LARB Quarterly, no. 35: Isn't it uncanny?

Film Exchanges

Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself A Screen History

John Scanlan

“Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself is a huge collection of information on the many connections and feedback loops that music, musicians, and movie culture established and refined over the decades, thereby appreciating the massive input (originally) rock’n’roll provided.”—popcultureshelf.com

Cloth $22.50

Fighting without Fighting

Kung Fu Cinema’s Journey to the West Luke White

“Whether you’re interested in Bruce Lee, the interaction between kung fu, Blaxploitation, and hip-hop, or fighting heroines such as Angela Mao Ying, this is an essential read.”—Leon Hunt, Brunel University Cloth $22.50

The Middle Ages and the Movies

Eight Key Films

Robert Bartlett

“Informed criticism where these films inevitably fall factually short. . . . Bartlett focuses on one film at a time, though deftly interlacing and comparing them when it reinforces his point. An intriguing and detailed discussion.”—Library Journal

Cloth $22.50

Hope Is of a Different Color

From the Global South to the Lodz Film School

Edited by Magda Lipska and Monika Talarczyk

This volume tells the story of student exchanges between the global South and Poland during the Cold War. It sheds light on the experiences of a generation of young filmmakers at Łódź, many of whom went on to achieve success in their home countries.

Paper $29.00

From the

Academic Outsider

Stories of Exclusion and Hope

Victoria Reyes

Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution

Austin Sarat

Reading John Milton

How to Persist in Troubled Times

Stephen B. Dobranski

The Baron

Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century Matthias B. Lehmann

STANFORD STUDIES

IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Criticism and Politics

A Polemical Introduction

Bruce Robbins

Data Cartels

The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information

Sarah Lamdan

The Souls of White Jokes

How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy

Raúl Pérez

Reader’s Block

A History of Reading Differences

Matthew Rubery

LEGENDS AND LITERATURE

“Insights into our generation’s most iconic female singer.”

—Walter Egan, music producer, songwriter, artist

“A breezy, colorful saga of Old Hollywood . . . and a touching romance between two flawed, magnetic personalities.”

—Publishers Weekly

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s original vision for her foundational and unparalleled text.

“Luminous.”

—Spin

“Essential.”

—New York Times

“A uniquely wonderful anthology.”

—Kimiko Hahn, poet and author of Foreign Bodies

“This dazzling study traces the emergence of an ‘underground’ circuit of Black anticolonial thought.”

—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora

“Beautiful”

—The Atlantic

“The volume brings to light part of Cha’s achievement . . . Tantalizing.”

—Bookforum

Isn’t it uncanny?

Publisher: Tom Lutz

Editor-In-Chief: Boris Dralyuk

Managing Editor: Chloe Watlington

Senior Editors: Porochista Khakpour, Paul Thompson

Poetry Editors: Elizabeth Metzger, Callie Siskel

Art Director: Perwana Nazif

Design Director: J. Dakota Brown

Production and Copy Desk Chief: AJ Urquidi

Executive Director: Irene Yoon

Managing Director: Jessica Kubinec

Publications Coordinator: Danielle Clough

Ad Sales: Bill Harper

Contributing Editors: Aaron Bady, Michelle Chihara, Maya Gonzalez, Summer Kim Lee, Juliana Spahr, Adriana Widdoes, and Sarah Chihaya

Board Of Directors: Albert Litewka (chair), Jody Armour, Reza Aslan, Bill Benenson, Leo Braudy, Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, Matt Galsor, Anne Germanacos, Tamerlin Godley, Seth Greenland, Gerard Guillemot, Darryl Holter, Steven Lavine, Eric Lax, Tom Lutz, Susan Morse, Sharon Nazarian, Mary Sweeney, Lynne Thompson, Barbara Voron, Matthew Weiner, Jon Wiener, Jamie Wolf

Interns and Volunteers: Harriet Taylor, Gisselle Reyes Medina

Cover Art: Bob Smith, Front Page #1, 1983, Mixed media in wooden drawer, 14 x 24 x 12 ½ inches

Courtesy of the artist, Danielle Tilkin and Martos Gallery

PRINTED IN CANADA

THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization. The LARB Quarterly is published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www.lareview ofbooks.org

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

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“Haines-Eitzen shows readers what it might mean to ‘listen with the ear of the heart.’”

—Gavin Van Horn, author of The Way of Coyote

“Tagliacozzo’s masterpiece shows how the connected past of maritime Asia has shaped our world.”

—Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters

“Hay’s meticulously researched biography . . . sheds light on both Johnson the man and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited.”

—Hannah Beckerman, The Guardian

“This is ultimately a book of devotion that invites us . . . to see devotion in a new way: as the act of reclaiming attention.”

—Leslie Jamison, New York Times-bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

LARB QUARTERLY

2022

it uncanny?

I WROTE A BOOK,

WOULD BE A BEST

interview with David Owen by Porochista Khakpour

RICH KIDS WITH NOTHING BUT

FRIENDS Porochista Khakpour

MY HOTEL  Andrew Durbin

IT’S A COBRA Alicia Andrzejewski

RANDOM HOUSE  Anna Dorn

STEPMOTHER TONGUES  Katia Gregor

MAGIC AND TECHNOLOGY  Sadie Rebecca Starnes

GIRL AND THE OUTLAW

Paul Thompson

IN LOSS

Ronaldo V. Wilson

ENJOYMENT OF FEAR  Kid Congo Powers

STALINGRAD  Michael McCanne

STATION FOR TWO   Xue Yiwei, trans. Hu Ying

CAVEWOMAN, LLC Allie Rowbottom

REFRAIN Mark Irwin

WASH DAY Amanda Gunn

EXILE Charif Shanahan

AFTER Rae Armantrout

LOOK AT YOU, FOX L. Lamar Wilson

HIGH AND POSH  Maggie Millner

SOME REFLECTIONS Michael Kleber-Diggs

RASHEED ARAEEN, MARYAM JAFRI, BOB SMITH

by Perwana Nazif Response by Shiv Kotecha

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Readers,

While we worked on this issue, the 117-year-old 240-seat Hollywood Playhouse Theater also known, at various points in its past, as the Hollywood Center Theater, the Actors Center, the Comedy Playhouse, the Writers’ Club Theatre, and Theatre VII which stood catty-corner from LARB’s office, went up in flames. As a drizzle of ash and asbestos fell from the sky, we had a gut feeling that the event was a sign.

The theater had played many roles over the years, bouncing between film, stage, and school. In 1967, it was known for its Christmastime musical adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin. In 1968, it was screening porn. The next year it came out of the closet, still committed to porn, but more of a private club, and organized under the tagline, “Where friendliness is contagious.” Adaptation, the planned theme of this issue, is always happening, until it's not.

Once it became an experimental acting school in the 1980s, the build ing had a chance to play itself in the 1982 film adaptation of Neil Simon’s I Ought to Be in Pictures. The main character, Libby, hitchhikes from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in order to reunite with her estranged father, a film director, who, upon her announcement that she wants to be in pic tures, yells back, “You like disappointment? You like rejection?”

A little disappointment comes with the territory here in L.A. For in stance, once all the pieces for this issue came, there seemed to be a rebellion against adapting. Maybe we aren’t ready to talk about that subject too real, too soon: the fires, the climate. Maybe it was like Kid Congo Powers says in “Enjoyment of Fear”: “There was no time for reflection.”

Whatever the reason, the pieces still seemed to fit, seamlessly. They found each other in this unintentional themelessness and inadaptability. We were witnessing the mystery of familiarity, and what was, we dare say, a supernatural resonance.

“Chrzan and Cargill dissect our urge to control our bodies through food intake, a perennially and vitally important topic.”

Ken Albala, author of At the Table: Food and Family around the World

“Fascinating and refreshing.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[These tales] are as relevant today as they were when they were first published in 1999 ... Feed your inner nostalgia monster some of these surrealist pop-culture bites.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Highly addictive, the equivalent of literary dim sum.”

—South China Morning Post Magazine

“Dung Kai-Cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest novelist.”

—Three Percent

“A politically charged, emotional novel about the impacts of prejudice, industrial city life, and desolation on China’s Uyghur people. It is a major literary event that is honest in its portrayal of oppression.”

—Foreword Reviews (*starred review)

“A brilliant archival discovery, a triumph of careful scholarship, an unsuspected episode in modern literature, a moving testimony about sex and love, and a fascinating, previously censored chapter in the history of sexuality.”

David Halperin, University of Michigan

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

“Poet Dubrow (Wild Kingdom) considers the five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami—in this amusing collection of essays. . . Dubrow’s musings are at once sober and evocative ... These thoughtful meditations offer lots to savor.”

—Publishers Weekly

We had serpents and foxes and David Duchovny as an author. We had the prismatic surfaces of Nadia Lee Cohen’s fake/not-fake bestseller and her not-real/real characters. We had Xue Yiwei’s time-traveling and setting-skipping parables. We had Allie Rowbottom’s MLM-scheme ro mantic dystopia. We had Andrew Durbin’s temporary seaside home. We had German and Soviet soldiers marching on present-day Brooklyn. We had aliens. And we had loss: loss of roots, fathers, mother tongues, inno cence, and confidence.

Is it in fact too late to adapt to this losing streak? Maybe we have to do more than adapt we have to superadapt. Uncanny, isn’t it?

Friends, it’s been a summer. Now onto the fall.

Yours,

Forthcoming

Maybe We’ll Make It A Memoir

BY MARGO PRICE

Black Country Music Listening for Revolutions

BY FRANCESCA T. ROYSTER

I’ve Had to Think Up a Way Survive

On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton

BY LYNN MELNICK

You’re with Stupid kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music

BY BRUCE ADAMS

The Color Pynk Black Femme Art for Survival

BY OMISE’EKE NATASHA TINSLEY

Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge Building a Community Archive

EDITED BY ROBERT MCKEE IRWIN

Fatherhood in the Borderlands A Daughter’s Slow Approach

BY DOMINO RENEE PEREZ

Oaxaca in Motion

An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration

BY IVÁN SANDOVAL-CERVANTES

Hope and Hard Truth A Life in Texas Politics

BY MARY BETH ROGERS

The Olympics That Never Happened Denver ’76 and the Politics of Growth

BY ADAM BERG

The Rural State Making Comunidades, Campesinos, Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra

BY JAVIER PUENTE

BOLD Ideas, ESSENTIAL Reading

Praise for Dan Burt’s previous memoir, You Think It Strange: “Burt’s early life was indeed a triumph of wit and will. He managed to escape a world filled with violence and a culture that valued street smarts over book smarts, all the while knowing that just about everyone around him thought little of his prospects. That he made it out at all is extraordinary. That he became a successful lawyer and writer is virtually unimaginable.”

Commonweal

Every Wrong Direction recreates and dissects the bitter education of Dan Burt, an American émigré who never found a home in America. Burt’s memoir follows his wanderings through three countries and seven cities over 43 years, culminating in his emigration to Britain, the country where he finally found a home.

Every Wrong Direction

An Emigré’s Memoir Dan Burt

The first booklength study of why the Beats were fascinated by Mexico and examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesserknown female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

The Beats in Mexico David Stephen Calonne

This book tells the saga of the Yiddish-language general encyclopedia Algemeyne entsiklopedye (19321966) and the editors who continued to publish it even as their world was utterly transformed by the Holocaust.

The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye

Barry Trachtenberg

1 9 8 0

Cullen compellingly details the events of 1980—a pivotal moment in American history, which culminated in Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in the election and inaugurated a rightward turn in politics and culture.

1980 America’s Pivotal Year Jim Cullen

Is for Cats

How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives Jessica Maddox

An in-depth look at online animal photos, memes, and videos, The Internet is for Cats includes analysis and interviews with everyone from animal-loving Redditors to TikTok influencers seeking to make their pets famous.

The Internet Is for Cats

How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives Jessica Maddox

PHOTO-ATTRACTIONS

A profusely illustrated and fascinating account, by a masterful storyteller, of a single extended portrait session that took place between Indian classical dancer Ram Gopal and photographer Carl Van Vechten in New York in 1938.

Photo-Attractions

An Indian Dancer, an American Photographer, and a German Camera

Ajay Sinha

IF I WROTE A BOOK, IT WOULD BE A BEST SELLER

An interview with David Owen of IDEA Books

David Owen is the D of London-based IDEA Books (the rest of the letters are his co-director and co-founder Angela Hill and their two children). Dubbed by Vogue as “the coolest pub lisher in the world,” IDEA have been bookdealers, vintage booksellers, brand consultants, and art book visionaries. This summer, they put out BEST SELLER by author June Newton who incidentally is not a real person. June is a character created by artist Nadia Lee Cohen. Owen inhabited June, an aspiring writer, in order to write the best selling novel of her dreams. “If I wrote a book, it would be a bestseller.

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And that is the title, too. BEST SELLER,” June declares in Nadia’s video piece, where the character was first introduced. The book, like all things Nadia Lee Cohen and IDEA Books, is as alluring as it is mysterious, so we turned to Owen to get a look into the process of writing a book as a nonexistent author — and actually making it good.

•

Porochista Khakpour: Are you actually a writer? I found this book to be ultimately very well written, and it made me think you might have written a book before.

David Owen: I haven’t written a novel before. In fact, I think that you can see how BEST SELLER actually gets better as it goes along! This is, in part, because I was emulating how a first-time writer like June might grow into the writing of a book, but mostly because I was learning how to do it as I went along. Hopefully, it makes the end result quite endearing. I have always been a writer, and there have been so many diverse projects and commissions: comedy books, nonfiction books, very well paid Instagram captions, topical monologue-style jokes, scripts that never get made, bits of scripts that did get made, trashy TV series plural, titles for things (these are my favorite short and super well paid). It goes on. BEST SELLER is a definite step up though a clear break with the itty-bitty writing of the past.

I am so curious about the actual process of composing of this book. Could you de scribe the whole process?

The first draft was written in six weeks flat completely finished. This was extra quick seeing as I had a company to co-run during those six weeks. Nadia would have wanted it kept exactly as it was then as did I. But, in truth, it was a real scrapbook of ideas and false starts for the first 70 pages, and a succession of other readers all said the same thing, that it ended brilliant ly so it was a shame that no one would get through the beginning to reach the real pacey novel ending. After a stubborn six months, I came to agree and restructured the first third. It is still an unusual format for a book now, but, hopefully, much more accessible. Of course, it only really makes sense when published in hardcover with a dust jacket and looking like a classic best seller then, I think, the reader is given confidence in the early pages that this surely will turn into a fabulous read. Nadia and I also spotted the oppor tunity for her to photograph June for the author photo. Nadia is a self-portrait art ist; this would mean that she would also sit in for June. There is a lot of writing about clothes and fashion in the book so we spent a lot of time choosing her wardrobe. There were many references sourced for what June would look like most of them variations on Carrie Fisher and Diane Keaton, but there are British actresses too, who I won’t name as maybe, one day, we will be asking them to play June for real. Nadia identifies as June as do I, of course. The real value would be if everyone who reads it identifies with June to some degree. Anyone who finds it moving will have identified with June, and “moving” is surely the world’s best single-word review.

“This is a landmark study that will change the terms in which Goya’s art will henceforth be understood.”

— Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge

“One of the most original, compelling, and intellectually rigorous books ever written on the plagues of history.”

— Brad Evan, University of Bath

“A startling meditation on the ways monuments defy the everyday and succumb to it.”

— Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

New in Paperback

“Brilliantly theorizes and demonstrates the democratic importance of technological literacy.”

— Rosalyn Deutsche, Barnard College

One of my favorite parts of the book is all the Easter eggs. And one of them is you! When did you realize you were going to write yourself into this? That is, I am as suming that character is “really you”?

The character of David Owen is exact ly me. As I was writing, I was wondering about whether to pass the book off com pletely under a pseudonym, but was a lit tle uncomfortable with it. The anonymity would make radio and TV appearances impossible to start with, so it worked out extremely well that June should meet me and, later, be advised to give her true story to this David Owen character to publish as a novel. Having had some early feed back from readers who do not know me personally, I would guess that most people are going to decide for themselves wheth er June is real. She is such a likable charac ter, and people always believe the version of the truth they like the best.

It is definitely true that June is the female version of me that never left my hometown. While I may have achieved more than she has by the age of 49, my unfulfilled ambition is exactly the same as hers. When she writes, at the start of the book, “I’ll lay my cards on the table: I’m aiming to write something with just about as many lines, paragraphs and pages as a very popular paperback book,” that is just me. And when she writes, “You know when you grow up, people stop asking you what you want to be when you grow up? Well I think that’s sad. It’s a shame, don’t you think?” that is completely me.

At what point did you and Nadia decide to work on this book together? Where

did the idea come from? And how much of it was Nadia and how much you all at IDEA?

Nadia was making the HELLO, My Name Is book and asked me to write some di alogue for her characters to say when they were in full costume and prosthetics. These are the video pieces that played on 28 screens at galleries. I wrote them very, very quickly, like under an hour for the lot and Nadia loved them and decided they should go into the book as texts for each character. There are some fabulous ones in there. The squirrel with a nut al lergy story, to start with. One of the first things I wrote for one of the characters was “If I wrote a book it would be a Best Seller, in fact that’s what I would call it BEST SELLER.” I don’t think that char acter was June but she did work in retail and she did also say (to a customer) “You don’t need retail therapy … you need a hat,” which June also says in BEST SELLER.

One day, I wrote those pieces for Nadia’s book and just carried on writing. Every time I finished some part of it I liked, I copied and pasted it to Nadia on WhatsApp. She loves everything so is the perfect reader!

Who is the projected audience for this book? Nadia’s fans? IDEA fans? Or oth ers? Who has been buying the book thus far? Can you disclose sales numbers? I am very curious about who is picking this up.

So originally I didn’t want it to be an IDEA book at all. I would rather it had been published by a major publisher. But I know all about the endless rejection

process from all the stories about Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc., etc. I asked our designer Karla Järvinen to come up with a cover for BEST SELLER, and when she showed me the design (exactly as it is now) I was like, “Oh, now we have to do it!” As much as I can be objective, it is a hell of a good book jacket!

The book is still out there to catch a publisher though. IDEA is resolute ly non-Amazon and our distribution is largely through Dover Street Market and similar high fashion stores. That is not the way to sell hundreds of thousands of books. Soon we will launch ideabookclub.com which will be our version of Goodreads.

The book has sold pretty well. We only printed 500 copies at first and are now about to print 1000 more. This has turned out to be a highly practical approach as there are at least 30 typos to correct already!

It has been bought by Nadia’s fans, and IDEA fans, and I have been stand ing near enough to our space in Dover Street Market to spot them selling from there. Curious people attracted by the cover, I assume. It is the latter group I am most interested in as they are a huge po tential audience. The section towards the end of the book where June walks around London spotting potential readers (gener ally, women carrying takeaway coffees) is completely as I see sales panning out.

I noticed Nadia had placed copies of the book around L.A. in community library boxes. I found it funny that she mostly placed them in trendy Silver Lake. Are there still copies out there? Was the hope

that in making this a “found object” it could enter an even more “real” reality?

That was Nadia’s idea. I love those free li braries too. I live in Laurel Canyon for a few months a year and they have lots of them there. There was one with a copy of a book about irritable bowel syndrome which was always disappearing and re appearing very well-thumbed, would be June’s joke! There weren’t that many free copies of BEST SELLER, and they have definitely disappeared. Nadia lives in trendy Silver Lake which explains the drop locale. We did worry that, as a mar keting ploy, it may actually stop people from buying them, living, instead, forever in the false hope of finding one so we have ended that promotion!

Is there really going to be a sequel as you tease in the book? A second book by June?

100 percent yes. June even begins writing Dead Head in a Bag for Life in the middle of BEST SELLER before apologizing for doing that. As it happens, Dead Head in a Bag for Life is actually the sequel to a dif ferent film script I wrote. It may be that June has to write the novelization of the first film script Kristen Miller Nazi Hunter and then she can write Dead Head in a Bag for Life.

The actual next book is a pure(ish) non-meta novel called HOME CINEMA and is almost done. I am very tempted to give it to June. She does not appear in it but June and I are basically the same per son, and she will have fans now so

Plant-Based Himalaya by Babita Shrestha

“In addition to fabulous recipes that will satisfy vegans and non-vegans alike, this book also provides a glimpse into the pristine landscapes, ancient architecture, rich culture, and generous people of Nepal.”

Anne-Marie Bonneau, author of The Zero-Waste Chef

Good Sex by Catherine M. Roach

“

Good Sex is an uncommon blast of good sense.”

Ann Pellegrini, coauthor of “You Can Tell Just By Looking”

At the Altar of the Appellate Gods by Lisa Sarnoff Gochman

“Here is a rare glimpse of life at the court—not on the bench but in front of it—that even experienced court-watch ers will find illuminating.”

Linda Greenhouse, author of Justice on the Brink

Departure Stories by Elisa Bernick

“A must-read for those needing a blueprint for how to bring an unwavering eye to difficult relationships in order to find the truth that rests not merely in the past but within ourselves.”

Kate St. Vincent Vogl, author of Lost & Found: A Memoir of Mothers

‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at Vitsœ. Other verbs just don't seem to cut it. Like in this heartfelt message from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in London, England.

As with any customer, Sophie ensured that every detail was considered so that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for his needs.

Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s passionate about good service, and communicates with all her customers directly, wherever they are in the world. Whether inperson, or on the other side of the globe, our planners hold your hand throughout the whole process.

Time and again we prove that long-distance relationships

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SUPER RICH KIDS WITH NOTHING BUT FAKE FRIENDS

Nadia Lee Cohen's dream of L.A.

by Porochista Khakpour

My first walk through Hollywood in years is to the HELLO, My Name Is Nadia Lee Cohen exhibit at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles with Chloe and Paul. I’ve driven and been driven through these streets for decades, but on foot it feels like those other times weren’t real. Sunset Boulevard is blurry in its overheated July antiglory, with tourists and home less people intersecting each other’s paths unseen as if on parallel dimensions. That day there is that distinct worn yellow-gray weariness of Los Angeles midsummer in the air; all day the old Frank Ocean “Super Rich Kids” has been rolling around in my head

(“Too many joy rides in daddy’s Jaguar / Too many white lies and white lines / Super rich kids with nothing but loose ends / Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends”). The song will play even more aggressively in my head once we get there, but just moments before, we cross the path of an androgynous white kid who is somehow taking up the entirety of a shaded sidewalk. This kid is already some thing celestial and otherworldly, a cross between a ’90s Abercrombie model and an extra in a JT LeRoy picaresque but it’s what the kid is doing that gets us. The kid is walking, much like a dog, very casually, a tortoise. The tortoise is the antithesis of a cute dog: awkwardly big, ancient-look ing, with other things on its mind than us. “He’s with me,” the kid says, and it turns out the tortoise had actually been aban doned at a dog shelter. In the course of the kid’s conversation, the tortoise’s gen der changes, but we are told its name is Marcel. I ask if they named it after “The Shell.” “No, just some … French guy,” the kid says. The tortoise, obviously leashless, begins crossing the intersection at alarm ing speed. Aren’t tortoises supposed to be slow? I want to ask the kid, but they are gone by the time I question the spectacle.

Like extras on a film lot, the scene shifts and we find ourselves around the corner at the Deitch Gallery, which is in its final weeks of being entirely overtaken by the world of Nadia Lee Cohen. When we arrive, Marcel and its owner are the main things on our minds, but that set seems to fade well into this one, the surre alities different but complementary some how. We’re Dorothies, but Oz, not Kansas, is our home.

Cohen is not an L.A. native, but she lives here and has made her version of it. The art school kids, just like the fashion girls, have her on their mood boards, but she’s not an accessible local; you can find her more easily on Madonna’s main than, say, spot her in tagged photos at her lo cal Erewhon. I first encountered her in 2013, when she was just 22, still a London College of Fashion student, sounding both assured and charmingly green in a writeup in New York Magazine’s “The Cut.” The piece was accompanied by photos of pla sticky, mannequin-looking models that straddled the grotesque and gorgeous, overly tanned and artificially glowing with caked-on makeup, in a Technicolor Los Angeles landscape of the collective dreams and nightmares of other eras. Even then, she had this signature look.

I was raised in Los Angeles, and so it surprised me that this Englishcountryside–raised artist grasped West Coast excess so well. It wasn’t my L.A., but it was L.A. Maybe a California more California than actual California, it was, like so much of her body of work, a ’60s and ’70s eternal-magic-hour Americana that permanently stained the perception of this region. Cohen seemed to have picked up where some boomers had left off in their portraiture maybe shades of Martin Parr as well as Slim Aarons, whose works Lee Cohen might admit ad miring. But there’s more. She’s also part David Lynch, Harmony Korine, David LaChapelle, Petra Collins, and perhaps most on the nose: Cindy Sherman. Her in fluences seem so obvious that she’s almost daring you to draw the comparisons but it’s missing the point to call her derivative.

Fall into New

would be heartbreaking if it weren’t so beautiful. As it is, it lifts the heart.”

John Banville

Here’s a white artist culturally appropriat ing a white culture not hers but in a way that dares you to question just why you assume that remove. Could we not imag ine our artist as one of her characters: in a McDonald’s, smoking her aunt’s Virginia Slims, wearing sales-rack mall clothes, and meeting ill-fitting dates in dive bars? Maybe we actually should.

On the other hand, there is an out rageously glamorous pulchritude to all things Nadia Lee Cohen that dare you to call this the highest of fashion. I’ve had to admit to myself many times in this same season that out of all Cohen pro ductions, I love nothing more than her campy, ’60s-futurist Skims ads starring a feather-haired blonde Kim Kardashian in metallic swimwear poolside with a gag gle of poodles and girlfriends. It’s like a Palm Springs universe in another galaxy inhabited by Peggy Moffit’s blonde nem eses, and when you see it in the ad, it’s a bit shocking that Kim hasn’t opted for this image all along that’s how potent the Nadia Lee Cohen effect is here. Kim somehow even in all this spacey desert country-house kitsch that she’s never been associated with seems at home. And Cohen seems at home in Skims, though arguably it’s her lowest-brow fashion ven ture. All her brands are relentlessly stylish or else she makes them so: she’s worked with Balenciaga and Margiela, done mu sic videos with indie-adjacent A-listers like A$AP Rocky and Tyler the Creator, and shot portraits of pop culture cool girls Charli XCX and Alexa Demie. You can imagine there is a world that just knows her in this commercial capacity rather than as a fine artist. There might even be another world, the Instagram lovestruck influencer

one, that knows one of her other day jobs: Cohen the model most recently one of the faces of Schiaparelli. After all, Cohen’s own striking physical presence im possibly skinny, otherworldly chic, the kind of face and physique that might have once been scouted in a food court but that now can only sell couture is something out of her own art dreams. Whereas the fashion world leans into her obvious supermodel splendor, Cohen has taken all that is pliable in her dolllike features and warped those very good looks to create anything but classical beauty.

Which brings us to the Deitch show. The most unforgettable element of HELLO, My Name Is is its central feature, which her London-based publishers (and main collaboration collective) IDEA also made into a book: a showcase of 33 char acters she created out of Hollywood-grade prosthetics, costumes, and makeup that are all her. Apparently the genesis of the whole thing was her encountering an InN-Out badge from a boy named Jesus that she got on Easter soon she began col lecting the nametags of unknown people. Cohen literally is wearing their faces and clothes and delivering their lines on tele vision screens that all play simultaneously at the show. This is of course pure Cindy Sherman, but even more convincingly so somehow. One of them, a favorite, Jeff, sits in the first hall you enter, amidst huge mu ral-sized portraits of the rest of the cast of characters. Jeff is in a white suit and cowboy hat and bolero, with an Arby’s name tag, and for a second you have to second-guess if someone is wearing him as he sits with a disturbingly human ease. After all, Cohen has worn him and been him. But this Jeff

Big ideas at the intersection of visual culture, science, technology, and society

Long Days, Short Years

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Curious Minds

“A brilliantly original exploration of curiosity. Reading this ambitious and joyful book is a marvelous experience in expanding the mind and the heart— in connecting all the dots to envision a better world.”

—Barbara M. Benedict, author of Curiosity

In the Black Fantastic

“Visually stunning, intellectually cohesive. Ekow Eshun’s exhilarating exhibition shows black art on the move and creating fresh idioms.”

—Financial Times

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is just a shell, a sculpture welcoming you to a room that features most prominently a dry cleaner’s garment conveyor rack as well as an airport conveyor belt that car ries a tray of each characters’ definitive belongings or representative possessions: Marlboros, rolled-up dollar bills, a hand gun, keys, cologne, a copy of Stop Aging Now!, Sun-In, Jolen creme mustache bleach, an opened carton of Jell-O, bacon, mugs, cassettes, notepads, a Bible, a vodka bottle, packets of In-N-Out condiments, a copy of Playboy. Enter the next room and there is a white breeze-block wall that also appears in her Skims ad. Another sculp ture that has probably enjoyed the most Instagram play is her Carol, an overly tan wax figure who has basically melted into her plastic beach chair. The installations plus giant mural-sized photos both do the most everything is beautiful and bizarre and the minimum somehow you want even more than the gallery can contain of everything that is beautiful and bizarre in the scummy, sublime, precious hell of Nadia Lee Cohen.

Maybe because I am an author, I get most lost in her June character from the wall of TV interviews. She’s a fairly plain, silvery brunette in a blown-out ’80s bob, with an uptight silk-striped blouse and gold hoops a sitcom stepmom at best declaring with the tedious confi dence of a soap opera villain: “If I wrote a book it would be a bestseller. And that is the title, too. BEST SELLER. I always say the same thing. Buy your umbrella before it rains …”

I recognize the title immediate ly, as just weeks before, Cohen had used Instagram her social media of choice, it seems to alert L.A. fans of the fact that

all around the city there would be copies of her book BEST SELLER. At first the images of her leggily lounging with the hot-pink hardcover seemed just promo for her show, but bit by bit, fans revealed finding copies of a very real book. Cohen had not only managed to make her own dreams come true with this show, but she had also made her character’s dream come true as well. It hasn’t become June’s pro jected bestseller yet, but the packaging has the Danielle Steel blockbuster vibe of a book expecting to be one.

Since I did not find my copy, I had to purchase my $25 copy from Dover Street Market, IDEA’s main retail home. I even read it, which, as its creator David Owen told me, would probably take me four hours and some change. (It took seven, but mainly because I kept rereading parts I liked, of which there were many.) The book is startlingly readable, not some art project that’s meant to be more collected than consumed. At some point, past the middle, I did feel it had the page-turning addictive quality of a true bestseller. There was love, romance, sex, crime, mystery, ad venture, all of it. Plus, most delightful of all was the writing about writing whereas “real” metafiction can feel stale and dusty and sometimes embarrassingly cerebral, the metafiction of BEST SELLER is mis chievous, weird, and fun.

The book begins: “The hour passed her by. Does that sentence even make sense?

First lines of books are important!” At so many junctures, our author riffs with sim ilar self-consciousness on the project at hand:

Novelists create characters that be come real for some people. Sherlock

dangerous fun

THE SOCIAL LIVES OF BIG WAVE SURFERS UGO CORTE

“The North Shore of O‘ahu is the Vatican of sur ng: small in area but densely packed with lore, power, secrets, and great waves. Ugo Corte goes straight to the heart of one of its abiding mysteries—the subculture within the subculture—the exceptional people who ride very big waves. He illuminates surfers’ mentality, diversity, self-expression, social bonds, and rituals with dramatic narrative and extensive interviews.”—William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days

on view now

Loretta Pettway (American, b. 1942), Detail of Remember Me, 2007. © Image courtesy of the artist and Paulson Fontaine Press.

This exhibition is supported by the Hannah and Russel Kully Fund for American Art and Laura and Carlton Seaver.

Holmes, James Bond and George Smiley all have addresses in London. I am sure many people think they actually existed. And yet, in compari son to their vivid reality, I am virtually non-existent. And I am real! That is why I need to write this book. To create myself. To write myself into existence (and an address in London would be nice too). I just need to stay positive. I don’t want this to be a sad book. I don’t read sad books …

Over and over, our author attempts selfdefinition of not just the book but the author:

Just to be clear, I had no intention of writing a novel until I started living in one! And the fact that I am the central character is, of course, un avoidable. What you have in your hands is a book that was meant to be a fairly uncommon form of literature, a journal of thoughts and ideas that became, for convenience more than any other reason, a diary of sorts. Then my life (my suddenly surreal life) rather hijacked the whole project and left me no choice but to write it up and put it all in. I have done my best to keep the first part more or less as it was intended. Then, as you know, all of a sudden, it’s the greatest story ever told! Sorry about that.

These asides are my favorites, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t ample plot. The characters even go above and beyond with June in conversation with Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Nicolas Cage, and Keanu Reeves. We even meet slight

spoiler! David Owen, the author.

It was Owen who told me he wrote the book, as “June Newton,” for Cohen, with Cohen having been involved in the book as a reader, not writer. Of course one can’t ex pect that artists would handle every aspect of production why would we add writer to her overfilled roster of talents? but it reminded me of another question that lingered in my brain. To what degree was Nadia Lee Cohen’s world her vision and to what degree her creation? Was Cohen a conceptual artist more than anything, a stylist of her hyperreality?

They seem pedestrian and somewhat forbidden questions to ask of visual art in our age. Because the book popped me back into my author psyche, the wonder ing may be more writerly naïveté than anything else. But it’s hard to fully ignore how much more curation matters here than construction. How many hands of as sistants and outsourced professionals and factories fulfill the fantasies of artists who can afford it? Whereas the boundaries of Cohen’s vision seem infinite and endless, is this indeed an optical illusion based on the opposite? Is Nadia Lee Cohen in some ways a more limited artist of our time? Is the project here the dream and the dream alone? How far are her prosthetic people removed from the animations in her head?

Maybe the questions don’t matter. When confronted with the wall-to-wall and page-to-page of her universe, ques tioning her logic would be as absurd as asking that dreamy kid around the corner why they went to a dog shelter to come out with a tortoise. It would be as daft as wondering where in all this is the real Hollywood, the one of poverty and des peration and endless hustle, the real heart

of L.A. that feels less shimmery and chic and more on the brink of economic and humanitarian collapse with a homeless population that’s expanding only to heart breakingly contract more rapidly than the city can even pretend to care about.

These questions haunt me off and on, but ultimately I let myself collapse back into Cohen’s glossy bimbocore, her claus trophobic surreality potent in how it gets you. Maybe the biggest question really lies in the subject/object divide if Cohen is her own greatest subject, then where does the real her fit in with her cast of charac ters? Is she just another caricature? Or is the point that we all are?

We’ve been here before, with many artists of the past, many of her obvious influences. What sets Cohen apart from her idols and mentors is her devotion to artifice and camp as absolute be-all and end-all instead of entry. Whereas a PhilipLorca diCorcia might present a portrait of a depressed waitress in an honest but dreary hi-res, Cohen will present the same portrait but with impossible proportions, silicone and plastic, sprayed and powdered to look like a photorealistic rendition of a cartoon. Cohen is not creeping through the streets of downtown Los Angeles looking for the most camera-ready downtrodden captured among kitschy neon and urban squalor for all we know she’s never seen it (she probably has). But her references are all pulled from cinema, pop music, and modern art they look “true” to us only because we get her jokes. She’s treading the line between transcription and punch line; her art pretends to be found though never quite by her. This Essex farm girl was never meant to be on the Mulholland Drives and South Figueroas, and she

photographs her L.A. like someone who was never built for the palm trees and fill er, smog and self-tanners. The only obsta cle that could threaten her imagery is ev eryone else’s sense of familiarity; after all, part of the delight one can take in Cohen’s world is that it’s not just you stumbling on something new it’s you watching Cohen stumble on something she is at least pretending is new to her.

Plus, this is Cohen on Cohen, and her promotion to her own muse is some thing to behold. She makes that clear not only in her own participation of her im agery most literally with HELLO, My Name Is but also in how she wants you to see things. She isn’t presenting childlike delight exactly; she’s not projecting edge lord cynicism either. It might be just the strangeness you get if you put London and Los Angeles in a blender the magic is both expected and not entirely obvious. You just get the same feeling you might get when ensorcelled by the cotton-can dy cowboys and sugarplum-adorned po nies of artist Will Cotton’s world. While Cotton feels pleasantly unreal, Cohen emits manic hyperreal. All the other worldliness is happening in this world exactly.

If you consider L.A. the world, that is. Deitch is by now onto its next show, and Hollywood is still, as ever, too hot and a little bit sad. In my head, the gallery be longs to Nadia Lee Cohen, which for me is the most clear marker of art’s success. We still talk about that show sometimes, still remember that day. It took us less than an hour to take it all in. We walked back to the office in the same record heat, seduced, dizzied, exhausted. We looked for him, but of course we never saw Marcel again.

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

MY HOTEL

by Andrew Durbin

When the worst winter storm in a century swept London, my boiler gave out. Every repairman my landlord hired was dismayed by the decrepit state of the pipes in my Victorian-era flat: they blamed a clog under the floorboards, which no normal vacuum could dislodge. Another machine, something French- or German-made, would have to be ordered from a foreign provider. That could take weeks. My breath formed wisps in the air as I watched guys thread tubes

down the sink to sound out the pipes, the thermostat ticking lower and lower. Finally, after two days and nights in deep freeze, my landlord encouraged me to find a room elsewhere, making no promises about repairs or compensation for my relocation.

A hotel recommended by a friend of fered decent rates, though they were not supposed to host guests during the pan demic, except in an emergency. My case was an emergency, the hotel manager agreed, though I had to show her pictures of my thermostat as proof. She sympa thized because she had faced her share of crummy landlords, distant men who ignored issues of insulation and heating, a shattered window, the neighbor with a growling dog. She upgraded my single bed to a double in one of their luxury suites on the ground floor. Nearly every room in the hotel was empty no one traveled to London anymore, they couldn’t under the national restrictions in England.

The woman at the front desk suggested a few restaurants across the street, which still delivered via an app on my phone, an app that, coincidentally, you were not sup posed to use because the guys employed by it were preparing to strike. Poke bowls and noodles were also within walking distance, which you could order from a window, then head home. The elevators and hall ways in the hotel smelled strongly of a flo ral perfume that made me sneeze whenev er I whiffed it.

My room viewed an imitation Japanese garden. The stream bisecting this garden was made of stones painted blue. I stared at boulders in the raked gravel, which were meant to evoke steadiness and calm. A

bridge spanned the fake stream; it was too small for anyone but a child to use, and I doubted it would appeal to even the small est of kids. At night, in the first three days of living in this hotel, I would wake and stare out the window, half-expecting to see strangers sitting on tiny benches, dimly lit by spotlight, the lingering spirits of the Victorian hospital the hotel renovated and replaced, or else fellow wanderers sorting out bad living arrangements. Once, when I woke up from a bad dream, I thought I saw some people, misty, immaterial. But the garden was decorative, inaccessible to guests. No one was there.

I was reading Nathaniel Hawthorne that winter and his spooky symbolism had seeped everywhere into my life. Take the garden it was like everything else in the third London lockdown, tinged with the contours of a dreary and unnerving secret meaning, always possessing an element of threat. Garden, boiler, even the lingering smell of perfume that filled the hotel’s hallways each of these contained within it something important, something from which I was supposed to gather special knowledge that nevertheless kept alluding me, something secret about what was hap pening to us, something I couldn’t remem ber. History or magic. The accrual of these secret meanings restyled my surroundings into a kind of fiction, the objects of a plot organizing itself into a story.

In the preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne writes that Americans are bad at telling the difference between fact and fiction, and, in my hotel room, facing the Japanese garden with its shadow guests, I was beginning to feel like I had been duped by my own propensity to believe I

have been blessed by easy access to the su pernatural. But also, I was convinced the flat I had just abandoned was haunted. She she was a mother, maybe rattled my stairwell and lingered outside my bed room door, never menacing, always awful ly sad. Maybe she had clogged the drain.

The ghosts at the hotel returned on the fourth night. I woke in a sweat, clutch ing my heart from a bad dream. My tem ples throbbed. A tentacle of mist swirled against the glass, like the fleeting hello from one of the homesick squids in Arrival. If I were Hawthorne, these dark figures would stalk some New England enclave I’d constructed at the edge of wilderness, where zealots torture friends and strangers for their obscure infractions against a rig orous social and religious code. He might have said of them, adopting a line from a letter he once wrote, “They are but shad ows; they are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about them is but the thinnest substance of a dream.”

Very true for me thin substance. There must have been a reason for their appear ance in my life, here in London, other than disassociation and loneliness. There must have been a reason the boiler gave way on the coldest April day in a century. I just couldn’t say what. The clog, as a device, was not so convincing. I was out for an other reason.

My landlord wrote me: “You were mis taken in thinking compensation for your hotel is guaranteed. We will need to dis cuss when I am back from holiday in two weeks’ time.”

I wanted to reply, Where are you plan ning to holiday in the middle of a cold like this? I wrote, “Fine by me. But I will not be

paying rent next month.”

He responded, “The expectation is that you do not break the contract we agreed last year.”

Perhaps my landlord was visiting Cornwall, the beautiful beach where the British like to spend their summers, though the weather (a favorite topic here) is fickler there than anywhere else in the country. It is pretty in winter: the waves slush with ice and snow from the Irish sea, reminiscent of old paintings in which the immiserated coast foams with ancient, fatal beauty. This kind of beauty is every where in winter. I call it The Gray. The Gray is always advancing, across the whole of the island, and The Gray, even at its darkest and rainiest, can be beguiling a silvery light that raps and presses against the dull browns and greens of the land scape. Perhaps my landlord was headed to the sea, where the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson once said he likes to eat fish and chips on the cold beach at night, his toes dug in the sand, fried flakes clinging to his rumpled suit.

When I lived in New York, I loved spending winter weekends on the Long Island coast with friends, Brooklyn or the Hamptons, depending on our mood, the beach towns and boardwalks cheap in the off-season. My friends and I would train to the Rockaways, sip cold vodka at one of the Russian restaurants on the boardwalk, listen to old men sing at the piano while young couples gazed confusedly at their blintzes and boiled steaks, unsure of what to say to one another. We would smoke weed and, once we were settled in the big plasticky booths at the restaurant, pretend we were elsewhere not quite the Russia

the restaurants simulate, but a Magically Approximated Russia of wintery associa tions and vodka-tinged images of snowedin streets and concrete plinths chiseled with a grizzled Party member’s face. An elsewhere, a hideaway, without the shape of any city we knew, whether from expe rience or movies. Afterward, we would sit by the water and watch the waves crash and the planes cruise to and from JFK. The long stretch of sand between the board walk and the sea on those winter nights held within its darkness a ferocious cold that called us forward to suffer and die in its frigid depths.

Once I rented a hotel room in Springs with Kevin and Charlie, two ex-lovers of mine. We hoped the restaurants would be cheaper without the usual tourists around to gobble lobster and crab, 70 percent off (in our dreams). What we really wanted for our trip was a hot tub, which the hotel’s website said would be fully operational all year round.

It was snowing when we arrived in Springs, the hot tub broken. We lugged our suitcases to a cottage at the end of the hotel complex, the last of a row of little houses, and then inspected the hot tub to see if it was really out of order or just turned off because the owner didn’t want to pay the energy bill. Charlie fidgeted with an electronic panel and sighed, con firming what the attendant at the front desk had said. It was dead. We would have to find another pretense to strip. The sea was too cold.

The idea for the weekend had been something erotic, unspoken. To be na ked together, drunk, stolen away from the city, where we lived sleeplessly in cramped

apartments with heating pipes that hissed and hammered through the night. This was a fantasy we had been harboring for weeks, though none of us could say why. Strip and compare our nudities, maybe. We could do that anywhere. The beach in winter promised cold separation from normality, a lonely cut of land that ended in waves that would freeze us, not nurture. Since the hot tub didn’t work, we drank Kevin’s whiskey to warm ourselves, then ran naked in the empty field behind the hotel, under the moonlight, our bare feet crunching the thin layer of snow that had fallen all afternoon.

Circling the field, I glimpsed Kevin and Charlie’s cocks bouncing between their thighs. Charlie was firm, a muscular body trimmed by years of running com petitively, in Ohio. I loved his nakedness, the solidity in everything about him, even his voice. Kevin was closer to my own body, average, pummeled from all the nights we spent drinking at badly lit gay bars. He was cranky and soft, and our sex was al ways rushed, conducted out of doors, in pools and alleyways, in the middle of the night or late morning. In the snow they were beautiful, their pale bodies glancing brightly against the darkness. I was in love with them, really in love, in love with the quickness of their movement, how they seemed to summarize all possible human movement as they lapped the field. In love as they waved their arms in the air and increased their stride to outpace one an other, their gait slowed in my mind, like an Eadweard Muybridge photograph. In love because, in winter, in Springs, a town we knew nothing about except that it was where Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock

were buried and where the superrich “summered,” they seemed to be the only two people alive besides me.

Naked, drunk, we braved the beach, against Charlie’s wishes, who was afraid we would end up on the local news tomor row. Doomed ménage-à-trois drowns in icy Atlantic. It was a 15-minute trek we made with our coats wrapped around our loosely toweled bodies, Charlie with his pants on, barely zipped up. In winter, Springs was as desolate as the moon. The path to the Atlantic passed the high walls and fenc es of those superrich, some camouflaged with bare vines and tall trees the famous mansions of the Hamptons we had seen on TV. We joked about seeing Oprah or Martha Stewart, Rupert Murdoch’s pre varicating children, members of museum boards and major polluters, arms dealers. One especially large house was completely dark, shielded by gardens and pools over laid with tarps.

Kevin said, “Let’s break in. We can be fast.” In the moonlight his eyes glazed with rabid ambition. I could picture him lifting a brick and hurling it threw a win dow as soon as Charlie and I turned our backs on him.

“No, no,” Charlie hissed. “Don’t be stu pid. Let’s just run into the ocean, then go back. We can take long baths.”

The waves hectored the longer we stood on a shelf of sand formed by the tides. The wind whipped us onward. My hair was long then, almost to my shoul ders. I tasted strands unwashed, smell ing of Kevin’s cigarettes. We shivered, hedged.

“On the count of 10,” I said, looking to both boys to be sure they were still game.

The alcohol was wearing off, and I could feel my resolve melting in view of the roar ing ocean. Three queers felled by hypothermia and stupidity their bodies recovered on the shore this morning. What drove them to swim in winter? More at 10. At one, Kevin and I threw our coats and towels down and raced toward the water but stopped when our toes tested how cold it was.

“Should we count again?” I asked. My voice was high pitched, nervous. This was it. We leapt or we didn’t.

“It could actually kill us,” Kevin said. He wrapped his arms around his chest and stepped away from the lapping waves. Charlie had not moved from the little dune where we had stood and admired the sky. “Let’s not be stupid.”

In the hotel room, Kevin drew a bath while Charlie and I watched Saturday Night Live. Charlie sat under the blanket and hiccupped over a large plastic cup of wine syrupy Merlot from a liquor store up the road. He was still shaking from the walk to and from the beach. The host of SNL, an actor we didn’t recognize, joked awkwardly, unsure whether his delivery was landing with the studio audience or his fellow cast members. Grimaces fol lowed his opening monologue, uncertain applause. Kevin called out, over the gurgle of water filling the tub, “Any takers?” The question hung in the air. It was enough for Charlie to green at the thought of sex, or water, or whatever. The cold, the small ness of the tub, the concern on the actor’s face on TV, the balmy hotel, the wine. He covered his face with his hands, mumbled something incoherent, then gripped his stomach before leaning over the side of the bed to vomit into a trash bin. I placed

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

my hand on his back and rubbed his spine. His skin was splotchy with blooms of blood vessels that seemed to brighten with each hurl. When he heaved, his muscles grew taut, splaying his ribs between my fingers. My touch overwhelmed him. He brushed behind him. “Just give me a min ute,” he said.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne went to the beach in Massachusetts on October 16th, 1837, he wrote about the sound of the water. Crash of the breakers upon the new country, which, as Hawthorne knew, was really a very old country only pretending to be new. On his trip to the beach, he wrote ideas for stories.

In one, he described a fictional ho tel, a setting for a potential novel, which he would populate with important peo ple whom his unnamed narrator be friends. This person spends down his savings, just to live with such great strang ers. Perhaps the hotel would be located somewhere between the North and the South, in Maryland or Northern Virginia, Washington, DC, on the eve of the Civil War, with guests from all over the coun try a 19th century version of Grand Hotel. Later adaptations might resize the hotel for other doomed eras and countries, a Victorian building (like mine, only larg er) that materializes the hour before a cri sis, with guests transiting into shadows as their respective ends approach. Hawthorne writes, “There should be a story connected to it,” but doesn’t say what the story might be, possibly because he didn’t know, possi bly because the novel might resist a story but strive toward it all the same, like he does in The Blithedale Romance, which is also about finding a place to live, only this

time on a utopian farm in Massachusetts. On that farm, the utopians have no story, or no story that matters except the under lying one that brought them together (love for one woman, Zenobia, whom he based on Margaret Fuller). Together, they build a community despite lacking a plot other than the organizing principle of their pol itics. They are there because, in real life, Hawthorne lived on the transcendentalist retreat, Brook Farm, with Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson. His wife was outraged at how flirtatious his portrayal of Fuller is in the novel and made him revise her character in later edi tions. Remember, Americans are bad at telling the difference between fact and fic tion. Americans are bad at love, too. They really do fuck things up.

After Springs, I dreamed of living with Kevin and Charlie, what our lives would be like. They had sometimes been my lovers, and sometimes lovers to each other, and to gether we might make a family, or a version of it, loose, flexible, no kids. Without plot. We could belong somewhere. Cooking, cleaning, bathing, watching movies, drink ing, smoking on our fire escape in the East Village or some uptown neighborhood, possibly one facing the East River. The dream was generic, impossible to speci fy in its details. Where Kevin slept, what Charlie would wear, the color of our walls, the art we would hang in the toilet and kitchen. Lack of clarity doomed it. Had I placed our threesome in Hawthorne’s ho tel, and connected it to a story, a hotel we never had to leave and could always afford, flickering on an obliviating edge of a twi light era, I might have enabled its reality. Instead, it lingered in a mental landscape

not unlike The Gray in England, wrung of distinctions, quick-moving, impossible to photograph or live in, a cellophane reality, glittering and crumpled.

Six days into my relocation to the haunted London hotel, my landlord wrote, “I write to inform you that upon closer in spection the problem seems to originate on the ground-floor office, with the improper disposal of cooking oil by a recently vacat ed tenant. WE UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE NOT AT FAULT. Until this situation is resolved, we will cover the cost of your hotel. But as soon as the pipes have been cleared, we anticipate your return to the premises without delay.”

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

IT’S A COBRA

Caving in to snake identification groups by Alicia Andrzejewski

When I am six years old, I begin to study serpents. I run my hand over glossy pictures in books from the International School Bangkok’s library, trace sloped jaws, slitted noses, and layered bands of color. I want to know ev erything about the reptiles that might lift their heads and strike me at any moment.

My family makes seven international moves before I complete high school. When we arrive in Thailand from England, snakes are everywhere. Cobras, vipers, kraits our expat community understands that serpents live among us, that no number of gates or guards can keep them from appearing on our doorsteps, in our shoes, coiled around our pool filters. “Every day, another

story,” my mother tells me. “My friend Laura found a pit viper curled up in her bedroom lampshade.”

One day, my mother is riding her bicy cle through Nichada Thani when a small snake appears in the bike lane and, star tled, strikes upwards. My mother raises her legs just in time.

says a guard, who saw. Not good.

Another time, my little sister pulls into our driveway in a golf cart and sees a gigantic snake. Her first impulse is to take a picture, her second to call our fa ther: “Why is there a snake in our yard?” He doesn’t believe her at first, but freaks out when he eventually sees it. Unlike my mother, his relationship to snakes is sim ple, masculine: destroy them.

“Get inside!” he demands.

The guards come and kill it it’s a cobra.

I start to dream of snakes often, as does my mother. “I am always in a dark room,” she tells me, “and they are every where hanging from the ceiling, slither ing across the floors.”

I dream about them rushing down wa terslides, gliding across the top of our pool, sliding down jungle gyms infiltrating images of childhood. Even the witch I be lieve lives in my closet is serpentine: pur ple and scaly, with slits for eyes.

My mother worries about my obses sion “Why don’t you read some fic tion,” she asks, “some Agatha Christie? Baby-sitter’s Club?” but sees some of herself in me, perhaps, and acquiesces. She buys me hardcover books like The World’s Most Dangerous Animals, which contains a blown-up photograph of a bright green

viper’s face spread across two central pag es, its pink, forked tongue darting toward the viewer. I stare at it for long periods of time, wrestling with the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“The more you know about some thing, the less afraid of it you become,” my mother says.

•

I ask my five-year-old daughter if she wants to watch a video of king cobras tak en at the Bangkok Snake Farm. She agrees. I hold my phone between us as the snakes slide in their signature S shape, necks raised off of the ground, hoods spread. I turn to smile at my daughter to encour age her not to be afraid and see her face fallen, her little body recoiled.

“I don’t like them,” she says, drawing further away from the phone, from me.

“Why?” I ask, but she has already moved on. I’m not sure she’d have been able to articulate it anyway. I go to close the browser and notice that the Bangkok Snake Farm website purports that visiting “might even help alleviate your unjustified fear of snakes.”

•

I’m in middle school. I wander into the Witchcraft, Wicca, and Paganism section in a local bookstore. I run my hands along spines, finally pulling out a hardcover book. I look at the cover and am stunned: it pictures a slight, blonde, naked woman sitting in a circle of candles and rocks, her limbs barely covering her breasts and pu bis. But I can’t take my eyes off the black snake wrapped around her shoulders.

I bring the book to my mother, who has

never denied me one. She does not disap point: “I went through this phase, too,” she tells me, taking the book and putting it in the crook of her arm. “Anything else?”

In the weeks that come, I try some half-hearted spells. I am not old enough to seek out most of the ingredients. I can tell, already, that Wicca is a spiritual commit ment I’m not ready to make.

Plus, I don’t have a familiar. I try to put one of the family cats into a magic circle, but she keeps stepping out of the space I marked, nearly knocking over candles that would set my room on fire. I can’t help but feel that if I don’t have a snake don’t want a snake as a familiar, I haven’t fully committed.

Later in life, I discover a Wiccainspired jewelry company. I follow its Instagram account and see pictures of pet snakes posed with jewels: pieces of Lorraine crosses, bat heads, claws, talons. They also make jewelry from life-cast, mummified snakes. I adorn myself my ears, my wrists, my fingers with these silver snakes.

•

I am in my senior year of undergrad at a small college in North Carolina when, in my Appalachian literature class, I read a novel called Saving Grace by Lee Smith. It’s a bildungsroman, and the protagonist’s father is a preacher who takes Mark 16:18 literally. “They shall take up serpents,” the Bible passage reads, “and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

My professor is encouraging and has Smith’s email address. I ask, “How did you

go about researching serpent handling for your novel? In what areas of Appalachia did you conduct your research?”

She tells me that the first service she attended was at a church in Big Rock, Virginia, when she was 11 years old. She was taken there by an older cousin who was trying to scare her. When she was older, she went with her friends to see West Virginia’s Jolo snake handlers and was “thrilled and scared to death, scream ing and giggling all the way home on that steep, curvy mountain road.”

“Those images are indelible,” she tells me. “They never leave you. Again and again in later years, they’d come back to me, almost like they were haunting me.”

I meet a photography professor who also studies the topic and ask him to bring me to a service. He is hesitant. Serpent handling is illegal in North Carolina, so they generally don’t invite strangers to worship. He has gained the congregation’s trust; I haven’t.

He looks me up and down. “It would help if you had a Southern accent,” he says.

I continue my project anyway. I find a book called Snake Handlers: God-Fearers? Or Fanatics? in the library. Someone has scrawled in black ink on every page, a bib lical call and response.

After the sentence “God could let the serpent bite to punish the person, to chas tise him,” they respond: The Lord chastises his children to teach them.

After “When the Holy Ghost comes upon you, it can get in your hands and you’ll then be anointed to handle ser pents,” they reply: The Holy Ghost is in you if you receive it.

And after “I don’t have control over

them. But I always know what I’m doing,” they exclaim: Amen!

I bring the book to my college’s copy center, where a sign reads “EXCESSIVE PHOTOCOPYING OF ANY MATERIAL (SUCH AS AN ENTIRE BOOK) IS PROHIBITED.” I wait in line and hand the book over to the wom an in charge. “I need this entire book cop ied for my research, for the annotations.” She flips through it, looks back up at me, pauses.

“I’ll make an exception,” she says, turn ing away.

Back in my dorm room I stare at the photographs, that sick feeling returning to my stomach. This first batch shows venomous, distinctly American snakes wound around hands, necks, and crosses: diamondback rattlesnakes, black-spotted water moccasins, golden-brown copper heads. But I soon learn there is an exotic snake trade among Appalachian collec tors; their cars weave across state lines, the cobras, vipers, and kraits from my child hood in their trunks.

In the photographs, the congregation members handling these snakes wear ec static expressions on their faces. Trancelike, frenzied, rapturous. There is some thing uncanny about the scenes, about limbs meeting limbless bodies, mouths crying out in jubilation over the encoun ter. After services, the snakes are returned to wooden boxes with holy symbols and verses carved into them serpent boxes. Cages.

This isn’t about God, I think. It’s about fear. I run my fingers over the pictures. These snakes are playing dead. They’ve given up.

Not always, though. A handful of years later, after the research project is nestled in boxes in my parents’ garage, I watch Snake Salvation with my husband. The show fol lows a handful of men who preach at ser pent handling churches in Tennessee and Kentucky. I’m enthralled, totally in love with the show.

The series is cut short, however, when one dies from a snake bite because he re fuses to seek help.

After “When the healer prayed and laid hands on Bea, the pain stopped,” they respond: The Lord is a great physician!

•

In a piece I wrote just last year, I recall from my childhood a Thai folktale about a monk and a cobra. In the story, the monk meditates in an isolated cabin. He opens his eyes and sees a massive cobra on his doorstep, neck lifted, eyes locked on him. The monk is terrified, paralyzed, and doesn’t move until dawn, until he fi nally accepts his fate, bows to the cobra, and collapses into a deep sleep. When he wakes up, the cobra is gone.

In the allegory, the cobra represents fear. The monk must submit to it to survive.

I thought I remembered reading this story in a book called Folktales from the Land of Smiles. After I publish the piece, however, I find the book while perusing the shelves at my parents’ house. I misre membered the tale. The story of the monk and the cobra is, in fact, a Buddhist allego ry but it is not the story from this book, the one from my childhood.

This story, “The Farmer and the Cobra,” is about a lonely man with a good heart who encounters a cobra on the steps

to his house. After the man realizes that the cobra is not going to strike him, he notices a deep gash down the cobra’s side. Moved with pity, the farmer begins to care for the snake like a mother would a child, dressing the wound, feeding it until it is strong, enjoying the company. After a couple of weeks, the farmer comes home one day in a good mood, calls the cobra “with a playful but gentle voice,” and even tually sees it curled up under a big pot. When the farmer puts his right hand out to touch it, the snake’s head darts forward and bites him.

The tale ends with the line, “Within minutes he was dead.”

•

Shortly after my husband and I make an unexpected move from New York City to Virginia for my job at the College of William & Mary, we start watching old episodes of The Mole, a game show where contestants must work as a group to add money to a pot that only one of them will win. Working among them is “the Mole,” tasked by the producers with sab otaging the group’s money-making efforts. Anderson Cooper hosts.

In one episode, three contestants on a mission are made to stay in three dis tinct rooms until they are told otherwise. If all the contestants do so, $100,000 will be added to the pot. One contestant is led by Cooper to a glass box. He tells her to sit on a small stool until he returns. After a few minutes, cockroaches rain down on her head, shoulders bounce off her body onto the ground. She completes her mis sion. Another contestant is led to a room containing an uncomfortable wire bed.

Cooper tells him to remain on the bed until told otherwise. After he is left alone, “Tiny Bubbles” begins to play. The song plays all night long, in all kinds of speeds, arrangements, and octaves. He completes his mission.

“He got off so easy,” my husband remarks.

Then, Cooper opens the final door for the final contestant. In a bare, concrete room with no furniture and a low ceil ing, a nine-foot python slithers across the floor. The camera is at the snake’s eye-lev el, its pink tongue flickering in and out of its mouth as it smells its surroundings. The contestant is clearly distressed, bend ing down to enter the room, never tak ing her eyes off the snake. Cooper leaves, and while the contestant does acrobatics to avoid the unusually active reptile as it moves across the floor, she seems to be managing.

Then the lights go out. The contestant feels the snake at her feet and demands to be let out of the room.

I close my eyes and try to imagine what I would do. There’s no chance of get ting hurt, of course, despite how active and provoked the snake is. If I listened close ly enough, I could get a sense of where it was …

“That’s completely absurd,” my hus band says, interrupting my fantasy. “Her mission was, by far, the most difficult. I would never do it.”

“Not even for a hundred thousand dol lars?” I ask.

“Not for a million,” he responds, dead serious.

I’m a little shocked. We could use the money.

As it turns out, this contestant is not the Mole and is not trying to sabotage the game. She gets to the final round before being crowned the runner-up. She is visi bly disappointed of course.

“Bet she’s glad she didn’t stay in that room,” my husband says, rising from the couch to get a bowl of cereal.

•

I manage to stay off Facebook for years, but when I eventually make an account I join multiple snake identification groups upon the recommendation of my mother. Now, when I scroll through my feed, every five or so posts comes an image of a snake with captions such as “Bagwell Texas. He just slithered down my driveway. ID?” or, “found this lil guy in my kitchen, would like some identification so my mom doesn’t flip out.” When group administrators and experts identify snakes as venomous, they’ll affectionately call them “nope ropes” or “danger noodles.” Most members are advocates for these snakes, even the cottonmouths, the rattle snakes, the water moccasins.

I am still startled whenever one of these snakes shows up amidst my friends’ children, cobras, weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries but I am heartened by the members’ assurance that we can all coexist.

“Just keep a respectful distance and ev eryone will be okay,” one writes.

•

Right before our move from New York to Virginia, I dream our back patio is covered in snakes. I am standing on a small slab of concrete, surrounded by them. I can’t get to the door. They slither around me, black

and green, hooded and flat-necked. They curl up in lounge chairs, run their bodies over my daughter’s toys. I stand still, look ing for a way out. To get inside, I must step on them. I know if I do, they will strike.

I breathe and move forward. Then, I wake up.

•

Today, one of the jewels I wear regular ly is a “Sleeping Medusa” ring, a nest of intertwined, sterling silver snakes. In the myth, Medusa is murdered while sleeping, when her eyes the ones that turn men to stone can’t save her. Nor can her snakes, which in ancient Greece were often por trayed as protectors of the earth. I suppose they were sleeping, too.

Snakes hold great power, intelligence, and ability as do many animals, includ ing ourselves. It is not lost on me that, of all the world’s dangerous creatures, we as sociate evil with one completely disinter ested in us, one we can grab hold of and render immobile in a moment.

I’ll continue to take up serpents but will never welcome one into my home as a pet, to curl up in my lampshades or under big pots. I will never stuff one into a ser pent box, to handle when the Holy Spirit moves me. I will never even see a picture of one without having to steel myself against a wave of nausea, a wobble in my stomach. Yet I am in awe of snakes, as much as I fear them.

I will never meet a snake by mutual choice, but I’ve come to bow to that sick feeling in my stomach, because we don’t have a choice when and where we encoun ter what we fear simply who we are, and what we know, when we come to it.

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

RANDOM HOUSE

Surviving rejection (after rejection)

by Anna Dorn

Icompleted my first novel draft while I was working as a law clerk at DC Superior Court. I wrote most of the book at my desk, in the body of a judicial order template, the same template I used to declare defendants innocent or guilty of what ever petty crime they’d allegedly committed. Because I worked in

a cubicle surrounded by my busier peers, I didn’t want it to be so obvious that I wasn’t doing legal work. But in all likelihood I was pretty obvious: I wore massive Sony headphones in an attempt to prevent co workers from asking me things, and was constantly minimizing Tumblr as col leagues approached my desk. I was about as enthusiastic about that job as a vegetar ian is about filet mignon.

That book was called The Esquires, and it was a smutty, incoherent novel about a group of degenerates at an elite law school. The main character was a fictionalized ver sion of myself, a law student with no inter est in the law, aimless and listless and des perate for a creative outlet. I didn’t show it to anyone, but I was convinced the book was a masterpiece, both commercial and avant-garde.

Writing fiction had been a private pastime of mine since high school. Back then I mostly wrote Floridian love sto ries, dreamy tales of surfer teens sneaking around on steamy tropical nights, aspi rational fantasies typed into my family’s desktop computer in landlocked, but toned-up Washington, DC. I hadn’t tak en a writing class so I didn’t understand anything about conflict or stakes that you have to torture your protagonist for readers to care. So I mostly wrote about the life I wanted: romantic, sun-kissed, and stress free. Not long after I went off to college, my mom got a new computer and the cloud didn’t exist, so these teen novels are gone forever.

When I became desperate to escape the law and finally started telling people I wanted to write books, I was met with a lot of suspicion. My mom said I was crazy,

comparing me to her friend the failed bas ket-weaver. At the time I thought she was being cruel and dismissive. I was angry at her and everyone who didn’t believe in me and felt desperate to prove them wrong. Growing up I felt misunderstood. I as sume most people who aspire to have an audience feel this way: desperate for the masses to validate us in a way that our loved ones have failed to.

Becoming a writer requires a level of delusion. Maybe a lot of delusion. Because I wrote in private, I wasn’t subjected to criticism and therefore wasn’t aware of my flaws. Isolation fed grandiose fantasies. For years I was convinced that I was the female Bret Easton Ellis. Up until my ear ly thirties, when I published my first book, I was certain that if I could just get my writing before the right audience, it would dazzle. And I would be universally recog nized as a precocious genius.

•

In between organizing misdemeanor case files by date, I became convinced that The Esquires was my Less Than Zero, edgy and brilliant and unlike anything that had ever been written.

I didn’t have any writer friends and had no idea how novels got published, so I asked Google. The search engine informed me I needed an agent, which required cir culating a query letter. I sent this first que ry letter to probably 50 agents, all of whom were way out of my reach, and not a single one responded. The agents were right not to respond: the book was a mess, and the query letter was insane. Formatted like a brief, I listed in roman numerals (“IV. Imagine if Legally Blonde were written by

the Literary Brat Pack”) reasons I was cer tain the book would be a bestseller.

The rejection was overwhelming, but not upsetting. Probably the agents’ refusal to engage (again, they were correct to ig nore me) made the publishing world more inaccessible. And the further away it was, the easier it was to remain in la-la land.

During this time I literally moved to L.A. I would walk around saying that writing was easy, that it was “just typing,” not unlike texting or tweeting. I’d pick up books by Ottessa Moshfegh or Sally Rooney and think, I could do better. I had no sympathy for people who got stuck or blocked or couldn’t finish their novels. Writing to me was like breathing: auto matic and necessary to live.

But now that I’ve published three books, I appreciate that writing one is re ally fucking hard. That it takes years and 30 drafts and so many words that end up trashed. And that the sentences you think are brilliant when you’re writing are prob ably obvious and/or cringe and you’re like ly going to end up deleting them or being embarrassed if you don’t.

These days I’m more insecure than ever. Being close means the stakes are higher. Being an author is no longer this fantas tical dream inside my head that can be whatever I want it to be. It is, I guess, a technical reality.

I recently overheard someone refer to my career as “popping off” and I thought they were talking about someone else. I don’t feel successful at all. All I can see are the reviews that aren’t written, the agents and editors who rejected me, the money I haven’t made. This is of course typical hu man behavior, giving more weight to the

bad than the good. But I suspect it’s more common for writers. Because we’re being rejected all the time.

•

Sometimes I worry I get off a little bit on rejection. Most writers do, probably why else would we do this to ourselves? A

friend who’s about to release her debut novel told me she had to block Goodreads on her computer; the bad reviews were too painful. I understood where she was coming from. Seeing random strangers of fended by your book feels shitty, as I think most of us write to make audiences feel seen and happy not pissed. But I also get a sick thrill out of read ing my bad reviews, probably in the same way I sometimes like to floss until my gums bleed.

There is absolutely nothing deep, interesting, charming, or worth reading in the first 40% of this tiresome novel and I just don’t have enough days left in my life to hope that the latter 60% is better and more meaningful.

NOPE

this is one of the most vapid, selfinvolved, boring books i’ve ever read in my life

Couldn’t get through the second chapter. Feels bad giving a new young author a poor rating publicly but this book is horribly cringe I’m sorry Anna.

The self-hating part of me adores my haters, cherishes the NOPE. And: I’m

young! The bad reviewers have great taste and absolutely know what’s up. An editor is never more attractive than right after she rejects me. She is brilliant and has her finger on the pulse. When an editor likes my book, I worry about her. I wonder if she’s okay, or if she’s just dumb.

Relishing rejection can be a form of emotional cutting. Do I think I deserved to be punished? Do I deal with my anxi ety over rejection by eroticizing it? Am I identifying with my rejectors in the same way I once picked up books by successful writers and thought I could do better? Am I in a twisted psychosexual relationship with my haters? Maybe! But getting a sick thrill out of the hate is a maladaptive cop ing mechanism.

When I teach writing, I tell my stu dents that they have to find a way to make peace with rejection. I recommend detaching the ego from the work, which is hard, but doable. I encourage them to think of their own tastes, how fickle they can be. I’m fully aware that my evaluation of a book is roughly 95 percent dependent on my mood when it reaches me. Often I’ll pick up a book and “not get it” and then pick it up again a year later, and it’s suddenly my favorite book ever. As author Tao Lin has said many times, “There is no good and bad in art,” just preferences. And it’s true.

But for this reason, rejection as a writer feels so random. (They don’t call it Random House for nothin’!) The amount of time and effort and heart I put into a project doesn’t always correlate with how it’s received by agents, editors, critics, and audiences. Often the books I write the fastest and with the least emotional

and intellectual investment are the ones to which people respond most positively. But I think part of coping with rejection means accepting that maybe it isn’t ran dom. And that maybe the books I write quickly and easily are a byproduct of the rejected books I agonized over. There is no better way to learn how to write a book than by writing a book. And sometimes those books you write aren’t meant to be read. Sometimes they’re just part of your process.

•

Rejection almost always makes sense with hindsight. When I was in my twenties working as a judicial clerk in DC you know, when I was writing The Esquires I was desperate to get this job in the appel late division of a federal public defender’s office in Baltimore. I really wanted to be a writer, but I hadn’t yet accepted the possi bility that “writer” could be a “career,” so I went after the law job closest to being a writer. An appellate lawyer just writes briefs all day. The statement of facts in a brief is novelesque, stories presented in a persuasive and theatrical fashion. Public defender work means the stories are juicy much more exciting than corpo rate law. And the rest is an argument not unlike an English paper. The federal office meant it was prestigious and well paid, but it was still a government job, mean ing I wouldn’t have to work that hard. Also, Baltimore seemed cool much cooler than DC. Baltimore had art and music scenes, a creative energy.

I got to the final round of the interview but did not get the job. And I was devas tated. I felt like a loser and a failure and

everything seemed hopeless. But now, 10 years later, I’m thrilled I didn’t get the job. I can’t imagine my life turning out posi tively if I’d moved to Maryland! Whereas now I live in Los Angeles, my dream city, with the perfect weather and most dra matic sunsets, where I can hike in the largest urban wilderness area in the coun try year-round. Where I spend my days writing and teaching and editing, thinking and talking about books constantly, and I hardly even remember being a lawyer. Not to be a woo-woo Californian, but this is the Los Angeles Review of Books so I won’t hold back: I believe that when I was re jected from that job, it was part of the uni verse’s plan to get me where I needed to be.

Now I try to find that trust when I’m being rejected. Maybe after a day or two of wallowing, I try to see that I’m being rejected for a reason. Maybe a work was rejected because if it was published it wouldn’t be good for me. I’d feel exposed and have a nervous breakdown, or get sued by a petty person to whose fabricated life details I’d paid homage. Or maybe I’m be ing rejected to pave the way for a better editor to say yes. I have to believe that the universe is looking out for me.

Rejection hurts now in a way it didn’t used to. But it’s normally when I’m about to jump off a bridge that I get a sliver of good news. When the light shifts or my antidepressants attach to more receptors and things seem a little less bleak. And I keep going.

• I’m working on shaking my deep-seated belief that confidence is tacky and selfhate is chic.

I’m having an easier time shedding the latter. Is there anything more boring than listening to a pretty and smart girl go on about how she’s ugly and dumb? Maybe it’s listening to a pretty and smart girl go on about how she “loves herself.” Maybe the latter isn’t confidence. Maybe I’m re thinking how I define confidence. Maybe confidence is just being fine with who you are and not talking about it. Accepting that it doesn’t really matter if you’re pretty or ugly or smart or dumb or if your work is good or bad and these things can never really be measured anyway. In the grand scheme of the universe, we’re all specks of dust.

When I think back to that 26-year-old convinced she was the female Bret Easton Ellis, I’m not totally sure who she is. But I’m grateful for her. Knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t try to be a writer today. I sympathize with my initial naysay ers; trying to make it as a writer is insane, and the odds are completely against you. But I’m already in the deep end. Twentysix-year-old Anna pushed me here. And now I guess it’s time I learn to swim.

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

STEPMOTHER TONGUES

A literary translator with no roots by Katia Gregor

Irecently sent my resume to an Italian writer who was look ing for someone to translate his novel into English. It sounded like an interesting project.

“I need a translator who’s English mother-tongue,” he emailed by return, making no mention of the 25 or so books listed on my resume all translated into English. “Can you confirm that your mother tongue is English?” I was taken aback by this

point-blank question. I appreciated the reasoning behind it: he clearly wanted a good translation, in good English. But I found his assumption somewhat question able. As we have daily proof on both sides of the Atlantic, having English as your mother tongue is, sadly, not a guarantee of good English.

In addition, his question made me un easy because it put me on the spot and I wasn’t sure whether to answer it practical ly or technically. Practically, I am a native English speaker, in that English is cur rently my dominant language. But tech nically … well, technically, some may argue that I am not.

I wrote back to this Italian author and presented him with all the facts of my lan guage status. I never heard back from him.

Before anyone stands up and shouts “Point of information,” I am aware of the semantic differences between a mother tongue and a native language, but for the purpose of this piece, I will use them in terchangeably. Most individuals outside the academic and translation environment do, and when a publisher needs an It > En or Fr > En or Any Language > En trans lation, no one asks to clarify whether the final “En” product should be produced by a native English speaker or someone whose mother tongue is English.

Whatever its approved definition, what most of us understand by “mother tongue” or “native language” is putting it simply our best language, the one in which we are most proficient and with which we are most at home. More often than not, this happens to be our family’s language as well as the first one we spoke as children. As many people like to put it,

it’s the language we “think” in.

What I explained to the Italian writer was that although English wasn’t a lan guage I’d spoken since birth, it was now the language I automatically reached out for to express myself both orally and in writing.

The truth is, I don’t exactly have a mother tongue, but I am blessed with four loving, nurturing stepmother tongues who made me what I am today.

I am half English, a quarter Armenian, and a quarter Iranian. More or less. That would be the abridged version. The Iranian quarter is really an Azerbaijani-Turkmen blend, and, rumor has it, the English half is more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon. I should have been born in Edinburgh (where I was conceived, apparently), but the cold drove my mother to sunny Rome. Technically, my first language, or mother tongue, is Russian, since my Russian-born Armenian grandmother played an essential role in raising me while my mother had to work. As soon as I embarked on a social life with the other toddlers in the apartment build ing where we lived, I learned to communi cate in Italian. When I was about five, my mother brought in an American babysit ter to teach me English and, a year later, enrolled me at the American Overseas School of Rome.

The family philosophy was You could lose everything you own at a moment’s no tice so education is your wisest investment. Have languages, can travel. Apparently, my maternal grandfather used to say that with every new language you learn you acquire an extra personality. When I was nine and juggling three languages with reasonable ease, my mother picked up sticks and

moved us to France, where I had to start my life from scratch in French. The Petit Larousse Illustré became my best friend. In my rage to master French, I rejected all my other languages and, by the age of 12, was practically a native French speaker. I wrote earnest stories, imitation Molière plays, strictly rhyming poems, and even my journal in French. At the age of 19, I moved to England. By then, I had neglect ed my English to the point where it was only slightly better than high-school stan dard, so there I was, once again, spending evenings copying words, this time from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, into a notebook, aping the tone and body lan guage of the natives, practicing in the mir ror. Now, 35 years later, English is my au tomatic go-to language. English is what I write my fiction, articles, plays, and journal in. English is what I translate into from Italian and French. Much to my shame, Russian, the first language I spoke, is now my weakest.

My mother tongue? Native language? I don’t know. What language do I think in? It depends on what fits best at the time.

I admit I am always puzzled when people ask me that. I think in con cepts doesn’t everybody? Surely, our thought process would be much slower if it relied entirely on words and sentences. Our thoughts form and fly at supersonic speed, whizzing, whirling, bouncing free ly. Words make it possible to convey these thoughts to our fellow humans, and this process of translation carries a degree of compromise and inevitable inaccuracy. For all their creative potential, words are lim ited. “Green” will evoke an emerald to one person and a fir tree to another, “pain” can

be physical or emotional, and there are as many ways of experiencing “happiness” as there are individuals on the planet. Thus, we use more than one word to communi cate a thought with more precision and to narrow down the margin of potential mis understanding. And so our lithe, spritelike thoughts are effectively shoehorned into wooden clogs so that they can walk at the somewhat reduced speed of human speech and writing. This is both a deeply frustrating and highly delecta ble challenge for people who, like me, are word addicts.

By extension, literary translators could be described as shoemakers, master cob blers who lovingly create shoes which must both fit the foot or book in the source language and be appropriate to the terrain or target language to be walked on. Will a particular book walk more comfortably and farthest in mocca sins, trekking boots, stilettos, or sandals? To manufacture the perfect piece of foot wear for the occasion, it’s helpful for the master cobbler to understand the needs of the client’s foot and not only to know the terrain like the back of their hand, but also to have themselves been fashioned from it, their roots having soaked up the water from that very soil. Aye, there’s the rub.

What happens to the cobbler who makes shoes for a terrain that did not bear him or her? A cobbler who learned to make shoes from the natives of this land but who doesn’t entirely belong to it? A wanderer who has no land? What about a literary translator with no formal mother tongue or native language?

I love and value all four of my step mother tongues equally, even though,

having lived with it the longest, English has become my default setting and my closest ally. At present, I couldn’t write in or translate into any of the other three. That doesn’t mean I don’t shapeshift from one to the other when no one is watching. When I translate, the process in the secrecy of my head is on occasion pluri lingual before it appears in English on the page. Sometimes the perfect word or idiom to convey the original isn’t English but, say, French, Italian, or Russian. The Italian una faccia da schiaffi (literally, “a face for slapping”) immediately summons the Russian рожа просит кирпича (literally, “a mug begging for a brick”) rather than a face you want to slap or an offensive mug. The French effleurer is a beautiful verb that contains the word fleur (“flower”) and means to touch something so lightly, so gently you could be using a flower instead of your fingers. Whenever I come across it, my mind immediately leaps to the Italian sfiorare, which also has fiore (“flower”) in it. Touch lightly is longer, consequently heavier, and the ch sound chunky to the ear. Skim makes me think of an action removing or somehow disturbing a sur face. Brush is better but suggests friction (a brush) and a raking or at least swishing sound, whereas effleurer is elegantly silent, except perhaps accompanied by a soupçon of breath. In such cases, I indulge in a mo ment of unconstructive frustration before settling on an anglophone reader-friendly version. Perhaps all translators includ ing those borne and breastfed by a mother tongue fluent in more than two lan guages experience this.

•

There’s no copyright on impostor’s syndrome, but it sometimes feels like we, language foster children, invented it. When you have no roots to anchor you to one place, you’re at the mercy of gusts of the doubt wind. You’re shadowed by the fear of being found out, of someone questioning your right to translate into a language that isn’t really “yours,” and you know if someone did, you’d have nowhere to run for shelter, no mother tongue to stand up for you because all your step mother tongues, however loving, are parttime parents with biological offspring of their own to care for. In darker moments, the thought crosses your mind that per haps you don’t have the right to be a trans lator, that you’re a usurper, a trickster, a fraud You grab one of the solid items that live on your desk and hold it in your hand (in my case, it’s either the pinecone with the comforting scent of resin or the cool, smooth rainbow obsidian), you close your eyes, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that you have as much right as anybody else, because those with no family home can settle anywhere. That no one has ever challenged the quality of your work, and by now someone would have. Surely. Still, as you put each foot down, you feel for quicksand you could sink into, loose rocks you could trip over, black ice you could slip on. You take nothing for granted. You check, double-check, tri ple-check every sentence, every word, wary of false friends, of assumptions, until you’re as certain as humanly possible that the color of your target language is uni form, with no smudges or gaps. That it can hold its own in the sea of native speakers. That it doesn’t stand out as different. And

when you achieve this and the copy edi tor returns your translation with only a few scratches of red here and there, you experience a delicious sense of pride and satisfaction.

•

Earlier, I wrote that I don’t think in lan guages but in concepts. Possibly because I mentally flit from one language to an other (or maybe that’s just a quirk of my personality), I find that my first and most immediate response to a text is emotion al and instinctive. Emotions travel faster than thoughts and instinct flies from A to B at such speed that your eyes can’t keep up with its trajectory. I often know what the author intends before I actually know it. A part deep inside me screams, “Oh, get on with it, it’s so glaringly obvious,” while I run around, chasing after the voice that’s shouting this, trying to capture it so that my brain can catch up with words and sentences and together we can channel the ethereal fairy into an appropriate pair of earth-worthy shoes, to carry the text far and wide.

When I watch my newly Englished book take a turn and see that it walks comfortably, no blisters, no rubbing, and the shoes I’ve crafted fit like a sec ond skin, I feel relieved, grateful and, yes, proud and hope that I have done honor to all my stepmother tongues, be cause even though English is currently my translating, working, writing, and best language, I know that its color, however uniform, would be duller without the un dertones of the other three.

MAGIC AND TECHNOLOGY

A profile of David Duchovny Sadie Rebecca Starnes

David Duchovny keeps distracting me. “Hey, look at those amazing things.” He’s pointing out toward the horizon where people appear to hover above the ocean on what a later Google search reveals to be electric surfboards. “They’re like fucking magic carpets.” It’s mid morning in Malibu, and I’m here to talk to Duchovny about his fifth book in only a handful of years, The Reservoir. Written from his old apartment overlooking Central Park, the pandemic-era story mirrors Thomas Mann’s own feverish

novella, Death in Venice. Yet sitting down with Duchovny on the porch of Soho House, the Pacific fussing just a few feet away, all I can think about is California. Having flown in from New York City the night before, I’m still rather awestruck by our surroundings the dramatic canyons and violent surf, shameless beaches called Billionaire’s and Dume but Duchovny is perfectly at ease. He’s looking fit, tan, and, at 61, finally showing some gray, which suits him.

While millions of television viewers met him as Fox Mulder on The X-Files, I only recently became familiar with Duchovny’s career. I was too young to watch the show when it first aired I did binge it during the lockdown but lately he’s frequented some of my favorite pod casts. I often write about artists who work across disparate media, and here was an aspiring academic turned Hollywood ac tor discussing Paul de Man and quoting Harold Bloom, a sci-fi icon writing nov els about Mormon radicals and American identity. Nevertheless, it seemed like all anyone wanted to ask him about was aliens. So I booked a flight out here. After exchanging the sole complaint to be made of L.A. weather really, it’s just too sunny I ask Duchovny if his recent move west has affected his writing. “No, I’m always in my own head anyways, so …” His hand rolls away, finishing the thought in that way New Yorkers often do. Duchovny grew up in the East Village, the son of a Scottish immigrant and an American Jewish writer. Even-keeled and quick to laugh, it’s not surprising to learn he’s a middle child, a family’s natural me diator. His father left when he was still a

boy “to write,” Duchovny says and his mother, Margaret, raised her three children as a teacher and school admin istrator. “We weren’t good kids, we didn’t help at all,” he laughs. “We had a dog and three cats in a small apartment … she cooked, she cleaned. Mom was a strong person.”

Duchovny’s mother, now in her ear ly nineties, grew up in a small fishing village in Northern Scotland. The first in her family to earn a college degree, Margaret passed on to her children the highest regard for education and hard work. At least in this respect, Duchovny, despite his recollection, was a good kid: he earned a scholarship to the elite prep school Collegiate, where he was captain of the baseball and basketball teams before graduating as valedictorian. He went on to study literature at Princeton and Yale a calling that aligned him with his other par ent. Duchovny’s father, Amram, worked in public relations but was always writing, be it political satire, an off-Broadway play, or his first novel, Coney, published only a few years before his death. “Bless him, you know,” Duchovny says. “He always said he was a novelist, and then, out the door, he just dumps this book on the world.”

Set between Mermaid and Neptune Avenues, Coney was inspired by Amram’s prewar childhood and his own father, Moshe, a Yiddish-language journalist, novelist, and playwright. As Jewish immi grants from the Pale of Settlement, forced to leave behind what is now Ukraine, the Duchovnys survived caravan attacks and ran a tavern in Egypt before arriving in New York. Names were Anglicized, pasts were pocketed, so Duchovny only recently

learned much of this. “If [Dad] knew, he didn’t tell me,” he says, “or I was too young to register.”

As in so many immigrant families, adaptability proved an inherited trait. Duchovny has moved fluidly between social circles, careers, and media. He was well into graduate school, preparing the fancifully titled (but never written) PhD dissertation, “Magic and Technology in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry,” when he took an interest in playwriting. This, in turn, brought him to an acting class and, before long, landed him a few well-paying gigs, then major roles and an agent. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, leaving Yale as an ABD.

“I was always looking for ways out,” Duchovny says. “I just didn’t feel like that was my place.” Academia drained his fa vorite authors of their verve, he found, while acting engaged him not only intel lectually and physically, but also emotion ally. “All of a sudden, I was in this space where they were saying, scream and yell and cry, get angry, instead of trying to re press everything,” he says. “It was cathar tic.” And truthfully, it’s hard to imagine Duchovny keeping office hours. Although he’s built a reputation on his winsome, easygoing demeanor, that barely glosses an innate restlessness some furtive energy. “I think I just liked [acting’s] sense of play more than anything else … I like to play.”

This playfulness has defined Duchovny’s acting career, tinging even his most saturnine roles with an irrev erent wit. It’s just as present in his writ ing: Dark moments are often punctuated with a comical lilt; musings on “Kashmir” might follow a line from Dickinson,

while a tightly bound plot can easily col lapse into stream-of-consciousness rev erie about baseball, poetry, or desert flora. Reared on classical literature (“and classic rock,” he quips), impassioned by Beckett and Pynchon, his novels experiment with the meta-magical within everyday life, grafting Irish mythology onto Manhattan (Miss Subways), anthropomorphizing farm animals (Holy Cow), even orchestrating a Red Sox winning streak (Bucky F*cking Dent). It’s only in Duchovny’s most recent books, Truly Like Lightning (2021) and The Reservoir, that this penchant for absurdist humor and hamartia find a certain harmo ny, a distinct voice.

Duchovny’s characters are often writ ers themselves, or actors or artists, aspiring or humbly resigned. They frequently turn to Ashbery, Yeats, or Whitman as guides and confidants, quoting them from mem ory, just as Duchovny is wont to do. Such erudition betrays his top-tier education, but specifically his studies under the late literary critic Harold Bloom, whose over whelming influence was recently satirized in The Chair 2021’s comedic drama about a fictitious Ivy League English de partment. Duchovny plays a pretentious, if amiable, version of himself in the show, but he really was a student of Bloom’s in graduate school, and gained from his lec tures an ardent respect for the Western canon, the centrality of Shakespeare, the authority of aesthetic over ideology.

Decades later, Bloom remains funda mental to Duchovny’s work. Not so much in his style, which strives for the ambitious range of Roth or DeLillo, the chortling attention to human detail paid by Tom Wolfe or Beckett, but in his scholarly

approach, this constant engagement with past authors. “It’s really belatedness,” he emphasizes. The key feature in Bloom’s seminal The Anxiety of Influence (1973), be latedness is the writer’s dilemma that ev erything’s already been said: put simply, that there’s nothing new under the sun. “It’s an intellectual concept that I feel very emotional about.”

When I ask Duchovny if he feels a part of any literary tradition, he takes a moment to respond. “I don’t know. I feel like my books are very different. You know, like Bloom, we’re talking about the anxiety of influence. And if I was to tell you who I think my influences are, those are exact ly the people that are not … Bloom would say that my true influence is so daunting and the presence so overwhelming that I don’t even know, that I’ve hidden it from myself.”

Bloom passed away just as Duchovny began writing Truly Like Lightning, a sprawling drama about a Mormon convert in 21st-century California. As laid out in the novel’s acknowledgments, the critic was deeply fascinated by the Latter-day Saints, especially the mythmaking imag ination of their founder, Joseph Smith. In 1992’s American Religion, Bloom twice hopes that a novelist will someday tell the story of Mormonism “as the epic it was,” so I ask Duchovny if Truly was written in direct response to this prompt. He seems genuinely surprised. “Oh, does he? Damn it. I was too late.”

Truly’s protagonist, Bronson Powers, is a retired stuntman and Mormon convert who leaves Los Angeles to raise a family in an isolated stretch of Joshua Tree desert. Duchovny’s best writing is often from the

perspective of Bronson’s three sister-wives (I find this sensitivity to women’s points of view common to the sons of single mothers), and of Maya the rapacious young land developer who sets the story in motion. After she forces a wager upon Bronson, three of his 10 children are en rolled in San Bernardino schools, where the family’s 19th-century worldview is used to approach a plethora of contempo rary sociopolitical issues, from race, class, and cultural warfare to climate change and #MeToo.

Juggling over a dozen family members, a few scandalous love affairs, and many of America’s most pressing concerns, the plot would run away from us if not for the dogmatic Bronson, whose monomania anchors the novel. He thinks little of con temporary society, much less of his former life. A stuntman is “just a shadow of an ac tor, and an actor is just a shadow of a real person making shadows on a silver screen in the dark,” Bronson tells his young son, Hyrum. “It’s a bullshit existence.”

Duchovny plans to play his protago nist in the coming adaptation of the nov el, which is in development. And indeed, Bronson draws on the writer’s own grap pling with fame and identity, the nexus of which produced not only a crucial plot device in Truly, but another of his ongo ing preoccupations: fraud. Duchovny is captivated by Mark Hofmann, a Mormon forger and murderer who sold off fake documents in Joseph Smith’s hand. Hofmann’s work was not only good but also engrossing for the forger so much so that he came to believe he was actually Smith. “He thought and wrote like an ac tor who has completely lost himself in the

character,” Duchovny writes. “He became his role.” In 2000, Duchovny even turned the story into an episode of X-Files, “Hollywood A.D.,” changing Hofmann into a Christian forger who believed him self to be Christ. In Truly, these lines be tween man and god, Hollywood and the holy, become exquisitely blurred.

“I’m interested in fraud, because we all are,” Duchovny says, indicating our surroundings. It’s a beautifully clear day, and everyone’s brunching. “Los Angeles?” I ask. He adjusts his sunglasses. “I mean, the world.” Our conversation turns to humiliation, which is rather like the lin ing of fraud its self-realization. “I guess humiliation is akin in some way to shame, and shame is deadly. But it’s also neces sary It goes back to Holden Caulfield. I’m still obsessed with phoniness, hypocri sy, arrogance, shamelessness. Those would be my four horsemen of the apocalypse.” Are they not also every actor’s greatest fears? He laughs. “Actors like to say they’re authentic, but [they’re only] good at fak ing authenticity.”

Existing between centuries and ide ologies, Truly’s Bronson personifies the anxious gap between the old and new worlds. It’s in this breach, Bloom argued, that Americans search for an original self, a fretful pursuit producing as much terror as beauty. “I am myself waiting my time to be a God,” Walt Whitman originally sang, but Joseph Smith was less patient, invit ing us all to be self-made deities today; and so “why couldn’t Bronson Powers […] hear the voice of an angel on Hollywood and Vine”? By the end of Truly, Bronson embodies this uneasy chimera quite lit erally. Dusting off his stuntman’s toolbox

of pyrotechnics and blanks, he fakes mir acles and divinity in the desert. Bronson postures and hesitates between manifes tations until one of his sister-wives, Mary, steps into the role of her namesake, and finally brings him down to earth.

The Reservoir shares this vision of an isolated man encroaching upon madness against the unknown; once again, it’s a woman who ultimately unveils his delu sion. Set during the early days of lockdown, the novella follows the internal drama of a middle-aged Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he reckons with his past and privilege, art and love, from an apartment over looking Central Park Reservoir. “[T]wenty floors above the asphalt,” Duchovny writes, “[Ridley] could be Thoreau or Emerson brooding on escape and self-reliance in his cabin in the sky. Living that peculiar American fantasy of forsaking the world while influencing it.”

Divorced, lonesome, and not “essen tial,” Ridley toys with the idea of becom ing an artist. Every evening, sunset to sun rise, he captures time-lapsed photos of the Reservoir with his iPhone. He calls the se ries Res : 365, daydreaming that “when peo ple would watch his […] films, they would learn of his depth.” Around the 250th, however, he notices a pattern of light flick ering from an apartment across the park. A beautiful woman in need is reaching out to him, he deduces, and he becomes ob sessed with finding her. “Ridley sighed at the possibility of a future. He wasn’t too old to dream of being needed […] He was […] a hero in search of a moment.”

Ridley’s quest echoes Melville in the mountains, Gustav in the canals, but also the mad Lear in Dover, estranged from

his beloved Cordelia. Ridley is missing his own daughter named Coral, no less who has avoided visiting her father during the lockdown, not “want[ing] to kill him.” Yet her concerned text messag es increasingly interrupt his wanderings in Central Park, a psychic geography that shifts between the past and present, truth and conspiracy, and, eventually, dream and reality itself. At the center remains the Reservoir, “always neutral while we never are.”

Exhibiting vague signs of COVID-19, Ridley begins to wonder if he’s in fact hallucinating. “Symbol or symptom?” he frequently asks, parroting a 92nd-Street Y lecture he stumbled into years ago. I ask Duchovny about the origins of this rid dle. “[I had a legendary] professor named Arthur Szathmary at Princeton … and he did exactly what I said he does: he played a heart beating and asked, ‘Is that a sym bol or symptom of a heart attack?’ I had no idea. I still have no idea.”

The dichotomy provides an elegant spiral for Ridley’s descent. Running half-naked around the park, he chases the subject of his desire into the icy waters of the Reservoir, where he’s drawn underwa ter to probe the seedy depths of New York City history: office papers from the debris of 9/11, the bodies of slaves and COVID victims, seemingly all of the city’s sins and grief surface alongside his own. Ridley be lieves himself a savior to the undead “un counted ones” he encounters, “who had been taken in secret by all manner of virus and bias and deceit and chicanery,” but they only pull him down further, where time and space converge “into the circle that is all center and no circumference

[…] where darkness began giving way to the light […] to the Fiat Lux.”

Duchovny nods to a new John Ashbery collection I was reading when he first sat down. “You know he says, ‘[T]here is only just so much room. And it accom modates everything.’” He continues, “And that’s what happens when Ridley’s seeing the truth of history under the Reservoir. He feels his mind actually blow, and yet accommodate it all.”

I ask Duchovny about his own experi ence with COVID, and he laughs. “Well, I didn’t see the key to all mythologies. I got no insight from it.” Nonetheless, he has a great deal in common with his protagonist. From summer gigs as lifeguards on Fire Island when they were kids, to a high-rise apartment on the West Side, they often share the same elevated view: capacious yet attentive. Still, it must be infuriating, I openly wonder, that people draw these connections between Duchovny’s work and his personal life.

“It’s not so much that, [it just] takes away the artifice, the meaning of it,” he tells me. It’s the symptom of what John Waters, also a multimedia novelist, called the “curse of fame”: the public’s inability to honestly perceive a celebrity’s transi tion into a different media. Duchovny begins to fidget. “Even if I look at what the algorithm recommends, it’s books by actors, or music by other actors … but no, I’m sincerely doing these things. It’s like, ‘Fuck you, algorithm you’re the stu pidest fucking algorithm!’” As I’m laugh ing, his gaze shifts suddenly back to the surfers beyond the beach. They’ve slipped underwater, and Duchovny’s lifeguarding skills emerge. “Oh, now they’re looking for

drowning people It’s deep and cold. It’s not like Hawaii out there.”

Ridley’s final memory is one of swim ming at the beach with Coral. She’s still a little girl, and they drift a bit too far out he’s “showing off” for her, he con fesses when a sudden set gets rough. He worries he’s going to lose his daughter, but they make it back to shore safely, where he collapses “in two inches of water from the adrenaline dump and residual fear […] [S]he dug holes in the sand nearby […] carefree, [while] he looked up at the blank blue sky and wondered what kind of man he was.”

“That’s me, too,” Duchovny admits. “That happened right around here. If I can love anything I do, I do love the end of that sequence.” I can imagine that, for a public person especially an ac tor made famous by iconic, decades-long roles writing may offer some control over his personal narrative. “I don’t see it as [that], because I don’t have any interest in writing a memoir,” he says, “but I see it as a psychic narrative. That’s more than any kind of recounting of history is going to be it’s the real me.”

I ask if his daughter had read this latest book. “I don’t think [so] … It’s like seeing your dad naked in a way. I don’t necessarily want to read my dad’s stuff. I don’t blame [her].” Amram moved to Boston soon af ter his divorce, remarried, and later retired in Paris where he died of heart disease in 2003. Duchovny discovered his father’s unpublished second book, A Lifetime Is Once, in a drawer after he passed; as a se quel to Coney, it was more autobiograph ical of his adult life and included com mentary about his children, with whom he

suffered some distance. “It was painful at the time,” Duchovny says. “It put me in a position that I suppose I put my children in, which is of walking into that kind of gray area But when I’m dead, I hope that [my children] can go to the books and say, ‘Oh, that was Dad.’”

As Ridley’s lungs fill with water, be it of the Reservoir or his own fluids, he for gets his name. It’s a final irony as his mar riage was damned “at some long-ago stu pid party” when he forgot his wife’s. “He wished he could inform his ex-wife that there was now a time that he had forgot ten both their names. […] He wasn’t a bad guy, a cold guy. […] He was just … emp tying out of detail.” It’s an ending that re calls the “perfect nothingness” of Gustav’s sea except that, ultimately, Ridley never forgets his daughter’s name.

And it’s Coral who finally breaks the story’s fever dream. After finding her fa ther’s phone wedged into the windowsill, she discovers that the photo setting had accidentally been set to reverse, captur ing not the Reservoir but “an inadvertent self-portrait.”

Duchovny actually created his own Res : 365 series during the pandemic, avail able in a special chapbook of poetry and lyrics released alongside The Reservoir. The art historian in me can’t help but get excited, bringing up Warhol’s Empire or Basinski’s Disintegration Loops as analo gous, extended portraits of our city, majes tic in the mundane as often as the tragic. Duchovny doesn’t take his films so se riously. After all, he first set out to mock Ridley’s aspirations as an artist: “I conde scend to myself as often as I can.”

He’s more interested in poetry, and we

fall into a tangent about its relationship to prose. “Fiction is workmanlike, and then poetry is the magic trick writing around something that can’t be said.” I can feel his love for Ashbery in the collection’s pacing and proclivity for interweaving dialogue, but filtered through the roseate gauze of what I now understand is very much, de spite his earlier dismissal, the influence of Los Angeles not the real Los Angeles, perhaps, but “L.A.,” the image of the city, as film essayist Thom Andersen once ar gued, crafted through our collective American imagination.

Thumbing through an advance copy of Duchovny’s poetry I had printed out a few weeks earlier, now looking like an over wrought script, I find a favorite passage. “L.A. is a bad place to die,” I read aloud, “with its ironic sunlight …” In company with the novella, some might argue these selections find Duchovny negotiating two minds, two cities, too many careers. I ask if he’d ever consider devoting his time solely to one medium, and he answers, “I think a part of me doesn’t want to be fully com mitted to one thing, because I might get heartbroken if that didn’t work out. I think some of my searching around in different forms is … self-protection. It’d be curious to see what would happen if you took ev erything else away and I only worked on one thing. I wish somebody would do that to me.” He laughs. “I think my agents want that, but [to have me only] act.”

The pressure must be immense, I pre sume, to remain on the screen. “I don’t want to sound like I want to put acting to rest, because I feel like I’m just entering into my own style in many ways …” I’m openly agreeing, when he turns modest.

“Although I may not even be that suited to acting, I love doing it.”

Over the course of our conversation, Duchovny has periodically scooted his chair closer, trying to remain in the shade. “I’m not getting fresh,” he says with a grin. The tide is inching nearer as well, and we have to speak up over the tumbling surf. We discuss the 20 new songs he recently wrote, his next films, and I’m wondering at his energy for all of this. I tell him so. “You’re tireless, David.”

“I’m tired,” he replies without hes itation, laughing. “I’m not tired, I’m just, what am I tired of, honestly …” There’s a long pause as he gathers his thoughts. Another wave smacks and falls away. “I’m tired of the fear that I’m going to do the same thing just because I’m afraid that if I’ve had some success, that I’m going to try to chase that. I’m tired of feeling like I have to prove myself And you know, I’m 61, and I see it coming …” He holds his hand out into the sunlight, gesturing at the future, and I notice a constellation of age spots. “I want to make sure I say it all, if I can. That’s why we’re all here, to give our interpretation of it.”

I’m about to ask exactly what his inter pretation is, but he’s already directed me back to the ocean. “Just look at this, doesn’t that look like magic? It’s like he’s walking on water.” A surfer skims across the Pacific without touching it, and Duchovny is re ally smiling now. “Everybody’s Jesus in California.”

THE GIRL AND THE OUTLAW

Jordan Peele’s Nope and the end of the alien by Paul Thompson

One hundred and seven years ago, Woodrow Wilson hosted the first-ever film screening at the White House. It was for D. W. Griffith’s adaptation of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman, which was published originally as a novel but made famous as a stage play that traces the lives of a white fam ily through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Griffith called it The Birth of a Nation. “It’s like writing history with lightning,” the

president is reported to have said when he walked out of the East Room. “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

In the century since its release, The Birth of a Nation has become shorthand for a specific, and specifically virulent, kind of early-20th-century American racism that was obsessed with relitigating that war and the legislation that came out of it (a shorthand so enduring, in fact, that Nate Parker’s 2016 The Birth of a Nation, about Nat Turner and the rebellion by enslaved people he led in 1831, was very plausi bly greenlit because of its title’s provo cation). Even given that reputation, the film is shockingly bigoted. Its depictions of Black people, including those elected to Congress in what Griffith alleges were sham elections designed to punish white Southerners, would be cartoonish if not played for such menace; white actors in blackface chase white women through the wilderness until they have no apparent choice but to leap off cliffs to their death. Intertitles say things like: “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.”

Birth also invented whole swaths of cinematic language still in use today. It is likely probably inevitable that other filmmakers would have, on their own, in time, devised dramatic close-ups on actors’ faces, tracking shots to follow action as it moved, cross-cutting between different sequences, or fade-outs to exit scenes. But no one had done so before Griffith. The late critic Pauline Kael wrote that “[o] ne can trace almost every major tradition and most of the genres, and even many of the metaphors, in movies to their sources”

in his work. The Los Angeles Times called Birth “the greatest picture ever made.”

And yet Woodrow Wilson was not talking about cross-cutting when he called Griffith’s movie “so terribly true.” Aside from sympathizing with its Klan-agitprop politics, the president, who grew up in Virginia and codified Jim Crow laws with in the federal government, was apparently engrossed by the film’s other great tech nical achievement: its intricate battle se quence, where Griffith skips between dis orienting close-ups, wide vistas, and the literal fog of war gun smoke choking the camera.

This footage was not filmed on the ground of old battlefields. It was captured on arid land across Los Angeles County and edging into the Inland Empire. (While some of this filming took place in Griffith Park, that preserve is not D. W.’s namesake; as the Times clarified in a headline earlier this year, “Griffith Park is named for a guy who shot his wife.”) Where, as Kael writes, the literary “his tory of Russian movies could be based on the ice breaking up in Griffith’s Way Down East,” the industrial lessons Birth had to offer were metabolized immediate ly by the Hollywood system that was then emerging.

Desert and near-desert backdrops in L.A. proper, Glendale, Whittier, Malibu, and San Bernardino came to stand in for the old American West, sure, but also for the African Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, and biblical Palestine, cheaply and, at least for a time, without complex permit ting processes. And then came the alien planets: unrecognizable races of beings at Point Dume, UFOs crash landing just off

continued on p. 85

above and right:

Maryam Jafri

Independence Day 1934–1975 (2009–2019)

Detail view of the installation, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol 2019

Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934–1975 features 54 archival photos culled from over 30 archives of the first Independence Day ceremonies of various Asian, Middle Eastern, and African nations, including many from rare and at-risk archival collections. The photo-installation emerges as a typology, poised somewhere between a grid and a storyboard. Although a great deal of research has been done on both the colonial and the post-co lonial eras, Jafri aims to introduce a third, surprisingly neglected element into the debate — that 24 hour twilight period in between, when a territory transforms into a nation-state. Jafri’s artist book Independence Days (2021) presents an expansion of her photo-installation Independence Day 1934–1975, bringing together 234 photographs from 40 archives located across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

INTRODUCTION

by Perwana Nazif

Each of the works presented in this issue’s art portfolio unearth the forces of naturalization so sedimented that they appear unmoved and inert in their construction of the “familiar” — precisely by what is “unfamiliar.” That exhumation stirs the distinctions between withins and withouts of being.

Bob Smith’s box constructions — sometimes called terrariums, miniature realms, worlds, stage sets, or small environment(al) boxes — exceed containment of such designations. Built in the 1980s, the wall-mounted scenes are created from a variety of discarded materials and found objects. These miniature worlds, with lights and reflecting mirrors, have a slower dynamism than ubiquitous screens. Inertia unmasks as interpellation. We watch signs emerge from a supposed nowhere along the axiological — but these varying sys tems of meaning are staged to upset dominating constructions. It’s as if the box has been held or shaken up before displaying itself, making its own ground to hold itself on the wall, as if it is floating.

The refuse within these boxes or openings works as refusal, in association with new and indecipherable imaginaries.

Smith’s collaboration with seminal avant-garde choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings, on her Basic Strategies No. V , could be called a collaborative large-scale box construction. Smith designed the costumes and created his first large-scale set design for the work as part of Cummings’s dance series. The production, which included writing by Jamaica Kincaid, was accom panied by workshops and panel discussions as a form of community engagement. Smith’s direct involvement with the stage, dance, and collabo rative community is another realization of the box constructions’ dynamism.

Rasheed Araeen’s conceptual performance work is a silting of the inertia vital to the production

of the (universalized Western) “normal” differently from Smith. Araeen’s performances explode the form of his prior minimalist sculptural work — that which would later evolve into his post/anti-mod ernist works for which he is known today. Araeen’s aesthetic rupture with modernism can be wit nessed in his political radicalism. Deprioritizing abstraction with his physical body and lived experi ence, Araeen explicitly reclaims blackness, for him self, as politicized, most explicitly in Paki Bastard ( Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person ), 1977. In Britain in the late 1970s, “black” was not necessarily an exclusively racial category, but a historically and legally situated marker of any nonwhite differ ence — especially for those of African Caribbean and South Asian descent.

While Araeen’s self-identification of blackness uses blackness as a collateral and coalitional term that subsequently denies the historical and lived particularities of blackness, his identification works within the Fanonian, Wretched of the Earth frame work of solidarity of colonial oppression across ethnic and racial lines. That political commitment is most realized in his journal Black Phoenix . The condition of legibility here is through a particularly violent framework — but one that can be consid ered appropriate to Araeen’s moment in history. Emphasizing the performance as challenging per formatives does not obscure Araeen’s (re)claiming of, and therefore working within, the normative order’s pliancy of Blackness. It surfaces these ideological historical, social, and economic forces of racialization and othering within art systems of value, which are intrinsically tied to capital and rely on anti-Blackness as a base structure, where Blackness figures as the most extreme Other.

Reissued by Primary Information, Black Phoenix compiles all three volumes of the original jour nal edited and published by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal between 1978 and 1979. A precur sor to Araeen’s academic journal on postcolonial art and theory, Third Text (1987), Black Phoenix can function as another documentation of his performance work: it is a documentation of lived experience through collaboration. While such unity

obscures important differentials, Araeen provided a necessary challenge to Western aesthetic valua tion, one that presupposes a universal uncanny.

Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934–1975 (2009–2019) documents a different performance of sameness across difference — one that exhibits concealed histories and forces that perform and construct motions of liberation and independence. The déjà vu is precisely constructed as evidencing familiarity of “freedom” with (Western) develop ment and modernization. As in, the familiarity is not “freedom” but a Western political formula applied to these decolonization/independence efforts that are then recognized — or, rather, compressed, repressed — as nation-states within certain bounds. The déjà vu Jafri arranges is that precise continuation, the consistent specter in the photographic archive, despite documentation that performs otherwise.

Jafri’s photo installation includes archival photos of the first Independence Day ceremo nies of various African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations from public archives in the countries themselves. Umbrellas, crossed hands, and smart suits between masses of indistinguishable people and a new leader: these eerie redundancies trouble simplified narratives of subaltern agency as a means of resistance. In fact, these photos as docu mentation of performances of achieved resistance, even in documentations as accepted or reformed resistance, visually archive such class stratifi cations where neocolonialism seeps in through invisibilized economic forces. A naturalization of class struggle as well as repression of resistance ensues — all within photos containing repeated and rehearsed gestures. The umbrella, the crossed hands, and the ensuing shape where suit jackets reveal dress shirts all form triangles where we can see political triangulations visually materialize and repeat. Those forms materialized and unsettled by Jafri’s transnational archive demystify the uncanny and the forces that buttress the seemingly natural and unnatural.

Bob Smith

The Piers / Manhattan Pier 82, 1982

and mixed media construction

Area Code 212 / Oh Superman / Andy at Studio 54, 1982

media construction with light

Untitled, c. 1980

and mixed media construction

Courtesy of the artist, Danielle Tilkin and Martos Gallery

above: Bob Smith

Home is a Cold Box, 1982 Wood and mixed media construction 18 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄4 x 6 5⁄8 in.

Courtesy of the artist, Danielle Tilkin and Martos Gallery

right:

Blondell Cummings, BASIC STRATEGIES No. V, 1986

Set Design by Bob Smith

North Adams Memorial Theatre, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Courtesy of the artist, Danielle Tilkin and Martos Gallery

Maryam

Bob Smith

above: Rasheed Araeen

Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person), 1977 Image courtesy of Rasheed Araeen c/o Grosvenor Gallery

right:

Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture, edited by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal (1979 / 2022).

Courtesy of Rasheed Araeen and Primary Information.

Rasheed Araeen Gastkünstler, 1980

courtesy of Rasheed Araeen c/o Grosvenor Gallery

by Shiv Kotecha

Before they called him Worm, they called him Eighty-Three. Eighty-Three learned this would be his name on the day of his arrival. It would be sever al months before he learned that the place he’d arrived in was a township called Robbinsville in a state called New Jersey, and that he might never be able to leave. They told him his name would be Eighty-Three, and that while his friends could ad dress him as Jannu, the name he came there with, he had not come there to make friends, so he’d better get used to being called Eighty-Three.

Jannu worked with stone like his father. Like his father, he’d grown up accustomed to the fact that others seemed fixed on calling him names that were not his own. The names were often ugly and/ or simply replaced by muffled slurs. Occasionally just silence. In time the appellations became something Jannu would grow used to. They began to lose meaning, and so began to give him comfort. At least the names that the once kind sahibs who brought him there, to Robbinsville, the sahibs who would come and stare at him through peepholes in the walls where he worked and slept, and call at him — Eighty-Three, Worm — at least these names distinguished him from the cold and inanimate slabs of stone he used as his bed in the night, and out of which, during the day, he carved up for them the likenesses of crescents, tassels, flutes, spires, arches, wall etchings, smiles, bases for gurgling fountains, and the feathered tails of peacocks.

I love it, it loves I — that’s what they see, thought Jannu, when they look at me as Worm, or Eighty-Three, or the stone they’ve given me to deface. That they addressed him at all made Jannu feel less like his stony equivalent and more like a sculpture, the essence of which is movement, as if it were suddenly possible to steal himself away.

“Hard plastic.” Jannu learned to say the name of the stones they told him to carve, repeating the phrase into the night, while sleeping in the mist of their polymer fumes, dreaming about the shards of his life incongruent to the name Worm, the name he would learn to live with. In one dream, a grid of nine windows, and from each, rising plumes of smoke, spirals, the smell of burning tire. In another, bird language, animal discourse, lessons taught by the ants: how best to form the heads of enemies into trophies. In another, a village destroyed. There were recurring dreams, of invisible-haired, faceless women who whispered confidences in his ear, that he was fair like they were and therefore lovely; and dreams of golden birds; and blood on the floor; and inverted goats with throbbing erections. Architectural chunks and rusted metal rods, light pouring in from jagged rips in the ceiling, the vista of a river, and the skeletal debris of the temple’s eventual end. Hard plastic. Jannu repeated the words to access his dreams, Worm repeated them the day he got out.

Author’s Note: This text borrows language from Adivasi poet Temsüla Ao’s poem “Stone-people”; from writer Gary Indiana’s 1984 Art in America review of Bob Smith’s Box Environments exhibition at Yvonne Seguy Gallery, New York; from reviews of the artist Rasheed Araeen’s Sonay Ke Chirya (Golden Bird, 1986); and from The New York Times coverage of the ongoing lawsuit against the Hindu religious sect known as Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), regarding the slavish, unsafe work environments and starvation wages, visa fraud, and, in certain cases, passport confiscation to which they subject the individuals who build their lavish Hindu temples — largely Dalit and Adivasi artisans and laborers from South Asia trafficked into the United States to work as “volunteers.” BAPS describes itself as “a spiritual, vol unteer-driven organization dedicated to improving society through individual growth by fostering the Hindu ideals of faith, unity, and selfless service.” Below this, they provide tools for self-understanding: “YOU ARE THE STONE YOU ARE THE CHISEL YOU ARE THE SCULPTOR.”

Rasheed Araeen Bismullah, 1988 Image courtesy of Rasheed Araeen c/o Grosvenor Gallery

the 101. Studios spent hundreds of thou sands of pre- and barely post-Depression dollars recreating the streets of Manhattan on tightly secured backlots. They were able to do so in part because when they want ed to film the most desolate scenes of the galaxy’s farthest reaches, they simply had to step outside.

•

On its most basic level, Jordan Peele’s third movie, Nope, is about filmmaking or, more comprehensively, the capturing of images. Near its beginning, Otis Jr. and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer, respectively), inherit the family business training and handling horses for film and television produc tions and the Agua Dulce ranch where they and those horses grew up. The family lore, which Em grafts onto the beginnings of her animated on-set safety seminars, is that the Haywoods are descended from the unnamed “Bahamian jockey” who rides a horse named Annie G. in Plate 626 of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (1887), one of the first widely known moving pictures.

The Haywood children are not able to maintain whatever success their father, who dies in the film’s first present-day se quence when metal debris falls out of a cloud above the ranch, had been able to secure. Em lives in Los Angeles and is dis tracted by other creative pursuits. Otis Jr., or OJ, struggles to communicate with the non-equines he encounters (Kaluuya, who recently appeared onscreen as a voluble

Fred Hampton, plays OJ instead like a nearly mute Clint Eastwood protagonist). As months crawl on and business remains slow, OJ is forced to sell off horses under the vague pretense that he’ll buy them back once film commissions pick up again. The man OJ sells these horses to, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), is a former child star who founded a western novel ty park near the Haywood ranch. Visitors drink in mock saloons and pay for handcranked pictures taken from the bottom of a plastic-bricked wishing well. Park’s big gest role was on a late-1990s sitcom called Gordy’s Home! that took its name from the TV family’s pet chimpanzee. The show was canceled after one of the chimps playing Gordy flew into a rage during a live taping and, as we see at Nope’s very beginning and later, in expanded fashion, mauled a num ber of cast, crew, and audience members. There is Gordy’s Home! memorabilia scattered throughout the park, and as OJ and Em discover during one horse trans action, a private room off Ricky’s office where he keeps his most prized memen tos. While in that room, Em asks Ricky what really happened during the chimp incident. In the film’s best display of act ing I mean by Yeun, though this is a speech Ricky has possibly honed over the years to elide the true horror in his mem ory Ricky recounts the Saturday Night Live riff on the attack, representation standing in for the genuine article.

It’s around this time that OJ and Em witness bizarre electrical phenomena, not unlike the event that preceded Otis Sr.’s death. All their devices, grounded and wireless, fail; their horses run across open desert; the lights in the barn flicker to life.

OJ investigates and is ambushed by what looks like a group of small, anthropomor phic aliens. Before realizing that these are local kids playing a prank, OJ, terrified and stumbling backward, does not run, but opens his phone in hopes of capturing the extraterrestrials on film.

On exiting the barn, OJ sees what scans as a classic flying saucer darting across the night sky. When he admits this to Em later, he’s sheepish. But the siblings, especially Em, sense opportunity. With the help of an overeager electronics-store employee (Brandon Perea as Angel), they rig the ranch with expensive surveillance equipment, the monitors for which all three pore over at all hours of the night, hoping for clean footage of the UFO that they can sell for a huge profit. The trio soon enlist the help of a renowned, ham mily villainous cinematographer (Michael Wincott) whose antique cameras are sup posed to solve the group’s electrical-failure problem.

From here the script escalates, as scripts do. The group hatches a plain to bait the alien OJ correctly infers that it’s not a spaceship, but an organic being capable of taking that shape and capture it with any of the n cameras trained on the sky, which, they have by now realized, includes an unmoving faux-cloud that acts as the alien’s daytime hiding place. In a truly un nerving sequence, the Haywoods notice an interloper on their property: a TMZ vid eographer (Devon Graye) on a motorcycle who never flips up his mirrored visor and who begs, even after being nearly killed by the alien, to have his maimed body on camera. In the final chase sequence, when the being has abandoned its disguise and

revealed itself as something like a giant jellyfish made out of ripped bedsheets, its mouth, hungry for flesh, appears as a cam era’s aperture, firing again and again as a paparazzi’s shutter would.

The climactic moment comes when Em, who has fled to Ricky’s now-aban doned theme park, cranks that wish ing-well camera until she gets a souvenir polaroid of the alien as it swallows a gi ant balloon in young Ricky’s likeness. She collapses, exhausted, as news crews clamor on the other side of caution tape. We do not see OJ, who had put himself at risk to lead the alien away from the others, die on screen, and it’s possible that Peele’s inten tion is his survival. But when he appears to Em in this moment, he does not run over to her, as a brother would to his sister after they survived almost certain death. Instead, he sits perched on a horse, clouded in fog, an image as indelible as the supposed an cestor of whom they own no pictures.

Through all this, Peele imagines the divide between real life and its filmed rep resentation as the uncanniest of valleys, one that is never exactly bridgeable. The inability to capture life as it really is makes his characters feel as if they’re in a dream where their screams are muted: to name the force that is so obvious, the one that took their father and home and has now turned its eyes on them, would make them seem like crackpots to those who haven’t witnessed it in person. And even if there’s a record of it as there is of the Gordy’s Home! incident so what? It becomes an other spectacle that will be downgraded, like those before it, to trivia.

Like Peele’s last two screenplays, for Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Nope is built around a verse from scripture. This one opens with Nahum 3 : 6, which reads: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” As suggested by the TMZ motorcyclist and the camera-flash mechanism of the alien’s jaw, Nope is a parable about fame, partic ularly as experienced by Black American celebrities. Peele can be cryptic, but he’s not subtle; Otis Sr. is killed by money that falls from the sky, and at one point Em en courages her brother to “run, OJ, run!” In literalizing fame as a beast that could kill him at any moment and his loved ones, in this case the horses, as totally dependent on him Peele puts his OJ in the same bind that traps so many stars. Toward the end of Nope’s second act, after he, Em, and Angel have fled the ranch for Angel’s apartment in the city, OJ announces to the disbelieving others that he’s heading back out to Agua Dulce. He’s “got mouths to feed.”

Beyond the traditional routes to fame sports, entertainment, even poli tics Nope hints at a morbid dovetail between its twin focuses on race and film. Though its protagonists are motivated by profit, it’s difficult to watch without think ing, at least in passing, of the way police brutality was disbelieved or minimized be fore the broad dissemination of videos de picting it or of the way those videos are in turn reduced over time by cable news and political pundits to mere spectacle.

Underlying all of this is the persistent marginalization of Black people in west erns, a genre so influential for so long that its stories of how the West was settled

have come to stand in as real history, flat tening and tidying it. Near Nope’s middle, we see that Ricky, the Asian American former child star, has been feeding the horses he buys from OJ supposedly on a sort of layaway to the alien, which he hopes to lure to the ad-hoc amphitheater near his park and amaze his paying au diences. Having heard about the tragedy that befell the Haywoods, he rhinestoned a jacket, wrote a few checks, and sought to cut them out of the last, lucrative steps of commercialization.

•

In 1998’s Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, the writer and L.A. historian Mike Davis synthesizes the environmental and political histories of the city to cast it as uniquely imperiled, by the whims of nature and by its plutocrats’ death drive. But he also dedicates a large part of the book to analyzing how the city is drawn, in literature and on film, as the leading edge of the apocalypse, destroyed time and again by nuclear weapons, drought, the devil, terrorism, tsunamis, a sandstorm, floods, the Crips, plague, ex traterrestrials, volcanoes, blizzards, and, in one entry, “Everything.” Over time and seeing as the production of these stories is effectively the town industry that “imagination of disaster” becomes as much a part of the city’s ecosystem as the Santa Ana Winds.

In Nope, the Haywoods exist on the fringes of the industry that drives this imagination. But these are, truly, the fringes: Agua Dulce, practical in the age of computer-generated imagery, horse handlers when superheroes have replaced

cowboys. The land that the studios have found to be such a convenient stand-in for the moon, Mars, and beyond the land that is meant to support them as they sup port the city, unseen until needed has turned, if not hostile, something just short. Peele’s script makes no overt mention of the environment, but the ranch is surely less hospitable than it was 30 years ago, and might not be around at all in another 30.

The film takes pains to underline the overwhelming power of the natural world, at least insofar as a giant UFO is “natu ral.” While OJ is not comfortable asserting himself on a commercial set at Nope’s be ginning, he comes close to raising his voice when reminding actors and crew members on the set of a commercial to respect his horse’s boundaries; they don’t, the horse revolts, and OJ and Em lose the gig. He has an abiding respect for the animals, which he applies to the alien while suc cessfully pushing his sister to safety. Ricky, by contrast, evidently believes himself to have an exceptional relationship with the alien, just as he did with one of the chimp actors itself an exploited captive who played Gordy on his sitcom. In the present day, he is, of course, swallowed whole.

One of the most charming things about Los Angeles, at least in my mind, is the way the infrastructure feels arrested in progress. Sidewalks crack like tectonic plates in miniature, cell service drops out for blocks at a time, sinkholes sink holes open up in the middle of posh neighborhoods which, it should be said, are unlike the posh neighborhoods from back east in the sense that these have winding, capillary streets and coyotes. The city has

long had the sense of being half-finished. Where the geopolitical tension that dom inated the second half of the last centu ry (Davis found that “nukes” were, by far, the most common cause of hypothetical annihilation) has faded from the popular imagination, the land itself seems to have had enough. And so Nope becomes an entry in a new genre, one that chronicles how it might feel to live in an increasingly alien world as it grows increasingly clear that it will never truly be finished.

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

COMPOSITION IN LOSS #2

After Donald, for Carmelina by Ronaldo V. Wilson

Ihaven’t drawn my father’s hands yet. The ones that held my wrist, guiding my fingers with his fingers over mine, firm enough to translate how to hold the forehand grip. Shake hands with it, he’s extending my fingers slightly further down the leath er tack, us eyeing the wooden tennis racket’s throat to where it curves open to the cross-woven strings.

This line of memory, for me, marks the space between drawing, writing, and touch. Hand-Eye-Coordinates: I’d like to return to this phrase. It was the title of my 2005 performance at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. I was in the early stag es of my research and creative practice that brings together poetry, visual culture, vio lence, and the reiterative violation of the Black Body.

As part of the performance at St. Mark’s, I screened a slideshow of draw ings and watercolors centered around postcard images of lynched Black men from James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (1999). These drawings would later appear in my third collection of poems Farther Traveler (2015), alongside what I like to think of now as process poems and art, works drawn and led through inquiry.

In my explorations through this ma terial, I do not have a language very far removed from my study and careful ren derings of the brutal records of lynched human beings, precarious Black lives still, shots of racialized murder, spectacle, in various stages of death and dying, death and life. To help me to explore my engage ment with this deeply violent and violat ing material, I return to the work of my dissertation, a living project for me, that continues to serve as a refuge for medita tion and creative reflection.

From my doctoral dissertation, Black Bodies Black Field(s) (2009): “What are the poetics of my looking again and again at his body trying to find the language to not only capture what I see but also to return to this image as a way of getting at why it has remained …”

Were the human beings I was ren dering still alive in the photos I stared at?

As I think about my art practice, a largely autodidactic one, were these my still lives, models of sorrow, of pain, through which I would develop my craft? Was I approach ing how to capture a shot up face, lynched, muscle, limbs, the surrounding flora, fau na? And what of the living others star ing out? white faces, too, I black ink in among these startling forms of humanity, landscape, and terror.

In this sense, these would become my first marks as a practicing visual art ist, at least my first made with intention, consciously or unconsciously, to convey emotion and feeling in attempting to span the distance between what I sought to say about poetry and art as interventions in how to consider violence, loss, and, at the time, what I thought of as my individual and collective sense of recuperation.

As a poet, I knew it was important to convey simply the emotion I felt through my subject, even if the feeling was not yet clarified, at best unfixed, perhaps especial ly as I held some faith in being a witness, even if it was a witness to my own activi ties in writing to articulate what I felt and touched by my own hand on paper with pen, water, color, and light.

I begin and extend my thinking here around this process, this initial training which still very much animates my work across disciplines, eliciting questions and forms I continue to engage.

In wet ink’s watercolor encounter, titled, Niggardly (Bear Gulch Drawings) (2004, 2009): “twist of this man’s neck, his death stare still looking outward, mouth agape, stunned, the angle of his head turned so he

seems to see through his sockets, eyes long gone, mutilated and blasted in …”

How to render between the living and the dead, exploring blackness, through the horror of violation, its constant and dai ly enactments, its reiterative enlivening through my own work and practice. This becomes much more complicated with loss, not simply the extent to which loss informs my work, but in life; most recently, the loss of my father, manifesting another kind of mourning not just for him, but the coming into focus of that which extends from his very precious gift to me fluid ity of the body, the arm, the hand, the feel into space. In this realization, my practice moves beyond the record of intellectual inquiry, the poem, the narrative, the dis sertation, the drawing, and into the stroke, the hit, the line, and its release through the living registers of returning to the first marks of making with my hands what I attempt to bring into view.

Something I am after here might be found in reflecting upon the intentionally undertheorized, the softly hit, the process of drawing, lightly pushing pen, pencil, or pure graphite into paper as a habitu ated act, rendering what’s seen as well as what’s imagined into the subject, to be released through memory and recogni tion. Through these realms, the activity of making work emerges from an aggregate dimension of disciplines. For example, I trace what enacts between writing and drawing into palpable queries.

At the performance at The Poetry Project, I serve tennis balls into the au dience, deliveries arcing softly into the crowd, one to five percent pace, slow enough to loop balls into the chairs,

marking, animating the space of what I wanted to say. The slides scroll, one drawn body after another on the projector’s screen; and then for another effect, while the images play, I hit forehands against one of the back walls getting closer to the wall to demonstrate another kind of rhythm. How to hit a forehand with “easy power” and accuracy that begins with the grip, tight and intentional, yet loose, open and ready at the wrist to receive what might come? And what remedy arises as I deliver the ball back, with pace, and with enough steady repetition so I might see what I am doing?

In a new work, charcoal, water-sol uble pastels on mixed media paper, titled, Forehand, Still Life (2020), I blend the wood en racket to charcoal arms, vacate boundaries, not by erasure but by blurring hard angular lines into air.

I switch to my backhand, like a boxer on a speed bag; for timing, making a tight triangle: the ball hits the wall, floor, racket, wall, floor, racket. One ball slips by. I re trieve it, then return to the act. I was not singing. I was not reading. I was playing tennis. I can tell you now that I couldn’t make the connections between the art, performance, and the shots I improvised in the room at St. Marks. Perhaps I was showing off. Perhaps I was showing off life. Perhaps I was delving into the space, exploring, at least, my own expectations of performance, all the while rendering what was possible, or what could be possible in the making and in the performance.

For me, all art is experiment. And by extension, to account for loss, losing, and what is lost is found in the act of hitting. To hit against the wall is to render the

form from line, to shadow, to thickened circle, which is also somehow a way of try ing to “say” something about the impor tance of coordination, about control, the discipline of repetition, one hit after the next, one move after the next positioned to make sense within the realm of impro visation, gesture, and material.

I mess up. In Donald in Carmelina’s Field (2022), I zoom in on the still-too-wet graphite,

Caran d’Ache ghost-print left on mylar. Paper holds the too-faint print, streaked red, jagged heart muscle, yellow-orange tentacles. I hear my mom’s voice, weakening.

To stay on my toes was my impulse at the hospital when my mother and siblings nominated me to go into my father’s emer gency room as he was close to dying. My father would not be alone, in the throes of what we would later learn was his battle with sepsis after an infection at the site his dialysis port.

Not alone, as he tried to rip the lifeline cords from his body in growing states of delusion. Not alone, as I placed my body over his as much as I could over the hard steel rack of his hospital bed, to calm him, my torso horizontal over his body, over one edge to the other, the hard mark of my body across his, a shape I would ren der into a still pattern, the cross slow arc of me, the nurse, and my mom begging him to breathe, slowly, to keep him here. What was I battling as I held him, his life in me, as I felt some of his very last strength. His tug, flex, all of his fight.

Don’s Forehand Volley, A Demonstration (2020): I use gouache on mixed media paper. Wet charcoal loosens to form my father’s face

in the sea-green sweep. One wide, swift black brush stroke captures my father I see and feel his focus.

“Continental” is the forehand grip he taught us. I miss his voice against a strang er’s question I hear as I emerge from just below the Provincetown Harbor’s surface. Did you see the double rainbow? Green water, gray sky. I’m here to make art, for conversation opening in the bay between long, sea swim strokes, crawl, back, but terfly. Why or how are the images I draw related to forms of reckoning?

I keep track of the shore, timing my beaked hands slicing through the rough water, dreaming of the possibility of learning my mother’s language. Tagalog, Visayan I am so far from either, here to work in monoprinting. Across race, time, across expectation. A form I do not know, yet. I draw images of my mother, now without her husband, and paint with water-dipped Caran d’Ache on the frost ed mylar sheets so that my lines, our grief, may “register” on some future print.

Mix if I am writing to honor my fa ther, to capture why I miss him, I am also attempting to mine the complexities of this loss, my mother’s loss of her husband, my care for her as I can, even as I am so often hundreds and, even now, thousands of miles away. For now drawing the shapes that morph into a “kind of heart,” as one poet interprets the recurring image I ren der in my time between the sea and the studio.

The sport touch marks the site, cordwire desire after my failed attempts in the last three drawings I made of my 84-yearold mother in her yard, which was all dry-brown grass, growing from what she

calls “clay” soil. She plowed the yard with a kitchen knife and pitchfork, from lawn to field, to her “parm” of tomatoes, cu cumber, watermelon, and sweet potato. I drew her hands, rooted with arthritis, even in the death of her beloved, mining into the living sweet potatoes she picks from the local Asian market to plant. Just like the garlic get the sprouted ones she has me bag not for us to eat, but to plant these precious “seedlings.” I borrow the rhythms of their knotty shapes as I draw one bulb after another.

In another series of drawings, I render my mother on the pebbled sidewalk next to her field, with a green, plastic mop stick without a head that she’s articulated into a too-long cane. I’ve drawn the “cane,” at tached to her small body, which “streaked” in the too-wet paper of the first mono print I made alone.

In writing, I could return to the draft to fix it. In monoprinting, I figure it’s destroyed, so maybe one day, anoth er pass, and/or I’ll draw or write over it. I’ll demonstrate in this mistake, another model in approaching learning my moth er’s language. But for now, I am working from drawings I spent all night rendering and must sit with the discovery that in a few seconds, the paper is too wet and the original work’s clarity is gone.

What’s left, a blurry record, muddled lines. But maybe this is my underpainting, a still wet life, tabula rasa! And against this, at least, I have some accounts, photos of vivid renderings on mylar before I lost them to print my bad, all wet, all gone. But it’s what I have.

To catch her fall, in Carmelina’s Field (2022) I photograph the mud-yellow line of

“cursive” drawn on mylar next to the row of my spear sharp Caran d’Ache pencils I use for writing, then wet for “paint” a shiny bul bous green tomato bubble dries on mylar : an eye : a body : a being.

Rich, August warmth I hold onto, and bring into, the drawings what I will print whenever I return. I concede only to the form of swimming in the bay, this one, this one above me, a double rainbow, so below I go, above the sea flora I wish I could capture by iPhone, but I am bog gled, still, by the research question or the prompt, or the need that I return to in the line, the mark, the stroke I cut into the waves.

How to catch up after loss, to face, head-on, the aftershocks, the tremors. The green blurs sprouting from the sand I crawl above. The scuttling red crabs stop and lift their claws as I slow down, pause, to swipe my own currents into them. I wish for an other sign and get it. It’s a black rock, then another crab following a horseshoe crab I also harass. I drop twisting sea-stones to bomb its carapace, but miss, my rocks flip away in the harbor’s undertow. I grab a handful of sand, and throw it underwater at the horseshoe, which shoots ink out of slats in its shell as defense. I swim on, then look out from where I surface; to my left, to what looks like a 300-pound seal swim ming a few feet away, head as big as my torso, then ripping in half what the barista later told me might have been a massive bluefish.

I tell my mother and she wishes I would not swim alone. On the phone, as I draw, she describes traveling to Tigbao by bus, maybe 30 minutes she says, to gather shells and paint over them with shellac:

tide goes out, then the shell appears, then we pick them up. This isn’t an interview, and most of what I record is only a register stuck in this time, where I find myself needing to breathe, in and out of time.

What are the names of the flora that billow below me and above, seaweed that I track back to the pool of water, stuck to my skin, washing out in my hotel shower?

I know how to work with my finger, and to wet the colored pencils enough so that they blend into smooth lines to account for what I am trying to capture. Between sessions, my vision unveils and glows be yond the bay shore, and along the cutting rocks, a burnt golden light and a pinken ing yellow thread glows into the blue dusk illuminating rocks that thicken on the beach: Did you see the double rainbow?

I say yes to the fellow swimming stranger, but I saw, too, how they faded to gray-going black sky, and was trying to think, at that moment, through a dream in which there was a rack of Black poets surrounding me, one more superstar af ter the next, and one more superstar than that one, but all a witness to some white body. A thick man clothed and curled in a form of hair and flesh, helpless, fetal-like and exhausted by a subjectivity that was being dropped from the sky somewhere in the proximity of the superstar Blacks. To them, the composite feeling is that a white body is not a being before it lands on the surface, death impacted into fragments, cloth, and chunks of body dissipating in the ocean.

If the fall is predictive, it is so because I know that I will soon find myself cruis ing in the bay, swimming again, looking at the soft sand below the water, my goggles

unblurred, my intent to flow forward with or against the current. Freestyle, or back stroke, depending. My new art studio –mate borrows my pencils. She gifts me a piece of plexiglass. Yes, you can borrow my black, and borrow my white, and borrow my gray. And I am so grateful to take your clear material as my own, and to file its sharp corners down to smooth arches.

For my father, I draw the whole body of a shape I feel captures his love for his wife, now alone, stiffening, but still she gardens. She exists in red wax, for now, and in water soluble pencil, which is not paint, exactly, but I add water to make it bleed. I am trying to find a way, toggling between my loss, my father, my mother’s love, our language, and the work.

Over time, a pattern, as in Donald and Carmelina’s Heart (2022), I commit to an asymmetrical diptych, one in pink-red Caran d’ Ache base / another / an EKG’s pulsing marks I mimic in brown/orange. My first monoprint, set between measures.

Here is how you place your art on the wall. My teacher shows me to never use the tape, which I use at first because I have no idea. My only fear is to tack-stab the art, and of course I don’t, but in my naïve taping, I tear the handmade paper at each edge when I remove the tape to reset the pieces, mounting them just at the corners with the slightest edges of the pushpins.

What I am getting at in my display is the DNA in the harbor, my family as a silky painted memory in one loose way to recount what’s taught: a conversa tion happens between floating beings, in the sea just for a sec, a sec in which I am thinking about composition, of course, and about the diptych, or a set of various

compositions that are paired, or layered, but not, now, ever symmetrical. I draw and draw, and crop photos to build upon new drawings that exist, to me, forever in conversation.

Through this connection, I spend time with the ruler to at least enact some sem blance in my belief that there isn’t a univer sal. I realize that one unnerves or doesn’t, resists, or doesn’t. My touch is firm, yet also floating in a state as firm as my moth er’s decision to leave the Philippines to be with her Black US soldier husband, whom her family warned her against, that he looked like a black mouse, and their kids would end up looking like black pigs: You know it’s not a rich life / daddy was stationed in Hawaii while I while I was stuck in the Philippines they found out I I’m not a criminal my dignity is always there

I butterfly in the ocean. When my fa ther died, my sister told me, Dad’s heart stopped, as I emerged from the pool. In motion me: I dipped under and butterflied into the shock. I am forever at that emer gence. Now. In flight. In water, He talks to me in the mornings. “C’mon Mom, get up,” my mom tells me in our den, now her bedroom.

We’re at the end of waiting, existing under the clasp of loss, the touch of the double, the push of one hand forward into the water at the same time as the other, both alive with what comes from my pen cil, my drawings to learn in the strength of the stroke. How to capture an unrelentless love, in the thumb that touch-squeezes the back of the hand, to prompt the fin gers sliding down, to feel where the print should lie perfectly set on the plexiglass, turn and turn, and turn just enough, the

grip’s quick flex, my wrist, firm into the shot.

I make Conversations with Carmelina (2022) as my mom’s stuck in the broken AC, 103°F Sacramento heat. Water pools in the ga rage. I hold my breath, sketch. My brown fin gers curve around two pencils, one tip points away, the other hovers just above the red, flowering shape.

Maryam Jafri, Independence Day 1934–1975 (2009–2019) Detail view of the installation, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, 2019

ENJOYMENT OF FEAR

An excerpt from Some New Kind of Kick by Kid Congo Powers

They looked like 1940s movie starlets gone to hell, then raised from the dead in skin-tight rayon dresses, with blue, black, and bleached-white hair. The ghostly Victorian pallor of their powdered faces, extreme kohl-rimmed eyes, and bloodred lip gloss reminded me of ’50s bohemian Vali Myers.

All of which made these gothic appari tions of extreme femininity look that much more incongruous standing in the blazing California sun, in the parking lot of NBC Studios, Burbank. That’s where I first saw them, while waiting in line to see the New York Dolls taping a performance of The Midnight Special TV show.

In the summer of 1973, I was a 14-yearold suburban curious cat, obsessed with glitter rock. The “glitter” look, a charming ly naive expression of futuristic fashion, was actually derived from vintage wear. Gaudy and colorful iridescent clothing was the height of fashion. Spangled, se quined teenage baby-whores in miniskirts and bikini tops roamed the Sunset Strip. Some of the better-known L.A. glitter girls of the time, like Sable Starr and Lori Maddox, even attained their own fame and notoriety after being featured in the pages of teen magazine Star as the “Sunset Strip Groupies.”

In their low-cut blouses, tight pencil skirts, platform shoes, and vintage jewelry, the quiet, sullen-looking girls who sparked my curiosity in the NBC parking lot stood a mile apart from the crowd. They looked like elegant femme fatales, and evinced ro mance and danger. I immediately wanted to know who they were. I sensed a dark ness about them that spoke to me, making me recognize something inside myself I had not previously acknowledged, a vi gnette around the edges of my luminous teenage daydream.

• Maybe it was hormonal, or even adrenal, but as soon as I hit puberty, music started to play a much bigger role in my life. It

became the medium through which I be gan to forge my own identity as a teenager. My own tastes and desires. My own sense of style.

I had fallen under the influence of some older high school guys in my neigh borhood, who mentored me in all things popular culture. Foremost among them was Steve Escandon, an affable, jocular figure four years my senior, who took me under his wing. He was a painter, heavily into underground comics like R. Crumb and Furry Freak Brothers, and under ground music culture.

Steve’s favorite group was the Mothers of Invention. Frank Zappa was a god to him. I was so much under Steve’s spell that I became obsessed with Zappa too and wanted to know everything about him. This was music unlike any I’d ever heard before freaky, rebellious, full of snark and biting humor. It was all so strange to me, but thrilling too. I immediately iden tified with the whole vibe.

Steve took his mentor role seriously enough that when he saw my burgeon ing interest in all things freaky and weird, he encouraged it by taking me to my first concert in September 1972: Frank Zappa and the Mothers at the Hollywood Bowl. Frank was performing his new, yet-to-bereleased album, The Grand Wazoo, with a small orchestra. The opening act was Tim Buckley, followed by the Doors, minus Jim Morrison, who had died two years earlier, leaving the group he had fronted floun dering for a career. They had just released a faux-Mexican novelty song called “The Mosquito” and went down like a lead bal loon among all the rock aficionados there to see Zappa.

Around this time, I also became friendly with these older guys who lived down the block from me: Mark Swenston, Jim Gaffney, and Randy Crooks. They attended the same high school, Bassett High, and played in a garage band called Hogwild. When I first met them, they were heavily influenced by Black Sabbath. At some point, they started getting into Bowie and Mott the Hoople. Through them, I was introduced to glam rock.

When the New York Dolls an nounced their first West Coast shows, a four-night stand at the Whisky a Go Go, the guys from Hogwild all bought tickets to see them. I was desperate to go too, but my parents wouldn’t let me out of the house because it was a late show on a school night. That afternoon taping for The Midnight Special at NBC was my consolation prize, and the Dolls did not disappoint.

I didn’t get to see them play a full con cert until almost a year later, in July 1974, when they returned for a string of mid night shows at the Roxy, playing after performances of The Rocky Horror Show. Midnight was evidently too early for the Dolls, who kept everybody waiting well into the early hours and riled up the crowd. Even so, it was the first concert I’d been to that felt like a party. David Johansen played the host to the hilt. He wore a white tuxedo over his bare chest, and wielded a bottle of champagne in one hand, the mic in the other. The other Dolls were dressed like Times Square street-walkers — in tight spandex, stacked heels, big hair and makeup but strutted like men.

•

Ground zero for every switched-on ’70s glam rock kid in L.A. was Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, an ultra-hip teen mecca that only played the latest British imports, located in a storefront at the lip of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

I had read about it in music magazines and wanted to experience it for myself. The first few times I went to Rodney’s, Jim Gaffney, one of the guitar players for Hogwild, came with me.

Rodney manned the turntables at the club, selecting from his collection of British glam 45s. At Rodney’s, I was ex posed for the very first time to records like “Tiger Feet” by Mud, “Blockbuster” by the Sweet, and “48 Crash” by Suzi Quatro. Rodney would obtain all these singles himself, often before anybody else in the country. It made Rodney, this glittery teen fantasia he had created around him, and everyone who gained entry to it feel all the more special, mysterious, and exclusive.

One of the main attractions of Rodney’s was being able to see somebody super-famous in close proximity. Bowie himself was said to be a regular visitor, but I never got to see him there, or Jimmy Page, or Elvis Presley, who famously came to check out the action at Rodney’s one night with his security detail in tow. I did see Iggy Pop, though, who was a regular. Then there were the people who were fa mous to me simply because I’d seen them in Rock Scene and Circus, like Sable Starr and Lori Maddox. To me, anybody who had their photo in a magazine was a rock star by proxy. It was all so exciting that I wanted to be near it, and I felt it was changing me just by osmosis.

Jim Gaffney wasn’t as captivated by all this as I was. He didn’t think of our trips to Rodney’s as much more than a lark and stopped going altogether after our first few outings there. Hungry for expe rience, drawn to this after-dark interzone of Hollywood and the strange characters that populated it, I started venturing out on my own.

•

On my maiden solo night out of subur bia, I staggered into Rodney’s wearing some girls’ platform clogs, which seemed like an accessory appropriate for the oc casion. That night, I was astounded to see the parking lot girls I’d spotted outside the New York Dolls taping a few months earlier, along with a male friend of theirs. Maybe I looked kind of lost, or it was just obvious I was a kid hanging out on his own, but one of the girls approached me. She told me her name was Pearl, af ter Pearl White the silent-movie ac tress who starred in The Perils of Pauline films but she was also obsessed with Jean Harlow. Pearl had her own distinc tive take on the “vamp” look of the 1930s: face powdered white, eyes smoky dark, squeezed into dresses that accentuated her figure. Because we were both too young to drink at the bar and the only thing on offer for the teen patrons was a revolting cherry cola, I ended up drinking in the back alley of the club at Pearl’s invita tion. There, she introduced me to all her friends: Meredith, Sue, her sister Joan, and their male friend, Jamie. We would pass around a tall green bottle with a silver la bel Rainier beer and each take a swig. I wasn’t used to the bitter taste of rank,

cheap ale, but I quickly decided that I liked being drunk. If nothing else, it made me feel part of the group.

From that moment on, this would be come our ritual, meeting early on Friday night with Pearl and her friends to drink in the alley, before heading into Rodney’s to dance, hang out, and be seen while spy ing on whichever pop star or celebrity was positioned in the VIP booth. The music I heard at Rodney’s opened up new pos sibilities in record collecting for me. But more than that, glam spoke to my budding sexuality.

There could hardly have been a more perfect fantasy figure and foil for a gay teenager at the time than David Bowie. He was a rock star, of course, but an drogynous to the extreme both asexu al and openly hedonistic. He was like an alien from outer space, which was exact ly the experience of a gay teenager at the time dispossessed on a hostile planet far from home. Gay guys who rejected the cli ché clone image of the day flannel shirts and Levi’s found a home at Rodney’s. Sexual ambiguity was the name of the game, whether gay, straight, or bi.

There was nothing ambiguous about my sexuality, though. Already sure I was interested exclusively in men, I re mained closeted at home and school. But at Rodney’s I could rock and roll and be as gay as a day in May, making out with older shaggy-haired types in a drunken stupor. One time, I even made out with Pearl’s friend Jamie. We were drunk and got amorous sitting next to each other in the back of the car, but it never got fur ther than that. It was all about the jour ney, not the destination, testing my limits,

consequences be damned. Jimi Hendrix asked, “Are you experienced?” I wanted to be able to answer, “Yes, I am!”

I planned my weekly excursions to Rodney’s so that I could stay there till closing. Then everybody would move over to the parking lot hangout scene outside the Rainbow Bar & Grill, a few blocks up the Strip. After that, it was on to either the Rock ’n’ Roll Denny’s din er, which was open all night and catered to the music crowd, or Danielle’s, a cof fee shop on Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, which was frequented by drag queens, transvestites, and hus tlers who worked the stroll nearby, on Selma Avenue. This part of the boulevard felt dangerous and alluring. A couple of blocks along, on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas, was another notorious pick-up spot and street hangout I would sometimes frequent, the Gold Cup. There was also Arthur J’s on Santa Monica and Highland. After-hours gay culture in Hollywood centered around these coffee shops. I didn’t have money for a hotel room so I would go there, hang out, and hope nobody killed me. I was a little bit fright ened by it all, but at the same time instinc tively felt I was in the safest place I could be. I’d usually stay till around 6 a.m., then catch the bus back home to La Puente.

My parents were none the wiser about my new life in Hollywood. As far as they were concerned, I was staying out late and sleeping over with a pal. That seemed like a pretty reasonable and harmless thing for a teenager to do, so they never inquired further.

Hanging out at Rodney’s with all the freaky young glitter kids started to change me, giving me the confidence to become more flamboyant. I started to express my self through clothing. This was around the time my idol worship of David Bowie be gan. He had famously worn a dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World. I was starting to dress up in a glam style myself. However, I couldn’t really afford any cool designer clothes at my age. No Kansai Yamamoto space suits or Fred Slatten platforms for me. So I was compelled to start making my own.

First, I got a pattern for flared trou sers, designed to fit over my six-inch wedgie platform shoes, which I had fes tooned with rhinestones in the shape of a lightning bolt in a circle a tribute to David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane character. I also made a snap-up, Chairman Mao–style jacket/shirt to complete the look. I was actually quite adept at following the sewing instructions. I made two outfits using cheap satin; one in red, and one in white. I also gave myself a rather crude Ziggy Stardust spiky-top haircut, which ended up as more of a shag than a mullet, I’m relieved to say. I had no idea what my extended family or friends thought of the alien in their midst, but I didn’t care either. Even my mom seemed to sense there was something different about me. I remember vividly one night, apropos of nothing in particular, my mother confided in me that she once had a transvestite friend named Greta. She didn’t go into detail, simply ex plaining to me that Greta was a man who dressed as a woman and had sex with men, as a woman. I tried to wrap my teenage brain around this information that, quite

literally, turned my understanding of men and women, and the relationship between them, inside out. To this day, I have no idea why she told me. She never mentioned Greta again. I figured she was drunk and just forgot. Maybe Mom saw my interest in gender-bending and suspected she had a homosexual son, and that was just her way of letting me know that not only did she understand but she accepted me.

•

Through my weekend romps at Rodney’s and my pre-meets with Pearl and her friends in the alleyway behind it, I was starting to feel part of the in-crowd and certain I belonged there. I was on a journey of discovery. On another evening, around the same time, we stopped by a Spanishstyle bungalow on Argyle in Hollywood, which reminded me of Joe Gillis’s apart ment in Sunset Boulevard, for a pre-Rod ney’s drink with a friend of Pearl’s named Mickey. A delicate and feminine fairskinned lady opened the door and let us in. She had soft, curled, golden-brown hair, a heart-shaped face framed by fine ly plucked, arched eyebrows, and full, soft red-lipsticked lips. Perhaps used to Pearl showing up at her door in the compa ny of stray pets, Mickey acknowledged me, but somewhat dismissively, before proudly showing off a black leather jock strap she’d just purchased, holding it up in front of herself like a new skirt or blouse. Mickey was a transsexual street prostitute. The jockstrap, she told us, was to help her “tuck” and please her clients. “Cool,” we both said, in all seriousness.

•

One day, I took the bus into Hollywood and was buzzing around in my platform wedgies. I wanted to lose myself in the glamorous big city and soak up the at mosphere, away from the constraints of small, suburban blandness. On my stroll this warm fall afternoon, Lori Maddox walked by me with some girlfriends. She looked me over in all my casual finery and exclaimed to her friends, “How cute!” They all smiled in agreement. I was flattered to be recognized by a famous “in-chick” of the Hollywood groupie scene, but then thought, Cute? I wanted to be hip and cool, not cute, as only a 15-year-old brat would think to themself. I had no idea that, to them, I looked like exactly what I was: a fresh-faced little suburban Mexican boy in platforms, skintight patchwork jeans, and chest-hugging T-shirt far from the newly world-wise teen I thought myself to be.

I walked on to Hollywood Boulevard, by the Gold Cup, and headed down to Highland Avenue, to a secondhand re cord store called Railroad Records. Just as I got to the Arby’s drive-thru nearby, a guy sidled up to me, as if he wanted to talk to me. I was a bit taken aback, but he looked friendly enough. Up to that point, I had felt quite anonymous, despite walk ing around in glitter platforms. Now this hip-looking cat wanted my attention. I was flattered, anxious, and excited, all at the same time.

He was tall, buff, and squeezed into tight, worn jeans, probably all of 17 years old, with blond, floppy hair. He asked me my name and what I was up to. I guess I looked somewhat aimless. I was on my way to visit some friends, I said. I had

some notion to give myself an “out,” sens ing that he expected something of me.

He said his name was Tommy and did I want to follow him? He might have asked me if I wanted to “fool around”; I can’t remember. I already knew, instinc tively, that was the reason he wanted me to follow him. And I did, as if in an autohyp notic state, possibly out of a reflexive fear or survival mechanism. But if so, it wasn’t working, because there we were, walking below Sunset to a residential side street, then down some back alley.

We came across an empty garage. At that point, the mood changed, everything became transactional. Tommy unzipped his pants, whipped out his big fat dick, and ordered me to get on my knees. Again, I complied. Finding myself eye to eye with his cock, I stared at it and it appeared to stare back.

In what seemed like an hour but was probably a minute, Tommy groaned, pulled out, shot a load, and wiped off. My first ever blow job was done. He zipped up and laughed. Giddy with excitement at my accomplishment, I wanted to laugh too. I had participated in this clandestine sex ual act and survived. What had I ever been scared of? But there was no time for reflection.

At that moment, we heard car tires roll ing up to the garage and quickly ducked out a side door, making a mad dash back up to Sunset. Panting after our two-block sprint, Tommy asked if I wanted to hang out more. But I wasn’t sure I needed to get to know him any better than I already had. Later, I would realize he was probably a hustler, trying to recruit me into the game. Being somewhat naïve, I didn’t take the

bait. “Gotta go,” I said and hopped on the bus back to La Puente.

I scanned the passengers around me. It seemed as if I was viewing them through a fisheye lens, goofy and animated. I imag ined I looked the same way to them, like a cartoon character rushing on endorphins. Laughing to myself, I realized the blow job was fun, but the enjoyment of fear was really out of this world.

From the book Some New Kind of Kick by Kid Congo Powers, with Chris Campion Copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved.

STALINGRAD

A situational comedy, Act II by Michael McCanne

Characters

sarah , 28, stuck in a longed-for past mark , 31, stuck in an endless present ken , 29, stuck in an imagined future soldier 1 , Russian soldier 2 , Russian political officer , Russian soviet announcer , Russian german soldier

Act II. Setting

The play takes place in a run-down loft, orderly but not clean. A counter divides the living room and kitchen. A hallway leads to the bedrooms in the back and a door leads to the landing.

The play takes place in the present.

Ken does arm curls with tiny dumbbells. Sarah lies on the couch and watches.

sarah

Like what does he do all day?

He barely leaves the house. He sits on his computer or his phone ken So sarah

How is he paying rent? Is he working? ken

I think he has a bunch of money saved up He had a freelance gig all last year He was on the couch for hours, smoking weed and color-correcting pictures of hotels

That was actually a really dark period in our lives sarah

Now he smokes weed and doesn’t do anything

He seems down ken

Mark’s always been low-key

You just don’t remember sarah

No. When I met you both, you were like amazing, and so ambitious. You were always doing stuff those parties, those crazy performances And now

ken

We don’t?

sarah

No. I mean, you do. Or you’re doing other things now?

But Mark doesn’t seem to care about anything

ken

Maybe that’s what happens You get older You don’t have time or energy You prioritize sarah

But I’m not talking about that It’s not like he’s occupied with grown-up concerns ken

No. That’s never happened Maybe it won’t Maybe you’ve changed and that makes him seem different That happens sarah I haven’t changed ken

Everyone does

Knocking at the door. Ken looks at Sarah expectantly. Sarah doesn’t move. More knocking, more insistent. ken Ugh. Fine

Ken sets the dumbbells down, goes to the door, and opens it a crack.

ken

It’s a soldier

sarah

What does he want?

ken

To come in There’s actually two of them

sarah

Tell them to fuck off ken

He has a gun He’s sort of pointing it at me?

Sarah gets up and looks through the crack. sarah

Oh for fuck’s sake Let them in, I guess

Ken opens the door. Two Russian Soldiers burst in.

soldier 1

Citizen, you must comply with our orders It is a military decree

sarah

What do you want?

soldier 2

We are making preparations for defense Every building must be ready to repulse fascists

ken

Oh, we’re ready Very ready

Sarah drapes herself over Ken’s arm. sarah

Ken’s been making smoothies and working out soldier 1

We need to build a redoubt here It’s a good place for a machine gun nest

The soldiers go into the hallway. ken

What’s a redoubt?

The soldiers reenter carrying sandbags. They start building a small wall in the far corner below a window. sarah

Oh come on What are you doing?

soldier 1 Fortifying sarah

Is that even the right direction?

soldier 1

Let us do our job

You get back to whatever you do for the war effort

soldier 2 Assuming you do something

The soldiers go back and forth building a small machine gun nest. Sarah and Ken try to pretend that they’re not.

sarah

This is too much ken

It’s only sandbags sarah

It’s not just sand bags

It’s that and the guns and the bombs (Sarah gestures toward the soldiers.) and more of these idiots

soldier 1 Citizen

It is a crime to insult a member of the People’s Army sarah Shut up Build your thing soldier 1

We’re done actually We’re leaving sarah Good! Idiot soldier 1 Parasite!

The soldiers leave, slamming the door.

sarah

You know what’s weird?

Ken gestures toward the door the soldiers have just closed as if to say, “That?”

sarah

I’ve been going to this yoga class for like a year

And I hate the teacher

She’s so annoying and cheerful I’ve been thinking about it lately, like why did I keep going?

And why did I hate her so much?

ken

Do you still go?

sarah

No. The studio closed months ago But I went for almost a year. To her class specifically ken

What made you think of her?

sarah

I don’t know

Like all this war and hostility

Like did I really hate her? Was I at war with her?

In a way?

ken

Uh no?

sarah

She always used to end the class by reading some quote

You know, some woo-woo shit about How everything is essentially good and will work out

But

(Sarah gestures toward the sandbags.)

I guess now

I wish she was right

STATION FOR TWO

by Xue Yiwei, translated by Hu Ying

We often feel a sense of dread at dusk. Perhaps it comes from fatigue after a long day, or from our fear of dark ness, or maybe from a certain ennui that is peculiar to dusk. Gripped by this dread, we always long for the phone to ring, for a call from somewhere. Even a pointless conversation might still help us through the most difficult time of the day.

But when I picked up the phone, the voice I first heard was curt and weak, not nearly enough to dispel my sense of dread. I didn’t respond. Of course, I could have asked: Is that you? Or perhaps, who are you? Two very different responses. The first response says that I recognize you, and even more, your calling is just what I’d

hoped for. But the second response says that I reject you: maybe you dialed the wrong number, or perhaps there had been an unbridgeable gulf between us … I can tell that when you said “It’s me,” you were trying to envisage a past with vivid colors.

You wanted me to give the first re sponse, wanted me to anticipate your af fection. But how come I couldn’t feel a thing? I couldn’t feel at all what should have been a passionate reference. Forgive me! Forgive me! I didn’t want to offend you with the second kind of response. Forgive me for not responding.

Clearly, my silence did offend. You be came agitated. “Don’t you remember?” you said. “Don’t you remember the station for two?”

A shiver went through my body, fol lowed by a confusing memory …

“You don’t remember.” You said it with emotion: “You don’t remember it at all.”

My silence expanded.

“It is a metaphor.” You said, “A meta phor that we …” You stopped, then hung up.

A metaphor? Another shiver went through me, followed by another confus ing memory … A metaphor for what? A metaphor that we what?

Paris

I remember that the young Chinese man made a rendezvous to meet with his child hood neighbor in front of the Information Desk at the Gare du Nord in Paris. He arrived 10 minutes early. Now, 25 min utes past the time they were supposed to meet, the neighbor still hadn’t shown up. The young Chinese man had long known

this former neighbor also lived in Paris, but he never felt as if he wanted to meet with him. In fact, they hadn’t seen each other for almost 20 years. But the young Chinese man suddenly asked to see him because he intended to discuss the issue he was facing with a compatriot who was at that moment studying linguistics in a doctoral program at the Sorbonne. For 15 years, the young Chinese man had thrown himself into writing novels. But start ing last winter, he had begun to question whether he could write fiction in Chinese, his mother tongue. He was deeply de pressed. In the phone call he made to the neighbor, he said, “How can one write fic tion in a language in which verbs have no tense? Such a language can only be used to expound doctrines or invent propaganda.” His neighbor agreed with him, and even offered a comparison with the French language, admiring the French imperfect tense for its narrative capability. After a little pause, he elaborated: if a story is like a flowing river, then time is the bank that guides the flow. So, if verbs cannot ex press the magic of time, the story inevita bly loses its flow, like stagnant water. This idea really got to the young Chinese man. He asked if they could arrange a meeting soon.

Waiting made the young Chinese man restless. Since his teenage years he had been waiting, waiting for the earth-shat tering success of his fictional creation. He was so deeply absorbed by storytelling that he often couldn’t be certain which was more real, life itself or the telling of it? He felt his stories had an existence of their own, that they breathed, had joy and con fusion, even death. Narration was like his

traveling companion, and the stories that came out were like train stations where he and his narrative met up. He wasn’t sure what the destination would be. But now, his distrust of his mother tongue made him doubt if he would ever arrive at the brilliant destination that might be await ing his arrival. If this was really his fate, then he felt his life would be totally mean ingless, like everyone else’s.

He was surprised that just as he was losing faith in his brilliant destination, he found himself increasingly drawn to his original departure point. Again and again, he reread his first work. It was an allego ry about an alien’s ill-fated journey to our planet: having heard “words are weapons,” a popular metaphor on earth, the alien opened up a hole in the back of his head so that he could have two mouths and speak two different strings of words at the same time. For example, one mouth could be sprouting fantasies about the future while the other could discuss current reality. Or else, one mouth could be extolling democ racy while the other propagated dictator ship. And familiar with the revolutionary slogan “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” he made two advanced hand guns with many complicated functions and trained himself to be equally good at shooting with both hands. Thus equipped, he flew to his destination with great con fidence, believing that he would quickly obtain supreme power there. Yet before he had even landed, he found himself in trouble. He realized that the languages he knew were unknown to earthlings and he didn’t know any earth language. Once he had forced a landing, a new problem pre sented itself: he hadn’t considered gravity when designing his handguns. He couldn’t

even lift a gun with both hands, let alone with one. The alien was thus not able to achieve what he had expected on earth. Initially, people were kind to him, feed ing him at set times. This exposed another problem with his modification. Although the two mouths enabled him to speak of different things at the same time, they also fought ferociously over every bite of food whenever he ate. In order to have some peace and quiet, the alien decided not to eat at all. But extreme hunger tortured him. At last, on a beautiful moonlit night, he started his spaceship once again. People thought he must be going home, but not two minutes after liftoff, there was an ex plosion. For a long time, a huge crimson ball hung in the sky. Miraculously, every earthling who witnessed this tragedy ac quired the unique ability to say two con tradictory things at the same time …

The young Chinese man could not forget that the first person to laugh at his writing had been his father. After reading his maiden work, the father concluded that he would never amount to anything in literature. Such ridicule did not affect the young man at all, as he had despised his father since the age of seven when he began to fall in love with books. He had always thought that his father had accom plished nothing in life. Later on, the young man’s works were repeatedly ridiculed by critics and readers. He didn’t care about that either. There was plenty of evidence from literary history: hadn’t there been many classic works subjected to ridicule from their contemporary readers?

Still, since last winter, the young man had begun to have reservations about his mother tongue, and this made him feel confused about his own creativity. He was

miserable every day.

His depression made him anxious. This was why he decided to meet his former neighbor. In fact, talking about language was no more than a nice excuse. What he was really trying to find was a safe har bor in distant memory. His reservations about his mother tongue were threatening his sanity; he could now almost hear the quickening steps of madness coming to ward him.

But his former neighbor never showed up. The young Chinese man took it as a metaphor. He did not wait any longer. Walking out of the crowded Gare du Nord, he felt a deeper sense of despair than the alien, his first character, had when he blasted off from earth.

In the evening, the young Chinese man received a call from his neighbor, who gave some weak excuse for missing the meet ing. In the end, the linguistics student said, whatever they needed to talk about was already pretty well covered in their earlier phone conversation. So, it shouldn’t matter much that they didn’t get to see each other. The young Chinese man answered in de spair, “True enough.”

Beijing

I remember that when the Italian Jesuit arrived in Beijing he was already dressed in a Confucian robe. With this demon stration of respect, he had reached the destination of his desire, or rather, his per sonal paradise, for he would never leave there again. He noted the date: January 24, 1601. Three and half months ago, he had turned 48, and it was now nearly 23 years since he had left Europe. Entering the il lustrious gate of the Forbidden City, the

Italian Jesuit had known, even though his life would continue for some years, that he had arrived at his promised land. The Emperor of the enormous empire had been anxiously awaiting his arrival. Or perhaps he was anxiously awaiting the exotic tributes his visitor would bring. The Jesuit presented to the Emperor an image of God, an image of the Holy Mother, a Bible, two pendulum clocks, and a map of the world. While preparing these gifts, he had been aware that the Emperor would not be drawn immediately to the first three items. He was right. But he had miscalcu lated that the Emperor would be interest ed in the map of the world, as were most European rulers. On the map, the Jesuit had carefully moved the prime meridian projection so that China was at the cen ter of the world, an orientation which the Chinese themselves were certain of. He thought this would satisfy the Emperor’s vanity and perhaps stimulate his curiosity about the rest of the world. This time he guessed wrongly: the Emperor’s contented smile was directed at the even swinging of the pendulum and the ringing chime from the clock. For the first time, a Jesuit had made it possible for a supreme Chinese ruler to see with such clarity the move ment of time. The swinging pendulum and ringing chime immediately reminded the Emperor of his favorite consort. Aha, he thought, her power of seduction was in fact the seduction of time. After this flash of insight, however, the virtual movement of time made this supreme ruler who had lost any ambition to conquer feel uneasy. He placed the small pendulum clock on his tea table. He planned to build a spe cial clock tower for the large pendulum clock in the Imperial Garden. The Jesuit

was initially opposed as he considered the plan too extravagant. He couldn’t stop it, of course. A long time after the comple tion of the clock tower, he learned that the construction had cost 150 times his monthly stipend at court, and a rather generous stipend at that. He felt this was much too extravagant.

In any case, the Italian Jesuit stayed on in Beijing, just like his pendulum clocks. His residence was only five kilome ters from his eventual tomb, and the day he arrived in the city was just nine years and three months away from the day he would depart the earth. He moved within this time and space, in and out of the res idences and minds of the literati-officials who harbored rather conflicting emotions about him. He could barely remember his own hometown. His reports back to Europe made his former colleagues ques tion his allegiance. Perhaps to one wan dering in his promised land, Europe had been abstracted into an axiom of geom etry. Eventually he found Chinese terms for a whole set of Euclidian concepts, and he established Latin equivalenc es for Confucian ideas. He didn’t think the Chinese language did any damage to mathematical precision, nor did he find that the complex Latin declensions di minished the appeal of Eastern wisdom.

Although held in suspicion by his col leagues at home, the Jesuit did not ques tion his fate. He knew he had arrived at the true destination of his life. Whether or not it was Beijing per se seemed immate rial. Sometimes he even doubted whether he actually lived at the center of this enor mous empire. Unlike the position of the empire on his map, this was not a center that he could have fabricated.

The truth was, he lived inside of his mission that is to say, he lived inside of a passionate love. The seed of his love for the Lord of Heaven was first sown when he was nine years old, at the most import ant assignation of his life, his first assigna tion with the Lord of Heaven. That year, a Jesuit school was opened in Macerata, his hometown, and the nine-year old was the first to enroll. This school was evidently the station where the boy first met his be loved Lord. Thus began his life’s journey, a journey toward its departure point. In truth, the Jesuit who never left Beijing also never left Europe. His destination was his origin. His life was like a planet that re turns again and again to its starting point.

The young Chinese man who became very depressed because of the missed ren dezvous in Paris once paid a visit to the tomb of this Jesuit in western Beijing. It was at dusk, 380 years after the Italian had passed away. Sitting by the modest tomb for 40 minutes, the young man had been thinking that perhaps the clock the Jesuit made was still ticking in the Imperial Garden, and perhaps the cycles of passing time were blurring the boundary between past and present. More miraculously, per haps time was the station where the living and the dead met up.

Sometimes these encounters were vio lent. During the Cultural Revolution that originated in Beijing, this modest tomb was repeatedly targeted by rampaging Red Guards. The young man’s father had been one of them. Proudly recounting to the son his participation in the desecration of many years earlier, the father concluded his story with great fervor: “Religion is the opium of the people.”

London

I remember that I couldn’t get it out of my mind how the old British woman cried in front of a stranger like me. She said she passed by a poster at the exit to Holborn Station, a poster for a book. She squinted at the author’s picture, and half a century turned into a blink of the eye. Yes, she rec ognized the gray-haired woman without any hesitation: she was a former classmate from the London School of Economics. The memory of her first appearance in class was still vivid. So enchanting she was, from the way she looked to the way she carried herself, even to the way her mind worked. She quickly became the moving center of the campus, idolized by everybody. But toward the end of the second semester, she vanished from public view. Rumor had it that she had gone back to her country, to fight against the invad ers whose ruthless offense seemed unstop pable. Nobody could associate this young woman’s unique elegance with the grime of war. Still, she vanished. And then came the news of her tragic death, two different versions giving conflicting information about the time and place.

The incredible reappearance of her idol from the Far East sent a thrill through the old English woman. She blushed a lit tle at her own excitement, and then tears rolled down her cheeks. It had been half a century since she heard the news of her idol’s death at the same spot where she was standing now, and she had been miss ing her all these years. The old woman no longer noticed the loud noise of the un derground station. In fact, she hardly even noticed the station itself, or her own be ing. She stood in front of the picture on

the cover of the book in the poster. Face to face beyond time! Half a century after death in her war-stricken country, the en chanting woman from the Far East was back in London! The raucous city was suddenly suffused with the sounds and smells of 1937.

The English woman had never mar ried. She had instead pined for her idol from the Far East. In the long years of her yearning, she saw her frequently. Again and again, she imagined how she might have died, how she came alive again and went on to lead an enigmatic life. She coexisted in her mind as a living person and as a dead one, the two states having no particular sequential connection. She could die in 1938, but in 1945, she could still give birth to a daughter who would grow up to be as elegant as her mother. For the longest time, the English woman en joyed or maybe suffered from fiction al freedom. She imagined, for example, that her idol stopped by India on her way to China and caught some tropical disease. She died on board and was buried at sea in the Indian Ocean. Or she imagined that she joined the Red Cross after getting to China. In a siege of the notorious troops of Kenji Doihara, her unit was cut off and cornered by the Japanese in a small village by the Yellow River. Those captured, she among them, were brutally tortured for days before being buried alive by the riv erbank to the north of the village. At other times, the English woman imagined that after the war, her elegant classmate was strolling along the Shanghai Bund with her daughter. She even heard her calling out to her daughter not to run too far ahead. “You’re going to get lost and I won’t be able to find you,” she admonished. This

is how they met in her stories.

Now, 50 long years had metamor phosed into a book, a book that the whole world was reading. The English woman rushed to the bookstore just around the corner. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on a copy. She realized the coming days of intensive reading would be emotional, but she couldn’t have expected that they would also be nightmarish. Almost every night she was awakened by horrific dreams and burst out crying. One night she dreamed that her idol had been trampled to death in the streets of Shanghai by a crowd of young people, her compatriots rather than the Japanese invaders. Her white cheong sam was soaked in blood. The English woman didn’t understand why a patriotic woman had been treated that way.

She also couldn’t understand why she still kept making up violent and uncer tain stories about her, even after reading about all the adversity her idol had un dergone, knowing that she was alive and well in America. It wasn’t that the old English woman didn’t feel the sufferings described in the book. Real sufferings they were, as real as those she had felt through her imagination. For example, the daugh ter of the elegant woman did “get lost” in Shanghai during the Red Terror of the Cultural Revolution, and the mother was never “able to find” her. Rather it was that after five decades of longing and dream ing, the English woman had turned her idol into a character. Only in fiction could they come together.

On the day the old English woman finished reading the book, she wrote down her thoughts concerning time in her dia ry. She said time was meaningless, and the

reappearance of her idol from the Far East was meant to compensate for her endless story-making. She also said that with this reappearance, she had witnessed the mira cle of longing.

Another miracle of longing would take three more months to appear. The author of the bestselling autobiography was com ing back to her alma mater to give a talk. The old English woman reserved a ticket well in advance. But in the late morning on the day of the talk, she was found by her cleaning lady dead in the armchair beside her reading table. Forensic examination determined that she had died the night before. Her last moments seemed serene. Lying in her lap was her diary whose last entry was, “If I were ever to meet with her again, let it be in fiction.” This time, nota bly, she chose to use the subjunctive mood.

Tokyo

I remember my grandfather’s emotion as he related how the young Japanese wom an spent a most exhilarating five months of her life in a foreign land. Having just returned to Tokyo, the young woman heard the news that “our” military had taken Shanghai. Was this the reason her parents had to leave the city all of a sud den? She refused to open the curtains of her room. She refused to face the street life of her home city. She refused con solation for her grief, a grief rooted in a foreign land. Every day she cried, and ev ery day she waited. She was waiting for a letter from Shanghai, which should have arrived, and which would compensate her for unbearable solitude and allow her to continue her passionate journey, or rather

their passionate journey. In other words, she was waiting for a new beginning.

It all started from a story she was writ ing. After living for a month with her par ents in Shanghai, a city dubbed the Paris of the Orient, the young Japanese woman felt that the life of an expatriate was in fact a bit dull. She began to make up a story. A man appeared, then a woman. With these two characters, she imagined their first encounter at the railway station in Tokyo she was most familiar with. She let the man in a rush bump into the woman. Embarrassed, he stopped and said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” The woman looked up blank ly. But when her eyes met his, she felt a jolt of desire running through her body. A conversation was struck up. She had nev er initiated a conversation with a stranger before, let alone with a strange man. But she wanted to find out who he was, or rather who she herself was.

The young Japanese woman constant ly let her imagination double back and wander sideways, attempting to prolong the story endlessly. When the thread of the narrative reached the point where the woman felt the man wasn’t really her type and decided to dump him, she panicked that this would be the end of the story, so she launched herself into an erotic scene in the next paragraph: in the middle of the night, the woman burst through the door, saying that she had one last wish, and that was for the man to look at her body “with extreme patience yet supreme passion.”

Quickly she took off her clothing and lay down on the bed, her eyes closed. The man looked at her. Her breathing quickened. She said she could feel the heat in his gaze. Confused, the man’s gaze glided over

her body and paused at the depths of her cleavage. At this point, the woman burst out crying. She threw her arms around him and said she would never leave him again. Interlacing tidbits she had picked up from romance novels with details she dreamed up in her own head, the young Japanese woman discovered that her story could be spun on indefinitely. It seemed to have taken on a life of its own, quite magi cally. In time, she no longer felt the tedium of expatriate life.

But the mother didn’t like it that her daughter was so immersed in fantasy and didn’t make any progress in life. She thought it would be better if she could learn something, something tangible, like painting. She hired a middle-aged art teacher for her. When the teacher showed up, the young Japanese woman was total ly taken aback: he looked exactly like the man in her story. The shock sent a shiver down her spine. She couldn’t understand how such a coincidence could possibly happen, a coincidence that crossed the boundary between reality and fantasy as well as of race. And like her female pro tagonist, she felt a tremendous curiosity about such a coincidence, about who he was, or rather who she herself was. Her curiosity quickly turned into a powerful source of seduction. While she continued to weave her endless story with passion, she also coolly devised a plan to seduce the art teacher, who seemed a bit quiet and shy. Before long, however, the balance between reality and fantasy was upset: the young Japanese woman found that she couldn’t continue her story as she no longer felt as much passion while writing as in reality. Meanwhile, her seduction plan was

getting out hand. Every day, the young Japanese woman eagerly waited for the art teacher’s arrival and couldn’t let go when his time was up. Even though she bore no resemblance to her female protagonist at all, she became increasingly convinced that she and the art teacher had indeed met be fore, even, to be precise, in the story that she couldn’t finish. There was no one else at the railway station in Tokyo. They talk ed for a long time, but the train still didn’t come … And then it dawned on them that the train they were waiting for would nev er come, or rather, what they were really waiting for was their own coming. So, smiling at each other knowingly, they lay down together in the middle of the empty platform When they lay down togeth er, the young Japanese woman felt that she was the canvas for the art teacher. His brush strokes were impulsive and rough. Just when she was about to drown in a flood of desire, she heard him say tenderly, “See, this is the most beautiful picture in the world.”

The mother didn’t fail to discern her daughter’s “progress.” She abruptly called a stop to the art classes and made the de cision to take her back to Tokyo. But the young Japanese woman successfully ar ranged for a last tryst with her lover the day before she left Shanghai. She wanted to let him know the initial motive for his seduction, or “our encounter” as she eu phemistically called it.

“This is unbelievable,” the art teacher said when they were about to part. The young Japanese woman gazed at his alluring lips with longing. “Many peo ple turn life into fiction,” she said. “But I turned fiction into life.”

“Maybe I’m dead.”

“Maybe we all are.”

On her way back, the young Japanese woman couldn’t stop reveling in that im age. “See, this is the most beautiful picture in the world.” Every time, this was how the art teacher commented on their passion ate union. His voice was always relaxed and gentle, quite unlike his impulsive and rough brush strokes. The young Japanese woman couldn’t imagine that their incred ibly passionate journey would stop just be cause they were forced to part company on account of the war or her mother’s worries. She did not feel as if she had arrived at or was even close to her last stop. She wanted the train they had boarded to keep going.

But the first letter from Shanghai made her see that she had indeed reached the last stop. She saw that the exhilarat ing experience of the past five months had suddenly come to an end.

The art teacher said in the letter, “Shanghai has fallen. So has my passion. Even though the two events have no con nection, they happened at about the same time … How could time hold together two misfortunes so dissimilar in nature?!

I thank you for letting me know the real reason for our encounter. I feel duped. In any case, let it all end here. This way, you can go on with your story-making, and I … I should probably join the real fight at the war front.”

The tears of the young Japanese wom an soaked through the letter in her hand and the front of her blouse. And this was the moment when she heard her mother’s call from the kitchen: “Time for dinner!”

About the station for two, I have lots of confusing memories … Is it a metaphor

for something? If so, a metaphor for what?

At this point, the telephone started ringing again. I know it came from you.

“Do you know why I called you?” you asked coldly.

Do you mean just now or now?

“Be serious,” you said.

I had no idea. I didn’t even know who you were.

“Did you really forget the station for two?!” you said.

There were indeed many untraceable broken pieces in my memory. Some of them might come from the station for two. Time had been dismantling these stations and trampling over the wreck age. But truthfully, I had no idea why you called me. And, who are you?

“I called you because I thought you’d remember that unexpected drizzle … And the pile of smoky old leaves … And those two tired water buffaloes, one of them with a big scar on its back … It was at dusk … I thought you’d remember saying it was a scene out of the 16th century. You said you could reverse time, and that you longed for life in the past … I thought you’d re member saying you could make the past come alive again, including all the confu sion, passion, longing, and loss. You said so yourself, I thought you’d remember.”

Please don’t cry. Something was com ing back to me.

“I thought you’d remember that sud den burst of gunfire. A lot of people came running down the road very frightened. I thought you’d remember that before long, an angry crowd came back carrying three dead bodies. People were shouting slogans about revenge. I could never forget that scene.”

A vague memory stirred in me.

“I thought you’d remember saying life is the real fake. You said that.”

What did that mean? I said that?

“Yes, that’s what you said. You said life is the real fake.”

Did I ever say that? Who are you?

“How could you forget everything?!” you said angrily. And with that, you hung up in a rage.

At this point, I saw it had become completely dark outside. Still, I felt the most difficult time of the day hadn’t yet passed.

We know that in this world, every one of us possesses another or is possessed by another. This other allows us to see ourselves, but also makes it difficult to see ourselves. The other excites but also depresses us, makes us clear headed but also confused. We are at once over joyed but also saddened, so proud of ourselves but also deeply disappointed in ourselves. Because of this other, we love and hate, are filled with hope as well as despair … So what does “station for two” mean for us? Do we really need it? Can we really reach it? Now that this world is no longer THIS world, it has become an alien place flooded with violent uncertainties. Does “station for two” keep us safe and sane in the new reality?

Let it be a metaphor. Let us imagine. To adapt ourselves to this new reality we can at least rely on our imagination and live by this metaphor.

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

CAVEWOMAN, LLC

by Allie Rowbottom

Every direct sales party I ever threw, I threw with verve. It didn’t matter which company I was selling, I gave the party part my all. First, I bought Product with my Distributer Discount. Then, I pushed around the living room furniture, made a semicir cle of cushions and chairs. I vacuumed, wiped the coffee table and side tables, hid stacks of books, bills, errant condiment bottles,

and foot creams. I went to Price Chopper, bought Franzia Chardonnay, a prepacked tray of raw veggies with ranch dip in the middle.

What mattered were the Products. I arranged them in the center of the room, semicircled, like children. When I sold for NatchLife Lavender, I set out essential oils, cleaning sprays, and scented candles. When I sold for Christiana Precious, I displayed Swarovski crystal crosses, ear rings, bracelets, stud earrings shaped like sleeping lambs. When I sold for Youngage Beauty, the Product was skincare: creams and powders; foundations and two-in-one tubes of pink paste, for cheeks or for lips, you decide. I had girlfriends and they came over to see my stuff, at first they really did. They drank my wine and ate my vegeta bles, and once in a while, they bought what I sold. It was always their choice, to take the opportunity, or to leave it.

But then, one by one, my friends stopped coming. One by one, I called and texted and pitched. I offered each wom an a once-in-a-lifetime unbeatable price. I offered her healing flower essences, an timicrobial tinctures, glittering talismans, wrinkle-shrinking serums.

“You’re being too aggressive,” my hus band said when I complained.

“Hard selling is a thing,” I said, “I’m leaning in, and besides, I’m so close.”

This was a lie. I was no corporate girlboss. I had sold next to nothing. But I didn’t want to fail and opened a secret credit card in my husband’s name to be come my own best customer. I charged Product to the card, stacked it in the guest room of our new duplex, reported it sold. Youngage co-founders Cindy and Sue

sent form emails about sisterhood and female-dominated industries, such as di rect sales. I read these emails aloud to my husband as if they were written to only me, urging only me to Youngage confer ences and cruises. Christiana Precious and NatchLife Lavender sent similar invita tions. They sent payout checks for $19.99, $39.99, $69.99, bonuses of $49.99, $59.99, $99.50, always to the order of me.

In my husband’s name: the debt I racked up buying Product I’d already bought, to sell to someone else. When he found out, he used the word “betrayed” a lot. He made me cancel the cruise, the con ference, made me quit direct sales entirely. Afterward, we both tried for a while: me to be the wife he wanted, housebound and happy in her carpeted cage; he to ignore my obvious misery. Where we come from, it’s wise to want less than what I want. My husband wanted his boring management job at Auto Parts International, his high school sweetheart wife, the kids we kept trying for. The kids I can’t produce. What I mean is that my failure ruined everything for him. We’re on a trial separation. But I doubt he’s coming back.

I’m in love with Roxanne now any way. Roxanne is also recently separated, from a wife rumored to have been un faithful. Which is hard to believe because Roxanne is gorgeous, her body built and tanned like a reality TV star’s. She’s about my age, mid-thirties, but she looks young er. I know her from NatchLife Lavender. Roxanne was my Upline when I sold for NatchLife; I was in Roxanne’s Downline. Roxanne received a percentage of every sale I made or fabricated. Once, her adul teress wife, whose name now escapes me,

attended a NatchLife party I threw. I un derstood her presence not as an act of sis terly support, but as a favor to Roxanne. I like to think of myself as a woman’s wom an, but I know I’m not.

When Roxanne and I were in business together, she texted me daily. Inspirational quotes, links to direct sales party games.

“The system works if you work the system,” she said when I reported my fake sales.

“Failure is a choice,” she said the day I quit. I never told her how I’d cheated; for all Roxanne knows, I wanted to stop, so I stopped.

“Wellness is a process,” Roxanne’s been saying lately. She recently left NatchLife for an opportunity with Cavewoman Paleolithic Nutrition; she direct sells carbfree meat sticks and supplements now. I stop by her office regularly, to browse and buy.

Roxanne’s office isn’t really an office, though. It’s a garage full of boxes. In the boxes are Products: Raspberry Ketone Workout Gummies, Sabretooth Waist Slayer Shake Booster, Cavewoman Keto Cookies, Cavewoman Bone Broth, Cavewoman VitaGize Nutritional Supplements, specially formulated to boost im munity, burn away fat and the appetite that feeds it. When I buy from Roxanne, I buy in small doses, so I have reason to return. I pay in cash, tip money, and Roxanne never counts to check the amount. She trusts me. She cares about my experience with the Products she provides.

“How’d you like the Turmeric Turkey Bar?” she always cares to ask. Or, “How was the Ashwagandha Energizer Drink?”

“So good,” I always tell her. Around

Roxanne, I never know what to say. What I want to say is, You’re a strong woman and special and successful and I’m in love with you. It sums up my feelings exactly.

“I’m trying to lose 10 pounds this month,” I offer instead. I want her to know that I’m eager to improve.

“No such thing as try,” Roxanne says. “Do or do not.”

“I’ll do it,” I assure, then watch her lift a box of Cavewoman Bacon Bites to get to the Cavewoman Chicken Sticks I’ve probably come for. They are, truth be told, the most edible of the Cavewoman prod ucts and anyway; I try not to eat mam mals. Though I do love the way they taste. Roxanne squats low to unearth my Sticks, pushes back up from the heels, and her glutes clamp a wedgie in her dress pants. Every time I see Roxanne she’s in better shape. I wonder if she knows it; I picture her in the mirror, watching herself squeeze a grip builder, and wonder if she knows her strength.

I’ve lived my entire life in this town and I know everyone else who has also lived their entire life here. For that reason, I now choose to work elsewhere. I wait ress at Bo’s, in Chicopee, 30 miles to the south. I drive the extra distance not to be reminded of my failures.

Bo’s is off I-91, an old, repurposed rail car that’s been around for decades. Locals love it, but so do New York ski bunnies. Alex works there with me. He’s a line cook, not a server, and a dealer on the side. But he gives me stuff for free. Every day after the lunch rush, Alex and I snort co caine and fuck in the back of his van. We do this no strings attached and for some thing to look forward to. Sometimes, I’ll

let him rub coke on my asshole, put the tip of his penis inside. Just the tip. It keeps him interested and the drug wakes up the special in me. But my feet are always tired, all those hours, all that serving. So I go all fours on the bench with him wedged behind me and cat-cow, moan, look out the tinted window. Sometimes I think of Roxanne, her neck veins and tendrilled forearm muscles. Alex has a small body, so pale it’s nearly see-through.

On the drive home from Bo’s, I watch for cops, eat a Cavewoman Chicken Stick. I know I’m an addict, which seems to be the standard response to habitual drug use. When I feel guilty about it I try not to give the emotion too much power. We create our own success, our own failure, we choose what we think, how we feel, I believe that. So I choose to think of Roxanne. I picture her bench-pressing, bi cep-curling, squatting, her sweat in pearls, drips, a puddle on the floor.

Home is the duplex my husband and I bought when we got married. He still covers his side of the mortgage. He says he’ll keep it up until I work off his debt and we get back together, or I don’t and we divorce. It’s two floors of wall-to-wall car pet and slightly dated appliances. I share half a yard, a driveway, and a wall with a couple my age. They have a baby and a toddler and jobs at Wyczescany Ford and Farmers Insurance. They are both obsessed with hockey.

Roxanne likes hockey too but that’s because she played it in high school. If she wanted to, she could play again. She’s fit for life and then some. When I text Roxanne, which I do every other day, I stay on the subject of Cavewoman, like what

new products I should try. If I don’t hear back, I think about cocaine, or worse, I do cocaine, then spend hours online shop ping, filling carts I click away from when it’s time to pay. This depresses me, but not as much as thinking about my husband, what I couldn’t give him, why he left, how I know in my guts he’s not coming back. Ideally, I keep the texts with Roxanne continuous, an ongoing conversation.

•

So, one day people are normal, and the next day people are sick. That’s not how it happens, obviously, but that’s how it feels. One day we’re all supposed to stay home, but I’m still working and people are still at Bo’s, having coffee and eggs and Bible study. The next day’s the same, but the next day all the restaurants close and we’re all online, filing for unemployment. It’s then I get the idea to start direct selling again. Specifically, I get the idea from an internet article that says people are hoarding non perishables, cleaning stuff, sanitizer, and all the stores are stripped. Roxanne, however, has a garage of food. Cavewoman food. And I have a guest room of Christiana Precious, Youngage Beauty, NatchLife Lavender, which maybe folks will want for once.

I pick up my phone to text Roxanne. She’ll want to go through Cavewoman corporate, make our union official, put me in her Downline right away. Recruiting Downliners is where the real direct sales profit comes from I learned that one the hard way.

I open our messages, consider my husband, my long-lost friends. They’ll all agree: starting up another direct sales

career with another multilevel-marketing company is an act of self-destruction.

“MLMs are pyramid scheme scams,” my husband said often, toward the end of my career.

“You don’t believe in me,” I responded. “Men can’t tolerate ambitious women.”

“I’m trying to help you,” he said. “You’re addicted to the scam.”

My debt proved him right: MLMs weren’t supportive spheres, women lift ing up women; I wasn’t special, unlimited in my potential, a potential millionaire. I don’t want him to remember that again. I open my news app, see images of empty shelves, just yellow price stickers flagged up where the food was. But this is a disas ter that warrants emergency action. People need supplies, and I can help them. I fill up on the promise of how good it will feel, to help. I feel sure of the feeling, sure I’ll show everyone who ever doubted me how strong and positive and self-assured I real ly am. I picture Roxanne, power-suited and open-armed, coming in for a hug when we become Cavewoman Nutritional’s best selling team, earn the bonuses promised by every Cavewoman Conference call, convention, newsletter. “I always believed in you,” she says. Then we’re side by side on our new yacht with our twin French bulldog puppies. We wear matching white bikinis and our perfect bodies glisten. I know she can be mine, know I’ve never stopped believing in me either.

“Hi Roxanne!” I type. “Thinking of you in these troubling times I wonder if you might be interested in hearing about a business plan I’m hatching for the greater good of all? No worries if not!”

I send. Eye my dime bag. Just a quarter

left. I text Alex, “Break quarantine with me.”

“For sure,” he writes, right away. We agree to meet at Bo’s. I brush my teeth, choose not to change. I’m wearing sweat pants and a hoodie. I briefly imagine the face Roxanne would make if she saw me this way. When she was my Upline at NatchLife, she talked a lot about dress ing for success. I think of the day I met Roxanne’s wife. What was she wearing? I can’t remember, but dress her in skinny jeans, ankle boots she bought at T.J.Maxx, a blousey blouse from Marshalls. I pull on my off-brand UGGs, grab my keys.

In the driveway, my neighbor is un loading her eldest from his car seat.

“Hi Gail,” I say. She turns, straight ens herself, shuts the door on the kid. She steps back, so there’s extra space between us.

“Can you believe it?” she says. “What a crazy time.” She’s got a big forehead, wrin kles like gashes even when she’s relaxed. She’s not relaxed though, that I can see.

“Gordy thinks he might have it,” she says and winces.

I say, “Oh no,” but I’m not surprised. Gordy’s soft dad bod seems a vector for disease. “Have you tried Vitamin C?” I ask and think of the Cavewoman Full Spectrum VitaGize Roxanne’s been push ing lately.

“The doctor says they don’t know enough about how to treat this thing yet, so better not.” It’s been a while since I’ve been around such bland passivity. “We’re seeing him over the computer though, so that’s good and safe.”

The computer thing gives me an idea. I look at my phone to see if Roxanne has

texted back. No dice. I text, “Hi Roxanne! Just checking in! Let me elaborate on my plan! First we use the power of technology to host an online party and sell much need ed excess products to clients in these trou bling times Then I join your Downline at Cavewoman Nutritional perhaps we team up to form an LLC? Cavewoman LLC! Let me know if this is of interest but of course no pressure!!! Xoxoxo ”

“Are you headed to the store?” Gail asks.

“Just a drive,” I say, still in the screen. I press send.

“It’s a nightmare,” she says and some thing about toilet paper. But I’m not lis tening, I’m thinking about Cavewoman Roxanne. I think of her all the way to Chicopee and deliver an extra subpar per formance when Alex and I fuck.

The coke feels weaker anyway; Alex looks smaller.

“We should go easy, watch our immu nity,” he says when I ask for another line.

“Jesus, you’re a wuss,” I snap.

“Just an idea,” he says. “This thing could get bad.” He’s shirtless and I can see the roots of his meager chest hair, black threads beneath translucent skin.

“I feel nauseous,” I say. “Is that a symptom?”

“You’re probably just anxious,” he says and starts in on a lecture about B12 for mental health, protein for strength, the importance of iron, especially for women. “You need a steak,” he says and gives me a fresh dime bag to take home.

Maybe he’s right. On the way, I stop at the Arby’s drive-thru and order the Smokehouse Brisket. At the pickup win dow, a handwritten sign says, “Wash your

hands.” The server has on a face mask and gloves. She passes me my sack of food with just her fingertips. I put it on the seat next to me, pull into a parking space, and check my phone. Roxanne has not responded.

I make a picnic on my lap, unwrap the sandwich, and contemplate the bun, which I know I should remove. But I leave it, take a bite. Beneath the sauce, the tough texture of excessively cooked, frozen, cooked-again meat, I taste blood. Out the windshield, a troupe of crust punks two girls, their tattered dog set up a tent outside a shuttered Jiffy Lube. They laugh as they work, oblivious to their obvious failures, the obvious danger they face, out here alone, where the men are.

I watch them for a long time, then ball up the sandwich wrapper and toss it to the floor. I open my phone.

“Roxanne, this is a private, one-timeonly business opportunity!” I write, then erase the exclamation point. “Roxanne, this is a private, one-time-only business opportunity. How would you like to cover your mortgage each month, pay it off in full? How would you like a yacht, a private plane? What would you say if I told you that the exceptional life you deserve could be yours, that together we could manifest the abundant financial reality direct sales is proven to produce? I have a plan to get us there and would be pleased to share it with you. The future is ours, Roxanne, the secret to success is ours, Cavewoman LLC can be ours. The only thing standing in our way is our own limiting beliefs about our unlimited potential. Let me know when you’re ready to trade in these low vibra tional beliefs for abundance.”

I press send, then drive the long way

home, around the traffic circle, past the Applebee’s, the Friendly’s, where all the lights are off, past the Price Chopper parking lot, packed and a line of prospec tive shoppers out the door. I drive past Roxanne’s, also dark, just a strip of light seeping from the crack where the garage door and driveway don’t quite kiss.

•

I’m asleep on the couch with my phone on my stomach when Roxanne finally texts back and wakes me. “This is just the opportunity I’ve been searching for,” she writes. “I have invested so much time and money into Cavewoman Product but have been unable to generate the sales I sorely need. When can we start?”

I stare at the screen for a long time. I can’t believe my canned hard sell, my ag gressive, masculine delivery, brought out Roxanne’s sensitive side. I’m surprised she’s struggling, but then again, who isn’t? Times are tough and it takes a strong woman to admit she needs help. Sensitive and strong, fucking Roxanne.

“I’m ready any time,” I write. “I hon estly can’t wait to work with you again.” I put the phone down and celebrate with a key bump from the baggie Alex gave me. I sniff and swallow, bump again. Then I re turn to my phone and send another text: “I think we’re an ideal team.”

I put my phone back on my stomach and feel for the buzz of Roxanne’s re sponse. A few minutes pass. I watch my feet, socked and far off on the opposite end of the couch. I wiggle my toes. Day two off work and my feet still hurt. I look again at my phone, find nothing, put it back down. Another few minutes go by

before I get up, go to the bathroom, return with the plate-sized magnifying mirror I use to pluck my chin hairs. I put the mirror on the coffee table, shake a mound of coke from my baggie, cut it with a Cavewoman Nutritional loyalty card that’s been sitting on a stack of catalogs for months. When I realize I don’t have a tooter handy, I go back to the bathroom and fish a plastic tampon applicator from the wastebasket, return to the living room and use the skin ny part as a straw.

Two lines later and still no word from Roxanne. I text, “When I said ideal team, I meant ideal business partners.” Then, “I mean, I’d love to be friends also obvi.” Then, “But I respect your boundaries, I too am going through divorce.” Then, “I have boundaries.” Every message I send is worse than the last and I can’t stop. I do another line, feel it hit my heart, which hammers in response.

“I don’t even know what kind of girls you like,” I write.

Then, “*Women.”

Then, “*Womyn.”

I write, “You might be into body build ing chicks, idk,” then wonder if I remem ber now that Roxanne’s wife had been built. I change her skinny jeans to a short denim skirt, from which hefty orange calves flex and twist when she switches the cross of her legs.

“*chicks = women,” I write. But maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe Roxanne, like many gym rats, is into plain, short girls. Women. Womyn. I am neither tall nor short and certainly I’m not a girl. I like to think I’m not plain but probably I am. Definitely I am out of control.

“I’d love to be what you want,” I write. I’ve ruined everything.

Minutes pass. I get on my side, tuck my feet to my butt, contemplate my epic fail. I eye the mirror, smudged with white res idue and shame. When my phone finally buzzes, Roxanne says, “Pitch me this plan of yours. Then we can discuss the rest.”

“Okay,” I write, thrilled again. I type the rest with furious speed. “Party will be online. A virtual flash sale. A bidding war situation. There’s a huge demand for non perishables and vitamins and you have that stuff, and I have cleaning solution and face serums for when women’s Botox wears off or w/e. Bottom line, we have supplies and can charge what we want.”

“Let’s do it,” she writes.

“They’ll pay,” I write.

“This is getting me fired up,” she writes.

“When should we have the party?”

“Tonight,” she writes. “7 p.m. Advertise on your socials, call me later to shore up the deets.”

I’m slightly surprised that Roxanne wants to rush. But I reply with a . She sends a .

I put my phone down, stretch out again and inch my hand under the waistband of my sweats. I press the heel of my palm where it feels best. I picture Roxanne and I, back on our yacht. We’re high like we’re on coke but we don’t need it because we have each other and money and love. And burgers, the most delicious, rare hamburg ers that squelch juices when we bite. Then we’re in our white bikinis again and tan and my body looks Photoshopped, full and empty in all the right places, but also real. And Roxanne is Roxanne, seated in the Captain’s chair. I sit on top of her, look

down on her, let her look up at me, the underside of my chin, the crease of breasts and stomach pooch.

Actually, no. I’m the one in the Captain’s chair. Roxanne kneels before me. Roxanne eats me out, her tongue a slow press, just the way I like it.

No, instead of that, Roxanne stands. She looms over me. She’s massive and I’m small, and still, something isn’t right.

I remove my hand, wipe it on my sweats, check the time. It’s only 10 a.m. I reread Roxanne’s texts. I post our sale on all my socials, use all the language. Opportunity, Once in a Lifetime.

Roxanne posts, tags me, and I repost her posts. Then I get up, put on Youngage makeup, put on my best bra and a top that hints cleavage, put on the tasteful gold cross necklace I bought from myself when I sold for Christiana Precious.

I open FaceTime, press Roxanne’s number. I wait. She’s probably in her home gym, pumping for tonight. I pic ture her face, red when she answers, but not in a gross way, just a healthy flush. She picks up and I see temple sweat, a gray hue where blood should be.

“What’s going on,” she says and her voice is skippy. She looks off the screen, then back.

“Just thinking about tonight.” I try to sound seductive, husky.

“You have something in your throat?” she says.

“No,” I say and talk normal. “No, I’m fine.” She moves her free hand to her neck, massages the nodes. As she does this, the phone shifts and I see behind her: stacks of toilet paper, Clorox wipes, bottles of hy drogen peroxide.

“You go to the store?” I ask.

“You can’t get Purell anywhere,” she says. I notice the mask that hangs from the trunk of her neck. I see myself in a small box above her, see my hair needs fixing. I reach up.

“Don’t touch your face,” Roxanne yelps. There’s rustling from her end. “Listen, can I call you back?”

“Sure,” I say and we hang up. I cave and do a line of coke. It stings and gives me nothing. But I still want more. To distract myself, I move around my house and wait for the phone to ring. I get a rag, a bottle of NatchLife Lavender All-Purpose Spray, and spritz door han dles, light switches, toilet flushers. I am not at all a fastidious person; this is the first time I’ve cleaned in months. Even my body could use a thorough scrubbing. I don’t shower or even wipe well before I get with Alex; I consider my poor hygiene a power move, which is probably an excuse. But at least I’m not like Roxanne, who just came off as sort of anal. The mask, for one. Aren’t masks for medical workers?

And where did she get all that toilet pa per? I check my meager supply, decide I can use Kleenex, paper towels, whatever. If we lived together and I did this, Roxanne might think me dirty. Maybe she already knows I’m a mess. I open my texts, see how rushed she was to implement the plan, no lead time to advertise or spread the word. “This is just the opportunity I’ve been searching for,” she wrote, desperate. She is desperate, she said so herself. Perhaps she bought too much Cavewoman Product and now she can’t move it. I feel ill again, nauseous. Maybe I have it. I put on my fake UGGs, my warmest puffer coat, and

leave. Outside my neighbor’s door, empty Amazon boxes stack. Beyond them, I hear a man, coughing.

I drive back to Arby’s and arrive by 11, just in time for lunch. I need meat to keep my strength up. I need brisket and blood. I need to be somewhere I can think. I go through the drive-thru, park in the lot to eat. When I’m done, I crank the heat, crack the windows, smell smoke and bar beque sauce. I close my eyes, breathe deep then stop, roll the windows up. I’m not informed; can the sick spread on the air? Is that what Roxanne was up to with the mask? I picture her, wearing it alone in her clean house where there’s no one to infect her. I see her skulk around like she’s in a movie montage, time passing while she shrinks. Muscle group by muscle group, her body downsizes, a punctured blow up doll, until only a deflated skin sack remains.

“I’ve been unable to generate the sales I sorely need,” she wrote. What if her wife had been supporting her, a revenue stream that’s dried up post-divorce? What if the rumors were wrong and she left not be cause of cheating, but because Roxanne is deep in debt, like I was? Like I still am. What if she drags me back into her Downline and together we become even more helpless, susceptible, unable to con trol our sales, our bodies, our houses, our whole entire lives? I can’t breathe. I have it. I must have it. Shortness of breath, the worst symptom of all. I should have lis tened to Roxanne, shouldn’t have touched my face, should have used the NatchLife Lavender to clean more and better and often.

I start the car. The air comes on, brings

in Arby’s, and who knows what else. The stink makes me gag. I feel fever-hot and unzip my puffer, look down at my bare skin, the puff of pushed-up breast and glint of sacred gold. I’m sick, in need. I text Alex.

“Come to mine,” he replies and sends the address. I’ve never wanted to see his place. I still don’t but open Maps and drive over anyway.

Alex’s house is a trailer, not a house. “You look pretty,” he says when he opens the door. He’s using a pillowcase on the knob and throws it to the side once I’ve entered. Here it smells like onion. On the crusted electric burner, a pot boils.

“Making soup,” he says and leads me to his room. It’s dark with laundry every where. He uses a sleeping bag instead of a quilt.

“Oh yeah, my Product got damp,” he says. “So we should smoke it.”

“What?”

“Like with a pipe,” he says and mimes holding a lighter.

“That’s crack,” I say.

“I mean, it’s based cocaine with a pipe.”

“I guess,” I say, and he goes to a dress er drawer, pulls out a lockbox, puts it on the bed. He sits, pats the mattress, and I sit too. He opens the box. Inside are com partments of different colored powders and pills.

Alex removes a pipe. It’s clear, brown burn marks like bruises up and down the length of it. He opens a baggie, taps powder in the belly. He’s hunched over and his T-shirt is thin; bones poke up from the fabric like they’ve been poorly buried. I still have my puffer coat on and the warmth of it feels protective, like I’m

hugged from behind by someone bigger. Alex hands me the pipe. He lights and I inhale. Burn fills my lungs, a sudden swell of blood floods my brain. I lie back on the bed, watch him take a hit, then another. He puts the pipe on the floor.

I don’t want to fuck. I will choke with him inside me. He’s skin and bones and I’ll still suffocate. I curl into a ball. My puffer is a hand and I’m small enough to fit in it. I think of Roxanne’s meaty palms. Alex rolls me to face him.

“You okay?” he says.

“I’m not well,” I say. “I think I have it.” My face feels hot. “Does my face look red to you? Like redder than before?”

“No, babe,” he says, then shhhhs me when I try to argue.

“Don’t shhhh me,” I say.

“Shut up,” he says, but not unkind ly. “Just lay there.” He removes his shirt, my pants. He stands over me, touching himself with a sweet part to his lips that looks like it might lead to tears. He gets on his knees, enters me. Up close he’s ac ne-scarred and pale and almost pretty. I feel sick but better together, like we’re in this together, like we’re both small and scared of what we don’t yet know, what we can never set right, but somehow this makes us strong enough to bear it.

“Let me put it in your ass,” he says, and smiles. I consider the Arby’s I just ate, consider the course of digestion, the pos sibility that I might shit brisket on Alex’s dick. But I shrug, nod, smile back. He pulls out and walks naked, with an ada mant erection, to the tub of coconut oil on his dresser. He slathers his hand, jerks off a little, picks the pipe up off the floor and kneels again before me, scraping residue

from the bowl, rubbing it around the rim of my asshole, then shoving some inside. I don’t even feel it when he pushes his pe nis in, further than I’ve ever let him. But then I do feel. Overstuffed, scooped-out. Myself, my failings, my future, all blotted and blurry. Still, I don’t shit. Alex catches come in his hand, wipes it on his tossed off T-shirt. He hands the shirt to me and I wipe too. “Want more?” he says. But it’s late afternoon, and I have a party to get to.

At home I wash my hands, soap in be tween each finger and under the nails so I know I’m clean. I straighten my face, flip my cross the right way round, consider a scarf around my mouth like a bandit, de cide it’s overkill. I eye my baggie, white crust clogging the Ziploc, then put it in the medicine cabinet and set my comput er on the coffee table, adjust lampshades to get the light right. I sit, check the time. 6:45 p.m. I feel ready, neither sober nor lifted but sort of serene, no drugs neces sary. I click the link Roxanne set up.

At first I’m the only box. I click away, check the news, find a map of where the virus lives, cities and states lit red like heat centers. Men get it worse than women, a headline tells me. Women have both a be havioral and a biological advantage. Men are the actual weaker sex. I click back to the party. Roxanne’s not here yet but a few boxes have joined, women’s eager faces, nobody I know, all waiting, presumably for Roxanne. As I watch, they multiply.

“Ladies!” I say and clap my hands. “So good to see you, we’ll get started soon.” There’s affirmative noises and anxious pat ter about how everyone’s holding up. It’s nice to see them, contained in their small corners. I check the time. It’s 7 p.m. exactly.

A few more boxes light up. I text Roxanne, who doesn’t answer.

“Jerky keeps for years,” someone says.

“Hand to Jesus I never get sick and it’s all about my supplements,” someone else begins.

Five minutes pass this way and Roxanne’s still not here. I call, find myself sent straight to voicemail. I wait five more minutes, and still she’s somewhere else and this conversation is waning.

“I don’t know what’s keeping Roxanne with our Cavewoman selection,” I say. “But let’s see what else you ladies might like.” I offer up the Products I’ve stocked. “Lavender is a natural sanitizer!” I say and, “Never a better time to show your faith to the world with these Christiana Precious collectibles,” and, “the Youngage Forever Young line takes years of stress off your face.” I get aggressively close to the camera to prove my point. I promise to hand-de liver with social distance in mind.

I’m met with halfhearted haggling. There’s uncomfortable shifting around. “I think any substance needs to be hydro gen-derived and vaporized to really steril ize,” someone offers. Others frown, squint into the screen, seemingly unaware of the wrinkles caused by “hyper-expressions,” which Youngage defines as expressions of anger, concern, confusion, or joy. I point this out to no avail. It’s clear these wom en aren’t worried about their looks. They’re worried about survival. They want absent Cavewoman representative Roxanne. She has the meat they need. Grass-fed beef jerky and bone broth, free-range chicken sticks, VitaGize everything. In the end, I sell almost nothing.

Before we sign off, someone suggests

a prayer circle. We close our eyes, imagine our hands linked and vibes of healing light pulsing from our circle. “Heavenly father,” someone says and asks for our protection, the protection of those we love, the pro tection of the whole world of hurt. We fall silent after, keep all other wishes to our selves. “Amen,” we say as one. One by one our boxes go dark.

I sit for a minute and imagine Roxanne hoarding the Product for herself. I imagine her surrounded by everything she needs. Then the fantasy shifts and I see her sick on the floor of her garage, unable to stand or squat or sign in or sell. I get up, go to the guestroom, parse boxes. Piece by piece, I carry what I’ve sold to the car. I return, separate some more, leave enough for me. On my neighbor’s door, I place a box of NatchLife Lavender All-Purpose Spray and some Youngage wrinkle-reducing se rum, to be nice.

Next, I drive to Roxanne’s. I told her I have boundaries but I’m worried, and anyway, she just screwed me over. I deserve answers. As I near the house I see that all the lights are up. I slow the car to a crawl, roll down the windows, and hear a loud but sultry folk song coming from beyond the walls. I’d know it anywhere, Melissa Etheridge, an omen. I park. “Come to my window,” Melissa sings, and I get out, drawn by the music to the living room window where I stand, intending to rap on the glass, a romantic gesture, the climax of my flirtation with Roxanne and the real beginning of our romance. But the win dow I peer through shows me a different story. The silhouette of body, slight and pretty, a pixie haircut and long dangling earrings. The woman moves around the

room with familiarity, lighting candles, dancing a little to the music. I remember now what Roxanne’s wife looks like.

I slink back to my car and sit for a while listening to Melissa sing It Will Be Me and I’m the Only One, ballads of love and longing muffled by the walls of Roxanne’s house. I feel sorry for myself. I wish I could feel happy for Roxanne, safe inside with her wife, the two of them re united by crisis, fucking and feasting on hoards of Cavewoman meat. But all I can think of is my duplex, dirty and full of Products I don’t need.

I start the car, drive around town, co cooned in my puffer, and visit the two women who bothered to bid at the online party. I leave small boxes on their porch es, then text the numbers they gave, offer them the opportunity to purchase more if they like what they find.

I drive next to Arby’s. The crusty girls are off somewhere. Either that or they’re already zippered into the tent for the night. I leave three boxes of Product where they’ll find them, return to the car. What they’ll do with Lavender spray and bright ening serum and crystal crosses, I don’t know. I go around the drive-thru, order the brisket again. We create our own suc cess, our own failure, I believe that.

Sathish Kumar, Untitled. Home series 2014–2018 © Sathish Kumar Courtesy of the artist

REFRAIN Mark Irwin

Let me be silent, looking at these newborns, each one’s small thump de Thump and blush, electric & rose at once; let me be silent as during that snowstorm

between Cerro Summit and Cimarron when I pulled off Rt. 50 onto a forest road where seven elk gathered around huffing, grunting, mewling taking warmth from the car, gently knocking their antlers, their dark brown collars and beards

dripping. — Silent, as when the one, who once carried me on his shoulders, lay in his coffin, dressed in a light blue jacket like a rocket blasting off into the sky’s throat. — Silent, as the word August

is swallowed in its own slow hush. Let me be silent, entering that chancel of sunlit pines where the chanterelles invisibly step, spreading their spores. Let me be silent as when once on a hill I glimpsed my own house from a distance and was surprised, and kept on walking.

WASH DAY

Amanda Gunn

You’d tell me to bring it, every dirty scrap, stay the day with you. I’d come, always, forgetting already Sundays past, not letting myself remember my clothes full with water, slippery with oceanfresh soap in your dilapidated wash-machine, still game, still trucking, the clothes and me suspended midcycle, tumbling there until they’d rinsed, spun, fluffed dry and hot, were folded back again into sacks of crisp grain-scented muslin. Almost home. We’d watch bootlegs, action flicks, and I would lean, never quite at ease, into the soft, pliant flesh of your waist. There in the dimming Bridgeport light, until the room fell black and white, until you’d vanished, drunk yourself gone. Mostly I watched alone with your cipher, dead as a dead catfish in its eyes. From its mouth, the childmost parts of you, the muddiest bottom-fed angers. I learned not to visit you on your one day off, our Sundays. I slept in or went to church. The mall sometimes. Spent my money on extravagant, secondrate perfume, blue-jeans I couldn’t need, jewel-glint trays of food court sushi. What I’m saying is I saved myself. I saved only myself.

It happened inside a single room. For me. Forgive me

If you feel with this assertion I diminish you Or the integrity of your story.

But it’s true: I was nowhere, there, On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds Mine to the left, my brother’s to the right Counting the tiny holes

In the radiator cover, dark eyes Piercing through painted-white metal.

When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was. Not even other nothings, like me. Do you think I take from you? I do not take from you, I am you.

AFTER Rae Armantrout

Fern shapes will be formed by retreating waves.

Clouds will feather and branch.

No matter what is dead, they will correspond.

*

No matter what has died clouds will bud and calve

if beauty is what matters, there’s that.

*

If beauty is what matters, we’ll enjoy it

for nothing, from nowhere, no matter who is gone.

LOOK AT YOU, FOX L. Lamar Wilson

As if this yellowed pulp were runway, canvas, & clay

As if you’re fresh from a spring shower & running late To brunch with your good Judy Jean Beavertons

As if the coyote who’s been trailing your musk Since September stole these cedars’ luster

Is friend, not menace as if You know he wants to woo, Not devour, you, against his nature

As if you know there’s no difference, So why bother worrying your pretty Little self with dodging Fate?

As if that rattler carcass you leapt over, Stinking up the joint, won’t sully your strut

Across this concrete one bit You’ve let the sun burnish the bush

Of your tanned tail, just so, & now hints of blond Glint when you flex your left hip uh huh, Sis

Look at you, looking at me, trying not to notice How we redbones, turning redder still, keep blushing at The thought of each other stalking Burden Hill

Like it belongs to only us, once singular

Against the sky’s certain doom, now a little less alone & feeling quite nicely, for maybe the first & last time Running about our Mothers’Fathers’ business, How could we not stop, just for a second, to note The grace of happenstance, then run on?

How could we not look back?

HIGH AND POSH Maggie Millner

We were stoned out of our minds and had convinced ourselves the backside of the dog ahead of us looked exactly like a woman wearing fur: the anus her face, the tail her blonde bouffant, the legs her legs, ending in dark pumps on which she strode with sprightly purpose, as if late to the opera.

K. grew suddenly afraid the dog’s owner could hear us speaking loudly in the character of the pretend woman, saying things like, “Be a lamb and fetch my housecoat,” and “Peter, that credenza is my birthright,” in a voice like Ava Gardner’s in Show Boat, high and posh.

But J. said, “Don’t worry, little cabbage even if they heard us, why would they assume we were ventriloquizing their Pomeranian’s ass?” and K. calmed down at that.

The sun was melting over Central Park when we stopped to watch the sledders take their final runs, and the dog continued uptown like a rich stranger, and I was in love with my friends, who in ten years had never once let me feel stupid or alone anytime we were walking together.

SOME REFLECTIONS

Michael Kleber-Diggs

I held her body close to my chest and hoped she could hear my heart — that it would be familiar and unique. She had arrived in a flash

after breastfeeding class, a night I first learned nature can be complicated. She was early — coated in meconium, strangled somewhat by a natal noose, a little bit jaundiced almost six weeks early & not yet strong enough to nurse at her mother’s breasts.

I was made to help. I was advised to wear loose shirts, taught to wash my hands, then draw pre-pumped milk from a warmed plastic bag into a sterile syringe

set to 16 ccs, to push any air out, taught to attach a thin tube from the syringe to my pinky with surgical tape, to place that finger right by my nipple, show her the source of nourishment, bring her slowly close to me, like a mother would.

I helped a little sometimes. I pressed the plunger a little sometimes. I wanted to be sufficient. Even then

I took care to take it all in our daze on the couch, the living room we had in the house we owned

two houses & 20 years ago, Sundays when her mother was away & we shared our daddy daughter days.

Even then, I made sure to remember nesting her

in a nursing pillow, how it curved in on itself like a sleeping doe, what it felt like to bring her to my chest, dust falling slowly around us,

visible in sunrays streaming through antique glass

the way we shimmered in that light. The goal was to make myself unnecessary, help her gain strength enough not to need

me. I recall wanting that time to stay & go away

complicated, complicated. I made sure to remember the first time I saw her see herself reflected in my irises, what it felt like to see myself as myself but also

myself as someone else in her eyes, how I sensed

both of us expanding like pupils, and how

I too became suddenly full enough to ache.

Anna Dorn is a writer in support of Calexit.

CONTRIBUTORS

Alicia Andrzejewski is an assistant professor at the College of William & Mary.

Born and educated in Pakistan, Rasheed Araeen (b. 1935) trained as an engineer before moving to Europe in the 1960s to become one of the pioneers of minimalist sculpture in Britain. However, he received no institutional recognition for his contribution to the modernist discourse in this country, being sidelined as a non-European whose work was consis tently evaluated within the context of post-colonial structures.

As a result of this, in the 1970s and 1980s his work in performance, photography, painting and sculpture began to develop an overtly political content which drew attention to the way in which black artists were invisible within the dominant Eurocentric culture. Through his activities as a publisher, writer, curator and artist he is one of the pivotal figures in establishing a black voice in the British arts.

Araeen’s minimalist, geometric structures in which vertical and horizontal lines are held together by a network of diagonals (like the bracing struts used to strengthen latticed engineering construc tions) play on the links between Eastern and Western thought and the frameworks of social institutions and aesthetics.

His works are included in important private and public collections across the world. Rasheed lives and works in London, UK.

David Woo says that Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan, 2022) “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.” Her book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her other books include Partly: New and Selected Poems, Just Saying, Money Shot, and Versed, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Andrew Durbin is the editor of frieze and the author of Skyland (Nightboat, 2020). He lives in London. Katia Gregor has worked as a theatrical agent, press agent, and English as a Foreign Language teacher. She writes fiction, non-fiction and plays, and a regu lar blog as ScribeDoll. She is also a literary translator from Italian and French.

Amanda Gunn’s debut collection, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she works on poetry and Black pleasure.

Mark Irwin is the author of 11 collections of poetry. He has also translated three volumes of poetry. Recognition for his work includes a Discovery/The Nation Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Lilly Foundation, and NEA.

Maryam Jafri is an artist working across diverse media including expanded sculpture, video, and photography, with a specific interest in questioning the cultural and visual representations of history and political economy and their impact on our quotid ian experience. Her pointed, often mordant works address issues including the latest mutations in iden tity-fueled capitalism such as personalization and the passion economy (Hi Maryam, 2021) to photo/text works focusing on the digitalization of historical im ages and the consequences for issues cultural mem ory and copyright law (Disappearance Online, 2021) to works examining wellness and precarity (Wellness Post-Industrial Complex, 2017) to sculptural instal lations focusing on the impact of graphic design, branding, and display on our everyday habits (Generic Corner, 2015, Product Recall: An Index of Innovation, 2014–2015). Jafri is currently hard at work on No Lithium, No Work—a sculptural installation informed by the fact that lithium is both the main component in rechargeable batteries, powering everything from electric cars to smart phones to solar panels, and also

the main treatment for mood disorders, specifically bipolar disorder and severe anxiety. She holds a BA in English and American Literature from Brown University and an MA from NYU/Tisch.

Porochista Khakpour is the author of four books. She is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at The Evergreen Review. She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, BOMB, Elle, Paper, and many other publications. She is currently in a Lyft from Long Beach.

Michael Kleber-Diggs is the author of Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. “Some Reflections” is built from memories of early days with his daughter.

Shiv Kotecha is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). His writ ing on contemporary art, film, and literature appears in publications such as 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, frieze, and The Nation. With the artist Pradeep Dalal, he coedits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He lives in New York.

Sathish Kumar was born and brought up in a small town named Kanchipuram in Southern India. He has been making photographs since the age of sixteen when his uncle gifted him a point-and-shoot film camera. Since then he has been carrying his camera everywhere from school picnics to play grounds to faraway mountains- photographing and recording his family, friends, and his everyday exis tence. He is currently based out of Chennai, India.

Michael McCanne writes all kinds of things.

Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, forthcom ing from FSG in early 2023. Her poems have ap peared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review. Kid Congo Powers is a guitarist and singer-song writer best known for his work with The Gun Club, The Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He

is currently the frontman for Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Allie Rowbottom is the author of the New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir Jell-O Girls. Her de but novel, Aesthetica, is forthcoming from Soho Press in November 2022.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017). He is an assis tant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University.

Bob Smith was born in Springfield, MA in 1944. Awarded a traveling scholarship by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1969, he went to Europe, settling in Madrid then Morocco. Between 1971 and 1977, Smith was regularly exhibited across Europe, including the 1973 Biennale de Paris. In 1977, Bob Smith returned to New York City. Sharing a loft with video artist Michel Auder he became friends with many artists and poets. In the harsh realities of the city, his work of the 80s took a new turn getting interested in people’s fantasies and dreams, first with the wave of Egyptomania around the large exhibition “The Treasues of Tutankhamon” organized by the Metropolitan Museum and soon followed by his Sleepers & Dreamers’ series of paintings inspired by his participation in some of Carole Bovoso’s (Ione) dream workshops. By the late eighties, Smith moved to Miami. During this time, he was battling debili tating symptoms of AIDS but found joy in creating art and being active in various art collectives and organizations. Smith passed away in Miami, Florida in 1990.

Sadie Rebecca Starnes has eclectic interests. Paul Thompson is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, New York, Pitchfork, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), a Thom Gunn Award finalist, and associate producer of The Changing Same

(POV Shorts, 2019), which streams at American Documentary and airs on PBS. Recent poems and essays have appeared in Interim, The New York Times, NPR, Oxford American, Poetry, south, and elsewhere. Wilson, who spent nearly two decades in the nation’s top newsrooms, teaches at Florida State University and the Mississippi University for Women.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is an award-winning interdis ciplinary artist, poet, and author of six collections of hybrid and experimental works spanning poetry, fiction, and visual art. He is professor of creative writing and literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Hu Ying is professor of modern Chinese literature at UC Irvine. She has translated classical and modern literature, from Chinese and from English, mostly of fiction but also some poetry, drama, and literary theory.

Xue Yiwei has a BSc in computer science, an MA in literature, and a PhD in linguistics. He is the acclaimed author of 20 books, including Traveling with Marco Polo and Shenzheners. His books have been translated into English, French, and Swedish. He lives in Montreal.

Music Cultures

Distillation of Sound Dub and the Creation of Culture

Eric Abbey

Distillation of Sound focuses on the original music of Jamaica and how dub reggae expanded and shifted Jamaican culture. Abbey discusses the separation between dub as a product and dub as an act of the engineer.

Paper $29.00

Heavy Metal Armour

A Visual Study of Battle Jackets

Thomas Cardwell

This lavishly illustrated study of the heavy metal battle jacket in a historical and cultural context features a series of detailed paintings that visually document examples of jackets alongside photographic portraits of the fans that wear them.

Cloth $46.50

PUNK! Las Américas Edition

Edited by Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, Rodrigo Quijano, and Shane Greene

Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (including interviews, zines, poetry, and visual segments) into a single volume, the book explores punk life through its multiple registers: vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays, and underground literary expression.

Global Punk Series

Paper $39.95

Blank Canvas

Art School Creativity from Punk to New Wave

Simon Strange

Tracing lines from the Bauhaus “blank slate” through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits, Blank Canvas draws on interviews with giants of the genre across the spectrums of music, gender, and race.

Global Punk Series Paper $35.95

Forthcoming in December 2022