizingly beautiful. Almost every shot could be a painting—cavalry battle scenes; the many councils of leaders draped with patterned kimonos; the delicate, expressive face of Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays both Shingen and his shadow. My favorite scene was the dream sequence: the kagemusha dreams of Shingen emerging dressed for battle, like an armored bird hatching from a shell, from the urn in which his corpse was deposited. The shadow flees, terrified, against a hallucinogenically colorful sky. The river water that splashes around his bare feet is dark like paint. I am ready to watch Seven Samurai. —Isabella Hammad, author of “Gertrude” Read More
January 19, 2023 On Poetry Sometimes a Little Bullshit Is Fine: A Conversation with Charles Simic By Chard deNiord Photo by Abigail Simic. I first met Charles Simic in 1994 at a dinner to celebrate the Harvard Review’s special issue dedicated to Simic. I had written an essay for the issue titled “He Who Remembers His Shoes” that focused on several of his poems and so was invited to this dinner and seated next to him. While we were eating, a small black ant started crawling across the white table cloth. Simic became mesmerized by this ant. We both wondered if the ant was going to “make it” to the other side, and then, suddenly, our waiter appeared and swept it up. Simic almost wept. (I later learned that ants were his favorite insect.) What an object lesson it was for me in Simic’s compassion for the smallest creatures, what Czesław Miłosz called “immense particulars.” I stayed in touch with Simic off and on after this night, inviting him to read at the M.F.A. program I cofounded in 2001. Simic declined at first, saying he was “too pooped” after a reading tour in Europe, but then agreed to come in 2005. He read at The Fells, John Hayes’ elegant estate overlooking Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire which New England College rented for the occasion. The indelible image of him with the lake and gardens behind him has stayed with me ever since. On November 21, I interviewed Simic on Zoom after several failed attempts to meet with him in Strafford, New Hampshire, where he lived. He was already having health issues, then but assured me that he was well enough—and eager—to chat. For an hour and twenty minutes we talked about everything from his local dump to his childhood in Belgrade during World War II. He told me, for instance, about what a “blast” he had playing in the streets of Belgrade even as it was being bombed by the Nazis. While transcribing our conversation, I realized that he never stopped playing in those streets. What a genius he was at witnessing to horror with wit, humanity, and a cold eye. I so envied and admired the way he transfigured such “immense particulars” as a forks, shrimp, breasts, ants, “bare winter trees,” and an alarm clock at the dump into powerful synecdoches. We ran out of time to talk, and made plans to continue the conversation. But he was rehospitalized several days later, and died in New Hampshire on January 10. I can’t think of another contemporary poet who wrote with such stunning sprezzatura, wit, and compassion. There is no one who can replace him, and he will be deeply missed. INTERVIEWER Have you been writing much lately? SIMIC That’s all I do. Read More