LARB Quarterly, no. 40: Water

50999>

9 781940 660943

50999>

2023

$9.99 ISBN 978-1-940660-94-3

WATER

$9.99 ISBN 978-1-940660-94-3

WINTER

NO. 40

New from

Reaktion Living with the Dead

How We Care for the Deceased Vibeke Maria Viestad and Andreas Viestad Translated by Matt Bagguley “No bones about it, there are wild and wonderful ways to honor the dead. The Viestads live in a Norwegian cemetery.

Their fascination with burials led them to dig deep into relationships with death.”—Sunday Post Cloth $25.00

Crooner

Singing from the Heart from Sinatra to Nas Alex Coles “This is an intriguing study of a wide array of vocalists who were inspired by Sinatra. A fresh look at an influential element of popular music.”—Library Journal Reverb Paper $18.00

Now in Paperback

Winters in the World

A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year Eleanor Parker “A heart-warmer for the coming winter.”

—The Wall Street Journal Paper $16.00

Critical Lives

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) Lara Vetter Paper $22.00

Richard Owen Patrick Armstrong Paper $22.00

Frantz Fanon James S. Williams Paper $22.00

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S The War That Must Not Occur

Blood and Lightning

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise

On Becoming a Tattooer Dustin Kiskaddon

Belonging without Othering

The Sociology of Literature

How We Save Ourselves and the World john a. powell and Stephen Menendian

A History of Fake Things on the Internet Walter J. Scheirer

Gisèle Sapiro, Translated by Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman

The Authenticity Industries Keeping it “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics Michael Serazio

Not My Type

Hegel

Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating Apryl Williams, with a Foreword by Safiya Noble

The Philosopher of Freedom Klaus Vieweg

sup.org stanfordpress.typepad.com

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 40 WINTER 2023

Publisher: Tom Lutz Editor-In-Chief: Michelle Chihara

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, Darryl Holter, Steven Lavine, Eric Lax, Tom Lutz, Susan Morse, Sharon Nazarian, Lynne Thompson, Barbara Voron, Matthew Weiner, Jon Wiener, and Jamie Wolf Editorial Interns: Alessia Degraeve, Jared Klegar,

Brandon Sward

Managing Editor: Chloe Watlington Senior Editor: Paul Thompson Poetry Editors: Elizabeth Metzger and Callie Siskel Art Director: Perwana Nazif Design Director: Ella Gold Copy Desk Chief: AJ Urquidi Executive Director: Irene Yoon Social Media Director: Maya Chen Publications Coordinator: Danielle Clough Ad Sales: Bill Harper Contributing Editors: Aaron Bady, Annie Berke, Maya Gonzalez, Summer Kim Lee, Juliana Spahr, Adriana Widdoes, and Sarah Chihaya

Cover Art: Rosalind Nashashibi, Electrical Gaza, 2015. Cinematography by Emma Dalesman, production by Kate Parker. Digital video still transferred from 16mm film, animation, color, sound 17:53 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, London, New York

The Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization. The LARB Quarterly is published by

the Los Angeles Review of Books, 672 South La Fayette Park Place, Suite 30, Los Angeles, CA 90057. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www.lareviewofbooks.org.

The LARB Quarterly is a premium of the LARB Membership Program. Go to www.lareviewofbooks.org/ membership for more information or email membership@lareviewofbooks.org. Annual subscriptions are available at www.lareviewofbooks.org/shop.

Submissions for the Quarterly can be emailed to chloe@lareviewofbooks.org.

To place an ad, email bill@lareviewofbooks.org.

PRINTED IN CANADA

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 40 WINTER 2023

NONFICTION

11

TREADING WATER

Jayson Buford 18

KELLER

Kim Gordan 28

MY RETRIEVALS

Briallen Hopper 36

82

86

CRIME, PUNISHMENT, AND

WHOLE FOODS Hannah Meyer 90

AT THE SCREEN DOORS

Liz Schroeder 96

THE PROPANE TANK

Benjamin Weissman 105

THE BIRD

Rashed Aqrabawi

I WILL NEVER DIE, PT. 2

Sadie Sartini Garner 68

SHORTCUTS

Grace Byron

WRECKING CREWS

Joe Donnelly 59

ANALYSIS

WRITING BLUE

Terry Nguyen 49

74

Olivia Heal

TWO COASTS, ONE RISK

David Lipset 42

FICTION

POETRY

MY WHOLE WORLD CAN FIT

IN THIS WASHER

Dorie Chevlen

109

EUPHORIC RECALL IN 80S

VINTAGE ARMANI

K. Iver 110

MOON AND SPRING

Ekhmetjan Osman

Translated by Joshua L. Freeman 111

DEAR O—

Vandana Khanna 112

THE GREEN LAKE IS THE PLACE

Dorothea Lasky 115

FAMILY POEM IN HARTLEY MAUDITT

Esther Lin 116

THE STORM

Jasmine Dreame Wagner

The first book-length selection from the extraordinary unpublished diary of the lateVictorian writer “Michael Field”—the pen name of two female coauthors and romantic partners

An arresting illustrated history of twins in mythology, science, and visual culture

Zone Books

A historical and theoretical investigation of the unexpected ways screen-based media protect and excite viewers’ fears and anxieties of the world

Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture

Zone Books are distributed by Princeton University Press

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader, The so-called futurists say it’s going to come down to water. That in the notso-distant future, wars will be fought over it. Corporations will privatize it, armed men will guard it, and it will be rationed and hoarded and poisoned and purified until the last bit has evaporated. Of course, wars have already been waged both on the oceans and under them, and the location and scarcity of water has dictated the course of industrial and agricultural development. Before there were lush golf courses off the Las Vegas strip and Miami penthouses underwritten for flood insurance, it was a trade route, a refuge, a venue for myth. Dams, aqueducts, “witches” bobbing lifelessly.

In the 40th issue of the LARB Quarterly, our writers, artists, and poets use water as a prism through which we can more clearly see our human habits and the planet they destroy. When we’re not fixating on water as a finite commodity, we see instead the ocean’s vastness, as Terry Nguyen alludes to in her essay on the color blue. Dorie Chevlen finds Sisyphus at the laundromat, the grey water pumping through endless spin cycles, and in a diaristic piece about the ebb and flow of wealth from generation to generation and paycheck to paycheck, Jayson Buford evokes the cliche about the man who spends his money like water. And in her short story, “Analysis,” Olivia Heal wades through water that “pulls what it has gathered with it as it runs out, as if the tide has a purpose.”

The cover image is taken from Electrical Gaza, Rosalind Nashashibi’s 2015 film which captures moments of stillness that she witnessed the year prior, just before the violence that erupted that July. The frame in question sees women and children bathing in the sea—with one gaze pointed straight back at the observer.

Paul Thompson

6

Brilliant Ideas to Brighten Long Winter Nights

“Offers persuasive and refreshing perspectives.”

Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep

“Important reading for audiences of all levels... a way of looking forward.”

Library Journal (Starred)

“An instant classic... highly original and beautiful.”

Ada Ferrer, author of Pulitzer-Prize Winner Cuba

“Honors the gay civil rights activist... by casting a critical eye on his life and work.”

Elaina Patton, NBC News

“Original and thoughtprovoking. Readers will want to tune in to this.”

Publishers Weekly

“Fascinating... New York history nuts will be in heaven.”

Publishers Weekly

New books from DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nimrods

a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir

KAWIKA GUILLERMO

an other

a black feminist consideration of animal life

SHARON PATRICIA HOLLAND

Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

Feenin

R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology

ALEXANDER GHEDI WEHELIYE

Dreams in Double Time On Race, Freedom, and Bebop

JONATHAN LEAL

Refiguring American Music

Marx for Cats A Radical Bestiary

LEIGH CLAIRE LA BERGE

Immeasurable Weather

Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy

SARA J. GROSSMAN

Elements

The Dark Tree

Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

STEVEN L. ISOARDI

Revised and Updated Paperback Edition

The Other Side of Empathy JADE E. DAVIS

dukeupress.edu

larb ad.qxp_Layout 1 2023-10-10 7:24 AM Page 1

Doing Harm

Paths of Pollen

The Beautiful Unwanted

How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror Roy J. Eidelson

Stephen Humphrey

Down Syndrome in Myth, Memoir, and Bioethics Christopher Kaposy

Cloth | $32.95 | 272pp

Chronicling pollen’s do-or-die mission to spread plant genes, from the prehistoric past to the present, under increasing ecological and anthropogenic strain.

A thought-provoking and unflinching, scrupulously documented account of one of the darkest chapters in the recent history of psychology and the APA.

Cloth | $34.95 | 256pp | 51 photos

Cloth | $32.95 | 208pp

A compelling reflection on the possible disappearance of Down syndrome from the point of view of a philosopher and parent.

Intelligent … Beautiful … Lasting …

Prophets of Love

Statesman of the Piano

State of Disappearance

The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul Matthew R. Anderson

Jazz, Race, and History in the Life of Lou Hooper Edited by Sean Mills, Eric Fillion, and Désirée Rochat

Edited by Brad Evans and Chantal Meza

Cloth | $34.95 | 280pp | 19 photos, 9 illustrations

An intervention into the problem of human disappearance curated by a renowned theorist and featuring artwork by a celebrated abstract painter.

Cloth | $25.95 | 192pp

A side-by-side examination of two Jewish thinkers, separated by millennia, but connected by their spirituality. Prophets of Love alters our views of both, re-introducing us to two poetic prophets of divine and human love.

Q M

The previously unpublished autobiography of a Canadian-born pianist who played with many of the 20th century’s jazz and blues greats in Detroit, Harlem, and Montreal.

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Paper | $34.95 | 288pp | 14 b&w images, colour insert

mqup.ca

@McGillQueensUP

A faithful friend Vitsœ’s 606 Universal Shelving System has now been in continuous production for 63 years.

Our customers come to rely on its dependability.

Collar our friendly team and we’ll walk you through the process.

Los Angeles New York vitsoe.com

NONFICTION

TREADING WATER On debit card transactions and being Black in New York

by Jayson Buford

All my life, whether I was stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s, going

to pretty awning-laden Manhattan sports bars to watch the Aaron Boone–era Yankees lose another heartbreaking playoff series, or inhabiting my current mode of powerhouse hip-hop critic and amusing lifestyle writer, I’ve had a fraught relationship with money—particularly with not having enough of it, and not knowing how and where to spend it when I do. My family has always risen and fallen in class status: intermittent trips to Miami, a yawning apartment at the end of Riverside Drive that was replaced by a small spot in Riverdale. The fact is that, most of the time, my money 11

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

comes from white institutions and is spent in white neighborhoods. An ex-girlfriend, whom I will always love dearly, used to tease me by calling me a 1970s Black man: “Your ideal mode of conversation is cocaine, Scorsese, Spike, Black-Jewish relations, the Knicks, Ghostface, and a white woman,” she once said. Not wrong.

May 2: Scarr’s Pizza—$18.01 (thanks to the two Presidentes I had with my pizza) Scarr’s, a Black-owned pizza place, is a good spot; I like that you can see John Starks dunking on Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. I’m sure Pippen blames MJ for him being on that poster, like he blames MJ for everything wrong in his life. I got a Hotboi slice—beef pepperoni and jalapeño peppers.

Living in New York, particularly Manhattan, means that it is impossible not to spend money every time you step outside. Cash transactions don’t even matter.

Spend money and watch the amount on your latest check wither away like a receipt dropped in water. The maxim is that you have to spend it to make it, and I’d argue this is true especially if you are in the Black middle class like I am, where taste is social currency. You have to move through the spaces and experience whatever you can—process, evaluate, and process again, chasing that electricity you can identify, define, and communicate to others.

I don’t quite fit into the Black-andbougie aesthetic of brunch hats, photo booths, and colorful cocktails with twee names. I can hang with anyone; some days I wish I could fit into that world, if such a world would accept a maniac like me. I want to look in the mirror and see Theo Huxtable. But I don’t. Instead, I see Jayson Buford—a man who lives with an 12

emotional intensity in a city that doesn’t desire him, a man who can’t stop chasing women, a man who thinks all police should be guillotined except for the ones on Law & Order, a man who dated a Zionist, a man who adores Reverend Wright and controversial Black preachers like him—and that, despite the attendant complications, will have to suffice in this lifetime.

May 2: Le Dive—$18.81 Let the record show that two High Lifes for 18 bucks is a rip-off. But Le Dive is nice: it’s posh and en vogue (being on the scene is my gift and curse) and sits right where Canal Street turns to Ludlow, across from Metrograph, a glass theater/restaurant that shows old movies. The weather is getting nicer; when the tables are set outside, that’s when Le Dive comes alive.

My pops—a wonderful man who taught me about movies, the Knicks, the Yankees, Black history, and how to be kind—couldn’t quite keep our class level as steady as my mother or my older brother wanted. This is not on him; this is not a moral failing. Being Black in New York is hard. Some days, I wonder if the way I spend my money is going to keep my head bobbing just above and just below that water line too. Money allows me to enjoy all the luxurious dinners that fill me up with joy; when that evaporates (it always does), I am taunted by my lack of institutional backing and my measly freelance life.

My mother is an immigrant, from Jamaica. My father isn’t. This explains at least some of the difference in how they think about money. Immigrants are taught to keep their heads down and stay grounded; Black Americans usually have a more parasocial relationship with the country.

Congratulations to the 2023 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Winners Presented by the Association for Jewish Studies WINNERS

FINALISTS IN THE CATEGORY OF JEWISH LITERATURE AND LINGUISTICS

Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End HEIDI KAUFMAN University of Virginia Press

IN THE CATEGORY OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321 – 1422 TZAFRIR BARZILAY University of Pennsylvania Press

IN THE CATEGORY OF MODERN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE: AFRICA, AMERICAS, ASIA, AND OCEANIA A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg

NATHANIEL DEUTSCH & MICHAEL CASPER Yale University Press

IN THE CATEGORY OF PHILOSOPHY AND JEWISH THOUGHT The Kabbalistic Tree

J. H. CHAJES The Pennsylvania State University Press

IN THE CATEGORY OF JEWISH LITERATURE AND LINGUISTICS The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History BARBARA E. MANN Yale University Press

IN THE CATEGORY OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance EMILY MICHELSON Princeton University Press

IN THE CATEGORY OF MODERN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE: AFRICA, AMERICAS, ASIA, AND OCEANIA Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism S. R. GOLDSTEIN-SABBAH Brill

IN THE CATEGORY OF PHILOSOPHY AND JEWISH THOUGHT Jewish Politics in Spinoza’s Amsterdam ANNE O. ALBERT The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

This book award program has been made possible

by Jordan Schnitzer through the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Family Fund of the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation.

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

No matter how much the racists beat us, we keep hoping for financial glory, no matter how implausible it seems. My parents are sweet and lovely. I need to take breaks from them, but they’ve been there for me my whole life, and have given me a sense of purpose, humor, dignity, sociability, and the ability to be myself in every single room.

That’s all that matters. No one is perfect, but as parents, they were close to it.

May 5: Clandestino—$11.00 (but I drank more—believe that) All discussions about Dimes Square— positive, negative, or simply confused—start and end in Clandestino, a solid dive with strong drinks and decent prices. To some, Clandestino is a front for unabashed fascism in a traditionally working-class neighborhood.

To me, it is just a fucking good-looking bar; either come drink pilsners with me or don’t.

There are three corner tables, a bench for insane conversation while standing up, eight seats at the bar, and tables in the back. I realized Ben Detrick—a writer and podcaster I’d admired since I was on Twitter yelling at Porziņģis— was a patron there, and it made me want to go more to hang with him. I’ve been in better bars than Clandestino—or “Clando,” as people call it, affectionately or derisively. But convenience, price, and beautiful women are what I look for when I make a bar my spot, and Clandestino rates well in all those categories.

I find the conversation about Dimes Square to be hilarious. You mean young people are congregating downtown? Color me shocked. Of course neophytes are going to a two-block-radius downtown to drink and clown. I understand, and empathize, with a Chinese New Yorker complaining about the rise of Dimes Square. An Asian mentor of mine told me that he didn’t like my calling the area 14

by this new name. That was fair—imagine yourself and your people shoehorned into a tiny part of the city, over-surveilled and -policed, then having your identity scrubbed from it as soon as the party reporters started showing up. But every neighborhood goes through its annoying moment when it seems inescapable in conversation and in print. You can argue that Dimes Square is different because of how quickly it happened, and the fact that it happened during the pandemic, though that’s the same end-of-history solipsism that fuels every scene. To me, it’s mostly just a place where I have those pilsners, smoke cigarettes outside, argue with Ben about basketball, and converse with people. On this night, I sat next to FKA Twigs and playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

I’m from 155th St. and Riverside, in a section of Harlem that stops being Black and turns very Hispanic, even white. Just up the block from me contained more people of color than the actual block did. It was very New York: most people around me did not look like me, but I didn’t have to go far to find those who did. I went to high school in the Bronx, which I am eternally grateful for. I remember when Kristin, a Black girl I liked, told me she felt I was molded by white people. This hurt my feelings. I am a Black man. I want to be loved and appreciated by Black people. What I didn’t realize then, but do now, is that she was trying to connect with me. She was from Jersey; New York is an entirely different life experience. She couldn’t quite grasp who I was.

May 4: Kossar’s Bagel—$14.43 Speaking of New York: I had an everything bagel with some nice lox and scallion cream cheese. I highly recommend that order.

Bagel spots in New York are distinct for the

J AY S O N B U F O R D

smell: the wheat traveling lazily through the air. I go there for that and the coffee.

I don’t give a rat’s behind how weird you believe you are. As a Black person, you must be able to relate to other Black people.

If you can’t do that, then take your anime posters and crawl back to your room. Fuck what Kanye West thinks; you can’t opt out of being Black. If you try to, it comes crashing down on you like it did for O. J. in that Bronco.

promote NYPD robot cops, and gentrify neighborhoods so that the walls close in on us from every direction. So when I’m in Dimes Square spending money at Le Dive or Bacaro, quite enjoying myself, I always either feel like I’m the one negro in a city that is hard on Black kids or I get defensive.

(Defensive or depressive is always a mood.)

Truth be told, though, I have never met a fascist who is into the Red Scare girls. At least not yet.

May 11: +$800.00 (I wrote about rappers and their relationship with Donald Trump) As a freelancer, finally getting paid is glorious, because you truly do not know when you are going to get your check. It comes when it wants to come—at the infinitely lackadaisical pace of media conglomerates. The people who work for those companies are just doing their jobs, and I don’t want to blame them as individuals. But all payments should work the way they do at Condé Nast. You know when the direct deposit is scheduled to hit, and you can plan your life ahead of time. Condé isn’t perfect—no place is—but they do a decent job of that. Now I have an $800 check. The first thing I plan to do with this check is eat food.

MLK once said that he felt integration might have been a burning house—a means for oppressing us while being friendly in our faces. This is, still, in the back of my mind, as it should be for all Black people in a white man’s world. New York, despite its reputation as a melting pot (or whatever other tortured metaphor those in power use to placate those who aren’t), is very much a white man’s city.

It’s why someone like Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg could so easily implement their brands of technocratic fascism.

The state is allowed to cut social services,

May 11: The Scratcher—$18.77 I hung out with a group of people, including my friend Caroline, a.k.a. Team Caroline, a.k.a. TC, who complained that I was not showing her enough attention. We made plans for a Sunday dinner.

I have found it hard, in my short lifetime, to have a coherent political dogma because, holy shit, do I like posh restaurants, people who contain multitudes, and chasing women. I’m just a Black man with vibes and issues. I crave this lifestyle even as I feel it corroding me. Capitalism does not work but Jay-Z’s crisp and clear-eyed raps about transposing its ethos from boardrooms to the corners I could see from my childhood windows made me addicted to the hustle. All of my most deeply held convictions would be considered progressive, but some of the most insightful Black men that I know are as conservative as NOI members.

May 12: Uncle Lou—$72.67 I never went to Chinatown as a kid. For some reason, my parents’ wide palates never brought us down to Mulberry Street. But walking down those streets today and seeing how busy they are—how Little Italy turns into Chinatown, how the curbs are filled with 15

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Asian families, or young people going on a date—I know this is going to be a neighborhood that I’ll enjoy for the rest of my life.

But I do proudly and purely hate the police, a gang of criminals bent on oppressing poor people. I voted for Bernie twice. I actually wrote him in for the 2020 election, because there should be no billionaires in a country that cannot afford to give people free healthcare—even if I think it is largely Bernie’s fault that he wasn’t able to convince older Black people that he was for real. If I had to pin myself down ideologically, I’d call myself a champagne socialist: someone who shouts for free healthcare and fewer cops over a white wine at Clandestino. The inability to shake this sense of tension, of disagreement, gives even those quiet moments of leisure a pressure-cooker intensity. But I’m from New York: I preserve my intensity. It keeps me sharp, on edge, and where I need to be: always moving quickly, forward.

16

`

`

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

KELLER Forthcoming from Karma (New York) 2024

by Kim Gordon

I know exactly when the myth of my brother started. I remember

my parents talking about the day I was born. My brother, who was three and a half years old, went down to the corner store with his neighborhood girlfriend and they shoplifted things. Of course, they didn’t exactly know what they were doing, but it began a pattern of my brother getting into trouble and getting attention for it. When I look at his baby pictures, he has a giant head. There’s a picture of him wearing a pair of my dad’s black-framed glasses. He looks like a scholar.

18

NONFICTION

My brother became king of the nerds in junior high. He drew them to his chest— they were outcasts, socially awkward, nonconformists really is what they were. They made an early mimeograph zine called The Fiend Thinker. They had their own vocabulary and interviewed different socioeco­ nomic groups in their middle school: surfers, socs, jocks. It emulated my father’s dissertation, the first study of a social system for a high school. My father and others were very impressed.

We were at war then, my brother and I, since the time I was six or so. The relentless teasing and arguing. It was a fight I would never win. At the hint of any vulnerable moment on my part, crying during a movie, he would unleash a wave of ridicule and threaten to tell everybody. I would never be stronger or smarter or more verbal than him, more cutting in my delivery. I wanted his approval so much, probably like any little sister would looking up to a big brother.

When I didn’t feel hate for him, I felt such a strong bond—like we could read each other’s minds.

As teenagers, we became co-conspirators against my parents. The ’60s were the perfect landscape for tossing aside my childhood striving to be good, to be “normal.” As a young girl, I had seen how much anguish my brother caused my parents with his refusal to do anything they asked of him and his abusive language, and it made me want only to be the opposite, to not cause any waves. But at 13, I decided it wasn’t getting me anywhere. By the time he was 17, we were getting high together, smoking pot. But I still never knew when he would turn on me. Out of nowhere, he would call me stupid, accuse me of not really understanding Bob Dylan lyrics, accuse me

of being a “weekend hippie.” I didn’t realize at the time that Bob D was not an easy thing and was up for wide interpretation.

I remember being really stoned, with him and some girl, in this giant closet he had in his bedroom. I don’t know what prompted it but she looked at him at some point and said something about him being the devil. He had this big smile on his face and looked incredibly arrogant. It sparked a sense in my mind that there was something dark in him, that maybe he didn’t care about other people. As I laughed along, pretending I was in on the joke or whatever it was, I felt uneasy.

The nicest thing my brother ever did for me was take me to see Pierrot Le Fou when I was 14. It was playing at a little art theater on the east side. Seeing it opened my eyes and changed me in countless ways, but even more than that, the gesture on his part made me happy for days. It was so unexpected, out of character. Mitch, who was living with us at the time, was a friend of my brother’s that we met in Hong Kong during the year we lived there.

Mitch was the nice one of the group. His parents, who were missionaries, remained in Hong Kong but wanted him to finish high school in the States. So he came and shared a room with my brother. Mitch and my brother had black light posters all over their room and took lots of acid. As things were murky then, in the late ’60s, I don’t think our parents knew exactly what was going on. Anyway, the parenting style of their generation was very hands-off.

They were liberals, not the type to try and institutionalize their son or daughter for taking LSD or smoking grass.

We sometimes got stoned and listened to recordings of Macbeth or King Lear, lying 19

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

on couches in the living room in the dark.

My brother would often get excited about a sonnet he wrote and want to recite it. To me, these were the best moments with him.

Although I wondered why he was following a form that belonged to a different era.

He always had a beautiful girlfriend.

First it was Kumiko, whom he met in Hong Kong. Then there was Marina, who was found murdered lying on top of her red sports car in the Palisades. It was long after they had broken up, but the police did come to question him. I remember seeing her name in Ed Sanders’s book [The Family], listed among people whose deaths were linked to Charles Manson, but this couldn’t be proved. Later, when my brother had dropped out of college and was living in my parents’ trailer in Malibu, he adopted the sort of Jesus/Manson look, longish hair and a scraggly beard, so prevalent at the time. His all-white attire made him stand out as he hitched around Malibu carrying a Bible—not for religious reasons but, he said, as part of his study of the classics, although he had already dropped out of college.

He never ever worked or held a job and probably survived on money our parents gave him. He only came to visit when he needed money. During the time he lived in Malibu, he had a girlfriend who was my age, and we hung out some. Amy was all blonde and golden brown, very pretty. She lived up in one of the canyons. One day, we trekked out to a pond with a small waterfall at Cross Creek in Malibu, carrying a cherry cream pie from the Apple Pan that I had picked up before hitching out there. It was very hot on our walk; I remember the cream melted. We got stoned and shoveled the pie into our greedy mouths with our 20

hot, sticky hands, then dove into the water to rinse off. She used some made-up words that my brother had come up with, like supra. It didn’t sound like Greek or Latin, more like acid-speak. I thought that by hanging out with her I would get closer to him, who at times seemed magical and other times worrisome.

He liked to give people names. He had one friend from college that I hung out with a little that he called “Young Boy in the Forest” because he had a sort of disoriented look in his eyes, as if he was lost in the woods, whenever he looked up. I thought it was from taking too much LSD. One evening, my brother showed up at my apartment, where I was living with a boyfriend, and said how deeply unhappy he was. He said that he had become unsocialized. He had broken up with Amy and pushed his friends away. Maybe he realized it was unhealthy to surround himself only with people who idolized him.

He started crying and I was shocked. My brother, whom I had always looked up to, was looking to me for help. I felt like our roles had switched.

I don’t remember where he spent the night after he left. I lived near my parents’ house, but I know he didn’t go there. I remember thinking about tales of Dennis Wilson seen roving around the corners of Pico and Westwood Boulevard near the theater and bowling alley, which had a coffee shop that was open very late. The stories reminded me of my brother and other lost souls wandering around this middle-class suburban L.A. neighborhood on the empty night streets, where police would stop you just for being out late. I told my parents the next day that I thought my brother needed some help, but they were unbelieving. They

KIM GORDON

thought he was just lazy and didn’t want to work for a living since dropping out of college. Psychiatrists were for rich people in Beverly Hills. My father, a sociologist, described my brother’s state as a sociological problem—another way of saying lazy.

Soon my parents came to see it was more.

He moved back home, bringing along their small trailer, which now sat in their driveway. He must have been put on some meds as he seemed to be more functional.

Or maybe he lived in the trailer in our driveway while I was still in high school.

I remember sitting in it with him, smoking hashish while he read me poems from Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. The chronology of events during this time is kind of a blur, as he was always leaving my parents’ house or just showing up. Maybe at some point he moved out to Latigo Shore Drive, near Malibu, where my parents had bought a lot but couldn’t build because of the new sewage laws.

He somehow managed to go back to school, first at UC Irvine, then transferring to Berkeley. He had his first full-blown psychotic episode the day he graduated. All they told me was that he lunged at a girl in the cafeteria. In his eyes she was a “maiden.”

He had studied the classics and Shakespeare, Chaucer, and somehow it was all part of his psychosis and delusions of grandeur. He now had a diagnosis, “paranoid schizophrenia,” which meant that he could be aggressive and violent. The day it happened, or the day my parents told me, was also the day I got into a car accident as I was waiting to merge into traffic. A car was speeding and I watched as it hit another car and then veered onto the sidewalk and continued until the driver hit me, throwing my VW Bug into the adjacent building. I 21

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

wasn’t too hurt—a sprained back, a few stitches above my eye—but I was in shock when my parents called, my mind screaming, “How could this have happened?” I couldn’t believe that he had had a mental break, had committed violence. This, along with the accident, jolted me as possibilities I had never entertained, a reminder of how life can change in seconds.

Once my brother was ensconced back at my parents’ house and fully medicated, he was more pleasant than he had ever been.

He could be funny and charming, but the meds made him crave caffeine and nicotine.

He lived in my old room, since our mother had turned his into a sewing room. I could still forget that he was sick and irrational and get sucked into an argument about something. He still knew how to push my buttons then, by saying something hurtful.

Every August, my parents would go up to their spot in a campground at the Klamath River. It was like a camp within a camp. Their friends ranged from UCLA alumni to documentary filmmakers to other bohemian types. Their friends, the Bentzens, had started the camp in 1953 when they pulled their station wagon into the empty area. They were real fisher/ hunter people but also intellectuals. They were people my brother and I knew all our lives; they were family. We would stay at their house on Latigo Shore Drive before they sold it—the place was slipping into the ocean, and anyway L.A. was becoming too much of a rat race for them.

Around the Bentzens, a more conventional trailer park sprung up, filled with rednecks and more conservative-leaning folks, a couple of whom were deemed cool and allowed into their circle. This area is one of the poorest in the country. Chainsaw 22

furniture shops littered the highway. South of there is Humboldt County, the seat of marijuana cultivation, California’s numberone cash crop. North of the Klamath is Crescent City, where they had rodeos and a new prison they said would revive the economy.

My parents and their friends had made a kind of compound with tarps encircling the tasteful cedar porches built around the trailers that were kept there year-round.

My brother had set up what looked like an old army tent in my parents’ area, and seemed quite jovial when he was there.

Sometimes there would be an outburst or an instance of him being inappropriate, but I remember it as a good period for him.

When I moved to New York in 1980, he would write me beautiful letters, sprinkled with poetic verse, that seemed incredibly coherent. They surprised me by how much love he directed towards me. It was as if he was a different person than the one I had grown up with, not the torturer or the bully or the inspiration, but someone adjacent.

As my parents aged, they couldn’t take care of him any more and tried placing him in various halfway houses. Some were better than others.They didn’t really cater to people with mental illness. They were mostly populated by people coming out of prison or rehab. He would inevitably go off his meds, as no one was closely monitoring him, and end up back at my parents’ house, scaring them with violent threats. They would call the police, who would take him to the Neuro­psychiatric Institute at UCLA where he could be held for 72 hours without his con-­ ­sent and be put back on his meds. He said a lot of the other patients were teenage girls with anorexia. This cycle would repeat over and over, sometimes landing him in jail.

KIM GORDON

Eventually my parents hired someone who helped them navigate the system. The only way he could be placed in a locked facility was if he became a ward of the state. They had been reluctant to do this, as it means you relinquish control over what happens, and obviously involves a ton of parental guilt. So began my brother’s life in a series of what are called “rehabilitation centers.”

The first one was the harshest as there were ex-cons and recovering drug addicts, and people would always steal whatever my mother brought: clothes, radios, cassette players. She would shop for him at the Beverly Hills or UCLA thrift stores where she bought all her clothes, looking for Oxford button-downs and corduroy jackets with elbow patches. He was very particular about his dress and definitely knew who he was, or wanted to be, playing up his idea of the scholar/poet, not exactly living in this time. He never wore a T-shirt, sweatshirt, or jeans. He was always a snob about anything that was too commonplace. When I was in seventh grade, he would rip me for using slang, saying I was so conformist.

My parents had this hope that one day he would wake up and be recovered, and I thought they were so unrealistic. It was something I never understood until I became a parent myself. You just never want to give up on your child. Eventually he was placed in something more like a glorified nursing home, which he actually could have walked out of, if he’d realized it.

On one of their outings at a park, he wandered or ran away and was missing for 24 hours before they found him.

Years went by and my parents passed away. I was it, in terms of family. At first

PRESENCE A Novel

By Brenda Iijima 9780820365305 PBK: $24.95

georgia review books “Here is a completely unique, genre-defying, anti-apocalypse story. It is sprawling in scope, pushing the limits of language and narrative to imagine futures beyond our wildest dreams.

Iijima is both a poet and a theorist of our frightening yet fascinating contemporary condition—and she does justice to our capacity to change and discover new ways of being in the world.”

—Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape

university of georgia press ugapress.org

23

Los Angeles Review of Books is proud to be printed by Hemlock Printers Hemlock Printers had a humble beginning: a backyard studio with a letterpress and an A.B. Dick offset. Since then, Hemlock has grown to be the most reliable printer in the business (according to us!).

In this industry it is difficult to find a combination of mass production and sustainability, but Hemlock comes through on that front.

Hemlock has a plan to be Zero Waste by 2030 — and they offer a ZERO Carbon Neutral Printing Program. Their craftsmanship is evident in these pages you hold in your hands and in all the many publications like ours they print and distribute.

www.hemlock.com

KIM GORDON

the conservatorship was still in place, but then one day I was informed that it was being terminated, so I became the sole responsible party. All his care really took place at his residence anyway; the conservatorship was basically just paperwork. I once tried to find out who was in charge and just got passed around a series of offices. At this point, he had mellowed with age and wasn’t going anywhere. No dream of escape. I would visit, always with the requisite carton of unfiltered Camels, a six-pack of Cokes, and potato chips complete with onion dip, the way my mother always did. It always made him happy; it was all he wanted, or at least that’s all that he asked for.

About 10 years ago, the nursing home wanted his bed so they suggested he would do better in a smaller setting. The social worker found a house run by a Christian woman who only had two other clients.

One of them was comatose and I only ever saw her lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The woman who ran it bought my brother a keyboard, as he had told her he liked to play piano. He was a very convincing improviser, and would claim to anyone listening that his opera had been performed in London the night before.

And maybe additionally, that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for writing.

As teenagers, we had played around with an upright piano that our parents had rented for him, along with an old African drum, and a big gong from Hong Kong. We listened to a lot of free jazz during that time, in addition to Buffalo Springfield, Dylan, Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Cream, and so on. I credit my brother with turning me on to improvisation, and showing me the freedom and joy of it.

The house run by the Christian woman closed mysteriously and he was moved to another. My old friend Margie, who knew my family well, would go out with me to visit him. We always thought there was something fishy with the whole operation, like it was a real-estate investment based on future development in the area. But we could never find anything wrong. Just neglect. I didn’t even know how to refer to the situation he was living in. I suppose it falls under board and care. They took his government check, which I supplemented. There were maybe nine men living there. When the pandemic came, just as the vaccines were made available, my brother got COVID-19 and ended up in the ICU. He was in the hospital for a month, and then a rehab place. It was incredible that he survived. A couple of years later, the nurse practitioner who owned the house told me that every other resident of the home had died of COVID during the period that my brother was infected.

When he was released from the hospital, he went back to the home (now moved, without explanation, to a different location) and was put into hospice care. The doctor had told me that my brother could never be intubated. He had some breathing issues and needed to be given oxygen periodically. The hospice person came to the home once a week. My brother was frail and skinny, but would still walk quickly to get outside for a smoke. He loved to sit out there and smoke. He supposedly was only given eight cigarettes a day. On one of her visits home, I brought my daughter Coco to see him. She hadn’t been around him since she was little. I said she wrote poetry and he smiled and said, “Ah, we need more 25

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

poets.” He was very polite to the people A couple months after the treatments who worked at the house, but he would ended, he was found not breathing, lying get angry if you tried to take his cigarettes next to his bed on the floor. I got a call early away or get him to do something he didn’t that morning from the police. Bill Nace want, such as wear a hat in the sun or put and I, as Body/Head, had played the night on sunblock. He would need help getting before in what felt like a celebration of in and out of the car but resented it and coming together after a long pandemic would flail his arms, yelling “I can do it pause. In that moment, the contrast myself !” but then apologize a few minutes between my life and my brother’s couldn’t later. have been more startling or defined. It was As he sat out in the sun smoking, two assumed that hitting his head was the cause big squamous cell cancer growths grew on of death, but no autopsy was performed. his head and a melanoma on his cheek. By When the man at the crematorium was the time I saw him, after returning from filling out his death certificate, he asked, a tour, they were quite large. For the next “What was his occupation?” and I said he seven months Margie and I ferried him to never worked, he was schizophrenic. The various doctor appointments. A dermatol- man pressed me on it and said my brother ogist in the Valley removed the superficial had to have an occupation, so I said he was melanoma, but the other growths would a poet. Next question: “How many years require UCLA. He ended up doing radi- did he do that for?” ation five days a week for three weeks. He was always pretty with-it. He flirted with From the book Keller by Kim Gordon. the female nurses and doctors, laughing at Copyright 2024 by Karma, reprinted with this or that. He sang along to Neil Young permission, New York, USA. All rights in the car ride over the 405 to UCLA and reserved. back to the Valley, often in agonizing traffic, oblivious to his incredibly off-key voice but filled with joy. My friend was a saint about it and split up the driving.

On a very hot fall day, as I handed my brother a cold can of Coke, he leaned back in the passenger seat and said, “AC and a can of Coke, this is living the dream!” He told me stories about how at night they would put wires into his head to translate his thoughts into a book, which he claimed was even better than Baudelaire and had just been published that day. In reality, they were putting a fitted cap on his head to focus the radiation in the treatments. He was still skinny and frail as he had been, but he was healing.

26

Caleb Stein Statue in Water, The Watering Hole (2020) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

27

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

MY RETRIEVALS Care and pain in the halls of power

by Briallen Hopper

I had two egg retrievals at Yale Fertility Center, and they live in

my mind in two genres: comedy and horror.

In the comedy version, I’m splayed on a table wearing fuzzy socks, and a long plastic tube is snaking out of my vagina through an open window that connects the retrieval room to the lab, where a technician is loudly counting the eggs as they show up on his screen— “19! … 20! … 21! … 22!” It’s absurd and excessive, like the birth scene in 101 Dalmatians where the puppies just keep on coming and Roger keeps calling out the total as they arrive.

28

NONFICTION

That really happened, but this happened too: I remember I felt a sharp piercing pain as soon as the needle entered the first follicle.

I remember I asked for more fentanyl right away, and they said something about adjusting the dose, but it didn’t help.

I remember when I asked again they said I was getting the maximum amount, which didn’t make sense, but at that point the pain was so big it was all I could focus on.

I remember that a woman wearing scrubs or a white coat offered me her hand to hold, and I remember squeezing it with each throb, as if I were in labor and she were my partner.

I remember I started sobbing and couldn’t stop.

I remember someone—maybe a nurse— saying sympathetically, “I know this can be an emotional process,” and I remember feeling a surge of frustration: I wasn’t emotional, I was in pain!

I’d forgotten this next part, but my friend remembers it: when it was over, I told her the pain was so bad that I didn’t think I could go through it again.

But I did go through it again. And then, after I found out I’d gotten enough embryos, I put the pain behind me. Superstitiously, I hoped that the suffering I’d endured would help earn me a baby. So far that hasn’t been the case.

Three years later, in 2021, I saw a breaking news story that one of my nurses at Yale Fertility Center, Donna Monticone, had been stealing drugs for her personal use.

She had extracted fentanyl from hundreds of vials in the storage closet and refilled them with salt water. As a result, hundreds

of patients endured invasive procedures without pain relief. I immediately knew: that must have been what happened to me.

At first I couldn’t place Donna, but when I looked back at my MyChart messages, I saw that she was the nurse who signed me up for my IVF classes and handled paperwork or medication for both of my cycles. It was chilling to reread our businesslike exchanges and think about the urgency thrumming beneath them on both sides.

We both wanted what we wanted so much.

For a while, it seemed like the story was over. After her theft was discovered and her drug test came back positive, Donna confessed to swapping out fentanyl, had her nurse’s license suspended, and was sentenced to four weekends in prison and three months of home confinement. (She was facing up to five years, but the judge chose mercy.) The next year, in 2022, Yale had to pay $308,000 after a Department of Justice investigation found that the fertility clinic had violated federal requirements to properly monitor drugs. It was anticlimactic, but it still felt something like closure.

Then came The Retrievals—a five-part podcast described by host and co-producer Susan Burton as an “emotional investigation” of the trauma and cover-up at the clinic. Critics called the story it told “outrageous,” “excruciating,” “a nightmare.”

Suddenly these experiences of pain and its aftermath were being covered in one of the most popular podcasts of the summer.

It took me months to finish listening to the first episode, “The Patients.” I kept having to turn it off when the women started reliving their retrievals. I flinched from both the visceral way the stories reactivated trauma and the podcast’s earnest, empathetic narrative framing. I 29

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

was used to taking refuge in a jaded, stoic, tough-enough stance—a common variety of defensiveness that Leslie Jamison calls “post-wounded” in her classic essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” I wanted to be over it. I was not yet ready for it to matter.

I eventually pushed through my discomfort, and I’m glad I did. Ultimately, the structure of the podcast offered me what I needed: a reckoning with something I’d been trying to evade. As I listened, I realized that nothing was as resolved as it seemed. Not for me, not for Donna, and not for Yale.

I wrote down my story before I listened to the podcast because I didn’t want my memory to be influenced by what I heard.

It was uncanny to discover that it was the same as everyone else’s.

In the retrieval room, the same thing happened over and over. We experienced agony. We asked for more meds. We were told we were getting the maximum amount.

We were offered a hand to hold. Someone at the clinic said something to dismiss or manage our pain: “It’s an emotional experience”; “It hurts so much because you had so many eggs”; “It’s normal for it to hurt.”

The podcast splices the stories together into a chorus and scores the shared narrative with a vox humana soundtrack. At times when I was listening, I felt the almost unbearable throb of emotion I feel when I’m singing a hymn in church—the feeling of breathing in time with the people around you, harmonizing, knowing that even if your voice falters, the others will carry you, the song will go on.

But even though I felt like I was part of the choir, in some ways I am not one of these women. The patients on the podcast 30

endured their painful retrievals during a five-month period in 2020—the short stretch of time that Donna has confessed to tampering with the drug supply. My retrievals happened in 2018. The women on the podcast received letters from Yale informing them that they might have been affected by Donna’s drug diversion. Yale never contacted me at all, except to send me my annual bills for embryo storage.

Officially, their pain happened and mine did not. Neither did the pain of any of the other patients who have reported experiencing excruciating retrievals between 2017 and the spring of 2020. I learned from the podcast that there are many of us. And it turns out that this matters to me. Worse than the pain itself is being told for a second time that I didn’t feel it. That we didn’t feel it.

As I listened to The Retrievals, I became desperate to find documentation of my pain. My retrieval records were mysteriously absent from MyChart, and even though I wasn’t sure they’d ever been there, it felt like a cover-up. I ordered a complete copy of my medical records and waited over a month for it to arrive, only to discover that the procedure descriptions were copy-pasted boilerplate: aside from the number of eggs gathered, the doctors had nothing special to report. I was strangely elated to learn that my friend remembered me telling her about my experience at the time, and then destabilized when I realized it was a phone conversation, not a text conversation, and had vanished into the ether. And I felt both validated and unsettled when I located a version of my experience in Merve Emre’s 2018 essay “All Reproduction Is Assisted” in the Boston Review. Merve had interviewed me shortly

BRIALLEN HOPPER

after my first retrieval, and summarized it this way: A different male resident performed the retrieval and, even through the haze of fentanyl, it hurt. He did not seem bothered, but the doctor supervis­ing him watched B’s face closely and, after a moment, asked if she wanted to hold hands. The women’s fingers stayed intertwined the entire time the resident retrieved B’s eggs—twenty-two in all.

Though I’m glad my pain is on the record here, I’m upset that this reads as a story about female bonding, not medical malpractice. I don’t know how much of the gentleness in this version of the story is mine and how much is Merve’s, but I worry that much of it is mine. I knew Merve a little, but not well enough to tell her a story in which I came across as weak.

I would not have wanted to confess to her that I sobbed uncontrollably for the entire duration of the procedure and was called “emotional” by a medical professional. Still, in retrospect, I can’t help regretting that this sanitized version of the story is the one I felt constrained to tell. It’s nice and all that the attending doctor held my hand, but shouldn’t she have attended to the fact that I shouldn’t have been hurting in the first place?

For similar reasons, I felt unsettled by some of the sanitized stories told by and about Donna Monticone, and by the grace she has been extended at others’ expense.

In the second and third episodes, “The Nurse” and “The Sentence,” Susan Burton pieces together a portrait of Donna from what she said about herself at her

sentencing hearing and the testimonials her friends and family submitted on her behalf. (Neither Donna nor anyone close to her agreed to be interviewed for the podcast.) Donna supervised the supply closet full of drugs and was responsible for getting fentanyl scripts signed by doctors and picking vials up from the pharmacy.

(Bizarrely, Yale’s practice was to send individual employees off to Walgreens to fetch bags full of controlled substances.)

She says that she first succumbed to the temptation of unmonitored fentanyl in May 2020 because of the stress of her divorce and the pandemic. She did not think her ex was a good dad and did not want to leave her kids with him. Her drug use was supposedly a way to cope with the pressure of being the more responsible parent: it helped her to manage her anxiety about her children’s time with their father.

She insisted that she hadn’t intended to harm anyone.

The judge who sentenced her was also a mother and accepted Donna’s belief that the children were better off with Donna than with their dad, despite the fact that Donna had spent a significant amount of time parenting under the influence of opiates. Donna’s extraordinarily light eight-day prison sentence was tailored to make it as convenient as possible for her given her custody agreement: she’d go to prison on the weekends her husband had the kids and get out in time to take care of them as usual during the week.

At the time The Retrievals was airing, I was teaching a class of women incarcerated at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, a low-security prison in Connecticut, and I couldn’t help comparing Donna’s sentence with theirs. Without 31

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

divulging details about my students, I will simply say that Donna does not love her children any more than incarcerated mothers love theirs, and her children do not need her more than their children need them. The wild disparity between Donna’s sentence and the way most mothers are treated by the system creates its own kind of pain.

More than one patient on the podcast pointed out that Donna’s light sentence was a result of her whiteness, as it obviously was. Thousands upon thousands of Black and brown mothers have lost their children because of drug use, and the figure of the dysfunctional, drug-addicted single mother has been used to demonize and dehumanize Black women for decades.

Meanwhile, Donna shot up at home and at work and harmed literally hundreds of people yet somehow emerged with her maternal rectitude intact.

The podcast pays less attention to how class worked to protect Donna from consequences, but it clearly mattered too. After all, Donna is not just any white mom. She’s a middle-class, college-educated white mom—a former catechism teacher at her Catholic church. Most of the people who are bearing the brunt of this country’s opioid epidemic are not afforded the grace that she was, even or especially when they are dealing with extremes of poverty and precarity that she could not imagine. If Donna were born addicted to drugs, if she’d grown up on welfare or in foster care, if she were a teen mom or an exotic dancer or lived in a trailer park, she would very likely be locked up now.

I don’t want Donna—or anyone—to be locked up. But I’m enraged by the inequality her sentence represents. You should not 32

have to be a middle-class white mother to be treated with humanity by the justice system.

If Donna’s sentence reveals one kind of injustice, her license reinstatement hearing represents another. One of the most horrifying parts of the podcast was learning that Donna was given her nursing license back without ever acknowledging the full harm that her actions had caused. When a group of nurses got together to uphold the standards of their profession, patient well-being was an afterthought. It seems obvious to me that a person who has systematically caused trauma to hundreds of patients should not be put in a position of power over patients again. But she was.

It’s tempting to personalize what happened. But as episode four, “The Clinic,” is careful to emphasize, this story is not primarily about Donna. It’s about systems.

Among other things, it’s about what happens when a woman like Donna is used as a scapegoat for one of the most powerful institutions in the world.

In contrast to Yale’s messaging that this was a short-lived problem and the fault of just one person, The Retrievals demonstrates that Yale ignored red flags for years.

Long before the pandemic, Donna was famously pushy about getting doctors to sign fentanyl scripts well in advance of procedures, but no one asked why. There were many loose caps discovered on fentanyl vials before 2020—so many that it was sometimes hard to find a properly sealed vial—and when this problem was brought to her attention, Donna attributed it to a “manufacturing error,” an implausible explanation that no one thought to question. And it wasn’t just hundreds of vials of fentanyl that were stolen under Donna’s

BRIALLEN HOPPER

watch; ketamine and midazolam went missing as well. In a well-run clinic, having a single patient who was mysteriously unresponsive to pain medication would prompt an investigation into possible drug diversion. At Yale, hundreds of patients suffered, yet nothing was done.

I studied and worked at Yale for nine years, and I recognized the stonewalling, the inertia, and the strange penny-pinching that the podcast documents. Yale’s unfathomably large $41 billion endowment perpetuates extreme inequality both inside and outside its gates, with lavishness in some places hiding austerity elsewhere.

And the institution has a default unwillingness to change, because change might imply that things are not already perfect.

When untoward things happen, the modus operandi is to sweep them under the rug.

Yale Fertility Center was a microcosm of the university. It had a reputation as one of the best clinics in the region, but instead of using an industry-standard computerized medicine cabinet to track the clinic’s supply of drugs, Yale used an ordinary supply closet with a haphazard trail of literal paper. Instead of using the standard-ofcare drug propofol protocol for patient sedation during retrievals, Yale preferred a cheaper drug combination that kept us awake. Yale ignored numerous reports about patient pain for years, and when it could no longer ignore them, its response was to deny, minimize, and lawyer up. But despite it all, Yale continues to benefit from a lustrous name that even parsimony and negligence can’t tarnish.

I live in a low-income neighborhood in Queens, near a block of no-frills doctor’s offices that cater to immigrants looking for medical providers who speak their

languages. Some of the doctors’ signs have typos and graffiti. There are apparently no waiting rooms, since I often see a line of women standing on the sidewalk outside one of the offices in all kinds of weather. The other day I walked by the dirty stairs that lead down to a basement OB-GYN office and thought, “That looks ominous.” And then I immediately revised the thought: I should know better! I of all people should know that shitty care—or warm and high-quality care—can happen anywhere. My doctors worked at Yale, but I might have gotten better treatment in a Queens basement.

The Retrievals joins other essential investigations of elite medical cover-ups that have compounded crimes against women, from Michigan State’s enabling of Dr. Nassar to USC’s enabling of Dr. Tyndall to Columbia’s enabling of Dr. Hadden. And episode five, “The Outcomes,” explores the ongoing harm that this kind of corruption can cause: the chronic fear and distrust of medical providers, the medical and emotional impacts of deciding not to seek needed care, the time and energy spent and lost in trying to be believed.

One woman gave up on fertility treatment after her retrievals. Because of what happened, she may never have children. Another woman spent the first hours of her son’s life terrified that the fertility center had mixed up embryos and her son was not actually her son. As I listened, I wondered: is their mistrust a wound that needs to heal, or is it a suit of armor they should keep on wearing? When you can’t trust the healthcare system, doubting it becomes a way to keep faith with yourself.

A way to keep faith with the incontrovertible evidence and nerve endings and 33

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

defense mechanisms and vulnerability of your own body.

The overwhelming institutional failure explored by The Retrievals is especially critical to consider as we enter the horrifying new era of post-Roe healthcare. Essential reproductive care has already been outlawed in half the country, and the same people who have outlawed abortion want to outlaw IVF too. Many anti-abortion activists believe that IVF, like abortion, is a form of murder: the fertilized eggs lost or discarded in the process are human lives being snuffed out. The next few years may see fertility clinics closing across the country.

In the meantime, gaslighting—already a ubiquitous aspect of medical culture—is in many places a legally enforced policy.

People who need abortions are told they don’t need them. A person has to hemorrhage to the point where their life is in danger in order to get treatment for a miscarriage, and the public is told this is normal and fine. (It’s an emotional process. It’s supposed to hurt.)

At a time like this, being trusted about the evidence of my own senses feels necessary. Or maybe what I really mean is: being told that what happened to me at the clinic didn’t happen feels intolerable. So I’m telling my story here, where I hope it will be believed. But I also know that being believed is not enough. It’s not sufficient for people to believe that patients are being harmed. They also have to care.

Living with a uterus means living at the mercy of systems. And in our current systems, tremendous amounts of gratuitous suffering are routinely normalized or ignored. In some places, this is because of anti-abortion ideology. In others, it 34

is because of misogyny and money. Yale needs to be held accountable for the full extent of what happened within its walls because if a healthcare system’s priority is protecting itself rather than its patients, it cannot provide good care for anyone.

After its deep immersion in the nature of pain and the systems that perpetrate and perpetuate it, The Retrievals concludes with an account of individual outcomes. Some women had babies. Some women lost them.

Some women gave up on fertility treatment altogether. What is my outcome?

My embryos are still frozen at Yale Fertility Center—my best hopes of having a baby one day. I want to believe that they are safely stored, accurately labeled, and carefully handled. I want to believe that my pain will not have been in vain. But I have a recurring dream that it is already too late.

While I was sleeping, someone thawed the vials, and emptied them, and filled them with salt water.

Caleb Stein Matthew, Jackson, & Oden, The Watering Hole (2018) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

35

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

TWO COASTS, ONE RISK Sea-level rise in California and Papua New Guinea

by David Lipset

Global warming and climate change have already brought

increasing cycles of wildfires, storm events, and overheated days, but the damage a restless sea is doing to low-lying environments and coastal communities persists through it all. Can we muster the commitment, the moral compass, and the resources to mitigate this slow-moving catastrophe? Can we reconcile competing political and economic interests, and their differing assumptions about nature and society? Can we find the global vision?

36

NONFICTION

As a cultural anthropologist researching how a tribal society in Papua New Guinea has been living with sea-level rise, I found Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline (2023) to be a fascinating and quite troubling history of the coast of the Golden State, not just because of the book’s topical value but also from a comparative viewpoint. Indeed, I think California Against the Sea sheds light on a further aspect of this devastating issue—namely, its insidious impact across the Global South.

Xia, who is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, toured the California coast, visiting communities, beaches, and tidal habitats. Along the way, she talked to citizen-activists, politicians, oceanographers, and climate scientists, and her book is populated with finely hewn thumbnail sketches of these places and people that illustrate the larger dilemmas and prospects that belabor the coast.

She opens with an Indigenous, Chumash concept of nature and society in a “mutual state of belonging” that lends a tone of melancholia to the whole narrative.

From the beginning of settler colonialism in the 18th century or so through the end of the 20th century, state-sponsored genocide drove the Chumash, and their kinship-derived concepts of environmental guardianship, into their graves or into forced eviction from customary coastal lands.

Subsequently, capitalism, and its profit-based concept of nature as an exploitable resource, gave rise to railroads, a range of new industries, million-dollar homes, and “beach grooming” by tractors—all of which were built with little or no regard for a sustainable ecology, much less for access by anyone other than the wealthy. The

coast, so Xia bemoans, thus became a site of “massive inequality,” racism, and environmental injustice.

In the 21st century, climate change and sea-level rise began to threaten what she derides as a “human supremacy” view of nature that gave rise to coastal mismanagement. Public interests collided with private, local interests. On the one side, environmentalist scientists, with their superb wave-monitoring instruments, allied with citizen-based activists who sponsored ballot propositions to establish shoreline regulation and public access guarantees. Eventually, soaked pavements, flooded roads, and surges over seawalls left these activists to conclude that “managed retreat” was the only viable adaptation. On the other side, property developers, homeowners, construction unions, and industry categorically rejected this solution, viewing it as a “sig[n] of surrender”—to environmentalism, to climate change, and to a new, limited concept of capitalism, notwithstanding the palpable damage taking place. Meanwhile, both local mayors and Sacramento-based officials were trying their best to negotiate a middle ground, often having to confront lawsuits financed by wealthy homeowners.

Wealth inequality is in the foreground of Xia’s portrayal of the coast. While the city of San Francisco had the resources to allocate nothing less than $2 billion to update the Embarcadero, the three-milelong seawall that has started to sink and is regularly breached, many little towns, like working-class Marin City outside of Sausalito, simply do not have funds to pay for any kind of adaptation, much less the resources to compensate homeowners for property loss. But the book does include 37

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

occasional examples that hint at a less dire future. For example, Xia offers the case of Alviso, a flood-battered immigrant community near Silicon Valley, which used to be a garbage dump and then became one of the largest salt-making sites in the world.

Here, federal wildlife officials bought the land from the Leslie Salt Company, and when a large group of scientists determined that the San Francisco Bay required 100,000 acres of healthy wetlands to survive, a big wetland restoration project was undertaken. Just to the north of San Francisco, in Bodega Bay, a section of the coastal highway was relocated inland and a new bridge was built. In the diverse low-income community of Marina on Monterey Bay, which was the site of Fort Ord until 1994, a “ceasefire” with nature was declared, and new hotels were built on the inland side of the coastal highway, sand mining was ended, and a desalinization company’s plans to build a factory were resisted. Hoping to build a conference center, the town adopted a strategy of managed retreat. The settler mindset must be dismantled in these kinds of ways, Xia argues, and “ancient kinship with both the water and the land” must be revived.

California Against the Sea should appeal to readers with a broad range of ecofriendly leanings. I must admit that, while my particular interest in the book derives from this kind of sympathy, it also draws from my long-term fieldwork among a tribal people in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a developing country in the Southwest Pacific, not to mention a nostalgia for childhood holidays in 1950s Santa Monica, where I learned to bodysurf, and then from excessive years as a graduate student along the shores of La Jolla.

38

Let me sketch out the circumstances of the particular cultural group in PNG with whom I have worked over the years. The Murik live in an intertidal zone adjacent to the mouth of the great Sepik River on the north coast of PNG. Set on a narrow stretch of barrier beaches about 40 miles in length, this intertidal zone separates the Pacific from a large system of mangroves and brackish lagoons from which the people make a modest living as subsistence fishermen. Although they sell seafood in town markets, vote in elections, listen to the daily news on the radio, and use cell phones when the signal reaches their coast, their world largely remains defined by local relationships and the local resources their lakes provide and their beaches protect.

About two months after my ex-wife and I first arrived in 1981 to begin doctoral fieldwork, we got a firsthand sense of the vulnerability of the Murik environment.

An extended family in a neighboring community about six miles down the coast from Darapap, the village where we were based, hosted a big, all-night ritual celebration that was meant to draw a period of mourning for an elderly kinsman to a close.

Invited to attend, we paddled across the lakes in a big dugout canoe that belonged to a family who had adopted my ex-wife as a daughter. After hours and hours of paddling, we joined the celebration already underway in a village plaza, and spent the night watching the festivities, eating, and chatting. The rite came to a close at dawn when the family bathed in the ocean and then ran out of the water and leapt over a small bonfire, an act that was meant as a symbolic return to daily life, no longer menaced by the ghost of the deceased.

Shortly afterwards, all the guests, including

D AV I D L I P S E T

the two of us, had a little breakfast and then dispersed. Instead of canoeing, we hiked along the wide, flat beach back to our “home” village, its brown sand strewn with dried driftwood, shells, and little trails and pellets left by small sand crabs.

On the lake side of the beach, the lagoons and the mangroves, with their long prop roots, were always visible. But as we got within a mile or so of our destination, the beach widened into a coconut grove the Muriks’ ancestors had planted, and I learned that harvesting the fruit of individual palms was only permitted for their particular descendants. Indeed, canoe access to this area was also limited to private, hand-cut “coconut channels.” When at last we arrived “home” around midday, exhausted even on our young legs, we found our ankles and shins entirely bitten up by “no see um” sand flies. The whole experience had nevertheless been magnificent, not least for the chance it gave us to see the minuscule distance between the ocean and the lakes, but also for how the area remained in the hands of its customary residents (more or less).

During the field trips that followed between the years 1986 and 2001, my research diverged from my original interest in conflict resolution and masculinity, as I shifted my attention to a wide range of what I saw to be interrelated topics: art and museum collecting, courtship, regional exchange, cell phone use, urban migration, and on and on. All the while, my relationship with the Murik and their culture changed and adapted, as generations passed on, and their relationship to a globalizing world shifted, albeit in ambivalent ways. However, when sea-level rise started to erode their narrow beaches

during the early years of the present century, I felt acute anxiety, or what is now called solastalgia, about the future of their environment and cultural identity. When I returned in February 2007 to have a look at the situation, what I saw shocked me. The tides had eroded the beach at Darapap village and waves were pounding away at the seaward edges of the coconut groves. Some palms had been cut down just above their root systems, which protruded out of the shallows, while others had been completely knocked over. Long trunks were lying prone, alongside piles of brown, pinnated fronds and stalks, and dozens of rotten coconuts had accumulated along what was left of the shoreline.

Determined to go back and study the relationship of sea-level rise to daily life, I was able to return three years later and then again every summer for the next four years to work on this project. I saw beaches lined with dead trees, from which people happily gathered firewood, but there was also wreckage of entire houses, and all that was left of some buildings were posts protruding from the shallows. Storm surges had broken new channels into the lakes from the sea. Children told me stories of storm events during which they had to retreat in dugout canoes in the middle of the night to take refuge in family fishing shacks located deep in the lakes. In late 2019, a huge storm submerged an entire mile of the very stretch of beach I walked on in 1981, leaving Darapap villagers with a sense of being stranded. “Now,” as a villager lamented on Facebook, “we live on an island.”

The lake side of the Murik beaches offered no relief. In the early 1980s, the daily tides used to recede by midmorning 39

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

so that village plazas and footpaths could dry out—until the tides rose again in the late afternoon. Now, the villagers might as well have been living in a Melanesian Venice: they had to pole canoes from house to house, while thigh-high water left them having to manage muddy, mucky, and slippery footpaths all day long. Nevertheless, people soldiered on. As one man told me, we don’t “complain about the sea. It has always been a threat and battle.”

The new high tides did not constitute a crisis but were rather more of the same.

Life in this relatively remote and undeveloped region just went on. Women paddled into the lakes in the early morning to fish and harvest shellfish to feed their families.

Men carved new canoes and built new houses. Couples paddled across the lakes to attend barter markets with inland gardening peoples. Women wove baskets from local reeds. Youths married. Families went on being raised. Children went to school.

The dead were buried in shallow graves flooded by groundwater, and their kin were released from mourning with all-night celebrations. In other words, storm events, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, the destruction of houses, and so forth were ongoing problems rather than abrupt changes.

Storms that forced village relocation are a commonplace trope in Murik oral history, and indeed, I have pictures of wrecked houses on Murik beaches that I took in 1981. Even so, the current tides, as everyone acknowledged, were abnormally high, and worrisome.

In 2003, the Papua New Guinea government allocated funds to buy land from customary landowners in an area inland from the Murik coast, the idea being that the most exposed villages would 40

resettle there. The initiative received very little support from villagers and the money mysteriously disappeared. Instead, community-based adaptations surfaced: in one of them, some trading partners, among whom Murik ancestors had once resided, now invited Murik villagers to return and live with them. In another, resettlement sites were selected in the Murik mangroves, if and when the coast became uninhabitable. As things now stand in 2023, the status quo continues. Rising sea levels erode the beaches during the rainy season between November and May, and then they expand in June when the dry season returns and the winds shift from west to east. Meanwhile, the lake tides remain high year-round.

Placed next to each other in this way, the fate of the Murik Lakes serves to illuminate Xia’s wonderful book about the California coast with a global light. The social and environmental history of the latter begins with state-sponsored foreign conquest and settler colonialism, which then gives way to property development and industry, all of which views the coast in purely utilitarian terms—as a valuable resource foreigners can exploit to accumulate capital. And now green ideology, advocated by outsider scientists and activists, promotes a concept of nature that acknowledges the limits of human intervention. In these struggles, the coast is not just a geological space but has also become a rather tense, moral one, contested by external interests.

Admittedly, the Murik case is an imperfect example of the relationship of environment and society because no mining projects or timber industry clearcut forests pollute and despoil it, as they do

D AV I D L I P S E T

elsewhere in Papua New Guinea. But this does illustrate just how much Indigenous social relationships prevail here and continue to define this ecology, as one where property claims are traced back to the ancestors and where people still work on behalf of kin.

And here, moreover, no experts advocate for the environment, as they have done both elsewhere in Papua New Guinea and, of course, in California. In the first few years of the current century, the state did manage to show a little interest in the Murik, but as I say, its resettlement initiative went nowhere. Environmentally oriented NGOs, as well as the neighboring states to the south, not to mention the UN and other international organizations, have been mute and have made no resources available. The Murik, to put it plainly, have had to rely on themselves. Thus, a basic difference between California and Papua New Guinea is revealed: peripheral peoples in the Global South, who have basically made no contribution to carbon emissions, must face the consequences of climate change on their own.

At the same time, capitalist centers are ready and willing to point out these consequences. For example, in a recent article in Nature, the world’s most cited scientific journal, 21 scientists joined together to declare that, should carbon emissions fail to be regulated, global warming and icesheet loss will cause sea-level rise to reach a tipping point that will exceed the capacity of coastal wetlands, such as the Murik mangroves, to adjust, as they have thus far been able to do. The result will be massive population displacement among low-lying coastal communities as well as loss of “productive ecosystems of high ecological

value” throughout the world. Such a forecast exposes a fearful similarity between Xia’s account of the California coast and the Murik mangroves and beaches: the future of both is uncertain.

Nevertheless, Xia’s book ends hopefully.

Perhaps new alliances with Indigenous people may be made in California, perhaps Indigenous concepts of nature and society may be revived, or perhaps pragmatic realism may win the day. At another beach, on the other side of the Pacific, daily life goes on among the Murik, informed as it is by a fierce attachment to place and by the people’s sense that experiences with storms and coastal erosion have never beat them off their land in the past. But how much longer can hopefulness, complacency, and neglect constitute anything like an effective, not to mention a just, approach to the looming crisis?

41

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

WRITING BLUE On color and the limits of description

by Terry Nguyen

My favorite blue essays begin with a baptism by color. The reader

is submerged into the blue of language, the blue of the world “at its edges and in its depths” (Rebecca Solnit). The deeper the descent into the text, the bluer one’s inner world becomes. This is the blue of “the light that got lost,” the bluesy listlessness of William Gass’s blue lists.

For Catholics, baptism is the first act of faith, a sacrament that bears the promise of salvation. Children are often baptized as infants, almost preemptively, years before any belief can be inculcated. But the workings of faith are mysterious, and if no one can claim to know when or how faith’s seeds are planted, can a baptism be considered premature? The church would say that one can never be saved too soon.

42

NONFICTION

As a lapsed Catholic, I find blue— These ambiguities imbue blue with unlike God—to be self-evident. Blue boundless potential for writerly meditadoes not need our belief. And yet, there is tion. Writers are aesthetes and obsessives, an iota of faith required in seeing blue, in blue creatures enticed and inspired by the identifying it to others in the world and on abstract. There is a thrill, I presume, in the page, its promise contained within the attempting to define something as linguisfour-letter word we’ve ascribed to its shift- tically impenetrable as color, for language ing hues. In giving blue a name, we sacrifice is not the most effective medium to do the arcane for the concreteness of lan- so. Simpler instead to paint a blue canvas, guage. Something is diminished. Wonder, as Yves Klein or Agnes Martin have, to perhaps, or enchantment at this intuitive get one’s point across. A monochromatic understanding of blue as “the language the painting retains the purity of blue—“a blue sky speaks” (Ted Dodson). Growing up, I in itself, disengaged from all formal justiwas told, “In the beginning was the Word.” fications,” to quote Klein—whereas blue Suppose the beginning was blue itself. Our texts mire the color with complexity, as retinal perception of color predates all writers are wont to do. notions of object identification and selfMy interest in blue stemmed from its hood, and our eyes are especially sensitive emergent intertextuality—blue’s prevalence to shorter wavelengths of light, the short- and presence across a range of contempoest among them being blue. Perhaps this rary texts: William Gass’s On Being Blue: is how faith begins, like the first sight of A Philosophical Inquiry (1975), Maggie color at daybreak, and I realize I have seen Nelson’s Bluets (2009), Carol Mavor’s Blue blue before I knew its name. I have always Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (2013), known blue. I have felt blue before I suc- Derek Jarman’s experimental poetic film cumbed to the wonder of its moods. And Blue (1993), and essays like Rebecca Solnit’s as much as I have read about the color, I “The Blue of Distance” and Julia Kristeva’s cannot claim to know it any better, if at all. “Giotto’s Joy.” These texts comprise their Across myriad blue essays, poems, own expansive universe of letters, where novels, and musings, I’ve come to recognize blue derives its symbolic power through blue’s utter ineffability—that which dis- repetition and imagistic association: blue tinguishes it from other colors on a visual, objects as “a kind of burning bush” that can cultural, and metaphysical plane. Blue is elicit “a stinging desire” (Nelson). as apparent as the sky and as murky as the The color becomes an invocation, a deep sea. Some say that blue is the deepest thing that demands Kleinian justification, color, a refractive intermediary between again and again. Gass, a critic and novelist, light and dark. It is “the most insubstantial wrote one of the first book-length essays on color,” “the color of transcendence,” of blue because he was intrigued by the word lovelorn musings and interior life. Blue itself. A blue canvas was of little interest to is the most modern of the primary colors, him. As such, the tradition of blue writing, younger than red, yellow, and green in following Gass’s 1975 work, is never strictly obtaining its formal name. about the color blue, but about derivative objects, experiences, phenomena—verging 43

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

towards language itself. On the page, then, blue is a point of entry and relation for the reader, a navy fog drifting from the mountains to settle upon the sentences.

With every new text, I am reintroduced to blue, greeted by this familiar acquaintance whose name and face reliably slip from memory. A certain amount of faith, too, is required of the reader when confronted with a writer’s blue conjurings. These chromatic conjectures can be slippery, whereas pure color is unequivocal (“[E]very color is a completed presence in the world, a recognizable being apart from any object,” writes Gass): blue becomes an inexact metaphor for love, loss, life, and the sublime. While vague, this literary reference to blue functions as “the laying down of One Meaning so that it might at once be pulverized, multiplied into plural meanings,” according to Kristeva. Color is “the shattering of unity” that allows the text to bloom.

•

All this blue talk owes itself, in part, to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German poet and scientist. In his Theory of Colours (1810), Goethe sought to refute Isaac Newton’s theory that all color is derived from white light. Goethe, who was no physicist, held a more archaic understanding of color. He thought the eye was affected by both light and darkness. And blue, by Goethe’s account, is closer to darkness than light, having an “affinity with black” and connoting “a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.”

But Goethe’s most memorable blue musing, which the poet Maggie Nelson quotes in Bluets, strikes a more pensive tone: “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it 44

draws us after it.” Blue earns our affections like an elusive lover, beckoning us towards its illusory arms. By her telling, Nelson’s love affair with the color began quite typically. Blue entered the door of her life, and she succumbed to its “voluntary delusion” (haven’t we all?). Bluets is a meandering dialogue between the speaker and a lost lover: “This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.” A close read of Bluets, however, reveals Nelson’s investment in the idea of blue as desideratum. Blue is a literary device by which the writer abstracts into the realm of feeling while the color’s concrete features, like that of an anonymous, faceless lover, dissipate entirely: “If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”

A sentence too mawkish, if you ask me, that is simultaneously evasive in sentiment, but perhaps that is to the point of blue’s name. It follows a logic unique to its own apparatus.

Goethe’s theory contained many empirical inaccuracies, namely for his assumption that darkness is an oppositional force to light. (Newton proved that a “dark” room with no visible light simply contained few light particles.) Nevertheless, I am partial to how Goethe considered color a visual phenomenon unique to each viewer. He was especially interested in color-blind and blind people. Color, he wrote, “is a law of nature in relation with the sense of sight.”

We are its audience. Color achieves its sensuality through subjective interpretation.

To free themselves from the centuriesold artistic mythologies of form, perspective, and narrative, the postimpressionist and abstract painters let color stray loose on the

TERRY NGUYEN

canvas. Of this nonrepresentational style world, to intuit David Hume’s concept of of painting, Henri Matisse said: “When “the missing shade of blue” from somewhere the means of expression have become so within myself. refined, so attenuated that their power of • expression wears thin, it is necessary to return to the essential principles which There are a handful of recurring sources made human language.” Matisse, in other that blue writers tend to cite, among them words, was advocating for a radical shift in Goethe, Wittgenstein, Jarman, and Klein. painting: a return to honoring the essence Reading them seems to be a rite of pasof basic shapes and colors away from rep- sage for any blue connoisseur, or maybe I resentational “refinement.” What’s striking had been diligent in following the azure is how Matisse, a painter and collagist (he threads of history. Still, I resisted refurconstructed a series of magnificent and bishing passages already quoted by Nelson, orotund Blue Nudes), refers to language Gass, or Mavor, although such overlap is in a discussion about painting. Language a natural by-product of this kind of intelmay only approximate a color’s essential lectual and intertextual exercise. Of course, qualities, but perhaps we can recognize originality is not impossible, but blue, like color as a private language unto itself— God and love and death, has been discurwhat Wittgenstein described as something sively wrung out by writers, so to speak, “known only to the speaker; to his immedi- like a pair of faded jeans turned inside out ate, private sensations.” in the wash. Correlations and coincidences When asked by colleagues and friends can’t be avoided. Blue’s poetic progenitors “Why blue?,” Nelson admits that she has no are bound to be quoted for posterity, I supadequate response: “We don’t get to choose pose, to serve as “formal justification” of the what or whom we love, I want to say. We color’s literary significance. It unites us as just don’t get to choose.” The same can be tourists traversing this foreign blue land. asked of our ineffectual attempts to eluciThese writings are a form of “blue date color through language: why bother to tourism,” to borrow a phrase from Mavor, say the unsayable? Unlike Nelson, though, who described her Barthesian multidiswho ascribes these whims to fate, I believe ciplinary study of blue as such. In Blue we have some choice in these discursive Mythologies, Mavor is our self-appointed matters. Blue writers have undertaken tour guide on a blue excursion, from a Sisyphean task, for even a million blue Giotto’s Arena Chapel to Polish filmtexts are unable to accomplish what Klein’s maker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film Three canvas achieves in a split second of sight. Colors: Blue (1993) to Belgian artist Francis But perhaps, much like Goethe’s efforts, the Alÿs’s The Loop (1997). These blue artworks thought experiment is the point, however and objects ground Mavor’s writing, in flawed one’s conclusions may be. “I want a sense, on the chromatic spectrum. Her she said / a theory that explains / every- digressions are brief, relative to Gass’s thing,” writes the poet Louise Glück in and Nelson’s, though Mavor’s methodi“Blue Rotunda.” As do I. I want what I want cal meditations reveal how we imbue our so I write to resolve my knowledge of the own matrices of meaning upon favored 45

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

blue phenomena. A derivative patchwork she meant that blueness can be ascribed to of associations emerges from our mental our heart’s whims. interactions with the color, even if what we Roni Horn’s monologue Saying Water encounter isn’t tangibly blue. We recognize is, as the title implies, about water. non-blue phenomena, like feelings, songs, Nevertheless, I’m convinced that blue is the disease, even fiction, as blue in sentiment dominant mood of her hour-long perforfor the color is “self-contradictory, yet true.” mance, which I have listened to many times Blue is a uniquely paradoxical color, Mavor in the dark with closed eyes and clasped argues: “The color blue yields meaning, but hands, as if Horn’s steady voice could offer paradoxically will also give way to oppo- me deliverance from my insomnia. Saying site meanings, as if it were performing the Water is conversational and poetic, though intransitive form of the verb, to blue.” the observations are steeped in an indigo Blue is, by all means, a hot mess. It despondency. Horn had written the monocontradicts itself, in nature and in language. logue at a residency in England, taking The blue of the sky is simply a trick of light: daily walks along the River Thames, which the shade we see is a result of scattered par- has the highest rate of suicides of any urban ticles, bouncing off gases in the atmosphere. river. She speaks of suicide and bodily dis“Blue” foods and “blue” flowers derive their memberment. She growls the word “water” color from a bluish-purple compound and stretches its fluid syllables. “Watching called anthocyanin; they are often more the water, I am stricken with the vertigo purple than “true” blue. Blue, as an adjec- of meaning,” Horn says. What she wittive, can represent the religious or the pro- nesses is dirty, swirling, opaque, black, but fane: blue stories are fairy tales, whereas the images conjured, to me, are insistently, blue movies are X-rated flicks. Tempting indubitably blue—“Water is the final conas it is to think of these blue ideas and jugation: an infinity of form, relation, and associations as artificial inventions (how, content.” Like blue, water is fluid, consistI want to ask Gass, can fiction be blue?), ing of a multiplicity of meaning. Water is stretched into a clunky, book-length met- “the master verb,” as blue is intransitive, a aphor for our moods and states of mind, I gestural state to be acted upon. take solace in blue’s illusory states and its Skeptical as I am of employing the synthetic prevalence in nature. The sky terms of grammar to literalize the univer“only gives our wish for blue a whet,” writes sality of water and color, I often return to Robert Frost in the poem “Fragmentary Wittgenstein, who famously proclaimed: Blue.” Fitting, then, that blue evokes “con- “The limits of my language mean the limits flicting temperaments” in culture and lan- of my world.” And color, for Wittgenstein, guage. The color’s fragmented mythologies was a black box of meaning. Inspired by have accumulated over centuries, such that Goethe, he wrote Remarks on Colour (1950) blue has become saddled (or shattered, as within the last 18 months of his life. It is Kristeva claims) with all sorts of mean- perhaps a last-ditch attempt to clarify the ings. “Sometimes, it seems, that everything logic behind the words ascribed to color, is blue,” Mavor muses. This is, of course, even though Wittgenstein believed that untrue (the grass isn’t blue), but I suppose “any attempt to describe [color] will always 46

TERRY NGUYEN

be insufficient.” He writes, “I can describe a language game to a blind person, or to a colour-blind person, but I cannot demonstrate it. If this is the case, then how is it possible that people learn the meaning of colour names?” A language game, in Wittgensteinian terms, is the process by which we learn, understand, and use language to communicate with others. The unspoken “rules” of the language game teach us to understand a word (like blue, for instance) by associating it with blue images and blue things.

But the conundrum that plagued Wittgenstein over the course of his intellectual life—how the meanings of words are developed and reinforced through collective use—began long before writing Remarks on Colour. The first chapter of Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, a set of 1933–34 lecture notes that were bound in blue cloth (hence the name), begins with this question: “What is the meaning of a word?” And later, he deconstructs an example of how a person may come to learn the word yellow.

They are trained like a dog, to put it crudely, to harbor an instant association, a feeling of recognition between word and image.

The ball is yellow, the trees are green, and the sky is blue because we agree they are so.

It is impossible to succinctly describe Wittgenstein’s philosophy without deconstructing the mechanics of a sentence and the relative meanings of its accompanying words. However, I find myself returning to Wittgenstein whenever I am faced with a sense of semantic satiation, which occurred several times while writing this essay. The word blue began to ring hollow in its shape and sound; I struggled to grasp its meaning while marveling at this temporary cognitive glitch, engendered by a word’s mere

repetition. When I am in this state, blue becomes, in effect, a placeholder, a daunting sign that can stand for anything and everything. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, to extricate myself from this void of associations, when I feel like I am standing briefly outside language itself. Horn describes water as “a form of perpetual relation, not so much a substance but a thing whose identity is based on its relation to other things.”

Blue, on the page, is as viscous in its literary properties as water, always presented and posed in relation to another thing. Only when it becomes reduced to hollow echolalia do I feel distanced from blue, rendered briefly ignorant of its connotations and mythologies. It is a sort of linguistic blindness—not visual, of course, and certainly not as severe as what Jarman suffered from.

When Jarman’s vision was deteriorating from AIDS, he often saw streaks of blue light. His entire field of vision turned blue when he put in the prescribed eye drops.

However, the partial blindness unlocked a realm of pure color, one that allowed Jarman to see “the fathomless blue of Bliss.”

There are two ways we can learn the meaning of a word, according to Wittgenstein. One can do so “inside the language” by seeking out a definition in the dictionary, or the meaning can be imparted outside the language demonstratively, which is the simplest way to recognize colors or textures like alabaster or travertine.

There is, I think, a purity to being outside language. It is a retreat to a private sphere of thought where the truth of blue resides, a realm beyond logical and linguistic interpretation.

47

Caleb Stein Shamus Embryo Pose, The Watering Hole (2022) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

48

NONFICTION

WRECKING CREWS

Remembering John Albert and his lost generation

by Joe Donnelly

I remember when my relationship dynamic with the late writer John Albert went from being friendly acquaintances to something like the hipster Honeymooners. It was when my then-wife and I moved into a house up the street from John and his then-wife. It was the early 2000s. The house was a Spanish bungalow fixer-upper in Silver Lake, just before the intense gentrification-shit hit the 49

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

fan (guilty as charged). The house is now valued at over twice what I sold it for when I got divorced in 2008, and now you’d have to pay cash for more than the asking price. Back then, though, the human-scale mortgages and rents, the unassuming taco stands and coffee shops, and the pocket park where our dogs would play provided a low-key structure to our neighborhood and a reliable rhythm to our days.

John was writing a book at the time, and I was the newly minted deputy editor of the LA Weekly. We’d often start the day walking with our dogs in Elysian Park and end it chatting about work and life while they romped across the street from the house. The point being, we had a commons and we had things in common, not the least of which was that we were both taking tentative stabs at normalcy after our so-called wild years had grown tiresome.

This all provided organic conditions for a deep friendship to grow.

Later, we’d get divorced around the same time. We lived together briefly in my mid-forties bachelor pad—hipster Honeymooners turned Echo Park Odd Couple, he the sloppy Oscar to my neurotic Felix. Our dogs by now were as close as we were. Eventually we’d remarry and become first-time dads just months apart, long after we thought we had passed our sell-by dates. John’s son was born a day after my birthday. Fatherhood became our focus and provided a new, welcome ingredient to our friendship.

Deep friendship is a mysterious, alchemical thing, even more so, arguably, when it arises between adult men, laden as we are with so much baggage and bullshit related to sharing anything like feelings. I have less time on the horizon than in the 50

rearview mirror, and being at such a stage, I’ve spent a great deal of this past summer reflecting on the loss of John, who died unexpectedly from a heart attack in early May. I’ve experienced plenty of loss in my life, but losing a best friend is unlike any I’ve experienced before. I’ve been taken aback by it. The reason I feel this way probably comes down to a simple truth that remains hard to say out loud: I loved him dearly.

That John and I became such good friends well into adulthood, despite— or because of—the baggage and bullshit, seems like a rare gift. I think part of what’s so remarkable is how few and far between these types of intimate friendships are, especially for men, who are currently suffering a well-documented crisis of loneliness, despair, and excessive death.

The crisis has spurred sober warnings from the Surgeon General and a New York Times article suggesting that pickleball may be the cure. Though I’m luckier than many in this regard, I’m aware of my own dearth of intimate male friendships and fascinated by the difficulty that men have making deep and lasting connections with each other.

By contrast, my friendship with John felt like it was foretold. Before we were neighbors, we had friends and associates in common. John was among the many significant authors, artists, journalists, and designers whose careers gestated around Ray Gun Publishing, the former L.A. indie-publishing darling of meaning­ fully tattooed Gen Xers, where maverick graphic designer David Carson rose to fame in the early 1990s and MSNBC’s Alex Wagner had her first gig out of college.

From roughly 1996 to 2000 I was an editor

J O E D O N N E L LY

there, first for the snowboarding magazine dread. He was always funnier than I was Stick, and later for the eponymous indie about the latter. About everything, really. music and style magazine Ray Gun and After surfing, we’d often stop for donuts the pop-culture title Bikini. Still, it felt like at a nondescript ma-and-pa donut shop in our friendship was more than the sum of an El Segundo strip mall. I have euphoric cultural and geographical proximity. There memories of those just-out-of-the-oven was something elemental to it. Maybe donuts. The proprietor, a stereotypically it was the water that brought us together. sassy Vietnamese woman, loved to tease Surfing, to be specific. me for some reason. This delighted John to As with most of the significant stations no end, and provided fodder for additional in life—sex, identity, career, marriage, even- shit-giving. Sometimes we were joined at tually fatherhood—I got around to surfing the beach by various of his or my friends. later than most who do get around to it. I Over time, we built a little community was a runaway from a gunmetal geography around surfing at El Porto, where the waves that traces back to Syracuse, New York and are almost always crappy but often less I'd hotfooted it all over the world before crappy than anywhere else within driving finally landing in Los Angeles. In retro- distance of Hollywood. spect, it seems weird that it took me so long One day not long into our routine, to get here. Once I had arrived, though, I when I was still a full-on kook, I must was thirsty for the California sun and surf have gotten in someone’s way while padto bleach out the past. Which is to say, dling out to the lineup. Before I knew what I was well into my thirties when I decided I was up, some burly guy was barking at me, needed to go surfing. claiming local status the way real locals John, an erstwhile junkie, accidental never do, yelling at me for some offense of rock star, and refugee from the dusty east- which I was unaware. I was still trying to ern suburbs, had been getting in the water figure out what was going on when John regularly since completing court ordered paddled over, acting like he was down with stint in rehab. All of this was more than a the dude. decade before I moved a few doors down “Hey,” John said, insinuatingly. “That and he taught me how to surf. By that, I guy do something?” He nodded toward me mean he took me surfing with him two to as I bobbed toward Catalina. three times a week while offering little or The angry guy, veins popping, went off: no guidance other than what freeways we “Fucking this, fucking that …” Really, nothshould take. ing at that break on that day was worth We’d drive together, usually in my Jeep getting bent about.

Cherokee, to El Porto, at the north end of John never postured as a tough guy, Manhattan Beach. It wasn’t the friendliest but he had little patience for fake tough place in the world, but I’m told there were guys. He paddled a little closer, looked worse. Depending on traffic, the drive this one dead in the eye, and said, “Yeah, I sometimes took half an hour, sometimes see … Well, he’s with me.” That was that. an hour. On the way to and fro, we’d talk Angry guy just paddled away cursing under about the Dodgers, and our existential his breath.

51

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

There’s no arguing with charisma, and John had it coming and going. I think that was the day he claimed me as a brother of sorts.

The feeling was mutual, and we became great friends over the years, but to be honest, I was pretty moonstruck before we ever got in the water. There were many reasons: John’s acuity, his transgressive wit, his been-there-done-that bona fides, and the Factory-like assemblage of left-of-the-dial Angelenos circling in his orbit. The thing that got me first, though, was his writing.

A mutual friend had sent me a draft of his first major foray into literary journalism when John and I were still just acquaintances. It was a memoirish piece that told of the misadventures of a crew of ex-punk-rockers, recovering junkies, assorted ne’er-do-wells and otherwise deeply scarred men who joined an amateur, fast-pitch baseball league. It was called “Hardball.”

This was in the late ’90s, and by then I had run two titles for Ray Gun Publishing.

At that point, culture was fast approaching terminal postmodernism and ironic posturing had started giving me heartburn.

The characters in “Hardball,” cast out as they were from the shipwrecks of their misspent youths, were swimming against the tides, scrambling for something earnest.

I found it immediately compelling.

In this passage, John relates how his team, the Griffith Park Pirates, arose out of a bold suggestion from dope-sick friend Mike Coulter, late of the near-great Lifter, a band described forlornly by one music mag as “the forgotten heroes of ’90s teen angst”:

52

Mike pulled himself upright and announced that he needed a cigarette, so the two of us headed out into the large weed-strewn backyard and sat at an old wooden picnic table someone had stolen from a local park. My girlfriend recently quit smoking— again—and understandably didn’t want her house to smell like cigarettes.

I noticed Mike’s hand trembling as he retrieved a single, bent Marlboro from his pocket, carefully straightened it out, and lit it. There was a silence as he smoked, punctuated by the sniffling of his constantly running nose.

Eventually, Mike looked over at me, wiped his nose with the back of his hand like a little kid, and asked, “Hey, do you wanna play catch?”

John said yes, and one thing led to another. Before long, they were doing something they hadn’t done in longer than they could remember—signing up. In this case, for a hardball league rife with strapping former jocks who meant business. The gambit was as ridiculous as the stakes were high.

The area where most of us live, Silver Lake, is the virtual epicenter of hipster irony. Sincerity is at best ignored and at worst ridiculed. This is a neighborhood that once boasted a wellorganized adult kickball game, where Scooby-Doo lunch pails are collected like rare coins. If Mike and I had casually announced we were going to permanently sear the image of, say, Shaun Cassidy into our buns, nobody would have batted an eye. This was different, though. In this endeavor we

J O E D O N N E L LY

risked committing the worst of all possible social sins: caring and looking stupid.

John’s manuscript, a version of which would be published in the LA Weekly in 2000, immediately stood out in a Vice- and McSweeney’s-centric climate of low-stakes irony. The piece then evolved into Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates, published by Scribner in 2005. The book, criminally out of print, captured preprofessional Silver Lake/Echo Park and a hunger for something beyond hipsterdom like nothing else I can think of. Critics hailed it, and the work has been optioned several times since its publication. In some dank corner of Hollywood, in fact, it’s still in development. That it is out of print but still in play underscores the dichotomy of John’s legacy: important yet underknown.

•

As I mentioned, John died of a heart attack on May 3 at the age of 58, leaving family and friends—many of them survivors of notso-polite society—stunned and saddened.

His passing warranted its own report in the Los Angeles Times, which remarked on his cultural impact and quoted some of his better- and lesser-known associates (including this writer) testifying to his impact on the culture.

For friends, his legacy is marked by a lightning-fast, withering wit that combined the streetwise charisma of someone who had lived dangerously with the intellectual range of the son of academics. All that was in his person and his writing, a vocation John arrived at in his mid-thirties after various incarnations, from seminal post-punk musician to junkie to flailing

screenwriter. When he finally found his footing as a narrative journalist, John told sprawling, poignant tales of his atomized, at-risk cohort. And yet, despite all that, John Albert may be the most significant Angeleno writer you’ve never heard of.

John didn’t help his case. He disliked self-promotion. Even a whiff of socialmedia humble-bragging—tools of the trade for writers trying to gain traction in the attention economy—would earn a disparaging aside. And while his stories frequently dealt with the bills coming due for prior transgressions, he never glamorized the urban underbelly the way lesser hands tend to do. What he did do was steadily chronicle the anxieties, struggles, and occasional triumphs of the latchkey kids who grew up in the smoggy, sprawling, unsupervised Southern California suburbs of the 1970s and ’80s, people who eventually made their marks on the city. In dozens of pieces for LA Weekly, Slake: Los Angeles, Playboy, and numerous anthologies, John spoke for this damaged-goods constituency, picking up an essential thread in the L.A. narrative where Joan Didion and Eve Babitz left off.

•

John Albert came from Claremont, where his father taught psychology at the eponymous college and his mother worked as a social worker at Loma Linda Hospital.

There, in the late 1970s, where the burgeoning metropolis stalled along the barren desert and the children ran bored and underattended, he became painfully aware of early-onset yearning. John writes about this in the tragicomic “The Satori Underground,” a story he did for the Rare Bird Lit anthology Yes Is The Answer (and 53

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Other Prog-Rock Tales). The story starts with our bemused narrator going to see King Crimson with his best friend Dwight.

The two knew little about the band other than that guitarists Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew were associated with their hero, David Bowie. Here, John describes their teenage state of mind: For some inexplicable reason my friends and I wanted desperately to be old and jaded. For me the oppressive stillness of the Southern California suburbs and an inner emotional turmoil resulted in a painful restlessness. For others, including Dwight, there were also broken homes. All this merged with above average intellects to create a hunger for adventure which drew us to new music and literature, but also a destructive underworld of drugs and crime. And so instead of skateboarding and kissing girls we spent our teenage years using heroin and dressing like middle aged criminals from some dreary, nonexistent European city of another era.

Dwight died several years later, after reconnecting with his drug-addicted, career-criminal father. He fell while attempting to escape out an 11th-story window at Downtown’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility using a rope made of bedsheets. Dwight was sharing a cell with his father at the time. In this passage, also from “The Satori Underground,” John writes about their drive home from the King Crimson show: When I eventually woke up, Dwight was driving the car back into the desert 54

as the sun rose. I remember thinking that he looked old in his suit, staring out at the road with heavy-lidded eyes.

I faded out again and when I regained consciousness it was the afternoon and I was in Dwight’s mom’s house. I wandered into the backyard. Dwight was sitting in a lawn chair holding a guitar […] play[ing] the David Bowie song “Heroes,” singing the words in a raspy whisper: “We can beat them—for ever and ever, we can be heroes—just for one day.”

Attempting to transcend the sun-blasted sameness of his suburban milieu, John spent some of his ensuing teenage years forming the innovative death-rock group Christian Death. Characteristically, he quit the band just as it was gaining a cult following. Rozz Williams, the original singer, later killed himself. These early losses, and others that would follow, left John with a fraught hyperawareness of time passing.

Still, as much as existential yearning and underlying dread were favored motifs, and as often as his pieces delved into addiction, loss, and illness, they were always exciting to read—alive with bracing insights and sly humor. The lives of John’s friends, many of whom died before I got to meet them, were vivid to me through his writing. And through them, I got to know parts of Los Angeles that preceded my arrival or exceeded my grasp.

•

When I was hired as deputy editor of the LA Weekly in 2002, part of my charge was to bring in fresh voices. John was among the first I turned to. For someone less sure of themselves, the initial assignment I gave

J O E D O N N E L LY

him would have been a tough sell: a cover story on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This was a slightly risky proposition at the time as the band had little cachet among cool hounds such as Pitchfork Media and, truthfully, had done little to spark my interest in its 20 years of making records. Which is why their 2002 album By the Way was so shocking.

That record set narratives of friendship, loss, recovery, and growing pains to a sweeping soundtrack of musical styles that referenced everything from the Mamas & the Papas to Los Lobos. Somehow it captured a changing Los Angeles zeitgeist that I found myself and my friends trying to sort out at the turn of the century.

Music writing, though, is as a genre actuarily averse to stepping out on a limb. Taking the Red Hot Chili Peppers seriously would require a writer confident enough to listen without prejudice.

Someone like John Albert. In “Sons of the City,” he writes: Though fast approaching middle age, the band has unfortunately aged exceptionally well. This[,] combined with a willingness to interject overtly sexual images into their lyrics[,] has pretty much damned them to the populist mainstream regardless of how inventive their work. Only the band’s past appetite for heinous amounts of narcotics gets them slightly off the hook with arbiters of cool. Still, be so audacious as to mention their latest disc in the same category as a hallowed masterpiece like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and you’ll get laughed out of the used-record graphic-novel store.

But the truth is, the Chili Peppers’

latest release is one of the most interesting and creative new records around and arguably belongs in the pantheon of great Los Angeles albums with the works of the Beach Boys, the Doors, the Flesheaters, X and others.

John would go on to write about all sorts of things for me and others: the first hints of the decadent new Hollywood party scene (which would peak with the notorious Bling Ring robberies), street artists, gun culture, authors, science, and, of course, music. Always, though, he returned to his favorite subjects—the friends who made it and the friends who didn’t. As with Babitz, his own Venn diagram of relationships gave him his greatest inspiration and produced his best writing.

Those bonds can give and take, as John shows in “The Hep-C Generation,” the 2010 piece he wrote for the first issue of Slake: Los Angeles. It tells the story of recovering addicts attempting, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, to stave off the life-threatening hepatitis C virus, contracted from sharing dirty needles. In it, John writes: I have the virus. So do nearly all my old friends. My best friend from childhood, who I grew up skateboarding and smoking pot with, is infected.

The pink-haired pixie from the San Fernando Valley whom I took to my senior prom has it, as does the formerly homeless, nihilist friend with the cigarette burns on his arms who, as an adult, became a wealthy production designer on blockbuster films. In fact, the majority of the kids I knew in the thriving Los Angeles underground of the late seventies and early 55

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

eighties—from the slam-dancing kids at the Starwood to the young junkies emulating Johnny Thunders outside the Cathay de Grande—have hep c.

At a time when the disease was the leading cause of death among chronic virus-caused infections, some of John’s peers were driven to seek experimental treatments from shaky doctors in shady places. Later in the piece, John crosses a pedestrian bridge into Tijuana on a blazing hot day, guiding us into this underworld, and into the past that led him there: My journey into Mexico that morning began about three decades before in the backroom of a small record store on a boulevard in Pomona lined with Pentecostal Churches and vacant lots. The town, thirty miles east of Los Angeles, was once the hub of a thriving citrus industry. It has long since degenerated into one more suburban slum. A gangly ex-radical in his thirties who had glommed on to the local teenage punk scene ran the store. He sold vinyl over the counter and purple tabs of LSD under it. His hippie friend, “Jesus,” would drive an old ice-cream truck around the city selling weed and hallucinogens as well as the occasional snow cone. My friend Rozz had recently dropped out of high school and was living with his new boyfriend, Ron, in a back room of the store where the two of them explored sadomasochism. One would periodically hear the sound of a cracking whip followed by a delighted scream. Love was in the air.

In my opinion, that piece, and its prequel, “Running with the Devil: A Lifetime of Van Halen,” written for the second issue of Slake, are among the definitive narratives of his generation—the lost sons and 56

daughters of Didion’s Golden Dreamers, squeezed, in our storybooks, between the oxygen-sucking boomers and digital-native millennials. As John puts it in “Running”: “It is the soundtrack to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I know because that world is where I come from.”

John Albert was in and of this world and also above it. I don’t believe it takes away from the wild ride that is Wrecking Crew to share its final reward: These days, when I’m flying in a plane, I look down and see baseball diamonds—each just a brown square inside a larger green square. They’re everywhere, and they look like nothing else. I imagine what it must be like to live in that particular town, to work there and feel like it’s your home. And I think of how friends down there play baseball together on those fields, just like we do. I’m sure some people think that grown men playing on an amateur baseball team—not to mention broken-down men fending off their personal demons—is slightly pathetic.

But it isn’t about trying to recapture the past—not at all. It’s about embracing the present. I’ve spent far too many hours regretting things I’ve done and fearing what lies ahead, and I don’t think I’m so alone in this. When I’m out there on the field, my troubled past kind of disappears. In those brief moments, nothing else in the world matters because I am right where I want to be—playing baseball with my friends in Los Angeles.

I ended up playing a season for the Griffith Park Pirates many years ago,

J O E D O N N E L LY

although John was no longer playing on the team. Just another gift from a friend whose body of work on the nature of community, and how it is forged in a place as vast as Los Angeles, will keep on giving—like surfing, or the intimate language we developed over years. We still talk in my dreams sometimes, bobbing towards Catalina, waiting for the donuts to come out of the oven.

57

58

Caleb Stein Taeshawn, The Watering Hole (2020) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

NONFICTION

I WILL NEVER DIE, PT. 2

On Revelation and the beautiful things we can see

by Sadie Sartini Garner

It never occurred to me that I might die one day. That I would

definitely die one day. But I desperately did not want to die.

I finished reading the Book of Revelation in the summer, sometime in August, in my computer chair in New Orleans. Somewhere late in the book, tribulations have taken over the earth and terrible 59

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

things are described as happening to but there was no real explanation of what people—it wasn’t necessarily clear to me exactly that meant. What did it mean to what was happening on that first and what defeat death? If he did defeat death, didn’t is to this point in November 2022 only it happen three days later, when he was resfull reading of Revelation. It was a riot of urrected? Didn’t he defeat it every day for confusion is what I remember; I remem- the rest of his time on earth, when he was ber opening it up knowing that there were walking around, spending time with his more interpretations of this last, strangest friends, clarifying his message, not rotting book of the Bible than any other, and that and decomposing? my attempt to make any kind of meaning And if he did defeat death in the sense of it was almost certainly going to fail to people meant—which is to say, that this conform to any of the most correct-seem- defeat meant those of us who follow him ing ones—there were simply too many will never die—why has every person who ways to take it, and the language was too has lived since that moment, even those vague, so I went with the scariest reading who love him or try to love him or devote to be safe. This, I thought as I read, is going their lives to determining what it means to be really bad for those people. and feels like to love him—why have they I liked that I had this thought, that all died too? We were told that those who the word “those” came to me in that died in the Lord were merely asleep, then we moment. It separated me from the pack. If were immediately told that this was a form I’d thought, This is going to be really bad for of metaphorical language, that it wasn’t us, I would obviously be including myself, as though you’d be buried alive snoring, but even if I thought, This is going to be bad, though some people didn’t want to be creit would be as though a part of me were mated, just in case. left behind, as a witness, braced for impact.

Jesus at one point in the Gospels says This is going to be bad for those people—I did that anyone who wants to follow him must really think it, but it was as if I knew that take up their cross and die daily. Every day, this was what I was supposed to think, that dying just like that, finding life through by this point, in the Bible’s final pages, it constantly choosing death. This seemed was time for me to identify with those who like an especially strange or cruel formuwere at that point no longer present among lation for living a good life to me, at the its pages (or so I supposed at the time). It age of 20, as I tried to emerge from the felt spontaneous, and it was, in the sense shadows. Walking through campus one day, that it had just popped into my head. And listening to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on I didn’t challenge it, so it felt a bit like mine. my iPod, I noticed for the first time that But I did look at it strangely.

Jeff Tweedy was saying the same thing.

There were many praise songs about “You have to lose—you have to lose,” he death, I would come to find out. “Sin has sang, and even though it sounded like he lost its power, death has lost its sting.” We was trying to encourage the person he was were told that Jesus had defeated death on singing to, it also sounded like he wasn’t the cross. This was the way it was always thrilled to be delivering this information. phrased, “Jesus defeated death on the cross,” “You have to learn how to die, if you wanna 60

SADIE SARTINI GARNER

wanna be alive,” he added. The melody was bouncy, and the song twinkled with the optimism of freshly realized truth. The harmonies cleared a bright path where once there was only bramble. But even when he sang it, it still amounted to the same thing: dying. Dying.

A friend from Bible study was flabbergasted one night, reading over Jesus’s words, after having gone through something particularly difficult and unpleasant that his faith had prompted him to undertake.

He was a good guy, a good friend. I always suspected he’d suffered some kind of social death, and that was what had him down on this evening. “I get it,” he said. “Dying sucks. It really sucks.” And he’s right. But everyone dies. No matter how they live.

Life consists of small denials. That’s what choices are—in selecting one thing, you cut off another. This is simply emotional health. Or not even emotional health—it’s a plain function of living. We could not see that at the time. It seemed as though only Christians, who would never die, were the ones who truly knew what it was to die.

“You will never taste death,” people would say, but death was on the tips of our tongues. It was a spice we mixed into every meal. A life, when properly prepared, should taste of ashes.

Death never had a sting for me. One night we were sitting around the house in Baton Rouge, me and my roommates and another friend. The latter was the worship leader at the Refuge. He was only a couple of years older, and he was already married, but he would sometimes come around to hang. “What would you do if you died and you found out it all wasn’t real?” someone asked, probably the worship leader.

It wasn’t meant to ferret out any weird

answers, just something the asker was curious about. I said that I would probably not be too upset, that being a Christian still would have caused me to lead a good life, a life I could be proud of. It was my assumption that, in this scenario, I would still be welcomed into heaven. “Not me,” one of my roommates said. He was leaning back, shaking his head. He was often full of shit, which was my favorite thing about him, but he meant this. “I wouldn’t believe them.”

At the time, I found this declaration of certainty very impressive. I still do. I admire its lack of logic, how stridently it refuses what would have, in this scenario, been as plain as day, all in the name of love. Some nights, when we lived together, I’d come home from the coffeeshop, and he’d be lying on the couch in this very same living room, all the lights off, Built to Spill’s cover of “Cortez the Killer” burning on the turntable like a cigarette in an ashtray. Once I caught him using his fist to drive his entire torso up and down diagonally across his waist, pumping like an oil derrick to the heavy part of “Greet Death” by Explosions in the Sky. He was a ginger, already balding with a full-on tonsure despite being in his late twenties, and supremely handsome, and he once recorded a hymn he’d written on a nylon-string guitar that unrolled with the rustic delicacy of a haiku. Come to think of it, he may not have been full of shit.

He’d worked in food service when he got saved, I think because he thought his evangelical coworker was hot and she used that to the Kingdom’s advantage. He absolutely meant what he said. At the gates of whatever new heaven, the opening of a great and unfamiliar and unpromised cosmos, he’d simply refuse. He knew it was true.

61

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Everyone else agreed with him. Who knows, maybe it was one last test. Some short years later, he became the first of my friends to lose their faith.

Lying down on the couch having a moment with Built to Spill, letting Explosions in the Sky throb through me.

I wasn’t sure if I was still capable of that kind of thing. Anyway, there was so much to do. It made the idea of sitting down and listening to music in this way feel indulgent. If I had a record to review, I could put my headphones on, sit at my desk with a notebook, and examine how it did the things it was trying to do. That was work, that was productive, there was a utility to it that, even the most conservative people at my church assured me, was good and helpful for the world. Having music on in the background, letting a record perfume the day as I walked to class or sat eating a sub at Inga’s, that seemed fine too. I couldn’t imagine simply putting music on and listening. Life was too short to waste in that way.

People were at risk—they might die without knowing the Lord, and if they didn’t know the Lord, they would be sent to hell. And there were always people around. Even if you yourself, when you got to the base of things, when everything else burned away, didn’t really care about saving anyone other than yourself. You still had to find a way to do the work. Even if you weren’t on campus, you could be browsing Facebook and responding to things that were tangentially about Jesus. Jerry Falwell died that year, to much rejoicing, and while I understood him to be an agent of chaos and hate, I nevertheless found myself arguing that to celebrate his death made one no different from Falwell himself. Loving 62

one’s enemies meant not cheering for the end of their life, I thought. But not all of my friends were compelled to love their enemies.

The leader of our Bible study one night told us about a friend of his whose father had recently died. In life, this father had not been a believer, and his son—the Bible study leader’s friend—had been respectful of that. He hadn’t wanted to drive a wedge between himself and his dad; he’d wanted to enjoy the life they had together. When his dad died, he burst into the church in tears, raging and wailing at whomever he encountered. “My dad is in hell now!” he was shouting. “And you could’ve saved him!”

Or maybe that’s not how it goes.

Maybe the son wasn’t a believer at all, and only became one later, after his dad’s passing. Maybe the dad was a Christian but not a deeply engaged one—not a Super Christian, as we might have called him.

And the newly converted son was. Being a Super Christian meant that following Jesus was your full identity, though you wouldn’t have phrased it that way. If you were a Super Christian, you wouldn’t know it, probably. You would probably say, “I’m just trying to follow Jesus the way he asks us to,” when someone at church said something about the intensity of your faith. And that would be a sincere answer. In high school, someone said that if anyone ever heard a cardinal say they wanted to be pope, that cardinal would be automatically disqualified from becoming pope. Even though papal history suggests this can’t possibly be true, it stuck with me, the idea that, in order to realize your ambitions, even spiritual ones, you couldn’t admit them to yourself. The Super Christian felt this way too, but without the self-expression. Surely,

SADIE SARTINI GARNER

to even think of oneself as being a Super Christian signified a lack of humility, and thus meant one was not, in fact, what one saw oneself to be.

And yet, being a Super Christian, with all its certainty and commitment, seemed like the goal. It was the end product of the disciple-making process. Nobody would come out and say it, of course, but think of the power of a ministry that could say: We mint Super Christians.

It was the first and possibly only thing people knew about you. You thought about the Lord the same way other students thought about football. He was a constant presence, the engine humming in your life.

But Super Christians weren’t Holy Rollers.

They were grounded, observably grounded, and very focused. They did their schoolwork. They held steady jobs. They were financially responsible. They didn’t seem to get quite as much enjoyment out of watching Dumb and Dumber or playing Wii with everyone, though they would do their best.

In my memory, the Super Christians I knew were steely and confident, the ones who were willing to call the Lord to mind when the conversation would veer toward gossip, or when whatever was on the screen started to get a touch too racy. They had the power to convince everyone, with only a sentence or two, that we should be focused on other things. Nobody—that I can recall—argued with them. When they spoke in social situations, everyone would see the truth of their statements and would experience a dampening of spirit.

We called this being convicted, as in, Wow, John really convicted me the other night, quickly noting that, actually, it was the Holy Spirit moving through John. The Super Christian would speak, and the whole

group would listen. They would turn off the TV. They would remember Jesus.

We were convicted constantly. We were constantly being brought back into focus.

At church, in a Mars Hill video, I heard a song by the Album Leaf. It was a big, boisterous song—it used tiny electronic clicks and beats to slowly crank open a big, blooming orange-and-red flower of sound.

In the video, that blooming was used to represent clarity—the song opened up at the same time the main character had a big revelation that returned them to first principles, to the Lord. At home, in my bedroom, I put my headphones on and closed my eyes. I felt the trickle of programmed synths run down my ears. Small whips of sound lashed back and forth off the beat, their unpredictability and soft insistence urging me to come forward. Did the song bloom for me? Did it bring me somewhere?

Or rather, did it bring me back from somewhere? Had I made it?

This was my regular pattern. I would read about a record on Pitchfork, something new and brilliant and moving. The critic would talk about the profundity of the music, how it opened new vistas in the heart, how it connected them to themself. How it made them cry. I wasn’t sure about being connected to myself—I was sure about the idea of being connected to Jesus—but crying, that I would like to do. I would find the record somewhere, though because I had stopped downloading music illegally after my conversion, and because there were no great record stores of note in Baton Rouge, I have no idea where I would find this music. The internet must have been involved in some way, but that way is lost to me now. I would track down this music, though, and I would put it on, 63

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

and I would hope to have the exact kind of direct experience that the Pitchfork writer had described. I hoped to feel the thing course through me too, if the thing could be identified as God. As the Holy Spirit. Something cool blowing on my open wound, soothing it. I would believe this was my own private version of God. An experience that I probably couldn’t share, since there was no real biblical provision for it. It would feel true, though, in a preverbal, preconfessional, undefinable way.

When it worked.

It never worked.

It sometimes worked. If the conditions were right. The conditions, I can now see, were that there had to be no conditions. It had to come upon me spontaneously. The Album Leaf song worked in the video because I’d never heard it before, and because it was being used in an emotionally charged situation. I can see now that what I wanted from music, from new music, was simply to ingest it, like a pill, and fall asleep.

I wanted to use it. I didn’t care about it as someone else’s expression. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear anything.

To really hear music required too much of me. It required a little death, a loosening of attention or grip on my own experience. What did my roommate feel when he had on that Built to Spill record? Was he thinking about his own life? Was he wondering how he ended up here, an evangelical Christian, in a house with other evangelical Christians five years younger than himself ? Did he let himself wonder?

Or was he really moved by the music in itself, independent of what it made him think about or feel? Is anyone?

I felt nothing. I felt very little. I wanted so badly to feel. I was not aware of what 64

I felt. And so I was determined to muscle my way into understanding the music. I was not going to be moved, but like a tree planted in the water, I could at least put my roots down, stand above the music, assert myself over it, be a solid presence in a world that seemed intent on growing more liquid at all times. I wasn’t feeling it.

I could get it.

One night, the Common Grounds Coffee Shop hosted a talent show.

Common Grounds was a café, but it was primarily a ministry. The café was attached to the Chapel, and it was staffed by members of the Refuge’s leadership team, all college kids. The coffee was free, and of reasonably high quality. The room was pleasingly dark, there was a free desktop computer you could use if you didn’t have your own laptop. Praise and worship music drifted quietly from recessed speakers in the ceiling. There were bookshelves stuffed with volumes that I would occasionally browse, including a rewritten version of the Bible called The Word on the Street. It was meant to impress the MTV Generation with its swagger and command of slang.

It was written by a young British guy, and he called the Pharisees “the Tutting Club” because of their “‘tutting and frowning’ routine.” I’m not sure that anyone I knew had ever met a British person before.

I didn’t play music in front of people, not even at the house. To do so would have been to allow people to hear what I was listening to. It would risk the conversation, the possibility of someone telling me Christians shouldn’t be listening to this kind of music. This is how I want to interpret my past right now, but in truth, at the time, I didn’t want anyone to hear what I was listening to and say, “I don’t get

SADIE SARTINI GARNER

it.” And I didn’t want anyone from church And it knows itself to be a ghost song. to hear what I was listening to and say, “And one day we will die / And our ashes “I get it.” will fly from the aeroplane over the sea,” go The guy who said “Dying sucks” played the first lines of the chorus. a breezy little folk shuffle in the Jack When I see an old picture of a person Johnson mold that positioned Jesus as just who I know is still alive, and they’re standing another down-to-earth soul, the friend next to a dog, I immediately assume the who radiated positivity and inner depth dog is now dead. Generally speaking, it even when he wasn’t speaking. I played probably is. And this makes these photos the song “Strangulation!” by My Morning feel haunted and tragic, even if nothing Jacket, a very long song that I can now see much is really happening in them. “In the is probably about autoerotic asphyxiation. Aeroplane Over the Sea” feels the same (Some of my church friends who were way. Death is simply there, in the song. It’s there that night lived above a guy who died unavoidable; its name is gratuitous. That’s that year in an autoerotic asphyxiation mis- the part of the song that feels the easiest hap. They were fairly worldly people, but for me to believe. they had no idea how to talk about it, other When I thought about my own death, than to be stunned and a little embarrassed which I did not do, I assumed that Jesus by it.) I didn’t really care what the song was would return before it was my time to die. about, only about the way that its melody Plenty of Christians had died throughout made me feel, and the way it seemed to the years; I was obviously well aware of revel in its own brokenness for twice as that fact, of the many millions of believers long as it should have. I fumbled through who had preceded me into eternity. But it it, uncomfortable for the wrong reasons. I would happen soon, his return—so many suspect my discomfort was palpable. people were sure of it. I wasn’t so sure of But when I played “In the Aeroplane it, but I was warmed by the idea that, if it Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel, the did happen soon, it would mean not havanxiety left me. It’s a love song, and a fairly ing to suffer the uncertainty of death, the simple one, structurally speaking. It sips ambiguity of the experience itself, being from the same pool of intermixed long- completely enveloped by pain I could not ing, sadness, and memory as Smashing anticipate and brought I could not be Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight,” or even sure where. Nor would I have to face the more, Georges Méliès’s 1902 film Le voyage sudden certainty I’m dying. In this moment, dans la lune, on which the “Tonight, right now, I’m dying, not quite getting Tonight” video is based. It feels like a song to say clearly to oneself, I am now dead. written by someone who is already dead, Ambiguity crushed by certainty without singing for someone who is also already articulation, without speech, an extremely dead. It’s so antique in its disposition that rational fact that couldn’t be rationalized. its sentiments feel completely removed Death was described as so many things: from the present, which in turn makes it as rest (from our labors), as reward (for feel like a miracle that it communicates our labors), as a state we’d enter where to the present so clearly. It’s a ghost song. we could praise God constantly without 65

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

the interruptions commonly called life.

It was never described as what it is: the first moment in your life that can be fully understood as it’s happening to you.

The next line in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” is the one I don’t believe. I’m not sure that the singer believes it, either, singing as he is from deep in history’s well, from what is essentially the other side of the veil.

Or maybe he believes it, even if he’s not personally experiencing it at the moment, even if he understands the now of the song to be some time decades ago. He believes he said this once. That he may have said this. That this may have been said by someone, perhaps. “But for now we are young,” he sings. “Let us lay in the sun / And count every beautiful thing we can see.”

66

Caleb Stein Michael & His Friend Embracing, The Watering Hole (2022) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

67

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

MY WHOLE WORLD CAN FIT IN THIS WASHER Sisyphus at the laundromat

by Dorie Chevlen

Here is Sisyphus. Here are his arms, straining in exertion.

Here is his rock, rolling in perpetual opposition. Here he is on a Greek lekythos, in a Venetian painting, in a New Yorker cartoon.

Even to those who don’t know his name—or who, like me, can’t spell it sans autocorrect—his figure alone connotes struggle. His legend persists these long centuries because we can always relate to his struggle: the work that never ends, the work that feels like punishment. Even the uniform he’s given is inadequate to the task— just a loincloth, offering no warmth or protection—and how apt does that feel, I think, writing this on a laptop whose N key sticks.

68

NONFICTION

I’m sure that, across generations, humanity has assigned different tasks to his namesake adjective: shepherding these sheep, again; milling this flour, once more; grimly watching the falcons turning and turning in the widening gyre—all of it Sisyphean.

But for me, more than anywhere else, Sisyphus is here at the laundromat, invisible but mythically present. His endless task is also mine. Or at least it feels that way, as I bend from the knees to lift my own heavy and relentless mound, wearing my own last-resort garment, as I have again and again for years, as I shall again and again for countless more.

It’s not that my life feels like punishment: given the correct concentration of coffee and vacuous compliments, I am actually quite grateful for my particular set of circumstances. But on those days when I must heft my clothes bin from my studio apartment (which has no air-conditioning) to my 2003 Honda Accord (which has no air-conditioning) to the shabby laundromat I use in Hollywood (which technically does have air-conditioning, but too much of it) … well, it feels like an all-access pass to my own personal Tartarus.

There are other tasks in my life that are also dull and unending: dishwashing, flossing. Even my job as a writer most days.

Perhaps laundry would amount to just a small irritant, like those, if I didn’t have to do it outside my home, or if I didn’t have to pay for the affront, or if I hadn’t thought my life would turn out differently. But alas, I do. Alas, it didn’t.

Growing up in small-town Ohio, I knew laundry was a regular burden—though my parents possessed not just a washer and a dryer but also an entire room devoted to the

task. With the tardy insight of adulthood, of course I realize that, for many years, my mother probably considered laundry to be her Sisyphean task as well, given the sheer volume of it produced by my three siblings and me—two sets of twins born just 11 months apart. Laundering (and parenting) while so cruelly outnumbered is daunting, and probably my mother should write an essay of her own about it. But this isn’t her story, it’s mine. And what’s hard to accept is that perhaps I thought those stories would by now be more similar.

Since 100 years ago, when my Eastern European great-grandparents disembarked at Ellis Island, I am probably the very first in my genealogical line who will not do better financially than the generation prior.

I’d love to blame that on the economic downturn that has defined the adult lives of me and my fellow millennials. But much of it is my fault too. I didn’t have to live in a pricey urban megalopolis. I chose that. I didn’t have to be a writer. I chose that too.

(But I will not apologize for all that avocado toast, which I absolutely did have to buy.)

In one of those infinite alternate universes other nerds love to rhapsodize about, there is a version of me who, at this very moment, is working as a dermatologist in Indiana and paying a housekeeper to wash her clothes in the state-of-the-art Bosch cleaning system that sits in the corner of the finished basement in the mortgage-free house where she lives. That Dorie is blonde, by the way.

But this Dorie, the one who lives in this universe, the woefully brunette one … well, I made different choices. Some of them were thoughtful and right, and others I wish I could take back, but all of them together led me here, to this hard plastic 69

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

stool at the laundromat, watching my clothes spin in public. Every time I come here, I must reckon with these choices anew. Will this art be enough to sustain me? Will I ever own my own washer?

These are the musings of a brat, I recognize, first world problems in any of the infinite universes. There are always other people here with me who surely sulk over better concerns. I know that’s so because some of them push their clothes here in a shopping cart. And in the entirety of their brief lives, my own ancestors would likely never have smelled lavender, let alone driven a car to Target to purchase a 146-ounce jug of Tide Zero Soft Liquid Laundry Detergent– Lavender Scent. Very often at my laundromat, an older person, sometimes one who doesn’t speak English, will tap my shoulder and ask how to operate the machine, and I am reminded that my burdens are actually small, indeed my life ahistorically easy, and I should just shut my idiot mouth and feel grateful.

But even as that condign sentiment of gratitude rises from the depths of my self-absorption, some weirdo makes a lewd comment, or someone else’s leftover bleach ruins my load. And the moment passes.

In the myth, Sisyphus earned his punishment when Zeus learned that he’d tried to cheat death, first by chaining Thanatos, and later by convincing Persephone to let him out of his own confinement in Hades, back to the land of the living. At the laundromat, I like to mull over this detail. Sisyphus loved life, and that’s why he was cursed to toil in death.

And regardless of how I feel about my own life and its quotidian details, it’s the living itself that necessitates the cleaning. I sweat through leotards in ballet class and 70

spill wine making a toast and somehow can’t cook without splattering grease. Even if I were tidy, I’d still constantly shed skin cells and oils and bacteria into the fabric of whatever I wear, and they’d need to be cleaned lest my aliveness embed too deeply and cause them—sick irony—to rot.

In theory, there is another way to avoid laundry: I could own more clothes. I could own so much clothing that I wouldn’t have to come here ever again. I could wear each garment once, then toss it aside, let it be someone else’s problem what landfill it lands in, or what turtle it chokes. Marie Antoinette’s annual dress budget, in today’s currency, would amount to about $3.6 million dollars, and there were some years she spent twice that allowance. She seldom wore the same outfit twice, and she looked amazing. Besides, who ever had a negative statement to make about Marie Antoinette? Would anyone lay my neck in the guillotine just for Amazon Priming a couple more pairs of underwear and socks?

I won’t do that though. Not just because I’m some parvenu who thinks Amazon and the vast majority of the fashion industry are both evil and wasteful (though I do, and they are). No, it’s not so much an ethical stance as a geometric one: I just don’t have the drawer space for more of anything. But I’d love to have something new; my lizard brain lights up with purchase just as yours does. And how dreary it is, to load and unload the same worn-out leggings and crew socks and shorts, week after week. How humbling it is, to measure the expectations I had of my life against the pedestrian shape it’s actually taken. I thought I’d own a washer by now, and I don’t, and that’s fine. But I really thought I’d own better clothes. Look at these little

DORIE CHEVLEN

shapes mixing in their watery filth, no silk or cashmere or lace to prevent their vulgar commingling.

I hate my clothes. At least, I think so every time I’m forced to sit and watch them slosh and spin into a blur. And I’m not even good at maintaining them. My leggings are all pilling up. My socks long ago lost their mates and their new liaisons feel mismatched. And despite my incredible mind, I still can’t figure out how to remove the yellow stains from my white tees. I know it’s a chemical reaction to the aluminum in my deodorant—not a stain from the sweat—but that knowledge has done nothing to help me remove them.

That knowledge has done nothing to get me to stop using aluminum deodorant.

In the days when Sisyphus’s myth still held the freshness of a new M. Night Shyamalan film, laundry would have been an even more miserable event than the one I’m carping about. Ancient Roman fullers collected urine from public waste receptacles, carried it on their shoulders to their stations, then poured the acidic liquid into a vat. Either they or their slaves would then laboriously stomp on the hot, urinesoaked garments until the dirt and oil had released, and would then rinse them with water and lay them out to dry in the sun.

Me, all I have to do is drop the clothes into a machine, pour in some detergent, and press the start button. I don’t even need to count quarters anymore; the machine reads credit cards.

I am sometimes aware, before entering a fugue state brought on by the swirling cyclone of my own sartorial waste, of how very small my life is. How small even my problems are. All those clothes, those sheets, those socks—they are mine. I have more

clothes in this basket than my ancestors owned their whole lives. I don’t have little spit-up–stained onesies in the mix, no king-sized sheets for a bed that I share. I don’t have to ask anyone, “Is this okay in the dryer?” Because it’s mine, all mine, so I know. And it’s a lonely, sad sort of possession. For all the years of my life, all my travels and loves, all of my underwear can fit into a tank and be cleaned in under an hour.

In the conclusion to Albert Camus’s oft-quoted treatise, he imagines Sisyphus happy—that the cursed man finds joy in his relentless task. I wonder if that joy isn’t better described just as comfort, the assurance of knowing he’d always have something to attend to. I wonder if, in the moment that he reaches the top of the merciless hill, he doesn’t feel a little sadness, that the jig is up, the job over. It would be a relief, then, to watch the boulder tumble down its worn slope, just a moment later.

It’s nice to depend on something, even if it’s not a thing that you want.

When I visit the laundromat, I often bring my laptop to write. It’s where this essay was conceived and born, which I realize now I should tell my accountant, but of course I don’t have one—my taxes are done by my dad.

Invariably, the droning woosh of the machines pulls my mind away from the task at hand into my imagination: I sometimes picture myself in the future, 5, 10, 15 years from now (somehow I look the same in each projection). In my own head, I stand on stage accepting an Emmy Award, a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer—one of them, all of them, I have time. I live somewhere fabulous, on a hill, and inside my hill house is a wallpapered washroom where I simply drop my clothes into the washer 71

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

and walk away. I don’t need to watch the laundry because I own this machine, I own this room, I own this house, and there is no worry that anyone will steal that away.

In the machine, there are many other garments besides my own, garments of people I love, with care instructions I don’t bother reading, because it doesn’t matter, because if anything is destroyed, I can fix it, because nothing is destroyed in this future.

Accepting my award, I’m wearing one of those fabulous French label-free garments, and I tell the enthralled audience that I wrote my book, my essay, my screenplay here, I wrote it at the laundromat, can you believe it, and never could I have imagined being on this stage, accepting this award, all the good fortune that’s come my way, how all the hard work has finally paid off.

They clap and cheer. Some leap to their feet. The camera zooms in on the one furtive tear that rolls down my cheek, somehow not smudging my makeup. And only I know that I’ve lied. I imagined this all the time. I am imagining it at this very moment.

And yes, I imagine Sisyphus happy. Of course he is happy. Why shouldn’t he be?

His whole world fits in the space between his sweat-gleaming arms.

72

Caleb Stein Three Teenagers & Their Huskie, The Watering Hole (2018) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

73

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

ANALYSIS

by Olivia Heal

Theirs is an unorthodox approach and scheduling is tricky.

Ideally they meet fortnightly on a Tuesday at half past seven but are obliged to play loose according to the time and height of the tide. If the water reaches eight meters at Hull, they can count on the creek here flooding. They park alongside each other in the car park west of the old sewage pipe. Red Peugeot, silver Audi, nosing out to sea.

They wear their swimming costumes under their clothes and strip off standing by the open boots of their separate cars. It’s efficient, not embarrassing.

74

FICTION

Whether they wear neoprene socks and gloves or beanies depends on the outside temperature. But they never call off even with a frost gaining the water. Barefoot, in sliders or neoprene-socked, they wade along the path thick with tideline. Marsh to their left, wood and then field to their right. They don’t speak besides corroborating the high tide time, or where to leave their stuff. We’ve done it so often we don’t need to discuss it the woman thinks. The analyst is polite, just, dismissive, not quite, to others they pass. The woman is still waking, hasn’t eaten, has a thermos in the car, tries not to think about what she will say, what she wants to say. She searches the high tide line for bones, for birds, for guillemots, even gannets that have been washing up. Some not quite dead. Disorienting the woman thinks, these birds of rock and cliff here on the marsh, defamiliarizing. And then the woman thinks about how the light can blaze back off the slack water so that it refuses her gaze, so that it’s impenetrable, and how when it does she feels suddenly alone. She has scrolled the interactive risk maps, watched this patch of land disappear beneath the red pixels designating the water level. But still she thinks she doesn’t understand the material reality rising sea levels will incur, right here she thinks on this path, at this pipe, over this marsh. Will it be like this: slack water, then the gannets coming inland, sudden, disorienting. Or will it occur at a different tempo, her own tempo, that of aging, of change over time. I’m speculating she thinks. And she thinks how quickly the light can shift to draw her in, how it receives her, and how then it’s precise, makes specifics, not abstractions.

They walk along the path past the pipe unspeaking like that and when they reach the point where it straddles the creek they unslide their sliders and leave their towels in a clump of blite. Except in spring when they climb the bank to the line of woods southeast, the line that means the sun only touches the path come afternoon for much of the year, and place their towels and sliders out of the water’s reach on a concrete bunker that the woman likes to sit on during other occasions. Sit there despite the shade and look out, down, across the marsh. Watch the egrets, the sea cracking beyond, and the wind turbines, all three making conversation across whites. Or on the smallest tides they leave their things at the log further down where the creek turns north and is deepest.

Nor does aging occur smoothly the woman thinks not all at once but in jolts, abrupt external manifestations, hands that are one day old, nails embedded, hard and opaque. Nostrils, earlobes. Sudden, disorienting. But you could kid yourself she thinks look the other way and think that change isn’t happening at all.

They don’t speak on entering the water, which is scrabbling down a bank, and then the shock of the cold up to their chests.

They don’t speak for the strokes it takes their breath to settle back into their bodies.

On a spring tide the water runs so fast it’s minutes and they’re already at the bend by the log, where the water pools. Only as they are shunted around north and emerge from the shade of the trees and the sun hits their shoulders and the back of their heads do they start to talk. No, only then does the woman start to talk.

The woman likes to think of her words streaming out and away like the water, 75

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

of the outgoing tide constructing the conversation. The woman thinks how she doesn’t know whether the analyst thinks this too. She doesn’t know whether this is the reason they always swim on an outgoing, not incoming, tide.

Bird-level, dry hair tucked neatly on their heads well above the water, breaststroking side by side or on soft days flipping onto their backs, toes and heads raised, hair still dry, they look older than they are.

Their shoulders, their shoulder blades, are visible, and below water their bodies are dragged along with the offscourings. It’s twenty minutes guiding themselves down the outgoing creek. The woman watches a lark, brown triangle wings, buzz vertically up and beside them brown flies skating just above the surface of the brown water, just high enough to see their reflection beneath.

The water pulls what it has gathered with it as it runs out, as if the tide has a purpose the woman thinks and it is this.

The woman talks and the analyst gathers her words, then warps them, then says something else entirely. The analyst talks in statements that don’t require answers.

She says things like Sex is the medium not the content Solitaries are over susceptible Displacement is a useful term Marriage cannot complete you Sex is a question but a distinct one.

The woman thinks of her own words as the drone, something ambient, a mood perhaps. And she thinks of the analyst’s like a melody or something sharp that spikes through. She imagines this is what counterpoint is, and what it gives rise to is neither drone nor melody but something else, a third object.

Sometimes the analyst asks what appear to be direct questions but are 76

actually statements framed as questions What is it you don’t want to feel Are you playing this out on the wrong terrain What is the lack you are looking to fill Does this have to reside in an other.

The woman has questions too. There are certain structural points that she would like to discuss but is unsure how to, for subjects are partitioned and some seem to be off-bounds. She doesn’t know for example if the analyst has the same take on the tide as she does. She doesn’t know whether the twenty minutes fortnightly are sufficient for her to progress in her analysis.

And she doesn’t know whether the analysis spills over either side of the swimming. Is she being analyzed, she wonders, when she climbs into the creek, when she climbs out.

On the walk there, on the walk back. When she undresses. It’s not something they talk about directly. The woman thinks it’s like you’re in the room but you don’t discuss the room. You don’t question the design of the room, the walls, the door she tells herself.

You entered the room she thinks the room itself is not up for question.

On smaller tides the banks rise above them left, right in short cliffs, and the water is sluggish and chocolatey puddling here and there and they really have to swim. The future has already marked much of the seaward end of the creek, by the fifth bridge.

The woman notices the shape changes, how banks have fallen, become tributaries, how sand has displaced mud and mud sand, how the path of the water has changed.

She scans the marks of a recent storm surge, it has torn up clumps of seablite and tossed them inland, taken much of the bank with it, wiped the small dunes that were. Plants that remain are ossific, their individual gray-white stems mimicking the bones of a

OLIVIA HEAL

seal’s ribcage that indicates the fifth bridge.

These changes mark process the woman thinks mark time. They mark the teleology of her analysis. But despite this the woman wonders if in fact nothing is moving forward. She wonders if she is still circling the same thoughts that she began with, if she’s bathing in the words that have been swilling around her since she started analysis. If the words aren’t really outgoing, if change isn’t linear, if there is no endpoint.

And now the questions have piled up, the woman thinks that unleashing the torrent might be too much, might destabilize the analytic process.

Sometimes the analyst speaks in non sequiturs, makes connections, or sketches scenarios that the woman doesn’t accept.

In these cases, the woman doesn’t know if the analyst is being sincere and therefore ignorant or if she is deliberately trying to provoke or dislodge something in her.

But the woman also thinks that it doesn’t matter what the analyst says because meaning doesn’t happen there in her words, it happens somewhere in between or elsewhere. This too she keeps from the analyst, but she likes to think that what she understands from what the analyst says might be quite different from what the analyst understands by it. And when the analyst says something that she thinks is too wrong, or too right, the woman enjoys skewing it, in her mind turning it into something else.

Sometimes the analyst joins up a series of statements to create a fuller picture. I’m interested in the patterns apparent in these periods Solitaries are over susceptible to the other This kind of connection can feel disarmingly like what we call love It’s as if you are looking to house your interior

world in someone else Sex is the medium not the content Do you need to rethink the methodology Perhaps we could consider these episodes through a different lens I’m keen to study what characterizes them They obey a series of principles You close yourself off to your family and friends You are unable to work You are aware you are inhabiting an illusion but you are content to reside there You push yourself entirely aside or You place yourself entirely in the other This other is characterized by their unavailability and by communication methods that allow you to curate the relationship in your mind where nothing is accountable The episodes are strongly habitual so much so that they come to have a necessary quality for you They could be conceived as acts of imagination or episodes of disembodiment Once an episode finishes you retrieve yourself and this profoundly enriching re-encounter with your self feeds into you work and into your marriage.

No, the woman is not always convinced by the analysis. She might find herself thinking that the analyst’s version is dubious, that her proposals require a leap of faith, or that they sketch out a world that she does not, she could not, inhabit.

They never reach the sea. They wouldn’t, the outgoing tide would eventually beach them on the wide plain of sand it crosses.

There, by the seam of cockles that they claw up with their hands and carry home to eat in months with the letter r in. No, their elbows and knees would scrape along the sand and at that breadth the tide doesn’t pull. But they never go beyond the fifth bridge. They grab the bank as it steams past and haul themselves carefully onto land.

Sometimes the analyst offers metaphors.

Maybe falling off your bicycle was a case 77

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

of needing to hit the ground, she might say, or There’s a child crying for love and attention in there Give that child your love and attention Listen to her but Don’t let the child run the show. But these are never sustained. For the woman, the best version of analysis would be a total analogy. A story equivalent of herself, a cautionary tale mapped exactly to her life. One she could sit down and read.

The woman thinks of the analyst’s statements like the five bridges across the marsh, solid constructions, neat, squared off. She thinks that they can stop her sinking, that she can walk across them and that they can take her further. But she also knows that they will scrape a bit, she might get splinters, and even when on the bridges, she might slip. And she knows that getting off them is tricky because water pools around the steps. Yes, she can walk across them but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. (This is the kind of analogy the woman likes.)

The woman wonders if the temperature of the water affects what she says.She worries that the cold on the back of her neck zaps everything in her head and furnishes her with something quite different. She’s unable to judge, however, because the practice of analysis requires her to trust that whatever arises is the right thing, whatever she says is the thing that needs to be said. She tries to trust but sometimes she worries that the water gets her out of her head and plunges her into her body and she thinks that for the best analysis she needs to stay in her head and sometimes she wonders whether this enforced embodiment as the analyst might put it is in fact the analyst’s project.

78

But there’s also something comfortable about being in the water the woman thinks.

It’s the right kind of holding environment as the analyst would say.

The woman carries her questions alongside the analysis. Sometimes she sees signs that her methods and the analyst’s concur and sometimes that they jar and sometimes she thinks that there’s no need to query anything. Theirs is an unspoken agreement. Yes she thinks we’re on the same page and all my questions would only receive her corroboration. To point at something she thinks risks spoiling it.

The analyst says Letting go of your old dreams will allow you to make space for new ones. The woman listens now. I can’t make new dreams because I’m still holding onto the old ones she tells herself. If I kill the old ones it might not she thinks leave a fucking gaping hole but make room for others. And on the sharp verge of forty this is one of the analyst’s statements that the woman holds to, without looking for it to mean something else.

On occasion the woman thinks that the analyst doesn’t give her enough direction and she wonders what she is paying her for, because despite the unconventional format she does pay. Money makes her think of her husband. And as her husband says You have to pay for it. When he’d seen a therapist he’d paid more, well over the odds on the sliding scale from a box of vegetables or whatever you can give to fifty-five quid the hour. Of course he had. Not for a better analysis but as if to solidify the structure on which the relationship was built, make sure it didn’t cave in. Or to take charge. She could picture him, counting out the three twenties at the end of the session, the four twenties, the two fifties. And at the start he’d

OLIVIA HEAL

slip off his shoes at the door and make his way over to the couch and he’d lie there and he’d talk, because that’s what he’d paid for.

Sometimes the analyst loses her composure You are resistant to change she says or You are unwilling to acknowledge what needs to be done You are unable to stand up to your baser self These conversations of ours all culminate in the same dead end You are inattentive to what is really happening You refuse to hear the truth.

The woman wonders then whose truth the analyst is referring to. Yes, sometimes the analyst is so dominant that the woman thinks that she wants to jump on her tidy head and sink her right to the bottom of the creek. She punishes her instead with silence. She stops speaking and sometimes it’s two or even three meetings before the woman feels reconciled to the project and speaks again.

Other times the woman starts to feel precious about her words, reluctant to release them to the sea. She wants to hold onto them. Or she thinks she needs to retrieve them from the outgoing tide, catch them on the incoming. Place them somewhere. When she writes up the sessions however the only words she recalls are the analyst’s.

Out of the water, their arms, chests, necks, thighs, and calves bared to the glare of the wind, they talk otherwise. We make small talk the woman thinks. They tread prudently on the marsh wet with tide just gone and the analyst says things like He replaced the AGA tops and took the old ones away and I know he’ll sell them on but he billed me the full whack or The vet’s bills are really making me wonder whether I will ever have another animal when she dies or I’ve been using retinol for months

now and my skin is still flaring up. And the woman tries to join in. She tries, but these statements confuse her, she wonders if the analyst is faking. Or worse, whether she is normally faking and only in these moments revealing her true self. If the analyst is just a persona, the analysis a piece of theater.

The woman also wonders when the analysis will end, when the analyst will say We have finished or even You have finished. The analysis is over she imagines her saying or bluntly You are resolved. The woman speculates as to if the analysis will end. This is the sort of question that she won’t discuss directly with the analyst but that might come out in a séance and the analyst will read as referring to something else entirely.

They take a break every year from mid-July until September when the influx of tourists, summer swimmers, stand-up paddleboards, kayaks, etc. make analysis impossible, even first thing. Or perhaps it’s because the car park is too full, or the privacy of the marsh is thrown open. Or just that the summer isn’t a time for words. The woman doesn’t know.

She doesn’t get answers. She tells herself that she doesn’t need answers. If she had answers she says to herself, the analysis would be over. The point is being okay with not knowing.

She pays twenty, cash, at the end of the session. Cash is a requirement and this coincides with her husband’s take. You have to pay for it. You have to feel it. And she does feel it, the fortnightly handing-over of the money when they’re back at their cars, when they’re dressed, when they’re saying goodbye. It’s embarrassing not efficient.

79

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Then the analyst shifts to work and the woman turns on the heating in her car and drinks a flask of tea watching the marsh or on days when the sun is out she leans against the bonnet drinking her flask of tea and she notices the sun hitting the side of her face.

80

Caleb Stein Bode & Owen Wrestling Vertical, The Watering Hole (2022) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

81

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

SHORTCUTS

by Grace Byron

There is nothing more on heaven or earth than our simple

romantic failings. They hum like beached whales on the desolate streets of every city.

The first year I spent in New York, I was circled by a pack of hyenas, men in the shape of mangy canines with feral teeth. On the street, men stared at men in disgust, lust, or a cerulean stew of both.

No one stared at me with love. I hung out with two older girls who clung to me like harpies. Fresh meat. They taught me the way of the scene, waltzing me around and telling me where to pick up trade, which girls were good lovers, who was a serial abuser, where to take

82

FICTION

a shortcut, and where not to. They meant well. I knew they were good allies but not good friends so I didn’t speak my heart.

Instead I listened and waited.

I devoured books writer by writer under an electric blanket in a rat-infested apartment. I never saw my roommates, they were just shadows outlined in the dim refrigerator light who never swept up or cleaned the toilet. I was just as irresponsible, bringing anonymous men into my room full of silk and old bras to fuck. My window looked out onto an old oak tree.

That first year was so bright and full of shortcuts. I was like a gnome, scurrying to and from bodegas in search of the cheapest microwavable dinner or ripest banana. The psalm of the huntress. Sometimes I got men to buy me dinner after work, where I taught kids how to read. Since it was my first year in the city, my access to hormones was a spotty network of trans girls on an ancient message board hidden behind wingding glyphs. I was gangly and muffled. No one told me how to get a breast augmentation and the padded bras I wore didn’t do me any favors.

The leaves turned crimson and crunchy.

I went to a lecture given by Anne Carson. I wore a bra just for the occasion and sat next to a man who was a poet. I realized, after a time, that he was hitting on me and I could not move. Most of my life has been lived as a single unit—me, me, me—going to a movie, heading to a reading, scribbling in a coffee shop. The lecture was, conveniently enough, about corners. The man invited me to a poetry reading series he gave in a park after I told him I knew a lot of poets. It is always my quandary that I am not a poet but, because for a time I hung out with poets and occasionally wrote about poetry,

was often described as a poet. Never have I given myself the label. There are plenty of great poets out there, I am simply not one of them.

•

Does it have to make sense? The little moral arc of our universe?

•

Cutting a tragic figure is easier than living out a happy ending. When a happy ending comes along, you have to put in some effort.

Lucky for me, the men I dated were only interested in one kind of happy ending.

Before I decided who was allowed to come back to my rathole apartment, I took men to the Met. Was their orgasm worth going both uptown and downtown for?

Yes, I discovered. Though I later learned the effort they would expend before their orgasms was much more than the effort they would expend after their orgasms.

Now when I go to the Met I have a beautiful memory map, my own ancient archaeology: Next to the water fountain, one man asked me if I was a top or a bottom. A few older women shot us a look.

Behind the Egyptian artifacts, I pressed myself against the glass trying to convince the man I later found out to be a virgin to kiss me. Virgins, it should be noted, are never desperate enough to kiss a transsexual.

Not unless they themselves are future transsexuals.

Across from Monet and around the corner from the stark Danish painters, a rich programmer stuck his fingers down the front of my pants until a security guard walked in the room. We were both taking advantage of having the morning off. The 83

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

programmer fondled my breasts behind a centuries-old tapestry.

On the veranda, a carpenter tried to smoke a clove cigarette. He stopped after a few people shot him a nasty look. He talked about Buddhism, Hamburg, and cocaine for 20 minutes until he kissed me. His kiss was like the reluctant sigh of someone who had to get up and answer the door. For some reason I really liked him.

•

My apartment refused to get warm. Who needs a boyfriend when you have an electric blanket?

•

Raven taught me how to mind the scene.

Unlike the other girls, she spoke with sage tenderness. We both like Joni Mitchell, Russian literature, and curling up in bed against something warm.

We texted with the fury of reunited lovers, unlocking parts of ourselves we had previously thought long dormant. We wrung out the rags of our pasts, episodes of a sitcom we had forgotten all about. Now we studied the reruns. Furballs of sex, men, hormones, blush, moms, folk music, and cats. Sometimes we woke up at her place and her cat crawled over us. Her cat was named after an obscure jazz musician.

Rarely we woke up at mine to my roommates jousting in the living room. We never went to her patron’s. Her patron’s house was never cold. Instead we woke up and read about what girls were like from poems.

We laughed at Sylvia Plath. We understood the oven. We understood Daddy.

•

84

In the spring, I went to Massachusetts to drive the cast and crew of an indie film production. The filmmaker, whom I knew, had hired me, and I was grateful to escape the city. I blasted Sade with the windows down on the I-495. There was nothing to distract me other than the occasional whiff of conversation with starlets and cinematographers. At the end of the day sometimes, I would get the small tart juice of minor gossip, but nothing that ravenous ever happened. I would return to my empty hotel room and fall asleep next to the freezing cold AC. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off until a week into shooting when a kind pianist told me the trick.

She also told me where to start buying my coffee beans when I returned to the city.

They wanted me to be an extra. All week long I dreaded it. Low-level anxiety or melancholy is my disposition. Hopefully I can one day make a joke of this and hold it lightly. Before the time to don a skimpy outfit came along, I was at a Goodwill grabbing props, strung out on my third Dunkin coffee of the day. A man who looked exactly like the guy from the Sickos meme began leering at me, smiling as he held the door and looked at my breasts.

Sure. No matter where I am in life, men seem to think I am approachable—either as an object of desire or disgust. Before you begin clucking or rolling your eyes, I am not saying this is new or unique. I am offering a menagerie of men’s grip on movement.

•

Have you ever had a man hand you something as if he didn’t care if you lived or died? Perhaps after you dropped your phone next to his feet on the subway and when he looked up he realized you were

GRACE BYRON

one of them. Does it hurt less if you text a friend? Does it hurt less if you don’t tell anyone because, after all, it’s become so common? Does it hurt less if you’re not interested anyway?

•

The quickfire days from May to June dissolved preciously. Raven and I went to public gardens and smoked joints. She was getting tired of her patron, worried he was getting tired of her. She would be his little mutt put back on the street.

“He’s going to find some cis girl with a designer pussy.”

“You’re the one who’s going to have a designer pussy,” I said.

Raven stared at me like I was an asshole.

She took a deep hit and looked down at her baby blue ballet flats.

“Babe, I’m never going to get a pussy.”

•

After my first full year in New York, I wanted to celebrate. Raven drove me to Montauk and we had a picnic listening to the gulls. The waves were speckled lavender and vermillion. She hummed something pleasant, drifting in and out of conversation.

By the time the sun set, we were alone.

A dull halo hovered above where the ocean met the end of the earth.

“Have you ever been in love?” she asked me. Her fish taco was sopping into her lap.

“No,” I replied.

85

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

CRIME, PUNISHMENT, AND WHOLE FOODS

by Hannah Meyer

When I was growing up, grocery stores were museums to me. My

mom, my docent, took me there to witness the work of geniuses who invented bunny pasta, artists who designed wine bottles, and deli chefs who skinned fish. Guided by the hem of her skirt, I slipped cheddar bunnies and cherry jam into the cart. Here, I could find beauty, satiation, and peace.

86

FICTION

When I was 26, I got kicked off of my because I am bored. I steal because I am parents’ health insurance, and the only hungry. I steal in protest of work environthing that made me feel calm was wan- ments in which shin splints are expected dering around grocery stores. Touching from the 10 hours of standing required. I all of the peaches. Clinking my fingernails steal because I have worked in the service against the wine bottles. Thinking about industry and it would give me nothing but my mom. joy to see a fellow thief steal from a comOnce, I got broken up with, laid off, pany that calls its employees “family” and and shat on by a pigeon in Central Park deprives them of chairs. in a 48-hour time span. At nightfall, I That summer, I meet a Beautiful Thief, find myself at a grocery store staring at but I don’t know she’s a thief until our an exhibit of eight-dollar chocolate bars. I seventh date. All I know about her is that don’t want to take them, I don’t want to pay she is a biomed scientist who loves to for them, I just want a little bite. I notice bench-press and hates small talk. She likes that I am picking one up and opening it to spring questions like: “What is your inside the shelves. My eyes dart from side least favorite thing about me?” to side. Possessed, I stuff a piece into my We’re lying in the grass in Central mouth and speed to the exit. I pass by secu- Park. She tells me a story about how, at age rity. I imagine them tapping my shoulder, seven, she rescued a decapitated frog from prying open my mouth, and leading me a snake’s mouth. down a cement hallway. But that night, I “What’s a moderately unethical thing walk free. that you enjoy doing?”

As I hunt for employment, I subsist on “Stealing,” I say without thinking. coffee and canned tomatoes, which fertilize She surveys me as if I am a chromosome an ulcer and an ever-deepening hunger. under her microscope.

Grocery stores become a reminder of my I tell her about how my hands wander dwindling bank account. Like a married into the darkness of the shelves where the man at a strip club, I tell myself that I am chocolate bars live in the grocery stores, just there to look, but my hands tingle with how I feel bad, then sad, and then glad. the itch to take. The way I feel about fancy As I ramble, she observes. I put this in the chocolate is almost sexual. I am not incapa- Mental List of Things That Sound Bad ble of spending money on something that When I Say Them Out Loud. isn’t canned beans. But I worry that if I do, I She stretches her arms behind her head. won’t stop. I’ll go on a bender and wake up “Sounds like a complex.” with my face smeared with 50-dollar truffle “Grocery stores just make me feel calm oil. My six-by-six-foot room will become and remind me of my mom.” a mecca of expensive, rotting vegetables. I She sits up and asks me if I’m hungry. will die by the debt of a thousand avocados. She doesn’t tell me where we’re going. I So, I make rules. 1) I will take minimally. follow her down several blocks until we 2) Local grocery stores will be spared. 3) I arrive at a Whole Foods. Inside, she power won’t steal whole meals, I will only steal walks past the hordes of people. If the averwhat is small, sweet, and necessary. I steal age grocery store is a museum, the Whole 87

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Foods hot bar is an interactive exhibit. She gestures to the pyramid of glistening salads sitting in metal containers.

“They’re going to throw all this stuff out anyways.”

The Beautiful Thief heaps quinoa into a box as a security guard brushes past her.

We are the epitome of privilege, two white women wearing running shorts at a Whole Foods, making short work of the vegetables in front of us. I can’t stop laughing at random intervals. I can’t look at anything except the Beautiful Thief ’s swinging ponytail.

We walk past the register with our boxes. My throat blooms with acid like a bullfrog’s. I can feel everyone watching us as I follow the Beautiful Thief to a table littered with crusty mayonnaise wrappers and a leftover kombucha. We sit. I shovel food into my mouth as I imagine feeling a hand on my shoulder and a low gravelly voice, “Did you ladies pay for this?”

That night, I type “Whole Foods thief hot bar” into Reddit. I read a post about a guy who was caught with 60 dollars worth of dragon fruit. He was brought into a room with three people. It was an inside job. There were no police involved. Just the Whole Foods authorities. They took his wallet and a photo of his ID and gave him a stack of papers to sign. He was later informed that his signature meant that he agreed to a lifetime ban from Whole Foods.

Back at the table, the Whole Foods security are nestled behind the register, like giant black polyester rats. I inhale. The Beautiful Thief leans back in her chair and smiles. I feel a wave of satiation for the first time in months as she rests her hand next to mine on the table and opens her palm to reveal a tiny piece of chocolate.

88

Caleb Stein Leo, Lexi, Lily, Willa, The Watering Hole (2022) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

89

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

AT THE SCREEN DOORS

by Liz Schroeder

When my husband got injured on the job, I thought—perfect.

I bought books on massage and watched all the videos. My loyalties lay with a low-budget series featuring an older man with a monotone voice standing above a naked back in a room with blue walls. He liked to use the phrase “now then” before he started, and I adopted it as my own. A little homage. I warmed my hands up with oil and shaved my legs before I sat on top of my husband, one leg on each side. My hands were small against his shoulders, I thought, preferring to imagine myself dainty. He winced at first—cold. I rubbed my hands together again.

90

FICTION

“Now then,” I said, starting the right obvious. I nodded towards the computer. way.

“The delivery.”

But he screamed when my hands He hated the delivery. He hated the pressed down too hard. He tossed me off delivery service and the delivery boy who and I fell to the floor in a pile, all white messed up at least three items on each limbs indistinguishable. list. He hated spending the extra money, a I drove to the wrong emergency room, luxury we could only afford because of my but the doctors were nice. I was breathing salary. heavy, so they gave me an Ativan when I love the coupons. I cross-checked they took my husband away. Without recipes the internet deemed foolproof with insurance—$48.68 per pill. At the right our coupon drawer and saved $13.64. So far. emergency room—free. My husband came “You have all the time in the world,” out two hours later with his arm in a sling he said to me, and that used to mean and a glazed look in his eye. An opioid pre- something different. scription for a herniated disc, and no more He asked me what I was working on massages from me. that day, and I told him. I showed him the “Who do you talk to?” my therapist pictures on the computer, the mishmash of asked once, peering at me through her smiling teens and neon shoes. glasses and the computer.

Advertising, he’d said when we met, “I talk to you.” really?

“No,” she said. “No.” I know, I’d shrugged, but it pays.

She didn’t count because I paid her.

At least I used to be someone who She told me to make a new friend. The dressed up and wore tall shoes that made computer froze and I watched her move- big noises in the long hallways I walked ments stutter, hair frizzed, behind a desk through where people knew my name. He filled with cartoon bobbleheads. liked that. Or he liked the idea of it.

Someone outside my comfort zone, she Now I stay home. said.

My shoes are worn flat. And the What could it hurt? I thought. hallways I walk now are short, with only The first time my husband left for work my husband to recognize me. The money is looking like he resented me was probably the same, but now he’s stung by it. not the first time. It was the first time I My husband left to fix someone else’s noticed it, and I didn’t know what to do. home. It was cold; he wore two coats. I He showered before me that morning, like clicked through photos of shoes: front always. And I sat on our bed in a towel, angle, side angle, laces. waiting, because I had nowhere else to go.

“Have a good day.”

He looks good in a towel, but that’s not “Okay.” why I married him. I asked him what he My mother never wanted me to be a wanted from the grocery store and his eyes housewife. And I’m not, technically. But I lit up. suppose I also am. The house is my world— “You’re going?” every inch of it, but only the inches of it.

“No,” and I shook my head like it was My world stops at the screen doors.

91

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

My mother’s image of a housewife was She lets the question hang, like—so? an apron. I don’t wear aprons. I am not “Yes, they’re fun,” I answer. And I laugh. that type of housewife. I am a homebound “And they’re addictive. I only get three at a housewife, not helpful. time.”

My mother’s mother spent three hours “What does that do? You’ll get addicted a day cooking dinner for her husband and no matter how many they give you at a children. I spend three hours a day stand- time.” ing behind the screen door to our backyard, Bea never asks to come inside. She watching the birds and willing myself to go makes herself at home on the porch, bunoutside and meet them. dled up in the winter and stripped down “Being outside feels natural. Being in now in the summer. public is fun.”

She tells stories with her arms waving, My therapist sent me recordings to leaving her cigarette in her mouth so her help, at first. I thought they would be pro- eyes water from the smoke. fessional recordings, but no. She put her She graduated high school two years voice in my head. after me, and we weren’t friends.

Standing in line at the bank, Our school was big. I was choir, “Everything is under control.” photography, French. She was cheerleadDriving on the highway, “The things ing, student government, Spanish. Now you’re feeling are normal.” we were the only two in the area, and two I pictured her sitting in her study with years felt like nothing. a little script. Looking to her figurines for She doesn’t mind that I can’t leave the comfort, she’d begin. I wondered if she house. made these recordings special just for me, I’ll always know where you are, she jokes. or if there were others listening at the same No nasty surprises. time. It felt too intimate. I stopped listening Sometimes she feels like the older one. and quit my job.

She takes big inhales all the way into Bea sits on the other side of the window her diaphragm. She tells me she brought screen, cross-legged on the porch bench. me a present and pulls out a small figurine She ties her hair up in the velvet scrunchie, from her duffel bag, a moose dressed like a blue today. lumberjack.

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

He’s holding a sign that says, Merry It seems like a question, but she always Christmoose. lights up before I answer.

“It’s a Christmas ornament.”

“Do you mind if I take another one of “Why?” these?”

She shrugs.

I keep my Ativan bottle on the ledge I know about Bea’s mother. She’ll above the window seat, in plain view. be dead in a year, maybe less. She loves “What are those?”

Christmas, and their house is fully decoI tell her they’re anxiety pills, and she rated all year. They’re a close family, and I asks me if they’re fun. think they must laugh a lot. Bea tells me “They’ medicinal.” her mother asks to go outside most days so 92

LIZ SCHROEDER

she can wave and yell out to the neighbors.

I know about Bea’s father, who worked at the post office and died when we were in high school.

I also know that sometimes, lately, my husband comes home late smelling like smoke and orange body spray.

“Are you hungry? I could go pick something up, or you could come with me.”

Her face, unreadable. I tell her I already ate, which is true, a bulk-order premade soup delivered from the grocery store: 64 oz. for $16.99.

“That’s not good enough, next time I’ll bring you something. Do you want to know what I’m making this weekend?”

I nod and close my eyes. Bea can really cook, and I like her voice. She’s making caldo de bolas de verde, and she promises to bring me half.

I doze off listening to yucca, plantain, dumpling and can’t help but think, I love Ativan so much.

I’m a light sleeper. I don’t sleep; I pass out. Bea is gone. A note on the ledge reads: See you Saturday! But another car is here, the grocery delivery.

I roll off the window seat because I don’t want to be seen. The delivery boy is young and nosy. He rubs the glass of the front door and looks through, assessing our front stairs and shoe pile.

He yells that he’ll just leave the bags here, every time. As if it’s the first time.

And then waits. I half expect him to fake footsteps walking away, trying to trick me into showing myself.

As if I would ever fall for that.

I crouch down, unperceived, until he leaves.

I miss grocery stores. I miss the blasting air-conditioning. Most of all, I miss picking out my own fruit.

The delivery mistakes don’t bother me.

I’m intrigued by the substitutions: bok choy for broccoli, vanilla pudding for vanilla ice cream. An $0.82 upcharge.

Little nudges from the regular.

But the peaches come bruised, the kiwi soft. The avocados already brown. The fruit someone else decided I deserve.

I wash my delivered produce in a basin in the sink. Don’t waste water, my mother used to say.

Carrots submerged. The water wrinkles my fingers. The birds in the window haven’t moved, except to scoot closer together.

I smell smoke and oranges, and I feel his beard on the back of my neck.

“You’re home early,” I turn and tell him, trapped against the sink.

“I wanted to see you.”

I tell him the kitchen faucet is still leaking, and he smiles. He’ll get to it, he says.

He’ll fix it.

“Okay.”

His face, unreadable. And when he pulls me towards the back door, I know something terrible is going to happen.

I think, Maybe the house will collapse.

I’m sweating and cold and the weight of his shoulder next to mine doesn’t help like it used to.

He slides the screen door open and holds out his hand. I think he says please, but I don’t hear it.

I wonder when he’ll leave me for Bea, the girl who can cook and wears velvet scrunchies. I hope she’ll still bring me soup, I think, which I imagine will be my last thought when I feel my heartbeat three times per second.

93

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

I’m outside, I realize, for the first time in a long time. And it’s brighter than I remember.

My back is against the outside of our house. The drainpipe sticks into my shoulder, the one with the scar.

My husband says, “You have all the time in the world.”

And that’s the way he used to say it, before.

He’s still next to me and we’re quiet, him between me and the screen door, my escape. I hear my therapist’s voice in my head: Being in public is fun!

I laugh for a long time because I can’t catch my breath. My husband asks what I’m laughing about, and I tell him.

“You never told me that before,” he says, his eyes on my eyes.

“I know.”

I hold his arm in both of my hands and look at the birds, still three, huddled together on the power line.

“What kind of birds do you think those are?”

“Crows,” he says with certainty. “Those are crows.”

My husband leans over and kisses my shoulder, the one with the scar.

Crows, I thought. I hadn’t even considered crows.

I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of smoke and oranges until it’s gone.

94

Caleb Stein Sanjay & Sherika, The Watering Hole (2020) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

95

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

THE PROPANE TANK

by Benjamin Weissman

I live on a steep street, the most treacherous street in town, a

street that closes if it snows too much because cars can’t get enough traction, even if they’re four-wheel drive and chained up.

It had snowed a foot and a half overnight. On days like this, the town plow creates a gigantic berm in the center of the road to block access, a 10-foot wall of snow, three cabins above me. You can climb over the lower sides of it if you need to pass. In the early days, the street was a ski run, Mt. Davison. Now it’s modestly 96

FICTION

Davison Rd. There are six-foot orange solid layer of ice under it that made it wildly metal posts positioned every 100 feet to slippery. I walked around the monster designate the road; they were buried in the berm down to my cabin. Such a relief to high sidewalls of snow. open the door and get inside.

Snow assaulted the windshield a million The cabin was freezing, and when I snowflakes a second. I could feel it in turned on the heat, nothing happened, so my eyes. The whiteout was blinding, the I figure I was out of propane, but I needed wiper blades were doing their best, madly to check. The tank was 30 feet from the thwacking back and forth. I was on the house. There were five feet of snow on the corner of Old Mammoth Rd. and Minaret ground. I started digging a long shoulderwaiting for the light to change, heading width trench that led from the house to the home. There was still some light left in white 10-foot marker with the Day-Glo the day at 4:30. The fir trees shimmied and orange tip that tops the tank, which rose quivered, then a strong wind came up and several feet above snow level. The top laythey heaved and swayed. Now the snow ers of snow were light and dry. The lower was hurling horizontally, right to left, a 50 layers were wet and grainy, and below that, mph gust. Then the wind stopped, and the ice. I found the propane tank without snow dropped directly from the sky like a much trouble and checked the meter. Yes, heavy gossamer curtain. A biblical silence it was down to zero. It was Christmas Eve. ensued; the perfection of the world was I phoned for a delivery, but it wasn’t going flaunting its beautiful self again. The snow to be now or soon or tomorrow, so the was moody that way: temperamental, flirty, next couple of nights would be cold. I had shy, with highs and lows and in-betweens. an old space heater that I thought might When snowflakes returned, they flitted have some juice left and a down sleeping about in loops and drifted back up like bag and a closet full of ridiculously warm giddy fairy dust defying gravity. clothes. I thought I’d be snug as a bug at I lost traction driving up Davison, two 30 degrees. doors from my house, and began to slide I had electricity, and not all the backwards. There was a car sliding down- lightbulbs had burned out, so when it grew hill coming towards me. Our cars got so dark, I could still see pretty well. The stove close that the driver and I made brief eye was electric, so I warmed up an old frozen contact like two desperate fish in separate burrito and dropped a fried egg on top of bowls. A driveway I was familiar with was it, my last. I was cold and getting colder. approaching below me, so I took my foot Outside it was 20. Indoors it was double off the brake and then turned the wheel, that. I put on two pairs of long johns, a and the car did a magical slow-motion couple of sweaters, a down jacket, gloves, 180, and suddenly I was driving frontwards and a ski cap and watched Psycho for the downhill, and all was good, and no fender umpteenth time. Just as I was falling asleep, was bendered. At the bottom of the street, my friend Patrick called, crying hysterically.

I turned left, and left two more times, a “Oh my god, Will,” he said, “something mellower route, and parked at the top of terrible happened, my nephew committed my street. The snow was boot-deep, with a suicide, what is the world coming to, Jesus 97

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Christ, this is so horrible.” His broken voice wailed into the phone. “I can’t believe what’s happening in this world, life is so hard and brutal, there’s so much pain every day, and now this, my nephew, this sweet 12-year-old kid named Evan. I just saw him.

He seemed fine.”

“Oh my god, Pat, I’m so sorry, how did it happen?” I asked. “How did he kill himself ?”

“He shot himself with his father’s gun,” he screamed and wept, his voice a wound.

“On Christmas Eve, can you believe this?

His mom and dad were wrapping presents in the living room, and he said, I have a present for you, and he walked into his parents’ room, and they didn’t hear from him for a while, so after they called out to him and he said nothing, they went in, and he was lying on the floor dead. The poor kid shot himself. This is so horrible.”

“It is so horrible. I’m so sorry. Was the gun just lying around?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. Yes. His father had been in the military, so there were guns in the house.”

“And there was one just lying around in the bedroom?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. It doesn’t matter.

The only thing that matters is that this sweet young kid, who I just saw the other day, was so unhappy that he had to kill himself.”

“Yeah, but if there wasn’t a gun in the parents’ room easily accessible, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“I can’t go there right now. I don’t want to talk about that.”

“I’m sorry. I know this is horrible. But that’s all I can think about right now, that your nephew would be alive if it wasn’t for the father’s negligence.”

98

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

“Guns are the instant answer to depression.”

“Stop,” he said, and hung up.

I stared at the phone, stunned, singed, zeroed out, my heart banging away in my chest. Pat was hurting. I should’ve just listened, kept quiet.

But I could picture the kid lying there, face down, a pool of blood seeping out of his head onto his parent’s white shag carpeting—a kid I didn’t know, someone named Evan, who I imagined had black hair. I could see the father screaming what-the-fuck, holy shit, oh my god and the mother rushing in yelling what-what and then both of them together screaming Jesus and then one of them dialing 911 but knowing it’s too late. I was lying in bed, staring straight up at the dark ceiling, trying to imagine how the parents of Evan could sleep in their room. Where did they sleep? Did they go to a motel? They had no other children. Violent scenes permeated my brain and repeated themselves until I fell asleep.

•

The next morning, the inside of the cabin was eight degrees colder, and outside the propane tank was fully buried again. Only the orange top of the marker was visible.

There was a shadowed indentation in the snow indicating where the previously dug trench was located. I went back to digging, the snow so light it was like shoveling air.

I picked it up and threw it high over my shoulder. The walls of the trench were above my head. In 20 minutes, I found the tank lurking down below. The sweetheart. I loved this propane tank. It was like my external green heart or my central

BENJAMIN WEISSMAN

nervous system. When it wasn’t encased in snow, it looked like a little fat submarine with a large steel cap on top that protected the meter and the valve that ingested the propane.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the gun in the parents’ bedroom and the boy knowing exactly where his father kept the gun and knowing that the gun would end his emotional pain in a flash, and it did.

I called Patrick back. “Hey, I’m sorry, I know you’re grieving, I’m just obsessed with this hideous scenario that’s happening all over the country. The same thing happened to my colleague Terry, and a kid he was mentoring in school, same deal, his father’s gun, lying around somewhere. And then at the funeral all the damn father talked about was high school bullying and social media. Nothing about the real thing that killed him, the gun, his gun that killed his son. Bullying has been going on since the dawn of man. It’s not about bullying.”

The line went dead. Patrick had hung up again. This was happening too often.

Clearly, my assholeness knew no bounds. I was doing something wrong.

Doing everything wrong, but I didn’t know how else to respond. Condolences, yes, of course, sorrow, grief, Hallmark card blah blah blah, and if there’s anything I can do please let me know. But it was the gun. I felt trapped in the limited area I was allowed to react in.

Just be there for Patrick, I coached myself, keep everything else to yourself.

We’d been friends for 30 years. I first met him at an art exhibition he had in someone’s apartment. There were papier-mâché heads on poles and miniature dioramas of intricate scenes that reminded me of Bruegel’s paintings of panoramic mayhem.

His art was super funny and beautiful and handmade, raw, and pure. He made giant paintings of grief and moral confusion, masked executioners telling jokes. There was a drawing of his hanging on the wall right in front of me that he gave me for my birthday like 20 years ago. It was of a cheerful bear standing tall with exaggeratedly giant paws and a long black lizard tongue.

That night I watched Dr. Strangelove. I thought about the pilot in the cowboy hat, Slim Pickens, who straddles the H-bomb backwards at the end, riding it like a bronco until it explodes over Russia. The green propane tank was approximately the same dimensions, a wide steel horse with no legs. I’d straddled it in the summer while straightening a very bent valve.

During a TV commercial for a new laundry detergent, I tucked my nose under the layered necklines of my many garments and sniffed: fragrant, or rather neutral. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that I don’t need to bathe. I do on occasion, but when I’m in the mountains it seems I never need to wash. Once a week for the hell of it, I jump in the tub, for the pleasure, to give myself a second wind, to wake up, stretch my hamstrings, and shave. But I’m kind of an odor-free man. I used deodorant once as a teenager, copying a friend, but never again after that. When you’re alone, you notice these things, and your sense of smell intensifies.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. What an odd subtitle, in the first person, who was the I? Was I supposed to learn to love the gun, and what would that even mean? Slim Pickens wasn’t committing suicide exactly. He was just trying to hot-wire the bomb door that wouldn’t 99

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

open properly because the aircraft had been hit by a missile, but once the bomber’s doors opened under him, he knew it was too late and he was heading straight for the target ass-first, so he began to hoot and holler and wave his cowboy hat like a good ol’ boy.

Before I figured out the right path to the propane tank, from below, the righteous path, I was approaching it from above.

I had a harrowing journey three years ago when I’d run out of propane, the cabin was dead cold, the pipes were on the verge of freezing, and I totally lost the tank and had no idea where it was. The marker was buried and the whole landscape was transformed by how high the snow was. Above the second-story windows. It made this A-frame house look like a tiny tip of an arrow. I dug 15 feet down over two days and found the propane tank with avalanche probes, lovely instruments that made the glorious tap tap tap muted-metal sound through the ice: the metal tip of the probe touching the steel tank.

Snow fell all night. I could hear it ticking the window, the roof, my brain. I woke up at three-something, then four, then five, watched some porn (briefly), got up, dressed for a storm, made coffee. I looked out the backdoor window. The new snow was sparkling, an iced sea of gems.

If I was a district attorney, I’d prosecute these fathers. Or maybe I wouldn’t. That would be cruel. They’re already grieving, but it is a kind of manslaughter. It’s worse than giving car keys to their drunken child and saying, here, go, drive. Of course the kid is going to crash. Of course the child will get hurt. It’s just luck that Patrick’s nephew didn’t kill some kid he might have been having a problem with at school, or 10 100

of his classmates.

My body was tense and rigid from the cold. Coffee in hand, I called Patrick back.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he mumbled.

“I can’t get Evan out of my head,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s impossible.”

“I had a young woman in my grad drawing class who made an eight-foot drawing of herself hanging from a noose naked. My class refused to discuss it. They said this was an emergency and that she needed immediate psychological help. I appreciated their guidance. I was slow to see the urgency. Then she grew angry and ran out of the room and hid in the freight elevator and demanded to be left alone. It was chaos. I had to cancel class. The campus police got involved.”

“What ended up happening?”

“It was the end of the quarter and she had been absent like 10 times, and when I gave her an F, she demanded a grade change.

She thought she still deserved an A.” “You know,maybe I didn’t tell you this,but my nephew told my sister and her husband, I have a present for you, I need to wrap it.”

“Yeah. That’s so heavy. Makes me think that the kid was in some way directing his suicide at his parents.”

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

“Or that might’ve been a wicked line he thought was amusing, to give himself some privacy with his father’s fucking gun. They turned out to be his last words. If I was a DA, I would …”

“Oh God, dude, I can’t talk about this like that.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know how not to. This isn’t a political analysis. It’s basic logic, and tragedy, and really a borderline negligent homicide.”

BENJAMIN WEISSMAN

“Yeah. Look, I just called you for support, not a point/counterpoint encounter.”

The phone went dead again.

Whatever consoling bone I had in my body, it was not present for this mess. I couldn’t escape the father’s gun, his culpability. Then I started thinking about my own.

I’m not a spotless lamb. I’m loaded with aberrant qualities. When I thought more about being a teenager, being Evan’s age, I realized that I had been a bully. Not a holy terror, but I took advantage of kids who were weaker than me. I forced kids in the neighborhood to punch each other in the face. I’d ball up their fists and throw their punches like they were my dolls. And when other kids I knew were bullied, I stood by and did nothing. I witnessed some pretty terrible things and did zilch to stop it. I really lacked courage, and I wasn’t a defender of the weak. I watched my friend jump out of a pickup truck I was sitting in and tackle a gay man who had left C’est La Vie, a notorious gay bar on Ventura. It was shameful. Was I an accessory to an assault?

I was an amoral shit.

And there was a guy at school who bullied me, Rocco McConnell. He was a badass greaser dude-leader of a gang that was always trying to intimidate me. He jumped me in the hallway. I was late for class and the hallway was empty and he and a couple of his friends were behind me.

I tried to act normal and just ambled along.

I had a solid-looking walk in those days, thinking I could posture tough, but boom, a flying kick to my back and down I went. I was on my feet and down the hall and into class 10 seconds later without further abuse.

But I was traumatized and wondered what would be next when class ended, and every

minute after school in the neighborhood. I knew Rocco carried a knife. I thought for sure I’d die via his blade. So, I bought an eight-inch stiletto and practiced opening and closing it in front of the mirror and threatening myself, calling out Rocco for a fight, twirling the knife in my hand like I was an expert. After about six months, I put the knife in a shoebox and forgot about it.

•

Snow is piling higher and higher. An hour of avalanche bombs, which sound like soft muffled thumps of a drum. The pine trees were heavy with snow, all branches weighted downward. I ate a can of turkey chili, expiration date seven years ago.

I sniffed it carefully: no toxicity, just a metal can, tomato extract, red beans, and something approximating turkey. It tasted fine. I poured it over a bed of old chopped romaine. Soon my stomach began making loud noises, like special effects sounds in a David Lynch movie, churning gears and explosions. I wondered if I just gave myself food poisoning. Walked around the kitchen and living room, slowly, hoping that would help. Laid down and fell asleep for a short while. Woke up, thought that was a good sign, believed I wouldn’t die. A few hours later, I was hungry again and considered eating a long-expired can of roast beef hash from back in the Eisenhower administration.

Pat and I were friends with Constance, the sexy single mother we both had crushes on who made brilliant, demented videos of herself flailing in muddy rivers, who recently died of cancer, and with Dave, who killed himself in his bathtub. And Ricardo, who made a six-foot photograph of a long noodle, who just keeled over the other day 101

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

from a heart attack. Joel, our teacher, who we called the Towering Inferno, died, but at least he lived to a ripe old age. But Lewis, patron saint of institutional critique, and Marco, who had himself crucified on his Volkswagen Beetle, both died too, of cancer, too young. And Jay, who slept with his female students and snorted complicated drugs, ODed, even younger. There had been a lot of death in a short period of time.

My neighbors were dying too, up and down the block, one after another. Both my doctor and my barber had recently expired.

We could see life, I guess I’m speaking with Pat in mind right now, as a constant state of mourning. And maybe it was better to stay in that state, so the shock of another death wasn’t so agonizing. We’d be prepared for it. Death monks, Pat would think and make an amazing painting of us in long habits, emblazoned with skull and crossbones.

•

I called Patrick again the next morning, via FaceTime, and he picked up after two jingles. We were both lying in bed, wearing black hoodies, which instantly amused us.

“A brotherhood of hoodies,” I said.

“We are monks,” he said.

He looked good and healthy even though he was under the weather. For some reason, this cheered me up. His voice was low and gravelly, like a detective in a crime movie. We talked groggily about getting through the holidays and school starting soon, movies we’d seen, and when he drifted into his nephew’s suicide, I went there with him. I said I hoped when they were done grieving, and really, they’ll never be done with that, the parents could restart the family they were making, and try to have another child, or adopt one, if that’s 102

what they really wanted. These people were strangers to me, and I was counseling about their future. I really didn’t know what I was saying, but it seemed like an okay direction with Patrick saying, “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. I hope they do. I think maybe they will.” He was talking softly and wasn’t mad at me anymore, and I was less strident and didn’t talk about the gun. And when Patrick said, “I know it’s California law to have the gun in a locked box with the bullets somewhere else, but it’s just so sad that this boy is dead at 12 and he doesn’t get to live his life. Life is a good thing to live even when it’s hard.” Which reminded me of the times, long ago, when Patrick talked about offing himself and me having to tamp down his fire. I told him I was sorry for being a lunkhead and gassing on about the gun. That I was a lousy shoulder to cry on. He said no, I was fine.

Forgiven again. Relief. Waves of love.

Levitating. No longer king asshole.

I heard a truck outside. Hallelujah, the propane man. I ran down to see him. He was sitting in the cab looking at a clipboard.

“Says here you’ve been truant on your payment. That’s the only reason you’re running out of fuel. If you were paying up properly, we’d be by to check the gauge and top you off every four months so this would never happen.” He was a crusty old guy, a few years older than me, wizened, gray hair, ponytail.

“I know. I’ve been neglectful. Money’s been tight.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” He slammed the clipboard on the seat next to him and stepped out onto the street. Every move he made was accompanied by a different groan. It had stopped snowing; clouds were shifting about, and the sun seemed like it

BENJAMIN WEISSMAN

might make an appearance. “I hate your “That, I very much want, but I must also street. No offense. I hate it when it’s storm- say no to, but thank you. Oh my god.” ing, and I’ve got to drive up it. When it says He screwed on the big nozzle and ROAD CLOSED, I’m glad. I’ve slid down then turned on the propane. Once it was it backwards and sideways and prefer never flowing from truck to hose to the tank, he to do that again.” said, “Nearly six bucks a gallon.” He wiped He hoisted the heavy hose over his his brow. He was sweating, in 20 degrees. shoulder, the steel nozzle tucked under his “Unbelievable.” chin. “This is going to be a real bitch,” he “Yep.” I shook my head. said. “Why the hell is your propane so far He looked back to the street. “I still from the street? Your neighbors’ tanks are don’t get why your propane tank is so far all easy access.” from the street. I know,” he continued, “I was told there was really nowhere else “that it’s got to be at least 30 feet from the to put it.” house, so that in the event of an explosion, “Hell, this is crazy. Now I’ve got to go your house won’t catch on fire. But why the ice climbing.” hell is it a mile from the street?”

He strapped crampons on his boots Whatever I said provided no solace. and kicked a set of steps up the eight-foot wall of hard snow. I stood under him with my arms up by his buttocks, bracing myself just in case he fell backwards into the street.

When he got to the top of the berm, he began the 50-foot walk to the tank. With each step he sank up to his hip.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Son of a bitch.”

I knew how he felt—breaking trail was not easy. In the summertime, it’s a no-bigdeal walk up a mound of dirt. In winter, it’s Kilimanjaro.

“I’ll meet you up there,” I said, and ran back up the stairs that were covered by an old rickety snow tunnel. I waited for him at the tank. He was halfway there. Each step took him a while to recover from.

“Damn,” he said, looking down, catching his breath.

When he finally made it to the tank, he stopped and stared at me. He didn’t look angry, just beat.

“Can I bring you a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“How about a shot of whiskey?”

103

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Rosalind Nashashibi Electrical Gaza, 2015 Cinematography by Emma Dalesman, production by Kate Parker. Digital video still transferred from 16mm film, animation, color, sound 17:53 minutes Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, London, New York

104

FICTION

THE BIRD

by Rashed Aqrabawi

When September came the bird had not yet sung. He simply

watched the family from his cage. The family was disappointed— they hoped he would sing—but no one acknowledged that disappointment. They named him, a musical name that came about almost by accident. The child, trying to get him to sing, began to hum.

105

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

The mother heard him. It filled her head with the sound of children screaming, and the waves crashing on the shores of her village outside Haifa. And some of those children grew up to become refugees, like her, though she hardly thought of herself as one, but then again, she never thought of herself. It was September, and she had bought a bird and put him in the kitchen.

He was an expense, the bird. During the day, the mother cleaned apartments in West Beirut, and she was in the midst of trying to teach her daughter how to cook, so she could help raise her four siblings. The father sometimes got up and left for days on end, and other times stayed sleeping. And he loved to eat, the father.

He ate and ate and ate. The mother came home and cooked, salvaging the food her eldest daughter had ruined. After dinner and a brawl, they all slept peacefully in the house, excluding the bird. The bird was a bad sleeper.

Then one morning the mother went into the kitchen and said, “Ouf.” And bent over the stove to light it. The bird turned around, and that was when he saw it. The mother heaved that verdigris cough of hers, and struck a match, and that was when he saw it. The flame. He envisioned it sliding up the edge of his tail, and sweet ecstasy filled him. He shuddered. From then on, the only thing the bird wanted was to be eaten.

“Shu ya tayr,” the mother said, and nuzzled up to him in a half-dreaming state.

The bird could not understand her.

Sometimes she suspected that he was merely the answer to a question she had asked many years ago and forgotten about. Many questions turn to flesh when they remain unanswered. In any case, the 106

bird loved the mother, and the mother contemplated the bird.

The bird’s small, black eyes were stars crashing into each other. On Tuesday nights, he watched the mother prepare meals with meat. The mother attended to the raw chicken. Pink mounds of it. It was excruciating. The pale exposed bone, peeking out like a tooth. Sometimes the mother would come home, on a Wednesday, and say, “I passed by Abu Mazen’s”—the butcher—“and he had extras today, which he gave to me for cheap if I drain the blood myself.” She was ecstatic on those days, days when she, the mother, also became a woman. Her eyes moistened, meeting his.

He savored those moments. She in her cage and he in his. Only then would he try to flap his wings, just a little. If they were alone, he would turn around and lift his wing so she could see that he too was pale in the breast.

On the counter, the raw meat glittered.

He watched her grease her fingers with oil and press them into the flesh, massaging the meat—that bright, silent starlet—and his heart beat furiously. The mother, who threw on the same weathered floral nightgown the moment she got home—with frills! Little ruffles framing her shoulders and her own breasts—as the light escaping from the window gave the mother’s eyes a merry sparkle.

So what if he was caged? The cage did not bother him. Sometimes he couldn’t tell who was caged—him, with his impossible plumage, or the mother with the tubercular cough. No. She was free to cough as she pleased. She was free even to draw blood from her cough in the privacy of the bathroom, which was not that private. A small hole in the ground, where the family squatted and released themselves.

RASHED AQRABAWI

It was most acute in the mornings, the bird’s desire, but in the morning everyone in the house looked for something to die for. The bird was no exception.

He got tired of being that sickening shade of yellow like he was drawn from a can of paint. He wanted to be radiant, black! Then something else happened.

The bird woke up in the middle of the night smelling the stench of blood. He could not get back to sleep. In the morning, the father turned on the radio, which announced an ongoing massacre in the camps.

That night, the mother came home, and when she cooked, with the news playing in the background, she took a little portion of meat out of the pot and wrapped it up in a cloth. After the family went to sleep, she came back into the kitchen, and produced it, trembling, from the cupboard and began to eat it. She coughed, a rich cough that reverberated in the air around her chest, and for a moment the bird thought his heart would stop, watching her eat all alone in the dark. She continued eating, and didn’t even bother putting it on a plate, she simply ate it with her hands in the dark.

She was finally hungry.

Weeks went by. The mother was too tired to cook, and always heated leftovers.

One night, she came home later than usual.

She heated some leftovers and they all sat down to dinner.

“I cannot bear this anymore,” the husband said, flinging his plate off the table.

He slammed his fists and stormed out of the room. The mother got up, furious, looking at the door he had left open. She flung the pot, and crusty, hardened rice flew everywhere, sticking to the ceiling.

She looked around furtively. The birdcage dangled from its hook. She turned towards it, the cage. The mother looked at the bird. The bird looked at her. In one fluid rush of motion, she snapped open his cage, and opened the window.

“Go!” she screamed. “Khalisni.”

The bird stared at the open door, did nothing.

“Fool,” she cried, reaching into the cage. She grabbed the bird, squeezing him hard—the pressure to his breast pulsed through his whole body, having never been touched like that—and she hurled him out the open window. There.

Then she closed the window and called on her daughter to do the dishes. When she woke up the following morning, alone in her bed, the house was quiet, and she began to hum.

The bird survived for several days after that, trying to find another cage. But all anyone could talk about were things the bird knew nothing about and did not care a dime for: husbands, Syria, bread, a massacre.

107

108

Caleb Stein Braily, The Watering Hole (2020) from “Down by the Hudson” Poughkeepsie, NY Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY

POETRY

EUPHORIC RECALL IN 80S VINTAGE ARMANI K. Iver

This hour, one year ago, I’ll slip on the pants the jacket, adjust the shoulder pads, fasten a gold button, walk in front of the hotel mirror to watch the pinstripes move. My lover will put on his new suit, will say, while brushing his teeth, people on the street stare at you. I’ll change undershirts, ask if he likes the white cotton crew or red silk button-up. He’ll say, wear the red. My binder underneath, a brighter red, will be stretched from his pulling, not off, but toward, his pulling last night, the night before, before. Soon, our suits will taxi to the Met, pose for pictures near the fountain. Ascend many stairs. Our suits will tilt over the balcony, watch for ambiguous genders.

When the princess admits in high octave to falling in love with the tenor, my lover’s long tattooed fingers will touch my knee, trace the stripes. He’ll say, come to another opera with me?

His suit will be solid black. If I touch it, the princess might change her mind, might behead the tenor.

One year ago, right now, we’ll subway back, run many blocks in the rain. It will rain in our hair, on his glasses, on his perfect shoulders. Inside, he’ll open my jacket. I’ll open his. What is happening will never happen again.

109

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

MOON AND SPRING Ekhmetjan Osman, Translated by Joshua L. Freeman

1 The moon has so yellowed in the sky …

The moon in the wellspring gathers the descendants of a flower from the prophet’s wind-scattered corpse.

2 Slowly the spring wakes the grasses, recalling a legend: the moon, they say, entered the orchard of sensation and turned just then to a slaughtered peacock.

3 When the moon shadow rests in my eyes …

Night’s sail is swallowed in the spring, bodies turn to stars, sin to a festival.

The moon washes the spring’s memory in light.

The spring— a moon roiled by high midnight.

110

POETRY

DEAR O— Vandana Khanna

The oracles say close your eyes and picture the boat, the water, the man. The bed that you spread your hair over like a trance.

Truth be told, water is the worst of them.

All those dark currents, enormous beasts of muscle and fin, their scales iridescent, glimmering like old coins at the bottom of a fountain. Tossed for luck that never seems to come. For decades, I swallowed my complaints like the slick meat of an oyster. I must tell you, in your absence, the garden held. Nothing stops memory, its tight apparition unfurls into bright tongues. How it blooms and blooms.

111

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

THE GREEN LAKE IS THE PLACE Dorothea Lasky

The green lake is where you see yourself The mirror of yourself Slick and greenish And part dirty emerald glass Part emerald You can take a bath there And submerge yourself into your other being The shadow power Where you are wretched An animal pasted to the wall Forever flat and haunted Forever just a picture of time and travel What does the lake mean to us Those of us who are so destined to destroy it A quiet walk by a soiled golden road The irresponsible song of so many Irrevocably noisy and deep Ideas of time and travel The green lake is the place Where you turn into the animal An animal who is wretched Lost in a kind of green paste

112

POETRY

Love is a very radical phone number When you dial it The other end says I was waiting for you To admit love is ash Is a very radical notion You will write your whole life And when you stop You will acknowledge The dark green soup Tenderness is a very green intention The green lake is the place Where they let you be the opposite of yourself To find the parts you love Before you hunger only for The moon In the end It will all be so real You will wonder why it was this you wanted The green lake is the place Where to be on the brink of love Will seem silly, ill-fated, a waste

113

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

In the shadow side of power Where you live forever You will wake up and the sun Will say, I did it And you will say, me too I did it, too The green lake is the place Where you are you forever You will say, is this what I was waiting for And love will say, I waited No, I waited for you

114

POETRY

FAMILY POEM IN HARTLEY MAUDITT Esther Lin

Three miles through green halls, the sun following like a white dog, my father walks with me.

At a crossroad my mother meets me too. They let me watch, smell, listen for myself.

Then, rising before us, round arches of Norman conquerors. The church in Hartley Mauditt.

In the eighteenth century the local lord left and never returned.

Without governance or protection, family by family departed too.

Shopkeep, spinster, and hand.

Yet the graves are mown around, lilies fill the font. A modern bell replaced the one teenagers ran off with. I heard it ringing from across the lake.

115

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

THE STORM Jasmine Dreame Wagner

I want to get up and walk around in the dark And I want to fall asleep and never get up I want a piano and for someone to play it For someone to knock on my door and say When the music falls in love with itself Everything is improvised. I’m afraid I’ll always feel this way regardless Of the city or its proximity to water Where a great procession of rubber duckies Moves towards us through our darkest ocean The wasps in the window have found the perfect window They’re about to break the world’s largest wishbone And everything is trying to go inside Especially the rain especially the rain

116

CONTRIBUTORS

Rashed Aqrabawi (b. Amman, 1992) is a writer and

poet. He lives in London.

Jayson Buford, born and raised in New York, is a writer for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, GQ, Pitchfork, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Passion of the Weiss. Go Knicks.

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based

in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, The Baffler, Lux, Joyland, and Artforum, among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife.

Dorie Chevlen is a journalist and screenwriter based

in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate, among other publications.

Joe Donnelly is the founding editor of Red Canary Magazine and teaches at Whittier College. His work as a writer and journalist has been published and anthologized widely.

Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of modern China

at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. His translations of Uyghur poetry have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

Kim Gordon is a multidisciplinary musician and visual artist living in Los Angeles. She is a cofounding member of the influential, experimental post-punk band Sonic Youth and author of the memoir Girl in a Band (2015). Currently she releases music under her own name and with Bill Nace, in their improv-based guitar duo, Body/Head.

Olivia Heal writes short fiction, teaches literature,

and swims in brackish creeks.

Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays

and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Gilead Reread (forthcoming from Columbia University Press).

She teaches creative nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY. K. Iver (they/them) is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is out now with Milkweed Editions. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

For more, visit kleeiver.com.

Vandana Khanna is the author of Train to Agra

(2001), Afternoon Masala (2014), Burning Like Her Own Planet (2023), and the chapbook The Goddess Monologues (2015). Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book prize, the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions chapbook competition.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of seven books of

poetry and prose, including The Shining (2023) and Animal (2019).

Esther Lin is author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, forthcoming in March 2025, and of The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2018). She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts; and a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow. She co-organizes the Undocupoets.

David Lipset is a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His latest book, co-edited with Eric K. Silverman, is Knots: Ethnography of the Moral in Culture and Social Thought (Routledge, 2023).

Hannah Meyer is a writer based in New York. She is an MFA Candidate at New York University. Her work is published in Literary Hub, Lilith Magazine, PULP Magazine, and La Petit Mort Magazine, among others.

Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973 in Croydon, UK)

received her BA in Painting from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK) in 1995, after which she attended the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (UK) where she received her MFA in 2000. Nashashibi was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017, and represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Her work has been included in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah 10. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003.

Nashashibi has had solo exhibitions at venues including, Nottingham Contemporary (UK); Musée Art Contemporain Carré d’Art, Nîmes (FR); Radvila Palace Museum of Art, Vilnius (LT); S.M.A.K., Ghent (BE); The High Line, New York, NY (US); Tate Britain, London (UK); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (UK); The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (US); Imperial War Museum,

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

London (UK); and ICA, London (UK). Nashashibi has participated in group exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou and Forum des Images, Paris (FR); Tate, London (UK); Sculpture Center, New York, NY (US); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (MX); Whitechapel, London (UK); Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (DE); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (US), among others.

Terry Nguyen is an essayist, critic, and poet from

Garden Grove, California.

Ekhmetjan Osman is widely recognized as a

pioneer of Uyghur avant-garde poetry. Bilingual in Uyghur and Arabic, he has published volumes in both languages to acclaim, and his work has been highly influential among contemporary Uyghur poets.

Sadie Sartini Garner is a music critic and writer

living in Long Beach, California. She has written for Pitchfork, The Ringer, The A.V. Club, The Outline, Resident Advisor, FLOOD Magazine, and Filter Magazine, among other places.

Liz Schoeder is pursuing an MFA at the University

of Missouri–Kansas City.

Caleb Stein (b. 1994, UK) is an artist currently

based in the U.S. Stein’s work can be found in a number of permanent collections, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Nguyen Art Foundation (with Orejarena), The New York State Museum, and the Ann Tenenbaum & Thomas H. Lee Family Collection (with Orejarena).

Stein’s work has been published in The New York Times, The British Journal of Photography, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, i-D Vice, Vogue Italia, Creative Review, Wallpaper*, and Photograph Magazine, among other places. A forthcoming book of Stein’s work on robots carving marble in Carrara, entitled ‘How to Move a Mountain’ is forthcoming with Luhz Press.

Jasmine Dreame Wagner is an American writer

and multidisciplinary artist. Her third poetry collection, Intricate Rituals, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing.

Benjamin Weissman is the author of two books

of short fiction, most recently Headless (2004). He teaches advanced drawing at UCLA.

A Miscellany of Fascinating Books From Tenov Books

Picasso Barcelona A Cartography Claustre Rafart Part biography of the young artist, part guide to Barcelona, Picasso Barcelona tells the story of the relationship between Picasso and the city that saw him evolve into a modern painter.

Paper $30.00

From Diaphanes

A Sinister Assassin Last Writings, Ivry-Sur-Seine, September 1947 to March 1948 Antonin Artaud Edited, translated, and with a preface by Stephen Barber A Sinister Assassin presents translations of Antonin Artaud’s largely unknown final work of 1947–48, revealing new insights into his obsessions with human anatomy, sexuality, societal power, creativity, and ill-will.

Paper $15.00

From Omnidawn

Shadows and Clouds Marcus Stewart

“Stewart evokes the unsettling sense of nothing being what it seems in this collection of stories about love, dreams, and childhood memories.”—S. J. Groenewegen, author of The Disinformation War Paper $16.95

From Park Books

Cloud-to-ground

Edited by Oren Eldar, Edith Kofsky, and Hadas Maor A study of the political consequences of the growing computer “cloud” technology in Israel and the Middle East.

Paper $35.00

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR

THIS WINTER

Enough $24.95

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters $29.95

Born in Blood $29.95

American Survivors $19.95

Gospel Thrillers $39.99

Uncertain Warriors $39.99

Uncivil War $29.95

Why the Bible Began $34.95

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories $34.99

www.cambridge.org/highlights