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Critical Lives
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Antosh explores Huysmans’s life and work, illustrating how both re ect an uneasy era of profound social and artistic change. In this context, Huysmans’s correspondence, early ction, art criticism, and surrealist novel En rade / Stranded demand greater critical attention.
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LAURA MCTIGHE AND WOMEN WITH A VISION
Nonhuman Witnessing War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
In the Land of the Unreal
Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
LISA MESSERI
The Movies of Racial Childhoods
Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian/America
CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU
Closures
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GRACE LAVERY
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DELE ADEYEMO, NATALIE
DIAZ, NADIA YALA KISUKIDI, AND RINALDO WALCOTT
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ADRIE KUSSEROW
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YAN LIANKE
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DANIEL WIDENER
FOREWORD BY VIJAY PRASHAD
Unspooled
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ROB DREW
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
ERIC DROTT
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To place an ad, email bill@lareviewofbooks.org THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 42
8 Sarah Thankam Mathews, Summer Kim
Lee, Daniel Lavery, Whitney Mallett, Tal Rosenberg, Sophie Kemp, Natasha
Stagg
Francesca Peacock
Emmeline Clein
Aaron
Jamieson
Clayton
Elena
Daniel Loedel
Rhian Sasseen
Michelle Latiolas
Veronica Gonzalez Peña
Sanaë Lemoine
Hedi El Kholti
Derrick
David St. John
Andrea Werblin Reid
Ivanna Baranova
Will Harris
Timothy Liu
Flora Field
For wherever life takes you
How often have you bought something with that slight nag that either the product or the company will not be around in a few years?
Vitsœ – and our shelves –have been around for three generations and counting...
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New York
Dear Reader,
This issue was originally planned around a different theme, “Lies,” but lying has never struck me as a particularly compelling subject.A lie,even when it’s shared,is an act of isolation.It’s a way of enclosing yourself,leaving parts completely inaccessible.That act of enclosure can be thrilling but it’s ultimately private.
Gossip, on the other hand, is an act of communion. It depends almost entirely on proximity and exchange. Truth isn’t relevant here; the priority is having another person nearby. Gossip needs to be shared; otherwise, what good is it? It’s a meal you can’t enjoy alone. As Robert Glück wrote: “Gossip registers the difference between a story one person knows and everyone knows, between one person’s story and everyone’s. Or it’s a mythology, gods and goddesses,a community and a future.”
It’s in that spirit that we’ve put this issue together. We gathered a group of writers to discuss group chats, an emergent literary form of its own. Francesca Peacock investigates gossip as a literary genre; Emmeline Clein eulogizes Anna Nicole Smith, the American Princess Diana; Jamieson Webster explores the history of psychoanalysis,the presidency, and a lost Freud manuscript; E.J. Koh relates a meeting with TV execs and the untranslatable power of han; in a short story, Veronica Gonzalez Peña remembers a childhood in Mexico City and the disappeared students of Iguala. And much,much more.
It’s a full issue,meant to be shared.
Warmly, Medaya
Bold summer reads at the intersection of visual culture, philosophy, and political science
Things That Move
Tim Anstey
Rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, Anstey considers how architecture moves subjects (emotive potential); how it moves objects (how it choreographs bodies in motion); and how it is itself moved (the mixture of materials, laws, affordances, and images).
What’s That Smell?
Simon Hajdini
A groundbreaking exploration of the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis, Hajdini sets out to answer why Indo-European languages have such limited language to describe smells.
War and Aesthetics
Edited by Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft
A collection from leading artists, political scientists, and scholars that outlines the aesthetic dimension of warfare and offers a novel perspective on its contemporary character and the construction of its potential futures.
Mortevivum
Kimberly Juanita Brown
An examination on how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable
Devotion
Garrett Bradley
A beautifully illustrated book-length publication on the contemporary artist and Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley, whose quietly devastating work blurs the space between fact and fiction.
Extraterrestrial Languages
Daniel Oberhaus
“Fascinating. A sober study of real—scientific, mathematical, artistic, and philosophical—efforts to enact this linguistic rendezvous.”
—4Columns
A GROUP CHAT ON GROUP CHATS
The history of the world is, you could argue, the history of advances in the technologies of organizing the collective to various ends: the nomadic tribe, the citadel, the infantry battalion, the jointstock corporation, the group text. The latter may be loved, feared, lurked within, or eschewed altogether. What it has not been: Sufficiently theorized. Which is to say: Respected. This is unfortunate because group texts are, at this point, historical forces in their own right. Used by white supremacists planning insurrections at the Capitol, billionaires coordinating anti-Palestinian agitprop, homies making weekend plans, and creatives sharing industry-melting gossip alike.
The first group chat, named Talkomatic, was developed in 1973 by Doug Brown and David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois. It operated on PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), which was the first comprehensive computer-assisted instruction system. It could allow for up to five participants at a time; it had a designated area on the screen, similar to a sectioned bulletin board, and messages were displayed letter-by-letter as they were typed.
More than 30 years later, in 2008, Apple introduced the ability to send SMS
messages to multiple recipients simultaneously. This feature, added in iOS version 1.1.3, unified “texting” and “messaging” into a single thread of organized conversations. Since then, the mainstreamed form of the group chat has remained static, though the ways we speak in them have evolved as the internet has, and as new features have been brought into being. Some of the features are useful; some of them, like the thumbs-up react, are demonic instruments of ambiguity and chaos. (On this particular subject, I agree with the writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires, who once said to me that “anything less than a heart is so cruel.”)
Talkomatic was synchronous, and its heirs, from WhatsApp to iMessage, are generally asynchronous. People tap in when they can and want to; group chats are not required to conduct their business in real time. But the root, the essential strangeness at the heart of how group texts function, has remained constant: the enormity of information they obscure. Who is to say what a couple of “!” tapbacks really mean? What are we to make of a formerly engaged, chatty, locked-all-the-way-in grext member’s current silences, their nonreactivity?
I should not have been, personally, an intuitive target for group chats, being, as I was once, an intense serial monogamist in friendships, and being, as I am now, easily overwhelmed by the great garbage deluge of digital signal and noise that crashes over me daily. Most of the group texts I’m added to are seasonal, ephemeral, weak flames soon quenched in my phone’s womb. Some persist. Some are large and freewheeling purveyors of chaos and news-you-can-use, like my extended family WhatsApp or 10-plus-person groups that exist primarily to coordinate nightlife or bike rides. But with love for the wonderful denizens of the unspeakably named “million $ listings BK,” “bitcoin bathers,” “������������,” “freak matchers llc,” and “do the right thing ��,” my personal One Group Text to Rule Them All is simply titled “the grext �� . ”
The grext �� is three people strong and I text it nearly every day. Into its benevolent void go internet scrapings, emotional confessions, logistical squaring-up, idiot patter, collective problem-solving, breaking news, homosexual and bisexual gossip, and occasional genuinely breathtaking intellectual analysis. My friends are, of course, a great part of why I enjoy the grext �� , but I think it’s important to create some demarcation between my love for my friends and my feelings about a technological entity. The fact is that the grext �� itself, in all its iMessage-enabled high jinks and meaning, brings something important and joyful and ineffable into my life.
Many people I know have versions of what I do, citing these group chats as ways for them to have stayed meaningfully connected to far-flung family, to have gotten through divorces and postpartum blues, to have found their way back into a creative
or spiritual practice. Sometimes the group chat is a group chat and sometimes the group chat is a prayer circle, you know?
In seriousness, my theory is that a certain kind of group text is a modern form of the interaction ritual chain, a concept developed by sociologist Randall Collins. Collins understood humans as seekers of emotional energy, and believed that the unintrospected objective of most social interaction was to acquire and spread emotional energy. He envisioned a kind of perpetual marketplace of cultural, social, and emotional exchange that in turn creates a “microfoundation” for what we understand as class, race, gender, scene, subculture, and, simply put, group life. The interaction ritual chain could be any sequence of social interactions that produce emotional energy and reinforce group solidarity; it could be a standing weekly gathering of old friends or that transition between meeting and hanging out that creates a friendship over time. Successful interaction rituals generate or deepen a sense of connection, confidence, validation, affirmation, enthusiasm, or initiative. Failed interaction rituals degrade, erode, or reduce emotional energy. Individuals, Collins theorized, are motivated to repeat interactions that result in high emotional energy, and to avoid those that reduce their emotional energy.
I come to the group texts I love because present within both their culture and their technological mechanism is the opportunity to quietly, and in light-touch ways, replenish the well of my emotional energy. Friendship and love are many things, and one of them is a quiet commitment to taking on and meeting each other’s bids for connection, support, and reprieve from the strange lonelinesses of existing as a single self.
The self. That vast and churning ocean, that shimmering soap bubble wafting through the air. Perhaps our exchanges, our communions, our formations with other people, are rain and river and factory runoff, are dish soap and water and small bright-colored plastic hoop. Fundamental to Collins’s theory, after all, is the idea that interactions generate the individual, not the other way around.
The sustained group text creates a sense of belonging and mutual understanding among participants that is no less meaningful for its digitality. Its shared moments, its failed or successful interaction rituals, contribute to the group’s identity and cohesion, much like traditional face-toface interactions. The group text is a place of unserious seriousnesses, of information exchange, of shared webs of reference, of bids for coordination and connection met again and again. At a specific and difficult moment in my life, thinking of a particular group chat of my kin, I once joke-tweeted: very slowly healing my familial trauma through daily wordle score sharing; I received a flurry of messages saying some version of “real” and “if you know you know.”
It is in the lightness of most of what is shared in the group chat that many of us find ballast for the heaviness of life.
None of this changes, for me, the fact that grexts are fragile and potentially ephemeral, as all digital constructions are. There have been periods of silence and inactivity and disinvestment in any and all of mine. But in an age of a certain kind of co-optation and blind adulation of Community in the abstract, I am grateful to the group text for its reinforcement of certain truths: that community intimacies function best with some degree of
boundary, that collective culture is a tenuous and shifting thing, that privacy and containment are crucial wellsprings of the self, and that any community is only as good as the people who make it up.
That we, those people, are continually, slowly being formed, through interaction, through ritual, through practice with each other.
— Sarah Thankam Mathews
In a group chat, a friend in New York is telling the rest of us about a “nightmare situation.” The night before, he went out with a couple friends who ended up not getting along. As a result, he had to mediate between the two. The night was messy, and the story is harrowing. While we in the group chat express our sympathy for the ordeal, we are also loving every detail. We hang on every text, waiting for the next, indulging in what Lauren Berlant might call the “conspiratorial pleasure” of being privy to a point of view in a story that others, particularly those featured in the story itself, may not have access to. This
distinguishes a conspiratorial “us” from everyone else in the story.
To be in a group chat is to be reminded, in the most mundane, quotidian way, that “hell is other people.” Berlant opened their book On the Inconvenience of Other People with this famous quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit. For them, the phrase implies that not all people are hell, because if you are the person who hears it, “it’s other people who are hell, not you.” “Other people” are not in the group chat, although they are probably in group chats of their own that you don’t know about and where you yourself are “other people” too.
I asked everyone in the group chat for permission to refer to the conversation about our friend’s terrible night and promised to do so in very vague terms. For that reason, I can’t tell you more, which is a little disappointing, but you likely understand. Generally, permission comes up in a group chat. Someone might ask, “Can I be a bitch for a second?” (the answer is always “yes”), or they might ask if they can relay something shared and discussed to another group chat, made of other people that are not just “other people” because they know that would be hell. When you send a message to a group chat, and especially when you have good story to tell, you know your audience. A story has to land with the right people—people who will find it funny instead of offensive, who will be interested as opposed to bored, who will know to keep a secret when necessary.
Our friend with the “nightmare situation” had not only found his audience; he also knew how to tell a story specific to the form of the group chat. Sentences were broken up into several short, separate text messages, which functioned like expertly
placed line breaks to convey comedic pauses; he left space for the rest of us to interject with questions or reactions. He knew that his story should not be written and sent as a condensed block of text—this is a conversation, not an essay or an email. Attention to the form that a story takes, and the style used to tell it, is part of the “conspiratorial pleasure” that the group chat has to offer. It comes with knowing that a story has been narrated, edited, and tailored specifically for you because you are not “other people”—you are the right people, who will respond the right way.
Without an awareness of permission, audience, and delivery, which is to say, without an attention to form, the group chat becomes a bore at best and a liability at worst. Conversations in the form of screenshots or copied-and-pasted text are leaked, gossip gets warped into a tattle, names are named carelessly, details of a story are forgotten and misremembered, or else no one cares to know, no one has follow-up questions, or worse, no one responds or reacts at all. Without the effort of appealing to the group, the group chat becomes filled with the hell of everyone else, made random and estranged. Like any literary form, the chat depends on constraints, and those constraints are social ones too. All this might make the group chat sound strict and unforgiving. But the next time you pull up the group chat on your phone and ask permission to be a bitch for a second, it is likely at least one person will soon after say yes. Without them, without the group chat, other people would truly be hell.
— Summer Kim Lee
My experience of being in group chats has largely been one of a resentful sense of being corralled and press-ganged into consensus. To clarify: Whenever I create a group chat, I am Danny Ocean assembling a crack team of gymnasts and code breakers for a daring heist, or Madame de Pompadour arranging an informal afternoon salon. I feel it’s understood that this is an outing of pleasure, to be broken up at the first sign of boredom or fatigue, that each member has been thoughtfully selected to harmonize easily with the others, and that no detail tending towards mutual delight has been overlooked. What a lark! What fun! If we are in any way bound to one another, it is only by the cobweb-thinnest of ties, easily broken should they interfere with anyone’s enjoyment.
And yet, when I am added to someone else’s group chat—even if I would have been perfectly happy to socialize with all of the other members under other circumstances—I feel as sullen and put-upon as if I’d been forced to attend the birthday party of an elementary-school classmate I particularly dislike because his character defects are so much like mine that I can’t pretend not to notice them. I can feel my personality being squeezed by forced proximity, presumed intimacy, and regulated affect. If I suspect an observation of mine isn’t meeting with collective approval, just you watch as I reword, qualify, and backpedal until someone else says the precise opposite and I can chime in with “Yes, that’s just what I meant, thank you for putting it that way,” before turning off notifications and angrily taking the dogs out for a walk.
Jane Austen’s heroine Emma Woodhouse understood best the two kinds of self-censorship that bedevil the group
chat. First, there is what one does not say to the person one disagrees with or dislikes, and second, there is what one does not say to the friend who wants to connect us with the person we disagree with and dislike:
This was so very well understood between them, that Emma could not but feel some surprise, and a little displeasure, on hearing from Mr. Weston that he had been proposing to Mrs. Elton, as her brother and sister had failed her, that the two parties should unite, and go together; and that as Mrs. Elton had very readily acceded to it, so it was to be, if she had no objection. Now, as her objection was nothing but her very great dislike of Mrs. Elton, of which Mr. Weston must already be perfectly aware, it was not worth bringing forward again:—it could not be done without a reproof to him, which would be giving pain to his wife; and she found herself therefore obliged to consent to an arrangement which she would have done a great deal to avoid; an arrangement which would probably expose her even to the degradation of being said to be of Mrs. Elton’s party! Every feeling was offended; and the forbearance of her outward submission left a heavy arrear due of secret severity in her reflections on the unmanageable goodwill of Mr. Weston’s temper.
“I am glad you approve of what I have done,” said he very comfortably. “But I thought you would. Such schemes as these are nothing without numbers. One cannot have too large a party. A large party secures its own amusement.
And she is a good-natured woman after all. One could not leave her out.”
Emma denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private.
Go ahead and beg, go ahead and threaten: nothing’s going to stop me from agreeing with you here. What a marvelous party. And how large it is too! How I approve of everything you’ve done.
— David Lavery
I mute group chats. I resent them. I will not participate if you invite me to one. I may passive aggressively exit. But I’m still going to take it as a personal attack when you post a screenshot from your group chat and everyone with rich husbands and award-winning bisexual novels is being cute and funny. I don’t want a rich husband, just like I don’t want to be in your group chat. Still, I can’t help feeling triggered sometimes by everyone I don’t like who doesn’t like me. I imagine my tether loves group chats. She’s the girl who can
drop an i want to kms and you know she doesn’t mean it—she’s just got a dark sense of humor like that. Not to mention effortlessly beautiful skin. She commands the group chat like it’s a dinner party, playing favorites for entertainment, possessed by the sedentary bourgeois energy of a chain smoker at the beach. She always says the right thing. Even if that’s nothing at all, just a reaction gif you’ve never seen before: something like young Cher dancing, skinny and sparkling. She has dirt on everyone’s ex’s new person, the kind that boosts your ego but nothing so bad that knowing it makes you feel worse than you did before.
— Whitney Mallett
Last week, full of tequila and psilocybin mushrooms, I made the now-common mistake of staring at my iPhone. It was close to midnight and I’d been enduring the unnecessarily expensive revelry of a bachelor party for five hours. In the interim, Joe Biden went full On Golden Pond in the first presidential debate and more than 200 messages slipped into my jeans pocket.
In my primary group chat, I’ll often send screenshots of my Messages app with an intense number on it: 153, 217, 305. Perhaps I’d been in a movie theater. Or maybe I just walked away. What could possibly be so urgent that more than 100 exchanges needed to occur to address it?
The Biden night was an exception: there was actually something important taking place somewhere. Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing happens. Most often, someone had posted something stupid on Twitter. Within an hour, a prolific and varied stream of shit-talking, jokes,
bits, and remember-whens issue into gray bubbles of fluctuating sizes. This used to be called hanging out. But the difference between the hang and the group chat, aside from plasma, is spontaneity. The hang is now ever-present and constant; it doesn’t require plans. Yet while all the other advents of instant communication—email, breaking news, Twitter, [shudder] Slack—fill me with dread, I can’t wait to open the group chat. It drives my wife crazy: what does the group chat offer that surpasses interfacing with real life? When real life is so slippery, a faceless forum counts for feeling alive.
— Tal Rosenberg
I’m not much of a texter. I don’t like seeing a block of blue bubbles on my lilac iPhone 11. Do not send me a TikTok. Do not send me a meme. I won’t open either. I won’t engage you in it. For me, the ideal medium is talking on the phone, or maybe email. If someone sends me more than three texts in a row, I will call them up. It is a waste of my time to respond to all of that.
I think this makes me Gen X, even though I was born in the mid-’90s. I can’t be bothered. If I want to ask someone out, I usually will resort to going through a friend. Or maybe sending an email. Or just telling them to their face. I wouldn’t put that in a text. I’m not a child.
Given all of this, I think it can be safe to say I am not really a group chat person. When I want the gossip, I want it over a martini. I want it while sitting in a cracked vinyl booth. I want it with a side of fries. I want it with my ear glued to my phone while I’m walking to my Korean dry cleaner on Nostrand Avenue. I want it while I’m wearing my hot pink Manolos and biting my nails.
But okay—I do have a few exceptions. I think the key is that the group chat needs to be small. It needs to be fewer than five people. It needs to be well composed. The best group chats I am in are purely tactile and puritanically organized. Where the agenda is set: Did you hear the gossip about so and so doing blah blah blah? Where the multimedia is labeled. Where I know what I’m getting into.
Otherwise, just call me, baby. — Sophie Kemp
“I just heard the most nuclear-grade gossip of my whole life,” a friend texted the group chat a few weeks ago.
“Spill.”
“It’s too powerful. I’m scared.”
“Why would you taunt us this way?”
“I need each of you to take an oath: you didn’t hear this from me (I’m not telling you who told) but … it’s a thing people know, and I’ve heard it’s being published in a column, and, wow. It changes everything.”
“Who what why where when?”
A voice note follows. I’m in my bed, alone, but feel as if I’m in a café with my friends. One of the people in the chat is asleep. We are all in different time zones. She will wake up to all of this.
“Can you even? It’s, like, everyone’s worst nightmare, but to the extreme. What’s amazing about it is they both deserve it. One really soiled the other’s perfect world.”
“The dollar amount is so funny. Like, what.”
“Imagine this happening to you, at all, and then imagine it happening at a friend’s house, and then imagine it is at THAT friend’s house.”
“I can’t.”
We are all laughing, in our beds, telling one another that this is what is happening (laughter).
“The ultimate social climber,” I summarize, “gets to the top of the A-list and shits the bed.”
“Apparently, the rumor has spread. Hell.”
“Is someone on suicide watch?”
I wonder if any of this could possibly be true, and if so, whether many of the details have been rearranged to make it a better story. I’m happy that they have, because it is.
“Will they ever live this down once it’s officially out?”
For some reason, I can’t imagine it will ever be, because there is no lawsuit to report. It is the ultimate gossip because it won’t be disputed. It lives as a whisper, a disappearing sound bite, an unnerving image in our minds. As I am writing this, another group chat I’m in has started to discuss the story, only it is getting distorted, no one
confident enough to confirm who what why where and when they first heard.
— Natasha Stagg
THE GARDEN OF THE LION
Derrick Austin
In The Garden of the Lion His absence presented itself. The mystic assumed the submissive’s position, wraithlike with desire, without sound.
In The Garden of the Lion the bluesman listened to his stomach and bowels churning poignantly. Craving wine, he drank white tea.
In The Garden of the Lion the melancholic’s heart stirred, testing its choke chain. Her hound leaped like a cinder hearing a door unlock.
In The Garden of the Lion, like emblems of the active life and the contemplative life, two crows tussled over steaming meat. I reeked. My teeth were filmy and ached.
In The Garden of the Lion sensualists spoke with Wisdom, and the loiterers too, and wanderers, and children, and the sleepers in their paper boats.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled (Tile) , 2019
Glazed ceramic
7 × 5.2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and private collection and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York
lindarosenkrantz
In the summer of 1965, a writer in her early 30s rented a house with her friends in East Hampton. comfortably ingratiated into the New York art scene workedat Sotheby’s
Warhol’sattendedAndy parties
They gossiped on the beach, shit-talking as they dug knives into the divots of oyster shells to coax them open at their hinges, and every minute of it was recorded on tape.
A cascade of artists, actors, and writers traipsed through her Hamptons house that summer, but she spent most of her time with two close friends:
Emily
Vincent Queer painter
The recording was linda’s idea, something she hoped would become a book, but her friends were enthusiastic collaborators. They spent the summer talking: about whether they still harbored grudges for old lovers and what gum they used to chew, whose analyst was brightest and whose just fed their neuroticism, and they wondered aloud if they were the only interesting people in the world.
How many men have you been to bed with?
About a hundred.
And how many women?
About seven.
So you haven’t really been promiscuous at all.
I love certain people being disliked.
What do you mean?
Just that.
So sad. You know you really were mad about him.
There are still some vestiges, like I just realized looking at that Spearmint gum—that’s the only kind of gum I can chew, because it was his favorite.
I saw you sneaking some Frosty Mint in the supermarket today.
That was for you, darling.
It was for me, all for me? How come there seemed to be a couple pieces empty and gone when we got home?
I chewed them for you too.
At the end of the season, Rosenkrantz began typing what’d become a 1,500 page transcript of their summer.
After a year of rearranging and editing, she had a manuscript built purely of dialogue, written in the shape of a play but with no stage direction or set. She called it “Talk,” and after a slew of rejections, it was published in 1968.
Much of the criticism condemned the quality in the book that I felt most compelled by: the sense that these three friends were searching each other for themselves.
The presumption of many of these reviews was that being rooted in adulthood requires a severing from the interdependence we experienced when we were younger, as if deep friendships, and the talk that comes along with them, are something to be outgrown.
Talk opens at Marsha’s apartment; Emily has come over to keep her company as she packs for their summer holiday. it’s a habit I had with my friend (a famously terrible packer, always hastily shoving her clothes into a suitcase when she should have already been in a cab to the airport) for many years.
Turtles barely count as pets, they don’t do anything.
I never even had a fish. I won one from the fair and my mom made me give it to my cousin.
That’s sad.
it was sad; it was a horrible day. I hate the fair now.
but you still like to win things.
who doesn’t like to win things?
I mean specifically with men. you compete in relationships.
You know that turtles are some of the oldest living beings on earth, they’ve been around since the dinosaurs.
Yeah, everybody knows that.
the hours i have to lie on my friends’ beds and gossip have shrunk: I have a child now, and a job that keeps me tethered to the piercing knocks of Slack.
yet i resist the argument that maturity is inherently tied to a closing inward.
When I reread Talk now, I envy the unburdened time I’ve lost access to, but I still see myself and my friends in the book: how I become funnier around the people I myself find funniest, how unequivocally I can know someone and still delight in the surprise of what they’re going to say next.
One of the first things we learn about operating in a social world as children is the division between public and private, an understanding that what is appropriate in one place might not be in another.
I think of friendship as the space between the public and private self, a room we inhabit that’s both inside and outdoors.
The criticism of the project seemed heavily tied to the stance that Rosenkratz and her friends had miscalculated the ratio of exposure to concealment that was required of self-possessed adults, as if they needed to shed the hypercharged intimacy they experienced when they were becoming who they were in order to become who they’re supposed to be.
This denies what I have learned to be true: that laying ourselves bare is the only way to maintain who we are.
GOSSIP AS A LITERARY GENRE, OR GOSSIP AS “L’ÉCRITURE FEMININE”?
by Francesca Peacock
There’s a passage in Rachel Cusk’s motherhood memoir A Life’s Work that angers me every time I read it. Unlike many critics who were furious upon the book’s publication in 2001, I’m not annoyed by its descriptions of motherhood. I admire Cusk’s honesty about the pain and depersonalization entailed by pregnancy and childbirth; I admire it to the extent that it makes me recoil, makes me question whether I’ll ever be able to have a child, to endure the disintegration of individuality, time, and subjectivity distinct from what she terms the “motherbaby.”
In fact, the passage that infuriates me wasn’t even included in the book’s first publication; it was added afterwards, as part of Cusk’s response to backlash. Newspapers attacked the book—The Times claimed that “if everyone were to read [it], the propagation of the human race would virtually cease.” Others warned against the volume being given to pregnant women. It’s still discussed on online mothers’ forums today. Rare is the voice that defends it.
Confronted with all this criticism, Cusk wrote a new foreword in 2007 defending the difference between literature and life, fact and fiction. Her argument is one of aesthetic values over personal offense, delight in “individual discovery over the institutional representation, the vicissitudes of the personal over the dishonesty of the communal.” In response to the many women critics who reviewed her negatively, she writes: “I take this opportunity to issue a health warning to my own sex. This is not a childcare manual, ladies.”
What’s so infuriating about these two sentences? Is it their patronizing tone, the near-palpable dismissal contained in the word “ladies”? Is it the likelihood that no one has ever taken A Life’s Work as a childcare manual? Or perhaps Cusk’s self-conscious denigration of “her own sex”—a possible perversion of Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous declaration in A Vindication of the Rights of Women: “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures”?
Rational creature that I am, these reasons alone aren’t enough to bring about anger. There’s something else added on top. In momentarily speaking exclusively to “her own sex,” Cusk seems to be opening her book up to a female group readership.
But just as quickly as she issues that invitation, she rescinds it with her irony and condescension. She affirms that hers is a book about a personal experience, and thus denies it a collective readership, or wider possibilities of reflection. •
Cusk came across as radical in the 21st century. She was going where few memoir writers had gone before, at least ostensibly: into a world of sleep deprivation, diaper changes, and the taboo of ambiguous— even negative—feelings about motherhood. Yet as early as the mid-17th century, a woman writer was sending up a society that made women delight in pregnancy: she describes those women “taking a Pride in their great Bellies”; faking a bodily exhaustion and a “rasping”; and spending all their energy, and money, amassing “Fine and Costly Childbed-Linnen, SwadlingCloths, Mantles […] fine Beds, Cradles, Baskets.” In many ways, these playful, verging-on-the-catty remarks could have been written by Cusk—who, in one passage of A Life’s Work, moves to a university town and rails against the type of “good” mothers she finds there with “dumpy flowered dresses and thick white arms.”
What’s different, though, is the former’s relationship to her readers: the author— the poet, philosopher, playwright, and scientist Margaret Cavendish—works in the epistolary form, addressing each letter to a fictional recipient. “Madam,” she writes, before divulging anecdotes, stories, and personal details about women she lightly anonymizes, referring to them only by their initials (“Th’ other day the Lady S. M. was to Visit me”). Rather than one woman railing against the foibles of her sex—a
lonely outpost of reason—Cavendish thereby constructs, and includes herself in, an imagined group of women doing something subtly different. Corresponding as a collective, these (fictional) women are reacting to what women are forced to do, the way they are expected to act and behave, the strictures—biological, social, and otherwise—placed upon their lives. In Sociable Letters (1664), this response takes the form of epistles; in The Convent of Pleasure (1668), a play, Cavendish has a group of women take this one step further: they act out the horrors of childbirth and marriage for each other’s benefit; the drama becomes a group spectacle. But there’s another term, of course, for Cavendish’s written and performed exchanges of stories and information: gossip. •
Ancrene Wisse is a monastic manual composed in the early 13th century. Anonymously authored, it was penned for three sisters, young women who had all decided to become “anchoresses.” Anchoresses (like anchorites, their male cousins) took the ascetic dedication of the nun or monk one step further. More than merely cloistered away from the world in a convent or monastery—alone, but alone as part of a community—anchoresses were enclosed: bricked into small cells attached to a given church or cathedral, and left to remain there for the rest of their lives. It was death to the world; the consecration of their enclosure borrows passages, word for word, from medieval funeral rites. The women were granted three slit-like windows: one through which to see services in the adjoining church, one through which to pass their food and bodily waste, and
one through which to admit light from the outside world. Anchoresses spent their days in prayer and contemplation, praying their way through the services of the daily office and reading religious literature.
It was only natural that anyone left so isolated—anchoresses only enjoyed contact with the servants who looked after their physical needs—would fight the temptation to talk to outsiders. The temptation was made worse by the fact that, given their reputation for spirituality, anchoresses gained an additional reputation for wisdom—for harboring the kind of sage advice that was of immense value to the free-roaming, worldly population. Yet among the reams and reams of advice given to anchoresses in Ancrene Wisse, much of it steeped in a near-pathological fear of sin (everything could be sinful, even an excess of prayer), is a tirade against chatter:
Me seith upon ancren, thet euch meast haveth an ald cwene to feden hire earen, a meathelilt the meatheleth hire alle the talen of the lond, a rikelot the cakeleth al thet ha sith ant hereth, swa thet me seith i bisahe: “From mulne ant from chepinge, from smiththe ant from ancre-hus me tidinge bringeth.” They say about anchoresses that each has to have an old woman to feed her ears: a jabberer who jabbers to her all the stories of the area, a magpie who cackles out all that she sees and hears, so that it is said in a proverb “From mill and from market, from smithy and from anchor-house, people bring the news.” (trans. Hugh White)
Just a few sentences later, the anchoresses’ anonymous guide—or censor—repeats his
fears. It is “not likely,” he writes, that an anchoress could have “a mouth of this kind” (that is, the mouth of a chatterer), “but it may be greatly feared that she sometimes bends her ear to such mouths.”
Is it fair to express surprise over the censor’s gendering of this specific, sinful type of speech? This is, after all, a guide directed at women. Still, his insistence that gossip—“all the stories of the area,” “all that [a person] sees and hears”—is exclusively female in purview, dominated by old women and, in the translation, magpies who take she/her pronouns, is rather grating. It’s of the same order as the oft-repeated fact about the etymology of “gossip”: stemming from “god” and “sibb” (in the sense of “sibling”), the term initially only meant a relation or friend, before it was deployed only to refer to female friends, eventually mutating into its meaning today. “Gossip,” it seems, has always had misogynistic connotations.
The fear, in Ancrene Wisse, is not only of news spreading in an unholy way but also of the anchoresses producing anything. The prohibition against these women talking or spreading news is reflected in the fact that much of the manual is dedicated to telling them to spend their days reading, but never writing. They are to absorb information, but never spread it; they are vessels to hold knowledge, but never to share.
•
It’s worth using a working definition here. Like real-world gossip, literary gossip reveals truths that are normally hidden, the sort of information that is spoken about— when it’s spoken about—in hushed tones. I’m using “gossip” without its negative connotations: it’s personal writing, either about
its author and their family or about other lives they know intimately; it’s writing that pushes the margins of what is acceptable to reveal, writing that is more (seemingly) open, writing that leaves its author vulnerable on the page. Crucially, it’s writing that is aware of a readership—the recipient of a letter, the dedicatee of a memoir, or even just the author rereading their own diary. This conspiratorial nature seems to define the genre, however mass-published a given work is; it’s an affirmation of personal experience or secrets, combined with an awareness that these will become (at least semi)public.
It’s a genre that includes everything from the chatty, revealing letters between the 18th-century Queen of England, Anne, and her beloved friend Sarah Churchill all the way through to Cusk’s A Life’s Work (hopefully by now, my distaste at her dismissal of her audience makes sense). It extends from Cusk’s later divorce memoir, Aftermath (2012) to the Regency-era courtesan Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs (1825) to Margery Kempe’s extraordinary, near-psychedelic 15th-century spiritual autobiography; from contemporary autofiction to letters exchanged by medieval women like the Paston or Stonor families. It’s a genre that, in the hands of Annie Ernaux, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. The ability of some of these works to create real-world gossip—when the Duke of Wellington heard that Harriette Wilson intended to print her memoirs recounting their time together, he allegedly replied, “Publish and be damned”; when 15th-century gentlewoman Margaret Paston wrote a letter about how much she disapproved of her daughter’s marriage, it began a long saga of family outrage—is not an essential
requirement of the genre. Many works of literary gossip never provoked lighthearted chatter, much less opprobrium— they’ve rarely been encountered outside the archive.
To that end, “gossip” isn’t a genre that comes easily. Historically, a lot of personal writing has never been considered literature: never printed, anthologized, analyzed; sometimes very rarely read. The irony is palpable: we live in an era of life-writing, in which memoirs and autofiction dominate review space and literary discussions both inside and outside academia, but very little life-writing from previous centuries is regularly read or considered. And that which dates to before the 20th century and is deemed “canonical”—I’m thinking of Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1665), Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English OpiumEater (1821), or William Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850)— is almost exclusively male.
•
In her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous issues a call to action: for women to write, and to write in ways that are true to themselves and, by extension, to their gender. Cixous asks:
And why don’t you write? Write!
Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven). Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is, for “great men”; and it’s “silly.”
In these pages, Cixous gave birth to the term “écriture feminine,” a type of literature women “must write through their bodies.” For her, such literature meant inventing an “impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes”—and, in doing so, “inscribe femininity.”
There’s something here that, to modern readers, comes across as essentialist: few women writers I know like to be told that their writing is inviolably marked as “feminine” (or, in Cixous’s words, “femalesexed”). Really, though, Cixous is calling for a new mode of personal writing—for freedom from the constraints enacted through Ancrene Wisse. She’s calling for writing of bodies, of selves—she’s calling, in effect, for gossip.
•
Cixous’s cry was for new writing. Her analysis of historical writing is painfully slim: she identifies only Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet as writing ecriture feminine. But could paying greater attention to gossip as a genre help us access historical women’s voices too?
So far I’ve mentioned literary works of varying fame, most of which can be found in shops or online, printed, published, and packaged as books. In the early modern period, though, print publication was accompanied by another form of dissemination—manuscript circulation. It can be all too easy to apply contemporary frameworks to historical writing, to assume that print was the privileged means of dissemination, simply because our contemporary culture now believes so. But, as scholars— among them Margaret Ezell and her brilliant book Writing Women’s Literary History
(1993)—have demonstrated, this is a fallacy. Manuscript circulation was a decidedly public form of writing in the early modern period (John Donne’s work, for example, was only printed after his death, but was well known in his lifetime), and a form of publication that was more open to women.
Let’s turn to the spiritual diary, or autobiography, of Mary Whitelocke, a Puritan woman who lived and wrote in 17th-century England. Whitelocke lived through a dramatic period of political and religious upheaval, when debates over worship could spill from books into state decrees, and political pamphlets had a role to play in the fall of the monarchy. Yet where John Milton and Andrew Marvell turned their pens to political change and biblical history, Whitelocke looked elsewhere. She wrote directly to her son Samuel as he approached adulthood, describing how she “did very offen greif and morne for the want of children in this life.” Her memoir, in which she passes years wanting a child and at one point endures a miscarriage, is largely one of her infertility. It’s a curious, fascinating document. Whitelocke is open about her pain, believing it heaven-sent—from God who “did mingle our cup with some bitterness” lest the couple be too happy—all the while addressing the child whose arrival marked the end of that pain. It’s a work steeped, for both mother and son, in gratitude; it’s also a remarkable demonstration of the way that 17th-century thought, and the Puritan mindset specifically, accommodated infertility. Does it feel odd to apply “gossip” to a text this intimate, and this sad? For all the levity implied by the name, literary gossip can be and often is a serious genre: Whitelocke’s text is as open and powerful
as Maggie Nelson’s description, in The Argonauts (2015), of the difficulty she and her partner Harry experienced trying to conceive (“Insemination after insemination, wanting our baby to be”). But whereas Nelson’s book was lauded upon its release, historical women’s writing on intimate, often unsavory details has broadly been ignored. Anthologies of poetry from the early modern period typically include five or six “Country House” poems, yet rarely Lady Mary Carey’s on her own miscarriage: “What birth is this: a poore despissed creature? / A little Embrio; voyd of life, and feature.”
Mary Carey was, at least, writing poetry, a genre that has the dignity of being certainly literary. What about the unknown woman of one manuscript in London’s Wellcome Collection? In MS.7391, a woman whose name has been lost to history painstakingly recorded the remedies she used when ministering to the women of her family and those in the surrounding areas: “I gave it [an “ointment”] to a woman of Burton who went on crutches.” She aided these women in times of emergency, recording what she tried for posterity, and for future needs: in times of a “flux in childbed,” or to “clear the body after childbirth.” This one woman is part of a whole choir of others; medical recipe books—complete with annotations about how the recipes have been used—are some of the most common early modern texts to bear the touch of women’s pens and brains. They were often books owned by generations of women—passed down from mother to daughter when a girl married and was preparing to look after children of her own, or even as a marriage gift, from mother-in-law to new bride.
Gossip as a literary genre is a way of taking these stories, and the language in which they are written, seriously.
But for all the intellectual side, I can’t deny a certain emotional pull I feel towards these texts. I think I’m addicted to the thrill of reading something so personal, so intimate. The new surname of a married signature rewritten on a page three or four times, or a marginal note to a recipe, have me far more interested than a diligent copy of a well-known poem. I can spend (and have) whole days reconstructing potential family trees from the names women wrote so proudly in the front of leather-bound books, the names they grew more confident in writing as the pages went on. I have spent whole days, too, guessing at the identities of those who didn’t even write in the books, those who borrowed them to make marks that practice and gesture at handwriting. I get intoxicated, I think, by the fact that these words were initially written for such a small group. And, if I’m honest, I get intoxicated further by the fact that they are now so little known. As a literary voyeur, I am part of a new small group reading these pages. Am I culpable of another critical sin here—rather than not engaging with these texts because they are personal, have I put them on a pedestal for their intimacy instead?
•
There’s a passage in The Argonauts that suggests Nelson’s own anxiety surrounding gossip and its status in literature. She describes reading an interview with Anne Carson in which the poet “answers certain questions—the boring ones? the too personal ones?—with empty brackets [[ ]].”
It’s not surprising to encounter such
a denial of personality in writing from Carson, who has, at different times, characterized her creative process as “an ongoing struggle […] to get every Me out of the way” and declared that her “personal poetry is a failure.” But Nelson’s written response is surprising. She tells her readers that “the sight of Carson’s brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table.” In a writer so known for her ability to alchemize the stuff of families, embodiment, and personhood into compelling literary and theoretical meditations, Carson’s comment still engendered a sense of embarrassment. In some ways, it’s easy to argue that we’re witnessing today the ascendancy of gossip as a literary genre. But for every triumph of declaration and intrigue, of putting one’s cards on the table—Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024), say—there’s another essay or podcast railing against personal writing. In February, a review by a UK-based journalist accused Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection No Judgment of spending too much space discussing, in the journalist’s words, “so-called autofiction.” And Joyce Carol Oates’s designation of “wan little husks” needs no introduction. For women’s historical writing, the disparity is even clearer: I am not the first to note that as scholars and academics turn to historic women’s writing, it is only the most palatable works—often women’s novels from the 18th century onwards—that are included in most anthologies. The messier, more personal writing is left behind in the archives. Even in the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, only four authors are included from before the 16th century. For the rest of the early modern period, the overwhelming
bulk of material is published poetry—that which fits into a more traditional canon— rather than texts in manuscript. The tone of dismissal in these attacks—or the act of dismissal in noninclusion and nonprinting—is one of insignificance, as if the personal did not matter as much as the author believed it did.
This stems, I think, from the fact that some critics and readers take gossip to be preeminently, obviously, true—true to the extent that it is a real reflection of the life of the author, not a mediated literary product. It’s a belief that sees the author disappear, become a cipher for their experiences, with the intermediary stage of their typing or writing all but forgotten about. It’s something that Rachel Cusk, in her retaliatory introduction to A Life’s Work, puts her finger on when she writes that the difference between “the struggle of living” and “the struggle of writing” is the “quality of fabrication.” It’s something, too, that Maggie Nelson writes about when she taps into the idea of writing that “dramatizes”: “[I]f I insist that there is a persona or a performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself in my writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me.”
Writing about the personal need not mean that the writer is not an author, that their work is less worthy of attention. There is always an act of creation, of generation, in taking lived experience and forming it into words.
This distinction is, if anything, even more important for writers of past centuries. Those who never had the chance to publish their writing, to wear the mask of a professional writer, a mask that covers— and elevates—their personal experience. The denial of personal writing as literary
creation doesn’t just malign their work; it also erases them as authors: there’s a reason that names like Mary Whitelocke and Mary Carey—or the many women who wrote private letters and diaries—remain largely unknown. Or that the anonymous women addressed in Ancrene Wisse—who were told never to write, not even to talk— left behind no trace. Gossip as a genre is not something lighthearted or ephemeral; at least, it need not necessarily be. It’s a way of paying attention to personal writing across the centuries, of honoring what happens when women turn life into literature and speak rather than remain silent.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled , 2019
Glazed ceramic
5.75 × 5.75 inches
Courtesy of the artist and private collection and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York
TRIMSPA, BABY
by Emmeline Clein
Slurring, slim, hands thrown to the heavens—her voice warbles, flirtatious or afraid. Her index finger is on her chest, pointing to the pendant resting between her breasts as she asks us, again, as she did in ad spot after ad spot, Like my body? She’s heard every version of the answer, lived so many lives in so many bodies in so little time. A few decades, a few surgeries. Dye jobs and modeling jobs and tabloid hack jobs, injections and incisions and then the inquisition: What did you get done, Anna, and what do you weigh? Operating theaters, green rooms, reality television sets, award shows—spotlit stages we promised would be warm then abandoned her in once they got hot enough to burn. Singed and trapped in the spotlight, our line of sight, a camera’s crosshairs.
Like my body? She doesn’t need to ask. Still, she’ll indulge us. After all, indulgence is what we accused her of: immoderation, intemperance, an appetite for eyes and sighs. And of course, fries, burgers, the all-American food we want to watch our All-American Girls bite into, but not really eat—“I like fast men, fast cars, and fast food,” she once announced through stoplight-red lips, trapped in the confessional cam of her reality show. While she’s remembered as an addict, Anna Nicole Smith was also an ascetic of a sort, a saint for the cause we sacrificed her for—beauty bought and bruised, chiseled and incised into submission. Disciplining her body, bending it to her will despite the bleeding, the abscesses; enduring the whirring tools of an industry intent on whittling her away.
Vickie Lynn Hogan was a flat-chested brunette, but she became Anna Nicole Smith, plasticine Marilyn Monroe of the new millennium. “After I got my body— then I really could relate to her,” Anna once said of Marilyn, her mother in another dimension and her role model in this one, a woman who understood the dangers a dream body can pose to a real one. Anna’s autopsy report name-checks Marilyn twice—once in the list of possible reasons to classify her death as a suicide (“Miss Smith declared that she wished to die in the same fashion as her idol […] Miss Monroe employed chloral hydrate,” which was also found in Anna’s blood), and once in the list of possible reasons to classify her death as an accidental overdose (“Miss Smith’s obsession with Marilyn Monroe had waned somewhat over time”).
An American scam, an Icarus story: The breasts that became her calling card condemned her. They caused physical pain,
incited scorn and stares, sent her spiraling into an addiction to painkillers. And, eventually, diet pills, including the ones she was hawking when she wondered, winkingly, how we felt about her body. When she attended the 2004 Billboard Music Awards, Anna Nicole Smith had been the spokeswoman for TrimSpa diet pills for just over a year. In ads, the star stepped out of a limousine into a crowd of flashing cameras. I’m back, she said, smiling, as a photo of a heavier her floated across the top of the screen like a haunting. Anna! How did you do it? the paparazzi screamed. TrimSpa, baby.
A fairy tale told in before-and-after pictures: A shrunken princess, white trash touched by Midas, skin gone golden and flesh lit lambent, bent and burnt and turned plastic, souped up and silicone slick. In another ad, Anna writhes around in a silk slip as a voiceover calls hers “The Ultimate Comeback.” Or she drives a convertible by the beach, asking us (of course) if we like her body, before she asks whether we’d like to party—enter TrimSpa’s Million Dollar Makeover Challenge and you could win a chance to party like Anna Nicole at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel.
During her onstage appearance that night in 2004, which would be mocked and memed into eternity, Anna wore a necklace that spelled out “TRIMSPA Baby” in rhinestones inlaid against fuchsia metal. At her funeral three years later, mourners would be asked to wear pink. The night before Anna clasped that necklace and stumbled onstage, she suffered two seizures. Seizures—in addition to stroke and heart damage—are known side effects of ephedra, one of the ingredients in TrimSpa diet pills. This was not The Ultimate
Comeback but the final push off a pedestal we stranded her on, the strong suction current down a drain. When Anna died, she was still a spokeswoman for TrimSpa; she was scheduled to host a contest for customers two weeks after her death. Have you heard the naked facts? a TrimSpa ad wants to know. It also wants to announce Anna’s total weight loss: 69 pounds. Had it happened, the contest’s prize would have been the opportunity to party like Anna at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel, the place where, instead, Anna was found naked and couldn’t be revived, her body riddled with abscesses linked to weight-loss injections.
Fate was far more terrifying than fiction in Anna’s life, in which coincidences harrowed and harm accumulated, men malingered and manipulated. It was the radio announcer Howard Stern who first told Anna about TrimSpa, during a 2002 episode of his show in which he spent 10 minutes attempting to get her to step on a scale because he’d made a bet about how much she weighed. A lawyer with the same name, Howard K. Stern, was meant to become Anna’s husband in the Bahamas just weeks after she died; he was subsequently sued for giving her pills she was not prescribed.
Anna’s glitter-dusted, forged fingerprints are, in fact, all over the US legal system. Her case against the estate of her late, billionaire husband J. Howard Marshall went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the decision. Anna and TrimSpa were co-defendants in another suit brought by dissatisfied customers who, despite taking TrimSpa pills, found that they were not suddenly decked out in their “DREAM BODIES” as promised. Published in a legal
journal, an article titled “Not Just Anna Nicole Smith: Cleavage in Bankruptcy” promised to investigate an opaque legal concept known as the “cleavage effect of a debtor’s filing.” Yet the silicone breast implants that ruptured in Anna’s body, banned by the FDA in the 1990s, were reapproved in the early aughts despite the anguished testimony of tens of thousands of women like Anna—women whose real lives, like Anna’s and Marilyn’s, had been destroyed by their dream bodies.
This is not a story about lost innocence, because Anna was never guilty of anything but yearning. We simply wouldn’t allow her that. “I didn’t have a childhood,” Anna once said, “so I’m living my childhood now.” In the end, she drank out of a baby bottle. She wanted to take a long nap next to her idol, Marilyn, but Hugh Hefner had already bought the adjacent cemetery plot by the time Anna tried to. Laid side by side or not, both women’s bodies were bought, sculpted, sold, printed, glossed, and gossiped over—never left alone, even nude or in death. Julien’s Auctions just sold a calorie-controlled diet a doctor once typed out for Marilyn for nearly $3,500; various undergarments and used lipstick tubes that once belonged to the star still crop up all over the site and store. A month after she died, Playboy published a commemorative issue featuring a selection of Anna’s past centerfolds as a “tribute.” It took a court order to keep the plastic surgeon who performed her breast augmentation from selling the two-hour video he filmed of her surgery. An Anna Nicole TrimSpa T-shirt currently goes for around $1,000 on eBay. Mocked, maligned, misunderstood, stolen from, and sued, Anna might have been in the mood for something to free
her mind from her body that night at the Billboard Awards. Like my body? Anna Nicole’s soul was stuck inside a never-ending gut renovation, a construction site complete with leaks and holes, demanding expensive upkeep and violent maintenance.
“It’s terrible the things I have to do to be me,” she once said. Want a cocktail? Pick your poison: envy, vitriol, chloral hydrate, rhinestones, SlimFast, sedatives, snickering, sobbing, syringes, scalpels, bathtubs, bad boyfriends, hospital beds. TrimSpa, baby.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled , 1999
Glazed ceramic
9.5 × 5.5 × 5.5 inches
Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York
STUPIDITY FOR DUMMIES
by Aaron Schuster
“At times I feel crushed by the mass of work”; “How mad I must be to have embarked on it!”; “One needs to be a master of asceticism to inflict such labors on oneself”; “Frankly I can’t take any more.” Thus does Gustave Flaubert complain to his friend Ivan Turgenev about his novel in progress, Bouvard and Pécuchet. It’s killing him. And in fact, he would die before finishing it; the book was published posthumously, in 1881, after several years of labor. But this moaning bears on something stranger than the usual case of writerly frustration: there is an inhuman dimension to Flaubert’s undertaking, as if he were emulating, by hand, a FlaubertGPT.
Bouvard and Pécuchet tells the story of two copy clerks who quit their jobs and retire to the countryside after one of them, Bouvard, inherits a small fortune. There they indulge their insatiable intellectual curiosity by undertaking a series of investigations that appear to run the whole gamut of human knowledge, and yet despite their voluminous reading, they never manage to understand a thing. A comedy of absolute knowing, the book is a piece of experimental or avant-garde writing more akin to an encyclopedia than a realist novel; Flaubert called it “a critical encyclopedia as farce” (“une encyclopédie critique en farce”).
The mammoth research project conducted by its protagonists is rivaled only by the author’s own: Flaubert claimed to have read some 1,500 books in preparing the novel. To give a sense of its sweep, the duo, in the course of their investigations, take up agriculture, gardening, liquor-making (one priceless episode involves their botched attempt to concoct the ultimate spirit, “Bouvarine”), chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, astronomy, natural history, geology, archaeology (including a very detailed bit on Celtic archaeology), French history, Roman history, universal history, literature, grammar, aesthetics, politics, political economy (“Let’s find the best system!”), love, gymnastics, mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, philosophy, logic, metaphysics, religion, Christianity, Buddhism, phrenology, and pedagogy, where they raise two abandoned children as an educational experiment. In an uncanny anticipation of Kafka’s The Castle (although I have no proof of this, I like to think that it’s a deliberate reference on Kafka’s part), the last profession they try their hand at before the novel breaks
into notes and sketches is land surveying. Each endeavor ends in a fiasco, or boredom, but this never deters the plucky amateurs for long. “Besides, what does one failure prove?”—this coming at nearly the end of the novel. Their failures, flops, and disappointments only serve to propel Bouvard and Pécuchet into ever new research.
The funny disjunction between theory and practice that drives the narrative— boundless enthusiasm for the former, unremitting incompetence at the latter—might recall Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but Flaubert’s “phenomenology” is strangely static and repetitive (perhaps Hegel’s is as well?). Bouvard and Pécuchet try to learn and understand, but they only ever recite and repeat. The Flaubertian universe is one of canned knowledge, empty formulas, and doctrines that clash with one another and cancel each other out. Bouvard and Pécuchet are essentially parrots (the parrot being a favorite Flaubertian animal), and the text of the novel is composed as an elaborate web of paraphrases and quotations. Where could this possibly lead? In Flaubert’s plan for the novel’s conclusion, there is a kind of reconciliation, a happy ending. After a final debacle, Bouvard and Pécuchet give up trying to learn and return to their original profession: copying. The duo have a special two-sided desk built for them and set about copying anything and everything they can get their hands on.
“They copy haphazardly, whatever falls into their hands, all the papers and manuscripts they come across, tobacco packets, old newspapers, lost letters, believing it all to be important and worth preserving.” Each and every signifier, the totality of the symbolic order, must be copied. During their previous experiments, Bouvard and Pécuchet
yearned to be celebrated for their scientific achievements: “Like all artists, they craved applause.” By the end of the book, they have given up their narcissistic fantasies and committed themselves to a purer vocation. In a 1967 essay, Michel Foucault drew the connection between Flaubert’s clerks and his earlier portrait of Saint Anthony. There is a quasi-mystical dimension to the labor of the copyists, a kind of secularized ecstasy for the era of the modern office. Just as Saint Anthony dreamed of becoming pure matter, so the modern-day clerkly saints dream of becoming pure discourse. This is how Foucault concludes his interpretation of the novel, by imagining, in an Escher-like loop, Bouvard and Pécuchet copying Bouvard and Pécuchet. Quite fittingly, the plot of the novel was itself a copy: Flaubert borrowed its basic outline from the 1841 story “The Two Clerks” by Barthélemy Maurice, about an aging pair of legal clerks who retire together to the countryside and plan on leading new lives, only to discover that copying is their true calling and source of happiness.
It is illuminating to compare Flaubert’s copyists with that other fabled copy clerk of 19th-century literature, and subject of intensive philosophical reflection, Melville’s Bartleby—who is himself heir to Gogol’s copyist Akaky Akakievich, the protagonist of arguably the greatest story in Russian literature. (A literary history of clerks, a genealogy of the office comedy, has yet to be written.) On the one hand, we have the diabolical copyist who, preferring not to copy, becomes the bone in the throat of the system, the singular object that cannot be assimilated by the symbolic order (in this case, the rules and quirky routine of the lawyer’s Wall Street office). On the other hand, we have the copyist-saints who elevate the symbolic
order itself to the level of the sublime object, and who, in a mise en abyme, become nothing other than “discourse folded upon itself” (to follow Foucault’s interpretation). By not only withdrawing from his copyist duties but also refusing to budge or even explain himself, Bartleby becomes an enigmatic “Thing,” an obtrusive presence that resists understanding and symbolization. Bouvard and Pécuchet, in contrast, are consummate copyists for whom everything is to be integrated into a vast seamless book, an ever-expanding patchwork of linguistic detritus. To put it in Lacanian terms: either the Thing appears as the internal limit of the symbolic, its indivisible remainder, or else the symbolic order itself occupies the place of the Thing, thereby becoming one gigantic all-consuming remainder—not the prison-house but the dustbin of language. Archive or library (Foucault titled his essay “Fantasia of the Library”) is perhaps too dignified a term: Bouvard and Pécuchet treat language more like a data dump. Flaubert’s final novel announces, at the pinnacle of realist literature, a world where literature has been surpassed, where stories and myths no longer hold pride of place, but where all words are equal and every last scrap of writing deserves to be redeemed. Such is the salvation of words: to be copied.
Flaubert’s disciple Guy de Maupassant described Bouvard and Pécuchet as “the Tower of Babel of science, where all the diverse, contradictory, yet absolute doctrines, each speaking its own language, demonstrate the impotency of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and ‘the eternal misery of everything.’” But it’s not simply that the novel pokes fun at the incompetence of its protagonists, or uses them to expose the more ridiculous doctrines of its times, or
delivers a moral lesson about the vanity of human striving. Rather, the monstrousness of Flaubert’s encyclopedia-cum-novel— the seriousness of its extremely prolonged joke—lies in a much more uncanny effect: language appears as an anonymous and autonomous power, the discourse of the Other turning its subjects into human parrots, spoken rather than speaking subjects. Writing of his Dictionary of Received Ideas, which was to form the final part of the book, Flaubert explains that its intended effect is to stun its readers into silence: “Once one has read it one should dare not speak for fear of spontaneously uttering one of its phrases.” For the novel to succeed, Flaubert knew he had to push it to the point of epistemological vertigo, so that the reader would no longer know what the author intended or believed: Flaubert had to identify with the texts he was copying, with the labor of his copyists. (As Flaubert explains to Turgenev in a letter dated July 25, 1874, “If it’s done briefly, with a concise, light touch, it will be a more or less witty fantasy, but will lack impact and verisimilitude, whereas if it’s detailed and developed, it will look as though I believe in my story, and it can become a serious and even a frightening thing.”) He had to become a universal knowledge processor.
Critics have argued that the literary style of Madame Bovary anticipates the advent of cinema, with its intercutting of shots, zoom-ins to significant details, and use of the hors-champ. Sergei Eisenstein praised in particular Flaubert’s cross-montage of dialogues. Likewise, Bouvard and Pécuchet anticipates the era of digital search engines and machine intelligence. It’s as if, from within the form of the realist novel (which he, moreover, arguably invented),
Flaubert anticipated another future medium. Doesn’t Google make Bouvards and Pécuchets of us all? Isn’t Bouvard and Pécuchet the original ChatGPT, providing canned answers for all queries, culled from an unfathomably vast scrap heap of data, the “universal library”? Flaubert’s knowledge-regurgitating clerks already sound a bit like AI. (The uncanny effect of chatbots is not that they can simulate human speech but that some human beings already sound like chatbots.) Bouvard and Pécuchet are extremely well-read imbeciles who only ever parrot the texts they consume, relentless and mindless as algorithms. They are human book processors, an automated intelligence avant la lettre, with Flaubert in effect bemoaning the cost of doing what ought to be a machine’s work, manually creating a universal knowledge engine: “Frankly I can’t take any more.”
Neither could many of his readers. Flaubert himself worried about this: “The great danger is monotony and boredom.” Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an existential psychoanalysis of over a thousand pages on Flaubert, disliked the novel, finding it “deadly boring.” Perhaps it’s only today that the farcical critical encyclopedia has found its ideal reader. ChatGPT furnishes an eminently Bouvard-Pécuchetian answer to the prompt “How is the novel Bouvard and Pécuchet like ChatGPT?” including its claim of superiority over Flaubert’s amateurs of science:
“Bouvard and Pécuchet” is a satirical novel by the French writer Gustave Flaubert, published posthumously in 1881. The novel tells the story of two copy-clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, who decide to abandon their jobs
and devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. They embark on a series of experiments and investigations, but their efforts invariably end in failure and absurdity. In some ways, “Bouvard and Pécuchet” can be seen as a precursor to the idea of an artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, which is also designed to accumulate knowledge and generate responses based on that knowledge. Like Bouvard and Pécuchet, ChatGPT is also capable of providing information and insights on a wide range of topics, but its responses are ultimately limited by the quality and scope of the data it has been trained on. However, there are also significant differences between ChatGPT and the characters of Bouvard and Pécuchet. Unlike the human protagonists of the novel, ChatGPT does not have the capacity to experience frustration or disappointment when its efforts fall short. Instead, it simply processes the available data and generates a response based on that data, without any emotional attachment or investment in the outcome. Additionally, while Bouvard and Pécuchet are portrayed as bumbling amateurs who are in over their heads, ChatGPT is a highly sophisticated tool that is constantly being refined and improved by its developers.
It’s true that the Flaubertian Generative Pretrained Transformer was trained on a mere 1,500 volumes compared to the 300 billion words and 570 billion gigabytes of text datasets consumed by ChatGPT. (Flaubert’s research for Bouvard and Pécuchet is now cataloged in an online project by
the European Association for Digital Humanities. To quote the website, its “main asset is an original computing device producing configurable arrangements of quotations extracted from the published documents. Among other arrangements, web users can produce hypothetical reconstructions of Bouvard et Pécuchet’s second volume.”) Curious readers can now play Bouvard and Pécuchet with Flaubert’s original archive: a kind of choose-your-ownadventure through the oddest corners of the 19th century hive mind. The Bouvard and Pécuchet system of our era operates on a far vaster epistemic scale. It’s also, as the project’s creators observe, perfectly dispassionate, without the capacity for frustration, disappointment, and other all-too-human affects that afflicted the original copy clerks. On the other hand, Flaubert’s “bumbling amateurs” already manifested a machinelike perseverance, never giving up on their quest for the absolute. Their answer to any setback or impasse is always more knowledge: “Maybe we just don’t know enough about chemistry!” Failure is attributed to a lack of knowledge, that is, to an insufficiency of inputs. There is never a question of a lack in knowledge, of a rupture or break within a given framework. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet in which he claimed that Flaubert was the first to shatter the realist novel he created; he also thought that its bureaucracy of knowledge looked ahead to Kafka. And Kafka was indeed a great admirer of Flaubert. But Kafka was obsessed precisely with this other lack, writing about structures riddled with gaps and holes, the missing word. He is the author not of the Tower of Babel of science but of, to cite one of his fragments, the “pit of Babel.”
At one point, Bouvard and Pécuchet do experience a kind of break:
Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village, and on the fact that one could find other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus stretching to the end of the earth, they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.
This is as close to a direct statement by the author as one can find in the novel— the “piteous faculty” of stupidity detection is Flaubert’s own. Flaubert intended his Babelesque novel as a revenge on his epoch: “I am planning a thing in which I give vent to my anger […] I shall vomit over my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me.” But it’s the automated form he so presciently anticipated—a purely descriptive literature that does nothing but rehash already existing discourse, vomiting back whatever it has digested—that’s now wreaking its revenge on Flaubert, minus the anger and disgust.
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso
Vintage silver halide print
14 × 11 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles.
On psychoanalysis and the American presidency
by Jamieson Webster
It’s well-worn knowledge that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fact, he was so grandiosely pessimistic that he counted his theories as one of the great blows to mankind along with Copernicus and Darwin: we are not the center of the universe, we are not some unique species set apart from the rest of life on earth, and we are not masters in our own house. Freud’s message is often watered down to mean that there are processes in the mind that we don’t know about, like the way computer software runs in the background, or that there
are parts of ourselves that are hidden and only need to be carefully revealed. These gloss the extremity of his actual message that we fundamentally cannot know ourselves—but for the tip of an iceberg.
How does our lack of self-knowledge tip the scales of history? It is important that we know what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. There is no better curb to human hubris. Actions we take might be more ethical if undertaken with a strong sense of our human limitations. As we begin to reckon with the failures of Western democracy, especially regarding the rationality of politics and the fitness of political leaders, could we have a better sense of how little shared knowledge there is?
This is a timely moment for Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (2023), which provides a reassessment of the much-disputed book that Freud and American Ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson, speculating about the president’s mental health. That book, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, has been much maligned through the years, renounced by Anna Freud and Erik Erikson, to name a few; the book is not included in the Standard Edition of Freud’s complete works. But reading the two books in tandem makes Freud’s cautionary message regarding human illusions resound, particularly as they affect politics. Since I am a psychoanalyst, you would think that I would know this human impediment intimately, and yet resistance is such that I felt startled revisiting Freud and Bullitt’s basic intuitions about a former American president. The
contemporaneity of the book shook me. It was as if they were speaking to our current predicament, close to 100 years later.
•
The book on Wilson by Freud and Bullitt was published in 1966, after a tumultuous and obscure path following its completion in 1939. Publication was ostensibly postponed due to Bullitt’s shifting political career. Bullitt, a diplomat who served under Wilson during the First World War, publicly resigned in 1919, later testifying against the president in a Senate hearing on the Treaty of Versailles. In the time leading up to World War II, he was already looking to re-enter politics and feared that a book examining the unconscious conflicts that led to devastating diplomatic failures on the part of an American president would stand in the way. The book’s eventual publication was met with skepticism and scorn, as well as endless speculation on the exact nature of the collaboration between the two men. Anna Freud, in a letter to the psychoanalyst Dr. Max Schur (who assisted Freud’s euthanasia), encouraged his psychoanalytic association not respond to the reviews: “The sooner the book falls into oblivion the better. We all wish, after all, that it had never turned up. […] The only correct conclusion is that this book was written by Bullitt, and not by my father.”
Weil, a fellow at the Yale Law School, recently found in an unmarked box in Yale’s Bullitt archive what appears to be the original manuscript by Freud and Bullitt, showing the extent of their collaboration. The box includes their notes to one another, as well as smaller signs of their cooperation—both their signatures grace the end
of every chapter. Freud clearly assented to a version of the text, which Weil believes was a political act: written during the rise of fascism, the study of Wilson spoke to the popularity of Adolf Hitler.
And yet, this manuscript is significantly different from the book published in 1966 (Weil hopes to publish the original text if copyright issues can be resolved). Weil counts over 300 edits; whole pages were deleted, as well as almost an entire chapter. We can see that the two men argued over the more overt interpretations of Wilson’s sexuality, especially what Freud called his unconscious or passive homosexuality. Some of Freud’s critique of Christianity, especially Christian attitudes of purity, was also edited out, though they originally agreed on these issues as evidenced by their signatures and exchanges. It was simply never a subject in their heated debates.
Bullitt also later edited out some of Freud’s most potent commentary on the psychic life of leaders. Weil speculates that Bullitt, in later life, returned to Christianity feeling that it was the only reasonable stance to fight a “faith” such as communism. The edits were perhaps also a response to a larger-scale reconsideration of Wilson’s legacy. By 1966, Woodrow Wilson had entered a renaissance. His ideas were being touted as a model for the UN and NATO avant la lettre. While this is true—and Freud and Bullitt certainly laud his attempt to broker world peace on a continent caught in a contest over the spoils of war— it is also an act of historical revision.
Prior to this re-canonization, an enigma haunted Wilson’s legacy. He botched the Paris peace talks, and the eventual Treaty of Versailles failed to include the United States in the League of
Nations—his raison d’être. Wilson allowed Great Britain and France to strip Germany of its territories, reconfigure borders that were sure to destabilize the region, and issue punitive reparations that could never be met. As Freud and Bullitt masterfully show, Wilson had all the cards stacked in his favor and never played even one of them. He had leverage over both countries: they owed money to the US and needed America’s approval. He could have forced negotiations into the public, whose support he had, rather than continue behind closed doors. This would have drawn in the participation of other countries and their interests. Wilson seemingly placed no pressure, at any moment, and acquiesced to all their demands. “It is possible he never made a decision,” write Freud and Bullitt, “and simply disintegrated.”
This was a moment of diplomacy so disastrous that many knew it would lead to a second world war. No one understood what Wilson was thinking. For Bullitt and Freud, politics is personal and the personal is shot through with the familial and the sexual. Religious or political beliefs are a thin cover for a world of inner turmoil. In his cuts and edits, Bullitt appeared to be making a shrewd and timely decision. Arguing about political miscalculations is one thing, but calling a former American president who was in the process of being re-canonized a puritan whose repressed homosexuality caused a psychotic persecution mania would have been difficult, to say the least—even, or especially, if it explained some of his bizarre capitulations to idealized masculine figures and near-obsessive, self-sabotaging battles with others.
Woodrow Wilson left Paris in 1919, after staying there for most of six months,
and soon suffered a breakdown and later a stroke, which weakened him and led to his death. Some have tried to attribute Wilson’s erratic actions to the stroke, but there’s no evidence of that, especially since many of his decisions were made before he became ill. For example, he had his own party vote against a ratification of the treaty that would have corrected the mistakes made in the original agreement (if the United States had ratified the treaty, Wilson could have achieved second hand what he originally set out to do). But that would require acknowledging his mistakes. As Freud and Bullitt say,
This looks like hypocrisy; but careful examination will show that it was not hypocrisy. Wilson’s apparent hypocrisy was nearly always self-deception. […] The facts of the war became to him not the actual facts but facts which he invented to express his wishes. From time to time the actual facts rose out of suppression and he drove them back by renewed assertions of the imaginary facts which expressed his desires. He was persuaded by his own words. He began to believe utterly in his phrases. By his words he made many men in many lands believe that the war would end in a just peace, and he made all America “drunk with this spirit of self-sacrifice”; but no man was more deceived or intoxicated by his words than he himself.
Weil’s book, and the manuscript by Bullitt and Freud, offer a unique interpretation among the many attempts to understand Wilson’s will to self-sabotage, which then led to one of the most catastrophic
events in modern history. And the implications are radical. If the problem is not hypocrisy, cynical politics, or ignorance and political missteps, but rather a man’s divorce from reality, what do we do about that? We’re still trying to answer this question. •
Why did Bullitt sanitize the text? Why did he keep the original version, which could eventually be discovered? No doubt for his own unconscious, self-sabotaging reasons. Freud was, after all, his psychoanalyst. Importantly, Bullitt was instrumental to Freud and his family being able to leave Vienna safely for London in 1938. Bullitt claimed that he received the final blessing for the manuscript when he met Freud in London; the letters between Freud, Bullitt, and Freud’s daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst herself, seem to prove this.
Bullitt lived a remarkable life between 1932 and 1966, working for Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union and ambassador to France during World War II. When he was refused service in the United States Army, he joined the Free French Forces and served under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. He was with the general at the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender. Following the war, he was increasingly alarmed by communism, which moved him politically towards the right. When Eisenhower won the election, he didn’t give Bullitt an appointment, feeling that his views on Russia and China were too extreme. By 1964, after Barry Goldwater had lost by a landslide, he was forced to admit that his political career was over. He was 73 years old.
Two years later, Bullitt finally decided to attempt to publish the book on Wilson and sent a draft to Anna Freud, who edited it along the lines of a well-known letter by her father (Freud wrote that Bullitt’s prose was repetitive and somewhat tedious, and so it is). She otherwise approved of the work. Bullitt rejected her emendations, and though she did not back away from publishing the text as her father’s, she eventually turned her back on it. We now know that she never saw the original version of the manuscript, Bullitt misleading her into believing that his version was the text Freud had approved.
The claim was eventually made that Bullitt only received Freud’s blessing because he felt obliged to Bullitt for saving him and his family from the SS. The psychoanalytic world later distance itself from the published book, and most psychoanalysts I know have never read it. No one could believe that Freud collaborated in writing something so seemingly mediocre, a work that bears none of the elegance of his style of writing or thinking. At best, they claimed, he served as a consultant for Bullitt.
Erik Erikson, winner of the National Book Award for his psychobiography of Gandhi, wrote a damning review in The New York Review of Books. “The ‘joint’ attempt,” he wrote, “to treat the whole scene at Versailles as a stage for one man’s danse macabre does not clarify the workings of history.” Quoting the book at length in exasperation, Erikson finally pronounces “enough”—adding, however, that the book’s failure is a pity since some of the parent-child dynamics suggested in it do tend to haunt the lives of those with a messianic bent, such as Wilson. Erikson mourns
what could have been, since psychological insight into matters of war and peace is indispensable. But this, he says, is not available here.
Freud’s interest in Wilson was, in itself, quite out of character, given Freud’s unrelenting suspicion of America and general pessimism about politics. Freud himself admitted that he had high hopes about Wilson’s peace mission, though he was promptly disillusioned. Erikson writes that Freud must have felt a “Moses-like indignation” at all false Christian prophecy. “What he heard from Bullitt about Wilson (with whom Bullitt had broken in Paris, as the book recounts) convinced Freud that Wilson’s policies represented the epitome of ‘Christian science applied to politics.’”
One can certainly imagine the interest and excitement Freud took in his new American patient’s tales of his time with Woodrow Wilson. Before they began writing together, Freud had lauded Bullitt’s play The Tragedy of Woodrow Wilson as brilliant, noting that it should be staged with “a hurricane of passion, like an anxiety-dream.” Aside from Freud’s early work with Josef Breuer for Studies in Hysteria (1895), this is his only other collaboration. The sad truth is that what Bullitt purged from the 1966 text were Freud’s most stringent critiques of Christian politics (Erikson sensed this but couldn’t prove it, and now we can see the full extent of the purges). Seeing the redacted pages in Weil’s book, there is no doubt in my mind that the hand behind these passages is Freud’s.
Freud did not live to see the publication of the Wilson book, a fact that Erikson claimed was just further evidence of “Freudulence.” Bullitt’s edits certainly make for a less elegant and less
complex work, but the essence of Freud’s thought is still there. Bullitt watered down the passages about Wilson’s puritanical beliefs and toned down Freud’s argument that Wilson’s blindness to his bisexuality and castration fears made effective political leadership nearly impossible. Instead, Wilson emerges as someone with rote daddy issues, without the sting of the broader implications Freud lent to these ideas. The book reads like a case study that happens to be political, not a study of a case with broader political implications.
And yet, Freud’s Moses-like indignation, his calculated reserve about what is democratically possible, reverberates in our contemporary political landscape. And here is where the real value of the book lies.
•
Freud was distrustful of America for two reasons: money and religion. This sentiment appears again and again in his letters. In a letter to Jung on December 3, 1910, Freud complained that the flat, sterile, insipid objections to his theories were the same on either side of the Atlantic. He mused: “In our studies of America, have we ever looked into the source of the energies they develop in practical life? I believe it is the early dissolution of family ties, which prevents all the erotic components from coming to life and banishes the Graces from the land.” The particular prudishness of Americans, the heavy repression of their erotic lives, made them ripe for the “unbridled pursuit of money and possessions,” as well as the pursuit of technological advances that render every obstacle illusory. To live like an American means “no time for the libido.” As many have pointed out, what Freud failed to see was that his
theories wouldn’t be rejected by America, they would be assimilated and turned towards the ends of efficiency, profit, and more repressiveness.
In fact, this was the most complete way to neutralize Freud. Freud detested the idea of psychoanalysis being adapted to the haste of American life and their zeal for cutting corners. He imagined the situation being like a fire brigade dealing with a house fire by removing the lamp that started it.
Freud was also fond of a joke about America, noted in his 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and repeated during his 1909 lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts (though he edited out the bit saying that the joke was specifically about Americans):
Here is an American anecdote: “Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgment on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap
between the pictures and asked quietly: ‘But where’s the Saviour?’”
Freud liked the joke because it plays on absence: the space between the paintings is also the absent image of Christ hanging between two thieves. Americans, in his view, were always asking where the savior is. In the book on Wilson, the punchline would take an entirely different tone. For Freud, Wilson, who arrived in Paris as a savior, also clearly had a God complex, and was himself caught between Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George and France’s President Georges Clemenceau.
Bullitt erased Freud’s final line in the book: “Facts are more useful than faiths. Truth is a better ally than any deity.” Wilson, as US president, imported a particularly American God complex into politics. Since then, we have seen this phenomenon repeated many times. Consider the watershed moment when George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, said that Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher, which preceded the Oedipal fiasco of his attempt to finish his father’s war in Iraq. Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency was laced with messianic hope. Donald Trump seems to elicit similar feelings, but from the other side. His father’s name was Fred Christ Trump—Christ being the maiden name of his maternal German grandmother.
Race also plays a peculiar, important role in this dynamic. Freud commented once on the importance of Jung’s study of America and the special repressions of white Americans living side by side with Black Americans. A great deal of critical studies of American racism have come to rely on psychoanalysis (even as psychoanalysis in this country became a
profession dominated by white men). Weil brings race into his reading of the Freud and Bullitt text, noting an important detail about Wilson that Freud and Bullitt had bypassed but which follows their theory closely. Wilson grew up in the South during the Civil War and was the first president from the region to be elected president following that war. He had a submissive reverence for General Jan Smuts—a racist South African soldier and statesman, and apparently a force capable of making Wilson capitulate almost instantaneously. Weil writes, “Smuts’s lofty purpose was to unify white Christian ‘civilization.’ Like Wilson, who moralized like a pastor while rejecting racial and gender equality, Smuts spoke a language of universal rights that applied in practice only to whites.”
Ultimately, the Paris peace talks were not immune to the idiosyncrasies of American politics, which were saturated with puritanism, money, misogyny, and racism. According to Weil, Smuts seduced Wilson into agreeing to strip Germany of their colonies, destroy their navy, and, through tortured logic, force Germany to cover British pensions and other payments to civilians. “It was after surrendering to Smuts on reparations that Wilson suffered his collapse.”
Freud and Bullitt describe a man gripped by extreme paranoia, entering into a mania of speech-making, claiming that the treaty was a masterpiece: “It is so much of a people’s peace that in every portion of its settlement every thought of aggrandizement […] on the part of the great powers was brushed aside. […] They did not claim a single piece of territory.” Freud and Bullitt write, “he was very close to psychosis.”
Wilson eventually suffered from thrombosis on the right side of his brain,
paralyzing the left side of his body. This was the last of a series of physical and mental breakdowns—each carefully detailed by Freud and Bullitt and all marked by similar forms of conflict, delusion, and manic speechifying. “The Woodrow Wilson who lived on was a pathetic invalid, a querulous old man full of rage and tears, hatred and self-pity.” In a final interview with Wilson in October 1923, a few months before his death, the only person the former president felt worthy of singling out by name was Jan Smuts. Freud writes in the Introduction,
We all know that we are not fully responsible for the results of our acts. We act with a certain intention; then our act produces results which we did not intend and could not have foreseen. Thus often we reap more blame and disrepute, and occasionally more praise and honor than we deserve. But when, like Wilson, a man achieves almost the exact opposite of that which he wished to accomplish, when he has shown himself to be the true antithesis of the power which “always desires evil and always creates good,” when a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible. […] A measure of sympathy developed; but sympathy of a special sort mixed with pity, such as one feels when reading Cervantes for his hero, the naïve cavalier of La Mancha. And finally, when one compared the strength of the man to the greatness of the task which he had taken upon himself, this pity was so
overwhelming that it conquered every other emotion. Thus, in the end, I am able to ask the reader not to reject the work which follows as a product of prejudice.
This is sober Freud. It is as if we can see him taking pity on little Tommy Wilson, on all of us.
•
There’s a funny phrase that Freud and Bullitt use throughout the text: “double identification” or, sometimes, a “double helping” of identification, as if identification tended towards gluttony. Identification—recognizing oneself in another—poses certain problems in psychoanalysis because it is easily confused with a fantastical version of the other person, and can also be a way of refusing to differentiate oneself and seperate from them. Ultimately it is fueled by narcissism and disavowed aggression—a way for the libido to not quite leave the self in the direction of the world, where it finds its limit. Wilson, they claim, morbidly identified with his father. On top of this, he also needed to find a younger man to identify with himself and then love as he wished his father had loved him (hence, “double identification”).
Thus, Wilson, who did not bear a son, was always father and son both. He remained close to his father throughout his life, unable to make decisions without consulting him. Wilson once wrote to his father: “I recognize the strength growing in me as of the nature of your strength […] and I feel daily more and more bent toward creating in my own children that combined respect and tender devotion for their father that you gave your children for you.
Oh, how happy I should be, if I could make them think of me as I think of you!”
This manic exaltation—a pure narcissistic circle—also hides an extreme aggression that was never openly expressed by Wilson towards his father. Wilson had long suffered from psychosomatic symptoms related to stress, including mysterious headaches and crippling indigestion, but these worsened after his father died, eventually resulting in a hemorrhage in his eye, which presaged his later series of strokes. And, throughout his life, Wilson carried on his most intimate relationships with younger men: Professor John Grier Hibben in his Princeton years and Colonel Edward House during his presidency. “His thoughts and mine are one,” Wilson wrote of House.
Identification cannot face the conflicts it is meant to resolve, and thus cannot bear open challenge. Wilson’s most bitter feelings of persecution manifested when Hibben and House expressed differences of opinion, which he took as an absolute betrayal. If you were Wilson’s enemy, there were no lengths he would not go to ensure your defeat, even to his own detriment. Through these repetitively loved and hated men, Wilson was fighting against what Freud and Bullitt called his passive homosexuality, even as he married and had a family.
Taking this further, the double dose of identification also created a powerful unconscious identification with Jesus Christ—not merely because Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister (and so a representative of God) nor because all children view their parents as godlike but rather because, for Jesus Christ, submission to the father meant absolute triumph. For
Freud, the Oedipus complex forces a man to confront conflicting and incompatible desires to submit to and be loved by one’s father, as well as to oust him. These strains find an acceptable unconscious form in the double identification that Christ offers as submissive son and God-the-father.
Freud always maintained the theory of universal human bisexuality. This also provided a foundation for his interpretation of the appeal of Christianity: each of us has to find an outlet for masculine and feminine wishes. “In many cases, a man whose passivity to his father has found no direct outlet discharges it through identification with Jesus Christ. Psychoanalysis has discovered that this identification is present in entirely normal persons.” It is around these questions of bisexuality that Bullitt redacted a great deal of material. For example, he did not include the following passages from Freud’s first chapter:
It is perhaps no accident that with the worldwide spread of Christendom during the first centuries after the birth of Christ an extraordinary decline in the direct expression of homosexuality coincided with its official suppression. Its direct expression simply had become unnecessary. Identifying with Christ gave expression to homosexuality in a manner that not only found social approval but also must have been acceptable to the superego, which always strives to resemble God. Christ is, after all, the perfect reconciliation between masculinity and femininity. Belief in his divinity includes the belief that one can realize the wildest dreams of activity by means of the utmost
passivity; by submitting unreservedly to the father, one triumphs over him and becomes God oneself. This mechanism of reconciling opposing impulses of masculinity in the constitutionally bisexual human being by identifying with Christ is something so satisfying that it assures the Christian religion a long existence. People will not readily be willing to give up something that rescues them from the most difficult conflict they have to grapple with. They will continue to identify with Christ for a long time to come.
This is a stunning passage. Freud lauds Christianity for the staying power of its particular brand of sublimation. “Perfect,” he calls it, noting that it rescues us from the most difficult conflict we have to grapple with—though I think he’s using a slightly ironic tone unique to him. But he also means what he says, for this avoidance is part of the ongoing processes of human civilization—processes that are long-standing and durable.
As Weil notes, the problem for Bullitt wasn’t suggesting that Wilson struggled with latent homosexual wishes. Certainly both of the authors accord no blame for this, only pointing out that, could Wilson have recognized this side of himself, he might have avoided some of the damages he caused. “The problem,” writes Weil, lay in suggesting that Wilson’s “homosexuality was associated with Christ and Christianity. […] To derive an interpretation of Christianity from a psychoanalysis concluding that Wilson was a passive homosexual would have attracted considerable dispute, if not alarm.” This is no doubt true, but I also think that Freud’s
idea of bisexuality is still radical, claiming as it does that both heterosexuality and homosexuality are contingent phenomena. A man who seems intensely feminine can be heterosexual, while a seemingly macho man can be homosexual. The variations, as we know today, are infinite.
Freud wrote: “If human bisexuality necessarily appears to us at times as a heavy burden and the source of endless difficulties, we must not forget that without it human society could not exist at all.” In fact, it is human bisexuality that holds the promise of uniting all races into one great brotherhood for Freud. The problem then is not bisexuality, homosexuality, or heterosexuality. Freud writes, “They exist. That is all. […] Like the universe, the bisexuality of mankind has to be accepted.” The ultimate problem is the repression of bisexuality, which can drive persecutory paranoia. “The habit […] is an easy one to acquire and produced dangerous divorces from reality. The sacrosanct repressed area tends always to annex adjacent territory until only facts which accord with desires can be recognized. […] [Wilson] lost his mental integrity.”
Only for Christ, write Freud and Bullitt, does submission lead to conquering the world. This is not the case for mere mortals, and Wilson was not Christ. They claimed that Wilson’s delusional, submission to power, in the belief that submission is actually the rationalized epitome of power, was a losing prospect. This kind of psychological dynamic would have rendered him useless from the beginning and would never have made for an effective negotiator in the subtle game of international diplomacy. And what guided Wilson was not any Christian ideal of universal love or peace—he was, as
we have seen, quite vindictive—but rather an “ideal of purity” that acted as a screen allowing him to avoid fears of castration and homosexuality. Wilson spoke of himself as a man of great intensity restrained only by his ideal of purity. Not only does such delusional narcissism tend to make these men impotent with women, this ideal is never strong enough to hold back a powerful libido (think of all the abuse committed by supposedly chaste members of the clergy). “Such [pure] men do not exist,” write Freud and Bullitt. •
I once heard of a psychoanalyst who worked for the US Navy screening applicants for service on submarines. According to the story, he was assessing for severely repressed homosexual conflicts that could lead to a psychotic break given the proximity of men in close quarters, deep in the ocean, for long stretches of time. It strikes me as rather miraculous that, at one time, we could have recognized this as a problem to be concerned with.
It also happens that America’s involvement in World War I was initiated by the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915. At that point, Wilson believed that he was already on the verge of establishing peace, right up to the moment when Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. This was one of the first signs during his presidency of his trenchant capacity for denial. Would he have been allowed on a submarine? And if not, should he have been allowed in the White House?
Freud’s final works during his lifetime were dedicated to the force of denial, as well as to an investigation of religion, and the psychobiography of Wilson provides
an important antecedent. If the ego can completely split from reality, believing two contradictory ideas at once, then rationalization runs deep. In fact, this kind of splitting has a lot to do with our inability to reckon with our own bisexuality. Thus, splitting goes all the way down. “[F]rom the point of view of ‘success in life,’” writes Freud, “psychic disturbance may actually be an advantage.”
America needed someone who could speak as if he were “God’s mouthpiece on earth,” and while Wilson’s obsessive speech-making was absurd, he nevertheless swayed crowds. Politics is seduction by means of the very psychic disturbance of our leaders. It is not merely that we, the audience, may be hypnotized by what leaders say, but rather that they may well be under their own spell, weaving a delusion with their words to further insulate themselves from reality. We would, of course, do better to pay attention to their actions than their rhetoric. More importantly, it may benefit us to know that our own struggles play into our fascination with our leaders.
Freud issues to us his words of caution:
a neurosis is an unstable foundation upon which to build a life. Although history is studded with the names of neurotics, monomaniacs, and psychotics who have risen suddenly to power, they have usually dropped as suddenly to disgrace. Wilson was no exception to the rule. The qualities of his defects raised him to power; but the defects of his qualities made him, in the end, not one of the world’s greatest men but a great fiasco.
We must consider not declarations and claims, but a leader’s character and capacity to act under great duress. Even a minimal amount of genuine insight into themselves on the part of our leaders would be hugely reassuring these days. That, and a relative absence of pomp and promise.
Weil ends his book with a quote from a letter by noted author and newspaper editor Frank C. Waldrop contesting a bad review in The Washington Post of the Wilson psychobiography. For Waldrop, the book laid bare how the secrets of the soul define our natures; it made most histories “look pallid and incomplete.” “Dictators are easy to read. Democratic leaders are more difficult to decipher. However, they can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history,” writes Weil.
Freud hoped that a feeling for the diversity of mental life would make us more just and less destructive. He could have admired the melting pot of American multiculturalism, but Freud was judicious with his hopes—Wilson was probably the last leader he allowed himself to be seduced by. In the end, Freud said that he did not really know if we could tolerate the diversity of human constitutions, a diversity that becomes the impetus for war. I am certain that Freud did not think that America’s myopic puritanism and greed was fit for the bill. Certainly not then, but the real question is—what about now?
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973/2019
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso
Silver halide print
8 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
PORNOGRAPHY
by Rhian Sasseen
The shoulder of a man resembles nothing insomuch as the sideways petal of a tulip. The two lips of a man resemble nothing insomuch as an archaic arbiter of might. The man sits on his bed and purses his lips. Below him, the video on his phone screen begins to play.
A language is a hideous thing, concealing as much as it reveals. The language used by the woman on camera resembles nothing insomuch as a code, an argot, a compendium of secrets. Men’s language, women’s language—they’re all the same. They all serve one purpose.
“Touch your cock,” the woman on screen commands, sitting in a dimly lit room somewhere, anywhere, who knows. Off-screen, the man sits in his own dimly lit room and obeys. It is always like this. In every one of this channel’s videos—and he has watched a few—this woman sits there, whispering. No one tells her what to do. The man has perfected his routine; he has his favorites. That curdled feeling, deep in his lower half—his desire rises and his impatience does, too, and away to the internet he scampers, ready to blow off some steam to the banality of a woman onscreen.
It’s always near him, his phone. He regards it with a kind of affinity, affection, as though it were a pet or lover. Rarely are they apart. It sits right beside him, at most tucked inside a pocket, close enough to his body that it feels like another appendage, and when it buzzes with a message, he can feel that buzz spread warmly across his skin. At night, he falls asleep with it beside him, half-hidden beneath the covers. Sometimes he wakes up and can’t fall back to sleep, and there it is, his phone, his comfort, its blue light familiar on his face as he takes it in his insomniac hand and scrolls and scrolls.
Is he lonely? Well, who’s to say. What does loneliness mean, what did loneliness ever mean, now that for the last thirty years every human being has been supposedly a mere computer click away? Alright, yes:
he’s lonely. Past three a.m., only foreigners and the friendless remain online, and that’s when the loneliness really kicks in, seeping out from his typed-out sentences like a stain. Past three p.m., too—in the daylight hours, he’s still lonely. It’s always there, this surprising yet indelible emotion, iris-shaded and soft to the touch. There is not a moment during which this loneliness does not lurk, and when he thinks about it, that’s when he turns to the screen, his phone, the distraction therein.
The screen, the screen. The screen! The thought of it evokes some quality, some emotion, but who’s to say what that is exactly, it’s a wordless humor, a feeling of bemusement, of terror. He feels drawn to it, even more so than the screens that surrounded him in childhood, the televisions and the bulky word processors. Sometimes, the desire to merge with the screen overtakes him, though he doesn’t know what exactly he means by that. But he doesn’t need to articulate it, the phone already knows—this new model unlocks itself with the touch of his face.
The screen. His eyes are on the screen. His eyes stare at the woman, they trace her body, her body that is all he needs in this moment, all he cares about, he’d prefer not to know any of the thoughts inside her head, please and thanks. She’s wearing some kind of frilly slip, a scarlet-colored bra. The way she poses is designed to fill the screen, she’s half-bent over, plush and pushed up breasts prominent. What’s her age? Well, it’s hard to say. She’s young, yes, but it’s that kind of ageless, oversexed youth that could be anywhere from eighteen to forty, a beauty that relies entirely on the signals in his mind that fire off when he glances at her heavy makeup. Oh, but
that’s mean. From the windowless room where she sits, she whispers eagerly about what she’d like the man to do, she’s desperate, you see, she needs it, him, she craves it, she can’t stop, she’d really like to see this faceless stranger’s cum!!!
As he watches her act, his breath grows heavy. What he likes best is turning off his mind and letting this woman do all the work. It is a one-sided affair; he has no need to worry about her pleasure, the pressure that comes from another living, breathing human being. It’s a different experience than sex, one that precludes any real form of connection.
The man’s eyes are shut now, furiously so. As he grips his penis tightly, he lets his phone fall beside him onto the bed. A delicate feeling begins to curl around his balls, his lower stomach; he’s close, and his body takes over. No more thinking, his body knows what to do. As he strokes his phone moves, almost as though it’s being kicked aside, but of course that’s not possible. He’s close, he’s so close. Has the video finished? There’s no more noise. Something brushes against his thigh—the orgasm leaps away from him.
Annoyed, the man abruptly opens his eyes. And there she is. The woman. She’s sitting on his bed.
“Shh, shh, shh,” she tells him as he begins to shout. Even now, there is a seductive quality to her voice, a maternal gleam— what? You don’t think Freud was right? —and she waves her hands in the air as she attempts to soothe him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she says. “I promise. It’s just me. You recognize me, right?”
“How—how exactly did you—”
The woman scrunches her nose up to pout. “There’s no need to sound accusative,”
she tells him, her voice taking on a sexy, babyish whine. “I just want to talk. Can we talk?”
“What exactly do you want to talk about?”
The woman moves off the bed, pulling a high heeled shoe out from where its curve is still stuck in the corner of his phone. She crawled through my phone, he thinks, and he watches in amazement as she begins to pace around his room.
“I just want to talk,” she repeats, turning in a circle. Her red slip shines in the bedroom’s dim light. “Does it actually feel good for you, when I say those words? I always wonder. I’d like to talk, but about anything other than that … I get so tired of all those words—cock, prick, dick, you know. It’s so boring, so one-note. This endless litany, there are really only so many variations. I’m always repeating myself, I never have anything original to say. But I don’t think anyone cares … Pussy, that’s even worse. I can never get into it, you know? What I’m saying. I’m always so fascinated by you, by the others. I really need to feel a connection to get off, you know?” She smiles ruefully. “But, and I know this sounds a little silly, I think … I think I might feel a connection with you.”
The man’s hand is still on his genitalia, only now he is protecting it, covering it, instead of wielding it for her to see. “Do you?” he asks.
She nods. “I’m just so bored of living inside that box,” she tells him, launching into another monologue. Her red vinyl heels are a different shade of red than the rest of what she’s wearing. Her red lipstick, too. So many reds, surely this reminds him of something. Surely it’s all in his head. “I’m so sick of only existing online.
Sometimes it feels like I can only come to life when someone needs me, that it’s my only chance to interact with another human being. Through a search bar.” She laughs, though the situation doesn’t strike him as happy. “I’m a genie, a porn genie. Rub one out and I’ll appear.”
Her pacing begins to grow more frantic. “All day, all night,” she says, voice low, “always having to whisper these fantasies, these endless fantasies—the stuff of other people’s fantasies—I can never speak above a moan. My throat hurts. I’m so sick of groaning! I’m not ashamed about my work, I have no reason to be, I’m doing nothing wrong. It’s not the worst job in the world, not by far. But all I do is whisper. All I do is pose. No one ever wants to hear about my fantasies, not my real ones, anyway. I don’t think I even have any. I think that to have a fantasy, you need someone who’s willing to mold themselves to fit it. But look at me—I’ve crammed myself into someone else’s outline, someone else’s dream.”
The man hesitates before finally speaking. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You never looked that bored to me.”
“Really,” the woman says flatly, stopping to stare at him.
“Really,” he says, shrugging. “But I—I have to admit, when I’m watching you, I’m not … I’m not really paying attention to how you’re feeling. Sorry. It’s just not a consideration.”
“You’ve watched almost every one of my videos, I think.”
“Sorry,” he says again. “I thought … you know, I thought that perhaps you might want to grab a coffee or a drink, or something. Oh, I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to say hello. You seemed
so interested in me.”
“I don’t really know what to say,” he tells her. Carefully, he tucks his penis away, zipping up his jeans. “I don’t really think of you that often, to be honest. Only when I’m watching. It’s a very in-the-moment kind of experience—it’s like, like a bodily function. Like a sneeze. When I’m done, I’m done. That’s why I like your videos, I don’t even have to imagine that I’m getting another person off. And don’t you think showing up here, uninvited, appearing in my room—well, it’s a little awkward, don’t you think?”
He watches the woman as she attempts to hide her disappointment. Carefully, she has constructed an intricate what-if scenario in the privacy of her own head, and now he’s cocked it up, he’s destroyed everything that she’s built. Foolish, she feels so foolish. To get excited over this, to start planning a future, a family, a possibility, with someone you’ve only met online, someone who may or may not really know that you exist—!
“I’m not a bot,” she says defensively.
“I never said you were.”
On the screen there is the possibility of constant revision. The river, you step in it; the dial-up tone, it disappears. Technologies move forward with a buzz and a whirr, but is the human still there? No one really knows! Sometimes you have to remind yourself it’s not a robot that you’re talking to, it’s a human being tweeting that response. No one need be the same self that exists online. The only thing in life we can trust is money, the only constant is debt. A relationship is just a transaction, right? In commerce there is truth—the woman stares at the man—if not exactly love.
“We know each other better now,” she says finally. “I’m glad.”
“I don’t know if we do,” the man responds, confused. “I think we’re talking about two very different things.”
“Oh, give me your phone,” the woman says, and rolls her eyes when he hands it to her. With a frustrated air, she turns away from him and crawls back into the small screen, having had enough.
OF BEAUTY
David St. John
I think Jacob said of the ladder It was A Thing of Beauty
Yet I’m not certain if he meant Its luminous destination
Or the ladder itself as our vehicle To such pure mystery
I’d heard the phrase spoken First with certainty by my own
Father holding up a glossy drama School photo of my mother
Lifted from his torn-ragged college Scrapbook one day
& I read in an essay this same Phrase referring to an elegant lie
In a famous novel by John le Carré —with whom I once had lunch
In Baltimore along with an amusing Anonymous actress—
& my father when I told him this story Called it an especially
Savory detail as he relished its mystery Though as a boy I’d discovered
My mother had a way of telling stories Without a certain objective
Reality that I could locate or quite Confirm but I confess I was
Undisturbed by a few untruths Offered with such original beauty
Of image & a flair for the magical Honored more than fact
So perhaps what she left to me in Death was beyond the bare
Recognition truth cannot always be A thing of beauty just as a ladder
Reaching a story of forgiveness Reveals at its end a thing of beauty
Remains a thing of mystery
Yasuo Kuroda
大駱駝艦 (男肉物語) / DAIRAKUDAKANN Saga of man’s meat, 1975/2023
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso
Inkjet print (exhibition copy)
8.25 × 11.75 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of The Artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
FROM AMERICAN HAN
by E.J. Koh
There are not many substantial studies of han and no studies that explain the features of the uncanny and melancholy intrinsic to han.
—Meera Lee
Culture is not a piece of baggage that immigrants carry with them; it is not static but undergoes constant modification in a new environment.
—Sau-ling Cynthia Wong
The Educated
In December, I joined a cultural read for a popular TV series because I was the sole Korean American on an episode about Korean Americans. The video call began with the writer and producer, the director, their assistants, one consultant, and two hidden screens. My job was to notice what troubled me in the script. In one scene, the father says to his son, “You ruined my life!” Followed by the father’s next words, “You made me suffer.” (The father slams the door). On the call, we talked about the Korean emotion of han. The director wanted drama. Han wasn’t drama. Han wasn’t saying you ruined my life. Han was not the door slamming. Han was the texture of the door handle. Han was the silence after the room darkened. Han was the air holding the unspoken. Han was not an argument. Han rarely had tears, an unraveling. Han was closer to an absence
of desire than its presence. Han meant you had to direct what couldn’t be seen. You had to write what couldn’t be uttered. The pauses, the spaces, and gaps. The director disagreed.
“This is what happens in real life.” The director’s hand waved in and out of view. “He just kicked his son out of the house.”
“But it’s hard to believe. It’s not different from the movies.”
“How about he says sacrifice instead?”
“That’s worse.”
The producer and writer frowned. “Yeah, it doesn’t sound right.” The consultant didn’t see a problem with the dialogue.
“Can we come back to this?” the director said. “Our audience is very broad and aware. They’re going to get it no matter what.”
I recalled once being introduced as a kind but not gentle poet. I could let go of other problems with the script but not this one.
“Changing a word isn’t going to change a scene,” he said. “You know what, you have to see the whole thing. I’ll give your notes to the actors, and they can adjust their delivery. You’ll see it in their faces.”
The director’s assistant stopped typing. The room waited for me to move on. Sitting back, the director told me that he’d lived a hard life, and words like these came with lives like theirs. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said to me. “You don’t know what it’s like for them.”
This surprised me. It was the first time we had met.
“Oh, you think I don’t know?” I said to him. “You think I don’t know what it’s like? You think nobody’s gone through this before? You know how many kids go through this every day? My parents left me in this country when I was a fucking child.
And this is what you have to say about it? You made me suffer? That’s your point for these children and their families, that’s your answer for their lives. It’s not about my parents leaving me. It’s not about this father leaving his son. It’s about what a father had to do to himself to leave. What a father lost to make that decision. It’s about what a child has to do to themselves to love somebody who left them. Who abandoned them. Han isn’t as easy as turning the wheel of a car. The car has to be going so fast for so long that the strength to turn the car must hold all the accumulative weight of what happened to them and be felt by everyone in the car. You don’t take a Korean American family, drop a line about suffering, slam a door, and end fucking scene.”
•
In 2017, four years before, I began my doctoral studies in English language and literature at the University of Washington. A literary magazine asked me to review Krys Lee’s novel. On the cover was How I Became a North Korean in big white letters on a red star. It follows Jangmi, a pregnant North Korean defector imprisoned by her captors, which include South Korean men. Jangmi considers jumping from her window to her death. Then she chooses against it. At first glance, her decision is brave. The soul would persevere, regarding a quality of lightness which satisfies us. American critics argued for such things—her sexuality and economic currency supposing a hopeless existence. Her decision to live as palatable relief.
After reading the novel and its critiques, I visited with the Korean studies librarian at her office with an extra coffee in hand.
“Do you think any of the critics have
tried killing themselves?”
The librarian laughed. “You’re serious. I can’t tell you for sure,” she said. “But you’re not going into the archives. We’re booked up.”
“Jangmi talks about the other girls who slit their wrists. She says it could’ve been her, but she doesn’t want to get away.”
“You’re talking about that book again.” Now she took the coffee. “Doesn’t Jangmi stab the bad guy with scissors in the end?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “By jumping, she wouldn’t have had the chance. She’s not making a decision for humanity—she hates humanity. She’s not relinquishing herself at the window—she’s arming herself.”
“It’s obvious to us,” she said. “But it’s another thing to try and make sense of it for somebody else.”
“It’s obvious because we can talk about han.”
“Han?” She grinned. “It’s everywhere; it’s like air. It’s not something you can bottle up and say, Here it is, it’s right here.”
“Han is just a human emotion. Even if our experiences are unique, we share the experiences of our emotions.”
“You have to be careful talking about han. There’s a lot of people who don’t like anybody using that word.”
When I asked her if I was going to get killed, she said my critics might get to me first. “Don’t stare at a tree you can’t climb.”
“Because of a word?”
“You’re going to need a lot of help.” She looked through her drawer. “When you get lost in your research, just remember what you know about han. You do know it. Your parents put it there, your mother would’ve made sure of it—just like mine.”
The librarian found her keys and opened the basement archives. I couldn’t be down
there alone. “Careful when you reach for something.” She tipped her empty cup. “Sometimes, the shelves get angry and move on their own,” she said. “They snap shut on your fingers to teach you a lesson.” •
I could see for the first time a troubling of the so-called untranslatable word that pointed to Korea’s long national history, one imposed with geographic, collective, and individual wounding—a hollowing. By the 10th century, Korean identity had a nationhood with globally recognized boundaries and a shared ethnicity, language, and culture. However, Japanese invasions preceded the 1910–45 Japanese occupation of Korea. In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched an all-out attack on Korea, and after a brief truce, a second attack. After two Manchurian invasions, France held a campaign against Korea in 1866. Then in 1905, Korea became a Japanese protectorate. Five years later, in 1910, Japan officially annexed the Korean Empire. Americans had misconceptions about Imperial Japan. President Theodore Roosevelt admired the Japanese virility to lead Koreans toward modernity. Japan replaced Korean industries, language, names of the Korean people, and, with systemic erasure, national independence and dignity. Bruce Cumings says, “The Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 is akin to the Nazi occupation of France, in the way it dug in deeply and has gnawed at the Korean national consciousness ever since.” The gnawing of the Korean national consciousness points to a nation and people largely misunderstood, humiliated, and unrecognizable to foreigners, colonizers, imperialists.
During the occupation, my grandmother’s parents escaped Jeju Island and settled in Tokyo. Passing as Japanese educators, they survived the Kantō Massacre and lynchings in the early 1920s over Korean paranoia. When they fled, again, back to Jeju Island, my grandmother found out at 19 that she was not Japanese but Korean. In 1945, after Japan surrendered in World War II, US and Soviet forces split the country at random at the 38th parallel. US Army General John A. Wickham Jr. declared: “Koreans are like field mice, they just follow whoever becomes their leader. Democracy is not an adequate system for Koreans.” On behalf of democracy, mainland Korean police—backed by the US—pushed the Jeju Island massacre. My grandmother’s father, who I called grandfather, came down from his mountain safehold to look for survivors. He was caught and accused of communist ties. They stoned him, over days, in a public demonstration. When they stoned him, my grandfather knew what a stone was—each word, a stone. The Soviets and Americans then waged a war as superpowers, occupying North and South Korea, fighting on foreign land. The Korean War recorded four million casualties—half civilians, or 20 percent of the population—a higher percentage than World War II or Vietnam. Rampant with diseases and deaths, the Korean War dug into the political body and the soul of Koreans everywhere. The North fought against the Japanese, quickly reinstalled to governance over the South by the American government. The US dropped more bombs, including napalm, over the North than they had in the entire World War II Pacific campaign. Meanwhile, the South purged communists and sympathizers, massacring
innocents throughout the region to the wanton applause of American ideology.
•
I was 12 when my mother’s palm enclosed the knife she’d used to slice my sandwich in that morning. In the white kitchen, she lifted the blade to her neck, delicate about the knife’s edge, as if it were a violin bow. Both her parents died tragically: her mother took her own life; her father crashed into a river soon after. Rushed into marriage, my mother moved with my father and his mother, my grandmother from Jeju Island, to California. Japan’s occupation of Korea haunted present-day relations between Korea and Japan—a furor which endured for my Korean nationalist mother, who cursed my Korean Japanese grandmother for buying Kikkoman soy sauce, not Joseon. My grandmother recruited my father against my patriotic mother. My Korean father called himself an American after his youth of corrupt governments, military dictatorships, and suppression campaigns. Today, the Korean War was ongoing. At the DMZ, one of the most militarized borders in the world, North and South militaries aimed for each other with bullets enough to raze a city in an hour. The direction of my mother’s knife naturally turned inward, as if there were no safer place to go. It was not a matter of a threat. It was a matter of knowing even her death would have no effect on our sense of the past. The feeling of the handle gripped her the way those unused to any sort of choice felt after so long a time. She balanced the handle and the heft, integral to the knife doing its job, a skill she maintained every day. Her voice was course like hands tearing silk sheets. “This is how you end
a marriage.” Her trembling touched me more deeply than any scripture or homily. But again, her knife went back into its drawer. Not because she wanted to die but because she couldn’t. My mother explained to me, “Han.” There was no other understanding, only that it lay somewhere within us. My mother, 42, kneeled in front of me in apology. •
Field mice or not, I could see the troubling of the word born of the 35-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea, the division of the country by US and Soviet forces after World War II, the ongoing war at the border. Americans unilaterally occupied Japan and established military rule in Korea while refusing war reparations. The corrosion of national spirit combined with inconclusiveness: the Japanese had yet to come to terms with their history, using the word advanced not invaded for their records. Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo said “no evidence” showed women “forcibly” recruited in the war as comfort women. “Forcible in the narrow sense of the word.” One month later, Abe changed his mind: “I express my sympathy toward the comfort women and apologize for the situation they found themselves in.” In 2023, only nine comfort women remained alive. Abe couldn’t cover the sky with his palm. People would one day recognize the truth. I could see, too, an era farther away. The word named the feeling that arose as you were buried alive with your dead husband. Elaine H. Kim describes han as “the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experiences of oppression.” In psychiatry, han is a suppressed anger with physical symptoms like dizziness and heart
palpitation. In religious studies, a hanful person may develop mental disorders or suicidal ideations; a hanful person may also develop fuel to revolutionize social justice.
Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” drawing on relationality, suggests that the Korean people are both sustained and bound by their relationship with han. Christine Kim complicates han by geography and inheritance, recognizing diasporic Koreans as “trapped in a situation of knowing emotions they cannot feel, being haunted by histories they cannot access.” Meera Lee discovers another dimension through linguistics: “Han is not unique to Korean culture, but rather universal [and yet Korean] society developed a particular language to express its sensitivity to tragic or catastrophic events.” Han, although Korean in its formation, could be universally felt.
•
I asked whether Jangmi’s window belonged to han. It might show a quality of hope, but han was not the feeling that convicted one to save their soul. Han was the distance between the windowsill and the ground. If she jumped, she’d close the distance so essential to han. To end one’s life was nevertheless an end. Han was ongoing. (The war was ongoing.) Han was a gap. By refusing to jump, Jangmi refused to close the gap. She rejected what she understood to be a cure. She did not slit her wrists; she got used to anything to survive. Jangmi wasn’t giving up; she was armed. She wasn’t interested in humanity; she wanted to kill it. Han created a gap within the confines of social atrocity where any choice became a predilection of freedom. The novel’s perpetrators implicated North Korean human rights groups, who depended on the vulnerability
of defectors. These groups risked the lives of defectors to get support funds from countries like the US with their agenda to keep an appearance of human rights interests. They endangered the very people they were supposed to protect. Liberation came at a cost. Many celebrity defectors, with police protection, were paid by networks to dehumanize “brainwashed” North Korean civilians. A chosen percentage spoke on behalf of defectors everywhere. Victims silenced victims. Human rights issues were corruptible. Meanwhile, North Koreans still lived with the horrors of Japanese colonialism and as victims of the worst carpet-bombing in history. From space, one could see the earth’s han—its face pockmarked over a hundred years of bombing. North Korea was a postcolonial state with no reason to trust the world. What remained was the current context of being human in the world: to be willingly uninformed of the atrocities occurring at the borders of nations. Han was not drama. Han was not a stabbing. Han was not even the knife. Han was the quiet before the window. It wasn’t the slaughter but the silence. The human condition could not be separated from its fragility. To be broken for that for which one may not have been to blame. To lose willpower. To be brutalized and condemned to a place one did not feel responsible for. To have han was to be a child who wanted to be loved in a manner she understood but who accepted any love, because pain could not lessen a hope for love.
•
Truth was, I had lost my senses during the video call. I wanted to kill everybody on my screen. By the looks on their faces, they must’ve realized they didn’t care, not really,
because the trouble with han ended with the call, but for me, the trouble went on for as long as I lived. I couldn’t separate how one understood han deeply and how one deeply understood their own experience of han. So I wanted to kill the director, make him see himself as his ghost, so he could watch himself be killed. I would erase the experiences that put him on the call and bury him into the ground. The director thought himself impossible of hatred, and I wanted so badly to punish him, and above all—I told myself over again—save myself from the darkness over my own heart, from recognizing his darkness as mine, and say I was not looking for a war but an end to it, because even in terrible conditions I looked for justice yet it was animal that the director should go even one day without knowing I had killed us both with all my heart. You think I don’t know. You think I don’t know. What was I saying? What was it about the director that I needed him to say I did know? I do know. I do know. After the call, the director wrote kindly in our emails. The writer and producer didn’t show me the script again. The assistant sent me audition tapes to differentiate accents. The set designer asked for photographs of my mother’s house to learn how a Korean immigrant woman arranged her kitchen. Years later, I would still argue in my head: It’s not the door. It’s not the slamming of the door. If all the slammed doors equaled to all the broken families, there would be a lot more slammed doors and fewer broken families.
•
Han is the gap between atrocity and the possibility of reparation. The gap can narrow but cannot close. The gap keeps loss; closing
the gap loses loss. Han is the absence of reparations. The rejection of that which cannot be repaired or forgiven. There can be gaps of internal, external, or imagined locations. Han is specific to Korea but not limited to Korea. Korean society developed a language to convey its specific emotion toward human catastrophe. Yet han crosses the Pacific because it is a word rooted deeply in the human condition. Han is not merely trauma, vague in Western cultural circles for colonization and war, historical defeat and inhumanity. Han is born out of long-standing persecution, inestimable civilian deaths, a forsaken country, inherited differently each generation. Han recalls a whole people or identity that preexisted persecution. Han comes from mercilessness, forcible violence from betrayal of both government and international parties, but culminates into space made empty. Han follows traces of absence—absence of reparations and peace, and the rejection of that which cannot be repaired or forgiven. Han has memories cut deeply by the presence of something missing. Han is a word for the soul that has been wounded. To understand han, one must understand what has been lost. That loss must also remain lost in the present. In its unresolved state, the experience of loss never ceases; han is a repetition of loss in perpetuity. Han is a way of thinking about ourselves. Not merely a suffering, but a suffering that is avoidable and is not avoided, a suffering that breaks us and need not break us.
No word has neatly folded edges like han. Saying han before the mirror, the tongue tucks up, the mouth only opens to close, and the exhalation sinks back onto a soft, flat palate. All the hardness drowned out by the middle ah sound—the ocean between the slight landmasses of h and n.
There are no life rafts, consonants on the way to hold onto. If you added a d at the end of the word, it would become an open hand; without it, a missing one, perhaps longed for. If you added a g at the end of the word, it would be something that could be held; it could hang on to hope. These are just costumes: handle, hanger, handsome. The word han looks like a prison, in symmetry, a crouched body between two identical gates; the first gate, flagged for occupancy. The Korean 한 is a kneeling person, their arms tied behind their back. The Chinese 恨 is a myriad of blocked hallways, a composition of gaps. When the first note is struck, the sound of han is sustained by the piano pedal moving the dampers away from the strings and allowing them to vibrate deeply until released. The word never quite howls, no shaking jowls, but keeps on through an utterance which only suggests its bare and constant presence, humming through the afternoon over the sound of rustling leaves, whipping flags. The word may become a shelter in a time of catastrophe, gathering people the way people gather in the cold winds. A single word, successor to its condition, which cannot be contained, and spills over into different vessels, like the soul that enters the body, and wakes out of it once meeting death, or dreams. The word cannot be fought, or defended; the word endures by its self-made, self-lasting wordness, as all language goes. Once it was a word, it was itself. If it were polite, the word would be a hat. If it had a color, it would be of the color of a dam in a gorge which no one had seen in a hundred years. To pronounce han was to start with an utterance, a sense of recognition, the glimpse of a sound, and the end, an abrupt silence. Without slyness or
irony, the word is sincere, causing anyone to shudder. What poets know about words they know about han as a keeper of secrets.
Yasuo Kuroda
陽物神譚, 1973
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso
Vintage silver halide print
8 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
MENTAL
Andrea Werblin Reid
for the record, please state your name and anxiety, the reason for your glassy eyes, and why your apartment is immersed in slices of light when all you do is speak of their opposite: brute storms and guards, nightmares that cheat their way through.
it’s not where the brain meets its bully, remember, but how the synapses are salted.
it’s just regular thoughts gone turntable. a series of nouns maimed as they exit your mouth
please state your pills, the state of your lungs. the stripes of every zebra you remember.
if machines don’t work, there is always umbrage, altars, u-turns. you could try gratitude sure, but that's a different kind of singing.
TALK SHOW
by Michelle Latiolais
The question had been sent through the radio host’s headphones, and so the host said to her, “My producer has a question,” or “My producer wants me to ask you a question.” Who was this faceless person behind the scenes in the dark technological reaches, listening? They were no longer recording, she thinks, but still she was concerned, surprised. How had the question been phrased? “Will you ever not be lonely?” or had it been “Ask her if she’s still lonely?” She can’t precisely remember. She didn’t know what to say. Heard the question for the
observation it was. Did an observation need answering, or was corroboration sought? It was a question about her, her life, not a question about her book. Had her head still been in the vise of headphones? She doesn’t remember that either, but she thinks not, and knows herself well enough to know she’d have removed headphones as soon as the host told her she could. She felt ridiculous in headphones, the black plastic compression of her head.
Maybe the phrasing had been “Will you always be lonely?”
No answering the question no matter how it was phrased, and then the host said that they always took pictures of their guests, just outside the studio doors, in the courtyard before the stairs, and they walked out into full, glaringly bright Southern California sunlight. A young assistant going through the paces, getting it over with, held a digital camera and raised it with little fanfare or preparation and with dispatch took the shot.
The photograph soon appeared online under Images and people occasionally mentioned a picture in the lineup that wasn’t her, a face bleached with light, eyes squinting above pinched lips.
Effervescent she was sometimes called, and she thanked the assistant for her time and attention, a completely undeserved crediting, and then she genuinely hugged the host, his tall, pudgy body warm in her arms, she was effervescent, grateful, but always, invariably … she felt loud, clattery, and she couldn’t help but think of the Latin, to effervesce, to start boiling, to burn. And it was the anger that arises from shame, a defense of herself, weak-kneed. A defeat. “Will you never not be lonely?” Alone, she didn’t feel quite so ridiculous, she didn’t
feel not famous enough to interest the assistant with the camera, or not young enough either for the assistant to care what the picture looked like, but alone was alone too, and not an achievement, not a success at anything much at all.
The host handed her a CD in a white sleeve with, written across it in wide black strokes, the show’s name, the date, and then she was on her way up the concrete stairs and out across the college campus, its trees and benches and striding students, their shoes rustling the huge sycamore leaves scattering the walks. Wasn’t that a fanciful trope of film, the manuscript pages scattering in the wind, the lift and tumble of the white pages and the credits rolling—yes, mostly an ending, that image, or perhaps now a clean slate. Now you can stop being lonely, she said to herself and laughed, and it amused her to think of the sycamores having written a great book, leaves now scattering in the wind, never to be collected again.
As a child she had had a bookplate that she moistened and placed on the flyleaf of all her books. In the beginning, her name was in her mother’s handwriting—Ex Libris, and then her name—and later she began to write her name herself, but the disparity between her creaky young penmanship and the finely done lithograph of a huge oak tree, its roots spreading over the opened spine of a book … well, the disparity compelled her to sit day after day until she had created handwriting that she thought acceptable, not discordant with the finely rendered oak, its reaching roots.
The Tree of Knowledge, her father told her, the bookplate, “each book leading to another book, and each book sending down its roots, creating your mind, and
each book sending something up too, into the light of how we lived from day to day to day,” words said to a child, words unafraid of sentiment. She can also hear her father saying, “But a book is not to make you do something; a book is to make you think about something.”
•
She reached the parking structure, entered its tenebrous gray light, reached her car, and opened the door, the CD in her hand. She propped it in front of the gearshift, thinking to slide it into the player, to replay the hour that had just transpired, the host’s voice, her voice, their conversation. Who did that? she wondered, popped the recording in immediately and listened as they drove away. It seemed about the loneliest activity she could think of right now. She pulled onto Pico Boulevard, into the two long columns of cars nudging along in rush hour traffic. She listened to Marianne Faithfull, and she heard the angry rasp of her voice, “Broken English.” Then “Witches’ Song,” then “Brain Drain,” then “Guilt.”
What happens, she thinks, when a woman, young, allows all the projections, the assumptions, the gazes—what choice does she have but to allow?—the sneers, the wolf whistles, the insistences on her attention, her time, her co-option to any cause other than her own? What happens when it all befalls her—or has befallen her—and now, older, she walks on by, “toodle-oo, bye-bye, have at it,” none for her, she just does not care anymore.
What happens?
Not just men hate her; the entire world hates her.
Maybe that was the question, not Will you ever not be lonely? but Why do you no longer pine for us? Why do you no longer care for us, or care what we think? Why is there nothing left that appeals to you about us, about our company, about these collectives we wish to enfranchise you within?
The years periodically return her to the producer’s question. The tremendous range of reasons why she might be so isolated, perceived as such, though often she is within large groups of people, alone within them to be sure, though if she asked herself, Are you lonely? she does not think that she is particularly lonely, at least not when she’s by herself, alone—is she lonely?—but yes, most often within a situation with others, she is isolated. But not lonely. She does not much consider herself part of any collective, has never been an easy joiner. Of course, she was gathered under or within so many collectives, but that, of course, was the work of others. Asked for her allegiances, well, this was always difficult, not because she didn’t have them but because they were not simply stated, or there were so many provisos, exceptions, understandings if that, then this, but if that, then no, this.
The talk show host had had all four of her books fanned out beside him when she entered the studio, and she had been taken aback. “I have reread them all,” he said, “and this latest is your best.” That hour had been the profoundest company in a place she had invited so many to, and yet so few had come. But the talk show host was such fine company that it was company enough, and now she had a recording of that company into which she could always be collected … and, too, there was always traffic, that company.
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973/2019
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso Silver halide print
8 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
GATHERING INTELLIGENCE
Chelsea Manning, the war on terror, and the trans internet
by Charlie Markbrieter
In 2009, a US security intelligence operative stationed in Iraq began to notice some gaps in the American government’s “surgical precision” drone strategy. “I was trained to be an all-source analyst,” writes Chelsea Manning in her memoir, README.TXT (2022). “I’m used to collecting the full context and getting—and sharing—as much detail as possible.”
Manning’s childhood and adolescence in many ways exemplified the white millennial trans experience. While transness is culturally synonymized with coastal cities, Manning, like many trans people, grew up elsewhere; she was born to a former Navy intelligence officer and his Welsh wife in Oklahoma City in 1987. Not only did Manning’s father, Brian, instill “rigid cis gender sensibilities,” he also evoked a thoroughly militarized model of masculinity. Little Mermaid dolls were replaced with small fighter jets.
Like many isolated, closeted trans people in the aughts—not even out to themselves, let alone to anyone around them—the internet was Chelsea’s escape. First it was forums: trolling, lolz, meeting other gay people. Then she became skilled at coding. Back in meat space, she was aggressively bullied for being gay; her family eventually kicked her out. In Chicago’s Boystown “gayborhood,” she experienced IRL queer romance and community for the very first time.
But she couldn’t make ends meet. She’d stay with hookups for as long as she could (to shower, get a meal) before going back to living in her car. In a testimonial used to appeal to then-President Obama for clemency, she says, “There were many nights that I was afraid of getting robbed of what little I had, or raped, or even worse.” She moved in with an aunt in Maryland, working at Starbucks full time to pay for community college tuition. “I tried very hard to get ahead,” she says in the same letter to Obama, “but I soon burned out.”
Manning hoped that enlisting would finally offer financial stability and cure what she would eventually identify as gender dysphoria. But instead of serving
on the front lines, as the Guardian reports, “her aptitude for computer-based intelligence work was detected early in training and she was sent to work in Iraq.” Being very online had prepared Manning for war.
In 2007, as the subprime mortgage market teetered, Apple released its first iPhone to US audiences, popularizing mobile internet access for the very first time. While the iPhone was new, it relied on a pre-existing military technology called Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which turned geographically-specific data sets—such as the names and locations of enemy targets— into useful schematics like topological maps.” As the iPhone became ubiquitous, so did GIS: ride-sharing apps like Uber rely on it, as do digital marketing firms— basically any system or entity that uses geographic data.
The new level of connection usually associated with the advent of the iPhone and Web 2.0 was directly afforded by US military technology like GIS. It is unsurprising that the same decades that saw the rise of the “War on Terror”—characterized by its increasingly impersonal and digitized drone warfare—also saw the rise of social media. And as Caren Kaplan points out in her prescient 2006 article “Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity,” GIS is not just military technology; it actually enabled the US’s modern military-industrial complex, which required tools like geo-mapping, photography, and satellite positioning to expand its blossoming drone program. “You could not,” as Caplan argues, “have targeted marketing without targeted assassinations.”
The rise of US trans populations in the aughts and early 2010s has been correlated with the rise of Web 2.0. “By the time I identified as trans, I located this habit as part of a larger pattern, enabled by the Internet,” writes scholar Avery DameGriff, author of The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (2023). “My first connections with trans folks came online.” This, as Dame-Griff argues, was just the norm for trans people worldwide. “The role of the Internet in my experience was by no means unique. Online, trans youth found and supported each other across a variety of fora, ranging from IRC chat rooms, message boards, home pages, LiveJournal, MySpace, and beyond.” Trans people made up such a geographically dispersed population that it was easier to meet a trans man in Germany online than to run into another trans man in your hometown.
If trans people were very online, they were also thus very reliant on the military-grade GIS technology refined in the War on Terror’s drone program. Web 2.0 not only facilitated content produced by and for trans people—it also increased the odds of them accessing it through “the algorithm.” Through the internet’s tautological logic, the more you clicked on trans content, the more of it you’d see. Cable had never been cunt like that.
•
The 1990 Gulf War was the first conflict to make extensive use of GIS. The narrative fed to US audiences was that Iraq, unable to pay its $14 billion debt to Kuwait, instead invaded the oil-rich nation in a grab for resources and territory. The US swept in as global policeman to counteract this rogue
state, all the while securing its geopolitical and economic interests in the region.
In order to justify this proxy war to the American public, the US government needed to limit its casualties and expenses. Precision-targeted warfare, especially drones run on GIS, offered the perfect solution. Despite not even being “fully operational when the war began in 1990,” GPS-based weaponry “quickly took pride of place in the pantheon of satellite-assisted technologies.” Instead of carpet bombing, commanders could quickly locate, map out, and eliminate enemy combatants.
While “precision targeting” was instrumental to the Gulf War, it also informed how the war was narrativized to US audiences. Mirroring the language of “targeted assassinations” from what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described as “the world’s most moral army,” Americans used GIS to paint themselves as ethical technocratic actors. If this was a war, it would be served end-of-history style, knocking out “the bad guys” while leaving civilian infrastructure intact. Of course, as evidenced by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, carrying out individual strikes seldom forecloses targeting civilian infrastructure.
Significantly, GIS technology also facilitated coverage of the Gulf conflict, allowing networks to run 24-hour coverage of what became known as “the video game war.” During WWII, “newsreels reached movie theater audiences no less than a month after the occurrence of events depicted,” Kaplan writes. During Vietnam, “that time lag had been reduced to twenty-four from forty-eight hours.” But as Iraq invaded Kuwait, satellites allowed news outlets to provide real-time coverage, turning a conflict that most Americans barely
understood into a constantly-changing Marvel movie screened in their living rooms. While this footage was heavily censored by the Pentagon, the 24-hour feed and gritty visuals allowed anchors to present the news live. Civilians increasingly expected technology to seamlessly merge time and space.
•
The US officially invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, yet drones were also a military staple long before George W. Bush took office. As Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall point out in their 2016 article “The Drone Paradox: Fighting Terrorism with Mechanized Terror,” drones were used for decades prior to 9/11. However, “since 2001, the use of drones has shifted from an instrument of training and surveillance to a tool for conducting offensive strikes against enemy targets. Over this time, the U.S. government’s covert drone program has become institutionalized as a defining aspect of its military strategy and operations.” From 2004 to 2016, US drone strikes are confirmed to have killed 5,909 people in Pakistan alone.
As troop losses mounted and public support waned from its post-September 11th high, then-ascendent President Obama moved away from the Bush administration’s strategy. After killing Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, Obama declared the War on Terror over in 2013 and began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. He did not, however, stop deploying drones. “The use of drones,” wrote the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in a 2017 report, “aligned with Obama’s ambition to keep up the war against al Qaeda while extricating the US military from intractable, costly ground wars.”
Despite this messaging, drones were not the flying scalpels that Obama and his new CIA director John Brennan made them out to be. Even in the imperially ideal case—in which a single “enemy” is killed without any other casualties—the metrics determining who is a target and why were flimsy. In many cases, someone could be classified as a “terrorist” just by virtue of being a military-age man. As the past decade of Black Lives Matter uprisings against police brutality made apparent, violence is often justified based on appearance rather than action. And if there are mistakes, so-called “collateral damage”— well, so be it.
•
The top comment on “Chelsea Manning DJ set at sksksks,” a 2022 reddit post on r/ pcmusic, reads, “The military whistleblower to trans DJ pipeline.” Manning, wearing a pair of light-up cat ears, plays a mix of “Material Girl” by Scottish DJ SOPHIE (a.k.a. Sophie Xeon), who had died the year before. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, SOPHIE’s breakout album, was released in 2017, which is when Manning got out of jail.
“Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History,” reads a 2017 Vogue headline. “Now She’s Focusing on Herself.” A 2022 profile in the online magazine Them, which includes coverage of her nascent DJ career, argues that “Chelsea Manning is Done Being a Symbol.” Politics is cast as a bad dream from which she had just woken up. Both pieces also repeatedly call Manning a “whistleblower,” which has always been easier than discussing her actual role in the War on Terror.
In a 2017 profile, New York Times staff writer Matthew Shaer hints that Manning’s
decision to become a “whistleblower” was motivated by her gender dysphoria. On leave from Iraq, Manning remembers wondering if she should come out to her family as trans before realizing “she’d never be able to go through with it.” Immediately after, Shaer writes that Manning “downloaded […] almost every SigActs report from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and burned a compressed version of the data onto CD-RW discs, one of which was labeled ‘Lady Gaga.’”
If this were a novel, we might issue the following close reading: unable to reveal her own true identity, Manning revealed the state’s true identity instead. Manning’s transness, military career, and eventual whistleblowing had never been unrelated; either personally or structurally. Fueled by GIS, both the trans internet and military-intelligence analysis were elaborate modes of gossip. Manning had mastered both. With the trans internet, GIS helps trans people observe, interact with, and talk shit about each other in ever more targeted ways. With War on Terror-era surveillance, GIS helps the state “gather intelligence” on “targets” and then ascertain which rumors are verifiable, and thus actionable, facts— just as any good gossip would do.
But while gender dysphoria and the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy increased her alienation from the military, they were not the main reasons Manning chose to expose state secrets. The main reason was that she no longer thought the US should be in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an anonymous text file accompanying the leak, Manning wrote that her goal was to expose “the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare.”
Her critiques of asymmetric warfare have not been limited to the War on Terror. On May 7, 2021, Israeli police stormed Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. “[T] his is not a complicated issue,” Manning said in tweet six days later. “the US gov, through decades of funding and several UN security council votes, is directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Palestinian territory.”
Manning doesn’t tweet anymore. If you were a security consultant who used to work for the US military, you probably wouldn’t either. The last thing she tweeted, on December 22, 2022, was, “lol, lmao.”
COUNTERPOEM
Ivanna Baranova
to say the face before me is a moon is obvious
evidence blinking lucid eye withdrawn
covered til the end of night I made my bed in the depths and you were there
fixed prayer in precise cessation all logic , kinetic , devotion
this is the part I want you to hear don’t speak , just look
walking in silhouette all fodder your open hand where
WHAT WERE THESE WOMEN TO ME?
by Ruth Madievsky
What I remember most about my early college days was a feverish need to desire and to be desired. A few hours into my first social engagement—an event I now think of as my university’s “preeminent retreat for Jews with undiagnosed anxiety disorders”—there were already outsiders. Acne-scarred guys in ill-fitting polos who lurked at the periphery of conversations. Girls who wore their bodies like lumbering animals and dressed as if performing in a middle-school piano recital. Then there were their foils: the hot ones who radiated sexual confidence and exhibited no detectable fear of death. I fell into neither category but was determined to present as the latter.
The retreat culminated in a drunken dance party. Beer pong, “Levels” by Avicii blasting from speakers purchased by someone’s dad. It wasn’t particularly memorable, except when a guy turned to me and said what sounded like, “Bathroom in three?” I froze, horrified. A few beats later, I realized he was not inviting me to join him in the stall; he was joking about women going to the bathroom in groups of three. My dormmates and I lost it. It was the perfect misunderstanding to foment our tentative friendships, which, in time, grew strong on a steady diet of shared secrets and vulgar gossip.
Over late nights in unair-conditioned dorm rooms, we unburdened ourselves to each other. M confided that the first time her boyfriend fingered her, awkwardly parting her legs beneath fluorescent lights, she kept picturing herself as a raw chicken in a supermarket. D shared first his coming-out story and then the story of him sleeping with a woman for the first time after our college’s annual foam party. What a mythical creature this anonymous woman was—rising from a sea of foam to deflower my friend before retreating to the strange land from whence she came. The sex was bad, yet somehow symbolic. Of what, we weren’t sure. We dubbed her Foam Monster.
Graphic sex stories—especially those with a winner and a loser—were friendship superglue. Particularly among my guy friends: I almost pissed myself laughing when T described drunkenly spearing a frosted cupcake with his dick and urging his one-night stand to eat it. The punch line was that T was a messy drunk, yes, but it was also that this rando who’d known him for an hour didn’t hesitate before
chowing down. They were all randos to me, even the girls who sat a few rows behind me in biology. When R hooked up with someone he’d been pursuing for months, he confessed that she had an alarmingly large nipple-to-breast ratio. From then on, she was Lightbulb Nips. Every moment of surreptitious eye contact, of shared private laughter at another woman’s expense, fortified my male friendships. I always took their side. These men, after all, were my friends. What were the women to me?
Of course, if I’d heard a man speak this way about one of my friends, he’d be dead to me. But these women didn’t belong to me. In my mind, they didn’t belong to anyone—even when I knew the woman in the story better than I knew the man. When a guy I’d exchanged maybe five sentences with hooked up with a girl from my chemistry lab, he went around telling people he’d accidentally stuck it in her butt, and that she hadn’t noticed the difference. My friends and I laughed about it for weeks. When a friend of a friend took his girlfriend to buy Plan B, she reportedly asked about the ingredients. “What kind of question is that?” my friends and I cackled. “The ingredients are DEAD BABY.”
None of this registered as slut-shaming. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being promiscuous. My friends and I encouraged random hookups, surreptitiously photographing each other’s dancefloor make-outs so we could laugh at the images over late-night tacos. I thought my guy friends’ sex stories were funny because of their sloppiness. Because of how cartoonish they were compared to my mundane hookups—I couldn’t fathom having anal sex at all, much less having so much of it that I couldn’t tell my ass from my puss. I
was terrified of my body. When I used my guy friends’ bathrooms, I angled my pee stream to silently hit the toilet bowl rather than splash into the water—god forbid the living proof that I peed diminish my sexual currency. Yet somehow, I cultivated a reputation as the horniest member of my friend group, though I hooked up among the least.
What none of my friends knew was that I’d been assaulted as a child. I was irrationally afraid that I had undiagnosed HIV. That the trauma had left me incapable of love. That, 20 years into marriage with a man, I’d realize I was a lesbian, and my husband and children would hate me for tearing our family apart. All of my anxieties were this specific. My friends didn’t know about any of them. I wanted to be touched, to be loved, but feared I was too damaged. I couldn’t fathom my body as a site of both pain and pleasure. At 18, I thought it had to be one or the other—and that, for me, the choice had perhaps already been made.
I lived vicariously through my friends’ stories, at once relieved that it wasn’t me who had experienced them and angsty because I had nothing comparable to share. I compensated with self-deprecating anecdotes that were more about sexual frustration than sex. I recounted the elementary-school friend I used to play graphic rounds of “Doctor” with, my obsessive countdown to my first period, my homoerotic friendships in high school. Eventually, I shared my adolescent fear of HIV, but not the origin of the fear. “Only you could concoct a scenario where you got HIV from a waiter coming in your pasta on a day you had an open mouth sore,” D said. We made fun of everyone, and we made fun of ourselves. Our days were a menagerie of
ridiculous men and ridiculous women. But mostly ridiculous women.
I’m not sure when my loyalties decisively shifted toward the women from my friends’ stories. It could have been the year after I graduated, when I began writing about my assault. It could have been at a pool party a couple of years later when D said, “Do you remember how we used to call that girl I lost my virginity to Foam Monster? Whenever I think about that, I want to die.” The transformation was definitely complete by the time of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. I’d taken to wearing an “I Believe Christine Blasey Ford” button when I took the train to work, and each time, I got this suffocating feeling that was equal parts anxiety and rage, daring someone to fucking say something to me.
The simplest explanation for the shift is that I grew up. I recognized my actions for what they were: internalized misogyny driven by fear of what my own female body harbored. As I began to process the trauma I’d spent the last 15 years repressing, my friends were unanimously supportive. I realized that my fears weren’t uncommon, and that fixating on others’ unruly bodies was a way of diverting attention from my own. The accidental anal story in particular haunts me. Having since, uh, experienced more of life myself, I now find it unbelievable that this encounter went down the way we were told. Was it truly an accident? Either way, I no longer find the story funny.
Writing this piece raised a memory I’d neglected for years. My junior year, a rumor went around that this awkward guy a couple of years younger than me had fingered an unconscious girl in front of his floormates. Supposedly, she’d passed out drunk in their dorm’s common area, and he’d
stuck his hand up her dress. I don’t remember who I heard this from. Did he really do it—because he was unpopular and had something to prove—or did my peers spread a vicious lie about him because, in their eyes, no conscious girl would have ever hooked up with him? I want to believe that if we’d seen a friend, or even just some girl who lived on our floor, being digitally penetrated while passed out in front of us, we wouldn’t ignore or encourage it. I want to believe we meant more to each other than that.
Looking back, the most absurd elements of my friends’ hookup stories were not the sex acts themselves. Harpooning a cupcake on a dick is chaotic, but wilder still is the idea that these women had trusted these men. Being that vulnerable with a man who hadn’t devoted several months to proving he wouldn’t hurt me—that’s what I found the most unbelievable.
I wish I could tell my younger self that my value as a person wasn’t tied to my sexual currency. That thinking critically about my assault, about what I wanted from my body and my sexuality, wouldn’t ruin me. That making my love interests all but submit to a background check wouldn’t save me. That there are better ways to organize your life than according to whatever metrics will result in the least suffering. That I was surrounded by much scarier and more insidious shit than the fears I had about myself.
The awkward guy rumored to have assaulted his unconscious classmate has a public Facebook profile. I scrolled through his page the other day, going back several years. He posted a lot about feminism, systemic racism, income inequality. During the Trump era, he aired his disgust with
the president’s racism and misogyny. Was this evidence he didn’t assault his classmate, the mark of a guilty conscience, or neither? I’ll never know. “Don’t do it,” I told myself, hovering at the edge of his fall 2018 posts. But I couldn’t stop myself. And there it was. He urged us not to believe Kavanaugh’s lies. He urged us to #believewomen.
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973/2019
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso
Silver halide print
8 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
by Clayton Purdum
The first time I tried to write this essay I failed. It was the middle of the pandemic—a time in which uncountable numbers of introspective personal essays were written to no apparent end—and I watched Sans Soleil, director Chris Marker’s dreamlike 1983 travelogue. I was working at a marketing agency at the time, suffusing strategic briefs with literary ambition, and something about the way Marker’s film faded from documentary to sci-fi to philosophical reverie ignited long-dormant neurons in my brain. Sleeper cells dissatisfied with a life in service of internet content and client work assembled. They blew up access tunnels and sabotaged meeting preparation protocols. I wrote something big and haunted about my experience as a writer and intended to publish it, in an act of vainglorious career suicide, on LinkedIn.
This is not that essay, which I ended up storing in the cloud, untouched and perfect. Maybe I just lost the nerve. I came to view the entire months-long ordeal as merely a romantic obsession with Sans Soleil, the sort of honeymooning that occurs with a piece of art only a handful of times in life, in which old tastes are dramatically reordered and new, long-lasting obsessions emerge. That essay, that romance, hung over me as I logged back in to Slack. And yet something was different. The strategic briefs shifted beneath my gaze now. I saw Sans Soleil’s borderless spirit everywhere, and came to see it as representative of an aesthetic thread that named itself outside of my will, its name slowly infecting my thoughts over the years since.
I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd. Sometimes it is as if the element of unreality is chasing the author through the piece.
Early examples include the essays and essay-like fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, Orson Welles’s exasperated, exuberant F for Fake (1973), and of course Marker’s otherworldly documentaries. More recently, you can see it in internet videos by Conner O’Malley and alantutorial, which warp glib, servile YouTube content into frantic horror; Twitter accounts that suggest vast cosmos of deranged characters, like Horse_ebooks and Dril; the speculative football analysis of Jon Bois and the
creepypasta narrative of Loab; Nathan Fielder’s increasingly reflexive documentary repertoire, particularly The Rehearsal (2022– ); Adult Swim experiments like Yule Log (2002) and Unedited Footage of a Bear (2014); W. G. Sebald’s ruined literary ruminations and the hours-long musical sagas by the Caretaker that echo them; the series finale of The Hills (2006–10), in which a high-stakes reality-show farewell is filmed, transparently, on a studio backlot; Carmen Maria Machado’s weird novella about Law & Order: SVU; certain Lydia Davis stories, especially “French Lesson”; Room 237 (2012), as well as Rodney Ascher’s other deeply credulous documentaries; the cover of David Bowie’s The Next Day (2013); and video games like Cibele (2015), The Beginner’s Guide (2015), and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017).
More often than not, weird nonfiction is intended as either comedy or horror—sometimes both. Its natural home is the internet, where disinformation and pissant humor are architectural principles. The element of unreality in all of the titles listed above is not just a fib or a joke but also an outright structural provocation, daring the audience to follow it into an abyss. Like weird fiction, weird nonfiction is built around some unknowable terror, replacing the tentacled horrors of H. P. Lovecraft with the many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century. It also suggests, in the process, that there is something unfathomable at the heart of reality itself, and that it is the duty of journalism to circumnavigate this terror if never speak it aloud. I humbly submit that weird nonfiction seems particularly well suited to reporting on climate change, but have not seen it done with the vigor that subject deserves.
•
I spent my last year or so on staff at a oncegreat pop culture website working on a column about the simulation theory, which I had begun to see as a sort of source code for my main beat of internet culture. The idea that we are all living in a simulation had crept from the fringes of nerd culture to pop up in everything from rap lyrics to prestige fiction, and it struck me as a cultural response to the evolution of the internet. Were that website now not a Cronenbergian flesh puppet made of scabs and celebrity chum, this essay might have functioned as that column’s final installment. That is to say, a bullet through its head.
Weird nonfiction is related to the almost overwhelming surplus of simulation theory yarns from the past couple decades— including not just The Matrix and its ilk but also the nested narratives of Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and Emily St. John Mandel—in that it asks the reader to question the very design of the reality presented to them. However, I see weird nonfiction more as an evolution of speculative fiction itself. Weird nonfiction shirks fantasy for the real world in much the same way that modern leftists have dropped the sloganeering of the 1960s in favor of concrete action. For those attuned to the occult and unreal aspects of being alive, “genre” fiction is no longer adequate. Creative world-building must be applied more violently to our own reality. Weird nonfiction is dreamlike, but urgent, cutting in its humor and suggestion. Even Philip K. Dick died believing his books were coming true.
One of the key moments in weird nonfiction history is William Gibson’s abdication of cyberpunk for the modern
world as a response to 9/11. He got halfway there. Gibson’s first present-day, real-world novel, Pattern Recognition, came out in early 2003, only a few months after a film by Olivier Assayas called Demonlover. The two works function as eerie twins, following high-powered marketing professionals on voyages into the seductive dreamworlds of online video, whether toward aesthetic ends (for Gibson) or lurid ones (for Assayas). Gibson rushes almost romantically toward a tidy conclusion, while Assayas’s story eventually dissolves into nightmarish torture porn. Two decades later, it’s obvious that they were both onto something: that the experience of watching people on the internet is simultaneously horrifying, transcendent, and boring. I sometimes think weird nonfiction is merely a cultural response to the prevalence of videography—the existence of a camera, and the question of who gets to wield one. Of course weird nonfiction would multiply as videography became democratized, as the means of production and consumption slipped into everyone’s pocket and distribution became a click away.
This era represents a turning point for weird nonfiction, when it seeped from the worlds of literature and experimental film into the emergent, lowbrow culture of the pre-social internet. The lonelygirl15 saga (2006–08), which originally presented itself as the bored vlogging of a teenage girl, evolved over the course of hundreds of minutes-long episodes to track her initiation into a bizarre cult. Viewed today, it is absurd, but it created many of the conventions around video thumbnails, including salacious (and misleading) episode titles like “4 Girls, 2 Guys.” The 66-episode saga of alantutorial has held up better. In
them, a bland content series (“How to Eat a Bag of Chips”) frays violently, moving from a messy room to the woods nearby to, finally, some sort of white-walled prison. Both video series exploit the credibility of the streaming-video player, using titles, descriptions, comments, and other conventions to further the narrative. Like Demonlover and many subsequent Adult Swim weird nonfictions, they end in hell: the thrill is watching digital and narrative noise burst through otherwise normal content.
A lot of writers hate that word—“content”—which grew in use by marketers and media organizations beginning around this time. But I’m not sure how else to describe a category that must encompass social posts, responses, long-form copy, video, podcasts, multichannel experiences, apps, and so on. Weird nonfiction thrives on this precise ambiguity. It simultaneously critiques the tendency to view the internet as a series of funnels leading to a series of mouths and exploits the grade of those funnels and the gag reflexes of those mouths. I will admit to a sort of resigned appreciation of content as a concept. I have worked, extensively, as a content strategist, after many ill-fated “pivots to video” precipitated a frantic rerouting of my professional ambitions over the years. I am built almost exclusively to write; everything else is ornamentation. When I lost my marketing job in 2022, I began evaluating the market value of different types of words; the indicators, as they say, were not good. The best-paying SEO work will disappear within years thanks to AI, which is already writing credible copy for bots to scrape and reuse as training materials for yet more AI. Perhaps this is why I began to
see weird nonfiction everywhere, sprouting like deep-dreamed eyes from each object I focused on in digital space. The content is eating itself alive.
•
I am starting to sense that old, failed essay in the room, each hit of the space bar a drumbeat that summons it. Am I losing the thread? Have I gone too broad? Weird nonfiction lives on uncertainty; it is always a mess. You should see my notes for this piece: sprawling across various cloud-based platforms for years, with detailed scraps about anime (not applicable), the concept of control in video games (not applicable), a clearinghouse for failed essay concepts (not applicable). Every section, I start on solid ground and end in some darkened hallway wondering, like a dementia patient at night, how I got there, who moved the rooms around.
Let’s try something different. More breaks, more air. Here are some things I know for sure about weird nonfiction:
1. The earliest example is Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play “The War of the Worlds,” which famously inspired widespread real-world panic. When one broadcaster attempted to assure his listeners that there was no actual alien invasion, he was accused of being part of the conspiracy. Weird nonfiction is an infection.
2. Weird nonfiction frequently breaks its own boundaries, infecting the real world by design, but it should not rely on extratextual understanding to function as weird nonfiction. If the method by which something was
made is germane to its understanding, weird nonfiction should talk about that method. The method, the container, is often the subject.
3. If you are wondering whether or not something counts as weird nonfiction, consider its weirdness. Modern mockumentaries do not work because there is no uncertainty; the documentary element is used to advance the plot, mug at the camera, key the viewer in. Much new journalism and the unfortunately named “creative nonfiction” attempt primarily to tell the reader a story, to convey a mood, using literary techniques drawn from fiction to heighten these effects. But they do not unsettle the reader. Weird nonfiction takes the “how much of this is real?” question threaded throughout the reader’s mind as they read new journalism and uses it as a bridge to an otherwise unreachable aesthetic destination.
4. Weird nonfiction is never aloof. Even early, experimental works, like William Greaves’s many-layered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) or Peter Greenaway’s mid-apocalyptic mockumentary The Falls (1980), are punchy, funny, profane.
5. The role of the author is critical in almost all weird nonfiction. Consider Welles in F for Fake, a knowing trickster monologizing wryly over wine-stained maps, or Borges, playfully implicating himself in his stories. More recently, consider rapper Tierra Whack coyly turning her hagiographic
documentary Cypher (2023) into a paranoid psychodrama about celebrities and cults.
6. The roots for weird nonfiction exist in classic weird fiction. Lovecraft set his stories in the brains of learned men of science and letters, lending a credibility to their gradual derangement. At the Mountains of Madness (1931), his masterpiece, is framed as a geological survey. “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) presents itself as a work of investigative journalism. His stories follow gentleman intellectuals asking questions with no answers, like QAnon podcasters charting evidence into the void.
7. Other authors of weird nonfiction, on the other hand, seem lost in the fun house, so to speak. Consider Fielder, disappearing into his own house of mirrors at the end of The Rehearsal, or Ascher, who follows his interview subjects so far down their respective rabbit holes that the primary project of his work seems to be rendering the subjective as objective, the world of fiction as reality.
8. On the internet, the author is often a simpleton: think early Dril tweets, the hosts of On Cinema at the Cinema (2011– ), alantutorials. All exploit the common experience of watching some gormless dolt getting his or her personal brand off the ground. This lends a sense of wonderfully mean humor to the proceedings as well as added believability. People thought Horse_ ebooks was some misfiring marketing bot for years.
9. It is helpful to consider the nature of the lie in a work of weird nonfiction. Who is lying to whom? How does it change the truth? For Marker, it is often a framework, like the game designer analyzing real-world archival footage in Level Five (1997). For game designer Davey Wreden, meanwhile, the lie is the nature of the thing being analyzed. His Beginner’s Guide is a career retrospective of a game designer who doesn’t exist. In still other works, the lie of weird nonfiction fizzes on the outside of the frame: more of a half-truth that gradually festers into something viler.
10. The way weird nonfiction works mirror each other suggests its own vast conspiracy. Probably my favorite example of weird nonfiction on YouTube is nana825763’s 12-minute video “My house walk-through,” which is an exactly correct description of its contents. You walk through someone’s house, a circuitous path of rotting wood that becomes increasingly fleshy with each new loop. Meanwhile, one of the best weird nonfiction video games is a 2023 mod of the classic computer game Doom (2023) called MyHouse. wad. Through repetition and careful perusal of extratextual elements like ReadMe files and even code analysis, the mod gradually reveals itself as a work of domestic horror, and then a metacommentary on its creator’s divorce. The best way to experience it, unless you have a particularly high fluency in Doom and its mod scene, is just watching a video of someone playing it online: “MyHouse walkthrough.”
I actually attempted to write a book about the simulation theory as a way of killing that old column, but as I wrote the book, I grew exhausted with the idea. The simulation theory strikes me, at this point, as a too-cute thought experiment for the most insufferable people alive—your Musks and Roilands and Wests. It is a half measure when what is called for is a fuller eradication of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, not toward ponderous self-discovery or narrative trickery but toward shock, stimulation, uncertainty.
11. On the other hand, perhaps weird nonfiction is merely, to quote the fascist Steve Bannon, “flooding the zone with shit.”
12. Weird nonfiction is an infection. The Rehearsal inspired a subreddit in which viewers of the show rehearsed their own real-life encounters. This subreddit inspired a separate subreddit called r/therehearsal1stdraft, in which users rehearsed the process of posting things on the larger rehearsal subreddit. This is not time-limited to recent works. Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) traces a vast conspiracy to create a new country complete with its own language, history, and culture. Borges cites countless sources in the essay, many of which are invented. Today, you cannot distinguish between which sources are real or not, because the zone has been flooded with so much shit. The entirely fictional character Silas Haslam has twice been cited in peer-reviewed scientific literature.
13. Even if #13 is not true, it does appear on the story’s Wikipedia page.
14. Sometimes I wonder if I wasted too many of my prime writing years producing internet slop rather than something more substantial.
15. Sebald was obsessed with Borges—The Rings of Saturn (1995) references the dream-nation Uqbar repeatedly. And yet Sebald’s sense of the otherworldly is baked into his books at a mitochondrial level. They read as if written by a ghost. It is almost impossible to spot the lie in Sebald. One of his final essays, “Campo Santo,” (2003) makes an unlikely pivot in its final moments to speak of the modern world, meditating on the place of the dead in an increasingly crowded physical world. He considers the existence of a memorial website, before concluding that “this virtual cemetery, too, will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass.”
16. This is also true of almost all the writing I’ve ever produced in my life.
17. Chris Marker called his films “home movies,” which makes sense for two reasons. They were typically filmed over many years before being edited together, often piecing together scraps of half-finished projects. They also feel like home movies in a spatial sense: lived-in, as if we are wandering from room to room inside the POV of its owner. The working title of Sans Soleil was actually “my-house walkthrough.”
18. Music does not lend itself particularly well to weird nonfiction, even if musicians such as Bowie, Whack, and MF DOOM have dabbled in it. But the Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time (2016–19), ostensibly a six-part series portraying the progression of Alzheimer’s disease through a human mind, absolutely counts. This six-hour ambient record became an unlikely hit on TikTok and inspired a mod about dementia for the children’s video game Friday Night Funkin’ (2020). In it, the sassy cartoon character Boyfriend utters lines like “This house is familiar—my memories are burning,” his face gradually dissolving into white noise.
19. Increasingly, weird nonfiction is the lingua franca of the internet. I believe a generation of creators is emerging for whom weird nonfiction is a base-level tone. If you were born after lonelygirl15, you probably think stories should blend the real and unreal; you probably insist that doing so is at once funny and horrifying and normal. You probably create spontaneously for whatever platform is on hand and embrace its conventions and contradictions. I have watched an urban exploration TikTok pitch-shift into the Backrooms. I have played video games that emulate the bodycam footage of real-world police assassinations. I have seen fandoms pursue imagined numerological clues in their favorite musicians’ music. You can will weird nonfiction into being on works that are not explicitly designed to be read as such. This does not make them weird nonfiction; it proves the
permeability of the concept itself. Like the conspiracy-born dream-country of Uqbar, it has colonized our world.
•
For my more advanced readers, I would like to propose an additional category of weird nonfiction, which encompasses works that invert the fundamental structure. Rather than presenting as documentary or journalism and then introducing fictional elements to unsettle the reader, these fictional works suggest nonfiction elements to disturb the reader. Consider, for example, the way Werner Herzog’s movies seem less like movies about doomed conquistadores than documentaries about lunatics pretending to be doomed conquistadores. Consider the way the repeated surveillance footage in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) ripples with uncertainty, feeling at once utilitarian and provocative. I suspect our most relentlessly modern filmmakers will push this technique more aggressively as film loses its grip on the culture. Jonathan Glazer’s
The Zone of Interest (2023) maps camera techniques popularized by reality television to actors working in the actual location of their historical counterparts; at the film’s conclusion, the lead is foisted along with the viewer into our own reality. He sees the aftermath of his actions along with us, then dodders off, astonished, into the darkness.
I hate to disappoint you, but I also just call this stuff “weird nonfiction.” It does not quite deserve an entirely distinct name. And anyway, as I have tried to tell you, weird nonfiction is an infection. It flows outward from uncertainty. Its definition, as much as I have tried to make clear in these notes, ought to be porous. You
stalk a path through this Zone tossing one stone at a time into the fog. Toward what magic? If weird nonfiction has poisoned the past four years of my life, resulting in countless deranged half-starts, why would I put it out into the world? This essay is not magic. I need to tell you how terrified I was to realize that, by the definition I outlined in the opening section of this essay, all generative AI is weird nonfiction. All of it presents as real; all of it is composed of real-world materials. Even at its most obsequious and mundane, it is still designed to move its audience to action, which is to say, to purchase. It is the final content strategy. But why not add a couple teeth, a couple fingers, to that human body? These are the flourishes of insanity. That there is absolutely no artistic intent only makes it more credible. Where is the lie? What is the intention of the author? Weird nonfiction flows outward. Years later, I can’t quite remember which thread I am holding or how I got here. Much of this research appears suspect in the twilight—incomplete. New threads crawling out of the shadows of new hallways, over there—when finally the unreality tackles me deep in the bowels of this old house, its grin melting. It is the failed essay, of course. Always hiding between the letters here, along with all the others, real and unreal, published and unwritten, conspirators in the summoning. All content yearning to be rendered one in the fire. I realize as I am dragged into the darkness that Sebald was wrong in his final moments. The past flows into a formless and indistinct void but it is not silent. From the basement I hear it begin to speak. •
There is sometimes a reading of works like the ones I’ve mentioned above as fundamentally hopeless, as a response to a broader dimming of possibility in the world. But I feel no despair these days. When I experience artwork that sets out to explain a corner of reality and instead contorts itself to reflect the very unease I brought with me upon entry, I feel less alone. I feel how I hoped to feel when I began this essay eons ago: linked, at last, in.
Yasuo Kuroda 陽物神譚, 1973
Signed Y. Kuroda ink on verso
Vintage silver halide print
8 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
GOSSIP
Will Harris
They were newlyweds. Newly arrived. He did not know how to answer. But no one was watching them. It was scary. A big sigh. He bought a Collins Shorter Dictionary and read it in the mornings. They learned new words. Submersible. Ten months later, she was struck. A random vehicle. He refused to return. Family were always talking behind his back. He could hear them. Every morning he would ride his bike to work and tie it up. He could see it waiting outside. It was his job to clean and prepare medical instruments. He enjoyed it. And every afternoon he cycled home for tea. In bed by nine. He missed cycling. But he still read the dictionary before work. Raconteur was the name he gave to their cat. He was going to retire. Sleepy, he said. He would be seventy. And when did you last speak to them? They did not talk.
NOTES ON DISAPPEARING
A life in fragments
by Veronica Gonzalez Peña
An Organizing Memory
I was four or five or six, and the sun was bright above us. The air was different here than in Mexico City, crisp and sharp and already carrying something of the ocean light. It was hot, the sky a deep clear blue. The children’s pool had a small resting ledge at the deeper end and I was pulling onto it, my arms working me out of the water as I dripped into the crowded cement seat. One knee already lodged I was awkwardly adjusting myself up into a sitting position, my hand reaching out to grab the pool’s edge, when I noticed a boy who sat extremely close to where my body was twisting to reach, his face above where my hand was about to land, and his proximity unsettled me; I was so timid.
He looked at me with an intense urgency and then, his face dipping even closer to mine, he exclaimed, “Cuida…,” as, confused, I met his eyes; did he like me? My stomach clinched as it always did when I thought a boy might like me, even at that young age, shy but excited too, and then I felt the burning sting as my hand landed, before he finished “…do!” I hadn’t seen it; how could I have, so focused on that boy’s eyes, their charge as they caught mine. The burning sting.
I feel it sharp and raw in my hand, is it my left hand? What hand is this? The boy had been trying to warn me. Did I cry out, or did he?
Whose voice was that now screaming?
Plunging my arm back into myself, the sharp dark pain, I twisted my body around it. I rarely cried. But I did then. How did she find me? Had someone run to her, one of the other children? I’d been in the water for what seemed like hours; in the water, submerged amorphous, surrounded liquid, my face, my eyes, slick in wet … squirming from my sisters, lunging toward the ledge, the resting place, splashing and faltering and laughing, as one of them grabbed at my leg, yanked me back into the depths before I was able to kick free and reach forward, pulling myself, gasping, up to sit, rapidly blinking to see while drip dripping in that awkward cement seat.
It was my grandfather’s pool, the pool at his hotel. There was a bigger pool across the way, the adult pool, with gardens all around, the hot damp air, and their bodies hot and damp too, surrounding its edges; why didn’t they just jump in, like we did? On that side of the hotel there were dense tropical walkways that vanished into leafy green jungle before opening onto small
clearings with all around the lush density of palms and flowering bromeliads and brightly colored vines. But this little pool was ours, the children’s pool. In Iguala. My grandfather, a good businessman, owned the gas station and hotel on the perimeter of this small town that sits half way between Mexico City and Acapulco. It was 1969 or ’70, and in those days we would pile into our car, like every other Mexican family from DF, and drive to Acapulco where we stayed on the beach in hotels that had even more magical gardens than our grandfather’s, with criss-crossing paths that lay winding under the thickness of climbing creeping vines, and giant fan palms that sat between dangling papaya, passionfruit and mango and lime, all of it amidst treelike aloe that flowered orange and red, the thick succulent leaves of which your aunt would break in half to then rub the sinewy liquid sap onto your sunburned arms; there were talking parrots and toucans that stood staring at you from inside their big cages in the small sand clearings and you could flirt nuts or fruit into those cages but pulled your fingers back with wild screeches when their beaks got dangerously close to your inching hands. There were signs, you were scolded, that warned against this feeding, but you ignored your aunts and their scolding for the thrill of the birds’ proximity. Beyond all this, we knew, lay the vastness of the beach we all loved, though the waves could be wild, so you stayed at the edges, feet lodged in the sand, unless an aunt or an uncle went in with you and helped you to bob on the surface of those undulating caps. But before you could get there, to that beach, you’d have to stop to refuel in Iguala. Everyone would. And we, because of our grandfather, and his hotel
with our pool, would sometimes stay the night.
Who ran and got her? Were they screaming out, Hurry, hurry!, as they grabbed and pulled at her arm? She was bikini-clad and like this she ran over and swept me up. Had she heard me crying? Who was she, this woman who picked me up and carried me now, as I wept, quietly, in her arms. My mother, who was so rarely a mother, ran to him with me limply drifting in and out in her arms, to my father where he sat drinking with friends.
Urgent, she approached them as she yelled out that they had to take me to the hospital, now, a scorpion had stung me. Now!
No. My father refused. Manolo said no. He sat in that clearing, low chairs, framed in garden lushness, the fruit from the papayas hanging bulbous all around, with his friends, laughing and cajoling in unison, a big manly mass. They were singing and playing guitar, drinking beer and having a good time, didn’t she see that? He looked straight at her, that wry smile of his, No, he repeated more sternly, as he cinched his blue eyes at her. And then, without lifting his hand to grasp it, he took a hit of his cigarette, which sat dangling limply in his mouth. He turned from her and toward the men, and she turned too, away, no time for this.
Were they shocked, these men he drank with? Were they men I knew, and would see again, maybe at a card game at my grandmother’s house? Coming in boisterous to eat her food and have a drink and tease the young girls and middle-aged women? Or were they a group he’d picked up at the hotel? He was always surrounded. And we mostly knew to hide from them.
Panicking, desperate, she carried me to the road, still draped in her arms, my tears streaming silently now. Where was she headed?
She is hobbling; I am weighing in her arms; the gravel pierces her feet. And then she spots it there, blurry in the shivering sunlight, coming toward her, from in the distance.
She sees it approaching and rushes now, into the road to intercept it, and with her gesturing body she makes the bus stop. My beautiful mother, still dripping in her bikini, stands before the creaking bus.
The driver pulls to the side of the road and opens the door with his big lever. She yells out to him and he calls us up before she is done speaking. I can see them staring, the other people on that bus, not unkindly. She rushes in now. We are inside. The driver will divert and take us to the hospital door.
I don’t remember arriving at, or entering, the hospital. The next thing I recall is my favorite uncle, 17, at my side. He must have come with someone, my grandmother perhaps. Though he is the only one I remember being there. Sitting at the side of the bed he makes me laugh. And because I am laughing now, my eyes still heavy with sleep, I know I did not die.
Martin jokes as he reaches over to me where I lie on the hospital bed, It got you, huh? And then his eyes sparkle and he pecks at my arm with his fingers and I shriek and yank my arm back and he laughs. He plays rough, but I love him. Martin was 12 when I was born. He’s my funny teenage uncle, thick black hair and shining smiling eyes.
My grandfather did not own the hotel, my aunt tells me 40 years later. He managed, and expanded it even, yes, and
brought it back to life, but he did not own it. Yet, even after she tells me this, in my mind he owns it. He is powerful. The grandfather who appears at our home in Mexico City and disappears the same night. He doesn’t stay over, though he is our grandfather. He rarely sits to have a meal with us either. Sometimes he eats at the table alone and is served by an aunt or the woman who cooks for us. Who is he to my grandmother now? Does she still love him? Hola, Abuelito. Emotions restrained, we don’t see what there is between them. A sometimes visitor, in his formal suits and white hair and temperate smile. My beloved grandmother’s husband. He breeds dogs, beautiful German Shepherds. We have one, Diana, and she is nearly human, watching my sisters and me play in the garden, our unruly games, herding us when necessary, as our mad mother paces the insides of the house …
This mother who in a lucid moment scooped me up and rushed me to my father Manolo and when he refused to do anything, she ran me to the side of the road, her feet burning, so that the bus stopped there and all of the passengers looked forward as she, panicked, called out to the driver when he opened the door with his lever, and as he heard what she had yelled he urged us on though she was already lunging up onto the bus barefoot, with me in her arms, silently crying, Scorpion, and all the other people, many in their formal white linen, looked forward at us as she climbed in, at the beautiful young woman ascending in a bikini with a little girl who may possibly die, weeping in her arms.
Is my mother crying too now? The bus stares and doesn’t say a word, until an old man in the front stands and quietly offers
his seat. I am listless in her arms and the entire bus is silent.
I don’t remember my mother being there then, at the hospital with my uncle. Was she back to struggling with her insides? The urgency of the reality outside her head having subsided to be replaced by that other urgency she always carried inside.
•
Iguala
Iguala is two and a half hours southwest of Mexico City, more south than west, and is the midway point to Acapulco. Its full official name is Iguala de la Independencia, because it is in this town that, on February 24, 1821 Mexican independence from Spain was proclaimed, through a document called El Plan de Iguala. It is where the Mexican flag was first raised and where General Vicente Guerrero swore allegiance to this Mexican flag, the first military leader to do so. The state, Guerrero, named for this general, is also home to Taxco, a beautiful silver-mining town, the stone and whitewashed buildings there built deep into the sides of mountains, appearing as if they hang perilously off the cliffsides. I’ve been to Taxco only once, though it is not far from Iguala, because it’s hard to get to, as you must wind up and around increasingly narrower mountain roads that spiral you, finally, onto the ancient cobblestone streets that encircle the pretty structures that dangle, seemingly precarious, off a series of stacked precipices. It’s a striking place. Acapulco too, of course, is in Guerrero— the draw, our yearly destination.
As a girl I did not know any of this geography, any of this history. I did not know that Iguala is, in essence and in fact,
the site of Mexican independence. It is also where, in 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College were murdered. These are the students, mainly Indigenous, the sons of peasant farmers and menial laborers, whose deaths were finally investigated two years ago, with the final outcome pronounced by the Mexican president, López Obrador, who had made a campaign promise to get to the bottom of things four years earlier.
It’s impossible to write about Iguala now without mentioning these students.
Ayotzinapa was, in the early 1800s, a hacienda owned by Sebastián de Viguri— a man who was so moved by a treatise on the equal rights of mestizo peasants and the Indigenous poor that he handed a large portion of his lands to those who lived and labored upon them. In 1918, he took the even more radical step of apportioning the proceeds specifically for supporting the elderly, sick, and disabled. In 1931, two teachers established Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College on the property.
Ayotzinapa lies a few hours south east of Iguala, which is a stop on the way to Mexico City from the college.
Did we ever enter Iguala on our visits? In my mind, it is tiny, a pueblito, but maybe this is because we always stayed on its outskirts, arriving only to refuel and visit our grandfather at his pit-stop hotel, sometimes spending the night there, but I don’t recall ever going into Iguala proper, before continuing to our destination: the beaches of Acapulco where we bobbed on the waves in packs.
In fact, in my mind the whole town was just our grandfather’s hotel and gas station; that was all I knew Iguala to be. Though now I know that Iguala has a beautiful
church, as all Mexican towns do, and a giant statue of Saint Francis, for whom the church is named, and a lovely central square with a bandstand and a promenade, and that, until recently, there was strong civic pride there, a flag museum and countless public statues celebrating it as the site of Mexican independence. The pretty park with its bandstand is at the center of the murdered student’s destiny, it turns out, as the mayor’s wife was to give a speech there that day; near it, the statue of Saint Francis reaches forward to feed a flock of mourning doves from his outstretched hand.
Iguala has another history too as it is also a strategic smuggling town in a state that has long cultivated opium poppies for heroin. Heroin seems to have played a role in the student murders. In some versions of what occurred that day the police were protecting a cartel transport when they intercepted those students. And in the end it may have been even more complicated than that.
On September 26, 2014 a large group of Ayotzinapa’s trainee teachers, almost 120 altogether, went to Iguala to commandeer a fleet of buses to drive into Mexico City. The 43 murdered students were part of this rowdy, joyful group who were headed to Tlatelolco, in the center of the city. Tlatelolco, which is made up of 102 tall towers, is the largest apartment complex in Mexico; based on Le Corbusier’s concept of “towers in the park.” it was once a solidly middle-class enclave. At its center lies La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where another group of students were murdered in 1968. The Ayotzinapa students were going to Tlatelolco to commemorate that mass murder at the hands of the Mexican government—a murder that had occurred
46 years prior, and which had for so many years been silenced by the Mexican Government—when they too were murdered, under the order of the Mayor of Iguala.
This voyage to Tlatelolco was a yearly ritual. The students always returned the buses.
But, as reported in Time magazine in 2014, on this occasion, after borrowing two buses, the students ran into a blockade of police officers, who immediately began firing at them. There seemed to be other shooters among the officers as well. “There were shots coming from all directions. We were shouting that we didn’t have any weapons, but they kept firing,” says a 19-year-old survivor.
When I went to Mexico City to visit my biological family the summer I turned 16, they lived in Tlatelolco. At first, I was sad not to be in the pretty modernist house with its travertine floors, lovely courtyard, and lulling private balcony that sat separate and secluded off my Aunt Betty’s bedroom. My family had lived in that house for several years. It is the house that Rafael Manzo had come to call at the summer before while I was visiting, when I was 15.
But my longing for this house soon subsided.
I loved living in Tlatelolco that summer, because those towers created a charged proximity: we were surrounded by countless other teenagers. Big groups of them—of us, because we became a part of them. Al’s strict and punishing wife was 2000 miles away, and our mad mother was nowhere to be seen, and none of the other adults really tended to us, so that my sisters and I could run wild in the streets, free and untethered, as much as we wanted. The
whole world opened up for us when we stepped outside, an unfurling under that big Mexico City sky that at 8,000 feet sat so much closer to the heavens than the sky in Los Angeles, and instantly my sisters and I were in the midst of it, at the center of the world, or so it seemed.
La Plaza de las Tres Culturas is called that because all of Mexican time, its history, is visible there: the colonial cobblestone streets leading to the 17th-century Spanish church, Templo de Santiago, under which lie the partially excavated Aztec pyramids of Tlatelolco, from which that very church was built, all of it surrounded by the modernist towers. And these tall towers house the thousands of apartments where all of these teenagers live. The Aztec city of Tlatelolco was the site of the last battle in the conquest of Mexico, where Cuauhtémoc was finally defeated by Cortés. 40,000 Aztecs were killed defending Tlatelolco. There is now a plaque on the site that reads: “The battle was not a triumph, nor was it a defeat. It was the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is the Mexico of today.”
We now lived in this place, site of the birthplace of modern Mexico, and, curious, I pause for only a second to read that plaque before running off to join my wild younger sister Elena and her friends who are sitting in a café scheming about how they are going to get the boy that my sister likes to believe she is still a virgin, my long hair whipping behind me as I run to get there in time. You hold your legs real tight before he enters, her friend says as I sit down, my coffee in hand. And then, when he does, you yell out in mock pain and turn your head and make yourself cry.
Pinch yourself if you have to!
They all shriek with laughter and I know I can’t hide my expression, the shock written there, because my sister catches my eye, smirks at my blush, and whispers, Idiot, under her breath, before she turns away in disgust to ignore me again.
We had big packed parties in the communal spaces, various large halls and common rooms in Tlatelolco, that we filled with the density of our young bodies, dancing and laughing and shrieking, cruising, while we all eyed each other under the flashing disco lights before leaning in and whispering confidences about the other boys, the other girls who we were only occasionally brave enough to approach. Sometimes you were invited and sometimes you weren’t, although you went to those parties too because they were more exciting than the ones where you or your sisters already knew everyone, and though I was still shy, my sister Elena wasn’t and so at one of these parties to which we were not invited, I met a beautiful boy, one year older than me, tall with black hair and blue eyes, from the Sonoran desert. He was standing with his friends near the back wall of the room, people dancing all around them while they stood oblivious in a loose circle and talked and joked and laughed. I eyed him there and could not stop looking, and Elena caught my eyes in their intense engagement, and after rudely asking what I was looking at, Que ves, Idiota? Elena told me to go and talk to him. I shook my head, and she called me stupid and pathetic; she had no patience for this, and so went right up to that boy, pointed at me from the distance, and then pulled him over to me by the arm. And though my heart was beating wildly in that moment, I was happy at her lack of restraint.
Aqui tienes, Mensa, she said, shoving him toward me before turning to huddle with her friends a few feet away.
Many magical things happened to us together, me and that boy, actual magic, and he was there alongside me when my mother tumbled into an especially dark place the following summer. I left him soon after her breakdown, for another boy I didn’t like nearly as much, a fact that has always tortured me, for though we were only teenagers, Emigdio felt real, clear and compassionate and unsentimental. He was interested too, both in me and in the wider world around us, and he took me to plays and other performances put on by activists. I was only 17 then and had never had a love like that. Of course, I understand why I did it now, left him for that other meaningless boy, he having witnessed my mother pacing the halls murmuring her madness …
But now, I am 16; I am here for the summer and I have just met him, and his parents are visiting their own parents in Sonora the whole time I am here, this first summer together, and he is 17, a year older than me, and they’ve trusted him to stay alone in their beautiful modernist apartment, and so we are always at his parentless house, loads of us, just hanging around.
Tlatelolco was about running in packs, the rush of other young bodies when yours was just starting to expand, eyeing the other especially thrilling ones from across a plaza, wondering how you might approach them; sometimes it just took a cruising past, on some casual fake errand—sodas from the corner shop for Auntie right when you knew they’d be hanging around; you’d do this once or twice before there’d be a calling out to you by one brave boy, and your sister’s quick and clever response—Elena
could be hilariously biting—and suddenly, you knew them all.
The excitement of their own youth, the power of deeply felt principles and humanitarian ideals and political justice and historical commemoration. This is what drove those kids who were murdered on September 26, 2014. The vigorous joy that came with movement and activity: climbing onto buses, bodies jumping and pulling themselves on, calling out for liberty in this town that 200 years earlier had raised the cry for Mexican independence.
One of the drivers was killed when the police and the cartel attacked. The young men were murdered for running in packs; they were shot at, rounded up, and disappeared, on the orders of the town’s mayor, who was in cahoots with the cartel. His wife, Maria de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, was scheduled to give a talk in the central park later that day, in front of the pretty bandstand, not far from the statue of Saint Francis. Francis reaches out to feed a pack of mourning doves as she furiously exclaims that she will not be interrupted by those hoodlum students.
Stop them! the Mayor orders his cronies.
That day, all decked out in her fine jewels, she was meant to give a speech that would help her secure the next mayoral race. This would be in the service of everyone who already worked for the cartel.
Time: The cartel is known to have inserted its gunmen into the police force. Many in the police were Guerreros Unidos. Mayor Abarca, who took office in September 2012, is known to have been a key operative of the Warriors United, helping to launder their money through the many local businesses, including several
jewelry stores, he and his wife owned. The mayor’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda was a known Warriors operator as well. These forces are known to have been directly working for the cartel.
These people were all connected.
Time: After shooting at the commandeered buses, the police started shoving students into vehicles. A 19 year-old survivor ran for his life. “I was scared of being shot, but I was also terrified of being taken by these policemen,” the teenager says. He escaped to a wooded area and hid in the trees, terrified, until dawn. “I feel lucky that I am alive. But I think all the time about my companions who were taken. I don’t know what they could have been through or how much pain they could have suffered. This makes me very sad, and very angry.”
The captured 43 were disappeared. It is known that some of them were hacked up and then incinerated. These are the remains that have been found. The local coroner also worked for the cartel. It was he who incinerated the bodies.
Some 44 years earlier, a bus driver in Iguala had taken his bus off route. Our driver was moved by compassion. That bus driver saved my life. The silent gravity of the mostly Indigenous passengers who would be detoured to drop the little girl and her young mother at the hospital door is in cosmic opposition to the frantic horror of what happened on that day in September 2014.
But that’s not really it, my friend tells me. It goes much deeper than them, the mayor and his wife. And it wasn’t just the local police who were involved; the military at every level were in cahoots with the cartel too. Everybody was being paid off. Those two are easy pawns, simple scapegoats.
I swallow hard as I look at him, try to hold his eyes while I speak, I understand, I say, my voice faltering. But can’t we just pause here for a moment? They are so despicable, those two, a symbol of everything that is wrong. The way she lorded it over the town as if she were some queen, her cartel jewels and criminal clothing, parading herself, all made up and haughtily self-righteous, throughout Iguala, in front of the families of the boys she would later help to have send to death murdered. Can’t we just pause here for a moment of clear indignation, of focused fury directed at these two before we plunge back into the not knowing, back into the question of vast collusion, back into the overwhelming doubt?
No, he says.
•
I had a mad mother. Her gaze was turned inward. It was stuck there, compelled by the sick fantasies that drove her, and as for me, aside from the day of the scorpion, it was indifferent. She did not want me. She gave me up. I was six, almost seven, when this severance occurred, and thus my confusion about my age, four or five or six when the scorpion stung, because the only thing I know for certain is that it occurred before I went to live in the States, with Al and the cruelty of his wife. Seven years earlier, my mother had tried to kill herself while I was deep inside her. I’ve written her madness in many different ways. It both evades me and will not let me be.
Yet on the day of the scorpion she pulled outside of herself. I almost died, but it also gave me something to hang on to, something else to organize myself around, in regard to her, my mother. She saw me
and in that moment knew what had to be done. It is there, in my mind’s eye now, in my personal ever-present. In the continuum that is me, my hand reaches up and out of the water, stretches to grasp at that ledge, every desire that lives inside me mirrored there in his eyes, in that boy’s gaze. I am small. I am five, I believe, because she has not yet sent me away. Am I five? He looks at me with urgency. We are in Iguala. The mayor is a cartel operative; his wife, who likes to parade around town covered in jewels from the shops through which she and her husband launder their money, is giving a speech that day. She doesn’t want the students to disturb it. The mayor orders the police to stop them; he barks out a command; there are 125 students; some of them escape the gunfire; they get away, running, running, fueled by terror, through the woods. For a whole night they hide there, silently panting, while 43 of their companions are mercilessly rounded up, shoved violently into police cars, from one moment to the next their joy transformed into a terrible electric panic. I am dripping, my left hand about to land on the little cement ledge. My eyes pause, suddenly caught on that boy’s gaze as he calls out, “Cuida …”
We are in Iguala.
My hand lands as we all scream out in unison.
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973/2019
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso Silver halide print
8 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
EMPTY FRAMES
by Elena Megalos
The first boy I loved became a father the year I gave birth to my second child. This wasn’t information that I learned in a phone call. We had not remained friends. Apart from occasional birthday texts—ones that I, admittedly, initiated—we were not in touch. I did, however, learn his happy news on my phone.
For many years, his presence on the internet had been minimal. Throughout the late aughts, when Facebook membership mattered among the young, he’d abstained from joining. This was a blessing in the aftermath of our college breakup. A window into the beginning of his adult life would have been irresistible and painful.
A decade later, not long after marrying my longtime boyfriend, I was lying comfortably on the grown-up couch we’d purchased for our grown-up apartment and scrolling Instagram, my feed a pleasurable mix of artists, memes, and real-life people I’d known or knew still. Suddenly, violently, there he was: the first boy I’d loved. Arm extended to snap a selfie against the backdrop of another country’s greenery, an amorous companion nestled against his chest. The source wasn’t his account, which was largely out-of-date; it was his partner who had posted the photo.
The girl he now loved—she was a woman, of course, not a girl—was an illustrator, famous enough that I followed her online without actually knowing her. I’d done so for years, and was familiar with her work, her wardrobe, the supplies and tchotchkes on her desk, the tasteful furniture in her home, just six miles and an entire universe from my own.
Like nearly 40,000 other strangers who admired her drawings and looked at her mirror selfies, I’d maintained the illusion of intimacy with this woman. For years, I thought of her as a successful, stylish peer. In more deluded moments, as a kindred spirit. I was no professional, but I loved the same obscure picture books she loved, and I drew pictures too. It was in part thanks to following artists like her on social media that I persisted in believing I might one day spend my days as she did.
Now she was in love—the love of her life!—and she wanted to share her joy. How could she have known the effect of her post on one of her thousands of anonymous fans? The jolt she would cause by letting him into her story and onto my feed? It wasn’t just jarring that my history with him predated hers; it was that my history with her predated his.
Before he entered the frame, the first boy I’d loved had been a ghost to me, preserved at 17—at once exalted and hobbled by my inability to imagine him beyond this formative time, the years that carried us from the West Coast to the East, speaking with earnest certainty of the adult life we would someday share and the children we would someday raise. Periodically, he still appeared to me in dreams, but this moonlit projection of a boy who hadn’t existed in ages—who, maybe, had never existed in the first place— made him less real, not more.
She hadn’t been real to me either. Yes, I’d watched curated evidence of her life unfolding and her career progressing, but like an influencer, she’d existed in an untouchable category. She was a fantasy I escaped to when I was bored or distracted, waiting for my subway home. I knew her no better than I knew the commuter hunched beside me, scrolling away on a device of their own.
When my first love began appearing on her account, he was no longer a ghost. He was right in her kitchen, at her party, his feet grazing the edge of her bed. He was participating in the world of now and I got to watch; sometimes, I was even given the coordinates.
She was real now too: a three-dimensional person whom, of all the people in the world, he had chosen. She had a body, one
that knew intimately well the first body I’d loved. In this way, unbeknownst to her, we were connected.
Every photograph she shared, even those she’d posted before meeting him, was now charged with significance. The loaf of bread he’d baked in Los Angeles and shipped overnight so that she could enjoy it in New York. The hilly cobblestone streets they walked abroad, hand in hand. The dog with which he played peekaboo while she recorded them from an unmade bed. The set of custom stationery she designed for him, spaghetti forming the same initials I’d doodled in the margins of high school notebooks. The strawberry tart and espressos with which they celebrated their eventual elopement.
Why was I allowed to know?
It felt troubling and personal. I studied her glamorous life—so far away, but deceptively proximal—and the contrasts that had once sparked inspiration now shrank me. The gallery where she celebrated a book launch and an art show was a stone’s throw from the school where I worked as an English teacher, pouring most of my energy into the creations of my students. It was only a block away from the home goods shop where I sold my own illustrations at a fraction of the price her work commanded. Our similarities, her nearness, seemed to suggest that a few tweaks—braver choices at moments I’d been too timid—might have collapsed the space between us.
I wondered if a bolder, shinier life would compel me to broadcast my joy as recklessly and relentlessly as she did.
I unfollowed her. I removed the app from my phone’s home screen. This made my roundabout efforts to steal glimpses feel all the more shameful. Her profile was
public; I had only to search her name (one letter typed and it appeared straightaway) and tap her circular icon (that fuchsia active-story ring seemed almost always to hover) to peer in.
I didn’t dare discuss the habit with friends, much less my husband. Sometimes I role-played a higher self, pretending this other me was a childhood friend I would never abandon but whose treachery frustrated me to no end. Get a grip, I urged her. What, exactly, are you waiting for? Is your own life so small and unsatisfying?
My life was satisfying. I’d met my life partner. I loved him; I’d married him! Our lives were full; they were, in fact, expanding. They were also contracting.
Within several months of stumbling into their romance, I was pregnant. Like each of my prior commitments, this one had involved years of deliberation and planning. There had been no surprise, no leap of spontaneity. I’d always craved certainty; I’d felt this way about marriage too. But parenthood would be different, I knew: a choice I couldn’t take back. The alternate realities, however unlikely they’d ever been, would vanish. Life would progress from this one branch I’d decided upon, a branch that would yield unexpected outgrowths, of course, but there would be no leaping from this bough to those other what-ifs. I may as well have taken a hacksaw to them.
It was difficult, in the early months of pregnancy, not to experience it as the countdown to an ending. I had a deadline and really did believe that whatever I failed to accomplish before my due date might never happen. I couldn’t help but view what I had as all I’d ever have. Their beginning felt like my ending.
Soon enough, though, my body reminded me that pregnancy—for all the ways I was determined to frame it—was not conceptual. What I’m saying is—the baby started making its presence known. It started to kick.
How I wish I could report that, having survived this descent, I returned home in one piece, chastened and more self-aware. That I left the happy couple alone and never looked back.
That is and isn’t what happened. I didn’t stop peering, periodically, into their lives, but my orientation toward them changed. As they transitioned to something quieter, deeper, more steadfast and mysterious, I transitioned too.
I’d never been one to take pictures of myself, but I experienced a sudden urge to bear witness. It wasn’t just my changing reflection that felt worthy of documentation: it was a meal my husband had cooked me, the messy tabletop on which I’d finished a drawing, a tree in bloom on my way to work. I’d catch myself openly grinning, keenly aware that I was in the midst of something, a state that would not so much end as evolve and keep evolving.
At 32, I was 17 again, falling in love for the very first time. I was in the throes of courtship, and everything shimmered.
This was what she had shown me, I realized. What had startled, pained, and consumed me. She had documented and broadcast her state of falling, one that so happened to involve the object of my own original fall. And she did it well, falling in love. With the man who would become her husband, yes, but it didn’t stop there. She’d fallen in love with the streets of New York City, its unorthodox inhabitants, with her brilliant friends, a pair of shoes, a plate of
shrimp, with—above all else—the contents of her imagination, inked on paper. “Fell in love” makes it sound fixed, like these were solitary acts she concluded, when really it was more continuous than this. She was, to my admiring eye, in a constant state of falling.
This had drawn me to her account in the first place, years before she’d even met him. It was what made her life look like art, and her art come alive. It was her secret, and it was available to us all. We, too, could love what we had; we, too, could celebrate it exuberantly.
Not long after the birth of my second son, she posted a mirror selfie. In it, she posed in profile, her unbuttoned blouse and fitted skirt accentuating the new shape of her stomach. Quick arithmetic confirmed it: my final month of pregnancy had been her first.
So here we were. Another ending, another beginning, another story that was both and neither. I wouldn’t push this one away. I would follow, with affection, as she continued to illuminate the places I knew well and the places I would never know.
I set down my phone. My baby was nursing. I didn’t want to miss it.
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso
Vintage silver halide print
7.75 × 10 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
WHO EDU WAS
by Sanaë Lemoine
What did you love about your father, I asked Camila, although she was three when he was disappeared. Would she have her own recollections or just the stories others told her, their memories shaping his imprint? Nine years of adults telling her who Edu was.
Without hesitation, she answered: How he took care of his shoes. He never wore the same shoes two days in a row, so they had time to breathe between. He would polish them once a week, wiping away the dirt and dust, polishing the tops until they shone but not too much, one shouldn’t draw attention to their gloss. Only the soles, unevenly worn down from his distinct way of walking, showed their age.
I asked Maricel what she missed the most about her husband.
His voice. The way it was thick in the morning, how the first words caught in his throat, like moving through wet sand, and once it had cleared, it was the most beautiful sound, a sound that came from his wide chest, the chest of a former rugby player. A small cathedral producing a deep and rich melody that grounded me. It was a centrifugal force. How could I not anchor myself there?
That he comforted me at night when I had nightmares, Camila said. Mamá would send me away without opening her eyes: Go to your bed! she’d say, in her commanding voice.
Camila learned to visit her father’s side and tap his face without rousing Maricel, who slept beside him. He would make a space for his daughter and, in the early hours of dawn, return Camila to her bed. It was their secret.
Milo described how his brother would run baths for him. Edu was 11 years older, the firstborn and for a long time an only child. Their mother had endured several miscarriages, one in her second trimester, and when Milo stayed inside, it seemed like no small miracle. They waited for his arrival, counting the days and their luck.
Edu’s task was to bathe his brother.
Imagine, while his other friends were out at the movies or chasing after girls, he stayed at home and prepared my bath. But he was distracted, listening to his records or lost in a book, and he would forget about the bath, so the water overflowed. We would run to sop up the water before it reached the wooden floorboards of the hallway. I had this impression of a neglectful brother who resented taking care of me, who never remembered to turn off the water. And then recently, I found a photo of us in the tub. I’m around four and Edu must be 15. We’re both naked and Edu sits behind me with his arms resting on the sides of the bath, to shield me from the hard ceramic edges. If you could see the look of pure delight on my face. It’s obvious that he took his job seriously.
The thing about Edu, a close friend told me, is that he was kindest to Maricel. Not to everyone. This is an important distinction. He knew when to put down or set aside others to lift Maricel up. She was his priority. He would have thrown himself in front of a truck to save her. Once the three of us crossed the street and a car stopped at our knees, and Edu grew three feet taller, slammed his hand on the hood. This side appeared when he sensed Maricel was in danger, because otherwise Edu was gentle.
What was he scared of? I asked his father. I’d caught him alone in the hallway, just as we finished lunch.
Dogs. Not of spiders or snakes or creatures you might typically fear. When Eduardo was little, my friends Osvaldo and Luisa invited us to lunch. They had a big dog who would often get into trouble for biting people. But they loved their dog, and so when guests came over, they tied him
outside in the garden. The dog would circle around a tree, barking. And because they adored the dog, they also wanted to show him off; they couldn’t help it. That day, the dog—his name was Rolo—seemed subdued. They untied his leash and brought him inside. Eduardo was standing next to me. He was five or six, his head no higher than my hip. The moment our friend left the room, Rolo lunged forward and bit my leg. What good fortune that he bit me and not Eduardo, but of course, the blood staining my jeans impressed him. He was stunned by Rolo’s strength. Yes, the dog’s teeth broke the fabric of my jeans. Even years later, my son would tense at the sound of a distant bark.
In my two weeks with Maricel, friends of hers visited and spoke to me as though I was one of theirs. They knew I had never met Edu, that this was my first time in their wrecked country—a word spoken with affection and irony. Perhaps because I was a new friend, flown in from across the world, they confided in me with unforeseen ease.
This is how it happened. First you were kidnapped, then brought to a secret detention center or camp where you were tortured. It didn’t matter that Edu came from a wealthy family of landowners with ties to the military. He taught history at the university, and perhaps that alone made him a subversive. After two months of being desaparecida, Maricel reappeared in a state prison where she awaited a trial that never came. Why she survived was not a question anyone dared ask.
I was most afraid that he was not the person I thought him to be, Maricel said. When we met, he was older, in his thirties, and had lived through a marriage to
someone I would never see and learned about through glimpses provided by friends. I knew his ex felt wronged and unloved; she had banished Edu from her life. It wasn’t just this troubling past, and a whole stretch of adulthood I had yet to experience, but an opaqueness that my close friends also noticed. The possibility of Edu withholding a part of himself. The rumors of him as a younger man didn’t surprise me. He danced with confidence and gave terrific embraces, and although he was rarely the most handsome man in the room, women wanted him. I worried that one day we would be in a situation where he could no longer keep his secret side tucked away. I would see it and we would both be confronted with whatever it was. I was most afraid of how I might act in that instant, my inability to forgive or the lengths to which I would go to protect myself.
How much he loved Maricel, her childhood friend said. This was no ordinary love; it was complete admiration. On days when he didn’t teach, he rode the bus with her to work just to spend another hour in her presence, and then he read student papers on the return, even if it was rush hour and he was stuck in traffic. Whenever they said goodbye in public, he would follow her with his eyes until she disappeared behind a corner or into a building. Sometimes she turned around to check that he was still looking. And that moment, when they caught each other looking, was enough to make you embarrassed of your own marriage. My husband certainly never glances at me that way.
•
Early in their relationship, Edu lied to Maricel.
I asked him a simple but serious question, and he looked into my eyes and answered with a lie. There was no pause; the lie came out naturally. And later, when I discovered it, he insisted it was an omission, a half-truth, nothing to be up in arms about. The more we spoke and the more I pushed back, describing the betrayal I felt, how I’d put myself blindly in his hands, the more he agreed with me. It was a blatant lie and he had not been forthcoming. Edu spent the rest of his life proving to me that I could trust him, sometimes telling me things I didn’t need to know, but I never shook this feeling of suspicion. Whenever I remembered how I had gulped his words the way one breathes air, I would shudder.
And why do you think he lied to you?
Because he was afraid of losing me. We had been together a few months, our bond was fragile, and he sensed that it would not withstand the truth. He was right—had he told me the truth then, I would have walked away.
Did you tell him that?
Yes, Maricel answered.
I wondered if knowing this made Edu more likely to conceal himself.
Not long after Maricel was released from prison in 1982, a man came to see her.
He stopped by the building and told the portero he was a friend of ours, so I let him in. I didn’t recognize this man. Somehow he had found my new address. He claimed to be a close friend of Edu’s, said they belonged to a swim club in the ’70s. I’d never known Edu to be part of a club, but this man insisted that they met once a month to swim laps for a half hour, and then drank beer at a nearby restaurant. He recounted specific details that only someone close to him would have known:
that he drank his coffee very sweet, like his maté; that he read everything, even poetry and magazines, with a pen, writing in the margins; that he hated the feel of salt on his skin and needed to wipe it off or rinse immediately after being in the ocean. We spoke for an hour. I told him Edu had been missing for six years. He nodded, saying he had wanted to meet me because Edu so often spoke about how intelligent and beautiful I was. The man laughed, saying he would tease his friend. Since he’d never met me, he thought I must be an imaginary wife, an idealized version, but now he could see those qualities Edu had described over and over again. At your swim club, I said, staring at him. As the man stood to leave, he asked if I knew that my husband was afraid of the dark. I was surprised. It didn’t sound like him, but we had never been confronted with pitch-black darkness; there was always some streetlight coming through the windows. I’d never blindfolded him. Yes, the man said, being in the dark “annihilated” him. I thought that was a strange word, but the man had already pressed the button for the elevator. Edu loved the sun, I replied, unsure of what else to say. Before the elevator doors closed, the man said he would come back. It occurred to me that perhaps he had known Edu not from a swim club but from the detention center. I’ve tried to find him. All I remember is his name, Carlos, and the first letter of his last name, P.
The entrance to our old apartment building had high ceilings and mirrors on all the walls. I would scream at the top of my lungs, staring at my reflection, listening to the echo of my voice. He didn’t care and he let me scream even when the neighbors walked by, shaking their heads in horror.
Edu, you really need to restrain your daughter, Camila said, imitating them.
Former students told me about his calm demeanor, how they were very anxious in the weeks after the military coup, when abductions became more frequent. How terrified they were to walk down the street. Edu never lost his composure. Day after day, he reassured them: There will always be a solution, we are here to think and learn. His optimism and belief in the present buoyed them until one day when he did not come to class. Our professor was taken in broad daylight, the students said, they opened the door and pulled him out of his car.
When he woke up, Edu would say: Good morning, my love, how did you sleep? It was imperative that I tell him how I had slept, a ritual of sorts, and sometimes I lied to him, saying that I had slept poorly when in fact the night had been one long stroke. After he was taken, I struggled to stay asleep. Often the exhaustion bludgeoned me, but then I would wake at two or three in the morning, my body full of adrenaline, heart banging into my ears.
No one was as skilled at ironing and folding clothes, Camila said. If only you could’ve seen those shirts.
When he felt threatened, Maricel told me, he would become a little boy. It was instantaneous, how quickly he went from the mature, reasonable Edu to a sullen child with the shortest fuse. He would want to leave right away; in seconds, he’d throw on his jacket and step into his shoes and be almost out the door, as though the argument had caused irreparable offense. But all I had to do was say one word, give him the slightest opening, remind him of my love, and then he returned. Sometimes
we would start making love with his jacket and shoes still on.
After the charges were dropped and Maricel was released, she had felt depressed. She’d lost years of her life and her husband was gone. How could she not see it that way? She carried psychological and physical wounds from the torture: irregular heartbeats, sudden pain in her chest. During that first week, as she settled into a temporary apartment, she had gone to a café she and Edu had loved. It was a short walk from their old home where Camila was born and raised until she went to live with her great aunt in La Plata while Maricel was imprisoned.
She was worried that it would feel different, the memory not aligning with the reality six years later, but it was the same as before, even the servers, barely aged. Every day she returned to the café and ordered a coffee and medialuna. She sat outside across the street from a plaza filled with trees. By late morning, the sun had shifted from behind a large tree and shone onto the front tables where she sat.
I can’t find the words to describe the particular warmth of light as it shines through the leaves and hits your bare skin. In prison, I told myself that all I needed was to be outside with one tree. And there I was, with more trees than I could count. •
That night, as though she could peer into my head, Maricel said: Ama, you and Edu would’ve gotten along.
It reminded me of how she spoke when we first met, almost six months ago—with authority and often saying my name at the beginning or end of a sentence. Later, I learned it was the way she addressed all her
friends, and I wondered if it was a mark of affection, to make us feel at the center of her world, or perhaps it was nothing more than a thoughtless mannerism.
What makes you think that? I asked, touched by her declaration.
Because he loved to tell stories and you are an attentive listener. Because you are gullible and love to be carried away by someone else.
ONE FOR THE ROAD
Timothy Liu
No one prepared us for that memory tube screwed into the side of my father’s coffin. It looked perfect for a hand-rolled joint or a bump of coke to help our dad get to wherever he was going— his wife sobbing hard over the botched job the morticians had done on his face—her man no longer her man but a stranger. No one expects to wake up to this but it happens every day, and if you too become unmoored from the ground loved ones buried you in, best hope future generations will be able to read
what we scribbled on that inside scrap of roller paper before taking a final hit—
Yasuo Kuroda
Quiet House , 2023
7.75 × 10.125 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles
WE GOSSIP IN ORDER TO LIVE
by Daniel Loedel
At some point in catch-ups with old friends, we inevitably reach the question “Got any gossip?” Increasingly over the last several years, the answer has been no. What follows then is typically a shared eulogy for this beloved concept that scarcely seems to have any role in our lives anymore. Remember the days when things happened? we bemoan. Remember when weekends were filled with stories, and the people in our midst surprised us with their foibles and complexity, and life, in short, did not stand still?
I am 36, and most of the people with whom such conversations take place are roughly the same age, give or take five years. We are all also primarily urbanites, particularly in New York City, meaning we do not have the small-town community structure that presumably helped establish the notion of gossip as a bad thing—everyone in everyone else’s business, and so forth. We are people who work from home, and whose knowledge of acquaintances comes from Instagram. We are usually married or partnered, usually starting families or considering it. We are nearly unanimously trying to “settle down,” whatever we might mean by that term: consistency of a career, of a home, of a routine. We are not seeking, by and large, to rock the boat of our existence. And so, the gossip we tend to have is rare and cataclysmic: a divorce, a job loss, a death. The stakes of this kind of gossip are incredibly high. Long gone are those Sunday mornings when gossip was about two people who hooked up after a party—the fun in it was the very possibility of transience.
It’s possible that my circle’s mourning the loss of gossip is a phenomenon limited to my circle, and that the rest of the world is either glad to be rid of it or glad to still have it in the desired quantities. But I think this loss is more universal, and that it is a loss in every sense of that word, and I don’t use the word “mourning” lightly. I feel this loss keenly, almost every day, probably because so many days now turn out to be the same.
•
Studies unsurprisingly reveal that men gossip just as much as women, and that children begin to gossip at as early as age five. It is something all humans do. And when we do it, the science shows, we get a boost of oxytocin. This is the so-called “cuddle chemical” or “love hormone” that has associations with sex and mother-infant attachment and—again, not surprising—helps us form bonds. Gossip is social glue.
It is also a tool for those disenfranchised by the patriarchal system we’ve inherited from that Victorian age (and all the ages before it). In the workplace, its usefulness is apparent: people exchange tales of bad bosses and co-workers to watch out for, creating a whisper network of mutual validation and advice in an environment that usually offers neither. There are also, of course, the less academic justifications for gossip: it’s social currency, and it’s fun as hell. So, case closed: gossip is
I was always a great lover of gossip; I suspect most storytellers are. Nineteenth-century novels (my favorite) depend enormously on gossip for plot; a case might even be made that most of that era’s novels are gossip. In the Victorian age, gossip was both pivotal as a narrative mechanism and generally maligned, which tells you a lot about where its bad rap came from: prudishness and patriarchy. The etymology speaks to this—gossip originally referred to the idle conversation of a birthing room, in which only women were present. It is also for this reason that women have been deemed bigger gossips than men and were even punished with horrific methods for gossiping. The scold’s bridle of Elizabethan England was an iron muzzle that silenced the wearer and had bells attached so that observers would hear the ring and know the woman’s crime. Sometimes these masks even had a spiked metal tongue.
good because it is socially helpful; it makes for good books and entertainment; and if we lack it, our pain is no deeper than a lack of oxytocin and the accompanying loneliness. Ostensibly, we need not dig further into its value.
But a piece of this puzzle is still missing. My friends and I are already bonded (we do not share a toxic workplace and so on). If we were merely craving an amusing fix of gossip about crazy people’s crazy doings, we could turn to celebrities or politics or reality TV. For some, that is clearly enough—hence the popularity of podcasts like Normal Gossip, along with a whole arm of the media industry. But for me? I need proximity to the object and I need it not solely in order to enjoy a sense of connection with the person across the table. Yes, I am lonely and live in a lonely era in a lonely city. But perhaps this longing has less to do with a riveting sense of other people’s lives than it does with the longing for a more riveting life of one’s own. •
Why do we tell stories? In order to live, goes the famous Joan Didion title. Kafka’s take, that a book should be an axe that breaks the frozen sea inside us, suggests that it is primarily about emotion bursting forth from repression, the catharsis of penetrating our self- or civilization-imposed numbness. But both skip over a crucial ingredient, and here a line from Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1985 interview with The Paris Review is instructive: “In general I’d rather talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis.” At its best, gossip is as interesting and educational as a spirited discussion about whether Hamlet is mad or feigning
madness or simply a dramatic teen acting out.
Back in college, an ex-girlfriend of mine provided another quote, which she misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt (as, for some reason, many people do; it is in fact a simplification of an adage attributed to the 19th-century British historian Henry Thomas Buckle): “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” Of course, she and I spent most of our time discussing people, and for many years, I subscribed to this notion. Now I see that it’s nonsense. What are ideas or events without the people who create them?
•
The other night, in lieu of actually exchanging gossip, a group of friends and I discussed why our current cultural era is lacking in this department. One of them, a religious studies PhD, made the case that we’ve lost our attachment to gossip because we’ve lost our attachment to those antiquated norms that required secrecy. If you can be out of the closet and have polyamorous relationships and experiment with drugs and befriend people of different races and classes—in short, if everything is permissible—what is left to make anything scandalous? But while norms have clearly shifted, they haven’t been discarded. Look at cancel culture—moral outrage persists everywhere, just under different guises. And even the most unorthodox of relationships function according to agreed-upon rules, which produce gossip when rules are broken.
The beating heart of gossip isn’t secrecy; it’s surprise. In college, a pair of people making out against a frat house wall in
front of everyone was gossip if they were an unlikely pair. In fact, the best gossip in my young, buzz-filled days was often the gossip everybody knew, because everybody had an opinion about it.
The other proposed culprits for the decrease in gossip my friends and I identified were the pandemic and the lack of in-person interaction. But the pandemic, while it’s often described as a standstill, was one of the most punctuated times most of us have lived through. Couples got together and broke up with far greater speeds, and an intensifying strangeness seeped through our off-kilter existences, often making them story-filled. I know one divorced couple who, because they both wished to be with their child, absconded upstate with each other and their respective new partners and produced a three-month-long living situation weirder than most sitcoms.
Another friend, a corporate lawyer with a contrarian streak, argued that we had it backward, that in fact this is the most gossip-ubiquitous era in history. Look at the current social media landscape, the posts relating all the intimate details of this or that person’s life, the tweets announcing departures from jobs or marriages or cities or whatever else—is this not gossip? I would say no. Gossip is what happens around the margins of these online declarations: it’s what they hide or unwittingly reveal. The posts themselves are guarded, products of the poster’s desired narrative; they are efforts to evade or control gossip. This is why even posts announcing misfortune tend to include a photo of the poster smiling, having arrived on the other side. The overwhelming sense presented by social media is of life as a journey with a destination, reached by
thirty-five and depicted as a highlight-reel of self-satisfaction.
This is not new; individuals have always projected success if they could. But today’s vision of success is a kind of one-way street without swerves. Upheaval is failure; messiness is failure. And if your life is messy and you are constantly inundated with these contrasting, sedate images of success, you will probably want to keep your messiness to yourself. You will also probably feel very alone with that messiness since, without gossip, you will not hear that others are experiencing the same.
It's not just about misery loving company, though. Settling down, even if it makes you happy, is still settling down. It is a quieting, a narrowing of possibility.
For me, it was only a decade ago: that dynamism hung in the air like a spice, be it at a party or a job or a simple visit to a coffee shop. Anything could happen. Was that because so many things were happening to me? No, the truth is that not many things ever did happen to me. It was, rather, that I heard about things happening to others, and, by wonderful osmosis, the “storyness” of their lives was infused into mine.
We gossip for the same reason that we read: to be reassured that stories take place at all.
•
Now, it would be extremely callous not to acknowledge that gossip can ruin lives, both emotionally and practically. Oscar Wilde, who wrote his own nice defense of gossip (“scandal is gossip made tedious by morality”), wound up in prison thanks largely to gossip about his sexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Contemporary examples of its destructive
power also abound (slut-shaming, cyberbullying, and so on).
But even negative gossip can have oblique positive effects for some people. Consider those who spill their guts on social media or report every salacious tidbit of their lives in memoirs. For them it is better to be seen in a bad light than not seen at all.
In our postpandemic internet age, when the social infrastructure of office corridors and neighborhood watering holes has been severely undermined, it easy to feel not only isolated, but nonexistent. To gossip is to battle against mutual disappearance. It is a way of rediscovering a sense of community and reasserting your presence in that community. This is true even if you are the one gossiped about; you may well hurt deeply, but you also matter.
It is revealing that even in Walden, there is a short but beautiful paean to gossip. “Every day or two,” Thoreau writes, “I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.”
DAYLIGHT SAVING LONELINESS
by Hedi El Kholti
I am getting out of the bus on Santa Monica Boulevard and Third. The air is moist and salty and I can feel the humidity rolling in from the nearby shore. The streets have suddenly become dark, after a tentative and colorless sunset. I dread that short interval after the night sets in and before the lampposts light up. I walk through the Third Street Promenade, a collection of old-fashioned department stores and low-end discount shops that closes early during the week, and then head south on Fourth. I stop briefly to glance from the overpass at the rush hour traffic on the 10 freeway and the otherworldly spectacle of liquid red and white lines produced by the cars’ headlights. The familiarity of this image, a
cliché of time-lapse photography, reassures me. I also find comfort staring at the Civic Auditorium on my right. Its dirty-white angular majesty reminds me very much of the midcentury modernist architecture in Casablanca, where I grew up. It felt so improbable there, but here it feels like I’ve finally arrived home, or at least that it’s a sign I should stay here. There’s so little I can relate to right now that this feeling could sustain me for a few more days. All of the misconceived notions I had, equating Los Angeles with a sun-drenched playground when I first came to town last summer, have disappeared really quickly. I conveniently forgot all the warning signs, I lied to myself so I wouldn’t be discouraged from moving here, because I knew that it’s not what I might find here that matters but what I escaped, what I left behind.
I’m listening on my Walkman to a mixtape that Tommy gave me, as a parting gift, after he dumped me. I’m hoping to find secret messages in the lyrics of songs I barely understand. Hüsker Dü: “There are things that I’d like to say / But I’m never talking to you again / There’s things I’d like to phrase some way / But I’m never talking to you again.” I met Tommy the previous year when I was working as an intern for Roger Corman’s film company, Concorde, during my first summer in Los Angeles in 1991. We became fast friends. We were the same age and shared a similar taste for obscure movies and alternative music, and talked about both endlessly. A Catholic boy from the Midwest, Tommy dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. We took weekend trips to Ensenada and San Francisco, and in the last couple of weeks I was here, after my sublease ran out, he invited me to stay at the apartment he was sharing with
a couple of roommates. I slept on a sleeping bag next to his futon. After a couple of nights, he asked me if I wanted to sleep in his bed where I’d be more comfortable. Years later, he would dramatize the night we first had sex in his first feature, and my memory of it has been replaced by watching myself on the screen played by a very good-looking blond. The bed is filmed from above, his anguish and hesitation palpable as he’s pondering, for what seems an eternity, whether to make a move or not. In the film, he doesn’t, only to learn later that the blond guy he’s in love with is gay after all, or gay for pay. I don’t remember. We took our last trip to Joshua Tree before I headed back to Paris. He bought a bunch of acid from the deadhead surfer maintenance guy at his office, and as we were tripping in the desert, I was filled with a sense of possibility for the first time in my life. When I left, he cried at the airport and I promised I would come back.
We stayed in touch and made plans to reunite after I’d finish my degree. Two days after I returned from Paris to Los Angeles, we met for dinner, and he told me he didn’t have feelings for me any longer. Still, we went to his apartment on the top floor of the old disused Venice post office on Abbot Kinney and had sex that felt disincarnated and joyless. He fell asleep. I looked at him for a while, confused, and decided to go back to my apartment. It must have been three in the morning. The streets were deserted. I was out of cigarettes. I saw an unspoiled cigarette on the sidewalk midway to my place. I couldn’t resist, took it, and lit it. A few minutes later, two guys appeared in front of me and asked me for a cigarette. I answered that I didn’t have any even though I was smoking one. One of
them pulled out a knife, waved it in front of my face, and summoned me to give him all the money I had or he would cut my throat. I froze and diligently emptied my pockets. They ran away after I handed over the wad of bills, and I kept walking calmly to my apartment, a bit dazed. Once I locked the door, I broke up into tears, feeling helpless and alone. I saw Tommy the next day for a few minutes. He told me he had fallen from grace. And he added that I could “service him” every once in a while, bringing to my mind images of gas stations and car maintenance. I could feel that he reveled in the power he had over me, and that made me love him less.
For a while, I thought we’d get back together, or that we could at least be friends the way we were before we started having sex. I thought there would be an explanation for his sudden withdrawal that felt so hard to reconcile with the feelings we experienced that summer. Maybe he’d been afraid that he’d be responsible for me since I only knew a couple of people in the city and that our relationship would stand in the way of his ambition. I thought that maybe it was a test, and that if I made a life for myself here, he would come back to me. Or maybe we plainly fell into that clichéd gay paradigm that I wasn’t aware of then with my limited grasp of the culture—that once the “straight” boy isn’t straight anymore, he loses his currency. I held on for too long to the masochistic pleasure I found in being rejected. But we seldom saw each other. I couldn’t hide my resentment and it made our encounters unpleasant. A stoic sadness, an affectation I would mistakenly associate with a kind of dignity, which softened in my mind this newfound infamy I felt by being out and
exposed. I became gay walking home in Santa Monica when this young blond guy screamed “faggot” at me from his speeding BMW. Really? I was 24 then and I had successfully hid it this whole time. Is it that obvious? •
In 2004, I ran into Tommy at Coachella in the beer garden. I had just dropped ecstasy and seeing him startled me. He still had that effect on me, where I would lose any sense of composure, would appear aloof and uncommunicative, only to retrospectively form in my mind what I should have said. I was overwhelmed by the large crowd, the punitive desert heat, which accumulates with more intensity around sunset. Toward the end of their set, the Pixies played their languorous R&B song “Hey,” which had become our love song that summer. When Black Francis sang the first utterance of “hey” a cappella, the crowd cheered wildly. During the few seconds of silence before Kim Deal’s loud bass line started, I vividly remembered our time in Joshua Tree, the promises we made to each other that we couldn’t keep, and I began to cry, silently. The song was an incantation I had forgotten: “Hey / Been trying to meet you / Hey / Must be a devil between us / Or whores in my head / Whores at my door / Whores in my bed / But hey / Where have you been? / If you go, I will surely die / We’re chained.” I naively used the song as a placeholder during our separation. It carried all the intensity of our brief affair. I scanned the crowd wanting to connect with him, but I was unable to single him out in the sea of people. When the song ended, the spell was broken. I felt I had completed a cycle. Any remnant feelings that were still
lingering from that period of my life were expunged. I was free of whatever debt I still owed to those moments, and filled with a sense of gratitude for what Tommy had facilitated then, the possibility of being emptied out, of having no history or destiny to weigh me down, of having no one expecting anything from me. Later, we ran into each other again and I asked him what he thought of the show. He said they had sucked and maybe they shouldn’t have reunited after all, that the whole thing felt like a cash grab.
•
When I think about my first months in L.A., I am seized with an irrational sense of panic, dormant and shapeless, that has never fully left me, and has informed every decision I ever made. How did someone like me, without an ounce of courage, with no particular skills, and with a very limited grasp of the English language, put myself in such a precarious position? When I read the diaries that cover my first couple of years here, I am surprised to find them fairly accordant with my current memories of that time. They’re filled with images I have forgotten, and material details of those first weeks in my barren apartment in Santa Monica. I remember the small, empty bedroom, save for a really large grayscale poster on the wall of Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, with the figure in the field pointing his finger at me accusatorily. I see the black-and-white TV that was abandoned in a closet, which I only used once or twice, watching Ross Perot’s endlessly strange, meandering infomercials when he was running as an independent presidential candidate. My life was reduced to a path between the French market up the
street, where I got bread, cheese, and wine, and the French bookstore in Westwood, La Cité, where I bought Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy and Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan. In one entry in my diary, I wrote: “The pang of emotion I experience glancing at the answering machine as I enter the bedroom, the little red number that blinks, an electronic glimmer of hope. I ration my long-distance phone calls with my friends abroad to maintain the illusion that beyond the silence and the loneliness I am experiencing here, a familiar world filled with warmth might still exist, permanent, with immutable people eagerly awaiting my return.”
GREEN TREES
Flora Field
Perhaps there is a greater revelation to be made but in the face of abundance not much can be said the English know this of course and to achieve their perfect silence they shove their cottages with antiquity their fields with trees between which they tractor up circle upon circle of dried grasses bales in surplus so much farmland it couldn’t possibly be useful at least this is what I told myself when I first said no I would no longer go and it isn’t that in the absence of that abundance I found emptiness it isn’t that I arrived at truth it’s that it still won’t stop calling to me won’t stop letting me know it’s there waiting knows I’m hiding
behind stringing words together as if the act could save me
Yasuo Kuroda Quiet House , 1973
Signed Y. Kuroda in ink on verso Silver halide print
10 × 8 inches
Copyright: © Yasuo Kuroda
Courtesy of the artist and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles.
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), which won the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016).
Ivanna Baranova is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Continuum (2023) and Confirmation Bias (2019), both available from Metatron Press. Her work has appeared in blush, Cixous72, DIAGRAM, Newest York, and elsewhere.
Emmeline Clein’s first book, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, is out now from Knopf. Her chapbook Toxic was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022. Her essays, criticism, and reporting have been published in The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and other outlets.
Flora Field is a poet from Oregon. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow and the recipient of a Chair’s Fellowship. Her poems can be found in the Vassar Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Hedi El Kholti is a co-editor, alongside Chris Kraus, at Semiotext(e), where he created the publication Animal Shelter, an occasional journal of art, sex, and literature, along with the Intervention Series. Hesse Press published A Place in the Sun, a book of his writings and collages, in 2017.
Veronica Gonzalez Peña is a Mexican-born writer and filmmaker. She is the author of twin time: or, how death befell me (2007), winner of the Aztlán Literary Prize; the novel The Sad Passions (2013); and a book on the Mexican drug war, So Far from God (2014), all published by Semiotext(e). Her widely
available documentary film Pat Steir: Artist (2020) has been called “intimate” and “revelatory.” Notes on Disappearing is forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in the fall of 2025.
Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Wesleyan University Press.
Sophie Kemp is a writer from Schenectady, New York, based in Brooklyn. She has written for The Paris Review, GQ, The Baffler, and Pitchfork. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), which won the Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
After graduating with an economics degree from Rikkyo University in 1970, Yasuo Kuroda (b. 1948 in Morioka City, Japan) began photographing Butoh and its founder Tatsumi Hijikata. His work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Tatsumi Hijikata: The Last Butoh: Photographs by Yasuo Kuroda, Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles (2023); Tatsumi Hijikata’s Last Butoh: Photographs and Notation, Galerie Omotesando, Tokyo (2021). Selected group exhibitions include: Sanya Kantarovsky: TO PRISON with selections from Tatsumi Hijikata:
The Last Butoh: Photographs by Yasuo Kuroda, Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles (2023); Enigma of 15 Billion Years Enigma of 15 Billion Light Years, Galerie Naruse, Tokyo (2021); Yukata Matsuzawa and the Nine Pillars, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (2004); Media and Interference, Saishunkan Gallery, Tokyo (2004); Hand Performance by 96 artists, Tamako Okazaki Gallery, Tokyo (1998).
Michelle Latiolais is the author of the novel Even Now (1990), which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her second novel, A Proper Knowledge (2008), was published by Bellevue Literary Press, as was Widow (2011), a collection of stories, involutions, and essays. She was released in 2016 by W. W. Norton & Company. Recent work is forthcoming in the Mississippi Review in 2025.
Daniel Lavery is the author of Women’s Hotel (2024) and the co-founder of The Toast.
Summer Kim Lee is an assistant professor of English at UCLA. She was born and raised in Los Angeles.
Sanaë Lemoine is a novelist and cookbook writer. She is the author of the novel The Margot Affair (2020), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the co-author of the cookbook Hot Sheet: Sweet and Savory Sheet Pan Recipes for Every Day and Celebrations In 2022, she was a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Sanaë was raised in France and Australia, and now lives in Brooklyn.
Timothy Liu is a writer whose latest book of poems is Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (2023). A reader of occult esoterica, he lives in Woodstock, New York.
Daniel Loedel is the author of the novel Hades, Argentina (2021), which won the Prix du Premier Roman, was a finalist for the Prix Femina and VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @DanielLoedel.
Ruth Madievsky is the author of the national best-selling novel All-Night Pharmacy (2023), winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction, as well as a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her work appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Cut, and elsewhere. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary-care clinical pharmacist.
Whitney Mallett is the founding editor of The Whitney Review of New Writing and the co-editor of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey. She has presented work at Performance Space New York, MoMA PS1, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Charlie Markbreiter is the author of Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella (2022). He is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and organizes with Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG).
Sarah Thankam Mathews was raised in Oman and India, is based in Brooklyn, and is the author of the National Book Award–short-listed novel All This Could Be Different
(2022). Thankam: It’s thun like thunder, gum like gumdrop. Mathews founded the mutual aid collective Bed-Stuy Strong, writes the newsletter thot pudding, and can be found on social media at @smathewss.
Elena Megalos is a Brooklyn-based writer, illustrator, and teacher.
Francesca Peacock is an author and arts journalist. Her first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, was published in 2024 by Pegasus Books.
Clayton Purdom has written for publications including Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. He is a co-founder of EX Research, a worker-owned research agency focused on the intersection of culture and technology. He lives in Cleveland.
Kristen Radtke is the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). She is the creative director of The Verge. The recipient of grants from the Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, her work has been nominated for a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, an Eisner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and numerous National Magazine Awards. Her comics and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and many other places.
Tal Rosenberg was born in Los Angeles and raised in Chicago, where he resides today. A former editor at the Chicago Reader, he has most recently written essays and features for Chicago, Pitchfork, and The Ringer
Rhian Sasseen lives in New York. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, Granta, and more.
Aaron Schuster is a philosopher and writer who lives in Amsterdam, and an editor of e-flux Notes. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016), and How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT Press, forthcoming December 2024).
Natasha Stagg is the author of Surveys (2016), Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 (2019), and Artless: Stories 2019–2023 (2023).
David St. John is the author of numerous books; his most recent collection is The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (2017).
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (b. 1929 in Caracas, Venezuela) lives and works in Venice, Los Angeles. In the 1940s, she studied painting at Artes Plásticas, Caracas, moving in 1949 to study sculpture at the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. In 1963, Suarez Frimkess was awarded a fellowship to study ceramics at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York, where she met her partner and longtime collaborator, Michael Frimkess. While their collaborative work has achieved acclaim, her first solo exhibition was not held until 2013, when she was 84 years old. Since that debut, she has been undoubtedly known for her hand-painted ceramics, recognized for their unique flare in the candid capturing of pop culture iconography, ancient histories, mythologies, and intimate memory. Her work is the subject of a forthcoming career retrospective at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in
August 2024 and will be included in the 2024 El Museo del Barrio Triennial in October. She will also open a major solo exhibition at kaufmann repetto in New York in September. Previously, she has shown at White Columns, New York; kaufmann repetto in New York and Milan; and South Willard, Los Angeles. Her work was included in Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum Biennial, Los Angeles (2014), as well as in group exhibitions at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2024); MAK Center, Schindler House, Los Angeles (2017); and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco (2021). Suarez Frimkess’s work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum; the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California; LACMA; and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, among others.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and parttime faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninsula Press, UK; Catapult, US; 2024), as well as Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many psychoanalytic publications.
Andrea “Andi” Werblin Reid (1965–2022), the author of Lullaby for One Fist (2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (2014), spent her last years working tirelessly on a powerful manuscript of poems about living and dying with ovarian cancer, To See Yourself as You Vanish, forthcoming in 2025 from Wesleyan University Press. “Mental” is from that collection.
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