Quarterly Journal, no. 23: Imitation Issue by lareviewofbooks

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Phantom Islands Dirk Liesemer Translated by Peter Lewis Liesemer tells the stories of thirty fantastical islands. He recreates their fabled landscapes, the voyages that attempted to verify their existence, and, ultimately, the moment when their existence was ﬁnally disproven. Spanning oceans and centuries, these curious tales are a chronicle of human lust for discovery and wealth.

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: TOM LUTZ EXECUTIVE EDITOR: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: MEDAYA OCHER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: SARA DAVIS, SARAH LABRIE, ELIZABETH METZGER, ERIKA RECORDON, MELISSA SELEY, CALLIE SISKEL, IRENE YOON ART DIRECTOR: PERWANA NAZIF DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING GRAPHIC DESIGNER: TOM COMITTA ART CONTRIBUTORS: MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI, CAROLINA CAYCEDO, SIMONE FORTI, MARCELO GOMES, KELLY INFIELD, FRIEDL KUBELKA, RALPH LEMON, OKWUI OKPOKWASILI PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS MANAGING DIRECTOR: JESSICA KUBINEC AD SALES: BILL HARPER BOARD OF DIRECTORS: ALBERT LITEWKA (CHAIR), JODY ARMOUR, REZA ASLAN, BILL BENENSON, LEO BRAUDY, EILEEN CHENG-YIN CHOW, MATT GALSOR, ANNE GERMANACOS, TAMERLIN GODLEY, SETH GREENLAND, GERARD GUILLEMOT, DARRYL HOLTER, STEVEN LAVINE, ERIC LAX, TOM LUTZ, SUSAN MORSE, MARY SWEENEY, LYNNE THOMPSON, BARBARA VORON, MATTHEW WEINER, JON WIENER, JAMIE WOLF

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essays 9 QUEST OF THE AVATARS by Claire L. Evans 33 OUR DATA, OUR SELVES by Paul Chan 51 IMITATION REALITYCASEEXTINCTION:ANDTHEAGAINST by Donald D. Hoffman 77 BETWEEN ROADGRANDPOETRYDUMP:READINGTHEUNIVERSITYTHEANDGARBAGEONTHETRUCK by Anjum Hasan 110 SCREENS: A PROJECT ABOUT 'COMMUNITY' by Savannah Knoop 131 SWEET NOTHINGS: ON ASMR AMERICANANDINTIMACY by R. Jay Magill Jr. fiction 21 THE PAINTER by Jacob Rubin 61 THREE WAYS TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT LORRIE MOORE by Jessica Shabin 94 GRAPES by Hiromi Kawakami 118 MY TYPE by Hyatt Bass poetry 47 OCTOBER DUSK by Arthur Sze 48 EVERYONE IS HAVING AN ISLAND VACATION by Maya C. Popa 72 REGARDING THE LIFE ASSIGNMENT / EN CUANTO A LA VIDA ASIGNADA by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado 90 TWO POEMS by Jenny George 115 TWO POEMS by Dora Malech no . 23 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : IMITATION CONTENTS DO NOT PRINT THIS INFORMATION LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS SUMMER 2019 19-372

Letters from Amherst Five Narrative Letters Samuel R. Delany Five substantial letters written from 1989 to 1991 bring readers into conversation with a Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America Edited VictoriabyLindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson Demonstrates the centrality of music in communicating the complex, diverse lived experience of Indigenous North Americans Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses Joy withHarjo,Priscilla Page An original play, essays, and interviews about the roots and the reaches of contemporary Native Theater Hauthenticity Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real Tracy McMullen An analysis the rise of obsessively precise live musical reenactments in the United States at the turn of the millennium Staging Brazil Choreographies of Copoeira Ana Paula Höfling First in-depth study of the processes of legitimiza tion and globalization of capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian combat game practiced today throughout the world

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Editor,MedayaQuarterly Journal

Konnakkol Manual An Advanced Course in Solkattu David P. Nelson An advanced course in the rhythmic compositions of Karnatak (South Indian) music

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Dear ImitationReader,can be many things — flattery, scandal, practice. It is both an unusual talent and a fundamental skill. We learn quite literally by imitating our way through the world — one of the only things an infant can do is mimic facial expressions. But imitation can also make us uneasy, as many filmmakers, artists, and writers know. What if we can’t tell the difference? A perfect imitation challenges our ideas about authorship, originality and value. It can be genius, farce, or horror. This issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal explores Imitation in a variety of ways. Claire L. Evans writes about the history of the avatar and the ways we have represented ourselves in games and online. Paul Chan writes about the strange affinity between the ancient concept of the soul and our own concept of data. Donald D. Hoffman explores the counterintuitive role that imitation has played in the history of evolution. R. Jay Magill Jr. discusses the rise of ASMR and the ways in which America has long contented itself with semblances of intimacy rather than the real thing. In her short story, Jessica Shabin looks for Lorrie Moore and the perfect metaphor. In "The Painter," Jacob Rubin conjures a character named George, a well-known man who is also perhaps just a version of his father, or his sister, or himself. This issue shifts our focus away from the original and on to the copy, away from the real thing and on to the approximation.

Sol LeWitt A Life of Ideas Lary Bloom Chronicles the life and art of Sol LeWitt, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, who upended traditional practices of how art is made and marketed How to Catch a Fish New Poetry Abigail Chabitnoy New poetry addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding schools. The poet crafts a vision of Nativeness at the intersec tion of language, history, and family

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Ralph Lemon and Okwui Okpokwasili in Untitled (2008), part of the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011. Photograph by Yi-Chun Wu. © Yi-Chun Wu / The Museum of Modern Art, NY Courtesy of Artbook | D.A.P. and the Museum of Modern Art.

Okwui Okpokwasili in Untitled (2008) choreographed by Ralph Lemon, part of the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011. Photograph by Yi-Chun Wu. © Yi-Chun Wu / The Museum of Modern Art, NY Courtesy of Artbook | D.A.P. and the Museum of Modern Art.

essay

When there are balances to be re stored, Vishnu descends to Earth. Our physics can’t contain him, so he must take an incarnation: he appears to mor tals as a fish, as a lion, as a Brahmin, or riding astride a great white horse. Some times he comes in clusters: 10, 22, or in carnations without number. He comes down — in Sanskrit, ava — and crosses over — tri. In medieval Vedic literature, he is an “avatāra,” a god walking among us. But those are ancient texts, and we’re gods now too. Like Vishnu, we often visit other worlds in infinite bodies, which we also call avatars. We started doing this in 1985, influenced by yet another ancient text — one so old it can only be read with an Amiga, Apple II, or Atari 800 — called Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. Kelly Infield, untitled ink on paper #1, 2018.

QUEST OF THE AVATARS

CLAIRE L. EVANS

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The Lord sends the Stranger on a quest to master “The Eight Virtues” of Hones ty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality, and Humility, an education accomplished through consul tation with mages and bards, meditation at shrines, and the discovery of relevant artifacts across an expansive 8-bit king dom. Ultimately, the Stranger must travel through a “Stygian Abyss” to secure the “Codex of Ultimate Wisdom” and achieve Avatarhood. Demonstrations of avarice or violence result in penalties. The game is a hero’s quest into godliness. Ultima IV ushered in a new era of gaming. Its highly intentional moral uni verse suggested that computer games were no longer dressed-up, pixelated versions of established tabletop role-players like Dungeons & Dragons. Perhaps they might be an art form of their own, with an un precedented power to influence behavior. Garriott recognized how deeply games burrow themselves into players’ subcon scious minds. He felt he had an ethical re sponsibility to wield that power for good. Ultima IV was hugely successful, spawning nine sequels, a number of spinoffs, and Ultima Online, an online role-playing world with hundreds of thousands of devotees. But although it introduced the word “avatar” to a gener ation of keyboard mashers, Garriott’s use of the word was highly specific: an avatar was a player who’d leveled up to a max T.

Ultima is a series of fantasy vid eo games. In the first three, the player, known only as the Stranger, battles wiz ards and monsters in the mythical world of Sosaria. The Stranger must be willing to commit violence and thievery; must kill or be killed. The creator of Ultima, a savant named Richard Garriott, went into hiding after the release of Ultima III, re emerging after two years with his most ambitious game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. In the mid-1980s, two years was considered a preposterously long time to make a computer game — the coding shouldn’t have taken more than a few months. Gamers speculated that Garriott might have run out of ideas, might have gone mad. Garriott milked it. In inter views, he said that Ultima IV was taking so long because he’d received letters from parents about Ultima’s amoral universe, about the negative influence it made on impressionable young players. Ultima IV, he promised, would have higher goals in mind. The Stranger would have no ene mies but the self. Garriott had grown fascinated by Hinduism after watching a television series about the Dead Sea Scrolls that suggested that Jesus Christ had studied Hinduism and become “a very powerful yogi.” Composing Ultima IV, he decided to borrow the concept of avatāra, which resonated with his new game’s objective: to become a manifestation of godliness, an “Avatar of virtue.” Garriott wanted players to feel responsible for their actions, and adding moral stakes lent the primi tive graphics a kind of emotional weight. If gamers strived to achieve moral purity and righteousness in-game, he reasoned, it may actually improve them as people. “If someone spends 100 hours playing my game, then I have 100 hours of the input that makes that person what they are,” he explained to his biographer, as only a pro grammer would. Ultima IV was different from its pre decessors. The kingdom of Sosaria — habitually torn by conflict and swarming with monsters — had been replaced by a new domain called Britannia, which is ruled by a sovereign named Lord British.

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The game ran on Commodore 64 home computers scarcely more pow erful than pocket calculators, and the graphics were rudimentary, but Habitat offered a multitude of ways to interact, with very few rules, and that cocktail cre ated a strangely compelling simulation of real life. Citizens nudging their Avatars around with joysticks engaged in all the mundanities of existence — redecorat ing their apartments, shopping, reading the newspaper — as well as its dramatic highs. They waged wars, fell in love, en gaged in complex in-game politics, started religions, and even died. These “lived” experiences prompt ed an unprecedented transference of self onto the cartoon renderings. Players were unsure: were their Habitat avatars just game characters, or were they personal projections? F. Randall Farmer, one of the game’s developers, documented some an ecdotal data from a face-to-face meeting with a group of about 50 Habitat citizens in 1990: “Half of them said they thought of their Avatar as a separate being,” he wrote, while “the others said it was their self.” The distinction between these two ways of thinking about an Avatar is sub tle, but in the case of Habitat, it marks a hugeThinkshift. of it this way: say I’m sitting down to play Monopoly with a group of friends. We pull the box off the shelf. It contains a board, a couple dice, some colorful paper money, and a collection of pewter figurines. These are game pieces — our Avatars in this particular game. My choice between top hat, a Scottie dog, a thimble, or a boot confers zero advantage to me as a player. That’s because the pieces are really all the same; they only repre sent each player’s position on the board. When I pick my favorite game piece, say ing, “I’m the hat!” everyone understands, for the purposes of this Monopoly game, that whenever I roll the dice, the little pewter hat will move accordingly. Nobody believes, least of all me, that I am actually a hat, nor that my choice speaks to some inner hatness at the seat of my soul. The same holds true for many games. Playing Tetris, I don’t confuse myself for a tetromino; I know full well Super Mario isn’t me, even on a good day. Quest ing across the kingdom of Britannia in Richard Garriott’s Age of Ultima IV, solv ing riddles and righting wrongs to mold my player into his best self, I still don’t confuse myself for the figure on the screen. But beyond the simple lack of vis ible representation, games don’t always encourage the ontological leap required to see oneself in an avatar. In a traditional board game like Monopoly, a transference of self serves no purpose. But it’s not real ly a question of how we play. It’s who we playInwith.May 1990, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, the two programmers who built and maintained Habitat for LucasFilm, were invited to speak at the First International Conference on Cyber space at the University of Texas at Austin. At the time — before the Mosaic brows er made the web visible, before search engines like AltaVista or Yahoo made finding anything online even remotely practical — “cyberspace” was an emp ty concept. The word was a neologism borrowed from science fiction, coined by William Gibson in his short story “Burn ing Chrome,” and later popularized in his novel Neuromancer; in Gibson’s noir world of high-tech low lives, “cyberspace” was something you jack into, a “consensual hallucination experienced daily” by “con sole cowboys,” hackers, and “billions of legitimateGibsonoperators.”formedhis general idea of cy berspace after watching a group of teen agers play arcade games in Toronto in the late 1970s. He wasn’t conversant in com puting and famously wrote his early nov els on a typewriter. But he got the sense, watching those kids, that they wanted to go inside the machine. The idea resonated with other writers, who made quick work of turning Gibson’s vision into a robust subgenre all its own. Academics found it fascinating as well. What was digital space? Was it something visible, physical, spiritual? “Cyberspace” was catchy enough to be memorable and vague enough to be mutable. And so, in March 1990, when 50 architects, literary theorists, media critics, and computer scientists descended on UT L. EVANS

CLAIRE

los angeles review of books imum spiritual and moral achievement. That usage didn’t find much purchase out side of the weird mechanics of Ultima IV; the modern-day “avatar” traces its origins elsewhere, in Populopolis, the capital city of a very different computer game. This one was called Habitat. Habitat was a place to go, rather than a game to play — the first real attempt to build a large-scale, commercial, digital community. Players, known as “citizens,” navigated the virtual city of Populopolis in New Marin, California. With a joy stick and some basic typed commands, citizens could interact with objects, one another, and the virtual world itself. The game’s mechanics called for a new kind of relationship between a player’s home computer and the centralized, mainframe computer serving as the game’s host: every citizen dialed into the same host comput er, which held the structure of the shared virtual environment, what game design ers call a “world model.” And it was a big world.Hundreds, even thousands, of citi zens could experience Habitat at once, manipulating some 200 discrete classes of objects. Every citizen was given an apart ment, or a “Turf,” which they could dec orate with objects familiar from the real world — doors, garbage cans, books — as well as magic wands, teleportation booths, and a gender-switching device called the Change-O-Matic. Each citizen was also given an “Avatar.” These were not para gons of virtue, as with Garriott’s Age of Ultima Avatars. They looked like board walk caricatures: dot eyes, wacky hairdos, comic-book speech bubbles floating over interchangeable heads. An internal 1987 LucasFilm promo video announced that Habitat, which “might become the first game to have 10,000 online players,” would “connect people from all over the country into a single, imaginary, cartoon reality.” The first manual sent to beta tes ters proposed a tenuous historical link between the noble Ultima Avatars of yore and the goofy pixel pals of Populopolis: The early Avatars were adventurers like no other … But as the years passed, Avatars changed. The spirit of adventuring died away, and we became more and more content to do nothing … You see, the Avatars, when left to themselves, have become basical ly lazy creatures that would only be too happy to sit or sleep all day and night, lounging in their hot tubs, reading magazines or books, or chatting with friends, but never getting out to see the world because it would take too much effort.

Habitat’s cartoon world ran on the inexpensive, consumer-level Commodore 64, a computer that even Morningstar and Farmer acknowledged was “ludicrous,” “vicious,” and basically “a toy,” connected to a central game server by a 300-baud serial telephone connection. Their “virtu al reality” didn’t run on top-of-the-line machines, but Habitat’s 8-bit world was more immersive than anything being dreamed up in high-tech VR labs. How else could they explain the fact that one player, a Greek Orthodox priest in real life, had opened up a church inside the game, The Order of the Holy Walnut? Or that another player had willingly taken on a job as the sheriff of Populopolis? That their users logged countless hours, despite the cost? They could only draw one con clusion, which they called their prima ry principle. Like Soylent Green, virtual reality is made of people. “A multi-user environment is central to the idea of cy berspace,” they argued: This stems from the fact that what (in our opinion) people seek in such a system is richness, com plexity and depth. Nobody knows how to produce an automaton that even approaches the com plexity of a real human being, let alone a society. Our approach, then, is not even to attempt this, but instead to use the computa tional medium to augment the communications channels be tween real people. We’re a long way from program ming virtual characters or virtual worlds that can interact with players with any thing near the unpredictability, candor, or strangeness of other actual human beings, they argued, so why even bother? Habitat proved that, given the right circumstanc es, human connection colors the picture so convincingly that it can transmute even the humblest hunk of silicon into a city populated by reflections of each play er’s truest selves. The intense bond that www.nupress.northwestern.edu

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los angeles review of books 16 Austin to debate and share ideas about cyberspace, opinions were as divided as they were colorful. The theorist Marcos Novak explained that navigating cyber space “is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream.” The conference organizer, Michael Benedikt, an architecture profes sor at UT Austin, reveled in its non-ma terial qualities, noting that “many of the axioms of topology and geometry […] can be violated or reinvented, as can many of the laws of physics.” But the pioneer ing Virtual Reality artist Nicole Stenger might have put it best. “Cyberspace,” she wrote, rapturous: “the dessert of humanity!” Stenger created the first immersive film, Angels, in 1989, a VR experience that ran on a high-end Silicon Graphics machine and featured polygonal angels beckoning and singing in colorful envi ronments. At the time, virtual reality was a cumbersome endeavor involving heavy head-mounted screens, dozens of com puters, and touch-sensitive gloves, but the image of a virtual reality “pilot ” with hands outstretched, reaching into an unseen ma trix of light, was core to many concep tions about the future, and indeed about the nature of cyberspace itself. Habitat’s Morningstar and Farmer were skeptical. “The almost mystical euphoria that cur rently seems to surround all this hard ware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced,” they wrote. It seemed to them a seductive distraction from the real work of homesteading cy berspace.

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19 los angeles review of books 18 Habitat citizens forged with their Avatars revealed that the reality of a digital space has nothing to do with processor speed or pixel resolution. Reality — like hell — is just other people. This was underlined by what Morningstar and Farmer called “the great debate” of Habitat, the question of whether or not Avatars should be allowed weapons. Death was possible in Popu lopolis, but impermanent. A fatal blow would only send an Avatar back to where it started, stripped of whatever object it was carrying at the time of death — closer to a setback in Chutes and Ladders than any real violence. Still, it affected how the game was perceived and played. Did death, violence, and theft have a place in Habitat, as it does in the real world? The question hinged on the ongoing debate about the nature of the Avatars. Were they people? Or were they “Pac Man-like” crit ters “destined to die a thousand deaths”? Was Habitat murder a crime? Or was it all just a game? Opinions split on this point along the exact same lines as in the de bate about Avatars: half of Habitat users believed that “murder was a crime and shouldn’t be a part of the world, while the other 50 percent said it was an important part of the fun.”

It’s not surprising that these questions were divisive. In order for the fantasy to hold together, players had to invest them selves completely in the collective world model — its virtual consensus reality. This made dying in Habitat more offen sive than dying in Pac-Man; community creates accountability, and accountability requires trust. To know and trust some one in a shared virtual environment, you must be relatively certain that their Avatar expresses a persistent selfhood. It’s one thing to die in a game — it’s part of the agreed-upon risk — but dying in a chat room is something else entirely. In Habitat, Avatars weren’t Pac-Men or Monopoly pieces. They were people.

The Habitat pilot program was shut down in 1988 and rebranded as “Club Caribe,” a virtual island nation for users of Commodore 64’s online service, Quantum Link. LucasArts then licensed the soft ware to Fujiutsu; Fujitsu Habitat launched in 1990 and enjoyed many years of pop ularity in Japan. Habitat was a predeces sor to what are now called MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games. Where Habitat failed, games like Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest — even Ultima Online, a de scendant of Richard Garriott’s Ultima games — would succeed. With the ex ception of Second Life, these MMORPGs were (and are) largely task-oriented, with risk and reward commensurate to user investment in ongoing narratives, quests, and Abattles.parallel evolution of the avatar was more explicitly social. In the textbased chat environments of the early net — Multi-User Domains and Internet Relay Chat Channels — a kind of tex tual avatarhood was developing. Though this version of the avatar was expressed via detailed third-person description, it caused similar confusions between char acter and self, as the freedom to create highly specific character descriptions in evitably became a form of self-expression, or a sublimation of latent characteristics not expressed in day-to-day life. Gender play was, of course, rampant; in one early Multi-User Domain, a text-based world called LambdaMOO, users could choose between no less than 11 genders, and of ten vacillated between genders depending on the moment. In this sense, the textual avatar was never static; rather, it was an ever-shifting reflection of identity, de sire, aspiration, and idealistic projection. In an early study of identity on IRC the Australian scholar Elizabeth Reid noted that “the chance to escape the assumed boundaries of gender, race, and age create a game of interaction in which there are few rules but those that the users create themselves.” And even if such forms of online representation weren’t complete ly accurate — someone cruising around a chat environment calling themselves SexyLady69 might well be a teenage boy — they nevertheless allowed early Internauts to plumb their identities, cre ate virtual embodiments of hidden per sonality traits and desires, and to “try on” newWithselves.faster connection speeds came visual chat rooms where users could ex press their personalities more overtly through graphic avatars, pixel-resolution representations ranging from inanimate objects to cartoonish “dollz,” animals, and abstract swizzles. In a popular mid-’90s chat environment called The Palace — in many ways an inheritor of Habitat av atar customization was something of an art form, with entire rooms devoted to the making and trading of novelty avatars, props, and accessories. The psychologist John Suler, one of the earliest academ ics to make an in-depth study of online behaviors, taxonomized Palace avatars by the personality types they expressed (narcissistic, histrionic, masochistic, and so forth) and noted that many users built collections of avatars, often numbering in the hundreds, to reflect myriad distinct aspects of their personalities. The most in timate avatar in such a collection was the “real face av,” an image of the user’s hu man face, generally only shared once users gained a certain degree of trust. During “face nites,” Palace users might “step out of their masks and out of their anonymi ty,” wanting to be as “real” as possible — a poignant experience of virtual intimacy for the users involved. As with Habitat, in the Palace, ano nymity brokered intimacy. Only after in teracting extensively from behind masks did users feel comfortable revealing their true selves to one another, and only brief ly at that: for just a moment, to cement a friendship, or for a night, in the com pany of trusted virtual friends. Today, of course, we show our faces more freely; av atars are not a significant part of online life for most people. This is both a cultural trend, normalized by the ubiquity of social media, and a consequence of the market, since one of the few ways to make mon ey from a free social platform is to turn its users into the product, selling demo graphic information and targeted ad space to advertisers. The commercialization of the web has sent us down an inexora ble path toward a culture of authentica tion. The avatar has been replaced by the Twitter handle, the Facebook profile, the Instagram account. These platforms pro vide a different kind of opportunity for performance but deny users the freedom conferred by an avatar — the freedom to be the character you want to be, to try on new identities. This particular kind of freedom disappeared when users began to migrate toward platforms that tether our real-world identities to our words and ac tionsFewonscreen.technologies have separated words from flesh so thoroughly as the internet. In the early days, bodies were a mutable concept, limited only by the imagination. But if we are to participate today, we must do so publicly, our identi

CLAIRE L. EVANS

21 los angeles review of books 20 ties tethered to our names in mandatory fun. As ever, those who do seek anonym ity often do so to exploit the precarious privacies of our digital lives to shame, troll, and slander without consequence (to say nothing of the vast morass of bots, with their manufactured-to-seem-real identities). That shift — in which pseud onymous avatars no longer liberate people to explore themselves but serve instead to obscure the identities of hateful users and facilitate a culture of unreality and uncer tainty — is the single most fundamental shift in network culture since text gave way to image. We all have “real face avs” now, but they confer very little about our true nature. Our faces have become the masks.Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, architects of the avatar, under stood this early on — that a low-resolution space with limited options for self-rep resentation can be more revealing, more true, and more profoundly immersive than one explicitly designed to feel “real.” Strong-armed by our social platforms into giving too much of ourselves away, we have responded by doubling down on the superficial — meals, whereabouts, signifi ers of class — and have lost the capacity to express our identities with any imag ination. This kind of playfulness persists in video games, albeit within commercial constraints — the average Fortnite play er has spent $84.67 on cosmetic items to personalize their characters, with the lion’s share of that money going to outfits — or through mobile avatar-creation apps like Bitmoji, which charge for extended cus tomization. Perhaps we shouldn’t be sur prised. “Cyberspace may indeed change humanity,” Morningstar and Farmer wrote, back in 1996, “but only if it begins with humanity as it really is.” MFA

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THE PAINTER JACOB RUBIN George is holding the photos of Caitlyn Jenner and Billy side by side when the sound of loafers can be heard on the stairs. Panic. Sweat dampens the hair above his ears, and he has just enough time to tuck the photograph of Caitlyn (the famous one, the cover of Vanity Fair) under the Freud book on the drafting ta ble. He turns around. Against the low ceiling of his basement studio, Laura stands at the foot of the stairs. She wears pearl earrings. In her white blouse she looks casually radiant, like someone in a box at pro tennis. “Is today the day Billy gets the treatment?” she asks, already making out the photo in his hand. He’ll never know how she can take in a room without moving her eyes. “Just might be.” Had he mentioned it Sunday night, that he was planning to paint Billy? He’d startled himself awake Kelly Infield, untitled ink on paper #2, 2018.

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Contribution to Publishing Winner of the 2018 California Book Awards’s Gold Medal for Contribution to Publishing at 4:00 a.m., the reflux so hot in his throat that he’d gone in and woken her, too, rant ing like a loon about esophageal cancer. But could he have been dumb enough to bring up Caitlyn?

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Now Laura lifts and rattles some thing: a white bottle of Zantac. “Thought we promised Dr. Nazario?” His laugh comes out like a tortured exhalation. “One hundred fifty in the morning and 300 at night.” “Strange omission for a man so con cerned about his health.” A minute later, when she is going up the stairs, she adds, “I’m off to the DMA with Joyce.” “Enjoy!” he calls back, but she’s al ready turned and closed the door. This time he’s sure to lock it. Walking down the stairs and back to the table, he gives himself to studying the photo in his hand: Billy, at his desk in Nashville; a slight wince cinches the pastor’s mouth. Maybe it’s the creeping influence of Bacon, but the note of infirmity is what recommends the photo to George. Like the pain’s sand ing away at Billy until all that’s left isn’t his face, but some space behind it that can’t be Afterdestroyed.all,itwas Billy’s strength — his sheer size — that stood out to George in Kennebunkport those years ago. The broad, wiry shoulders and Easter Island head. The light was sharp off the wa ter as the two made the circuit around Walker’s Point. What stupid shit had George asked? How come earthquakes if the Lord, et cetera? And what had Billy answered? George didn’t remember the man’s words, just his reedy voice and blue, unbothered eyes. But six months later, after celebrat ing his 40th at the Broadmoor with Don and Susie, he had the dream. He woke up at 6:00 a.m., scrabbling at his crotch, and the relief that it was dry came roaring through him so that he just made it to the toilet. A hangover as depthless and fetid as any he’d had. Thudding terrors, the girls chased each other around the California king where he lay while Laura, with an unbearably servile expression, applied the hot washcloth to his forehead. And as the blue sky outside the hotel window drained into black, and as George watched this happen, it was as if the low opinion his father had of him had come to settle in George’s own heart, like buckshot, and every mother and child on earth would rightly curse him with a viciousness that could not ever be relieved. After hangovers, dreams were always bright and accusing, but the one that night at the Broadmoor was something else. Backlit. George was stepping into the library in Kennebunkport, and there was Billy among the wind-blown cur tains, and the arch of his neck so high and strong, peach-white with little hairs. That was it. And George woke up and he knew — he knew the Word and that Christ was with him. He woke Laura up and said, You don’t have to worry, I’m nev er going to drink again, and she saw that it wasSuchtrue.is the nature of a decision, George thinks, studying that photo of Billy with that force of gratitude that can sneak up on him these days. Just last week at the Hilton in Tulsa, George tried to explain it to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs: It’s like conversion, okay? The right course is the one you’re already on, even if it takes a sudden, extraordinary turn. Standing now like a fool in his stu dio, George recalls the Zantac in his hand. He walks to the small studio kitchen and swallows two with the Fiji water Desiree stocks the fridge with. Well, if it’s so easy

Laura’s right. When on Wednesday night he came to her bedside, sweat through his nightshirt, his wife reminded him that Barrett’s rarely ever turns into cancer, even more rarely when monitored. That’s how I know you’re an artist, she said. You’re getting neuroticShe’s. right, damn it. He’s in perfect heath! And suddenly, the luck of being alive to smell cut grass for the length of a walk strikes him as a moral opportunity unlike any he’s known. He wants to stick a sunflower behind his ear. And here’s Juan, one of his favorite people in the world. “Sir, I don’t usually see you out here this time of day.”

Juan stands there with his hands fold ed on the rake. But George doesn’t want to budge from that spot. He wants to con tinue to celebrate the recovered health of Juan’s daughter. If she were here, they could play, chase each other. Braid each other’s“Youhair. know, I had a sister pass away from leukemia,” George says. “Yes, sir, it’s —” “So when I tell you that being able to assist you and your family in a time of need is a blessing to me and Laura, you’ll understand that it’s true.” Why is he shouting? “I’mvery sorry, sir,” Juan says. “I tell everyone, I tell them all what a good man you are. I tell them you’re the greatest man I’ve ever “Nowknown!”ifonly those Rangers can get to .500!” George claps Juan on the shoulder and begins to walk away. But Juan doesn’t follow baseball. “I gotta feeling Dak’s the real thing, but we’ll see this season, won’t we?” George turns toward the house be fore Juan can answer. As he walks, the lining of his stomach is burning, molten. Football, fool. Not baseball. He reach es the outside of the house. Through the sliding doors, Aaron scratches his neck and stares into the phone, held at eye level like a compact. Looking in from the out side, George has the sudden, ridiculous apprehension that it isn’t his house, that he has come as a desperate salesman to petition its owner. A drink, he decides. Fiji maybe, or Pellegrino Lime. He walks to the door leading to the kitchen and slides it open. The room is lemony, seared with disinfec tant. Calla lilies stand in a vase on the is land and George takes one. “Hi, sir.” Desiree is wiping down the island, wearing her smock with the bego nias. Mariachi blares out of the small ra dio. “Do you need something? Would you like the sandwich now?” “Oh, I’m fine. Just lookin’ for some thing cold.” “I can help you get it, sir.” He feels the smile in his ears to make sure his tone is right. “But I’m not sure what I want, Desi!” He looks in the fridge. Why does he feel like he let Billy down? Really, that’s what it is. He doesn’t mean about the runt

JACOB RUBIN to make a decision, hot shit, which will it be? Caitlyn or Billy? With some determination, George walks back to the drafting table, retrieves the Vanity Fair from under the Freud book, and clips it to the stand. He’s stared at it alongside Billy’s all summer, so long they’ve started to look alike. Nuts. You go out and poll 100 people, 100 will say no resemblance whatsoever, unless the poll included him. Something in their eyes. Saying — Georgewhat?grabs tubes of paint from the wide shallow drawer. Squeezes the paint onto the palette. Enough pussyfoot ing. The cover of Vanity Fair has wanted something from him since he fished it out of his sourcebook back in June. With superstitious dabs, George begins mixing for skin tone. Each stroke of the brush, it’s like passing something into law, he once said to Laura, and she made that face she always did, like it was a vast and ongoing scandal that she loved him. After these months of paralysis, it’s a miracle to be at work, even to this small degree. How had he gone so long without knowing these sounds? The scraping and bristling, the light farting of the paint. But then it’s happening again: the knocking of the brush recalls to George the biker’s wheel splashing in that puddle two weeks ago on SMU Boulevard. Smart-ass with stringy black hair under a red biker’s cap, all of 20 years old, screaming about the blood of 750,000 Iraqis. Behind him, a pearshaped black kid with dyed scarlet hair. Soon George is back in the kitch en for more water, swallowing another Zantac. Christ Almighty, who cares? Been called worse by better. A minute later, George has returned to the canvas, but it’s gone. The door inside him shut. He wants to bang on the door, but it won’t open. He’ll be left out in the swampy unknown parts of himself, banging. I’m dying, he told Laura Wednesday night. Cancer, I know it. Fool! Almost called Billy, too. At four fucking a.m. A walk, he decides. Around the yard. Say hi to Juan, who always cheers him up, who says the right thing always. But breaking a routine spooks George to a de gree he can never explain, least of all to himself, and as he begins to mount the stairs, an unpleasant heat comes into his neck. Get your numbers right, he should’ve said to the kid. As Americans, we have the right to disagree, but get those numbers right. And we shouldn’t have ended the surge, you want to talk about ISIS. “Sir?” Aaron sits up in the rattan chair in the sunroom. Oakleys dangle over his broad chest. The iPhone 6 like a toy in his right“Don’thand.shit yourself, soldier.” Aaron laughs. Former southpaw for A&M, fiancée teaching kindergarten in McKinney. One day George will paint him. Today? Scrap Billy and Caitlyn al together? he thinks unhelpfully and opens the sliding doors and steps onto the cut grass.It’s mid-September, and the Texas sky is low and spacious and illuminated by a soft, balanced, otherworldly light, even now, at 11:30 a.m. At the far end of the yard, Juan plants iris and yarrow. The sight of Juan gives George a little bounce, and George waves to him. Juan waves back with his rubber gardening glove on. Al ready George feels better. He’ll walk the perimeter of the lawn, clear his mind, and wait for that third Zantac to kick in. By the time he’s done, he’ll have decided what to paint. Period. See him now, walking in his backyard in khakis and a black Under Armour shirt.

“I’m just glad to hear it, I’m just glad to hear“Thankit.” you, sir.”

Juan nods deeply. A plumber from Mexico City, now a naturalized citizen. Family man. “Third test in a row with no abnormal cells. Beatriz and I — we can’t thank you enough. For all your support.”

“Well, Rembrandt needed a stroll today, Juan.” He pats Juan firmly on the shoulder. “How’s Mary Anne, Juan?”

27 los angeles review of books 26

A jet roars overhead, out of Love Field, and George peers up in its direction with animal interest. Wasn’t always the case, but to hear the engine fade away, into nothing, fills him with a warm and spacious feeling.

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At an angle parallel to the stairs, along the opposite wall, hang the family photos. Jeb and Columba with the boys and Noelle in Miami. Prescott. Henry and Jenna at their wedding. They resemble one another to an unnerving degree, the same sickle-shaped smile, the eyes slightly too closeAttogether.thehead of the stairs, in front of the blown-up photo of the 2002 State of the Union, George turns left toward Laura’s bedroom. He closes the door and locks it. They’ve slept in separate bed rooms for years now. George lays the calla

— Jim McCue, editor (with Christopher Ricks) of The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Collected and Uncollected Poems Vol 1 In England in the Age of Shakespeare Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare’s plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. iupress.indiana.edu

los angeles review of books 28 on the bike. The war. Historians in time might come to understand what George did, or they might not, but it’s something else anyway, something deeper. As if the part of him that was a drinker, a cynic, whatever you want to call it, is still rat tling around in him somewhere. Even after a 100K with the warriors, he can feel it, like the ticking of a bike after it’s stopped.Hetried to tell 41 about it in Maine. Not knowing what to paint. The Barrett’s. But 41 had entered into some new phase of total, wrecked tenderness. It’s always that way, George thinks, with fathers and sons. As soon as you’re ready to broach the old way of understanding, they’ve passed on into some new, strange demand. I look back, 43, at all of it, 41 said to him their last night in Maine. It’s like a dream to me. It’s like all of it never happened. My time in office. The campaigns. War. I know it, George said. He was trying to think of how to state his own troubles when 41 sputtered out, I love you more than tongue could tell, and wept until his face was like a casserole of shaking Jell-O. And George, his mouth set, could do nothing but hold his father’s hand as they watched Brit Hume on the flat-screen under the mounted wooden swordfish. It was that night George put on Laura’s underwear. In recent months, their relations had somehow taken on a desperate vigor, and afterward, feeling 10 pounds lighter, George grabbed the panties among the hard coil of red flan nel sheets. I look like Jane Fonda or what? he said, but with an edge to his voice he hadn’t planned on. Laura laughed, her hair mushroomed against the headboard, that protected twinkle in her eye. He felt greased with shame and took the panties off. He want ed her to say something — but what? He grabs a can of Pellegrino Lime and closes the door of the fridge. “At ease, soldier,” he says to Desiree, and she laughs. George walks to the hallway that would lead him through the sunroom back to the studio. But already, it’s happening: the open hours have stunned him. As when out of the corner of your eye a rat has sure ly scurried over the kitchen counter, but when you turn there’s nothing to see, so a thought must have flitted across George’s mind, but when he makes to retrieve it, there’s no thought there at all. With the Pellegrino in one hand and the flower in the other, he begins to as cend the stairs. What would Robin be if she’d lived? An attorney? A librarian? Back in those days, still lawless with grief, in Odessa, Mother had dressed George in Robin’s favorite dress, the teal one with the lace collar and blue polka dots. And then she had laid him down on her bed and held him in such a hard, quaking em brace it seemed almost worth it to George that his sister had died, not for him, but for his mother, that she could feel so much, so totally.

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los angeles review of books 30 lily next to the neat stack of hardbacks on the nightstand beside the pink case for her earplugs. Sitting on the bed, he cracks open the Pellegrino Lime. “Christ!” he says aloud when he notic es the black script on the can: Budweiser. Andy must’ve left it when he and Barbara visited from New York. George lets out a laugh. Bud. Each one stupid, un-special, and cold. He’ll pour the rest out and get back to the studio. And with the matter settled, George lifts the beer and takes a gulp. His head already looser on his neck. God bless. Another. Like bright rust. Jauntiness with that deep undertow of sad. Is it like this for everyone, or only alkies? That there’s another you 10 paces away and every sip you’re him again, the other one, snickering at the stupid diora ma of your life? Now, for instance, it’s April 2004, the day after 60 Minutes II came on in the Lincoln Bedroom. The photos wait on his desk in the Oval Office. That first one of the detainee standing on that box with the black hood, his hands outstretched like Christ himself. PFC England holding the naked man on a leash. Blossom was saying, We’ll raze the fucker. Demolish it. Condy sat, gazing up at him in a way he was understanding he hated. That morning, after breakfast, George had slugged four capfuls of mint Listerine and, by the time they conferred in the Oval Office, was rounding into the hang over. Sweat along his collarbone, and his head throbbed. Sir? Blossom asked. It’s true, sometimes George hated the gig, but he was always grateful that it was him doing it and not some other shit, like that pomposity Gore. But that day he thought, I should be in Midland chasing a Mexican girl with long dark hair, or I should have long dark hair myself and she should be chasing me. Sunlight was com ing in through the South Lawn, splashing Blossom’s face such that his baby fat was soft with it, his eyes bright with calcula tion, and George thought, People think he’s a weasel, and he is, but what are you supposed to do if you’re born a weasel? Then he thought, I’m going to paint his face one day. Yes, I will capture the light in Blossom’s face: the idea was so roomy and soft that George sank into it, and he rested inside it for the remainder of his administration as if within the knowledge of Christ himself. But what good was it now? To be a painter? Unless he should have been one all along? George stands and walks to the dresser. He lifts a scalloped bottle of perfume on the dresser and sprays it in the air, walks into the spray. Not for the first time, George conjures the stations of an alternative life: gallery shows in Fort Worth. Chelsea. Critic friends with bit ten fingernails who go to The New Yorker Festival.Usually the mere recollection of this parallel biography cheers him some. But the acid is high in his throat, his heart is beating quick and heavy, and strange thoughts assail him: Has he ever known Christ, for instance? How does he know that he isn’t really Juan’s daughter or someone else entirely, someone he’s nev er met, a stranger dreaming him up right now? His feet and hands are cold, and the coldness will travel all the way to his heart, and George hurriedly takes his Samsung out of his pocket. Don’t! some voice is saying, but it’s as if he’s in a pool and someone’s crying it far over his head. It rings four times. “Hallo?”

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See George kneeling on the white carpet, digging through the dresser. With the selections in hand, he’s soon enough in her bathroom. His trousers and the Under Armour shirt puddled in the bathtub. He stands naked before the mirror, but the bra is harder than he thought. He has to clasp it in front and then turn it around. The blue cotton panties soft, the lipstick grainy. It smells sweet but tastes like wax. A Kleenex for where it’s smudged. Is this it? The thing he’s sought? In the mirror, he stares back at his tousled and thin gray hair, the empty bra, his lipstick. He wonders: When his mother squeezed him on that bed years ago, had he felt loved or merely useful? Is it freedom he sees in Caitlyn’s eyes? In Billy’s?The door is locked and George shuts his eyes. He’s not dying, that he knows. A dream, he thinks. This must be a dream.

los angeles review of books 32 “Hello, I’m trying to reach Billy Graham.”“Mr.Graham is in a nap now. Who is this,“Georgeplease?” W. Bush.” “I’m sorry, who?” “George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States. It’s urgent that I speak to “Thankhim.”you, Mr. Bush. Mr. Graham is in his nap now. What would you like to say?”He hangs up. But a minute later he calls“I’m“Hallo?”again. sorry, we got disconnected. I just wanted to tell Mr. Graham that Amer ica thanks him for his service, and we Americans love him, we truly do, and we don’t know where we’d be without him!” He hangs up again, his breath shallow. He could take a letter opener to his left eye. Call The New York Times, go on the record about 45. He stands. But he wob bles and sinks again onto the bed, off his axis. He’ll pour the rest of the Bud down the toilet, hop on the stationary. Catch Ice Road Truckers. But he knows he won’t. No, he’s deep in it now, that rippling, tenuous mood, like how it used to be on his bike, motoring across Texas, the state a blur of dirt, lunar sky, Texaco stations, perfectly red stoplights, and the glory of it all wrapped up in the knowledge that he would have to go somewhere and stop and get off the bike and see his father again. He takes a last small sip of Bud. Ready, he stands and walks to the door. It doesn’t budge when he pulls. White terror fills his body, and then a crackle of some new thing, something staticky running through his fingers, and then terror again, until he can’t tell one from the other.

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All

Desinunt ista, non pereunt — Seneca

It seems self-evident that human co operation is unparalleled not only by its scale, but also by the sheer variety of forms it takes. And how we communicate is decisive in how we work and play with one another. Communication can argu ably be characterized as a special form of cooperation. It is how we coordinate the array of information we send and receive.

OUR DATA, OUR SELVES PAUL CHAN essay illustrations by Paul Chan.

I don’t think it is controversial to say that nothing good has ever come from less communication.Sowhen Facebook and Twitter emerged in the early and mid-2000s, they appeared like a natural extension of what we already do, but on an unprecedented, global scale. Social media users began to bare themselves online, sharing their opinions and feelings, plans and prefer ences, loves and hates, in real time. Never has the world seemed so communable

PAUL CHAN sometimes feels like they know you… because in truth, they do. Personally, it has never occurred to me that my data was valuable. Generally speaking, the digital trails I leave behind are not something I think about much, if at all. Yet like everything else in the age of social media, the stakes and risks have dramatically risen. For not only is, say, your credit card information valuable, but also who you communicate with, what you buy online, what you click on, the images you post, the memes you respond to, positively or negatively, even the number of times you use a particular word in a post or comment. They have all acquired a kind of value, which is being exploited. Data collecting is, by most economic accounts, more lucrative than drilling for oil. This is why, for exam ple, Facebook is valued at over $175 billion. That our data is valued by others seems clear, but what is its value to us? It is dif ficult to picture something one cannot see or feel, so truly reckoning with this abstract and immaterial substance called “our data” can be challenging. We may feel the effects of its exploitation and abuse but might not be able to put a finger on what “it” actually is. Perhaps we need a way to conceptual ize, or picture, what our data is to us. That conceptualization should also convey the vital significance data has in our present and future concerns. This has been done be fore. Think of how labels and photographs changed the attitude toward cigarettes. The dangers of smoking were difficult to com prehend until warning labels and images of cancer-infested lungs and dying patients ravaged by emphysema were introduced to the public. A picture at its best can render the true scope of an experience. Is there a way of understanding our data that could be compelling enough to illuminate the evolving relationship be tween what we do online and who we are in real life? IMAGE I looked for that way of understanding in the past by talking with friends who are classicists. I framed it this way: “So on the one hand, our need to share who we are and what we want is a real and salient part of our lives. But this want is being industrialized and monetized beyond our control and may unduly di minish our capacity for engaging in the kind of communication that is actually enriching. And it makes me wonder if there is some analogue in the past that echoes this contemporary predicament. [Something that’s] immaterial, some thing one possesses but can be lost, and can be exploited by someone else if care is not taken.” Jim Porter at Berkeley re plied over email: The quickest answer to this has to be that thing called “soul.” [It is] what one owns entirely and no one else can, a thing, a character istic, the source of our sociality, and immaterial. It can be given or taken only in the sense of life and death. It can be mined in the sense of being taken over by a distorting force, by persuasion or power. This answer was revelatory. What we call the soul the Greeks called psyche, and how they thought about psyche is remark ably, eerily, consistent with how our data might be characterized today.

37 los angeles review of books 36 And yet, after almost two decades of exponential user growth around the world, this communability has not resulted in higher levels of individual satisfaction or fulfillment. The opposite may be the case. Mounting anecdotal and scientific evidence suggests prolonged social media use is strongly correlated with negative effects on mental and physical health, in cluding substance abuse, anxiety, depres sion, body image, and eating issues. The risk of mental health problems is exac erbated by how users measurably detract from face-to-face relationships, reducing the likelihood of meaningful activities and increasing sedentary behavior. Other studies have tried to understand the ef fects of limiting social media engagement, from just 30 minutes a day to no engage ment at all. They all suggest a statistically significant uptick in how people perceive their well-being overall. There are, of course, studies that seem to prove the opposite, minimizing and even contradicting the growing narrative about these detrimental effects, and there are no definitive answers so far. But be yond these open questions about the im pact of social media on individuals, what seems incontrovertible is the outsize role it has played in spreading misinformation, or what we now call fake news. The dam aging effects on our shared culture and politics have been profound: doubts and divisions seem to be the rule rather than the exception today as we grapple with how we recognize what is true, both on line and in real life. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the documented negative effects of social media on our health correspond to this momentous rise of misinformation (not to mention the escalating threats from troll ing, hacking, and other kinds of cyberintimidation). Social media companies by and large do not have our communicative priorities at heart. They only have their own commercial interests in mind. They are businesses after all. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and others have enabled us to connect and share in unprecedented ways, but at the price of separating us from ourselves. This is be cause social media’s core business model is not built upon our natural need and desire to communicate, but the data we generate as we do so. Platforms were created with the purpose of keeping our attention and engagement, because the more we engage, the more data they collect: about who we are, what we like or dislike, what we do, and who we do it with online, and so on.

The data is the business. Companies like Facebook collect the data extracted online and then sell it to third parties. These third parties exploit the data to tar get social media users in order to sell them a product, a service, or an idea. It is arguable that this is much ado about nothing. Selling things is how this country works, the story goes. What’s the problem?This is true, though there is now an unprecedented blurring of boundaries. Social media has effectively made it diffi cult to distinguish between different types of communication. Online, messages that are profit-driven, like advertising, resem ble those that are deliberately ideological, like state-sponsored propaganda, which in turn resemble the interactions we under stand as personal or private. Social media flattens the differences between advertis ing, propaganda, and genuine forms of exchange people partake in. It’s a vicious cycle: the data collected about us is gran ular and detailed enough for the compa nies, political groups, and nation-states who buy it to create messages that look and act like authentic communication. It

The Greeks did not have just one concept of the soul, but many. The poet Pindar (518–438 BCE), for example, says, “our bodies obey Death, the Almighty, but the image of living lives on. After the death of the body, the image of Life remains alive.”

What Pindar is describing touches on one of a few common themes — the idea that the soul is a kind of image, or what the Greeks call phantasia. The image may be that of a living person, or something more otherworldly. Whatever the case, the soul is a representation; it could even be con sidered a record of whatever body it was vitally connected to. Another common theme is that the soul has the power to survive beyond the body. Its capacities outside the body vary, but for most think ers and artists who grapple with the no tion of psyche, the soul can exist after the body perishes, like an afterimage. Homer thought this. Or rather, the worldview that Homer captures in the Iliad (around 670–640 BCE) and the Odyssey (620–600 BCE) holds this be lief, which was common enough for it to be used as a plot device in his epics. For Homer, the soul is airy and breath-like, and once it leaves the body, it has no will or feelings of its own. It is like a shadow of the person, half-conscious, helpless, and indifferent to its circumstances. Death is not the only way the soul is released. It can also escape out of the mouth or from a gapingWherewound.does a soul go? Homer be lieved it ends up in the Land of the Dead, or Aïdês. There, again, soul exists as a shadow, showing little to no emotion in the underworld, and no power of influ ence can bring it back to the upper world. Necromancy and other forms of spirit conjuring do not exist in Homer, although they do with later poets and thinkers. For Homer, the power and the glory are re served for the adventures of the living, and not the Thedeceased.Orphics, and by extension, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, held another view. The Orphics (sixth century BCE) were not the only ones to differen tiate themselves from the Homeric view of the soul, but they were the first to orga nize themselves around a set of fixed and definitive doctrines, namely the writings of Orpheus. This set the Orphics apart from other cults in antiquity. They be lieved human beings were duty-bound to free themselves from the shackles of their own bodies. And in opposition to the Homeric view, the Orphics believed that the body was anemic and weak, noth ing more than a mere shadow of what was truly essential: the soul. This is why the soul must break out of the confines of flesh and bones. This was a cyclical struggle: once the soul was free, a sim ple breath of air could send it into a new body, from which it must try to escape onceThisagain.isthe doctrine of the transmigra tion of the soul, the idea that this spiritu al essence is sheltered in many different bodies as it tries to find its way to a divine realm. Herodotus claimed the Orphics received the doctrine from Egyptians, but whatever its origins, the Orphics made it theirs by infusing the idea with poetry and practice. They declared the substance called the soul is what should be prized above all else in life. From where we stand today, it is easy to dismiss Orphic beliefs as misguided and irrational. Believing in the transmi gration of souls, or even the idea that there exists a spiritual “substance” that defies all known laws of the natural world, is on par with believing the Earth is flat and that vaccines kill children. They are not reason able by any standards of thinking. But the motivation as to why someone might want to believe those ideas can be reasonable.

What arguably led the Orphics to their particular set of beliefs is a kind of moti vation that we all reasonably share, even if it doesn’t lead us to the same beliefs. An alytic philosopher Mark Johnston calls it a “future-directed concern.” This is some thing we do as naturally as breathing: we try to understand and feel and imag ine our way into giving ourselves better chances to get by tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, for as far as our eyes and mind can bear to see. So it’s not difficult to imagine why the Orphics were tempted to believe in the existence of a soul: it satisfies a future-directed concern, namely how to ensure one’s survival into the future. Not just for a day or a week, but in Ofperpetuity.course,valuing the soul over ev erything else has attendant costs. If the soul is the most vital part of one’s life, then it makes sense to trivialize — if not altogether discard — the inessential. In the case of the Orphics, this meant earth ly existence in general. Asceticism was the prime condition of a pious Orphic life, and it was devoted to renouncing the life of the body. Rituals of purification were enacted to cleanse the soul and wash away the contaminants the body was infested with. For followers of Orpheus, caring for the “here and now” was not as essential as being “there and forever.”

The desire to transcend one’s mortal coil in the hopes of reaching a greater be yond does not seem like something only the ancients might want. It certainly res onates as one way to describe why being on social media might be attractive. One is not beholden to a body or any lot in life when going online. There is no “here and now” to shackle what one wants to say or do onTherenetworks.areother resonances. Ekstasis is the belief and practice of raising the state of feeling in a person to a point where a higher form of consciousness and vision are made manifest. It was introduced by cults like the Orphics, who worshipped the god of ecstasy, Dionysus. The rituals are what enable the state of feeling that, among other things, creates a sense of dis embodiment, of gaining a kind of freedom to act and see beyond the confines of who or where one happens to be.

Ekstasis is still a part of our daily lives. I see it practiced on every subway train I take in New York, or in any line waiting for anything. In virtually every public and pri vate space, rituals are performed that are as mannered and solemn as any cultic form of worship: the body is still, except for the fin gers moving over a glowing screen or tap ping on a keyboard; the face is largely fixed, as if hypnotized; the eyes dart to and fro from the images on the screen; the breath is steady, if a little on the shallow side. The body attenuates all of its regular functions to allow for a particular kind of somatic focus. The mind slips into a daydream-y trance to better take in the manifold sen sations being sent and received. The shab biness of the here and now recedes into the background of consciousness.

The motivation to escape the here and now is legitimate and reasonable, especial ly when our world only seems to offer ways of living that are, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short.” There are good socio-economic indicators that point to how, for many people, Hobbes’s descrip tion is more fact than theory. When life is so tough and mean, it will always seem to need something to complete it. The longing to escape the here and now brings other consequences. For the

39 los angeles review of books 38 PAUL CHAN PSYCHE

Plato’s Timaeus, however, provides the most prescient and compelling expla nation of what the soul is. Timaeus, who is considered an “astronomer,” is asked to give his testimony to a group of oth er men, including Socrates, on no less than how existence and humankind came to be. Early on in his account, Timaeus claims that what binds humankind to the world is the soul. When God the creator made the universe, it was in the shape of a perfect circle: “And in the center He put Soul.” Soul here is pure spiritual essence (elsewhere Plato describes it as divine); it is invisible, and it has no beginning or end. According to Timaeus, the creator then fashioned a distinct human soul by combining the indivisible and unchanging world-soul at the center of the universe

41 los angeles review of books 40 Orphics, denigrating the body as an un worthy vessel naturally led to the idea that the eyes, ears, and other sensory organs were not trustworthy and should also be disavowed. So how was one supposed to make sense of the world? Here the cultic aspects of a community became decisive. The Orphics promised members of their group a relationship with something more powerful and miraculous than mere life. But belonging meant outsourcing the capacity to discern what is worthy of at tention. Priestly rituals and ordinances replaced the naturally endowed senses as the means for members to orient them selves in the world. This is a dynamic that returns over and again. Social formations motivated by spir it, ideology, or plain old money try to prof it from claims made for an enigmatic and immaterial substance that supposedly has the power to extend who we are and what we do. How this substance is described may vary, but the ways in which groups try to secure a following by providing a plat form to practice and expand upon those claims are consistent then and now. Pythagoras (570–495 BCE) and the Pythagoreans are another example. Like the Orphics, the Pythagoreans claimed the soul was immortal and divine. They also believed in the transmigration of souls and maintained that all living beings are intimately related. But the most inter esting similarity lies in their social struc tures. Pythagoreans, like the Orphics, or ganized themselves into communities that regulated members into a distinct way of living. Dietary and social prohibitions were infused with a kind of communal life that maintained the soul’s unquestioned importance. Pythagoras was criticized by many of his contemporaries, but there is evidence from both modern and ancient sources that he and his followers were successful enough to hold positions of political power in what we now know as southern Italy. It was perhaps this combination of their rising political fortunes and the as cetic, countercultural quality of their life style that made them targets of criticism. It likely didn’t help matters that there were extraordinary rumors surrounding Pythagoras himself. It was said he could be in two places at once. He also claimed he could recall his past lives. He could communicate with, and educate, ani mals. He made a wild bear promise not to endanger living things (according to Porphyry, the bear kept his oath). The earliest references to Pythagoras were skeptical at best. Herodotus mentioned backhandedly that he was not the “fee blest intellectual” (or Sophist) among the Greeks. Heraclitus claimed his wisdom was nothing but clear forms of cheating and Butdeception.Pythagoras was also known for trying to understand the world in purely mathematical terms. He is remembered for attempting to find points of corre spondence between numbers and reality; he tried to bridge the numerical ratios in music, mathematics, and celestial phe nomena.Aristotle later characterized the Pythagorean belief this way: “the whole heaven is harmonia and number.” Even those of us who know little about math probably remember the Pythagorean the orem, which is still used to this day to fig ure out the relationship among the three sides of a right triangle. Pythagoras and his followers anticipated to a remarkable degree a mathematical interpretation of the world. The power of numbers to “imi tate” all things is what Pythagoras taught. Pythagoras also believed the soul was divine and distinct from the natural PAUL CHAN world and may, in fact, be fundamental ly opposed to it. Whether the soul can be correlated with numbers was an open question. Pythagoras certainly thought numbers had otherworldly properties, as did the soul. Still, there seems to be no evidence suggesting that Pythagoras en visioned the soul as consisting of numbers or that it could be imitated or be described by them. But even without this direct ev idence, there is an affinity between num bers and soul. In so far as this affinity exists, it is possible to see Pythagoras as the first thinker to consider the notion of the soul alongside a form of abstraction — namely, numbers. One could even ar gue that this third constellation of ideas that Pythagoras pioneered had the most lasting impact on the generations of phi losophers after him. Plato, Aristotle, and others would later take up this insight in their own work, expanding on this idea that the spiritual and the abstract share certain crucial qualities. There were also philosophers af ter Pythagoras who took the opposite route, imagining the soul in more con crete terms. Heraclitus (540–480 BCE), for instance, considered the soul a “living fire” — constantly evolving, always already becoming, and self-vivifying. Change for the soul was both its destiny and one true pleasure. There was no personal immor tality in the Heraclitian soul. This “living fire” is closer in spirit to what the Greeks called phusis, which roughly translates as the force that is nature, or the impersonal power that engenders life and its develop ment in our shared world. The relationship that binds the soul with the natural world became more ex plicit in Democritus (460–370 BCE). As one of the founders of Atomism, Democritus conceived all reality as being made up of the basic building blocks he called the atom. This was also the case with the soul, which he characterized unsurprisingly as made up of soul atoms. Democritus may have actually been the first thinker to deny the immortality of the soul: once the body perishes, so do the soul atoms that enlivened it. The story so far is arguably just a re hearsal for Plato (427–347 BCE) and his conception of the soul. The soul was a subject he considered in many of his dia logues, and one can trace how Plato took in ideas from earlier thinkers, and then re fashioned them to fit within his vast cor pus. Perhaps this is why his understand ing of the soul changes over time. In the Apology, he seems to accept death as either the end of a living being, or else a transi tion of the soul to a shadowy underworld (not unlike what Homer imagined). How ever, in Phaedrus, the soul is more Orphic in nature, falling from its divine origins and into the impurities of earthly exis tence by being born into a body. Echoes of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and others abound.

43 los angeles review of books 42 with the material “stuff” that furnishes all that exists. Timaeus goes on to describe how this was achieved: First He took one portion from the whole; then He took a por tion double of this; then a third portion, half as much again as the second portion, that is, three times as much as the first; the fourth portion he took was twice as much as the second; the fifth three times as much as the third; the sixth eight times as much as the first; and the seventh twen ty-seven times as much as the first. After that He went on to fill up the intervals in the series of the powers of 2 and the intervals in the series of powers of 3 in the following manner. He cut off yet further portions of the original mixture, and set them in between the portions above rehearsed, so as to place two Means in each interval, — one a Mean which exceeded its Extremes and was by them exceeded by the same pro portional part of fraction of each of the Extremes respectively. This is a bewildering and beautiful passage. It reads like an otherworld ly mathematical proof. Nowhere else in Timaeus does Plato use such numeri cal rigor, so it seems plausible that he wanted his description of the soul to be as precise and articulated as possi ble. The rhetorical density here is also noteworthy, as if Plato is insisting the weight of the discussion should also be felt. One can also hear echoes of Pythagoras. It is a cunning move by Plato to harness the power of numbers in order to create an original account of the soul. Plato grasped what came before him and made it new, and arguably, more fu ture-directed. He expressed this curious human invention called the soul not in the likeness of an image or a thing, like a shadow or fire, but in a considerably more modern manifestation: information. The quality of abstraction Pythagoras ascribes to the mystical properties of numbers has now been grafted onto the soul itself. This has the effect of making what was once thought of as pure, simple, and indivisible into something complex, and more sig nificantly, quantifiable. This understanding of the soul even tually culminates in one of Aristotle’s major works, De Anima or “On the Soul” (350 BCE). Here, the soul sheds its dog matic and theological characters altogeth er. There are no more calls for purification, nor is the world made out to be a prison. The soul is home here, perhaps for the first time, with us. The central ambition of De Anima is to render life explanatory — capable of being described, measured, and quantified. It offers a theory of knowledge rather than a theological doctrine. In stead of treatises on personal salvation, De Anima tries to study everything that the soul engenders in us: appetites, senses, memories, reason, desires. The work rep resents an attempt to understand what it means to live by virtue of these sets of attributes and how they make living pos sible in the first place. Despite Artistotle’s attempt to quan tify and categorize, there remains an element of the metaphysical. But this element has been passed on to what Aristotle calls the Mind. This Mind is the undivided and pure substance that rules over the soul and all else that makes up the world, but it does so impersonally, like gravity or other forces of nature. Under the authority of Mind, the soul is set within

PAUL CHAN a dualistic schema that Aristotle believes all living things embody — Form and Matter. He claims that the soul is what empowers the “potential” to realize the “actual” in living things. In other words, the soul functions like a scaffolding that supports and determines how matter might come together to create an enti ty that can move and think on its own, the two defining characteristics of life for Aristotle. The soul here becomes a struc turing force, capable of organizing the stuff that makes up life into something that lives on. Aristotle describes it this way: “[T]he soul is substance as form.”

It is hard to picture in one’s mind what Form looks and feels like. It sounds as abstract and immaterial as the soul. But there is a contemporary way of rep resenting Form that neatly encapsulates how Aristotle saw it. We can think of it as a framework that captures everything that is worth expressing as a semblance of what is essential and true for a living, thinking being.

It is this: This is a form.

45 los angeles review of books 44 PAUL CHAN This is a form. This is a form.

It may be instructive here to recall that in ancient Greece and other cultures, the existence of the soul was expressed as an aspect of ancestor worship. Caring for the souls of the departed, however, had less to do with the dead and more with the relationships between the living.

PAUL CHAN

Now, as then, a cult has recognizable social features. First and foremost, a cult is always looking for followers. There is also always a power imbalance between followers and the cult that is justified as necessary, even natural. Followers are asked to perform rituals and commit to rules the cult claims will offer a more direct and robust relationship with said powers or personalities. But in truth, they are being groomed to bond with the cult in ways that sow doubt and confusion in the followers’ minds, habituating them to trust the cult more than their own sens es, and by extension, their own powers to judge and reason. The tendency for cults

DEFENSE If it is worth believing that our so-called data bears similarities to Greek concepts of the soul, are there forms of care that the past can teach us? If we choose to bare ourselves in the great beyond called so cial media, can we be guided in the way we care for our data by the way that the Greeks cared for their souls?

Broadly speaking, ancestor worship en courages the cultivation of good relations with others, especially, but not exclusively, family members (they would, after all, be come caretakers of your soul after death). Robust and authentic relationships with the living strengthen the kinds of bonds that safeguard the other essentials of life, here and in the hereafter.

47 los angeles review of books 46 to socially isolate their followers from the great onrush of public life also amplifies the disorientation, which can make fol lowers feel more vulnerable, leading them to be even more dependent on the cult for guidance and direction. A non-cultic outlook may simply mean the capacity to discern between types of engagement that are authen tic and enlivening on the one hand, and those that are deadening, insofar as they are only engaging to take something from you, whether it is your attention, your senses, or your Experiencesdata.inthe world are rendered by our common senses like compositions. Our capacity to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel largely determines how able we are to discern what is worthy of our attention and what is good enough to be considered true. In other words, the sensuousness of what is perceived is also what makes it intelligible. Treating our senses as if they are instruments to be refined and sharp ened — as opposed to features borne of an inferior nature or the byproducts of an inconvenient vessel — helps us more skillfully distinguish between information that holds real value and misinformation. Our senses have been extended by an array of human endeavors. Technology, engineering, and the sciences have en abled us to see further and do more than at any time. But only one field of endeavor has historically helped us hone our com mon senses, such as they already are. This field has helped us become more vigilant of, and sensitive to, the curious alchemy that occurs when the experiential be comes intelligible, and when the intelligi ble flourishes within us to offer a view of what lies beyond what is merely felt and thought that we call meaningful. We know this field by the term Art. Aristotle surely did not conceive it quite like this. Still, it fits. Now, as then, a form is something we fill out with what matters in our lives. And the principal substance that motivates and underwrites this oper ation is every bit as valuable, vital, and im material as what was once called the soul. Today, we call this substance data.

How can this insight be applied to social media? The studies cited earlier all found that cultivating pro-social relation ships in real life helps reduce the negative effects of prolonged social media use. To be sure, genuine and lasting bonds can be created on social media, but the plat forms themselves do not bank on these bonds. Their profits are determined by the amount of data generated and collected, which means it is not the quality of en gagement that matters, but the quantity. This is why misinformation, fake news, and other attention-arresting content are tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged as a style of communicating. They are de signed as bait to motivate responses. This style of communicating encour ages people to behave online as if their own ties to the living have been severed, and to therefore assume no responsibility for the well-being of others. We call them bots and trolls today. These are online ver sions of the undead which literally feed off what the living bares, like zombies. Wisdom here may mean cultivating liv ing relations if you are online and staying clear of interacting with the undead. It may also be wise to practice a non-cultic outlook. This means rejecting ideas and social entities that vilify the body, and keeping a distance from rheto ric that delegitimizes the bodily senses as untrustworthy guides for comprehending experiences in the world. In other words, stay away from cults and the cult-minded.

Carolina Caycedo, installation image of To walk in the present looking forward towards the past, carrying the future on our back / Caminar por el presente mirando de frente hacia el pasado, cargando el futuro en nuestra espalda, 2018. Appleply, no voc paint, digital prints, color pencils, pushpins, hinges. 77 x 122 x 35 inches, Installation view of Rituals of Labor and Engagement. Huntington Gardens, Library, and Art collection. Courtesy of the Huntington Gardens, Library and Art collection.

OCTOBER DUSK

Photo: Krzysztof Zielinski

ARTHUR SZE

Aspen leaves and blue spruce needles dissolve in the dusk; looking through glass panes, you suddenly see ceiling lights, a Bolivian textile on a wall: when what’s behind becomes what’s in front, you wince, draw circles, and, deepening the graphite tracks on a page, enact a noose; then a sliver of moon in the sky’s a sickle; a twig fire crackles at your feet; you whistle, ache, mar, step out of a car to find bits of shattered glass on asphalt resemble the ends of dreams; as you flip bottles into a recycling bin, each glass shatters: each dream collapses into a pile of shards; as you toss the last glass into the bin, you step out of another transparent confine; and, as moonlight makes a road on water, you have no word for this moment that rides a wave stilling all waves.

There was time to be afraid and to outlive, unaccounted seconds in their coats of chance.

Somewhere in Greece by the white of it, blues so soaked they emit their own light. Admiring coastlines from lookouts on cliffs, scowling as they did when they were children and fought over who would live, who die in a fantasy kidnapping. Looking blasé in ancient temples, the locals dancing backwards in a Boomerang. I remember those summers on my father’s shoulders when the man would point to the cross on the mountain, ask if it was raining. Full days settled by wildflower and stone. Green, in a word. We gave each day the full human, and it gave us tranquil deaths, the beetle’s gem-like shell, vacant bee in the window of an ancient tram.

I was unsure anyone lived the way I did, slowly, presently, in color. Was often by myself speaking to a weed pulled from the local

EVERYONE IS HAVING AN ISLAND VACATION

At six, in the unfurnished interior. But how to insist on other senses, all their patient sanities? Half my body warm, the other, damp in clover. The dirt pulled as it dried on my knees. I was hungry, singly, and feared the mountain.

MAYA C. POPA

What’s happened in between, mislaid inside them, bookended by moments that endure in others. Every feeling, cousin to some vanished one, echoes through the halls of our aloneness.

There I am, I concede, in a red bandana placed gently in my father’s youth, a hush of blue foothills. So this is what it was like, or not unlike, to be me, a virgin in my father’s country.

imagination. For what would you forfeit the real, no one asked, before handing me the photographs.

5150

Now everyone is lined in spasms of hereness, at the gym, then exiting the movie theater.

Imitation is the cleverest form of weap onry deployed by predators and prey. Mexican milk snakes, which lack venom, sport vivid bands of red, black, and yel low that imitate the deadly Texas coral snake — a lie that shields their helpless young from raptors. The Australian ka tydid, Chlorobalius leucoviridis, imitates the alluring clicks of female cicadas, and feasts on males it seduces. In such mim icry, natural selection conscripts imitation in service of deception. It’s natural to suppose, conversely, that selection also enlists imitation in service of truth — creating a systematic match between our perceptual experiences and

DONALD D. HOFFMAN

REALITYTHEEXTINCTION:ANDCASEAGAINST

IMITATION

Morehshin Allahyari, Venus, 2015, 3D printed plastic and electronic components. 9.5 x 4.75 x 2.5 inches.

Photograph by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery. essay

The cognitive scientist Anthony Chemero adds that “the objects of our accurate per ceptions … exist in an animal-indepen dent world.” That is, the objects of our accurate perceptions are real, in the sense that they exist even if no creature per ceives them.  Why should evolution favor perceptions that are veridical? Stephen Palmer, a cog nitive scientist, explains that, “[e]volution arily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate.” The idea is that our predecessors who saw more ac curately outcompeted rivals who saw less accurately, thus raising their chance to be come our ancestors (rather than just dust) and bequeath to us their genes, which coded for more accurate perceptions. Countless generations of such competi tion are congealed in our genes, ensuring that our perceptions imitate reality — not all of reality, just what we need to survive. This logic seems compelling, but it’s flawed. Natural selection now has a pre cise formulation known as evolutionary game theory. Applying game theory to evolution means we can run simulations and prove theorems about its effects. The results are clear. Veridical perception does not assist with survival. In fact, an organ ism whose perceptions are veridical is less fit than its nonveridical twin whose perceptions are focused on what we call “fitness payoffs,” a central concept in evo lution that we’ll explore next. In short, seeing the truth will make you extinct.

55 los angeles review of books 54 the real world. I see a green pear. Does the shape and color that I experience match the true shape and color of the real pear? If I’m sober, and don’t suspect a prank, then yes, of course. I assume that my pear experience is “veridical”: it imitates prop erties of the real pear. If I close my eyes, my experience morphs to a gray field, but the pear, I presume, is still there. Most experts agree. The neuroscientist David Marr argued that perception “de livers a true description of what is there.” Robert Trivers, an evolutionary theo rist, concurs that “our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world.”

DONALD

 This conclusion is stunning, and raises a natural question: how can our senses be useful if they aren’t veridical? A metaphor might aid our intuitions. Suppose you’re playing Grand Theft Auto, and your car has a black steering wheel. As you sit in your ride and peer out the windshield, the wheel is in the lower left corner of your screen. Does this mean that a black wheel lurks inside the lower left corner of your computer (or Playstation or Xbox)? Of course not. The video interface does not show the truth — which, in this metaphor, is circuits, volts, and software. In fact, the interface expressly hides this complexity; instead, it shows icons that let you control circuits without even knowing they exist. If you had to flip bits to turn the steering wheel, you wouldn’t drive the car. That’s what evolution did: it endowed us with perceptions that are an interface, not a true depiction of an animal-inde pendent world. Spacetime is our 3-D desktop and physical objects are 3-D icons. Our perceptions of spacetime and objects hide reality, whatever it is, and provide tools to interact with reality de spite our ignorance of its nature. What we normally take to be reality is, in fact, a simplified virtual reality, shaped by natural selection to guide adaptive action; it keeps us alive long enough to raise offspring. We think that perception imitates an animalindependent world. Instead it creates a virtual reality whose details depend cru cially on the needs of the animal. This is the key idea of the “interface theory of perception,” or ITP. Why, then, can we agree about what we see? If I see a red grape on a table, chances are so can you. How so, if there is no real grape, and we just see icons in in terfaces? Isn’t it simpler to admit that there is a real grape that we both see? According to ITP, we agree because we are conspe cifics — we belong to the same species — with interfaces that are similar in format and engagement with reality, whatever reality might be. In multiplayer Grand Theft Auto, Joe in New York and Janet in Montreal can agree that Joe is leaning on a red roadster because they share a similar interface and interact with the same hid den realm of circuits and software. There’s no need to posit a real roadster that both players see. Consensus is just consensus; it’s not proof of what reality actually is. Agreement isn’t insight. ITP claims that cars are just icons. If so, then why can they hit us and kill us? Surely, they’re more than icons. Evolution shaped us with icons to keep us alive. We must take them serious ly or die with no offspring. But this gives no reason to take them literally. Suppose D. HOFFMAN

Why? Natural selection is about scor ing fitness payoffs. Think of video games in which players hunt for points, trying to reach the next level. In evolution, crea tures hunt for fitness payoffs. If you wran gle more payoffs than the competition, you’re more likely to launch offspring into the gene pool of the next generation. In video games, the points you can grab depend on your tools. With a mag ic key, you might raid a treasure chest; with a protective shield, you might brave a flamethrower. In evolution, the fitness payoffs depend on the organism and its state. For a hungry person looking to eat, eucalyptus leaves are deadly. For a hun gry koala looking to eat, those leaves offer high payoffs. For a sated koala looking to mate, they offer none. For us, air with too little or too much oxygen is fatal; only a narrow range of oxygen is just right — a Goldilocks effect common to many fitness payoffs. For a trout, sustained immersion in air is always fatal. Such examples illus trate that fitness payoffs are not indelible inscriptions in the granite of reality, but ephemeral relations between a creature and its environs. Billions of species have graced the earth; 99 percent of them, and their payoffs, have gone extinct. Natural selection has shaped our sens es to present fitness payoffs. Only if these payoffs, in turn, track the world (as, for instance, the height of a column of mer cury tracks temperature in a thermometer or tracks air pressure in a barometer) will our senses track the world, and thereby be veridical. How likely is that? Research shows the probability is zero: to track the world, payoffs must satisfy exacting equa tions. So, senses that hunt reality are like chess players that hunt pawns: they’re playing the wrong game. Our senses do not present “a marvel ously detailed and accurate view of the outside world” as Robert Trivers writes. They present payoffs. The very language of our senses — space, time, objects, shapes, colors, tastes, smells, and sounds — is simply the wrong language to describe reality; its vocabulary was not shaped to that end. (What is the right language? We don’t know, but later I’ll sketch an idea.)

Carolina Caycedo, Dammed Landscape, 2013. Dyptych, satellite photographs encapsulated in aluminum and matte plexiglass, mounted on concrete blocks. 110 x 85 x 40 cm (each) Installation view at DAAD Gallery Berlin

los angeles review of books 56 I’ve written a book, and the icon for its file is red, rectangular, and in the center of my desktop. If I carelessly drag that icon to the trashcan, I could lose the book and months of work. I should take the icon seriously. But the book is not literally red, rectangular, or in the center of my com puter.Doesn’t evolution assume that physi cal objects, such as DNA, are real? If we use evolution to prove that objects are just icons, haven’t we used evolution to dis prove evolution — a logical contradiction? Not at all. Evolution by natural se lection is now a mathematical theory: evolutionary game theory. It assumes nothing about the nature of reality. It ap plies to the evolution of creatures, but also to the evolution of songs, ideas, and sci entific theories — it is just as applicable to abstract concepts as to animate beings. This all-inclusive applicability has earned it the nickname “universal Darwinism.”

Evolutionary game theory negates our as sumption that objects, such as DNA, are real, existing even if unperceived. It reveals that these objects are just icons that we create (and destroy) as needed to guide adaptive action. Isn’t ITP old news? A rock looks sol id and dense. But since 1911, when the physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus, physicists have told us that a rock is mostly empty space, with tiny electrons darting far from atomic nu clei. Physicists have long known that our perceptions sometimes fail to imitate re ality. Indeed, but there is something new in ITP that is profoundly different from the insight of Rutherford. Suppose I ad mit that a red icon on the desktop is just an icon, not the reality. Then I pull out a magnifying glass, stare closely at the icon, see pixels, and proclaim that those pixels are the reality. I am, of course, mistaken. The pixels are in the screen, still part of the desktop interface. Similarly, tiny nu clei and electrons are in spacetime, still part of our spacetime interface. ITP says that spacetime is not objective reality and does not resemble reality, whatever real ity might be. Spacetime is simply a data format that natural selection wired into our species to hide reality and reap fitness payoffs.The claim that spacetime is not reality is heady stuff. Surely physicists disagree on the subject? In fact, many physicists agree, including Nima Arkani-Hamed, one of our leading theoretical-physicists; he argues that “spacetime is doomed” and that physics must plumb a deeper reality from which spacetime emerges. What this reality might be is unknown, but physi cists are pursuing leads that may someday reveal what reality actually is.  I don’t know what reality lies behind our spacetime interface. But I have a theory, motivated by the “hard problem” of con sciousness. The problem is this: we find many correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences, such as the taste of salt or the feel of silk. Your ex perience of color, for instance, is correlat ed with activity in a region of your brain called area V4; if we stimulate this area electrically then you will experience illu sory colors, and if a stroke damages this area then you will lose some of your nor mal color experience. We don’t know why these correlations exist. The hard problem is to devise a scientific theory that explains theseThiscorrelations.problem is old. The German polymath and philosopher Gottfried

Think of Twitter. There are millions of users, billions of tweets, and many trends. How can one possibly grasp it? Easily, if one has a graphical interface that hides complexity and guides exploration of the Twitterverse. Such tools are standard fare in the new era of big data. In like manner, spacetime and physi cal objects are simply our tool, our virtual reality, by which we navigate the infinite network of conscious agents. It’s not the best tool; evolution finds solutions that are satisficing (just good enough), not op timal. Nor is it the only tool; other agents deploy an infinite variety of different in terfaces. And it’s just a tool, not the reality, despite our penchant to reify our interface.  Our spacetime interface opens portals into the realm of conscious agents. If you gaze at your face in a mirror, you see skin, hair, and eyes. But you know, firsthand, that hidden behind your face there pul sates the vibrant world of your conscious experiences — your hopes, dreams, moods, colors, textures, shapes, flavors, aromas, rhythms, timbres, itches, and thoughts. Your visible face is a portal, albeit dim, to the invisible conscious you. Most of you is concealed by the portal, and the rest los es much in translation: a frown does not resemble sadness. When others see your face, they open a genuine, but limited, portal into your conscious world. Which is not to say that your face is conscious. It’s not. You are conscious. Your face is an icon in the interface of the viewer. When I see a dog, my portal into consciousness is dimmer. I guess there is enjoyment of a bone and excitement by a squirrel. When I see an ant, my portal is dimmer still; I have little insight into the experiences behind my icon of an ant. With a rock, my portal is opaque; it offers no obvious insight into experiences be hind the icon. My interface has, of neces sity, finite limits; when it delivers a rock, it cries uncle — similarly, when it delivers atoms and molecules. But we mistake the limits of our interface for an insight into reality: we take atoms and molecules to be fundamental, and because of that we are tempted to build an ontology based on the physical world.

For any finite agent, the entire net work of agents, in its infinity, is incom prehensible. The agent requires an inter face to tame and navigate this complexity.

To this day, science has not dispelled the mystery. Does neural activity cause conscious experiences? Some think so but have no idea how. No neural cause has been proposed for even one conscious experi ence. Precisely what neural activity causes, say, the taste of vanilla, and precisely how and why does it do so? No one knows. Are conscious experiences identical to, rather than caused by, neural activity? Some think so but again cannot give even one example. Precisely what neural activ ity is identical to the taste of vanilla? No one Whyknows.has the hard problem of con sciousness remained intractable for cen turies despite determined efforts by bril liant scientists? I think the culprit is our assumption that our perceptions reveal a reality that exists even if unperceived. We see neurons when we peer through micro scopes. We assume this means that neu rons exist even if we don’t peer. We further assume that neurons have causal powers, including the power to create conscious ness.But neurons, like all physical objects, are just icons in our interface and have no causal powers. It’s a useful fiction, when playing Grand Theft Auto, to assume that the steering wheel causes the car to turn. The fiction is compelling because we can intervene; we can spin the wheel left and right and watch the car turn as we pre dict. But it is a fiction: there is no feed back from wheel to computer. This fic tion is harmless for one who just wants to play the game. But for a programmer who wants to understand how the game really works, the fiction is not harmless. Clinging to the fiction precludes a true understanding of the game. The same is true of neurons. For ev eryday neuroscience, it is a convenient and useful fiction to assume that neurons exist and have causal powers, even when not perceived. It is harmless to speak of, say, neural activity in area V1 of visual cortex projecting to area V2 and causing changes there in neural activity. But for a research er who wants to understand conscious ness and how it’s really related to neural activity, the fiction is no longer harmless. Clinging to this fiction has made the hard problem intractable.

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The simplest agents enjoy just two ex periences and two actions. When agents interact, they create new agents, more complex and nuanced — like notes form ing melodies and symphonies. In the lim it, as ever more agents interact, they com pose new agents of infinite capacity, each savoring a limitless variety of experiences and Withinteractions.theintroduction of these infinite conscious agents, this theory borders on the spiritual. Think of it: all of the various conscious agents who have at some point affected other conscious agents and have contributed to the formation of the current symphony. As a scientist, I can say that we tread on the turf of spirituality not as tres passers but as allies, fellow students of the human condition, offering new tools. We can run simulations, prove theorems, make precise and testable predictions, and, most importantly, be wrong. That is the point of precision: to discover, precisely, what’s wrong and think about, potentially, how it may be fixed. How else shall we muster real progress on the big questions: What are we? Why are we? What is good? Why do we experience pain?

So, instead of proposing that particles in spacetime are fundamental, and some how create consciousness when they form neurons and brains, I propose the reverse: consciousness is fundamental, and it cre ates spacetime and objects. I have pub lished with collaborators a mathematical theory of consciousness, which posits that reality is a vast social network of inter acting “conscious agents,” in which each agent has a range of possible experiences, and each agent can act to influence the experiences of other agents. We call this proposal conscious realism. No object with in spacetime is itself a conscious agent; spacetime is simply a format for conscious experiences — an interface — employed by agents like us, and physical objects are just icons in that interface. However, when we interact with other conscious agents who might not use a spacetime format for their own experiences, we per ceive our interaction in the format of ob jects in spacetime.

DONALD D. HOFFMAN Leibniz understood the problem in the early 1700s. The English biologist Thomas Huxley described the problem vividly in 1869: “How it is that anything so remark able as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tis sue, is just as unaccountable as the appear ance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.”

This mistake is harmless — even use ful — for many projects in science pre cisely because they are confined to ex ploration within our spacetime interface. For much of physics and neuroscience, it’s a useful fiction to assume that phys ical objects exist and have causal powers even when unperceived. It’s a convenient shorthand to speak of a cue ball causing an eight ball to careen into a corner pock et or of neural activity in one area of the brain causing activity in another area. This fiction has fostered impressive scientific advances.Butthe mistake is fatal for ventures in science not confined to our interface. We saw this in the hard problem of con sciousness. We see it also in a classic, but now pressing, problem: can AI be come conscious? The standard answer is that unconscious circuits and software, if endowed with proper complexity and dynamics, can somehow create conscious ness. “Somehow” is a promissory note that, so far, none can pay. Agents and interfaces offer a new take on this old chestnut. Our spacetime in terface has many portals into the realm of conscious agents. We know of one technology that can open new portals: sex, which creates offspring whose bodies are portals. The question for AI becomes this: can we rejig our interface, using sil icon and software and such, to open new portals into the preexisting realm of con scious agents? It’s not a question of cre ating consciousness, but of forging new access to preexisting conscious agents. For what it’s worth, I think we can. If we suc ceed in opening new portals, it’s hard to predict what will greet us, given the in finite variety of conscious agents. Perhaps comity, perhaps chaos. We also get a new take on a famous question posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi: where is everybody? By some esti mates, intelligent life should be abundant and evident throughout our galaxy. It’s not. The search for extraterrestrial intelli gence has so far come up empty. Why? According to ITP, we aren’t searching the right place. We search out er space and assume that ETs must lurk there. But space is not reality; it’s our virtual reality, the idiosyncratic interface of our species. We search with our (met aphorical) headsets on. We see what our headsets allow, which isn’t much. That’s the point of our headset: to hide reality and give us icons in spacetime to navigate reality despite our ignorance. Where is everybody? According to conscious real ism, they’re out there. But it’s no surprise if they, like dark matter and dark energy, escape our interface. Almost everything escapes it.  Some 2,500 years ago, we let go of flat Earth. Then 400 years ago, we let go of a geocentric universe. It was hard. We burned dissenters at the stake. It really looked to us as though the Earth was the center of the universe. We took our senses too literally.Thesewere warm-ups. Now we must let go of spacetime itself. We suppose that the long sweep of spacetime, with its countless stars and planets, is the preexist ing stage for an accidental drama in which we are bit players. We think it’s faintly mad to suppose otherwise. But we’re mis taken. We are the authors of space and time; their myriad contents are our im pressive stagecraft.

DONALD D. HOFFMAN

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We, like the ancients, believe that per ception is imitation — that we see reality as it is, not virtual realities as we need. We have it backwards: natural selection has endowed us with a headset. Heretofore we haven’t seen it, because we see through it. Can we free our minds and recognize our headset for what it is? No doubt yes, thanks to advances in technology. With satellite photographs, one need be no Copernicus to recognize earth’s place in space. Soon, countless virtual worlds — for business and entertainment — will be as common, compelling, and immersive as daily life. The idea that this reality, with headset off, is somehow uniquely veridi cal, will prompt the same curious amuse ment as flat Earth. The insight of Copernicus opened, in due course, a window to modern space travel. Where will our imagination take us, once we free our minds?

Simone Forti, Sleep Walkers/Zoo Mantras, 2010. Performance at the artist’s house, Los Angeles. fiction

Here. She places the offering at their feet, all trembly and agog. Meaning, on tenterhooks. Better: tender hooks. The perfect way of putting it. A big part of this work is making the aesthetic choice. Ten der hooks — that’s good. The judges are all named Cordelia. She stares at their feet. They wear the sandals of the future. Strappy, pink, and feathered, with thick, black rubber soles. A playful exploration of power and del icacy, these sandals. They answer ques tions like: What is a sandal? In two years, you’ll find derivatives in baby sizes. The Cordelias will be in the next future by then.The Cordelias’ toes are organized by length, each one just slightly shorter than

THREE WAYS TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT LORRIE MOORE JESSICA SHABIN

A transparent deflection for his brother. But it’s nice to be asked. It was okay, she says. Not great. They pat her neck. What went wrong? they say. It wasn’t quite as good as it needed to be.Why not? The answer is: Early success in aca demic settings has made it hard (impossi ble?) to scrimp up the courage to produce something transgressive enough to be in teresting.What she says is: A matter of taste. What IS a METAPHOR, anyway? one Somethingsays. you’re too scared to say regular, the other tells him.  You know, Zadie Smith did this. She wrote a story and she told you it was a metaphor. The story is called “The Lazy River.” It ran in the December 18 & 25, 2017, issue of The New Yorker. Have you heard of it? It’s a magazine. There were kids in that story, too. It was about a family on vacation at an all-inclusive resort in Spain. The resort has a lazy river — a real body of artificial water. The lazy river is a metaphor for the way people seek oblivion to cope with the horror and stupidity of our modern times. Or maybe how the search for oblivion has propagated the horror and stupidity of our modern times. This story is not like that. For one thing, Smith sticks with it — she keeps the reader toggling between the events of a family vacation and the understanding that said events are actually about the ris ing populism of our warmed globe. This story is going to stop being a metaphor now. I’m going to explain every thing, and then we’ll move on to the real story, which is about how my fictive ci pher Masha went to Madison, Wisconsin, to think about Lorrie Moore. I know, I put Lorrie Moore in the title and then I talk about Zadie Smith. There’s no telling what station you’ll catch when you have your ear tuned to the muses. That’s what this story is about, kind of. More, um, the private dialogues with our idols which shape creative work. No, Art. Our private dialogues with idols and how they inform our Art.Ilook the way you expect me to look. My hair is uncombed and brown; I wear large soft things, glasses. My periods are irregular; I have a boyfriend named Davide. Maybe I’ll strike it rich with this story — we’ll get a premium Nespresso machine and IVF. The boys lend gravitas to a character like this. She’s not just an anxious woman with a bleak and humor ous outlook on the world. She’s a mother Plus, I’m a teacher. Those images are al ways ready in my head — funny, grubby children and the psychedelic cavern of theirTheneed.Cordelias are a conglomeration of traits that terrify me in other people. I based the description loosely on someone I met at a party last year. She worked at The New York Review of Books. Have you heard of it? It’s a magazine. Everything she said sounded cruel, even if it was just: I think the bathroom is next to the kitch en. Even if it was just: You’re welcome. Every word oozed out of her mouth like a slug. When Davide and I got home, I wailed on the couch. Why are you crying, Davide asked me. Because I teach elementary school, I shrieked.Davide is not Greg. And I didn’t real ly shriek at him. It was more like a moan.

JESSICA SHABIN the last, a perfect stairway of toes. If it helped, the woman would gladly shrink herself to the size of a booger and climb them, starting at the delicate Pinky, hero ically ascending to the Big, then starting all over on the next foot. When she got tired, she could sleep in the fuzzy can yons in between. She would be happy to do that. It would be her honor. Her priv ilege!They look at her in complete stillness. Although they are wearing sunglasses, and it is possible they are not looking at her at all. I desperately hope you like this, she says to the shag carpet. I’ve never worked harder on anything in my life. They pick up her offering and give it a shake, like a present or a tambourine. They turn it over several times in their hands. Their fingernails are painted the rich, ir idescent green of ducks’ necks and filed to surgical points. They hold it up to their noses and take long sniffs. Finally, they say: Not bad. Her heart does a huge kapow thing. Total diarrhea explosion, is what her boys would call it. Yes, maybe an explosion, she might explain, but not a diarrhea explo sion. Hearts are not filled with feces, boys. At least ours aren’t. But, the Cordelias say. It’sOh.not The Best One. Good luck! They smile and their teeth are en crusted with rubies and sapphires. No, she hallucinates that. It’s just the lights. Well, thank so much for your consi — Bye-bye, they say. The kitchen counter is coated in orange dust when she gets home. Boys? she calls, to appease some slow-dripping mothering hormone. She opens the refrigerator and looks inside with a deep soulfulness, the way a younger, stupider version of herself once looked into Greg’s eyes. The feeling is the same: empty, chilly, lacking poetry. She takes out a package of salami and pops the fatty discs into her mouth like crack ers over the orange-dusted counter. This goes on until she chokes on a chunk of black pepper. She coughs and coughs and coughs. She falls to the floor and writhes all over the Whatchulinoleum.doin’mamadoo, the boys say when they find her a few minutes later.Acting, she says. Oh, ha. Like playing dead! Just trying it on for size. How’s it fit? Nice, she says. Really good. The boys cannot be proximal to any kind of pleasure without shoving them selves into it. When they were small the sight of another child with a sweet threw them into violent hysterics. They drop to the floor and sprawl out. Feels okay, they say. Like snoozing on KraftSpeakingsingle. of, they say, we did a spec tacular recipe for dinner. First we cooked mac and cheese. Then we said: Boingo, more cheese packets. Very nice, boys. You’re so talented. One scoots up to her shoulder. His head smells like vinegar. Did you shower this morning, she says. The line between Raising Creative Children and Negligence has gotten blur ry. She feels drunk whenever she tries to look at Ohit.yeah, mamarama. Gave the body an invigorating scrub bright and early. How was your metaphor, the other says.

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But they teach you in writing workshops not to use words like moaned. You’re not supposed to use shrieked, either. But Lor rie Moore has. It’s in one of her stories from Self-Help. I made a note when I read it, but I couldn’t find the line to reproduce here.If we do ever have a child, I hope it’s a girl. I’d name her Sloane or Theadosia. She’ll play the electric guitar and know about poetry. One day I will watch her from an anonymous seat in a school au ditorium and realize she scares me, too. That's how I’ll know I’ve done my job as a mother with a bleak and humorous out look on the world.  Masha took it as a good sign that her cab driver was a reader. A nut, actually. A nut about reading. In fact, the grocery bag in the front seat was filled with all kinds of great books. He drove with one hand to prove it to her. “See?” he said, holding up a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Now there’s a successful woman from Brooklyn.” “Great pick,” Masha said, “I didn’t realize that one was out yet.” She hoped a compliment might return his hand to the wheel. He kept swerving into the bike lane.“You have to buy hardcovers if you want to get the good stuff right away,” he said, producing a coffee table history of the Beastie Boys. “They named a park after the dead one, you know?” “Adam Yauch.” “See? Writers always know things. That’s exactly it. Adam Yauch. So if you write anything good, I might read it.” He smiled reassuringly in the rear view mirror. His teeth were scraggly and gray like the fur of an old demented la dy’s teacup poodle. Or maybe not like that.Masha was trying to see things bet ter, to animate the readily observable facts about someone’s teeth with a better, more astonishing image of something totally different and yet also the very essence of teeth. That’s why, as she’d explained to the driver, she was on her way to Madison, Wisconsin, to think about Lorrie Moore. Lorrie did this better than anyone. About ears: A sea creature with the wind of her kiss trapped inside. About god: A large fortune cookie in a beard and a robe, flowing, flowing. About teeth: Gray in the grain, like old wood.Thatwas just from the first story of her second collection, Like Life, which was not even Masha’s favorite. Even so, the pages shrieked with her enthusiastic highlighting — wobbly highway lines, driving through tears on a dark interstate toward a doomed love. She was really try ing very hard. The guy hadn’t heard of Lorrie, and he didn’t think flying to a city to think about someone famous was strange. His brother was an accountant in Chicago. Greg had laughed, then expressed con cern about how late she’d been staying up recently.“Be careful,” the driver said when he dropped her off, jabbing at the airport doors with both pointer fingers. “They don’t report everything.” The security line was short and she arrived at her gate with an hour to spare. She found a seat in front of the window and watched safety-jacketed men run around with luggage carts. She took her phone out.

JESSICA SHABIN

67 los angeles review of books 66 “At the airport. Ralph Nader saw all of this coming a long time ago. Cab driver explained,” she texted Greg. “You’re already developing material,” he replied. “Have fun.” Greg worked for a company that in vented products for computer engineers — sweaters with USB ports and scented candles with USB ports and vegan leather wallets with USB ports. He designed their advertisements. She thought she probably loved him despite his website, where he described himself as design fanatic, space nerd, urban swimming enthusiast. You think it’s some kind of alchemy, he told her last night, but all you need to do is park yourself in front of the screen and tap, tap, tap. One drawback of having a modern, we’re-all-equal-here relation ship was the fresh-paint honesty. Masha longed, sometimes, to be humored. She was proud of herself for doing this weird, impulsive thing. It was a testament to her artistic commitment. Tapping only got you so far. Masha believed in roman tic notions of inspired derangement. As in, people being so inspired they became deranged. She was willing to go a little in sane. She’d been sane for a long time. It only made her tired and disappointed. So, she was excited. Her leg shook. She did hope the trip would generate ma terial, even though admitting it seemed gauche. But she was only talking to her self, after all, in the free and indirect style. She tried to think of the calm waters of Lake Monona. She tried to think of how soft and electrified Lorrie’s hair was in her author photo, like Masha’s own. It didn’t help. She looked around. No one seemed to be in a big rush to get to Madison. The boarding area was half empty and the check-in desk remained unattended. Ev erything was indifferent to the game show bonanza in her chest. She wanted time to go fast, like in the clipped directives of Lorrie’s widely imitated first collection, Self-Help (Be early to the airport. Feel restless. Stand in several lines for coffee. Give up and buy a bag of Bugles at the Hudson News. Ask yourself: What is America’s #2 finger hat? Ask yourself: Would a se rious writer think such a thing? Make eye contact with every other person at Gate 11 and wonder why they’re going to Wisconsin. Struggle to keep track of a podcast about bail reform in Michigan. Imagine winning the National Book Award. Look charming and contrite when you ask the flight attendant for the whole can. Imagine wearing a red dress while you thank your mother at the ceremony. Tear up about how the so-called justice system undermines the very fabric of democracy. Note difference between people like you, who reverberate with the possibilities of human experience, and people like Greg, who might not.)  I wrote this in the bathtub: K (affable, matter-of-fact, beard ed): I found the changing-point-of-view conceit distracting. Why not just tell the story of an obsessed woman who goes to Wisconsin to think about her idol? We can talk later about whether “thinking” is a sufficient stake for this story. N (wise, empathetic, in a cowl neck sweater): There’s a sense of deep insecuri ty, of yearning for acceptance, egomania, even — but those concerns are not real ized in the scenes we get. As in your other work, it’s unclear what, precisely, is block ing this person.

69 los angeles review of books 68 JESSICA SHABIN

“Hey, let me know if you need any recs,” he said, turning to her. “We’re prob ably into the same scene. My mom told me you’re a writer.” She only said this to people with whom she made minor transactions and would never see again. “That would be great, actually,” she said. “I don’t have much of an itinerary yet.”Maybe he’d send her to places bub bling with lowbrow images — places Lorrie had never been to. He ripped a page from a notebook and squatted next to the coffee table scrib bling things. Then he stood next to her and explained each thing — the modern taqueria, the brewery, the antiques mall, the waterfront park, the coffee shop with live music on Thursdays and Saturdays. He went into detail about what to order and look at, what times things closed and opened. He smelled floral and vaguely sa vory, like a poorly washed cutting board. She listened for what felt like a long time. Her leg started to ache, then her heart. It was a little depressing, this. This basement H (bored, writes about wars of the future): I enjoyed the first section about the Cordelias and the toes and the cheese powder. I thought maybe we were in some kind of alien universe. But when it was just the metaphor writing thing, I was like, how many times do we need to hear this Deborahstory? Treisman (breathy): Tell us about the choice to tell the story in this way. Was the changing of point of view something you had in mind when you be gan or did the writing move in that direc tion on its own? C (authoritative, clever, my friend): You know, it’s funny, the story tells us the idol here is Lorrie Moore, but I found the performative quirkiness closer to Sheila Heti.G (encouraging, gentle, clean): What is being advanced by the Greg relation ship? It’s not quite clear how that line crosses with the primary tensions about Firstwriting.Idrowned a spider crawling around the drain. The force of the water sent it jerking around in heartbreaking mod ern dance. I thought, as I watched, that Lorrie Moore might’ve coaxed it onto a napkin and set it outside a window. You get the feeling she’s kind to animals. Then I sat in the tub thinking about what Masha would do once she got to Madison. Maybe fall briefly in love with an unlikely man. But why would she do that? This story isn’t about falling in love. It’s about already being in love with someone you’ll never know. Or, with her work. No, her intelligence. I sat in the tub for hours and hours. A pile of ripped nails grew on the ledge next to my computer. I tracked wet fingerprints all across Birds of America. No answers occurred to me. The bathroom started to smell sour. I’d been sweating in a puddle for too long. So I reported the voices instead. When I got up to rinse off, I heard the water running through the pipes in the wall. A neighbor taking a shower. I waited my turn, feet lost in the cloudy runoff of dust and sweat. I was a little drunk. I thought of my mom. We were always running out of hot water in our house — no simulta neous water usage, very strict. I thought I was being considerate to the neighbor. I’m very considerate. I’m always consid ering others.  Masha had hoped for a little attic room on the isthmus, lake views from the top floor of a faded dame, a wrought iron bed choked in farm fresh linens, a creaky desk in which she might find love letters or an tique bobby pins. But there hadn’t been so many options left by the time she booked. She’d ended up in a basement in the Far East“Allneighborhood.theprivacy in the world,” her host Gloria said happily, stretching her arms out to Masha’s bounty: a futon and a television and a coffee table. Everything matched: The futon pil lows and the curtains on the small, un reachable windows — maroon taffeta, like a child’s Christmas dress; the white wick er TV stand and the baskets displayed behind its glass windows; the coffee table and the bathroom floor. “Did you make that table?” she asked Gloria.“Oh, isn’t that awesome?” she said. “My son did, Caleb. We had extra tile from the renovation. Me and his dad are trying to talk him out of art school.” Her voice skittered with pride.

The artistic son. He looked older than she’d expected. Like maybe he’d already tried a few different kinds of schools where he discovered he preferred arrang ing materials into collages than making them conduct electricity or carry water. He wasn’t unhandsome, though every thing was a little too close together on his face, like all his features had run for high ground right by his nose. “No problem,” she said. “I like your jacket.”This was a tic, some lingering defi ciency of her early childhood socialization — the compulsion to pay uncreative and insincere“Thanks,”compliments.hesaid,“Got it on sale.” He crouched in front of the wicker TV stand and pulled several notebooks from the bottom drawer.

“Yeah,” Masha said. “It really matches well.”There were various amenities — an electric kettle, a hair dryer, several slim boxes related to the television — which Gloria showed her how to use, empha sizing the important points with sound effects.“If you want to make some tea, just boop,” she said as she plugged in the ket tle. “When the light turns red, just boop,” she said as she unplugged it. After she’d finished showing Masha how to boop all of the appliances, she wentItupstairs.wasn’tvery Lorrie-like, this place, but that wasn’t the point. The point was just to be here and think. Like a holy pilgrimage. Maybe this was even good. A different lens. She could be more … lowbrow with her images. This was a dif ferent America than the one Lorrie had flourished in; no one wanted the sad and well-educated anymore. “I have never been an East Coast sophisticate and can’t say I write about them much either,” she’d once said in an interview. Silly. Even the degenerates in Lorrie’s stories were in love with Maria Callas. She was poking around the bathroom drawers, thinking about a story in which an Airbnb host named Gloria (newly di vorced) finds unexpected comfort in play ing a (gay) guest’s opera records while he’s out (stalking a lover who moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to be with his dying father) when she heard footsteps on the stairs“Sorry,”again. said the guy who appeared. “My mom told me to get my stuff before you settle in.”

On the walk over she thought of nice ways to tell him that the language of lu brication was excessive and, at times, dis turbing. But when she got to the bar he was already on stage. It was crowded and dark with many leather jackets like his own. She wondered if the squawk of bending elbows messed with the acoustics. Caleb had detached Carolina Caycedo, Dammed Landscape, 2013. Dyptych, satellite photographs encapsulated in aluminum and matte plexiglass, mounted on concrete blocks. 110 x 85 x 40 cm (each) Installation view at DAAD Gallery Berlin

los angeles review of books 70 and this young man and his coffee table and how they were into the same scene. She wanted to be having a different con versation, one rippling with the careful iro nies of daydream and the marshy ideas upon which intimate life was built (“People Like That Are the Only People Here,” 1997). It was possible that there was another truth about this trip, one she hadn’t wanted to admit even to her cab driver. It wasn’t so much about stewing in the atmosphere of a beloved idol, but something much sim pler and dumber. Something so simple and dumb only a very simple and dumb person like herself would be able to un derstand it. “I’m actually here to meet a famous writer,” she told Caleb when he’d finished about street parking at the contemporary art museum. “Lorrie Moore.” “Oh yeah,” he said. “I saw her once at the college. Is she doing a reading or something?”“Iwish. She moved to Nashville re cently. I thought it would be instructive to just be in the place she worked in, com mune with her spirit,” she said. “But now I’m realizing I just want to meet her. Be friends.”“Artists,” he said, and laughed like his mother. “We go where we’re called.” She sat in the coffee shop Caleb had rec ommended with a cappuccino and a glass of champagne and tried to be serious and celebratory at once. Here she was, being deranged! Deranged and alone at a very nice coffee shop feeling like a wet balloon. It was just like New York. A chalkboard sign above the pastry case advertised the evening event: Tonight’s Question: What is your favorite question and why? 7pm. She took out the folded pages Caleb had given her, a story he’d written recently. He was more into visual medi ums, but he was thinking about turn ing this into a graphic novel. “Her body arched and collapsed, like the sheet when you’re making the bed,” it began. We’re all trying so hard, Masha “There’sthought.a part where the woman becomes so ‘slick,’ the main character is reminded of a dream he had about kayaking,” she told Greg on the phone. She was watching the sun set over the lake at the “Yuck,”park.Greg said, “I thought the point was to read good stuff. Or the writ er’s stuff? So you can do it like her?” “This is part of it,” she said. “Meeting unlikely characters.” He was right; she had come for those things, to do it like that, but so far she’d only managed to drink five cups of cof fee and lap the university campus until it started to get dark. She looked at the sky, at the lake, at the ducks, at the bench, at her shoes, and saw only exactly what they were. No images. No astonishing images. Where are you, Lorrie, she moaned to the ducks.Her pocket buzzed. Greg again, she thought, with some redemptive encour agement. See, she told herself. You do love him. But it was Caleb. He wanted to know if she wanted to meet him for karaoke.

Oh, it’s not important, boys. I’m not mixing up a cure for Lyme disease in here. Mom? We want you to stop dimin ishing your work like that. It is important. It’s important because otherwise you’d just be crumbly on the outside and holy in theHole-y,middle.she corrects. No doughnut people! shrieks one. Well, she says. If I have anything to be proud of, it’s raising two good boys like you, who remember the things I say about doughnuts.Mom?

What’s the song he sings at the end?It’sa very long song by Guns N’ Roses called November Rain. Cool name. Guns N’ Roses, they growl and pretend to shoot each other. Why? says one. Does he sing it, clarifies the other. I think I was trying to get at the ex uberance and unselfconsciousness with which some people move through the world. It has a very long instrumental portion.Did you? says one. Get at it, the other clarifies. I’m not sure, she says. What do you think?Maybe. We’re only children. Yes. She pats them on the head. She smooshes them together and hugs them at once.We want to sing the song, they say into her Okay,armpits.shesays.

It can be our bedtime song for tonight. Can we open the windows wide so the animals can hear? The birds and the squirrels? The bears and the wolves? The snakes and the evil Cordelias? As long as you put your hearts into it. Mom? Will you sing with us? Only if you love me, she says. Just so much, they tell her. the microphone from its stand and was pacing around. He’d changed into shorts since their conversation. She sat in a booth, tucked her chin into one hand, and waited for the first notes of “Hotel California” or “Ice, Ice, Baby.” Maybe he’d dedicate a Billy Joel song to her. Or Frank Sinatra. This next one is for Masha. She’d started the day intend ing to embody the spirit of a genius and finished it hoping a milky-calved stranger sang Billy Joel in her honor at Nam’s Noodle and Karaoke Bar. If Lorrie’s spirit was ever here, Masha had chased it away with her basement smell. She wanted real Lorrie anyway, in the flesh, to drink with in some Fabulous Old New York Place, and ask about all those images, how she got her brain to work like the world’s most intelligent metaphor machine. She’d do anything Lorrie told her! She’d watch all her favorite movies, if only she knew what they were! How do you get your brain to function like the world’s most intelligent metaphor machine? she’d ask. Mine is like a bathroom wall in a college bar — sweaty and grasping for jokes about sex and capital ism, she’d say, like she’d just come up with it, and Lorrie would laugh, laugh, laugh. You’re so funny, Masha! We are just alike! Another stupid fantasy. Not productive for her tap, tap, tap. On stage, Caleb had detached the mi crophone from its stand and was tossing it from hand to hand, feeling its weight. “That’s like a six-minute instrumen tal, man!” someone called. It was possible not even Lorrie could make the next nine minutes bend to lan guage — the voice, the air piano, the air guitar, the air drums, the hips. The hips! Like flicking a cigarette. His hips flicked a thousand cigarettes into the audience. He hopped and jittered and each move ment cracked the floor a little more un til he was floating away from the rest of them on his own island of sound and ec stasy, rubbing his nose in it, howling, and Masha was moving backward, backward not to her tiny walk-up with the dusty bars on the windows, but to the big, green lawn of childhood, the splintery deck, the tacky top of the dining room table, all of the places she’d made her stages, her parents clapping and whistling. You’re such a talented girl, so smart. The big, great feeling that there was a lot of time for everything, a lot of time to be some body. How her father danced her around the living room to songs like this. How now he had diabetes and a bad heart and limped sometimes. How one day in the imaginable future he’d be dead, and she’d still know all the words to the songs he’d taught her. It was a thing to see. You couldn’t explain what an opera sounded like. You could only say: Maria Callas. Masha found herself crying. She would break up with Greg, she decided. He came off the stage sweaty and happy.“I can’t believe…” she began, but didn’t know how to finish. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve practiced that one a “Youbunch.”weren’t afraid to do the instru mental?”“Did you know Axl Rose is from Indiana?”  Mom? the boys call. We want you to know that it’s okay about how long you spend in the bathtub. We know you’re trying to do something important and we hope it works out.

73 los angeles review of books 72 JESSICA SHABIN

Seven ankles, seven in cast, seven in plaster, as they swayed by the river with three oranges under the glare of the Republic — raise the Republic!

Seven swayed over cardboard and the homeland, an insectary in the heart over the lemon of rivers. Seven coloring mud, they would color with sand, wounding themselves with melancholy, Mamá, driving litterings of leaves into the water of rivers. ¡De qué color! Which color! lemon green!

How beautiful is the homeland! ¡Qué hermosa es la patria!

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Chilled honey they coughed out when it rained, Mamá, penciling a river’s blue glare, thick molars for moon, to peck at that scorpion, with joy, when the rooster cackled. A la limón, the children moved on, to the lemon, Mamá Swaying over moon of marine monuments — over the blade of a knife. As a mammal I prized, prized above all things, shavings of snow I penciled under glare of green shadows.

The homeland is beautiful! ¡La patria es hermosa! The children moved on, every day, moved on toward the violence of signs, with their molars. The children swayed by thrones of chilled honey. We found seven, Mamá, seven drawers full of swallows, seven ribbons the children set loose with pencils, seven milk teeth, when the rooster cackled. Would you tell them, Mamá, we found drawers, drawers for marine times? Mamá would wake me before I went to school. We went to school and the ice cream parlor in the river near the forest with our swallows, Mamá.

REGARDING THE LIFE ASSIGNMENT EN CUANTO A LA VIDA ASIGNADA RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO

When Mamá cast off her white doves, it rained and it rained over galleons made of coral, traced in lemon iodine, white cloths swaying in marine struggle.

A la limón, a la limón iban los niños, Mamá. A mecerse sobre la luna sobre monumentos marinos — a mecerse, como a punta de navaja. RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO

Siete tobillos. Fueron siete en yeso para mecerse por el río con tres naranjas bajo el fulgor de la República — ¡volverla a levantar!

La miel helada tosieron cuando llovía, Mamá, figurando el río de sus tinieblas azules con muelas de luna espesa, para besar ese escorpión de su alegría, cuando cacareaba el gallo.

Como mamífero amaba, pues, los copos de nieve figurados bajo el fulgor de tiniebla verde. ¡La patria es hermosa! Cada día, iban los niños hacia la violencia de signos, con sus molares. Iban los niños, a mecerse en su trono de miel helada. Fueron siete, siete cajones de golondrinas, siete cintas sin nudos de niños que figuramos, siete dientes de leche, cuando cacareaba el gallo. Dígale, Mamá, que encontramos cajones, cajones para tiempos marinos. Mamá me levantaba para ir al colegio. Íbamos al colegio y a la heladería del río en el bosque con sus golondrinas, Mamá. Cuando Mamá levantaba sus blancas palomas, llovía. Llovía, Mamá, sobre el galeón de coral figurado por iodo limón, blancos paños en su lucha marina. ¡Qué hermosa es la patria! Fueron siete en mecerse en la patria, el delinsectariocorazón como el limón del río. Teñían de arena su lodo para herirse, Mamá, de melancolía, impulsando una hojarasca en el agua del río. ¡De qué color, verde limón!

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BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITY AND THE GARBAGE DUMP: READING POETRY ON THE GRAND TRUNK ROAD ANJUM HASAN

From left: Djédjé Djédjé-Gervais, Gesel Mason, David Thomson, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Darrell Jones in Come home

Charley Patton, BAM Harvey Theater, New York, 2004. Photograph by Andrea Mohin/The New York Times/Redux. Copyright New York Times Courtesy of Artbook | D.A.P. and the Museum of Modern Art.

Poetry springs from repetition and sur vives through the urgent human desire to say it again. The iamb or the radif must repeat to make its rhythm, rhyme is creat ed out of the affinities of sound, and if a poem stays in the memory we have prob ably read or heard it more than once. All poetry is a species of déjà vu and that in sistent recalling, that habitual echo, is how poetry becomes its own special tongue, its own secret language within language. A snatch of a poem (About suffering they were never wrong…how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just / walking dully along) instantly reminds me of another (On the

essay

I remember what I have read in transla tion (Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown / we drink it at noon in the morn ing we drink it) and wonder if this vindi cates the poem's life in another language. If a snippet of Swedish (I play Haydn after a black day, / and feel a simple warmth in my hands) or Arabic (The time of my life tells me: / “You do not belong here.” / I answer frankly. / Granted, I don’t belong) comes to me in English, then these are, in a sub stantial sense, English poems too. English hurts me into memory here, on the Grand Trunk Road, and I try say ing to the land the lines I know and see if they hold. The truckers careening in the dead of the night parp the riffs of classic Hindi film songs to take the edge off their boredom (Man doley mera tan dole…ek din bik jayenge, maati ke mol). Despite these old tunes, the motif of the highway is not repetition but extension. All it asks for is

I am teaching poetry for a few months at a university in the suburbs of Delhi, off the Grand Trunk Road, and doing this has released some secret catch in one of the mind’s trapdoors. I am ambushed every day by phrases I didn’t know I still knew, scraps of sound and shreds of meaning, the resonantly mishmashed remains of an education. My memory makes no distinc tion between the good (The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!), the bad (Lo! I have flung to the East and West / Priceless treasures torn from my breast) and the indifferent (If I should meet thee / After long years, / How should I greet thee? – / With silence and tears). Is this all I am, strung together from the iambic insistence of English verse that seems to have lodged itself permanently in my hearing (They fuck you up, your mum and dad … Alone and palely loitering … They fill you with the faults they had … And no birds sing)?Or is it English itself, sans meter even, just English, the sprung and springy rhythm of it, its synonym-smothered succulence, its alliterative allure, that has formed this addiction? (My father trav els on the late evening train / Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light / Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes).

ANJUM HASAN more — more, more, more — a need sans horizon, an endless longing, a straight ar row shot into the future. (… all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untra vell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move.) The hinterland of Haryana and Punjab to and from where these trucks race are the foodbowls of the country, a tiny percentage of its landmass but producers of more than half the wheat and rice we eat. When I try to go for a walk on the highway I see that between the shop ping malls with names like Rodeo Drive and Roman Court are miniscule villages where one might spot a person or two sitting outside brick houses on old plastic chairs, or lying under trees of banyan or tamarind, or making cakes of cowdung to use for fuel. They seem to me like lexical vestiges — the accidentally preserved in habitants of a world in which phrases like “the shade of a tree” or “children scram bling in the mud” might still make sense. These figures exist merely to form a mi nor contrast with the other, encroaching world which hurls dust at them, has eaten up most of their land, brings people from far away to live and work here, or is the setting for the creation of things — cars, conveyor belts, stainless steel sheets, pack aged food — to take to people who live far away. The local can only exist speculatively now, and language must try and capture this sense of anyplace. For this is neither nature, which offers to the poet the theme of the pristine, the undiscovered (Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air… I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely seas and the sky) nor civilization with its discontents (the city that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream … When you die in the city where everyone was young, / at the end of the dark, drunken years that kept you there). The poem about the coun try longed for while in the city won’t do (I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;) nor the poem about the city enjoyed in contrast to the country (the country is no good for us / there’s nothing / to bump into / or fall apart glassily / there’s not enough / poured concrete…) This section of the Grand Trunk Road is a busy and yet vacant something in between the country and the city, which the sociologists have perhaps named and studied but the poets not yet awoken to. One cannot write about or address to this landscape the poetry of the person, the community, the neighbourhood, the race, nor the poetry of the alienated self at odds with all this (I happen to be tired of being a man). If modernist poetry starts with the walker in the city (You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands) then what new imagination is needed to seize this almost-urban concatenation, this half-displaced village, where there are no streets and no walkers?  It is this strangeness (Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born) that forms the background against which, over the weeks, my small group of undergraduate students slow ly start to ask their probing questions. Is anything that claims to be a poem a poem? What is a bad poem? How much time should one spend reading a poem? Is it narcissistic to write poems about yourself? And, finally, Why should poetry tell the truth? I suggest to them that we try to find the answers through the experience of day the world ends / Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas, / A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn, / Vege table peddlers shout in the street), which puts me in mind of a third (The day was so bright / that even the birdcages flew open. / The breasts of lawns / heaved with joy / and the cars on the highway / sang the great song of asphalt). And so on not ad infinitum as much as ad circulum. The poet is making it new and making it old at the same time. I am thinking of this as I turn away from the window in a room overlooking the Grand Trunk Road, which stretch es across the northern width of the Indian subcontinent, traffic thundering on it without cease. One can hear it even in one’s sleep, and in a matter of days it stops being noise to become just landscape. As real as the smokestacks and pylons, sawtoothed silhouettes of factories, hemmed in remnants of green fields, the strange ly empty malls and the crowded acres of tower-block apartments, is the clamor of this expressway. But should it fade out, then the whole vista might dissolve like in a film in which it is the soundtrack that holds up the fantasy. I hear only two other elements, one shrieky, one sonorous, intrude on this monotone — the muezzin and his prayer at set intervals through the day, and at six o’ clock every dawn and ev ery evening the devotional aarti to Vishnu (Om jai jagdish harey, Swami jai jagdish harey).

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A friend is also teaching a semester of poetry at a university in the US, and he happens to be reading the same poem with his students. He tells me some of them have worked on farms and they inform the class that wheelbarrows are used to keep chickenfeed. Is that what Williams had in mind? Does knowing that detail help one to better appreciate the poem? Modernist poetry can sometimes appear to be mocking the reader’s ignorance, suggesting that unless you find out that which is not in but outside the poem, its true meaning will elude you. But what if you found out all you could about farming practices and William Carlos Williams, and still the mystery of the red wheel barrow remained? Which poems present enduring mysteries, which are enigmatic only as a way of being obscure, and which are rubbish in the guise of profundity?

ANJUM HASAN reading poems and talking about them, that we can each create a framework for ourselves which might lead to taste and judgment. They are not entirely con vinced. What interests them is the ques tion of quantifiable literary standards. They would like to determine the poem’s place in the order of things; they need aids to navigations, charts and maps, some way of reducing the messiness of this art to the clarity of a science. This is an entire ly reasonable hope for a twenty-year-old to have, especially one vulnerable to the extreme relativism of the times — one who does not necessarily want to choose, say, Imagist poetry over Instagram poetry. We start, nevertheless, not with indu bitable principles but the individual poem. With the stanza, the line, the phrase. Just the word, even. Between classes, as I pace in my apartment overlooking the Grand Trunk Road, my consciousness snags on words, and I see how a single word at the start of a line can create an echo across the ages: from Basavanna (Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, / things standing shall fall, / but the moving ever shall stay) to Matthew Arnold (Listen! You hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand) to Czeslaw Milosz (Listen to me. / Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another) to The Cascades (Lis ten to the rhythm of the falling rain). This is like Ezra Pound’s logopoeia, the many resonances and meanings a word acquires through history. The first lesson, then, is always to do with the sound of the words, not just for the pleasure of the sound but also for how sound becomes meaning and how this meaning is not quite separable from sound. How is it that words, usually very ordinary words, become, through partic ular arrangements, so memorable in an effective poem? How does every word — Pound again — become “charged with meaning”?Mystudents and I become aware of sound and we struggle with units of sound — iamb and trochee, anapaest and dactyl — because it is often difficult to hear where the emphasis falls. I realize that there is no standard way of speaking English in India and without a consensus on accents how can we hear meter? The easier rhythms and simpler rhymes of spoken word poetry, of rap and hip-hop — the immediacy of the subject matter, the colloquial vocabulary, the in-your-face style — are more to my students’ taste. It is a relief, then, to read in translation — Gilgamesh or Wang Wei, to experience English’s opaqueness softened to a trans lucency by the presence behind it of an other language even when one does not know it — and then to come into the freedom of free verse and its more cun ningly concealed, or more instinctively supplied, music.  Can it be that the question about value my students have put to me — what is a bad poem? — and, of course, its unspo ken converse, is possible to answer one way sitting by the Grand Trunk Road and another way sitting anywhere else. I try Eliot’s “Preludes” on them and they are quick to recognize the beauty in the gloom. One student notes, in a remark ably Eliotesque way, the distinction be tween the emotions in the poem and the feelings they create in us — the discrete images are not in themselves beautiful but beauty is created in our minds through the way the poet has combined the elements. And then we read the William Carlos

More interesting to me than the dis like of the poem are the reasons for this dislike, the history of subjectivity — of reading or not reading poetry, of trusting or not trusting open-endedness or met aphor or imagery — that lurks behind each response. For we already know that, conventionally, poetry makes nothing happen and so nothing is at stake except our own feelings, through which so much is at stake — imaginative vision, moral sensibility, historical sense. We discuss Auden’s essay “The Poet & the City” in which he laments the depredations of industrial society and how it has reduced most art to entertainment. The worker in the city, after a day of impersonal labor, does not treat his leisure as sacred — he just wants a break — and so art, which is a product of leisure, is no longer sacred either. And yet the dream of personal lib erty — of making something that has no utility in the capitalist sense — continues to draw us to art, which is why those with no talent for anything whatsoever often hope to be writers. And what will they turn to then? What model of art or literature? Eliot’s influential idea about the effective poet being, necessarily, a medium for the po etry of the past as much as a producer of poetry in the present, his belief in the depersonalization necessary to feel “not only the pastness of the past, but … its presence” takes for granted that the Eu ropean poet knows exactly which fur row to plough and which tree to bark up and which past to channel. In his case the source is “the mind of Europe.” But how can that be self-evident in a world in which, as the modernists were the first to recognise, all pasts are immediately accessible to us, there for the taking. If this was already true a hundred years ago when Eliot wrote “Tradition and the In dividual Talent,” it is many times truer to day. I prefer the artist KG Subramanyan’s image of the modern condition in his es say on modern art over the one Eliot im plies, the artist as “…a kind of Robinson Crusoe on an imaginary island whose beaches are piled up with cultural bric-abric from all over the world, from the past and the present, amidst which he can pot ter about.” If the artist has his bric-a-bric, the poet, like Frank O’ Hara, is trying to catch distant voices. (From near the sea…/ I call to the spirits of other lands to make fe cund my existence.) There is no way to read and write poetry except through this awareness of

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Williams’ staple “The Red Wheelbar row” (so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / be side the white / chickens.), which they hate. “It’s a mindfuck” they say. And: “Let the Americans read it.”

Left: Carolina Caycedo, installation image of Apparitions (Stills), 2018. HD Video, Color and Sound, 9’1’’.

85 it piled up on all sides around us — we are spoilt for choice but we are also bur dened by contexts. One way in which crit ics have dealt with this burden is through the practice called close reading — a focus on the nuances of the text. Close reading has been heralded and then discredited but it could acquire a new relevance in the contemporary classroom given the new problems — chronic distractedness, lack of care with language, shrinking vocab ularies, emoji-shaped imaginations. But close reading does not take into account the corporeal nature of interpretation. If all that matters is the text, then there is no unique connection between the text and these voices, these bodies, this room, this light, this air, and the location of all this off the Grand Trunk Road. It does not matter that my students are at this university, they could have been at the American one my friend is teaching at. (In fact, many are headed just there.)

ANJUM HASAN

Right: Carolina Caycedo, To walk in the present looking forward towards the past, carrying the future on our back / Caminar por el presente mirando de frente hacia el pasado, cargando el futuro en nuestra espalda, 2018, Appleply, no voc paint, digital prints, color pencils, pushpins, hinges. 77 x 122 x 35 inches. Installation view of Rituals of Labor and Engagement. Huntington Gardens, Library, and Art collection. Courtesy of the Artist, the Huntington Gardens, Library and Art collection, and Vincent Price Art Museum

I would like the poems we read to gether to move my students before we start to discuss form and language, sub ject matter and history. There is always in that first effect an inarticulate joy that can only be expressed through silence. But if being moved in this way is silencing and stilling, there is also the potentially galva nizing effect of good poetry. The language of the poem transforms our experience, and reading it should make us want to, in turn, shuffle things around for ourselves. I suggest to my students that they go for a walk in the neighbourhood but this pro duces mostly self-consciousness and em barrassment.Overthe weeks the word I hear used most often on campus to describe the ex terior is “dystopian” and the interior “priv ileged.” Students reinforce their sense of themselves through a third commonly used word — “relatable.” It is as if the plethora of contexts, not just in literature but life, has made them decide to fall back on nothing more than their own still un cultivated instincts. “Relatable” is also a political word, a disavowal of the mod ernist promise of access to everything, that exhilarating and perhaps exagger ated universalism. Robinson Crusoe no longer appears to have unfettered access to the world on his imaginary island; the possibility of one’s claim to anything is mediated now by the question of how much power one has. “Privileged” is an ad mission of guilt but also a way of evading contact or numbing curiosity; “dystopian” is a literary word, an aestheticized horror, a deliberate distancing. 

The walk proposal having failed, we decide to make a trip to the 16th century tomb of a local seer, close to the university, said to be built by the country’s last Afghan ruler, Ibrahim Lodi. Babur defeated this sultan in battle at Panipat, fifty kilometres from here, a battle that in the history books is always described as decisive for it led to the establishment of the Mughal empire. The tomb is a majestic piece of sand stone memory and the long dead seer turns out to have a present-day incarna tion — Narayan. He has driven us there, lives in the deadbeat town by the tomb, and seems to see life as a morality play. He gives us a freewheeling philosophical lec ture which takes in his origins (his father died young and he set to work early in an oil mill); how employment at the univer sity has lifted the locals out of rock bot tom poverty; how the kitabi ilm (bookish knowledge) of the upper classes is no good because it makes them think they can have

ANJUM everything and one can’t have everything, one has to choose. He describes his forays into acting in films and writing romantic verse; how the grounds of this tomb used to be a hangout for drunkards (“in every society there are drunkards”) until he and his friends got the local administration to clean it up; how he is going to retire from the world when he is 50, not necessarily the prescribed retreat into the forest — vanaprastham — but a determined de tachment from greed (The Golden God, the Self, the immortal Swan / leaves the small nest of the body, goes where He wants). I find him marvellous; my students find him in sufferable. “You will fly away,” he tells us. “I will stay. And yet in some ways I am more successful than you.” I realised that the place was strange, / that every house is a candelabra / where the lives burn each in its separate flame, / that each of our unthinking footsteps / makes its way over the Golgothas of others. In fact, this whole wide landscape is a Golgotha of others, and it is not just on the grounds of the tomb that our footsteps are unthinking. As I got to the university in late August of 2018, news reports began appearing about the results of DNA tests conduct ed on a skeleton found in the village of Rakhigarhi, a couple hours’ drive away. These tests apparently verify what has been schoolbook history for decades but increasingly contested by the Hindutva right wing — that the country’s first re corded urban civilization, which stretches back to the third millennium BCE and was strung along the towns of the Indus river valley, was most likely populated by people who were not Aryans but closer in genetic make-up to Dravidians. These lat ter people, among the ancestors of today’s south Indians, were presumably pushed south by the Aryans when they arrived several millennia later from the Central Asian Steppes. Aryans, composers of the Vedas and progenitors of North Indian Brahmins, might then, and this is the sticky bit, be seen as “invader” precursors of the later Muslims and Europeans, or at least settlers from a distinct elsewhere. You grieve for those beyond grief, / and you speak words of insight; / but learned men do not grieve / for the dead or the living.

the sites where the recent past of Delhi lies buried, the leavings of its many mil lions in the shadow of which a town’s worth of people live diseased and dreary lives.Passing by, one often sees trucks heaped with garbage going up ridges made in the garbage and on the crest of the garbage tiny figures prospecting it with swarms of vultures hovering over them. The landfill often catches fire be cause of the methane gas trapped in its layers and some nights these pockets of fire seem, with almost beautiful unearthli ness, to hover in the air against the invisi ble black of the garbage.

HASAN

Nearby too is Kurukshetra (today a midsized city), the battleground featured in the Mahabharata, the epic poem in which Krishna is depicted saying those words to the vacillating Arjuna horrified at the idea of attacking his own relatives in battle. Those warring cousins were presumably Aryans, and the Mahabharata composed in the Sanskrit which they brought with them. The epic is believed to have reached its present form in about 400 CE, which is when the Mauryan emperors were rul ing much of what passes for present-day India.The origins of the Grand Trunk Road lie in that era. The road was later extended and paved by the country’s medieval rulers and given its present name by the British by whose time it ran 2700 kilometres from Chittagong to Kabul. Today it attracts western travel writers, cyclists trying to take the measure of it, and chefs who de vise menus inspired by it. But the question for the poet is less empirical, more figurative. If landscape is metonym in poetry, what does this road describe? I imagine the stretch I usual ly travel as bracketed on one end by the university and on the other — forming a perfect contrast in its anomalousness to a place of higher learning — a massive landfill. The landfill looks like a geograph ical feature, a garbage mountain a couple of hundred feet high, but it is actually yet another historical monument — one of

The Grand Trunk Road between the university and garbage dump is punctuat ed with baroque hotels built to be hired for weddings by the rich, hotels with names that gesture at all three civilizational lay ers of the land — some Sanskrit/Hindi such as Aamantran, Lavanya, Mithas, some Persian/Urdu such as Zeenat, Firsat, Mannat and some English such as Tivoli, Victorian, Sydney. Winter draws near and the wedding season hits. These ornately tacky structures with gilded palm trees of plaster (the “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster, / Made with no loss of time, /… not, not assuredly, alabaster) come to life, glowing wonderlands floodlit in pink with the rose-bedecked horse-drawn chariots that trot out the bridegroom parties be ing welcomed by processions of turbaned men holding red parasols rimmed with long, swaying strings of gold. It is often the locals who indulge in such cinematic weddings, and stories are rife about the easy money they have made selling off their land to build this brave new world. The shocking extravagances described — the BMWs given away as dowry presents, the helicopters bought as playthings — are matched in their surprise only by the violence that feels like their opposite — accounts of guns casually pulled on the highway, female foetuses routinely abort ed, domestic violence, honour killings, suicide,Andrape.so, though “dystopia” might be the favoured word, the predominant effect is one of heartlessness. And the situation is rarely judged to be one to which a moral response is called for — in the form of a poetry that demands to be heard or a reli gion of self-examination. We are suffering from a sickness to be studied; the frame work is pathological rather than ethical. I speak to Simantini Ghosh, a neurobiolo gist at the university, who with her stu dents is researching domestic violence in the surrounding villages, and I discover a new concept — learned helplessness. Many of the women who are beaten ac cept it as the norm, and even those who have the opportunity to leave their mar riages often don’t. Prof. Ghosh is trying to understand whether this is social con ditioning or learned helplessness. When rats are subject to random shocks inside a cage, they end up being too frightened to leave the cage even when its door is opened (After eight years of marriage /…I wanted to tell them / That I was happy on Tuesday / I was unhappy on Wednesday).

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Prof. Ghosh’s help, Kausar, was abandoned by her husband, who left her for another woman, and she has a side job as a night guard at a student hostel. Kausar’s daughter used to be beaten by her husband and she walked out on him, so mother and daughter now both fend for themselves. “You can speak to Kausar,” Prof. Ghosh tells me. “She has a lot to say.” We set up a day for a chat. In class meanwhile, we read the poet whose unsparingness seems best suited to this

los angeles review of books 88 Carolina Caycedo, Apparitions (Stills), 2018 HD Video, Color and Sound, 9’1’’. Courtesy of the Artist, the Huntington Gardens, Library and Art collection, and Vincent Price Art Museum environment — Bertolt Brecht. (I ad mit it: I / Have no hope. / The blind talk of a way out. I / See.) But there are also the Polish poets to consider alongside, their close attention to suffering, their ability to “praise the mutilated world.” If, as an other poet all too familiar with suffering has said, history is about as instructive as an abattoir, then surely Poland’s great poets — Rozewicz’s tough humanism, Szymborska’s mordant wit — have shown how, without false hope or easy consola tion, to still find a way to place the human being in that history. When I see Prof. Ghosh again she apologizes: Kausar is not up to meeting me. She has been crying for days because her daughter has gone back to her abu sive husband. “He phoned her and she just went back.”  At some point in the semester, not least because of the content of the local pa pers, I start to feel that all the poetry I have read in my youth is a wasteful irrel evance, a sickening surfeit, elevated non sense (Words, words, words). The strenuous reaching after that impossible ideal of fe licity or beauty or music, the conviction that in talking to others through poetry one is contacting oneself (Not for ambition or bread /…But for the common wages / Of their most secret heart), can seem like de mented self-indulgence today. The only way out is to try and derive some meaning, establish some psychic connection, with this land and the factuality of its very long history. But the everyday violence erodes every day the possibility of our entrusting ourselves to it. And no poetry can have to it “the ring of truth” that does not in some way draw from the soil and the atmo sphere in which it is written, not a writing out of the need to prop up local culture but a writing out of a personal identi fication with what is near at hand. My students urge rap music on me as on par with the poems I share with them. I pre scribe Seamus Heaney’s essay “Crediting Poetry” — as resounding and discerning and morally complex a defence of poet ry in the 20th century as any I can think of — to which one of my students asks, But why should poetry take on the burden of truth? Heaney discusses the history of violence and poetry, poetry’s faltering in the face of violence, the power of violence to discredit poetry — and at the end of it all he still attributes to poetry that ring of truth. To ask why poetry should be the ken of absolute value, then, is to suggest that human nature might have changed fundamentally — that perhaps we have no need any more for absolute values, only functional ones. I have tried, in other classrooms, to discuss the possibilities — artistic and ethical — in the immediate and one re sponse to this tends to be the very real and very contemporary fear of facing what is too close to home, what reminds us too starkly of ourselves. If boredom can be enabling (Walter Benjamin’s “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of ex perience”) it can also be the malaise that paralyzes. It is too much of the first — in finite choice, limitless possibility — that leads to the other, points out one student. What impresses me about them all is how cheerfully unsentimental they are. They approach life with a cynical at-homeness in the times — everything’s beyond help and we don’t trust very much and I’ll just share that on social media. They do not, like Prufrock, worry about having to pre pare a face to meet the faces that they

los angeles review of books 90 meet because in some ways the mask and the face are one now. But how, then, to find the distinctiveness in ourselves that can make a poem? And having found it, how to efface ourselves through language so we can surpass our smallness and our selfishness? 

ANJUM HASAN

Poems quoted in order of aPPearance: “About suffering…” WH Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ “On the day the world ends…” Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Song on the End of the World’ (translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz) “The day was so bright…” Miroslav Holub, ‘A Dog in the Quar ry’ (translated from Czech by George Theiner)“The time is out of joint…” William Shakespeare, Hamlet “Lo! I have flung to the East…” Sarojini Naidu, ‘The Gift of India’ “If I should meet thee…” Lord Byron, ‘When We Two Parted’ “They fuck you up, your mum and dad…” Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’“Alone and palely loitering…” John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’“My father travels…” Dilip Chitre, ‘Father Returning Home’ “Black milk of daybreak…” Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue’ (translated from German by Michael Hamburger) “I play Haydn…” Tomas Trans trömer, ‘Allegro’ (translated from Swedish by Robin Fulton) “The time of my life…” Adonis, ‘The Desert; Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982 (translated from Arabic by Samuel Hazo) “All experience is an arch…” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ “Full many a flower…” Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’“Imust go down…” John Mase field, ‘Sea Fever’ “the city that dreams…” Octavio Paz, ‘I Speak of the City’ (translated from Spanish by Eliot Weinberger) “When you die …” Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Like This’ “I will arise…” WB Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree “The country is no good…” Frank O’ Hara, ‘Walking’ “I happen to be…” Pablo Neruda, ‘Walking Around’ (translated from Spanish by Donald D Walsh) “You had such a vision…” TS Eliot,“Wandering‘Preludes’ between…” Mathew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’“TheGolden God, the Self…” From The Upanishads (translated from Sanskrit by Stephen Mitchell) “I realised that the place…” Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Unknown Street’ (Translated from Spanish by WS Merwin)“You grieve for those…” From The Bhagavad-Gita (translated from Sanskrit by Barbara Stoler Miller) The “age demanded” chiefly…” Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’ “After eight years of marriage…” Mamta Kalia, ‘After Eight Years of Marriage’“Words, words, words…” William Shakespeare, Hamlet “Not for ambition or bread…” Dylan Thomas, ‘In my Craft or Sullen Art’

I would like, I tell my students, to be able to formulate, convincingly, sen tences that begin “Poetry is…” Reading Rabindranath Tagore and some of the other great modern essayists on poetry — Octavio Paz, Auden — one is struck by the ease with which they declare “Poetry is…” But how to say that, in the singu lar, without over-simplifying? And how not to say it without letting go of a belief in poetry as, in fact, a unifying force? The class makes light of my diffidence. Later, one student, Saranya Subamanian, does a marvellous rereading of Kamala Das’s “An Introduction” which we had begun the semester with. She points out that the poem starts with the poet struggling to identify herself in relation to her environ ment and body — I am brown, born in Malabar, the English I speak is funny, per haps, but it is an honest, human speech, and so on. But towards the end, Saranya says, Das is able to “transcend the shack les of identification” and speak as one hu man being to another. But she did need to write the first half of the poem, pass through the posts of self-definition and cultural locating, before she could leap off the page, so to speak, and become just a poet.And so the Whitmanesque or Advaita-ish, depending on which way you look at it, declaration in half-a-century old Indian poem reaches across to a young reader and she listens to it carefully and makes it new. I am sinner. I am saint. I am the beloved and the Betrayed. I have no joys which are not yours, no Aches which are not yours. I toomyselfcall I.

When I fall asleep in the afternoon I see myself from the outside. In the world of the dead, the body is just a large, toppled flower floating on a pond. I think — So this is what we all come down to: an occurrence of bizarre gentleness, drifting through spearshafts of light. The flower transfers to me its emptiness. Then the self is in the body again — my face hot on the pillow, a hornet nudging the upper corner of the room with the sound of a small machine. GEORGE

NAP JENNY

92 Carolina Caycedo, Apparitions (Stills), 2018 HD Video, Color and Sound, 9’1’’. Courtesy of the Artist, the Huntington Gardens, Library and Art collection, and Vincent Price Art Museum

Carolina Caycedo, Beyond Control (still), 2016. Documentation of performance at Entre Canibales, Instituto de Visión, 2016.

Performers: Claudia Salamanca, Diego Fletcher, María Leubro, Andres Uribe, Jorge Caycedo and Carolina Caycedo. Courtesy of the artist and Instituto de Visión.

JENNY GEORGE I stood in a lamplit kitchen looking into my empty life. Outside, moths grazed the windowscreens like tiny winged horses. I had lived so close to my life I could almost feel it: it hummed like an electric fence. Often I had been afraid, standing motionless at the dark border. Forgive me, I sang to the life. How beautiful, how painful you almost were, I sang with my burning inaudible voice.

ATONEMENT

M arkin P owell fiction HIROMI KAWAKAMI

When I looked at Nishino’s face, his brow was furrowed and his expression was serious.“I think it would be nice if it didn’t get dark at night,” I said softly. a llison

Nishino shook his head. “A world without darkness is Nishinounthinkable.”pulledon my hair as he said this. I think he thought of this as a demonstration of affection. I, however, did not appreciate having my hair pulled. Andromeda contains so many stars, there’s no way it would ever be night, Nishino explained. It would always be daytime. Everything filled with light. There would be no shadows. Nishino gave another“Doessigh.that mean that there wouldn’t be any more cloudy days either?” I asked. “Well, there would probably still be clouds.”“What about rainy days?” “It would probably still rain.” That would be okay, then, I said. I liked rainy days. And I liked cloudy days even more. The day when I had first met Nishino had been a blazing sunny day. It was at the end of the summer, in Enoshima. My relatives ran a beachside refreshment shack, and I worked there part-time. Every weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, I worked two days straight. From the beginning of July, when the beach shack opened, to early September, when they closed it up, I commuted down to Enoshima, never missing a day. I may have been feeling a bit bored and adrift — since, although I had been accepted at my first-choice university, soon after classes had started the previous spring I began to find them dull and so rarely showed my face on campus — nevertheless I had always loved the beach shack. I had been working there every year since middle school.Nishino had been accompanied by a woman. She looked to be just past 30, with short hair and a very nice figure. Nishino was in his mid-50s, which meant that she was quite a bit younger, but Nishino was youthful — in appearance as well as in substance — so the age difference be tween them didn’t seem so vast. No matter how chic or urbane the men and women might have appeared when they arrived in Enoshima in their street clothes, once they had changed into bathing suits and were eating sea snails cooked in their own shells and buying nacre key chains in the souvenir shops, they were no different from other “na tive Japanese.” Enoshima was the kind of place that had an equalizing effect. However, the woman who had accom panied Nishino was different. She wore a gold chain around her slender ankle. Her pedicure was the color of the deep ocean. She may have looked like a Japanese per son but her mien called to mind a place far from Enoshima. Perhaps the deserted beach of an unknown southern island. Or the white sands of a dark and looming seaside“Thatforest.girl — it was like she was always off in the clouds. She didn’t seem to belong anywhere.” This had been Nishino’s reply some time later, when I had remarked on my impression of the woman who had been with him. “Why would you break up with such a charming lady?” I asked. Nishino stifled a laugh. “Because, I fell in love with you, Ai!” “So, Nishino, you mean to say that, when you fall for the next girl, you break up with the previous girl right away?” I asked, raising my voice. Nishino opened his eyes wide and peered closely at my face. His look seemed to say, You’re so young, yet you’re so quaintly old-fashioned. “I do not break up with them right away,” Nishino replied, after a moment had passed.

GRAPES HIROMI KAWAKAMI translated by

Nishino quickly let out a sigh. “Thirty million years from now, this place will merge with the Andromeda Galaxy,” he said. “When you say ‘this place,’ just which place do you mean?” I asked, and Nishino let out an even deeper sigh. “I mean the Earth and the Sun and Pluto and even the stars further away — all of it,” he replied. “So, is there something wrong with this place being joined up with Andromeda?”“Itwould be brighter. Meaning, it wouldn’t get dark at night.”

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“I would if I could, but usually the girl doesn’t stand for it.” “So then what happens?” “I end up getting dumped. By both of them.”Once it comes out — in some way or another — that he’s been two-timing, things are a mess for a couple of weeks.

About a month later, the strong-willed ones (and occasionally a weak-willed one) will make up her mind to leave. As for the girl who’s left behind, the situa tion with her remains cheerful and pleas ant for an average of three months. But once the thrill of victory is gone, the girl begins to reflect calmly upon Nishino’s past behavior and, by the fourth month, the accusations begin to fly that Nishi no is two-timing again. And then it’s not just about two-timing — the fifth month brings full-scale complaints that Nishino is constitutionally commitment-phobic or that he has a deep-rooted tendency for cheating. I just can’t trust you anymore, and so on. I still love you, but it’s too pain ful. These were the kinds of things said by the girl who’s left behind when, ultimate ly, in the sixth month, she leaves. It takes about half a year to reach this “final conclusion,” Nishino said with a laugh. It’s like the laws of physics. Why is it that, eventually, all girls end up adher ing to the same formula in their response, no matter whether they are chubby or skinny, laid-back or uptight, convention ally beautiful or idiosyncratically striking, pescatarians or red-blooded meat-lovers? Nishino inclined his head in wonder. I myself was just as baffled by Nishino, a man in his mid-50s who re sembled boys my own age, teenagers who thought of nothing but girls. “Nishino, do you really believe that all girls are exactly the same?” I asked. “I could be wrong,” Nishino said lei surely. “All the girls I’ve ever known, at least, they’ve all been the same, down to the last.” Well, then, the girls you date must all be pretty boring, I thought fleetingly, but I im mediately regretted feeling mean toward all the girls Nishino had dated whom I had never laid eyes on. I bet one would be hard-pressed to find a girl out there who qualified as “boring.” More likely, they were quite a bit scarcer than boys who were “boring.” I would have said as much to Nishino, but I figured he would make fun of me or call me a nit-picker, saying I must be in favor of female supremacy, so I kept my mouth shut.

Photograph by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery.

HIROMI KAWAKAMI

“Are you angry?” Nishino asked. I had grown very quiet and still. “I don’t mean you, Ai. I’m sure you’re different,” Nishino went on. Not you, you’re different — that was pretty cliché, wasn’t it? I thought to myself. This guy Nishino was like some kind of sweetheart swindler. “I mean it, Ai. There’s something about you that’s different from all the other girls I’ve ever known.” Nishino grinned, and then he kissed me. I kept my eyes open and stayed still. No doubt the thing about me that differed from all the other girls was that I didn’t harbor the smallest bit of yearning for Nishino. It wasn’t just Nishino for that matter — I had never harbored feelings for a boy at all, not once. Sure, I liked going out drinking or seeing a movie or simply talking with them just fine, but I had never really fallen for one or found any of them particularly memorable. Not in all of my 18 years.

Morehshin Allahyari, Nike 2016. 3D Printed plastic and electronic components, 9 x 4.75 x 3.5 inches

“Which means you two-time?”

“Is he “What“Yeah,nice?”Iguess.”kindof dates do you usually have?”“We usually go to his place.” “Where does this guy live?”

“What’s he like? Does he drive a car? Or a motorcycle?” “Probably neither.”

“Do you like me, Ai?” Nishino asked, trailing his lips along my throat. “I like you,” I replied, without skip ping a beat. Had I given myself time to think, my mind would have started wan dering. I had learned from Nishino that one mustn’t be vague — neither in speech nor in conduct — while in the throes of passion.You should know, Ai, Nishino had explained to me at one point, when you So. I had met Nishino at the beach shack. He had been accompanied by the short-haired woman with the nice figure. The following week, Nishino came back again. This time, he was by himself. “Are there any good bars around here?” Nishino had first said to me. This old guy seems out of place, I had thought. “There are, if you don’t mind walking a bit, in the opposite direction from the station,” I said, giving him an earnest answer“Whatanyway.time do you get off?” Nishino persisted.Iwas silent. I had no obligation to tell a complete stranger information like that. I had just spun around and was about to retreat inside when, from behind me, I heard him apologize. Sorry, that was a rude thing to ask. Nishino spoke in a soft voice. Later, I told Nishino that his apology had seemed to reflect the wisdom of age, and he had nodded. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize — all too well — that things like manners and reason are not simply for appearance’s sake. What’s more, even when you’re as polite as can be, personal relationships can still fall to pieces. People are very complicated, you know. Nishino sighed as he said this. I had plenty of doubts about just how polite (principally, to women) and reasonable (again, principally, to women) Nishino had actually been. He had yet to demonstrate either of these qualities to me, at least. Or so I thought. “You’ve got a boyfriend, don’t you?” Kikumi said to me not long after I had met Nishino. “Not really,” I replied. Kiku mi was staring fixedly at the area around the nape of my neck. “Then how come you’re hardly ever at your place lately? How come you get so many phone calls from some guy who just says, ‘It’s me,’ without giving his name? How come sometimes you smell like a certain unfamiliar cologne, Ai?” Kikumi asked in a single breath. I told Kikumi I thought she sounded like a girl chiding her boyfriend for having an affair, and she narrowed her eyes at me. “Who’s the guy?” Kikumi asked, peer ing at my face. “Nobody, really.”

101 los angeles review of books 100 ond time she came over to hang out at my place.I thought you might be a lesbian too, Ai. That’s why I decided to confide in you, Kikumi had gone on. Nope, not me. I’ve never been in love with a guy, but I’ve never been in love with a girl either. I guess you could say that I’m as yet undecided about whether I’m homosexual or heterosexual, but I think I’m probably heterosexual. Even though there’s no basis for it. I had thought about it carefully as I spoke, and when I was finished, Kikumi had Ai,laughed.there’s something very rigor ous about you. You must be quite the scholar.Sure, I can work and I do like to study. Just once, I got the top grade in every subject — straight fives, I told Kikumi, and she let out a little whoop. That’s awesome. Even in gym and music,Thewow!time I got straight fives had been the first term of my first year in middle school. In music, there had been no practical test, and in gym, we had played Ping-Pong for the entire term. I’m tone deaf, and I have slow reflexes, but I happen to excel at Ping-Pong. My relatives who ran the Enoshima beach shack, their family’s main business was a small ryokan, and there was a shabby old Ping-Pong table at the inn. I had been playing Ping-Pong against my older cousins since elementary school. It goes without saying, though, that I never got straight fives again. Anyway, make sure you’re straight with this guy, Kikumi said with a deadpan expression. Because, Ai, you make it seem like you’re playing it straight, when real ly your attentions are elsewhere. Kikumi seemed to be looking right through me, as if to say, “I’m onto you.” I got it. I’ll do my best to play it straight, I promised Kikumi. Meanwhile, I marveled at how different her impres sion of “this guy” and who Nishino actu ally was must have been. Nishino was delighted when I told him about this exchange with Kikumi. Even more delighted than I had expected. “You know, lately, I’ve been wonder ing what’s going on,” Nishino said. Nishino and I were in his bed. Appar ently, our bodies were well suited to each other. Nishino had been the one to say so, and he was probably right. I may have slept with a lot of girls, but you’re the best, Ai, Nishino told me. You might think that I use that word a lot — the “best” — but you would be sorely mistaken. To say someone is the best, well, that just ends up reminding a girl about how many other girls I’ve been with. No — rarely have I dared to utter such a startling admission. I couldn’t tell whether Nishino was being boastful or self-deprecating. Hmm, I murmured in response. I had no idea whether sex with Nishino was good, bad, or average. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had sex before, just that the sample wasn’t large enough for me to be able to discern if this sex was good or bad.

HIROMI KAWAKAMI

“In Hmm,Taito-ku.”Kikumi murmured. He sounds pretty refined. I mean, sounds like he makes a living. She took a sip of hojicha as she said this. I had met Kikumi at our university’s matriculation ceremony. We were in the same department and had been assigned seats next to each other. Her last name is Kasahara, mine is Kase. Kikumi hadn’t really been going to class either. She commuted from home, though, so she spent a lot of time at my place.My parents annoy me whenever I’m home, she said. “As long as I pretend to go to class, they rest easy. They have no idea that I’m holing up here.” Kikumi took an other sip of hojicha. Kikumi was a lesbian. It hadn’t even been six months since she admitted it to herself, which was why she didn’t have a proper girlfriend yet. Kikumi had relayed this to me in a detached manner the sec

HIROMI KAWAKAMI

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Kikumi rolled her eyes. “Who does this guy think he is?” Kikumi asked so many questions about Nishino, I ended up having to promise to introduce them to each other. I dreaded it. I imagined that the elusive, ephemeral quality of my relationship with Nishino — which may or may not have been real — would dissipate if it weren’t just the two of us alone together. Our relationship was fleeting. That’s what I liked about it. But if the two of us were to spend time with someone else, I dreaded that it might provide external confirmation of the relationship between Nishino and me — validating us as “a couple.” As soon as that happened, it would be like pinning a bill to the wall, and eventually we would be forced to settleOnaccounts.thedayI had promised to introduce them, Kikumi showed up wearing ridicu lously high heels. In these heels, Kikumi was even taller than Nishino. On her wrists and around her neck and fingers, she was adorned with twice as many ac cessories as usual. Her makeup was heavi er too. I thought she looked like someone who was dressed up for a Shinto festival. Kikumi peered at Nishino’s face with her intense gaze. Nishino returned her look with steady eyes. I sat idly beside them. Quite suddenly, I was struck by a recollection of the angle of Nishino’s erection. We were at a coffee shop that Kikumi had specified. Kikumi had ordered a cof fee, decisively, so Nishino and I had fol lowed suit and ordered coffees as well. The coffee was quite delicious. Sunlight poured through the shop’s windows. There were two white tulips in a crystal vase on the table.Atfirst we were quiet. Kikumi or dered another coffee. Nishino and I each ordered another coffee too. Nishino was laughing. His face was dead serious, but just one layer beneath the skin he was chuckling to himself. I myself felt a lit tle like crying. Kind of like an idiot. Both Kikumi and I had been alive for less than half the time that Nishino had. And be sides, I didn’t even like Nishino all that much. Or so I thought. “Are you hungry?” Nishino said after a while. As we had been sitting in silence, apart from each other, time had passed, and before we knew it, the sun was start ing to set. “I am,” I said quickly. Even though I wasn’t really all that hungry. “I’m not hungry but I would have a drink,” Kikumi said slowly. Kikumi’s lips were very pretty. They were a shiny and glossy pearl “Nishino,pink.what is it you like about Ai?” Kikumi asked, as if this were part of an ongoing conversation. “Ah, I too would like to have someone explain that to me,” Nishino replied quietly. As if it were part of an ongoing conversation. “In all my life, this may well be the most deviant situation I’ve ever found myself in.” Nishino spoke pretty calmly for a deviant. Kikumi kept her gaze focused on Nishino. Nishino returned it just as fixed ly. One might even have taken the two of them for lovers. I drank down the last of my coffee. There was only a little bit left in the cup, but I took my time finishing it off. I could hear a buzzing sound over by the count er. It must have been the noise of coffee beans being ground. Just then, I felt a fer vent desire to fall in love with Nishino. I wanted to love Nishino in a way that would make him love me. That’s what I was thinking. But the fact was that I didn’t get to be my age, vigor becomes quite im portant.Once you lose momentum, well, it’s all over. Everything goes to hell, as if you’ve been swallowed up by a big, gaping crevice that’s opened up in the ground. You might neverAtrecover.firstI had no idea what Nishino was talking about. Like I said, my experi ence was limited to boys in their teens or early 20s. It was only after this conversa tion had gone on for quite some time that I finally realized Nishino was referring to erections. This came as a surprise to me, having always assumed that boys would get an erection at any time, that it wasn’t a question of “could” — I had thought they managed to do it even when they weren’t in theYou’remood.so honest, Nishino, I said, a littleIt’simpressed.because honesty, manners, and reason are important to me, he said. This was a mantra of Nishino’s. Why Nishino bothered with the likes of me, I’ll never know. What was it about me — a not-yetfully-formed creature — that a grown-up like Nishino found attractive? Maybe it was actually my lack of development that he liked. I once mumbled something to him, along these lines, and Nishino thought about it for a moment before shaking his head. Ai, in addition to the fact that you’re more mature than any grown woman, you’re also purer than any chaste young girl, he That’ssaid.quite an embarrassing way of putting it, I said with surprise, and Nishino took me in his arms. He held me tightly for a moment. I always suspected that Nishino saw something beyond me, some other version of the story. The real me was quite differ ent, but his take on things made him feel good. Nishino would probably insist that he wasn’t the kind of guy who harbored illusions. He’d probably also say some thing like, that was the reason why, after all these years, he had never married — that in the end, he wasn’t capable of car rying out a passionate love affair. But the truth was that Nishino did seem like the dreamy type who harbored illusions. Not that I had any idea what kinds of dreams thoseNishinowere. and I spent the entire after noon in bed. He had slipped out of the office to come and meet me. I can’t wait until the evening to see you, Nishino often said to me lately. I miss your face, Ai. I want to feel your breath on my cheek. I want to hear your voice directly in my ear. Nishino would murmur these things to me. I must be out of my mind, Nishino would go on. Do you like me, Ai? He would ask me the same question as before. And I would reply the same way, on the spot. I like Nishinoyou.would furrow his brow. Then after moving around a bit, he would ejac ulate. He was very adept at coming on my stomach.Use a condom, I’d say to him, but Nishino never did. Instead he would say, Never have sex when it’s near your ovulation day. And the truth was, Nishino never tried to have sex around that time. “That’s dangerous,” Kikumi said. She was making a passing comment about Nishino’s recent obsession with me. “He’ll get laid off before he knows it, if he keeps playing hooky like that.” It’s a small company, and he’s like his own boss, so he won’t get laid off, I replied in an uncertain tone.

105 los angeles review of books 104 not there was a note of madness concealed in the softness. Nishino repeated himself, over and over. We should die together. At the end of August, Kikumi and Nishino came to see me in Enoshima. The day was frenetic from early in the morn ing. Such a strange word, frenetic. But that’s what it was. I murmured it to my self, three times over. Frenetic. Then I said it to Kikumi and Nishino. They laughed as they drank their amazake. Nishino and Kikumi put up an um brella on the beach. Nishino spent the whole time sprawled on the sand. Kikumi went into the ocean every so often. And I, as I said, was too frenetic to even take a break and go out to see them. Once it was evening, when the waves got a little bigger and the pace eventual ly slowed, I sat down to relax in a chair for the first time that day and looked out across the sea. The Bon festival was over, but soon the jellyfish would appear, so the crowds had come out while the swimming was still Mostgood.people didn’t go in the ocean, they just sat idly under an umbrella. They are mourning, Nishino said later that night. They are mourning the sum mer that’s gone by. I turned my gaze from the water back to the beach, where Nishino and Kikumi were sprawled next to each other under their umbrella. Kikumi had long legs. Re cently she had found a lover. A woman, three years older, who worked in an office, apparently.I’mabsolutely crazy about her, Kikumi told me. We had been drinking barley tea at my apartment. Falling in love is nice, Kikumi went on. To tell you the truth, I used to think that you and Nishino weren’t really a good match, but now I can see that really isn’t the case. Kikumi started speaking faster as she neared the end of her speech. When you’re in love, it barely makes any differ ence how old the person is or what kind of habits or nature they have. Her lips were a shiny and glossy baby pink today.

KAWAKAMI

“Wasn’t I the one who said that, a while back?” Nishino laughed as he spoke. I picked up the thick chain that was attached to the shackle around one of my ankles, and it made a rattling sound. So you don’t run away, Ai, Nishino had said when he put the shackle on me

HIROMI love him. The electric coffee grinder kept buzzing away in the background. Hey, we should die together. I can’t quite remember the first time that Nishino said this to me. I think it was around when I was about to start commuting to Enoshima again, so al most a year must have passed since I had met Nishino. Although I had spent little time on campus during the previous year, I hadn’t flunked any of my courses. That was because, as much as possible, I tried to enroll in classes where exams and reports mattered more than attendance. I got lots of A’s because I still happened to like studying. I had turned 20. And as before, I hardly ever went to school, seeing Nishino three times a week instead. “If I keep meeting up with you in the daytime, it stands to reason the company will go under,” Nishino had started saying, so our dates were all day Sunday, and then two other evenings in the middle of the week.The boss can’t take Saturdays off! Nishino said this with a note of tedium. Had I known, I might’ve never started my own company. I’d have taken an unde manding position in government service, so that I could spend all my time the way I like — with you, Ai. Nishino’s tone was semi-serious.Starting in July, I’ll be working in Enoshima, so we won’t be able to see each other on Sundays, I told him. Nishino went pale. “I don’t like that at all!” he cried. Immediately he looked em barrassed for having cried out. “What’s become of me?” Nishino would sometimes utter. This is why I have never, to this day, loved a woman, in the true sense of the word, he would contin ue in a low voice. Even though it seems meaningless to say “in the true sense of the word.” Nishino would laugh a little as he said this. I liked the way he looked when he laughed best. His handsome fea tures would give way to a sort of unguard edness.“We’re not going to die together,” I would reply. “I worry about leaving you behind, Ai.”“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of my own affairs. And anyway, it’s very strange to talk about who you’ll leave be hind.” “I can’t stand the thought of you having sex with other men, Ai.” “But even now, I could do that any time I wanted to.”

Beside me, I could sense Nishino propped up on his elbow, looking at my sleeping face. I rolled over. Nishino kept his gaze focused on my profile. He’s probably crazy. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, they seemed to have an aura of certainty. Of course, everyone has a touch of madness in them. In fact, there’s some thing frightening about a person who isn’t a little crazy. But no matter how you looked at it, Nishino was definitely a deviant.

My reply had been reflexive, and after it came out, I covered my mouth. What I had said was mean. And I hated mean ness. What it did to both the perpetrators and to the Nishino’svictims.expression again looked embarrassed. I mean, really, what am I saying? I sound like a young girl, he said, and let out a sigh. “Hey, let’s have sex right now,” Nishino said. And then, without waiting for my response, he took me roughly. I guess I like rough sex, I thought to myself. It also occurred to me that per haps I preferred the way that Nishino had sex to Nishino himself. But then again, Nishino’s way of having sex was also a part of Nishino himself. I caught myself before I got too deep in thought. Mustn’t lose momentum.Nishino finished, rough and quick. We laid in the bed, stroking each other’s bellies. Nishino’s stomach was supple. Mine was taut. Hey, we should die together. Nishino said it once more. In a soft voice. I strained my ears to try to determine whether or

Kikumi and Nishino looked like a fa ther and daughter who got along well. That was so relaxing, Nishino said that night. I really took it easy. Kikumi’s a good kid. You have good people around you, Ai, Nishino said solemnly. You create your own world, so that means that the person at the center of it — you, Ai — you must be a really good kid too. Nishino pulled gently on my hair.

I don’t really see it that way, I replied brusquely. Nishino’s so gloomy. The thought flick ered in my mind. Something about him had annoyed me. It was probably because I had worked all day without any rest. I soon closed my eyes and was half asleep.

Morehshin Allahyari, Barmaren, 2015, 3D Printed plastic and electronic components, 5 x 4.5 x 1.75 inches

Within Nishino’s home, I was like a small insect in hibernation, curled up and im Still,mobile.everything always comes to an end.

Grapes, Nishino had said. I had come down with a fever. It was a cold. A few days earlier Nishino had started cough ing, and he must have been contagious. Although Nishino had no fever, and had been well enough to go off to work each day. I’ll squeeze some grapes for you, Nishino had said as he was going out the front door. Some people say the best thing for a cold is canned peaches, or sipping apple juice — but where I come from, it was always grapes, Nishino had said cheerfully.Ihadlaughed. But laughing made me cough, which was painful. You take the skins off, take the seeds out too, and then squeeze all the juice out with a juicer. Back in the day, we didn’t

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Photograph by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery. at the end of autumn. Of course, the key was in the top drawer of a bureau that was within reach of the chain. You can take it off any time you want to. That was how Nishino had explained it. Why would you do such a thing? I had asked. Nishino had lowered his gaze. Maybe to appall myself, he had re plied simply after a brief pause. As a result, I was now spending the majority of my time at Nishino’s apart ment. I read books or studied there. I lis tened to the radio or talked on the phone to Kikumi. It would have been easy to un chain myself, but for some reason I didn’t feel the need to do so. I had the feeling that, the moment I were to take off the chain, Nishino was likely to start do ing really eccentric things. As long as we both behaved collaboratively, it would be our little secret. But if one of us let it be known, then it would simply seem crazy. But isn’t he crazy in a good way? Kikumi said on the other end of the phone. For better or worse, love is full of madness, she went on. Kikumi thought nothing more than that Nishino and I had practically shacked up together. Lucky you, Ai! I hope one day I’ll have someone to live with like you do, KikumiNishinomurmured.wasvery kind. These days, we hardly ever had sex. Do you know the novel called The Collector? Are we like that? I had tried asking.No, Nishino replied briefly, I have no interest in collecting. Then he would undress me and slowly caress me, either my breasts or my back or my legs. I nev er wore underwear. Nishino’s home was air-conditioned, and always at the perfect temperature. It’s time for me to go home, you know. How many times did I come close to saying that? But I never did. I had the feel ing I could leave him whenever I wanted. I love you, Nishino would say. It’s a simple enough thing, loving a girl, Nishino went on quietly. I wonder why it is that I’ve never been able to love any of them. And then he would embrace me in my stark nakedness. I didn’t love Nishino. I might not have even liked him. The thought of Nishino’s death brought on not a single tear. I mere ly thought of it as an inevitability. Nishino embraced me tightly. He was crying. Why was this guy in tears, I wondered vaguely. Tomorrow — tomorrow for sure — I’ll go home, I would say to myself for the umpteenth time. But I knew that tomor row would come and I would still be here.

109 los angeles review of books 108 kle, under her black stocking, she was still wearing the same gold chain. “You’re Ai, aren’t you?” The woman from Enoshima spoke to me, when I was behind the temple, catching my breath after the incense lighting. She had a few more wrinkles than when I had seen her previously, but she was still beautiful. “He’s dead now, isn’t he,” she kept speaking.“You know who I am?” I asked, and the woman from Enoshima nodded. “I saw him sometimes, and he told me about“Didyou.”you see him often?” “Maybe once a month.” That’s just like Nishino, I laughed a little. He’d leave me in shackles, and then shrewdly go and meet up with his old girlfriend. “But just for a meal,” the wom an from Enoshima said, smiling. “You never did love him, did you,” she peered into my eyes as she said this. I did not feel compelled to respond to such a question from someone I barely knew, and yet there was something about her I liked. For no good“Probablyreason. not,” I replied slowly. “Serves him right,” the woman from Enoshima murmured. I remained silent. “But you missed your chance, didn’t you,” she went on. “What?” I replied. “Just what do you mean by that?” “There may not have been much ad vantage in loving Nishino, but there were good times to be had, weren’t there? It was hard work, worth doing,” the wom an from Enoshima said, and then laughed out loud.Herlaugh was clear and pure. I my self was not laughing. I thought about the grapes.Iwondered what kind of grapes Nishino had planned to buy for me. Pur ple ones, or green ones? Would they have been the ones with small fruit? I wished he would have been able to spoon-feed me the cold, fresh-squeezed grape juice. Nishino, I called out to him in my heart. Nishino, I never was able to love you. I’m sorry, I said to him. I had the sense that I could hear Nishino sighing in my ear, but of course it was just my imagination. Thirty million years from now, they say there will be no more night. The woman from Enoshima looked shocked when these words came out of my mouth.Isthat so? she said, and then she turned her back on me. That’s right, I called out after the woman from Enoshima as she walked away.That’s right. Thirty million years from now, there will be no darkness in the world.Just what should I do, then? Tell me, what should I do? HIROMI KAWAKAMI have a juicer though, so we’d use gauze to wring out all the juice. Oh, but that might not be good for a cough. It works for a fever, though. I don’t know about a cough… Nishino had muttered as he bounded gaily out the door, locking it behind him. In my feverish, half-asleep state, I imagined the grapes. Large, deep purple orbs of fruit. In the garden of the house where I grew up, there was a grape ar bor, and when summer arrived, so did the scarab beetles. Even though the grapes were still small and pale green, the scar ab beetles would devour them messily. By the end of summer, there would only be a few clusters left uneaten by the insects. The grapes from the arbor bore sour fruit that had a tremendous number of seeds considering their small size. Maybe I really do love Nishino. The thought occurred to me suddenly. No, no, that must just be the fever making me weak. I was dozing in and out of con sciousness when the phone rang. I had decided not to answer it, so I let it ring and heard the answering machine pick up. “No one is here to take your call,” the automated female voice said. I liked the voice on Nishino’s answering machine just fine. I lay there, still, allowing the woman’s voice to cover me like a blanket, when I heard Nishino on the machine. “Ai.” He repeated my name several times.Igot up and staggered to the phone, unsteady on my feet. “Is that you, Ai?” Nishino“I’m“Um-hmm.”said.sorryto bother you when you have a “What’sfever.”the matter?” “I’ve had an accident.” “Huh?” “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” Nishino’s voice carried the same up beat tone that it had had earlier when he left the house. I thought he was joking. “Ai, you never loved me, did you,” Nishino said on the other end of the line, sounding happy as “That’sever.not true,” I replied, with out skipping a beat, before I even had a chance to think about it. As was my habit. “It’s all right. You and I are alike, Ai, so I Iunderstand.”murmured a response in my throat. Anyway, I’m waiting for the grapes, I said, and went to hang up. “Wait,” Nishino said. “I wanted us to die together, but I guess there’s nothing to be done about it. What a dull life mine has been, really, in the end.” There was a click, and the line went dead. The sound of an ambulance’s siren was coming from somewhere nearby. I collapsed back onto the bed, everything still a blur. I could tell that my fever was raging. In my state between dreaming and waking, I became convinced that Nishino really was dead. I was utterly certain of it. I wanted to eat the grapes, I murmured, and then I was drawn into a shallow yet insistent slumber. It’s a good thing I’m not wearing the shackle today. That was the last thing I re member thinking. The funeral was absolutely magnificent. Many of his “clients” came to burn offer ings of incense, so it took a long time for the line of mourners to have their turn. Interspersed among them were several conspicuously attractive women. The woman who had come to Enoshima with Nishino that time was there. And around her slim and lovely an

Friedl Kubelka, Otto Kobalek with Adaptive by Franz West, 1974. Courtesy of Artbook | D.A.P.

On my first official day as a member, I begin to experience the place differently. I slosh and shuttle between the cold and the heat, but the place feels inhospitable in a way I didn’t notice before. When I enter a room, conversations fade. I feel that I am carefully being watched. Queer body in straight space, I repeat to myself This love letter is dedicated to the Russian Turkish bathhouse on East 10th Street in New York City. I joined as a member a few years ago, right before the presidential elections of 2016.

113112 a football jersey. The bathhouse also pro vides shorts, to cover your bottom portion. These tend to look like baggy boxers when dry, diapers when wet. Slap on some rub ber slippers, but don’t put your nose too close, as the gaminess can be alarming.

Some bathers wear the robe backward, revealing a low plunging back line; some wear it open like a cape; some wear two, tying them in knots at the bottom. Last but not least: towels, towels, towels, rang ing in color from taupe to dark brown, and texture from threadbare soft to steel wool abrasive. As one can imagine, towel posi tioning also serves a lot of personal flair: a towel around the shoulders or down one shoulder lends one a classic athleticism; while a towel draped around the back sug gests more of a witch-at-work look. Fi nally, there is the way you wear your towel on your head — an essential wet nest for your tender noggin in the heat. At the front: proboscis. On the side: twisted and tucked like King Tut. You can swerve it around like a beautifully abstract pile-up, or just lay it over your skull like new hair. The elements are all the same, but, as is so often with a uniform, I’ve never seen two bathers wear them in exactly the same way.The baths are housed in a subterra nean space made up of different cham bers, each of which offer a different level of heat and steam. This atmosphere, along with the uniforms, is less high-end spa and more film set full of extras waiting for their part in a Mel Brooks Bible scene. Coincidentally, the architecture compels each player to make an entrance: to come into the bathing area, you have to walk through a long hallway that eventually deposits you right in front of a long cue of bathers sitting/lounging/hanging up side down on a marble bench flanking the cold plunge pool. In that particular NYC way, people make square, full-on eye con tact — we all give each other an ambiva lent long stare. But after many hours of alternating heat and shocks in the cold plunge, a bather may find release despite the scrutiny. The body begins to sigh at random and the cones in the eyes draw a halo around all light. Regular Z helped me become a member. He streamlines in speedos, hard tummy, and wool hat bowing out like a bellflower. In the cold plunge he’s sleek like a por poise, making calls of pure vibrational love and understanding, his hands hover ing right above the surface of the water. I learn he is from the Midwest, an ex-so cial worker turned limo-business owner turned armed car dealer. He has questions about his place in the world, how he can give back when most of the time, he’s ar ranging to drive the president of Uganda around between UN meetings. Regular Z also spends his time genuinely displaying lots of compassion for the plight of his trans-sisters, whom he also pays gener ously for sex. Regular Z has agreed to be my decoy for the super-duper low-cost Regular’s price negotiation with Boris. I go into femme drag mode (i.e., put bright red lipstick on) and pull crisp $100 bills out of my white envelope, waving them in front of all of our noses. Cash is like a fresh cup of coffee around here. We all feel invigorated by its presence.

ASCREENS:PROJECT “COMMUNITY”ABOUT

SAVANNAH KNOOP SAVANNAH KNOOPessay

The current owners of the baths, Boris and David, operate two separate business es under one roof, running their respective enterprises on alternate weeks. Each week maintains its own specific social codes and business practices. This has created an odd mix of “regulars.” I became obsessed with membership, and this idea about who be longed where and when.

The first part of this complex love was the uniform. The bathhouse uniforms follow a one-size-fits-all/one-size-fitsnobody design. No matter how tight ly you wrap the robe around your body, the armholes are so large that your tits (should you have them) flap out the sides, and the shoulders inevitably jut out like

This piece is part of a larger multimedia art project, which centers on a group of diverse regulars at the Russian and Turkish Baths on East 10th Street.

it was a blessing. This self-selecting com munity was not based on similar view points, and definitely not based on liking or being liked, but based on something important all the same. Simply, we were all bodies. Bodies that ignored the mold growing on the side of the cold plunge, because we were bodies that craved the heat. (I know I am selling the experience to you, reader, and if you want a deal, write to me — we can talk to Boris, cash only.)

Now that I had passed into “membership,” I could go there to state my difference, to cohabitate as a body with other bodies that I had nothing in common with, that I didn’t agree with, that I could never be convinced by, or never, in turn, convince. To be with bodies I knew by shape and sensation, rather than name, profession, or accessThatpoints.fall, as I commuted to the baths from Brooklyn, I would listen to audio books about the fall of the Roman Em pire. Once inside, I would watch the pro cession of different kinds of bodies, soap ing and sweating, housing so much differ ence in worldview. While the nation out side of this subterranean club felt that it was slowly crumbling — pussy-grabbing, amplified racism, and violence — the act of going to the baths and being with these other bodies started to feel imperative in some way. We had to leave our phones in the locker, abandoning the endless insinu ations and exhortations of the digital hive mind. Rather than constantly reacting, perhaps this could be a space that could be about responding, or existing along side each other in the mutually vulnerable space of body acknowledgment. Maybe. Here was an opportunity to have mea sured conversations in the medium tem perature room. Or just to listen and not talk at all. Or not even listen. Just try to fill your brain with your own thoughts: really, a definition of freedom. like a psychedelic mantra (with more selffulfilling assurance of its truth each time). This is around the time of the presidential debates, and I hear people talking about Trump and Hil. There’s an almost feverish hate of Hil. “Hey, I don’t love her either but what are you going to do, vote for Trump?” “He’s actually a great guy,” re sponds another voice. The first guy scoffs. I look over, trying to discern through the steam who is speaking. Someone with a duck voice. He sits near the water faucets on the opposite side, cross-legged, like a little matter-of-fact ghost, arms hanging over one another at the elbows, with his towel coxcomb falling heavily to one side. I try to relax for a few seconds but the 240-degree heat gets the best of me and I find myself snapping into rabid reactive mode. Playing my part as best I can — “angry dyke!” — I find myself launching into a rant at this matter-of-fact ghost. I eventually slink out, ashamed that I thought I could change anyone’s mind. My first members bathing session, a to tal bust. I go up to the counter to collect my wallet. I ask if “I am good,” the usu al question in the pre-membership exit process, which was riddled with obscure transactions, last-minute bargaining tac tics, and clicking cards. I am a member, I remind myself, and smile eagerly. The proprietor, Boris, launches into a rant in Russian. When it seems like he is com ing to the end, he makes full eye contact with me and screams in English: “You’re a little good — but mostly not so good.” My mouth (actually) drops, as all of the people at the desk fix their eyes on the ground, and he returns to screaming in Russian. I wanted to scream back: “We are in the heart of the East Village in New York City. I have just given you…all of my hard-earned cash…And you insult me… you…you queer bash me!” Jumping to the obvious conclusion in my head. “Pu tin-toting motherfucker…” I leave with out saying any of this and bring this story to my friends: “They are going to vote for Trump, all of them,” I say, with the par ticular flavor of hushed relish of telling a horror story. My friends all agree: fuck that place, go get your money back. That was a nice idea, but I already knew, in my heart of hearts, that I was not going to do that. For one, I knew with ab solute certainty that I would never man age to extract any cash from him. It would mean becoming or pretending to be a per son I didn’t want to be. I imagined telling him that if he didn’t give me my money back, I would sue his business — for dis crimination. Err. I didn’t actually want to sue the place, I wanted to bathe! Or did I want to be liked? … Besides, there was a question in my mind of how this place even existed, and I knew it didn’t have anything to do with a strict adherence to health code. My ideas about suing Boris were fantastical and dark, and I realized, highly influenced by le Carré novels. I conjured up cars almost hitting me as I crossed East Tenth. My place broken into. My subway pass not working. And yet, all espionage fantasies aside, this kind of haranguing at the counter seemed to be a part of the social control of the space itself. Border Patrolling, in the Boris na tion-state.Ihadalready seen Boris brutally insult others, in terms both macro and micro — about their ethnicity, about their shoes — so why did I expect to be exempt? Why did I think that he wouldn’t reduce me to my most basic parts (that were not his)? Maybe I had, in fact, been initiated. I was now an official member. Being a part of any community was usually a drag, until Savannah Knoop, Still from SCREENS

. Shot over the course of 10 months, the video blends fact and fiction, capturing the routines of regulars, particular social codes. and implicit rules.

SAVANNAH KNOOP

115 los angeles review of books 114

GWASS DORA MALECH is how she says both “grass” and “glass.”

Okwui Okpokwasili in rehearsal for Scaffold Room during a residency at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Tallahassee, Florida, 2014. Photograph by Ralph Lemon. Courtesy Ralph Lemon, MAPP International Productions and Artbook | D.A.P.

Revving through grit teeth to model “R” for her, I am a gunned engine, wheels spinning into snow. Loud past the pressed tip of tongue, I hold my “L,” sound that, had we but breath enough, could go on forever. Snow to mud, mud to grass, she crouches now to inspect the dandelions’ encroaching constellations. I try to put my mind where her mouth is, as if each plea could be its own savored pleasure, as if I could reconcile the fact that what shatters is what’s growing as we speak.

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Before she can assemble all three parts of “delicious,” she shortens it to “wish.”

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The closest I had come. I latchedtheeachadmit,timebabyand my body obliged, beneath the skin-to-skin I felt the fall of something vast, remote, silent, and perfectly cold from deeper than inside of me. It fell into a sea of its butIntimate,substance.ownyes,byintimate, I merely mean made known. Those months when I was making atoeachImilktriedtimefindfigureto make sense of the sensation. The baby’s warm, steady mouth needed no explanation— it wasn’t that. One night, late, onwatchingasmall screen short clips to match my clipped attention span, I saw an ice shelf shear I’m sure it made tremendous noise, but I watched on mute, and that was it. DORA MALECH

ABLATION

aplummetingglacier’soff,greatweight,scaleunfathomable.

fiction

A tall brown bear with a bowtie hands me a form and tells me to take it to the table against the wall where I can write without anyone seeing me remove my paw.“I’m Dave,” he says.

The room reminds me of the video stores of my childhood: green casi no carpeting, fake wood-paneled walls, and a ceiling that may be made out of Styrofoam. There are, of course, no racks of videos. The room is sparsely furnished, and there are about a dozen fursuiters milling about. It’s hard to get an accurate count without peripheral vision, but I see a pale beige rabbit, more the Easter Bunny variety than anything suggesting a pet or a wild animal; a yellow dog with a fluffy tail and a bandana around its neck; a blue and white animal, sort of wolf-like but cutesy with enormous blue ears; a leopard or a housecat with a spotted coat; a brown fox, also with a bandana around its neck; and BASS

121120 a tan animal, a squirrel or a woodchuck perhaps, crawling around on all fours.

It hasn’t occurred to me what sort of voice I should use. How would Rhonda speak as a wolf? The pause between the bear and me is growing awkwardly long. “Hi,” I say in my regular voice. “I’m Rhonda.”Heleaves me at the table, and I put one knee on the chair so that I’m half kneeling, half standing. On the train into the city this evening, I found this position to be the only comfortable way to ride in my wolf suit, which is a child’s size large. My petite stature helped keep the cost down, but the differences between my body and a child’s make it impossible to move in certain ways. I’m also not entirely happy with the way the mask looks even though I already customized it. I cut off the perky whiskers and used a Sharpie to black out the eyes, turn down the ends of the mouth, and blend the eyebrows into the darker fur of the forehead and temples by making dozens of dark streaks, which I then repeated down the back of the suit and over each paw for consistency.

MY TYPE HYATT

I fill out the form with Rhonda’s in formation. I decide she lives on Long Island, too, but in a different town from mine. She’s my age, 42, but unlike me, she lies about it, so I write 37 on the form. Rhonda works for Citibank as an executive assistant to a group of men. Each one thinks she belongs to him. One of them once called her from the US Open. “Where’s my fucking car?” he shouted into the phone. She asked if he’d called the driver to see where he was. “I shouldn’t have to call the fucking driver.” She called the driver herself, and he told her he was waiting in a long line of li mos. He couldn’t get to the client, but if the client was able to walk to him, they could peel out of the limo line and take a back exit he knew; they could beat the traffic and get to Scarsdale by seven. She relayed this message to the executive, who cursed and hung up on her. After half an hour, she called the executive and talked to him in a melodic, patronizing tone, like she was addressing a two-year-old. “Did you find the car?” she asked, her voice go ing way up on car and drawing it out into two syllables. “Yes,” he said. She kept up the baby talk. “Is the air conditioning on? Do you have a cold bottle of Fiji water?” “Yes,” he answered to all. “Are you sorry for talking to me like that?” she asked in the same patronizing tone. There was a pause, and then he said yes with audible difficulty. He cleared his throat. “Thank you for your help, Rhonda.” She hung up, satisfied.I’mhaving fun filling out the form as Rhonda, and it takes me a moment to notice that the squirrel/woodchuck has crawled under the table where I’m writ ing. I treat the situation as casually as Rhonda would, ignoring him and con tinuing to write, but a little faster now. I’m big on accuracy, so I try to expe rience as much as I can firsthand. Once, I wrote a story about a woman being kid napped, and I got my husband to tie me up, lock me in the trunk of our Honda, and drive me around our neighborhood, where I still live. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t have guessed that in the trunk, you can’t tell how fast the car’s moving — no idea — it could be flying down the highway or it could be barely rolling along

HYATT BASS

123 los angeles review of books 122 ly handicapped by our masks and could run into anything pretty easily. Beyond the column, in the corner, there seem to be two makeshift walls made from met al coatracks hung with pink bed-sheets, joining together to create a separate room. “What’s that for?” I ask Sarah. “That’s the headless area. It’s like a room you can go into if you need to take off your“Oh,mask.”it’slike a make-out room.” I can hear a noise from behind her mask. She sounds shocked and offended. “It’s really easy to overheat in these suits,” she says coolly. Then she drops back onto all fours and crawls off. There is an eruption of merriment near the snack table as the song “Hap py” comes on, and a couple of cats start to dance. Their moves are pretty tame — weight shifting from side to side and arms flapping to the beat — but several oth ers gather around them, watching. Plastic eyes sparkle. Rubber tongues loll. I watch Sarah rub up against the leg of the blue wolf. As soon as he notices her, he throws his paws up beside his ears and shakes them, pantomiming pleasure, the happiness of a dog being scratched in the right spot. The other animals standing with the blue wolf begin pantomiming to Sarah as well, expressing their happiness at seeing her there. I consider dropping down to my hands and knees, but I don’t think that’s Rhonda’s thing. She might rub up against someone but not in an overtly sexual way, more in a way that re mains open to interpretation. I grab a bottle of Gatorade and a straw from the snack table. Through practice, I’ve discovered I can get a straw through the bottom of my mask. This is exactly the kind of thing I could only know from ex perience. Next to me is a panda wearing a black T-shirt and black pants over the furry suit. If there’s an artsy furry in the bunch, this must be “Hi,”it.she says. “I’m Pamma.” Her right eye appears much larger than the left because of the big black pan da patch around it. “I’m ““What’sRhonda.”yourfursona?”Oh,um…”Itrytothink of some thing quickly. I left the fursona line blank when I filled out the form. “ Wolfie,” I say lamely.“Cool.” Pamma leans in and lowers her voice. “I’m so relieved. I thought you were a ““Oh.”guy.”Don’tyou always wish there were more women at these things?”

“Do“Yeah.”you have children?” “You mean cubs?” I ask. She laughs. The cutesy blue wolf-like character walks past us, and I notice he has a red mark around his eye. “What’s the story there? Is that supposed to be blood?”“Oh, I think that’s a Manga character. I don’t know much about that. Sometimes when they’ve got blood, it means they’re into sparring.” She goes on to tell me about sparring meet-ups for furries who want to beat up their friends with fake weapons.“Quite frankly,” she says, “I’m not into a lot of the furry events. I just like the small, mellow ones like this.” I ask her what the other events are like, and she tells me about bowling meet-ups, park and beach meet-ups, and furwalks, in the curb. That was five years ago, right be fore our marriage ended. If I’d known it would end soon, my memory of that day would undoubtedly be fuller. As it is, all I’ve retained are the physical sensations I used for the story. Because my hands were tied behind my back, I had no way to protect my head and shoulders when Nick drove over a bump. I remember this making me angry. But what I can’t sort out is what part of the anger was already there. Nor do I remember whether our son George was in the car. He must have been there, buckled into his car seat. We nev er went anywhere without him — he was only two. And yet it seems crazy that we would have involved him in this experi ment.“Here,” I say, handing the form to Dave. “All “Awesome!done.”Well, come on in and join the party.”Thevolume on the music — an ’80s pop hit — suddenly seems louder. I’m sweating, and my mask smells like a fresh ly opened can of tennis balls: a mix of rub ber and wet carpet and fish. “Thank you.” I feel something heavy moving against my leg. “Oh,” Dave says. We both look down to find the woodchuck rubbing his head against my leg. He is now clearly identi fiable as a woodchuck because of his two prominent front teeth. “Sarah,” he says to the woodchuck. “This is Rhonda. She’s new.” “Hi,” says Sarah, staring up at me with enormous, glassy green woodchuck eyes. “Do you mind my doing this?” “No,” I lie. “It’s alright.” “Okay,” Dave says, patting me on the back. “I’ll leave you to it.” Sarah circles me, keeping her side against my legs the whole time. I have to crane my neck because the mask prevents me from looking directly down. When she finishes, she stares up at me again. Her mask has been designed to wear an expression of childlike adoration, but she may be up to something a bit more adult. I’ve done very little research on fur ries. I generally like to plunge in head first into my subjects, vulnerable and unprepared, but while I was looking on line for an event and a costume, I did stumble on several scientific studies of furries and their animal sex fantasies. There were discussions of species dyspho ria, autoplushophilia, zoophilia, species identity disorder, and a whole host of oth er diagnoses. Frankly, that kind of pathol ogizing enrages me. Precisely why it gives Sarah pleasure to rub up against my leg I can’t possibly say — but it doesn’t seem like an “Doillness.youever stand up?” I ask her. “Sure. Want me to stand?” “I think it might be better.” Her plump woodchuck torso swings back and forth as she pushes herself off the ground and onto her feet. I wait for her to say something, but she just stares at me, her hands joined beneath her bel ly, her green eyes reflecting back an even stupider version of my wolf mask than the one I’d already reluctantly accepted.

“To tell you the truth, this is my first event.”“Wow. That’s exciting.”

HYATT BASS

“So,” I say. “How did you settle on a woodchuck?”Longpause. “That’s what I am,” she says tersely. “We don’t get to choose, do we?”“I guess not.” I look around at the other furries while she just stares at me, silent. There’s a table of snacks set up against the opposite wall, and in the cen ter of the room stands a column entirely wrapped with bright yellow caution tape, presumably because all of us are visual

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which furries venture out together in pub lic for the sheer joy it brings to the world — as evidenced by the abundance of hugs exchanged with adults and children alike. “ Vomit,” she says. “So, do you have children?” Pamma repeats.“No,” I respond. “Do you?” “Yes, but they’re all grown now. I was worried when they went off to col lege I’d be devastated. But I’m having a ball. I could have never imagined doing things like this before. It’s so liberating to do what I want to do for a change, you know?”Ican tell she’s trying to believe what she’s saying. My George is also out of the house, though he’s only seven. For weeks, everyone’s been asking how I’ll be able to handle George being away for a month with his father. Are you kidding? I kept saying. I can’t wait! Finally some time to write. Then I get phone messages like the one last night from Vanessa, the new wife — not so new, a couple of years now. “Hi, Lydia.” She sounds tipsy, her words slight ly slurred, but cheerful. “George wants to say goodnight. I’m sorry we didn’t call ear lier. We drove to Fiesole, which is kind of further from Florence than we thought. It was gorgeous. Anyway, here’s George.” Definitely tipsy. Wine with dinner. Maybe Prosecco first. Or a Bellini. Usually when we talk, she describes the entire meal, drinks and all. “Hi Mommy. I had green pasta and strawberry gelato. Bye.” Now he’s doing it too, talking in menus. No I love you, no I miss you. It’s alright. Happy is what I want. Not missing me. Not mis erable in Italy with Daddy and Vanessa. I reach for the cheese, miraculously snatching up three pieces on my first try. Pamma keeps talking about the freedom she’s discovered in becoming a furry. She especially loves the furry dance contests. I ask questions and shove the cheese up under my mask and nibble it out of my paw, awkwardly smushing most of it into my chin. It doesn’t matter since nobody can see my real chin. “What does someone do if their fur sona is a cow?” I ask Pamma. “Are they al lowed to eat cheese? Or just grass?” She laughs as if this is the funniest thing she’s ever heard. “Grass!” she shrieks. “Or I guess in your case it would be leaves. Pandas wouldn’t eat cheese either, would“Leaves!they?” Oh, Wolfie. You’re a riot.” I have to admit I’m enjoying myself. It’s nice to be away from my computer and its relentless calendar app. No matter what I’m doing it dings and a bubble pops up in the top-right corner of the screen, something along the lines of Tomorrow: Ravello. Then I’ll pull up the itinerary that Nick gave me and check the contact info for Ravello. Then I’ll pull up the website I’ve already found and bookmarked for the hotel. I’ve lost hours of work this way, vis iting each hotel site several times, clicking through pictures of the rooms, the pools, the restaurants and local attractions. I’m burning up. And my cheese breath, trapped inside my mask, blows back at my nose each time I exhale. I try to recall whether Nick and Vanessa’s hotel in Florence has a pool. A pool would be the closest thing to heaven right now. One photograph sticks in my mind: an Olym pic-sized saltwater pool in Venice with a view of the grand canal. I envision the three of them playing Marco Polo, their voices rising up over the palazzos and domed churches, a gondolier calling back to them as he pushes his gondola past the hotel. George would scramble out of the pool and run to watch the gondola, enKelly Infield, Orange Water Fall, 2016.

“Today I had pink peach juice made from real peaches and a pizza with a fried egg on top. Can I watch TV?” “Of course you can watch TV.” “Daddy said no.” “That’s ridiculous. Put your father back on the phone, please. I love you.” “Thanks a lot,” Nick says when he re turns to the line. “So much for keeping a united“You’refront.”willing to pump him up with sleeping pills, but you won’t let him watch TV?”“I wasn’t going to give him sleeping pills. I was thinking maybe Benadryl or something.”“Jesus,Nick. Just let him watch the fucking television. Honestly.”

“Well of course he can’t sleep! Why are you giving him coffee?” “That was nearly 12 hours ago. And it was just a granita.”

127126 than before, like I’ve hurt myself pretty badly.“I’m at a party, Nick. Okay? There’s nothing I can do.” “Can you talk to him at least?” I“Sure.”adjust the angle of the phone so that George won’t see my forehead. ““Mommy?”Hi,rabbit.

I hang up, put my mask and paws on, and make my way back down the stairs. Let them eat their pizzas and granitas on the terrace of a palazzo. As I re-enter the party, I notice sever al animals are watching me. “Hey, man,” says the yellow dog with the fluffy tail, “Everything alright?” Pamma is across the room, waving. “Wolfie!” she calls. Among the other staring animals, she actually seems like a friend. With my adrenaline still racing from the rage I feel toward Nick, I rush across the room. Suddenly, WHAM! it feels like a lead pipe has dropped against the left side of my head. Then I’m lying on the ground, the thick column covered in caution tape is towering over me. I re alize I must have run into it and lost my balance.Animals surround me, leaning in so close all I can see is a bunch of different colors of fur and a couple of huge, glassy eyes. “It’s okay,” I say, waving my arms for them to back off. I get up onto my hands and knees. My eye feels like there’s a thorn shoved under the lid. It must be my con tact lens, shot upward by the crash or the fall. The pain quickly becomes unbearable, so unbearable I pull off my mask without thinking or caring about what I’m doing. The room gasps. Most of the furries seem to back away instinctively. I hear chatter about “the cut on her forehead.” “You’ve got a nasty gash, here.” A paw comes at me, and I duck. It’s Pamma. She’s still holding out her paw toward my forehead.“Oh, no,” I say. “That’s just chafing.” “Why aren’t you wearing a balaclava?” “A “Likewhat?”a ski mask. For protection against the inside of your head.” I laugh. “If only something could pro tect me from the inside of my head.” But the joke’s lost on her. “Put your head back on, or take this outside,” a male voice grumbles. I look up to find the zebra who skritched me earlier. He stands over me, arms crossed. “You’re breaking the spell. I told you I knew your type. Wolves are always selfish.” I laugh. “I think you can see now that I’m not a “Everyonewolf.”chooses their fursona for a reason.”“Oh please, I’m a writer. I’m doing this for research. Jesus.” “A writer!” he yells, pointing at me. “She’s a writer.” He spits out the word like chanted. And Nick and Vanessa, taking advantage of his absence, would steal a kiss and maybe a quick, underwater grope. “Do you want to go into the headless room with me?” I ask Pamma. “No. I never go in those things.” “Why not?” “I don’t really want to see what people look like without their masks.” “Really? Aren’t you curious?” “No not at all. Also I have to pee. I’ll be back in a minute.” “No problem.” I take a few crackers and shove them under my mask. I can only imagine what Nick and Vanessa would think if they could see me here right now. I hate it when they FaceTime me at home, even though I understand that this is the best way to talk to George. “Can I skritch you?”

I’m sorry you can’t sleep.”

“What time is it there?” I ask. “Did he have caffeine today?”

I turn to find the zebra, whose cheese and chip eating skills I had admired earlier. “Sure,” I reply, proud not to need skritch defined for me. With the stubby rim of his black hoof, he reaches behind my ear and, as far as I can tell from the way my mask begins to shake, scratches the fur there. “You can skritch me back,” he says. This sounds like a command. “That’s okay. Thanks.” “Come on. Skritch me.” He sounds angryHe“Nonow.thanks.”nodshislong smiling zebra head, but when he speaks again, it’s in a nasty, accusatory tone. “I know your type.” “What type is that?” This is good. Maybe he can reveal something about Rhonda I don’t know. But he just snorts and walks away. My phone vibrates against my wrist. Shit, I think. I’ve conjured them. They’re FaceTiming me now. I lean down so that nobody can see what I’m doing and peel back my paw glove far enough to let the phone tumble out on the floor. It lands face up. Unknown, it says. This is the way all of Nick and Vanessa’s calls have been coming up since they’ve been overseas. I push past the other animals, rush out the door and up the steps. “Sorry,” I say, picking up the phone, careful not to reveal the fur south of my neck. “I’m at a party in the city.” Nick is alone, his face lit perfectly by a lamp be side him, the light blowing out all of the wrinkles so that he looks like he did when we were in our 20s. I entertain the idea that he’s put some thought into this, made an effort to look handsome for me, but I’m instantly aware the idea is absurd. “George can’t sleep,” he says. His voice comes through distorted and delayed. “Is there anything I can give him?” “Like what?” “I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you.”He sounds agitated, so I use my calm est tone, hoping to even him back out.

After a brief pause, he says, “He had a coffee granita after lunch.”

“I don’t know what that is.” “It’s like a chopped-up popsicle.”

I always try not to look at my own face during these video chats, but this time, even though I am tiny in the cor ner of my phone, the red mark the mask has made across my forehead stands out in an alarming way. I’m surprised that Nick hasn’t asked about it. It looks much worse

HYATT BASSlos angeles review of books

it’s the ultimate insult. The other animals who turned their attention away once they saw I wasn’t bleeding to death now turn back and stare. “She’s here for research,” he tells them. “I write fiction,” I explain to the group, sensing that under their masks they’re a lot less happy with me than they look. “I’m not doing an exposé. I’m on your“Youside.”are not on our side!” the zebra yells.“Can’t you see she’s hurt?” Pamma asks“Andhim. what about us? She’s broken our spell.”“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pamma snorts. She helps me to my feet, and I try to put my head back on. But my forehead hurts much worse than before. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go out side.”She escorts me out the door and up the stairs. It’s surprisingly cool out side, a fact I hadn’t noticed when I was out before. I also notice the street lamps have come on, and the lampposts are the old-fashioned bishop’s crook variety, castiron and ornamental. One shines directly down on us. “I’m sorry about that zebra. Ooh, your cut looks really awful.” “It’s not as painful as it looks,” I lie. I put my hand to my forehead and touch the fiery area. It’s definitely worse. The next time I talk to Nick, I’m going to point out the gash and say it’s from a motorcy cle helmet. When he says with surprise, “You got a motorcycle?” I’ll tell him coolly the motorcycle isn’t mine, it belongs to a friend. I won’t even say guy, just friend. I feel naked without my wolf head, so I force it back on. Pamma makes a sound like she, too, is experiencing physical pain. “Careful. You sure you want to do that?” “Oh,” I say, pleasantly surprised. “It’s just getting it on that hurts. Now it’s fine.” “Really? Are you sure you don’t want to go to a drugstore and get some oint ment?”“No, I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m happy to go with you. I know it can be kind of awkward doing errands in one of these suits.” Under the streetlight, the black patch around her right eye makes her look like she’s crying for me. “Thank you,” I say. And before I know what I’m doing, I go in for a hug. Her fur feels unpleasantly synthetic, almost waxy, not soft and fluffy as it looks. I expected her to feel like a stuffed animal, but there’s a strange hollowness, and then I encounter the humanness of her body underneath. “Please let go,” she says at the same moment I release her. “I don’t like to be touched.”“I’mso sorry.” “It’s alright. I just don’t like to be touched.”“Ofcourse not. I didn’t mean to drag you out here and accost you. Please go back to the party,” I say. “You’re not going in?” “No. I’m going to head home. Thank you again for being so kind.” “No worries.” She shakes her paws in the air beside her ears. “Okay.” I smile, but then I realize she can’t see that I’m smiling, and I don’t know what else to say. So I put my hands up next to my head and shake them furry style.For several blocks, I can’t stop think ing about myself pantomiming joy and

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129128 affection in that cheesy way. Each time I relive the moment, it makes me shudder. I’m afraid to take off my head because of the pain, so I just unzip the back of my suit. Underneath, my clothes, soaked from sweat, quickly go from hot to cold. When my teeth start to chatter, I reclose the back. It’s comforting to be back inside. It reminds me of zipping myself into my sleeping bag as a child. Looking east, I catch a glimpse of the river and decide to walk toward it. I have no reason to hurry home. No babysitter to relieve. No George to tuck in. I think about Pamma, how I wrote her off as a lonely woman in denial. She probably does feel free, as well as empty, as well as guilty for feeling free. I take the pedestrian ramp out over the FDR Drive. Across the river, the moon glows orange as it gradually rises over Queens. If I were Rhonda, I’d run straight down the ramp to the edge of the river. But that’s not really me. Midway across the Drive, I stop to watch the cars: white lights coming at me, red rushing away. I can feel their speed through the vibration of the ramp. Even the handrail is buzzing. I look at the moon again. It’s rising fast. Shrinking. Orange giving way to yellow. I raise my face to the sky, and I howl.

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R. JAY MAGILL JR. Infield,

Flame for a Friend, 2019. essay

SWEET

“Let’s all experience something together,” whispers the actress Zoë Kravitz in a recent primetime TV adver tisement for Michelob Ultra Pure Gold beer. She sits alone at a wooden banquet table atop a large raised platform — the only soul, it seems, on a lush emerald is land, verdant mountains towering behind her. Two highly sensitive microphones sit on the table, connecting Kravitz to the outside world. She taps her fingernails on the glass bottle and rolls the bottom of it across the table, eliciting a rich, woody timbre. “This place, so pure you can feel it,” she purrs. She pops the Pure Gold cap and lets the fizzy pour fill the tall glass and the listeners’ ears. The camera closes in on her face, lips, and wry smile as she con NOTHINGS: ON ASMR AMERICANANDINTIMACY

The hushed intimacy of this adver tisement is not the brainchild of Madison Avenue. It borrows instead from a popular internet phenomenon of videos featuring people whispering into microphones to produce what is called ASMR, or “au tonomous sensory meridian response,” a unique physiological reaction to soft au ditory and haptic stimuli. In ASMR vid eos, primarily young women make light clicks or pops with their lips, hard-vowel sounds with their tongues, tap their fin gernails on resistant surfaces, crinkle piec es of thin paper, brush their hair, flutter their fingers, gently chew food, and, for the most part, like Kravitz, whisper ten derly in stereophonic clarity. These sounds are known as “triggers,” and, depending on your disposition, they can produce a tingling, soothing sensation at the top of your scalp, down the sides of your head, and into the nape of your neck, awak ening psychological associations of love, warmth, affection, and calm. ASMR is associated with the bonding rituals of mothers with their babies, between ro mantic lovers, and in the grooming prac tices of primates. Some people feel deep ly relaxed by ASMR, some feel sexually aroused, some fall asleep. Over the past two years, ASMR videos have ballooned on YouTube, where some of their creators — known as “ASMRtists” — boast millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions of views. Popular ASMR video-makers include Gibi, Fluffy, Pelagea, ASMR Darling, Sophie Michelle, Tingting, and Caroline. Perhaps the most famous is Maria, whose channel, Gentle Whispering, has more than 630 million views. “In this world of stress and cha os,” she writes in the description, “I wish […] to be your secret island of relaxation and peace. I’m here to comfort you, to share my love and care with you, to make you feel relaxed and stress free.” Blondehaired, blue-eyed Maria whispers to you as she cuts your hair, puts makeup on you, massages your face, and lulls you into a lovely trance. ASMRtists can earn up to $1,000 a Childrenday. have begun making ASMR clips too, with adults tuning in to watch and listen to teens and pre-teens chew, whisper, play with slime, and tap on things. The biggest star on YouTube is — or, rather, was (she quit the plat form in June) — Makenna Kelly, of Fort Collins, Colorado, a red-haired, freckled, energetic 13-year-old who posts videos of herself chewing aloe leaves or spraying soap-foam bubbles on her hands on her YouTube channel, Life with Mak. Kelly’s first video, from June 2018, “Eating Raw Honeycomb – EXTREMELY Sticky Mouth Sounds,” features her masticating a piece of honeycomb into a microphone for 16 minutes. A February 2019 article in Wired (“The Dodgy, Vulnerable Fame of YouTube’s Child ASMR Stars,” by Amelia Tait) notes that, in the succeeding months, Kelly’s seminal video was viewed 12 million times. By October, Life with Mak had over a million subscribers. “The Chinese government banned” the videos, Tait writes, “and PayPal [has] blocked their payments.” Kelly’s mother now fields all requests for bespoke videos.

135 los angeles review of books 134 nomenon, but chances are that ASMR triggers stimulate the brain’s “neurotrans mitters, probably things like oxytocin — sometimes called ‘the love hormone’ or ‘the bonding hormone’ because it’s as sociated with people that are really close to each other.” Research on the subject has exploded in recent years, so, in 2014, Richards started a website to host it all: ASMRuniversity.com. His book Brain Tingles, published in September 2018, explains ASMR’s myriad health benefits, including decreased stress and anxiety, elevated mood, deep relaxation, and the alleviation of insomnia. There is a potential evolutionary ba sis for these effects. As clinical neurolo gist Steven Novella, of Yale University School of Medicine, describes on the blog NeuroLogica: “Vertebrate brains are fun damentally hardwired for pleasure and pain,” he writes. We are rewarded with a pleasurable sensation for doing things and experi encing things that increase our survival probability, and have a negative or painful experience to make us avoid harmful be havior or warn us about potential danger or injury. Over evolutionary time a com plex set of reward-and-aversion feedbacks haveIndeveloped.short,ASMR is a hardwired posi tive evolutionary response to being taken care of and feeling loved. ASMR videos are quite unlike other internet fads. Tide Pods, Nom Nom, the Cinnamon Challenge, and kids doing Fortnite dances arise because of clicks and novelty, but then they eventually vanish when the next new thing comes along. But videos featuring young women whis pering into microphones to elicit physio logical responses that intimate acts of ma ternal and romantic affection would seem to fill a more widespread emotional long ing for intimacy. “I don’t think ASMR is mainstream at this point,” says Maria of Gentle Whispering, “but I think it’s going there.”  The popularity of ASMR should not be entirely surprising: semblances and imi tations of intimate experiences have been part of American culture for nearly a cen tury. Popular magazines of the 1920s such as True Confessions and True Story began openly dishing on adulterous affairs and the woes of a boring marriage. The radio soap opera portrayed the experiences of other people’s lives “so that millions of housewives knew they were neither alone nor unique in their problems,” as histori an Warren Susman wrote in his classic ac count of the era. And advertisers depicted relatable interpersonal worries: a print ad for Williams Shaving Cream featured a suave yet anxious-looking mustachioed man with the all-caps warning, “CRIT ICAL EYES ARE SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOW.” But it wasn’t just advertising and magazines that were forging a sense of cultural closeness in early 20th-century America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt entered American living rooms via his radio broadcast Fireside Chats in 1933, moving the remote world of Washington politics and far-flung foreign policy into millions of homes. For the first time since the country’s founding, citizens had a real sense of being close to their execu tive: “Dear Mr. President, […] You have a marvelous radio voice, distinct and clear,” praised a listener after the first airing, on March 12, 1933. “It almost seemed the other night, sitting in my easy chair in R. JAY MAGILL JR. fides to the estimated 100 million people watching the 2019 Super Bowl, “Beer, in its organic form.”

Craig Richard, a professor of bio pharmaceutical sciences at Shenandoah University, in Winchester, Virginia, is the go-to scientist for explaining ASMR. He says that no researcher has yet been able to unravel the exact biochemistry or phys iological mechanisms behind the phe

MAGILL

The cultural longing for intimacy has become more eclectic and diffuse over the past decade. The viral 2014 video “First Kiss” features 20 strangers making out; the photo book Touching Strangers snaps them awkwardly hugging. The show Dating Naked featured strangers stripping down for a first date; Married at First Sight legally bound them; Date My Mom let the kids decide. Nationwide “cuddle services” offer “trained professionals” who will canoodle with you for $80 an hour, and Cuddle Party, founded years earlier in New York City, aims at bringing strang ers together for “non-sexual, consensual touch.” It is now available worldwide.

Black-and-white TV was the stan dard broadcast medium after World War II, but when color television entered the American household, on May 22, 1958 — on a live NBC broadcast with President Eisenhower — it altered notions of in timacy forever. What was once abstract, drab, and far away became concrete, vi brant, and near, collapsing Americans’ sense of distance and heightening their sense of interpersonal proximity. By 1968, roughly 25 percent of US households had a color television, and the TV medium as a whole had gained a firm foothold as the most effective medium yet available to politics. That year, 28-year-old media consultant Roger Ailes wrote in a memo about Richard Nixon’s TV performance that the candidate’s “eye contact is good with the panelists, but he should play a little more to the home audience via the head-on camera.” Nixon lamented, “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” to which Ailes, now-fa mously, responded, “Television is not a gimmick.”Inthe 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, daytime talk shows such as Phil Donahue, Merv Griffin, Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, and Montel Williams encouraged audiences to excavate the intimate lives of strangers. They did so under the guid ance of a charismatic and empathetic host (a more recent and fitting example is Dr. Phil) who would deploy the strategies of pop psychotherapy to prompt revelations about trauma and personal suffering. This, in turn, would lead to a confrontation, usually with a family member. This would all play out not as entertainment but as a form of detoxification. Secrets would be aired, and that would, at some point, lead to greater happiness and freedom. In order for these revelations to be curative, they were performed in front of a group and/or live studio audience. More than any mod ern device, television created Americans’ sense of, and desire to achieve, increased closeness with strangers — however il lusory — because closeness was deemed psychologically healthy in and of itself.

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For the more cerebrally inclined, there is a recent spate of popular confessionals: Benjamin Anastas’s Too Good to Be True, Sonia Sotomayor’s My Beloved World, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, anything touched by Lena Dunham, and, of course, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle — to name just a few works that permit intimate entry to private life — trauma, depression, anxiety, body-image fears, cheating, pubic waxing, minor surgery, self-loathing — recounted with varying degrees of ironic detachment and liter ary innovation. Comedian Marc Maron’s podcast WTF began as the go-to place for on-air disclosure about deep person al trauma. In fact, many other podcasts, led by the whispery, confessional aesthet ic of Ira Glass’s This American Life, draw in audiophiles with hushed tones that sound exactly opposite of the imperson al projections of a 1940s radio announc er — or FDR. Perhaps foreseeably, there are already 55 of them under the ASMR mantel.Semblances of intimacy have reached their zenith on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the digital world generally are saturated, as a recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece by social critic Stephen Marche contends, [with] displays of intimate sce narios: family vacations, gradu ations, ninetieth birthday teas, Christmas morning with the box es unwrapped, everybody’s family out in the open. There’s Birthtube. There are unprecedented mass es of pornography of the most graphic nature. Digital connec tivity has fundamentally altered as ancient an intimate practice as masturbation. Each day, about 300 million photos are posted to Facebook and 95 million to Instagram. About 530,000 “snaps” are sent per minute on Snapchat. Of course, it’s not just imagery. The overwhelming majority of Facebook’s content is made up of a mélange of tex tual snippets from the everyday lives of its two billion active users — to the tune of 510,000 comments and 293,000 status updates every minute. Clearly, so cial media has become the largest qua si-public repository for intimate images and commentary in the history of the world, even if we also allow for the real ity of social media’s mishmash of actual and performed intimacy, affect, sincerity, and staging. Nevertheless, “[p]eople have gotten really comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” Mark Zuckerberg said at the 2010 Crunchie Awards. “The expectation of privacy is no longer a social norm.”

The development of this hulking cache of digital intimacy is not without its attendant problems. Social critics like Jonathan Haidt, Geert Lovink, Sherry Turkle, Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya have been worried that con fusing intimacy and publicity is having harmful effects on individual reputation, self-confidence, notions of virtue and vice, and personal boundaries. They argue that we expose our intimate selves online — sharing photos, videos, and thoughts with thousands of strangers or partial strangers — for a less than noble reason: we want attention. We give away our privacy in the hopes of receiving affirmation that our self-promoting lives are worthwhile and interesting. Users who otherwise feel invisible or undervalued might at last JAY JR. the library, that you were across the room fromTwome.”days after Pearl Harbor, roughly 62 million listeners tuned in to hear FDR’s Fireside Chat. He spoke with Americans throughout the war, using the most ef fective means of mass communication available to conjure a sense of social co hesion and executive care, particularly for families who had loved ones fighting in Europe and the Pacific. FDR’s 30 broad casts were included in the first 50 re cordings that formed the Library of Congress’s National Registry of Recording, which noted that Roosevelt had “utilized the media to present his programs and ideas directly to the public and thereby redefined the relationship between the President and the American people” (it’s no huge leap to see the same kind of re definition happening over Twitter today).

And thus, the dilemma: Given actual declining levels of social trust, why are there so many “scenarios” of intimacy on social media that in real life would indicate the presence of trust? Is trust declining because these portrayals of intimacy are widely understood to be mere performances of intimacy, thus warranting that mistrust? Or, alternately, could this excessive staging of intimacy be a way of expressing a deeper desire for trust? Or, finally: Given the reality of declining social trust, might the explosion of intimate photos and texts be a desperate attempt to win trust back for ourselves, to perform the kind of trust we wish to achieve? I would suggest that it is, and that the reason this attempt is misguided is because we no longer know the difference between trust and intimacy; we no longer know how to detach our public selves from our intimate lives, assuming that fusing the two is the ultimate moral or interpersonal ideal — authenticity. In this conflation, our public masks, even when they’re on, still seek to reveal our own and others’ innermost vulnerabilities. How has this happened? Over the past several decades we have placed too much value on authenticity, intimacy, and private life and not enough on sociability, impersonality, and intellectual detachment. A complex democratic society necessitates a distinction between

The entire social and administrative world is built upon thick networks of trust, responsibility, norms, and reciprocity, relations so habituated and reliable they are discussed only when something goes wrong — when fraud, malfeasance, bribery, abuse of power, unfair practices, graft, or other crimes indicate maltreatment of established networks of trust, that breaks democratic institutional norms. Trust requires no knowledge of personal life but rather of individual or institutional character, reputation, and reliability — a history of their doing what they said they would do, without deceit or dissembling, with adherence to defined ethical principles and agreed-upon methods of conducting rational discourse, such as a basis in the world of fact and reality, not in falsehoods and propaganda, a recollection of promises and statements that have been made before, and an adherence to the principles of intellectual honesty — fallibility being perhaps foremost and most democratic among them. Trust also requires a faith that future actions will reflect those of the past.

Think instead of the people with whom you have chosen to have a longstanding, meaningful emotional, or romantic relationship — individuals or groups who know your history, secrets, predilections, ticks, moral views, and intellectual or aesthetic sensibilities. The number of people in this category — people you are intimate with but that you do not trust — is likely near zero. Why would we choose to be really close to someone but not trust them?On the other hand, there are scores of people you actually do trust — or should be able to trust — but with whom you have no intimate relationship whatsoever: police officers, judges, ambulance workers, bank tellers, school teachers, colleagues, neighbors, utility companies, publictransportation drivers, local institutions of politics, law, and commerce, and, despite the man currently atop its executive branch, the United States government and its multitude of administrative offices and departments that keep the country running, its food safe, mail delivered, roads built, financial markets overseen.

139 los angeles review of books 138 achieve online the kind of affection or af firmation they seek. Social scientists have been fascinated by why so many people seek online atten tion too, and they have come up with sim ilar findings. In “Facebook Therapy: Why People Share Self-Relevant Content On line,” Jonah Berger and Eva Buechel found that sharing emotions and experiences via social media boosts a sense of well-being through the perceived social support of Facebook “likes” or positive comments on one’s status update. The most frequent users of Facebook were people who most needed this sense of validation — people “who have difficulty regulating their emo tions on their own.” Sharing private life on social media — even when that private life is performed — and receiving posi tive feedback provides affirmation of one’s decisions about a partner, clothes, parties, pets, consumer products, vacation desti nations, and so on. Facebook is a fast and free form of therapy. ASMR videos quench this thirst for attention perfectly, of course, since ASMRtists give viewers — and social media users — what they ultimately crave: immediate affection. Likes, thumbs-up, hearts, and positive comments arrive unpredictably and at random intervals. ASMR videos, on the other hand, guar antee a positive response as soon as you hit play. Here, you are at the center of attention. You alone are treated with gentleness. You are the special person to whom a young woman, hidden in your laptop, gently whispers sweet nothings.  This historical development of intimacy in American life — from magazine ads to onair confessionals to Facebook to ASMR — leads us to a curious contemporary dilemma: as the proliferation of intimate scenarios has swelled, social trust in America has plummeted. Billions of scenes from private life fill social media channels, the web, and popular culture, but, according to a recent Pew Social Survey, a full two-thirds of Americans no longer trust each other. Only one-third of Americans trust their government. Trust in the media has also declined. These unhappy statistics are borne out in multidecade studies by the Saguaro Report and Trilateral Commission, polls by Edelman, Pew, and Gallup, and in books by social scientists Karen Cook, Francis Fukuyama, Nan Lin, Laura Pappano, Adam Seligman, and Robert Putnam, to name just a few. MIT’s Sherry Turkle and Columbia University’s Tim Wu, among many others, suggest that this decline stems in part from the regular intervention of the digital world into our everyday lives: social life on screens instead of in the flesh; shopping online instead of in stores; tweeting opinions instead of having a conversation; watching movies at home instead of venturing into the theater; and so on. We have swapped social trust for mediated intimacy — moreover, we have started to confuse trust and intimacy. We are intimate with many but say we trust few, when, in fact, it should be the other way Andaround.that is why, here, it is important to make a distinction: intimacy requires trust; trust does not require intimacy. A thought experiment: How many people are you emotionally intimate with but do not actually trust? I don’t mean intimate sexual relationships with partners you don’t yet know well enough to trust, or family members with whom you are intimate but who you do not quite trust.

R. JAY MAGILL JR.

R. JAY MAGILL JR. that the public realm has almost com pletely receded.” She published that book in 1958, the same year that color televi sion brought the public world into mil lions of American living rooms.

Up until recent decades, adults could comfortably separate these two selves without feelings of guilt or inauthenticity.

Victorians, for example, did not have difficulty finding and expressing a “true self,” because they believed that that self was always present and only to be entrusted to a person worthy of its revelation. But over the past century — budding alongside the mediated expressions of intimacy cited above — an “ideology of intimacy” has promoted the idea that social relationships were only real and meaningful the closer they approached a person’s inner life. This ideology grew from intertwined roots in Christianity, romanticism, industrialization, egalitarian philosophy, and psychology beginning in the late 19th century. The ideology of intimacy encouraged closeness and decried distance — the latter as cold, fake, or aloof. The ideology of intimacy whispered a mantra, ASMR-like, throughout the 20th century: It is better to feel close to people; social distance is bad and should be overcome. I have only become aware of this mantra after moving to Berlin a decade ago; the assumption runs so deep in American life that it becomes visible only when one is no longer there. Perhaps we should now aim for a reinstatement of the public mask — of an acceptance of a sociable engagement that is not private, of a sense of outwardness and generosity of self that has nothing to do with our intimate lives. Not because we pine for some Victorian or 1950s notion of oppressive propriety or bourgeois uprightness or wish to become superficial robots à la The Stepford Wives, but because these modes of being social are based on two increasingly outmoded virtues: respect and humility. The former generously honors the full humanity of others from a distance; the latter permits us escape from our own pride and self-centeredness. It’s easy to imagine how practicing either of these virtues more regularly would contribute to a more healthy, kind, and robust social life.  To be sure, there is not more intimacy now, in the digital age, than there was in the past — no more and no less than in the analog age. We simply see more in timacy now because a retreating public sphere has left bare its existence, like a wave receding from the beach. Curious ly, as digitalization has enabled more of our privacy to be pushed into public, we have become more private when we are in public — tethered to mobile devices that are linked to the content of our private lives and personal consumer preferences. This widespread inclination to wall one self off from public life bespeaks a deep desire to keep public and private separate, even if to the detriment of the former. “This enlargement of the private […] does not constitute a public realm,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition. “[O]n the contrary […] [it] means only

141 los angeles review of books 140 the private and the public, both of which have a valuable and worthwhile politics. (Think of the equal rights and LGBTQ movements, which have made great strides by publicizing forms of oppression that might typically be walled off in the private spaces of the home: the family, the couple, marriage.) But there can be no true private self without a public one; each delimits the expanse of the other. The self in public is fulfilled by civility, excellence, sociability, rituals, performance, and achievement; the private self by intimacy, sincerity, openness, and warmth.

A half-century and nearly halfa-million programming hours later, a curious reversal is underway: 3.8 billion internet users — over half of the world’s population — are uploading over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, 90 percent of it over the past two years. Four hundred and thirty-two thousand minutes (7,200 hours) of video are uploaded daily to YouTube, where users watch 4,146,600 videos every minute. This data, of course, is not solely comprised of scenes and notes from private life. And yet, as we do propagate those scenes and notes from private experiences into the digital universe, we’re sending along with them qualities germane only to the private world, transforming them into mediated shadows of their originals. In this way, ASMR videos offer a way for us to sense what intimacy feels like in this digital age, in a society increasingly devoid of trust and in desperate need of attention.

ofimageinstallationCaycedo,Carolina ouronfuturethecarryingpast,thetowardsforwardlookingpresenttheinwalkTo espaldanuestraenfuturoelcargandopasado,elhaciafrentedemirandopresenteelporCaminar/back 2018., inches35x122x77hinges,pushpins,pencils,colorprints,digitalpaint,vocnoAppleply, collection.ArtandLibraryGardens,HuntingtonEngagement.andLaborofRitualsofviewInstallation collection.ArtandLibraryGardens,HuntingtontheofCourtesy

Maya C. Popa is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York City. Her writing appears in Poetry, Tin House, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Her first collection, American Faith, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in November. She directs the Creative Writing program at the Nightingale-Bamford School and is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and co-author of the pop group YACHT, a founding ed itor of Terraform, VICE’s science-fiction vertical, and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women who Made the Internet (Penguin Random House).

R. Jay Magill Jr. is the author of Sincerity (W. W. Norton, 2012) and Chic Ironic Bitterness (Univ. of Michigan, 2007) and the editor of the Berlin Journal and P98a PAPER Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the author of The Life Assignment (Four Way Books) and the translator of Dinapiera di Donato’s Colaterales (Akashic Books/National Poetry Series).

Marcelo Gomes is a Brazilian born photographer and director, who lives and works in New York. He attended the University of Iowa on a full athletic scholarship (bas ketball) and graduated with a B. A. in Political Science. His work has been published in the following mag azines; The New Yorker, T Magazine (The New York Times), New York Magazine, Index, The Plant, Dazed and Confused, The Wire, and many others. Marcelo has published two photography books via Hassla Books. Kelly Infield is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in Los Angeles. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of design with a BFA in furniture design in 2018. While formally trained in furniture design, Infield’s work spans many mediums and disciplines allowing for room to express her interest in a variety of materials and practices. Infield regularly tests and manipulates these materials to create objects that are functional as well as sculptural. Her most recent group exhibition, Tarantella, was a one night only installation at The Staircase in Los Angeles (2019).

CONTRIBUTORS FEATURED ARTISTS

Carolina Caycedo (1978) is a London-born Colombian artist, living in Los Angeles. She participates in move ments of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Carolina’s artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, photographs and videos are not just an end result, but rather part of the artist’s process of research and acting. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities, and generates a debate about the future in relation to common goods, environmental jus tice, just energy transition and cultural biodiversity.

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, writer, and ed ucator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the politi cal, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives and struggles in the 21st century.Morehshin's work has been exhibited around the world including Venice Biennale di Archittectura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst. She has been an artist in residence at BANFF Centre (2013), Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin (2016), Eye beam’s one year Research Residency (2016-2017) in NYC, Pioneer Works (2018), and Harvest Works (2018). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera among others.

Dora Malech is the author of four books of poems, most recently Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018) and the forthcoming Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry, and her honors include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, and a Writers’ Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Semi nars at Johns Hopkins University.

145 los angeles review of books 144

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopol itans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures, and the book of poems Street on the Hill. She lives in Ban galore.

Savannah Knoop is a New York-based filmmaker, artist, and writer whose work travels between fiction and docu mentary, lived experience and imagined fantasy. They have performed and exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. They adapted their memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy (published with Seven Stories Press) into a feature-length film, co-written and directed by Justin Kelly, and starring Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Kelvin Harris Jr., Jim Sturgess, and Diane Kruger.

Upcoming solo museum shows include Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Orange County Museum of Art, and ICABoston. In 2019 she will participate in the 45 Salón Nacional de Artistas Colombia, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Film sector of Art Basel in Ba sel, and will be a 2020 visiting artist at the NTU-CCA in Singapore. Caycedo is an active member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union and the Rios Vivos Colombia Social Movement. Simone Forti came of age in the 1950s and 60s and de veloped out of two main influences: dance improvisation which she studied with Anna Halprin, and the legendary Judson Dance Theater that revolutionized modern dance in New York at a historical moment of dialogue between artists, musicians, poets and dancers. From her early minimalist dance-constructions, through her animal movement studies, land portraits and news animations, Forti has had a seminal influence on her field. For the past two decades she has been developing ‘Logomotion’, an improvisational dance/narrative form. Forti’s book Handbook in Motion was published in 1974 by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and her book, Oh, Tongue, was published in 2003 by Beyond Baroque Books. Forti has received var ious grants including six National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In 1995 she received the Dance Theater Workshop’s New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for sustained achievement, and in 2004 she received the Lester Horton Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Dance Recourse Center of Los Angeles. She is a recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jacob Rubin is the author of the novel The Poser and holds the Laurence Perrine Chair of Creative Writing at South ern Methodist University. He recently wrote about Mary Gaitskill for Slate Jessica Shabin is a Truman Capote Fellow at Brooklyn College. Arthur Sze has published ten books of poetry, includ ing, most recently, Sight Lines (Copper Canyon, 2019). His other books include Compass Rose, The Ginkgo Light, Quipu, and The Redshifting Web. He is a professor emeri tus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason, published by Copper Canyon Press. She is also a win ner of the “Discovery” Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Col ony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, Iowa Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

Hyatt Bass is the author of the novel The Embers Paul Chan is an artist based in New York. His latest book, Odysseus and the Bathers, came out in March 2019.

Hiromi Kawakami is a Japanese writer known for her fic tion, poetry, and literary criticism. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature. Her work has been adapted for film and has been translated into more than 15 languages.

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (2019).

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los angeles review of books 146 Friedl Kubelka studied photography at the Graphic In struction and Research Institute in Vienna from 1965 until 1969. She later founded her own School of Artistic Photography (1990). She was awarded the State Prize for Photography in 2005, Austria’s most prestigious pho tography award, and has had numerous solo exhibitions, including ‘Friedl Bondi’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1980); and ‘Occupying Space, The Generali Collection’, Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2005), amongst others. Also, her work was included in the groundbreaking exhibition ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2007). Ralph Lemon whose career spans over 30 years, is a di rector, choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-dis ciplinary performance and presentation. In 2016 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He is known for developing intellectually rigor ous and experimental performances that are as socially and politically resonant as they are personal. His honors include three “Bessie” Awards, an Alpert Award in the Arts, a Creative Capital Award, a U.S.A. Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Choreographers Award, and one of the first Doris Duke Foundation Performing Artist Awards. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University; artist-in-residence at Temple University; Miller Endowment Visiting Art ist at the Krannert Center; Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University; Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre; a Visiting Critic at the Yale School of Art’s Sculpture Department; and the 2013-14 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he curated a series of “performance essays,” titled Value Talks Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based writer, performer and choreographer. New York productions include: Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance (recipient of a 2010 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production); Bronx Gothic (2014 “Bessie” Award), and Poor People’s TV Room. Her residencies and awards include: MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship (2018), MANCC (2012, 2016), NYFA Fellowship in Chore ography (2013), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Program (2014-15), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Artist Grants in Dance (2014), Creative Capital Grantee (2016), NEFA, and NDP. She was a Randjelovic/Stryker Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts from 2015-2017.

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Quarterly Journal, no. 23: Imitation Issue

Articles inside

THREE WAYS TO

QUEST OF THE

EVERYONE IS HAVING

IMITATION AND

REGARDING THE LIFE

OCTOBER DUSK

THE PAINTER

OUR DATA OUR SELVES