Quarterly Journal, no. 29: High/Low Issue

BOOKSOFREVIEWANGELESLOS IssueHigh/Low29NO.QUARTERLYJOURNAL 9 781940 660769 5 1 2 0 0 > ISBN 978-1-940660-76-9$12.00 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS QUARTERLY JOURNAL : HIGH/LOW NO . 29

BuzzFeed News, 29 Best Books of 2020 “A quest toward wonder re-envisioning,and a quest to go beyond, as the best poems do, the ‘edge of thinking.’”

To place an ad in the LARB Quarterly Journal, email adsales@lareviewofbooks org

—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States “An accessibleunusuallyprimer on immigraton law and a valuable guide to the ways it currently works to perpetuate an excluded underclassimmigrantwith diminished rights.”

PUBLISHER: TOM LUTZ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: SONIA ALI CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: SARA DAVIS, MASHINKA FIRUNTS HAKOPIAN, ELIZABETH METZGER, CALLIE SISKEL ART DIRECTOR: PERWANA NAZIF DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING GRAPHIC DESIGNER: TOM COMITTA ART CONTRIBUTORS: JA'TOVIA GARY, ROSEMARY MAYER, REYNALDO RIVERA PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: IRENE YOON 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 COVER ART: WENDY RED STAR, CATALOGUE NUMBER 1950.74, 2019, PIGMENT PRINT ON ARCHIVAL PAPER, 18 X 28 INCHES. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SARGENT'S DAUGHTERS. INTERNS & VOLUNTEERS: THOMAS WEE, EMILY SMIBERT Te Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501(c)(3) nonproft organization. Te LARB Quarterly Journal is published quarterly by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Submissions for the Journal can be emailed to editorial@ lareviewofbooks org. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www lareviewofbooks org Te LARB Quarterly Journal is a premium of the LARB Membership Program. Annual subscriptions are available. Go to www.lareviewofbooks.org/membership for more information or email membership@lareviewofbooks org Distribution through Publishers Group West. If you are a retailer and would like to order the LARB Quarterly Journal, call 800-788-3123 or email orderentry@perseusbooks.com.

ConversationsNew

—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine “Historian Gretchen Eick has ofabiographyemployedtowritebrillianthistorytheUSgenocidal policy of eliminaton or assimilaton.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no. 29 QUARTERLY JOURNAL HIGH/LOW unpress.nevada.edu Start “Murray makes it impossible for readers to maintain the shelter of distance from politcs... It is absolutely essental reading.”

The New York Review of Books

essays 7 WHERE GILDED AGES GO TO DIE: HOLLYWOOD RETURNS TO THE 1930S AND ’40S by J.T. Price 23 SEX — EVERYTHINGAND ELSE by Katherine Angel 55 WHY VIOLENCE GOES VIRAL by Brian Lin 72 PULLING by Rachel Genn 87 "LITERATURE IS A MAXIMTRIBUNE":GORKYANDTHEKLAVIDAGROSSSTORY by Donald Rayfield 114 COLLECTING STEPHEN LEACOCK by Andrew Nicholls 127 JEFF TWEEDY WILL TEACH SONGWRITINGYOU by Alex Scordelis fiction 43 QUEEN'S RUN by Gar Anthony Haywood poetry 20 TARKOVSKY by Michael M. Weinstein 40 TWO POEMS by Victoria Chang 84 THE BLADES by Emily Jungmin Yoon 111 FACING IT by Forrest Gander & Ashwini Bhat 123 MY FATHER FINDS HOME THROUGH THE BIRDS by Threa Almontaser 139 ATE MOON by Tyree Daye interview 31 PAUL R. WILLIAMS IN LOS ANGELES: A CONVERSATION WITH JANNA IRELAND by Erin Aubry Kaplan NO . 29 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : HIGH/LOW CONTENTSFROM THE ENDLESSANGELES’MURDEROUSMOSTERAINAMERICANHISTORY,AVINTAGETRUECRIMETALESETAMONGLOSGLASSYTOWERSANDRIBBONSOFASPHALT brilliant“Jacobs’MarchAvailable2021chopsareondisplayin The Darkest Glare, a delightfully of-kilter true-crime tale. The prose is intimate, darkly funny, and crisp. This isn’t an old song in a new key, but an entirely new song about crime, fear, and a weird kind of redemption that could only happen in the general vicinity of Hollywood.” —RON BESTSELLINGFRANSCELL,AUTHOR OF THE DARKEST NIGHT

STANFORDstanfordpress.typepad.comsup.orgUNIVERSITY PRESS A Matter of Death and Life Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom “An unforgettable and achingly beautiful story of enduring love. I will be thinking about this for years to come.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Our NationNon-Christian How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others Are Demanding Teir Rightful Place in Public Life Jay “Timely,Wexlertrenchant, and tremendously engaging.” —Phil Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life NOW IN PAPERBACK Nothing Happened A History Susan A. Crane “Clever and funny and serious and illuminating. You won’t want to put it down.”—Marita authorSturken,of Tourists of History Identity Capitalists Te Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality Nancy “Entertaining,Leong accessible, and thought-provoking.”—NicoleBuonocorePorter,co-authorof Feminist Judgments Copy Tis Book! What Data Tells Us about Copyright and the Public Good Paul J. Heald “ T is book is so engaging and sensible. T is will sound ridiculous, but I can’t put it University—Sauldown.”Levmore,ofChicago Feral Atlas Te HumanMore-TanAnthropocene Edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou REDWOOD PRESS DIGITAL PUBLISHING INITIATIVE Explore now at feralatlas.org

ArchitecturalLynetteFilmmakerSerbiaWidderHistoryColumbiaUniversityClairWillsCulturalHistoryUnitedKingdom

JosephPortugalPhotographerR.Slaughter

Abigail R. Cohen Fellow English and Comparative LiteratureColumbia University Ersi WriterSotiropoulosGreeceMilaTurajli ć

Indeed, the current issue perfectly embodies LARB’s central aims — aims we’ve followed for 10 lively years: to break down traditional barriers and to encourage a rigorous yet openminded and soulful engagement with the broader culture. So what’s to feel low about? Simple. With this issue we’re bidding farewell to Medaya Ocher, LARB’s brilliant longtime Managing Editor, under whose imaginative and discerning leadership the Quarterly Journal became what it is: one of the most groundbreaking, consistently surprising, unfailingly rewarding literary venues in the nation. We take comfort in the knowledge that Medaya is moving on to bigger and brighter things, and though our world will be less luminous without her, we’ll make sure that the Quarterly Journal continues to shine.

— Boris Dralyuk, Editor-in-Chief, and Sonia Ali, Managing Editor

Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Visual YasmineEnglishUnitedArtistKingdom/NigeriaDeniseCruzandComparativeLiteratureColumbiaUniversityElRashidiWriterEygptLamiaJoreigeVisualAristLebanonAnaPaulinaLeeLatinAmericanandIberianCulturesColumbiaUniversitySkyMacklayComposerColumbiaUniversity

The theme of this issue is “High/Low” and, fittingly, we at LARB feel two ways about it. On the one hand, we’re truly floating high. The pieces in these pages tackle everything from fine art to the latest Hollywood productions from exciting, unusual angles, putting disparate genres and themes into fruitful conversation with each other. Here fiction and nonfiction, architecture and photography, songcraft and poetry, crime writing and comedy mingle freely without jostling for a loftier hierarchal position.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

John Duong Phan East Asian Languages and ColumbiaCultures University João Pina Abigail R. Cohen Fellow

For further details about our Fellows and their work, the Institute and its mission, or our fellowships and how to apply for them, please visit our website at www.ideasimagination.columbia.edu. We encourage cooperation with partner organizations from the world of academia and the creative arts. is proud to announce its 2020 21 class of Fellows: The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination is made possible by the generous support of the Areté Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and Daniel Cohen, and with additional gifts from Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc, Olga and George Votis, the EHA Foundation, and Mel and Lois Tukman.

Located at Reid Hall, home to Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute hosts a community of scholars, writers, and artists whose work has the potential to transform the way we think about the world. A presidential global initiative of Columbia University, the Institute aims to foster collaboration across the creative arts and scholarly disciplines (including the humanities, social sciences, and theoretical sciences) through residential and short-term fellowships, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, and artistic events. Its primary goal is to enrich academic modes of presenting ideas by drawing together the scholarly and the artistic imagination.

AnonymousAbounaddaraFilm Collective WriterArudpragasamColumbiaUniversityKarimahAshadu

AnukSyria

—Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs

Correspondent, National Public Radio “A treasured compilation of essays, interviews, and thoughts about one of the most important artists of the late twentieth century.”

—Richard J. Powell, author of Going There: Black Visual

www.ucpress.edu AMERICAN HISTORIES AND FUTURES “A welcome contribution to Native studies and the rich literature of California’s fi rst peoples.” —Kirkus Reviews “Her fi nal work gives readers a glimpse at the person behind the accomplishments.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton, former United States Secretary of State “Must reading for anyone interested in James Baldwin.” —Washington Post “Intensely local and satisfyingly global, it is thorough.”staggeringly —Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness of a Different Color and Barbarian Virtues staggeringly “If you admired Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you should love this book by Herma Hill Kay.”

Satire

Eric N. Mack, Key, 2020, assorted fabric, acrylic, felt, feathers, toweling, graphite, 46 1/2 x 45 in. (118.1 x 114.3 cm).

Photo: Steven Probert. © Eric N. Mack. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Morán Morán, Los Angeles.

7 In California in 1934, as dust clouds across the plains drew migrants west ward in droves, an outspoken socialist writer, Upton Sinclair, donned the man tle of the Democratic Party to run for governor. Te new flm Mank, David Fincher’s latest directorial efort, sug gests that Sinclair was favored to win the race, at least until the movie studios had their say. Tanks in large part to a series of faux-documentary shorts purporting to give newsreel testimony of voter prefer ences, Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPiC) movement fell short, and a revan chist attitude took hold: circle the wagons against the unwashed hordes. Today, under the shadows of California’s highway overpasses, tent WHERE GILDED AGES GO TO DIE: HOLLYWOOD RETURNS TO THE 1930S AND '40S J.T. PRICE ESSAY

Perhaps in recognition of the blend ing of Simon & Co.’s vision with Roth’s, the family surname is no longer “Roth,” as in the novel, but Levin, and it is through the Levins that we experience the creep ing changes to American norms under President Lindbergh, a prejudiced man dressed up as a media hero. In Te Plot Against America, initially subtle shifts in what the middle of the country will accept soon pitch toward the precipitous; simply seeing, through digital magic, President Lindbergh shaking Adolf Hitler’s hand — “like he’s any other fella,” as a friend of the family’s patriarch, Herman, puts it — immediately makes the skin crawl.

Te American Jewish family, middle class with hopes of a better tomorrow, is the heart and soul of the story, and the dramatic arc traces the way child can be turned against parent, sister against sister, the prosperous against those who identify with the victimized. Nearly every episode opens with a bravura sequence: chalk on asphalt outlines a child’s understanding of the war; Lindbergh’s aircraft zips across the skyline of a New York City rewound 80 years in time; a series of American presidential stamps transforms into an endless succession of Hitlers. Te signa ture systems-not-individuals storytelling technique that worked so well in Te Wire takes more than an episode to get rolling here; the frst episode, especially, lags, as the viewer grasps for a focal point among the profusion of characters they do not yet know. But things pick up.

Trough its depiction of an alternate 1940s USA, the miniseries comments

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 8 cities lurk, visceral evidence of a crisis in afordable housing, even as a new studio system has emerged under the banners of Disney, Netfix, Apple, and Amazon. Tose inside the studio gates earn sala ries sufcient to buy property, driving up the cost of housing and forcing the less fortunate from their homes, while those trapped in the gig economy are stuck in rental apartments. A housing system vest ed widely in rentals allows those who can aford it to become rentiers, perpetuating a vicious cycle in which much of the pop ulation can’t aford to own the foor be neath their feet. Maybe we should not be surprised, in our own time of radical inequality, that storytellers would turn with renewed vig or toward the 1930s and ’40s. In our col lective anxiety about what comes next, it makes sense to grapple with an era when the last gilded age gave out and radical politics came roaring to the fore. ¤ Perhaps no single fgure holds more sway in convincing Americans that Tis Is Just the Way It Is than a sitting US presi dent. Philip Roth intuited as much in his celebrated 2004 novel Te Plot Against America. Set in the immediate lead-up to what would have been the country’s involvement in World War II, this fc tion charts an alternate course wherein Charles Lindbergh, “that little man in the plane,” runs a successful campaign for president as the Republican nominee. Te six-part HBO adaptation by Te Wire’s David Simon and Ed Burns is an impres sive expansion of Roth’s tightly conceived narrative, with more developed parts for two supporting characters at the oppo site poles of a nuclear family: aunt Evelyn Finkel, whose every quaver of uncertainty plays out on Winona Ryder’s brow, and cousin Alvin Levin, the frebrand whose righteous indignation is communicated through Anthony Boyle’s gaze.

David Wittenberg, author of Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative Edited by Costica Bradatan

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, winner of the Pulitzer Prize NEW SERIES from Columbia University Press “These are the books we need right now: unorthodox, irreverent, forward-looking. Knowledge is no longer what it used to be, nor is book writing. This series is among the first to recognize that.”

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CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU “Intervolution is at once informative and thought-provoking—a fascinating exploration of the ever-narrowing gap between men and machines. Mark C. Taylor uses his own experience of chronic illness to probe some of the central questions of our time.”

Lutz is an explorer, a tinkerer, a connoisseur, a peripatetic scholar, a prodigious reader, and a beguiling writer. His Aimlessness invites us to ask how, when, and above all why we set goals for ourselves and why perhaps we sometimes ought not to.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 10 all but directly on our past four years. Lindbergh’s celebrity as a pilot is rendered as a sort of prototypical version of tele vision stardom. “ Tere’s a lot of hate out there,” says Herman Levin, “and he knows how to tap into it.” “ Tey keep putting it on the radio,” says Bess Levin, “no matter how many times he says it.” Te central ity of the newsreel in establishing mass narrative is played to the max, starting with actual historical footage before slid ing into digital alterations, and climaxing with the well-cast Ryder’s confused yet fattered Evelyn dancing in black-andwhite with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi ambassador to America. Ironically, the intra-family tensions the Lindbergh presidency brings out in both versions of the story are the same that Roth spent nearly his entire career exorcising from his own psyche: the brim ming confdence, and recursive neurosis, of the midcentury secular Jewish belief that America was homeland enough, all anyone could ask for, in contrast with an older generation’s intractable sense of oth erness, the need to cling to kin against the great assimilating tide of the mainstream. ¤ Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s new Netfix series, Hollywood, comes at the viewer fast with its own vibrant take on the tensions between image and reality. Adopting the swagger of high camp, the series delivers the clean and well-lit in teriors of Musso & Frank’s and Schwab’s Pharmacy, sites of Tinseltown infnite re turn. Tis alternate vision of Hollywood’s Golden Age posits a scenario in which the right circumstances and creative chutzpah sufce to explode the color and gender barriers that prevailed on screen (then and, arguably still, now). “Sometimes I think,” opines a frst-time director to the studio executive on whose good graces his career depends, “folks in this town don’t understand the power they have. Movies don’t just show us how the world is, they show us how the world can be. If we change the way movies are made […] I think you can change the world.” Change the content of the newsreel and the world will follow suit. One moment you’re at the bar con soling yourself over your failure to make it as an actor when a guy named Ernie (who looks a lot like Dylan McDermott) proudly declares, “I have a very big dick”; blink, and you’re a high-class gigolo an swering the needs of high-powered grand dames with erotically disinterested part ners, precocious overworked women in ju nior administrative roles, and, whoa, who’s that — Cole Porter? “I tried sleeping with the help,” declares Patti LuPone as the studio head’s wife, Avis Amberg, a tur baned lady-in-charge. “ Tis is easier. Less complicated.” In response, Jack Castello, earnest and plain with Superman looks, asks from Amberg’s bedroom entryway, “You think I got what it takes to make it in this town?” Or, as seen through the eyes of proprietor-pimp Ernie West, the guy for whom Castello does his energetic business: “In a way, I’m no diferent than Louis B. Mayer!”

Diference, though, is the name of the game, and while the creators have fun with the distinctions between two os tensibly identical, white-bread, would-be male leads (David Corenswet’s Castello and Jake Picking’s Rock Hudson — i.e., the one we know makes it, right?), those two play second fddle to the rest of

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the cast, at least dynamically speaking: LuPone’s regal Amberg; Joe Mantello’s suave, high-minded, torturously clos eted exec Dick Samuels; Jeremy Pope’s omni-talented, radically incoherent, al ways on-the-make Archie Coleman; Jim Parsons’s gleefully vicious proponent of tough love, power agent Henry Willson; Darren Criss’s charmed boy-genius di rector Raymond Ainsley; Laura Harrier’s walks-on-rose-petals starlet of color, Camille Washington; Samara Weaving’s slim beauty set on evading, via stage name Claire Wood, the embarrassment of being the studio head’s daughter; and Holland Taylor’s smoky Mid-Atlantic-accented casting director Ellen Kincaid. Archie wants to get his script pro duced, but fnds himself running lines, and more, with the unknown Hudson; Willson represents Hudson, alternately building him up and dressing him down (literally); Samuels greenlights Ainsley’s picture based on Archie’s script about Peg Entwistle, the real-life actress who jumped from the Hollywoodland sign in agony over her stalled-out career; Claire conspires with Camille over how to fake tears for the camera; Camille puts her sex ual majesty to negotiating use to score an audition from her boyfriend Ainsley for the starring role in his frst picture as di rector, which development sets everyone into a frizzle. All these plot lines converge on the key question: Is it a good idea, in 1947, for a Black woman to play the lead in what must, for the sake of everyone in volved, become a motion picture hit? You commend the ambition. Admire the verve, the refusal of any inkling of shame. Indeed, shame is the enemy over which Hollywood means to triumph, and for more than a minute it looks like the kid might make it. From John Schlesinger’s classic Midnight Cowboy, where homo erotic inklings lurked on the margins of urban squalor, we have arrived at Brennan and Murphy’s Hollywood, where gay desire is central, luxurious, and vehement (“I’m not ashamed,” says Archie, “I know who I am”); where the desires of women of a certain age are insisted on, with immacu lately coifed hair and a sparkle in the eye; where heterosexual unions are slam-bang propositions that crash past with brute force or, alternately, in the show’s one tru ly loving scene between a husband and wife, immediately followed by death. Tere’s a wicked humor to it all, in verting the tropes and expectations of the (straight) hero’s journey: when the pro duction of “Peg,” which turns into “Meg” after Camille lands the leading role, hits a budgeting snag, the guys team up with a plan to turn tricks to fund a sound stage recreation of the Hollywood sign. Addressing blowback from more culturally conservative quarters, and the threat that he will be run out of town, McDermott’s West declares, with a crooked grin and ironclad confdence, “I am this town.” We recognize that he’s speaking beyond the frame for a newly ascendant orthodoxy decked out in the vestments of power, an orthodoxy that is a heterodoxy, a hetero doxy that celebrates every way there is to be, while throwing shade on white-bread normalcy, the tried-and-true universal mold that couldn’t keep all this reveling diference down. ¤ As cheery camp, Hollywood is, at least in part, in on the joke of its own shortcom ings: the original script for “Peg,” around which the entire story turns, is laugh ably awful, with a major bummer of an

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 12

What do we give away when we click “I AGREE” to the terms of service on our phones? Why are billionaires squirrelling away all that money? And why is everyone so depressed? Ms. Never is the story of Farya, who sufers from world-ending depression, and Bryan, who buys and sells human souls for a living. They fall in love, and soon have to risk everything to save their family— and reality itself. “an exceptional work… a fantastical tale…” kirkus reviews (starred review) “a wildly entertaining novel.” indies today (5/5 stars, best books of the year finalist) “extraordinary and unreservedly recommended…” midwest book review AVAILABLE NOW! nupress.northwestern.edu “. . . romps through an art infused life of love, loss, and redemption, inviting the reader on a wild, exhilarating ride.” AVAILABLE NOW! —Carlanupress.northwestern.eduTrujillo,author of Faith and Fat Chances

Tis sentiment is a bedrock of the movie-making ethos, whose fne wording includes at least the possibility, no matter how far-fetched, that it isn’t a lie. Yet the true Fuck You, Hollywood! moment arrives when none other than Eleanor Roosevelt visits the Ace Studios lot to sway the deciders-in-chief into casting Camille as Meg. Te widow of FDR, a woman who was no stranger to power or the potential for politics to efect real-world outcomes, declares to the studio’s gathered digni taries, “I used to believe that good gov ernment could change the world. I don’t know if I believe that anymore. However, what you do […] can change the world.”

Here we have a recognizable depic tion of the ascendant vanguard in the contemporary arts, and it’s in the felt con nection between artifce and lived reality that the phenomenon is most afecting. I am thinking, to take a popular example, of the late Chadwick Boseman respond ing to his experiences getting to know a child with terminal cancer, someone for whom a viewing of Black Panther fgured as the culmination of nearly every wish. Tis was beautiful, and beautiful in part for how it hurt to see the pathos between image-making and reality that tends to determine what we remember best. When such a connection is forced into a fction, however, the takeaway can feel mawkish, at best.Ultimately, it isn’t the series’s glar ing ahistoricity that is damning, the fact that, most especially in the 1930s and ’40s, stars were, in efect, the owned property of the studio heads, who controlled not only which pictures they appeared in, but where they were to dine, at which flm pre miere or party they were to make an ap pearance, and who they were permitted to date, or even marry. Te notion that a frsttime director like Ainsley would have had a leg to stand on in resisting the studio’s decrees defes the reality of that time. Yet this reality is exactly what Brennan and Murphy’s alternate history wants to shake of in its fantasy of a watershed moment when all at once every barrier falls — in cluding the actual history of those who sufered for their diference (like Wong, or Queen Latifah’s Hattie McDaniel, to say nothing of the studio heads themselves, mostly immigrant Jews from ghetto back grounds) on the long hard road toward col lective progress. Tat Hollywood’s creators are savvy to the toxicity that lurks within the prevailing orthodoxy is expressed early in the story when Avis, soon to be the stu dio boss, implores Castello, the actor-gig olo, as he is preparing to bed her, “Make me feel like I matter. Even if it’s a lie.”

ending. Te actress Anna May Wong, an actual early Hollywood player devastated when passed over for the lead in Te Good Earth in favor of a white actress in yel low-face, is performed with beset dignity by Michelle Krusiec, even as Hollywood itself repeats Wong’s injury by sidelin ing her role (though, yes, Krusiec does get an acceptance speech at the end). Te cringe-inducing fnal episode of the series takes place largely at the 1947 Academy Awards ceremony, where the creative team behind “Meg” wins award after award, giving speeches that celebrate what a diference their diference-making has made. “ Tink of what it might mean,” says Herrier’s Camille from the Oscar podi um, “to a dirt-poor little Black girl living in a shanty in some cotton town, where she’s told she’s free but really her life is no better than that of her grandparents who were the owned property of another hu man being […] to see herself up there on that screen. Vaunted. Dignifed. Valued.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 14

— BENJAMIN BINSTOCKDISTRIBUTED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS | ZONEBOOKS.ORG

SPRING 2021 Te power these moviemakers wield, no matter how benevolently employed, is that of tyrants, not of politicians elect ed by a democratic vote. To imagine that Eleanor Roosevelt would see societal change as best efected by movies is a dis tortion well beyond the absurd. ¤ Tere is no shortage of things to say about Perry Mason, the Robert Downey Jr.produced reboot for HBO, which plays like a top-notch hard-boiled detective novel. Resolutely the yin to Hollywood’s yang, Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones’s cool, slow-burning yarn vests itself in the se ductive hues — and visceral horror — of Depression-era Los Angeles. From its top-of-the-bill actors Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, and Chris Chalk on down to the bit parts, each memorably scripted and performed, this immaculately wellcast series afrms that even the smallest detail matters in the never-ending tug-ofwar between those with power and those without. Nobody comes through uncom promised — and it’s often knowledge of one’s own transgressions that serves as a driving impulse toward universal justice. Subversive in its own fashion toward the tropes of noir, Perry Mason traces a sort of deranged and unconsummat ed romance between Rhys’s Mason and Tatiana Maslany’s Sister Alice McKeegan, an Aimee-Semple-McPherson-type. It is the ghost of a bond between the dogged, self-destructive investigator and the exu berant, self-evading celebrity minister that turns the gears of a plot involving an in fant’s horrendous murder. Hollywood’s Jack Castello claims brightly to have fought at J.T. PRICE

— GEORGES ABSENTEES:DIDI-HUBERMANONVARIOUSLY MISSING PERSONS by Daniel Heller-Roazen “Weaves scholarly rigor together with theoretical vision . . . Heller-Roazen is operating at the height of his powers.”

— BERNADETTE MEYLER NEW IN PAPERBACK HISTORICAL G R AMMAR OF THE VISUAL ARTS by Aloïs Riegl

“A crucial precedent for the current reevaluation of the theory and practice of art history today.”

BIZARRE-PRIVILEGED ITEMS IN THE UNIVERSE: THE LOGIC OF LIKENESS by Paul North “At once free and rigorous, impertinent and lucid . . . a philosophical tour de force.”

John Outterbridge Untitled, ca. 1974-76. Mixed media. 20 x 18 x 17 in. (50.8 x 45.7 x 43.2 cm). Collection of Vaughn C. Payne Jr., M.D. Photo by Ed Glendinning. Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

What you wanna do is take these poor sufering people’s hope away? […] You need to decide what kind of person you wanna be.” Te tension between a private awareness of ugly facts and the public vo calization of a popular narrative gives the ostensibly apolitical Perry Mason its quiet political torque. ¤ No actor living does a look of deathly judg ment as well as Charles Dance, and it is his withering gaze, as William Randolph Hearst, around which the drama in Fincher’s Mank turns. Mank is a great flm, not because it is perfect but because it’s overabundant, deft in its commentary on the relationship between Hollywood and politics, and the kind of picture that doesn’t really get made anymore. What begins as a standard postcard to Hollywood’s Golden Age soon re solves into a split narrative: a Beckett-like present-tense wherein a bedridden Herman Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman) scratches out his masterpiece on deadline for Orson Welles (Tom Burke, brilliantly channeling the voice) — a drama, Citizen Kane, about a man whose immense wealth and fame can’t satisfy him; and a remembered history of Mank’s rise and fall in the court of Hearst at San Simeon, which features Amanda Seyfried’s smarter-than-she-looks Marion Davies, Ferdinand Kingsley’s resolutely poised Irving Talberg, and Arliss Howard’s bombastic, mercurial Louis B. Mayer. Te story grows more interesting by far when the focus segues from movie making to political campaigning, a shift in the script that culminates with the best send-up of a Republican Party cel ebration on screen since Hal Ashby’s Shampoo. Rather than sharp-edged satire issued from some imagined moral high ground, Mank ofers a rueful observation of the state of play from a guy close to the nerve center of conservative politics, his deep misgivings fnding expression only in his art. A dissolute screenwriting suc cess whose satirical tongue can’t hide the fact that he’s a softie, Oldman’s Mank is one part Bryan Cranston in Trumbo, one part John Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape, yet a sweeter and more freewheeling spirit than either of them, a fellow on whose shoul der Seyfried’s Marion Davies can rest her golden head for a minute, and to whom that loaded exchange will recur and recur and recur in memory. Blackout drunk, he awakens in yet another magisterial bed (the set designers who selected the beds for Mank deserve special recognition; these are beds of enormous character).

Te functionary assigned by Welles to keep Mank on schedule encourages the screenwriter to write down to his audi ence; his refusal to do so stands as her oism, or at least its facsimile. Any minor liberties with the facts here seem like fair play for a fctive work. J.T. PRICE

17

Anzio, while looking as if he never saw a day of battle; Rhys’s Mason mentions the trenches of the Argonne, and one glance at his face appears testament enough. When Mason seeks to cash in on com promising pics of a Fatty Arbuckle type making merry with an up-and-coming starlet (and various foodstufs), the head of the fctional Hammersmith Pictures drops his mask of jollity to oversee hired thugs in torturing Mason. “People are desperate out there, Mason,” says the mo gul (played by Howard Korder), “and for one little nickel, what do we give them? Two hours in the dark. Singing. Dancing. Laughter, tears, romance. Hope. […]

Ultimately, it is the art of art, and not the bullhorn, that sways hearts and minds. Te likeness to life we behold in fction happens to be pure illusion besides. It is our own lives, at least for the present, that matter.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 18 “ Tis is a business,” says studio head Mayer, speaking not just to his screen writer Mank in the mid-’30s but, why not, to the coterie of hopefuls in Hollywood convinced of moviemaking’s moral vir tue, “where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. Tat’s the real magic of the movies and don’t let anybody tell you diferent.” What Mank experiences leaves him only with the foundering wish to look after those who pass within his orbit. When he fails at that, an excoriating wind rises from his throat, alienating everyone at Hearst’s al titude — and driving the speaker into an exile from which, years later, he will draft his masterpiece.Discussingthe Upton Sinclair cam paign among Hearst’s court at San Simeon, Mank teases, “Upton just wants you to apportion some of your Christmas bonus, Irving, to the people who clean your house.” As everyone laughs, Talberg responds, “Nobody’s asking to hear you sing the WhenInternationale.”Talberglater prevails on him to contribute to Mayer’s fundraising campaign on behalf of the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mank refuses, in of-handed fashion, “You have every thing it takes right here. You can make the world swear King Kong is 10 stories tall and Mary Pickford a virgin at 40. And yet you can’t convince starving vot ers that a turncoat socialist is a menace to everything Californians hold dear?”

Taking the barb perhaps more literally than the screenwriter intended, Talberg commissions a set of faux-documenta ry flms featuring actors who pretend to be everyday American voters, a form of propaganda that sways public opinion not so much by the merits of argument as by how strongly the public identifes with the person speaking on screen. After this technique proved highly efective for the Republican Party in 1934, the step from defeating Sinclair to seeing Ronald Reagan into the governor’s mansion three decades later really wasn’t so great at all.

In between, from the Depressed ’30s to the Swinging ’60s, a period of wide spread homeownership and prosperity took root. Notwithstanding the many ex cluded from the American dream of the 1950s, the average CEO of that era made 20 times the salary of the average worker while, in our day, that ratio stands at 271 to 1. Rising roughly in parallel to CEO salaries were the earnings of movie stars as the original studio system crumbled into dust.Te politics of Mank are ambivalent, as perhaps are those of the greatest art.

Te screenwriter’s stance isn’t about po litical ends — we have no reason to be lieve he actually wants to see a candidate like Sinclair elected — but the means. His objection is to a breach of fair play, which turns out to be a deft message for our age of ever-more-fervent absolutes.

John Outterbridge, No Time for Jivin', from the Containment Series, 1969. Mixed media. 56 x 60 in. (142.2 x 152.4 cm). Mills College Art Museum Collection, Purchased with funds from the Susan L. Mills Fund. Photo by Ed Glendinning. Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

20

TARKOVSKY

MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN [indistinct chatter] say the subtitles, and my eyes listen harder tug the loose thread of sadness through the syllables the familiar fray where the voice’s poise and fuency start to unravel — free.hethetoonscreenformeroflikevulnerabilityswallowedastoneinthethroatthebroken-facedbusdriver—becausehisdreamhoisthispastandleaveonlycityhasknownwillnotsethimIcanfeelthe

21 last thread snap, then drop.

Ten a silence: the kind of day when the sun seems to carve light into every edge, a medieval engraver with gold leaf stuck to fngers that have traced each frontispiece since the birth of the world. A hard almost reverential light as if the day watched what becomes of us. In this movie, it does: it lavishes the man with attention nothing else pays — his misgivings, mistakes. It is based on real life.

Nancy Lupo, Container, 2016, Rubbermaid Brute ICE ONLY 10-gallon container, 30 Nasco Human Body Fat Replicas, 1 lb., 18 x 17 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.

23 ESSAY

KATHERINE

SEX —

EVERYTHING

In Netfix’s Sex Education, teenager Otis struggles with his mother Jean’s profession: she is a sex therapist. Tey live, the two of them, in a home adorned with vulval art. Patients — individuals, couples, groups — come to unpack their sexual difculties and participate in plea sure workshops with Jean. It’s mortifying for Otis, whom Jean is constantly trying to get to talk about his feelings. And yet somehow Otis, despite his uncomfortable situation, fnds himself advising students at his school on their sexual problems. He has problems too: he can’t masturbate, and is repulsed by the thought of ejaculating. Jean, for her part, has difculty commit ting to a man. Having separated from a philandering husband — with whom she co-wrote sex books — she now has fings AND ELSE ANGEL

.

Te Fall in fact had a dark subcurrent running beneath its supposed celebra tion of female sexual agency. Its slavish depiction of the ways a killer pursues his female victims felt designed to instill ter ror in women (it certainly did in me). Te show felt curiously pedagogical, even in structional; a scene in which Dornan ac quired an unsuspecting woman’s address made me resolve, briefy, never to talk to a pleasant-looking man on a train again. Te Fall seemed almost to salivate over the killer’s murderous schemes. Under the guise of feminism — and with a fgure of Anderson’s stature standing in for female empowerment — the series got away with a lot of traditional, titillating misogyny, feeding an appetite for crimes committed against the bodies and hopes of wom en and girls. It addressed women by as suming, and insisting, that they must, as scholar Rachel Hall has put it, be “afraid of becoming the next body in line.” Tis kind of address to a viewer can be read as feminist — after all, the series is savvy about the violence and injustice women face. And what enabled Te Fall to feel feminist was precisely its depiction of an assertive woman pursuing sex for its own sake, a woman who unashamedly satisfes her sexual desires. A high sex drive in women may be read as assertively feminist, but it also worries us. In Te Fall, Stella’s sexual con fdence and pleasure set her up for a fall: they make her more vulnerable, or more hateable, or more punishable. Te eternal warning is there: that the pursuit of sexual pleasure may bring women more danger than it’s worth. In many narratives, a high sex drive can fgure as a red fag for some deeper pathology. In Sex Education, Jean meets Jakob, a rugged Swedish handy man, and they begin to have sex; gradu ally, a relationship develops, but Jean is rufed and unsettled — Jakob leaves his things in her house; he noisily cooks or does odd jobs while Jean sees patients; he disrupts the calm space of her home. Her frustration grows, and she lashes out at him. Ten her oleaginous ex-husband turns up, having been thrown out by his current partner, and she kisses him. Jakob fnds out, is heartbroken, and leaves her. Regretful, she comes to realize that she misses Jakob and wants him back. But the betrayal is too much for him, and she has lost her chance at happiness. While Jean may be read as feminist in large part be cause of her “masculine” approach to sex

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 24 and one-night stands, attending to them with a brisk efciency. Matter of fact with her partners about these arrangements, she is also straight with Otis, and he takes to pointing out to heartsick men coming down for cofee in the morning that his mother “doesn’t do relationships.”

Jean does, however, have a high sex drive, which often functions in popu lar discourse as a symbol of female em powerment. Contemporary feminist dis course often fgures the truly emancipated woman as one who is sexually confdent and assertive, as brazen as a man. Gillian Anderson’s Jean in Sex Education is not dissimilar to Stella Gibson, the detec tive she played in Te Fall, an ITV show that also starred Jamie Dornan (of Fifty Shades) as the serial killer Gibson is trying to track down. Stella is a ballsy feminist: she speaks back to presumptuous male colleagues, and she is sexually assertive. She pursues men for casual sex and, like Jean, treats these encounters with a breezy masculine air. Stella was readable — and rhapsodized over — as an admirable, crush-worthy feminist, just as Anderson’s Jean is in Sex Education

25 — instrumental, pragmatic, unsentimen tal — this approach is also represented as a cover for her deep longing for intimacy and love. She fell in love, felt vulnerable, and sabotaged the relationship. Her sex ual appetite was thus both a sign of her unhappiness — her impulse to keep inti macy at a distance — and a further cause of it.Watching Anderson in Sex Education, I thought, too, of Samantha Jones, the sexual libertine of Sex and the City, which aired on HBO in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tat show featured material that was in some ways radical for mainstream TV at the time: women talking irrever ently about sex, their partners’ penis sizes, STDs, fertility. Te four main characters were to a large extent stock types: Carrie was overwrought and creative, Charlotte prim and prudish, Miranda smart and cynical, while Samantha was the voracious and adventurous one, racing from one sexual encounter to the next. Like Jean in Sex Education, Samantha didn’t really, or comfortably, do relationships; like Jean, she stood in for the emancipated woman, fnally free to be as sexually carefree as a man. Samantha’s character invited the audience to admire — and to enjoy be ing shocked and thrilled by — her brazen attitude toward conquest, her frankness about her needs. It’s not, of course, that simple. Te sexual freedom and assertiveness of Jean Milburn and Samantha Jones are also si multaneously portrayed as rather patho logical; it’s hard to let time-worn stigmas go. Sex and the City’s defant celebration of fnancially independent women pursu ing sexual pleasure fought for space with the show’s own prescriptive undertones. It could be daring, insightful, and tender; it was smart and acute on the sexual double standard (remember the guy who criti cized Samantha for inadequate genital grooming?), but it also tended to follow a neat, lesson-learning structure, emerging no doubt from the weekly advice column on which it was based. Te four diferent types of girl would, in their weekly sce narios, learn an often-painful truth. In Samantha’s case, these lessons were usu ally cautionary: don’t expect commitment from a fuck-buddy; if you pursue men purely for sex, you are going to have no one to mend a broken curtain rod when you need it, or make you soup when you’re ill. Tese depictions were undeniably driv en by some familiar misogynistic horror of unrestrained female sexuality. We may valorize women’s sexual desire, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also have the same old anxieties about it: the admonitory im age of the out-of-control maneater who ends up Samantha,alone. for all her pleasure-taking, her joyful escapades, was, we were meant to know, really searching for an intimacy she both craved and feared. When she loses her capacity to orgasm and, preoccu pied by frantic, thwarted masturbation, is unable to express sympathy or tenderness on hearing of Miranda’s mother’s death, it is fairly clear that her sexual frenzy is a desperate keeping at bay of something else entirely (she eventually breaks down at the funeral). A promiscuous woman has to be in denial about something, right? Samantha sufers for her sexual liberation; she is lonely, she gets hurt. Ultimately, she represents not a joyous libidinal emanci pation but a conservative anxiety about the very idea of sexual liberation for wom en, a sense that women are just not made for sexual freedom. Her promiscuity is depression denied, her sexual emancipa tion a delusion. Te audience is asked to KATHERINE ANGEL

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 26 enjoy, vicariously, her unashamed sexual indulgences but is also warned that she is a pitiable fgure — because her sexuality is ultimately empty, her voraciousness a facade behind which cowers a damaged woman fearful of love and commitment.

Te recent BBC series Fleabag took this dynamic still further, ultimately prob ing it more thoughtfully. Fleabag firts with earnestness, in a winkingly knowing way, only to puncture it; the show evinc es a palpable distaste for the po-faced, an urge to defate pomposity. But pretty soon, the more painful motivations be hind the winking humor become clear. In the opening scene, the eponymous her oine pretends to have just arrived home at 2:00 a.m., so as to appear nonchalant when a booty-call appears at her door. She tells the viewers that she’s just gone through the rigmarole of digging out her sexy underwear and “shaving everything” so that she can appear efortlessly appeal ing. Te sex, she says, is okay: we see them have anal intercourse, for which the man is grovelingly grateful, but it’s not clear whether the act is pleasurable or joyful for her. Fleabag is frankly cynical about sex: she enjoys using it, enjoys watching various men want her, need her, be grate ful for her. Her sort-of boyfriend Harry, a rather wet, doleful character, tells her on the event of their umpteenth breakup that there’s no point her “turning up out side the house in your underwear, it won’t work,” at which Fleabag ficks her gaze to the camera and whispers, knowingly, “It will.”She’s arch, she’s canny, but does Fleabag enjoy the sex she has? While she’s having sex with a guy with protrud ing teeth, he keeps repeating, “ Tat was amazing,” but she just says, with a fake smile, “Yeah.” With another man who asks her if she’s okay, she replies, overly brightly, “Yeah, I’m amazing.” Te insin cerity is glaring. Fleabag is compulsive about sex but does not seem to be en joying it very much. “I masturbate a lot these days,” she says, “especially when I’m bored, or angry, or upset, or happy.”

Talking to a therapist, whom her father has paid for, she says — again brightly, a performative smile on her face, defend ing herself against sadness — that she’s “been for most of my adult life using sex to defect from the screaming void inside my empty heart.” It’s self-knowledge as camp — but it’s still painful. Te sex in Fleabag, though often rather joyless, does have its pleasures, not least the knowing ness of the performance, as the heroine dissects sex’s petty humiliations, pokes fun at masculinity’s fxations, all while speaking directly to the audience. But the savvy humor is often a kind of bargain, a way of gaining something while stav ing something else of. At the end of the frst episode, we learn about the death of Fleabag’s mother, and about her friend’s apparent suicide, yet Fleabag seems to be trying not to grieve. In Sex and the City and Sex Education, a woman’s high sex drive serves as a marker of feminist fulfl ment — you go, girl! — while also fgur ing as a cover for a deep longing for all the traditional trappings of marriage: stability, emotional commitment. Yet this longing is disavowed and converted into anxious avoidance. While Fleabag might nod to the pressure women feel to be performa tively sexual, it also exposes the way sex can be used to manage unbearable grief, to keep excruciating loneliness at bay. When Fleabag takes her dead friend’s hamster out of its cage, and reluctantly begins to stroke it after a long period of neglect, she is acknowledging that mere sex does

KATHERINE ANGEL

27 not amount to intimacy — that she is a lonely woman, in need of warm human contact.When I frst started watching Fleabag, it felt wearily familiar: as with Samantha in Sex and the City, it seemed to be asking whether a woman behaving like a man (or, rather, adhering to what is typically cast as masculinity) is a recipe for happiness in sex. Sex and the City was ultimately inca pable of imagining a sexually adventurous woman as anything other than a failed mimicry of manhood, parroting clichés of what she thinks men are like — only out for themselves, unable to truly feel, prioritizing their orgasm over everything else, dispensing with tenderness or obliga tion. Te way Samantha, and Jean in Sex Education, assert their right to sex uncan nily mirrors the way men are thought to assert theirs: these women fuck like men; they avoid intimacy and vulnerability, treat lovers as dispensable — and it makes them miserable. Fleabag is in some ways continuous with these portrayals. Te sex Fleabag has is gallingly empty; she is so detached from it that she can talk to the camera while having it. Tese asides to the audience are an oblique way of critiquing and ruefully regretting the performative aspect of sex that so many women experience at one time or another — the hyper-awareness, the experience of seeing oneself from the third person, from the outside. Tis sort of critique often edges into a view that women’s sexual feelings are themselves in authentic, only ever brought in from the outside.But this is not all that Fleabag is doing. Te second season ofers a much deeper delve into the unbearable pain and shared grief in families that can manifest either in sudden aggression or in a wary keeping of one another at arm’s length. In the ear ly episodes, Fleabag rather hyperactively defends herself against her own misery, trying to convince us that she is okay. In the later ones, her attempts to do so lose their potency, as both she and the series itself come to embrace a deeper reckoning with her grief. It’s a relief — though a poi gnant one — when Fleabag fnally has sex that appears so genuinely joyous that she pushes the viewers and the camera away. And yet something in me prickles at my own account of the show. Why? Because it has been so hard for women’s sexual desire to fgure at all, except as a symptom, or a metaphor for something else. In popular culture, women rarely simply have sexual desire; instead, it is usually in the service of, or a cover for, something they want more (such as inti macy). Is it possible ever to see a woman’s sexual desire as simply itself, rather than as a vehicle that usually winds up afrming traditional virtues? Tis might be a wor thy political aim for popular narrative: for sexual desire to simply be, without having to be explained, justifed, or rationalized. (Te Good Wife and Broad City did a good job along these lines.)

Because women’s sexual activity has so often been pathologized, it is import ant to be on guard when watching depic tions of sexually voracious women. Tey often serve as warnings, or as rueful de pictions of how unnatural a libidinous woman is, how her desire cannot really be what it seems but must instead be a com munication of something else. Fleabag shows us, however, with unusual intensity, how everything else in life does pervade our experience of sex, and our desire for it. Sexual desire can both be sexual desire and something else, can express diferent, even competing aims and impulses. In addition

Nancy Lupo, Open Mouth, 2019 (detail), cast aluminum bench, bronze, iron, nail lacquer, 22 7/17 x 54 15/16 x 29 9/16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.

29 to being itself, sex can also be, and often is, a way to manage pain and sufering, to contain and suppress certain feelings (sor row, fear) while engendering others (relief, absorption, distraction). Sex can distract us, can help us feel something when we are numb, can help us release feelings we didn’t know needed releasing. Like any other human activity, sex can be recruited to the management of pain. In his book on Freud, Jonathan Lear writes that the founder of psychoanaly sis “regularly causes ofence because he is seen as trying to reduce our mental life to our animal nature. But in our sexuali ty, as Freud understands it, we are unlike the rest of animal nature.” For Freud, Lear argues, the human sexual drive is impor tantly diferent from animal instinct, in that it is so varied in the activities it in cludes and the targets of that activity; we can recognize as sexual an activity that is unmoored from reproduction, such as fe tishism; sexuality can manifest itself in the least overtly genital activities. Nothing, in other words, is excluded from potentially beingWhat’ssexual.more, while one of the clichés about Freud is that he reduced everything to sex, it’s more accurate to say that sex be comes, in psychoanalysis, a way of think ing about everything else. Tere is such ambivalence and melancholy in Fleabag’s portrayal of female desire. Rightly so, perhaps — and not just because sex is a source of deep pain and confusion for many, but because it acknowledges that sex is also about the rest of life. Sex can be a window onto meaning. Te trick is to think about what sex can do without reducing sexual desire, especially in wom en, to something that is only ever brought in from the outside. But Fleabag’s hunch — one that bears further exploration — is that the way we have sex can tell us a great deal about what we want, what we fear, and what we grieve. KATHERINE ANGEL

31

W hen, in 2016, photographer Janna Ireland frst started a project of shoot ing buildings around Los Angeles designed by Paul R. Williams, she had almost no idea of what his work was like. I have to confess that, for a long time, I shared her ignorance. Like many Angelenos more than a little familiar with local history, I’ve always been more aware of Williams’s stature as an iconic local architect than of his actual work. I thought of him as a fgure more historical than aes thetic, one of many trailblazing black profes sionals who de fned ascending black L.A. and the Central Avenue scene at its zenith in the 1940s. I assumed that his designs followed the popular ones of the era — streamline moderne, Art Deco. Tat would have been impressive enough.

PAUL R. WILLIAMS IN LOS ANGELES: A CONVERSATION WITH JANNA IRELAND ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN

INTERVIEW

But, over the years, I’ve learned that the scope of Williams’s work was much more varied, stylistically and functional ly, than I ever imagined. Geographically, it ranged across the city, and across the cities of Southern California, and beyond. Ireland’s new book, Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View (Angel City Press, 2020), captures that scope not by cataloging the physical buildings — Williams designed an astounding 3,000-plus, including luxe single-family homes for Hollywood stars, housing projects, hotels, and churches — but by capturing the emotional sweep and dogged ambition that connects all of Williams’s work and creates a narrative about Los Angeles itself.

Ireland’s black-and-white images are sometimes intimate, glimpses of voluptuous staircases and immaculate interior walls in half shadow; sometimes they observe, unsen timentally but meditatively, dirt and concrete lots where Williams’s work used to be. Tere is a poignancy to all of this that make each image a compelling piece of a larger search for the essential meaning of Paul R. Williams, and of the city that gave him his chance. It’s a search that, for Ireland, is far from over. I recently talked to Ireland about the book and its impact. ¤

ERIN KAPLAN: Te photos in this book are beautiful and profound, but also kind of feeting and elegiac. Tere are stately structures that have stood the test of time, and there are the ghosts of what were. Overall, your images capture built Los Angeles at its core. Did you plan JANNAthat?IRELAND: Originally the idea was to photograph buildings that were still in pretty good condition. More and more I’d hear about a Williams building that was in a fre or damaged, and I want ed to get to places in various states of re pair. In terms of fnding places, I did my own research, one person would lead to another, and another. You didn’t know much about Paul Williams before you started the photo project. What do you think of him now? He was someone who was really brilliant, creative, and driven in a way that is in teresting. He had to maintain this career, keep his ofce open for 50 years. Tat took lots of tenacity.

He’s a continued source of fascination for me, the way he presented himself, the way he wanted to keep things positive, to minimize the stress of racism. He himself said about his own life, “It leaves you to consider the facts.” Te epiphany he had of not competing with the white world but of always competing with himself, of blocking everything else out — I love that.

It took incredible skill to please all these clients and to fulfll all these diverse interests. If he had wanted to or if he had been in a position to, he absolutely could have developed a “signature” style the way many architects did — the way he uses curves jumped out at me. His own house is full of curves, it’s defnitely something I see again and again in his work. But that diversity was kind of used against him, it made him a generalist and not specialized or exclusive. But his diversity was his ge nius. It’s what made him unique, and also ubiquitous.Hisvariety is very L.A. You can have one block with houses in many diferent styles. Back east, you have row homes, and there’s a real uniformity, but here there’s a feeling that anything could be on any

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 32

Hillside Memorial Park Mausoleum (in Culver City) was my favorite building. It was very peaceful, very resonant. For all the “gone” structures — the rubble — there’s the question of what comes next? So often in architecture, these really classical houses are replaced with monstrosities. I’m always thinking about that, so I was trying to get the last little bit of what remains. One thing I learned doing this project is that people buy Paul Williams houses, they promise sellers to preserve them, then they get torn down. It’s kind of horrifying. What else did you learn? Before starting this, I knew only a little about black history here. I knew about the First AME church that Paul Williams designed, and attended. I learned about racial redlining, restrictive covenants. I didn’t know specifcally about segregation in L.A., but it didn’t surprise me at all. But I fell in love with L.A. — it has a real art community. Tat’s a necessity for me. My grandmother lived here when I was grow ing up, so I had that connection. Now I live in Sherman Oaks. Paul Williams did a couple of smaller projects here in the Valley, in Encino.

33 street. Paul Williams started his career in the ’20s when there was still much to build in Los Angeles; his work was from the ground up. He did many single-family homes across the spectrum of styles, from Moorish to Spanish Colonial to Tudor. You capture a lot of that spectrum in this book. But you say it’s the tip of the iceberg. Tere’s so much more to do! I didn’t shoot the buildings he worked on with part ners, partly because it’s hard to see the line between his work and someone else’s. I didn’t shoot the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he designed an addition — not the whole building, though the hotel’s iconic lettering is his. Paul Williams is so iconic, but he’s not well known. I would say he’s not unrecognized, but underrecognized. I think because of the sheer variety of his work, and because of his race, he never got recognition during his lifetime (he won the prestigious AIA Gold Medal Award in 2017, 37 years after his death in 1980). I’m still going, trying to get into the ar chives at Getty and USC.

ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN

You write in the book’s introduction that you’re not an architectural photographer or a documentary photographer. How would you characterize this book? Tis book isn’t the frst of its kind, but it’s the frst of a kind. I haven’t fgured out exactly what to call it — fne art photogra phy, but something else. It isn’t a straight forward architectural book. It might be confounding for some people who are ex pecting that. Tere is overlap of photog raphy and architecture, of course. But this is its own thing. Te choice of shooting in black and white seemed right, though not because the buildings are old and I want ed to do this period thing; it just felt right for the project. I moved to Los Angeles six years ago, got a driver’s license when I was 31. For this project, I drove around a lot, mostly on Saturdays. My favorite thing was visiting communities where Williams designed all the houses, created a scene — like in Rancho Palos Verdes, and Willowbrook. I liked seeing him all around me, as opposed to seeing one of his houses here and there.

35

How did you integrate this project with your working life, and your life as a wife and mother? Before the project, I was working fulltime as an administrator at USC, teaching at Pasadena City College, running around and commuting. After I had my second child, I eventually quit USC because the cost of childcare basically meant I wasn’t making money, just breaking even. After I started the project at the end of 2016, I did an exhibition, then kept going with it in 2018 and 2019. Te whole thing fed on itself.Tehomeowners whose places I want ed to shoot received me very well, though for others it didn’t quite happen. But once someone knew what I was doing, they were usually very happy to help. All of them had at least one of Karen Hudson’s books (Hudson is Paul Williams’s grand daughter, an author and director of his archives). For the most part, people who lived in these houses understood they had something very special. Te day I went to Rancho Palos Verdes to shoot, I did feel very selfconscious. Very conspicuous. Carver Manor in Willowbrook, next to Watts, was very diferent. Te single-family homes in Willowbrook were conceived by a black woman, Velma Grant, who fgured middle-class black people needed some where to live after World War II. Williams started designing public housing proj ects, Pueblo del Rio, Nickerson Gardens. He also designed stuf way outside Los Angeles — in Memphis, Oregon, South America. I’d like to fgure out where more of these places were. What do you want people to take away from this book? I hope it encourages them to go do their own research. Tere’s room for lots of dif ferent projects about Paul Williams’s work. It deserves more. For me, doing the book defnitely made my world in L.A. bigger — it introduced me to all these architects and all these other people interested in the city. I discovered the art community, but there are so many other people that I never would have encountered otherwise.

ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN

Te East Coast perception that there is no culture, no history, here — that’s not true. Te city has now become a subject for me. It’s L.A. as subject, not just, “Oh I’m here and I happen to be taking pictures.”

40 Te bank is empty. A cluster of birds live there. Te birds are all gold, but they can fy like dollars. Tey are lawless birds glorifed by all our poems. If you look closely at the ones in the corner, some of them have human lips. A DEBT VICTORIA CHANG

41 Mass graves are modern. I caught up with the future, the metal trees are silent as they wait for us. Te future isn’t modern. It worries it won’t arrive. WHAT IS MODERN VICTORIA CHANG

Celia Herrera Rodríguez, La Jornada, silkscreen print on Japanese paper, 2011. Created for exhibition Ser Todo Es Ser Parte/To Be Whole Is To Be Part at LACE. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ray Barrera.

43 FICTION

Washing her hands in the dark, empty bathroom of a rest stop of Highway 10, just west of Ripley, California, Margaret’s thoughts turned once more to Lloyd and Ray Pettibone. Of all the old enemies she was think ing about revisiting upon her return to Los Angeles, the Pettibone brothers were the ones who made her skin crawl the most, Lloyd in particular. Te little bastard had laughed in her face. Murdered a 20-yearold girl and made a paraplegic out of her 17-year-old brother, and when she’d promised him she was going to fnd a way, somehow, someday, to make he and Ray pay for both crimes — having failed mis erably to build a prosecutable case against them — he’d chuckled at the threat as if it had come from a little girl in pigtails: “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” Maybe if Churchill Stevens hadn’t been everything Lloyd Pettibone wasn’t — a young, hardy black man with a mind HAYWOOD

QUEEN'S RUN GAR ANTHONY

Outside in the parking lot, standing alongside an old Chevy sedan with a white man who, in look and demeanor, delivered the same message of lingering desperation. Teir car had been so loaded down with dufels and garbage bags, it sat as low to the ground as a tortoise. At 2:00 a.m., the couple and Margaret had been the only ones stirring in the entire rest stop. Rather than enter a stall to do her business, the woman went straight to a sink instead, on the end near the door to Margaret’s left. She didn’t speak, just turned the water on and made a halfhearted attempt to run her hands through

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 44 and a future and zero interest in the thug life — Margaret might not have taken what the Pettibones did to him so person ally. But Churchill was a jewel, a rare ray of light in a desolate, South Central patch of the City of Angels that generally knew only darkness, and to see him reduced to an emaciated, paralyzed stick-fgure by two pieces of shit like Lloyd and Ray Pettibone … It had just been more than Margaret could bear. Lloyd Pettibone hadn’t been the frst punk to treat her like a joke and he hadn’t been the last, but it was he and his broth er Ray she now found herself wanting to pay back more than all the others. Not because of Lloyd’s cruelty or disrespect, but because of his apathy. What he and his brother had done to Churchill Stevens and his sister Violet hadn’t moved Lloyd Pettibone one way or the other; it had just been something that needed doing, like hammering a nail or taking out the trash. He should have been made to feel something, some combination of pain and regret, but Margaret had left that job undone.Tis was part of the unfnished busi ness she would spend the next few days attending to in Los Angeles. She remembered Lloyd Pettibone’s crooked, self-satisfed grin and felt the old familiar outrage boil to the surface. She’d been suppressing it for years, unwilling to agonize over something she could never change — but now she let it come, turn ing a deaf ear to the dull voice in her head demanding that she come to her senses and drive her sick, crazy ass back home. It wasn’t too late. She hadn’t yet done anything to embarrass herself and no one ever had to know she’d come this far. All she had to do was get back in the car and return to Scottsdale. Crawl into bed, say a prayer, and commit herself to being a compliant, hopeful cancer patient. It was a tempting thought. But not tempting enough. She wasn’t going home. She was go ing to Los Angeles. Not just to enact some revenge against Lloyd and Ray Pettibone, but against this thing, this crawling evil, that had taken root in her body and was threatening to destroy it, one cell at a time. What she couldn’t do to cancer she would do to the Pettibones because it was either that or lose her mind. She had run into a mammoth trafc jam just outside of Goodyear that had set her back almost four hours and she was exhausted beyond description. She was at the bathroom sink in the ladies’ room, freshening up to stay awake, when the girl came in. A big white girl with oversized teeth and jet-black hair, cut the way a blind man might have done it. She wore a silk-screened T-shirt one size too small underneath a dark green hoodie, and den im pants with shredded holes along the tops of both thighs. Margaret put her age at somewhere in the early 30s, her silver nose ring Margaretnotwithstanding.hadseenherbefore.

“Go fuck yourself,” the man said, but he was in too much pain to put any sub stance behind it. Margaret rushed out, paused to fre a round into each tire on the driver’s side

“ Te man outside waiting. Te one who sent you in here, with the beard and the gut. Call him!”

Another second passed before she was convinced: the Beretta wasn’t blufng, even if Margaret was. “Danny!” He came storming into the room in short order, reckless and clumsy like an ox in heat. He was a big blonde, with thick arms and legs and a neck that wasn’t there, but the most he could do with all of it was throw it Margaretaround.put a bullet in his left shin, just below the knee, to take the steam out of him right away. He howled and went down in a heap as his woman let out a scream of her own. Margaret backed her way to the door, stopping just long enough to pick the girl’s knife up from the foor.

GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD

45 the spray. Margaret dried her own hands on a towel and watched her, waiting, but the girl wouldn’t look up. Shit, Margaret thought. She started for the exit and the white woman stepped away from the sink to block her path, shaking the water from her hands.“Hey,excuse me. Don’t mean to both er you, lady, but I wonder if you could help me out.”Upclose, her frayed nerves and ill in tent were more easily recognized. She was in a bad Margaretway. tried to move past her but the white woman blocked her again, slip ping a knife from the pocket of her hoodie as she did so. It wasn’t much of a knife, but she held the blade up high where Margaret would be forced to consider its potential for mayhem. “I don’t want to hurt you, nigger, but I will. Your money. Everything you’ve got, rightMargaretnow.” had felt sorry for her to this point but being called a nigger with a hard “R” had its usual efect, sucking her dry of all sympathy. She performed the required assessment, relying on old skills not yet dead, and decided the woman before her was nothing she couldn’t handle. “Okay. Please don’t hurt me.” She nodded and raised her left hand in com pliance, then reached into the purse hang ing from her shoulder with the right. “Easy!” the girl said. Easily or otherwise, Margaret had the Beretta out of her purse and pointed at the girl’s face before she could blink. Te knife seemed to fall from her hand with a will of its own. “Call him,” Margaret said. Te white girl didn’t seem to under stand. Her eyes were wide with terror and she lilted to one side, unsteady on her feet. “Lady, I don’t — ” Margaret almost laughed. She’d stopped being a “nigger” and was back to being a “lady” again.

“You fucking bitch!” the woman said. “Yeah, that’s me. On the foor. Face down. Unless you want some of what boy friendTgot.”ewhite girl didn’t move. “What, you think that shit was an accident? Grandma with a gun just got lucky?” Margaret took aim at her right leg. “All right, all right! Fuck!” She got down on the foor, her man still wailing and bleeding beside her. “I’m leaving now,” Margaret said. “I see either one of you outside before the count of a hundred, I fnish you.”

Celia Herrera Rodríguez, La Cuentista, silkscreen print on Japanese paper, 2011. Created for exhibition Ser Todo Es Ser Parte/To Be Whole Is To Be Part at LACE. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ray Barrera.

47 of the overloaded Chevy, and resumed her trip to Los Angeles. ¤ Minutes later, fying down the interstate, eyes checking her mirrors for the fashing lights of a Highway Patrol car that had yet to appear, Margaret was overcome by a giddy lightheadedness she hadn’t known since her earliest days as a rookie cop. She still had it. She was still the Queen. She should have been ashamed for taking such a stupid chance, shooting a man in a public rest stop and leaving the scene of the crime, but she wasn’t. She felt good. Alive. Te asshole and his lady friend had fucked with the wrong angry black woman. She rolled her window down and laughed into the wind. When her cell phone rang, she almost didn’t hear it. She took it in hand and checked the display: Early again. Her sec ond call in three hours. Margaret hadn’t answered the phone the frst time and she was reluctant to answer it now. Te voice mail Early had left previously mentioned no emergency; she just wanted to talk. After 11 months of treating Margaret like a pariah. Te child’s timing was incredi ble. Even if Margaret were interested in a reconciliation — and to her mild surprise, she was — it was too late to pursue it. Any peace she made with her daughter now would only feel like a slap in the face to Early later, after Margaret had done what she was planning to do behind Early’s back in Los Angeles. And yet … It was almost 3:00 a.m. Two unanswered late-night calls would almost certainly arouse Early’s suspicions. As broken as their relationship was, they’d never been in the habit of not picking up the phone for each other. If Margaret didn’t answer this call, a third would come after it. And a fourth after that. Margaret put an end to the phone’s ringing. “Do you know what time it is?” she asked, trying to sound half asleep. Early ignored her mother’s rude greeting, said, “Yes, mother, I’m sorry. I tried to call you earlier, but you didn’t pick up. I’ll call back tomorrow.” “No, no. I’m awake now. What’s on your“Wheremind?” are you? It sounds like you’re in theMargaretcar.” quickly rolled her window up, cursing silently. “In the car? It’s three o’clock in the morning, Early. I’m home in bed, of course.” An ensuing silence suggested the lie was less than convincing, but Early moved past it. “Well, I only called to say I was thinking about you tonight and realized how much I miss you. And how much I love Sheyou.”waited for Margaret to reply. Feeling a twinge in her chest, Margaret had to pause to think before she could say something her pride would hold against her later. “ Tat’s nice to hear. I love you, too.” “You do?” “Of course. But — ” “ Tat doesn’t mean you forgive me. Is that what you were going to say?” “Something like that.” “Mother, I did my job. Tat’s all I did. In most cases, when I do my job, justice is done. Mistakes are corrected and lives are saved. But I’m not perfect. I can’t al ways see all the ways the work I do can go sideways.”“Except in this case, you could have. I told you how it would go sideways.” “You were guessing. You couldn’t have known. No one could have known.” GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD

If“Shit!”shehadn’t been on the clock before, she was now. Early would not rest until she found out what Margaret was up to. She would call and keep calling, and text and keep texting, when Margaret refused to an swer — which Margaret would from this point forward — and after that, she would call the police in Arizona. Tey’d wait two days to make sure she was really missing, and then someone would eventually enter Margaret’s condo and fnd the note she’d left for her daughter. After that … Margaret rolled her window down again, needing to feel the night air on her face, and stepped harder on the Camry’s gas. ¤ In Harry Shepard’s experience, people who didn’t write always thought it came easily to those who did. Tey had this idea in their heads that a writer just sat down under a shady tree with his laptop, fipped an inner-switch while sipping a piña cola da, and watched the words fow onto the page, one immaculate, inspired line after another.Harry knew all that was bullshit. In the seven years he’d been writing professionally, he had yet to write a full paragraph that he hadn’t had to drag, kicking and screaming, into existence. Te process of writing for Harry, if it wasn’t comparable to natural childbirth, was at least akin to passing a gallstone, and it pissed him of that some couldn’t look upon what he now did for a living as work. Of course, it only made matters worse that Harry was an ex-cop who wrote novels about a fctional one, Telonious Wendall Coltrane. People assumed Harry got all his story ideas from his own per sonal experiences, or the experiences of cops of his acquaintance, eliminating any need he might otherwise have for an actual imagination. In truth, Harry hadn’t writ ten a book yet that was based to any sub stantial degree on a real-world case in his past. Tat wasn’t his method. Rather than draw upon history, Harry chose instead to reinvent it, using his own experiences as

“I’m not going anywhere. You’re imagining things. Good night, Earlene.” Margaret ended the call.

“Callaccomplish.itwhatyou

“Mother — ”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 48

“Mother, what is that? Is that a siren?” Early“It’sasked.nothing. We can talk about all this later. I’m going back to sleep now.”

“Is this why you called, Earlene? So we can have the same old argument?” “No! I just wanted to talk. To see if we could fnd a way to be friends again. Wouldn’t you like that, too?”

But Margaret had known. She hadn’t been the cop who put Anthony Kingman away but she had known enough about his arrest and conviction for the murder of nine-year-old Jamilla Alberts to pre dict what returning him to the streets was likely to

will,” Margaret said. “A guess, intuition. Any way you slice it, you had a chance to trust my judgment and you chose not to. And now we’re both living with the consequences.”

Before Margaret could answer, a sound outside the car became incessant, building from a faint note to a violent wail. It was the Highway Patrol car Margaret had been dreading, only this one, fashing by on the opposite side of the highway, wasn’t coming for her.

“You are in the car. At three o’clock in the morning. Mother, what’s going on? Where are you going?”

GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD

Eleven days later, armed with cell phone records that punched holes in Cafrey’s alibi and threatening emails sent from her home computer to the victim, Harry and Margaret were ready to try again. Only this time, Margaret asked the frst set of questions.Shestarted by placing two photo graphs on the table in front of Cafrey: Steven, age 11, and Penny, nine. “Where did you get those?” “ Tat’s not important,” Margaret said. “What’s important is that you love them. Tey’re your children, your babies. You

49 a former Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective to provide detail and verisimilitude to murder investigations he created from whole cloth. Today, onboard the 45-foot Carver Voyager he had christened Te Alabaster Angel after his frst New York Times best seller, Harry was pulling teeth trying to get a scene in his latest Teo Coltrane novel to take shape. It was an interroga tion scene, Teo and his partner Dinah Ellington trying to work a confession out of a murder suspect before he could lawyer up. Such scenes were anathema to Harry because they rarely bore any resemblance to the real thing; in all his 24 years on the job, Harry could count on one hand the number of Q-and-As that had not been either tedious or brief. If a suspect didn’t run the cops through endless hours of denials and lies, they asked for a law yer within minutes of entering the room. Neither option ofered an author much in the way of suspense, so Harry always had to come up with something diferent, something that was both clever and mar ginally plausible at the same time. Tis morning, Harry had spent the last two hours seeking inspiration and fnding none. Nothing he tried would grease the rails. He was about to go up on deck and call it a day, watch the girls in bikinis foat in and out of Long Beach Marina on sailboats and cabin cruisers, or read a better book than he knew how to write, when fact came to the rescue of fc tion yet again. Tis time, it was in the form of a woman named Glenda Cafrey. ¤ Harry’s old partner Margaret Dodd al most never took the lead in Q-and-As, preferring instead to let Harry do the honors while she sat back and waited for the perfect moment to ask a question that, more often than not, would knock their suspect on his or her ass. But every now and then, the Queen — as she was known throughout the squad in deference to her debatable resemblance to Aretha Franklin — felt moved to take the reins of an inter rogation herself. Such was the case with Glenda Cafrey. Cafrey was a 33-year-old mother of two who had murdered a rival for her boyfriend Lester Andrews’s afections, shooting her four times in the face in the garage of the woman’s home with a .38 caliber revolver not yet found. It was supposed to look like an aborted carjack ing, and without witnesses, Harry and the Queen had little to suggest it had been anything but. What they did have in the way of motive and circumstantial evi dence, however, was enough to convince both that Cafrey was their killer. All they had to do was prove it, or better yet, get Cafrey to admit it. But Cafrey was playing tough. On her frst round of questioning, she’d fatly denied any involvement in the crime and had said nothing remotely incriminating.

“What I’m trying to tell you, Glenda, is that this may be your last chance to spare Penny and Stevie a lifetime of grief. We know you killed Patricia Escobar because we have the emails you sent her threatening to do so, and cell phone re cords prove you were near her house when she was killed, not home in bed like you said. Maybe we’ll fnd the gun you used and maybe we won’t, but either way, we’ve got enough right now to take you to trial. Do you know what that means?”

Harry watched a tear stream down Cafrey’s right cheek. She was biting her lower lip, no doubt to keep from saying something she didn’t want to say. “You want to control what Stevie and Penny fnd out about what you did? Tell the story yourself. In your own words, your own way. If you make us tell it for you, we won’t be kind.” Margaret turned to Harry, who was standing of to the side. “Will we, Harrypartner?”lookeddirectly at Cafrey. “We don’t get paid to be kind.” She didn’t answer right away. Te two photos on the table were a constant distraction to her. Finally, Cafrey wiped her eyes and said to Margaret, “I want to speak to a lawyer.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Cafrey said, shaking her head. “It means these poor children will hear everything,” Margaret said, hammering a fnger on the two photographs resting on the table between them. “Whether you’re convicted in the end or not, it’ll all come out in a trial. Everything you did and how. Every ugly detail. Tey’ll call you a mon ster who plotted and planned the ruthless murder of an innocent, 26-year-old girl. Tey’ll read your emails out loud and show the jury blown-up crime scene pho tos of the four bullets you put in the vic tim’s face. Tey won’t talk about how you did it for your children, or how Lester’s lying ass drove you to it. Tey’ll just say you were a jealous, coldblooded bitch and leave it at that.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 50 would do anything for them. And you’d do anything to save them pain. Wouldn’t you?”“Yes. But — ”

Tey thought they had lost her. Harry couldn’t believe it. But then, fve days later, Cafrey’s court-appointed attor ney approached the D.A.’s ofce with a plea deal: a full confession for a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, with a maximum sentence of 15 years. Margaret wanted more but Harry sided with the D.A.; they didn’t have the murder weap on and weren’t close to fnding it, and the case they could build without it might not satisfy the wrong jury. Te D.A. took the deal and Cafery got the full 15.

“Maybe that’s why you did what you did. From what we understand, aside from his cheating, Lester is a good man. You wanted a good father for Stevie and Penny and you thought Lester was the one. Ten along comes Patricia Escobar to ruin ev erything. For you and the kids.” Cafrey just sat there, waiting for Margaret to make her point.

All because the Queen had recog nized something about their suspect that Harry had completely missed: Cafrey would kill for Lester Andrews, but she would lay down her life for her kids. ¤ Some people liked to say his partner was lucky, that she took wild guesses that just happened to pan out, but Harry wasn’t one of them. Margaret Dodd had been a damn good cop who simply knew how

Celia Herrera Rodríguez, La Nepantlera, silkscreen print on Japanese paper, 2011. Created for exhibition Ser Todo Es Ser Parte/To Be Whole Is To Be Part at LACE. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ray Barrera.

“How you doing, Harry?” Nicky asked as he took his usual place at the bar. She wasn’t naturally exuberant, Nicky, but the short, meaty blond looked more subdued thanItusual.wasn’t hard to guess why. She only had seven customers to serve, including Harry, and among them were two white men sitting at a table in the rear, laughing and talking like they had the place all to themselves. Tey were both middle-aged and dressed to impress no one but each other, testing the ft on faded denim pants and cotton T-shirts that advertised the brand of the truck outside and a beer Harry had stopped drinking as a teen. Te larger of the two was a bearded red head with a fat face and forearms black with tattoos, and the smaller was a sickly scarecrow, his cheeks hollow and his long neck that of a goose. Much of what they were saying couldn’t be understood from the bar but every now and then a vulgarity or racial epithet would ring out loud and clear.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 52 to read people, and eight years of part nering up with her had provided Harry with more fodder for his writing than all his other professional experiences put together.So,the lady wasn’t “lucky.” Far from it. Te last time Harry spoke to her, she’d let it slip that she was ill. He couldn’t get her to elaborate, but from what little she said, he gathered it was cancer. Harry didn’t push her for more details because he knew there’d be no point; to Margaret Dodd, cancer would just be one more ass to kick. She was indomitable. Today, the Queen had come through for Harry again. Te interrogation scene he’d been struggling to write was a prob lem solved. He wasn’t going to have Teo Coltrane or Dinah Ellington work a con fession from their suspect with a photo of two children, but they were going to do something similar and just as inspired. Harry knocked the scene out in less than an hour and decided to celebrate by taking the rest of the day of. He typically put in at least six hours of writing every day but his last Coltrane novel, Te Black Keys, was the third in a row to sell over a quarter-million copies, so he could aford to check out early every now and then. He drove his emerald green, ’66 GTO convertible out to Nicky’s in Belmont Shores, top down, jazz blaring. Nicky McMillan was the ex-wife of a cop Harry once knew who worked the bar herself and could pour a martini to rival the ones Harry used to throw down three at a time at Musso & Frank in Hollywood. Te bar was small but it had a vibe that matched Harry’s own, cool and dark and quiet as a church on Tuesday morning. It was a place a man could think in, and trade sto ries with people on either side of the bar without having to shout above the din of some fool’s idea of music, or a drunken birthday party run amok. At least, that was how Harry usual ly found it. But not this morning. Tis morning, there had been a giant blue monster truck cocked at an angle in the handicapped parking space Harry usually put the Pontiac in, fags the size of bed sheets hanging from poles propped up in the back. One fag was the American standard but the others were political bill boards for people who loved half-baked conspiracy theories and the former US president who once liked to Tweet about them. Harry parked his car in a regular spot in a far corner of the lot and, on his way inside, confrmed what he already knew: there was no “handicapped” placard hanging from the truck’s rearview mirror.

53

“Was only one space the truck would ft, so that’s where we put it,” the scare crow said. “You got a problem with that, go fuck yourself.” He and his friend laughed, waiting to see what Harry would say next. “Hey, no ofense intended,” Harry said, smiling. “I fgured you guys had an explanation and, now that I’ve heard it, it makes perfect sense. Gotta park where you can park, right?” “Right,” the redhead said. Nailing the subjectHarryclosed.turned and went back to the bar, the pair at the table snickering as a way of bidding him farewell.

It wasn’t the same as putting his fst through a deserving face, but it was satis fying, nonetheless.

Nicky set Harry up with his usual libation — Ford’s gin, extra dry — and waited for him to take his frst sip before saying, “I was hoping you’d come in today.” Harry had made up his mind he wasn’t going to get involved so he pre tended not to follow her meaning. “Why? Isn’t my tab paid up?” “All I need you for is back-up.” She cut her eyes at the two proud Americans in the back. “I can handle this myself.” “Don’t trouble yourself. Tey’ll be gone in an Anotherhour.”“nigger” made its way up to the front of the bar. Nicky visibly finched. “I’ve already had one hour of this. I think one is Sheenough.”tooka step to come around the bar and Harry said, “Okay.” Stopping her cold.He got up from his stool and went over to the table where the two loudmouths sat, coming to a halt between them. Te lightweight went quiet in mid-sentence. “Sorry to interrupt, boys, but I was wondering which one of you has the disability?”“Tewhat?” the redhead asked, al ready annoyed. “ Te disability. Tat’s your truck in the handicapped space outside, right? I was just wondering which one of you has the bad back or the bum knee.” Te bar was suddenly dead silent. Te two men shared a glance and grinned. “Or maybe it’s the kind of disability you can’t see. What they used to call ‘re tarded’ in my day but is now referred to as ‘developmentally delayed.’” Te grins went away. Te man with the beard turned in his chair to glower at Harry more directly. “You trying to be funny, old man? You’ve lived too long, is that it?”

He started out, doing his best to re semble a defeated old man in full retreat.

“ Tanks for trying, Harry,” Nicky said as he paid his tab. “It was nothing. Take it easy, Nick.”

GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD

On his drive back to the marina, a gi ant blue and white fag emblazoned with the name of the 45th president of the United States fapping against the wind in the convertible’s open back seat, Harry wondered if he couldn’t have done more to defend his honor against the two apes at Nicky’s bar. He decided the answer was no. A man his age, ex-cop or no, had to defne “kicking ass” diferently than he had in his youth. Twenty years ago, he would have broken the end of the fagpole he’d torn from the bed of the monster truck in Nicky’s parking lot and shoved it up the ass of the truck’s ignorant owner. Today, all he did with the pole end was ram it down deep into the throat of the truck’s exhaust, rendering the vehicle undrivable for rea sons that would only become apparent af ter a tow and a good-sized repair bill.

John Outterbridge, Healing, 2011, mixed media, 24 x 9 1/4 x 8 inches. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.

55 ESSAY

WHYGOESVIOLENCEVIRAL: A THREAD IN SIX PARTS BRIAN LIN

1/ THE MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES has grown during the pan demic. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are shaping so many people’s sense of ra cial justice. Te problem is, social media is a technology of the white gaze. It feeds of of racial violence; killings go viral. Hooked to our phones, we circulate and cycle through Black death. We need more life. Asian Americans in particular need strategies for demand ing recognition beyond the schema of ra cial violence — especially so our visibili ty does not form at the expense of Black people.Inthis essay, I turn the gaze onto nonBlack people who make a show of look ing at Black death. I close read the viral discourse compiled by #AhmaudArbery.

I go to his Facebook and scroll through his feed. I look and I look for that frst post. Was it the same man? I give up. I can’t fnd it. Te Woke Hapa posts a lot. I go back to IG. I Google the name of the man in my student’s post: Ahmaud Arbery. Killed on February 23. Te timeline makes sense. It’s the same man. It’s Ahmaud again. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison examines what she calls American Africanism: how white US writers imag ine Black people in the pages of liter ary fction. As Morrison argues, literary scholars have failed to pay attention to the mechanisms of race in canonical US fc tion even (or especially) when race is op erative. By revisiting Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other canonized authors, Morrison makes the case that white writ ers have used Black fgures to make sense of what it means to be American. She calls this scheme the literary imagination.

I examine social media virality itself and surface the contradictions that organize discourse about racial justice. Tis essay makes space to ask: What are just and genuine ways of being Asian American beyond white adjacency and Black alignment? What are ways of do ing Asian American that would make “for Black lives” redundant? Tat’s it. Tat’s the whole argument. Scroll on. Today is May 5. I’m stretching before a run, listening to a podcast. Te hosts, who live in New York, refer to the city as the epicenter of the coronavirus. Te diction strikes me: a term for earthquakes used to describe a disease whose spread exceeds any center. Te metaphor of the more familiar disaster gives shape to an otherwise uncontainable pandemic. In form we fnd safety even when it comes to harm. One of my former high school stu dents posts an IG story. It’s about a case of “jogging while Black.” It lists action steps for holding the killers accountable. Here’s my Woke Asian response. At frst I'm confused. I came across similar news two months ago, at the start of shelter-in-place, but that case wasn't viral then. Is this a diferent murder? Did another Black man get killed while out on a run?Ican guess who posted about that kill ing: the Woke Hapa. I met him years ago, at a conference for ethnic studies teachers. I remember my discomfort at hearing a visibly Asian man speak with the cadence of spoken word, which to my ears at least takes on the sounds of Blackness. I can imagine him calling people “fam” and greeting people with “what’s good?”

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What’s the diference between the gaze and the imagination? Te white gaze is a relational concept. It assumes a sub ject and an object. Te subject looks, the object is looked upon. Te imagination requires no object. One can imagine the Other entirely alone. As Morrison did in 1992 and writers of color today continue to point out, white writers fail at imag ining characters of color when they lack substantive relationships with actual peo ple of color. Nonetheless, just because the

57 imagination is private does not make it any less deadly, a point Claudia Rankine made viral. IYKYK. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is about how white writers imagined Black people during de jure segregation. Morrison’s work is groundbreaking, yet the white gaze is something else. 2/ May 7. It’s viral now.

Tere’s a lag time between an inci dent going viral on social media and that same incident scaling up into digital news media. As of 6:00 p.m. Pacifc, the land ing page of Te New York Times has no mention of Arbery’s killing even though Patrisse Cullors’s tweet is every fourth post in my social media feeds. Te delay throws me for a loop. Eventually, the Times catches up, posting their reporting on social media. Tese delayed posts are like aftershocks. Te language of earthquakes. One emergency as heuristic for another. Te next day, May 8. Morning. Awareness of Arbery’s murder has grown exponentially again. Most of the people posting about it are not Black. Not a few of them are white.

BRIAN LIN

I can’t help but think that all this post ing is not about raising awareness. Our social media feeds are echo chambers. It’s a well-known problem. By the time you fnd out about something, your followers probably have as well. So, if any cause is really at stake today, it’s people’s status as anti-racist.Another post is going around. Here’s the start and end of it.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 58 [...] Even a non-Black person posts this, editing all the frst-person pronouns to third.Tis — two white men killing a young Black man while he was doing something harmless and recreational — running — this is violence that’s legible and Amidindisputable.allthis, I get an ad for a Times virtual event. It’s about running. I click on it to check whether anyone has comment ed on the terrible timing. DuringGuess.the pandemic, I have looked for other ways to describe the phenom enon of “going viral.” Te metaphor seems insensitive now. But in the case of #AhmaudArbery, they would lose some thing not to examine the coincidence.

All these Arbery posts today are the equivalent of IKYKNYKIK: I know you know, now you know I know. If the topic were anything with lower stakes (e.g., exchanging a glance with the other person of color during a particularly white writing workshop), such rhetorical games might be fun, even useful. But the topic is not innocuous. It is the vulnera bility of Black people to state-sanctioned violence and premature death. Anti-Blackness is the most endur ing US currency. Tese days, social media trafcs in virtue signaling. In other words,

Te paradox of social media virality is this: people spread content that’s already repeating on their feed. Tis choice runs counter to traditional publication, where the norm is novelty. In turn, the expecta tion is to cater to the unknowing. Take, for instance, the most obvious tell of the white gaze: the explanatory comma. Te social media acronym “IYKYK” upends the value placed on the unknown. It is the slightest status symbol, rewarding those who already know. Tus, IYKYK exposes novelty as a matter of the gaze. Novel to whom? Te whole premise of writing something new is a norm that steers people away from writing for their own communities. It disciplines people into writing for the white gaze.

John Outterbridge, 5 Pieces, 2011, mixed media, 18 1/4 x 15 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.

Tis is 1998. She’s won the Pulitzer and the Nobel. Perhaps that informs the matter-of-factness with which she pro nounces these permissions. Tis is no lon ger the party line for writers of color in 2020. Because of the violence of the white literary imagination, we are often called upon to enforce the lanes.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 60 the economy commodifes Black pain, and non-Black people proft. Tey make a killing.“Iknow you know, now you know I know” comes at a cost to the people who have to know, who’ve been knowing, whose overdetermined knowability to the white gaze is the very problem. Te cost, I think, is Black people’s dignity. Te knowledge that liberals like me go out of my way to buy the Ta-Nehisi Coates-edited issue of Vanity Fair with a Breonna Taylor portrait on the cover while the state consistently values real es tate over Black life — that people invest more to mourn Black people than to pro tect Black people — that a Black person murdered moves this country more than a Black person creating excelling coping struggling defying — the knowledge of what this nation values and whom it de nies life — it must eat at Black people’s dignity.Ours is a country that acknowledg es Black people most upon their murder. White liberals would call such decency love, but no. It is a sickness when Black death is Whiteclickbait.consumption powers our time lines. It insists on knowing where things stand to maintain order and control. Social media enforces a legibility — a cleanness, a purity — that secures the arrangements of white supremacy. Consequently, obedi ence and fear govern social justice culture online and of. What I’m saying is: can cel culture, generally blamed on the POC left, might be more deeply understood as an extension of the white gaze. I hope that people read and share this essay. I fear getting cancelled. I want to get out. Morrison did talk about the white gaze. Her pithy example regards Invisible Man. She brings it up in conversation with Junot“InvisibleDíaz. to whom?” she says. “Not me, so that’s already a wonderful book that still has that other gaze.”

People post her Charlie Rose inter view more, the excerpt with this couched and encoded question: “Bill Moyers, I think, once asked you the question: can you imagine writing a novel that’s not centered about race?” “Yes, I can write about white people,” she says. (Leave it to a white man to ap peal to white male authority to hide white supremacy.) “White people can write about Black people. Anything can happen in art. Tere are no boundaries there.”

Morrison credits African writers such as Chinua Achebe and diasporic writers like Aimé Césaire, “who could assume the centrality of their race.” In their work,

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[T]here were the parameters. I could step in now, and I didn’t have to be consumed by or be concerned by the white gaze. […] It has noth ing to do with who reads the books. Everyone of any race, any gender, any country. But my sovereignty and my authority as a racialized person had to be struck immedi ately with the very frst book. So what is the gaze if “it has nothing to do with who reads the books”? Every decision a text makes implies the gaze that it centers, which is to say, the experi ences, values, and worldviews that it vali dates. Instead of “Who is the audience for this?”, we can ask “Who are its people?”, even “What communities does it serve?”

maud.com:Idon’tsign the site’s petition. It’s a revealing choice to character ize Arbery so minimally: “a ft athlete,” “unarmed,” “only 25 years old when he died.” If I were writing a Black male character, my frst move would not be to describe his physicality. It would be a shortcoming of the imagination to char acterize a Black man as athletic, valued for physical labor. Tat’s to say the least. Whereas this narrative presents Arbery as a trope, stripped of dignity, the two killers get backstory and social con text. If these paragraphs showed up in a writing workshop, I would think the story was about the two white men. Notice, for instance, how the text stretches out the act of violence into so many extraneous steps. Tis story plays out like an action fick, its protagonist not Ahmaud. Te text not only slows down the vio lence. It repeats the scene and bolds it for emphasis. Most Black audiences probably wouldn’t want any of this. What Black audience would want this nightmare played on loop? We even name our pain to assuage our oppressor.Consider “microaggression,” once eth nic studies jargon, now social justice cliché. Every time I’m in a space with two or more people of the same race and gender, I worry I’ll mix up their names — that classic racial microaggression. At the same time, I no tice my anxiety with disdain. Calm down. But it’s worth taking seriously. Te confusion of two people of color of the same race and gender sets the stage for the replacement of Asian people with virality, of Latinx people with virility, of indigenous people with savagery, of brown people with treachery, of Black people with criminality. Te synecdochic mix-up scales up to a metonymic opera tion. Microaggressions are only micro to BRIAN LIN

When people of color decenter the white gaze, we are, as Morrison says, claiming our sovereignty. In contrast, writing for the white gaze is uphold ing this nation's founding principle: that white lives matter at everyone’s expense. 3/ Overnight, an infrastructure has cropped up to organize around the injustice. On May 8, this is the centerpiece of runwith

However,gaze.defning

“people of color” as “victims of occasional racial violence” is a lose-lose proposition for our personhood. It leaves us either suferer or fraud, but we are so much more than how they harm us or whether they believe us. We exceed the gaze by measures be yond imagination. “One way to know you’re in the presence of — in possession of, possessed by — a racial imaginary is to see if the boundar ies of one’s imaginative sympathy line up, again and again, with the lines drawn by power.” Put plainly, the racial imaginary makes up stories about the Other that match the plots underwriting white pow er. Tat’s how Claudia Rankine and Beth Lofreda defne the concept in their an thology of the same title. To concretize: If another Asian per son is walking toward me on the sidewalk, and I move onto the street to avoid infec tion. If a Black person walks past me in the parking lot, and I lock my car again “in case.” If a brown person walks into the el evator, and I gesture at the buttons instead of speaking English. In all of these cases, I am perceiving the person of color within a narrow grid, something like a cage. According to Morrison, the white literary imagination is how white writ ers make use of Black characters while excluding Black people. Te racial imag inary, h/t Rankine and Lofreda, makes clear the invisible frame for the creative act: the power and policies of a settler-co lonial racial state. Te Georgia Bureau of Investigation ar rested the two white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery on May 7, 74 days after his murder. Te impetus, some claim, is the organizing that social media has facilitat ed, the very reposts I have bemoaned. Te efectiveness is not exactly surprising. It actually proves the point. Tat social media can enable mass mobilization and political change suggests both the extent to which the white gaze governs American institu tions and the power that’s harnessed when you move white people to outrage.

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a people and a system that fail to under stand the telescoping nature of their harm. Even as we minimize our pain for the sake of white comfort, we often truncate our worlds to a history of white violence. We do it for the sake of legibility to the white

Oh Shaun, you social media lightning rod. As someone who’s edited my résumé to make my achievements measurable and myself hirable — consumable — I’m embarrassed by all these numbers in your tweet. Which fundraising expert taught you about SMART goals, and what are you getting for meeting them? Tis tweet is also going around:

Viral content often lacks context. Every time I come across this tweet, I assume it’s about the arrest of Arbery’s killers. Only now do I notice the ways in which it’s al most scrubbed clean of historical specifcity, written to outlast the moment perhaps. Te “always remember,” an admonition made in anticipation. Te use of the anonymous “they” and “we.” Is it Twitter’s character limit, or is it the power and presumption of whiteness to move freely across space and time? Only a white man would step so comfortably into the position of historical authority. Always remember. People are also circulating the rhetor ical opposite, the highly specifc: Yeah, okay. But also this switcheroo logic is characteristic of naïve understandings of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the rest of the gang. Te hypothetical scenario is so unimaginable as to scuttle the point.

Two white men going viral for tweet ing about a Black man’s murder — this is the clearest evidence I’ve come across that social media operationalizes the white gaze. Tat is to say, it puts into play white ways of making sense. It reifes, normaliz es, and incentivizes ways of self-fashioning and community building that accord with whiteEverynorms.time I follow a thirst-trap ac count, click on the latest iteration of the latest unparsable meme, or write a refec tive, raw, but ultimately uplifting caption to accompany my increasingly profession al selfes, I reinforce a worldview in which I and everyone I love are lesser. Tis, even though I "curate" what I follow to only consume people of color. Tat’s what the white gaze is all about: consuming people of color. George Yancy makes clear what the white gaze does. He writes in Black Bodies, White GazesAs: I endure those clicking sounds [i.e., of someone locking a car], I catch a glimpse of myself through the white person’s gaze. I am con structed as evil and darkness. […] As I move along urban streets, the white imaginary projects upon my Black body all of its fears, rendering my Black body the in stantiation of evil. Te distinction between signifer and signifed have collapsed.

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BRIAN LIN

John Outterbridge, Ritual Consoled, 2009, mixed media, 30 x 13 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.

•

• idealizes/demonizes • exceptionalizes/essentializes • coddles/objectifes • de-sexualizes/hyper-sexualizes • over-identifes/others • overestimates/belittles • demands

But to the white gaze, “a Black jog ger” is safe. Jogging implies leisure, which overrides the danger that the white gaze inscribes onto the Black body. Te media, always ready to return innocent Black vic tims as the always-guilty Black criminal, preemptively decided that Arbery died jogging. LIN

To the racial imaginary, the sentence “a Black man runs” raises questions like “What did he do wrong?” and “From what?” I don’t think these are the ques tions most Black people would ask if faced with this post:

BRIAN

Yancy, philosopher, is describing a phenomenological process: what changes within a person as power acts on two peo ple. Projecting and rendering, construct ing and collapsing, white perception has the power to make and break people. Te literary imagination centers an isolated white subjectivity, one that stages the racial Other to tell a story about the self. Te racial imaginary takes power into account. While focusing on the imagi nation limits a relational analysis, Yancy complicates both formulations. He tracks the fraught transaction between two coor dinateWesubjects.actually have a term already that synthesizes what Morrison, Rankine, and Yancy are each theorizing. Te white gaze is a social medium. 4/ A tentative defnition: the white gaze is a set of dialectical perceptual practices — flters, if you will — that inscribe a re lation within the dynamics of white su premacy. (Doesn’t “followers” make more senseTonow?)illustrate, the white gaze: classifes/mixes up care/evades criticism. Case in point: Much of the report ing shared about Arbery’s killing describes him as a jogger. Yet people who run seriously would never say we “jog.”

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widely

What does the diference reveal?

If a legion of social justice warriors runs in the streets, and no one takes a selfe, does the activism even occur? Recall the “Black people are tired” meme. Probably the last thing many Black people feel safe to do right now is run in public. Tis outdoor action, like the on line petition, does not seem to serve Black people.Recruiting non-Black people to do for visibility what a Black person was killed doing — it would be an understate ment to call it rubbing salt in the wound. It is un-empathetic, infectious overidentifcation. It is the discursive violence done when narratives about people of col or center the white gaze. It is American Dirt. As far as I can tell, the tension between Run With Maud and shelter-in-place has gone unnamed. Tis, despite those posts people made to shame anyone breaking quarantine. What’s going on? Social media delights in exposing the cluelessness that results from segregation, as this trio of posts shows: With that said, social media lacks the capacity to integrate realities. It tends to acknowledge crises one at a time. Tis has the efect of partitioning realities: antiBlackness content here, pandemic content there.So let us put two and two together. Te "I Run With Maud" action calls for masses of people to go outside when sci ence advises against it and many govern ments forbid it. In addition, anti-racist reporting has proven what many already knew. Because of preexisting systems, this pandemic disproportionately harms and kills Black people. What does this amount to? A cam paign named after a Black man that by no means seems to be for Black peo ple — made possible, of course, by social media. In other words, non-Black peo ple leveraged the grief around a Black

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67 catastrophe to seek relief from the global Ione.take a Pomodoro writing break and go on social media. Tis again: I make the mistake of scrolling through the comments. Non-Black people talk about Black death like it’s nothing. 5/ Today is May 10. Another Black icon has died: Betty Wright. Yesterday, Little Richard and Andre Harrell both passed. I think about posting something on social media about what a mournful week it’s been for Black people. I decide against it. From posts by Black writers and journalists, I glean that these artists have shaped the world in ways that many nonBlack people will never recognize, myself included.Another piece of Black knowledge that I learn during the pandemic: the ad age “when white folks catch a cold, Black people get pneumonia.” Black excellence and anti-Black racism are both conditions of possibility for modernity. A corollary of that propo sition — a generalization, I admit: Black people are positioned and poised to iden tify the fallacies and foul play of the mod ern world. Tis sociopolitical arrangement might be news to some non-Black people. Our ignorance is often a burden and a harm to Black people. How do we reduce or even eliminate it? I think about ending this essay with ac tion steps. Chalk it up to my Virgo MO. I write that ending. My partner reads it. He says I’m pandering to the white I’llgaze.speak to us instead. We East Asians long to surpass the role of white suprem acy’s side piece. I mean, we are yearning for self-determination and agency. Te turn from white adjacency circulates as hashtag: #NotYourModelMinority. Our desperation is very human and very deep. To my mind, it explains why some of us perform what we take to be Black culture, publicize our proximity to Black people, and tally our pro-Black acts. In an anti-Black nation still defned by the Black-white binary, the most legible way to defy the racist order is to align with Black people. If this sounds exploitative, it often is. Legibility, after all, is prerequisite to marketability.18MillionRising is selling a T-shirt to fundraise for Black- and Asian-led grassroots organizing. Te illustration: BRIAN LIN

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Five or six years ago, I would have bought this in a heartbeat. At the time, I was teaching English and ethnic studies at a majority-Latinx high school. I was one of two Asian American male teachers on campus. Desperate not to be mistak en as the wrong type of Asian, an hon orary white, I amassed an array of social justice-y T-shirts. I even bought the one that DeRay made viral. It says “I LOVE MY BLACKNESS AND YOURS.”

Tankfully, I never wore it. Now, in 2020, I pass on the new look. If the shirt serves anything, it’s the image of the person wearing it. It’s the worst of both worlds: IYKYK and IKYKNYKIK. Tis self-boosting function appears in the design itself. For one, the man in the drawing looks nothing like Malcolm X. Dude looks more like Chidi Anagonye than the actual Black radical. Meanwhile, Kochiyama looks spot-on and bad-ass. She speaks, amplifed, while the former Mr. Little is of to the side. It might sim ply be that the Yuri drawing reproduces a well-known photograph. While that might be the case, there’s another wellknown photo. It’s Malcolm holding a rife by the front window. Tis unfortunate illustration might as well be captioned “NOT YOUR MODEL MINORITY.” It paints Asian Americans in a powerful light, Yuri liter ally ahead of Malcolm X, in order to prove the white gaze wrong. A second Rorschach test: Every aspect of this activates me. It’s less the anti-Asian sound bites than the characterization of “my Black friends” as ignorant and hateful to imply the saint liness of certain Asian Americans. I don’t buy the implied ratio of xenophobic Black people to activist Asians. Maybe this incredulity is particular to me, an East Asian man who has made more Black friends than Asian ones precisely with the premise that Black people get it and East AsiansPeopledon’t.who might otherwise meme the Audre Lorde quote about singleissue lives are, in this staggering moment, treating two US institutions — forever foreignness and anti-Blackness — as if

John Outterbridge, Jive Ass Bird, from the Rag Man Series, 1971. Mixed media. 22 1/4 x 31 x 12 1/2 in. (56.5 x 78.7 31.8 cm). Te Greg and Diane Pitts Family Collection. Photo by Ed Glendinning. Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 70 they weren’t ordered by a third: racial seg regation. If there are Black people scape goating Asians for a global pandemic, if there are Asians victim-blaming Black people for state-sanctioned violence, their respective ignorance certainly has to do with the endless impersonal forces that make us strangers to each other. It has to do with the social distance. Segregation is not only spatial. It is ontological: don’t say that/wear that/be that because it doesn’t belong to you. In turn, it’s also epistemological: don’t think that/cite that/write that because it doesn’t apply to you. People put up gates to pro duce the resources presumed most scarce. Scarcity has spiritual consequences. When we internalize the myth that there isn’t enough to go around, we risk falling for the premise that we are not enough. And when we believe that our lives are worth less, we treat the sufering of others as worthless.Whenwe fght for the scraps they set aside, it’s white people who stay fed. When we stay in the lanes they painted in the dark, it’s they who weave and wile out, boundless, lawless. Last test. Back in late April, because of scarcity, my Facebook feed looked like this: For some Asians, it was novel to note we're not actually white. Surprise! Ten there are the Asians who can't stand them: their vestiges of whiteness, their complic ity. Lest they're confused for the wrong kind of Asian, they brand themselves as the diametric opposite: the Angry Asian Man.I’m no longer novice or saint, but I remember the confusions and wounds of both. Social-justice-oriented Asian Americans make strawmen out of every one else because of resentment. I feel it too. If I ever let it out, here would be my cry: All that we want is to be called broth ers and sisters for once! I mean, siblings! And it’s because of all those white-aspiring Asians that we’re always left out. So, John Cho, stop telling Asians to feel bad because of COVID. Anti-racism isn’t for us — we’re the racists! Because of scarcity, people have post ed about the more episodic violence of anti-Asian racism and the more structural violence of anti-Black racism as if we can’t acknowledge both at the same time. Te fear: Paying attention to everyone will somehow bankrupt the sources of recog nition, maybe even nullify the currency already paid Rememberout. the Woke Hapa? He shared a Facebook post that illustrates this fear. It’s addressed to “my Asian (esp

71 East Asian) family.” In case the post is not quite public, I’ll paraphrase. Te long and short of it: Please bracket your pain, how ever shocking and unfamiliar, so that you can learn about other communities’ ongo ing sufering.It’sprobably fne to leave out the screenshots because the post sounds a lot like me. I fnd the writing insuferable, and my repulsion has to do with my iden tifcation. Te specifcation of East Asian to signal awareness of the inequities with in Asian America, the listing of systemic oppressions to demonstrate ethnic studies fuency, even the afrming parenthetical at the very end — “I see you!” — I rec ognize these rhetorical moves so keenly because I use them all the time. I want people to know what side I’m on. Likewise, the post is a perfect recitation of every so cial justice script. Yet the bad Asians it’s explicitly addressing wouldn’t pick up on all its cues. So who are its people? What communities does it serve? Not Asian Americans. Te post fulflls expectations to get some thumb-ups and bubble hearts. Tat is to say, like much so cial justice discourse nowadays, it’s for the white gaze that wires us all. Even when we create “for the people,” we can end up speaking past our own — even when no one is out there at all.

I would like to think I’m joking. I don’t know whether I’ll post a photo once it’s good to go. I love it — it’s very me. I also know that most of it’s not mine. I fear judgment, call-out, and condemna tion for what I’ve made a part of my body. I heal, and I do. Flowers foat near panther’s claws, tail taut. I wear our histo ries as horizon line.

BRIAN LIN

6/ Today is May 15. I drafted the bulk of this essay last week. Tis week, as I revise, I use social me dia much less. I would like to think it's because of everything I'm writing. I do post once on Facebook. It is short, witty, and positive, of course. It’s the most likes I’ve ever gotten.

People comment congrats. I would like to think they’re celebrating all three of my successes and not just the model minority one.I’m on day two of my tattoo’s healing. It’s a black panther embraced by a banner, which reads: “SERVE THE PEOPLE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.” Te artist is Japanese American and pulls from his traditions. IYKYK. A friend comments, “OH MY GOD HOW CAN YOU NOT SHOW IT TO YOUR“LOLOLFANS?”It’s literally a bloody mess right now. Not on brand! But soon.”

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PULLING RACHEL GENN

Idreamt my mother was a felled fr, hung with dewy cobwebs, that quivered as it tried to embrace me. I never felt such a need in her while she was alive. Overjoyed, I knelt to her on the forest foor, only to discover her intention — to reveal the shaft of pain devoted to her, shored up for me outside my waking life. I can’t remem ber whether it was before or after this that I heard Herta Müller dismissing fr trees as boring and arrogant. Tough the tim ing remains sketchy, I sensed that the fr totem meant something. To infer a cosmic connection is one of the few liberties of love.I like women who write in German. Who aren’t German. To come clean, I have only read one book by Elfriede

— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet Infuence, like the pull of a magnet or a lover, is invisible but strong. When a magnet meets another magnet, choice is dispensed with and the force with which they attract each other is violent and alarming. Tese women are not afraid to write what they want, and this makes me want more of them. When I read, I am claiming the magnet’s right of reciprocity: as each writer pulls me, I imagine I am attractive to her. As I grow to understand what each is about, I can’t help but feel she is doing all this because she knows it’s what I like. When someone gets you, they are showing you they can solve the clues you provide. It’s hard not to reveal all at once how much more there is to get. Watch out. You can take the magnet log ic too far; you can fnd yourself preaching about cores of mountains only talking to cores of mountains. You can get thrown out of book clubs. The Piano Teacher’s dust jacket copy goes something like this: Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day, but by night she scours the porn shows and fairgrounds of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. When Walter Klemmer becomes her student, Erika spirals out of control in an ecstasy of self-destruction.Iwaseasilysold: regret is addictive and mothers are never not interesting.

73 Jelinek (Austrian) and one book by Herta Müller (Romanian). Tese are Te Piano Teacher and Te Fox Was Ever the Hunter One novel is no more than a plung ing speed-date and, though I have never speed-dated, I predict I would be uncool — trufing for love as furtively and ur gently in real life as while reading. Both books brought a pain to my throat in an ticipation of the failings of my language to do justice to my hasty love of them. Ultimately, I fell under the infuence of one more than the other and here is my at tempt to understand how it won me over. “To think about one’s own tactics is always a tricky business.”

RACHEL GENN

In Te Fox Was Ever the Hunter, we are in Romania in the last months of the Ceaușescu regime, following Adina, a young schoolteacher; Paul, a musician; Clara, a wire factory worker; and Pavel, her lover. One of them works for the se cret police and is reporting on the group. Win-win. Paranoia, for balance, is my hobby.Both authors are intimately aware of the systemic cruelty and violence that irradiates their characters’ intimate rela tionships, and are attuned to the work ings of the patriarchy, from which they steal their energy as it escapes in scalding spurts from the machine. Both writers are able to fx the unsteadiness of experience without pinning it down: both manage to keep a current of constant threat in their language without electrocuting us. From the frst sentence of each book, we are aware of an urgency that belies massive resistance to — and entanglement in — oppressive systems. In Te Piano Teacher, Erika Kohut meditates on these inescap able cycles of violence in a Vienna fair ground, with teenagers on rides “like kit tens, playing with the horror of the world before they themselves become part of that Aggressionhorror.” and power, and their con sequences for desire, are attacked by both authors. Jelinek (meaning “little deer” in Czech) is unfinching in a scene that

It’s a speed-date. I have to choose who does what best. Quickly. I turn back to the books. In Müller’s depiction of the Ceaușescu regime, it is hard to tell the victim from the perpetrator. Te same is true with our piano teacher narrator Erika Kohut. Within a few pages, Jelinek has established a vigorous pace for Erika who, almost immediately after the novel be gins, has pulled handfuls of hair from her mother’s head, leaving bald patches, and is preparing cofee after. If there is a point at which our continuation is guaranteed, it is via this savaging of the conventional notion of daughterly love.

“Sometimes language fnds itself on the way by mistake,” writes Jelinek, “but it doesn’t go out of the way. It is no arbitrary process, speaking with language, it is one that is involuntarily arbitrary, whether one likes it or not. Language knows what it wants. Good for it, because I don’t know, no not at Müllerall.”admits a life for the words themselves: “I’m not hungry for words, but they have a hunger of their own. Tey want to consume what I have experienced, and I have to make sure that they do that. […] Te language knows where it has to wind up. I know what I want, but the sen tence knows how I’ll get there.”

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 74 serves to both generate and absorb her shock at the banality of familial violence: Te head of a four-year old is thrown back by a mother’s slap of hurricane strength. […] Te mother has heavy bags to struggle with and she’d much rather see her little girl vanish down a sew er. […] Te child is learning the language of violence, though not Wewillingly.glimpse the depths of a degrada tion we can do little to stop, and wonder at the capacity of the cruelty available in us while Jelinek blithely hints that death is not its border. A ferocious mix of cou rage and pent-up violence creates a sense that what is said has to be said right now. Hope rarely rises to meet Jelinek’s obser vations. For such pluck, I could fall for her, she could be the one. Neither book is cozy reading. Each exalts our frailties while screwing us down into our own muck: both writers appreci ate a porosity between the dominance of language over us and its submission to us. Lack of language can ofer creative free dom, and Müller demonstrates a particu lar expertise in the manipulation of silence, understanding it as an equivalent compan ion to text. As she put it in a 2014 Paris Review interview: “What gets said is one thing, but what isn’t said has to be there as well, it has to foat along with what you’re writing. And you have to feel that, too.” In her Nobel acceptance speech, Jelinek incorporates an improbable, frol icking, extended metaphor of language as a disobedient hairdo, through which she cheerfully assures us that she is resigned to its impish habits. “It simply won’t be ti died up,” she says. “It doesn’t want to. No matter how often one runs the comb with the couple of broken of teeth through it — it just doesn’t. Something is even less right than before.”

I am impressed by what each author is in control of (but of course I love them most for what they aren’t). I admire how each rises to unknowns in her own writ ing, how they are both prepared to walk boldly, blinkered, along the precipitous path that is mapped for them. Both are aware of their limited agency and the often-overrated capabilities of language.

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1948.102, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 18 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

In Te Fox Was Ever the Hunter, Müller’s images can be as stark as they are unlikely: “All the lamb fur coats are white except for one, which is green, as though the pasture had nibbled through the coat after it had been stitched together.” Or: “When Adina stares at the poplars too long, they dig their knives inside her throat and twist them from side to side. Ten her throat gets dizzy.” I don’t know what a dizzy throat is, and I don’t care. What matters is the fris son I feel from the coupling of the wrong elements. In her poem “An Essay on What I Tink About Most,” Anne Carson ex amines the emotions attached to error: In what does the freshness of metaphor consist? Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experi ence itself in the act of making a mistake. He pictures the mind moving along a plane surface of ordinary language when suddenly that surface breaks or complicates. Unexpectedness emerges. In my own work, when considering whether regret can be addictive, I have found literary metaphors of regret that can allow for both pleasure and pain have been of most heuristic value. It is when elements come up against each other in unexpected ways that truly original meta phors can emerge. In Carson’s words: From the true mistakes of meta phor a lesson can be learned. such[…]mistakenness is valuable.

Metaphors[…] teach the mind to enjoy error and to learn from the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case. I return to Müller. What is and what is not the case fickers through her nov el, and I feel, as I read, pursued by a tidal wave powered by the force of divergent possibilities. It is no particular image that compels me to continue but rather a movement: a kaleidoscope turning. Te disorientation and tickle of threat is un nerving at frst. Poplars and their loom ing reincarnations inserted throughout the chapters are at once friends, invaders, guards, attackers, or a part of the land scape, which itself, in turn, is complicit in unseen atrocities. It is the unsaid, and the possibilities between that and what is said, that holds power on the page. Between each sentence a synapse is jumped, creat ing a charged void for the meeting place of what neither author nor reader expect, but still Müller’sdesire.writing is periscopic. “And so I started writing,” she says in the Paris Review interview, “and suddenly there was this rearview mirror, and everything started coming back about my life in the village.” Hers is an illusory world — shim mering, semi-permanent — but, never theless, a ferce, cold mirage. Te breath of a curse clouds the mirrors between what is said and unsaid. Te very incline at which we encounter the text is oblique; we read suspiciously. Müller’s controlled syntax convinces us through its rhythm of the said and unsaid, which beckons follows-and-so-it-follows-and-so-it-followsand-so-iteven when the sense of the writing predicts

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 76

“I need a mirror, when I cut hair I have to be able to see myself as well as you.”

77 no such thing. Tat clauses are so casually disconnected is intoxicating, as connection exists somewhere; the reader’s perceptions of a city scene are cut at precise slants, per fectly angled out of lives lived elsewhere. I look again. And listen. Müller has an ear, too, and admits that reading her writing aloud is the only way to know if the words are doing the right thing. Can she be counted in an oral tradi tion? In a 2011 New Statesman essay, “ Te Unbearable Brightness of Speaking,” Alice Oswald says of Homer, an oral poet: Te tendency of his grammar is therefore cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit. It might be placed loosely on an other and held there with a quick connective, but it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you often fnd that one end of his sentence turns away from the other. […] [I]t’s as if the eyes of the clauses are looking outwards, Telsewhere.ismade me a little dizzy in the throat because Müller’s clauses also ap pear to be looking outwards, elsewhere — but look closely, and they may also be accused of spying on each other; maybe they know things about each other that we don’t. Gaps and silences create a space for betrayal; the unsaid is a cleft between clauses that must be kept open and elec tric. Moving from one to the next requires a leap of faith and the reader leaps be tween these voids, exhilarated from the efort and ftter than s/he was before. Müller forces me into Syntax Parkour and I fucking love her for it. Te beneft is the creative freedom of a readerly complicity, the deep thrill of puzzling out a coded love letter. I am ever aware of the question of what is and what is not the case, and feel no need to look for answers.

— Te Fox Was Ever the Hunter I cannot tell if the net efect of strap ping periscopes together could equal a prism. What Müller intends beams out of the safety of the text and bounces back from another sentence, paragraph, chap ter, so that all perceptions and intentions are clues to solve future or past interpreta tions. Tis is not just syntactic posturing; it helps me experience the watchful, un certain confnements of an oppressive re gime. Müller places me askance enough to get me in there, behind a mirror, so I can feel my way (almost haptically) around the prism, as the difusion and refraction takes place. I got the feeling that Müller had really done her homework on me. Had she read my diary? How else could she know how I feel about the internal structure of concepts? Let’s take the con cept of desire and how my authors make use of it as a concept, since, according to cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity. Hofstadter and I are in terested in how concepts are formed and the infuence they have on our thinking (thus, writing), because what is imagin able is strongly infuenced by the inter nal structures of a concept. He says in his 1982 essay “ Variations on a Teme as the Essence of Imagination” that organization of the mind consists of thousands, if not millions of overlapping and intermingling

RACHEL GENN

While “wanting” can be associated with desire, the hedonic pleasure of “liking” is integral to romantic love. And so, pressed by Jelinek, our fne talented pianist narrator pushes herself to demonstrate that she can want what she does not like. Garbage “nestles into the profles of her shoes” as she treads in dog turds to get closer to the Turk-like man and the ambivalent woman fucking in the meadows by the fairground. Erika will not be put of from demonstrating her wants, though the existence of her wants is inac cessible to her. But she won’t be put of, and neither will we. Even the desperate urge to piss into the dusty earth doesn’t deter her peeping. We are encouraged to accompa ny her through a landscape of danger and contamination, into distaste and disgust and back again. Jelinek uses us to discov er how Erika might be put of. We inhale as Erika snifs the semen-flled tissue in a peep show. Te further Jelinek squashes us into the wipe-clean corners of the seedy voyeuse’s world, the more acutely we vi cariously experience Erika’s plight and feel ourselves relieved to be able to distance ourselves from it.

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Tere is a mask of bitter irony from behind which we are invited to pillage Erika’s desires without her involvement. We are told: “If there’s one thing [Erika] doesn’t want, it’s being clung to.” Erika sticks rigidly to Carson’s tenet that “[a] space must be maintained or desire ends.” Tis applies twofold: Erika keeps her feel ings out of the way to persist with what she wants. For Erika, a self-mutilator, one

implicospheres (the implicit sphere of hypothetical variations within a concept) at the centre of each of which is a conceptual skeleton. Te implicosphere is a fickering, ephemeral thing, a bit like a swarm of gnats around a gas-station light on a hot summer’s night, perhaps more like an electron cloud, with its quantum-mechanical elusive ness, about a nucleus, blurring out and Erikadying…Kohut is no stranger to the con cept of desire but does seem a stranger to romantic love. If we rely on concepts rath er than frozen perceptions, love becomes complex, irksome, human. After working on the neuroscience of motivation for some years, I imagined that the conceptual skele ton of desire might comprise wanting and liking. According to Hofstadter, “[t]here is a way that concepts have of ‘slipping’ from one into another, following a quite unpre dictable path. […] Tis slippage afords us perhaps our deepest visions into the hidden nature of our conceptual networks.” When concepts reach out or slip into what they are not — when desire reaches out, wants what is not desirable — as with metaphor, real originality is born. It is how these writ ers engender this slippage that make them almost irresistible to me as thinkers. It is sometimes unclear whether Erika is the source or a conduit of the violence that centers on her. If she is merely a con duit, she is sometimes a gleeful one. Unlike Erika, we wince as she slams her musical instruments into the shins of fellow trav elers on the streetcar, understanding that such violence comes from the struggle be tween the pressure of society’s clichés and personal freedom, between wanting and liking. Te ancients realized that Eros, ro mantic love, was most accurately character ized by absence and pain. When conscious of being in love, writes Anne Carson, “[y] our new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.”

RACHEL GENN

Realities are diferent depending on the language used and the cultures in which that language is embedded, and the Romanian culture and language Müller describes are crawling with superstition.

79 slice and the tendons of desire can be wrenched through the skin. By the end of the book, wanting and liking are undifer entiated, as she begs Klemmer to humili ate and debase her utterly. Erika Kohut’s ecstasy of selfdestruction foats credibly around the conceptual skeleton of desire. If desire were a stif matrix of associations, rather than an intermingling of conceptual im plicospheres, we as readers could not in corporate the friction between wanting and liking, or countenance the possibili ty of regret as a motivating stimulus. By imagining implicospheres and conceptual slippage, we are “extending our abilities to see further into the space of possibilities surrounding what is.”

Hofstadter goes further: “Strange though it may sound, non-deliberate yet non-accidental slippage permeates our thought process and is, I believe, the very core of thinking.” Müller believes the words and sentences know where she wants to get. To this, Hofstadter says: “By non-accidental, I do not mean to imply it is deliberate. […] [S]ometimes a slippage can be non-accidental yet still come from the unconscious mind.” Surreality also takes its pleasure in collating the unrelated. Müller lets us ob serve an ofcer’s wife who dutifully serves her husband, though ghosted by lost love: “Sometimes, she said, her mother feels the woman’s head is sinking farther and far ther into her neck, as if a staircase were running from her throat to her ankle and she were climbing down the steps carry ing her own head.” Surrealism, for Müller, certainly does not mean accidental. As she put it in her Paris Review interview, “sur real scenes have to be checked against re ality with millimeter precision, otherwise they don’t function at all. […] Te surreal can only work if it becomes reality. So it has to be proofed against reality and built up according to realistic structures.”

In Romanian, unlike German, Müller ad mits that cursing is an art, a kind of mag ic, and she uses the magic of curses and superstitions as charms to enhance the re alities of her fction, so that we feel the narrowest gap between words and life. In her long childhood days alone tending cows in Romania, Müller claimed to eat every weed she could fnd, thinking that, once she’d tasted the plant, she would be a little closer to it and that she could change into something that was more like the plant so that it would accept her, narrow ing the gap between people and things. “I picked the fowers and paired them up so they could get married,” she says. “I was convinced that they had eyes and that they moved at night and that the linden tree near our house visited the linden tree in the village.” When the interviewer asks her why she has “ma[de] up new names for plants […] [l]ike thornrib or needle neck instead of milk thistle,” she replies: “Because I didn’t feel the plant listened to the name milk thistle.”

Such is the stoicism of Müller, who drags into a shifting, paranoid regime, like a sackful of old toys, the impossible certainties of childhood. In her artistic homage to superstition, she maintains a stranglehold on bewilderment, and I feel her powers at their height when she con fesses the certainty of what she had decid ed was right in childhood, which need not be relinquished in the writings of an adult. It is as if Müller says, I want to present you

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1949.105, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 18 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

[S]he doesn’t know whether the shiny wheel is her desire for the green lamb or for the man with the reddish-blue fecked tie. But she has the feeling that if the wheel in her throat is spinning for the green coat it’s also catch ing on this man.

In the wire factory where Adina works, Müller’s surrealism feeds rumor and superstition to paranoia, keeping it plump and sleek. Desire barely dares breathe. Te supervisor, Grigore, choos es workers to accompany him in greedy lovemaking, quick thrusts in a laundry pile. When the factory cat comes to watch their coupling, the women shoo it away, their rubber boots above their heads, be cause they know they will be refected in the its eyes, and “the cat will carry their thighs through the factory, naked in the lair and spread wide.” For only one week of the year, after the cat has eaten her slippery, blind young, does the refection disappear, and “because there are no im ages in the eyes of the cat during the real week of mourning, each of these encoun ters remains a rumor.” Rumor glints at the center of Müller’s concern with what is real and what isn’t.

I was in Texas when I read this sen tence, in the shade of a tangerine-colored stuccoed wall, the other side of which was the interstate, where tires pounded by freakishly close. Te noise of the traf fc mufed my gasp. Sometimes magnets travel a great distance to slam into one another. I think I held the book to my chest, but no one needs know about that.

Müller’s understanding of Hofstadter’s defnition of the “accidental” gives her writing a fash strong enough to illu minate the whole implicosphere of a con cept: a sparse, passionless still of what can viably slip into desire. She shows us the guts of the process, an X-ray simultane ously capturing what may and may not be desire’sShetarget:wants to go, but he is holding her hand. She feels a small shiny wheel spinning in her throat. […]

Looking for the origins of love, we ache to pinpoint (together!) where our voli tion took a turn. Once in love, we yearn to go back when we could have helped it, even when we are glad we didn’t. Tis passage, with its wheel and its throat, is RACHEL GENN

Causes are kept hidden deep in the psy chological subsoil while consequences overgrow the feld. It is impossible to es cape the images of the beloved son of the people. Te light from the black inside the dictator’s eye falls where it will: the café, the park — even in the water, one can detect the black from inside the eye of the dictator. Müller uses a phrase: ALL THAT SHINES ALSO SEES, suggest ing infnite ways of being surveilled, but also ofering the hope that refection may give a new way of seeing. Chinese Whispers for the eyes: this notion epitomizes the book. “And wher ever the light from the black inside the eye falls, people feel the place where they are standing, the ground beneath their feet, they feel it rising steeply up their throat and sloping sharply down their back.”

81 with things that I think speak to each other, without knowing the language myself. I don’t fully understand what I mean by that, but I hope you do. She never presumes about her reader. Tis is very attractive. Around the mutant superstitions that grow out of the Romanian earth Müller pours the paranoia and rumor of the regime. Ceaușescu exists everywhere.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 82 exact without being tethered, both unex pected and desired. It gave me what John Carey, in his 2005 book Creative Reading: Literature and Indistinctness, calls the “feel ing of knowing” that comes from the most poetic thinking. It made me remember Robert Frost and what poetry can achieve: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, a poem should ride on its own melting.” Müller’s writing knows about its own melting. Her prose is a fun-fair, a series of chutes and slides between the sharp edges of mirrors. Her syntax, metaphor, and simile all force “the imagination [...] to keep ftting things together that ratio nal thought would keep apart.” In Carey’s terms: “It has, that is, to keep ingenious ly fabricating distinctness — or whatever approximation to distinctness it decides to settle for — out of indistinctness.” Müller does not try to convince only using what is but relies instead on what her translator calls “the honesty of the de ceit — and one charged with considerable energy.” Trough sheer efort of imagi nation, I, the reader, become part of the blending of the elements of metaphor, ex periencing what Carey terms the creator’s possessiveness.Realizing that I was choosing one over the other spooked me into more questions. Is it style I should look to to decide this? Am I really asking who is coolest? Because if either writer’s style is an attack on reality, we must scrutinize their battle plans as well as their spoils. Can we substitute how we write for how we fght? Does coolest mean the potential winner in a fght? Must I hold of mean ing and appeal to rhythm? Is the frank prose of Müller too stark compared with the musical fow of Jelinek? Enough. I already had my answer.

Tose who don’t feel the need to speak always get me. Writing in what is not her mother tongue, Müller had accessed a special creative crawlspace: her silence, and the writing about rumor and super stition in Te Fox Was Ever the Hunter, satisfed me in a mystical way, in a way that the hyperreality of Te Piano Teacher perhaps didn’t. Tere is a nobility in ac cepting that the very inability to commu nicate fully and fnally is a condition of literature’s existence. I hadn’t expected a nobleSo,speed-date.withhermany ways of examining what is and is not the case (FYI: falling in love might be a toggling between the two), it was Herta who infuenced me most. It took time to decide — an im pression can only be seen once the force behind it has been removed. When Herta made me gasp beside the freeway, when she freeze-framed desire as anticipation for me, in the shade of an orange wall in Texas, she won at speed-dating. Now I feel the thrill of choosing one over the other. Te thrill is partly know ing I am wrong about choosing only one, especially on the basis of a single book (I still rate Te Piano Teacher a 10). To avoid the dip of regret, I turn my mind to me and Herta and our future. I don’t go so far as to calculate a love percentage, but I do make a list of capitalized words as they appear in Te Fox Was Ever the Hunter. After the frst few, I am convinced. I tell myself I am happy with my choice, as I am forced to face perennially the question of whether loving one thing more than an other is possible, or ever enough.

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1949.66, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 28 x 18 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

To keep us in check, a Texas man took it to himself and stabbed an Asian father and two sons, cutting their faces open. One of the children has a gash pointing to his eye, the damage itself in the shape of a blade. A delta. Wanting to breach another opening. BLADES EMILY JUNGMIN YOON

In the time of pandemic, alone together, I read too much news: “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’

A blue jay your family feeds and has trained.

“WomanLabel,”assaulted in Manhattan, blamed for COVID-19,”

“Racism is a Virus.” I obsess, knowing our place as Asians in this country, the exemplar minority with advanced degrees and gadgets, a superior meekness. Knowing, our desirability was built to reassert Western centrality. Tat, too, a type of technology.

I picture the gopher, no longer struggling in the trap inside the water pipe for the sprinkler throbbing over grass and stones.

You cut down on the gopher in a single, crisp stroke in the garden. In it also, your mother’s prized orange tree.

84

Ten, you must have slid open the door to the dining room, leaned the shovel on the tree. I heard this story years ago in California.

THE

85

For the slowly dying animal, injured beyond saving for entering the human world in the shape of a pipe, a wet reach to a diorama of the natural world.

Embarrassed and ashamed, you looked away. As we sat, in that moment, two Koreans in a white world, I wanted to marry you.

Watch. Watch the wild turkeys roam the neighborhood, unconcerned, banal, and ugly. Yet you love these animals. When our friend’s old cat died, you had cried. He was eighteen, had a good, adored life. You had mourned so, for someone else’s animal.

To protect the person who loves like no other, whose kindness is unlike anyone’s I’ve known. Foolish and naïve, yes. Every day someone leans the shovel and knife, real and not, against a gentler thing, after striking another that looks like us. For crawling too close, out of the technology they built. Yet today, feeling momentarily safe in our room, I can ask what you did to the gopher. You buried the animal, you say. In the same earth it came from.

So when your mother told me at the dining table about the gopher, I was shocked. But that, too, was kindness, your shovel.

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1935.33.a,b, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 18 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

"LITERATURE IS A TRIBUTE": MAXIM GORKY AND THE KLAVDIA GROSS STORY

DONALD RAYFIELD

87 ESSAY At tbe end of June 1899, from his summer dacha on the Volga, Maxim Gorky wrote to his friend Anton Chekhov, now terminally ill, and settling in the Crimea. ( Te two men, so diferent in character, origin, political views, and literary talent, had taken an instant liking to one another: Chekhov tried to teach Gorky to write better, and Gorky helped Chekhov extract more money from his publishers.) Tis time Gorky was ofering Chekhov human material: Please forgive me: I have sent a certain Klavdia Gross, a young “fallen woman,” to see you in Moscow. When I sent her I didn’t yet know that you stroll up and down Tverskoy Boulevard [in Moscow] chatting to those

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 88

“fallen women.” She’s an inter esting character and I think that I did the right thing by sending her to see you. She will bring you the story of her life, written in her own words. She is decent, speaks foreign languages, and overall she’s a fne girl, even if she is a prostitute. I think she’ll be more use to you than to me. Chekhov never met Klavdia Gross, and he would not have used her anyway as a prototype for a story: his story “Peasants” had just been deprived by the censor of its fnal chapter, in which the young her oine is forced to return to Moscow from her native village with no alternative but to prostitute herself. In the 1880s, the censors used to pass stories about prosti tution — Chekhov’s own “An Attack of Nerves” describes a brothel crawl by three students, one of whom is so distraught at what he sees that the other two have him treated by a psychiatrist. Chekhov himself at the time boasted of being “a great specialist in that department” and was at his happiest in 1890 in a Japanesestafed brothel in the Far East of Russia; yet at the same time he railed at his friend and publisher Aleksey Suvorin because Suvorin’s newspaper, New Times, was not denouncing prostitution as a major social evil, but instead condoning it with adver tisements on the back page for “dermatol ogists” (who treated syphilis) and “French ladies in search of a position.” In the 1870s, a novelist like Dostoyevsky could make a prostitute the heroine of at least three of his major nov els. In the 1900s, the censorship relaxed again, and Alexander Kuprin was able to publish Te Pit, a novel about the horrors of Russian brothels, while G. B. Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession had 200 perfor mances in Saint Petersburg. Te medical journals had long been free of censorship: they discussed the issue of prostitution almost every week. Russian doctors were frustrated by the country’s endemic syph ilis — 11 percent of army recruits were in fected — and its ineradicable sources, not just brothels and streetwalkers (who were subject to regular police inspection), but wet nurses, who caught and transmitted congenital syphilis, and peasant house holds with no running water and no clean linen, where a migrant worker could bring back the disease and infect a whole village. Despite Chekhov’s lack of response, Gorky took up Klavdia Gross’s case. In October 1899, he gave a speech in Petersburg, About Prostitutes (probably the same as his introduction and afterword to Klavdia’s story when it was print ed), to an illegal radical student gathering, which was broken up by police. Gorky ofered the story to the main newspapers, who refused to print it. Finally, a new newspaper, Te Northern Courier, found ed by Prince Vladimir Bariatinsky, the second husband of Chekhov’s old fame, the actress Lydia Yavorskaya, courageous ly ran the piece as a feuilleton (a story on pages two and three, running along the bottom third of the paper) on the 13th, 14th, and 15th of November 1899. Te Northern Courier was then closed down for several months, not only because of Klavdia Gross, but for political liberalism; when it began publishing again in spring 1900 it lasted only until the end of the year. Few copies survive, even in Russian libraries, which is why Gross’s story is still largelyFromunknown.thestory we gather that Klavdia attempted suicide and was therefore to be tried by an ecclesiastical court. She

I now ofer is not “litera ture”: it is something more valuable and important. It is the authentic statement of someone who has sufered from the ab surd and disgraceful conditions of life in Russia.Te origin of the story is as follows: Not long ago a girl came to see me. Her face was jaundiced and haggard; her eyes were frightened, constantly twitching, her manner was both tense and casual. She was shaking from head to toe, shrugging, and she impressed me as someone who had been hounded. It seemed that she had

89 was also accused (but acquitted) of theft (possibly over non-payment of a Singer sewing machine bought on hire-purchase, the traditional path to salvation ofered to prostitutes all over Europe). Gorky did his best for her: he secured 50 rubles in pay ment for her story, and he then employed her in his house in Nizhny Novgorod. Tis soon ended disastrously: frst of all, while Gorky was in Petersburg, his wife report ed that a police detective had called to see Klavdia. At the beginning of December 1899, Gorky wrote to Chekhov: Yesterday the most absurd melo drama was performed in my house. We had a prostitute whom I had been “saving” … She was staying and it was all right. She was looking after my wife’s sis ter’s baby who was born 12 days ago and squawks non-stop for days on end. She’s a hardworking, good woman, but a hysteric. Suddenly it turned out she had been spreading rumors that she was sharing not just my house, but my bed. I found out and carried out a little interroga tion, which convinced me that she really was the source of the gossip. Well, what was I to do with her? She’s pitiful. Of course, my wife was very upset, so was her mother. What a bore! It’s just as well my wife’s a wonderful woman. But all the same I had to throw the woman I was “saving” out on the street. All this has tired me out. Klavdia Gross then disappears from the record. All we have is what was print ed in Te Northern Courier: A Story Te newspaper Te Northern District reports a grim drama that was recently played out in one of Kostroma’s police stations. An educated, good-looking girl from out of town turned up at the sta tion, asking to be issued a Yellow Ticket [a streetwalker’s license, recording medical inspections, etc.] Te police ofcer spent some time trying to dissuade the girl from doing what she intended, but she insisted. She was charged 10 kopecks for the Ticket. “Let me work tonight, then I’ll pay you,” she responded. She was issued the booklet with her details. Ten, distressed by some mysterious event that had happened earlier and by the whole scene of the booklet being issued, the girl could hold out no more: there and then, in the po lice station, she died from a heart Tattack.estory

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 90 just been chased down the street by people who were shouting at her, throwing mud at her, and now, trying to get away from the chase, she had burst through the frst door she came across, seen a man whom she didn’t know, and was standing in front of him, breathing heavily, frightened, ex hausted, not knowing who he was. Was this another enemy? What was he going to do to her? Was he going to mistreat her like everyone else? “What have you got to say?” I asked her. She smiled such an exhausted, bewil dered smile. Ten she fung her arms apart apologetically and hurriedly, but quietly, started talking in a strained, quivering voice.“You see, I’m … a prostitute. Not in the full sense, but now … all the same now … I … poisoned myself recently … I drank smelling salts … I’ve been in hospital…” In her broken speech the words some how jumped over one another and her eyes also jerked from side to side. Looking at her and listening to her, I couldn’t help thinking about her heart. I imagined it was compressed by fear into a little lump, covered with sores, scratched and barely able to take a deep breath. “I’ve recovered…” the girl said, apol ogetically lowering her head. She added quietly: “I’m going to be taken to court for doingShethis…”wasn’t quite right: she was going to be taken to court for attempted suicide, not for recovering (that is not the law in Russia).We got talking. It turned out she had drunk 20 kopecks’ worth of smelling salts and was being prosecuted by the ecclesi astical courts. I asked her to tell me what drove her to kill herself. She started telling me, while I listened and thought: “Nowadays Leo Tolstoy, the Lion of Russian literature, is roaring loudly so the whole world can hear about the life and suferings of his heroine Katya Maslova [a prostitute tried for murder in Tolstoy’s 1899 novel Resurrection], and the public is enjoying listening to the prophet’s words … If one of Maslova’s fellow workers were to tell her life story in her own words, might that not heighten the public’s inter est in these doomed human beings, these women whom the public needs so bad ly, but who for some reason are despised and treated so cruelly? Tey work with out complaining … Might not someone’s deadened conscience be brought to life by the sounds of these words from life’s low er depths, life’s thickest dirt? Even people who were born deaf listen to the words of a genius about a prostitute, so let them hear out one more story, that of the pros titute herself, something straight from her lips … If her story is to be just a bitter belch of the kisses which we, drunk and slobbering, have awarded her for years on end, even that is no bad thing! Perhaps, someone will feel self-revulsion … will be ashamed … perhaps the feeling of shame will be a lever for some people and that lever will set other, more creative feelings — love, wrath, revenge — in motion. For oppression of a fellow human being re quiresTvengeance.egirlturned out to be literate, and I suggested that she should write the story of her life, telling us how her thinking led her to the idea that she had to die …

At frst she only laughed: she didn’t believe me when I said that there would be people who would read what she wrote. Finally I persuaded her, and about two days later she brought me a few sheets of paper covered in writing. She wrote her tale in a fairly literate and coherent way. I

Demián Flores, América Tropikal, mural in vinyl, 2021. Created exhibition Ser Todo Es Ser Parte/To Be Be at LACE. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ray Barrera.

Part

for

Whole Is To

I WAS BORN on a general’s estate in the village of Baranovka, in Saratov Province, Atkarsky District. My grandfather was the general’s estate manager, and when S. died, the estate passed to my grandfather. After a few months, grandfather sud denly died; this was around Christmas in the winter of 1871. At the time I was 15 months old. My grandfather’s wife, my grandmother, immediately sent a tele gram to Saint Petersburg, summoning my father, her son, the senior male in the family, who therefore had to take over the running of the estate and help his mother who was now a widow with two grownup daughters on her hands, and fve sons, the youngest of whom was eight years old. My grandmother was as kind as an angel, she loved her children and every one around her equally, so that all her own people, as well as strangers, called her “Mama.” She died as peacefully as she lived — God grant her the Kingdom of Heaven! She was a woman and a house keeper who never allowed any quarrels or disorder in the house, she kept an eye on everything and on everybody. It was an enormous household, a house and estates on a lordly scale, a great number of ser vants, but there was never any disorder in the house or estate as long as she was alive. I grew up, spoiled by my grandmother, my godmother, father, and everyone around me; I was fve when my three older broth ers and a sister died. My brother and I were the only survivors. Like my brother, I wasn’t loved by my mother: she already had another son, her spitting image, and at the time he was just two months old; although he was handed over to a wet nurse and a nanny, he was the favorite and had more afection from our mother. I was still small, but all this grieved me and my breast seethed with hatred for my little brother and my mother, whom I was afraid of, shaking at every word she spoke, but at the same time I hated her and tried to do as much as I could to annoy her. I was capricious and stubborn, so I drove her to fury, and sometimes I was beaten several times in one day, but I still had my defenders, my grandmothers, and other familySuddenly,members.however, my much-loved grandmother sensed that she would die soon and divided up all her possessions while she was still alive, although she had never had a single day’s sickness, not a sin gle minute’s. Yet she was dying. It wasn’t death so much as going to sleep, she fell asleep and didn’t wake up. After dinner she had cofee, lay down to rest and nev er got up again. I shall never forget that minute, or the expression on her face: she was sleeping, and a kindly smile remained on her lips. I couldn’t tear myself away, she meant everything to me, she was frst to teach me the alphabet, although she spoke Russian badly, yet she tried to teach me everything: she was so pleased when I burbled German poetry. I was six years old and, when she died, I buried my childish burbling and became far too serious for my age. Games and amusements no lon ger interested me, I saw no more love or afection, my father was busy and I still did not feel any attachment to anyone, and so I would huddle in a corner in the nursery or the garden and ruminate over every thing, sitting alone with my thoughts for days on end, crying bitterly. My character

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 92 didn’t instruct her how she should write, I didn’t correct her narrative, I only inserted a few words to connect separate phrases and these I have put in italics. ¤

93 changed, I became secretive, taciturn, and my mother took against me permanently. Of course I had plenty to eat, I was very well dressed, but that wasn’t for my sake, but for outsiders to see. Tat was how I lived and sufered until I went to boarding school. We went to the town of Saratov and I entered the second form, was a good pupil, the favorite of teachers, male and female; I had no time to be bored, and I spent more time at school than at home. I saw my mother for fve or 10 minutes a day and got even less used to her. My father set of on business to Moscow to sort out his afairs; he would send for us and then, abandoning once more every thing I treasured and loved, I had to travel with my mother. Where to? Why? What was waiting for me there? I never stopped asking myself those questions. When we got to Moscow, where my father had already rented an apartment, our family settled down and I went to grammar school, as did my brothers, but after a few months our situation changed, our schooling stopped and we were taken back home. I had to do the servants’ work in the house, the washing, sewing for my father, mother, and little brothers. I soon got used to my position and although I found it difcult at frst, I was sorry for my father, who had no job, and I also was fond of my elder brother, so I did everything to the best of my strength. I was growing up, I had developed early for my age, although I still wore short dresses and I was only 11. Finally father got a job and left for the town of B.; from there he was transferred to Voronezh and, fnally, back to Moscow again. All this happened in the course of one year: there was nothing special hap pening that year, the whole family was in a state of fux, while I got on with house work as at the start of the year, after I left the grammar school. Once again, father lost his job, but happened to fnd another one and, gathering up his family, left for the estate of Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky. We settled in very well, again I was a young lady, we had servants, and I didn’t have anything to do. I spent my time like this: getting up at frst light, setting of for the felds to look at the peasants working, visiting the threshing machine, then the bathing pool, calling on the cattle shed for a jug of milk. I spent whole days in the garden or the copse, lying on the grass, and the things I thought about, the cas tles in Spain I built! Or I’d raft down the river and drift without thinking where or why. I had no girl friends, I didn’t like to share my thoughts with my brothers, and I spent whole days with nature; but once, when I was strolling in the copse, I saw a young man who was so pensive that it was some time before he noticed my presence. Tere were books strewn around him and I was interested in them; I picked one up and my movement roused him from his thoughts. After our frst exchange of greetings I learnt that he had come from Petersburg, that he was a student who had graduated from the medical faculty, and was attending the wife of Prince L. From that day on we were inseparable, he was my comrade in all my expeditions and enterprises, I grew fond of him, or so at tached to him that I couldn’t do without him for a single minute. I could recognize his footsteps at a distance, my heart al ways predicted where he would be wait ing for me. But the time came for a fnal meeting: he had to leave. As usual, we set of for the felds, we strolled, we went ev erywhere, as we always did. And we said goodbye, exchanging a chaste kiss. Tat was my frst kiss, but it didn’t lead us to sin. But I was so emotional that I fainted,

DONALD RAYFIELD

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 94 and in my mother’s eyes I was irredeem ably lost. I was a fallen young woman and that was the only thing to call me, but it was a lie — I was a virgin until I was 20 years and a half. He had left. Very soon my father quarreled with the prince for some reason and was dismissed. Life changed sharply again and we were living once more in Moscow. My father used his last capital to open a laundry, then left on business, leaving my mother in charge of every thing. But, spoiled by a life of luxury and by a variety of servants, she was unable to run things or even to cope with the people. Laundry maids are very diferent from servants, and things got worse when they should have improved, while I, an eternal thorn in my mother’s fesh, had to endure a lot of grief because my mother had become a laundress even though she had never worked at any job in her life. Punishments every day, and a laundress’s hard work, together with the other work ers, reduced me to such a state that, when my mother tried to sell the laundry and did so, she told me that I had to fnd my self a position. She fung my papers at me and told me to go of and look for one. I was now free. I was 13 and beginning to live an independent life. I took the frst position I found: it turned out to be very good, and I calmed down and got so used to my employers’ little children that I couldn’t bear to part from them, their babbling gave me great plea sure, they loved me more than they loved their mother (the eldest one was getting on for four, the youngest was six months old, there were three of them). Te par ents were seldom at home, since they were performers at the Bolshoi Teatre in Moscow, and the father also gave dancing and music lessons. Tanks to the attention of the young couple I was quite happy, I was liked, I was not hindered in any way. On the contrary they tried to teach me useful work, sewing, embroidery, and other handicrafts. For my part, I tried to study and learn, I helped my employer’s brothers and sisters, who lived in the same house, to do their homework. But my lit tle empire soon ended, and I had to part from them — the reason was that I was now 16 and I had no documents allowing me to live there, and nobody knew where my parents lived. What was I to do, where could I go? My employer gave me mon ey to deal with the problem, but whatev er I did, whomever I turned to, it was all uselessOne…has to live somewhere, to fnd shelter for the night. But my employer was strictly forbidden to keep me, on the grounds that I might have left my home without my parents’ permission and, if I had no papers, I would have to be sent to my place of birth. You have to realize how horrible my situation was: no resources, the salary I received was spent on clothes and linen, and without papers I could fnd neither accommodation nor a position. What was I to do, where was I to go? I could walk about in the day, but what about the night? How many sleepless nights I spent, walking from one street to another, praying to God for day to break, and when day broke, you prayed for night to fall. How much agony and hunger I en dured during that time. But I couldn’t fnd the courage to ask for help from my rich aunt who had refused to help me at a mo ment when I was in need. I swore never to turn to her ever again, even if I was dy ing of hunger. I don’t want to describe my aunt, I’ll just say she probably never was able to do good and two or three months spent with her proved to me that it is far

95 easier to live with strangers than with a rich aunt and be her maid of all work, her skivvy, yardman and dairymaid, all that without receiving a penny in wages. But I did have one kind, good fami ly, the I.-s, who loved me and were ready to share their last crust of bread with me, but I couldn’t and didn’t want to force my self on them. Tey were kind, but terribly poor, and they had six children, of whom two were marriageable girls my age. And I was unable to confess that, although I had rich relatives, I didn’t have a crust of bread or a place to lay my head. I wasn’t proud or egotistical, but it pained me and it was bitter to be aware that there were people with no soul or heart, and those were peo ple related to me. Finally, fate took pity on me, and I had the prospect of a position. I arrived to fnd out all the details and it turned out that it was no place at all for a decent girl. One glance was enough to tell me what this was, which is how I escaped the fate that I was threatened with. Fate had a joke at my expense, but, still, I was saved for the time being. Finally, exhaust ed, worn out, I went to see my kind family to recover my spirits and I learnt to my joy that they had managed to get papers for me. I don’t know who did this, but I had papers and I think I must be grateful all my life to whoever got them for me, because I had decided that day to put an end to my life. Once again providence had saved me. But I continue: I had papers in my hand, but I was badly dressed! You are hired for the way you dress, I couldn’t show myself for any decent position, so I ended up as a cook in a box factory. Family and employees amounted to 35 people, masses of work. After spending three months there I fell ill, and seriously, too. I spent about two months in hospital before I recovered and immediately took a position about 12 miles outside Moscow. It was a small family, and I felt at home with them; my health was restored; my depressed state came to an end; I want ed to live; my dreams carried me a long, long way of, I was waiting and looking for something. For afection, love, that was what I was waiting for. Life can’t all be labor and work; I wanted to rest, to talk, to share my thoughts with somebody about what I had been through. It would soon be summer. Our neighbor’s son was coming home from the academy. Our acquaintance began by him help ing me get water from the well, which had a very difcult pump. From that day on, he tried in any way he could to make my position as a servant easier, by doing all the heavy work for me. We were soon in separable, spending all our free time to gether, walking, dreaming, reading, trying to please one another. Sometimes we sat in silence for hours on end, each plunged into our own dreams, there were no words of love pronounced between us, but we loved one another. Our eyes told us that … Again, an unforeseen event: my employ er’s wife was dying. I had to go back to Moscow. Tere was a position awaiting me. Te student, when he found out, de cided to talk to his parents and tell them that he wanted to marry me, but they re fused permission outright, all the more because he had another year’s study left. I had a premonition that this would result in something bad. And, daring to take a risky step, I set of to the gazebo where he studied and rested. One minute lat er, he would have been dead, my coming made him drop the revolver that he was about to shatter his jaw with. I don’t re member what happened to me, but when I regained consciousness, I summoned up all my willpower to distract him from this DONALD RAYFIELD

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1949.73, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 18 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

97 idea. To persuade him, I spoke as if I were a kind sister and made him swear to me that he would not commit suicide. After talking to him and calming him, I began packing for Moscow. He was not allowed even to come with me, but we couldn’t part like that, without saying farewell to one another. Pure love always fnds a way! Before my departure, his parents sent him to Moscow to buy things, but the family with which he was to stay was one I knew too: it was a family where I was godmother to the daughter. Our unexpected meeting nearly killed both of us. It was almost im possible to pull us apart. To know that we are in love but cannot belong to one an other, just because I was a servant! Was I born to be a servant? Whose fault was it all? God forbid what was happening in my soul, but I didn’t want seem selfsh, and out of pity for him I tried with all my strength to calm him and to have hopes for the future. It was time: we had to part. He was going back to Voronezh, and I was stay ing in Moscow. At frst we corresponded a lot, he was going mad, but I answered with cold, moralizing letters to make him understand that we were not social equals and, even more, that it was impossible to go against his parents’ wishes. We stopped writing to each other, but my heart had a worm in it that gnawed at me constantly. I was madly in love, and at the same time I hated my beloved’s parents and their stu pid prejudices that were destroying their children and pushing them into a slough of despair. At least that our love observed boundaries and, despite our passionate impulses, we managed to hold back from temptation. But I digress. I had a position, I was getting a decent salary, dressing very well, and I had managed gradually to take control of the household, but there was something else: my position was with a major catering company where there was a mass of people, so that I had quite a few admirers. I was still very shy, since I’d jumped from an isolated life into a sort of chaos. But you can get used to any thing, and so I did. I was neatly dressed, as dark-skinned as a gypsy, as curly-haired as a Jewess, always cheerful to see such a number of admirers around me, I was turning their heads, I could respond to sarcasms and rude remarks, I laughed at cynical outbursts, but at the same time I could hurt people to the quick to stop any repetitions. Some men loved me, others respected me, others ofered me their bed and their wealth, and the rest hated me for my sharp stings and the truth that I always told everyone to their faces. But at the same time I wanted a life, I avenged myself on all of them for my precious love that I could not forget. Just as earlier I had sought solitude, now I began to go everywhere — to parties, to excursions, to picnics. All the same I knew that I was working and was not being paid 15 rubles to do nothing, even though the elderly boss would have paid as much as 100 a month, but I was not willing to give myself, to sell myself for money, not love. I took pleasure in looking at my band of cavaliers, each one of them trying to outdo the others in entertaining me. Of course, I didn’t let on that I understood what was going on, I behaved extremely freely and merrily, nev er refusing champagne and wine. I went everywhere that a woman, but not nec essarily a decent woman, could go. I kept such good control of myself that I nev er allowed any efusions and could stop my gentlemen cavaliers in time from any extravagant behavior. But how I loathed them and what fun I made of them! I was a servant now, but a diferent kind. DONALD RAYFIELD

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Before nobody paid any attention to me, now they were happy to kiss my hand and carry me about; even my mother changed her opinion, although she never stopped considering me a fallen woman. Even the rich aunt paid attention to me, but so far I still wasn’t a lost woman. I hadn’t forgot ten my love. And I was still living here, tormenting my cavaliers, working, busy with the housework, helping the old man cope with his commercial business, doing all the book work, the monthly and the annual accounts, and I had a wild good time, even though at heart I sufered for my poor unhappy brother, who turned out to be more of a coward than me and took to drink because of love. Poor brother, I have tried my best to help him, but he was recruited into the military and left. I began to see my mother more often and stopped being afraid of this aristocratic woman, I was no longer afraid of being embarrassed by being treated as a servant, but nevertheless at heart I felt the full bit terness caused by my crippled childhood and the destruction of my love. I was 20, still living the same way, but it was spring, and summer was approach ing, and this was a time of major chang es. Tanks to the nagging of my elderly boss, I was forced, regrettably, to resign from my job, but when we settled up it turned out that I was not going to be paid anything, since I had, out of love for my brother, taken my salary in advance. On the contrary, it turned out that I owed my employer about 25 rubles. Not know ing what to do and how to repay him, so as not to owe him anything, I left all my things behind, since I didn’t want to be his concubine.Ileft.But where could I go? I didn’t have a penny in my pocket, and I hadn’t taken any unneeded things I could pawn or sell. I went to my mother’s. I spent a day with her, stayed the night and told her the full story. She listened very seriously, but declared in the morning that I could not stay any longer than one day, other wise she would lose her position — she was living there as a governess or music teacher, or something like a companion for the landlady, a young widow (none of this made sense). It must also be noted that my mother, once she sold the laundry and abandoned her children, had separat ed from her husband. Of course, when I got up in the morning, I said goodbye to my mother and left. It never occurred to my mother’s heart or mind to ask where I would go, and I didn’t raise the ques tion. I went — I didn’t know where I was going, and got as far as the Garden Ring or the boulevard. I sat down without thinking and cried bitterly. Of course, as always happens, one man, then another passed — some laughed, some said some thing sarcastic, and one man just gave his frank opinion, that I had been beaten up or was drunk. My tearful outburst passed and I started thinking about my situation. Although it was July, night would still fall and I had to fnd somewhere to spend it, so I went to look for quarters. I found something, handed over my passport in lieu of a deposit and said I came from out of town and didn’t have any money on me. I spent the day at my friends I. and in the evening I set of to my quarters and, oh horror! it turns out that I was in the hands of a madame, or whatever such women are called … Where could I escape to? It was night, so, being afraid to lose my selfcontrol, and to keep my nerve, I took some laurel drops, something I’d been taking re cently. Te evening passed all right, noth ing remarkable happened. People tried not to let me know where I was, but it took just

DONALD RAYFIELD

one look at my surroundings and company that evening to tell me everything; more over, the most colorful of my admirers, a man I hated with every fber of my being, was here. Finally, everyone went to their homes and I was calm, because nothing had happened and I could go to sleep. A week or so passed like this, nothing special happened, but one evening my new land lady began insisting that I should join in a party, which apparently was laid on for a bride and groom. I agreed; the evening was merry, there was a lot of dancing, but in the end they decided to take a cab to the Zoological Gardens. Te whole com pany set of, including my admirer, who was treating the ladies in the gardens, me included, to oranges; that orange was my ruin.1 I was ruined, and thanks to a man whom I heartily loathed. What had hap pened to me! How I cursed myself for my impulsiveness. But it was too late to re trieve what was lost, they had planned this earlier. Te next day I could hardly stagger home, I was ill, destroyed. Although there was nobody in my room when I got up, I knew my tormentor had been there. Once I got home, I tried to leave the quarters for good, but my landlady wouldn’t let me go, she gave me a bill that showed I owed her a lot. Ten she refused outright to hand back my papers. What could I do? My head was spinning, so reluctant ly I set of to ask advice from I.’s family, without, naturally, letting them see that I was no longer a young lady — I just told them about the business with my land lady. When he heard me out, my friend’s husband wrote a document and told me to hand it to the magistrate, which I did. Te landlady was summoned to court and, 1 If they want to possess a woman, various rogues often resort to oranges. Tis is how they do it: they inject the orange with some drug that is sexually arousing, or with sedative drops. [Maxim Gorky] of course, handed over my papers, but she said such things about me that my hair stood on end. Finally it was all over. I was alone, on the street again, without means, with nowhere to sleep, and just now my health was badly shattered, so that I could hardly even walk. I decided on a desper ate act: I went to the police station to beg them to issue me a ticket so I could trav el to Ryazan, where I had a cousin once removed who was enormously rich. Of course, they refused to give me a ticket at state expense, but they sent me with a convoy of criminals, although I was in a separate carriage with the ofcer on duty, who turned out to be such a decent person that he didn’t take advantage of my help less situation: on the contrary, he tried to relieve my situation. We spent more than a week traveling … but I didn’t have a pen ny to my name, and over the last week I had become very emaciated thanks to hunger and other unpleasant experiences. Finally, we were in the town of Ryazan. Te ofcer was so kind as to tell me where things were and added that if I couldn’t manage to sort out my life, then I shouldn’t hesitate to come and see him at his quarters which were next to the prison building. As he had foreseen, that’s what happened. I found my aunt’s house, but I wasn’t received, because she herself was in Petersburg and as her lady friend and the manager didn’t know me, they dared not risk taking me in. So, like it or not, I had to go back to see the ofcer. It turned out that he was a family man, his wife was a nice lady, and he had already told her my situation. She showed me great hos pitality, asked me not to feel awkward and to live with them until I could arrange

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I registered with a job center, and in two days I became a nanny for a fve-year-old boy. I had a monthly salary of 12 rubles and I was helping the poor Jewish children, then I went to the country. Tat was when I received a letter from someone I didn’t expect to hear from, a letter from my frst love, whom I had saved from death. It turned out he was alive, happy, married with a son, but when he found out about me and my life he asked me to accept from him, as a brother’s gift, 300 rubles. I was very grateful to him, I accepted the money, not refusing, all the more because I wanted to help the poor Jews. Although they were Jews, I thought they were good people; I gave them some money, and he passed his examination as a professional tailor with top marks and his business improved, which made me very happy. I also helped a poor woman to get a trading license, and she paid me interest every day in fresh fruit or early berries. All this was good, but fate was persecuting me again. My admirer, after disgracing me, found

Suddenly, here I was, the owner’s niece, and not just a blood relative, but a sick woman! Every day the doctor came, that was ruinously expensive, but the opinion of society had to be considered, so I wasn’t shown the door. But every minute I my self was thinking that when I fnally got my health back I should no longer be a burden on my aunt. But you can’t live as you like, you live as God ordains — one illness followed another, and I staggered on from Christmas until early May. In May, my aunt suggested I should go back to Moscow, although I asked, even in sisted on staying in Ryazan, if not with her, then wherever I found a job. She re fused outright and soon I was packed and ready to go, with a railway ticket bought.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 100 something for myself. I rested that day, and the next day, with letters provided by my protector, I set of where he told me to go. As I am considered a resident of Ryazan, it was easy for me to get into the reception center or, as it’s called, the workhouse. I was taken in, given a room, linen, food, government clothes, and in exchange I had to work. I thanked my new acquaintances and settled into the workhouse, but I didn’t have to work. I had become very ill with a fever; from July when I left my job and until I arrived in Ryazan I underwent a lot of sufering, and I didn’t get out of bed until the end of December. Finally, just before Christmas, my aunt came to fetch me and took me with her; I didn’t want to go, I didn’t like her face, which I was seeing for the frst time. An old maid, as gnarled as bark, her face was a mask of egotism, but I had to submit.Iwas in her house, wealth all around, luxurious furnishings, but all the rest was such meanness, such false piety that it was revolting! Tere was a housekeeper, and she was a dirty servant; as for the man ager, he was also the handyman and jan itor, the flth was impossible, I was often hungry, but I’d never lived in such flth, the whole house teemed with cats and dogs, and for them nothing was too much.

I was back in Moscow, without means, anywhere to stay, or a job. But I failed to remember that I did have the poor family of the I–s, whom I had forgotten. Unfortunately, they’d gone to Petersburg to collect a small portion of an inheri tance. I had to look at least for temporary accommodation; I found a small room with a Jewish family: terrible poverty, three tiny children, all infants, the father was a tailor, but no customers, since he didn’t have a shop sign. In a word, it was an awful situation, and mine was no better.

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1950.76, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 28 x 18 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

On the one hand, there was a tempting life, on the other hand I had hunger, cold. O God, how depressing it is to recall how things were! Tough my present situation is not an enviable one. I gathered up my last belongings and asked the landlady to sell them, so as to settle up with her and go back to Moscow. She sold my things, but I didn’t get a single penny; in fact, she made me leave my quarters and I had to join other tenants in the same house.

I went for a fnal time to the job center to see if there was a position. Te answer came that there wasn’t. I was so upset and felt so helpless and angry that I burst out crying, I wandered aimlessly, it didn’t

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 102 out I was in Moscow, sought me out, and began visiting me, pretending to be a brother, every day. I didn’t want him now or before, but he threatened me with a scene, so I had to receive him. I didn’t want to lose my job. He abused his rights, and also spread gossip that reached my em ployer’s ear, so I was forced to leave. But I did have money, so I set of to my Jews, took one of their rooms, hoping to rest for a while. But no, my pest of a lover, his cro nies, and their drinking sessions gave me no peace. It was now October, he had to go to the town of Nizhny Novgorod and insisted that I come too. For a long time I couldn’t make up my mind to go, but in the end I decided that I would. I hoped that another city would make my life eas ier. All the more because I found Moscow terribly loathsome, I’d seen so much grief there, and several times been reduced to destitution, and decided to kill myself. I didn’t believe a word he said, I hated and despised him at heart, while I carried out the duties of a housekeeper and wife or mistress. I was traveling to forget things, to distract myself: another city, another view, but what would I fnd there! I didn’t try to guess, what did I care? After all I was no longer a young lady, and if life got too bad I could always sell myself. Oh, how I tormented myself when I imagined all the horror of my irretrievable fall. When I arrived in Nizhny I found my self quarters and lived there for a month or two, perfectly aware that my illicit better half had no means, and was living on my last means, which I was too goodnatured to refuse him. Tings got so bad that I took a position as the sole servant in a small family, being glad to be rid of him. But that was not what happened, he went on visiting me and, having no means of his own, got money from me. Suddenly my life completely changed: in Moscow he had a mother, a sister, and a brother; his sitter was getting married and he was required to go back immediately. At the same time, my employers got a telegram announcing the death of a father and they also left for Moscow. I was again left on my own, in a strange town. I spent in total 10 months there, living on the job; I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t know anyone, so I set of to the quarters where I’d lived be fore getting the position and asked where the job center was and registered again. But while I waited for a job, I had to fnd nourishment, so I did whatever came up, namely washing linen, sewing, and all the hard graft. Tat still didn’t matter, but life in this room became unbearable for me, I was being tormented, mocked for my poverty, told that I was healthy, young, and could live in luxury, like a rich woman, not in such poverty, all the more since I was a girl from out of town and there would be a lot of takers, so there was no need to be hungry and cold. God alone knows what I went through, how many tears of blood I shed, but I didn’t allow myself to be de bauched, although I was in horrible agony.

103 occur me to go home, and why would I? Just to hear what had been repeated to me a thousand times? I was myself tormented by my situation, so why torment me still more and remind me every minute about it? I had been enduring such agony — it’s easier to have a knife in your heart, one can’t live like this! A thought occurred to me. I’d met an old man who was sym pathetic and asked about my situation; I couldn’t give an answer, only tears; he begged me to calm down and explain ev erything to him, and so that it would be convenient to talk he suggested we should go somewhere for tea. I agreed, because I hadn’t eaten or drunk all day. We set of; I calmed down and told him in detail about my stay in the town of Nizhny. He promised to do everything he could for me, as long as I loved him. On one hand, I found that annoying, on the other, ridiculous, so I couldn’t help smil ing. Of course, he ofered to rent a room for me from some elderly people, so that there’d be no young men about, and all the rest he’d take care of. I replied that I would think about it, and promised to give him a reply in a week’s time … I agreed, and the reason was that in my situation I needed support. Rather than publicly collapse, I wanted to live for a while, to recover, not in a material sense, but at least buy a few clothes, and later leave for Moscow. After fnding a room, I moved, and he brought some furniture, though it was old. Our life began. But call it a life! He was mean, al though he loved me, while for my part, I never asked for anything, so his expendi ture wasn’t increased. In any case, I wasn’t able, I didn’t know how to address him, I felt ashamed of him as an elderly person, I found talking to him embarrassing, but he demanded afection, love that I could not give him. I was unable to pretend and always told him the truth to his face: that I was living with him so as to recover. From day to day our relationship began to change, and I became more demanding, and he became more jealous: he followed my every step, he made snide remarks, re proached me for my poverty, said that he had taken me in when I was a beggar and for that I should be eternally grateful to him and, above all, love him. When the old man spoke about love, I responded by laughing out loud and told him that he could love me as much as he liked, be cause I was cheerful and young, even if I wasn’t all that good-looking, whereas he was a wreck, so why should I love him? But I could have respected him if he had spoiled me, even if just a little, but yet again I didn’t own even basic necessities. I was soon fed up with this and I changed tactics. I wanted freedom, I was gasping for air, whatever I asked for, I was refused. I asked him to buy me a sewing machine so that I’d have some pennies of my own, but he wouldn’t hand me the money, and I couldn’t keep on asking: surely he himself should understand that a woman should have something for her own personal expenditure. But his endless talk that I was hiding under his protection a young man whom I probably loved, while I was robbing him, an old man, angered me to the core. But I held my tongue, made the efort to get a sewing machine, got some work, and now I had my own pennies in my pocket. I began to dress more neat ly, which made the jealousy and the in sults worse. He didn’t like me working, becoming independent. He was afraid that I would desert him, so he began try ing to win me over with presents, but he didn’t actually give them to me, he merely showed me them, which irritated me even more. I wouldn’t have asked, I wouldn’t DONALD RAYFIELD

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 104 have made demands if I’d known that he didn’t have the means, but this old man was well of, and his behavior made me indignant. To live with a wreck, not loving him, to give oneself to him, just for a piece of bread and a corner to sleep in: I was ready to kill myself for that humiliation, I grew to hate him, I pushed him away, but I couldn’t get rid of him, he was an imper turbable old man! I said various outrageous things to his face, but that didn’t bother him; in a word, I insisted on doing every thing my own way, but it was all no use.

Finally, in that same house I got to know a family which was cheerful: there were grown-up children, a brother arrived from Petersburg and we began walking, going out, skating together. Tis enraged the old man, but he still couldn’t provide me with any sort of pleasure. I was having my ven geance for a year’s imprisonment that he had imposed on me; I wasn’t lying when I told him that I hated him, and he heard this from me a thousand times. In short, I decided to end it all with him with a fnal blow. I was carried away by the handsome young man, but anyone will understand what it is like to spend a year without leaving four walls and in the company of a specimen like my old man! We went out uninhibitedly to the same places that the old man went to. But more than that, I invited my lover home, so as to convince the old man once and for ever that I didn’t need him or his support. No sooner said than done. We parted, but not without a fght. I was free, in the em braces of another man, a young, handsome fop. I had no means, but I loved him, was madly jealous, I followed his every step, tormenting myself and my own heart, but when he was there, not a sigh. He liked my dress sense, my hairstyle, and every thing was right for him, except the source of my money: that he never asked about. I was so blinded by jealousy that I neglected my morals. For example, he might tell me that a dress or a hat would suit me better, and two or three days later I had it. Just as I hadn’t wanted to sell myself for a piece of bread, now I would sell myself just to satisfy his whim. What blindness and what mad ness! I soon realized that. He lost interest in me, no longer had any free time for me, and spent his time with other young la dies of various classes. In my fury of jeal ousy I spent a long time torturing myself, but once we had a scene in which I asked him to remove himself, and do it forev er. I wasn’t sorry for him, but for myself, for having destroyed my honor for a fop like him. I was now living again in peace, alone, working, I became godmother to the daughters in two families. One was the daughter of illegitimate parents and had become a wet nurse, while I took it upon myself to bring up her own daughter. I became so used to the child that nobody could believe she wasn’t my own. I found time to work and act like a mother, look ing after the baby. I lived four months like this: the baby fell ill and — was dying! For all of 12 days I didn’t sleep a wink, neither doctor, nor medicine, nothing helped. Te little girl died, I spent my last pennies in order to bury her, I scattered all the fow ers I could fnd in the conservatory — her body was surrounded with fowers, as if she was alive … I buried her — and again I was alone: I didn’t love my other god daughter, and still don’t. If I do anything, it’s because of my obligations as a godmother. My quarters are decent, I’ve taken on a tenant, frstly to make things easier, secondly, more cheerful. I found a woman who is lively and cheerful; she’s a dressmaker, but her situation isn’t enviable, either, al though she used to be kept by a rich man.

She gets a lot of work, but has nothing to work with, while I had a sewing ma chine but was sitting with nothing to do. At the time I did have work: embroidery. So I handed her my sewing machine and sewing work, and we worked in tandem. Nothing disturbed our peace except vis its by her friend, sometimes with a whole company of his comrades. I was a lonely fgure in their circle, none of them could make any impression on me. Sometimes, talking to my friend, we agreed that I seemed to have lost any purpose in life and was unable to love anyone. Could that be possible? I put the question several times. Ten whom had I loved? Yes, I had loved as an innocent young girl, but never with a woman’s passion. I was waiting for that, waiting for something pleasant that would make my heart beat more heatedly, but I couldn’t see that happening in my circle. I was equally welcoming, cheerful to all of them, but I had no feelings. And there were minutes when I was annoyed with my girlfriend: why this crowd of peo ple, stopping me working and dreaming? Once a new personality appeared with this idle mob: his facial features interest ed me at once. His way of walking and talking reminded me of my fancé, the one who was now a happy family man. After chatting for an hour or two, we became close, as if we’d known each other for ages. He began to visit us every day. As I knew the time he would come, I waited for his arrival with impatience. And now what I had been expecting happened: I was 24, I was living with him. For the frst months I didn’t love him, but day by day I got so attached to him that I couldn’t bear not to see him. But all the same I understood that he had an ofcial job, I knew when he was free, and I worried if he wasn’t home at the time, I lived like a family member, I tried to make sure he didn’t lose money, I worked and did all I could to please him. We both turned out to have a similar, impulsive na ture, but we were able to stop in time, I had to change a lot of my stupid impul sive urges. In the same way, he too tried to do everything possible for me, but he was two years younger than me, although he had also experienced a lot in his life. We lived together for just over a year, and then another disaster occurred. Gossip, vicious people, family circumstances, forced him to get married; he began to drink, think ing that would put me of him; he began to swear at me, to curse me and his life. Sometimes he wept like a child. Finally he suggested that the two of us should take poi son. Imagine my reaction! He wouldn’t lis ten to my words of consolation, he drove me to tears and hysterical attacks with his groans and drunkenness. I had asked him not to get married, I’d begged him, kissed his hands. But later, reconciling myself to the thought that he would marry and had to marry for his family’s sake, concealing my grief behind a mask of calm, I advised him to go ahead, if his fancée was a good young lady and would be a good wife and would make him happy when she replaced me. She knew that I was living with him, and she used her money to take him away from me, but I’m not a malicious person, he was so dear to me that I would have done anything to make him happy. So I didn’t try to stop him in any way, even though I said various nonsensical things, such as that I’d stop the marriage. I didn’t; I had no more tears to cry. I moved to new quar ters so that nothing would remind me of the past. But on the eve of his wedding he came to say goodbye to me. Tat was September 27, 1897. I will never forget that day: I thought that either I or he would go mad, I’d never seen him like this:

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Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1949.67.a,b, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 28 x 18 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.

DONALD RAYFIELD

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it was, in a word, like an attack of rabies: he kissed me, he cursed me, and he was ready to sufocate me in his embraces. But everything passes, and it was over: he left. I didn’t weep, I couldn’t, but I drank two glasses of vodka so as to drown my grief or all my innards, so great was the pain and anguish I felt. I wasn’t drunk, but I can’t explain what came over me. I was in a state of paralysis that hit me. Te night fnally passed. I knew where and when the wed ding would be, but I didn’t go, in case I lost control and did something stupid. A day of agony passed, and in the evening I went to see my friends to distract my self a little. We sat and chatted, and then came out to see me home. Te state I was in worried them very much: just before I reached my quarters, I came across him and his young wife: I shrieked and fell unconscious. After that I was ill in bed for almost three months. When I recovered I somehow avoided people, above all I was afraid of meeting him, I neglected myself, I paid myself no attention. Earlier I had tried to obtain things; now I was giving away my last possessions, although be fore then I was straightforward and used to help people, whereas now it was as if I was giving things away before I died. In a word, I didn’t understand what I was doing. Liver disease and excessive bile afected my body, and I became highly strung and irritable. I had attacks of mer riment during which I had no idea what I was doing and several times could have perished. But I didn’t perish, I merely fell into the hands of a young con man who managed to entangle me so cleverly that within one month all that was left of my decent quarters and furniture were bare walls and debts. He himself vanished, of course. It was my own fault: you shouldn’t trust people. I didn’t complain to the po lice: what was the point? Does it matter whether I have something or don’t, whom should I live for, what purpose? I have no faith in people. Can a person live without faith? No! So — this thought had long been obsessing me — I should kill myself! I had sufered all I could in childhood, getting no afection from my mother. Beaten down, worn out by hard work, my love killed of, and no hope for the future. As for the unpleasantnesses, the nasty words, the poverty, the humil iation, what can that do to a person, to a woman? True, I may have a weak charac ter, but, with a life like this, it’s impossible to have a strong one. Did I spend much of my life for myself? Never, not a single calm minute. You’re always afraid of something, expecting something, and memories might not last, but they might have been pleasant. No, it isn’t worth living! Tere was one response in my heart, but no de cision was yet taken. Yes, once again I was left without any means, thanks to that con man, and just before Easter. What was I to do? My posi tion was utterly hopeless. Of course I was quickly ofered a position in a brothel, but I wouldn’t agree. Opposite me, two women had been dragged out of it. Well, I wasn’t an obvious prostitute, but still that’s what I was, since I had to pay my debts somehow, and there was no other job for me. But once you sink into that mire, you’re unlikely to get out of it. I spent less than a year in that life, and even so only occasionally, and I didn’t give up my work. I used my frst earnings to buy a sewing machine, but my labor didn’t give me enough to pay my debts, I only got more entangled. As for prostitution, I had little luck, frstly because I was no longer young, and sec ondly, because I wasn’t brazen enough

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 108 and I still had a conscience. I was cheated; some men gave me respect, but they were rare. Everyone was ready to make fun of a woman. Tey would insult you, destroy your last drop of faith in goodness, every one of them was ready, under the guise of moralizing, giving advice, or help, to push you even deeper into the flth, and who of them would sincerely help anyone, without demanding a woman’s soul, heart and body as payment? No, only one in a thousand would have a soul; the rest live exclusive ly for themselves and their desires, which they conceal with a mask of beauty and eloquence, and shove a thousand women into the abyss. Where a defenseless girl should be protected, they debauch her and so, I, as a woman, undergoing every thing, even the flth of prostitution, would not blame a single girl if she ends up on that path. Not all of us can struggle with poverty, hunger, and destitution. Some en dure these things from their parents, some because of themselves, or also thanks to their fancés, husbands, and cavaliers. Men seduce a girl without thinking of the con sequences, while girls perish, cursing these men, trying to drown their sorrow with spirits and mad orgies, singing songs to forget their existence. Listen to the laugh ter: doesn’t it bring tears to your eyes? A girl might not have eaten for 24 hours, but she amuses you with chat, even intelligent chat, because she is expecting a snack; you listen, you take an interest, but she has tears in her eyes: she’s hungry. You don’t believe it: she’s so decently dressed that this can not be so. I personally have experienced all this from you, so don’t try and deny it. Tat’s not all: you visit an apartment, you’re mistreated in every way, not a day passes without insults and outrages. You’re treated worse than a dog, even though you do everything for them and nothing for yourself … No, I couldn’t stand even a year of this life. It doesn’t matter that I have nothing but poverty: my health is ruined. Live, and live such a disorderly life: I can’t take it anymore! I found everything loath some, I was fed up — I had nobody, not a girl friend, not a boyfriend, and I didn’t fnd anyone among the people surround ing me who would help or give me even a helping hand, or even good advice. I was only wanted when I had something extra, or could satisfy someone’s lust. But there was no advice to be had, and nobody’s hand to hold me back from suicide. I took poison. Who among you can condemn me and women like ¤me? THE STORY IS written better than it needed to be. Tat’s a pity, since this fact lessens its worth. Such things have to be written about more coarsely, so that ev ery word penetrates the reader’s heart, like a nail in a tree, deep and frmly. If so, we could hope for a stronger reaction. Because a person shouts most sincerely and loudly when he feels pain.

Look how this girl loved children … And how sincere she is: she didn’t love one of her goddaughters, she didn’t have to talk about that. But she does — simply and directly. Tis story echoes sincerity everywhere. And yet there is one menda cious bit in it. I consider it to be the scene with the academy student and the revolv er in the gazebo. I think that this never happened. Presumably, the girl has in vented all this, but now, possibly, sincerely believes it happened. Her lie is a good lie. Tis is the kind of lie that my late com rade Sasha Konovalov had in mind when he said, “Sometimes lying is better than truth at explaining a person.”

And perhaps it was then, when this question of hers still had not been settled and was burning her heart, that one of us was embracing her drunkenly, kissing her with his slobbering lips, and, annoyed be cause she responded wanly to his caresses, telling her, “Why are you such a misery, eh? Come on, relax a bit … I’ll pay you anotherWhyshilling!”amIsaying all this? So that you feel that we are crushing living human be ings, we are killing living souls. Perhaps there will be people with scornful expressions who will say, “Why print all this? An absurd idea! Tere’s no place at all in literature for prostitutes and theirTtales…”osewould be stupid and false words. Tere is a place in literature for any truth. Tere is a place for prostitutes with their tales, unfortunately. Teir names are too well known to cite them here. And their addresses are known to those they sell themselves to. Tere is room in literature for any voice, if that voice is sincere. Literature is a tribune for any person who has in his heart a burning desire to tell people about life’s disorders and human sufering and the necessity that all people feel for free dom! freedom! freedom! M. Gorky My thanks to Irina Zhuravliova, director of the Central Scientifc Library of V.N. Karazin Kharkov University, for supplying scans of Te Northern Courier RAYFIELD

Female human shame is also alive in this girl who sells herself. Telling us about her journey in a railway carriage with an ofcer, she writes, “A decent person … he didn’t take advantage of my helpless situ ation … We spent more than a week trav eling,” she says, and then puts a full stop. You must realize that these full stops are tears of shame, bitter tears of hurt. “A decent person … he didn’t take ad vantage of my helpless situation … But I didn’t have a penny to my name … I had become very emaciated thanks to hun ger…” Tat man didn’t have the sense to feed a hungry girl and, clearly, enough shame or conscience to refuse her body, her payment, ofered to him in exchange for a ruble that she needed to buy bread. Here, she sells herself because of hun ger, afterward she trades her body to sat isfy her lover’s lusts … Of course, she was selling herself just casually, without having to. Sometimes that happens out of reck lessness, sometimes because of a shortlived fancy for some handsome mug. But more often than not, I know this, she fell into the dirt “because of the dreariness of life.” “ Te dreariness of life” is a terrible, dark force, which only has to breathe to cripple a weak person for the rest of their life. Tat force makes people take to drink, go mad, it drives them to debauchery, to murder … It can arise in the depth of any soul, because it, too, is an instinctive yearning of the human spirit for the good, for life’s beauty, for freedom … You heard the prostitute asking, “Can a person live without faith?” And she answers, “No!”

Te source of this lie is a passionate desire, more or less vital to every person, whoever they may be, to have some thing noble, heroic, truly human about themselves. Such a thing is rare in life’s accursed conditions, in which a person is fettered and his creative spirit has no free dom. Te good is something that has to be invented, for all the links of the chain that fetters it are equally heavy and all of them abrade the body to the point of wounding it. And if it were only the body!

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DONALD

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I, the unknighted, rejected. Donning the mask of adoration. If you don’t want to take of your happiness, hold it in place. Each wearing the mask the other wants to see, but in the mirror: no Becauseone. I love you I’m asking you to put this on.

I didn’t recognize the dead wood to which I’d screwed myself. Recycling my exhalations, I hyperventilated.

Te female mantis chews away his mask. But where has his face gone? Eclipse erotics. In the photos you send, clouds conceal, then unconceal the moon. Placing it over your head for the frst time. Never again the same person.

And when your vision adjusts, what joy is there in looking back?

FACING IT

I dilated and flled the little room, staring from its two uncurtained windows. It continues to sway on its feet, but nothing registers in the wide Saturns of the hammer-stunned beast’s eyes.

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FORREST GANDER & ASHWINI BHAT

My devotion led to imitation and your gestures, even your scent, be came my mask.

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113 FORREST GANDER & ASHWINI BHAT

It’s not a well-known book, at least not these days. I don’t press it on people looking for something good to read, and I can’t say I’ve read everything by its au thor. It’s not that I expect my collection to appreciate, nor do I have the typical com pletist’s mindset — there was never a var ied feld to piece together, no long-sought rarity just out of reach. I guess you could say I started out to protect them. NICHOLLS

114 ESSAY

¤ STEPHENCOLLECTINGLEACOCK ANDREW

When people discuss the silly things they collect and my turn comes around, I sometimes admit I collect a book. Not diferent editions or printings of a book, just the one.

115

Te town where I grew up, Oshawa, an exurb of Toronto, was at one time home to the largest automotive manufactur ing facility in the world, with 10 million square feet of GM factory foor, some of that concrete dating back to 1907. When I moved to Canada from England in 1966, over half of my new classmates had parents who worked at “the Motors.” Not then, or now, a fertile training ground for an aspiring writer.

In the last year of high school, trying to imagine a literary future, I read 100 biographies of writers — most bought raggedly used from tiny Morgan Self Booksellers bunched into one corner of a brick building adjoint a leafy park on Oshawa’s Simcoe Street. Te bookstore faced the Canadian Automotive Museum, displaying a century of domestic carriage and engine design — Oshawa’s pride. I never learned how an internal com bustion engine worked, or much cared, but S. J. Perelman’s delight at learning the word “totaled” when he wrecked his car enthralled me. Perelman led me to Te New Yorker, thence to James Turber, from whom I learned about fantan and Superghost, Harold Ross, sympathet ic ophthalmia, and the Zeiss loupe. I jumped from Turber to Dorothy Parker (Marie of Roumania, the importance of Te Elements of Style) and Robert Benchley taking his frst alcoholic drink — one of too many — at the age of 31. Ten it was on to George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, and the other wits of the Algonquin Hotel. In that gritty corner of industrial Oshawa, I was transported back to those 1920s writers’ hangouts. I knew their menus. (Later, when I got some money, I’d seek out those menus; I had a signed Jack Dempsey’s.) Te Round Table crowd led me to Moss Hart, Fred Allen, Al Boasberg, David Freedman, Alexander Woollcott, and Edna Ferber. At 18, I was ideally situated to enter adult life as an in terwar Manhattan freelancer.¤ If I’d been an American child, I might have had to wait for my teens and for Perelman and Benchley to lead me to their favorite humorist, the Canadian economist Stephen Leacock. But as a newly minted Canadian, I met Leacock in Grade 5 when we read his story “My FinancialWhenCareer.”Igointo a bank, I get Trattled.eclerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me. Te moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irre sponsible idiot. Tere was a small thrill here: growing up with two younger brothers, I’d been forbidden to say “stupid” or “idiot.” But here was Leacock putting the naughty word right there in print. In the course of his story, Leacock stumbles from teller’s window to manager’s ofce to vault with his $56, creating accidentally along the way the impression that the “grave mat ter” he is there to discuss involves a large sum of money, or, perhaps, the security of the bank itself: “You are one of Pinkerton’s men I presume.”

ANDREW NICHOLLS

MISS SHARP: Oh, he always barks like that when he thinks it’s time to lock the doers for the night. Or these pieces of condescending pith, from monologist Josh Billings: “I never argy agin a success. When I see a rattlesnaix’s head sticking out of a whole, I bear of the left and say to miself that whole be longs to that snaix.” “I have seen men so fond of ar gument that they would dispute with a guideboard at the forks of a kuntry road about the distance to the next town. What fools.”

“No. Not Pinkerton,” I said, lead ing him no doubt to presume I was from a competing detective Asagency.arecent arrival in Canada from a suburb of London, I’d thought: Fantastic! In North America, school kids study jokes Alas, everything else we read that year had to do with long division or Balboa’s route to the Pacifc. But I’d fallen in love with my frst Anotherhumorist.Leacock story in that book, “How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90,” got me laughing so helpless ly that I obtained permission from the teacher to take Literary Lapses home and read its short pastiches to my brother and my parents:Iwasleaning up against the man telpiece in a lounge suit which I had made out of old ice bags, and Beryl, my wife, was seated at my feet on a low Louis Quinze tabo uret which she had made out of a Finnan Haddie fshbox, when the idea of a bungalow came to both of us at the same time. “It would be just lovely if we could do it!” exclaimed Beryl, coiling herself around my knee. “Why not!” I replied, lifting her up a little by the ear. “With your exquisite taste.” “And with your knowledge of material,” added Beryl, giving me a tiny pinch on the leg. “Oh, I am sure we could do it! One reads so much in all the magazines about people making summer bungalows and furnishing them for next to nothing. Oh, do let us try, Dogyard!”

Lifting her up a little by the ear

Tis, I’m amazed to note, was written 120 years ago. Te lounge suit made of ice bags and the Finnan Haddie fshbox pre fgure the absurd delight in language of Sid Perelman, who said in a 1977 Dick Cavett Show appearance that Leacock was the frst humorist he ever read. It was Perelman who turned Groucho Marx on to Leacock. Even from this distance I can see the appeal. I invite anyone to open Wit and Humor of the Age (ed. Melville De Lancey, 1910) and try to fnd a giggle anywhere in it. Even the Twain excerpts, without the carpet of story to sprawl out on, come across fat. Most of the mate rial contemporaneous with Leacock’s frst collection reads like this: MR. STAYLATE: Dear me, what makes your dog howl so?

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.

.

Nancy Lupo, Bench, 2015, concrete, 23 x 52 x 21 inches. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.

James Whitcomb Riley was a popular humorist of Leacock’s youth. Extracting pleasure from Riley’s tale “ Te Bear Story” is a hard slog. It’s all inference and mock-politeness, demanding of a modern reader great patience and, as is often the case in humor from that period, a tolerance of dialect. In an 1894 McClure’s Magazine interview with Hamlin Garland, each time Riley is about to say something amusing, Garland unfailingly mentions the “twinkle in his eye”: “ Tere came a comical light into his eyes, and his lips twisted up in a sly grin at the side, as he dropped into dialect: ‘I don’t take no cred it for my ignorance. Jest born thataway.’” Leacock took that slyness into his portfolio, walked around it a few times, and gave it a twist — the addition of brag ging cluelessness — to show the Great Man out of his depth. In piece after piece, he mocked journalistic fawning after the famous. His titans of art and industry are fatuous, their humor condescendingly of, their insights banal. And Leacock’s prose was actually fun ny, the way Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was funny. (Did folks even say “that’s fun ny” in 1900? Tey seemed to recognize humor the way one identifes calcium in a solution. We have located it; it is this milky precipitate.) ¤ “My Financial Career” appeared in Life Magazine on April 11, 1895. A decade and a half later, having been turned down by Houghton Mifin, Leacock borrowed money from his brother to privately print 3,100 copies of his frst collection of short pieces, Literary Lapses, which quickly sold out. John Lane picked the book up for the Bodley Head in London the following year. It has never since been out of print.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 118

Tat self-printed 1910 frst edition is the volume that became an obsession for me; my Shangri-La, my Rosebud. Gazette Printing Company, Limited, it says on the title page. 35 cents. Gazette was Leacock himself, sitting in a rented room in Uxbridge, Ontario, opening boxes of books and sticking the small gummed ti tles on the spines. In 1985, I found a frst edition of Literary Lapses in a used bookstore in Toronto: 125 pages, with a green board cover and dark green cloth spine. I’d never considered the possibility that any of the originals that started out in piles under my hero’s boardinghouse bed in 1910 had survived. I bought that copy, for less than a hundredLeacockdollars.wrote over 30 more books. Between 1915 and 1925 he was the most popular humorist in the English-speaking world. It was said that more people had heard of him than had heard of Canada. In 1947, an annual award for literary humor was named after him. He’s on a Canadian stamp. Jack Benny adored Leacock, hav ing been introduced to him by Groucho. He was a hero to Turber and to Dorothy Parker, and a mentor to Benchley, whom Leacock encouraged to publish his own humorous writing. Benchley blurbed the 1930 collection, Laugh with Leacock: “I have enjoyed Leacock’s works so much that I have written everything that he ever wrote — anywhere from one to fve years after him.” Teddy Roosevelt quoted from Literary Lapses and its follow-up, Nonsense Novels, in speeches. By 1921, Leacock was drawing large crowds on speaking tours of Scotland and England. He infuenced many midcentury comic stylists in their youth, inspiring Te Goon Show’s Spike Milligan and a young John Lennon. John

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Cleese credits “Self-Made Men” from Literary Lapses as the inspiration for Monty Python’s sublime complaint-brag ging sketch, “ Te Four Yorkshiremen.”As a student at Princeton in 1915, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Leacock a fan letter: As imitation is the sincerest fattery, I thought you might be interested in something you in spired. […] Te two stories I wrote, “Jemima, A story of the Blue Ridge Mountains, by John Phlot Jr.” and “ Te Unusual Ting” by “Robert W. Shamless,” are of the “Leacock school of hu mour — in fact, Jemima is rather a steal in places from “Hannah of the Highlands” … Leacock wrote back, “Your stories are fne. Go on!” ¤ Inspired! Exactly. In middle school, fredup, I teamed with a fellow British expat, Darrell Vickers, to write purportedly fun ny material. At frst we wrote for school productions and newspapers, then af ter high school for cartoonists and radio shows, “industrials” and training flms, TV and stage. In 1982, we got of a Greyhound bus after an almost psychedelically hell ish 78-hour ride to Los Angeles, to be gin our Hollywood careers by working for late-night host Alan Ticke. We wrote for buyers as diverse as Joan Rivers and Te Love Boat. We stafed Don Adams’s last sitcom, Check It Out! George Carlin read some of our material and invited us to work on his frst HBO special. We wrote a musical and a lot of personal appear ance stuf for Mickey Rooney. Ten, in 1986, still without an agent, we smuggled some jokes to Johnny Carson through his Second Assistant Bandleader. Johnny brought us onto Te Tonight Show, our era’s version of the 1920s New Yorker. Te night we got the news, we celebrated so loudly the neighbors called to complain. Darrell and I became head writers of Te Tonight Show in 1988.¤ Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock was born in Swanmore, England in 1869. In 1875, his family immigrated to Canada — to, as he described it in an unfnished autobiogra phy, “a wind-swept hill space with a jum ble of frame buildings and log barns and outhouses.” At 18, defending his mother and siblings from his father’s alcohol ic abuse, he ordered Peter Leacock from their home and never saw him again. He began a degree at Toronto’s Upper Canada College, lived for years in board inghouses, taught Latin, Greek, French, German, and English for a decade, and hated it all. With the success of his frst textbook, Elements of Political Science, then with Literary Lapses, he was able to leave teaching and build a house on Lake Simcoe in 1928. On a trip home from Los Angeles, I paid a visit to that house and grounds, now the Leacock Museum, 120 miles north of Toronto. Te front desk had a sign plaintively inviting visitors to add their names to a petition aimed at preventing the city of Orillia from appro priating several acres of Leacock’s beau tiful parkland home for the construction of a municipal seniors residence. I was outraged.When I returned to Los Angeles, I wrote a letter to Orillia City Council on Tonight Show letterhead, appealing to ANDREW NICHOLLS

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 120 their patriotism and sense of Canadian cultural history to leave my hero’s proper ty alone. Tis man was once better known than Canada! I had no reply. Te land was seized and the housing erected the fol lowing year. ¤ Few writers I meet in Los Angeles, or anywhere, know about Leacock. I spoke to a Canadian bookseller at the New York Antiquarian Book Show in 2019 who said she couldn’t recall ever having stocked one of his books. I wondered if this was per haps the fate of the professionally glib. I think of comedian Fred Allen writing, toward the end of his life, “When a radio comedian’s program is fnally fnished it slinks down Memory Lane into the lim bo of yesteryear’s happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of for gotten laughter.”

In 1977, I’d been as enraged as a Canadian can be after enrolling in a col lege course with Leacock on the curricu lum, only to have him dropped because, as the professor announced on the frst day, “I fnd humor ify.” Maybe she meant sly, allusive, in conclusive. Leacock’s is the gentlest of authorial voices. His narrators profess lit tle knowledge of worldly things, instead praising everyone who does, letting the blowhards and dullards, the Industrialists and Giants of Industry hang themselves. Gentle and gentlemanly things struggle to survive. If Leacock has been washed out by the laser-harsh humor that fol lowed, it’s a pity. I daresay no one before him would have had a narrator lift his wife up “a little by the ear” for no real reason, displaying — what? Artful randomness? Surely not, the words are well chosen and make a clear image. (Compare Woody Allen’s attempts to “do” Perelman in Te New Yorker for 40 years, banging together Yiddish, recondite adjectives, Hollywood smarm, and little-guy braggadocio, but of ten in the new century scraping a bucket and getting only the sound of the spoon.)

Leacock, for me, prefgured Absurdism’s burlesque of norms and pop ular styles. I don’t know how he knew that was something people needed in those straightlaced times. His contem porary Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s “ Te Wonderful ‘One-Hoss-Shay,’” published in 1891, contains 119 lines and one joke, as if readers of the time might be ejected from their corsets and drop their snifters if forced against their will to gufaw robustly. A few years after I happily found that frst edition, a friend of mine found another in a library remainder sale and mailed it to me. I put them together in a shoebox and made a mental note to check the used bookstores I visited for other copies. ¤ Leacock worked, alone, in a room over looking Old Brewery Bay, for 16 years until his death in 1944. He’s not associ ated with any literary salon or group. His esprits aren’t quoted. He never had to suf fer, thank God, in a “writer’s room.” His niece Elizabeth Kimball, in 1983’s My Uncle Stephen Leacock, paints him as a bel lowing paterfamilias, barkingly unaware when he was overdoing things by drag ging a squadron of nephews and nieces from their summertime games to joyless outings, swatting fies in deep brush. He was a jacket-and-tie-at-the-cottage con servative. In 1944, he wrote While Tere Is Time, a call for Canada to reexamine

121 its economic roots (what? fur trading?) and moderate the infuences of unions and overreaching socialists. He opposed women voting and non-Anglo-Saxon im migration. I knew none of that. From his collections of pastiches I learned about the Hohenzollerns and Prohibition, about geometry textbooks and boardinghouse managers. About “getting up a collection” and Toronto’s Blue Laws, Whigs and Tories and Te Armenian Question. And about Lord Ronald, who “fung himself from the room, fung himself upon his horse and rode madly of in all directions.”

ANDREW NICHOLLS

When I’m asked about ideal din ner-party guests from the past, I want to invite young Stephen. Not just to hear him talk; I want to tell him, “You did it. You’re immortal.” ¤ As the internet era dawned, I located more frst editions of Literary Lapses — in Canada, Australia, Europe, Upstate New York. At some point I noticed my pur chases driving up the price.Today, there’s one signed copy available for sale. Te Leacock estate in Orillia has a copy. Te Leacock Collection at McGill University in Montreal has three. I have 33, one percent of the original print run. Tey sit together on a shelf in my bedroom, the spine labels that he un evenly applied jiggling up and down like 16th notes in a cadenza. Who knows how many are still out there, in Hamilton attics and Ottawa basements? Some of mine are heavily read, some are near-pristine. One has been crayoned in. Like spent nuclear fuel rods, they’ve discharged their power into the culture and yet here they are, readable, still po tent as acorns. I imagine Leacock cutting open the boxes that contained them with a pocket knife and laying them out on his bed. I can’t help but feel that if I keep them pressed together they’ll conjure some col lective magic, something long-gone but wonderful, a sharp unexpected delight at the foolishness of an age, fanned back to life.

John Outterbridge, Eastside-Westside, from the Containment Series, ca. 1970. Mixed media. Soldered metal with extrusions mounted on wood. 19 1/4 x 20 1/4 x 1 3/4 in. (48.9 x 51.4 x 4.4 cm). Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Bequest of the Estate of Mrs. Dorothy Adams McCoy. Photo by Ed Glendinning. Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

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MY FATHER FINDS HOME THROUGH THE BIRDS THREA ALMONTASER

Pigeons on Broadway follow him like winged guards. He bargains with a yard fnch to peck us when we cuss. Someone’s love birds let loose in the hood & my father calls them with a whistled song, the soft clapping of his heart. Along broken leaf light, he marvels a hawk’s lonesome fight into the emptiness, its feathered breast a qibla. He can’t trace his footprints. He still wants to belong, even after leaving. How does a Baba know when to remain, & when to unravel the nest? He grew among the ancient zaytun his whole childhood, & see how they spill their oil on his arms like an invasive species. I peck for something daughterful, something that won’t chip his teeth, leave seed pits

124 in his shoes. I long to hang our homeland on the wall, eat it like a beak hammering at bark, the violent hunger. For someone to point me on a map, take their fnger & say, Here she is. Darwish wrote, Words are a homeland. So I bring my father to listen to a white professor describe the village his family comes from to feel less alone. It is stunning, words I would wrap in a gift box, place in front of his mother’s prayer rug. But somewhere in the bucolic, a cousin digging, ruby-throated, searching for his leg. Te neighbor, grass in her mouth, spitfeeding her baby. Maybe it’s how the man says soil, the way he uses crimson to evoke our mud brick homes. Or maybe it’s how he compares noon refecting of the mountain’s fog to fre. My father’s America has a thicker mist than those Yemen woodlands. My father’s America has a glass window where he sees someone like him, fies forward too fast, concussed & caught in the long wind. I bite into olive stones to feel my Baba’s migration. I hurl them into ponds — the way Zeus hurls his bolts of jewel orchids, lamping the sky. Tere is a raptor collecting fox fur in his beak, held by the sky like large hands.spectralWho decides to extend into that deafbarren gap, but the thing LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

125 that wholly gives in? Tere is a submission in fying, in the wind that gathers him, feathers splayed & begging the sky to grant just an eighth of its tribe to call his. THREA ALMONTASER

Nancy Lupo, Bench 2016, 2016, exhibition view, Dodge Caravan License Plate 7KAA008, Los Angeles, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.

Here's the thing about me: I live for a challenge. So just imagine how my competitive spirit ignited when I saw that Jef Tweedy, the beloved singersongwriter who founded and has fronted Wilco since the early 1990s, wrote a new book called How to Write One Song. Even though that title boasts a modest promise that Tweedy, one of the most gifted and prolifc songwriters of his generation, will teach you the ins and outs of penning a single, solitary tune, I took it as a dare. I imagined Tweedy, with his stringy hair and patchy beard, looking slightly be draggled under a Stetson hat, standing 20 paces away from me on a dusty road out side an old saloon, with a guitar in hand instead of a six-shooter. Go ahead, he’d say, let’s see what you got. To be fair, I’m no stranger to song writing, but the last time I wrote a song,

I. A Magician Reveals His Tricks

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JEFF TWEEDY WILL TEACH YOU SONGWRITING ALEX SCORDELIS

ESSAY

III. Jef Tweedy Is Not a Self-Help Author

Te frst topic I discussed with Tweedy, other than that his book worked for me, was that at times it felt like I was reading

A Jef Tweedy Crash Course

the Black Eyed Peas topped the charts. In high school, I played guitar and sang in a garage band called Mall Security. Most of our songs were either about a goofball friend of ours named Kayvon or about how hard we rocked (which in our minds was a lot). In college, I fronted a more sur realist garage-rock band called Nuns of Summer. Our songs were surf-punk doo dles, with titles like “Sternum Shredder” and “Seven Dollar Boots.” None of the songs by either of my bands has stood the test of time. For the most part, we never bothered to record them. So I was eager to see if Jef Tweedy, of all people, could guide me back into a regular songwriting practice, starting with just one song. Spoiler alert (I guess): I breezed through the slim 158-page book and, yes, wrote a song. In the book, Tweedy is an amiable songwriting teacher (who occasionally dishes out tough love when needed), and his methods and exercises work. After I wrote my song, I scheduled a Zoom call with Tweedy to discuss his book and my experience using his song writing methods. I ironed a collared shirt and combed my hair for the call, but at the last minute his publicist informed me that the interview would be “audio only.” (I only mention this because, amidst all the current tragedy and strife, I want there to be some record of a trivial hiccup with a publicist in a pandemic.) During our conversation, Tweedy, 53, was as afable as he is on the page: thoughtful and generous, kind and fun ny. How to Write One Song isn’t Tweedy’s frst foray into writing prose. In 2018, he published a memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). While his lyrics can often be dreamlike, his prose is conversational and folksy, like a skilled storyteller teasing out a tale by a roaring campfre. Tweedy called me from a lake house at an undis closed location in Michigan where he was spending time with his wife Susie and their two sons, Spencer and Sam. During the pandemic, Tweedy and his family have been putting on a weekly Instagram Live show called Te Tweedy Show, where they sing songs and putter around the house. It’s like a cross between Te Osbournes and Te Johnny Cash Show. “Right of the bat,” I told him at the start of our call, “I have to say that I read your book and I wrote a song. So I’m feel ing very “Fantastic!”accomplished.”Tweedy said. Tat lone word of approval felt like getting a fa vorable comment from a beloved teach er, written in red ink in the margins of an essay.II.

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For anyone unfamiliar with Tweedy’s work, here’s a CV of sorts. Born in 1967. Formed Uncle Tupelo, a band that pi oneered the alt-country genre, in 1987. In the wake of Uncle Tupelo’s demise in 1994, he founded Wilco, his main proj ect for the past 25 years. Wilco has been nominated for six Grammys (and won one in 2004, for Best Alternative Album, for A Ghost Is Born). He grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, but at this point he’s associated with Chicago in the same way that deepdish pizza and Ferris Bueller are.

129 ALEX SCORDELIS a self-help book. In the third chapter, “Obstacles: What’s Stopping You,” Tweedy writes about overcoming “selfdefeating inner dialogue.” It’s the kind of language you’d expect from Tony Robbins, or How to Win Friends and Infuence People, not a rock musician who sells out amphi theaters. I mentioned this to Tweedy, and he laughed.“Self-help books have always been a little strange to me because if you’re help ing yourself, you don’t need a book,” he said. “But mine is a little bit of an exposé of how I helped myself. And I think the ways that songwriting can help you as a person are vast.”

As I read Tweedy’s advice on overcom ing obstacles, which occasionally veered into self-help speak, I recognized the ob structions to creativity he describes. Tat “self-defeating inner dialogue” — I don’t have time, I don’t have talent, I don’t know what to write, I don’t have proper training can build to a crescendo, like a chorus of schoolyard bullies, with the ability to freeze any artist in their tracks. But with Tweedy as a guru, quieting those inner critics seems manageable. With its song writing exercises (which, hang tight, I’ll get to), reading his book feels like having Wilco’s frontman sitting on your shoulder, like an alt-country Jiminy Cricket. And, as he motivates, Tweedy manages to get a laugh or two along the way. “I guarantee you,” he promises in one semi-inspiring passage, “that I have records made by peo ple who are worse than you.”

I hadn’t written a song in almost 10 years, but I wasn’t sure if I was “stuck.” Songwriting was just a thing that I stopped doing because, well, I got busy. But when I fnished writing my new song, it felt like I was in an old commercial for Irish Spring soap — the clouds parted in the sky, the sun shone down on my shoul ders, and the world smelled like a dewy countryside meadow in County Cork. “It’s an incredibly centering thing to do, to remind yourself that you have an imagination,” Tweedy said, when I men tioned how good it felt to write a song. “ Tat you have some control over how you see the world. Tat you have an inex haustible well of entertainment between your ears.”

Tweedy and I discussed the idea that making songwriting part of your daily rou tine can help ground you as a person, al most like a meditation app. “Songwriting is a process and it’s an activity that, aside from being the way I’ve earned a living in my life, I’ve found to be so helpful that I thought it was worth sharing that in sight,” Tweedy said. “I don’t think it’s a revolutionary insight that being creative and having a daily practice of creativity can be benefcial to your mental health.”

I recently read New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s new book How to Be an Artist. It shares a lot of common ground with Tweedy’s book — it’s (obvi ously) a how-to, it has a similar trim size (they both seem designed to be stufed in a Christmas stocking — elves, take note), and they both share a similar tough-love message of “just get of your ass and do the work.” Saltz’s book boasts chapter ti tles like, “Work, Work, Work” and “Start Now.” Tweedy also delivers the same “get to work” directive, but he’s slightly more casual about “Songwritingit. takes diferent paths every time,” he told me. “It’s a process, not a blueprint. I’m just doing whatever I can to grant permission to somebody who might be fnding themselves stuck.”

IV. Does My Song Need Meaning? It depends. In the songwriting days of my youth, because I tended to write abstract, nonsensical lyrics, my chief concerns when sitting down to write in 2020 were: 1) will my song make a lick of sense? And 2) am I going to have anything interesting to say?

In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz writes about a trip to a gallery where he looked at some black-and-white pho tographs of clouds. Te gallerist told him, “ Tese are pictures of clouds over Ferguson, Missouri. Tey’re about protest and police violence.” Saltz bristled and said, “No, they’re not! Tey’re just pictures of clouds and have nothing to do with any thing.” Saltz’s argument is that the mean ing has to be in the work. To that point, Tweedy said he’s constantly striving to be clearer about the meaning in his words.

“I don’t believe I have any control over the meaning that gets put together in someone else’s head,” Tweedy said. “But I do consider it the challenge and the thing that I fnd most satisfying — feeling that I can get better and better at making what I’m seeing clear, and what I’m trying to say clear. So that there’s still a lot of room

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Tweedy writes that the question he (and all songwriters) get asked most often about their craft is, “What comes frst, the music or the lyrics?” His answer is “both and neither.” But for the purposes of his book, to get the reader to crank out one song, he starts with getting words on the page. Tweedy teaches seven exercises on how to “hot-wire language,” to jump-start the songwriting process. I tried all seven exercises, but I found the frst exercise he teaches, creating a “word ladder,” to be the mostAhelpful.word ladder, Tweedy explains, is when you quickly jot down 10 verbs, then 10 nouns, each pertaining to a subject. Te resulting two columns form, yes, a ladder. For my word ladder, I wrote down 10 verbs about being in a classroom, then 10 nouns that I spotted out the window in my garden. Using those pairings of words, I was able to get complete song lyrics within about fve minutes. But the lyrics I wrote, which were vaguely about growing roses, seemed ab stract and aimless. But the closer I looked, and the more I edited, I was able to parse out some personal connection. In the book, Tweedy writes, I fnd it’s almost impossible to put two words together and not fnd at least some meaning. We’re con ditioned to look for patterns and identify mysteries to solve much more than we are designed to dictate what we’re searching for. I recommend allowing that natural curiosity and our sense-making brains to do their thing. I underlined that passage because it made me consider Tweedy’s songs and my relationship to them as a listener. When I hear him sing the song “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” with its lines “Spiders are singing in the salty breeze / Spiders are flling out tax returns,” I can conjure up the images and my own meaning, but is it the meaning he, the songwriter, wanted me to receive? “ Te exercises and the things I’m try ing to get at in the book,” Tweedy told me, “are that, with revisions and with taking a step back and doing this as a practice, you become much more efcient at seeing what is coming across clearly, and what is making that assumption that somebody can see what’s in your head.”

Nancy Lupo, Open Mouth, 2019 (detail), cast aluminum bench, bronze, iron, nail lacquer, 22 7/17 x 54 15/16 x 29 9/16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.

Te Wilco song I’ve listened to per haps more than any other is “Company in My Back,” of the 2004 album A Ghost Is Born Trough countless listens, I’d as cribed my own, perhaps ridiculous (and totally wrong) meaning to the lyrics. In the chorus, Tweedy sings, “I move so slow, steady crushing hand, holy shit, there’s a company in my back.” As someone who sufered from a debilitating back injury before having surgery to correct it, I heard this song from the perspective of someone with immense back pain. Tis narrator imagines a company of, say, tiny OompaLoompas, who are demanding Vicodin to ease the pain. Tis was my absurd reading of the song, but I related to it because of my own personal experience. I went to the Genius website, where listeners annotate song lyrics with what they think they mean. On that site, a random person wrote that “Company in My Back” is about picking up a woman at a club and having a one-night stand. A very diferent interpretation from mine.

In How to Write One Song, Tweedy writes that “Company in My Back” is “written from the viewpoint of an insect at a pic nic.” Me and the guy on Genius couldn’t have been more of base. “If I look back on that now, I don’t know if I was as clear as I needed to be,” Tweedy said when I told him of my mis reading of the song. “At that time, I was really intoxicated by opioids, for one thing. I think I was really interested in the playfulness of the language, and I wasn’t as concerned with having a clear story emerge or an overall clear scene emerge as much as I knew that the language was making me see things. Tere was imagery there. It wasn’t just vague wordplay. So that was good enough for me at the time.”

Tweedy paused, then continued, “When I go back to a song, I’m not try ing to get back into the same headspace that I was in when I wrote it. I think that’s common when people frst start writing poetry, in a lot of high-school-age poetry. You get the sense that the writer assumes that we’re seeing what they’re seeing. And that’s always the mark of some imprecise and inefective poetry.”

V. Te First Time I Talked to Jef Tweedy Midway through my conversation with Tweedy, I told him that this wasn’t the frst time we’d talked. Ten I went on to tell

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 132 for the listener.”

In his new book Tis Isn't Happening, about Radiohead's Kid A, Steven Hyden, “Meanings can exist whether the cre ator consciously put them there or not. Sometimes, an artist can put things into their work without realizing it. Or the au dience might hear or see things that aren’t ‘supposed’ to be there, but are made real because ‘we’ put them there.” In the case of Kid A, obsessive listeners made connec tions between the album and 9/11 (even though it was recorded before the terror ist attacks). In the case of Tweedy’s songs, anyone’s songs really, I usually make some sort of connection between the lyrics and my own Afterlife.my conversation with Tweedy, I went back and looked at the lyrics I had written, about growing roses. I felt they were similar to “Company in My Back” in that I liked the imagery and the word play, but there’s no clear story, no easy-tounderstand narrative. I knew what the words meant to me, but it’s the kind of song that some rando on Genius might incorrectly think is about picking up a woman in a club.

133 him about our frst conversation, 16 years ago. In 2004, I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago as a representative of my college’s literary journal. I’d describe it as a ho-hum weekend spent sitting in a booth, selling poems and short stories written by my classmates. As I scanned the list of panel discussions happening at the conference, one caught my eye: Jef Tweedy was going to speak and read from his then brand-new poetry collection, Adult Head. It’d been three years since Wilco dropped their critically acclaimed album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and anticipa tion was sky-high for their follow-up. As I made my way over to the panel, I spotted Tweedy standing alone in the cor ner of the room. I was kind of surprised that he wasn’t surrounded by handlers, publicists, or label honchos. Wilco was arguably at the peak of their fame. Tey graced magazine covers, topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop’s critics’ poll, and had been featured in a documentary. It’s not every day that rockers with those creden tials walk down from Olympus and mingle with the common folk. Or at least that’s what I thought when I was in college. So I walked up to Tweedy and said hello, introduced myself as one of the editors of UC Santa Barbara’s literary journal, Spectrum. I’d purchased a copy of Adult Head, and I asked him to sign it. He did, with a shaky hand, and added a “2004” below his signature. He handed it back to me and noticed that I was also holding Digressions on Some Poems by Joe LeSueur, a memoir about LeSueur’s rela tionship with the poet Frank O’Hara. My memory is foggy all these years later, but I remember Tweedy mentioning that writ ing poems on your lunch break seems like a good way to pass the time.

It’s an unremarkable anecdote about a friendly encounter with a rock star. Te only reason it sticks in my memory is that, less than 48 hours later, when I was chan nel surfng back on my couch in Santa Barbara, MTV News had a breaking up date that Tweedy had checked into rehab and that the forthcoming Wilco album, A Ghost Is Born, was indefnitely delayed. Tweedy has been sober since that day. “Yeah, that was at the Palmer House,” Tweedy says, remembering the afternoon we met. “I was panicking all day long. I had a very rough time getting myself to that event. Susie went with me. I think I went to the hospital that night, and I think that they turned me away. Te next day I went back to the hospital and they sent me to a diferent hospital and that’s where I ended up. I hadn’t taken any drugs of any kind for a month or so at that point, because I was trying to just fx it myself. But that caused all kinds of brain chem istry problems that made me extremely vulnerable to my mental health issues at the time.”Inhis 2018 memoir, Tweedy writes candidly about the events that led him to check into rehab, including stealing his mother-in-law’s cancer medication to get high. In the memoir, he explains why he was compelled to share the darkest parts of his addiction. “I don’t want to roman ticize any of this,” he writes. “It wasn’t glamorous or fun. It was awful.”

In one of How to Write One Song’s early chapters, Tweedy breaks down what his day is like as an artist. It couldn’t be further from a description of a user’s day — it’s a portrait of a working singer-song writer and family man. He writes that, from 10:00 p.m. to midnight every day, he spends time with his wife and sons and does a crossword. “Yes, I’m a crossword

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Nancy Lupo, installation view, Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.

“ Te weird thing is, is that the same person that you’re talking to is the person that saved me,” Tweedy said. “I was able to see a better way to live. If I hadn’t been able to see that, I wouldn’t have been able to write about anything. Tat day is very memorable. It was a really, really rough thing. I’m glad you perceived me as nice, because I know that a lot of times in those days the struggle I was having internal ly would be interpreted as being aloof or distant or not friendly. So I’m happy that I was. Tank you for giving me the beneft of theTweedydoubt.”added that sobriety, and sta bilizing his previously chaotic life, were necessary to his songwriting. “I don’t know if I would have been able to write about anything with any sense of purpose,” he said. “It was a really difcult thing for me to do anything other than communicate through those abstract forms and through songs and things like that. I think I was able to maintain human connections, and fortunately that led to me being able to get help.”VI.

135 puzzle nerd/addict,” Tweedy writes, “but it sure beats the hell out of when I was an addict addict.” If there’s a pervading rock ’n’ roll myth that drug abuse and being a walking disaster lead to better songwrit ing, Tweedy’s existence dispels it.

It was going to come up sooner or lat er. We’re obviously living in politically charged (and divisive) times. Depending on when you’re reading this, we might have a new president, or we might be in the middle of a coup. In this climate, I was curious if Tweedy ever feels compelled to address politics head-on in his lyrics. “War on War” is a standout track on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Even though it was recorded months before 9/11 and the United States’s invasion of Afghanistan, and years before the Iraq War, the song seemed like a condemna tion of war, but what was it really about? Te song begins with Tweedy hypnotical ly strumming an A chord and singing: It’s a war on war It’s a war on war It’s a war on war Tere’s a war on Seems pretty clear that this is a song about war, right? But a few stanzas later, Tweedy sings: Just watching the miles fying by You are not my typewriter But you could be my demon Moving forward through the faming doors At that point it seems like Tweedy might be singing about a diferent type of war altogether. But listening to the song in 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and amid the War on Terror, it was hard to hear it as anything but an antiwar anthem. On Wilco’s most recent album, 2019’s Ode to Joy, Tweedy makes oblique references to politics, like dropping the charged phrase “thoughts and prayers” into the song “White Wooden Cross.”

Living in a country as divided as we are now, I wondered if Tweedy ever toyed with writing a song that carries a blunt po litical message. I mentioned a Neil Young song from August 2020 called “Lookin’ for a Leader” that is over-the-top in how direct it is (full disclosure: I currently play drums in a Neil Young cover band called

It’s Time to Talk Politics

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 136 the Cinnamon Boys). In that song, Young sings:Lookin’ for a leader To bring our country home Reunite the red, white, and blue Before it turns to stone Lookin’ for somebody Young enough to take it on Clean up the corruption And make the country strong Sure, it’s cringeworthy, but you can’t accuse Young of sitting around and do ing nothing during an attempted fascist takeover of the United States. But is it efective?“Idon’t know if I have a whole lot of faith in that type of messaging in a song, for me personally,” Tweedy said. “I think art is much more efective as a way to shift people’s perception than it is a way to shift people’s opinions. And I think that that’s much more powerful if you can change people’s perception about how the world is — if you can convince them that it doesn’t have to be this way, because they’re able to see a diferent world. Tat can do some thing much more powerful than reading something out of the headlines and telling somebody how to think about it. I mean, I’m a huge fan of a lot of music that has done just that at the same time. So it’s not like I’m against it. It’s a weird political time where I’m not sure who that’s for, and I’m not sure it’s for me. I would like to believe that it’s helping somebody move toward being on the right side of history or the things that I believe in. But I don’t fnd it to be particularly good as a song.”

In short, don’t expect Trump to get name-dropped in Tweedy’s songs any time soon.

He explains that it helps to get out of your own head by just writing in the voice of another singer. As an example, he says that, when he was writing the country-rock song “Forget the Flowers” for Wilco’s album Being Tere, he heard Johnny Cash’s voice in his head as he wrote it. When he sings it live even now, he has to consciously try not to mimic Cash’s baritone. “It really helped a lot of songs come out of me that I’m not sure would have made it through the dense neurotic thick et of self-doubt and insecurity that de fned my own self-image,” Tweedy writes of the act of pretending to be another songwriter.Earlyin the pandemic, I listened to Flying Coach, a podcast hosted by Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. At the time, sports were on hold, so the two coaches killed time by podcasting togeth er. One topic that came up frequently in their conversations was a book from 1974 called Te Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. It’s a book that, accord ing to the back-cover copy, will help “fo cus your mind to overcome nervousness, self-doubt and distractions.” Te book has gone on to sell more than 800,000 cop ies because, well, it’s about more than just

VII. Roleplaying in Songwriting Among the many songwriting cheat codes that Tweedy ofers, one particularly captured my interest: as you write, pretend you’re another songwriter. “While I agree it’s important to be truthful about what afects you in your day-to-day living,” Tweedy writes, “I’d like to ofer a solution to the stultifying feeling that our lives ar en’t worthy of songs being written about them: BE SOMEONE ELSE.”

137 tennis. In one passage, Gallwey writes about a technique he used as a tennis instructor:Imagine that I am the director of a television series. Knowing that you are an actor that plays tennis, I ask if you would like to do a bit part as a top-fight ten nis player. I assure you that you needn’t worry about hitting the ball out or into the net because the camera will only be focused on you and will not follow the ball. What I’m mainly interested in is that you adopt professional mannerisms, and that you swing your racket with supreme selfassurance. Above all, your face must express no self-doubt. You should look as if you are hitting the ball exactly where you want to. Really get into the role, hit as hard as you like and ignore where the ball is actually going. Gallwey says that, when his students pretend to be world-class tennis players, their level of play elevates. Shots that were fying out of bounds were suddenly hit with precision and grace. It obviously re minded me of Tweedy’s technique. As I sat down to write my song, with an acous tic guitar and a legal pad, I realized that I was pretending to be a songwriter too: Tweedy, of course.VIII. My Song So, after reading Tweedy’s book, I wrote a song called “Raise Roses.” It’s a threechord (A-E-B) country-tinged ditty sung by a narrator who tends to roses like they’re people. It’s not going to set the Billboard charts on fre and, if anything, it sounds like a Wilco B-side. So, yes, Tweedy’s book works. How to Write One Song reminded me of Te Inner Game of Tennis in that startedsomeoneuntilI’mNottionallyallywhosentit’smakesimagination.istwrites.tropeofwriteone?”said,fully“Here,democracy.mystery,itates.likematchingprobablyword-ladderknow,visionandWilcoanywaysway.tennis-but-it’s-not-really-about-tennisit’s-about-Tweedy’spracticalexercisesandtothinkaboutcreativitycanbeneftartist,notjustsongwriters.Tere’sasongcalled“KickingTelevision,”Ialwayslikedthattitle.Itmakestelesoundlikeabadhabit(which,youitis).AfterIreadaboutTweedy’smethod,Ithought,“Oh,hestumbledonthosewordsbyrandomverbsandnouns.”It’sDavidBlaineexplaininghowhelevButwhenanartiststripsawaythenomattertheform,it’sanactofEssentially,Tweedyissaying,youcandothistoo.”WhenItoldTweedythatI’dsuccesswrittenasongusinghisbook,he“Well,haveyoushareditwithanyForTweedy,sharingthesongyouisoneofthemostimportantpartstheprocess.“Tisisn’tquitetheoldaboutatreefallinginthewoods,”he“Idon’tthinkyoursongdoesn’texuntilyoumanifestitinsomeoneelse’sButIdothinkthatwhatasongasongishowitfeelswhensung.”TetruthisIrecordedmysonganditoftoanoldbandmateofmine,isnowapainterinNewYork.HerelikedapartinthesongwhereIintencoughedtocoverupaguitarfub.whatIwasgoingfor,butI’lltakeit.goingtokeepplayingitandplayingitIworkupthecouragetosingitforinperson.Inthemeantime,I’vewritinganothersong. ALEX SCORDELIS

John Outterbridge, Urban Man (from the Ethnic Heritage Series), 1981. Mixed media. 64 x 13 x 7 in. (162.6 x 33 x 17.8 cm). Private collection. Photo by Ed Glendinning. Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

ATE MOON TYREE DAYE

Tortured by land that ate crop, but this cabbage was the color of the Jacaranda blooming in his mother’s yard.

Ham spit on ground as he did often from years in a mill when sawdust stuck to his body like a dance foor for unearthly beings. He had mustard-stained eyes from putting his lips on too many bottles.

It was luscious & made him call out to God, which I’ve never heard him do. His luck had turned around, the soil opened up like an oiled dresser drawer.

My older cousin Ham held up a cabbage in the coming on dark like he was being born again. Like his body grew from the cabbage. I couldn’t help but see a purple orb, a purple moon. A few night crows few around & rivers lifted out of their beds.

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Te evening was muggy & I wanted to take a plunger to it. We went into the kitchen where he placed a cup in front on me & a bottle of gin. In the cup a piece of ice blue as a glacier. At dinner he put the cabbage in a pan with a little butter and onion.

Te true moon astonished hid behind one large cloud unspooling itself from the rest in the west.

John Outterbridge, Let Us Tie Down the Loose Ends, from the Containment Series, ca. 1968. Mixed media. 13 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 3/4 in. (34.3 x 36.8 x 4.4 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Zermeño. Photo by Ed Glendinning. Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Photo: Steven Probert. © Eric N. Mack. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and Morán Morán, Los Angeles.

Eric N. Mack, Performance (suit), 2019, assorted garments, thread, pins, 80 x 25 x 12 in. (203.2 x 63.5 x 30.5 cm).

Andrew Nicholls has written for comedians, stage, print, radio and television. He’s the author of Comedy Writer (2020). J.T. Price has recently completed a novel manu script about Ronald Reagan’s time as an outspoken member of the Hollywood left.Visit him at www. jt-price.com.

Gar Anthony Haywood is the Shamus and Anthony Award-winning author of 14 novels and dozens of short stories. His crime fction includes the Aaron Gunner private eye series and the Joe and Dottie Loudermilk mysteries. His most recent novel, In Tings Unseen, was published by Slant Books last December.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a Los Angeles–based jour nalist and columnist who has written about African American political, economic, and cultural issues since 1992. She is a contributing writer to Te New York Times opinion pages and Te Los Angeles Times, where she was a weekly op-ed columnist—the frst black weekly op-ed columnist in the paper’s his tory. For nine years, she was staf writer and col umnist for the LA Weekly and a regular contributor to many publications. Her essays have been wide ly anthologized and she has published two books: Black Talk, Blue Toughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista (2011) and I Heart Obama (2016). She is currently book review editor for Ms. magazine. Brian Lin is a Ph.D. student in the creative writing and literature program at USC. His work can be found at Hyphen Magazine, Lambda Literary, and Te Margins. He has participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and is a 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars fellow and a 2021 Ragdale resident. Brian is fction editor of Apogee Journal and is working on his frst books of prose.

Donald Rayfeld was born in 1942 and educat ed at Dulwich College, London, and Magdalene College Cambridge (in modern languages, chief ly Czech, Russian and French). He has spent most of his career as Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London,

Trea Almontaser is the author of the poetry collection Te Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press) selected by Harryette Mullen for the 2020 Walt Whitman Award from Te Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of awards from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright program, and more. She teaches English to immigrants and refugees in Raleigh. Treawrites.com Katherine Angel is the author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difcult to Tell (2012), Daddy Issues (2019), and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021), and teaches creative and critical writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections, River Hymns, 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal from Copper Canyon Press 2020. Forrest Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Be With. His new book, Twice Alive, is forthcoming from New Directions in May 2021. Rachel Genn works across Manchester Writing School and the School of Digital Arts. Formerly a neuroscientist, she has written two novels: Te Cure (2011) and What You Could Have Won (2020) and has contributed to Granta, 3AM, Aeon/Psyche, and Te New Statesman. She is currently working on three short volumes on the subject of longing.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, Te Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s books include Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love, a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles and serves as the program chair of Antioch’s low-residency MFA program.

Ashwini Bhat, an artist born in southern India, cur rently lives and works in the Bay Area, California. She often introduces radical but somehow familiar forms to suggest complex interplay between the landscape, the human, and the non-human.

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FEATURED ARTISTS

Alex Scordelis has written for Billy on the Street and Difcult People, and received an Emmy nom ination for his work on Triumph’s Election Special A longtime contributing editor at Paper, his writ ing has also appeared in New York, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Esquire, and Te Believer. Michael M. Weinstein has spent much of the past decade reading, writing, and reminiscing about Russia. He is currently a Helen Zell Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Michigan. You can fnd him on Twitter @transpoetics.

CONTRIBUTORS

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work is in the per manent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, TX), the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY), the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), and the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL).

143 and has been an Emeritus Professor since 2005. Among his monograph are Anton Chekhov—A Life, Stalin and his Hangmen, and a history of Georgia, Edge of Empires. He was the editor in chief of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary and has also written a number of articles on compar ative literature and other subjects. His translations of prose and poetry from Russian, Georgian, and Uzbek have appeared widely and have received nu merous awards. He was awarded the OBE in 2003 and the Georgian Order of Merit in 2016.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species, published by Ecco in 2018. Born in Busan, Republic of Korea, Yoon earned her BA in English and communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in cre ative writing at New York University, where she served as an award editor for the Washington Square Review. Her poems and translations have appeared in Te New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for Te Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is pursu ing a PhD in Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

John Outterbridge (1933–2020) was a central fgure in the art community that included Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, and David Hammons, amongst many other canonical artists in Los Angeles. Outterbridge was the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Communicative Arts Academy (1969-1975) in Compton, CA and the director of the Watts Towers Arts Center (1975-1992) in South Central Los Angeles. Outterbridge’s work has been exhibited in six of the Pacifc Standard Times 2011-12 exhibitions in Los Angeles, including in Now Dig Tis! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. It has been included in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, organized by the Tate Modern and originated at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., and West by Midwest: Geographies of Art and Kinship at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work is in the collections of Te Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.

Nancy Lupo’s work often explores the potential for ambiguity and confusion as a slow force that is at once unsettling and full of potential. Her sculptures draw attention to our presence amongst everyday objects, materials, and spaces that are often over looked, but that deeply afect our understanding of the world. Recent solo exhibitions include: Teller, Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles (2020), Scripts for the Pageant, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019), Te Square at Noon, Visual Arts Center, Austin (2019); No Country for Old Men, Antennae Space, Shanghai (2018); and Parent and Parroting, Swiss Institute, New York (2016). She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles – A Fiction, Mac, Lyon (2017) and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2016); Te Poet, Te Critic, and the Missing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016), and Taster’s Choice, MoMA PS1, New York (2014).

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In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tifany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her frst career survey exhibition "Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth" was on view at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey through May 2019, concurrently with her frst New York solo gallery exhibition at Sargent's Daughters. Red Star is currently exhibiting at MASS MoCA (Boston, MA), the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY), the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), and the Van Every Gallery at Davidson College (Davidson, NC). She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Jocelyn Art Museum (Omaha, NE) opening in January 2021, and will be included in a group show at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (St. Louis, MO) in March 2021. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She is represented by Sargent's Daughters and will have her second solo show with the gallery in April 2021.

Demián Flores has a degree in Visual Arts from the National School of Plastic Arts of the UNAM. His graphics, paintings, drawings and installations have been exhibited in a multitude of galleries, mu seums and institutions in America and Europe, such as the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2009) Museum of Modern Art (2010), Museum of Mexico City (2012–2000), Museum National Art Museum (2012), Arocena Museum (2013), and Museum of the Painters of Oaxaca (2013), among others. His work can be found in the collections of the British Museum, Chelsea College of Arts and Essex Collection of Latin American Art in England, at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Museum of Contemporary Art of the UNAM, (MUAC)., Museum of Art Contemporary and Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca., and Museum of Art of Sonora (MUSAS), among others. Celia Herrera Rodríguez (Xicana/O’dami, born in Sacramento CA) is a visual artist and educator whose practice refects an intergenerational dia logue and engagement with Xicana[x], Indigenous Mexican and North American thought, spirituality, culture, and politics. Recent projects and exhibitions include Making Ohlone Visible, a collaborative project with the Chochenyo – Ohlone community, Oakland, CA, 2018-20. ost recent conceptual set and costume design and artistic collaborations with playwright Cherríe Moraga include: Mathematics of Love, Te Nitery Teater, Stanford University and the Brava Teater; San Francisco CA, 2017. New Fire, Altar To Put Tings Right Again, Brava Teater, San Francisco, CA, 2012; and La Semilla Caminante, Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco CA, 2010. She is co-founder and co-director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Tought, Art and Social Practice, and teaches Xicana[x] Art, Teory, and Practice in Chicana[x] Studies at UCSanta Barbara. Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from Te Cooper Union, New York, NY and his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. In 2017, Mack was the recipient of the in augural BALTIC Artists’ Award selected by artist Lorna Simpson and completed the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva Island, Florida, FL and an artist-in-residency at Delfna Foundation in London, UK. Institutional solo exhibitions in clude Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); the BALTIC Artists’ Award 2017, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); and Eric Mack: Vogue Fabrics, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Bufalo, NY (2017). Major group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Ungestalt, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2017); In the Abstract, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts, MA (2017); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, MO (2017); Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2016) and Greater New York 2015, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2015).

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