I have been getting The Threepenny Review for some time now. It arrives, I take a quick peek, I think I really ought to start it now, I put it on one of the piles of magazines...
And there it sits.
As this last issue sat. For a bit. But on a pile that was closer. A pile of more current magazines and articles. One that turned over more rapidly than most. And since for the last two or three weeks a bad back has compelled me to walk instead of running to the office, I had that much more time to read.
Finished though it was in the sweet, warm confines of home, the bulk was read and enjoyed on the road. A mish-mash of articles, fiction, and poetry, it was uniformly strong and engaging. By far, to my thinking, the most intriguing was Gideon Lewis-Kraus's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (not, sadly not, available on the Threepenny website): detailing his encounter with the performance Call Cutta in a Box. Lewis-Kraus's own experience, his own performance in the written piece, is at once understated (almost transparent) and yet, as perhaps it's meant to be, transformative.
For as gripping as that piece was, my interest rarely waned in the others. A closing story by Mary Gaitskill (who I had never read before), a piece on the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who I don't believe I had ever heard of before), a dismantling of Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight -- all engaging and all, almost without fail, setting off little flurries of thought, often bringing me up short to scribble notes of my own, as I trundled back and forth between the office and home over the course of this last week.
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