May 16, 2022 Arts & Culture Basilica By Cynthia Zarin Giotto Di Bondone, “Mary Magdalene’s Voyage to Marseilles,” 1320s. LICENSED UNDER CC0 1.0. For a number of weeks one spring, I spent every afternoon at the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi. It was what we then thought was the tail end of a plague, and I had come to Italy to visit a friend who had lived for many years a few kilometers above Assisi, in an old schoolhouse. This turned out not to be the visit I had imagined, nor, I am sure, the one she had, and after a few weeks, I went to Rome. But before that, every afternoon, I drove down into town—I had rented a car—past the long flank of Monte Subasio, with its temperate oxen, parked on the escarpment before the gates because the switchback of tiny streets flummoxed me, and walked down to the basilica. Everything was off-kilter, as if a great wave had passed over us, and now, if we were lucky to be alive, we found ourselves stranded on the banks of our own lives or paddling furiously toward where we imagined the shore might be. I had been to the basilica and to Assisi many times over the years to visit my friend, and so I knew my way on the small strade that opened and closed into a series of piazze, as if the town had exhaled and then drawn breath again. Because you could not come with me, I was aware of seeing with your eyes, which in any case had become a habit, and as the streets diverged and reconnected, I thought of our long drives through the old mill towns of New England, where the houses press up against a communal idea—the church, the post office, the firehouse—and imagined your voice saying Incredible! as you paused at a crumbling viaduct or a ruined steeple. My route passed through narrow cobbled capillaries lined with bright flowers; the cafés were open but almost empty. The last time I had been to Assisi was several winters before. It was freezing, and a few days after Christmas, the piazza and the tilted streets were deserted. A huge blown-up reproduction of Andrea del Sarto’s painting of the Madonna with angels was still projected on the outside wall of the Church of Santa Chiara, and the façade was bathed in unfathomable blue-and-red light, as if the story of the Christ Child was too large for the apse to contain, and the church was wearing the mystery on its skin. Read More
May 16, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2019: Berkeley/Summit Hospital, Oakland By Joyce Carol Oates Photograph courtesy of Joyce Carol Oates. March 29, 2019 Berkeley/Summit Hospital (Oakland) It is not true that for all persons the essential question is: Shall I commit suicide? But it is true for the widow. The placating fantasy, that makes possible those countless hours of bedside vigil. The beloved husband is asleep, or, if awake, not so very aware of you as you would wish. You are forced to see, as in an ingenious torture, how, moment by moment, diminishing second by second, you are being erased from the beloved’s consciousness. When he looks at you without looking at you. For the widow there is one looming question: Should you outlive your husband? For Widows Who Have Considered Suicide When Surviving is Not Enough Read More
May 13, 2022 The Review’s Review On Watery Artworks and Writing-Retreat Novels By The Paris Review Jim Campbell, Topographic Wave II. Photograph by April Gornik, courtesy of Sag Harbor Church. “Empire of Water,” on view until May 30 at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York, is well worth a wander out east. The exhibition, cocurated by the Church cofounder and artist Eric Fischl and the chief curator, Sara Cochran, features watery works from forty-two artists including Warhol, Ofili, Lichtenstein, Longo, and Kiefer, and an Aitken that delights. But the cake stealer is hiding in the back corner of the first floor: Topographic Wave II, by Jim Campbell. Tucked behind a partial gallery wall are 2,400 custom-built LEDs of various lengths mounted on a roughly four-by-six-foot black panel and arranged neatly in a tight grid, like a Lite-Brite for grown-ups or a work of Pointillism by robots with OCD. From a small distance, images appear as shimmering figures swimming through Pixelvision water. Walk closer and the picture dissolves into fragmented dots blinking some unrecognizable pattern. For a short time I paced in front of it, goofily leaning in close then stepping back. Distantly, I recalled an instruction to squint when viewing Seurat, so I did that, too. —Joshua Liberson, advisory editor Read More
May 13, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2022 By Catherine Lacey From the afternoon of March 13 into the early hours of March 15, 2022— Journals are more a nervous habit for me than anything else. I tend to copy out passages of whatever I’m reading, less because that passage is particularly important and more as a way of taking a photograph of a time and place and line of thought. Read More
May 12, 2022 Fiction Two in the Afternoon By Mieko Kawakami Illustration by Na Kim. Saki’s Moment Saki once had sex with Jin the Actor, and she couldn’t be any prouder. She hasn’t told anybody yet, so maybe pride isn’t the right word for it. Still, wherever she is, whenever she starts thinking about that intimate moment and everything it means, she slips into ecstasy. She’s in ecstasy when she thinks about how it’s going to feel to share her moment, when she thinks about the day the rest of the world will finally know what happened—when her moment will become a full-fledged point of pride. She imagines standing in front of all the women burning for Jin, the women who fantasize about him. She clears her throat and comes out with it as if delivering the best news they’ve ever heard: I had sex with Jin, Jin the Actor. In bed, in the middle of the afternoon, fair and square. Read More
May 11, 2022 First Person Flight Paths By Omar El Akkad Francisco Anzola, Old Cairo Skyline, licensed under CC0 1.0. 1. 2010 The word for invoice is the same in Arabic and Italian: fattura. We learned this, my mother and I, on the outskirts of a cemetery in Naples, as we tried to navigate the final arrangements for the transfer of my father’s body. It was a beautiful day, sunny, the sky Riviera-blue, and somewhere in the periphery of my vision, focused on this undertaker in his ill-fitting suit, there was a family mourning their own newly dead. They were of this place. We were not. Helplessly, my mother struggled to make the man from the funeral home understand what she was asking for, until finally, exasperated, she blurted out the word in Arabic, and the man nodded. By chance, our languages overlapped; we were understood. The man disappeared into a nearby office and, a couple of minutes later, returned with the bill of sale. In a few days we would need to show this document to a military inspector at the Cairo airport, when we returned to bury my father in the city of his birth. For the last twenty-eight years of his life he had been a migrant and now, in death, he would go home. Read More