September 27, 2023 Home Improvements Apartment Four By Jacqueline Feldman Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second that I’d hit her. “Hi, my neighbor,” I said as Stefanie hopped down. She and I had a project to one day go in on compost pickup. We had something else in common, we realized that evening. Neither of us had been told about apartment four. And the vacancy had filled so quickly. We both may have had reasons for considering a move—mine being I have mold—and that apartment, I happened to know, was a two-bedroom, with a bay window, beautiful gold-and-cream striped wallpaper, and decoratively ribbed molding that pooled, at the corners, in concentric circles. It was not, however, perfect. “It’s really loud in there,” I said to Stefanie. “That’s why Alex”—my ex-boyfriend—“had to leave.” I had started seeing Alex during the pandemic in 2020, a month or two after my arrival in the Northampton, Massachusetts, building. He was there already. I had been aware that he paid more in rent than I did. But my thoughts, as I left Stefanie and made my way inside, turned instead to the way I’d had of judging Alex, privately, for giving up his lease on what was truly a nice place … so that it only later occurred to me to investigate my feeling that out of all of us in the building, a converted Victorian that has eight units, each neighbor had a different curiosity, or jealousy: an opinion about which apartment is the best. Or worst—built out of the irregularly shaped old house, they are all different. Read More
September 26, 2023 On Books My Strawberry Plants: On Marcottage By Kate Briggs Alphonse du Breuil, Marcottage en serpenteaux, 1846. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Recently, I read Virginia Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, for the first time. There, I made a discovery: it features a character named Clarissa Dalloway. This encounter initially provoked delight, surprise combined with double take, like bumping into someone I thought I knew well in a setting I never expected to find them, causing a brief mutual repositioning, physically, imaginatively. (Ah! So we’re both here? But if you’re here, where am I?) Then my feelings went strange. For some reason, I felt disgruntled, almost caught out: as if the world had been withholding something important from me. How was I only just now catching up on what—for so many readers—must be old news? Yes, there’s a Clarissa Dalloway in The Voyage Out. She’s married to Mr. Richard Dalloway: the couple have been stranded in Lisbon; they board the boat and the novel in chapter 3. She is a “tall, slight woman” with a habit of holding her head slightly to one side. Read More
September 25, 2023 Dispatch Lost and Found By Sophie Haigney The MTA lost and found. Photograph by Sophie Haigney. I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go? That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored. Read More
September 22, 2023 The Review’s Review J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, “Not Good” Writing By Tom McCarthy Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one. Read More
September 21, 2023 First Person W Stands for W By Stephen Haines The W Hotel, Barcelona. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. When I was first hired as a bartender by the W Hotel in Seattle, the brand was still owned by Starwood, an indistinct consolidated corporation that has since been subsumed into the ravenous belly known as Marriott. There was a lengthy process involved in getting the job. I interviewed twice: once in the HR office and then a second time downstairs with the manager of the hotel restaurant and lounge. After being hired, I attended a mandatory, introductory eight-hour job training that was quite similar to the one I’d experienced prior to beginning a regrettable stint at Starbucks. I was stuffed into a room with about twenty other new hires—everything from housekeepers to sous-chefs to servers to maintenance workers—and we were each inundated with Starwood history. Starwood business policies. Starwood subsidiary family trees. We watched videos. We read dense packets filled with glowing customer surveys and reviews. We broke into small groups, and we were quizzed about the things that we learned. We won prizes—Starwood-engraved keychains, W Seattle pens, and the like—for each answer we got right. These gifts would be tossed about the room by the two HR workers who gave these training sessions, and they would clap with absurd enthusiasm each time. Their gusto was on brand with that of a game-show host or some seasoned motivational speaker as they shouted into their blouse-pinned microphones. “And you get a prize!” “And YOU get a prize!” Read More
September 20, 2023 On Poetry Making of a Poem: D. A. Powell on “As for What the Rain Can Do” By D. A. Powell Joshua Sampson, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245. How did this poem start for you? This poem began as a silence of wishing. As one does when falling silent. One wishes a something that isn’t happening. Or a something that is happening but should happen (one wishes) differently. In this case, I was in my kitchen nook. Outside it was raining. But raining in that dire way—trees falling, streets flooding. And endlessly so. San Francisco was at the bottom of what meteorologists were calling an atmospheric river. In thirsty California, rain is so often wished for. And now here I was, wishing it away. I didn’t want to be against the rain. Read More