In the high school library that I manage, I run a manga club that is very popular with the students. In the past eight years I’ve seen it grow and evolve with the students. Manga is by far the most popular kind of book we have in the library, especially with those who claim they don’t like to read “regular” books. From a librarian’s perspective, this is a win-win because reading is reading, if they’re reading manga all the better. You don’t need to lead them on to “real” books or to any other kind of reading if they don’t want to.

From my perspective, we have lots of kids who stick with manga for years on end and don’t stray to anything else unless they absolutely have to and this is perfectly fine with me. We’ve already written about great manga apps before, what I’m going to highlight below are the best manga web sites where you can legally read manga for free and sites that offer other manga related news or opinions. I see students reading manga on the computers in the library quite often and these are the manga websites that I recommend they use as I know how popular a medium it is.

If you’re looking for an anti-censorship group to get involved with, you’re in luck. There are dozens across the country, with more popping up all of the time. While there is certainly a need for a national push against censorship — we need politicians at the federal level to do something — work at the ground level in one’s own community is essential. Find below a roundup of anti-censorship groups who shared their information via this survey in early January. This information has been dropped into a Google Sheet, which you can save a copy of and use as you see fit.

This is, by nature, an incomplete roundup. It includes only the groups who shared their information on the survey. If you know of other groups, feel free to continue utilizing the link above to share information about them. In addition to developing this database of groups, those who share information about their work are given access to a suite of tools and resources to help in the work, thanks to our friends at EveryLibrary. Note, too, that not all of these groups focus solely on anti-censorship efforts; some are also focused more broadly on student rights and education but have anti-censorship as part of their mission and work. Not all groups have web or social media presence quite yet, but keep an eye out.

When you talk about grassroots efforts, look to the groups below. These are not funded by political groups or organizations and are not in the pockets of politicians. If you are in the position to get involved, do so; if you can’t, these are some places where you can also donate money to help the cause.

National Level

Comic Book Legal Defense FundFor the People: A Leftist Library Project (More details coming soon)Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)Red Wine and BlueStop Moms for “Liberty”

Arkansas

No Book Bans Coalition (Bentonville)

Florida

Citizens for Truth and Justice in Education (Central FL)Clay County Reading AllianceFlorida Freedom to Read ProjectFoundation 451 (Brevard County)Volusia Fight for the First

Idaho

Idaho First Amendment Defense GroupSociety of Secret Library Friends

Illinois

Illinois Right to ReadLibrary_defenseProtect Our Library (Lincolnwood)

Indiana

Hamilton County Against Censorship (Fishers and Noblesville)

Iowa

Annie’s Foundation (Johnston)

Kansas

Kansas Against Banned BooksSt. Marys Library Alliance (St. Marys)

Louisiana

Lafayette Citizens Against CensorshipLivingston Parish Library AllianceSt Tammany Library Alliance

Maine

Maine Library Association

Massachusetts

Mass Right to Read

Michigan

MI Right to Read

Missouri

Uturn in Education (Nixa)

New Jersey

NJASL/NJLA Regional Response Team

New York

No Book Bans Coalition (Brooklyn)PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program

North Carolina

Guilford County

North Dakota

North Dakota First Amendment Defense Group

South Carolina

Freedom in Libraries Advocacy Group (FLAG) (Greenville)Freedom to Read SCSouth Carolina Association of School Librarians

Tennessee

Right to Read Sumner (Sumner County)

Texas

Access Education RRISD (Round Rock)Children’s Defense Fund of TexasFREDom FightersGalveston County Library AllianceKISD Equity 4 All (Katy)Mosaic Community Library (Austin and Travis County)No Book Bans Coalition (Houston)Stand Up for Tomball ISD (Tomball)Texans for the Right to Read

Utah

Let Utah Read

Virginia

Loudoun4all (Loudoun)

Wisconsin

No Book Bans Coalition (Sheboygan)

Don’t see an organization near you? Use this guide to build your own local anti-censorship group.

Book Censorship News: March 10, 2023

Over 90 books have been pulled from shelves in Martin County, Florida, schools “for review.” You already know this is censorship and you already know it’s Moms for Liberty behind it. “Requiring book vendors to ‘rate’ titles with sexual content before selling them to school districts will be a priority for the Texas House, Speaker Dade Phelan announced Tuesday.” Remember how over 20 people were killed in a shooting in Uvalde last year in the same state? The Keene Memorial Library’s (Nebraska) decision to allow patrons to demand books be moved to other sections of the library is going to be a nightmare. A must-read about the way these book bans infiltrate and impact public libraries. This story out of Moon Public Library (Pennsylvania) shows how not bending to demand means the bottom line is impacted (a.k.a. retaliation). Article is, of course, paywalled, but I’ve broken it for you because this should be free. The state of school board meetings right now in Brevard County (Florida) and elsewhere. Turns out that the banning of The Upside of Unrequited from a Sparta, New Jersey, middle school came at the behest of a single complainer.This pastor is using his free time to complain about books at Robeson County schools (North Carolina)…and the paper is giving him space to talk about it. What even in the world? In good news, Sold and Last Night at the Telegraph Club survived their challenges in Flagler County, Florida.This Book Is Gay will remain on shelves in Hillsborough County schools (Florida). The Oklahoma legislative push to ban books from kids AND adults advances.Here’s a rundown of the latest Blount County, Tennessee, school board meeting on book banning and restrictions. Wareham schools (Massachusetts) apparently never had a book challenge policy prior to last month, and now they do. Policies like this should be standard practice; how these policies are followed is key to successfully combatting censorship. How Drag Storytime has come under fire in Jackson Heights in New York City. It should be interesting to see how Laramie County school board members (Wyoming) figure out how to define “sexually explicit” in their library policies.18 books have so far been pulled from Penncrest schools (Pennsylvania), with another 11 currently under review. The Livingstone Parish Library director (Louisiana) has decided to resign amid all of the book censorship controversy in his library. “This week, the Campbell County Public Library Board will be going over proposed changes to the library’s collection development policy. The suggested revisions were created by a Florida-based attorney affiliated with a national nonprofit organization. […] Liberty Counsel is a nonprofit organization based in Orlando, Florida, that provides free assistance and representation to advance ‘religious freedom, the sanctity of life and the family,’ according to its website.” So this Wyoming school district drafted a policy from a right-wing religious group? Separation of church and state does not exist.The new policies in Cy-Fair Independent School District (Texas) would restrict YA books to only middle and high schoolers, and any books “beyond” the YA designation would require parental permission. So that means even classics are inaccessible to teen readers?Pinellas School Board (Florida) will reconsider its ban on The Bluest Eye over the summer. Again, the proponents of these bills would like you to believe their opponents are perverts. Pedophiles and “groomers” who are titillated at the idea of showing pornography to children. I didn’t see anyone like that among the hundred or so quietly reading demonstrators at the Minot Public Library on Saturday, March 4.” An excellent piece about the quiet protest against North Dakota book ban bills in Minot. Let’s be clear: by putting this article about how Moms For Liberty behind a paywall, Lancaster’s newspaper is complicit in burying vital information from its community. This story is about Moms attempting to take over the Warwick school board (Pennsylvania), and I broke the paywall for you. Guess who puts their information out there for free? It’s Moms. It’s real neat how right-wing politicians are actually using children as pawns in their wars. This time, a Kansas republican claimed a 4th grader’s rainbow drawing was “proof” of indoctrination.Buried in this story is a debate over whether or not Gender Queer could remain in the Hastings, Minnesota, school libraries.The Faulkner County Library (Arkansas) canceled all of their public programs because bigots don’t understand how programs work, as seen after their anger over a Drag Queen event. A key part of this story is the director pointing out how much complaining about books there is and yet none of the complainers fill out the complaint forms. And here’s who is pushing to ban books in British Columbia, Canada…and the group fighting to preserve the right to read. The Duval County Public Schools (FL) supervisor of book reviews has resigned. Perhaps because her bigoted comments have now come to light? “A Wilson County man in a new lawsuit is accusing the Wilson County Book Review Committee of violating the Tennessee Open Meetings Act, as well as the First Amendment, by holding secret meetings to determine what books could be restricted or banned.” More of this, please. We all know about the Moms for Liberty list, so that’s not really interesting here. What is interesting is this is the first time I’ve seen books being challenged in Lonoke County, Arkansas.Greeley-Evans School District (CO) says the classic Beloved can stay in the high school library. Gender Queer will be able to remain in Hancock County schools (ME).When you read stories like this one, you just see how made up this entire book ban crisis really is (Pitt County, NC). A mother puts on a book crisis performance for the Montgomery County School Board (VA) over Flamer. They aren’t even creative in how they introduce their dramatics. Western Placer Unified School District (CA) listened to book crisis performers over The Hate U Give being used in 9th grade English classes. The executive director of the Shreve Memorial Library (LA) speaking against book bans and the “parental rights” that already exist should be a model for others. They keep calling Flamer pornographic which makes clear they have no idea what pornographic means (Collier County, FL). Regional School Unit 24 (ME) will keep Gender Queer and Queer in high school libraries.

The 2023 Women’s Prize longlist has been announced! After the 1991 Booker Prize shortlist was announced, then called the Man Booker Prize, and no women authors appeared on it, a group of journalists met and wanted more. Together, they founded the Women’s Committee and began the quest for starting a literary prize of their own, exclusively for women authors.

Now in their 28th year, the committee chooses what they deem the best contemporary works by women writers yearly to honor with the prize, announcing a longlist of 16 books, and later, on April 26, a shortlist of just 6 books. 

Chair of judges Louise Minchin said of the 2023 longlisted books: “[They are] a glorious celebration of the boundless imagination and creative ambition of women writers over the past year. . . . They all offer fresh perspectives on history and humanity, exploring hard truths with empathy, sensitivity, directness, and sometimes infectious humor.” This year’s judges, along with Louise Minchin, are Rachel Joyce, Bella Mackie, Irenosen Okojie, and Tulip Siddiq. 

The winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced on June 14. 

 

Visiting Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, on exhibit at Princeton University’s Firestone Library from now through June 4, 2023, is like going to a sauna. You enter a warm, windowless space, and as you rotate your way through each experience, you find you’re dunked suddenly into something that barrages the senses—fire-singed early drafts, a detailed map, alternate endings for Beloved, the photograph that inspired Jazz. But it’s also like taking a cold plunge: you’re carried along on the continuous current of Morrison’s voice and work, and you duck out refreshed, tingling, alive with more possibilities than you’d realized there could be. 

The exhibit pays careful attention to the geography of imagined space, as well as the processes by which Morrison’s novels—which seem so inevitable in their final form—took years of wrangling, revising, discarding, drafting, and re-forming. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison writes:

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”

As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.

It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit.

Perhaps it was the intoxicating effect of the wine-flavored air, perhaps it was only the novelty of being so much by myself, but I fell that summer into a sort of enchantment, a sort of moody drunkenness, that troubled and frightened me more than a little.

I had led an active boy’s life. I had always been the typical young extrovert, delighting in games and the companionship of other boys, having little time for reading and abstract thinking, having little time for looking inward upon the mystery of myself, and so this dry summer on the beautiful lake, as I fell slowly into the habit of deep introspection, brooding and dreaming about myself and life and the meaning of things, I felt as though I were waking up from a long dream or sinking into one. I was lonely and frightened and curiously content.

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This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much.

I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” That’s probably because, although it pains me slightly to say this, it began for me as a family romance. When my parents were young and childless and living in Seattle, they saw a sign for the movie Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, at a theater near the Pike Place Market. I don’t think my parents were particularly interested in the hip music of the eighties—they just liked the name of the movie. They bought tickets on a whim and went inside.

So the cassette-tape soundtrack of Stop Making Sense was a sonic canvas of my childhood. But it wasn’t until I saw the movie for myself, in high school—watching it with a girl, making feeble couch-based sexual advances—that I was reawakened to the song. It’s unusual for the Heads, who are better known for blending angular, art-school/CBGB cool with African polyrhythm borrowings. The song is very straightforward. Sentimental, even. But a great love song should be sentimental. Why wouldn’t you try to feel everything you possibly can? The groove begins straightaway—simple drums, the bounce of the bassline, some light synth stabs. A perfect little loop. After a couple of repeats, a bubbling riff kicks in, with a soft, pipelike quality to its pitch-shifting. It reminds me of a calliope, although I’ve never listened to one in real life—it’s children’s music from some other, unlived existence: “Love me till my heart stops / love me till I’m dead.”

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

There was a woman who was always explaining to me the structures of the world, of desire, of experience. Her analysis was brilliant. I have never met somebody so sure of the way things work. Between us, they didn’t. In the end, I learned, form was a problem. Well placed constraints can excite; they can also kill. Either way they tend to leave marks. A studied silence, breezy banter—these are not so convincing if she can take you in at a glance and see where you are still mottled from the pressure of her touch. But it is easy to adopt the position of the wounded lover. If you know what love is, like Nina Simone sings it, then you know that you, too, can leave, must have left, someone with lips that can only taste tears.

Nina Simone was not the first to sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and her version is not the most famous. That honor probably belongs to Dinah Washington, with her bright and clear voice, or maybe Chet Baker, about whom I have little to say. Billie Holiday’s take, with her enchanting, off-kilter warble is also probably better known. But Simone’s is something else entirely. Hers was released much later on a collection of rare recordings. It is live, noisy, and the background hum nearly merges with the brushes sliding along the snare drum. That and the crowd’s murmurs lend the track a warmth that all the other versions lack. It speaks, in spite of itself, to love’s inexplicable optimism.

At the very beginning, Simone sings, “You don’t know what love is till you’ve learned the meaning of the blues.” That third word, know, hangs for nearly three seconds. She never loses control of her voice, but she makes the word tremble as does a heart, a hand, a jaw fixing itself in preparation for sentences that cannot be retracted. She performs the standard as a lament sung at the precise moment that mourning’s fog has begun to lift. It is not a warning meant to dissuade young lovers. The blues aren’t miserable; they’re knowing. Simone’s spare rendition comes with the wisdom of experience, of understanding that if love is faith, favor, desire, support, and—when it can be afforded—indulgence and forgiveness, then all of these add up. When it turns, you lose so much: a body to hold yours, eyes that blink too fast in pleasure, a voice that drops too low to even hear it, the rippling sensation that settles somewhere just below the chest. All of the things that accumulate in the miracle of that face besides yours in the morning. It is the loss of such a gift that makes clear what it’s worth.

My first real lover was dumb, virile, hilarious—I didn’t trust a word he said. Certainly nothing he recommended. This is why, for years, I stayed away from his favorite book, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Until now. I’ve given in, and the epic Western is, predictably, blowing my mind, and, perhaps less predictably, my groin. 

I am never sure when carnage might strike—when I might find men whose naked bodies have been “roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes,” when I’ll come across a “charred coagulate” of bodies or a decapitated man whose severed neck “bubbles gently like a stew.” While reading, my muscles stay flexed. Blood pulses through dilated vessels. Awaiting climax, I am in a state of constant tension. Groin on vibrate. I never uncross my legs. This is reading as grotesque edging.

It doesn’t help that the novel’s landscape is excitingly predatory: “The sun rose … like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.” McCarthy’s pulsing, penile sun has been making its way into my dreams. So have men—naked, dangerously erect, charging off cliffs, their bodies bursting into constituent parts on the way down, blood running after them in silken crimson ribbons of … But fuck, I can’t do it like him. I wake frustrated.

Adding to the tension is McCarthy’s syntactical cadence. No matter the content, the persistent beat of his language (biblical, oratory, metaphorical, parodic, straightforward) generate a steady thrum—a rhythm that seems to emanate from the throbbing, carnal core of the earth itself. Or perhaps it’s a lover’s incantation—or weapon. You might say that, while reading, McCarthy’s language functions like straps fastened over my body. Hard as I might writhe, those straps are never tightened, they are never loosened—and even though I’ll finish, I will not be released.  

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

In her 1993 memoir Exteriors, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the song will end.” This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the impact hardly compares to the “intense, almost painful” feeling produced by the song. “A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfillment of desire,” she writes. “In songs one remains locked in desire.” The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of desire embedded in everyday life—say, the feeling of being alone at a party, sad and self-conscious, desperately missing someone.

This is the premise of “Slow Show,” a somber but rousing midtempo track from The National’s 2007 album Boxer. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by people but unable to reach them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his own mind. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of feedback, while Matt Berninger’s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator’s recursive, dead-end thoughts: “Standing at the punch table, swallowing punch”; “I leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away”; “I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in.” In the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the distance, if only in his imagination: “I want to hurry home to you,” Berninger croons, “put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up / so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain.” His halting syntax smooths out into the simple, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude.

But even the utopic space of the chorus is marred by doubt in its final lines: “God, I’m very, very frightened / I’ll overdo it.” The same fear that strands the narrator alone in the midst of a party gnaws at the edges of his reverie, manifesting now as a terror of spoiling the moment. (In the roiling “Conversation 16,” released a few years after, Berninger intensifies this same dread: “I was afraid I’d eat your brains / ‘cause I’m evil.”) Within each gesture of mutual understanding between lovers there lurks the possibility that the bond might break; the separation that shapes desire shadows every tender encounter.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to  Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos. The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning amid “photos and notebooks and things and memories.” I could hardly wait. 

In adulthood I have found that intense pleasure and intense grief are startlingly similar experiences—both ecstatic states of being, from the Greek word ekstasis: “entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place.” “Estoy Aquí” articulates the specific contours of feeling left behind in a great love’s wake. But, also in adulthood and much to my disappointment, I have found that most affairs end in anticlimax. Twice I have been overcome by the obsessive conjuring of a lost lover; countless times, a budding romance has fizzled out unspectacularly. Infatuation often fails to coalesce into substance. As a child I knew no anthems for the guilt that comes with ghosting or, worse, for the blunt anxiety born of receiving text messages with decreasing frequency. I must admit I feel a little ripped off. “The letters I wrote, I never sent,” sings young Shakira, but what about the pages you leave blank because passion would be unwarranted? 

I suppose it is apt that, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, “Estoy Aquí” ends not with a bang but a whimper. The song fades with no resounding note, just a watered down repetition of what has already been stated, a languid dissolution of something that started off so strong.

Do Everything in the Dark was the last of three novels I wrote while mostly living in houses in upstate New York or at the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles. It began as a collaborative book project with a painter, my extraordinary friend Billy Sullivan: I was to write very brief stories to appear beside portraits of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were also friends of mine. The stories would not be directly about the portrait subjects, but fictions in which some quality or characteristic of a real individual was reflected, stories about characters they might play in a film or a theater piece.

This project was never entirely certain, the prospective publisher having had an opacity comparable to that of Dr. Fu Manchu, and somewhere in the summer of 2001, Billy and I realized our book was never going to happen. By that time I had written most of what appears as the first third of this novel, though, and in this instance I had written past Kafka’s “point of no return” much sooner than I normally did. (I have abandoned many more novels than I’ve ever published, usually realizing after 50 or 60 excited pages that they were heading nowhere I wanted to go.)

One early title I considered was Psychotic Friends Network. At the time, an unusual number of people I knew were experiencing crises in their personal or professional lives, having committed themselves to relationships and careers that, however bright and promising for years, were suddenly not working out. The binary twins, “success” and “failure,” were negligible concerns in what I was writing about, though some of my characters tended to judge themselves and others in those terms; I was far more interested in depicting how things fall apart and reconstitute themselves in the face of disappointment. My overall purpose in writing Do Everything in the Dark was to discover, if I could, what some would call paranormal ways in which a lot of monadic individuals and couples are connected to a vast number of other people, how networks of money, emotions, and wishes overlap across the shrunken geography of a globalized world. I also wanted to write a novel in which the two Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos, were at work simultaneously, chronos being linear, consecutive, and irreversible, while kairos, “the moment in which things happen,” offers people an opportunity to employ time as a flexible medium—to write books, paint pictures, fall in love, or walk away from unfavorable situations.

When you live alone with characters you’re making up, you are more alone with yourself than you realize. Re-reading this book after twelve years, I see more clearly than I did then that it’s a hall of mirrors. Not everyone in it is me, but I distributed my own insecurities and madness quite liberally among the figures I modeled after people I knew. And the book I thought I was writing from such a dissembling distance from real life situations turns out to be transparently about people whom a great many other people reading it could readily identify. That doesn’t matter. I wasn’t indicting anybody in front of a grand jury. It isn’t a cruel book, or a score-settling one. In certain places, I did defend my side of a few long-recounted, wildly distorted stories people told about me, in a veiled way, but I wasn’t moved by any animus about them; they were just more material when I needed some.

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Peter Mishler’s “My Blockchain” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242.

How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about?

When “What even is a blockchain/an NFT?” was the subject of conversation everywhere you went, I got interested in the technology’s claim that it creates an “immutable record” of each transaction along the chain of a digital asset’s ownership. I wanted to write a series of personal statements that could not erase what preceded them. Then I noticed this idea was also connected to a certain type of statement—made by a certain type of man—that we’ve seen often, recently: a public apology by someone whose behavior grossly outweighs their supposed contrition. No matter how much they try to distance themselves from themselves, the mea culpa still contains something that can’t be undone: it’s an “immutable record” of all the actions that preceded their apologies, which sound far more like launching an asset than sincerity. So, I thought I would write in the voice of a corrupted consciousness that mirrors the workings of this new bro-corrupted mechanism of capitalism. 

I often save my drafts under file names that function as little code words or reminders about a feeling I was having during that day’s writing. “My Blockchain,” though, remained the official title, even as I played with other ways of reminding myself what I was writing.

Fictional wall texts, with thanks to the object labels at the Brooklyn Museum. 

A fight over pumpernickel bread results in tragedy. Quinto’s use of burgundy paint for the dried blood on the tip of the foreground figure’s machete is related to the shortage of crimson in the nineteenth-century pallet. Quinto died in Brooklyn in 1901.

Gallup Trenton’s wife of forty-two years, Anne Grace Bellington, was his muse and model for works that range from photography to poolside performance. But it was a Memorial Day weekend encounter with his mistress, Pierra de la Fucci, that led to this joyous exploration of romance, foreplay, and the artistic possibilities of plaster of Paris. An artist herself, de la Fucci gifted this sculpture to the Museum after Trenton’s death. The monumental scale of the nude, including its commitment to puckered lips and seductive eye roll, is the embodiment of female power.

The wood used to construct this early Dutch cabinet, including its secret compartment, comes from a genus of tree, Quercus, that is native to 10 percent of New York’s sixty-two counties. The latches are crafted from rose gold.

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. The Review is also nominated in the category of general excellence, with the winner to be announced on March 28. Read the three prizewinning stories—“Trial Run” by Zach Williams, “Winter Term” by Michelle de Kretser, and “A Good Samaritan” by Addie E. Citchens—unlocked this week in celebration.