October 3, 2023 First Person Free Everything By Miranda July Photo by Friedrich Haag, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed via CC BY-SA 4.0. I don’t remember the first time I did it, but I remember the first time I got caught. I was a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the store was called Zanotto’s, the item was Neosporin. I took it out of its packaging, bent down as if to scratch my ankle, and then wedged the tube of triple-antibiotic ointment into my white ankle sock. When the guard grabbed my arm, I was so scared I peed on the floor. As we waited for the police to come, I had to watch a janitor clean up my pee with a mop. I was taken down to the station and formally arrested: fingerprints, mug shot—they really wanted to teach this nineteen-year-old, transparent-dress-wearing punk a lesson. The lesson I learned was that I was now legally an adult, so I didn’t have to worry that my parents would be called. I was free—even my crimes belonged to me alone. Read More
October 2, 2023 On Children's Books On Peter Pan By Laurie Stone Scene from Mabou Mines Peter and Wendy with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine. I remember reading Peter Pan as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie—based on J. M. Barrie’s story. It turned me on. I’m six or seven, and I’m flipping through the pages, and there’s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He’s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for. All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another—when we’re children and when we’re old. It doesn’t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children—and often female humans along with them—start out sexually “innocent,” I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity. Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can’t really be contained. What to call the feelings you don’t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn’t have spoken about. It wasn’t because I was masturbating. I didn’t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I’d had sex. I’m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, “If he can do that, so, probably can you.” Read More
September 29, 2023 The Review’s Review The Language of Lava Lamps By Nora Claire Miller Photograph courtesy of the author. In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic. Read More
September 28, 2023 First Person So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman By Richard Deming Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010. Photograph by Justin Hoch, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0. “He’s dead.” The voice on the phone belonged to Joshua, a friend with whom I had gotten sober years ago. Back then, in the nineties, driving to and from twelve-step meetings held in smoky church basements across Rochester, New York, in a rickety station wagon with my drum set in the wayback, we kept ourselves focused by improvising sketch comedy and working out stand-up routines that Joshua would then use in his fledging act, which he’d eventually abandon in order to become a travel writer specializing in Southeast Asia. He was calling from Portland. “Who’s dead?” I asked, trying to think who from our past might have relapsed. “The actor, the guy you’re writing about. Overdosed on heroin.” Read More
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