1.

It’s the silent abandon with which they kiss, as if they are aware of someone striding toward them, this someone’s finger wagging, telling them, “No, no, not here, stop that now, or I’ll be forced to separate you, you profligate negroes.” But before this imagined censor can reach them, they pull each other close and kiss again, their mouths disappearing into each other, their mouths taking the shape of their longing. They touch each other as if they have just been released from something, as if their license to touch is short, stolen, or forged. In Something Good, which features the first known on-screen kiss by a Black couple, filmed in 1898, it appears as if the two actors, a peach pit–toned Black man wearing a bow tie and jacket and a peach skin–toned Black woman wearing a ruffled collared dress belted at the waist, are touching each other after a long period of denial, as if they have forgotten what the other’s mouth and hands and neck feel like and are now voraciously reacquainting themselves with each other. The pit of the peach swaddled by its flesh, becoming whole there on the limb of the day. Voraciously seeking itself, making itself happen—be. No, not quite voraciously, but without caution or care for who’s watching, though they are both aware, and we, too, are aware that someone is watching their performance.

They do whatever they like, their arms swinging back and forth between forays of kissing, as if they were going to a carnival down by the railroad tracks or have suddenly come out of a clearing, the man having drunk water from a stream, the sky all in it, and when he looked up, there she was, this peach-skinned woman. The man’s mouth moves as if he were remembering the taste of water, and the woman moves about him as water and as what he could not predict, which is the sky, and the shore that makes the water possible. In less than twenty seconds, they move together as earth moves with water, unpredictably, their kissing meeting and coming apart without a preordained or announced rhythm. Earth and water. Peach swelling into its flesh and pit on the limb of the day.

2.

One of the most provocative sequences of Kenneth Anger’s career appears in an early short film (and my favorite), Fireworks (1947): a sailor opens his fly to reveal a Roman candle spitting sparks at the camera until it explodes, drenching the frame with spurts of white light. This image would later establish Anger as a seminal figure in the history of queer film, but it also resulted in an obscenity trial—gay sexuality was criminalized, and the Hays Code had a vice grip on Hollywood. A countercultural icon and lifelong Angeleno, Anger died in May at age ninety-six. The body of work he left behind stands beside that of American avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas: experimental shorts, made predominantly between the forties and seventies, that combine surrealism and scenes of stylized violence with a heavy dose of occult symbolism.

Fireworks, which Anger made at twenty in his parents’ Beverly Hills house while they were out of town, is a gorgeous fourteen-minute film with no dialogue, set to orchestral music. The nameless protagonist, played by Anger himself, leaves his bed, wanders through a homoerotic dreamworld in search of a light, and meets a group of beautiful sailors. They flex their cartoonishly massive biceps for him and light his cigarette with a flaming palm frond but then turn hostile, chasing the dreamer down to deliver a beating. There’s a flurry of white-clothed limbs as they tear his clothes off, whip him with chains, pour milk over his lips and eyes, and gouge open his chest with a shattered beer bottle to expose the face of a compass buried among his internal organs. The dreamer’s expression passes from ecstasy to agony and back again. A few hallucinatory moments later, the fireworks go off.

At the heart of Anger’s work is a question about the erotics of masculinity. The biker film Scorpio Rising (1963), for example, is an ambiguous exploration of fascist aesthetics: high-gloss rider jackets, Nazi iconography, an obsession with the perfected physical form—and the attendant unspoken racial implications. Like the sadomasochistic brutalization of the dreamer in Fireworks, the scenes in which the biker gang lovingly assemble their looks for the night—peaked caps, imperial eagle insignia, and leather—are suffused with desire. It’s one of the hardest watches of his oeuvre for me, but is emblematic of Anger’s work: shorts that span a vast imaginative territory, a sort of psychosexual underworld, where repressed fantasies of the American unconscious can take shape and move around unfettered. He takes dreams seriously as a subject worthy of art and utilizes them to develop scenes that operate on multiple registers. Though it might have been part of a strategy to avoid censorship, the Roman candle in Fireworks reads to me like an homage to the props enjoyed by a certain kind of transmasculinity. Like a strap-on or a souped-up packer, the prosthetic phallus allows the wearer to bathe in the pageantry of a particular type of queer masculinity, whose aggressive quality in this scene is undercut by a sense of comedy, magic, and mischief. Here, and elsewhere, Anger is able to observe the inner workings of desire—its pursuit, suspension, satisfaction, and fluctuation.

—Jay Graham, reader

The following letters were sent by David Wojnarowicz to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage in 1979, as part of a three-year transatlantic correspondence that ended in 1982. In them, the artist details his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age, providing a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and of the love he has found in it. Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s have largely been lost, leaving us only with a glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years. 

Capturing a foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, the letters not only reveal his captivating personality but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. Included with his writings are postcards, drawings, Xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, and other ephemera that showcase some of Wojnarowicz’s iconic images and work, as well as document the New York that formed the backdrop to his practice.

—James Hoff, editor

New York City
June 14, 1979

Each time I return to Mexico I find myself marveling at how many elements of daily life there could, in some way, be described as Baroque: our sunsets, our cuisine, our pollution, our corruption. Century after century, the country has exhibited a great tendency towards exuberance, and a natural bent for the strange and the marvelous. There’s a constant play between veiling and unveiling (even in our newscasts, one senses indirect meaning in everything), as well as a fluidity of form, in which excess triumphs, every time, over restraint.

Three hundred years of colonial rule produced an intense syncretism of indigenous and European cultures, a bold new aesthetic accompanied by many new paradoxes, and these can be glimpsed today in both lighter and darker manifestations, some playful and others barbaric.

Mexican Baroque emerged from the conquest of the New World, from the long, fraught process of negotiation and subjugation that began to unfold once the Spaniards established their rule in 1521. The European monarchs wanted as much gold as their conquistadores could plunder, while their missionaries sought to convert the pagan savages to Catholicism. The Aztecs of course had their own gods, a monumental pantheon that included the fierce and formidable Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, yet these ancient powers proved no match for colonial rapacity.

There was one pivotal overlap between the two religions, however, a fortuitous convergence which helped ease the transition from the Aztec cosmology to the Catholic faith. And this was the “theater of death” present in both religions. Accustomed to their own culture of human sacrifice, the Indians identified with the Crucifixion and with other violent chapters in the new theology, and were thus gradually lured by its passions and taste for the macabre. In artistic portrayals of certain scenes from the New Testament, the blood and the drama were laid on thick.

When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?”

The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side.

My building is an old Boerum Hill brownstone with a criminal exterior renovation. Inside my bedroom, though, the floors slant and the ceiling droops. It’s a beautiful princess bedroom, if the princess never got saved and lived forever unmedicated in her virginal bedroom. It’s a room of illusions, and the nook is its most illusive element. The nook is the last thing I see every night before I go to sleep. Goodnight Moon, good night dollhouse room, good night nook.

He was the first person I dated after a catastrophic college relationship. He was sweet. He reminded me of a portrait of a medieval saint or a beautiful lesbian. He asked questions.

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” novelty of Caravaggio’s subjects, to which Pasolini alludes in passing, underscores some of the parallels between the two artists’ bodies of work: an eye for the unlikely sacredness of the coarse and squalid; a penchant for boorishness to the point of blasphemy; an attraction to louts and scoundrels of a certain type—the “rough trade,” of homosexual parlance.It is striking, for instance, that some of the nonprofessional actors that Pasolini found in the outskirts of Rome and placed in front of his camera bear an uncanny resemblance to the “new kinds of people” that Caravaggio “placed in front of his studio’s easel,” to quote from the essay presented here. Take Ettore Garofolo, who for a moment in Mamma Roma looks like a tableau vivant of Caravaggio’s Bacchus as a young waiter. Even the illness that ultimately kills that subproletarian character—so often read as a metaphor of the effects of late capitalism on Italy’s post-Fascist society—is born out of an art historical intuition that is articulated in this fragment on Caravaggio’s use of light. 

But it was equally an exquisite formal sense—a search after “new forms of realism”—that drew Pasolini to Caravaggio’s work, particularly the peculiar accord struck in his paintings between naturalism and stylization. Pasolini professed to “hate naturalism” and, with some exceptions, avoided the effects of Tenebrism in his cinema. It is, instead, the very artificiality of Caravaggio’s light—a light that belongs “to painting, not to reality”—which earns his admiration.

The Roberto Longhi mentioned below is Pasolini’s former teacher, an art historian at the forefront of Caravaggio studies. It was Longhi who resurrected the painter from a certain obscurity in the twenties, arguing for the consequence of his work to a wider European tradition from Rembrandt and Ribera to Courbet and Manet.

It has been years since talking about the meanings behind words used to discuss book bans and censorship. Although we might all think we’re using the words the same way, in many cases, the nuance and gravity of language can be lost when the wrong word is used. It might sound nitpicky, but it’s not. Clarity around language and meaning around book bans is important. To communicate the true extent of what is happening and on how many different levels, a shared understanding of words and their meanings is crucial.

This week, for example, an author talked on Twitter about how his book was being “soft censored” because a school board decided to pull the book from shelves before it could raise a concern from community members. Though it conveys the same thing, this is not actually what soft censorship is. This is textbook censorship, no softness about it.

Here’s a short introduction to the nuances of language around book bans, censorship, and more.

More specifically, censorship means that suppression is coming from a government body, a private institution, or other group with authority. These authorities are intentionally suppressing or removing information from those who do not have the same level of power or authority that they do.

This has been the longest June in a long time, hasn’t it? We’re wrapping up a Pride month that has been joyful but also one tinged with ongoing fear about the future for queer people in America. I don’t need to tell you this, and I also don’t need to say that celebrating queer folks is an all-year thing that begins at the voting booth, continues in school and library and community board meetings, and shows up everywhere along the way. We emphasize that libraries are safe places for ALL and we also acknowledge that showing up looks different for everyone. Maybe you’re at the board meetings to talk or maybe you’re writing a letter; both matter, both make a difference, and both require work and effort on everyone’s part. One other small thing you can do to celebrate queer people all year long is to identify yourself as part of or ally to the community. Again, acknowledging rainbow capitalism is important, but so, too, is in supporting queer people and creators.

All of that is to say, have you seen the fun bookish Pride mugs floating around? There are so many, and they offer an opportunity to enjoy your favorite warm beverage (or cold, I’m not judging how you drink your cold stuff) in a mug that celebrates queer people and/or supports their creative work.

Grab your wallet. It’s time to do some bookish Pride mug shopping.

Copyright © The Paris Review 0   93 Hits Tags: literature books Show Your Claws: 9 of the Best Monster Girls in YA Friday, 30 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature There are plenty of stories about girls who fall in love with monsters, but what about monster girls themselves? Perhaps not surprisingly, YA fiction is also a great place to find girls who are monstrous in one way or another. Gothic fiction has often used monsters as a metaphor for puberty or sexual awakening — think of Lucy’s transformation into a vampire in Dracula, or Carmilla’s titular character threatening and intriguing the heroine. Many YA supernatural stories have continued this Gothic tradition, creating monster girl heroines who grapple with changes in their lives or bodies, or who show their claws in order to fight back against something wrong in society. Some YA contemporary stories also focus on girls who could be viewed as monsters, metaphorically speaking, portrayed as antiheroines or outright villains who harm others. In a world where female characters still get criticised for not being “likeable enough,” and where teenage girls are pressured to conform to models of femininity, monster girls in YA fill an interesting niche that explores what happens when girls break out of the boundaries imposed on them by patriarchy and other repressive social systems, and how frightening this can be to people who want to keep girls in this predefined place. Unlike monstrous boys, monster girls in YA are rarely set up as love interests — instead, their roles are complex and often unsettling. Monster girls make for fascinating, nuanced reads because of the way they challenge our notion of what a heroine is “supposed” to be like. Here are some of the most interesting monster girls in YA. Note to readers: This article contains a major spoiler for The Midnight Game. Read on at your own discretion. Eternal by Cynthia Leitich Smith Part of Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize series, Eternal is the story of Miranda, a high school theatre nerd who is transformed into a vampire. As the newly-adopted daughter of the highest figure in vampire royalty, the King of the Mantle of Dracul, Miranda indulges her monstrous side by feasting on the innocent — until her conscience starts to catch up with her. Wicked Fox by Kat Cho Gu Miyoung, a teenage girl in Seoul, is living a double life. Outwardly, she looks like any other school student but in fact, she is a gumiho, an immortal nine-tailed fox who must eat human energy in order to survive. Miyoung sustains herself by feeding off of evil, predatory men, something that causes more than a little tension with her ruthless mother. However, when she rescues a human boy, Jihoon, her supernatural life crashes into her human existence, with shattering effects for everyone. Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   87 Hits Tags: literature books Welcome to the Stone Age: An Introduction to the Stonepunk Genre Friday, 30 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature Have you ever thought there should be a word for the sci-fi genre involving prehistoric technology developments? Well, there is! It’s called “stonepunk.” Maybe an example springs to mind, maybe not. Either way, let’s learn about the sub-genre together, and then I’ll give you a few recommendations from the genre to get you started. What is Stonepunk? Stonepunk is a sub-genre of the science fiction genre among the likes of clockpunk or cyberpunk. The term applies to books about technological development during pre-historic times using the materials available at the time like stone, clay, or bones. Sometimes this genre plays with modern technology made using prehistoric materials like The Flintstones’s car made of stone wheels and wood. Some Examples Some non-literature examples of this sub-genre include the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn in which a young female hunter battles robots using primitive weapons in a prehistoric-style post-apocalyptic world. Another example is Land of the Lost, a television show about a family who gets stuck in an alternate dinosaur-infested universe and has to find their way back to their time. They live in a cave, gather food, and fight both dinosaurs and large lizard creatures, too. The Best Stonepunk Books If stonepunk sounds interesting to you, here are a few books in the sub-genre to get you started! It’s fairly new as a designation, so there aren’t a ton of examples out there. To give a more thorough list, I included a few that don’t 100% fit the mold, but check most of the boxes so you have some variety. Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   194 Hits Tags: literature books Never Too Young: Why Kids Deserve Queer Friendly Libraries Friday, 30 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature I worked with young children long before my first year teaching in 2007. I have three degrees that qualify me to educate kids. Interacting with young people has been my greatest skill for as long as I’ve been a person. My biggest takeaway over the last, oh, 30 years? Kids will never fail to surprise me. It’s been proven to me over and over that kids know more, feel more, and deserve more than adults ever give them credit for. My latest lesson in this has been around the palpable relief felt by my elementary students when I worked to make my school library more queer-friendly. This process included no fanfare. I had already been adding picture books that challenged gender norms and middle grade titles with queer characters and storylines for as long as I had been developing the collection. But as I was working to add racial and physical diversity into my library posters and signage, I knew I wanted to branch out to make sure everyone felt welcome. The first noticeable shift was when I decorated my door with a “This Classroom is for Everyone” sticker from the Etsy artist MegEmikoArt. The sticker is decorated with pride flags and my students buzzed as they came into Media. Soon after, I bought the “Libraries are for everyone” shirt in the same design by the same artist. A 5th grader who didn’t usually stop to chat pointed to one of the flags on my shirt, grinned, and said “That one’s me.” I was wonderfully, pleasantly floored. I thought I was adding more queer flags, using gender-neutral terms, and featuring books with queer characters to help them prepare for the real world. I thought my students should be exposed to these things in case they met queer people or to make them more comfortable with queer family structures. This was a condescending way for me to think about my students. Thank god the kids are smarter than me. What actually happened was that my students thanked me. There was gratitude, excitement, and relief. My students already knew how to identify more specific pride flags than I did. They already knew that gender and sexuality are spectrums and each person knows what feels right to them. I had students with whom I had no previous relationship sharing their pronouns. Our STEM building materials were used to build and label different pride flags. Requests were made for the LGBTQ book section; the books had always been there. The kids just needed affirmation that it was safe to ask for them. My students did not need exposure. They needed a safe space. Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   95 Hits Tags: literature books Books and Comics for Fans of ADVENTURE TIME Friday, 30 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature It’s hard to believe it’s been 13 years since Finn, Jake, Bubblegum Princess, and the rest of the Adventure Time crew came into our homes to delight us with their mathematical dealies. Even though the show ended way back in 2018, its offbeat characters and bizarro world still have a place in fans’ hearts. If you’re missing your AT faves, these books and comics for fans of Adventure Time might just fill the void. Now, before you ask: no, the Adventure Time comics and graphic novels themselves are not on this list. In the interest of sharing some off-the-beaten-path recommendations, I’m not including them here. With that being said, you should absolutely check them out if you haven’t already. It’s difficult to replicate the spirit of Adventure Time. Anything can happen in the Land of Ooo. There are always new civilizations to meet, treasures to discover, and places to explore. It’s hard to maintain a sort of internal logic when every corner of your invented world is wildly different from the last. But in literature, with the exception of a scant few niche sub-genres, that logic is critical for readers to be able to understand and access your work. These books and comics for fans of Adventure Time won’t bring the show back, but they might just fill that Jake-and-Finn-sized hole in your heart. Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   87 Hits Tags: literature books Why You Should Read Reviews After You’ve Read The Book Friday, 30 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature I read (and write) a lot of reviews, and while I sometimes do let them guide me toward or away from books, I find that reading reviews is most interesting, useful, and insightful not before I’ve read a book, but afterwards. In fact, I often turn to reviews soon after I finish a book. It’s one of my favorite reading rituals. I like to let my own thoughts and feelings about a book settle, and then I like to see what other folks are saying about it. Inevitably, reading these reviews, whether they’re positive, negative, or critical, deepens my understanding of the book I just read. There are so many reasons why reviews are better after you’ve read the book. There’s the obvious fact that sometimes it’s hard to write a good review without spoilers. I personally do not care about spoilers. Ninety-eight percent of the time, knowing what happens does not decrease my enjoyment of a book, and often it increases my enjoyment. But I know lots of people do not feel this way, and so I try to avoid major spoilers when writing reviews. Of course, this means that sometimes I can’t write about the heart of a book, and it’s frustrating. So I’ve started writing more reviews with a different mindset: When I review a book, I’m responding to and reflecting on a piece of art. I’m not trying to convince anyone to read it (or not read it). This brings me to the number one reason that I think it’s better for everyone when we all read reviews after we’ve read the books. Reviews are not objective. There is no such thing as an objective review. I don’t know why this is a thing that people think exists. It does not exist. You cannot write an objective review, and you shouldn’t! The point of reviewing isn’t to judge a work of art against some invisible, arbitrary standard. The point of reviewing is to engage with art. Critical reviews, pithy negative reviews, glowing reviews, thoughtful reviews, dishy reviews — it’s all part of the conversation. It’s all worthwhile, and it’s all important. But here’s the thing: because reviews are never objective, they are actually not that good (on their own) at helping you decide whether or not to read a book. Here, I’ll give you an example. Earlier this year, I read Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. I did not like it at all. I could see what Lacey was doing, and she did it very well, but I couldn’t make myself care about it. I did not want to be in the world she made. I’ve since read dozens of glowing reviews of it on Bookstagram. I do not disagree with any of them — they point out many of the things I admired in the novel. If I hadn’t already read it, I’d be tempted to, based on some of these reviews. You see the problem, right? None of these reviewers are lying! They’re writing about their experience of the book, which was the opposite of my experience. A glowing review does not mean a book is good. A scathing review does not mean a book is bad. A review is response to a piece of art. Unless you know the reviewer well, and know that you have similar taste, it’s impossible to tell from a review whether you’ll have the same response or not. I’ve quite enjoyed reading reviews of Biography of X. Some of them have made me think about it in different ways. Some of them have reminded me exactly why I hated it, and I feel validated. I read a book, I didn’t like it, and now I’m interested in the conversation people are having about it. The conversation is the main event. I can learn from and enjoy the conversation even though I didn’t like the book. And this goes for pretty much all books — books I’ve loved, books I’ve felt indifferent to, books I’ve hated. Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   96 Hits Tags: literature books Diary, 2021 Thursday, 29 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature 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. Copyright © The Paris Review 0   108 Hits Tags: literature books A Summer Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor Wednesday, 28 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature 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 just how objects appear in the rearview mirror; even the most operatic affairs can seem a little comical in retrospect. In his poem “Armed Cavalier,” Richie Hofmann captures the hothouse kind of summer romance, when two lovers lock themselves away “for a whole weekend / and not eat or drink.” I love the wry look he casts over his shoulder at the end of these lines: Stars, slow traffic, Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   91 Hits Tags: literature books On Vitamins Tuesday, 27 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature Molecular model of Vitamin B12. 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 all came back negative, but they had also run a nutrient panel, and I was deficient in B12. I started googling. “Fell off bike low B12?” Everything that came up was random; I might as well have strung together any other combination of five words. I wanted to google more, but the doctor had told me that the internet was bad for my concussion. So I forgot about my deficiency and tried hard to make my body do nothing, which was the only way for it to heal. Things got better. I started to feel normal, and eventually I was allowed to google as much as I wanted. Years went by. And then one day at a café, I met a man—a comedian—who told me horror stories about his life as a former vegan. His hair had fallen out, he was exhausted, his mood was always sour, and it was all because of vitamins: he could never get enough of them. While he complained, I felt my hairline receding; I was a vegan, too. And when I thought about it, really thought about it, my personality was on the decline. I was always struggling to make my days have meaning, and I wore my meaninglessness like a divine premonition. (“I have a feeling,” I texted a friend, “that something bad, really bad, is going to happen.”) I remembered the emergency room doctor’s diagnosis and felt the empty place inside of me where all the B12 supplements should have been, leeching into my bloodstream. I tried to make a doctor’s appointment, but I had moved to California, and my insurance only covered care in New York. My body was on the West Coast, but all the tools I had for reading it were on the East. I told my father I was coming home to visit him, and when I arrived, asked him to drop me off at urgent care. Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   104 Hits Tags: literature books Making of a Poem: Leopoldine Core on “Ex-Stewardess” Monday, 26 June 2023 Maxwell Abbey Literature 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?) Continue reading Copyright © The Paris Review 0   107 Hits Tags: literature books First Page Previous Page 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Next Page Last Page