Quarterly Journal, no. 25: Catharsis Issue by lareviewofbooks

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no . 25 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : CATHARSIS 9 781940 660448 51200> ISBN 978-1-940660-44-8$12.00

THINKING about ART

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The Punk Reader Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global Edited by Russ Bestley, Mike Dines, Alastair ‘Gords’ Gordon, and Paula Guerra Documenting disparate international punk scenes, including Mexico, China, Malaysia, and Iran, The Punk Reader is a long-overdue addition to the study of punk. Global Punk Series Paper $33.00 MASKS Bowie & Artists of Artiﬁce Edited by James Curcio Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents David Bowie as the key exempliﬁer of the concept of the “mask,” then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers. Paper $40.00 Art inSight Understanding Art and Why It Matters Fanchon Jean Silberstein By emphasizing the relationship between viewer and image, Art inSight urges readers to discover meaning in their own ways and offers questions that lead them into profound connections with works of art and the cultures behind them. Paper $28.00 Performance / Media / Art / Culture Selected Essays 1983–2018 Jacki EditedApplebyMarina LaPalma Experience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture examines performance art, multimedia theater, audio arts, and dance in the United States. Paper $37.00 The Idea of the Avant Garde—And What It Means Today 2 Edited by Marc James Léger This volume analyzes the manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics that are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas. Paper $37.00 With

CATHARSIS

INTERNS & VOLUNTEERS: MIA GUSSEN, MOLLY MITTELBACH

COVER ART: ASAKO NARAHASHI, TAPPI , FROM THE SERIES HALF AWAKE AND HALF ASLEEP IN THE WATER , 2001. © ASAKO NARAHASHI. COURTESY OF ROSEGALLERY.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: TOM LUTZ EXECUTIVE EDITOR: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: MEDAYA OCHER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: SARA DAVIS, SARAH LABRIE, ELIZABETH METZGER, ERIKA RECORDON, MELISSA SELEY, CALLIE SISKEL, IRENE YOON ART DIRECTOR: PERWANA NAZIF DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING GRAPHIC DESIGNER: TOM COMITTA ART CONTRIBUTORS: BRUCE DAVIDSON, HADI FALLAHPISHEH, ASAKO NARAHASHI, VINCENT RAMOS, CARISSA RODRIGUEZ, TOM RUBNITZ, HEJI SHIN, ESTELLE SRIVIJITTAKAR PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS MANAGING DIRECTOR: JESSICA KUBINEC AD SALES: BILL HARPER BOARD OF DIRECTORS: ALBERT LITEWKA (CHAIR), JODY ARMOUR, REZA ASLAN, BILL BENENSON, LEO BRAUDY, EILEEN CHENG-YIN CHOW, MATT GALSOR, ANNE GERMANACOS, TAMERLIN GODLEY, SETH GREENLAND, GERARD GUILLEMOT, DARRYL HOLTER, STEVEN LAVINE, ERIC LAX, TOM LUTZ, SUSAN MORSE, MARY SWEENEY, LYNNE THOMPSON, BARBARA VORON, MATTHEW WEINER, JON WIENER, JAMIE WOLF

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BOOKS no . 25 QUARTERLY

essays 9 SIXTHITALOCONSISTENCY:CALVINO'SMEMO by Andrei Codrescu 21 THE BICENTENNIALAMAZING GIRL by Deborah Taffa 38 SEXY IS THE AUNT WHO HOLDS THE MUG by Fiona Landers 56 OF FORGIVENESS by Ashon Crawley 86 STUFF, THE ESSAY by Sasha Graybosch 131 DEATH IS A MASTER FROM TURKEY by Golan Haji fiction 47 FROM ROMANCE IN MARSEILLE by Claude McKay 71 REALTOR TO THE DAMNED by Mary South 107 WALKING INTO THE HOLY LAND by Wes Holtermann 123 FROM THE NATURE BOOK by Tom Comitta poetry 35 STARS ON EARTH by Shuzo TranslatedTakiguchi,byMary Jo Bang & Yuki Tanaka 42 FROM "THE ORPHANS" by Don Mee Choi 55 THREE CHARMS FROM FOREIGN BODIES by Kimiko Hahn 68 IN OLEMA by Tess Taylor 100 TWO POEMS by Kiki Petrosino 119 GIFT FEATHER by Ishion Hutchinson prayers 104 FOUND EX-VOTO... by Dagoberto Gilb 120 O MEDUSA by Sophia Shalmiyev 139 ANOTHER KIND OF METAPHYSICS by Hannah Amaris Roh no . 25 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : CATHARSIS CONTENTS

“The story of the rising cost of college in America is often told through numbers. . . . The personal toll these trends have taken is hard to convey, but the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom does so in her new book Indebted.”

“This powerfully written account of taste and inequality is an essential read for cultural observers and critics.”

—Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic “A fascinating exploration of ancient philosophical thinking about the divinity of the universe and the immortality of the soul.”

—John Sellars, author of Hellenistic Philosophy Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers Series

—Patricia A. Banks, Mount Holyoke College “These writings of Plutarch are surprisingly relevant to political life in twenty-first-century democracies and deserve to be better known.”

—Timothy Duff, University of Reading Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers Series

Dear CatharsisReader,istraditionally understood as a kind of release. Tension builds, and through a cathartic experience, is purged from the body. Think of the last time you’ve experienced this feeling. Was it recently? To me, it seems like our world is increasingly resistant to these forms of relief. Catharsis is consistently frustrated in the news, in politics, online, in art. Movies, trapped into constant sequels, all but ensure that the story is never over. Superheroes keep the world safe only until the following summer. Social media is at a perpetual boil. The political sphere is full of trials, depositions, hearings — all without any seeming conclusion. The climate is on the brink of total collapse, but that collapse is slow.

Editor,MedayaQuarterly Journal LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

We’d like to thank the following Print Sponsors whose generosity made this issue possible: Dylan PatsyGreysonBaquetBryan & Ron Buckly Steve Lichtman & Kathleen Salvaty Leila Scheu Jane Smiley in honor of Tom Lutz John Friedman & Alice Kimm in honor of Shirley Friedman The Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501 (c)(3) literary and cultural arts nonprofit. Your donation directly supports new essays, interview, reviews, and literary works; offers scholarships and free events; and keeps the art of lively, nuanced discourse alive and well. Donate to support at lareviewofbooks.org

This issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal is dedicated to Catharsis and the many different ways in which we encounter it or fail to encounter it in our lives. Ashon Crawley writes about the process of “forgiveness, in black”: “What if we considered forgiveness to be a reckoning and confrontation with what happened, is happening, will happen?” In “Stuff, the Essay,” Sasha Graybosch considers our relationship to things, how we assign meaning to objects, and how we both crave and detest them. Deborah Taffa remembers herself as a young girl in the 1970s, coming to terms with her Native American identity during the U.S. Bicentennial. Wes Holtermann’s short story, “Walking into the Holy Land,” follows a young man whose catharsis, and perhaps his saving grace, comes from a sexual encounter with an angel in an airplane bathroom. We’ve also included three “Prayers” in this issue. I’ll offer one of my own: Let the next year see an end to the tragedy. Let’s move on to the release.

iupress.indiana.edu —Kate Bowler, author of New York Times bestseller Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) “God Land is a stubbornly hopeful book about how the places of faith we belong to might someday belong to us.” “Crackling with sensuality and ... poetic ambition.” —Jim McCue, editor of The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Collected and Uncollected Poems Vol 1 “A keenly observed and deeply felt narrative . . . so original and compelling . . . it wouldn’t let me go.” —Alex Kotlowitz, bestselling author of There Are No Children Here

above: Tom Rubnitz, Pickle Surprise, 1989, Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. All screenshots, after the screening event Tom Rubnitz, collected video works 1981 - 1992, January 11th 2020, courtesy Goswell Road, Paris.

opposite: Tom Rubnitz, Strawberry Shortcut, 1989, Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. All screenshots, after the screening event Tom Rubnitz, collected video works 1981 - 1992, January 11th 2020, courtesy Goswell Road, Paris.

Heji Shin, Kylie, 2019, UV print on copper, 47 x 36 in. Photograph by Michael Underwood.

ITALOCONSISTENCY:CALVINO'SSIXTHMEMO ANDREI

essay

The backstory is this: Italo Calvino was the builder of Invisible Cities, a novel. His oth er novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, as well as his stories Cosmicomics and his journalism, made him a popular and wellloved writer, a sought-after speaker, and an international celebrity. In 1985, he was asked to deliver six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. Calvino chose the title for the sixth, “Consistency,” but died before he wrote it. The lectures, published posthumous ly, were called, famously, Six Memos for the Millennium, but there are only five in the book. Martha Cooley, a novelist who lives in Italy, had the idea of asking some writ ers to compose what would have been Italo Calvino’s last address for the Harvard Eliot lectures. I wrote mine in the voice of Calvi no, Martha copyedited it, but the project fell through. Here it is, direct from Castiglione della Pescaia. CODRESCU

There are no dead writers — if they are talented and lucky. To be lucky means to stay in print or on the tip of a discerning reader’s tongue for a long time. It also means that the writer must have a mellifluous and memorable name, like mine, Italo Calvino, meaning Italy and the Crucifixion. This might look like onomastic luck, but Italian luck mixed with the Crucifixion is like Borges’s “Lottery in Babylon”: you might win the Rialto Bridge or be decimated in the grand Roman tradition. To gain or to lose immortality to the vicissitudes of history is possible anywhere but more difficult in Italy. I am neither an admirer nor an adversary of the extrava gant poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, governor of the utopian pirate island of Fiume, though I could have been a part-time resident. I would certainly not have eaten most of the dishes in Marinetti’s Futurist cookbook. But I will always think of them as inevitably and consistently Italian. The Crucifixion is consistently and inevitably Italian, too, first as inherited from the Romans, beautified by Renaissance art, and experienced collectively in the recent war. “Consistent” and “memorable” are the two faces of the coin I carry in my Inname.this post-mortem “memo” on the sub ject of consistency, I must tell you that I might have never gained the immortality that makes possible such an address to you if I hadn’t been part of a history that car ried my people to the extremes of beauty, the borders of grotesquery, the adven tures of Marco Polo, and the Decameron garden near Florence, and then to an age when fascism, poverty, and war made it necessary to fight the seduction of that gilded past. The poet Salvatore Quasimodo, a near-contemporary of mine, worked against the musicality of our mellifluous and poetic language, to discover something hard and truthful un der layers of aesthetic history. He found: Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra trafitto da un raggio di Sole: ed è subito sera. Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it is evening. It may be hard for a speaker of English to see what effort it took for this poem to be born: it is spare, unadorned, elemental, solitary. And still, it cannot escape beauty — “ed è subito ser,” is a magnificent line of poetry in Italian. After the Second Word War, I was a communist and wrote realist novels. Had I stayed faithful to the Party, Togliatti’s Stalin-flavored communism would have made it easy for me to be successful in postwar Italy, where neo-realist cinema and its portraiture of everyday life was rich fodder for an observer attentive to paradox, economy, and the class struggle. But the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 made my decision for me. I left the Party and neo-realism. It was not a dif ficult decision. I was feeling constrained by so-called reality and it was clear that I didn’t have the appetite or the ability to improve it with words that rode with tanks.Ireturned to my first love: folk tales, myths, legends, fantastic travels. I realized that the great intellectual and creative revolt of the 20th century had been pre cisely against realism. The reality of imag ination was a greater force than realism,

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los angeles review of books 14 which at its ideological extreme, in the Soviet Union, had become propaganda. It was as if my imagination had been under lock and key until Raymond Queneau, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar opened the doors. As soon as I resigned from the Party, I overcame grim postwar existentialism, communist prudishness, and Italian provincialism. Italy, my provider of myth and beauty, was also a fountain of misery, superstition, bad politics, and regional vendettas. Neoreal ism had shown us in this latter light, but I champed at the bit, as your horses say in English.Itwas a fairly long exit. I won’t bore you with the details of my disentangle ment. By the time I was in the clear, as it were, I wrote If on a winter’s night a traveler, published in 1979. This book was consistent with all that I loved in my childhood and youth about literature: the beginnings of fantastical stories, suspense, magic, and the questioning of the notion of “you,” the reader. This “you,” is some one real, someone like the “you” (or “ye”) in Dante’s Purgatorio when Virgil answers the traveler seeking direction, Voi forsecredetechesiamo esperti d’esto loco; ma noi siam peregrin come voi siete. Ye Perchancebelieve that we have knowledge of this place, But we are strangers even as (translationyourselves.by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1867) If on a winter’s night is storytelling, philosophy, and love song. It is also a love letter that follows Shakespeare’s advice: You are a lover, borrow Cupid’s wings / and soar with them above a common bound. It’s a love letter to creative intoxication. A historian might wonder why André Breton, Philippe Soupault, or Salvador Dalí were not as radically life-changing for me as Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, or Jorge Luis Borges. All were near-contemporaries and drew much of their juice from prewar surrealism and other creative avant-gardes. My response is that the Second World War created a number of irreparable fissures. The radical and audience-averse prewar movements rejected everything, especially fiction. Our own Futurist founder, Filippo Marinetti, despite his wildly creative ideas about cooking, design, poetry, and art, still found Mussolini quite sympathetic, and violence aesthetic.Postwar survivors of those avantgardes turned their attention back to creative materials themselves. For writ ers, this meant going back to language — written and oral histories, beginning with the oldest stories. Above all, writers sought to free human beings to delight in all the senses, in reading and making. You might say I partook of an atten uated surrealism, a friendlier and lighter play in the meadows or skies of fantastical imagery. You might even say a certain di lution, if not an outright rejection of vi olence enabled a postwar return to myth and classical poetry. You could say, too (who’s there to stop you?), that the imagi nation of prewar avant-gardes dug a deep trench between their practices and art that still explored myth and religion. Some ad mirable prewar writers had unfortunately

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I like lists of three. My favorite tri ads are “myth, beauty and art,” “predeces sors, contemporaries, and heirs,” “paradox, economy, and class struggle,” “storytelling, philosophy, and love song.” Storytelling, the first item in that last triad, is what all humans do. But the writing of a story, un like any “telling,” has the advantage of be ing fully empowered by the imagination to employ language in the best way the writer sees fit. At the same time, writers must recognize that words are inhabited by the ghosts of those who’ve used them best.

los angeles review of books subscribed to mystical nationalism with the same fervor I did to communism, but you might as well blame the history of Europe for both. Art, despite the military nomenclatures of avant-garde, tradition, arriere-garde, and futurism, did not fol low the rituals of war. We had pedestrian writers, but they were not infantry. All pi lots were not Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and all horse lovers were not cavalry. (Though some of them might have been centaurs.) One cannot be simultaneously free and bound when the polis demands it. Art must have its playpen no matter in what perilous position it finds itself, on what edge of the abyss it perches, what nightmares it risks. Imagination is a thief: it can appropriate anything that inspires it, and must escape from anything that polices it.

Several things then — Jacques Lacan’s new writings on human psychology, and the liberty of using the word for the well-being and childlike wonder of the reader, as in the games of OULIPO — came to be associated for me with essen tial pleasure. I felt relieved of the neces sity to make conventional literary bridges because writing, like life, could exist in fragments, as Montaigne and Nietzsche had already shown. Our literary zeitgeist no longer required leading the reader by the hand because, miraculously, the reader supplied the missing links. Indeed, a new kind of reader had come into being — a reader who could leap from one energy field to another, a storytelling reader. Consistency, insofar as it is a subject, is both inevitable and impossible. In the course of writing my Six Memos on “the values or qualities or peculiarities of lit erature” I hold dear, I resorted to oracular means of finding support for this theme. When speaking of lightness, for instance, I looked to writers who’d lifted off the ground in their fictions and poetry; yet I also looked at dense texts not known for verbal uplift. Opening a novel by Henry James, I read a random passage that was not exactly “light” in the sense I had in tended. I had to hack my way through a psychological thicket to arrive at the gos samer feeling that James’s female protag onist experiences. James’s prose suggested to me that density and lightness aren’t opposed. By simply opening his novel to answer my question, I had the thrill of collaborating with the author through an act of willful interpretation. In any case, whether done directly or after a bit of crit ical ingenuity, oracular reading is helpful and fun. A reader, not unlike a writer, will generate consistency from the directions of chance, giving the fictional world the shape of reality — which is anything but consistent. There is no inherent impera tive for consistency; it is a creative whim. Without worrying about the atomic and quantum motion I describe in my “memo” on lightness (with the help of Ovid and modern physics), I trust that any literary work will be consistent if it is freely imag ined and conceived.

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Writers are by default philosophers. Yet ever since Heraclitus, philosophers have found that to make credible argu ments, they need the literary devices of fragmentation and chance. All literature, whether intentionally fabulist or faith ful to a “scientific” language, finds itself part of a torn parchment or a broken clay tablet. Attempts to tell stories of “being” in the language of philosophy cannot be free of the weight of the world until they adopt the freedom of storytelling — espe cially of the fairy tale. Words can never be completely free of the weight of the world, but the opportunity to test the lightness of dreams against that inevitable weight is a miracle. As for “love song,” the last of the triad, it is literature’s best employed power, the force that drives language to the “you” that is invariably the beloved.

“Stories” are but one story, a single story inside of which are a myriad of stories di rected to that “you”: reader, lover, listener, subject of the story. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, books are accidentally mixed up so that we can read only the beginning or parts of their stories. We are given the be ginning of a story that unfolds to a point of great suspense; the reader can’t wait to learn what happens next. But instead, the reader is captured by another story that also moves to a moment of great suspense, at which point yet another story begins. This is how Scheherezade saved her life for 1001 nights: instead of being killed by the cruel king who murders all his wives at dawn, she breaks off her story at that mo ment of unbearable suspense. Each night a new story is born and interrupted before its climax, and the king has no choice but to postpone Scheherazade’s murder. The archetype of Scheherezade’s is the story of humanity. The writer who tells a story (rather, parts of stories) is fishing in the unending river of Scheherezade’s stories and is thus, like her, partly responsible for the fate of humanity. Indeed, the writer is always inspired by Scheherezade. (One need only think of Balzac’s unsuccessful attempts at novel-writing until he wrote Les Chouans, or of someone closer in time to us, my compatriot Umberto Eco, whose Name of the Rose is another update from Scheherezade.)Consistency, then, might be renamed “1001,” a symbolic number that signifies human time from the birth of language and storytelling to the end of humanity. From “1001” on, human beings will have to communicate with numbers instead of words. What will happen to the imagi nation when the preprogrammed images issued by technology reorganize storytell ing? The answer is that human RAM will surrender to the infinite memory of the machine. Or is that really the answer?

In consensual “reality,” consistency is an approximation in the sense of “habitual.”

A consistent writer is one of whom we have come to expect something familiar. A writer who breaks her or his own rules is often thought of as “inconsistent,” and here, inconsistency is seen as a defect, not a quality. No reader, though, should expect anything familiar from a serious writer. (All the more so from a comic or serio-comic writer.) The pleasure of lit erature, both for writer and reader, lies in its surprises, its inconsistencies. The work with the greatest inconsistencies is thus the most surprising and, by extension, the most delightful. The writer finds secrets he or she lets the reader in on, and these secrets germinate surprises, fruits of the Tree of Inconsistency.

ANDREI CODRESCU

stories-within-stories

los angeles review of books 20 And yet, language preserves human ity’s stories even as it allows us to create new ones. Language is consistent. It is my curse and blessing that I am well versed in classical literature. From it, I have come to expect certain consistent (if I may say so) pleasures of the ear and jour neys of the mind. There are surprises here, too, revealed by rereading for a purpose — for example, to delve into the subject of consistency. Here is Sextus Propertius: Quo fugis a demens? Nula est fuga: tu licet usque ad Tanain fugias, usque sequetur NonAmor.siPegaseo uecteris in aere dorso, nec tibi si Persei mouerit ala pedes; uel si te sectae talaribus aurae, nil tibi Mercurii proderit alta uia. “Where do you think you’re going? There’s no escape: you can run to the Tanais, Love follows all the way. Not if you ride on the air on a Pegasean back, not if Perseus’ wings propel your feet, not if breezes cut by winged sandals take Mercury’syou,high path would do you no good.” (Translation by Vincent Katz, II.xxx. a, from The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, Princeton University Press, 2004) In my “memo” on lightness, I note that Perseus is the only hero capable of cut ting off Medusa’s head. But after he does, he must always carry it with him, careful not to look on it but only at its reflection. He also uses her head to turn his enemies into statues, only against those who deserve the punishment of being turned into statues of themselves [italics mine]. I note, too, and not without evident self-irony, that the myth is “certainly telling me something,” but I abstain from speculating on what that something is. I would like to reprise this here, in my sixth and final “memo,” by adding that in addition to the danger of auto-hagiography, I am haunted by the perilous ease with which my imagination lets me enter a magical world, an invisible city, a dream castle. As per Sextus Propertius, there is no escape from love (or stories of it), even astride winged Pegasus, wearing Mercury’s sandals, and carrying that most frightful weapon ever devised, Medusa’s head. One can escape from one’s imaginary world into another imaginary world. And from that one into another. One might even, while making worlds, arrive in one’s child hood. Can one change the world one has escaped from by powers gained in imagi nary worlds? I think so. Imagination con tains the yeast of world-making. If so, this is Oneconsistency.morething: the seeming task of the creator of an imaginary world that begins “once upon a time … when there was no time” is to abolish time. But as fairy tales remind us, returning to the world of time means certain death. Make no mis take, this is the fate that the writer, like you, reader, will face when the book is closed. Arachne’s gossamer thread is wo ven through every story and her web en snares us. But when Athena, the goddess of wisdom, changed Arachne into a spider she also doomed us to be enraptured by

ANDREI CODRESCU

Perhaps I have been consistent despite myself. I promised to write six “memos” for the coming millennium; I wrote five, thinking I’d outfoxed the new millennium by leaving one unwritten. Evidently, this wasn’t up to me. The sixth, written in the new millennium, retroactively threads it self to the five written in the last. The new millennium is thus (consistently) taking care to finish the business of the last.

21 the threads of her web. Arachne’s weav ing harbors a secret, namely the possibility that one of the threads will lead back to the world others made for one — when one thought he was a realist. That wish may be called “consistency.”

Hadi Fallahpisheh, Surrender from the performing series “Truth Has Four Legs”, 2017, Unique Photogram.

The summer of 1976, I was a sevenyear-old girl with two long braids, a backward baseball cap, and a cocka mamie plan. I would memorize the en tire list of US presidents. Starting with honest George and ending with our pea nut-man Jimmy Carter, I would impress everyone by reciting them in chronolog ical order. I practiced for weeks, enunci ating the seventh name, Andrew Jackson, with special emphasis because my father said that a hundred years ago our family had been named after him. “All the old est families on our reservation were given presidents’ names by the government,” he said.I sat on a lawn chair out back, flipped through the pages of my picture book, and stared at Old Hickory when I came TAFFA

THE BICENTENNIALAMAZINGGIRL DEBORAH

essay

On the other hand, here was Andrew Jackson, recognizable. He gave me some thing to brag about in the classroom. I thought I finally understood why the dirt road leading to my grandma’s old house, my uncles’ houses, and our family land on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation had a sign that read Jackson Road, and I planned to make the most of it in school. I couldn’t wait for second grade to start. I planned to ask my friends if their family was named after a famous president.

All that summer my big sisters called me Chaka, after the Neanderthal from Land of the Lost. I was only seven, but my boyish gait and deep voice made

“Don’t forget your brother fought in Vietnam,” Mom called to Dad in the kitchen.“Ididn’t say nothing,” he replied.

los angeles review of books 24 to him. I traced his bushy eyebrows and widow’s peak with sticky lemonade fingers. Just the sight of the old guy made me feel important. It was the Bicentennial, the Vietnam War had ended, and the summer hummed with the chatter of spe cial events. Anewdollar coin would soon hit the streets with Susan B. Anthony on its face. Our brownie troop rode on a flatbed truck in the Fourth of July parade displaying a banner that read, “Two Hundred Years of American History!” Dodger Stadium erupted into a spontaneous rendition of God Bless America after Cubs center fielder Rick Monday stopped a hippie and his kid from burning the flag on live television.After growing bored with my mem orization, I wandered inside and found Dad on the couch watching the game. The Dodgers were at bat when Vin Scully, the broadcaster, announced the intruders. “Wait a minute,” Scully said, “there’s an animal on the field.” He said it so calmly, I thought he was hallucinating. But then he added, “There are two,” and I realized he was using the word “animal” to refer to the men.Wewatched as the protesters jumped the fence near third base and ran into the outfield. The camera panned in on the pair as they unfurled and poured kerosene on an American flag, then knelt before it, and fumbled with matches. They looked related, like a father and a son. Dad leaned forward in concentration. I bounced up and down beside him. We waited for the tongues of fire, for the flag to turn into a scorched black spot. Suddenly, from the right-hand cor ner of our TV screen, Monday zipped in to snatch Old Glory away before they could burn it. The crowd leapt to their feet and cheered as the left-field mes sage board flashed the words, “Rick Monday you made a great play!” Secu rity officers arrived on the field. Tommy Lasorda yelled at the two men, spit flying in the older man’s face as he and his son got arrested.Afterthe excitement died down, Dad went into the kitchen for a beer and Mom put down her sewing. I was left staring at the TV, too embarrassed to ask if any one else noticed that the man and his son looked like our family.

I spent the last free month of that summer sitting outside with my US presi dents book, cracking sunflower seeds until my lips burned from too much salt. My dad said my grandpa had been tribal pres ident, my great-grandpa before him. He said we came from a long line of civic lead ers, leading back to granny Ethel’s greataunt — but this didn’t mean much to me. None of them were famous. None of my teachers talked about them in school.

Hadi Fallahpisheh, Hidden in Translation from the performing series “Truth Has Four Legs”, 2017, Unique Photogram.

los angeles review of books 26 it seem like I was channeling the spirit of a middle-aged man. I was desperate for them to stop before any of my new class mates caught on, so I fawned over my old est sister Joan hoping she might go soft. I said her new feathered haircut and her red softball uniform with blue stripes and white socks made her look like a brownskinned Wonder Woman. I complimented the way she stretched her softball mitt out for a line drive, then fired from third to first for a double play — her speed reminded me of how Wonder Woman used her gold bracelets to deflect bullets in battle. Our family had finally turned the corner on Southwestern poor. We were still Indians, but we were the good kind of In dians, the kind you would not mind hav ing as your neighbors. We lived in a clean house in a new town. We kept our yard tidy. My dad got bumped up to foreman and bought a long yellow Firebird that we drove down the hill for Chinese food. We went to church. On the Fourth of July, my mother dressed us in matching outfits and took our picture with her new cam era. My older sisters, Joan and Lori, wore plaid pantsuits. They towered over me and my little sister, Monica, in our bumblebee sundresses. We stood in front of the apple tree in the backyard and flashed the peace sign for prosperity. On the day we moved from the reser vation to northern New Mexico, a mob of cousins milled around the moving truck. Mom filled every square inch of our car, a Chevy Nova, with blankets, sheets, tow els, pillows, and clothing. The windows were blocked with garbage bags. Our cat, Inky, had to ride in the Chevy too, which meant that she would be separated from us, pulled behind the moving truck. We kissed Inky goodbye and shoved her into the maze of bags. Dad and his brother Johnny had just finished loading the U-Haul with our Big Wheels, bikes, beds, the brown flower couch, a black-and-white TV, our kitch en table and chairs with the chrome pipe legs and vinyl seats that stuck to the back of my thighs on hot summer days. Uncle Johnny handed Dad the last piece of fur niture, one of those metal TV stands. Dad jumped on the truck’s bumper, stretched his arms up high, and shoved the stand on top of a large brown box. He jumped down and pulled the rolling door shut. He and Johnny locked arms. “Thanks, bro.” Uncle Johnny shrugged. “No prob lem.”“You guys get in the truck,” Dad said. Then he reached in his front jeans pock et, pulled out a ball of crumpled bills and handed it to Johnny. “Take Anita and Tonia out to dinner.” Uncle Johnny got stiff. “Why you got ta tell me what to do with it? You think I’m gonna waste it on booze?” But Dad knew how to handle his lit tle brother. “Shut up,” he grinned. “It’s my day, not yours.” He punched Johnny’s arm and they laughed, then Dad hitched the Nova to the bumper of the U-Haul and climbed into the cab. As we pulled away from our old house in Yuma, the dogs shot out from their resting place under our older cousin’s ja lopy. They barked and chased us down the road. I looked out the side window as I perched on Mom’s lap, until the dust set tled, we hit pavement, and I couldn’t see themDadanymore.lectured us as we drove — about ambition, about not being afraid to get out in the world and try. “You just gotta do your best,” he said. “Get good grades in

DEBORAH TAFFA

27 school. Lots of tribes got chopped in half when the US and Mexican border was created. There’s a whole southern band of Yumans down there. Imagine if you were in Algodones trying to get by.”

Mom sniffled and blew her nose. Dad was quiet until we passed through Phoenix and started climbing toward the Kachina Mountains and Flagstaff. “We ain’t complaining about having to move away from Yuma for this job. Right? We’re going to do our work and our homework and don’t complain.”

Mom had put blankets on the floor of the truck where my little sister Monica and I were supposed to lie or sit or squat as we traveled north to our new town in northern New Mexico. But we were worried about the Nova on the hitch behind the truck and couldn’t sit still. We ran to check on Inky when Dad pulled into a gas station, but she hid. We couldn’t see her in the Nova at all. We worried that she had died and begged Mom to open the doors so we could find her. Mom wrinkled her nose and said she better not be dead because that would smell bad. In Kayenta, Arizona, Mom fi nally agreed to unlock the door. Joan and Lori hogged the doorway and stuck their heads inside calling for her, “Inky? Come out, Inky!” Then Joan screamed, “Inky scratched me!” and Inky slithered right through her legs. She darted past the gas pumps and around the dumpster at the side of the mechanic’s garage. Dad had his hand on the hose, the nozzle in the side of the truck. He looked at us and shook his head. He was mad. “Why’d you open the door?WeStupids.”never saw Inky again. She disappeared down an alley and Dad gave up looking for her. Monica sobbed herself to sleep during the last hours of the trip, but Dad stayed ruthless and calm. Even then, I knew that the cat was not all that we had lost that day. I had also lost a sense of perspective, some sense of both past and future. If we had stayed in Yuma, the pride I felt in our presidential surname would have died out faster. With family around, somebody would have explained its origins to me. Someone would have explained that in 1894, on the day our reservation was allotted, fraud had already tarnished the treaty signing. The white Indian Commissioner rounded up as many local Natives as he could and told them: “If any of you refuse to obey the orders [to sign], the police will see to it that you do.” Tribal members who weren’t present had their signatures forged with newly assigned names. Andrew Jackson is known as the “Indian Killer,” for ordering his soldiers to murder Native women and children. Even though he billed himself as a populist, who fought to advance the rights of common men against a corrupt elite, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which led to the forced relocation of 60,000 Native Americans and ended, of course, in the Trail of Tears. Born into poverty, he be came wealthy, in part, by mining lead at a mine in Kentucky. His wealth grew with the purchase of a cotton plantation east of Nashville. Over time, he came to own over a hundred enslaved men, women, and children, who worked on his property. It was April when we arrived in Farm ington for Dad’s new job on the Navajo Reservation. Mom enrolled Joan and Lori in a private Catholic school right away, but she refused to enroll me. “She’s way ahead of her classmates,” Mom said, con vincing Dad we’d save money if we waited until the following year.

2017, Unique

Hadi Fallahpisheh, AMERICAMERICA from the performing series “Truth Has Legs”, Photogram.

Four

Joan said, “The kids are brats.”

Joan and Lori made fun of me. “Deb bie’s an elementary school drop-out!” But after the first couple of days, their smiles were gone. They hated Catholic school in Farmington. They feigned fevers in an effort to skip, and cried when they came home in the afternoon. Lori said, “The nuns are mean.”

Mom dragged me and Monica to mass every morning so she could watch Joan and Lori file in with their classes. She studied the other girls, trying to pick out the ones who were giving ours trouble.

Joan and Lori stared at me with sad eyes but there was nothing I could do. A priest named Father Ben said mass. He was a fun Franciscan who played the guitar and took the eighth graders to the Anasazi Ruins at Chaco Canyon every year. “Too bad he doesn’t teach,” Dad said. One day Mom started crying while we were waiting for the students to come in to the church. I tried to hug her, but she wasn’t in a cuddly mood. She stood and sat on cue, but she kept blowing her nose and tears kept streaming down her face. I thought I knew why she was crying. In Farmington, we were nobody. There was no running into one of Mom’s 14 siblings at Del Sol Grocery. There were no allIndian baseball tournaments, and even if there had been, Dad didn’t have his six brothers and five cousins to enter an all-Jackson team. There were no dinner invites from Dad’s older sisters. No mul berry trees to climb, no frogs to catch, no septic tanks to serve as base during tag with the cousins. I even missed the old, funny-smelling ladies on the res who raised their eyebrows and said they knew exactly who my family was when I told them my last name.¤

DEBORAH TAFFA

The recording was clearly a black minister: “We are gathered here today, to celebrate this year of bicentenniality, in the hope of freedom and dignity. We are celebrating two hundred years of white folk kicking ass!” The audience hooted and laughed. “We offer this prayer, and the prayer is: how long will this bullshit go on?”Islumped down against the wall and listened to Dad chuckling on the couch. It wasn’t the first time I had heard about black slaves. I was an advanced reader and had recently finished a book about Harriet Tubman. Even so, I didn’t know what black history had to do with us. Throughout my earliest childhood there were hints that our political re lationship with the United States was complicated. Dad loved boxing, and I had heard him praise Muhammad Ali for being anti-establishment. There was the look he gave me when I came home from the library with the biographies of patri otic men like Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. There was the expression on his face when Rick Monday ripped the American flag away from the two protesters at Dodger Stadium. My mouth felt dry as I listened to Dad laughing. In a second skit, Richard Pryor played a 200-year-old slave with “white stars and stripes on his forehead” and a “lovely white folk expression.” He

Watching Lori and Joan adjust to paro chial school was tough, and that summer only heightened my anxiety. I felt nostal gia for Yuma, and worried about my own upcoming semester. One day, when Mom went to run errands, and my sisters were outside playing freeze tag, I snuck in the back door to the kitchen and overheard Dad listening to his new record, Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger

los angeles review of books 30 was laughing about death, poverty, and the loss of family as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played quietly in the back ground. After talking about the disap pearance of his wife and kids he said, “I don’t even know where my old mama is now hyuck, hycuck. She up yonder in that big white folks in the sky hyuck, hyuck,” and I felt a knot in my throat thinking about Grandma Esther. I stared at my reflection in the chrome legs of our kitchen chairs, suddenly real izing that my family stood outside the standard version of patriotism. There were two Americas, and if God guided one, he must have been against the other. I was intuiting who I was, and I was discovering that it wasn’t good. History takes time to come into focus for a Native child, and the lesson I learned that day lacked language. It existed only as a vague feeling that no matter how hard I tried I would nev er be able to cheer whole-heartedly for the home team. For me, being patriotic meant willing the death of my ancestors. It meant hoping that the settler fami ly on the Oregon Trail encountered no obstacles, human or otherwise. It meant hoping that this pioneering family found their happily ever after, no matter the de struction wrought in their wake. My ed ucation, over the course of my childhood, came together like a puzzle, painfully slow, one edifying piece at a time. I wish someone had told me that Sky City in Acoma Pueblo had been con tinuously lived in for 900 years, making America’s 200th birthday an omission and a snub. I wish I had heard that the Dodger Stadium duo were Native Americans pro testing the lack of health care in Indian Country. I wish Dad had told me that Vin Scully’s slur was evidence of a culture that undervalued the animal world, while we came from one that valorized it. If only I had known sooner that I could have re claimed the pejorative by simply taking pride in this fact. Instead I have to remember myself as a buck-toothed kid who worked all summer trying to memorize the list of American presidents. As if being aware of my displacement was not pain enough, I must live with the insult of how vague that awareness was, and how stupidly it allowed me to behave. My childhood self is such an embarrassing caricature I may as well laugh: a little Indian girl who spent all of her bicentennial quarters playing an arcade cowboy on Boot Hill, trying her hardest to kill her Indian sisters.

Joan laughed so hard at Lori’s comment that she choked on her KoolAid. But then she got serious. “Catholic school is rough,” she said. I chewed on my nails all afternoon. When Dad got home, I waited until the sound of the lawn mower cut off, then I went outside to talk to him. Rather than tell him how homesick I was for Yuma, I

The day after this realization, I wanted to play freeze tag with Joan and Lori, but they had made friends with two girls down the street and didn’t want me around. I sat in front of the big box fan, reciting the list of presidents into its whirr to hear the distorted sound of my own deep voice: Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan When they came in for lunch, Joan said I was stupid to be studying and Lori said I should appreciate the summer, a time when I was free to be me, veg out in front of the television, and use sentenc es like “you ain’t the boss of me” and “I’m gonna get me something to eat” without anyone telling me otherwise.

drunk,” Dad said, watching with calm interest. I climbed in the back seat with my sisters.Dad started the motor. He revved the engine, but he didn’t pull away. Mom said we should leave. “Let’s go,” she told Dad, but he sat there with his hand on the gear shift, watching what was happening.

All summer long Dad tried to fix the homesick feeling in the house by keeping us busy. He bought us softball gloves and record albums. He took us to restaurants, the roller rink, and movies. But for all his encouragement to stay positive, I suspect ed he was homesick, too. I was suspicious because he was drinking alone, staying up late with too little sleep, trying to recreate the reserva tion in small but obvious ways. He drank his beer in tall singles wrapped in paper bags like his brother Johnny did back home. He looked for beat-up dives with questionable-looking characters to eat Sunday breakfast. Mom liked going to the fancy side of town, but Dad liked the rough side and that’s where he wanted to go to celebrate the last free weekend of summer.Wegrabbed a corner booth. Dad or dered stuffed sopapillas all around, but Mom wrinkled her nose and said she wanted enchiladas. We gabbed about Mom’s bowling league and the skates Joan wanted to buy. The food was rich and filling, and when we left the restaurant, I felt happy. But as we were walking to the car we saw a Navajo couple arguing in the parking“They’relot.

He“Why?”looked at me as if he suddenly remembered that I was there. He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I could hear her sucking in her breath when I hit her.” We sat and stared at a line of ants making their way across the patio. “It must’ve hurt,” he said, before heading to the garage. I called after him. “Why do we have to go to Sacred Heart instead of public schools?”“Because the public schools in this town are crappy,” he said. “Now get inside for dinner.”

“Did you go to school with nuns?” “Yeah, but your school won’t be like mine.”“Why“Thingsnot?”were different back then.”

“Like “Whenhow?”Igot in trouble Sister used to rap my knuckles real hard, but one day she gave me the ruler and said from then on, whenever I got in trouble, she was going to hold out her hand and I was going to hit her“Whatinstead.”doyou mean?” He stared past me with vacant eyes. “She put out her hand. She told me to swat her palm with the ruler as hard as I could for my punishment.”

The couple went from yelling to shov ing each other. Mom tried to push my head down on the seat, but I fought her

31 told him I was worried that I had gotten behind. I’d lost days of school, and Sacred Heart sounded scary. I said, “Joan and Lori say the nuns are really strict, and Catholic kids have bionic brains. What if I can’t catch up?” “Bionic brains?” He laughed. “Is that what your sisters are telling you?” I Heshrugged.shookhis head. “Everyone has a few bumps when they start something new. That’s just normal.”

DEBORAH TAFFA

That night in bed I heard my older sisters whispering. Lori said, “That man looked like Dad.” Joan was outraged. “No, he did not look like Dad,” she said. “He looked like Uncle Johnny. Dad’s a welder!” She said the word welder as if it meant doctor.They fell asleep, but I felt afraid of the tree outside, the way its long branch es cast shadows across the wallpaper like monstrous arms. We’d seen a terrible thing. We had moved to a foreign town, and we were completely alone. The cocoon of safe ty provided by our extended family had broken open and I was raw and rubbing against a scary new world. My stomach was queasy. I got out of bed and made my way down the hall way, following the dim glow of the TV. My parents were relaxing on the couch, watching The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. “I can’t sleep,” I said. “Well, okay,” Mom told me. “But don’t complain when it’s time to get up tomorrow.”Isatcross legged on the floor in front of them. Dad said that Cher was part In dian and I stared at her on the TV. She shimmied across the stage in a sequined dress, glamorous as any woman I’d ever seen. I looked hard, wondering if she wore thick makeup because Sonny sometimes socked her and she needed to cover the bruises.Ifinally came out and asked, “Why did we have to move away from Yuma?”

When Dad talked about the oppor tunities we had in this country, he always spoke about the Yuma Indians who lived south of the border and who were not rec ognized as US citizens. He asked me to imagine all the families trying to cross the border in the heat and sand, some of them

los angeles review of books 32 to see. The man socked the woman hard in the jaw and she fell, her hair spreading in the air like a Chinese fan. “I can’t watch,” Mom said, covering her face.The guy ran to the driver’s door and got in his truck. He revved the motor and started backing out. The lady was lying in between the tires, and it seemed the truck would go around her, but at the last min ute she lifted her head and looked toward the truck. Then she hugged her arms to her body and rolled right into the path of the oncoming wheels. The two left tires bumped right over her chest. The Indian guy sped out of the park ing lot and disappeared down the street as the lady lay wounded on the dirt and gravel drive. Dad opened his door but de cided against it when the manager of the restaurant came running out. Sirens start ed up in the distance. He said, “Someone called the cops,” and we rolled slowly out of the parking lot. When the manager came out I looked away and couldn’t look back. Monica couldn’t look either, but Joan and Lori had their faces pressed to the window. “She’s still moving,” Joan said, her voice sound ing scratchy.Dadsaid, “The tires would have gone around her if she hadn’t rolled.”

Dad turned the volume down and then dragged me next to him and Mom on the couch. Mom asked if I saw what happened in the parking lot. I said yes, and she said that kind of violence mostly happened between family members.

Dad put his hand up to stop Mom from talking. He said he loved the res ervation but had to be able to criticize it as well. “It would have held me back,” he said, “and you and your sisters, too.”

Hadi Fallahpisheh, Ali The Bear from the performing series “Truth Has Four Legs”, 2017, Unique Photogram.

los angeles review of books 34 dying for the chance to make a living in America when our family had made the cut by mere miles. As Dad spoke, I thought of the state lines we passed coming to New Mexico.

Just before the start of school, Dad drove us to the Four Corners Monument: the point where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet. It sat in a majestic canyon on the Navajo reservation, and as we got out of the car I could see sandstone mesas descending and arching in the dis tance. A strong wind snapped a collec tion of flags on their poles. There was the red, white, and blue, and the Navajo Nation. There were the four state flags. We climbed the steps leading to the center of the flag poles. As we drew close, a simple tomb-like plaque with a cross appeared. Each quarter of the plaque was

I thought of the times he drove us across the border to go to Algodones, Mexico. There were no marks in the earth to in dicate we were crossing. There were only men in uniforms standing at their posts. I realized then that we didn’t cross the border; the border was built to cross and separate us. By the time Dad was 28, he had seen both of his parents die. He was intimate with catastrophe, and knew that it was as cen tral to life as the sun. One day in the fu ture each of us would die, and our families would kiss our foreheads for the last time. The trouble, in his opinion, was not death, but the way some people never accepted it as a part of life. People thought they would live forever, they never questioned the rules of their existence, and they were willing to imprison themselves in taboos, traditions, tribal politics, religious ritu als, superstitions, and totems to prolong the illusion of safety and deny that final breath. Dad said, “I want to live and die as an individual,” and he used that statement as his north star, his guiding principle, the point on the horizon he used to set his tack.For me, all my life I’ve been edging toward home without fully arriving. I was raised between cultural and historical differences. I was taught to practice two types of religious ritual: earth-based and Catholic. I learned to juggle and balance two types of educational wisdom: one intuitive and myth-driven, the other ra tional and scientific. I was a citizen of an Indian tribe and America, two historically warring nations. The result of my bicentennial sum mer was not to retreat, but to grow into an adult who stands against artificial bound aries and despises a divided land. Dad knew that building a life in mainstream America wouldn’t be easy, but when he spoke of my future he always spoke of its promise — he must have believed in the Declaration of Independence. The circumstances of America’s founding are not insignificant, and neither is the role of Native Americans in that story. The idea of the federal government, in which certain powers are given to a central gov ernment and all other powers are reserved for the states, was borrowed from the sys tem of government used by the Iroquoian League of Nations. Rather than white washing history or throwing our govern ment’s mistakes out the window, my Dad showed me that we must try to see our founding in all its complexities. America’s narrow form of patriotism did not fit my family, but that did not mean we were un worthy of belonging in this nation, even if that belonging came at a price, even if it was painful.

35 labeled with one of the four intersecting states. Dad’s cowboy boots clicked on the pavement as he marched up on the plaque and straddled the north-flowing line, placing one foot in Arizona, and one in New Mexico. He looked over his shoulder at us and said, “See? I’m in two states at once.”The possibilities became clear. Joan — bigger, stronger, faster — was the first to react. “Me next!” She hopped the lines like a jump rope, calling each state by name. Monica ran around the plaque in a circle yelling state names as she went. Lori got down on all fours, plac ing her hands in Utah and Colorado, her knees in Arizona and New Mexico. Not to be outdone, Joan returned and did a backbend like one of the gymnasts at the Olympics.When it was my turn, I walked up on the plaque. The sky seemed immense as I reclined directly on the lines and opened my arms in a cross. “I’m between the states,” I said. I didn’t understand the size of the North American continent. I didn’t un derstand the size of the country. I had been in few states and even the scope of the Southwest region was beyond my comprehension. I imagined my own world — New Mexico, Yuma, the church — as inordinately large, the most import ant piece in the big puzzle of earth. Now I added Colorado and Utah and I felt even larger.Dad came and stood over me. “Right over the crossroads,” he said, smiling. DEBORAH TAFFA

37 Birds,I a thousand birds close their eyes and open their eyes sufferPloversbetween trees. Scarlet birds are assaulting crimson stars injuring my skin My voice will soon snap I go mad I sleep soundly. Like a butterfly hatched in a bird’s egg I draw a rainbow on the ground In order to hear the pulsing of a star I bury both cheeks in the breasts of my lover. LikeII a stellar imprisoned inmate in a firmament inside an ear I embedded a demented star in an Elle’s lap. STARS ON EARTH SHUZO TAKIGUCHI tr. mary jo bang & yuki tanaka

los angeles review of books 38 An out-of-sight-out-of-mind star I cannot call out to it On one fine-weather day I will ask the Elle about it From inside the stellar dark a new star gives me its word. Like the child of a beautiful model globe the Elle captures me & the stars of my lips through the mirror of her lips We lose everything as trees lose everything as stars lose everything as songs lose everything. I scribbled verses with the hand that was left like a bolt from the blue, I fell upon Elle. The limitless snowfall of hands the solitary-loneliness of two the countless fountains of palms the pleasure of a pair in an infinite field a nosegay bouquet of cheeks drifts away. BirdsIII made us suffer Stars made us miserable Lit glass tumblers were lying about Sightless birds pass through a net of light Countless glistening hairs This moronic letter that resembles a cellblock. The white freesia prison will soon catch fire And fall away like tears.

SHUZO TAKIGUCHI

Beneath me a she has her eyes shut Below me an Elle has her eyes closed Birds bring us a green grassland. Her calfskin eyelids are the color of wet gold Like Leda like a Holy white lily her torso-fork is empty I even spotted a beggar begging there All sorts of malices were floating about I can even move the white cylindrical forms. A Buddha is dead. LikeV the darkness each instant brings the blue sky nearer One-by-one I take off her pearls We get turned on like airplanes & grow sad like flatfish Like a single star on earth we are one My gametes flutter like a dole of doves I write a verse as old as a Tibetan temple Then rip it up I write a verse I write a verse Then rip it up It had a red rose scent It had a gassy stench. Her cheek seen fogged like an icecap Her sex seen misted like flowers & birds will go on forever and ever living in the wind like erratic rocks. Sightless birds pass through a net of light.

BirdsIV warmed up this world

SEXY IS THE AUNT WHO HOLDS THE MUG FIONA LANDERS

I curled my stumpy fingers around its ir regular handle and gave it a pathetic air swirl. I could feel the bold desperation of the mug crying out to my very soul. I gazed at it and my jaw collapsed, knowing I would never again behold a pair of fonts more cheerful or grotesque. The text on the mug read Sexy Aunt, and you’d better believe the Sexy was bigger than the Aunt. The Sexy triumphantly took up two-thirds of the mug, the Aunt, a piddling third. Reminding us that an aunt who isn’t sexy probably shouldn’t take up any space at all. There was a wholesome violence lurking within these fonts. The Sexy was not only essay

My family has a history of giving sexy coffee mugs as gifts. It is not weird, it is good. My sister, Lily, gave me my most treasured sexy mug when she told me she was pregnant. When she let me know we would both soon be bringing a new life into the world. Her: a baby. Me: a sexy, full-grown aunt. She placed the mug in my palm, and we both teared up. “It was the ugliest one I could find.”

41 colossal, it was medieval — Carolingian calligraphy fit for a scroll, something un furled by a maiden, announcing she just lost an archery competition and is now looking to get fucked by the village barrel maker. Or the village fishmonger. Or even the village gongfarmer (the guy who emp ties the latrines).

Everything about the mug shouts: I have no children and that is good, because I am far too busy with “sex” and scrapbooking my regrets. It screams: I just can’t stop sex ting the assistant manager of Black Angus from this Marshall’s dressing room. Welp, looks like he wants to have traditional au dio phone sex so away we go. Hello Rory, I’m at Marshall’s. Oh, you love the iconic swamp smell of Marshall’s, do you? You disgusting, bad, bad boy. Well you’re in luck, Rory, because I buy all my underwear here, and it doesn’t matter how many times I wash those suckers, they still retain that signature Marshall’s musk of rejected jelly beans and wet hay. Hang on to your dick, Rory, because this Marshall’s has an esca lator. Yeah, it’s a big Marshall’s. Why don’t you take the escalator down to my vulva, we’re having a sale on seasonal popcorn. Yeah, those big tubs of holiday popcorn are on sale for $5.99 and they’re in the same aisle as the coat hangers. No, there isn’t any universal order to Marshall’s, it’s chaos, that’s why it’s so hot. Hang on, I’m just gonna have a sip of tea. Mmm-hmm, I’m drinking room-temp raspberry zinger out of my Sexy Aunt mug, Rory, try not to come all over the employee restroom at Black Angus. Don’t, Rory. Your supe riors will find out and then you’ll never climb the corporate ladder of the Temec ula Black Angus, and I want that for you because sexy aunts emotionally support losers. It comes with the territory. I see your potential Rory, it is minuscule, only the squinting eyes of a sexy aunt can see it — Okay, did you finish? Great, because I’m attempting to try on a romper and it’s gonna take 55 minutes minimum. ¤ Sometimes I just stare at the mug and think, “God, I’m sexy and an aunt, what a conundrum.” Growing up, I didn’t have sexy aunts to look up to. It’s not that they weren’t physically attractive, it was their behavior that wasn’t very sexy. Here’s a good example of my aunts’ unsexy behavior: When my dad — their brother-in-law — died from cancer at the age of 62, they processed their grief by accusing me and my sister of steal ing a rocking horse. We caught wind of the accusation via our mother. She said, “Um, I just talked to Aunt Marge and she thinks you stole Aunt Gladys’s rock ing horse while you were cleaning your dad’s stuff out of Grandma and Grandpa’s cellar.”“Oh my god, poor Aunt Gladys,” I said. “She must be in so much distress over this missing rocking horse tragedy. Jeez, first Dad dying six days ago and now this? I better call her. Aunt Gladys, hi, it’s Fiona, the alleged rocking horse bandit. I’m so sorry your grief style is asshat, that must feel psychotic. Anyway, I just want

The Aunt font could only be described as Dungeon Nun — The Sound of Music of fonts. The Aunt font runs to the hills singing, “I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain. I have confidence that tonight I am getting railed by a real folksy-dom of a captain who enjoys har monizing with his kids and stabbing Nazis in the ear if he has to.”

FIONA LANDERS

¤ I was in the room when Lily shot my nephew out of her body. He flew like an arrow, but he landed limp, slick, and purple. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice like a snake. A nurse rushed to Lily’s side. “Your baby just needs a little help breathing.” Kevin, my brother -in-law, buried his face in his hands as three nurses transferred his baby to what looked like a hotplate from the future and vigorously rubbed his tiny chest with their fingers. The world ended and began in the span of 50 seconds. After 50 seconds, the baby cried and we leapt to the ceiling of the hospital. My mother and I threw our arms around Kevin and there was that unspoken language again. His body shook with the knowledge it was now suddenly made of glass. He stood frozen, struck by Love’s quiver, the arrow sticking out of his chest. I pulled the arrow out of his chest so he could hold his son. I yanked it out the only way a sexy aunt could — with my teeth. He asked Lily what their son’s name was. She said, “His name is Matteo and he has the sexiest aunt in Sherman Oaks.” I spit the arrow out of my mouth and held my nephew to my pumping heart. I cra dled him like I cradled the cherub who shot his father. The cherub who shot us all. We worshipped the arrow Lily had launched from her body with the preci sion and triumph of Artemis. There we all were. Struck. Shattered. New. Our sexy mugs runneth over.

43 ed to call and clear up the whole rocking horse fiasco. Okay. So. That rocking horse either never existed on the physical plane or my grandma sold it at an estate sale in 1977. I am truly sorry I can’t help you lo cate this mythical, wooden creature. Wait, actually, Aunt Gladys, it’s time for me to come clean. I did steal your rocking horse and I just can’t stop riding it. I am rid ing your prelude to an aneurysm, I mean rocking horse, day in day out and it feels so damn good. I actually gave my dad can cer just so I could ride your strictly figura tive rocking horse off into the sunset. Just kidding, I ride it in the closet right next to your pile of skeletons, Aunt Gladys. Lily and I had been planning this heist for years. We thought, “Hahaha, no one is gonna see this coming. Nothin’ to see here, folks, just a couple of grown-up grand daughters holding their grandmother’s hands because she just lost a son.” But then she forgot she lost him. She forgot she even had him, and there was a mer cy in that. But there was no mercy in her hands, which shook with knowing. Our hands were suddenly speaking a language I had never spoken before. A language without words. She wrapped her fingers around my wrist like a tangled umbilical cord. She looked at me and I experienced firsthand the heart superseding the brain. Her tele pathic grief coursing through her body — a result of the love transfusion that had infected her blood since his birth. To love and grieve and die. You hardly need a brain for any of it. It was then that I leaned over and whispered into my grand mother’s ear, “Hey, Grandma? Can you let go of my wrist now? There’s this rocking horse … thing me and Lily have to get to and we’re kind of on a time crunch. I know you’re not remembering much these days but does Ocean’s Eleven ring a bell? With Sticklegs Sinatra! Yes! Oh my god, you’re such a delight. We’re doing an Ocean’s Eleven with Aunt Gladys’s rocking horse. Yes, the one you sold in 1977.”

FIONA

LANDERS

44 Orphan Kim Gyeong-nam (age 16) from "THE ORPHANS" DON MEE CHOI

Our big sister hid my brother under her skirt and sat on him to keep him alive. He screamed and screamed. I could only grab a clump of Mother’s hair. I couldn’t put out the flames. Father sizzled and crackled. My brother screamed and screamed. In a dream I chew and chew Mother’s hair.

My little brother came home barefoot covered in blood. He got out alive from the mass grave. He said, I stepped on dead bodies. The grave filled with blood. I asked, Did our parents run away without us? No they are all dead. He screamed and screamed. I didn’t believe him. No they’ll come back alive.

46 Orphan Jeong Jeong-ja (age 8)

In a dream I asked my auntie if I could touch the moon. Everyone was wearing pretty blouses and skirts except for me. My mom and sister took off, leaving me behind. It was snowing. I saw a cluster of fleas. They were soldiers. They yelled, Come out! Listen to our speech! I didn’t know what speech was. Speech was scary. Commies! Bastards! Not even human! Not better than dogs! The fleas scattered, then began spitting at us. Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Speech was scary. I was the only one wailing in my dream. Then I was hungry. I asked my auntie if I could touch the Milky Way.

Estelle Srivijittakar, Sweeping the Tomb, 2019, armoire, graphite, steel, inkjet, highlighter, 90 x 60 in.

from ROMANCEMARSEILLEIN

CLAUDE MCKAY

From the thought of having an irrespon sible gay time in Quayside with Lafala, Babel turned to work. The loss of both legs to which Lafala was now quite rec onciled was a fresh and terrible shock to Babel. On Babel’s mind was painted a pic ture of the day when he and Lafala stowed away on the same boat, both of them poor and ragged but robust and happy, sound of legs. He imagined himself painfully in Lafala’s place, his huge body without legs. He couldn’t imagine how comfort able Lafala felt with his thousand-dollar bonds. . . .Early the next morning Babel went down to the docks and secured a job with a gang of Senegalese unloading copra. . . . In the evening he looked up Big Blonde.

fiction

CHAPTER TWENTY

Big Blonde was mighty glad to see Babel out of prison and to hear that La fala was also free. He was sorry he had missed last night’s party, but he had gone to bed early to be fit for a hard day’s work, for tonight he was going on a special private party himself. Babel said he was hoping Big Blonde could join them that night. Lafala wanted to treat him and St. Dominique and Falope to a little gettogether between them only to celebrate their coming out of prison. But Big Blonde replied that he was engaged for the night with Petit Frère and he became quite lyrical about it. Nothing could make him break that engagement. Not for the love of a drinking party which always delighted him, nor the bouquets of the rarest wines, nor the music of hy men though sweet with the honey of the queen bee and glorious like the songs of Solomon’s loves, no not for the virgin stars of the sky nor a brighter shining moon. And in the midst of his lyricism Petit Frère arrived, fascinating with his pale prettiness and challenging, deep, dark-ringed eyes and insolent mouth. He had departed from La Créole because of some disagreement with Madam and was now engaged as a bar boy at the Domino café and this was his night off.

los angeles review of books 50 Big Blonde lived near the cathedral mid way between Quayside and the breakwa ter. He was sprucing himself up in his best suit when Babel entered.

Babel’s being present was opportune, for Petit Frère had a story to tell. At the Domino he had overheard a little of a con versation between Titin and the Grand Maquereau, who was also entitled the Duke of Quayside. The conversation was about Lafala and the scheme of Aslima to despoil him. Petit Frère hated Titin. For it was Titin who had been instrumen tal in getting him the place at La Créole and he had had to pay Titin at regular in tervals for it. Big Blonde was inclined to take the thing lightly, saying that Lafala had ex perience enough to look out for himself, but Babel insisted it was a serious mat ter, for Lafala was losing his head over Aslima. He wanted Big Blonde and Petit Frère to go with him to see Lafala. Big Blonde said it was common knowledge that the protectors were well organized and he couldn’t believe that Lafala would easily allow himself to fall into a trap. Babel replied that it wouldn’t be so hard to believe if Big Blonde was less interested in petits frères and more in petites filles. Big Blonde guffawed and excused himself from joining Lafala and the others that night for just that reason. He and Petit Frère were going to dine together and af terward resort to a certain little café. . . . Babel felt that he was no longer bound to silence after what Petit Frère had said. Aslima’s intentions would soon be common underground knowledge in Quayside. Babel decided to go right then to St. Dominique and ask him to try to talk Lafala out of the crazy idea. He found St. Dominique with Falope in a little restaurant near the Seamen’s Club. St. Dominique was not surprised at Babel’s revelation. He had seen enough into Lafala’s amorous feelings to under stand that he might do something just like that. He said that he didn’t think Lafala was wise. Falope thought he was a fool. Meanwhile Lafala had quite made up his mind about it. He had known a girl or two in his life and Aslima was the only one he had ever felt he could live with. Under her coarse and hard exterior there was always that rare green and fruity quality which had so intoxicated him when they

“I think Aslima is all right,” said Lafala. “She gypped you for a white tout once and she’ll do it again,” said Babel. “I can’t understand you, Lafala,” said Falope. “You must be spoiled by civili zation. What you’re planning to do isn’t right at all. It isn’t African. It’s a loving white“Oh,way.”no, I’ve passed all through that already,” said Lafala. “But you weren’t cured,” said Falope. “Yes, I went crazy once, black fool that I was, but I got over it.”

51 first met. Something was always burning, never consuming itself and going out, but always holding him. The night before they had talked over a perfect plan of stealing away from Marseille. It would be the easiest thing to accomplish without anybody being aware. Thus Lafala was full of sweet thoughts and dressing to go to visit Aslima when his room was invaded by Babel, St. Dominique and Falope. . . . Petit Frère’s tale did not make much impression upon him. He was aware of the differences and mistrust existing between Titin and Aslima and it seemed natural to him that Titin should seek the counsel of other members of his fraternity. He did not say this to his friends but he was displeased with Babel for revealing his plans to St. Dominique and Falope. Lafala was more apprehensive of Titin getting information from other sources which might stir up new suspicions and endanger his plans. Babel defended himself: “I didn’t say a thing to you’ friends heah until the kid done told me and Big Blonde. What was the use keeping me mouth shut when other folkses talking about it?”

“Love! What is this thing called love?” said “JestFalope.afunny little word with four let ters,” said Babel, “the same as rope with which you hang yourself.”

“But you’re joking, Lafala,” said Falope. “You can’t really mean to do such a thing.”Lafala said he did. “Impossible!” said Falope. “Pardon me butting into your private affair, but you don’t seem to have any idea of your proper position. You don’t seem to realize you’re a different man than before your accident — a better man, a bigger man. How could you think of taking a girl like Aslima back to Africa now? You ought to have a col ored woman that can stand up against the best European women over there — a woman that can be an example to the na tive women.”

“It’s four in your language and Petit Frère’s, but it’s five in mine,” said St. Dominique.“FiveFrench letters and four English to make love,” said Falope. “Enough, my friends, enough for tonight.”

“Youse all getting too high-classish literally for me,” said Babel. “Guess tha’s some moh you’ civilization.” “Yes,” agreed St. Dominique. “I prefer to think of love without letters.”

CLAUDE MCKAY

“Better you’d stayed on the crazy side,” said Falope, “than doing what you’re planning to do now.” “Shut up, you,” said St. Dominique. “You’ve got no feeling for anything. I un derstand what Lafala is talking about. I’ve been through the same experience myself.” “Oh, yes!” exclaimed Falope. “Now I know why you’re a red.” “Oh, go on!” said St. Dominique. . . . “Look here, Lafala, I thought you were doing a crazy thing at first, but now I feel that if you love Aslima it’s all right. I can’t see anything so awful happening. Just go right ahead if you love her.”

CHAPTERBabel.TWENTY-ONE

A phonograph at one end of the bar was wheezing out a popular bal-musette song, but the music sounded plaintive as if it were asking why more attention was not being paid to it there.

Big Blonde and Petit Frère went to dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Petit Frère was a hearty eater and they ate plenty of several dishes: chopped pork and celery, chopped chicken, fish with thick sauce, rice and tea. Finished feeding they went to the Petit Pain, a little café bar that was Big Blonde’s favorite place when he was in a sentimental mood and wanted to spend a quiet evening with his little friend. The bar was in another quarter of Marseille far removed from Quayside and its hectic atmosphere. It was located in the vicinity of the principal railroad sta tion in a narrow and somber alley. Like the street there was something a little sin ister and something very alluring in this café, but difficult to define. It was a quality strangely balancing between the emotions of laughter and tears, ribaldry and bittersweetness. The bar was run by a rather young man and his middle-aged paramour. The man was tall and very thin and his bloodless skin was like parchment upon his flesh and looked as if it were drawn away from his mouth. The woman was a spreading type in happy relief against the sharp harshness of the man.

Big Blonde ordered two coffees and two glasses of cognac and asked for the checkerboard. He and Petit Frère began playing checkers. Petit Frère was a poor player and Big Blonde made bad moves to give him a chance and make the game in teresting. Petit Frère won the game and was elegantly preening himself over it when a taxicab slowly negotiating the narrow al ley stopped before the Petit Pain. Babel alighted and helped out Lafala who was followed by St. Dominique and Falope.

A few clients were there when Big Blonde and Petit Frère entered. Two men of middle-class respectability were throw ing dice for a game called “Pigs” with three lads evidently of the slum proletar iat. Two fine and handsome sailors were sipping cognac and sugar with a young man slickly dressed in black like a pro fessional dancer. They soaked the cubes of sugar in the cognac and ate them and the right cheek of the young man twitched at regular intervals like a poor fish out of water and gasping for breath. A soldier was sitting alone over a small beer. And also alone at a table in a corner there was a woman with half a glass of coffee per fumed with cognac between her sad el bows stuck at a weary slant into the table, her fingers crossed over her eyes.

los angeles review of books 52 “Like the time when it was naked and we were too, before we went to school to learn our letters,” said Falope. “No, Dominique. You can’t be primitive and proletarian at the same time. We can’t go back again. We have studied our figures and learned our letters. Now we are civ ilized.”At that moment a boy knocked at the door and entered with a letter for Lafala. He opened it and read: “Look out, they’re trying to get you with your own plan. Take warning from Insider.” Lafala’s face went blank. He passed the note to St. Dominique who read it aloud. “That tells its own tale,” said Falope. “Better let’s go and find Big Blonde so Lafala can hear the story from the kid himself,” said

“Lawd no!” said Babel. “They are all young and jolly and working together at the same trade.”

The other clients had left excepting the soldier and the old woman in the corner with her still-unfinished glass of coffee perfumed with cognac. Two little brunettes resembling twins and dressed alike in soiled black frocks and red belts and brown canvas shoes looked in at the door of the café. They were just out on a cruising from a little bal-musette in a neighboring alley.

“But the little brothers steal business away from them,” said St. Dominique.

CLAUDE MCKAY

“There is Petit Frère!” said one. Petit Frère lifted his hand in greeting and the girls entered. They kissed him os tentatiously and one of them drained his glass of wine. Lafala poured the other a drink.“Play the phonograph and let’s dance,” she said. The proprietor said they couldn’t dance for he had no dancing license. The girls glanced around and patted their hair and cheeks looking in a mirror.

“I never understand why the girls are so affectionate with their little brothers,” said St. Dominique to Babel in English. “I should think they would be jealous.”

“Come on down to the dancing when you are finished,” said one of them to Petit Frère and they ran out again.

They entered the café adding to the uni formly pale atmosphere a touch of that exotic color for which Marseille is famous. Petit Frère could add nothing more to what Babel had already said. Lafala asked him about the Grand Maquereau and his relationship with Titin. But Petit Frère did not know anything specific. He was a simple kid and knew nothing of the extent and ramifications of the métier by which he ate his daily bread. And now Falope tried every way to scare Lafala away from his infatuation, magnifying the ingenuity and resource fulness of the protectors, telling how they outwitted and bribed the police, victim ized women, terrorizing timid men and always evading the law which was pow erless against them. It sounded frightful, especially as Falope, spending his time between his office and a cheap respect able pension in Marseille, knew nothing about the romantic gentlemen. Lafala knew more because he had lived all of his civilized life in their milieu without ever minding them and how they lived behind their well-dressed facade. There were quite a number of Negro protectors down at Quayside since the Great War, who were seriously competing with the white natives. Only the Negroes were not as closely knit in relationships with the bars and the loving houses as the old na tives. Lafala himself had had his chance of being a protector or some approximate thing in well-kept ease. But he had not taken advantage of it, not feeling equal to the job of remaining forever a black god consecrated to the worship of phallicism. “Let’s forget the damned thing,” he said, and proposed standing a treat and paying his respects to Big Blonde for his part in helping to get him and Babel out of jail. They gathered in a circle round two tables and Lafala ordered spumante wine. They drank many bottles. Big Blonde was a heavy, good-natured drinker. Now that the lads had invaded his retreat, he gave himself willingly to the enjoyment of the party. He didn’t want to impose Petit Frère upon them when he was invit ed. But it was all right to have him in the crowd since they had come themselves to find him. And Petit Frère was pleased.

cul-cassé and dirty mouth!” the woman cried at Petit Frère. “Little suck ing pig!”“Better to be a sucking pig than an old good-for-nothing sow,” said Petit Frère. Discomfited, the woman left the café and the men laughed hilariously. Big Blonde complimented Petit Frère: “Fine! You were a match for her.” “Come on, let’s do the moon-song, again,” said Babel. And he began singing: “I was stricken by the moon. . . .”

But after an interval the woman re turned, looking along the floor as if she had forgotten something. Passing by the group she quickly took a paper full of filth from her basket and slapped it in Petit Frère’s face. “There! That is your life,” she cried. Big Blonde jumped up and knocked her sprawling to the floor and flung the

los angeles review of books 54 “And their men too sometimes,” Babel laughed. “That’s why the little sisters keep on the good side of the little brothers.” “Quayside, it’s business above every thing else,” said Lafala. “Our little broth ers are liked and tolerated, because they’re good“You’rebusiness.”right,” said Babel, putting his hand round Petit Frère’s shoulder. Big Blonde removed it playfully, say ing, “Keep your hand off that, old man.”

Laughing, Babel said, “Lemme sing you all a little song. My song is entitled ‘Moonstruck’:Iwasstricken by the moon, I was smitten by the moon, Crazy for the fairy moon, It lighted my heart and it caused me to roamFar away from my loving wife waiting at Thehome.”tunewas slow and pretty and sound ed like a sentimental tango. The others began humming to Babel’s singing.“Come on, Big Blonde,” said Babel. “Let us dance to this thing.”

Big Blonde got up and he and Babel began an ungainly shuffle. “Boss,” said Ba bel, “the police can’t interfere for this ain’t no dancing. We just swaying to the music of the“Lookmoon.”out the moon madness don’t get you too,” said Lafala to Babel. “I’m crazy all ways bar none,” replied Babel.And while they were joking and drink ing an old woman entered with a basket of dolls and such baubles that are hawked around all-night cafés and cabarets. She was prematurely grey and her skin was wrinkled and her mouth twisted and she looked like an old cocotte to whom time and people had been cruel. She offered her wares to the men, dan gling a doll by the leg. Big Blonde, happy in his environment and a little maudlin, was going to buy something to be rid of the poor hag but Petit Frère stopped him with a nudge that she did not miss. Babel roughly told her that they didn’t want anything, she was in the wrong place.

“Indeed I am, there’s no doubt I am when you have that thing there between you,” she said, fixing Petit Frère with a malevolent“Whetherfinger.Iwas here or not, old cow,” said Petit Frère, “it wouldn’t make any dif ference, for you’re too God-forsaken old and “Andugly.”you’re so pretty, like a doll,” said the woman. “You all ought to buy him a doll. He’d be more darling with one in his arms.”“Yes, I’d look better than you selling them,” said Petit Frère. “Old useless and jealous“Petithas-been.”

CLAUDE MCKAY

55 basket through the door of the café, scat tering the contents. The paramour of the proprietor came from round the bar and picked the woman up and pushed her out of the door. The woman stood in the street, swearing and picking up her wares and demanding payment for them. But the proprietor threatened to telephone for the police and she quickly disappeared. . . . Meanwhile Petit Frère had slipped away to the lavatory to clean himself up. “Well, that’s a pretty ending to your moon song, fellows,” said St. Dominique. “I am going home now.” “Oh, don’t break the party up yet,” said Babel. “Let’s finish it up at Quayside. I feel like going up the rags.” Petit Frère returned, well-washed and looking none the worse for his ordeal. “If I ever run across that old sow again I’ll cut her twat out and give it to the dogs,” he said.Everybody laughed. “Here, have a drink on that,” said Babel to Petit Frère, “and let’s sing the moon-song.”Babelbegan singing and shaking Big Blonde who had his head down on the ta ble as if he were drunk: “Come on, let’s sing together.” But he discovered that Big Blonde was crying softly. “He’s drunk!” said Babel. “Let’s go,” said St. Dominique. Lafala called the proprietor and paid the bill. Petit Frère shook Big Blonde. “He’s drunk! Leave him alone till he’s sober,” said Babel. And the four of them went out, leaving Big Blonde and Petit Frère alone. From Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by The Literary Estate for the Works of Claude McKay.

1997-2018, Hi8

37:30

Carissa Rodriguez, The Girls, video (digitized), minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

57 CollectMindfula sand dollar from dry sand And not from silted shallows While wet it’s very much alive and To you’ll consign its sorrows NeverTrustfulness*takefrom a father’s shelf Impressions of ancient reptile Or you’ll fossilize your heart And forever bleed out bile IfReprisal*asweetheart aims to stray For a neighbor’s tryst Secure a means to shake Nettles on her sheets THREE CHARMS FROM FOREIGN BODIES KIMIKO HAHN

“Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said. And probably wanted to add on to that, Starting with me. He knowed the fools he was dealing with. But Mr._______ not Christ. I’m not Christ, I Yousay.somebody to Nettie, she say. And she be pissed if you change on her while she on her way home.”

1 Choreography and sonicity, movement and sound, always working and acting and function ing and being performed simultaneously; the di vision between movement and sound is illusory and the word choresonic marks that connection.

And forgiveness, in black, is anaes thetic labor. It is in the sound, in the vibration, in the music. The choreosonic sociality1 of blackness informs the way I consider various kinds of practice as pul sating with life, with birth and breath. Continually.Itisinthe sound, in the vibration, in the music. Listen to the way Hammond organists in black churches take up the

ASHON CRAWLEY

essay 58 OF FORGIVENESS

ASHON CRAWLEY

59 instrument, how they become made in strument with the mechanical object. How they announce with each chord change and bass run, with each arpeggio and flatted fifth, each suspended and aug mented chord, possibility for difference. They could choose to play other progres sions, other notes, other chords. But they choose this way in this particular moment to respond to the moment of worship, of praise. The keyboards are constraints but also occasions for the practice of differ ence. This is a way to think worlds. It is the practice of inventiveness, of construc tion, of making worlds otherwise than the given. It is in the way of and on the way to an abolition from — and of — the given, the normative, as all that is possible.

I listen to the practices of Hammond organists in the black gospel tradition a lot. And one thing I noted before I ever played myself is that the concept of same ness and difference is constantly in flux and flow, is continually engaged through expansion and critique. You can play the same song differently, you can play the song “Blessed Assurance” or “Amazing Grace” in various ways based on the chord progressions chosen in any pursuit of per formance at a given moment. Yet this same with difference not only happens with and in the same musician but also across different musicians. It is why there is something noted as a Detroit style or Chicago sound or a Brooklyn sound that is difficult to describe if you’re not a musicologist — I am not one — but that you can sense and feel when it’s happening.Theunexpected chord following an other chord or melodic line or run. That unexpected, the moment of delight and surprise. That unexpected, the practice of tension and release. Like the copula deletion in the preceding two sentences, the inventiveness the Hammond organ ist plays emerges alongside and against the anticipatory drive of musical phrasing and statement. You expect the choreoson ic corollate of the is but it doesn’t come, that loss compels you to sense the sen tence, and sense into it, into what is ex pected but not there, what’s there but does not emerge. You hear, you sense, the same withThisdifference.feeling and sensing of the same with difference calls out some viscerality in the chest, in flesh. This is the effec tuation of the anaesthetic practice. It is anaesthetic insofar as the numbing and deadening of sense perception are partly the objective of the practice, which in it self creates and sustains and encloses, the individual subject. But. There is more. This more is the and. And an opening to sense perception being what it’s always been — a collective practice of the social world. ¤ It’s in the constant struggle that free dom is found, Angela Davis informs us. We share in air. Here. In this place. We flesh. Even those that have renounced relation to flesh, which is their relation to the earth, to the social, to the sensual sound, to blackness. And it is urgent to think about how we can live together, to breathe with one another — to, as Gwen dolyn Brooks says, live in the along. This, in the language of Katherine McKittrick, livingness of blackness is a syncopated, ar rhythmic, polyrhythmic thing. Found in the sound, in the music. Not about or for or in the direction of linear progression of spacetime but is a thing that happens in some otherwise relation to normative time and space. It also doesn’t long to re

Asako Narahashi, Jumeirah Beach, Dubai, from the series Coming Closer and Getting Further Away, 2009. © Asako Narahashi. Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

Forgivenesstemporality.¤isonthe

61 turn to normative function and form; it is instead about an otherwise form of music and an otherwise praxis that would pro duce a radical alternative to and against the normative in our current moment. A different

And sister, Alissa Charles-Findley: What Brandt did, I truly admire.

minds and mouths of lots of folks, again as if for the first time. Eternally. Amber Guyger was convict ed of murdering Botham Jean. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Brother Brandt Jean offered a hug to Guyger, said he forgave her. “I forgive you. […] I want the best for you, because I know that’s what Botham would want you to do. […] Can I give her a hug, please?” This gesture was interpreted in endless ways — as an act of genuine compassion, as forgiveness for settler colonialism and white suprem acy, as backward spirituality and religios ity, as silly and dangerous indoctrination, as the pandering to white woman tears. Allison Jean, Botham’s mother, after noticing the dismissive and deeply terrible ways people responded to her son, stated, What Brandt did today was re markable. […] But I don’t want the community to be mistaken by what happened in the courtroom. Forgiveness for us as Christians is healing for us. But as my hus band said, there are consequences. It does not mean that everything else we have suffered has to go Andunnoticed.fatherBetrum Jean: “We don’t hate you, [Amber]. You have broken us but we would like to become friends at some point in time, I believe I have the ability to do it, despite my loss. God is good. That is why I want to do this.”

I pray everyday [sic] to get to the point of forgiveness and he is al ready there. That’s a weight lifted from him. He hugged our broth ers [sic] killer to free himself and I stand behind him 100%. For those who feel any different, I respect that. Not everyone is in the same mental place at the same time — but do not be disrespectful with your posts and comments on so cial media or by word of mouth. Let my brother be free and keep the negativity to yourselves.

There have been, of course, compari sons made to the family members of the Charleston 9, who also expressed the de sire to forgive the murderer. In both in stances, this desire to practice forgiveness is blamed on Christianity, which is then understood as a kind of weakness. This is a kind of Christianity which makes people docile and unacting, which placates peo ple instead of allowing for anger and rage to flourish. The victims of the violence of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy are then blamed for not having the proper affective or emotional response to trauma and Butviolence.Ithink what happens is an at tempt to act out what I call an anepiste mology of feeling. This is not an individual’s feeling and affect and emotion and mood that is a kind of private property one can own and exchange. Rather, the anepis temology of feeling is about a collective practice of care for and in and with the

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62 los angeles review of books social world. Affect and mood would then not be predicated upon innocence or blamelessness but the fact of birth and breath as the grounds for attempting to refuse the logics of white supremacy, in cluding the affective responses it is sup posed to presume or forestall. What if we actually thought about what the Jeans did — the complexity of their words, and actions, as well as their incredible sense for possibility in this, and thus against the normative, world? What if we considered forgiveness to be a reck oning and confrontation with what hap pened, is happening, will happen? What if we considered it to be a reckoning and confrontation with harm done? What if we recognized it as not the search for inno cence but a choreosonic vibration out from a different epistemology that doesn’t search for perfect victims, victims that would then perform victimhood “correctly”? Harm harms the social worlds. What if forgiveness — like the practice the Jeans elaborated for us — emerges from a collec tive practice? What if we begin to think of it as a feeling that refuses to consider harm on an individual basis even when harm has in fact been inflicted on certain indi viduals? And in deeply racialized, classed, gendered, sexed ways? What if forgive ness takes the collective shared breath and breathing as its line and root? And what if from this form of forgiveness otherwise, we might create a different kind of wrestling with the Thenworld?itwould be this: It would be a practice that exceeds reason, sense, log ic, rationality. Forgiveness would exceed these insofar as reason, sense, logic and rationality are the products of modern constructions of the proper ways to be a human. This form of forgiveness would otherwise go beyond the imperative to divide mind from flesh like a good Car tesian dualist. This form of forgiveness would not be property to own but a thing in which we share, a practice that allows for deep connection to all that is. It is ca pacious, widening, against enclosure. And that it is most forcefully felt in moments of the reprehensible and illogical. But what would be considered reprehensible and illogical would only evince one hori zon. Like Octavia Butler says about new ness and suns, there are other horizons. Brandt Jean is already there. And, and also but, so is Esaw Garner, wife of deceased Eric Garner. She said, “As long as I have a breath in my body, I will contin ue to fight the fight to the end” toward jus tice for his murder. And when asked if she would forgive former police officer Daniel Pantaleo, she responded, “Hell no. The time to show remorse would have been when my husband was yelling to breathe.” The prac tice, whatever practice it might be, must be non-coercive, has to be the desire of the one — the ones — that are responding to the way — the ways — harm occurred. Can we hold this complexity? The fact of her refusal with the fact of Brandt Jean’s refusal? They are, perhaps like the sound emanating between Chicago and Detroit and Brooklyn Hammond organists, the same with difference, attempts to feel and feel with and in and through the com plexity of our world, the desire for other wise than this. Garner’s response was both about the murder of her husband and the material conditions of the world in which she lives — the concern about feeding her children, providing shelter and clothing, the deep practice of care and parenting that was interrupted because of police vi olence. She was indicting the world with her hell no.

CRAWLEY

ASHON

And the Jeans, too, indict the world. I have been attempting to reject Greek ide als of movement — the idea that life is a series of movements higher, away from the flesh, away from the social, toward some thing ephemeral, ideal, heavenly, amateri al. Such that the Jeans aren’t trying to be higher or better than or more ideal than the Garners. Perhaps we find movement inward, into a way of living that rejects the division between the so-called interi or from the exterior life. I want to focus on the Jeans’ practice of forgiveness be cause of the way it was so readily and im mediately dismissed as a too-immediate and too-ready act of immorality, a tooimmediate and too-ready act of resigned religiosity, an unthinking, unfeeling act, which in and of itself supported white su premacy. Narrated, in a word, as simple. Can this — the desired practice of forgiveness and compassion and hugs of perpetrators of violence and offers of friendship — be weaponized in the service of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy? Certainly. It has in the past and continues. For those committed to the normative world and its operation, who only want inclusion and consider reform as the hori zon of their thrust and imaginative drive, then yes, this practice of the Jeans can be used in the service of the project of white supremacy. But that is not the fault of the ones attempting to practice it. What we must do is create conditions under which harm can be acknowledged and confront ed in all its complexity.¤ James Cone is an ancestor. His work guides, still, to think otherwise possibility. In and as a flesh thing. The imagination for and practice of the alternative. His at tempt to honor the people, most funda mentally and foundationally, of Bearden, Arkansas — the folks that made his birth and breath and thought and theorizations possible — is what we find throughout the arc of the work and teaching he prac ticed and shared with the world. What he was after is a way to think the density and complexity of the dense and com plex world that gifted him a love of black breath and breathing. In God of the Oppressed, he offered this: The black tradition breaks down the false distinctions between the sacred and the secular and invites us to look for Christ’s meaning in the spirituals and the blues, folk lore and sermon. Christ’s mean ing is not only expressed in the formal church doctrine but also in the rhythm, the beat, and the swing of life, as the people re spond to the vision that stamps dignity upon their personhood. Right here we have the opening, the in cipient movement, of the double critique of theology and philosophy, particularly in the way that it marks persons to be either included or excluded from its zone and domain. This marking of persons by way of inclusion or exclusion is the practice of power and authority vested in the ones that nominate themselves to perform such serrational activity, and yes, such violence.

The black tradition, Cone informs readers, is antagonistic to such serrational activity, such divisionary practice. And it is because the black tradition is a prac tice and activity and movement against enclosure. It is a practice and activity in which meaning exceeds the enclosures of doctrine and theology. The black tradition

los angeles review of books 64 — and not all things that black people do or perform or merely gesture; but a tradi tion made by the enactment of otherwise possibility in the service of the flourishing of all life and birth and breath — cannot be reducible to doctrines and creeds and what we call the religious, though it is no doubt a forcefully spiritual thing.

James Cone, and Black Theology in general, is the thought of one otherwise possibility or alternative to and not of the ology. But, and also, this does not mean that we should rest there. We have to de termine what are the resources, particular ly of performative fleshly practices, that a modality of thought allows to emerge for us as gift and gifting. What happens, for example, if you don’t accede to the idea of a deity as all knowing, everywhere present and, most importantly, all powerful? What if there is a weak god? What if that weak god is one that cannot change things but can be in relation with you still? This is friendship. Not as an object to be owned but a desired practice in which to share. ¤ For some, there is embarrassment and deep shame around the posture of com passion. Because it is thought weakness. And weakness is thought to be a sign of colonization. But if I am informed by a Christianity (I claim agnosticostalism, an agnostic with Pentecostal roots and lean ings), it is the one Lynice Pinkard preach es — weakness is not a thing we should shun, and strength is not a thing we should aspire to in this normative world. On the one hand, the concept of weakness as a state that we should escape — forgive ness being an expression of this state — is deeply ableist in its construction, because it considers strength as a kind of norma tive ideal. Fitness and health become de pendent on a state of strength. But what if we think of weakness dif ferently? What if weakness is the refusal to center white supremacist violence as the main producer of possible behavior and response? Then, perhaps, weakness is a gift. That is, to give or withhold a thing because of structural racism is to only and ever respond to that thing as the center ing logic for life and birth and breath. But the tradition of the same with difference does not take as its line and root white su premacy. Because it does not think white supremacy as a creative capacity. Such that whiteness does not and cannot create the thing enacted and practiced and loved called blackness, it can only respond to it. And with violent force. Shug understood this truth, taught it and breathed it and shared it with Celie. Wanted Celie to be who Nettie was wait ing for, not something transformed by Nettie’s having gone away. Because who would Celie be if she allowed for, if she yielded to, Mr.________ fundamental ly reorienting her path and mode and movement, if she allowed him to become the centering force and gravity for all that was for her? Shug understood that something, Nettie, was coming toward Celie, that something was arriving — Fred Moten might say, out from the outside — approaching her, and in such approach desiring the Celie that was known. A wait ing outside of and beyond and against the colonialism of Western time and space. Shug presented otherwise possibility as a flesh thing, as a connection thing, a yield ing and presumed preferential option for weakness such that she could ongoingly practice love, care, concern for Nettie.

Asako Narahashi, Oarai, from the series half awake and half asleep in the water, 2006.

White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, antiblack racism and settler colonialism, is the perpetual practice of renunciation and relinquishment of flesh, of relation, of care and concern, of the social world. Such that relinquishing and renouncing a desired practice that attempts a more capacious understanding of possibility does not, can not, and will not undo antiblack racism nor settler colonial logics for personhood. The Jeans attempted the practice of a complex sensual openness and vulner ability against the imposition of a violent world that would attempt to exploit that sensual openness and vulnerability. The logic that would stand against this prac tice emerges from a logic of antiblack racism, a settler colonial desire for place and placement of and against some other. From ground, from thought, from feeling.

There is a supersessionist logic at play, in other words. This logic is the normative epistemology of Western thought, that we who would so perform the relinquishment and renunciation of a certain set of sensu al open protocols and vulnerabilities are, in Sylvia Wynter’s terminology, the dysse lected against those that would renounce, the selected. The latter are the selected, they supersede and practice through a kind of ideal toward perfectibility over and against that which came before. And displace. From ground. From thought. ¤ Could it be that forgiveness otherwise is never in the time of its enactment, that it is not given to Newtonian theories of cause and effect? That it is, instead, a mo mentary event that makes clear the ruse of linear time and progressive narratives? This is why saying that these acts of for giveness are “too quick” or “too soon” plac es the pressure for the texture of a desired practice in the organization of time and space in rationalist discourse of sense and action. Another displacement. But then there’s the sound. But then there’s the rhythm. My friend, Kendal Brown, offered this on Facebook:Blackchurch clapping is a science. It’s not just about clapping on the downbeat (2 & 4). It’s about hand positioning. Do you know what to

los angeles review of books 66 One world, the genre of world that overrepresents itself as The World, as the only possible world, attempts to weaponize any idea, tool, practice, or behavior for its goal of excluding what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the Others of Europe from the domain of humanity. In this particular genre of world, everything is engulfed and enclosed by antiblack settler colonialism, and thus can and has been used against the ones practicing modes of care against them.But the folks James Cone thinks of and about and with, and Shug elaborating for Celie a method of ongoing care against violence and violation experienced, each understand that it is not the particular practices of black life — the deeply dense and varied performances — that create or structure white supremacy. It is the fact of blackness — the fact of black life as a deep, dense, varied, sensual possibility — that white supremacy attempts to discipline, devour, destroy. Such that we should not, in my opinion, relinquish our capacity for complexity, which would then include the noncoercive (because it must be non coercive) practice of forgiveness, if it is a noncoercive enactment of and in the flesh.

67 do with your hands on the 1 & 3? Do you know that swinging into the clap is a no-no? Do you know that the golf/cupped-hand clap is reserved for the male chorus? Do you know that your bounces and claps have to be in synch? Can you syncopate (mix the rhythm with accents)? Can you maintain the 2 & 4 on the FAST shout beat? (Most mega churches fail … lol). Do you know that we stomp the downbeat if there are no drums? Can you switch from standard black rhythm to South Carolina low-country in the middle of a song? Do you know that 3/4 time “Oh How I Love Jesus” (Stomp-Clap-Clap) is the sound of heaven? Can you guess someone’s denominational tradi tion simply by the way they clap? Yeah. We magic, y’all. He begins with science and ends with magic. We cannot forget the Jeans as St. Lucian, a place wherein black rhythm and sound would have its own magical sci ence, scientific magic, in and through and as diaspora too. This space between is a sign of life, of birth and breath. If science, then not predicated on the faulty meth od taught in lots of compulsory schooling situations. If science, then a critique of scientific practice, a critique of science as a particular kind of neutral, unbiased, ab stracted knowledge that can be replicated over and over again with precision. This is a science of the contingent, of the improvisation, of the creative class of black sociality. The science is an atheologi cal practice, not given on the down beat of doctrine and theology but exceeding beat to involve and be about and enunciate the flesh. The space between science and magic is the beauty of black performance. And instead of the oversimplification the beauty of black church culture, perhaps al low the edges to remain. Maybe the edges — between the Jeans and the Garners — are where complexity is most pronounced, and perhaps that is where life emerges, the possibility for critique. Life in practice. I like the word practice as opposed to offering because it doesn’t imply sacrifice or sacrament. It implies method or form. It is important because yes, the colonial ism of Christianity cannot go unstated — this tradition has been used to justify heinous acts of exclusion, harm, violence, and brutality. But those within the folds of sociality have also contended with tra dition, sought otherwise, practiced alter natives. They utilized a hermeneutic of the flesh, their flesh. I think of the Jeans this way, their complex, dense, textured prac tice of forgiveness and its refusal as the space between science and magic, against the downbeat being the only thing that carries, but that understands the flesh and how it moves is itself important for mean ing, for worldmaking. SylviaSoWynter:ifIwent down to the coun try with, let us say, eight dresses, by the time I came back, I came back with two. My grandmother would have given the other six to the group of poorer children whom she had informally ad opted. I remember we all slept together, stacked horizontally on a large four-poster bed. Even today, the memory of that gives me a sense of grounding in an existential sense of justice, not

ASHON CRAWLEY

los angeles review of books 68 as grim retribution but as shared and elaborates and attempts to practice an epistemology of otherwise possibility. She demonstrates that the same actions can be considered with difference, that the same with differ ence is the gift of a black radical tradition. Rather than considering her grand mother’s redistribution of the dresses as a violation of her personal private property, she was and is able to frame such giving and gifting as the desire to share in hap piness, to spread happiness, to practice happiness as a social fact and mode of con nection. This sort of gift giving illustrates the way those marginalized by systems of domination have something that is not private property that they share, share in, share in as a practice of joy and love. This would then mean a cheerfulness and joy and pleasure in the disbelief in the struc tures under which we find ourselves, while also using what we have to live otherwise than this, to again and again practice with hesitance and rhythmic spirit otherwise possibility. ¤ The practice of forgiveness does not, for me, require anything of the person who harmed. Because it has to be noncoer cive. Because it is not about the one who harmed as the center of gravity. Cedric Robinson: I believe that the historical strug gles in Africa and the New World culled some of the best virtues of their native cultures. One such virtue was democracy, the com mitment to a social order in which no voice was greater than another […] This heritage gave Black Radicals many things. For example, it gave them an ability to retain the value of life, a fact that had many consequences, such as presenting restraints on the use of violence as a political instrument. The practice of forgiveness is not the an tithesis to acceptance, or anger or rage or reality; it is not inaction or complacen cy or docility. Forgiveness, for me, is the acceptance of the fact of harm and the desire to figure out how to live, how to breathe. What is left to work out is how I think about my relation to harm, how I have been harmed, and how I can move from it to — as Gwendolyn Brooks says — live in the along. This means allowing anger and sadness or whatever is felt to move toward an active engagement with the world, which would then mean mov ing beyond and against and away from the moment of trauma or harm. And the re straint from a desired replication of harm as recompense. It’s an abolitionist posture, the desired inculcation of an abolitionist disposition.Inthis way, the restraint on violence as a political instrument, we might find that a hug and a practice of forgiveness could be an enactment that does not be long to, even when it is an expression of, Christianity. The desire for an end to vio lence and violation is the practice of the tradition of black radicalism, expressed in different ways and means. As a pris on abolitionist — not as identity but de sired posture; not as identity but desired relation to the earth and our creaturely existence; not as identity, so I fail and harm and am not innocent and need

Wynterhappiness.understands

69 compassion and forgiveness too — I think my work, as part of a collective struggle, is to make a world wherein we care for peo ple that are harmed. With joy and plea sure and delight. It is a kind of modality Cone elaborated for us from Bearden. It is a way of life Shug helped for Celie to imagine as possible. It is the tradition as practice of making worlds otherwise. ASHON CRAWLEY

IN OLEMA TESS TAYLOR

February: Buckeye unscissor new leaves. Cows pasture, buffleheads paddle, a kestrel perches on a bishop pine. Now just above us the mountain’s humped spine pushes north to Alaska. Extinct invertebrates ride sea cliffs through time. Even these stones have lost cousins in Mexico. Even this freshet is landmass torn open, even these rocks are reft from each other. Each shelf pulses onward, a restless swimmer looking for land though nothing is still. Gray whales swim through ocean explosions, along continents forged of cracked dispossession.

Sunset today: The ridges grow luminous. Cold air, dark spice: Horses exhaling. They stomp on the cold steaming visible earth. We heat the stove. The children are napping. The cabin’s the raft on which we are floating. Below us the crust is molten & nationless. We only light our lamps on the rift.

Tom Rubnitz & David Wojnarowicz, Listen To This, 1992. Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. All screenshots, after the screening event Tom Rubnitz, collected video works 1981-1992, January 11th 2020, courtesy Goswell Road, Paris.

Before relatives could ruin our fun with anecdotes, my wife and I made a game of guessing the histories of the dead. There was Greg, who was convinced that when he wore his bifocals with owls on the rims that he could decode messages from outer space in his crossword puzzle. And Beth became bored with knitting scarves, so her many amorphous blobs of yarn were chastity belts for retirees with arthritic hips. Dan was aroused by the sight and smell of cocktail olives, but the effective ness of old jars wore off eventually, which was why he had so many jars of cocktail olives. Yolanda crafted those paper cranes out of the obituaries she recognized. What pathos we inflicted upon the deceased’s potted plants. Once, we discov ered a closet filled with golf balls. Upon their inadvertent release, the golf balls sprang around the foyer like giant pop corn kernels that refused to bloom.

REALTOR TO THE DAMNED MARY SOUTH fiction

los angeles review of books 74

“He was a sportswriter,” I said. “He kept a golf ball for every tournament he was assigned to cover for his paper.”

“Where are my Titleists?” my wife spooky-joked. “Where are they, Gary?”

It was me who ruined our fun by de bating the ethics of reaping a profit from haunted properties. Did we have an ob ligation to list ghosts on the condition assessment?“Eventhe dead need a qualified pro fessional,” she reasoned. Her practical wisdom was why I mar ried my wife. Thus, when I was touring a listing to take inventory — black mold, alas, but crown molding, hallelujah — and there was a dachshund in the refrigerator, I immediately texted my wife to get her opinion: Hey, honey, found a dachshund in the refrigerator. A ghostly ellipsis surpris ingly indicated she indeed had an opinion about this development, and after an eter nity, she texted back: Dick pic? I complied, from astonishment, and snapped a photo down my pants. But I wasn’t expecting a text because, like those whose houses we sold, my wife is also dead. Now send me the dachshund, she texted. I sent her the dachshund. Since I am a professional, I should con fess that I have never seen a ghost. The closest I have come to a ghost is a sono gram, which is the opposite of a ghost, the presaging of a life, unless the life is never born. With my wife’s miscarriages, my sales slipped until I was ranked last. When you’re last, you get what no one wants; in the case of Florida real estate, that was the weird homes of the elderly, recently dear and departed. To pass the time, my wife, herself a trained realtor on leave, read ghost stories aloud, and we had a lot of time to pass in no-show showings where a ghost would have been a welcome relief from the drudgery — a good name for an evil spirit, Drudgery. “One should accept ghosts very much as one accepts fire,” my wife read from a book by Robert von Ranke Graves, his actual name. “It is not really an element, not a principle of motion, not a living creature — though a house can catch it from its neighbors. It is an event.”Fairenough, Rob, but if ghosts are events, then each instant counts as a ghost. The car accident that killed my wife is a ghost. Rumor has it that there’s an astronomer ghost who occupies the dere lict telescope at the Ritter Planetarium at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Celes tial light is what’s left of stars long extin guished, so the stargazer ghost is a ghost observing ghosts. And when a comet cuts its wake through the black, it’s called an apparition. Science, too, it seems, supports the notion that everything is ghostly. If you are my wife, I texted, what advice did you give to women who were desperate to become pregnant?

“He had that disorder that compels you to eat objects,” she replied. “This is his food.”The owner had been a woman who hunted for golf balls while she took long walks to think about God. Her son ex plained this to us while sobbing, so we kindly inquired whether we should dis pose of the golf balls for him, and he whimpered, “No, thanks, I’ll take them to the range.”“Hismom’s going to be mad he got rid of those balls by working on his swing,” I said after he was out of hearing range at the golf range. “What if that means she can’t move on?” I can recommend a rep utable moving company, but not one pre pared to move the incorporeal.

When I first got pregnant, she texted back, I thought I was turning into a were wolf. Do you think werewolves get premen strual syndrome but for becoming a werewolf in addition to regular premenstrual syn drome?Ithink female werewolves go into heat. They don’t have periods. So they don’t expe rience premenstrual syndrome. But the gen eral werewolf population gets premenstrual syndrome for changing into a werewolf and that’s why werewolves are a matriarchal so ciety.Maybe you are my wife. You are not my husband. The deceased with a grand piano in per fect tune and without a trace of dust was easy — concert pianist, I concluded. But he didn’t fulfill his dream of playing Carnegie Hall, therefore he returns as a ghost night after night to practice his Rachmaninoff. I was so lazy, unlike that pianist ghost I invented. My wife could be a harsh ghost critic. Where was my imag ination? Clearly, this owner had been de voured by the piano. Look at it, she insisted, doesn’t it look hungry? Speaking of imagination, I said, you always go for the meals! Tinkly piano music kept coming from a place that was and wasn’t the piano. My wife and I started to fear the piano truly was possessed, but then the niece of the deceased informed us that there was a school for gifted children down the street. Sometimes we forgot there were children in Sarasota County, despite trying to have our own. We strolled to the school for gift ed children, and outside there were boys fishing in a construction hole, though we didn’t know if they were gifted boys. Ga tors sunned themselves in the hole, and my wife told me it was a shame the gators weren’t wearing those yellow construction hats. But alligators are so tough already, I argued, they’re like a big construction hat. The youngest boy caught a fish that resembled garbage. Unfortunately, af ter the fish had swallowed the hook, the pointy end punctured through its eye. This made the boy sad, so an older, freckled boy muscled the fish from him, yanked out the hook, and punctured it through the fish’s other eye. Pliny the Elder attested in his Natural History that ghosts despise peo ple with freckles, so I whispered to my wife, “Pliny the Elder.” She demanded the freckled kid hand over the fish, and she tossed it into the water after removing the hook. My wife was always performing small kindnesses, such as saving fish. As we left, I tried to make her feel better by saying, “We will never have a son who is a bully.” And she replied, “I don’t care if he’s a Accordingmurderer.”to the Saxons, the woman who routinely miscarries may be visited by the ghosts of the children she has lost. In the Lacnunga, a book of their folk remedies, a charm is suggested: let the woman who cannot nourish her child take part of her own child’s grave, wrap it in black wool, and trade it to merchants, then say, “I sell it, you buy it, this black wool and this seed of grief.” The child’s grave is the miscar ried child. If you are not my wife, I texted, then who are Wereyou?you aware that you can make enough money to pay your mortgage, she tex ted back, by searching the internet for rich assholes who are too busy to procrastinate? I keep the best results for myself. What are some of your searches? How to avoid rectal prolapse. Names for

MARY SOUTH

Tom Rubnitz, Wigstock: The Movie, 1987. Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. All screenshots, after the screening event Tom Rubnitz, collected video works 1981-1992, January 11th 2020, courtesy Goswell Road, Paris.

The paintings were donated to charity, except for the one we kept — our favorite redhead in a red bikini. She hung over our sectional and made an excellent conversa tion piece for guests. We proposed names: Leonora, Gertrude, Remedios, Sylvia, Eileen. Nothing stuck, so we ended up re ferring to her as Portrait of a Woman with Second Molar. In the pantheon of ghosts, there is a veritable pageant of unearthly ladies. Should they be categorized by region? By era? By age? (It is indecorous to query a lady, especially a spectral lady, how old she is.) As the attendant pulled down the white sheet over my wife’s face in the hos pital morgue and I confirmed, “Yes, that is her,” I remembered those many brides filled with rage behind their ephemeral veils. But they shouldn’t be summed up merely by the hue of their muslin and lace. Let’s not be coy, I texted. I’d like to take you out on a date. How about the Denny’s in Siesta Key? Denny’s it is. I will treat you to a Denver omelet.Idon’t want to be committed to Denver. Please, feel free to choose any metropol itan-area omelet that you crave. But before we meet, can you confirm whether or not you are myGuy,wife?Igot a new plan, and my carrier randomly assigned me this number. As I conducted my test of the taps to de termine whether the plumbing was func tional in the Reluctant Gambler’s condo, we learned we were in the direct path of the hurricane. The Reluctant Gambler was dubbed the Reluctant Gambler on ac count of his stacks and stacks of scratchoff lottery tickets that weren’t scratched off. Hurricane Frida had altered course almost impossibly — or quite possibly, in keeping with the capricious habits of hurricanes. My wife and I hid in a walkin closet with a dialysis machine that was also in hiding. We hoped to wait out the storm the way we endured our open hous es: with ghost stories. Saint Louis of France, my wife read, was a very religious king. Due to his piety or simply because he was nice, he donat ed a manor near Paris to monks from the Order of Saint Bruno. The monks were not resentful in the slightest that right

MARY SOUTH

When we beheld the oil paintings of teeth with sexy ladies — models leaning on fill ings as on the hoods of cars, chanteuses in sequined gowns draped on the lunar landscapes of crowns — I asked my wife, “What the fuck?” “This was a psychopath,” she replied. “Should we check under the floor for bodies?”“Knock yourself out, but you know how I feel about mouths. Dentists should be forbidden from putting illustrations of smiling teeth holding toothbrushes on their awnings. Everybody acts like it’s normal, but it would be like if you went to the bathroom in a restaurant and the sign was an overjoyed bladder pissing in a toilet. I have questions. Do the teeth have teeth? Do they floss?”

77 fruit in foreign languages. Words in which the word “wild” is contained. How to hire a clown. Trauma and brain chemistry. The most famous great ape. Guilt from lying to a dementia patient. If you are in an airplane and it crashes, will you feel pain at impact? Famous great apes, please. You’ll have to pay. Happy to pay for premium great ape in formation.Oryou could tell me who you are. I am a realtor to the damned.

los angeles review of books 78 next door was the Palace of Vauvert, a res idence of superior majesty. Vauvert didn’t have a reputation for ghosts, yet after the monks arrived, reports circulated that it was home to the ghost of a bearded man in robes who shrieked obscenities. When word of these goings-on reached the king, he was appalled and inquired if the monks had heard about the phantom neckbeard. The monks expressed their sympathetic shock and disgust and promised the king that, in exchange for taking up residence, they would exorcise the ghost. Relieved, Louis had a deed drawn up that designat ed the Palace of Vauvert the official abode of the monks of Saint Bruno. The devot ed monks, if they ever did encounter the ghost, at least did not complain. “Pretending to be ghosts could be our side hustle,” I said to my wife. “I’m not sure anyone will believe we’re a couple of 13th-century monks,” she re plied.Hurricane Frida made landfall while my wife continued to read, and I of fered her my senses if not my interest. The tides were rising and rising — I was convinced that we would drown in that condo, though in my mind the dialysis machine floated peacefully out the front door and into the canals. Ultimately, the storm spared the condo of the Reluctant Gambler, but the rest of the block was the picture of a haunting. I kept quiet and didn’t mention again how it was lucky we didn’t have children, how the world was getting worse, the floods hotter, the sum mers higher. My wife was a cheerful per son until confronted with the suffering of the vulnerable or crushing desire, at which point she became cheerful beyond com fort. She would probably bring up Lewes Lavater’s lament, in 1572, in Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght: “The world waxeth worse and worse. Men are now more impudent, more dould, more couet ous, and more wicked, than euer they were in times past, and their ghostes doe but followe in deede.”

At Denny’s in Siesta Key, I wore a rose in my lapel like an idiot, requested a booth, and drank a cup of coffee. I drank another cup of coffee, and I got the jit ters. The woman who had my dead wife’s phone number didn’t appear, and I wished my wife were there to read me ghost sto ries while I waited for the woman who had her number. I’m in a booth at Denny’s, and I’m wear ing a rose in my lapel like an idiot, I texted. I’m sorry, she texted back. I’ve been gathering up my courage to leave my bed and come to Denny’s. The truth is that I moved here to get away from someone, someone who hurt me very badly. I just can’t meet a strange man right now, I’m sorry. I understood, I told her. Don’t be sorry. The ancient Greeks divided ghosts into several types: idolon, aoroi, ataphoi, umbra, larva, lemure, imago, plasma, effigy, mane, muliebris. Canadians have their windigos and the Inuit their angiaks. The Japanese, their voluptuous, vulpine kokitenos. As long as there is space and time and real es tate, there will be ghosts. There are ghosts who distress, ghosts who simply wish to impress, and ghosts here to redress their crimes; there are poltergeist ghosts who play pranks, housekeeper ghosts who clean without thanks, avaricious ghosts who rob banks; there are ghosts of the theater, ghosts of the opera, ghosts of the cinema; there are ghostly miners digging in coal-stained overalls; there are ghostly bakers preparing ectoplasmic croissants; there are ghostly surgeons performing ghostly operations; there are ghosts in

79 habiting ghost towns in the American West; there are ghostly traveling circuses and ghosts on skates circling roller rinks, and gleeful ghosts sledding down wintry slopes; there are ghosts dancing across the floors of the Ozone Disco in the Philippines who were dancing in the club when it collapsed; there are ghostly ho tel guests and ghostly bellhops; there are ghosts in tennis matches, the ghost of a jockey galloping on top his horse at Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong, and the ghost of Andrew Irvine, who perished as cending Everest in 1924 and has stayed to assist struggling mountaineers; there are ghostly deep-sea divers who succumbed to the bends, strapped onto ghostly oxy gen tanks; there are ghosts who operate ghostly ships, dirigibles, and trains; there is my text-message ghost; then there is the ghost of my wife. We didn’t discuss what we would be like as ghosts ourselves, or, when one of us died, if we would return to haunt the bereaved spouse. I imagine I would be a rather bumbling spirit, unsure whether to stay or leave, and in the interim I’d try to be helpful by organizing the pantry or toss ing junk mail. My wife, however, would not have opted to become a ghost — she was the decider in our relationship — but by refusing to let go of our ghost hobby I was turning her into one, an entity in my mind that was and was not my wife. A memory is altered each time it is rec ollected, so whenever I long for my wife I lose her more and more. That’s another fact in support of the existence of ghosts: for what could be more ghostly than miss ing someone so intensely that you can no longer remember her as she was? MARY SOUTH

Fake-riarchy, 2019, self adhesive vinyl.

Heji Shin, Photograph by Michael Underwood.

artist portfolio

There are a few memes I find my self watching and re-watching — video mashups of Kylie Jenner walking, tucking her faultlessly-coiffed hair behind her ear, then transforming into a vogueing con testant on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, who then suddenly morphs into Brittany Spears, walking into the Ellen Degeneres show. This is all set to the beat of a Nicki Mi naj song. Or another meme that alters the pink and plump Jiggly Puff, a cartoon Pokémon, into a tall-legged version of its former self — not unlike a Victoria’s Se cret Angel—walking, or strutting, down a runway. These memes are unmistakably about celebrity, reality TV, culture and

THE #ENERGY OF HEJI SHIN PERWANA NAZIF

Catharsis does not necessarily have to be real to be true. It doesn’t have to be an actual release or relief, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be purifying. There can be ways of experiencing catharsis as a kind of placebo effect — we feel like we’re ex periencing relief when we’re not.

los angeles review of books 82 media, but you can’t escape into them — they’re a loop, and they are also highly aware and unmistakably ironic. In other words, they point to the loops and traps in our escapist rituals of catharsis. This is akin to the work of artist Heji Shin, who considers memes art and refers to them as “highly conceptual.” For her, their genea logical and referential nature is far more interesting than most other art produc tion these days. Heji Shin explores these and oth er forms of cathartic and near-cathartic experiences, delving into their contradic tions as well as our fascination and fe tishization of these experiences. Born in 1976 in Seoul, Korea, Shin later moved to Germany and studied at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (Faculty for applied sciences) in Hamburg. She is now just as well known for her art as her commercial work in fashion and editorial. Though her work had been exhibited at major institutions, like the Palais de Tokyo, Shin’s photographs and her characteristic style began to gain momentum after be ing featured in Anne-Marlene-Henning’s 2012 sex-education manual for teenagers, Sex & Lovers: A Practical Guide. Those ear ly photographs demonstrate Shin’s inter est in issues of intimacy, access, power and provocation, which reemerge in almost all of her work. More recently, Shin was recognized for her large-scale portraits of Kanye West, which were featured in last year’s Whitney Biennial, and her 2017 campaign for the fashion label Eckhaus Latta in which she captured couples ac tually having sex. Other infamous works include her “self-portraits,” in which Shin is replaced by a monkey, exhibited in her 2016 #lonelygirl show at Galerie Bernhard in Zurich. She is also known for campy images of gay cop tropes, shown in her 2018 exhibition Men Photographing Men at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York. The pornographic and ironic nature of Shin’s work is carried through into her latest show at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in Los Angeles. Angel Energy once again returns to the issues of intimacy and pow er, particularly around celebrity worship.

The work is partly about the power of the image, as well as commodifica tion, fetishization and the market value

The show features images of the in famous Kardashian clan — moderately obscured but recognizable nonetheless — along with staged images of Kar dashian-lookalikes cast from the inter net, and collaged images of AI adult en tertainment influencer Jedy Vales. This is all primarily Shin’s commercial work: the tarnished images of the actual Kar dashians come from a recent shoot for CR Fashion Book, and the lookalikes from an editorial for The Face magazine. The inclu sion of Jedy Vale is only possible because of Shin’s own contributions in designing, altering, and retouching the avatar. These commercial photographs, however, were almost completely reworked for the show — the images of the Kardashians were re-photographed and colored by exposing the original Polaroid portraits. They were then re-printed onto aluminum, brass, and copper sheets, resulting in Warhol-esque pieces that look both decaying and iconic. Works like Kylie (2019) are nearly abstract — with the original photograph of the eponym barely distinguishable from the pink, purple or orange-hued blotches of exposed film covering the canvas. Kendall (2019) on the other hand shows disinte gration of the UV print in another form altogether, with the shape of her body still visible but covered in darker patches, as if the print itself is in decay.

83 of hyper-visibility, inevitably reinforced by fans. This form of image commod ification — the monetary value of these kinds of images and these celebrities and celebrity lookalikes in particular — seems predicated on another person’s need to es cape. These images are a way out of our mundane lives, and into the mundane and everyday lives of the unattainably beauti ful and famous. If catharsis is a form of es cape, here are its many Kardashian-shaped doors. Angel Energy, however, does not take itself too seriously, which is characteristic of Shin’s work. Shin is not warning us off these pseudo-cathartic practices that rely on obsessively watching and consuming fame and power. She’s not warning us off the Kardashians as the “coming matriar chy” or the corporate culture it begets and is a product of. In short, she is not warning us off of the people and the products that keep these same systems and structures in place. She’s just pointing at them, with a slight smirk. This humor is palpable in the juxtapositions of the show — images of breastfeeding AI and radiant angelic Kar dashian lookalikes, paired with images of the family itself, which Shin describes as having a “hotel art lobby kind of vibe — very kitsch.” Shin acknowledges her own sardonic humor in placing the “intention ally camp” images of the fake Kardashians next to the real images, which are also, in fact, camp. In that placement, the dis tinction between the real — real people, real camp, real affect — and fake becomes blurred, as does the larger distinctions be tween each series of works. For Shin, there are two modes of ca tharsis: total chaos and total loss of control. As she puts it, the difference is between “people just going crazy … physically and mentally out of control and doing some thing [that is] normally prohibited” and people who “desire complete submission, like when you think of S&M practices — the kind of desire for hierarchy [as if] you are actually completely delivered or sur rendered to something else. This can also be catharsis. Something like infantilizing yourself so much that somebody has com plete control over you.” Shin is hesitant to associate the latter directly to Angel Energy, though she admits that the idea is recognizable in the show. The infantiliza tion of the self is rendered quite literally in the images of Vales mothering a collaged photograph of a baby. This is also reminis cent of Thank You For All The Love (2019) where a fake Kim breastfeeds a fake baby. What role does the audience play in this scenario? Are we the baby that feeds off of technology and fame? Or are we the fake, nearly nude Kim, taking a sundrenched selfie in front of a picturesque window in You Killed This (2019)? The answer is of course, well, we’re both — it’s a deafening, hashtagged, nonsensical resounding yes. The disintegrating impression of these images, the uncanny nature of the lookalikes, and the utter creepiness of ba bies mothered by an AI porn influencer, all become interchangeable. Our cathartic impulses, desires, or fetishes — they all become a fungible mess, an endless series of similar images. We see ourselves escap ing ourselves. Maybe with Heji’s work we can at least watch this and laugh. ARTIST PORTFOLIO: HEJI SHIN

Jason Harvey with Heji Shin, Jedy Vales, 2019. Photo by Michael Underwood. Courtesy YouPorn.

Heji Shin, Thank You For All The Love, 2019, Inkjet print, \25 x 19 in. Photograph by Michael Underwood

Heji Shin, Installation view of Angel Energy featuring Kylie, 2019 and Kourtney, 2019. Photograph by Michael Underwood.

I was home from college for Thanks giving break, and I had packed my watch and earrings in a little cardboard jewelry box on my dresser. She saw it when I was out, and she wanted to let me know she had more boxes like that if I needed them. She wrote on the note: “I’m sure shoure I have more of these,” and then drew two rectangles, the lid and the base, and an arrow pointing. After the picture she con tinues, “but I can’t reach. Remind me to show you where to get them.” She was 53

essay 88

For several years after my mom died, I carried a green Post-it in my wallet, the last note she wrote to me. It doesn’t say I love you or I’m proud of you or any thing like that. It’s a note about a box, when she couldn’t remember the word “box,” and for complicated reasons I don’t quite understand, it is very dear to me.

STUFF, THE ESSAY SASHA GRAYBOSCH

A few years ago, I bought a new wal let and moved the note to a box I keep in my wardrobe filled with pictures from childhood, postcards my mom sent me from trips to England with my dad, paper ephemera. I didn’t think of it much until last year, when I decided “to Kondo” my apartment. My home had grown cluttered, my partner defensive of his limited space, so I read two books by Japanese home and decluttering guru Marie Kondo and de cided to make a change. Maybe it was a mistake to seek solace in stuff. I did well in the clothes section, clutching items to my questioning heart, judging what “sparked joy,” ditching what made my muscles contract — any thing ill-fitting, itchy, blah. I shredded paperwork and donated books and shoes and pans. I did everything in the order Kondo describes, saving sentimental items for last. After weeks of work, I fi nally pulled the box from my wardrobe and opened it, saw the wrinkled green Post-it on top. I didn’t have to touch it to know what I felt, and it wasn’t joy. There was fullness in my chest, heaviness behind my eyes. Images from my childhood bed room, a flicker of fondness, of faded fear, a sense of regret, of being 20, as though I were viewing a little sister who was me. I see a memory I can’t have — my mom writing the note, though I wasn’t there. I remember myself throughout my 20s opening my wallet and remembering. I ar rive in the past, and there is pain, but the depth of it, its texture and associative lay ers bring a sense of security — I’ve man aged to preserve something real. To give that up in favor of curated happiness, the gentle release of forgetting, feels fraud ulent, even sinister. I put the note in the box, the box in the wardrobe, and returned Kondo’s books to the library. In the short period after my mom’s funeral when we — my dad, my two older sisters, and I — shared our feelings constantly, outright, I remember saying how afraid I was that I would forget her. This was be fore my dad emptied her bedroom of her possessions without telling me, though it must have been on his mind. “I only knew her for 20 years,” I said, resisting all the space that I would live without her. He told me, “You won’t forget her. She’s your mother.” He said it like it was impossible, or like he knew what my memory was capable of. I remember being briefly reassured and horrified. I couldn’t do it on my own; I knew it would nev er work. I needed to stop time, and if I couldn’t do that, I needed her things to remember.It’snot a fashionable view these days, to be concerned for objects, to desire to preserve and dwell among things. And it

I threw away the note when I first found it and pulled it out of the trash af ter she died. I tucked it behind my ID and credit cards and examined it in idle moments, thinking of her thoughtfulness for oth ers, of this strange period between the old Mom and the post-stroke Mom and then gone Mom, one kind of pain collapsing into another. It’s not a happy memory, the one evoked by the note, or even a memory at all. But I am protective of it.

89 years old, recovering from a stroke. Her intestines were dying, her organs failing, and none of us knew she would die in a few days. Her handwriting is wobbly but recognizably hers. Her second-guessing of her spelling was an improvement from when she would write words on paper and stare at them blankly, unable to read what she’d written.

SASHA GRAYBOSCH

los angeles review of books 90 bothers me, too, the way I keep contra dicting myself. I believe, on the one hand, that my mother was not her belongings, but on the other hand, I don’t know if that’s true. The day I found my mom’s room empty, light invaded the bare surfaces when I opened the door, glancing starkly off the walls and stripped mattress. The dress ers and cabinets were empty, and in the closet, I found wire hangers and two pairs of shoes on the floor, inexplicably left be hind. I couldn’t find her books with the pages turned down or the constellation of sticky notes on the back of the door, or everything else I had touched and held in her absence to give my senses a mixed-up kind of relief. I could not find everything I would never know had been there. Death, I learned, comes not once but many times: a long series of vanishings, some violent, some unnoticed. A person doesn’t disap pear from the world as much as dissolve into it, like a chalky tablet dropped into water.I may have touched the furniture. I remember sitting on the closet floor. It was about four months after she died. After shock came fury and a sick ly sense of violation. I found my father downstairs and demanded to know where everything was, anxious to get it back. “Goodwill,” he told me. The rest went in the garbage. Anything “important” was packed away elsewhere. If he said it gen tly, it didn’t feel like it. You didn’t ask, I yelled. Was he trying to erase her? I’m here all alone, going crazy, he said. I remember the incredulous look on his face, my heart slamming in my chest. “Which one?” I said.“What?”Imeantwhich Goodwill. “Sasha,” my dad said, as though my name might wake me from some kind of fugue. “They probably send most stuff overseas.”Mydad has always hated stuff, re garded it with dread. It was a recurring ar gument between him and my mom, who loved stuff, buying presents and cards, collecting teacups, making crafts, keep ing special coins and stones in her jewelry box. My dad wore the same clothes for decades, rarely gave or wanted presents, and believed a cluttered house indicated wasteful spending and the indulgence of inferior, unexamined desires. He once taped a sign next to our decorated Christ mas tree that read, “National Monument to Wretched Excess,” and often quot ed Thoreau’s Walden, lines about a man alone in the woods, the purity of nature over industrialized civilization, et cetera. I knew all this, but I still couldn’t believe it, that he wouldn’t recognize what her stuff meant to me.

I drove to Goodwill after Goodwill, alone, looking in vain for a familiar sleeve, a vest. There was something shameful about it, as though to pursue an emotional attachment to things was unseemly, crazy. This was in 2007, pre-smartphone apps, so I bought a voice recorder at Best Buy and talked to it on the four-hour drive back to college in Kansas from Nebraska, describing every detail of the room I could Theremember.recording I made that day in the car is not something I’ve listened to obsessively; in fact, I haven’t listened to it at all. About five years ago, I did switch on the first 10 to 15 seconds, but it made me uncom fortable — to hear that younger person with the throb in her voice. “Okay,” she says. She takes a shaky breath. I turned it

Carissa Rodriguez, The Girls, 1997-2018, Hi8 video (digitized), 37:30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

My dad and his wife visit New York to take care of my sister’s two young sons for a week. I go over to help, and I tell Dad I read about a museum in Denmark called House Of Memories that’s designed spe cifically for Alzheimer’s patients. It’s an exact replica of an apartment from the 1950s, back when the patients were young, their brains and memories ripe. “Huh,”

It’s just stuff, my dad kept saying. She’s not in there — nothing is. To preserve her stuff was to preserve her, her very being, I argued. Sometimes we insist to others what we wish we could believe.

los angeles review of books 92 off. She’s a different person, one closer to Mom, one with a mission to not become me: my murky memory, sorrows dried up to puddles. I hear her desperate to re member, to keep away from me, and from this distance, I know that she failed. I feel sad for her, sorry for her, in a way I cannot feel sad for myself, as one can’t fully miss what they can’t remember.

I search through my desk drawers and find the recorder — a slender gray device that has no reason to exist these days, aside from the information captured on it. There’s only one audio file, the one I made 13 years ago alone in the car. I don’t know what I’m expecting or wanting to hear when I pull it out. Something for the essay. Something to help me understand why things mean what they do. I turn it on — or, I try. Inside the battery compartment, there’s a strange odor, a crusty substance where the batteries leaked. It doesn’t help to switch out the batteries. I impotently poke at the coiled battery spring with a cotton swab dipped in vinegar, as the in ternet suggests, but before it even dries, I know it won’t work. Sometimes feelings surprise you when you watch them close ly, let their contradictions unwind. For in stance, the sag of remorse and guilt under a bright wash of relief, as though two sep arate women inside me want their feelings known at once. My dad’s actions and their fallout created a rift between us that settled into period ic tension for years. A strain that hasn’t vanished even now, though our commu nication is kinder, our stances well known. Don’t throw anything else away without asking, my sisters and I implore my father. You girls have got to come get the rest of the stuff out of the basement, is his response. We take what we can, when we can, crowd ing our small apartments in big cities with stuff. He sends emails with attachments of the “inventory” in a spreadsheet — a categorized list of boxes containing our childhood stuff and anything from the old house. He makes these requests for re moval with the bedside manner of a wea ry middle manager at a shipping company who’s got to send this crap out so he can go home and rest. He warns, Once I retire, I’m out of here. Meaning, all the stuff must be, too.My dad met someone shortly before the room incident and married her the following year. He sold the old house and moved into hers across town, shedding more stuff and keeping what fit in the new basement. Because I could not com prehend my dad’s actions, I made assump tions, many of them angry and unkind. I wanted to remember my mom, and he didn’t. I loved my mom more than he did, or I loved her better. I read betrayal and weakness into his rapid life reshuffling, saw a cowardly man who could coldly am putate the past and replace one person for another, as though my mom and their 30 years of marriage didn’t matter at all.

93 my dad says. He doesn’t have Alzheimer’s and he’s not exactly enthralled, but I keep going. Everything is authentic, all the furniture, the appliances, food, artwork, tablecloth, dishes. People can touch and sit, tell stories, remember. And they do remember, much more than before they entered the home, as though handling objects brought another time to them, or them to it. All this old stuff was consoling their fears, surpassing other treatments. “Isn’t that fascinating?” I say. “Yeah,” he says. “By the way, speak ing of stuff.” He brings up the boxes in storage, the holiday stoneware dinner set my sister is supposed to take off his hands, photos that need to be scanned. “Do we have to talk about it now?” I say. I know he can’t help himself, his anxiety over stuff intruding like a hot potato he can’t hold — he has to pass it on. But my chest still flares with irritation. I tell him I’m writing about stuff; could I interview him? He agrees, a little surprised, but oblig ing. We make a plan for later that week. My dad loves talking about stuff, in the way that we love to talk about what we Ithate.has been strange to see this conflict over stuff surface in public conversation in recent years. You can’t throw a rock across the internet without hitting some one talking about it. There are forums, lists, helpful hacks, Pinterest inspiration boards. Kondo has her own show, boosted by the rising numbers of tiny-housers and minimalists, the thousands of bloggers and influencers eager to practice the vir tues of simple living, of doing more with less. Shopping sites are often geared to ward the one perfect thing that will re place all of your terribly imperfect things — the one T-shirt you need, the one face cream. This isn’t the first time this trend has surfaced, considering the countercul ture rejection of materialism in the ’60s, the ascetic underpinnings of many world religions, and periods of austerity during war and economic depression, but the ar guments to shrink our collections of stuff have become increasingly persuasive to the mainstream American public.

In the face of climate catastrophe, environmental degradation, and growing awareness of the externalized, human costs of material convenience, I agree we should be suspicious of certain kinds of acquisi tion, the belief that amassing products will make us special and safe and whole, but the decluttering movement seems to have taken aim at stuff en masse, as though personal possessions are all the same, one lumpy substance out to bog you down, or bum you out. In this paradigm, stuff is both empty and dangerous, superfluous to the self and inhibitory. It’s become a tac it precept of human-object relations that there’s one logical reaction to a troubling or complex emotional experience when it comes to things. Rid yourself If you’re not careful, you might drown. Perhaps you consider yourself above these concerns. You think of yourself as reason able when it comes to inanimate objects. You’ve never torn into a new package with an adrenaline high or sobbed over a cracked mug. You know how to keep a level head. In that case, I present to you a sweatshirt owned by a vicious serial killer. In fact, he wore it as he tortured and mur dered his victims. Don’t worry, I washed it. You could wear it to bed or to pick your daughter up at school. No? I see.

People don’t want objects from any one who scares or disgusts them, just as many people appreciate an autograph or

SASHA GRAYBOSCH

los angeles review of books 94 souvenir from an admired celebrity, trea sured precisely for its residual essence. The perception of object contamination, positive and negative, is one of the be haviors consumer researcher Russell W. Belk describes in his 1988 landmark ar ticle “Possessions and the Extended Self.” He argues that possessions are a powerful means by which humans negotiate and develop their identities, using belongings to “extend” ourselves into the world be yond our brains and bodies. Belk’s article incorporates a synthesis of disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, in service of this idea of selfextension through possessions. “Apparent ly, in claiming that something is ‘mine,’ we also come to believe that the object is ‘me,’” he writes, whether it’s sensations, ideas, and experiences, or places, people, and things to which we feel attached. This has been confirmed in more recent research, as Francine Russo reports in her 2018 Sci entific American article “Our Stuff, Our selves.” Psychologists at Yale University in 2013 found that during “functional magnetic resonance imaging,” the objects that a participant had been previously prompted to imagine as “mine” activated the same brain regions that refer to a per son’sThisself. way of connecting ourselves to objects also applies to how we think of the relationships between other people and things. Belk explains that the “psychic energy” of an object increases with the “ef forts, time, and attention” a person devotes it. It follows then, that a spoon used by your grandfather for many years, or one he laboriously carved from wood himself, for example, or that he carried through peri ods of severe adversity, would hold more meaning (both to him, presumably, and to you) than a very expensive or otherwise remarkable spoon he rarely used. The feel ings we have for a possession that’s been “charged” with personhood may be deter mined by our current feelings about that person or our relationship with them. In other words, the feelings we’d experience in proximity to their body could also be evoked by those personal objects. I imag ine seeing this object-human “charge” like one of those UV light scans in a crime show; the glow of past touch scattered across things, widely dispersed here, cen tralized and dense there. Some things are more “me” than others, some things more “them” or “her.” Each object contains var ious emotional valences depending on who’s looking at it.

This reminds me of the attachment I had to my mom’s clothes, which was much stronger than my feelings for the heirlooms she’d stashed away, which my father did preserve. I associated her clothes not only with her personality and preferences, but also her vulnerability, her efforts to con ceal an insecurity. My mom had scoliosis, and despite the rods surgically implanted in her spine when she was a teenager, her hips were crooked, her back misaligned, an asymmetry she concealed with fastid ious tailoring. The thought of her pants, one leg hemmed shorter, or her shirts, a thicker shoulder pad sewn into one side, strewn across the racks of a Goodwill, pulled onto the bodies of strangers and tossed to the floor, was disturbing to me. It wasn’t about wanting them because I wanted more shirts to wear, or even for the memories they elicited. They glowed with her. I know they were shirts, not sentient creatures with nerves, but their disappear ance signaled my failure, my helplessness; I couldn’t protect her from harm, even af ter she was gone. ¤

When I interviewed him, he repeated a line I’ve heard many times before, a the ory about my mom and her antique col lecting hobby, her $4 teacups and saucers crowding the secretary in the dining room that drove him crazy: he says she loved the thrill of the hunt. I think this is only partially true, but it’s an interesting anti pode to his own attitude, which is also a sort of thrill-seeking: the pleasure of the purge. I see both sides: stuff as emotional support versus emotional clearing. Empty space. Full space. Alone. Together. Saved. Lost. So many dualities, binaries. And I feel allied to all of them at once. Through these random shipments from my dad, my oldest sister, who has chil dren, wound up with the Christmas orna ments and toys; my other sister has family

My dad sends me items now and then, unannounced, as though he’d woken up in the night with his mind racing, men tally scanning the contents of his base ment, and decided to whip a box across the country first thing in the morning. Sometimes he asks first if I want it, and sometimes he just sends an email with a tracking number. He ships a painting by my mother’s aunt that hung over the fireplace in the old house, retro jadeite measuring cups my mom collected, and a box of tiny salt and pepper shakers I have never seen before. My home is layered with the past, like the fossilized strata of archaeological time, but in reverse. The old keeps appearing on my doorstep, and I nestle it in with the new.

SASHA GRAYBOSCH

I admit it’s not just the material ef fects of our family my dad wants to whittle down — it’s everything. He often tosses random books into these boxes, as though to have a finished book lying around caus es him aggravation. Once a thing is com pleted, it’s done, and there’s no looking back. (A more charitable view might be that he wants to share something with me, give us something to talk about, but with him it’s hard to tell, that boundary be tween the thrill of discarding and the act of giving.) It’s easy for me to get defensive on this point, to fall into assumptions and feel vicariously dismissed by his predispo sition, an old pattern resurfacing. When I think back to the conflict over stuff between my parents throughout my childhood, I realize I hardly ever heard them fight about anything else. Their argu ments were silly at times, a playful attempt from my dad to irk my mom, who largely ignored him or swatted him away, and at other times, they turned into heated fights where he lost his temper and screamed, and she locked herself in the bedroom. It was as though they weren’t arguing about objects at all but a fraught moral imper ative, a battle for the house and family’s soul. What stuff should mean to us. Because I was a child, I sought love and attention in whatever form it was convincing and available, and I had no conception of consequences, financial, en vironmental, or otherwise, so it was easy to side with my mom and her love of things, to view my dad’s challenges as inconsider ate bullying. Not only did I, like most kids, desire and enjoy toys, dolls, books, et cet era, I was also sensitive to the undercur rent of my dad’s provocations, his groans at the sight of a shopping bag, his wistful fantasies of heading off into nature with a canoe and a dog — the implication being it was us he wanted to flee. My mom and her things were steady, permanent, easy to understand, while my dad, with his rants and idealized emptiness, might as well have been plotting his escape.

Carissa Rodriguez, The Girls, 1997-2018, Hi8 video (digitized), 37:30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

I discover a few sheets of paper cov ered with a smattering of her handwriting that I find confusing initially: phrases and sentences dipping across the page, circling and trailing off — she’s working some thing out. It’s written on the back of a cus tomer order form at Fast Signs, the sign shop where she worked. I realize from the date what the writing is about: she was trying to describe a memory, for me. This was the year before she died, not long after I’d given her a floral embroi dered journal for Christmas. My mom told charming stories about her childhood — the dog that went down the slide at the playground, the times she appeared as an extra in Western films shot in southern Utah — but she never wrote them down, and I wanted more, others that she might not tell us in person. I asked her to start writing her memories, though after her death I found the journal empty. But here on the back of this order form, it seemed like she was trying to get something down, taking notes on what she would write. She’s writing about a place in her childhood home that she loved, the attic bedroom. She’s describing the sensory experience of it, the sound of the steps creaking, the warmth of the sunshine fall ing through the windows, the fragrance of apple blossoms during the spring. She loved the smell of the wood, which would hit her the moment she stepped through the doorway. She writes multiple versions of these descriptions, finding her wording, sometimes jotting down one word, “win dow,” then adding it to a fuller statement that tips sideways across the page. I read, “to this day if I happen to be in a room where a sun ray is shining in.” But there’s nothing else. A thought spun from the page into the air, right where I can’t reach.

My dad is 63, recently and joyfully retired from a long career as a research geneticist, with a beard and a full head of graying hair, a slight stoop, and a noticeable Long Island accent, despite having lived in the Midwest for over 30 years. When I was young, his penchant for functional but ragged clothing and disinclination for haircuts placed him visually somewhere between quirky professor and homeless, but he’s cleaned up in recent years, lost weight, purchased newer clothing, though he does still break out his ancient tie-dye T-shirt to putz around the house. He is

When they arrived in 2015, I was overwhelmed by the immensity of the in formation suddenly available to me, let ters going back to the ’60s from my mom’s parents when she was away at camp, from her brother on his proselytizing mission for his church, from her parents and friends when she went to college, little check-ins about life decisions, a lot of pragmatic back and forth about a bill, a lead on a part-time job, and then, in 1975, the letters become consolatory — the year her own mom died, when she was 22. An event that would become an eerie, distinct connection across our lives, a formative split in before and after that we never knew we would share. I spend hours pulling pa per from envelopes, smoothing the creas es, squinting at cursive, filing letters by date in folders and boxes I slide with care on my bookshelf. But still, the letters are to her, not from her, so I’m still guessing what she said or asked, what happened, filling in gaps.

SASHA GRAYBOSCH

97 dishware because she entertains; and I re ceived all of Mom’s saved letters, because I am the writer. As far as I can tell, my dad didn’t look inside the box to keep the ones he himself wrote.

los angeles review of books 98 generally calmer now, less volatile, though one might still describe him as “highstrung.” He likes to know exactly what will happen in a day before it will hap pen, and his version of love and care is to make sure everyone is fed and insured and employed and aware that retirement is ex pensive, and we need to start saving now. We get together to discuss our rela tionship to stuff, as I had asked. The con versation is structured like an interview and I start slow: “How would you define your relationship to the things that you own?” and “When did you start having strong feelings about stuff?” and then the harder questions, the ones more direct ly about mom, and me, “What motivat ed you to clean out mom’s room without telling us?” He’s careful with me, too, and his word choice is vague and euphemis tic. Just as I’m wondering why he’s talking this way, he brings up my mom directly and his voice cracks; I realize his evasion wasn’t for my protection, but his. During this conversation, I remember what I often forget about my dad — how close his feelings live to the surface, how similar to each other we really are. My dad’s avoidance of mementoes is not a matter of absence or rejection of feeling, but an excess of it, a desire to tone down what’s inside by clearing what’s outside. As he’s talking, I remember a line I read in one of the letters he wrote to my mother, one that surprised me with its tenderness. I think of you always. His partnership with my mother gave him access to decades of intimate experience that I never had, a whole world of memory. In my case, I use the outside to bring in what’s missing in side. If only we could share what we each have.I bring up my mother’s room, which we have not talked about for many years. I listen to his explanation of his mind-state at the time — devastated and panicked — but I still have to ask: “Did you know it would hurt us when you cleared out her room?” “No,” he says softly. “I didn’t — I didn’t think of that.” He looks right at me. “I’m sorry, Sasha.” I tell him I understand. For a moment it’s like the windows have come parallel and opened and we see each other inside. At least, that’s what it feels like to Afterme. the talk, we’re standing at a stoplight and my dad puts his arm around me — a rare occurrence — and we thank each other. As we wait for the light to change, he mentions his idea to scan pho tos from the family albums, pull out the best ones to keep. I feel a twinge of re sistance, and since we’re feeling connected and open, I make efforts to explain why I appreciate the original albums. My mother was a devoted photogra pher, a meticulous chronicler. The collec tion of albums is massive and contains as many family moments as boring pictures of countryside and birds. But it’s not just the content of the images that is import ant to me, it’s the physical record of her countless hours spent shooting, develop ing, organizing film. To keep the albums is to preserve something acted on, an actual remnant of her personhood, and with it, the opportunity to maintain a relationship that is curious about her, has questions. I find myself in her labors, her choices — a desire to observe and document expe rience, render it in tangible form. I don’t want to keep this stuff merely as a gesture of sentiment. I want to keep it because it still speaks to me. Surprises me. If I’m try ing to continue a conversation with her, where else would I go? My dad nods. He’s listening. “We could scan them in the same order,” he

I listen back to the conversa tion I recorded with my dad, my perspec tive darker. After his apology, he spends a long time talking about his pain, and I listen to him talk about his pain, the depth of it, the isolation and trauma of his grief, his anger at the doctors, himself, and I see that instead of the windows staying open between us, the shades were slowly being drawn.“Would it surprise you to know that once when I was walking home from work, I thought I should blow my brains out?” he said. He described how his body collapsed internally, how waking up each

The cars stop, and we cross. A few weeks later, I receive a package from my father; there’s an envelope and a small plastic box filled with photos. “I think you might be interested in these,” he writes. “Your mom evidently selected these her self — as favorites perhaps.” Inside the box are studio photographs of my sisters and I, from birth through high school. Curled hair, bows. I fan them out on my bed, care ful to retain the order, and scan the babies morphing into girls into women. I see my mother in all of them, in all of us. Splinters of features replicated here, diverging there. I am touched that my dad preserved them, that he’d listened to what I’d said. I’m at work when a burst of text messag es lights up my screen. They’re from my sisters. My dad and his wife are having a moving sale, and she’s posted photos on Facebook of the things that will be available. There are the kid’s costumes my mother made. There is the furniture my uncle built. Dishes. Artwork. Teacups. Jewelry. Tagged for two dollars here, 50 cents there. Things my father agreed to store until further notice. Apparently, the final reckoning had come, we just hadn’t been invited. I call Dad that night, hoping to re kindle the understanding we’d had in the coffee shop. “I’m old, I’ve had it,” he snaps. “No more stuff.” They’re selling the house, moving into an apartment. The stuff has to go. This is it. I tell him I’m baffled. I’m indignant, and as my frustration spikes, I start to snap back. “What do you think you are? An archaeologist or something?” he says. “If you can’t remember your mother without a bunch of junk, there must be something wrong with you.” “Maybe there is,” I say, stunned. I don’t point out the different ways a person might want to remember, and that I can’t have his mind, as much as he wants me to. There’s only my own. We fight, the con versation burns out, and we’re back where we were, only more lost in difference, it seems. He threatens to get rid of every thing. I talk him down — give us 24 hours

99 says. “We could keep some of the albums.”

The ensuing day is a ridiculous tugof-war that involves Excel and a strate gizing conference call, and ultimately en listing one of my sister’s old high school friends to buy two pieces of my mother’s furniture from my dad at his garage sale. My sister makes a spreadsheet so we can claim and discuss ownership of items, and she labels it “Mom’s Stuff.” I think of how many iterations of this we’ve experienced, objects divorced from my mother’s pres ence, put through filters, columns, tagged with words, like we’re selling and shop ping for Mom. It all feels further from her, less her. I choose a flower press, a painting. Much of it my dad agrees to ship. I scurry to make room in my closet. The episode culminates in a sludge of gratitude and Weeksresentment.later,

SASHA GRAYBOSCH

los angeles review of books 100 day was “horrible, horrible, horrible” and the only way to handle it was to act, to do something, to move forward. He ex plained the symptoms of grief to me as though I had not experienced them my self, as though I had not been as lost. It was obviously important to him that I recognize his motives, the way he didn’t see beyond his pain. But that is ex actly what I recognize, one of the aspects of his grief that feels familiar to me. He did not see beyond his own pain. He didn’t see Listeningme. to him, I realize that while sorrow can open you to empathy and connect you to others, it can blind you to anything beyond the spotlight of your own turmoil. It is easy to revel in anger and blame, use it as justification for selfinterest. But I don’t want to live that way. I don’t want to lose sight of others in the walled-up darkness of my own hurt. For me, this means coming to accept that I can’t keep my mother, or anything, whole, that I will never know everything there is to know.And if I’m being entirely honest with myself, I know that the absolute es sence of my mother doesn’t reside in the flower press or the painting, in the lost clothes and kitchen gadgets, in the pho tos or scraps of handwriting, or even in my memories, because I don’t believe it’s possible to gain total possession of some one you hold dear, just as you can’t lose them completely, either, even if you try. My mom is in the note she wrote about the box, but that’s not all of her. She’s in my father’s mind, but that’s not all of her either. These are pieces, real pieces, just as any encounter with another person, living or dead, is an incomplete glimpse, one drop of a moving process colliding with one drop from another. We’re currents of human drift passing through, meeting and parting like clouds. This doesn’t mean I’ll let everything go or stop turning to stuff to find and make meaning. I’ve grown to acknowl edge that each of us operates under our own scheme of material representation, that the personal project of stuff is aligned with the pursuit of self. Some seek refuge and liberation in refining their things, while others accumulate or divest to prior itize status or conformity or individuality, and preservation can range from nur turance of relational bonds to unhealthy immersion in longing. Whatever the case, our stuff reveals how we wish the world to be. There’s no right way to relate to things, only the decisions we make and their in ternal, interpersonal, and environmental consequences, which are thorny and sig nificant, and in all matters that stoke the human heart, we’ll find variety, peculiarity, self-destruction, and redemption — any and every story that can be told.

For my birthday, my dad sends a package and tells me to be on the lookout, which means it’s something old or import ant. When the box arrives, I’m confused to find two books with generic, freshly bound covers, Great Expectations and an Introduction to Literature anthology. I call him to find out where they came from and learn they belonged to my mother. The Dickens novel was her favorite book, and the other she’d had since college. He took them to a local bookbinder who put new covers on, gold embossed print on green and blue pebbled leather. “What did they look like before?” I ask. I’m wanting to picture them somewhere in her room, on her shelf. See if I can draw up a senso ry memory of them from when she was alive.

“Oh, they were a mess,” my dad said. “One — the cover was falling off. You wouldn’t want it.” I thank him for the books and thumb through them when we hang up, some what touched, but mostly irritated. They bring me nowhere, except for a signature I find in a youthful loop in the back, Eva, which I touch with my finger. I am sad that my dad still doesn’t know that I’d pre fer the ragged copies with their personal resonance. I am sad that the books have been changed, put through another fil ter, another layer of separation from my mother. I put them on my shelf with all the rest, and in looking up at them, my attitude softens. The connection to my mother is not there, but I can imagine a time in my life when they will adopt new meaning, when I will turn to them when I want to remember my father. When I want to remember his generosity and his flaws, his unique character, the ways that, despite everything, he tried. I can see my self holding them between my hands to get a feel for him and the way we were to gether, all the ways we didn’t understand each other, and all the ways that we did.

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SASHA GRAYBOSCH

Mr. Jefferson’s cold dressed victuals, his expensive butter & salads the sealed jars sweating clear gems of condensation, white blood

KIKI PETROSINO

102

Every night, I go back to Mr. Jefferson’s place, searching still his kitchens, behind staircases, in a patch of shade somewhere beside his joinery & within his small ice house, till I get down that pit, lined with straw, where Mr. Jefferson once stacked frozen slabs of river water until summer. Then, visitors would come to him to ask about a peculiar green star, or help him open up his maps. They’d kneel together on the floor, among his books lavish hunks of ice melting like the preserved tears of some antique mammal who must have wept to leave Albemarle, just as I wept when I landed in Milan for the first time, stone city where Mr. Jefferson began to learn the science of ice houses, how you dig into the dark flank of the land, how you seal the cavity. Leave open just one small hatch through which I might lift, through gratings

TERROREM

103 appearing from warm air, as if air could break & slough, revealing the curved arc of our shared Milan. There, I wore silver rings on each thumb. I studied & spoke in fine houses of ice. I knew a kind of crying which sealed me to such realms for good. Old magic weep, old throb-in-throat. How much of my fondness for any place is water, stilled & bound to darkness?

Bruce Davidson, Untitled, 1966-1968, from the series East 100th Street © Bruce Davidson. Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

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FARM BOOK KIKI PETROSINO

Whenever I write about Mr. Jefferson, he gallops over. Knock knock, he begins in quadruplicate. It’s pretty wild, like my student’s poem about a house of skin & hair, a house that bleeds. Mr. Jefferson’s place is so dear to me, white husk my heart beats through, until I can’t write more. In my student’s poem, the house stands for womanhood, pain coiled in the drywall. Sorrow warps the planks, pulling nails from ribs. In Kentucky, I’m the only black teacher some of my students have ever met, & that pulls me somewhere. I think of Mr. Jefferson sending his field slaves to the ground, a phrase for how he made them pull tobacco & hominy from the earth, but also for how he made of the earth an oubliette. At sixteen, they went to the ground if Mr. Jefferson thought they couldn’t learn to make nails or spin. He forgot about them until they grew into cash, or more land. For him, it must’ve seemed like spinning. Sorrow of souls, forced to the ground as a way of marking off a plot. At sixteen, I couldn’t describe the route to my own home, couldn’t pilot a vehicle, could hardly tell the hour on an analog clock. I had to wear my house-key on a red loop around my neck. Now, I rush to class beneath a bronze Confederate, his dark obelisk, his silent mustache. My books tumble past the lectern as I recite Mr. Jefferson’s litany: Swan. Loon. Nuthatch. Kingfisher. Electric web of names, yet in the ground, I know, a deeper weave of gone-away ones who should mean more to me than any book. I live in language on land they left. I have no language to describe this.

Painted on an ill-cut, not quite rectangle of tarnished tin: On the western side, a spin ning earth, a swirly blur of ocean blue, smog gray, jungle green, and desert tan. All to the east is a beautiful daylight powder blue. At the center, a man, white cotton shirt and jeans and bare feet, who flails as if falling, though somehow his fall seems upward or sideways, as if he were painted wrong on the tin. His expression is of one who just leapt free from a patch of cholla or nopal. From the middle of the tin, above the man, an eagle is circling, while beneath him a rattlesnake contorts. On the eastside of the tin, watching, La Virgen de Guadalupe, her eyes a motherly Mona Lisa’s on him, and she seems to be in a bubble of golden light, but it really is the sun behind her.

EX-VOTO FOUND ON THE ALL X'S BORDER OF TEXAS, MEXICO, AND NEW MEXICO DAGOBERTO GILB

short 106

— Perfecto Sánchez Ixcoy, 12 Dec 2019

— Perfecto Sánchez Ixcoy, 12 dic 2019 [día de la Virgen de Guadalupe]

107

En aquellos años yo, Perfecto Sánchez Ixcoy, caminaba por aceras rotas y corría por senderos de tierra y cruzaba zanjas y ríos y subía muros de piedra y me reía recio y me burlaba como pelado y tomaba cerveza mezcal y waro y gastaba toda mi plata y perdía muchas horas andando de vago o acompañado por mujeres no mi esposa y jugaba de masiado a los gallos y no les hacía caso a los débiles o los más pobres y me confundía tanto conmigo mismo que en mi camino serpenteante y torcido, dondequiera que esta ba, tonto y ridículo, me encontraba lejos y perdido, y luego triste, y solo, y luego donde ya no sabía los puntos cardinales los cuatro y el arriba y el abajo o si me estaba moviendo despacio o muy rápido o si estaba quieto, hasta que supliqué con lagrimas y recé mis por favores en silencio con toda humildad a Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe La Madre que es La Tierra y al Nuestro Señor El Padre que está en El Cielo. Con mis gracias al Señor y Señora por oírme me convertí en el alma que había sido hacía mucho tiempo cuando era un niño inocente aunque horita con un cuerpo quebrado y desgastado pero lleno de esta vida. ¡Qué marabilla! Un bisabuelo de ocho, doy todo mi profundo agradecimiento.

In those years I, Perfecto Sánchez Ixcoy, walked broken sidewalks and ran on dirt trails and crossed ditches and rivers and climbed over rock walls and laughed too hard and scoffed like the foulest and drank beer mezcal and guaro and wasted all my money and lost so many hours doing nothing or being with women not my wife and gambled too much at cockfights and I paid no attention to the crippled or the most poor and I got so confused with myself that on my winding and twisted road, wherever I was, stupid and foolish, I found myself faraway and lost, and then sad, and alone, and then where I no longer knew the cardinal directions the four and up and down or if I was moving slow or very fast or if I were still, until I begged in tears and prayed in silence my please pleases with all my humility to Our Lady of Guadalupe The Mother who is The Earth and to Our Lord The Father who is in Heaven. With my thanks to the Lord and Lady for hearing me, my soul was changed into what it had been long ago when I was an in nocent child although now with a broken and worn out body but full of this life. What wonder! A great-grandfather of eight, I give all my deepest gratitude.

DAGOBERTO GILB

109

WALKING INTO THE HOLY LAND

I was on my way to ruin a wedding. A song played in my head that my aunt Zaza used to sing. There’s a time for all things, it went. Not now not now not now. My slug gish head chased its tail. I wondered, is

WES HOLTERMANN fiction

Maybe I was too drunk to find it all that unusual. I was staring out the win dow admiring the green squares of coun try. I didn’t see what I was supposed to be looking at. I was on the wrong side of the plane.We were flying over the Holy Land, I supposed, a dilapidated theme park near Paris, Wisconsin, nestled in the corn. The small charter plane sputtered over the farms, silos sticking up like thumbs.

The cabin tipped sideways, then right ed “Lookitself.down, Hal,” the pilot said over the loudspeaker. He was talking to me. “This is the place.”

Chosen wasn’t me. No honors, no su

I “Yeah,shrugged.the Holy Land had its ups. There was a snack shack meant to look like a Nazarene hutment. Free for employees. Next to it was John the Baptist’s ball pit, where you’d jump in and be absolved of all the gluttony you’d just exhibited on your corn dog.” He laughed a lot at that one. I think of Sigrid when I think I’m dying. The same way people who don’t pray, pray on planes. But to trust in prayer, doesn’t one have to assume they’ve been chosen?

los angeles review of books 110 there ever a time in life you get to just go in and empty it out? My brain was heavy. I held it in my hands. Not now not now not now not now The pilot and I met at the airport bar. I didn’t know he was the pilot at the time. The playoffs were on. I was having a $12 highball, thinking about the NBA, won dering what it would be like to have an exquisitely functional body. The pilot sat next to me. He was a religious fanatic. The bartender, whose name was Mahalia, called us both sugar pie. It wasn’t the first time a stranger, un prompted, had told me at length about his childhood. There’s something about a wallowing man that attracts other wal lowing men. Sit around long enough. Like mussels glomming on a rock. “My dad took me every Sunday,” the pilot said. He was talking about the Holy Land, an immersive Bible experience. “He thought I needed it back then, and he was right. You a Bible guy?” I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, but tell that to a drunk. I took a sip instead of answering.OnTV, the Utah Jazz were strug gling to score over Houston’s long arms. Each shot thudded like a bird against a windowpane. I knew the feeling. I’d spent most of my savings on this flight, then the last of it on this highball. But I was head ed for a defining moment. I started a letter in my head. The pilot was still talking, but he didn’t seem to care if I was listening, and I figured I might as well accomplish something. Dear Sigrid. I stopped. It was as far as I’d gotten all week. My idea was I’d ask her to get a drink. An old friend buying an old friend a tequila soda. Nothing wrong with that. Laughing the whole time like always. I’d say something incredible, and she’d put her forehead on the bar. Ha ha, a hand on my leg to keep her balance. There would be a pause at one point. A look. I’d give her the letter when we said goodnight. The letter would say everything. The let ter would be warm to the touch, would contain the whole of me, meltingly. Dear Sigrid, it would say. And she’d feel the stars leaning on her. So to speak. “There was the Garden of Tempta tion,” the pilot said. He was in his own world, lost in the theme park. “The most luscious caramel apples hanging from fake trees. You were supposed to take one.” He looked at me, twinkling. “But when you did, a guy dressed as a snake chased you into a barn full of teenagers in devil suits, who would jump out at you. I worked there in high school, wore a rubber goat mask and jean shorts with no shirt on.”

The pilot laughed at the image in his head and sighed. “I’d squirt my stomach with fake blood and terrorize customers. But it was for their souls. I was striking the fear of God in their hearts.” He drank from his margarita bowl with both hands. “My first job was at the Cracker Barrel,” I said. He toasted me and said, “Good man.”

111 perlatives. The Oldsmobile I’d just bought was a lemon. It made noises, gurgles, little coughs, shook like a wet dog at stoplights. Plus I had asthma. Plus a hemorrhoid. I had an allergy that made my right eye chronically red. I had the body of a tall 12-year-old. True, in the right light, I was medium-handsome, but the right light seemed to find my face an uncomfortable perch. What I mean is it never settled there long. So I’d given up looking for it. In fact I’d given up looking for lights of all kinds. I didn’t expect much anymore, let alone a blessing from a higher power. But I wouldn’t have minded one. The wedding was in a barn somewhere outside the city. Sigrid had met Laszlo at a Halloween party. He was tall, a “cyclist,” believed in Bigfoot. “He reads books,” she said, a shrug in her voice. This was when they first started dating, back when we were talking on the phone almost ev ery day. Sigrid said, “It’s nice he reads.” I thought it was a low bar, but who was I kidding. I hadn’t finished a book in more than a Painyear.was a warm muck, and I’d made it my dwelling. The highballs sloshed in my body. I thought of the nuns who flayed their own backs until the welts spewed blood. Streamers. A celebration. A heal ing. Pain was devotional medicine. “All pain is sacred,” Sigrid said to me once. She said it laughing. We were drink ing Butterfinger Blizzards in an empty outdoor seating area. We were both heart broken for different reasons, so we tried to unbreak. It was the night we fell asleep in the dark back corner of the Dairy Queen parking lot, bent like flexi-straws in the trunk of her CRV. The night Sigrid pulled me into her by the hand. “More fingers,” she said and kept saying until I was up to my wrist. “Like this.” The windows fogged. She made a fist for me. I made a fist. Sigrid’s body unbuckled around me. Sweat collected dripping on the glass. “You’re very pretty,” she said, touching my face. I remember crying, but I couldn’t have. I re member she pressed her dewy forehead to my neck and it was the feeling of crying. I was sure Sigrid and I had met when we were too young to remember. We were from the same city, and I imagined a sand box. A waddle toward each other. A touch that lingered. A couple of babies figuring it out. Our fingers in each other’s mouths. I was sure because that night in the back of Sigrid’s car, with her adult fingers in my mouth, the overwhelming feeling was homesickness.Sometimes I got that way. A yearning I couldn’t explain for a world I didn’t in habit. Or a world I’d only dreamt about. Sometimes I thought about the ridiculous promises we’d all been made. Of gods. Of paradise. There had been so many mis steps, so many stumbles, a lot of falling, but toward what? I was homesick for milk and honey. My original flight was double-booked, so the airline had found me a spot on a small charter plane. At the boarding gate, I’d noticed an odd clientele gath ering. Some were in muumuus, some in three-piece suits, others in long biblical robes. There was a group of three women who seemed to be dressed as saints from Renaissance paintings, two men in starched, white suits. Their posture was impeccable, like they’d been starched themselves. One woman carried a long, unlit candle. There was a palpable buzz of excitement, though it was hard to tell what was going on. Everyone was shaking hands, milling about. WES HOLTERMANN

It was the reason she’d been attend ing the convention for the last 10 years. When the blood started to ooze from the spork tracks, it oozed in the shape of a dove. “As we know from scripture,” she told me, “during His baptism, the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and alight ed on Christ. Well I was floored. My eyes opened. It was then that I chose to live.”

los angeles review of books 112 I’d learn later, from the woman next to me on the plane, whose name was Holly, that they were all headed to God Con, a convention for lesser prophets.

“Some of these people have heard God’s voice in the gurgle of a creek,” she said. “Some see the Virgin’s face pop out pe riodically from the pattern in their li noleum floor, or the Lord swimming in their chicken noodle.” She offered me an Ambien and when I said no, took it her self. “No one here thinks they’re Moses, but it’s worth getting together once in a while and comparing notes. The hope is a pattern might start to emerge. Such that our purpose might reveal itself. You see what I’m saying?” I nodded. She patted me on the leg and opened SkyMall. As a teenager, I’d seen a cult, all in white, wade into the Yuba River in slow, sweet song. Some of them sat on the flat rocks on the bank, playing wooden recorders. One by one these people approached the priest, who stood ribs-deep in a royal blue gown, and one by one she blessed them, pushed their heads under, held them a few seconds. When they came up, they came up grinning. They were lighter then, I imagined, washed free of the chubby demons they’d been carrying around on their shoulders. I watched the baptisms from the oak trees above the river, in swim trunks and flip-flops. My own demon played with my ears, singing an ugly song. I looked at my belly and tried not to think about what must be inside, dragging me down. My body is so tired of carrying it self, I thought. Even then. “You go to church?” Holly said. I shook my head. “Sometimes,” al though the only church I’d been to in the last 15 years was for funerals. “You spiritual?” I “Ishrugged.cantellyou are, somewhat, just by how you hold yourself, how you listen. Maybe you’re suppressing it though, huh? Maybe you’re afraid of faith, but I see it in there. You’re an observer,” she said. “That means your satellite dish is up. That means you’re receptive to a signal from the divine.”

The reason I was quiet was the high balls from the airport bar. My brain sloshed, echoing in the sepulcher of my Imelon.hadto pee. It wasn’t urgent at first, but my bladder was beginning to swell against the seatbelt, causing me some discomfort. Holly — fat, sublime, and smelling of rosewater — was asleep now, blocking my path to the aisle. Once, she’d tried to kill herself in an airplane bathroom. She told me this ear lier, over our bags of nuts. She’d taken a bunch of sleeping pills but fought against them, clinging to consciousness. “So there I was, high as a fly,” she’d said, laughing. When they hit a patch of turbulence, she entered in a death dream, the plane rambunctious and full of fear. Like a bull stuck with swords. In this moment, death seemed to her a respite. “But the only thing I had was a spork from the airline,” she said. “It was highly unsuccessful.” She showed me the rake marks, laughing. What foolish things.

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Now Holly was zonked out, dragged un der by the Ambien. Immune to death. Out the window we emerged from white into a sky of tabernacles, towering clouds dolloped all over, as if gliding along a lumpy and baroque cul-de-sac, and we plunged again into one, into pure, soft milk. A quietness. Like stepping from screaming honking daylight into the peace of a church. “Isn’t it incredible?” I turned around. The flight attendant was pushing his coffee cart past and must have seen me staring out the window. I noticed my lips had fallen apart into a childlike look of awe. I was slightly embarrassed and tried to reorder my face into Friendly Smile. The flight attendant poured me coffee and bent over sleeping Holly to hand it to me. “The clouds are why I’m here,” he said. He told me he’d been in the medi cal supplies business and was taking work trips — Houston to Zurich to Ottawa to D üsseldorf, he said, and he’d always get the aisle. He liked the legroom. “I’d take a Xanax, put my eye mask on, and miss the whole thing. Then one day I was up graded to business class, a window seat — they’d overbooked — and my whole world opened up. Somehow I had forgot ten what flight was, the magic of entering a cloud, being thrown headlong into it. It was a nostalgic feeling for me, that great palace of wonder that, as a child, had once been my “Nowhome.”Iliveup here,” the flight atten dantLikesaid. an angel, I thought. Maybe it was just the light from the window, but his face seemed luminescent there among the dull grays of the cabin. It was as if he’d transcended the grays of this mortal coil. He beamed. I myself was bogged down in grays. When I did go out these days, it was to wind up alone on a balcony outside a par ty, to wrap myself in the tiny gray world of a spliff. Indoors, there would be mingling, dancing. My friends laughing and drink ing, but I couldn’t bring myself to join them. There would be Alyssa and Dawn, Phillip and Eddy, all of whom I’d dated briefly and not well. And there was Sig rid, through the glass, dancing slow and dreamy, my friend, who once had taken me by the wrist and pulled me inside her, who I’d held all night in the hollow my sleeping body made, who I’d dated not at all but loved with each gathered molecule of me. Every party was always this. There was a warm light through the window, too thick and gold to stay in long. The warm gold light of the chosen. From there I’d walk back to my apartment, for which I’d never gotten around to buying more than one chair. I’d tend to my two dying cac tuses, a few drops of water each, and lie on my back until sleep laid its cloth over my body.Ithanked the flight attendant for the coffee, and as I looked back up at him, he smiled. I felt a hunger well up in me, the inexplicable hunger one gets in the pres ence of something beautiful, a cloud, for instance. In that moment, I wanted to put a cloud in my mouth. The flight attendant had a fresco face. A face flush with sun. I got the feel ing here was a man who had the missing piece. Here was a man who was full. The fasten seatbelt sign lit up, and the pi lot was speaking directly to me: “This is it, Hal. The Holy Land. The place I was telling you about. Tray tables up, people. We’re landing.” We were nowhere near Cleveland and seemed to be circling back.

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“Who’s Hal?” I heard someone say. The pilot was quite Somewhere,drunk.ababy was crying. The plane veered toward the ground. My ears were popping, and I thought I ought not to have had my third drink. A hard bell had begun to ring in my head. The rubber oxygen masks unfurled, and many of the passengers were scram bling to undo their inflatable yellow vests from under their seats, though we were over dry land. All around, you could feel the air beginning to thicken with anxi ety, the way the static electricity around a balloon starts to knit itself into being. Someone screamed. Soon there were sev eral babies crying. A man, who’d been pounding on the door to the cockpit, now smeared down it, sobbing, and slumped. There was no turbulence. The sky outside was clear blue and smooth, and we floated down through it. It felt natural. I knew I should be afraid, but I couldn’t summon it. I thought of the pilot in the goat mask covered in blood. I tried to think of God. I thought of Sigrid. Holly’s head lolled peacefully. I still had to pee. Across the aisle, a man had his face on the tray table, muttering a prayer. I thought about what I’d pray for. What to want in the face of God. Certainly not the first thing I thought of: a bleak Cleveland winter, financial hardship, strain, Sigrid and Laszlo fighting and fighting, a reali zation. No. Certainly happiness for them, abundance. A rain of beheaded marigolds. Doves. A rain of rice. Dear Sigrid, I thought. But the body of the letter dangled out of reach. Even then, I knew the letter wasn’t real. The idea of it was a sense of agency. The sense of being the hero in my own life. A day dream. In it, she and I would tear down the wedding streamers together, to the sound of trumpets. We’d drive to the des ert. I’d devote myself to her completely.

A murmur of alarm went up in the cabin.

The cabin was in a state of disar ray, so it went relatively unnoticed when I climbed over the woman next to me,

There were baths I’d dreamt up, can dles, garlands of flowers slung from the curtain rod. And there were dinners I’d cook her, of lamb braised so long the meat barely clung to the bone. I dreamt mas sages, oils, hyacinths, the smell of jasmine, luxuries heaped on the altar of our life. In the way some people had idols and deities, Sigrid and I would have each other. For a year I couldn’t sleep unless we talked on the phone. I needed her. That was the truth of it. She was an escape from my floundering, unfulfilling life. A purpose that kept my great reservoir of emptiness at arm’s length. I was still calm, considering death, a lush cornfield, was hurtling up at me like a thrown dinner plate. An old woman wobbled down the aisle, raving, holding up a large crucifix she must have had in her carry-on. “He’ll open his heart to us,” she was saying. Some turbulence threw her sidelong into a row, and the people helped her back up. “Trust in Him,” she said. “Heads down! Pray, people!” I wasn’t praying. She was looking at me. I didn’t know what good it would do, me of little faith, but here I was any way flying into the room of God’s heart. The room at the end of anxiety, struggle, the room that would quiet all those aw ful symptoms of hope. I looked at the woman’s icon. Typical Christ: limp and dripping on the cross. The end of suffer ing. Another promise. As if such damage could hasten the coming of peace.

Tom Rubnitz, Wigstock: The Movie, 1987. Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. All screenshots, after the screening event Tom Rubnitz, collected video works 1981 - 1992, January 11th 2020, courtesy Goswell Road, Paris.

los angeles review of books 116 stepping catlike on the armrests. The pee inside me needed to get out. As I moved through the aisle, I saw people breath ing “I love you” into cell phones, parents cinching the rubber masks tight to their children, a man with his nose buried in the fur of an emotional support pug. One couple was making out, weeping, hands holding each other’s faces, clawing like they were trying to find a way in. By now the plane was shaking. Like rolling downhill in a shopping cart. Over head compartments popped open, and bags started falling like a plague of fat birds. At the end of the aisle, the edges of the closed bathroom door glowed. Sometimes you find yourself in a room full of candles. And someone is singing a long low golden tone, and you sit on a bench, whose wood sputters under your weight, or if there is no bench simply set your knees on the cold stone floor. You find it is incredibly painful, and for what? Again and again you find yourself in this room, or a room just like it. Your whole life is spent seeking these places, because at some point a promise was made of ref uge, salvation. Sometimes the room you enter is made of salt crystals and is inside a Korean spa. Sometimes it’s a quiet church in the belly of a thunderstorm. Sometimes the shelter you’re looking for is in the soft folds, between the fat luminous thighs of a friend, and sometimes you yourself are a room. Sometimes a friend enters the room of you and finds refuge, and this is a feel ing of splendor. Each room asks that you give yourself over completely. Sitting in the lavatory sink was the flight attendant. It was cramped in there with both of us. The light made it look like he was radiating gold. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can leave.” “Are you using it?” “I was just thinking in here. A little respite.”“It’s no problem. You don’t mind if I use the “Betoilet?”myguest,” he said. “I’ll look over here,” and he began to touch the paper towel dispenser interestedly. I noticed two lit votive candles inside slender glass ves sels, one on either side of the sink. I got the sense the lavatory was a kind of chap el for him. “It’s the quietest place on the plane,” he said. “I’m Hal,” I said. “I’d shake your hand, but—”“Gabriel.”Iwasaiming, so I couldn’t turn around. Pee choired in the bowl of the toilet. “What do you think the odds are on this landing?” I asked him. I hoped he’d have some idea, being in the business. But instead of answering, he said, “Do you Thispray?”did little to reassure me. I shook my head. “I don’t know what I’d pray for.”

I shook out my penis and zipped my fly, feeling emptied. “World peace,” I said. “Every“Evertime.”come true?” He smiled. The plane lurched, and the whole bathroom dropped. My stomach flew up into my lungs, then settled. The votive candles re mained lit. “Maybe I can help you,” said the flight attendant. He placed three fingers under the fau cet on which he was sitting, twisted the knob, and then looked me in the eyes. I realized then it wasn’t the bathroom light.

The flight attendant laughed, shift ed on the sink so his leg was up. He was wearing shorts. His thigh was a cornuco pia of defined muscle. “What do you wish for on birthday candles?”

The sink water from my forehead was dripping down, and Gabriel was open ing his shirt to me, kissing the holy water from my jeweled face. He reached down. I did too. As my lips found the oil and stub ble along the thick shaft of muscle on his neck, my fingers found his zipper. His pe nis was smaller than mine. Though hard, the skin was tender as a fig. I knelt. For a moment, I held him on the wet altar of my tongue, then kissed lower. His balls tasted like sweat. I suckled at them, licking along the seam up to the base, then further. I could feel his heart in the veins. He sunk into me, as one sinks into a hot bath. I felt the bulb of his tip press on my throat. I felt a retch, felt him swell, bursting against my teeth. And I felt pride in being chosen, at last, by my circumstance, there in that gold light, rattling toward oblivion. The attendant pushed further, and tears welled in my eyes. I thought of all the ways I had been chosen and not chosen in life. I tried to see any difference between the two but could find none. Some people, it seemed, were chosen to be blessed, and some were chosen to suffer. There was no use asking for anything. The key was to remain open to whatever you were chosen for — holy sink water, slings and arrows, the great swinging cleaver of God — and to open all your sticky wounds to God like flypa per. To catch all of him in them. So I did. I opened myself completely. I opened my mouth wide, opened my throat despite its retching, until the flight attendant seemed to have entered my chest, to have filled my heart and my lungs with chosenness, and I was anointed. I caught my breath and rested my head on Gabriel’s thigh while he buttoned his shorts. I felt myself ease into him, still kneeling. I closed my eyes like I was pray ing. I could have fallen asleep if he didn’t move. But he blessed me again by doing the water thing. “Will this improve my luck?” I said, getting to my feet. “What luck? Luck is a devil’s trick. You’re one of God’s children.” I thanked him, and he nodded. I wiped my “Well,mouth.we’dbetter,” he said. “The fas ten seatbelt sign is on.” So I took my seat, balancing down the aisle, climbed again over peaceful Holly, who opened her eyes and smiled, and strapped myself in. Holly put a hand of comfort on my knee. Out the window, the farms were swelling upward, blurring now. They were close. The clouds in tatters. Barns flew past. I wasn’t afraid. Trees whipped the belly of the plane. Corn stood like baby hair on the backs of the hills, waiting for the knife.Iput my head on Holly’s shoulder and closed my eyes. Then we were walking into the Holy Land through the cornfields. The plane was on fire behind us, and all we could see of it was the smoke now, ribboning up over the stalks.The pilot was shepherding us. Most of the passengers had been talking to God for the duration of our descent, God whose big hand, through the bodily ve hicle of the pilot, had just set us tenderly

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He was surging with a warm glow. I bowed my head, and he touched me wetly on the forehead, on the heart, on one shoul der, then the other. But I didn’t pray for world peace. Instead I thought of a bed, a window, slabs of morning light, a leg slung over me, and the pear-sweet call of a mourning dove outside. The plane banged around the clouds. I thought of Sigrid.

los angeles review of books 118 in the soft soil of farmland. These people, already minor prophets, amateur seers, were feeling supremely touched, in a little bit of a stupor, following this miracle man. When he parted the corn, and the Holy Land opened up before us, there were ac tual gasps. I gasped too. The entrance was a gate built to look like a parting sea. The blue paint was chipped, the plaster falling off its chicken wire frame in chunks. The D on the Holy Land sign had rotted its way out of its top nail and swung upside down. Through the gate, now sealed with a section of cyclone fence, was a dried-up lazy river, a statue of Jesus pouring two pitchers in, one la beled Milk, the other, Honey. The pitch ers of course were empty, and Jesus’s face was dripping with bird shit, but the effect landed. A couple people burst into tears. WhyGabrielnot? peeled the fence up, and we all crawled in. He smiled at me as I went through, gave a wink. His legs, squatting, strained against his shorts. I touched his foot meaningfully as I crawled past. The place was in a state of disrepair. Windows were boarded up, and the small rollercoaster, Purgatorio, which had once slung whirlygigging through the seven levels of Hell, was buckling under the weight of ivy. The Holy Land was a ghost town. Hip-high thistles came up through the asphalt like fists. The passengers wandered the park in bleary-eyed awe. They bowed before the milk and honey statue, touched the plastic belly of a pregnant Virgin. There was another statue of Jesus on a donkey, whom they caressed, lowering their eyes. Stooped before a chair was an animatron ic Jesus that, when he worked, had loving ly washed the feet of guests. Passengers knelt beside him, did their cross, kissed and nursed at his hands. How afraid they were to offend a plastic god. By sunset, everyone had mostly dis persed. Many had found their way into the small chapel by the food court, and the streets of the park were empty. I looked up. The sky seemed to me a domed room, intimate as a church. I was alone. I could do anything inside that sky. I could ask for anything, and my asking would ring around me. The echo would run down all sides of the dome and envelope me, like two great hands. All this time I’d wanted love, but I’d imagined it in the literary sense: some thing found that instantly gives meaning. A satisfactory ending. Like God. An end to searching. An end to suffering. A child’s understanding of love, it now seemed to me. Gabriel was gone, lost somewhere in the theme park, though I still tasted him in my mouth. I wandered through the Holy Land looking for him, through the filthy windows to John the Baptist’s ball pit, through the decrepit trees of the Garden of Temptation, inside the nativity scene, where several of the passengers had nestled in the hay to sleep. I didn’t know what I would do or say when I found him. I didn’t even know if I wanted to find him, but searching was all I seemed to know how to do. It always had been. But, like all my aspirations, like Sigrid, like a love to end all suffering, he was nowhere. I wasn’t even entirely sure he was real. Soon I was in the middle of the weedy asphalt courtyard at the park’s entrance, standing before the plaster Jesus. I looked around. With a rock, I broke off the pitch ers of milk and honey at the wrists, hands still attached, and put them in my car ry-on. It would be a wedding present.

The sun was gone by now, and the moon showed up like a thumbprint on the dark. A light appeared a few hills over — warm and honey gold. An angel, I thought at first, but I realized it had to be a house. The more I stared at it though, I could swear I saw the light furl and unfurl now and then like a set of wings. It was hard to tell how far the walk was, but the light glowed there like a bea con. We were in Wisconsin. America’s Dairyland. Within the house would be a TV, a table, a set of comfortable chairs. An ordinary living room in which noth ing much divine ever happened. I slipped into the cornstalks in its direction. I fig ured they might have a phone.

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A black feather for the old man, who of late hobbled into the vale, rose-tinted, dithering his bitmap gospel. A cormorant’s, the feather.

By heft a scholar, one not unjust, or so it felt when I slashed his last work with it and a double-crested grunt flounced out. To his question, whether verse administers medicine or tar, I would say I have seen a place called Îles de la Madeleine where, spectral, in small rock pools, the former bloomed. Near-field plume, the feather fell from there. Still even, light-drawn density avails ills only in fulminant ink. Bloodletting, so goes, goes darkly against the sun.

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ISHION HUTCHINSON

GIFT FEATHER

O MEDUSA SOPHIA SHALMIYEV

short 122

Iclasp my hands to face this portrait of Medusa, head still firmly attached, and ask her on our behalf, Is this the year ev eryone can be formally asked to stop say ing the phrase: He’s a good guy, but…? Like last night. He’s a good guy but he is a violent alcoholic who chokes women and drops racist comments about those types of people, giggling. Here he is at the reading — which I had to leave quite suddenly because my ex forgot to pick up our two children. This good guy gets a hug and a whiskey from the bartender, talks over the keynote speaker with a mic; he is not asked to leave, he is asked to shut up, but only by the speaker, who is exhausted, alone, and almost done with her book tour.

He’s a good guy but he wrote a book about his incel fantasies, which he obviously hopes to turn into realities, and he loves the pushback as a marketing strategy.

O Medusa, do you love living in this gray shield city with so many good guys, the word guy nested into the word but?

Yes, he’s a good guy but he forgot to pick up his kids at aftercare, so the mother leaves her event to go fetch them 40 min utes after the community center closed.

He’s a good guy but he has to be chased down and begged for abortion money when he’s too much of a dodgy grifter to provide anything for the problems he cre He’sates. a good guy but he embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from a nonprofit whose poetry books you probably really He’senjoy.a good guy but abuses his power as a mentor, an elder, an authority figure, and fucks his interns or students.

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SOPHIA

Do you like pretending that literary mag azines close because of the price of paper rather than the price of giving a misogy nist a quiet exit? Do you enjoy buying books from men who don’t read women and call them vul gar bitches and hos; a bag of expired corn nuts who doesn’t think the word “retard” is a Medusa,profanity?stare back at these stoned faces with a hiss and a jolt. I want a timeline, a de-activation code, a set of basic rules to offset the banality of passive-shrug evil, a schedule to disarm and de-nuclearize every vapid corner of my city of ghost and ghoul dicks on parade. I want you to calculate the costs of belonging, of being casual, of shared meals with losers and villains, of allowing the gag reflex to dis appear, silence as reassurance in exchange for cozy readings at faux-Parisian book shops. And then our helpless disgust, like hands in pockets inside this tight hang over tomorrow.

SHALMIYEV

Asako Narahashi, Amamioshima, from the series half awake and half asleep in the water, 2005.

The Nature Book is a novel that collages na ture descriptions from 300 other novels into a single, seamless text; it includes no origi nal language. With the background brought to the fore, patterns emerge in how we think and write about nature; the resulting nar rative is shaped by these patterns. This is an excerpt from Part I, “The Four Seasons,” at the end of a long, frigid winter. There had not been such a winter for years.1 Every night — bone-cracking cold.2 Every morning the world flung it self over and3 the view had changed,4 ap pearing a shade lighter,5 but the country was of a deadly and a deceitful sameness.6 The same day returned once again — the same7 waste of snow and rock very lonely and Itaustere.8snowed every day now, sometimes only brief flurries that powdered the snow from NATURE BOOK COMITTA fiction

THE

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TOM

los angeles review of books 126 crust, sometimes for real.9 On the cold est days the snowdrifts were deep and the pine needles in the glades were ossi fied with ice.10 On the days when the sun shone,11 it was only an instant.12 A bright speck. Then it was13 gone. One14 could not imagine that matters could get worse, but they did.15 In a matter of weeks,16 in a blizzard,17 how it snowed so hard.18 Raged for forty-eight hours.19 Ani mals that occupied the land20 felt the wind of the blizzard increase, and overhead the sky grew dark with snow.21 The cold in creased until22 it was thirty below zero.23

When the light began to come65 back to life at once, it was the clump of66 clouds and vapours67 that flared in the sky.68 The sun was an angry little pinhead69 in the gloom. Though70 in a matter of minutes the nameless71 clouds opened and,72 lo! — all of a sudden, for the change was quick as lightning,73 the wonderful compara tive smallness of74 the sun shot a broken and discoloured light that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and75 cast vast clouds76 and snow and ice77 and rocks into such vivid relief that for the first few mo ments the sense of distance and propor tion was almost annulled.78

One cold winter morning,48 the pat terns of cloud cover49 began to change slightly for the better.50 The wind was still blowing overhead.51 The snow was falling over the ice and turning to ice. The snow was falling over the ice and hiding the ice.52 The winter bareness spread drearily over it now,53 suffused with sloth and sul len expectation.54Butjustbefore noon the light changed.55 The snow had stopped after dumping a fresh eight inches on the old crust.56 The wind had dropped and it was less cold57 when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God,58 some strange light flared up — died away.59 There came a pause, a hiatus60 to the cold sky. There was the smell of wood61 even if just for a few minutes. A change of air.62 Of course, every tree within the valley was destroyed, but63 their scent, one that mingled sweetness and decay, at once filled one’s nostrils so completely that its very memory lingered for hours afterward.64

The very next morning24 when the snow finally ceased falling,25 quickly the passion went out of the sky. All the world was dark grey.26 Altogether changed. Although the breeze had now utterly ceased,27 the temperature had dropped ten degrees and28 made it memorable. On the north wall29 of the valley a mile away, sev en deer30 had frozen on31 a rock.32 Now the land itself33 seemed op pressed and banal in comparison34 to be fore. Two or three times35 before the awful storm36 was over, the white blur above the mountains37 caught the full fury of the rushing wind.38 Permanent ice began to form in the highest mountain valleys. It became only a matter of time until39 this valley was different,40 unreal and mocking, until the landscape41 and snow and ice42 were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones.43 A long time passed44 in such weather.45 Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. Colder and46 intangible but more disquieting.47

The sun stood high in the sky,79 star ing down through the hole in a perforated cloud, waiting for80 animals and for the wind,81 for a moment. A few82 of those sudden shocks of joy that are so physical, so precisely marked,83 set out across the valley.84 The eye had an almost boundless range of85 craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and86 looking up,87 the sunlight was a

veritable flood, crystal, limpid, sparkling, setting a feeling of gayety in the air, stir ring up an effervescence in the blood, a tumult of exuberance in the veins.88

Eyes opened wide90 upon the glorious golden shaft of sunlight shining through the91 great clouds that sailed in masses.92 Light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and anoth er and another, so that93 the sweep of flat land below the abrupt thrust of the moun tains94 was burnished gold,95 arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot er ratically across the quivering96 tangle of reflections.97Thislight excited and upset.98 The valley was now much more pleasant than it had been before.99 But why? What was100 all this commotion? With just one glance101 the sun had stirred up102 the clouds that had loitered in the heavens.103 For weeks, — ay, months104 — winter had piled high drifts105 in every direction and as far as the horizon.106 Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve.107 But now, with the sun over head,108 it was like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than like an idea, or an act of remembering.109Thesensation of sunlight over whelmed,110 was undisturbed but by the wind, which broke at intervals in low and hollow murmurs from among the moun tains.111 It was a strange sensation,112 and it grew, and grew. Till soon113 the clouds broke and drifted apart, shining white in a clear blue sky.114 The valley seemed an enchanted circle of glorious veils of gold and wraiths of white and silver haze and dim, blue, moving shade — beautiful and wild and unreal as a dream.115 The valleys and divides lay in such a manner that116 this valley alone could re flect the great spatial majesty of the sky.117

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The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, de manding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time he liolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a gold en-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.89

Far to the south the mountains118 drifted in and out of the uncertain light of a moving cloud-cover like ghosts of mountains;119 there was no direct light120 whatever to be seen… But this too121 changed so gradual ly.122 Holes in the clouds123 spread a weird, unearthly light124 across the valley and125 a gold-edged rent in the clouds126 moved out over the flat lands127 beyond — now,128 stubbornly, inch by painful inch, it grew. It was the uncertainty and agony of its growth that were significant.129

Presently the vapours slid aside,130 a rolling mass of clouds that just kept mov ing131 on and on. The cool wind moved over132 until the sky went clear133 across the mountains134 and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow.135 Just like that, as if nothing had happened136 all winter long. Every winter every year137 seemed to dispart, and, through it, to roll clouds of138 inconceivable splendour; and unveiled a scene which in other circum stances139 would have been something sad, unutterably dreary.140¤

TOM COMITTA

Estelle Srivijittakar, installation view of Descending Mirror, 2018.

The mother bear185 heard something. The sound repeated itself. It came from near at hand, from the thick shadow be tween the treetrunks on the hill.186 Then the bear187 went down on all fours,188 made for the nearest tree. And189 wait ed, because even190 the bear, all hot cold dark in her fevered confusion,191 needed to think what was best to be done. The bear made a gurgling sound deep in her throat and bared her long, curved yellow ish teeth, so good at ripping and tearing. Suddenly, crash! Two bear cubs burst from the bush and rushed pell-mell, tumbling head over heels straight for her. One flew flat on its face, bumping its nose and squealing. The other twisted in midair and landed in a heap on the ground, shaking its head in confusion. The bear boys looked at her, jumped forward.

Now suddenly, as by a miracle,151 they had returned to avail themselves of the height of the ground, in order to examine the152 glorious, the truly glorious weather.153

Other animals had gathered in the northeast corner154 of the valley and shone warmly155 in the light or giving off a dull, dry shine:156 martens, minks, ferrets, ot ters, weasels, badgers, ermines, foxes, and the small, gray-and-black tabby-striped wildcats.157 All these animals, and others, had fallen prey to158 the winter landscape. When they got out159 for a breath of country air,160 and Sunshine raced across the slope,161 it was something shocking.162

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Never had there been such weather.141 Ev ery moment of the afternoon was full of new things and every hour the sunshine grew more golden142 on the ground. And it was still143 very cold — below freezing144 — but there was one nice thing.145 Some thing special in the wind.146 The storm was a thing of the past.147 As the light grew,148 sounds joined the parade of perception — sparrows haggling among themselves, a blue jay ’s squawk of false excitement, the sharp warning of a cock quail on guard, and the answering whisper of the hen quail some where near.149 All these animals, and oth ers, had150 felt so doomed up here in the eternal snow, as if there were no beyond.

Curds of bruised clouds hung motionless in the sky173 — memories of the174 bitter winter,175 but memories that the murmur of the mourning wind carried across the treetops176 to distant east and west.177 It was hard to tell178 if this turn in the weath er,179 these blessed calms, would last.180 On the other side of the valley,181 an other animal that had lost everything182 that winter183 came sludging through the snow.184 It was the sow bear, the mother, a huge, powerful, heavy thing breathing a stale breath of decayed old deer-hides and skunk cabbages and dead mushrooms.

An animal with four legs — a beast163 — came trotting164 up the hill. Into the sun.165 Unlike the animals who knew only the present,166 this animal, overseeing its offspring proudly and tenderly,167 could look up into depths of pearly blue168 and see the golden world169 for what it was:170 Nightmare. Nothing but the nightmare had seemed real171 all winter long.172

TOM COMITTA

The little cubs piled against their mother, clung to her. For a long time the giant bear sat calmly with them, deciding where to go.192 The sun moved on in its course.193 Then, in no hurry, they rose in one piece of dark fur.194 They moved as if across a swale of moon dust, bulky and wobbling, trapped in the idea of the na ture of time.195 By the time the sun was196 sinking, the hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red

los angeles review of books 130 and gold shot through in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness197 — right through the mountains, through198 the valley, and then the sky.199 Erratically rays of light flashed and wandered200 through the clouds. In the buttery yellow light.201 1 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy 2 The Secret History, Donna Tartt 3 Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston 4 The Magus, John Fowles 5 The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri 6 Heart of the Sunset, Rex Beach 7 The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles 8 To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf 9 The Shining, Stephen King 10 The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford 11 The Shining, Stephen King 12 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 13 Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko 14 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder 15 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 16 The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri 17 The Cider House Rules, John Irving 18 The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis 19 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 20 Centennial, James Michener 21 Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya 22 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 23 Main Street, Sinclair Lewis 24 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder 25 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 26 Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence 27 Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson 28 The Secret History, Donna Tartt 29 Centennial, James Michener 30 All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy 31 Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy 32 The Shipping News, Annie Proulx 33 Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison 34 The Magus, John Fowles 35 The Magus, John Fowles 36 Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya 37 Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey 38 Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey 39 Centennial, James Michener 40 Centennial, James Michener 41 The Book of Khalid, Ameen Rihani 42 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 43 The Virginian, Owen Wister 44 The Shipping News, Annie Proulx 45 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson 46 Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey 47 Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton 48 Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton 49 Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy 50 Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry 51 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder 52 Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker 53 The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins 54 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy 55 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder 56 The Shining, Stephen King 57 The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch 58 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 59 The Desert of Wheat, Zane Grey 60 Lord of the Flies, William Golding 61 The Big Sky, A. B. Guthrie 62 The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles 63 Centennial, James Michener 64 The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara 65 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson 66 The Virginian, Owen Wister 67 Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift 68 The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles 69 Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut 70 Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence 71 State of Wonder, Ann Patchett 72 Lord of the Flies, William Golding 73 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne 74 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 75 Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott 76 To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf 77 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 78 The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy 79 McTeague, Frank Norris 80 Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie 81 The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck 82 Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence 83 The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy 84 The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy 85 A Sicilian Romance, Ann Radcliffe SOURCES

131 TOM COMITTA 86 David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 87 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 88 The Octopus, Frank Norris 89 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy 90 Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya 91 Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey 92 Middlemarch, George Eliot 93 The Waves, Virginia Woolf 94 The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner 95 Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru 96 The Waves, Virginia Woolf 97 Lord of the Flies, William Golding 98 The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch 99 Centennial, James Michener 100 State of Wonder, Ann Patchett 101 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 102 Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston 103 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 104 The Prairie, James Fenimore Cooper 105 The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel 106 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 107 Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon 108 Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh 109 The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather 110 The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri 111 A Sicilian Romance, Ann Radcliffe 112 Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence 113 Dracula, Bram Stoker 114 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder 115 Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey 116 The Conquest, Oscar Micheaux 117 House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday 118 All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy 119 All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy 120 The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara 121 Big Sur, Jack Kerouac 122 The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel 123 Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey 124 Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence 125 East of Eden, John Steinbeck 126 Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton 127 East of Eden, John Steinbeck 128 Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy 129 Hawaii, James Michener 130 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 131 The Round House, Louise Erdrich 132 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder 133 The Round House, Louise Erdrich 134 The Virginian, Owen Wister 135 Middlemarch, George Eliot 136 The Round House, Louise Erdrich 137 Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey 138 St. Irvyne, Percy Bysshe Shelley 139 A Sicilian Romance, Ann Radcliffe 140 The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne 141 The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford 142 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett 143 The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger 144 Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke 145 The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger 146 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 147 And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie 148 Watership Down, Richard Adams 149 East of Eden, John Steinbeck 150 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke 151 Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence 152 The Prairie, James Fenimore Cooper 153 Molloy, Samuel Beckett 154 Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy 155 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson 156 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 157 The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel 158 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke 159 Plainsong, Kent Haruf 160 Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov 161 The Shipping News, Annie Proulx 162 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 163 The Prairie, James Fenimore Cooper 164 The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy 165 The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Oscar Zeta Acosta 166 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke 167 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 168 The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather 169 On the Road, Jack Kerouac 170 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 171 Ice, Anna Kavan 172 The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford 173 The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford 174 Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison 175 The Sea-Wolf, Jack London 176 Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya 177 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 178 The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather 179 My Ántonia, Willa Cather 180 Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 181 The White Peacock, D. H. Lawrence 182 Life of Pi, Yann Martel 183 Anne of the Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery 184 Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker 185 The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich 186 The Octopus, Frank Norris 187 The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich 188 Bear, Marian Engel 189 The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles 190 Centennial, James Michener 191 Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey 192 The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich 193 The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey 194 The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich 195 White Noise, Don DeLillo 196 Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru 197 The Waves, Virginia Woolf 198 The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford 199 House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday 200 The Waves, Virginia Woolf 201 Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

February 14–16, 2020

Vincent Ramos, What if We Die, Can We Leave Then (Dave's Not Here), 2017, Mixed media on paper, 10 x 15 in Courtesy of the artist and Frieze Los Angeles, at Paramount Pictures Studios

DEATH IS A MASTER FROM TURKEY GOLAN HAJI tr . alana marie levinson labrosse & z ê dan xelef essay

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The Signature of the First Master In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk issued a statement instituting the adoption of Latin script in place of the Arabic used by the Ottoman Empire for four centu ries. He made a significant and secular break with the past — though it was in complete, of course, since Kemalism did not fundamentally separate from Islam. Atatürk signed the decree, after practicing his new signature several times, testing it on a prototype of ready-made stationery designed by Hagop Vahram Çerçiyan, an Armenian calligrapher. At that time, the Armenian Genocide had just ended, and the genocide’s architects believed it for gotten, along with the Kurds whom they had set up to take the fall. This signature is still one of the most common tattoos nationalist Turkish wolves display on their arms, necks, wrists, even foreheads, as an

The Ottoman/German Lesson After the French mastery of suffoca tion and starvation came the Armenian Genocide, another source of inspira tion for the architects of the Nazi death camps. German perseverance never flags; their strict laws never slacken, not in this life or the next. Let’s remember what Swedenborg saw in his dream: German angels holding colossal volumes, never venturing an answer without a reference.

los angeles review of books 134 emblem for the man who monopolized and continues to monopolize the title “Fa ther of Turks,” with his piercing blue gaze. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey, or the TBMM, voted unanimous ly to ratify the bill on the new alphabet. Meanwhile, the founder of the Turkish Republic and Turkish modernity paraded through Anatolia promoting the new cul ture and its easy acquisition. Blackboards were affixed to the walls of every bank, post office, and police station — even under bridges and on vehicles. Turkey became “a large classroom.” Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul became a primary school where servants, ministers, and of ficers immersed themselves in learning their new language, with Atatürk himself as their teacher. Before the Flood of Operation “Peace Spring” The neighbors inspire internecine enmity, antagonizing one another. Last year, Erdoğan’s white doves car ried olive branches as a prelude to the in vasion of Afrin in Syria, before that city was surrounded by soldiers who, sym pathizing with the bravery of that other Sunni lion (both Erdoğan and Saddam share the same nickname), stooped to re trieve Saddam’s scattered pictures. Adapt Paul Celan’s line, change it to: Death is a master from Turkey his eyes are blue. Death is a master with blue eyes, who comes to teach the disobedient students a lesson they can never forget; he lands here or over there, a Turanian from Turkey or a Frenchman in Algeria, an Israeli in Palestine, or an Anglo-Saxon in America. He visits so he may teach his victims how to be thieves and murderers, preaching to any who have forgotten his sermons.

The French Lesson

In the mid-19th century, the French gen eral Aimable Pélissier suffocated hun dreds of nomadic Algerians in the Dahra Range, trapping them in caves and filling the air with smoke. They died of inhala tion; his punishment was a promotion. When Pélissier returned home, he wrote that the most feasible course of action for the French Empire was to withdraw and occupy only a few Algerian ports. Victor Hugo, a loyalist to the empire, who was dedicated to the complete colonization of Algeria, disagreed. With a hint of what I might call nostalgia, Hugo wrote an al most-eulogy for the guillotine: “What France lacks is a little barbarity. The Ottoman Turks who occupied Algeria before us knew better how to behead the barbarians.”

Marcel Cohen, in his Light Years Away, describes how Jews purchased their own deaths, how they went deep into their pockets:The victims paid their own way all the way to the concentration camps. The ticket price for travel ing in the cattle cars was the same as a train ticket: four pfennigs

Before the invasion of Poland, in the beginning of World War II, a debate raged among Nazi officers. Hitler lis tened to every objection, many of which concerned the international response Germany would incur as a powerful coun try launching an assault on its neighbor. “It will be a scandal,” one chancellor said, but Hitler assured them that it would just be empty noise and moreover, that it would fade quickly. In closing his ar gument, he asked, “Who remembers the Armenians?”

Mehmed Kemâl, streets in Istanbul and Izmir, statues in Adana and Izmir.

One Al Thawra article covered the outreach tours that Assad conducted in outlying Syrian provinces: “Ordinary cit izens of Al-Hasakah slaughter a ram be fore Mr. President’s motorcade and lift the car aloft.” Another article published in Tishreen quotes Faisal Kalthoum, fu HAJI

GOLAN

135 for each kilometer. Children un der ten paid half price and chil dren under four traveled for free. The price rose every six months. And there were special rates: for groups of more than 400 people, only two pfennigs per kilometer. ¤ In the early days of the gas chambers, the engineers tested their prototype on psychopaths, madmen, and the disabled. But architecting death was not a mod ern, German innovation. During World War I, before the Germans, the Ottomans used similar methods. They suffocated Armenians in Anatolia’s caves, soldiers collapsing the entrances to prevent escape. After smoke inhalation killed their pris oners, the soldiers relieved them of their property: jewels, rings, even gold teeth.

¤ Let the reader imagine German streets named for Himmler and Eichmann, as they read this list of perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, decorated as heroes throughoutMustafaTurkey:Reşid Pasha, the Butcher of Diyarbakır, a main street in Ankara.

Mehmed Talaat Pasha and Ismail Enver Pasha, Ministers of the Interi or and War, respectively, throughout the Armenian Genocide. Many Turkish streets and schools still bear their names.

In 1943, Talaat Pasha’s coffin traversed the country on a train manufactured and gifted to Turkey by the Third Reich. The second Turkish president, İsmet İnönü, presided over the funeral. In 1996, the Republic reclaimed the ashes of Enver Pasha from Tajikistan. For mer president Süleyman Demirel rebur ied him with his own two hands as part of a solemn state ceremony in Istanbul. The Campaigns A friend of mine in Damascus, a fellow physician, enjoyed reading volumes of old newspapers and magazines. He spent Friday mornings sprawled on the floor with scissors in one hand, clipping from the local and variety columns. When he was in a good mood, he categorized the clippings into envelopes according to date and subject. I contributed to one of these envelopes, which somehow survived my frequent travels from city to city. Its contents gathered reportage on Erdoğan’s commercial ventures, built to have civi lized Islamic faces and avoid the stigma of the “brotherhood,” which coincided with the march of modernization and develop ment led by Dr. Bashar al-Assad.

An expression, “the situation in south Turkey,” has become a common metaphor for “the Kurdish cause.” In 2007, Erdoğan expanded on Atatürk’s old motto. On TV, in front of the coffins of Turkish sol diers who had been killed in southeastern Turkey, he said, “One flag, one nation, one language, one state.” A leader like him can’t walk away from this history of mas sacresErdoğanemptyhanded.won’tbe able to forget the Kurdish women who joined the battle, politically and physically. Leyla Zana of the early 1990s is a glaring example. She spoke Kurmanji Kurdish in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and was confronted with one simple sentence in response: “Separatist, terrorist, arrest her.”

los angeles review of books 136 ture governor of Daraa, four years before the first demonstrations of 2011: “Local authorities will begin a campaign to elim inate stray dogs throughout the Daraa Governorate. Anyone who kills a stray dog will receive 300 lira. Stray dogs are detrimental to our economic and social life.”The oldest clipping, from Al-Hayat, yellow as straw, its rust a metaphor for Erdoğan, the man and his mustache, reads: “Our mosques are our barracks, our domes are our helmets, our minarets are our bayonets, our believers a battalion — this is the holy order that guards our religion.”These rhyming lines, combining the symbols of virility and war, are well known in Turkey. In 1997, when Erdoğan was Istanbul’s mayor, he recited this poem and was jailed for four months. He does not forget offenses but buries the painful memories deep in his heart and searches for the opportunity to return the hurt. Af ter taking office, he again recited this verse at a conference of the Justice and Devel opment Party, or AKP. He is known for his love of poetry. He has recited eulogies to the Prophet Muhammad on several oc casions, once weeping as he recited a poem on his nostalgia for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. ¤ Turkish politicians, those poet ry fans, have had their own exploits. Poet Bülent Ecevit led the North Cyprus invasion of 1974, during which the Turkish military forced Kurdish con scripts to the front lines against the Greek Cypriots. Turks, throughout their history, have consistently dragged other nation alities and ethnicities into fighting one another while Atatürk’s officers watched and managed the massacres — their ul timate goal being to Turkify what could be Turkified. They founded their state on massacres and never abandoned the na tional commitment to them: the Greek massacres, in which Greek churches, shops, and schools burned (1955–1964); the murder and expulsion of the Cypriots (1974); the persecution of the Arabs and Alawites in occupied areas of Syria (1978–1993); the murder and suppression of the Kurds (1923–present). Approximately 12 million Alawites live in Turkey, a quar ter of them Kurds, and approximately 15 million Kurds live in Turkey. I will pause here to point out that Abdullah Öcalan, portrayed as an Alawite Kurd, eliminated his political opponents and sold himself first to Assad and Khomeini, second to the United States and Israel. His party flag is yellow like the Star of David, like Hezbollah pennants. Turkish nationalists are always making fun of the stupid Kurds who sell their souls to Satan, their God.

Öcalan’s Richter Scale

Vincent Ramos, Obliteration Poem (Architectural Horror Vacui), 2017, Mixed media on paper, 10 x 15 in Courtesy of the artist and Frieze Los Angeles, February 14–16, 2020 at Paramount Pictures Studios

los angeles review of books 138 Erdoğan, that Sunni lion, tried over and over to pass a fornication law that would sentence whoever breaks it to three years’ imprisonment.Turkishlaw is partly inspired by Italian and Spanish fascism. The 1980 Turkish coup d’état targeted the Turkish left-wing, jailing and exiling its mem bers, as well as criminalizing the Kurdish language, which had been culturally in visible since the creation of the Turkish state. State policy effaced some people completely. The political assassinations of writers, journalists, and activists continue. Since the commencement of PKK opera tions in 1984 until Öcalan’s detention in Nairobi — where he was blindfolded and handcuffed by the Mossad and CIA to be extradited to the Turkish authorities in 1999 —the Turkish armed forces burned more than 3,000 Kurdish villages, killed more than 50,000 people, and displaced millions of Kurds in the outskirts of major cities throughout Turkey. The capture of Öcalan, or “Apo,” Uncle, was a victory for Turkish nation alists, the devotees to the “Father of the Turks.” The solutions to the conflict be tween the Kurds and the Turks ended with that victory, but the destruction did not. During the trial of Apo, he surprised his proponents by praising Atatürk and apologizing for the Turkish casualties and fatalities caused by the guerilla warfare tactics his fighters still rely on Kurdistan’s mountains. Like Yilmaz Güney, the im prisoned Kurdish director who directed his latest film, The Road (1982), from in side his cell in Turkey, Öcalan directs his party from inside the Imrali Prison, where he has now resided for 20 years. Some times, in his rage, he shakes the bars of his prison like Samson, and an earthquake hits Istanbul. A factor the seismologists ignore when preparing their analysis. A Retired Footballer “When the feet take office instead of the head, start the doomsday clock.” This is an aphorism of Erdoğan’s, the loud-mouthed orator. It takes us back to his begin nings as a professional footballer, son of the working class, graduate of religious schools, before he was the rising star who would climb the political ladder within the Welfare Party and become the mayor of Istanbul at the age of 40. During those years, he made a fortune as a businessman, guided in his trade by the Holy Prophet Muhammad — a tactic that was certainly not new to politicians like him. Righteousness is the virtue of the devout president. He starts his meet ings and speeches with Al-Fātihah, his mercenaries recite Al-Fath before invad ing Kurdish cities and villages in north eastern Syria, and yet he has no mercy for Istanbul’s Saturday Mothers, the Kurdish women who gather in the middle of the city to demand information about their missingErdoğansons. loves a big audience, the wider the better. He did once try to sat isfy some Kurds, despite their ingratitude and impiety. In 2013, he brought Masoud Barzani, the former president of the Kurdistan region, and the Kurdish sing ers İbrahim Tatlıses and Şivan Perwer together to a stadium in Diyarbakir. He hoped this might help create an agree ment or resolution to the conflict.

Erdoğan, the former athlete, a char ismatic man of high stature despite his bowed legs, close to the people’s con cerns, who’d rather use the language of the streets than the highbrow language of literary salons, a paragon of masculinity in his silence, irritable in both word and deed, with both friends and foes. He qual ifies as one of the raptors swirling in the

Let’s remember Bilal Erdoğan’s wed ding party, where Berlusconi was one of the witnesses. Let’s remember Saddam Hussein spraying the Kurds with “just a little gas,” as Trump put it. Let’s re member Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds because they didn’t take part in the Battle of Normandy during World War II, or Trump maintaining that the con flict between Kurds and Turks is endless, bringing only sand and death. Despite Trump’s nauseating sense of humor, I will risk telling a joke I think he might tell, “Gulf oil is American because American dinosaurs migrated and died in the Arabian Desert millions of years ago.”

139 world’s sky, from Putin and Viktor Orbán to Trump and Bolsonaro. He stands iden tically before the bright lights of yellow journalism: a hulking nightmare for car toonists and journalists.

GOLAN HAJI

Asako Narahashi, Dubai, from the series Coming Closer and Getting Further Away, 2009. Asako Narahashi. Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

Iused to think of catharsis as a dra matic event, in which we experience an intense releasing or purging of emo tions. Indeed, Aristotle’s Poetics spoke of catharsis in this way, referring to a spec tator’s experience of tragedy. When I was growing up, Korean dramas provided that kind of cathartic function for me. It was such a relief to cry so freely and intense ly about the stories that unfolded on the screen — I could tap into my own grief, anger, pain, and longing for meaning, and let them out in an unrestrained way. But this experience was contained within the parameters of watching the drama. After the screen was shut off, I could return to my daily routine. If we do normally understand or ex perience catharsis as the intense purging of emotions, it is easy to associate those emotions with negativity. That is, we would consider it the cleansing or puri

HANNAH AMARIS ROH

141 short

ANOTHER KIND OF METAPHYSICS

I began practicing yoga while writing my dissertation. I needed an outlet to turn off my brain. But in what I thought was a merely physical practice, I encountered another kind of understanding through a more heightened awareness of my body, especially the breath. In the philosophy of yoga, I encountered another kind of metaphysics — that of oneness, rath er than dualism. The word “yoga” comes from the root yuj, meaning “to yoke, to join,” or “union.” Yogic philosophy not only addresses the union of our individ ual mind and body; our individuality (our self) is actually a gateway into the oneness of all things, the oneness of being. And the breath is the pathway into experienc ing the deep interconnectedness of our individual life force to the life force of the world.This philosophy of oneness has re vised my experience of catharsis. I no longer think of it as a purging of negative emotions. I used to think that especially in practicing yoga or meditation, it was a process of releasing those feelings or thoughts of agitation from inside of me in order to reach a state of peace and qui et. But I’ve come to realize that the nega tivity is actually not located within those emotions; negativity resides in my own relationship to those feelings, especially unwanted ones, including anger, resent ment, bitterness, anxiety, or fear. Thus, in the practice of yoga, especially when we are invited to bring our awareness to our breath, we awaken the observer within. And in coming back to the breath, we could perhaps begin to observe the range of our emotions, as well as our thoughts, which come and go. And if we notice, with compassion, thoughts that are usual ly unwanted or unwelcome, such as anxi ety or fear, the more we allow ourselves to connect with our inner observer. We could perhaps begin to change our relationship to those thoughts. Perhaps we could even begin to include those thoughts as part of our human experience. It is still, in a sense, a practice of re lease, in which we are invited to let go — not of our emotions, but of our expec tations. Rather than framing it as a dual

los angeles review of books 142 fication of negativity from “inside” our selves to the “outside.” This understand ing implies a dualistic vision of the self. In this philosophy, there is the self — our individuality or subjectivity — that stands autonomous and separate from the rest of the world, even our own emotions. In this understanding, there are emotions that are unwelcome and that therefore need purg ing. If catharsis is a form of purification through cleansing, then we can think of it as the practice of returning to the pure self, which still remains separate from the outside world.

I was raised in the Korean Protestant church, where I was taught to seek out a self that is cleansed from the impurities of worldly sin. I was taught to be “in the world but not of the world.” Having grown up in America and Korea, I was confused about my identity as both a “Korean” and an “American,” so this Christian world view provided solace and a sense of self throughout my childhood. And for a long time, I professionally pursued a deeper un derstanding of the source of self. This pur suit led me to a doctorate in philosophy of religion, but it also drove me beyond aca demia. My worldview began to unravel as I studied the history of Christian theology and Western philosophy, and the painful link between Christianity and colonialism in Korea. Yet in the process, I forgot about my body as a gateway into another kind of understanding and experience.

HANNAH AMARIS ROH

istic purging of that which is “inside” to be released “outside,” what if we are invited to let go of our expectations of what we “should” feel or think? In so doing, we may allow space for the full range of emotions and thoughts, also recognizing that there is the observer — a higher self — that does not have to be overwhelmed by those thoughts. This is also the recognition that our identity is not in our thoughts. The recognition that we are not our thoughts. There is a common phrase within and outside of the yoga community: “Getting out of your own way.” I now wonder if that is the experience of catharsis — the surrender of our ego. Catharsis is by no means an individual experience; it is an experience that seems deeply relational, so that we can be more connected and aware of the oneness of all things. Becoming more present to this connectedness is to become less distracted, to direct our atten tion to the sensations that connect us to ourselves and to the wider world. In that sense, we may in fact surrender our sense of ego to connect with our higher self. This release and surrender can begin with the simple awareness of our physi cal experience, like grounding our feet on the floor. In fact, let’s practice now. Stand up if you are sitting. Stand on your two feet and feel all four sides of both feet — shifting your weight forward to the ball mounts of the feet, then the heels, then the outer edges, and finally the inner edg es. Consider your sense of gravity. This is how we arrive into our bodies, how we feel sensation, softening the calluses that may form around the feet and perhaps even in the heart. And here, bring your awareness to your breath. Let’s experience catharsis together, with this simple practice: close your eyes, or bring your eyes to a soft gaze. Begin noticing your breath. Begin to no tice the rhythm of your inhales, and the rhythm of your exhales. Soften the space between your eyebrows, your third-eye center, the space of intuition. Begin, very gently, to deepen your breath. Fill your heart and your belly as you breathe in and let it all … go.

143

Claude McKay (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the U.S. in 1912. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short

Wes Holtermann is the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, GlitterMOB, Deluge, and elsewhere. He is a gardener from Berkeley, California. Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica.

CONTRIBUTORS

Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in France. He has published four books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, Is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016). His translations from English and French include books by Mark Strand, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War (2016), a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women.

144 Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight collections of poems, including A Doll for Throwing, The Last Two Seconds, The Bride of E, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published in 2012. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of DMZ Colony, Hardly War, The Morning News Is Exciting She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death, received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He was an NPR commentator (1983–2017), a Distinguished Professor of English at LSU, a Peabody Award winner for the film Road Scholar, and recipient of the Ovid Poetry Prize. Tom Comitta is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the author of m (Ugly Duckling Presse), First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), ToDo (The Block Museum), and Airport Novella (Troll Thread). His short-form writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, The Believer, Fence, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020 Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). All his work is about alternatives to normative function and form, the practice of otherwise possibility. Dagoberto Gilb is the author of nine books, including The Magic of Blood, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, and Before the End, After the Beginning. Recent publications have been or will be in Alta, Zyzzyva, and The Threepenny Review. Born and raised in Los Angeles, with as many family years in El Paso, he lives in Austin.

Fiona Landers is a writer, actor, and musician. She has contributed satire and essays to The New Yorker, Bust Magazine, Reductress, Dame Magazine, and more. Her live musical comedies have enjoyed sold-out runs in Los Angeles, Edinburgh, and London. Currently, you can see Fiona perform her new musical solo show, Funeral Bouquet.

Sasha Graybosch grew up in Nebraska and lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, Canteen, elimae, and elsewhere, and she’s written nonfiction for The Rumpus. She received an MFA from New York University and works as an academic writing consultant.

Kimiko Hahn's forthcoming Foreign Bodies is her tenth poetry collection. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.

Deborah Taffa is an enrolled member of the Yuma Indian Nation. Her writing can be found on PBS, Salon, A Public Space, the Best American series, and in other publications. Her memoir-in-progress won the SFWP Literary Award in 2019. She teaches CNF at Webster and Washington University in Saint Louis, MO.

Mary South is the author of You Will Never be Forgotten, a collection of short stories. Bruce Davidson began making photographs at the age of 10 in Oak Park, Illinois. He studied atthe Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, later enlisting in the army. After WWII, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life magazine, and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. From 1958 to 1961, he created such seminal bodies of work as Brooklyn Gang and Freedom Rides

. In 1962, His highly-acclaimed work, Time of Change, was a profound document of the Civil Rights movement. In 1966, he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the early 1980s, he captured the vitality of the New York Metro’s underworld, later published in his book Subway and exhibited at the International Center for Photography in 1982 and at the Tate Modern in London.

145 stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica. Kiki Petrosino is the author of four books of poetry: White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (forthcoming, 2020), Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Fort Red Border (2009), all from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House, and online at Ploughshares. She teaches at the University of Virginia as a professor of Poetry. Hannah Amaris Roh is a culture writer, religion scholar, and yoga teacher. She received her PhD in Philosophy of Religions from the University of Chicago, and a Master of Divinity from Yale University. She is working on a memoir about identity, religion, and spirituality in Korea and the United States. Hannah lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

Yuki Tanaka was born in Yamaguchi, Japan. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers, and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. His chapbook, Séance in Daylight (Bull City Press), was the winner of the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Contest. He teaches at Hosei University, Japan.

Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, The Forage House, which was a finalist for the Believer poetry prize, and Work & Days, which was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. In spring 2020, she will publish two books of poems: Last West, and Rift Zone. She is poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to America in 1990. She is a feminist writer and painter living in Portland with her two children. Shalmiyev’s work has appeared in Literary Hub, Guernica, Electric Lit, Vela, Portland Review and other publications. Her book, Mother Winter, is out in paperback February 2020.

Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979) was one of the most prominent Surrealists in Japan, introducing and promoting the works of André Breton, Paul Éluard, and other European Surrealists through translation and criticism. In 1941, Takiguchi was imprisoned by the Japanese “thought police” and held for over eight months. After WWII, he became a visual artist and art critic. He helped revive the avant-garde scene in Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), which was active from 1951 to 1957. In 1967, his work was collected into a book titled The Poetic Experiments 1927–1937. His fourteen-volume collected works was published in Japan between 1991 and 1998.

Hadi Fallahpisheh works primarily with photography, as well as performance and installation, to FEATURED ARTISTS

Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992) was an American video artist. His films embodied the 80s downtown New York drag and performance scene for over a decade before his AIDS-related death in 1992. His films star some of the scene’s most talented and outrageous performers including The Lady Bunny, RuPaul, Sister Dimension, Hapi Phace, Tabboo!, Ann Magnuson, John Sex, Barbara Lipp, Quentin Crisp, The B52s, and David Wojnarowicz. The legendary Pickle Surprise! found new life with in the early 2000s, becoming a YouTube classic, spawning countless reproductions and inspiring an entire generation of video artists and YouTube stars. His last film Listen To This, made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz, remained unfinished at the time of Rubnitz’ death. It is a scathing attack on the Reagan administration. Heji Shin is an artist and commercial photographer born in Seoul, Korea. Angel Energy is Heji Shin’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Previous solo exhibitions include Baby at Real Fine Arts, New York (2016) and #lonelygirl at Galerie Bernhard in Zurich, Switzerland (2016). Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Kunsthalle Zurich in 2018, The Whitney Biennial 2019 and Kanye at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin. Estelle Srivijittakar (b. 1986, Los Angeles, California) received her B.A. from Hampshire College in 2008 and completed her M.F.A. from Bard College in 2020. Recent group exhibitions were held at Arturo Bandini, Rogers Office, and ESXLA. In Fall of 2018, Srivijittakar presented a series of reading performances at OOF books, Poetic Research Bureau, and Leimin Space. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

146 destabilize visions of a stable and singular subject. Often commenting on conditions of displacement, his work questions the ability of representation to convey truth, revealing the gaps between public perception and personal experience. Fallahpisheh received an MFA in Photography from Bard College in 2016. He is also a graduate of the Creative Practices Program in Photography at the ICP, New York. He has presented work at venues including Tramps, Kai Matsumaiya, Off Vendome, ICP, and Callicoon Fine Arts, and in Tehran at Delgosha Gallery, Dastan Gallery and Maryam Harandi Gallery, among others.

Asako Narahashi was born 1959 in Tokyo, Japan. In 1989, she graduated from the School of Letters, Art and Science II of Waseda University. She studied photography as an art student, and in the mid-1980s she joined the photography group Photo Session led by the renowned photographer Daido Moriyama. In 2008, Narahashi ’s photographs were included in the group exhibition Heavy Light: Photography and Video from Japan at the International Center for Photography, NY. Her work has been featured in international galleries and renowned museums and her photographs are held in permanent collections worldwide including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Vincent Ramos (b. 1973, Santa Monica, CA) received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007. Solo and two-person exhibitions include: The Parable of Arable Land, If I Had a Hammer, The Wilhelm Scream, Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX (2015), Plum Pudding Peanut Island (Gilligan’s Squaw Fire Island II) Elephant, Los Angeles (2013) and Pachuco Cadaver or There Are No Heavies in America, Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles (2011). Group exhibitions include: Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018), A Universal History of Infamy, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2017) and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). He lives and works in Venice. Carissa Rodriguez lives and works in New York City. Select solo exhibitions include The Art Institute of Chicago (2020); The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2018); SculptureCenter, New York (2018); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2016); Front Desk Apparatus, New York (2013) and Karma International, Zurich (2012). She was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and 2014. Rodriguez received a BA in Literature from Eugene Lang College at The New School, New York in 1994. She was a core member of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York from 2004 to 2015. Since 2018, Rodriguez is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Daniel Meadows

Edited by Donatien Grau and Christoph Wiesner

Comparing the current situation of photographic images with the crisis experienced by representation at the time of the medium’s birth, the contributors to this volume set our relationship with photographic images in the digital era in perspective.

Now and en follows the oeuvre of Daniel Meadows, the maverick documentarian, starting with his free portrait studio in Manchester’s Moss Side in 1972 and then as he traveled 10,000 miles to make a national portrait from his converted double-decker, the Free Photographic Omnibus. Cloth $40.00 From the Heinz Mack A 21st Century Artist Edited by Robert Fleck and Antonia Lehmann-Tolkmi is journey through Mack’s rich oeuvre culminates in a look at his passionate plea for the “idea of beauty in the twenty- rst century.” Containing y color illustrations, Heinz Mack brings a fresh perspective to this artist’s extensive career. Paper $24.00 From Publishers

Images and Their Discontents

Uc23642-2 2 pages LA Review Quarterly jal 11/19

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu Ericka Beckman Edited by Henrie e Huldisch Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman has forged a signature visual language in lm, installation, and photography. roughout her work, she engages with profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power, and control.

From Now and en England 1970–2015

Paper $29.95 A er the Crisis Contemporary States of Photography

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Giving the Devil his Due Reflections of a Scientific Humanist Michael Shermer This book is for all readers who care about science and reason, humanism and secularism, the progress of humanity, and the advancement of morals and values. It also advocates for the protection and continued expansion of human rights, such as civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, and animal Hardback9781108489782rights.|$24.95 The ClimateGuideCitizen’stoSuccess Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress Mark ConcernedJaccardcitizens can drive the energy transition needed to prevent climate change by their personal choices and their identification and support of climate-sincere politicians. Jaccard explains the simplicity and modest cost of decarbonizing electricity and transportation in developed countries and spreading that critical change Paperback9781108742665worldwide.|$19.95 NEW AND FORTHCOMING from Cambridge University Press cambridge.org/trade Trump and Us What He Says and Why People Listen Roderick P. Hart Trump and Us offers a fresh perspective on how Donald Trump became president and maintains his popularity, taking seriously the breadth and depth of his support. Through a rhetorical analysis of the 2016 campaign and early presidency, the book identifies four emotions central to Trump’s hold on his Paperback9781108796415supporters.|$24.99 Whitelash Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box Terry Smith This book is for anyone seeking an understanding of the 2016 US presidential election and its fallout. It uses analogies Paperback9781108445467ofdiscriminateobligationAmericansandunderstandthatanti-discriminationfromlawAmericansintuitivelytodiscussvoting,asksthequestion:dohavealegalnottoraciallyintheprivacytheballotbox?|$24.99

Quarterly Journal, no. 25: Catharsis Issue

Articles inside

DEATH IS A MASTER FROM

WALKING INTO THE

FROM THE NATURE BOOK

TWO POEMS

O MEDUSA

GIFT FEATHER

FOUND EX-VOTO

STUFF, THE ESSAY

REALTOR TO THE

STARS ON EARTH

FROM "THE ORPHANS"

CONSISTENCY

OF FORGIVENESS

FROM ROMANCE IN

SEXY IS THE AUNT WHO

THE AMAZING

THREE CHARMS FROM