What’s your favorite Dawn Powell book? I’m beginning this way because critical essays on Dawn Powell always emphasize her obscurity, her failure to achieve fame or fortune in her lifetime (1896–1965) despite her enormous output. Just once, I want to skip that part. Let’s pretend I’m writing this from a parallel universe where Dawn Powell is the literary legend she deserves to be, where everyone knows the story of the Ohio-born New Yorker whose sparkling, lacerating fiction distilled the spirit of the city. And maybe you really do have a favorite Dawn Powell book. Mine is A Time to Be Born (1942), no question—the other day I was rereading it in the park and attracting stares because I kept laughing at its farcical scenes and snappy one-liners (“They couldn’t have disliked each other more if they’d been brothers”). But you might instead be partial to The Locusts Have No King (1948), or to her luminous short-story collection, Sunday, Monday, and Always (1952). Or maybe you prefer The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, which weren’t even written for publication (they weren’t printed until 1995) but rank among her funniest work. If you love those diaries and have a trollish sense of humor (which, if you love Dawn, you probably do), you might give me a joke answer: Your favorite Dawn Powell book is Yow.

Yow was Dawn Powell’s first and only children’s book project—as she put it in her diary, “a story to be read aloud.” All its characters were cats; the conceit was “a complete cat-world with humans as pets.” She wrote it in 1950. No, 1952. Actually, 1954. Make that 1955. Okay, 1956. Just kidding. Yow doesn’t exist. Or, rather, it exists only in the diaries, as a project that Powell is constantly on the verge of starting. She spent the final sixteen years of her life resolving over and over—for real this time!—to write “the cat book.” Even on her deathbed, Powell refused to give up on Yow. “Drying up, weak, no appetite,” she wrote in one of her last entries ever. “Will take liquid opium plus pills I guess. God how wonderful if I could get some writing done—if, for instance, I could knock off the cat book just for fun.”

Heaven knows it’s not unusual for writers to have ideas and not follow through on them. (You should see my diaries.) But it fascinates me that Powell was so utterly defeated by a kids’ book about kitty cats, because writing usually came so easily to her. From the twenties onward, she published a new novel every other year, in addition to ten plays and around a hundred short stories in her lifetime. On the side, for extra cash, she churned out book reviews and the occasional Hollywood screenplay. She did all this while managing her institutionalized son’s medical care, her husband’s alcoholism, and her highly active social life in New York City (and, relatedly, her own borderline alcoholism). Powell had many problems, but writer’s block was never one of them. On February 14, 1962, she recorded the death of her husband: “Joe died at about 2:30.” Five days later, she wrote: “Fatigued, numb, brainfogged yet must reassemble novel. … Must have it done by Monday.” And she did.

Yet Yow wouldn’t come. Hubris, it appears, was at least partly her downfall: she assumed that a children’s book would be easy to write, a mindless hack job. Her diaries are full of self-reminders to get Yow over with, as if it were a dental cleaning. On April 2, 1950: “Remember to do cat book for Julia Ellsworth Ford juvenile prize.” July 15, 1954: “Plan to finish Eva story, also ‘Yow’ story over weekend, maybe.” December 16, 1961: “Will do the Scrubwoman story and ‘Yow.’ ” March 15, 1965: “Getting excited and clarified on novel. Would like to rush it—also do the lovely play and the ‘Summer Rose’ one and the cat one.” Even in that deathbed entry, “the cat book” isn’t a grand plan; it’s something she hopes to “knock off.”

Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself.

Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now?

A man walks down the street trying to recollect the final lines of an unfinished poem he had been composing two nights ago when the phone rang. It was his seventy-four-year-old mother calling to remind him of the suit she’d ordered for his birthday, now ready for collection at the tailor’s, although it was likely alterations would have to be made. He reaches the corner and treads on a large corrugated nail that goes rolling off the pavement and into the street. The man’s first thought is that this nail has fallen out from somewhere inside him; his second thought is that it dropped out of the woman wheeling a bicycle a few metres ahead. His third thought is that the nail fell out of the teenager with the pierced lip who delivers the post each morning. Unable to draw any conclusions, the man casts one final glance at the nail now lying parallel to the tire of a parked car and returns to the matter of the unfinished poem, which, should he ever complete it, will surely fit him better than the tailor-made suit.

I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away.

—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo

The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance.

Every summer, my mother would take me and a friend to Salisbury Amusement Park to eat fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar and go on the roller coaster until we were sick and then get our minds blown by the 2001 Space Oddity dome, which spun us around in complete darkness while a narrator intoned about galaxies and time warps. But best of all: every hour, on the hour, the Solid Gold Dancers jogged out of a pit in the center of the fairgrounds and, sweating under the August sun in full gold lamé, would kick, spin, leap, and boogie for fifteen minutes while disco music boomed (those loudspeakers carried barely any treble, which made for a peculiar version of disco). Sunrays glinted off the sequins and I was hypnotized. It all jumbled together in my mind, the sensations, the nausea, the ecstasy. That gold-flecked feeling of 1979 faded away until thirty-five years later, when my French husband, Bruno, took me to the nightclub in Montmartre that started it all: the Moulin Rouge.

I walked through red velvet curtains into the past and straight onto the set of the sweetest magical movie flop of my youth, Xanadu! Roller skates, a swimming pool rising up out of the stage where we could see women dancing underwater. In costumes made of diamonds and skin. I was in heaven. The show lasted two hours. It had everything: a fantastic light show and sound system, constantly changing sets—a castle, a pirate ship, a circus, a London street corner at the turn of the century, a … a Chinese opium den?

Even though the women had naked boobies, they still looked like angels. I think angels do have naked boobies, now that I’ve seen this show. And there were so many of them! A teeming flock or herd. Singing and kicking and dancing. Costume changes for every act. A personal favorite was the giant red-feather puffballs with legs sticking out. No arms, no head, just a big red puffball on legs. One act featured good-natured Siamese twins, another strongmen who balanced whole humans on a single elbow, wow! At the Moulin Rouge, clowns are bare-breasted along with the angels. And I shouldn’t have been surprised that in France, one clown act per nightclub experience was not enough … there had to be two.

 

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won a 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges wrote:

For seventy years and counting, The Paris Review has remained wonderfully distinctive and sophisticated, never short on chic art direction, impeccable curation, or international flair. The interviews make you ache to have been in the room for the conversation. Readers will find exceptional work by feted writers in every issue, but The Paris Review does not rest on its legacy: it deftly employs its footing as the standard bearer for American literary magazines to uplift talent that hasn’t yet gotten its due.

We are deeply grateful to the Whiting Foundation for providing the literary ecosystem with vital funding and support, and we congratulate our fellow 2023 winners: Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mizna, n+1, Orion, and Oxford American.

Sometimes, as the Review’s print deadline looms, I catch myself fantasizing about a return to university life. I should clarify that, in this fantasy, “university” is a quiet, spartan room, with a bed, an armchair, and a constant supply of paperback classics. It is entirely lacking in lectures, academic conferences, or tenure-track infighting, and also bears no resemblance to my actual experience as an undergraduate: a fog of nervous smoking, romantic dysfunction, and tearful struggles to conjure up an essay on, say, doorframes in the work of Henry James.

Sadly, there is, to my knowledge, no program or job at which reading is the sole responsibility—and, of course, nothing complicates a love of books like the attempt to build a life around them. Not one but two pieces in our new Fall issue suggest, for instance, that even too much Shakespeare can have side effects: in Rosalind Brown’s “A Narrow Room,” a conscientious student on deadline for an essay about the Sonnets finds herself continually waylaid by an erotic triangle of her own invention, while Ishion Hutchinson recalls his undoing as a homesick sophomore alone in a windowless yellow closet in Kingston, Jamaica, obsessing over local folklore, Crime and Punishment, and Hamlet. And in Munir Hachemi’s rollicking “Living Things,” translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, four arrogant, well-read young men spend the summer after graduation working in the South of France, searching for that “hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined experience,” only to find that their education has in no way prepared them for the outside world, with its onslaught of corruption, exploitation, and force-fed chickens.

My tendency to romanticize university likely originates from those moments when getting through the assigned reading became an almost mystical interlude. I sometimes think of the night I spent with The Book of Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century text usually considered the first autobiography in English. A visionary with a less-than-kosher approach to the saintly life, Kempe had run a brewery that went bust and given birth to fourteen children before she persuaded her reluctant husband to join her in a vow of chastity and embarked on a whistle-stop pilgrimage—much to the irritation of her fellow travelers, who quickly tired of her God-given gift of tears. I’d loved Margery, her shameless grandiosity and the frankly sexual tone in which she wrote about God and his Son, and I’d forgotten about her until a few years ago, when I came across Robert Glück’s ravishing, funny, heartbreaking novel Margery Kempe (1994), which interweaves her story with that of his all-consuming affair with a younger, richer man. As Glück tells Lucy Ives in his new Art of Fiction interview, he, too, first discovered Kempe as an undergraduate, while studying medieval literature at UCLA, and was drawn to her precisely “because she set everyone’s teeth on edge,” but it wasn’t until he found himself in anguish over a breakup that he realized he could set his midlife crisis alongside hers. The novel broke over me as what Kempe would call a “revelacyon,” and turned me—as it has many others—into a proselytizer for Glück, who has a knack for conveying the religious power of desire. “When people would ask me—and sometimes they did—to write about them,” he tells Ives, “I’d reply, ‘First, you have to break my heart.’ ”

Glück, incidentally, is not a believer in the “short story”; he prefers the conte, the tale, or the piece of gossip. We’ll leave you to ponder the differences—I’m not sure I can always tell; it’s possible that my mind was somewhere else during that particular lecture—as you read this issue, which also includes an Art of Theater interview with Lynn Nottage, poetry by Bei Dao and D. A. Powell, and debut fiction by Liam Sherwin-Murray.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf brings into sharp focus the question of what to do with one’s life. I’m referring not to the text, to the content, to anything written on the pages, but to the objects: the books, the five published volumes.

The first bit of Woolf merch I ever bought, in Woolworths in about 1975, was a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Waves. On the cover was a portrait of the author by someone called Vanessa Bell. I couldn’t read what was inside, gave up after about five pages, and never tried again. Around the same time, I bought similarly lovely editions of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I did get through, under compulsion, at university, though I struggled with the preciousness, the sense of someone walking—writing—around on tiptoe. That was pretty much it for me and Woolf’s fiction until the pandemic when I was nudged toward it by an unlikely enthusiast from the American West. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry writes of how, after a serious illness, he found, for the first time in his adult life, that he couldn’t read fiction—unless it was by Proust or Woolf. I picked up the novels again and, despite McMurtry’s lobbying, failed to make any progress.

Which was surprising because I had, by then, come around to Woolf in several ways. In 2003 I’d gone to see Patti Smith perform at Charleston, the home of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa. This was one of several rustic hubs of Bloomsbury life, and it’s obvious, as you are shown around the bright rooms with their painted furniture, the sanctuary and liberation this place offered from the oppressive dreariness of English life between the wars. The handmade look is like a precursor of the make-do aesthetic I was familiar with from London squats in the eighties, which remains my ideal of interior design. This fitted in well with Smith’s performance when she read passages from The Waves, which sounded much better as Virginia’s clipped English “yellow” became Patti’s New Jersey “yellah.” If it sounded almost impossibly cool and contemporary that was because in places the original had given way seamlessly to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations.

Shortly after that I read plenty of Woolf that I could relish: A Room of One’s Own, the essays in The Common Reader, the essays on almost everything, in fact, and, crucially, the Selected Diaries and Selected Letters, published by Vintage and bought in Delhi in 2010. For me, then, Woolf fell into that subsection of writers whose minor works or private writings I preferred to the major ones. The closest comparison was with John Cheever, whose work can be arranged in an ascending order of importance, which is an exact inversion of the generally accepted hierarchy of merit: novels, stories and, at the peak, the posthumously published Journals. There’s also an overlap with D. H. Lawrence, much of whose best writing after Sons and Lovers is scattered across essays, travel books, dashed-off poems and letters. We’ll come back to Lawrence a little later.

Happy X-Files anniversary! *sings* It was thirty years ago today / Agent Skinner taught the band to play… Okay, so Skinner didn’t show up until the 21st episode of the first season, and I can’t sing, but you get the idea. I’m excited for the anniversary of The X-Files! It was three decades ago, on September 10, 1993, that one of the most iconic duos in television history made their first appearance on screen. The FBI recruited Agent Dana Scully, a skeptical, by-the-book doctor, to partner with Fox Mulder, a conspiracy-loving loose cannon whose sister went missing when they were young. From their unglamorous office in the basement, the pair investigated stories of sewer monsters, ghosts, aliens, vampires, murderous insects, psychokinetic teens, cults, and more. And then there was that black goo. (Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas tea…)

Like with many successful sci-fi franchises, there are dozens of tie-in novels (including by author Ben Mezrich), and books about the show. And the two stars, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, both have written books themselves! This post is about fun books with aliens and creatures for you to enjoy if you’re an X-Files fan, or if you just love books about aliens and creatures. So grab one of these books, kick back, relax, and try not to think about Eugene Tooms staring at you through your window or heat vent. I want to believe…that you’re going to love these books!

Banned Books Week is less than one month away, but for those of us who’ve been engaged in the anti-censorship movement over the last several years, it’s far from the only time to highlight and emphasize the growing power of book banners. Although it draws attention to the reality of censorship in America, ultimately, Banned Books Week — all capitals — is a marketing campaign. Whether or not it empowers the everyday person to engage in anti-censorship efforts the other 51 weeks of the year is hard to say.

Although Banned Books Week can be as annoying as it is important, it can and should be reframed as an opportunity to revisit library policies and procedures to ensure that the First Amendment Rights of every individual within a community are being considered, addressed, and honored. Build those good banned book displays and provide information to users about how to push back against ongoing censorship, but also turn the lens inward toward your own institutions to ensure you’re living the values expressed over the course of the week.

This applies whether you work in a library or are a library user. You have the power to speak up and help codify the rights of all to see and be seen within the library, its programs, its books, and all of its services.

Libraries of all stripes — public, school, and academic — should have strong policies around how they build their collections, the types of materials they include, where and how items are removed (generally following the MUSTIE guidelines), and where and how people can challenge those materials/ask for reconsideration of their inclusion (hereafter referred to collectively as “collection policies”). Not all libraries put this information directly on their websites, though that is good practice, but it should be available to patrons if they ask to see it. Libraries who do not make these available on their websites might want to consider the implications of that choice. Many of those demanding book bans do so under the guise of libraries trying to hide an agenda, but by making those policies and forms readily accessible, book banners can’t as easily fall onto that belief. Be as transparent as possible.

Though there are numerous examples of robust collection policies out there to help in modeling and strengthening current policies — or developing them if none exist — one element missing from even some of the best policies is one that deserves to be included: the explicit naming of identities and beliefs protected under those policies. Too few policies state that their collection policies are crafted with the belief that people of LGBTQ+ identities, of varying abilities, of a range of racial and cultural backgrounds, all ages, and an array of religious beliefs are at the heart of the decisions made about the materials acquired for the library. Simply stating “all people” feels inclusive, of course, but without explicitly naming who “all people” two things can happen.

There was a wordless picture book I loved when I was little about a tricycle that rode all around the town. The photos were black and white, but the tricycle was red. My mother was a librarian at our town’s library, so I got to spend a lot of time staring at the book at the table while she worked. One day, she brought me over to a man by the circulation desk and introduced him as the author of the book. Well, I was stunned! It was already hard for my small brain to comprehend that there was a book with pictures of places where I lived, but now I was meeting the actual author?!? I was too shy to say anything. (And so began my life-long habit of being awkward in front of authors.)

Many, many years later, I had the luck of becoming a bookseller at a small independent bookstore. Indie booksellers are amazing; they’re like one big family across the country, and I quickly learned that so many of the booksellers I met were also writers. Authors who work as booksellers? AMAZING. I worked with two award-winning poets; my fellow Mainer Josh Christie had begun publishing books about skiing and brewing beer; Jami Attenberg worked a shift behind the counter at WORD in Brooklyn. Every year, there were more booksellers announcing that they were writing books!

What a great place a bookstore is for an author or an aspiring author! As a ravenous reader turned bookslinger, I was all about the employee discount. Before I was a bookseller, I was the store’s biggest customer, but I bought even more books when I worked there. (My boss was no fool.) As a writer, you are surrounded by inspiration, some in the form of books by your heroes, and you get to talk about books all day and meet authors and listen to them talk about the craft.

It’s no wonder that so many amazing authors were booksellers or that several authors have opened bookstores! Authors who currently own bookstores include Judy Blume, Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, Kelly Link, Alex George, Jenny Lawson, George R. R. Martin, Kristen Iskandrian, Emma Straub, Jeff Kinney, and Josh Cook. And there’s a whole other enormous group of authors who have been librarians, including my hero Elizabeth McCracken and our very own Kelly Jensen, Jessica Pryde, and Tirzah Price. But let’s get back to the booksellers!

I’d argue that the best thing about the bookish corner of the internet is its capacity to bring people together and form a huge community that can collectively discuss and enjoy books. What’s another way to bring bookish people together? Book clubs, of course! The only problem is that finding the right book club for you can sometimes be a bit difficult. Especially since book clubs tend to be local, and not everyone can meet up at the same time. But I did mention the internet for a reason, which is that there are plenty of online book clubs you can join! Once again, it may be hard to choose one. So that’s why today, we’re taking a look at some of the best online book clubs, 2023 edition.

One of the beauties of these online communities is that, more often than not, you can join in on the discussion in your own time. Of course, when there are scheduled talks or livestreams, things get more complicated. But overall, you could be half a world away and still join in, which is one of the reasons why I like this format so much. For this post, I chose eight of the best online book clubs of 2023 — which I picked because I think they offer a wide variety of books as well as different engagement levels. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you a bit about each — things like pricing or previous picks. Plus, I’m adding their websites so you can learn more if you want to.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the best online book clubs 2023 edition, shall we?

Summer is nearly in the rearview mirror, which means the big summer crossover events in comics are behind us as well. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some amazing comic book and graphic novel stories on the horizon, though. As the weather starts to turn colder, it always makes me want to curl up with the glossies. Give me cool weather, a couple fingers of Scotch, and great superhero stories any day.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty excited about a ton of new superhero series launching this month with new #1 issues, which are always great jumping-in points. There’s also a true crime in comic book form, which is pretty unusual. There is also a new epic fantasy comic and a wild fantasy/cyberpunk cross-world comic. Oh, and we can’t forget a pair of brilliant new graphic novels tacking coming-of-age and race.

There are a ton of great comics coming to us in September 2023, but I’m keeping the list short and sweet so you don’t get overwhelmed when you visit your local comic book shop. But by all means, peruse the rest of the shelves while you’re there. Without further preamble, here are nine great comics and graphic novels coming this month.

Have you ever wondered how life might have turned out if you hadn’t studied that thing… taken that job… married that person… made that decision?

I engage in these existential exercises all the time. Not because I’m unhappy with my life. No, it’s not that. But the thought that if I’d done just one small thing differently, my life might have gone in a completely different direction. The notion is fascinating. Staggering. Mind-boggling.

It’s why I enjoy time travel stories and Sliding Doors-like narratives. I love imagining the endless possibilities that exist, the ways in which life might have spun out. The ways that paths might still be altered.

Multiverse stories — alternate timelines — are similarly satisfying. Because all those possible paths? They exist simultaneously. And if you had the ability to step from one stream to another? Well, what would you do with that power? Would you come to the conclusion that no version of life beats the one you’re already living? Or would you try to step into the life of another you?

There may come a time when you find yourself at just such a crossroads. (Come on. Let me dream.) The books below will prepare you for just such an eventuality.

My favorite reading challenge, The Sealey Challenge, wrapped up at the end of August. Created by poet Nicole Sealey, it’s a challenge where participants read one collection of poetry every day in August. Reading one collection a day can be an incredible experience, but the point is simply to enjoy poetry and connect with other poetry lovers. This was my third time doing the challenge, and, as usual, it brought me so much joy.

One of my favorite things about the challenge is that it I always come out of August hungry for more poetry. This is perfect because fall is a big season for new releases, and poetry is no exception. There are so many incredible collections that have just come out or are coming out soon. Whether you, too, have just finished the Sealey and are excited to ride the momentum into September, or you’re just eager for some new collections to peruse at a leisurely pace this fall, you’re in luck. This list includes a reissue of a classic, a book of poems all about pigs, a collection that wrestles with complicated questions of heritage and erasure, and several exciting debuts.

So what are you waiting for? You know what to do: get those preorders and library requests in now!

The latest image in our recently relaunched print series is by Sam McKinniss and features the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey—white-gloved, in a sun hat—reading the Review. The lithograph print, based on a painting by McKinniss, was made with the help of Dusty Hollensteiner at Publicide Inc.; on Friday, September 8, at 9 P.M., the print, made in a limited edition of twenty-five, will be made available for sale to the public at parisreviewprints.org. McKinniss and I talked on the phone a few weeks ago about his process, Lana’s latest album, and images of women reading on the internet.

INTERVIEWER

What led you to make an image of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review?

SAM McKINNISS

A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion:

the bright world below the park at night is a blur to me when I try to look out over it

but if I get close enough to a creature’s eye I can see what it sees and in the owl’s eye I see ellay clearly

more lights than I could ever count stretch out into the darkness and don’t stop stretching

Last Friday afternoon, the first in a series of downpours began in northern Nevada just as Burning Man was preparing to wrap up. Life in Black Rock City, the temporary settlement created for the event, ground to a halt as the hard-packed desert clay turned into a particularly sticky species of mud. Wheeled vehicles from bedazzled bikes to fire-breathing art cars instantly became useless. For approximately two and a half days, festival organizers forbade travel into and out of the city. Burners were asked to conserve food and water, and to live out their espoused principle of radical self-reliance.

As the lockdown dragged on, news reports from Black Rock City were limited and at times sensational. (Rumors of an ebola outbreak on Saturday were quickly debunked.) Social media commentary on the waterlogged festival was, predictably, infused with heavy doses of Schadenfreude. But one source struck a slightly different tone. 

BMIR 94.5, a radio station which surfaces annually for the festival, quickly adapted its programming to the shifting conditions. The station—located in a DJ booth in the makeshift city—allowed walk-up studio guests to mingle with on-air callers from the “default world,” as attendees dub the universe beyond the Black Rock City gates. Over the long weekend, I periodically tuned in online from New York, listening for the vibes.

Every ten minutes or so, BMIR played a series of prerecorded PSAs. Some were earnest exhortations, if slightly surreal: “Please do not climb on art. There are muddy, unsafe conditions on playa and very limited mobile emergency services,” one message went. “Also, refrain from entering the man.” (This refers to the towering wooden effigy ritualistically set aflame at the conclusion of every festival.)