LARB Quarterly, no. 36: Are you content?

A Miscellany from Reaktion

Song Noir

Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

Alex Harvey

“I would recommend it to anyone who loves music, specifically Tom Waits, or those that just like a great biography. Go and buy this book, you will not regret it.”—With Just a Hint of Mayhem (UK)   REVERB

Paper $15.00

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ritchie Robertson

“This type of balanced and informed account is rare in Nietzsche scholarship, and Robertson’s scrupulous incorporation of previous research and exceptionally lucid prose make this book all the more welcome.”—Robert C. Holub, Ohio State University   CRITICAL LIVES

Paper $19.00

Counter-Texts

Language in Contemporary Art

Kim Dhillon

“A necessary and compelling examination of how words and language can disrupt the status-quo and challenge power through dynamic artistic media.”

—Waubgeshig Rice, author of Moon of the Crusted Snow

ART SINCE THE ’80s

Paper $32.00

Now in Paperback A Band with Built-In Hate

The Who from Pop Art to Punk

Peter Stanfield

“Stanfield locates the Who (and crucially their peak years, during which they were, he writes ‘not copyists but innovators’) at a boundary-breaking intersection of pop and art-rock.”—Irish Times

Paper $16.00

Race in the Machine

A Novel Account

Quincy Thomas Stewart

The Socialist Patriot

George Orwell and War

Peter Stansky

Undesirables

A Holocaust Journey to North Africa

Aomar Boum, Illustrated by Nadjib Berber

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Hinge Points

An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program

Siegfried S. Hecker, with Elliot A. Serbin

India Is Broken

A People Betrayed, Independence to Today

Ashoka Mody

The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub

Or, How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka

Jacob Norris

WORLDING THE MIDDLE EAST

The Souls of White Jokes

How Racist Humor Fuels

White Supremacy

Raúl Pérez

sup.org

stanfordpress.typepad.com

In the Nation’s Service

The Life and Times of George P. Shultz

Philip Taubman

THE LARB QUARTERLY

No. 36

Publisher: Tom Lutz

Editor-In-Chief: Michelle Chihara

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

Social Media Director: Maya Chen

Publications Coordinator: Danielle Clough

Ad Sales: Bill Harper

Contributing Editors: Aaron Bady, Annie Berke, 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, Darryl Holter, Steven Lavine, Eric Lax, Tom Lutz, Susan Morse, Sharon Nazarian, Lynne Thompson, Barbara Voron, Matthew Weiner, Jon Wiener, Jamie Wolf

Interns and Volunteers: Harriet Taylor, Gisselle

Reyes Medina

Cover Art: Tishan Hsu, Fingerpainting 2, 1994 Silkscreen ink, acrylic on canvas, 69 x 69 inches

Photo: Stephen Faught © 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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

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

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

by YXTA MAYA MURRAY

“This tale of Southern California’s long-hidden nuclear catastrophe is a deeply compassionate, intimate, and powerfully human work. A beautiful and haunting book.”

HÉCTOR TOBAR, author of The Last Great Road Bum

Four of the Three Musketeers, Updated Edition

by ROBERT BADER

“A new benchmark in Marx scholarship.” Los Angeles Times

www.nupress.northwestern.edu

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 36 WINTER 2022

Are you content?

11 WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Open Mike Eagle in conversation with

25 THE WATER’S EDGE

Rosa Boshier González

30 BLACK(ENED) (DIS)SATISFACTION

Kali Tambreé ESSAYS

38 GHOST NOVEL

Hervé Guibert, trans. Dana Lupo 42 EAT, PRAY, KNOW WHEN TO HOLD ’EM Michelle Chihara

WHY WE DON’T TALK NEARLY ENOUGH ABOUT FAERIE PORN

Thao Thai

62 WHOSE RAW MATERIALS?

Daisy Hildyard

84 UGLY CATS AND THE LONELINESS

FICTION

113 DICAPRIOLOGY

Kate Durbin

118 THE STARLET AND THE COUGAR

Max Lawton

POETRY

129 I LIVED HOW I DIED.

Maya Martinez

133 NO FAILED TREES

Brian Whitener

136 WATER & RICE

Vi Khi Nao

138 ME AND THE EARTH, DESTROYING ONE ANOTHER

Elaine Kahn

139 THE HISTORY OF LIGHTNING

Ama Codjoe

140 [HORNS WITHIN]

Devon Walker-Figueroa

PORTFOLIO

72 BERNADETTE MAYER AND TISHAN HSU

with an Introduction to Bernadette

Mayer's Memory by Perwana Nazif

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Reader,

Here, as promised is your content: 144 pages Husky Smooth Book White (both the 50- and 80-pound variety) trimmed to 6.8 by 9 inches, creased, and PUR Perfectbound, unpacked and packed again, bulk-shipped media-mail to your mailbox or to a retail location from where they will soon be refunded at our expense and destroyed as per the affidavit agreement. Essays, stories, poems, letters, art, and art writing acquired and edited and sold against advertising. Some also appear online, although we can assure you that they are not the only pieces available online.

The rights and permissions process is labyrinthine and honestly quite dull; if (when!) you post photos of our content, please tag us, the writers, your friends, their friends, your teachers, your students, your enemies. You know do what feels right.

We would also like to remind you that we are always grateful for submissions. On page 117 you will find a PO Box address to which you can send your most closely guarded regrets, your fears, the notes from your analyst. We will make of it what we will.

Just Kidding, The Editors

FOR THOSE who are natural contrarians, certain substantial writers like Cendrars, Borges, or Nabokov constantly stimulate and entertain (especially if they respect cats). My current literary hero, Giacomo Donis, a Venetian writing in English, having long renounced his US citizenship (see The Empty Shield, 2020), has no living peer. An Abyss of Dreams, described as a ‘meta-memoir,’ amiably proposes Plato as the father of modern totalitarianism. With a mixture of Vian’s absurdism, Benjamin’s intellectualism  and Iain Sinclair’s defiant eclecticism, two substantial novellas and commentaries  attempt to confront Freud and pretty much every major thinker since Aristotle. Stunning!

— MICHAEL MOORCOCK, New Statesman Books of the Year 2022

In phantasmagoric representations night presses in from all sides; suddenly a bloody head darts out—there another white form, and just as suddenly they vanish. We see it when we look a human being in the eye—entering a night that becomes terrible. What is it? What is reaching out from this eye? I see it! It is the night of the world.

— G.W.F. Hegel

Shearsman Books

www.shearsman.com

A decision. Thinking. Imagining. An idea just pops into my head. Fine. No problem. The problem is that then I start to chase it. Like a cat chasing her tail. OK. But, then, this idea I’m chasing leads me to another idea. And I chase it. From one idea, another. Another. Another again. Free association. How free? What association.

— The Empty Shield, epigraph to An Abyss of Dreams

Eteocles ‘bad decision’ at the 7th Gate of Thebes. Putin’s ‘bad decision’ at the Great Gate of NATO. In The Empty Shield I do not stop at the surface of facts, as [practically] all political writing does. People have gotten tired of the ‘Ukraine facts.’ But this book is radical, and radical is important, and much needed, and badly missing, if not missed, because no one [else] asks what a political decision is in and for itself.

it’s the abyss that keeps us all alive, only the abyss, — Thomas Bernhard

facing page:

Tishan Hsu

Detail of Watching 2, 2021

UV cured inkjet, acrylic, silicone on wood, 72 x 48 x 3 inches

above:

Tishan Hsu

Biocube, 1988

Plywood, ceramic tile, stainless steel, acrylic, rubber, 35 1/2 x 44 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches

Photo: Stephen Faught

© 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photo: Kyle Knodell

© 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

A little over a decade ago, the government peered into Open Mike Eagle’s brain. The rapper from Chicago’s South Side had seen that the National Institutes of Health was studying live MRI scans of improvisatory keyboard players and, along with a producer friend, he offered to design and co-author a study of rappers as they freestyled. He served as the test case. The findings (e.g., “Lyrical improvisation appears to be characterized by altered relationships between regions coupling intention and action”) were released in the journal

Open Mike Eagle in conversation with Paul Thompson

“Through a thorough philosophical accounting of the moral imperatives of living in a globalized society, Butler makes a rousing case for pushing progressive policies as a response to the disruptions of the pandemic. Thoughtful and profound, this hits the mark.”

—Publishers Weekly

“From one of our finest critics, an elegant and deftly argued contribution to our appreciation of the great and glorious Preston Sturges. Stuart Klawans teases out inspired connections in the culture surrounding the director—the books, paintings, and legends that fed the artistry of a man who refused to call himself an artist. The kind of book that makes you want to dive back into the films for fresh stimulation and delight.”

Molly Haskell, film critic and author

“Gibson pushes past both eyerolling dismissals of Franzen and the uncritical accolades of Oprah and Time magazine and takes the novels seriously as complex, if flawed, works of fiction that inspire and reward immersive and close reading.”

Briallen Hopper, author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“Absolutely fascinating, and a terrific lesson in how to tell good stories. Whether you seek instruction, or simply to know why some podcasts are better than others, this book is for you.”

Olya Booyar, head of radio, Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union

“Finally! I have been waiting for years for someone to give The Last Samurai, the most inventive and delightful novel of the twentyfirst century, the critical attention it deserves. Lee Konstantinou has done it, and he has done it with amazing insight, clarity, and humor.”

Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker

Scientific Reports from academic publisher Springer Nature, then aggregated by blogs and news sites. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the vitriol,” Eagle says over coffee at a restaurant in Leimert Park. “The common idea among the people in these comment sections was that there was nothing inside the brain of a rapper. ‘What are you looking for?’”

Ironically, Eagle has made the goodfaith version of that question central to his work. After moving to Los Angeles in 2004, he became part of the second wave of rappers at Project Blowed, the open-mic workshop that was founded in Leimert 10 years prior and has served ever since as the hub for the city’s underground and avant-garde MCs. In the 2010s, Eagle’s solo albums including 2011’s Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes, his 2014 national breakthrough Dark Comedy, and 2017’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, a rumination on the demolished Chicago housing project where his relatives lived probed his psyche and the machinery, often self-operated, designed to grind it into something consumable.

In 2019, The New Negroes, a series of standup performances and high-concept music videos hosted by Eagle and the comedian Baron Vaughn, premiered on Comedy Central. It was canceled after one season. On the day before the release of his eighth solo album, A Tape Called Component System with the Auto Reverse, Eagle and I spoke about seeing his face on billboards, dodging voicemails from his loved ones, and being lied to by Viacom.

Paul Thompson: It still makes me laugh: the image of scientists standing around in lab coats, squinting at a monitor, going,

“Do you think that was written?”

Open Mike Eagle: [Laughs.] That’s the funny thing though: part of what they did was make sure you went in with a memorized rhyme first.

As a control. Exactly.

You have a song called “No Selling,” which is named for the practice from wrestling, and from battle rap, of acting as if your opponent isn’t fazing you, even if he is. But on your records, you’re often seeming to exaggerate the effort, the strain, the sense that you’re running out of breath or ideas. On “Multi-Game Arcade Cabinet,” you really spiral out toward the end.

With that verse, before I even wrote a bar, I had the energy I wanted in my head. And so, there was this very conscious choice of where the space went between the bars: “Secret history … it was all me and Mitski.” The way that stretches across it’s three rhymes: phase three, paisley, and Count Bass D but the way that that evolves, the energy there is between the words.

So that verse is completely written —

But the energy is freestyled.

Exactly. I associate the way each new rhyme and each new reference and idea is this trump card that can only exist if it tops the last one. That comes from the thousands and thousands of hours of freestyling, right?

Congratulations to the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Winners

Presented by the Association for Jewish Studies

WINNERS FINALISTS

BIBLICAL STUDIES, RABBINICS, AND JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE IN ANTIQUITY

Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism

Princeton University Press

SARIT KATTAN GRIBETZ

Fordham University

JEWS AND THE ARTS: MUSIC, PERFORMANCE, AND VISUAL

A City in Fragments:

Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem

Stanford University Press

YAIR WALLACH

SOAS University of London

MODERN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE: EUROPE AND ISRAEL

Yiddish in Israel: A History

Indiana University Press

RACHEL ROJANSKI

Brown University

SOCIAL SCIENCE, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND FOLKLORE

Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa

Duke University Press

NOAH TAMARKIN

Cornell University

BIBLICAL STUDIES, RABBINICS, AND JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE IN ANTIQUITY

The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstrual Impurity and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context

Oxford University Press

SHAI SECUNDA

Bard College

JEWS AND THE ARTS: MUSIC, PERFORMANCE, AND VISUAL

Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989

Oxford University Press

TINA FRÜHAUF

Columbia University/The Graduate Center, CUNY

MODERN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE: EUROPE AND ISRAEL

A Citizen of Yiddishland: Dovid Sfard and the Jewish Communist Milieu in Poland

Peter Lang

JOANNA NALEWAJKO-KULIKOV

Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences

SOCIAL SCIENCE, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND FOLKLORE

Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age

Princeton University Press

AYALA FADER

Fordham University

This book award program has been made possible by generous funding from Jordan Schnitzer through the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Family Fund at the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation.

One hundred percent. Somebody told me, in high school, that the best writtens sound like freestyles and the best freestyles sound like writtens. And I think I didn’t even really know what that meant until a couple years ago. I think what it’s trying to identify is that sense of urgency in a freestyle how it sounds like you’re reaching for something, somewhere, and delivering it in real time. When writtens have that energy, it feels fresh and urgent.

You have to have that urgency but also the innate rhythm and style to not sound desperate.

Honestly, I don’t mind a little desperation poured onto it. There’s some in that verse for me.

But like you say on the new record, “If you can’t dance good then you probably can’t rap.” A few months ago, I was hiking and I ran into [All City Jimmy, the legendary battle rapper and longtime collaborator of Eagle’s]. We started talking about this theory of dancing and rapping. One of his things was that, sure, there’s the rhythm component, but the social organism and hierarchy of a rap group also has to come from dancing, because there’s no place where someone can hide. Literally, when you’re performing, you can’t fool people as to whether you’re a good dancer. Before someone puts out music, they can kind of intellectualize it. But at a certain point, you have to rap outside. I was thinking just about the rhythmic aspects, but he was like, “No, it’s the whole thing, from the ’80s to jerking.”

I hadn’t even thought about it that far, but, yeah, the OGs! There’s a big connection between L.A. underground rap and L.A. underground dance. The grooving style they used to do is very close to the approach to rapping out here. Freestyling, that’s the dancing here. I was a breaker, too, so I would get in the rap cyphers and the breaking cyphers, and I’d notice the difference between what the South Side of Chicago taught me to emphasize versus what the natural values of this place are. With rap, specifically in the part of [Chicago] I came up in, it was about punch lines. Here it was style and cadence. And then with dance, the South Side emphasized power moves, where here it’s literal style and groove.

So much gets written about its roots in disco, R & B, and funk, but a lot of rap of L.A. rap in particular stems from the electro scene. Chicago’s inextricable, in some ways, from house.

Miami bass.

Right. It’s dance music. I think people forget it’s a rhythmic function.

You know, it’s funny, I think I’m part of the people who try to make it unmusical, and try to really deconstruct everything, and put the words in front of everything. But at the end of the day, yeah: it’s a rhythmic activity.

But you can only deconstruct it so far, because anti-rhythms become the new rhythms, broken forms are new forms.

Jaguars’ Tomb by Angélica Gorodischer

Translated by Amalia Gladhart

258 pages, 5.5 in x 8.5 in $19.95

Winner of the 2022 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize

“One of the highest points of Gorodischer’s poetic art.”

Book Radar

“The whole novel can only be read as a poetic of writing, an institutional attempt to create a new world.” Adrián Ferrero, National University of La Plata

Also available in English from VUP

BOOKSTOBRING NEWYEAR INTO THE

“An exceptional volume and essential for anyone who wants to understand the constitutional debate about Roe.”

nyupress.org

Relying on interviews with college students themselves.... this groundbreaking book is required reading.”

An intimate tour de is a necessary intervention into the human quest to understand pain.”

Beautifully illustrates how humor can help us shape the world into what we hope it could be.”

Roy Wood Jr. Comedian, Correspondent, The Daily Show

Nadine Strossen

E. Patrick Johnson

True, and there’s only so far you can go in deconstructing rap until it just becomes either spoken word or bad. [Laughs.]

You have the tribute song for MF DOOM on here, and I was thinking about how, on 1999’s Operation: Doomsday, he’s rapping in these pretty avant-garde ways, over the ends of bars and quote-unquote offbeat. But by the time he gets into the 2000s if you listen to 2004’s MM..FOOD he is the pocket. I can’t think of another rapper whose style is obviously his own from period to period in his career, but if you broke down the rhythmic elements on paper or on a computer, it would scan as completely different. [Rapper billy] woods once described to me the DOOM on [his final solo album, 2009’s] Born Like This as “driving a truck through the beat.”

In some senses, yeah. But on other songs, everybody is expecting him to drive a funny car down the straightaway, and before he even gets in the car, he pours grease all over the track. I feel like the MF DOOM on Doomsday is like, drunk, trying to survive, and has ideas and concepts he very much believes in. But he’s recording like he’s not going to live much longer. There’s an embrace of the raw that’s both aesthetic and alcoholic specifically alcoholic. And as the character progresses and the career gets going, it becomes more precise.

Like math.

It’s math. And then Born Like This is like, “Fuck math. No. I’m going to destroy the math.”

As you age, are there fewer records that come out in a given year you find yourself emotionally attaching to the way you might have at 16?

Absolutely. I don’t even … I mean, honestly, I have ruined it for myself. It can’t ever be what it was. Ever.

From making it your career?

Because of my brain because it’s 65 percent business.

This is what I wanted to talk about. I think so often about lyrics of yours like “I’m checking last year’s numbers and it’s not bad / I probably need to start another podcast” and “Fuck music, sell shirt screens.” Those lines are both presented humorously; I know they’re not jokes.

They’re not jokes.

How do you guard against that 65 percent bleeding into the creative process? More generally, how do you not go insane?

I have a few different outlets. Some of that is for revenue; some of that is for sanity. The best way for me to move creatively is from different type of project to different type of project. What feels most efficient and optimal for me is to make an album, then write a script, then tape a season of a podcast, then make an album, then write a script … In order to not be forgotten, you have to engage in business cycles. You have to have a product. When Black Thought’s album came out last summer, I was talking to Brother Ali, and we were like, “It’s

amazing how everyone forgets how dope he is.” But that’s the business cycle. It’s not that people literally forget; it’s that you have to check off the boxes again.

Before Brick Body, we talked about how your album was going to come out around the same time as Kendrick Lamar’s, and they were going to appear as little thumbnails next to one another on streaming platforms. And that’s illusory in one way; it obscures disparities in resources and reach. But people forget that the overhead to simply get the thumbnail there is overwhelming.

It is. There’s existing in a technical sense getting that box on Spotify but beyond that there’s existing in a cultural sense. Which is … this is the problem. All anybody doing this wants is to constantly exist more fully.

In a personal, self-actualized way? Or in terms of commercial reach?

I mean cultural import. And that’s the thing even if you’re behind the mask like DOOM , you want your work to exist on that level. Even if it’s just to make money. There’s nobody doing this who doesn’t want that. But without major label resources, you’ve got to do so much work to exist in the literal sense, and not have the existence you actually want to have, which is way beyond most of our reach. All of us who do this, we have a vision for what we want it to be. We all have this shit in our hearts that we want out, not talked about in hushed circles. Like I said, even if you don’t want your face visible even if you don’t want to be a personality

you want your work to be fucking everywhere. You want to walk into coffee shops and hear your music. You want to get your shit licensed in every commercial, every movie. I don’t think there’s anybody doing this who wants limited reach.

Have you been offered things that might have given you that reach, but with tradeoffs you couldn’t stomach?

No.

You haven’t turned down any of these things you hear about —

No. I’ve never been in those positions, that I’m aware of. Honestly, I feel like … ah, now I’m thinking about The New Negroes. There were people at Viacom who wanted what we worked on, and by proxy me, to be very successful, with a giant corporate push. That’s probably the closest I’ve ever come to being in any sort of position to be that visible. But the other side of that is there were other people at Viacom who did not want us to be very successful.

Did someone say that to you explicitly?

We had some very difficult meetings before that show even came out. We came face to face with people who did not get what we were doing, didn’t like what we were doing and these were people who were ultimately going to be tasked with working on the show. I think, if anything, they worked against it. They didn’t want it to succeed.

I know this is a naïve thing to say, but if you’re Viacom and the show is already in

production, doesn’t everyone win if it’s successful?

Viacom is a very big company. There are a lot of people who aren’t connected to a show in any sort of creative way who still have to work on it. They have to sell it, get advertising on it. They have a giant building in L.A., a giant building in New York, and there was a lot of misalignment between those two buildings. I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about this shit, but I’ll say this: the central problem, the original sin of our show, was the title.

I was in the giant building in L.A., in a room with you, Baron, and a handful of TV critics when they screened the first two episodes.

This is so funny I forgot you were there.

There was one older, Black critic, and he wouldn’t move off the title. I remember you and Baron each giving him answers you’d given in interviews, giving new ones, being pretty thorough and personable. And he didn’t seem mad or offended. He was just like, “I don’t get it.” And I watched you and Baron both just [stares blankly].

And I’ll tell you this: later that day, right after y’all left, we had another meeting, and it was way worse. That day, in that room, was when we met the people inside of Viacom who [didn’t like the show].

But the title kind of was the show’s project. You don’t call it Baron and Mike’s Comedy Hour.

You don’t. But if you call it The New Negroes, then that’s all we ever get to talk about. It dominated the conversation in so many different phases. And like you said, the gentleman sitting at the press screening that’s one red flag. We got red flag after red flag after red flag after red flag. Ultimately, when I look back on it, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we kept making a choice.” And I think we put ourselves in a rough position by holding on to what we thought was the right thing to do.

If you could go back, would you change that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Making that show ended up hurting a lot. It ended up being a painful process.

Because of the cancellation?

Because of the amount of ourselves that we poured into it and the fighting we had to do for so many different things. Even the conversations around renewal versus cancellation were painful. We weren’t even allowed, to me, the dignity of straight conversations. Basically, we were told, “Your show costs too much to be a standup show.” And we were expensive: we had an expensive set built, the videos were expensive, and it ended up costing way more than most standup shows. So, we were told: “Get it under budget, get it to this number and we’ll figure it out.” We did that and it wasn’t easy. It basically involved us reconstituting the show. Season two would have looked very different. The music video component would have been done completely differently, probably as in-studio performances.

‘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

really do work. Be it planning your first system, moving it to a new home or adding an extra shelf, every single interaction is handled with love, from Vitsœ…

West 3rd Street

Los Angeles

Design Dieter Rams vitsoe.com

“We love love love our Vitsœ system.

The build quality and easiness of assembly is amazing, but it was your service that made the whole process such a joy.”

Photo by Melvin T

And that was a giant sacrifice, because the show we pitched them was standup and a music video. I was going to be the one who had to do my thing in a lower-rent kind of way. I agreed to do that, and we still got canceled. So, my feeling was, we were never going to get renewed. It was just a line they were telling us.

A fool’s errand.

Yeah. I think they bought the show because of the title, then started regretting it very early on.

This is still at a time when there were billboards with your face on them. How did that feel?

Amazing. Honestly, amazing. Like, “pinch me” shit. But I don’t think [the billboards were] that effective. Conceptually, I got it: there was a certain psychedelia that it meant to symbolize. A little bit of Afrofuturism. But ultimately, it was kind of a mess I don’t mean to criticize the designers, it’s a good execution of what it’s meant to be. But at the end of the day, we needed a black billboard with “NEW NEGROES ” in white letters. Something with punch.

But they were hedging.

Our entire experience with them was them hedging.

You come out of that period with an album called Anime, Trauma and Divorce. This is from The New York Times: “Even as he has been praised for his honesty, Eagle admitted he has felt guilty of holding back

the whole truth before now. ‘I feel like I’ve been curating my own existence,’ he said. ‘Every album, there have been three or four songs I’ve ended up pulling because they were too personal. The dark stuff is always hidden out of view.’” Did you stop censoring yourself?

There were no songs pulled [from A, T and D]. There was one song I ended up rewriting, only because I was literally doing therapeutic writing. This one song came out and I was like, “Oh, this isn’t even a song. This is just straight bellyaching for two minutes. This isn’t entertaining.”

This makes me think of the line on “Southside Eagle”: “It hit me like a ton of bricks at the interview / I made a audio mural you can walk through / About my auntie that I don’t even talk to.” It sounds like you felt guilty about commodifying a family member’s story.

I was doing an interview in … Chicago? I know I wasn’t at home. And they asked me about my aunt. It’s such an obvious question, right? “My Auntie’s Building” is a whole damn song [on the album]. And it hit me: I don’t know how she’s doing. Which is chilling. Because it’s also kind of representative of how I’ve lived my life.

“I’m Orson Welles avoiding voicemail.”

“I think I’m Orson Welles avoiding voicemail.” That’s clear. I’m way less rich.

Yeah, that’s a guy with resources: he was in his 20s and they said, “Take it.” I think they regretted it right away.

But they didn’t take it away from him.

So, for years you put out these very personal records and then, on subsequent songs and in interviews, say you regret holding back. Now that you’ve put out an album without that self-censorship, does there become pressure to repeat that or even top it, in terms of how personally revealing your work becomes?

No. There was a cost to me putting out Anime, Trauma and Divorce. And it was my decision I’m not blaming anyone else. I wasn’t polling to see what people wanted. I needed to make that album for my survival. And I put it out because it’s what I made. But there was a cost to that. And I’m the only one who pays it. I made it so my ex-wife didn’t have to pay it. My son … I think he has to pay it a little bit.

In the sense that he raps on it? Or in the sense that it’s about his parents?

In the sense that he’s on it. He’s going to be 14; he doesn’t like how young he sounds on it, and he’s got friends who are into rap who might find it and mess with him. He has to pay the cost a little bit because he was too young to really make that decision on his own, even though he told me he wanted to a hundred times. It meant a lot to me it still means a lot to me that he’s on there.

What do you mean that you made it so your ex-wife doesn’t have to pay it?

It’s personal in terms of how I felt about things, but it wasn’t a tell-all. It’s not gory

details. And I’m not even saying there was anything I needed to protect her from it was just literally part of my directive in making it, making sure it wasn’t going to mess with her life.

A lot of A-list rap is gossip now.

I’m not even positioned in a way where that would have garnered me much.

There’s one other line from the album I can’t get out of my head and it’s not from you, it’s from Serengeti. It’s so deadpan; it’s so Geti. “L.A.: what a great place to come and stay.”

[Laughs.] Well, there’s a story behind that, but I can’t give it to you right now.

THE WATER’S EDGE

On Laura Aguilar’s photography

by Rosa Boshier González

It’s December 20, 2020, and 65 degrees in Los Angeles, California. I’m driving along Alvarado to meet a friend at Echo Park. I slow down to take in the yellow storefronts of casas de empeño, the iron grills of Thai restaurants not yet open, a panadería roughly painted lavender, and the trapezoid motel signs dotting the horizon. I’ve been gone four months and the sky cracked open bright with these views makes me wonder why I ever left this city.

I’ve been in the car a lot on this trip to Los Angeles, acting like a stranger in my own city, much to the disapproval of my sister. “Hospitals are packed,” she scolds me, “What’s going to happen if you get into an accident?” Despite the risk, I can’t resist the act of driving. I marvel at my hands on the wheel, Sunset Boulevard widening in their background. It’s a way of life I surprised myself by missing over the past months of biking through the rainy winter in Oregon. I had felt naked out in the world without this aspect of car culture, the ability to remain both seen and unseen, intact and private.

I’m wearing a fur collar over my leather jacket, dressed for the drama I’m about to recount to my friend about my breakup. I’m starved to see myself as precious again.

Los Angeles has always been a contradiction of desperation and intimacy: an open mouth filled with bougainvillea, a desert with a freeway running through it, a desert with a seaside community, cracked earth thirsty for rain. Something that looks and feels like a desert, but as any Angeleno will tell you, it is subtropical, boasting just enough wild grasses and brush to separate it from its neighbor Palm Springs, an arid valley of the Colorado Desert.

Los Angeles laughs at any grasp towards sameness, any attempt at definition. Its skyline flickers, dancing in and out of your field of vision, dipping between a concrete reality dry river, overpass, eucalyptus grove, pickup trucks, and Teslas the synthetic shimmer of light on its horizon, a mirage ever shapeshifting so you can’t remember what it was that you were yearning for, but you know the want is there. A dream that recoils just as your desire turns towards it. Even in its fantasy form, Los Angeles won’t sit still. Just as you think you

feel it beneath your fingers, it moves again into the shape of another bright, possible thing. It slips the knot of any focused gaze but demands to look at you. And in this way, it’s the queerest city I know.

L.A. photographer Laura Aguilar knew how to subvert the gaze just like her city. The subjects of her 1992 Plush Pony series, a collection of portraits taken with a drop screen at the back of an infamous, now closed, queer bar in the South Bay city of El Segundo, stare back at the camera, interrogating the gaze that falls upon them, fucking with our assumed authority as viewers. Aguilar’s Latina Lesbian (1986–90) series complicated the often-siloed allegiances of culture, class, and sexuality. The series was sponsored by Connexus Women’s Center / Centro de Mujeres, an L.A. lesbian community center. Yet many of the portraits and accompanying testimonials, handwritten underneath the photographs, subvert any strict identification. Taken collectively, the portraits form a roar of individuation. Herein lies one of Aguilar’s many gifts to maintain her positionality simultaneously within and beyond a given community, to reject any or and relish the infinitely permissible / generated and.

Aguilar was born in San Gabriel, California, on October 26, 1959, and died in Long Beach, California, on April 25, 2018. Five generations of her family lived alongside the Rio Hondo in the San Gabriel Valley, an inherited link she most famously documented in her Nature Self Portrait (1996), which feature her straddling the rocks naked, her large body both of and apart from the land. In her 2017 essay “Clothed / Unclothed: Laura Aguilar’s Radical Vulnerability,” art historian Amelia Jones writes of “Aguilar’s insistence on making / looking /

posing as relational processes; we become part of this relationality by engaging this work, and as we are implicated, this increases the emotional impact of the images.”

There is a sense in Aguilar’s photos that, as we view, we are also being fucked with, that the subject’s gaze back gains authority the more you look, becomes more of a question as to why we, the viewers, want to look at all. Aguilar’s subjects seem to demand either, What are you looking at? or, in their joy, as in the photo Plush Pony #6 (1992), why wouldn’t you look? Why would you ever look away? Here, I think of a remark that writer Roberto Tejada made about poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s work, but that I think is applicable to Aguilar’s photography as well: “It’s a kind of welcome and a kind of exile at the same time.” And in this diametrical mode of embrace and release lies agency. Each image carries within

it a statement, but that statement isn’t of the photographer’s making; when Aguilar takes the reins of the visual field, the image is at first co-authored and then fully possessed by the subject she photographs, all within the span of looking.

This co-authorship, which slides into subject possession the more that viewers look, has a startling equalizing effect. Jones continues, “Aguilar’s work teaches us: all meaning is (at least) relational. All subjectivities are precarious (at least: mortal), although some suffer from their precarity more than others because they have no choice in living it. The best we can do is to be with our vulnerability, in order to recognize it in others: in order to acknowledge the possibility of making others less precarious.”

But acknowledging the potentiality of precarity is only possible while leading with love. I first encountered Laura Aguilar

Featured image: Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #1, 1996. Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches; 23 x 27 inches framed 3 of 4. Collection of Susanne and Jost Vielmetter, Altadena, CA. Photo credit: Brica Wilcox.

on-screen, her voice strong and delicate, emitting from the corner of a room in a basement classroom at CalArts. The video is grainy, light straining to project Aguilar’s images. The photographs are all of people she loved her great-aunt Bea; her lifelong friend, the author Gil Cuadros and I’m struck by the personal tone of her description. She notes how they met, what she loved about them, how they’re remembered, the kind of real estate they take up in her mind.

I’m fresh out of an MFA program when I watch the video, pumped with art jargon and lofty explanations of obscure poetry. In the cramped, windowless rooms of our creative writing department, every fart and fold of the body is somehow connected to the theoretical. It is a world in which all of us volley for import, meaning, intellectual real estate. But with Aguilar’s work, I notice that the impact feels effortless; its intellect and politics inhabit the frame, deepening as we continue to look, without forcing an agenda or ideology.

There is something inherently tricksterish about Aguilar’s work, especially the self-portraits and their ability to point out the universal experience of being together and separate from others at the same time. I wanted to know what Aguilar could teach us about loneliness. I wanted to know what she instinctively knew about kin about the connections between community-making, ancestral knowledge, and land in Southern California. I wanted to know more about the ways in which she felt like she belonged, the ways in which the world set her apart, and how she peeled herself away from social expectation.

We come from different places, Aguilar and I, though we both have roots in Los

Angeles. I landed decades later, an accident of my parents’ status as migrant artists, shuttling between suburban Glendale and rapidly gentrifying Glassell Park. Aguilar came from five generations of San Gabriel Valley dwellers yet struggled to find visibility in the art world of her hometown. The daughter of working-class Mexican and Irish immigrants, Aguilar articulated in her photographs the hydraulics of belonging of mixed identity, as well as of fatness and queerness and understood the simultaneity of kin and loneliness in Los Angeles.

I have had the privilege of living in many other bastions of otherness San Francisco, London, Portland, Houston and when they didn’t please me, I had the means to seek other shores. Aguilar rarely left Los Angeles, and when she did, it stunned her. A whole generation of artists she influenced, from Rafa Esparza to Guadalupe Rosales to Aydinaneth Ortiz, are left behind to enact the creative possibilities she could have brought before the lens if she hadn’t died so young.

To write about Aguilar and her work is to write about the power of possibility and the potential of intimacy. Los Angeles houses all of this energy its mythology and its cruelty, how they are shelved within each other, and how much Aguilar knew of each. I write to her, about her, in deference and not in kinship. Though I would have wanted her to be, she isn’t mine. And so, the question of any piece I write on Aguilar becomes, how does one write about love and admiration and kin without ownership? How do you love someone without breaking a little of them off in you, and if that breaking off cannot be avoided, then can it be a generosity? How do you make sure you are giving that little bit back tenfold,

cultivating an art not just of exchange but of offering?

This essay is an experiment in that in caring, in taking only a grain of sand’s worth of what you can give back. To this city, to this artist, and to the art of intimacy in all the forms that it takes.

That December day in Los Angeles, I found my friend sitting alone on a green iron bench, watching the ducks catapult themselves into lily pads and algae. I sat down next to her and we embraced, her chin grazing the fuzz of my collar. I opened my mouth. I wanted to tell her the story of how I had gotten to the precipice of, yet been recently dragged away from, a great love affair. I wanted to tell her about my lover’s questions delicately posed over wine in a sparse studio apartment, afternoons spent circling each other in art museums, probing for insight into each other’s worldviews. I wanted to tell her about shared music obsessions divulged over perfect cups of tea, books read at the same time without knowing it, the twinning of cultural and social histories. I wanted to tell her about lying next to someone all night and holding hands but not sleeping. I wanted to tell her about our first meeting underneath the mint-green bridge at Cathedral Park, the halo of greenery and water, and the feeling that I’d manifested something out of the preceding months of sorrow. I opened my mouth to tell my dear friend about the look of admiration caught in a mirror as I brushed my hair back, that feeling of ecstatic recognition.

And I wanted to tell her about the cascade of doubt that tumbled forward when that look was extracted, my viewer unreachable in the glass or elsewhere, nowhere to be found. The great silence between me and

a body I had been close too, but not as close as I would have liked. “Want to live forever?” I was poised to ask her, a pithy line I’d thought up in the car. “Split up with someone in the midst of falling in love.”

I meant to describe this startling separation in the wake of intimacy, but all I could think about was Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self Portrait #4. In the black-andwhite photograph, the artist lies naked across an open landscape. Her arm is extended and her head rests upon it, eyes closed. Her stomach almost touches the lip of a small pool of water.

I, like Aguilar, am interested in that lip, that edge. Suddenly, as I gazed out at Echo Park Lake, a body of water familiar to both her and me, I didn’t want to talk about my affair anymore. I wanted to appreciate the edge, the way in which love brings you beside yourself and invites you to take a look, to soak in the dichotomies of being whirled in and out of knowing, to inhabit that marginal space between recognition and bewilderment, one foot in the water and the other on dry land. I was close enough to it then that I could really taste what it was like to have been on the border of love, much closer than I am now, writing this. That feeling of being both isolated and alone in one’s intense experience of intimacy.

Laura Aguilar was the one that taught me that the act of loving is both being seen and unseen to wholly embody oneself on the verge of being submerged, the thrill and terror of the possibility of consumption. She taught me how to want to touch the water, even knowing that it was just barely out of reach.

BLACK(ENED) (DIS)SATISFACTION

On Kearra Amaya Gopee’s installation “pappyshow in the dark time, my love”

by Kali Tambreé

New York–based antidisciplinary artist Kearra Amaya Gopee’s installation “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” (2022) asks, “What does the guttural give us that the saccharine cannot?” The installation consists of an audiovisual triptych surrounding an ouroboros carved into a viewing bench.. The figure and flames of an unrelenting Blue Devil a figure central to Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival celebrations emboldens the film. The Blue Devil’s demand is to stay with dissatisfaction. From an unsatisfiable posture, the Blue Devil reveals questions of “unpayable debt,” a theory pursued in depth by academic and practicing artist Denise Ferreira da Silva in her new work of the same name. To borrow again from da

BLACK(ENED) (DIS)SATISFACTION

Here, in the ruins of our shared darkness, I whisper to you, “are you satisfied?” Smoke rises, your face, always, already inflected with fire, tarries the line between “no” and “yes is an impossibility.”

Kearra: I love being incited to mangle. If I’m mangling anything, I want to mangle it with you.

“Let’s make a world of our dissatisfaction,” I respond.

Noticing “only against the backdrop of fire does your painted body bring out the blue of night.” I feel your emergency; I dance to it.

Kearra: When it all boils down, who can render the noise like the flesh?

It occurs to me, “I’ve never asked you, but what comes after the flesh?”

Walk with me to flesh’s edge; tell me, do you hear everything or nothing?

Silva, “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is an experiment in activating “blackness’s disruptive force, that is, its capacity to tear the veil of transparency (even if briefly) and disclose what lies at the limits of justice.”

[Emphasis added.]

The lens flits and resolves like a curious eye settling into a conversation that requires a vulnerable amount of attention. Kearra floats on the screen of a MacBook held by a friend. They are in conversation with three friends situated in their respective spaces: Richie sits on the couch, Ashlee

rocks slowly in a hammock, and Elana is framed by a window, low gray clouds settling behind green mountains. Kearra’s presence instigates a series of pauses, lacunae accentuated by the murmuring of birds.

Elana: So we in J’ouvert / the Purge Purge J’ouvert … revenge is mine for the taking, nah boy. [Giggles.]

Kearra: That look like it elicit a type of glee in yuh.

Elana: [Laughs.]

Kearra: Expand on that feeling.

Expand on that feeling for meh.

Kearra asks (us all), “What would you do if you could have your revenge?” As what immediately takes shape in my mind, I wonder what creates more of a paradox: the question of could or the conundrum of your? The scope and scale of this question is its central epistemological burden.

Filmed in Trinidad and Tobago, and produced virtually between Trinidad and Tobago and Los Angeles, predominantly during the ongoing pandemic, “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” stages a conversation shaped by aloneness, longing, deprivation, and detachment. Slavery neither as metaphor nor as historical event establishes the stage and forges the (ill) conditions from which any conversation of black(ened) revenge will unfold.

The viewer witnesses Kearra and their loved ones entrapped in a call-and-response with the pressures of law, ethics, morality, and religious guilt, as they recall the fatal stakes of any black(ened) revenge. With capacity to claim neither injury nor redress comes the displacement of a black(ened) my, precluding the possession of political subjectivity. Possessing no legible measurement to claim the injury of anti-blackness thus precludes the legitimacy and materiality of our something-like revenge or otherwise. How can one make a claim for revenge in the face of a violence with no accountable analogy? Employing what grammar, stood on what ground may that claim find legibility? Their revenge fantasies are delivered amidst the murkiness of dissatisfaction, their satisfaction made impossible.

Unfolding less as dreams of freedom, revenge as explored in “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is indexed by a spectral

and irreversible confrontation immolated by the implications of another burning, an indiscriminate fire. The process of mourning the unchanging climate of anti-blackness offers new shapes of desire. Abandoning the temporality of forgiveness, revenge bred from the ordinary ambience of antiblackness asks not of its repair toward a better future.

Can a slave make a plea for justice on a plantation? If justice is a service of/for humanity, is humanism available to the slave?

Can juridical metrics of injury and/or redress index and punish anti-blackness? The film offers me a new metric of black(ened) revenge, units taken in fire.

Kearra probes Elana: If the impetus is to “pick up something,” what does putting it down look like? And if we say putting it down, for instance, could be “justice,” what does that look like essentially?

[Kearra pauses as if arrested by the gravity of their own impossible question.] Elana without hesitation: Flames. Everywhere. Everything Kearra: Flames everywhere. Wha yuh burning? And be graphic.

With nowhere to go where the state would not eventually intervene, Kearra’s artistic ethos relies on a methodology of sprawl. Formalized art regimes often exchange expertise and discipline for an imposed singular sense of self, wherein multidisciplinarity might just be an entry point to multiple expertise (read: ownership). The complexity of “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is its antidisciplinarity. Its affective nuances are expressed through a community that is formed in atemporal, geographic plasticity, such that their communion takes whatever

form is necessary to hold something-like satisfaction (however brief).

Kearra told me: I was beginning to yearn for a more nuanced understanding of affect in my own work, if only as a salve for my own detachment.

As honestly as the work resuscitates dissatisfaction (leaving it available for the taking and creating a public for its display), it also renders something-like a disarticulation of satisfaction’s attainability. The viewer’s experience of the installation is not designed to be accumulated, discovered, or understood, a satisfaction-seeking mode of engagement with art. The video footage is unstill but not unnatural, rhythmically mutable like an inhale and an exhale (reminding you to inhale and exhale). The images are at times synchronous, at other times split between

glimpses of the speaker’s clutched palms, small objects in private corners, erupting smiles, crossed ankles, palm trees caught in the wind. The work finds you in the familiar intimacy of a gesture or the fastidious unraveling of a risky question.

Filling the room to its corners, the film projection makes a balanced gaze impossible. By not offering a single unit of focus, “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” displaces consumptive and extractive strategies of viewership. The film is edited in a way that betrays the traditional conventions of an interview, elongating and suturing along threads of intimacy rather than linearity and its conclusive end: revelation. Kearra’s editing favors sighs and fidgets over eye contact. They keep affective nuances that might escape a lens or editing process focused on capturing truth for an “official record.”

Kearra Amaya Gopee. “pappyshow in the dark time, my love,” 2022. Image author’s own. All rights reserved by the artist. https://kearramaya.com/pappyshow

Making no formal claims regarding a colonial past nor a “post”-colonial now, the temporal landscape of the film is of multiple tenses. Rememory (recalling Sethe in Beloved) syncopates the subjunctive, as their conversation unravels from a simultaneous preoccupation with the violent events of their collective last week, as with an impending but atemporal doomsday. We are intimately involved in the familiar and intertwined worlds of Kearra and their loved ones (including those present but off-camera for production purposes). Their risk, then, is not ours to keep. The demand of the film’s intimacy is to meet at the site of our ruptured geographies, to let rememory in, and to ask, What shapes our revenge? The work reverberates a mandate to turn inward, not for the sake of self-identification, but from an understanding that you must prepare to be called to return to the communal, to share in the praxis of study, instigation, and skill-sharing.

Kearra: The more in touch with myself I feel, the more equipped I am to return to my people. Solitude and reprieve both emerge as possibilities in laying bare what we fear to desire.

Kearra: We engage each other with mutual wonder and terror.

Collectivity, collaboration, and risk are often-absented facets of public art.

Kearra: It could not be as simple as an exchange of soul for sustenance.

For unambiguously black queer artists who cannot count nepotism as an entry point to opportunity, making work that is oriented toward an end of the world from a black perspective (which is to say, the perspective of having never been in the world as such)

is often isolating. Kearra’s work is, then, unsuitable for the world, as the full expression of their artistic ethos would signal something terminal for the world-as-such. Their work, then, has no linear temporal scale: the why of their work will not exist in their lifetime; the what of their work is process, not property.

Is this not a deeply dissatisfying reality?

Kearra: Dissatisfaction does not feel terminal to me: it feels incredibly generative. It comes after the understanding that, actually, the world as is cannot hold you by design. It is not that your place hasn’t been made yet, but that your place cannot be made. It is from this no-place that, in the first moments of the film, Kearra tells Richie: The concept of the world having to end is very appealing to ME.

Kearra: Once you come to the fact that you do in fact feel, where do you go from there?

Igniting the room’s shadows, a rising flame brews in the corners at the video channels’ seams. It threatens to spread and engulf the room’s three walls, and me along with them.

Kearra: A frequency to negotiate.

Nighttime rips through the screens, rendering the viewer alone and anonymous. The Blue Devil is announced first by a catalytic mix of Soca, noise, and techno. The soundtrack dredges the solitary Blue Devil’s fire preparation into view. A bucket of blue paint grants the Blue Devil absolution as they prepare their negotiation with the flame. Footage capturing the spirit of a J’ouvert (unbridled by surveillance) animates the Blue Devil, whose fire creates a

fleeting light momentarily caught on two embracing lovers, unsurprised, before they turn and run back into the darkness. With no proclamations of an ethical or moral responsibility to “should” or “ought,” the Blue Devil embodies a chaotic and insistent claim to an incalculable debt. Fire is the guiding light. Black collective destruction remains a revenge fantasy worth dancing for. Freedom is not the word for it. The Blue Devil’s command for more multiplies.

As the conversation resumes, unfurling in low, slow pulses, the ouroboros bench translates the bass for the body of the viewer; its sonic delays and punctuative thrusts make for a deeply embodied experience. The bass’s watchful homecoming creates a state of anticipation. The bench’s chain-link skirt chases the floor in a rowdy cacophony of rattles and echoes. The sonic atmosphere makes the viewer feel studied by a watchful pulse that refuses to sync with their heartbeat. The pulse threatens to return, and to not. A metronymic dread.

What “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” reveals to me is that I dread what I want. I dread wanting. I dread that my wants exceed wanting, and, most of all, I dread my revenge’s loneliness.

Richie: Um, and sometimes performance is just de only way you can think to “appropriately” whatever that means or, like, publicly grieve. Like publicly feel something. Within every turn to the public lingers a desire for a witness.

Richie: Ent that white man say life is a stage?

As I see it, the state designs the stage and bankrolls the production.The performance’s benevolent witness showers the performer

in identification and empathy. As the curtains close and the performance trails off, the performer stands alone, wondering if they’ve raised enough awareness or exchanged enough experience to live. In all ways, a libidinal investment in black suffering makes witnessing an exercise of desire, and performance a showcase of empathy’s discipline.

Kearra to Elana: This thing not fixable, nah boy.

The performer’s final confrontation with their witness occurs as everything goes up in flames. Perhaps paradoxically, revenge in “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is in many ways about the stakes of nothingness wherein the ultimate revenge is the punishment of a confrontation with nothingness in its totality. With nothing to empathize with or to kill, the witness must instead be with the totalizing loneliness of there being nothing to salvage, nothing to own, nothing to know. Joy James said that a violent world cannot be addressed with therapeutic modalities; “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” undisciplines and demystifies violent responses to violence, and is haunted by the only outcome of a materialized black(ened) revenge: the world’s end.

Kearra: I am acutely aware of the dangers of metaphor. Why does one wish to be of / occupy a world that cannot include them?

Kearra: The concept of “the World” is void here.

Joanne Leonard

Dancing Seen from Joanne’s Second Story, West Oakland, CA, c. 1967

Gelatin silver print, 5 1/16 x 6 1/16 inches

© 2023 Joanne Leonard Courtesy of the artist

9, 2019

Inkjet print on paper Courtesy of the artist

Joanne Leonard

Dancer and Bird, from the Newspaper Diary Series, October

GHOST NOVEL

by Hervé Guibert

translated by Dana Lupo

Translator’s Note: Written in 1983, early in Hervé Guibert’s career, “Ghost Novel” was not published until after his death (in the 1994 Gallimard volume The Sting of Love and Other Texts). All the books he wrote in his brief lifetime (he died at 36) exhibit the qualities of the novel (“the imperfect form par excellence”) that he champions in this essay: interruption, “de-documentarization,” monstrosity, morbidness. The last is an essential, even inevitable quality of the novelist that is produced by the very act of writing: “To take up writing a novel is to take up residence with ghosts.” Not merely the ghosts of one’s literary forebears but of “all those who have desired to write novels (it is to take one’s turn in the chain of this universal fantasy).”

The novelist, then, suffers less from an anxiety of influence than from a kind of shared delusion across time. His writing desk doubles as a séance table; to summon the spirits of every novelist and would-be novelist in history, all he has to do is put pen to paper. He might even be a spirit himself. Of all the ghosts haunting Guibert’s writings, none appear as frequently or as vividly as his own.

I didn’t choose to write novels, or short stories, or poems, any more than tales or love letters. I chose to tell stories, as directly as possible, as I would report them in person to a friend, and finish them when they were finished.

I was in a hurry to write: at first out of romantic urgency (these weren’t stories so much as recopied letters) and a lack of time, as my paying side job journalism demanded pages from me. These personal stories, in which the I was no longer forbidden, I wrote on the sly, like a thief of scant writing time. From journalism, too, I learned to be brief, to dread repetition, and I wrote more or less within the limits required by that profession, between two and six pages. Then I wrote a short story that seemed to be the condensed, aborted dream of a novel (“The Desire to Imitate”).

I wrote longer and longer pieces, because length creates the illusion of progression, of arrival. “Now you have to write a novel,” the editor said. “Now we’re waiting for him to prove he can go a long distance,” the critic wrote. For my part, I felt a need to invent characters, and to love them, and to live with them for a while, for lack of

any real-life adventures and because this sense of adventure, the absence of which I believe prevents me from writing, came to me then more from reading, from literature, than from traveling or chance encounters. To take up writing a novel is to take up residence with ghosts, with the specters of all those who have desired to write novels (it is to take one’s turn in the chain of this universal fantasy), and in addition to the weight of one’s characters, the weight of these models is somewhat heavy to bear. As in a difficult dream, one must travel through a dark and infinite gallery of ancestors, to grapple until the black hole of waking up, or of the period with all these fascinating, snickering figures who toy with you, flick you like a flea from one writing posture to the next.

Recently, after completing the eightyseven cramped pages the longest text I’ve written so far of an adventure novel, Arthur’s Whims, I stumbled upon Isaac, whom I love, and who only wrote very short pieces. My pleasure in reading him somewhat unsettles any vague desire to write more fiction, makes it seem a conceited undertaking. When I read “The Bathroom Window” or “Makhno’s Boys,” which are only three or four pages long, I wonder what the point is of saying anything else, when these stories say everything. Starting from realist observation, he seems to heighten emotion more through an unusual arrangement of narrative components than through the content of those components itself. Then, when the reader is overwhelmed by the mystery of the emotion, he cuts the story off, and that’s that. The slender stories in Red Cavalry could constitute a novel (and any idiotic present-day editor would have asked Babel to

revise his text to give it a continuous narrative thread): the characters are the same, the narrator is the same, the chain of events from end to end mirror historical reality. Yet Babel felt the need to isolate them, to cut them up, as life is cut up by its phases of sleep and absence, in order to bring out instances of raw emotion (and he gives them a date and a location, like photographs) exemplary moments of blood, death, rape, a horse’s exhaustion and in that way he de-documentarizes his work, demilitarizes it (it was Gorky who pushed him to enlist, so he would have an experience to recount), snatches it back in advance from Soviet propaganda.

In a 1937 interview, Babel declares: “Tolstoy’s temperament made it possible for him to recall and describe everything that happened to him over the twenty-four hours of a day, whereas my temperament, evidently, only makes it possible for me to describe the most interesting five minutes I experienced. It is precisely in this way that the short story arose as a literary genre.” But Babel is no less admiring of Tolstoy. In his last letter to reach the West, right before his arrest in 1939, he writes: “I will soon begin putting the finishing touches on my great Work.” A Work that was no doubt massacred. Was there not a terrible cruelty of fate in Barthes’s final lecture, entitled “For a Long Time I Went to Bed Early,” when he said that he finally felt that he was (on the eve of his death) on the eve of writing his novel, whereas all his life he’d extolled and defended the virtue of the haiku, the supreme short form of the Japanese?

The dream of the novel is to some extent a dream of death, of posterity: dreaming of the novel can bring writing to life, but if by misfortune a hand accomplished

the perfect novel, the ideal novel (and it would be the Devil who held this hand, for the novel is the imperfect form par excellence, the labor of which ultimately calls for botching up, for monstrosity: MobyDick), it would have nothing left to do but put away its pen. The French 19th century pushed the outfitting of this form to a point of no return: Madame Bovary continues to poison us through all the trivial imitations it necessitates, as much in film as in publishing (for my part, I prefer A Simple Heart to Salammbô: I wonder whether perfection in writing removes, blurs, and covers up more than it reveals). A novel that is faithful to the idea of the novel for the subject of the novel, which draws from apparent history, is always the history of the subject writing the novel and running after his goal is an unfinished novel, like In Search of Lost Time or Bouvard and Pécuchet, interrupted by death, or else voluntarily interrupted due to listlessness or a juvenile about-face, as in The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (the novel breaks off just when its peregrination is about to lead us to God).

Perched on his spinning wooden horse, the child extends a stick toward the little machine that dispenses metal rings with two slightly sharp, slightly dangerous tabs sticking out of them. The child who is too skilled at this game collects all the rings, turning his stick into a tree with too many flowers, a dubious tree that makes his arm stiff. The child who has the most fun is perhaps the clumsiest, the one for whom the game remains difficult, and who regards the two or three measly rings on his stick with the secret triumph of failure.

Joanne Leonard

Untitled

Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches

© 2023 Joanne Leonard

Courtesy of the artist

PRAY, EAT,

HOLD ’EM KNOW WHEN TO

A

Annie Duke by Michelle Chihara

In 2004, Annie Duke won the first televised world championship in poker. She would later say that, even though she had been playing for a decade at that point, she felt like an imposter when she arrived as the only woman in the arena. Something like three percent of professional poker players were women when she started, and the numbers have never shifted all that much. The 2004 ESPN event was poker’s coming-out party to national audiences. The game

conversation with

looked like it might have a future as a legitimate, professionalized pursuit, and the pressure on Duke was immense. On live television, lipstick cameras would display each player’s hand to the audience. “[M]y mistakes were no longer going to be private to me,” Duke worried on a 2015 podcast appearance. She felt like she might be exposed, “that everybody was right and I was actually a terrible player. […] I was bad and I had just gotten lucky and now everybody was going to know it and what they were saying was true.” She had bangs and wore a black UltimateBet hoodie, but not sunglasses or a hat. You could see her pale face, tense but serious, through every hand.

Early in the tournament, Phil Hellmuth, then and now a feared champion, berated Duke for folding on a pair of 10s. She had studied the other players, and she thought she had caught one of their tells, a physical tic that gave away his hand. In the moment, Duke felt she had made the right decision. But Hellmuth’s dressing-down got to her. She started tilting, the term in poker for an emotional state where players stop being able to step back from the game and start making bad decisions. She already felt like she had been invited as a token girl, like she was out of her league. And when Hellmuth questioned her, she started to question herself. On break, she tried to pull herself together.

And she did. Duke was able to turn stereotype threat into what NPR’s Hidden Brain called a “stereotype tax.” She took the chauvinistic idea that a girl can’t bluff and leveraged it against the men at her table. During the final hands, when it was just her against Hellmuth, Duke turned on the charm. You can hear it even in the timbre of her voice, when she tells him how well

he’s playing, or when she says she feels so lucky to be there.

Hellmuth didn’t think she could bluff him. So he went in hard, and he let the charm offensive throw him off. After Duke’s victory, the camera followed him down a dark hallway as he muttered and cussed to himself in disbelief. He says, “She fucking check-raised me six times, I know she didn’t have it all six times.” This is intercut with Duke laughing and saying, “Oh, my god! I won!” and calling her brother. Hellmuth still can’t believe she beat him. “She had to be fucking 30 to one to win this. I love Annie but …” and more bleeped-out cussing.

Hellmuth got played.

When Duke appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2009, she was widely considered to be the smartest and most ruthless person in the room. She beat Joan Rivers by every metric, but lost the competition on the final task. This was despite or perhaps due to the judges siding with Rivers in her startling outburst against Duke, where Rivers yelled about knowing that poker players were white trash with “no last names” and that Duke was a manipulative “whore pit viper” akin to Adolf Hitler.

In 2018, when The New Yorker attempted to profile her, Duke played a game of catand-mouse with the reporter, never really letting her in. The headline read: “Annie Duke Will Beat You at Your Own Game.”

Here’s what I can say for sure: Duke stopped playing cards professionally in 2012, but she still talks about it, still seems ready to spar with anyone who tries to impose a narrative on her, and still applies wisdom from poker to life writ large. She has transitioned into a career where she puts her reputation as a particular kind of badass to

work as an author, a public poker intellectual, and a financial advisor. Her books and her brand of economic advice have been shaped by the idea that strategies from gambling can be applied to everything. Her 2018 book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts was cited in The New York Times as “a big favorite among investors,” and Duke now seems to work primarily with behavioral economists and venture capitalists. Her website advertises her as an author, speaker, and “decision strategist.” When she agreed to talk to me, it was to promote her latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.

Duke draws on the ways that poker, unlike chess, involves hidden information, in the cards that are face down and in the luck of the draw a level of uncertainty that chess doesn’t reach. Chess can be reduced to a finite computation, at which supercomputers excel. Poker’s odds can be calculated, but the game is played, on its fundamental level, against the players at the table. This, according to Duke, makes it more like life.

Thus Duke separates the evaluation of decisions like the decision to fold from the evaluation of their immediate results. Did you make the right decision based on the odds, regardless of whether or not you got lucky? That’s how you determine whether you’re tilting or not. In poker, this separation is vital, because it allows you to plot strategy over the course of many hands. At a talk at UC Berkeley, Duke said that most of life’s results are influenced by mountains of hidden information and uncertainty. Your outcomes are determined by two things “the quality of your decisions and luck. So you better figure out

which is which, and then you have to get really comfortable with the luck element, and not obsess about it, because you have no control over it. And then you have to get really obsessed with, How do I improve the decision-making part of my life? Because that’s the thing I have control over.”

Thinking in Bets opens with an example from football, meant to illustrate the ways that people engage in “resulting,” or the way they judge the wisdom of decisions incorrectly based on the results. But Quit returns to cards for its opener, specifically the 1978 Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler.” Duke points out that in the chorus of that karaoke favorite, three of the four things you gotta know are about quitting. Duke sets this somewhat basic card-shark truism off against our cultural fixation on grit. American society is dominated, she argues, by messages about sticking to your guns, believing in your dreams, and never giving up. Duke’s message is to think more about quitting instead early and often.

There is, of course, some truth to the idea of an American obsession with persistence. There is cruel optimism in the countless stories we tell ourselves about chasing some of capitalism’s more unattainable dreams. However, I also spend a lot of time writing about behavioral economics, Duke’s current intellectual milieu and the public face of business thinking for the gig economy. In the new platform economy, a fetish for quitting fits in with the new neoliberal conventional wisdom. Duke, after all, isn’t talking about dropping out to get in touch with your values as a beach bum or a guru (unless you’ve figured out a way to monetize that). She’s talking about quitting strategically, in service of finding a better gig. She’s talking about quitting as

part of a flexible path toward more valuable human capital.

When Duke joined my video call, I could see white bookshelves and a pale blue couch in the background. She appeared as a well-put-together brunette in business casual. She didn’t seem particularly keen to talk at first, but the space looked inviting, like an attic or a loft turned into a light-filled home office. I wanted to take a screenshot, but I refrained. I wasn’t entirely clear on how much access I could ask for on the call. Duke clearly wanted to be interviewed primarily as an author. I had the sense that if I was too probing, she might show me how it’s done the hanging up and walking away part.

In the postwar Fordist compromise, employers needed workers to master their jobs and stick around, at predictable rates. The Fordist compromise with labor meant that full-time and long-term contracts were both the ideal and the norm. Since the original dot-com boom and bust in 2001, venture capital and Silicon Valley have been dismantling those norms and ideals. More and more of the economy is moving away from long-term salaried work. In the platform and gig economy, there is an ideological motivation for capital to encourage workers to think of themselves as flexible and creative independent operators or project-based contractors. Employers encourage this because it gives them a fluid workforce and new ways to get out of providing healthcare benefits. Workers like some aspects of this, even as we all wake up to the new shape of exploitation. In many ways, then, “optimal quitting,” as Duke calls it, is an important part of surviving in the era of flexible work.

I figured Duke would have plenty to say

about the gig economy. But we never got to it because we couldn’t get past the subject of dating.

The following distinction seemed obvious to me: just as a game of poker is qualitatively different from a game of chess, marriage is qualitatively different from a game, period. A relationship offers no moment in time at which it can be evaluated against an objective ranking. Even after death parts us, the living make meaning through the continuous narrative of our experiences. Our relationships exist only over time; there is no point at which you can tally up a score and say that you won or lost your marriage. The window of evaluation on our commitments to other people is always open.

But in our brief call, Duke wouldn’t budge from the idea that marriage is a quantifiable prospect. “Imagine yourself in a year,” she said. She granted that loyalty might matter to some people, but insisted it was just another factor. “On a scale of one to 10, how fulfilled do you feel, forecast how happy you’ll be how fulfilled do you think you’ll feel, how much joy, given a sense of partnership and duty? how in love do you think you’ll be? We shouldn’t be scared of that measurement.” She brought up the example of women who stay in abusive relationships. They needed to learn to quit more optimally, she said, presumably with better forecasting of the odds.

As to the value of loyalty, Duke said, “Maybe they never clean a dish; maybe that’s an emotional cost to you. […] On balance, the loyalty is outweighing the cost of doing dishes.” Thus, loyalty is just one yardstick among many.

This just doesn’t quite work. It’s not being scared of measurement to say that you can’t pit loyalty against dishes. They exist

on different planes. Loyalty might help you see past the dishes, to something that matters more. But there is no way to measure the ephemeral dividends of commitment and set them against the earthly rewards of youth or beauty. Or chores. Both types of reward are real. But there are real risks to assessing the payoffs of patience or deep intimacy in a cost-benefit analysis that tries to forecast them like financial prospects.

To be fair to Duke, she uses pokerbased thinking to encourage a more considered type of probabilistic assessment. In many ways, her advice is fundamentally just this: take a step back and do some critical thinking. Whatever is on the table in front of you, look at it clearly, and you might achieve a certain brand of humility in the face of uncertain realities. Accept what is. Watch for tilt. If you’ve been dealt bad cards, look at them coolly, and fold.

Also to be fair to Duke, there is something about tilt at the poker table that is akin to abusive relationships. When people get hurt, they often spiral and stop thinking clearly. They stop making rational choices, and sometimes they chase their losses with ever more desperate attempts. That’s tilt. We get addicted to outrage and drama, and instead of folding and walking away, we go back spoiling for a bigger fight. Sure.

In her last book, Duke was even more direct about life always being like a game of cards, and she promised that she combined “her experience as a professional poker player with the most advanced thinking on decision making, integrating psychology, economics, game theory, and neuroscience.” She imagines a human subject working to narrow the odds on every outcome, where every grocery line and relationship is an investment of time or money and there-

fore an investment of personal human capital. She told an audience at Google headquarters that “everything can be quantified” and that these strategies apply to every aspect of her life, from parenting to career choices. She co-founded the Alliance for Decision Education, which supports a national movement “to ensure Decision Education becomes a critical part of every middle and high school student’s learning experience.”

Decision education sounds fine. But who gets to say which decision was correct? Who gets to call it?

I asked Duke if Quit was really a way to get people to meditate on what’s at stake before embarking on their journeys to get them to look clearly at the possibility of loss, failure, or even death. This was one of the only things I said that she agreed with.

I wanted to press the essentially philosophical point that the game of life is qualitatively different. The cards don’t change, but people change. Life decisions are different not only because of the amount or type of uncertainty, but also because of the way that relationships exist in time. We carry a fundamental ability to redefine what it means to win. Duke wouldn’t cede on this.

As I was pushing Duke on the issue, she told me that she had stayed in poker too long. She mentioned, almost in passing, the end of the boom in the poker economy. So, I took a risk, and asked whether she meant the year 2011. This is a topic she was likely dreading.

In the poker world, the moment that year when US authorities shut down online poker is known as Black Friday. On that day, the Department of Justice went after Duke’s older brother, Howard Lederer. They wanted $40 million.

Lederer taught Duke how to play poker. He was the first person she called when she won the 2004 World Series; he had been knocked out of the tournament earlier on. And she was in business with him through the Costa Rica–based Full Tilt Poker when the DOJ came knocking. As the US Attorney started hunting down Swiss bank accounts, Preet Bharara said that Full Tilt was a Ponzi scheme and that insiders had “lined their own pockets with funds picked from the pockets of their most loyal customers while blithely lying to both players and the public alike about the safety and security of the money deposited with the company.” The government accused Lederer of money laundering and illegal gambling through his online casino in a series of moves that were intended to shut down most offshore operations. Lederer ended up settling. The feds took a set of luxury properties, cars, and a smaller sum from him. But the game had been fundamentally changed. Most of the big money in online poker ground to a halt, and some of the players didn’t get paid. Duke wasn’t directly implicated, but her reputation in the game was wrapped up with Lederer and Full Tilt. These facts are in the public record, but both she and Lederer have avoided discussion of these events. This tricky past clearly motivates part of Duke’s desire to control the narrative. And in her brief conversation with me, she pivoted immediately when 2011 came up.

Instead, Duke began to tell me a story about running into her former dissertation advisor in a doctor’s office.

Years ago, when Duke was in graduate school for cognitive psychology, she fell seriously ill with a stomach problem. She had been about to defend her dissertation. She

already had kids. When she got sick, she had to come off the seasonal academic job market. She took time to heal and started playing cards to pay the bills. When she got better, instead of going back to cognitive psychology (a field that has close ties with behavioral economics), she stayed in professional poker. She said that when she bumped into her dissertation advisor, they hadn’t spoken in years. Duke told me that she had carried an “incredibly deep shame” around for 20 years, until this chance encounter. During all her time away, Duke said she had felt embarrassed, as if she had let her advisor and her mentors down, and so she had never contacted them. She deeply regretted the years of friendship she had missed.

“Even though I was a world champion in the thing I had chosen to do instead, I lost two decades with somebody who was one of the loves of my life, because I felt so bad about quitting. But why did I feel so bad about it?”

It was only at this point that I remembered that I had started the conversation with a brief reference to the fact that after a decade as a professor, I was in the process of stepping away from academia. I hadn’t mentioned my dissertation advisor. But did I have to?

When Duke wanted to move me off of Black Friday, she pivoted to a story about disappointment and redemption with an academic mentor. Perhaps she was simply sharing something about a time when it was hard for her to quit, just as I had asked her to. Or perhaps she had picked up on my somewhat obvious tell, that I was a person who would resonate with the special cocktail of shame and attachment that comes with walking away from this particular game.

It almost felt like Duke had played me.

When I realized this, I tried to get even more honest. That was my only move. I said that in the male-dominated worlds of academia and journalism, I have sometimes quit, while other times I haven’t been able to quit because I needed the paycheck. But usually, the thing that helps me is not a cold assessment of the odds but a focus on the people around me, who are not my opponents. Instead of quitting, I’ve tried to think about changing the nature of the game, maybe making more spaces less hostile to more people.

Duke considered this. And then she said, Look: nobody ever made decisions for me. “In my career … it’s very different if there’s a boss who can not promote you, or [who can] decide if you get extra responsibility.”

“I could sit at any table I wanted,” she told me. “However somebody viewed me could have an emotional impact on me, but they couldn’t not promote me. In a space where there’s very few women, in a workplace … well, I can only tell you so much. I didn’t have a boss.”

In these times of mass resignation and quiet quitting, I realized that this is what Annie Duke is really selling a chance to spend time with her in a sometimes-useful fantasy, where we all have the freedom to ditch our bosses.

Most of us can’t do that, and the game of jobs is always played against house odds. Our relationships still can’t be quantified like bets. The real friendships that can happen at work mean that there are hidden and often incommensurable costs to quitting and benefits to staying. And while most of us will never amass the kind of capital that would let us start our own offshore shop, above and between the laws of any nation,

most of us don’t really feel the need to go that far. The true appeal of quitting in the platform economy and the lure of flexibility are mostly about having more autonomy from work. Duke may have played me, but she also reminded me that I need to know my own worth beyond the approval of any one job or mentor, and that sometimes leaving the game is the right move. Especially for those of us who have had the “labor of love” discourse used against us, who have worked too long and too hard for the privilege of doing more work, to prove that we love it sometimes it can be helpful to imagine a canny poker player as your quitting coach. Take a step back. If your job is damaging to you, don’t tilt. Maybe quit. Or maybe unionize.

Joanne Leonard

Bronze baby and Julia from the Newspaper Diary Series, December 30, 2011

of the artist

WHY WE DON’T TALK NEARLY ENOUGH ABOUT FAERIE PORN

by Thao Thai

It started one evening when I flipped through that trusty panacea of modern life TikTok. One after another, the algorithm served me 30-second clips of broody, centuries-old fae princes bedding mortal women; domineering mob bosses groping their lovers in the

backs of limos; and a lush bouquet of dirty talk paired with tongue-in-cheek commentary from creators.

As I scrolled, I pictured a concierge in the lobby of a chandeliered hotel drawing back a red curtain as she purrs, “Welcome. You’ve made it to #SmutTok.” •

Smut is one of those funny words that straddles the line between cutesy and naughty like bum or knob. Interestingly, the word “smut” has its origins in the fear of dirt or defilement, applied to garments or objects that have been irreparably stained. Its more common definition can be traced back to the 1660s, when the word became synonymous with indecent language. It’s now typically applied to written content like erotica or fan fiction. When hearing the word “smut,” most might summon images of well-paged Hustler magazines thrust underneath a mattress, or even the kind of troublesome images found within the corners of the dark web.

For years, smut was seen as an attack on wholesome family values, often represented in the media as a combination of exploitative and vulgar content intended to corrupt. In the 1960s, conservative activist Mary Whitehouse earned the title “smut-buster” through her tireless critique of everything from television shows like Dr. Who to stand-up comedy acts and popular songs she felt demonstrated a “disregard for human dignity.” She was also a highly problematic figure often villainized for her sweeping stances against homosexuality, pornography, and obscenity. That same decade, Playboy began to take off. Its first issue featured a beaming Marilyn Monroe on the cover, wearing a halter dress with a

plunging neckline. The magazine received its fair share of detractors labeling its pages as glorified smut, a criticism that hasn’t quite vanished over the years.

When internet pornography rose in the 1990s, politicians like Nebraska Senator Jim Exon urged that the existing Communications Decency Act be extended to web content. Even today, the troubling book bans across the nation can be traced back to a fear of obscenity and sexual content. In a June 2022 article tracing the rise of book bans, The Washington Post named a common cause for such challenges as content having to do with “sex, abortion, teen pregnancy, or puberty.”

The truth is that smut would not have so many detractors if it also didn’t have nearly as many fans. Among many, smut is usually seen as something to hide, a shameful secret that eats at the conscience, a sickly antithesis to squeaky-clean morality. The taboo nature of smut is inherent in the word, which might explain why its usage feels so subversive now.

But smut is nothing new. Much of classic literature is rife with steamy exchanges. Books like Lolita, Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer celebrate the restless pulsating, quivering, and swelling of the body. They don’t shy away from the sweaty underbelly of desire. One could say that the illicit nature of the body is the point of their plots. But these novels are mostly tragedies, decrying the consequences of giving in to one’s impulses. They are seldom seen as celebrations of sex.

Romance novels are another genre altogether, where the happily ever after setup (lovingly shortened among writers and readers to HEA) depicts sex with joyful permissibility and normalcy. Sure, sex can

be a meaningful site of conflict between characters, but sex itself is not an inherently dangerous act. This, perhaps, explains why readers are gravitating towards a new definition of smut one that, in its healthiest incarnation, foretells a new era of personal liberation.

•

On TikTok, there are different subcommunities dedicated to all sorts of hyper-specific interests everything from car detailing to designing the Southern Gothic dollhouse of your nightmares. One immensely popular community is #SmutTok, dedicated to celebrating the romance genre with playful videos overlaid on top of hit song clips.

The neon-lit corner of TikTok called #SmutTok is not what you think it might be. It engages in a full-frontal display of all the tropes, kinks, and dirty talk that make the romance genre so wildly fun. There, “wingspan” referencing a fae male’s wing size becomes a synonym for testosterone-fueled girth. “One bed” is a well-visited shorthand for a common romance trope (one bed, two lovers, oh my!). Penis puns are accompanied by an insider’s wink and a conflagration of flame emojis. #SmutTok represents a reclamation of erotic pleasure, both playful and salacious, a digital landscape that offers titillation without the usual taboos around sex. Pearl clutchers, beware: you can look, and you can even touch, but you cannot judge.

So how did I find myself in this sybaritic paradise? As a Vietnamese American woman raised in a conservative household (no nail polish! No boys!), the smuttiest thing I’d ever witnessed during my youth was a G-rated innuendo between the

slick-haired Jesse Katsopolis and his wife Becky from Full House. If Jesse leaned over to peck his wife on the lips a common occurrence, given their sizzling chemistry I was expected to hold my hand over my eyes. I had to hide my paperback copy of Boy-Crazy Stacey, a Babysitter’s Club book that featured a lifeguard with shiny pecs who looked about 40 years old, gazing flirtatiously down at 13-year-old Stacey. The announcement of my first coed school dance was received with such apocalyptic panic that I feared I might be shipped back to the motherland on the next flight.

Needless to say, ours was not a household abundant in hugging, kissing, or any of the other terrifyingly American displays of familial affection. My parents didn’t even want me to know about sex. They’d opted me out of that age-old rite of awkward sex education in fifth grade. While the other kids were watching slide shows about eggs and wiggling sperm, I was sitting in the principal’s office, staring glumly at the wall, wondering what secret knowledge I was missing out on. For much of my life, the body was a thing to be ignored, seen as base, distracting, and even dangerous.

Yet, for all my family’s rigid surveillance, they rarely guarded what I read (Boy-Crazy Stacey, with its incriminating cover, aside). I think their assumption was that books couldn’t be dangerous; books were scholarly and enriching, sanctioned by publishers who could not possibly allow salacious content within the pages. They were proud of the fact that I was such a voracious reader. Little did they know that what I was actually consuming was tantamount to a DIY sex-ed class, with some very notable gaps in knowledge and practical advice. I think they would have, in retrospect, preferred

the actual, school-run sex-ed class.

My first gateway into the world of romance novels came from the Amish bonnet rippers I devoured during my pre-teen years. Our small-town library boasted row upon row of these mass-marketed novels, catering mostly to Evangelical white women. The covers featured dewy-faced young women staring pensively into the distance, with titles like The Amish Candymaker and The Shunning, a wildly popular 14-book series by popular Amish romance writer Beverly Lewis. To be clear, these romance novels had no sex in them; they were, in fact, mostly about maintaining one’s chastity in a world of temptation. In The Prodigal, Lewis writes, “Patience is yet another virtue, one that grows stronger through the practice of waiting.”

But even at my tender age, I understood on some level that a denial of the body was very nearly the same as an obsession with it.

By contrast, an excerpt from Boy-Crazy Stacey describing the older lifeguard reads, “The sun caught his hair, making it gleam. He was gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. He turned back to his towel and I let out my breath in a shaky gasp.” Stacey’s shaky gasp was a sensation I knew all too well, having accumulated a long list of crushes whose names I murmured before bed every night, as a kind of yearning incantation. I didn’t just shake in their presence, though; I fumbled. I became mute with wanting. This wasn’t the innocent, mostly hypothetical hero-worship I felt for the cartoon Disney princes of my girlhood. That shaky gasp represented my first brush with desire, breathless and visceral.

Over the years, I continued to dive into romance novels, often at moments when

my life felt too stressful to sustain another read of Middlemarch or Nineteen EightyFour. My initial forays into romance mostly showed me closed-door scenes, with a heated kiss here or there, though eventually the kisses graduated to heavy petting and panting foreplay. My adult feelings about Gone with the Wind aside, the way Margaret Mitchell portrayed Scarlett’s illicit kiss with Ashley Wilkes left me utterly weak in the knees at the time: “He bent back her head across his arm and kissed her, softly at first, and then with a swift gradation of intensity that made her cling to him as the only solid thing in a dizzy swaying world. His insistent mouth was parting her shaking lips, sending wild tremors along her nerves, evoking from her sensations she had never known she was capable of feeling.” Again with the shaking.

Decades later, I gave birth to my daughter at the age of 31 and found myself relating to my body in an entirely new way. I had become a merry-go-round, a stroller, a source of food and comfort. But I was not, at that time, a sexual object. I felt alienated from my own body, sometimes staring at it in the mirror with a total lack of recognition. Some women feel uniquely empowered by pregnancy and childbirth, but I found myself on another end of the spectrum, one marked by postpartum depression, where my body felt like a series of floating appendages meant for function rather than pleasure. The only things I passionately desired were a plate of nachos and a night of uninterrupted sleep.

But one afternoon I picked up The Hating Game, by Sally Thorne, a 2016 romance novel (later made into a movie) about two office enemies who have the kind of red-hot chemistry that makes you

want to throw that HR handbook right out the window. In one particularly sultry scene, the hero mutters, “I want to slide in between your sheets, and find out what goes on inside your head, and underneath your clothes. I want to make a fool of myself over you.” Uh, yes, please.

I eventually found my way to more deliciously spicy novels, with all the rushed, heady, animalistic passion I’d been missing from my reading. Books like Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient (featuring an Asian, neurodivergent character having sex) allowed me to center my own eroticism. (A very silly yet very sexy quote: “You’re wet already, Stella. You’re like a Lamborghini. Zero to sixty in two point seven seconds.”) Spicy reading gave me a taste of Main Character Energy at least, when it came to my own sexual pleasure.

And I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen under the scintillating spell of smut. •

In the last two years, #SmutTok has become wildly popular among bookfluencers for reasons aplenty. With the prolonged period of isolation from the pandemic, more readers found themselves sequestered and eager for escapism in the form of spicy romance. Searching for community, they leaned on TikTok, known for its scrappiness and unfiltered, take-no-prisoners brand of humor. The hashtag #SmutTok has been viewed almost four billion times, making it one of the most popular on the app. The community is active, engaged, and extremely invested in this collective fantasizing. There’s an energy in the #SmutTok community that feels uniquely exciting in many ways. Exciting and completely inviting.

Around the same time, Kindle Un-

limited, with its database of over two million titles, became a beacon for inexpensive yet satisfying reads that take only a couple of hours to fly through. There is something propulsive and addictive about the romance genre that begs for near-obsessive consumption. It follows that the community around that genre would also have a rapacious appetite for discussion.

When I first started watching #SmutTok videos my personal antidote to insomnia and a highly ineffective one I was immediately captivated by the prurient playfulness of the videos. It felt like witnessing a series of winks from your most audacious friend. In some TikToks, readers put spicy quotes to popular music, like this quote overlaid atop a Doja Cat song: “You know that I respect you right? Because I’m about to f*** you with nothing but disrespect.” The creator, Annie of @anitaslibrary, lip-syncs directly into the camera with a knowing smile, a silken scrunchy in her braided hair. It’s a low-fi video in almost all ways, yet it garnered over 1.8 million views in just a couple of days. Users echoed their appreciation for the video with comments like, “The way I’d simply pass away ”

Some creators like to use photo stills to present a kind of erotic storyboard of the steamiest scenes from books. Author Sanjana Nidhi (@authorsanjananidhi) posts a black-and-white photo of a young woman leaning over an attractive man sitting on a couch, their lips just a whisper away from one another’s, to illustrate a scene from her book Sinful Love, which is billed as an age-gap office romance. The onscreen text reads, “When he’s going down on her and says … ‘Look at me or I stop.’” The video ends with a clip of a person frantically bouncing up and down in

Little Prince and Covid Curves, from the Newspaper Diary Series, April 7, 2020

Inkjet print on paper

Courtesy of the artist

Joanne Leonard

a car seat, TikTok’s visual shorthand for a delighted jaw-drop.

Other #SmutTok accounts act as makeshift booksellers, rating books with chili peppers to denote the spiciness of the scenes, and outlining standout tropes like enemies-to-lovers or grumpy-sunshine. In one video, romance author Shanen Ricci (@authorshanenricci) hands her boyfriend an excerpt from her own novel and films his reaction while he reads. As she watches with a mischievous smile, his eyebrows rise. He cocks his head and smirks at the pages, a sure sign of mounting interest. Then, noticing her watching him, he bites his lip and proceeds to pounce on her with undeniable amorous intent. The video itself only 15 seconds long is like a distilled scene from a romance novel. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that both the gorgeous Ricci and her boyfriend could play on-screen versions of romance protagonists.

It’s easy to see how these videos can lure viewers like myself in. They’re patently unserious, floating bubbles of desire without context. Sometimes, in my day-to-day life, I find myself wondering about the last time I laughed in a truly goofy, unguarded way. #SmutTok helps me find my way back to the lighter corners of my own mind, where a raunchy pun can, against all odds, help me gain some perspective.

After all, life can’t be all bad if there are places left to find that HEA. •

Aside from #SmutTok’s uniquely active community, the rise of this TikTok subgenre also indicates a revival of books and of reading as a whole. Due to the popularity of BookTok, Colleen Hoover climbed the charts of The New York Times bestseller list,

with her backlist titles taking up four of the top 10 spots in late 2022. According to NPD BookScan, a point-of-sale publishing tracker, BookTok helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, with at least double that rate in 2022. In summer of 2022, TikTok partnered with Barnes and Noble for the #BookTok Challenge, intended to promote the discovery (and sharing) of new authors on the social-media platform.

Brick-and-mortar stores were quick to see the profits from this reading revival. Younger readers are more willing to browse local bookstores, which have dedicated displays for #BookTok darlings, many of which feature some spicy scenes behind the deceptively cutesy cartoon covers. Authors are paying attention to pre-orders and embarking on large campaigns asking readers to hop on the wagon earlier than usual to build up the hype. The indie publishing community a popular site for romance and fantasy continues to blossom, with many TikTok authors turning to self-publishing as a means to sell their stories.

More than all that, it turns out that books are just cool again. According to an August 2022 study in Business Wire, the publishing market is predicted to grow $19.2 billion in the next four years. The study identifies indie and self-published authors as primary drivers of this growth. And on the other side of the pages, readers also command more power than ever. On Instagram, the hashtag #bookfluencer has almost 40,000 posts; on TikTok, there are over 86 billion views of the hashtag #BookTok. It’s clear that readers are eager to discuss the latest novels they devoured and the tropes they gravitate toward. These readers often filter down to the popular genres of romance, fantasy, and erotica in

the #SmutTok community. With its centering on the female gaze and celebration of women’s agency, #SmutTok has shaken up the publishing landscape in the most unexpected and refreshing ways.

In addition to the rise of modern romance novels a genre that has been around for decades but is now imbued with new life thanks to writers like Jasmine Guillory and Emily Henry there is an increased focus on telling a wider range of stories, with protagonists representing different races, religions, sexual preferences, disabilities, and marginalized groups. Molly Gale of @mollyreadz identifies this positive trend: “We have seen a rise of inclusivity and diversity in #smuttok (which we LOVE ). This shows the market for more diverse books within the romance space.” Prominent BookTokkers of color include Talia Hibbert (@taliahibbert) and Nisha Sharma of (@nishawrites). Additionally, there are more LGBTQ portrayals and stories centering on protagonists with disabilities and neurodiversity.

It’s also important to note that, within the #SmutTok corner of the social-media-verse, there are significant distinctions in the subgenre. Fantasy romance focused largely on the worlds of faeries, as represented by Sarah J. Maas’s energetic fandom bleeds into paranormal romance, like the vampire court of Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series. There’s also dark academia (Zodiac Academy by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti), alien romance (Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon), and your run-of-the-mill reverse-harem romance.

Tessa Bailey (@authortessabailey), a prolific romance author and mainstay in the #SmutTok community, began joking

with readers about writing a reverse-harem romance. In January 2022, she posted a video about the fantasy of being in relationships with multiple men at once versus the reality. In the fantasy portion, she hums appreciatively while reading a book. In the real-life version, she holds up a sock and looks around the room accusingly, asking, “Whose socks are these? Tobias?” Imaginary Tobias would later become a recurring figure in Bailey’s TikToks. In response, a commenter writes, “Soo… how would you feel about writing a reverse-harem?” Months later, the joke turned into a real novel when Bailey’s Happenstance, about a heroine who dates a coterie of gorgeous boyfriends she meets in a subway car, hit the shelves.

Perhaps part of the rise of #SmutTok is due to the willingness of romance authors to maintain an accessible TikTok presence and community, putting them in dialogue with readers in a more immediate way. As Bailey says, “Talking so openly about sex and our sexual preferences tends to break the ice!” That transparency is an antidote to shame, which becomes even more clear when you look at the comments hundreds on hundreds for an average #SmutTok post that comfortingly assert, “You’re not alone in your kink!”

Celebrated author Akwaeke Emezi recently published their debut romance novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, a genre departure from their other, highly celebrated work. In an interview on The Daily Show, they describe smuggling Fabio-emblazoned romance novels into Nigeria, where such books were banned for vulgarity. About their current interest in romance including paranormal romance! Emezi says that the genre “has

so much representation in it. And it has so much hope in it. You can read these love stories about people society considers deviant […] and they get happily ever afters. There’s a little magic in that.”

Given the open-minded, unfiltered nature of this community, I was surprised to witness very few examples of outright shaming or harassment, as one can easily encounter from dissenters and trolls in almost any space on the internet. Though there are critics of the non-literary nature of the writing itself, particularly Colleen Hoover’s work, the feedback is mostly positive. Perhaps it’s because this community overwhelmingly identifies as women and remains fiercely, wonderfully outspoken about its right to exist. Eloisa James (@ eloisajamesbooks), author of The Reluctant Countess, tells me that “[r]omance is a very feminist genre. It has always been the genre that foregrounds women’s sexual pleasure and sexual power, in a way unlike any others.”

Or maybe #SmutTok is just self-selecting in that way. You don’t enter #SmutTok with your eyes squeezed shut. If you do, you’re missing the point.

Stacey McEwan (@stacebookspace) is a #SmutTokker-turned-author (Ledge, first volume of The Glacian Trilogy) who choreographed an arch series of skits around turning her husband into a fictional romance hero. In one video, she asks him if he’s ever kept a memento or token of hers a typical, swoon-inducing gesture from romance heroes. McEwan’s husband asks, “You mean, underwear? Or toenails and stuff?” Exasperated, she clarifies, “Like, something I may have given you. To make

you think of me.” He replies in a deadpan voice, “Like syphilis? Or a mountain of debt? Or all the hair you drop all over the house? You’re like a Labrador.” This exchange is far more familiar to most of us than the flirtatious banter we read in romance novels, which is what makes the video so endearing. McEwan’s videos also offer a fun, metafictional spin on the reflexive act of idealization inherent in the romance genre.

Though McEwan’s videos are tonguein-cheek, they hint at something tugging at the back of my mind. What is the real-life implication of the proliferation of the #SmutTok community? Are readers truly having better sex because of romance novels? Or are the idealized scenarios (and characters) pushing us further from intimacy? Romance novels promise a HEA. But is that real life? I worried that there may be a dark side to all this joy, a kind of alienation between real experiences and those presented on the page.

Bailey disagrees. “We’re not harboring any delusions that real life will be like it is in romance novels,” she says. “That being said, maybe we should expect more from our intimate partners. I think that a lot of the people complaining about romance setting unrealistic expectations would be better served learning how to meet higher expectations.” Insert fire emoji here. Indeed, romance novels can be a tool, not only to clear our minds of the daily grind of schedules and responsibilities, but also to provide concrete access to fantasies we may not otherwise express in those locked corners of the imagination.

Mallory Parsons of @mal_reads says, “My husband and I have been together for 12 years and I can confidently say that

reading spice has reinvigorated our sex life. We have tried things in the bedroom that I wouldn’t have even thought of, had I not been convinced by the spicy books.” The role of fantasy in intimacy is well accepted, especially among professional sex therapists. Nikki Coleman, a feminist psychologist who maintains the website Dr. Nikki Knows, notes that “[w]e’re in a relationship revolution. And fantasies are really powerful mechanisms that we use to resolve our intense emotions.” She sometimes recommends that her clients explore their eroticism by sharing spicy books with one another, even reading scenes aloud. There may be discomfort at first, but the pay-off is an exchange of vulnerability, which is, at its heart, the root of the most fulfilling intimate interactions.

While writing my forthcoming novel Banyan Moon, I struggled with the amount of sex to include. It isn’t a romance novel, though there are love stories within its pages. I’d read too many memes about horribly written sex scenes (think: jiggling breasts, throbbing members) and worried that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to intimate moments between my characters. And to be frank, I blushed to think of my family and friends reading my thoughts on sex, some of which might be conflated with my private fantasies by those same readers.

Yet I couldn’t ignore the crucial role of the body in my story. My characters live life sensuously through cooking and eating, through working and sweating, and even in the act of childbirth and motherhood. And they have sex. They celebrate their corporeality; to them, a mortal, carnal life has always been the point. What I began to understand through #SmutTok and the romance community is that sexual intimacy

can complicate a story and move it forward. Like love, sex is often messy, complicated, and more wondrous than we can express.

Slowly but surely, I began adding more texture and sensation in the scenes between my characters heat to the embraces, wetness to a stolen kiss. Writing a sex scene requires a certain level of mental choreography and imaginative dexterity. I learned to pay attention to my own body as I wrote, asking myself important questions like: “Would I like this feeling? Would I want more of it?” There’s the old adage that says, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” in other words, a lack of feeling in the writing produces a dryness to the content. My take on that might be: “No titillation in the writer, no titillation in the reader.”

And with #SmutTok dropping new videos every day, I would say there’s no shortage of titillation, if you know where to look.

It’s not all sunshine and swooning, however. Coleman cautions, “There’s still a lot of sex negativity and shaming in our culture. Generally speaking, I think we’re not having nearly enough sex.” I think this is true. Some of the running jokes in my circle are about the lack of sex in our daily lives. When we talk about naughty indulgences, we’re more likely talking about an extra hour of binge TV, or a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos eaten under the covers. And even among younger generations, there’s a documented sex recession, though awareness of and openness to sexual experience is higher than ever. So maybe we haven’t quite arrived at our HEA after all. But perhaps this new generation of spicy bookfluencers, known for their audacity and gleeful freedom, will unchain us all from the conventions that prevent us from finding

our individual brands of pleasure.

So, given that #SmutTok continues to climb in popularity, and given that the romance genre is a billion-dollar literary industry, what does the future look like for readers? More of the same, we hope. “I mean, we are in the golden age of monster erotica. Who knows where we go from here?” says Bailey. “As long as there is a happily ever after.”

As for myself, I’ll continue consuming all the bite-sized videos on #SmutTok, each reminiscent of a sweet morsel that melts quickly and satisfyingly on the tongue. And I’ll continue to find my joy in writing that is unfiltered, raw, and immediate like the best kind of sex.

Another Morning (sleeping houseguest ), c. 1972 Courtesy of the artist

Joanne Leonard

WHOSE RAW MATERIALS?

The new provincial literatures

by Daisy Hildyard

In the early spring of 2020, a few weeks before the first pandemic lockdown, I read an interview in the newspaper that changed the way I felt about the future. The architect Rem Koolhaas was discussing an exhibition he was about to open at the New York Guggenheim, but he didn’t sound like a man on a promotional junket more like a self-proclaimed prophet, holding forth. He was talking about the conditions of the planet today, and his conviction was that

the countryside, not the city, has become the location of “truly radical change.” Urban life has nothing new to show us: every city looks the same, “a predictable accumulation of roads, towers, icons”; meanwhile, out there on the 98% of the earth’s surface that is not occupied by cities, things are more volatile, speculative, “profoundly unfamiliar.”

At the Guggenheim, the exhibit “Countryside, The Future” featured stories of these places, from across the planet. German ghost villages repopulated by Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Robots cleaning the contaminated fields of Fukushima. A colossal greenhouse complex, 30 times the size of Manhattan, in eastern China. An ecological buffer zone in a Ugandan National Park, planted with species that are designed to deter humans and gorillas from encroaching on one another’s home territories. An indoor dairy in the Qatari desert. In this world, at the brink of ecological and social crisis, Koolhaas argues, the countryside is diverse, inventive, and spacious. It’s the place to find a way forward.

I found these ideas unsettling. I’d always accepted the conventional associations: cities are modern, while the countryside looks to the past. I grew up in a village in the north of England, and I remember it as authentically bucolic. I played in haystacks, stole fruit from other people’s trees, spent all day out in the fields and woods alone, not coming home until it was dark.

I had other memories, though, and they’d never quite meshed with these generic scenes. All the kids in my village grew up in front of the television and Nintendo console; we spent as many hours gaming as we did playing outside. Cocktails of chemicals pesticides, fertilizers, routine medi-

cations ran through the earth and all our bodies. The village was networked into supply chains that were often visible, the loaded lorries that came along the rural roads running our village to the city, to the docks and airports, to other continents, and back. The haymaking, apple-picking story of rural life never found a place for any of this.

When I imagine the landscape of the future, what I see is familiar from sci-fi. Large, strangely shaped buildings. Screens and reflective windows. Smooth, quiet machines. These are settled zones, horizons lined with towers and flyovers. When I consider this idea of the contemporary countryside, I realize that I have seen very different futuristic forms in reality, standing in open spaces, during and since my childhood. There was a quarry near the village in which I grew up, an enormous valley with its own roads and small buildings. I must have passed it and looked down on it many thousands of times, and never once set foot inside. More recently, there’s the Amazon hangar that I pass on the train; it doesn’t flash past as a building usually does, but runs on and on for several minutes. There’s the long, low shed housing battery hens on the edge of the local nature reserve a stench of ammonia comes over you before you see the building. There’s a new recycling plant outside my city, which looks like a monumental washing machine; my own waste passes through there. Up on the North York Moors, there’s a missile-warning and space-surveillance system co-owned by the British and US governments. Enormous radar plates, visible for miles around, are guarded by fences, warning signs, and soldier-staffed checkpoints, which look incongruous on the bare expanse of heather.

Each of these constructions is situated in a rural landscape. They have different purposes, but they’re all built on an awesome scale. Koolhaas describes the urbanization of the contemporary as an environmental problem: a story that permits urban cultures to repurpose the rest of the planet as “a back of house for urban civilization, a residual, enabling domain, where all the needs, demands, impositions of the urban can be orchestrated and implemented at will.” These rural architectures are true to that. They are places of production and surveillance, homes for industrialized bodies. There is something inhuman about each one: huge, windowless, guarded or otherwise concealed all the wrong shape and size for a person. They’re places that provide and process the raw materials of the urban environment, but they’re also places you’re not supposed to see.

This suggests a new story for the contemporary countryside. When I read about it, I had recently begun writing a novel set in the rural north of England. I had been thinking about how all of life not only provincial life happens in a local environment. All surroundings are small village, neighborhood, river mouth, strip mall, mountain slope, block, or highway. I wanted to tell a different kind of story from the pastoral tradition as I was familiar with it, a rural story that was not enclosed within its fields and farms, but one that was open to and active within a global world. I needed that because I wanted the story to help me see how the world is connected and made up, right now and everywhere.

England went into lockdown a short time later. Isolated at home, I had an intensified experience of the outside world as a place that was interconnected, a place

in which the stories of people and animals, and plants, and technologies, were crossing and unfolding against one another in new ways. I had this new sense of intensity and profusion, out there a liveliness as a distinct new landscape. I thought: perhaps this is just me. Over the following months, this last year up to now, I read other new books on the countryside, to see what stories for the future can be found in the contemporary rural form.

Marit Kapla’s Osebol (2021) is an oral history of the titular village, a small and quiet place in Värmland, western Sweden. Kapla, a journalist, grew up in Osebol, and a few years ago she went back to interview the remaining inhabitants. In Osebol, Kapla edits and orchestrates their words over short, broken lines, so that the thick book, in Peter Graves’s English translation, reads like a long, plainspoken poem.

Osebol is on a river, the Klarälven, and surrounded by forest. Forestry was the old industry there, flagging now. The place is steeped in the past. Many of the inhabitants are elderly, and even the younger villagers recall the beauty and the struggle of the old ways of life. Sleeping on the floor in hay. Hungry children going door-todoor to beg for food. Ice skating, itchy wool stockings. Dances, berry picking, lifting the potato harvest. The painful physical labor of forestry in winter. Christmas loaves, baked with rye, raisins, and cumin, in the shape of angels. The publisher’s synopsis sees Osebol as “secluded” and “quiet,” a place of “heirlooms” and “memories,” its story told in the “gentle rhythms of simple language.” The review in The Times Literary Supplement calls the book a “dusty mosaic,” a “fugue.”

When I read it, I saw something else. In fact, I felt surprised that it had been read, so straightforwardly, as a fugue for a lost pastoral world. The village is different these days. People eat pasta, not potatoes, and the kids are all on their phones. There’s a hydroelectric dam upstream, adequate broadband for remote workers. Social change is something that confronts the community, and it feels unexpectedly direct here, somehow too close. Osebolers speak as direct witnesses to crises that extend beyond them, beyond their village, around the world. There is a reception center for asylum seekers sited in an old forestry building. AnnaKarin helps out there. In conversation, she returns to her motivation for wanting to do something, which turns on the difference between hearing news of a refugee crisis and living in a close-knit community with people who have been through it. You read about “the things that happen” to refugee boats on the Mediterranean, but you can’t take it in. And then a real person materializes. Anna-Karin found herself sitting opposite a mother who had been in one of those boats, holding on to her two-year-old boy so that he wouldn’t fall in. “That’s when it becomes real,” says Anna-Karin. The center is slated to close, and she asserts that the refugees are not outsiders but integral participants in a changing community, “part of the local picture.” Some would consider staying, she thinks. The problem is job opportunities. “They don’t grow on trees.” The village is distinctly global now, within and beyond the refugee center. The population has diversified: there are residents from Amsterdam, Łódź, California. There are second homeowners (“we love the silence, we love the nature”), Estonian laborers, and German tourists. The

globalization of the countryside comes to the fore in conversations about work. Jan is in construction. He describes his industry’s internationalization, moving from wooden chipboard to by-product pasteboard, modular assembly, and global shipping. Åke, a retired metallurgist, produced metals for spacecraft, ice breakers, nuclear reactors. These days labor costs are reduced by globalizing production. Metal products are circulated through different countries for mining, processing, and fabrication. “They’re not exactly thinking about the environment.”

One retired widower makes an unnerving speech about a widespread movement away from the physical environment. Per Erik, born in 1940, used to work with electrics. As a child he liked taking household objects apart to look at their mechanisms. “There weren’t many things / I could leave alone.” He taught himself how to fix cars, then found employment looking after the machinery in the chipboard factory. He describes with precision the lacquered, coiled wiring on an electric motor. Suddenly, he cuts forward to broadband connection. Despite his lifelong interest in electrics, he is circumspect about the possibilities here. He wonders aloud what the future will bring. In five or ten years, perhaps, fiber will be obsolete. Personally, Per Erik prefers paper to wireless payments. “What would happen if we had a long electricity cut?”

Per Erik’s speech is disorientating, switching past and future, and reimagining a movement towards the virtual not as historical progress, but as a withdrawal from the material world. His speculation emerges not from an old-fashioned mistrust of new technologies but from an experienced feeling for its material basis. Many of his

neighbors are similarly concerned with this with the surroundings as material. “We live in the middle of the forest,” says Åke. “That’s your raw material.” István, a Stockholmer who established a commune in the village decades ago, didn’t see his community as part of a “green wave” movement back to the land. The motivation was industrial: he was planning to manufacture wooden playpark equipment. They moved to Värmland because it made sense to work here, “where there was plenty of the raw material / for what I was going to do.”

Whose raw material? Christer, a joiner, sees the rural landscape as the “back of house” for civilization that Koolhaas has described. “A town can’t function without the countryside,” says Christer. The village is a place in which people sit quietly sharing memories of tea dances and stooking the wheat, and it is equally a place whose inhabitants are confronting Europe’s refugee crisis, environmental collapse, rapid technological change, and problems with the costs human, environmental, and financial of globalized labor. It’s not that these macro-phenomena are bigger or more real in the village than they are in the city, but they are differently visible to the villager, who speaks with every newcomer, who witnesses the process through which a forest becomes flatpack furniture. The scenario Per Erik envisions, of extended wireless cut-off, is one I have never encountered in history books, nor in contemporary life. But I have come across it in speculative futures, describing what could happen as climate emergencies hit.

•

At the other end of Europe, a different village shares some of Osebol’s concerns.

Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019), translated from the Catalan by Maya Faye Lethem, is a novel set in a village in Catalonia. It’s an intergenerational story that turns on a catastrophic event: the accidental killing of a young man, Hilari, by his friend Jaume. Jaume is in love with Mia, Hilari’s twin sister. However, the book pulls focus from these characters to accommodate a wider panorama: its chapters are narrated by many different voices. Jaume speaks, as does Mia, but so too do the lightning, the black chanterelle mushrooms, the ghosts of witches, a roebuck, a local council official, the collective voice of the mountain’s bears.

Like Osebol, this village culture is an old world in many ways. Children build forts, catch rabbits, eat wild strawberries. There’s a chestnut festival in October. The people here are steeped in myth and ritual. Jaume says that his mother was a water sprite. His parents were giants. They made him out of snow.

But the present and future are also here. Solà has some fun with cosmopolitan stereotyping of the backward countryside. A city-dweller, visiting Mia’s butcher’s shop, sees it as a place that is “frozen in time.” It’s all “so authentic,” this village, with its primordial, otherworldly mountain panorama and its bad coffee. But he can’t deal with Mia’s erratic opening hours.

The village is not otherworldly or frozen in time; it’s trapped in history and of this world. There are witches and bears, but there are also employment problems, Vicks VapoRub, Stieg Larsson novels, asphalt, and hard shoulders. Solà’s countryside is carved with slick dark curving highway, and it’s wired up. When lightning strikes, locals know to avoid electrical poles and

animal fences, as well as the rocks and the caves. A villager, looking at the hillside, sees the electrified livestock fence as something that gives pause. “So modern, the most modern of things, that electric fence. Modern but designed for the mountain.” The estrangement between the rural landscape and the contemporary world is taken as read, but that “but” it isn’t borne out by the histories of technological development, or the actual view.

At the heart of When I Sing…, the mountains themselves speak, inhabiting an expanded sense of time that destabilizes any and all existing human stories of this place. They offer an alternative real to the villager’s or the tourist’s time, moving from the primeval past of geological formation (a slow, blind violence) to the remote future (another apocalypse, “The next beginning”). The mountain narrative sweeps away the human experience of time as tiny and insignificant. From their deep-time perspective, “nothing lasts long.” •

Esther Kinsky’s Rombo (2022), translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt, brings us to another isolated European mountain village, and it does something similarly estranging with human perspective. Kinsky is German, writing now, but Rombo takes place in Friuli, northern Italy, and spans the weeks of summer 1976. In May that year, and then again in September, the landscape and the community were torn apart by two earthquakes. Rombo lies somewhere between Solà’s novel and Kapla’s listening project: it’s a fictional oral history, frequently shifting its grounds. It combines human stories and natural histories, sometimes recounting a

neighborhood feud, elsewhere delineating with precision the geology, the plants, the light, and their histories. The narrative describes emergent stories, as various plants sprout from their soil minerals and weather conditions; animals are grazed around the plants; humans farm the animals and construct a landscape of buildings, roads, fields, placed according to their needs and their up-and-down relationships with other species and with one another.

This is a narrative that notices the ways in which humans and the planet shape one another; it’s a story of and for the climate change era. Kinsky integrates this distinctly contemporary way of seeing with 1970s rural life. She describes the traces of the antique manifesting in these “secluded zones with their own languages, dulled by waning use, their own shrill, helpless songs, and tricky dances.” She describes the incisions of modernity, a landfill site at the side of a highway. Arriving there, a lorry driver has nowhere to deposit his cargo, the site is already overflowing with concrete waste and cannot accept any more “everlasting scrap.” In the dump, there are piles of balanced toilets, sinks, bidets, and bathtubs. “Inerti is the elegant name for this rubble; it does not stir, already familiar with the lethargy of eternity.”

The mountain’s inerti is like a vision from a daylight dream, like the images of floating islands of trash mid-ocean, band-aids in turtles’ stomachs, the plastic flip flops that have been discovered in the Mariana Trench. It’s rare to catch glimpses of inerti at scale occasionally maybe, when passing a scrapyard or visiting the garbage dump. That’s because we tend to store it away from the centers of population. Kinsky’s roadside dump bears witness

silver print, 8 x 10 inches

Joanne Leonard

Untitled

Gelatin

© 2023 Joanne Leonard

Courtesy of the artist

to the utilization of rural areas as repositories for everlasting scrap. It miniaturizes the condition of the wider environment as a holding-house for human inerti, a holding house that is running out of capacity. It’s an apocalyptic vision earth stifled under the weight of eight billion broken toilets.

After the earthquakes, many people leave the mountain. For departees, the isolated slopes are “snares of memory and sentiment.” But Kinsky suggests a different way to be moved by this place and moment. The earthquake is described as a “time to learn, wide awake, about the new situation, the new order of things.” It’s no longer possible to live as though the landscape is an inert backdrop. Disaster shakes up the landscape, and the inhabitants no longer know where a familiar path will lead. For Gigi, a woodcutter and goatherd, the earthquake makes him feel that human life is as small as the smallest pebble in the river. Like the deep time of Solà’s mountains, Kinsky’s geological presence changes the perspective, so that the human scale is diminished it’s not the only scale. It’s disorienting for Gigi, “a new order of things in the world.”

The association between city and modernity has always been a fiction. That isn’t how space and time are woven into one another, with the future zoned in metropolitan areas and the past amassing around the edges. People on the Tibetan Plateau and the Congo Basin are living and breathing in the present; meanwhile, the past exerts a powerful influence at Shibuya Crossing and in Silicon Valley. And it follows logically from here that the great novels of rural Europe have never truly been separate from the contemporary world. Thomas Hardy writes

about new upheavals in science. Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories are set deep in cultures of heavy industry and engineering. The farming novels of Émile Zola and Halldór Laxness explore and indict, in their different ways, the flows of capital and power.

So, do these new rural narratives have anything new or distinct to say? Koolhaas’s idea of a “back of house” gives a particular contemporary perspective on the contemporary world. These books explore the provincial as a place where people confront environmental and social changes, the home of the modern world’s raw materials. If you want to learn about a palace, you might learn more by visiting the servants’ quarters than by standing in the ballroom. These books go into the backstage places factory, quarry, forest, dump, reception center that service urban life.

I noticed something else, though something beyond the rural settings that connects these three books. At first, I thought it was incidental. After a while, I changed my mind about that. It’s a structural thing: each narrative is polyvocal, there are no protagonists, and the stories are not configured by the conventions of major and minor plotlines. Readers and reviewers of all three books were struck by this. Nicci Gerrard, reviewing Osebol in The Guardian, describes how it gives us “voices of people who are usually unheard.” In the same paper, Christopher Shrimpton describes Solà’s multivocal narrative as “nothing if not inclusive.” Maria Stepanova describes Rombo “speaking out with many mouths and living voices.” The books created experiences of plurality; it was as though each reader’s attention had been redistributed, scattered more widely. For Gerrard, in Osebol, “each voice is given equal weight.” Shrimpton

describes Solà’s narrative as “democratic.” Stepanova feels Rombo’ s “compassion and solidarity not only with us human beings, but with the whole world.”

These multiplied voices articulate themselves in different ways, and language itself is also multiplied: the books are all polyglot as well as polyvocal. I read them in translation in English, but Catalonia and Friuli are already multilingual environments. Osebol has become so as it internationalizes. And the books extend towards communication outside words. Gerrard merges the Osebolers’ talk with other environmental noises: their conversation sounds like something caught on the wind; she compares their flowing and renewing language with the Klarälven. The speakers themselves tell stories of wolf calls, the plop of a beaver jumping into the river, and the quiet of the open, which makes the ears buzz. Solà develops a playful idiom to voice the nonhuman directly articulating, for example, the mushrooms’ pleasure in the rain: “Mmmmmmm, we said, mmmmm, rain.” Kinsky’s book has chapters that narrate the experiences of rivers and geologies, and the narrative also attends to the diverse ways in which different species embody and communicate aspects of the unfolding story. In the time before the earthquake, a caged bird’s whistling has the power to sour milk. Wild birds are restless, rattled. Dogs bark. The goats stand “incredibly still,” and their milk is bitter. Language mills around this confusion of experiences: “There are countless words to explain what transpired at the end of a day of three suns, yowling dogs, restless carbon snakes.”

I wondered whether there was a word for this radical redistribution of voices, proliferating to the point of bewilderment

within and beyond language. I recalled a term in a book I’d read a while ago, and went back to the book, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), to find it. The word, when I located it, struck a chord: provincializing. Kohn proposes a movement to “provincialize language,” drawing on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe (2000). Kohn and Chakrabarty are both using the word to describe a redistribution of power through a process of diversifying. Kohn is thinking with forms of communication beyond language. He argues that academics might “provincialize language” by accepting that it is not the central or highest form of communication, merely one mode of communication among many different noises and cries, motions or actions that exist and are useful in the human world and in the lives of other species. This has the effect of reorienting relations between species, redressing the effects of a tradition in which humans have habitually thought of themselves as the most advanced and most important species. As a way of understanding an ecosystem, this is more generous and loving, and it’s also more true. Chakrabarty questions the application of Western social theories to non-Western histories and invites his readers to imagine what new histories and new worlds might emerge if this assumption of universality and centrality were to be relinquished, and if differing theories were applied in different places. Again, this raises the prospect of a more realistic, more diverse and distributed understanding of wisdom.

Provincializing narratives, generalized from Chakrabarty via Kohn, is a word for recognizing that certain identities and perspectives have historically been elevated

and naturalized in anglophone cultures as though they were universal but they’re not. This centralization structures and exercises power. Straight white modernity has historically positioned itself as a global leader and apogee, a norm, a baseline, a protagonist, a center from which other ways of being, and other beings, are pushed to the margins. This narrative itself is power’s raw material. Provincializing this narrative means telling a story in which this position is dislodged: the centralized subject is only one form, story, voice, idea, identity, and there are others.

These rural stories reject conventions of center and margin; of protagonist and supporting cast, in favor of intertwined polyvocal stories, including those of other species and ways of being. This doesn’t mean that every voice in the story is exactly equal, but that the books have a panoramic focus that widens the narrative space for difference. They bring quieted voices into earshot and strain the conventions of priority. There’s a sense of purpose.

I read these three books after I’d written my own novel Emergency, which tells stories of different people and animals and plants and machines that live in and around a village in the north of England. As a reader, I could see a cause or context that I hadn’t conceptualized when I was writing: I could see why I’d wanted this form in that setting. Polyvocal and multispecies stories are not unique to rural literature of course not; however, it isn’t a coincidence that these provincial stories share this distributed approach to narrative because that is where the provincial embeds itself in form. The new provincial puts forward differing voices, redistributing and unsettling the narrative. It offers a

way of seeing and of being in the world that changes power relations. As a subject, the provincial is as interesting as any other localized environment, but no more. As a form, the new provincial suggests a world of difference.

A Note on Memory

For Bernadette, May 12, 1945 – November 22, 2022

by Perwana Nazif

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer shot a roll of film each day and kept a rigorous daily journal. Conceived as an installation, Memory was first exhibited at 98 Greene Street in SoHo, New York City, in 1978. Over 1,000 sequentially placed images were set to six hours of recorded poetry the outcome of Mayer’s real-time impressions and reevaluations upon viewing her developed photos. In 2020, Mayer’s installation was translated into book form by Siglio Press; it includes full-color scans of the original slides, give or take a few from the original installation, and 200 pages of Mayer’s writing. Siglio is set to print a second edition later this year.

Mayer’s experiment with memory and consciousness through exhaustive visual and articulable means eludes attempts to capture a complete representation of experience and experience-as-remembered. The orders are incommensurable: Bernadette’s poetry does not caption the photographs just as the photographs do not illustrate her words. Her poetry announces limits, the lacunae between and within the image(s), the edges that border, the points where words reach their exhaustion, that all approach the carnality of memory but can never embody it in total. And yet, Memory does not fail Mayer’s project isn’t testing whether experience can be directly represented in entirety through the seeable and the discursive. Mayer tests with openness, an unbounded hypothesis that, instead, experiments with these two orders to see what they reveal about memory in short, in what the seeable and sayable do. We testify to these gestures: reflection coated upon reaction; a reanimation of the inert; being as gridded, interrupted, and transformed; the gap that opens.

Beginning her July 3rd entry, she writes “So why dont you come over every saturday, why dont you teach us every monday: more than 30 years have passed since that moment when is anything permanently forgotten photograph: monday a window of a factory,

tuesday a small white handkerchief with ‘a merry christmas’ embroidered in red across one corner, wednesday a man’s black striped pants, thursday a light brown earthenware jar, friday an earthenware jar like thursday but darker in color, saturday a saucer with a pattern of brown & gold squares round the edge, sunday a metal cream pitcher.” A picture of colors inaugurates Bernadette’s week, broken into daily vignettes within the day, while the tiled images on the following page, a false continuity, read of reflecting and perspectives that ascend. It conjures inwards prompting collaborative remembrances. As for myself, Monday long drive west, tuesday steam emerging from the pavement, wednesday a closed book, thursday a pie for two, friday a pie for one, saturday a scalloped body suit, sunday a bagel in half and cone incense that comes with captions, tangerine daydream and love must.

More listings, but images: Bernadette, yellow taxis, shopping carts, Bernadette again, diner counters, zoomed-in cityscapes, friends, intimate kitchen scenes, intimate bedroom scenes, intimate bathroom scenes, evidence of writing, her Ed, light, light exploding, light crackling, waters in various forms, vegetation, images that seem more in succession than others, underexposed or superimposed. Patterns emerge of repeats with differences, thick and thin images that prompt, a vehicle in various times and spaces. Of the latter, what do they carry through? The images exist in verb form rather than verbal they simply and not so simply do.

Her listings read moody, read impulsive, read incantatory, read attest to this or forget, read work put in and working through not to an ending. The singular of Memory points to the inherent and participatory plurality contained in the singular the seemingly singular contains multitudes. I have a friend that writes Bernadette is the one. Her memory continues.

Selected images from Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.

detail, July 1, 1971

detail, July 2, 1971

detail, July 3, 1971

detail, July 4, 1971

detail, July 5, 1971

detail, July 6, 1971

above

Tishan Hsu

Watching 2, 2021

UV cured inkjet, acrylic, silicone on wood, 72 x 48 x 3 inches

above right:

Tishan Hsu

Boating Scene 1.1.2, 2019

UV print on aluminum, silicone, pigment, 90 x 67 x 3 inches

© 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

facing page: Detail of Boating Scene 1.1.2, 2019

left:

Photo: Stephen Faught.

© 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

above:

Tishan Hsu

Intensive Care, 1990

Steel, glass, cement compound, plastic, rubber, 58 x 40 1/2 x 20 inches

© 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

facing page:

Tishan Hsu

Blue Interface, 2019 –2021

Dye-sublimation inkjet, stainless steel wire cloth, silicone on aluminum, 61 x 48 x 3 inches

Photo: Stephen Faught

© 2022 Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UGLY CATS AND THE LONELINESS OF MAN

by Lauren Collee

In the early months of the pandemic, my housemates and I adopted the world’s least photogenic cat. Someone in our local mutual aid group had found her wandering the streets. She was extremely skinny, her fur was matted, she had cloudy speckles in her eyes and a strange lump on her chin, and her meow sounded like a haunted floorboard. We’d post photos, and people would reply asking if we

were sure she was okay. “She’s got liver problems,” we’d explain, continuing to post. Her vulnerability enchanted people. We called her Hildy.

We put up flyers just in case her owner was out there somewhere. Two different people got in touch; neither wanted her back. We developed a narrative in which the previous owners had been neglectful, if not abusive, and congratulated ourselves on saving her from certain death. (Once, while walking back home from the shops, I’d come across what I thought at first was a cat asleep on the road; when I got closer, I discovered that its entire head was missing. Reports of dismembered cats found around London a few years earlier had spawned fears of a serial feline murderer referred to as the “Croydon Cat Killer,” though an extensive police investigation yielded no evidence of human intervention. The phenomenon was dismissed as the unfortunate result of vehicle collisions combined with scavenging by foxes and other predators.) For three years, we showered Hildy with love, massaged her little ears, and spent a fortune on liver supports and carpet cleaner and cat-relaxant diffusers.

Then, this summer, she went missing. It had only been a few hours, but she’d never strayed beyond the garden wall before.

I knocked on all the doors in the neighborhood. After a few friendly dismissals, a woman answered and confirmed that there was a strange, emaciated brown cat in her garden, which she’d presumed to be a stray. There, I found Hildy fast asleep in a makeshift bed the woman had built for her. When I tried to pick Hildy up, she screamed as though she were being kidnapped. “I promise you she’s my cat,” I told the woman, who looked skeptical and told me she

seemed “really hungry.” The woman pulled out a packet of off-brand cat food to hand over to me, and Hildy let out a heartwrenching wail at the sight of it. Again, the woman looked at me sideways. When I finally got her home, my arms covered in scratches, I put out the sachet of food for her. Hildy gave it a sniff and walked away.

I felt a weird vertigo; I could sense the neighbors developing the same story about Hildy as I had, except this time, I was the neglectful owner, and they were her happy ending. Sure enough, over the weeks that followed, Hildy began visiting the neighbors for longer and longer stretches, coming home only to be fed. They sent me photos of her lolling about on their laps, assuring me she was safe. Eventually, she stopped coming back to our place at all, and I stopped trying to collect her. We went out to the pub with them and talked about Hildy for hours. At the end of the evening, we invited them to take on full ownership.

I experienced Hildy’s departure like a one-sided break-up. I couldn’t sit with her over coffee and do a postmortem, so I went back through an album of photos of her on my phone, searching for early warning signs. In one photo, Hildy wears a placid smile on her face as she stretches a skinny arm out over my belly, embracing me like a child would. In another, she perches on the edge of my bath, her love for me evidently stronger than her fear of water. It was no use. I’d curated these photos to tell a very particular story one in which she needed me. What had I missed in my view of her? And what role did my incessant photography of her have to play in this?

By most accounts, pet-keeping in its contemporary form dates back to the Victorian era, when the practice of keeping domesticated animals for companionship and pleasure began to spread through the middle classes; prior to this, it had been largely viewed as a quirk of the aristocracy. From England, it was exported globally, where it clashed with other forms of interspecies relation and friendship. Animal historian Harriet Ritvo ties this to the wider sense of a new technological mastery over nature: “Once nature ceased to be a constant antagonist,” she writes, “it could be viewed with affection, and even, as the scales tipped to the human side, with nostalgia.”

John Berger makes a similar argument in his classic 1980 essay “Why Look at Animals,” which begins with a paradox: “Everywhere animals disappear.” Lost to forces of industrialization, Berger writes, the animal proliferated in popular culture at the same time as it was disappearing from the functions of daily life. From the 19th century onward, animals no longer formed part of society’s fabric. Instead, they began to show up as meat, as leather and wool, in zoos, and in the domestic sphere as plush toys for children, and as pets. For Berger, these approximations do nothing to satisfy a still deeply rooted desire for interspecies contact. Since 1970, wildlife populations have plummeted by approximately 69 percent. Meanwhile, in the same timeframe, pet ownership has more than tripled in the United States.

Whether pets count strictly speaking as “nature” is a question that was as tricky to answer in Victorian times as it is today. Cats and dogs are the product of long histories of selective breeding, in which certain traits docility, loyalty,

emotional expressiveness were favored. In the 19th century, the categories of human and animal were coming to form opposite poles, giving way to a scalar logic according to which some animals were more animal than others and some humans more human than others. Meanwhile, the pet emerged as a bridge, absorbing the fraught questions that developed at the intersection of humanity and animality, while simultaneously offering a palatable vision of nature as subordinate to and dependent on man.

The emergence of the “pet” as a concept emerged in tandem with a technology that was crucial to this new framing of the animal companion: photography. In the 19th century, several famous animal taxidermists, including Walter Potter and Hermann Ploucquet, staged images in which stuffed creatures were arranged into social tableaus. A schoolmaster weasel punishes his rabbit pupil; a group of kittens sit around drinking tea while another plays the piano. Their bodies are strangely stiff, their eyes glassy and blank. The Victorian photographer Harry Pointer, by contrast, used live cats for his subjects, capturing them in unlikely poses riding a bicycle, or ice-skating and sold the images as greeting cards.

The invention of photography helped establish the pet as a kind of ready-made anthropomorphism. But pets are still animals. A large part of the appeal of adopting a pet is the thrill of interspecies contact, the everyday encounters with what Berger calls the “abyss of non-comprehension”: the joy of making contact across this abyss and approaching a non-verbal intimacy that feels ancient and transformative. A pet is a little walking tornado of mysteries. What does she dream about? What is she trying

to tell me? What does the world look like through her eyes? Who am I to her? These are not trivial questions.

•

Like Rome or Istanbul, the internet is absolutely swarming with cats. The 2007 meme I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? kicked off a generation of “Lolcats,” normalizing the use of pet pics as a tool for expressing simplified responses or emotions. Perhaps it is significant that it’s the cat that absorbed this function rather than the dog. In many ways, dogs are too human. They have less in common with their distant ancestor, the wolf, than the cat does with the wildcat; the cat has enough apparent “wildness” in it still to satisfy our desire for intimacy with “nature” without frightening us too much. Content featuring non-domesticated animals performs well on the internet, but pet content does even better. The most widespread memes aren’t of elephants, or snakes, or even pandas (the most beloved of non-domesticated animals); they’re of cats and dogs. The pet is a Goldilocks zone. It has one foot in the instinctive and bodily world of the animal, and one foot in the socially conditioned world of the human. Pets often pop up on Twitter or Instagram as a “timeline cleanser,” a soft animal body to interrupt the doomscroll, counteracting the nastiness of the human world and of its crowning achievement, the internet. If the pet is an extension of human life, then the pet pic is in a sense a kind of flattering selfie, a Vaseline-smeared mirror, expressing the best, most innocently “animal” elements of humanity without the worst. The pet cannot give consent and therefore we presume that none is required. Following Sianne Ngai’s definition of

“the cute,” an anaesthetic category, the pet expresses an appealing powerlessness, a body that is “soft, malleable, diminutive.” Crucially, the cute is shorthand for describing an object to others, rather than a means to process the subject for oneself. When I was a teenager, my mother used to burst into my bedroom in a panic, telling me to come downstairs urgently. Each time I would assume something had caught fire or that one of my siblings had lost a finger, but each time she merely wanted to point out the family cat, who would have tucked himself into a drawer or would be lying in a particularly vulnerable position: belly-up, legs akimbo, arms folded over his stomach.

“He’s being really cute right now.” Right now! Her determination that I not miss the moment stuck with me, and I adopted it as a habit of my own, the camera as my witness.

Pet pics are a way for strangers to bond with one another, a bond forged across a shared aesthetic judgment. A couple struggling to maintain a relationship will often adopt a pet in an effort to rediscover their connection. As a framework, though, cuteness is limited in what it can do to extend care. Cuteness creates community horizontally, across different observers. But it doesn’t operate vertically; it doesn’t transcend the species barrier.

For Akira Mizuta Lippit, as for John Berger, the emergence of contemporary imaging practices was bound up with the emergence of contemporary relations to animals. In his book Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), Lippit argues that contemporary technologies were forged to incorporate or resemble the animal they

replaced (he gives as an example the insignia of a horse that commonly featured on the early steam engines that replaced horsepower). For Lippit, technology widely and film specifically can be seen as “a massive mourning apparatus, summoned to incorporate a disappearing animal presence.” In other words, technology became a home for animals at a time when they were physically disappearing from the surrounding environment. Haunted by animals, our technologies even developed some animal traits (Lippit traces the origins of film back to Eadweard Muybridge’s fascination with animal movement, identifying a common etymological root between “animal” and “animate”).

For Lippit, animals in the contemporary world are ghosts, finding themselves most at home in the spectral media of photography and film. The animal “cannot die” and therefore lingers in the world undead. It cannot die because here Lippit borrows from Berger animals are not perceived as subjects with individuated identities. Every elephant is Elephant, every lion is Lion; when the animal body dies, the species continues. The living animal is therefore also perceived as a corpse. But where do pets fit into this argument? The pet is individuated. We view the cat as a specific cat, and not as a category. We don’t look at a cat and see its corpse.

It is the individuation of pets that most separates them from the wider world of “nature” as conceived within Western modernity. Corresponding to the atomization of society under neoliberalism, this individuation has become more pronounced as it has become more commodified pets aren’t just individuals; they’re complete brands. “Consider your pet’s persona,”

advises a guide to monetizing a pet’s online presence. Between 10 and 50 percent of pets in the UK have a social media profile (the most famous pet on Instagram, @jiffpom, has 9.5 million followers). The pets that crop up on Instagram are strangely placid. They sit in the bath while their bellies are massaged with toothbrushes. They are probably heavily sedated.

Insofar as the pet (and, by extension, the pet pic) gives us an insight into the consciousness of another species, and a glimpse of what interspecies friendship might look like, it can only be a good thing. Pet-keeping, though, isn’t a de facto ecological good. By some estimates, owning a medium-sized dog is as bad for the environment as owning an SUV. More nebulously, the very blinkered way in which we have learned to understand human-animal relationships through pet-keeping may prevent us from conceiving other arrangements with non-human species. “Pethood” is a specific lens, one that reveals more about us than it does about the inner lives of the animals we have domesticated.

When I was a child, images of puppies or kittens would arouse an almost painful feeling of longing in me, one heightened by the tragedy of the knowledge that I would never be able to tell them how much I loved them. It turns out this is a well-documented phenomenon called “cute aggression,” a response present to some extent in all of us, sometimes resulting in the desire to crush the cute object: to pop it, or squish it, or eat it to possess the animal in a visceral, bodily way. According to neuroscientist Anna Brooks, the impulse results from “frustration about an over-the-top reaction

that we can’t really act upon.” A prevailing theory is that the brain tries to counteract positive emotion with negative impulse. This feeling of frustration may go some way to describing why every time I experience a wave of love for my cat, I reach for my phone. Short of absorbing her entirely, the only response left to me is to relentlessly capture her image.

Today, I spend as much time looking at pet content as the next person (truthfully, probably more). I do not think people should stop keeping pets, nor that people should stop photographing them. But I do think we are missing other models of relating to animals, and that this sense of loss expresses itself as a fetishization of pets, whom we have created as an antidote to what Berger calls “the loneliness of man as a species.” For better or worse, this fetishization is and always has been enabled by photography.

Last week, my neighbors went on holiday, and Hildy came back to me. I know she’ll leave again the moment they get home. I watch her walking about the house and I don’t know what to make of her, and it suddenly seems absurd to me that I ever did. Nonetheless, I continue to photograph her, sending some of these photos to the neighbors to assure them that she’s safe.

HOME LEAVES HOME

When diaspora isn’t, yet

by Karen Cheung

The airport is a beginning and an ending. It is just past 6:00 p.m. on September 13, 2022, and I am in the slow-moving queue for Turkish Airlines, along with 10 of my friends who have shown up to see me off despite repeated assurances that my student visa was only good for a little over a year. The departure hall is sterile; it smells like the inside of a hospital appropriate given that for at least half of the people here, it is the death of a life as they knew it. Ahead of me are about 50 suitcases and a dozen children in face masks that do little to muffle their shrieks.

My skin still smells like the ocean. The day before, Kaitlin and I went for one last swim at Turtle Cove, and on the beach I ate a whole snowy mooncake for breakfast, in honor of mid-autumn festival. The surface of the water was broken up by trash, and there was a lining of sunblock residue that was at once dreamy and disgusting. I couldn’t resist putting my head under. My visa would not come until the morning of my flight; for days, I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to fly out after all. I didn’t go through the motions of things one was supposed to do when they leave host a ceremonious farewell hotpot, take the tram from Shau Kei Wan to Kennedy Town, get dim sum with my old teachers. I didn’t do any of those things because I told myself I wasn’t really leaving.

My two suitcases are stacked onto a trolley, which Francis and Gareth take turns pushing across the sleek speckled floor, even though I told them that if I couldn’t haul them around on my own here, I’d be screwed when I got to Heathrow on my own. Gareth mumbles something under his breath about how being at the airport reminds him of the protest they staged here in 2019. Not so loud, I say to him.

Hsiuwen has brought along a Polaroid camera and is snapping portraits of me and everyone else, photographs that I would carry with me in my wallet for weeks to come. I’ve instructed everybody that they aren’t allowed to see me off if they think they might cry, because I don’t want my eyes to dry out on a 17-hour flight. Emily breaks that rule when I pull her and Bernadette into a group hug. I don’t know if it’s because Bernadette’s seen something of my future in the tarot cards that she hasn’t yet told me, or if Emily’s been disappointed by too

many friends who had promised they’d be back and never returned. Surveying this entourage of people I love, Holmes says, “I’m starting to think maybe I should not have believed you.”

The beginning: a new climate, new city, new community. The ending is the part of my selfhood that had been constructed upon the narrative that I could not and was incapable of leaving home, even for a short period of time. Being someone who has never lived anywhere outside of the place I had grown up has, over time, become a core part of my identity; I like being rooted in one place, a place that informed how I see and move through this world. It felt vaguely punk to choose to stay when everyone was adamant about moving across the globe.

But, as the political conditions deteriorated, my imaginary list of factors that could kill me kept growing: getting arrested, never falling asleep again, being crushed by the sheer weight of my anxiety. If I do not leave now, on the cusp of turning 30, I know I will never leave. It feels like time to challenge my hypothesis that I would wither and perish if I ever left Hong Kong. I am powerless to change the course of history, but at least I can control the distance of the seats from which I watch my world burn, if only for a little while. •

When I was 18, I got the words seize the day tattooed on my wrist because I was convinced that I’d die young. It wasn’t because I had an underlying medical condition or that I thought I was some genius child doomed to an early death; it was that, throughout my adolescence, I had lived on the precipice of mental collapse, the result

of growing up in a volatile family environment. This eventually drove me to move out, and from that moment on, home became a singular obsession, in both life and writing.

Home is not a place but what is it then? White walls and a scented soy candle that constitute what writer Hyejoo Lee recently called “an amalgam of affects,” an oval cast-iron casserole dish, the monstera plant aesthetic? A person you promised to be partnered to forever? A miniature toy model of the bus of your regular route, a bath mat that says Home Kong? What I desired, above all else, was a permanent address. I had moved, over the past decade, from 5 Water Street to 21 North Street to 1F Sands Street to 343 Des Voeux Road West to 62 Po Hing Fong. I wanted to be parented, to have a bowl of soup waiting for me at home after a long workday, to know where I was meant to be during the holidays. Oh, why don’t I have a home, I’d moan, feeling so damn sorry for myself.

Questions like who is your emergency contact? or name of next of kin? on a form at the doctor’s office or on the university registration website used to pull me into a black hole of despair, make me feel like I was all alone in this fucking world. When I had food poisoning and passed out from dehydration, I refused to check into the hospital, for fear that they would call up my father. When I attended weddings and saw the parents dabbing at their eyes, I’d drink until I threw up. At my graduation, I cried so hard amidst the other proud multigenerational families that the vice-chancellor twice turned back to look at me in alarm. I lived in chaos mode, channelling my energy toward the simple task of not dying.

During the protests in 2019, I wondered: who the hell was I supposed to call

if I landed myself in the hospital or at the detention center? Rules around visitations are archaic, privileging one mode of social relations those decreed by blood, or by your willingness to sign a piece of paper betrothing yourself to another over freer forms of love. This question I had been wrestling with since my early adulthood suddenly took on a perilous quality, as if it was connected to my fundamental survival in this city.

For a long time, I did not have a place that felt like mine, so I sought refuge in my friends’ apartments. I am now almost 10,000 kilometers and an eight-hour time difference away, but if I close my eyes, I can still see every one of these with photographic clarity the warm insides of these apartment blocks stacked on top of one another.

What I remember about each of my friend’s places: the mug, etched with an initial K, that sits on the shelf of Jesse and Bianca’s tong lau flat on the quiet Sycamore Street near Tai Kok Tsui. It is a street that would have been unremarkable if not for its melodious Chinese translation, 詩歌 舞街, the street of song, poetry, and dance, and the fact that it’s been cemented in the pop-culture imagination by an eponymous indie pop song. Jesse, an engineer and my gig buddy, is one of the best home cooks I know, making elaborate meals to feed his friends every weekend. After dinner, we’d clear the table and lay down board games while tiny men ran after a ball on the television. The mug was presented to me by Bianca, and it sits beside other initials, a gesture that says to their friends, now my home is yours, too.

The line of potted plants at Rachel’s rooftop garden, in a leafy village nothing like the boisterous Kowloon neighborhood I was raised in. Bees wander in through gaps in the glass doors and circle the room while we duck our heads, and sometimes, when she has guests over, she cuts leaves of basil and tosses them into the sauce. Rachel is a journalist, with an ability to talk to just about anyone, and a ferocious dedication to reporting in a hostile political environment. She writes the menu onto stiff cards chawanmushi, clams steamed in saké, salmon chazuke and it was here, this past Lunar New Year, that I finally learned how to play mahjong, overcoming my adolescent shame of having to sit in a corner whenever my friends gather round the square table.

At Rocky’s public housing flat, it is the framed Death Cab for Cutie poster on the wall, next to a bookshelf of volumes by Paul Auster, political theory, and manga. His place faces a track field with glaring stadium lights that cast fluorescent imprints onto his window every night, and vinyl records are scattered across the space, spilling out of their worn sleeves. After a few beers, we would force each other to listen to our favorite music. Our friendship came slow, formed after years of running into one another at gigs or reporting assignments, and cemented through traded book and music recommendations. Rocky has been a 40-year-old punk since he was about 21, and by that, I mean he’s a hater who loves very fiercely. When he plays with his band, I never miss a gig.

I have had the same friends for the past five, then 10, then 15 years; if I ever felt lonely, there was a contact list on my phone of dozens of people dating back to my secondary school days whom I could ask out

for dinner or a drink. We were all here, and never more than an hour away from each other in this tiny ass city that does not even have its own postcode, separated at most by a narrow harbor and the taxi drivers who refuse to cross the tunnel.

My last place of residence in Hong Kong was a seafront apartment on Connaught Road West. There was a view of the harbor from the study, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the balcony in the living room, a smudge of distant blue that cast an aura of serenity over the space. A few days before I left, my friend and colleague Elaine came over to pick up a monitor and a couple of miscellaneous items for her new place. “This is such a nice flat,” she said, wistfully, looking at the famed Hong Kong skyline that was right outside my window.

The apartment was crammed with belongings that were not mine, because every time a friend left Hong Kong, their things would inevitably wind up in my apartment. Over the past year, I had inherited a soda stream I never bothered to order capsules for, a biking helmet I did not use because I couldn’t bike, seven potted plants, and dozens of tote bags from a civil organization that has since disbanded. People kept giving me things because I was the person who was not going to leave, and I kept adopting them because I was ready to become a Person With Things, in a home with a person that finally promises to feel a little permanent.

When I was 20, I had lived in a seaview flat with six others, among them Francis and Gareth, and despite the messiness of the bathroom and our interpersonal relationships, I remembered the moments

of quiet staring out at the nautical lights drifting gently on the surface of a sea that disappeared against the night. I always thought, so long as I found the right person and lived in a perfect flat that replicated those previous conditions of quiet, my void would be filled once and for all.

What I missed wasn’t the place itself, but the version of myself that had existed in that place: open-hearted and young enough to still believe that, so long as I tried hard, my love would have to be reciprocated, whether by another person or by a city. I never felt quiet in this place, not after I hung my friends’ artwork on the wall, not after I populated the flat with musical instruments and cooking equipment, not even with the photographs I had carefully framed and propped up in each room symbolizing our union. I thought maybe the difference was that this apartment had been adjacent to a highway, and the sounds of cars racing down the road bled into my dreams. I had equated home with domesticity, believing I could build a welcoming space like the one my friends had generously offered me, but I was crushingly lonely, making meals for one despite living with another, and trying to distract myself via podcasts and baking and reality television.

When it was time to clear all my personal items, I threw out the Things with a calm indifference that surprised me. On my last day in the flat, I baked a lemon cake. It was dry and did not rise; in bed later that night, just before I fell asleep, I realized I forgot to put the eggs in. It was inedible, but the sweet smell of baked goods lingered in the space. At least I tried to make it home. I tried so hard.

I moved to London for a graduate program in writing. Over the past decade, I had worked first as a reporter, then as an editor at an art archive. I wrote a book about growing up in and loving and resenting and mourning Hong Kong. I was proud of being a Hong Kong writer, but I was starting to feel unsure about whether I could ever write about anything else, so I came to England to find out.

I thought I would finally give myself the freedom to write about music and heartbreak and literature, but instead all I was writing about was still Hong Kong. I often said that if I ever left, I would not write about Hong Kong anymore. I harbored some faint moralistic objection to being a Hong Kong writer who no longer lived there. What right do you have, I muttered to myself, as I read yet another piece written from afar, portraying a version of the city so long past it was unrecognizable to anyone who had lived there in the past decade. Now it was, What right do I have?

When I was in Hong Kong, everything had felt urgent. We were documenting the times, keeping the memory of the fight against the authoritarian regime alive. Now that I am so far away, nothing feels urgent anymore. My writing has always been maximalist, stretching to the limit of the permitted word count. There are gaps and asterisks, yet too much happens over the span of 700 words, as if I’m trying to cram an entire life and history of a city into a piece of writing. The writers I meet here in England don’t write that way. They hold the gaze; they single in on one idea. I am fast and out of control, swerving from one crisis to another. Their moments unfold gradually, deliciously. In their company, I, too, learn to slow down.

At the pub after class one day, I tell a friend I have no idea what an English village looks like. We open Google Street View and show each other where we grew up. We click on the arrow to move down the road: I see a fish and chips shop, a barber that hasn’t updated its storefront since the ’80s, a pub dripping with bursts of flowers in hanging pots. The roads are flanked by aggressive trees on both sides.

This is the tree my window faced, I say as I zoom in on the banyan at Blake Garden I had written so much about. Then I type in Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park; the description says, Green space with a jogging path & pool. It is still marked as 7 min walk home. I plant the little man onto the waterfront, point at the tall buildings lined up neatly in front of a soft mountain ridge, the cable bridge on the left, the solitary fishing line dipping into the waves by the fence. And these are my waters.

interior differences, looks almost exactly like their studio in Sheung Wan, where I had been a constant dinner guest. Beth has my spare keys; she is listed as my local emergency contact.

I came to England for no other reason than to prove that I could do it. But I also waited for there to be a critical mass of people I love in this foreign land before deciding to come. Two of my best friends from university had moved to England, one after the other, just before I came: Beth and Lam and I met over a decade ago in university in Hong Kong, and by some stroke of serendipity we are now once again no more than an hour away from each other. Every day we share the stray thoughts that cross our minds, trade photographs of the meals we make for ourselves, exchange tender encouragements. Beth teaches tenancy law to a group of middle-aged moms and dads who have moved with their kids. She and her partner’s flat, for all its structural

The other people I knew here are émigrés from Hong Kong, an assortment of artists, lawyers, activists, and writers. They aren’t here to prove a point to themselves. They’re here because they can’t go home, after the national security law in 2020 effectively outlawed all dissent in the city. Or maybe they could, but they aren’t sure. That’s the whole point of the national security law: that fuzzy slab of uncertainty in between. They don’t call themselves exiles it’s too loaded a term. They aren’t diaspora either, at least not yet; that is an identity that perhaps their children would assume when they grow up. They learned to make their own char siu and have an arsenal of information about the best deals at Asian supermarkets. I speak just as much Cantonese here, in a place where I am no longer the racial majority, as I did when I was living in Hong Kong. At dinners, we joke about making our own TamJai minced pork and selling it at Colindale, a neighborhood saturated with Hong Kongers.

I’ve always hated how corny missing home was, the diasporic food writing and the empty signifiers of home and mother tongues, and now, despite my best efforts to resist, I was turning into a corny person. The sudden food cravings for baked pork chop rice, the thrill of finding a boxed carton of Vita lemon tea (the bitter kind!) at your local co-op, the impulse to put a Hong Kong map up on the wall, blasting Cantopop in your bedroom in a house of foreigners like it’s an inside joke (wait, but remember, they

aren’t the foreigners anymore, that’s you). I haven’t turned off my push alerts of Hong Kong news, so while I’m at the local pub quiz with my neighbors trying to figure out what years Horatio Nelson had been alive, I get daily updates about the number of buildings given mandatory mass-testing orders in Hong Kong, the warning signals for the unseasonal typhoons that have now been hoisted.

I had promised myself I would never write a piece about leaving Hong Kong, but maybe I could write about all the ways Hong Kong never leaves us: how, when I’m walking down a biking lane reveling in the novelty of living next to a graveyard, I’d still be thinking about the noise of the city from the first row of the tram, the pink bougainvillea that drapes down a graffitied wall, even the black layer of grime outside a street food stall in Mong Kok. I plop myself down onto my neighborhood in Google Maps every now and then, wander the streets, click through the alleys and past the blurred faces of ghostly pedestrians. I’d see the storefront of the goods store and think to myself, there ought to be a cat with a red collar writhing on the pavement right there, between the bus stop and the boxes of dried scallops.

When I saw on social media a poster of Rocky’s upcoming show in December, a day before Christmas Eve, I realize that, for the first time in years, I would not be joining hundreds of others in a sweaty mosh pit at a grubby warehouse dancing along to his band. Instead, when I am at the organic food store next to Hampstead Heath, I put his music on my iPod, listen to him scream into my ear, then send him photographs of all the produce I’ve previously only known from cooking shows: pumpkin and squash

of all sizes and mutations, celeriac, tiger tomatoes, plantains.

Perhaps I would not have seen permanence as a worthwhile pursuit had we not grown up in a city with a countdown timer. But it felt only fair that, if I were to be forced to get used to a new residence every few years, it would at least be in the same city, a vast expanse of land and water, people and streets that would be called home. For those who had recently moved, either forcibly out of fear of arrest or voluntarily, Hong Kong as home was now an abstraction. They may think of the city as home until the day they die, but when they say 返屋企 these days, they mean a suburb in a new apartment development in a British suburb that reminds them of LOHAS Park.

I am not as fully here as those who have emigrated, nor can I pretend to be as up to date with political developments as when I was there, as in back home. I don’t want to be caught in that punishing loop of post-protest memorialization. Observing certain protest anniversaries is necessary because it is now dangerous to do so in Hong Kong under the law, but the memory is still fresh enough to be an open, gaping wound, and nobody could say what the purpose is beyond commemoration. I have no patience to follow the drama within exile and immigrant communities, but I don’t want to lose my connection with what had defined me either. I’ve also come to understand that any guilt over not being physically present is utterly meaningless and serves only to entrap myself. All I could do is keep the people who love me close, people who still keep home close.

One afternoon in late September, a group of us all find ourselves within the

vicinity of Liverpool Street, and so we meet up at a Hong Kong cafe that offers French toast that costs three times what we’d be paying at a cha chaan teng in Prince Edward. The menus are sandwiched between a square of glass and the table, and the plates are a cheap yellow plastic. Behind the counter, a young man in a white shirt is making milk tea with an impassive expression while singing along to N.Y.P.D.’s “Mee & Gee” blasting over the speakers: 屌 你老母 Giordano, 屌你老母 Bossini. I had left home, but home had also left home.

•

Once upon a time, I was in love with someone who was fond of telling me I was rubbish at taking care of myself. I internalized it so thoroughly that I started making even that a part of my identity. Haha I’m so rubbish, I’d say when I knocked something over or misplaced an item or burnt a piece of meat I was cooking. One morning at work, I was describing something I don’t even recall what to Paul, and I let it slip out again. I’m just useless, lol.

Paul, my colleague and one of my best friends, turned to me and shook his head. With an almost pained expression, he said, “I really wish you would stop saying that. But whatever, ugh. You do you.”

From then on, I’d let my friends know that they can call me out if they hear me saying that again. When CC caught me reverting back to my self-hating monologue, she chastised me, too. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore!” •

Callum and I met when he was on exchange at my alma mater in 2015. He lived across the street from me and would come

over to my flat every other day to watch Community. He moved back to Britain after a year, but we kept up a long-distance friendship, weathering our failed relationships and career changes and family drama alongside one another, albeit virtually. Callum works as a doctor with the NHS, one of my few friends here who isn’t also from Hong Kong. He lives in a beautiful house in Kilburn that faces out to a garden with two other flatmates and “Rita the fake bitch,” a plastic monstera.

When I visited him in May, he told me that he had read my book and that he took issue with one thing: that I believed the only way I could fill my I’m-so-fuckingalone void was to succumb to a heteronormative family structure. Queer folks have long understood what chosen family meant. I mean, we’re basically family, he said.

For the five years we were apart, we never forgot to send each other cards and books and recorded video messages on birthdays and Christmas holidays. Whenever he’s in town, he sleeps on whatever vacant couch or bunk bed there is in the flat I am then in. When our hearts are broken, we hold each other and cry. These days, when he’s not working night shifts, the two of us, along with his friend Brian, order takeaway and nestle onto the couch in his house and watch the latest episode of Bake Off, my head resting on his arm with an easy intimacy.

All of my Things are still in Hong Kong: my four boxes of belongings are at my friend Ysabelle’s art gallery, packed by Rachel, who became exasperated by my lack of progress and showed up at my door clutching paper boxes one morning, methodically instructing me on what to do about each item and sealing my clothes in a

vacuum bag. My books are at a community bookshop, and my vinyl player and collection at Jesse and Bianca’s flat. What I do have with me are my suitcase, a gift from Elaine and Bernadette, who bought them from the Wing On department store after work one day as I was preparing for a reading that evening; my charging cable, which had belonged to Paul; the Polaroids from the airport, now on the wall of my bedroom, along with postcards bearing my friends’ handwriting; and gig posters from indie shows over the past decade.

On my first cold day in London, I realized I’d forgotten to pack either a raincoat or a winter jacket; I didn’t even have an umbrella. I was caught in the rain and hurrying home from my daily walk at Waterlow Park when Wilfred texted to tell me a package was due to arrive at my new address. I tore it open at the door: it was a down jacket with a rain hood, exactly when I needed it most.

Every so often I am caught off guard when it occurs to me that I am 29 now. I have been kept on life support by all the people who made me chicken congee when I was sick and made pacts with me to spend every Lunar New Year’s Eve together and sat in dive bars with me until I worked out my shit. These days, every morning, I wake up to a wall of texts from friends back home: messages checking in, or conversations in group chats that have continued without me. They are the permanent fixtures in my life in these transitory times. Home in the form of everybody who has taken care of me when I was useless, kept me alive through all these years.

There is a tree outside my window here, too. My banyan tree back home was a deep green all year around, a facade of

permanence. Here, over this past month, I’ve already watched this tree lose its golden crown of leaves; it is slowly growing bald. Seasonal cycles of death and rebirth, movement and renewal. We never return to the same place twice.

The line outside Genesis Cinema on Mile End Road curls all the way down the street, a mini-parade of Hong Kong people in all shapes and ages yabbering away in Cantonese, attracting the curious gaze of passersby. Within the first few minutes, I run into three different groups of people I know, upon whom I thrust miso chocolate chip cookies I had baked the night before. We are all here for a special screening of Blue Island, a documentary film billed as “Four generations of Hong Kongers, one impossible dream of freedom.” I had thus far avoided watching films that touched on the anti-extradition protests in 2019 too many of them felt like it was too soon, and I was allergic to the sentimentality that set the tone of most of these works, but I had heard good reviews about this film.

The lights go out, and my stomach lurches with longing when I hear the crowd on the screen chant slogans that had once been so familiar to me. It feels unbelievable that it’s already been three years: so much has happened so quickly since the protests ended. But what stays with me aren’t the scenes of the marches and clashes it’s the B-roll footage that book-ends the transitions. There are brief shots of an intersection, and immediately I know that it is Whampoa. When you’ve known one place your entire life, all it takes is three seconds to locate it on the map. One day, that street corner will change beyond recognition,

but until then, we will always see it as what home had looked like.

In the streets in 2019, it was nearly impossible to get home safe if we did not rely on fellow strangers in masks or anonymous handles on Telegram groups that gave us exact locations of police sightings, grabbed our arms and pulled us away from the tear gas, told us where to run or rinsed our faces or tended to our sprained ankles. We were in this together. We left no one behind. When that ended, we returned to our regular programming of yelling at each other on forums and social media, shitting on each other for leaving, for staying, for advocating in freshly pressed suits too much, for not advocating at all. We retreated to our default stance that we had only ourselves in this world.

There was a time when I believed that the most useful, least rubbish I could be as a human being was to make myself very small, not get in the way, not need anything from anybody. If only I could truly be alone and self-sufficient in this world, I could fill the void all on my own. I don’t believe that anymore. I genuinely think the most revolutionary thing we can do is take care of each other; to make a home for each other wherever we are.

In the film, the director asks each individual interviewee what Hong Kong meant to them. One of the protesters pauses, then says, Hong Kong to me, it’s like family.

Inkjet print on paper Courtesy of the artist

Joanne Leonard

Funerals: Spain and Myanmar, from the Newspaper Diary Series, March 3, 2021

WAR, EVERYWHERE

Personal libraries are shrines to who we are. But can they alter what we may become?

by Kenneth R. Rosen

Some 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the personal library was a bizarre room stuffed with cuneiform tablets, a vault for reading and exposition. In Ugarit, a coastal city in Syria, archaeologists later discovered the earliest known private library, which dates to the Bronze Age. Beginning in 1928, French archaeologists discovered several libraries, all containing tablets inscribed with ancient languages like Hurrian, and varied Ugaritic literature, including tablets listing the names of gods. Some texts also referenced a great flood,

as with the story of Noah and the ark. One library was a strange little room like a wine cellar. The shelves were filled with cuneiform tablets.

The Library of Ashurbanipal, near the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, dates to the seventh century. Named for the last great king of Assyria, the library housed the Epic of Gilgamesh and more than 30,000 clay tablets, mostly war loot. The martial commander was a literate intellectual who prized bounties of heads and volumes just the same. Ashurbanipal sent scholars to roam Babylonia and beyond in search of legislation and aristocratic declarations, but 6,000 tablets were also chronicles of foreign correspondence. The Library of Ashurbanipal hosted dispatches from scenes of violence, the library born and its site occupied in conflict. In 2016, the Islamic State overran its former location.

The “Light of Italy,” the Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro, a Renaissance patron, did not lose his library to war. He built it atop clashes and crusades. Montefeltro’s library contains not a single printed volume but rather 600 Latin, 168 Greek, 82 Hebrew, and two Arabic tomes, all handwritten. Montefeltro himself was a wealthy mercenary, fighting wars for cash, a condottiere. He used the spoils of war to create his library walls of inlaid wood covered in portraits. One depicts Montefeltro in full armor, with his son, reading a manuscript.

•

As a one-year-old, my daughter chewed the spine of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. During tantrums my two-yearold son would reach for a copy of Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True

Stories from a War Zone, then toss it at my head. When they visited me at my home office, their little necks craned to glance at the shelves of books: Valley Forge and The Things They Carried, but also titles like The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy and The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. A recent arrival in our home was Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind the Lines by Edward Behr. My son, now three, thumbed through it absently.

A personal library is the closest thing we have to a tangible representation of one’s mind. Someone who stops adding to theirs is someone who is content with what they already know or believe. But perhaps someone who adds only books within the realm of their interests risks losing sight of the broader world in which those subjects are situated.

I had covered international conflict for years, along the way collecting volumes that imprinted on me a particularly morbid, if somewhat hopeful worldview: it was clear that humankind had been here before. Of course, I know all writing is about tension. For this, war is an exemplary milieu. Yet as my children grew after I packed Sebastian Junger’s War and Tribe on a family trip through Provence I found myself drawn into violence both real and imagined, in work and relaxation, sometimes from the corner of a hotel room while my two children slept silently nearby. I watched their chests rise and fall as I read about the horrors of a distant war and the young men and women, sons and daughters, who fought and perished, and recalled my reporting trips to conflict zones near and far.

My library lit by the buttery glow of a broken lamp, its books’ spines cracked,

uncracked, and stuck with library stamps or egg-yolk-yellow “USED” stickers is spread across a storage unit, a private office, and my family’s modest apartment, its contents splayed, upturned and down, read and unread, highlighted and underlined and dogeared, some with pages ripped out or stuffed into a folder from which I could later draw nourishment. A phrase, a paragraph, a word I had not known I needed. Were my children ever to ask how or what to learn, how they should spend their waking days, I’d point to our many bookcases and shelves, scattered across a crowded, roughly 1,000-square-foot apartment in northern Italy, and tell them: “Start there.” There are plenty of war books, but I also have law dictionaries and books about physics and mathematics. I have books on woodchopping and homebuilding, on birds and other ephemera. They would get snapshots of life in crisis, sure, but the geography is broad.

For now, they seem most interested in conflict, a token of their age. My son might look up from his cereal and ask why I have a bullet-resistant helmet and vest in my office. He might ask why that child lugged a pail of water in a photo from Afghanistan. I had purchased the print to support photojournalists working now under the Taliban. Those are objects easily explained away and largely forgotten, consequences of a job that one day requires waders and a fishing rod and the next armored protective equipment. But the books are stalwarts.

We do not live in active conflict; far from it. Through osmosis, though, a stream of violence seeps into our home. One day, after I returned from a reporting trip to Ukraine, my son played grenadier with A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power’s tour

de force on global genocide and America’s complicity in it. So, I came to wonder: if we are who we surround ourselves with, can we also become the violence or hatred found inside the pages we collect? Would my children inherit violence? Would they conflate home and conflict?

“Parents,” the British writer Richard Hughes once wrote, “finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil.”

Stephen Ambrose, the vaunted and maligned World War II historian, was my first great love. Before attending a military academy in my adolescence, I read Citizen Soldiers twice, cover to cover. That book part propaganda, part historical accounting was a lifeline to a war I’d been exposed to only through video games. The first of the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises had recently arrived and it was how I spent much of my recreational after-school time. When my allotted time on the computer concluded each day, I found continued obsession in the conflicts, weaponry, and operations depicted on-screen through the books and writings of Ambrose.

I was no older than nine when my yeshiva teachers in New York City were teaching my class about Kristallnacht, the pogrom carried out by the Nazi Party in 1938. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry was required reading. I have the vaguest memory of an arts class in which we cut yellow stars from construction paper around Yom HaShoah and stood in silence at the exact time when the country of Israel pauses for its annual two minutes to remember the six

million souls lost. It wasn’t long after that my parents took us to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with its solemn display of victims’ shoes. Eventually, the revival of Rudolf Steiner’s library signifies a blessing of postwar reconstruction, containing copies of all the books banned and burned by the Nazis the minds of the dead resurrected, if inchoate.

It can be difficult for young children to identify the implicit bias of narrative writing, and therefore to hold war stories at a critical distance. Counterinuitively, researchers have found that when children read “enemy” narratives it results in positions of supporting war for the sake of peace. Young readers of “ally” and “imperialist” coalition narratives focusing on conflicts of “merit” were “less supportive of war” and “proposed using ‘talk’ to ‘understand’ both sides of conflict.”

These impressions, however, often change along class and educational divides. A 1993 study in the Journal of Peace Research sought to understand the ways Australian children think and feel about war and peace, especially in response to constant threats of nuclear escalation. The study is unique in that it links a “degree of security children feel” to “attitudes to war.” The author found no substantial link between information sources or violent media (in whatever form consumed) and these attitudes. The more exposure, the better realization of war’s ill-gotten pursuits.

War is a morose and morally complex subject. Whether or not to expose children to such literature is frequently debated among educators. Those who wish to restrict access believe that doing so will prevent the glorification of violence, as well as shield young readers from disturbing imagery

or accounts of human cruelty they might not be ready for. But what is lost when we curb access to such stories? War has long been considered an adult domain, but the vulnerabilities and experiences of children in conflict zones have great stakes as they are future contributors to solutions for those conflicts. According to studies by the United Nations, “more children are hurt and killed in today’s wars than are soldiers.”

Whether in children’s literature or comic books or video games or the news media, conflict is often made sensational, heroes triumphing over villains. Children’s literature can be a much-needed counterbalance to the dangerous oversimplification of depictions of war as a proving ground for righteousness, strength, and courage. One scholar, Kem Knapp Sawyer, noted a particular shift in this direction with “many recent children’s books […] challenging the notion of warriors as heroes while redefining the word courage. Today’s authors are fighting stereotypes and adding new dimensions to an old subject. These stories are often told from a child’s perspective, but not of a boy who dreams of following his father into battle.” I imagine this applies also to adult literature accessible to children. As another researcher, Jennifer Armstrong, has argued, “If you really want to teach young readers about peace, give them books about war.”

•

War is often the backbone of a civil society. Books are perhaps the least conspicuous reminders in our various homes of the conflict and constant suffering endured by others around the world. But there is no shortage of reminders. My aunt uses a spent artillery shell to roll up her garden hose.

Military guards patrol the local yeshiva and synagogue. Pressed into the sidewalk cement outside various residential buildings across my city are golden plaques commemorating those taken from their homes during the Second World War and slaughtered in concentration camps. Whether reminders of what was lost or monuments to what was saved, the detritus of war brings about change. If not for the better, perhaps for some increased moral tensile strength. Emma Carroll, the author of the children’s book When We Were Warriors, once wrote about the importance of war stories for children: “untangle all the prejudice and misunderstandings, and the reasons people take up arms against each other doesn’t change. It starts, in the beginning, with hate. […] What stories do is help us realize that differences can be overcome. They give us hope.” These differences can be overcome in the moment, but the conflict reproduces itself throughout history. That presence was always built on conflict, libraries referring to earlier libraries and the spoils of war or dominance that led to their creation.

The Japanese word tsundoku refers to the stacks of books purchased but unread. Though my children already possess the books in my library, it’s up to them to decide how they will become adapted to their literary journeys. These books of conflict and war and carnage are portentous to what young people can prevent in their own lifetimes, a duty toward amelioration my children uphold through exposure. Those books could be found guilty of, as Miguel de Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote of the personal library, “casting dangerous spells.” For each child, their spells will be their own.

TV, Bedroom, Berkeley, CA, c. 1972–75

Gelatin silver print, 6 13/16 x 6 7/8 inches

Joanne Leonard

© 2023 Joanne Leonard

Courtesy of the artist

MY LIMINAL IRAN

On journeying through freedom

Helya Salarvand

My mother met the man who’d help us come to the States on an internet chat site for atheists. She spent months talking to a stranger and disclosing the most intimate details of our life: my father’s abuse, his drug habits, his refusal to allow for divorce, our legal identity and information. He took it upon himself to help us out, finding a lawyer who accepted our case. My mother temporarily left Iran for the States for the first time, without us, in an attempt to ignite our eventual permanent immigration. For four months, my sister and I were left with my father. Most of the memories I had of

Iran from my childhood were of these months. Though I rarely have nightmares, the few I’ve had took this shape.

When my mother returned, she began to plan a flight so cinematic, almost as if made for the movies. This was my way of coping as a child: pretending our move was an Oscar-nominated journey. It is no coincidence that I am pursuing acting now.

I use the word flight deliberately. My father didn’t know that we’d be moving to the States as he’d never allow for it if he were aware. My mother convinced him that she would take my sister and I to America in order to get some sort of residency status that would allow us to return for college, as we had heard the most privileged Iranians do. Before we left, my mother started a new job, bought a new car, and started a home renovation project in an attempt to ease my father’s anxieties and assured him we’d be returning.

I recently asked my mother if she revealed to me at that time that our move wouldn’t be temporary. She said it was a secret from everyone, including me, though I have a distinct memory of knowing. During one of my father’s tirades, I recall sitting on the kitchen counter, asking my mother when we were leaving.

•

The first few years of my life in the United States were a blur. I left Iran after my first month of first grade and attended the last three months in the States without having to repeat the grade. My mother tells me I would go to class, put my head down, and sleep. Though I spoke no English when I arrived, within those three months I had somehow managed to pick up most of the language because I remember having

a conversation with my first-grade teacher on the last day of school. She told my mother how impressed she was by my improvement.

I was raised in Woodland Hills, or what they called the poor man’s Beverly Hills. The San Fernando Valley has changed significantly since 2004, but when I arrived, it was a space carved out by Iranians and Jewish people who could not afford West Los Angeles. There was a brief period after we first arrived where my mom married the man she had met on that chat site for atheists. He supported us financially for about four years, but when they divorced, my mother, sister, and I moved into a one-bedroom condo in a complex named Versailles. We ended up at Versailles because it was the cheaper sister apartment to our previous condo. Our lease was not up and paying to break the contract was not an option, so the management company of our previous apartment directed us four miles north to Versailles. Within the first few months of our stay, my bike and roller skates were stolen from our ground floor balcony.

I can laugh about the irony of a shitty apartment with such a palatial name. I was the only one of my Iranian friends on food stamps, but the other families I knew still lived in the same shitty condos we did.

I owe my current financial literacy to the fact that my mother never kept our financial stressors from me. As a child I knew that Menchie’s frozen yogurt was a privilege and a treat, and that every ounce of sour gummy worm topping would come out of my mother’s bank account, not our EBT. Like many families, immigrants and nonimmigrants alike, if I asked my mother whether we were poor, she’d insist we were lower middle class.

Though my mother’s second divorce was a significant financial setback, I loved living without a man in the house. I was never bothered by the absence of a father. My friends wondered why my sister and I would exclusively refer to our mother by her first name. I had never made note of the oddness in referring to a parent by their name, so I asked my mother. I guess my father had never bothered to refer to my mother by her name whether conscious or unconscious, it robbed my mother of her sense of identity, so, after coming to the States, my mother taught her children to call her by her first name.

•

I did not look back to Iran and acknowledge what I had left until I was forced. In 2011, my mother told me that we’d be returning to Iran for a short trip. The news made me feel as if my world, every lie of assimilation I had tried so desperately to maintain, was caving in. I was so furious at my powerlessness in this decision, not knowing that this access to my home, due to its fleeting nature, would be the greatest privilege of my life.

Being embraced by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and father (who had managed to get a visa to Mexico and meet with us for the first time after our flight two years prior) during my first night in Iran gave me a full-fledged panic attack. The force of remembering home, its strangely comforting and prickly embrace, discovering the roots I had attempted and failed to maim, felt violent after being marked by migration and a relationship to home defined by distance and obscurity. As I cried and hyperventilated in my grandmother’s home, my relatives brought me noon-o-panir (bread

and Persian cheese) and rejoiced over our return.

The next morning, I woke up with an alertness I had never experienced before. The clarity was unmatched. This, I knew immediately, was something that happens to your body upon returning to the soil that made you your senses are heightened to an impossible extent. The smell of my home, my Iran, unique as a lover’s scent, revived memories and feelings that I had taken pride in my child-self for successfully suppressing.

My first trip back to Iran aged me. It lent its hand to a personal evolution so rapid I believe it changed the chemical composition of my body.

After 10 days of joy and remembering, it was time to return to the States. I cried at the airport, unable to cope with the fact that I would once again be starting from scratch. Every fabricated piece of identity I had renovated for myself back in America had come undone. I was bare. My father was stopped by an airport security guard who instructed him to make me compose myself.

During our trip back, at the layover in Frankfurt, Germany, I came out to my mother.

Watching protests erupt in every province in Iran over the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, I felt as if I had been here before. My last trip back to Iran in 2018 was more dystopian than the rest. The brutal impact of sanctions was starkly visible as people sold American dollars on the streets, the exchange rate having skyrocketed so high that a dollar bill held some symbolic magic transcending foreign currency. Protests had erupted during my trip and the internet

was shut off for the first time, I had no way of contacting my mother back in the States (who has since been unable to return to Iran).

My sister and I entertained ourselves by creating shadow puppets in our shared bedroom at my grandma’s house. I remember feeling as if I were living in a literal pressure cooker the same one my family would use to make ab goosht (Persian lamb stew). As I walked down the street, I would peer into the faces of passersby in an attempt to gauge whether they felt it too, or if I was just tripping. There was a threshold approaching.

While images of Iranian women removing and burning their headscarves permeate online imagery of the current protests, I caught many glimpses of similar moments in 2018. Women would let their headscarves fall to their shoulders, which encouraged me to do the same. One of the most interesting things I noted from this last trip was the visibility of queerness, which I had so desperately searched for during each of my visits. The same visual signifiers of queer identity in the States like certain colorful dyed hair, certain short hair, certain piercings and tattoos, and all manners of androgyny were not just discernable but obvious amongst Gen Z.

During my last week in Iran, I desperately downloaded Tinder in hopes of connecting with queer women in Tehran. It led me nowhere.

•

In January 2020, I repetitively pictured myself on flight PS752. I had been there before. The chaos of navigating Imam Khomeini Airport and the bittersweet relief of takeoff is so palpable to me. I compulsively

replayed the scenario in my head: I make it onto the plane. I sit in anticipation until we take off. I take off my headscarf. I settle into a guilty sense of comfort and ease. For months I obsessed over how the passengers of PS752 might have felt, realizing mere minutes after takeoff that they’d never reach their destination. The lucky ones become the most unlucky. Bombed by their own government, midair.

The epitome of Iranian migrant existence is the perpetual state of liminality as our relationship to the physical space of home is convoluted by confusion and contradiction. Whether it be war, exile, politics, finances, violence, or some other force that pushes one to part from their home, the contested state of reliable physical home space is impossible to disregard. The liminal nature of movement is precisely what grants the conditions for the construction of home: where physical place is undependable, the liminality of movement is stabilized as a mode of dwelling. The tragic, gut-wrenching symbolism of PS752 is not lost on me. From PS752 shot down by Iran to Iran Air Flight 655 shot down by the US Navy, Iranians die in the most Iranian way possible. The airplane, as a liminal space, becomes a site of simultaneous hope and death. Iran and the United States, tied in their game of tug-of-war, remain sites of hope and death.

I am haunted by the writings of one of the passengers of PS752: “Behind me, behind me. I’m scared for the people behind me.”

•

When I caught wind of the protests in response to Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s death, I asked my mother if she thinks things will

be different. We have been here before, she more than I, as the 1979 revolution characterized the entirety of her childhood. How do you know when it’s happening? What are the signs? At what point is there no turning back? I am stunned by my mother’s recent shift from using the word “protest” to “revolution” in describing these events.

I have found it challenging to remain tethered. There is much division within the Iranian diaspora as we all have varying levels of stake in our home country. Our traumas take different shapes, and the wealthiest often take up the most space. I attended the Los Angeles protest linked with the Global Day of Action for Iran. I witnessed countless Pahlavi signs and flags, Shirin Neshat marching in her heels, and a white woman boldly exclaiming, “I wish I could march down the streets of Iran in a see-through burqa and be shot!” When we reached city hall, famous artists and activists like Googoosh and Masih Alinejad took to the stage.

I think of Kurdish Iranians, whose phrase “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” / “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” / “Women, Life, Freedom” has defined this movement. We so desperately lacked their voices on that day. I think of queer Iranians like Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani and Elham Choubdar who sit facing the death penalty. Does Googoosh think of them too? In a video Zahra filmed before her arrest, she states, “I am journeying toward freedom now … If I don't make it, I will have given my life for this cause.”

Is Googoosh kept up at night by the heaviness of these words?

•

Countless times I have walked down the streets of Los Angeles exclaiming, “It

smells like Iran!” It’s the scent of charcoal and burnt rubber that takes me back to Tehran maybe not as glamorous as one may hope, but certainly transporting. Echo Park at dusk is Iran to me as the park and its lit-up swan boats draw families, lovers, and groups of youths in summer evenings. Afternoon heat in Iran is far too potent, so we’d usually venture to the parks or city squares in the evening. Darkness provides a sense of security as young lovers are shrouded in its anonymity. Moments like this, I breathe deep and squint, imagining this was Iran, embracing the predicament of our liminality.

Joanne Leonard

Winged Ones (Julia with Cicada wing), 1985

Gelatin silver print, 15 15/16 x 16 1/16 inches (image), 20 x 24 inches (paper)

© 2023 Joanne Leonard Courtesy of the artist

DICAPRIOLOGY

by Kate Durbin

Plague of Frogs (1995)

We are always at the mall, where we start to see frogs everywhere: at 5-7-9, Wet Seal, Afterthoughts, The Magic Company, Natural Wonders. Another trend is holographic everything dresses, stickers, and necklaces that shimmer and quiver like oil on asphalt. Micro notebooks, so small you can only write a single letter on a thumb of page. Giant pencils from Claire’s Accessories. For her birthday, I buy her a frog pencil, a foot long and an inch in diameter, and a tiny hologram notebook that is also a keychain and fits in her palm.

When you wiggle the notebook, a frog hops across the cover, leaping off the edge, then resurrecting back to where it began. The dare is she will use them in biology class the day we dissect frogs as I slit their bellies and stab their formaldehyde hearts, she will take notes.

Dicapriology (1994)

My bedroom walls are plastered in teen heartthrobs, from magazines like Teen, YM, Big Bopper, Bop, Teen Beat. Gazing each night at my wall shrine, I notice Leonardo DiCaprio poses weirder than the other heartthrobs, whose posturing could be categorized as “innocent but sexy.” For example, one heartthrob, JTT, stands on overgrown railroad tracks, swallowed up in an oversized blazer for a much larger adult man, head cocked, lips pouty. But in Leo’s posters, he seems to be trolling this teen hunk cookie cutter pattern. In one, he’s in a kitchen drinking milk out of a measuring cup, spilling it everywhere, arms and legs flailing. In another, he leans his hip on a pool table, but also, he’s putting the pool cue down his pants. Leo holding up a big pair of inflatable lips that say KISS ME, covering his own lips with the inflatable lips. Leo reading a Tiger Beat where he is on the magazine’s cover, a look of fake surprise on his face. But the strangest posters are the ones of Leo holding framed photographs of his younger self. In one of these Leo inception photos, Leo looks about 12, and he is holding a framed photo of himself at about age five. Both Leos, the Leo pinned to my wall and the Leo in that Leo’s hands, smile out from the image, conspiratorially.

Spencer’s Gifts (1998)

I collect candles from Spencer’s Gifts. An alien head that glows neon under black light. A purple mushroom, little white daisies scattered across its cap. A drip candle that melts rainbow. My favorite is an orange VW bus, decorated with yellow smiley faces. Meant to resemble 1970s smiley faces, they look somehow 1990s, which is when they were made. I rode in one, my mother says, back when we hitchhiked and wore our hair long and didn’t use hairspray and sewed our own clothes. The trippy 1970s, a full-blown mall trend, my youth a cannibalization of her youth. It wasn’t that good of a time, she says, all I did was smoke, mostly just to piss off my mom, and run away from rapists and serial killers. They were everywhere back then. A girl from my homeroom was killed by Ted Bundy and then he killed another girl who lived two houses down from my best friend. We came up with safety plans: always travel in pairs, stick to lighted roads, known faces … but still, we went to parties. Wasn’t that dangerous? I ask. To still go to parties? It’s not like I was safe at work. Every day, I handed files to the Green River Killer. What was he like? Not like anything. Just a man. There must have been something odd about him, I press. She thinks awhile he never smiled. One time she was at the park, sitting on a bench, and a man jogging by grabbed her face, shoved his tongue down her throat, and then just kept jogging. In Hawaii on a trip with her friends, her date raped her in a hotel room. I knew he was going to do it by the way he looked at me when he closed the door. And because he locked it, she says. If you scream, I’ll kill you, she says, he said. I don’t think it’s affected

me, though. I mean, it’s been decades, I think I’m over it. When she tells me this, I feel something so terrible and far in the distance, I cannot go and get it for you. I want more Spencer’s candles than I can afford, I only have four, always thinking I’ll buy more eventually, which I never do. I am always starting collections I never finish. I also never burn any of the candles, thinking they could last forever that way. I guess I am still too young to really understand materials, the substance a thing is made up of what can, under careful conditions, endure, and what, by its very nature, is doomed. My Spencer’s candles sit on a shelf in my window, next to my blue lava lamp, also from Spencer’s, collecting dust and cat hair, fading and softening in the sun. Over time their shapes warp. The van wheels flatten to the shelf. The mushroom cap distends weirdly. The smileys start to look nervous. When I go off to college, my mother throws them all out without asking me, and turns my room into her sewing room. She lines the window with Yankee Candles, their cozy Americana fantasy scents like MidSummer’s Night and Home Sweet Home. The reason Yankee Candles are so expensive, the company claims, is because they have slow burning wicks, wicks that, unlike other candles, you need never trim. And because the wax burns evenly, all the way down to the bottom of the jar. She goes into that room, where she sews slim, ugly dolls in pioneer dresses, dolls whose patterns she cuts out from the Better Homes and Gardens Pattern Book, while she watches Gilmore Girls. Agoraphobic, she never goes outside. When I come for Christmas, flames in the window, that room now smells like fake sugar cookies, and I was never born.

Starship Enterprise (1994)

Since the days of abandonment at the forest’s edge, social death has existed and will surely continue to exist in some form into the future. In ancient Greece, anyone who threatened the stability of the state could be banished without a specific charge being brought against them, or, in other words, without saying it to their face. In the assembly, citizens would write another citizen’s name down, like high schoolers passing mean notes in homeroom, and when a sufficiently large number wrote the same name, the ostracized person had to leave Greece and stay away for ten years. Of course, what charges might lead to social death, a birthmark transmogrifying into a witch’s mark, has always depended on complex variables of a given moment in time. The dangers of the physical environment, the pathogens in the air, the invisible structures that form what we call culture: politics, religion, the internet, late night TV talk shows, Justin Bieber for Crocs. Though now, in 2022, we live in a time of cons, as in conventions, and fandoms and subreddits, when I was in high school in the mid1990s, liking Star Trek was something that could lead to social death, at least at my small religious high school, an ugly concrete block in the Phoenix desert. Before Steve Jobs gave us iPhones and made turtlenecks edgy, I watch my first episode of The Next Generation, in 1994, an episode about The Borg, an alien collective in a goth black metal cube hurtling through space. The Borg have no names, they are only numbers, and they all think and speak as one. When they come for you, it’s no cougar hunting you in the dark, it’s a storm on the horizon-elemental. They even walk

without agency, half-flesh, half-machines jolting forward as if by remote control. When they take you over, it feels inevitable, like nothing else could have happened to you. But the worst part is they don’t kill you. They body-snatch you. Injecting nanobots that form neural networks inside your brain, your blood, turning you into a drone. Anyone can be assimilated, your individual identity uploaded into the hive mind, which has one goal: to absorb every being into a state of sameness and horrifying perfection, where not even your thoughts are your own. The Borg drone in unison: we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply. I don’t tell any of my friends I actually watched TNG, except my best friend, who I tell everything. She doesn’t tease me about liking the show, but she does tease me about my embarrassment about liking it. She doesn’t get why I care so much what other people think, she finds our school cliques funny, the Abercrombie cheerleaders who go into Nordstrom together and come out all smelling like Tommy Girl. When the Star Trek: Generations movie comes out, my father, who grew up watching the original series starring William Shatner, takes me to the theater. Nervous my classmates might be there seeing another, cooler, movie like Pulp Fiction or Clerks, I make sure we go on a Tuesday night so the AMC 24 will be mostly empty. Hold my pee the whole movie so as not to duck out to the restroom and be spotted. Besides my father and me, there are only two other people in the auditorium, two men my father’s age. I’m relieved, though this adds to my Trekkie shame, to be seeing a movie only

old guys like, and not even that many old guys. Afterwards, my father buys me the Generations Special Edition model spaceship of the Starship Enterprise. When you push plastic buttons on the side of the ship, lights flash, and it makes a crashing sound like it’s being hit. Fake burns singe the hull, a visual reminder of the Federation’s commitment to freedom and self-determination, their willingness to pursue it, at any cost. I hide my Starship Enterprise under a pile of clothes in the bottom of my closet, so my friends won’t see it when they’re in my room. The comm badge is another of the movie’s special edition products that I want, and it’s pinned to the Korn shirt of a boy with unwashed hair in math class. The comm badge toy is cheap plastic, just for display, which means he must have altered it himself to be able to pin it to his shirt like that, or maybe a parent did it for him. The crew members of the Starship Enterprise use their comm badges to communicate. No matter where you are, your crew is always standing by, ready to transport you back to the ship at any sign of trouble. This boy who lunches alone by the far wall of the courtyard, drinking Capri Suns like a child, waiting to be beamed up. His isolation, the cost of being himself. While I am not a nerd, I am also not popular, that’s the football team, the rich girls in brown Doc Marten sandals, who have attended school together since preschool, girls who will go on to marry the footballers, all of whom will not talk or even look directly at me, not once over the course of four years. The Borg communicate via neural networks; they need not speak aloud to each other to know who is one of them and who is not, and they also do not acknowledge lone individuals from other species, especially those they do

not consider a worthy enough target. If you are unlucky enough to be on an away mission on a planet by yourself, for example, and Borg show up, you shouldn’t worry too much, despite their superior strength and ability; they likely will not hurt or even see you. It’s groups they’re after, entire crews of starships, populations of planets, whose distinctiveness they might assimilate en masse. What is there to fear from a whisper, the turning of a back each time you pass by in the hall, a glimpse of notebook paper exchanging hands, paper with your name on it, crossed out. One night, in 1994, not long after my father took me to see Generations, the Star Trek movie, my second-best friend comes over to watch My So-Called Life. I have, at this time, five best friends, and except for my best-best friend, their designations are always shifting, who is in third or fifth place on a given day. She goes into my closet, in that way high school girls rifle through their friends’ things and just take them without asking. What’s that? Muffled sounds of intergalactic war arise from the closet’s depths. Yeah, I don’t hear anything. Sounds of battle drop away. In the mirror, she strips off her clothes, puts on my shirt and pants, and neither of us show any surprise when she’s me.

THE STARLET AND THE COUGAR

by Max Lawton

The Starlet was located right off a busy road in Toluca Lake. The constant whoosh of cars streaming by soon became a feature of the landscape for her, no different from the way people who lived by the ocean had to get used to the waves.

Surely, it had once been a motel. Two floors of studio apartments behind flimsy doors, all of them arranged around the swimming pool at their center. The walls were settled by an entire people’s history of California dust. The water in the pool wasn’t precisely blue — it looked yellow in the sun and green at night. Her room

smelled perpetually of weed, both because of her own habits and the joint that could always be seen dangling out of the corner of her neighbor’s mouth. The scent of cremated herb combined with the staleness of the years meant that her room had the olfactory aspect of an ancient temple, a place where occult rituals were performed.

The day before, she’d taken a long walk up one of the nearby hills. She lived by the fork in the road where Barham became Olive and Forest Lawn. An enormous movie billboard ornamented a building of uncertain use (not a studio, she didn’t think) just outside her window, the movie changing with each season. Also: a barnred Italian restaurant that hadn’t been open since before Covid.

As she walked, she traced Barham back toward the 101, but crossed the boulevard before it hit the freeway, cutting right onto a side road leading up a hill.

The car sound melts away the higher you get.

Some houses were new, with walls along their perimeters and Ring cameras just above the doorknobs; they looked like a scifi reimagining of the geisha bars she’d seen in so many Kurosawa films. Other houses were barely standing: crooked stacks of sunbaked boards, wooden facade facing the street attacked by time and prominently displaying signs about their owners’ dogs or guns.

Los Angeles is America, after all.

At the crest of this hill, she discovered that, behind the tightly knit mesh of a soft-looking black fence about nine feet tall, she was afforded a perfect view of the crashed Boeing 747 kept constantly on display at Universal Studios. She wasn’t sure what film this was from or what scene this

crash was depicting. First of all, she saw the plane, split open in what appeared to have been judicious fashion its general shape preserved, even in death. It lay at the center of a suburban street, the constituent homes of which were smoldering; then, there was a small train of what looked like linked-up golf carts, in which visitors to the theme park rode. Initially, it had seemed to her that this was actually a movie being filmed, especially as she couldn’t recognize the scene. However, the golf carts quickly laid bare the truth of the matter.

What she was seeing wasn’t just fake, it was double-fake: not just a film about an ostensibly possible event, but an amusement-park ride imitating that film.

Above her, a real plane, banana yellow and, therefore, belonging to the Spirit Airlines fleet, began its descent toward LAX . She hoped its passengers couldn’t see all the way down to the ride from up in the sky. Fuselage tugged into four pieces and not a corpse in sight, the plane on the ground offered a terrible invitation to its airborne fellow: to once more be bound to the earth and, simultaneously, to extinguish a small fleet of consciousness within a single cylinder.

Once she’d lost interest in the spectacle, she turned back and, by way of a different access road, began to wend her way down the hill. A scythe-bearing skeleton alongside its trusty canine companion (also a skeleton) on the roof of a single-story Spanish-style home. Cobwebs complicating access to the porch next door. It was almost Halloween.

She focused her attention on a dot of white directly atop the segmented lane line, focused on it until its true form appeared: a shredded bag of trash, its contents

scattered toward either side of the road. She approached the bag and began to examine it. It hadn’t been shredded by human hands. Each one of the cuts was too fine. Was it conceivable that a man was going around and cutting up trash bags in the Hollywood Hills with a razor blade? A kind of Black Dahlia killer in reverse?

Well, it looked like the work of either a knife or … a claw. And it was at that moment that, a recent transplant from Russia, she remembered all the rumors she’d ever heard about mountain lions, gooseflesh symmetrically rising on either side of her spine.

Her voice caught in her throat, she knew that she was meant to make a lot of noise if a mountain lion were to try to get close to her, but she saw nothing only the ribboned plastic and an empty tub of Greek yogurt and a plastic Kefir jug, and a holey rectangle of strawberries, several moldfurred specimens left behind inside of it.

A few months ago, at a party her first weeks in L.A. when she heard someone say the words “mountain lion,” she was confused, but declined to ask for further clarification on the spot, not wanting to seem an ignoramus. As such, upon returning home, she’d googled “mountain lion los angeles” and, after seeing what the creature was in broad terms, had found a good deal of reassuring information about how mountain lions were more afraid of humans than humans were of them, but most of that info seemed to come from vegan-adjacent humane-society-type sites.

Therefore, what had stuck with her most from this particular research session were the horror stories about mountain lions that went on rampages, starting to hunt humans and, in one case in particular,

keeping corpses in its cave-lair for several weeks before discovery.

She stood before the scented garbage bag its odor not so much a smell as the inversion of one a 21st-century burnt offering upon the city’s highest altar, the fake plane yet another down below.

If this had been a horror movie, the mountain lion would have been perched on the roof of a nearby home right next to the reaper with its canine companion.

After rotating round in several full circles, as convinced as any human prey could ever be that there was no bestial hunter in the vicinity, she made her way back down this ungentle fell of the Hollywood Hills, rejoined Barham, and, soon enough, had made it back home.

What was it she did all day at The Starlet chain-smoking cigarettes, sometimes so stoned she stared at the individual nubs of the popcorn ceiling until they began to seethe?

She was translating Henry James’s The Golden Bowl into Russian, something that had never been done before. Before the war, a well-thought-of Russian publisher had offered her a generous (by Eurasian standards) fee to be parceled out into quarterly chunks. Enough on which to get by in L.A. Enough, at least, for a studio at The Starlet. How and why she had a green card was a mystery, even to her.

She’d won this contract on the strength of a 20k-word sample she’d done for the publisher, but after that initial triumph, the further she got into James’s dictated word-rot, the less she knew what it was she was even meant to be rendering. Syntax? Vocabulary?

The novel was like a 19th-century marriage plot fantasia, from which the crumb of the bread had been removed, leaving behind only crust, crust, and more crust. This didn’t seem to bother James, as he zoomed in further and further on these dry bits of hard, blackened bread-rind with his prosaic microscope so much so that readers lost themselves entirely upon the crust’s inhospitable sandstone surface.

She didn’t know if it was because of how stoned she was as she worked, but the deeper she got into the book’s nut meat the pistachio shell of her sample long discarded the more frequently she was forced to admit that she just didn’t know what a sentence meant. She’d begin with the English: “These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place.” She’d read it once. Then twice. Then a third time.

By the time it had found its way into Russian, each clause and phrase had become something like a small moon orbiting her stoned brain.

She saw nothing as she worked no world inside of the text it was all and only surface, a geological exploration of a frozen tundra, under the ice of which she never seemed to be able to find the rocks being researched. And finding these rocks was her job, so, pounding away at ice with her pickaxe, her extremities numb from the cold, she was left bereft of profession; she’d become an archaeologist of ice and wasn’t sure what that even meant.

In the mornings, she’d look at what she’d produced on the previous day and would be consistently horrified by the chat-

ter of her rendering. Here lay words, but no meaning.

Perhaps there was a reason why the text had never before been translated.

It made no sense to be translating Henry James in Los Angeles. Who in this sun-scourged Babylon of creeping things (but no cattle certainly not, no cattle) would ever have the time to read Henry James?

At particularly desperate moments, pecking Cyrillic characters into this accursed Word document one by one, she’d decide that masturbation was the solution. After the obligatory period of half-hearted toggling with her clit, she searched out a video that could get her over the finish line (the James doc lurking behind the porn in the background of her home screen, so, in a way, the 180-year-old eunuch was still with her), she’d settle in for five or so minutes, her body and mind already so benumbed that it felt like she was levitating, buoyed up over the hills by the smog. Her recycled (or reclaimed or whatever) wooden desk stood reproachfully in the corner.

Inevitably watching two young guys masturbate each other slowly, sensually, and with an extreme excess of massage oil, her two hands would have to find a rhythm that was both a response to and commentary on the Grecian-looking boys’ tempo. Once she’d locked into it, she’d cum quick, feeling like all three of them were cartoon renderings of beautiful people on the outside of an ancient urn.

They moved in stop motion and came in 3D.

After the war began, the money from the publisher dried up, and, though she kept on

translating, she also had to seek out alternative sources of income.

An acquaintance of hers, a PA on Netflix sets who had been on the periphery of her Moscow social circle, knew of a babysitting job out by Laurel Canyon. Only it wasn’t exactly babysitting; it was more like caretaking, as the person she’d be watching was old an elderly man, to be precise but with all the technical procedures that might usually characterize caretaking for the elderly subtracted from the equation.

“You’ll just be there for company,” her friend’s voice was breaking up on the other end of the phone. She too was probably somewhere up in the hills.

She was given a number to call and called it. The woman who explained what she would be doing spoke in an affectless tone: “You won’t need to interface with the client in the slightest. Which is to say, you’ll be one where and he’ll be another. You should feel free to bring a book or magazine; you’re not being hired to make conversation. We’ll have need of your presence on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. You’ll be paid $1000 per week.”

She gasped just ever so slightly.

“Yes, you shall be remunerated most kindly for your services. Think of it this way: the generous nature of the fee you’re to receive is a sign of the work’s seriousness. A lesser individual would slack off on the job. Or think of it as a joke. Babysitting for the invisible man upstairs. You won’t do that, will you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I thought not. Do you have a car in your possession?”

“No, ma’am.”

And, in fact, it wasn’t just the car she didn’t have, it was also the license she was without unable, therefore, to set sail through this ocean of cars on her own, giving whatever money The Starlet didn’t take from her to Uber.

“Well, if you proffer receipts, we’ll also be happy to refund your transportation to and from the home. The address is …”

She was too in need of cash to worry about the precise parameters of this weird job.

The house was perched on a hill above Laurel Canyon, near where erosion as such had made so many L.A. Times headlines the previous year. For a split second, she wondered if her job wasn’t to watch over the home itself and make sure it didn’t slide down the bluff.

It was a towering edifice, stark and gothic with a view out over Studio City and Toluca Lake. A brick path wound through ferns leading up a gentle fell. The home looked exactly like the one on the cover of the mass-market paperback copy she had of ’Salem’s Lot the first book she’d ever read in English and, as such, a sort of talisman that was meant to crown all her translation endeavors with glory. After ’Salem’s Lot, her hometown reputation for reading a great deal of literature in English hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Just like the storm-whipped mansion so pithily depicted in colorful cartoon style, so too did this home have a turreted tower with a cross protruding from its peak, rows of spindles surrounding an open front porch, a shingle-covered, high-peaked gable roof, square-latticed windows, arched

Joanne Leonard

Joanne in mirror (self-portrait )

Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches Courtesy of the artist

transoms, elaborate dormers and chimneys, and a cornice decorated with figures, the species of which she wasn’t quite able to discern.

The week previous, at a party in a spacious downtown loft that had taken place two nights after she’d called the woman in charge of the caretaking job (they’d agreed that she would start work a week after their call on the following Monday), a musician with bitten nails, greasy hair, and a cigarette stench emanating from his long leather jacket so long it sort of made him look like a union agitator elected to explain the metaphysics of Laurel Canyon to her after she’d outlined her new job:

“Lemme start from the top … like, when I was a kid, I burned myself a disc of The Downward Spiral from the library. Like, the Nine Inch Nails album. But once I got the CD home, I read the lyrics and, like, to be honest, they scared me … D’you know the record?”

She shook her head.

“So, there’re, uh, three or four fuckedup songs on it. The title track is obviously this, like, super vivid description of suicide, but ‘Big Man with a Gun’ is also about, uh, rape a guy forcing another dude to give him a blowjob with a gun.”

By this point, she’d begun to grow slightly uncomfortable. The guy’s hair was a dirty shade of blonde and his eyes were brown, close-set, maybe even a bit crossed. He was handsome in the way edgy ’90s film stars were (he did kinda look like Bill Pullman), but there was something curdled at the heart of this resemblance something she couldn’t be sure didn’t emanate from the films themselves.

He continued: “Anyways the cherry on top of the whole thing is that, uh, Trent

recorded the record at 10050 Cielo Drive. Ring any bells?”

She shook her head.

“Did you see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? ”

She nodded.

“Great … so, I’ll just assume you know that there was, like, meant to be a real murder at the end, but the super-cool thing Tarantino does is make it not happen. Like when Hitler gets fuckin’ massacred in I.B.”

And she knew what I.B. stood for but who the fuck abbreviated movie titles at random like that?

“10050 Cielo Drive is where the actual murders happened. Where they wrote ‘pig’ on the wall in Sharon Tate’s blood. The Manson Family, I mean. So, like, Trent named the studio Le Pig as a kind of homage to that, which must be why the record’s so out-of-control good, like, I never thought any of his other albums even came close. But, in any case … that’s what Laurel Canyon means to us. I’d be careful out there if I were you.”

It was 12:55 when she entered the house, first having creaked up the porch’s wooden steps, a capacious leather purse containing her laptop, The Golden Bowl, and a big bottle of water slung over her shoulder. She was slightly stoned but would be able to keep her shit together should she have to interact with anyone never mind the fact that she was told she wouldn’t be seeing anyone.

Something watching her from a higher peak in the middle distance as she followed the path from the road and through the front yard.

Right when she stepped onto the porch,

she was confronted by the stench of damp soil and lichen. It grew more powerful once she was inside.

The door was extremely heavy, and she stepped into the house and onto its granite tiles as if it were the floor of a medieval European cathedral. The vestibule’s vertical space was unimpeded all the way up to the turret, forming, from where she stood, either a tunnel or an arrow all the way up to the cross that marked the mansion’s peak. She hadn’t noticed from the outside of the house, but the top of the turret was made of stained glass. Colored light drifted down from that cylindrical space, so high above her head, but was extinguished upon the granite’s dun, forest-colored surface. This descent seemed to be a metaphor for something for the soul’s movement down from heaven, then into the world of earthly things, then, finally, into the soil: sealed into the depths of the earth with the same mercilessness that whatever was sealed beneath the granite tiles was kept there.

And what, in this home, did the world of earthly things consist of? At least 10 clocks —pendulum clocks, mantel and tabletop clocks, cuckoo clocks, and grandfather clocks, all ticking in perfect unison in the vestibule and study, the latter’s shelves stuffed with old books the titles of which were in a language (or languages) she couldn’t read. Beyond that, every piece of the study’s furniture was surfaced in gilded cloth: a sofa and three bulky armchairs. The study was connected directly to the vestibule without the intercession of any door, but there was a closed door at the other end of the study, one she knew she wasn’t meant to open.

She felt vaguely sheepish for agreeing to such a strange arrangement. At least the

friend who’d referred the job to her knew where she was and what was up (but how the hell had that friend known about the job? It had never been explained quite to her satisfaction. A friend of a friend of a friend).

As she sat down in a particularly heavy gilded armchair, burgundy cushions notching into her spine, she felt that the musician had cursed her new position with his furred tongue; absent his warning, she wouldn’t have had the feeling that she’d burrowed a tunnel through the newsprint-smelling paper of the Stephen King book the feeling that she’d become a kind of weirdo Ben Mears.

Stoned and translating instead of drunk and writing: the 21st century compared to the 20th.

And yet, for the next two months, she barely budged from the gilded armchair on the days she went to work.

The house was silent, and the old man remained upstairs. Perhaps, she thought, he was the colored light streaming down from the turret.

Each Sunday, she’d find an envelope of cash on the smallish chest of drawers right by the door. Her name written on its milkwhite surface in splotchy cursive characters. She hadn’t yet given the woman any Uber receipts and wasn’t sure of how that handover would work. She assumed that she’d be paid in exact change.

Gradually growing bolder as regarded her level of stonedness, she was now showing up to work high as high could be, but not not ever smelling of weed.

Sitting with HJ her own nickname for James in the gilded armchair, her progress through his text had been stymied. Each sentence eventually became a mantra

that she was unable to properly render in Russian, but of which she’d memorize each and every part.

•

Waking up soaked in sweat, a perfect outline of her body beneath her in drips and drops. Bladder bursting.

Minutes before: on the street where she’d seen the shredded bag of trash. Pinned up against the fence’s environmental-noise-reduction padding and the cougar standing before her. Its eyes not leaving her midsection which was to say, never meeting her gaze, bleary with terrified tears. Then, after five or 10 minutes of this, the cougar began to speak in the musician’s voice:

“Yes … certain that you can see it now … no more hiding from the facts … that mankind is generally unhappy the world as it stands a narrow illusion, a phantasm, an evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

The beast lunged forward and she wakes up to the sound of tapping at her door.

She doesn’t bother to go look through the peephole and see what’s there. Eyes pinched with fractals of sharp sand.

She gets up and goes to the bathroom faucet for a drink. A squirt of piss into the black toilet before sucking at the sink’s cylinder of aerated water.

•

Exactly two months since her first day, a Monday, and stormy weather in L.A. Such a rare occurrence that the newscasters must preemptively wage war against the people’s hysteria.

Forty-five minutes of traffic en route from Toluca Lake. Without traffic, it’d only take 15. Water pouring down the slopes all around the house. The trees that had been planted to prevent erosion quivering, as if to say: one home in the vicinity is sure to go down.

The door slams behind her even though she pulls at the brass handle no harder than usual.

The colored light down from the turret trebled in power as a function of the storm light; the entire vestibule has the aspect of Balkan cathedral in the wake of national tragedy. The clocks, normally so orderly in their ticking, now utterly out of joint.

A rumble of full-throated thunder as she sits down in her usual armchair.

She opens the Word doc and begins to weave her way through the hairpin turns of HJ ’s gear-shifting sentences: “They had these identities of impulse they had had them repeatedly before; and if such unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness.”

About to read the sentence’s first clause once more when suddenly a heavy beat is struck against the wooden door at the other end of the study.

She isn’t supposed to talk to anyone isn’t supposed to see anyone. Is she meant to respond?

Another heavy thump upon the other side of the door’s dun brown.

“Hello?” she replies. She still isn’t sure whether she’s meant to say anything back, but she can’t keep her mouth shut. The room becomes very large and the moldings at the tops of the walls fill up with TV static.

Another heavy thump and she shuts her

laptop slowly, the contours of HJ ’s incomprehensible sentence exploded from her mind.

“Hello?” she says once more, this time certain of her intention.

She thinks of running out of the house, of screaming, of calling 911. She can taste the musician’s furred breath underneath her own tongue.

Another thump.

She thinks of running up the staircase’s emerald carpeting. Of hiding in another one of the house’s rooms. Of somehow becoming one with the turret’s fractalized light, thus dispensing with any possible threats to her corporeal form.

Another thump just as thunder seems to shake the very hills upon which the house sits.

About a mile away, a cozy, glass-walled bungalow from the ’70s surfs down a muddy slope. The insurance payouts are sure to be enormous.

Another thump.

She doesn’t respond.

She does nothing.

The cougar waits patiently on the other side of the door, its fur matted down with unseasonable rain.

Joanne Leonard

Joanne in mirror (self-portrait )

Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches Courtesy of the artist

I LIVED HOW I DIED.

Maya Martinez

“I lived how I died.” is an excerpt from Hell or Mercy? a chapbook of poetry by Maya Martinez published by Other Weapons Distro and available for purchase on their site: otherweapons.noblogs.org

Wearing the shape shifting bustier. I purchased the age defying elixir. I served the children no preservatives. I paid the gardener. I went to the pharmacy. I grew the windowsill herb garden. I waxed my lip. I cooked from scratch. I cut off my pinky toe to fit in my shoes. I watered the hydrangeas. I brought my neighbor her mail. On long walks I wore those butt lifting sandals Oprah told me to wear. I hid the money. I packed the lunches. I laid at the foot of the steps. I screamed. I looked through the phone. I ordered the silverware. I spied on my children, in the good parent way. I portioned out my laxatives.

I lived how I died. Every day became louder. I didn’t want to be known. I wanted to stop all the care I acted with in my hands. I fantasized about selfishness and silence. I was tired of loving others. At night I wondered. I would lay awake at night whispering to myself, “I wish I had one real thing in my life,” in my nightgown, looking up at the ceiling fan, counting the turns.

I lived how I died. With a pure sense of wonder. I wonder what it’s like to be famous, I wonder what that girl feels like, I wonder who is staring back at me in the mirror after I’ve stood there for hours it seems, talking to my reflection. Saying things like “this is me, that is you,” I repeat my name over and over. I ask my reflection, “why are we here?” I tell my reflection, “these are my hands” and “why can I move?” I repeat my name, move my hand, and ask the mirror, “why is this my name?,” “what are the chances of this being me?,” “why was I given this name?,” and “what is my purpose?” After a while something beautiful happens. I do not recognize myself; I do not feel like myself. I begin to wonder, “Is this my higher self?” The person obstructed under the wants of others. The person untouched by children, love, and age? That’s when I became suspicious of all this. God’s scam. I know my eyes are the window to my soul. I once was lost, I would run from the mirror, wash dishes, paint my nails. But now I am found. My body is

a prison, and it doesn’t scare me so much, because I will claw my way out. How, you ask?

Clawing my way out with my higher self clenched in my jaws. Firstly, I’ve been making my own sense of things lately. As you can tell. After the whole mirror birth. So, my plan, it’s kind of like karma, with a twist. I can attract situations into my life. So can you, if you truly want. Don’t believe me? Before I had these lips, they came to me in a dream once. I saw them on my dream face, and I thought yes this is what my soul wants.

Do you know what your soul wants? Do you want to know what your soul wants?

Because you can

But probably right now you’re thinking you can’t

What percentage do you believe in yourself? How about you?

Or you?

What about you back there?

Do you want it? To reach out and grab what’s yours?

Because you can Stop thinking you can’t

Do not do that

Do not worry about fitting in because you’re custom made

And guess what baby

The light is coming to give back everything the darkness stole

Little known fact, everybody dies but not everybody lives.

Take a deep breath today now the past, who? Some people well they visit my past more than I do, And guess what, I don’t live there anymore, guess what? I sold the building.

YOU get to write your story I get to write my song

I want you to imagine yourself getting what you want getting what your heart wants ok now reach out in front of you and touch it

Ok now grab it really fast hurry before it gets away Ok you grabbed it that’s good

That’s good we are manifestinggggggggggggggggggggg

Now that we have what we want in our grasps

I want you to (sing)

kiss it love it lick it shove it never let it go

Baby that’s your dream baby that’s your dream

kiss it love it lick it shove it never let it go

Baby that’s your dream baby that’s your dream

In the end we only regret chances we didn’t take. The timid approach to risk

What if this happens what if that happens wah wah wah News flash it’s already happening!!!!!

The minute you were born it got risky and let me tell you wait till you see the cost

Because it’s going to cost us all of us it’s going to cost us things we can’t even imagine.

I don’t know if I want to live long but I long to live. When you look out the window do you see the sunset or the specks of dirt on the window?

Because that will say a lot about who you are and what you want and what you’re willing to do.

I bet the people here are thinking who is this person? Where did they come from? They don’t know me? They don’t know who I am. What I feel. I live in New York!

Well actually I do. I do know you because I also work at a taco restaurant just like you and you and you. You all may not remember it, but we all worked at the same taco restaurant.

Remember remember remember that day in early July when the heat index was 104 and we had to refill the water dispenser so we were lugging these heavy water buckets outside and everyone in line was watching us and was also sweaty too and half the menu is in Spanish so people really have a hard time understanding what they’re ordering and a woman in line mid50s with red curly hair asked us if the chicken was spicy and we said at the exact same time “Maam that’s the spiciest taco on the menu” remember? remember? That happened because we all are connected.

I still think about what you looked like at sunset when we were bussing tables and you spilled ceviche juice on your shirt so I spilled ceviche juice on my shirt so you wouldn’t feel alone.

I love you I love all of you and I never want you to feel more alone than you want to. Ok?

All I can really leave you with is Don’t choke on your own regret we are headed to the promised land.

NO FAILED TREES

Brian Whitener

There are no failed trees.

First the lanes seem different: less sickness, more sickness. Each morning you watch the transition: solid to liquid to gas back to solid.

You meditate on the ocean. Place it next to and then inside your body. Always in movement. Each crest a trough like your body: what feels solid is a liquid, liquid a gas. The wave is a membrane as you are: a container, holding life while also open to a plunge from above.

In your dream, you wake up to your door moving and there is terror. It is your neighbor asking about the gas. You wake up and no one is there.

You drop acid and walk out into the ocean: you feel the joy of each drop of water at being so close to so many they love.

The first time you listen to the news and can’t stop crying. You organize your fear. You’ve watched before fear of the state be politicized, then disappearance, this will be no different but the road seems so long. So many without time. Every small collateral damage memory loss, houses lost, lives preyed upon even time to hold a memory is lost. Like running from a hurricane and you can’t find your people but then you do but they are too slick with rain and slip through your grasp.

The sun sets but into a body. Our bodies and needs and desires, too big, but also on the verge of failing.

In three pages of her essay “In Praise of Love,” Julia Kristeva declares: 1) love is rebirth 2) love mingles sexuality and ideals 3) love is wild and immeasurable 4) love calls forth vulnerability and vigilance 5) there is an abyss between men and women. It is hard to say anything and not try to say everything.

“For the first time, love and friendship weren’t separate things” is not the most memorable line in DeJong’s Modern Love. What draws me to it is it shows once you say love you’ve already said so much else.

You did everything that was typical; after wrestling you fantasized. If you try to trace it back you find it entwined with pleasure and hurt. Crushes and groups and sporadic. Always drawn to the figure of the membrane. You have something you don’t want but can’t get rid of it.

It is harder to write about depression because at first it feels like a selfinflicted wound.

In a 1990s Vogue interview Lil’ Kim says: “It may take time before we all start rapping about flowers.” You cut out this interview and carry it with you from apartment to apartment for twenty years. You are not a rapper but when will you start to write of flowers?

You think of Alexander Bogdanov giving himself a blood transfusion he wanted to be immortal but also he was a fierce defender of the democratization of scientific knowledge. Today’s immortals all have access to hospitals and we have forgotten Bogdanov gave himself successfully any number of transfusions which is something more than just a contingency.

Having escaped from Nazi Germany Erich Fromm wrote that authoritarian societies claim democratic ones are marred by selfishness thus the call to fascists to be unselfish and pliable. Even today when you remember Fromm’s rejoinder you are surprised: he writes that the only counter to a “readiness for submission” is self-love.

In a review of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization Paul Mattick writes: “There is no market in despair; whereas the market in hope and health becomes the larger the greater the despair.” You saved on your computer a picture of a cloud called an “undular bore” which looks like a great oval tube multiplying itself into infinity across the sky. You don’t seek it out when you are

sad but whenever you see it you feel less overwhelmed. You also have saved the image of a senior center’s sign engulfed in flames the sign reads closed due to COVID. Water falls from a cloud and finds the lowest point. When you think of the past that is what you see water always finding the lowest point.

What depression teaches you is that the chair is not a thing, it is in motion. In allowing thoughts to pass, we self-abolish. Depression registers life without connection is death and the pain of even the perception of losing access to it is enough to cause death itself. A thought or feeling rises through a pot of boiling water a droplet of air trapped inside a body of water, a membrane, an inversion of a cloud when it reaches the surface we are reborn.

The body becomes a machine an aversion. We spin out in a stasis of a frozen world, motionless in the echoing boom of regimented time, regimented bodies. Birds in flight fall, language fails, thoughts die on their branch. You place the body of a loved one next to yours and search for the pull of its gravity. Infinitesimal but you find it and motion starts again. The depressed mind is the ultimate proof of dialectic’s truth: the energy required to stop motion is infinite.

You dunk your face in cold water, you radically accept, you focus on each wave of emotion. You journal: “All writing has to be for survival.” Your phone holds only pictures of clouds each one holds itself imperceptibly together, each wants to connect. You look at a cloud and remember a line that you love from CrimethInc.: “When we fight on the basis of … love … we open ourselves to serve as a channel through which everything beautiful in the world can defend itself.” You would defend this cloud, but then you remember the line is about things defending themselves. Love is the channel from the inside to the outside but you too are a channel. Maybe this is also what Fromm meant by self-love: defend yourself, in self-defense be immortal like a flower.

WATER & RICE

Vi Khi Nao

rice I

Each grain is one

Eye slanted towards hell, Water me until my body

Becomes

Soaked in artificial agriculture.

water II

My impulse for her Takes too long

To take a bath In a washbasin

Called desire & compulsion.

rice III

Grown in Asia

To treat sprains & bruises: Rest now ice

Before I compress You in my own mountain.

water IV

Colorless & tasteless

I want him commercial & cold, Dressed in oxygen & hydrogen. His viscosity is my tension, This ion of temporality.

rice V

Wild in a swampy paddy

Thrashing with husk, I want her flooding me On my hillsides, in long terms Sleeping in me like a crescent.

ME AND THE EARTH, DESTROYING ONE ANOTHER

Elaine Kahn

On holy ground I walk, nursing myself, my brains. Star lights grease the water like a pinball machine.

I watch a stranger fall asleep while sitting in a chair. Waves push into shore. I piss in a boat. How life claims the total it withdraws from. I gesture in the shape of myself.

I am trying not to mind what happens. I still like the way my life feels in the rain. The way the night falls

in my mind. A bell rings over the horizon like a curse word.

Beauty has no loyalty to what is moral. A fire sky, a toilet, a red rotary phone.

THE HISTORY OF LIGHTNING

Ama Codjoe

Through what gulf am I wading, wanting a husband, but not wanting to be a wife, as when my mother burned the bacon and started over again. He liked his eggs over easy. And not for the first time, it was the history of lightning that drew me from the shore where I was sunbathing alone, tan against pebbled sand, no company except the night heron, the palm tree, a fish twitching in glitches of light. And again it was history that drew me, chest deep in water, toward earth instead of paradise—the scent of deodorant, clean hands, large against the beast of my body, darkness of white bedsheets, stillness before hurricane. And when I opened my eyes there was someone, familiar from a night dream. But what I am naming, what I am trying to admit, is not about a person or even the legend two people make, it is a thirst dizzy with daylight. It is a hunger with a mouth like a sore. Sometimes, for years at a time, I forget how birds take the shape of leaves. I forget my musk. I can’t speak the secret language of eyes. There are times I press my flushed cheek against the cold floor and others when I sigh up and down with branches of pine. Even fish slip through air like water.

[HORNS WITHIN ]

Devon Walker-Figueroa

I too have studied deserving, served myself dessert six times a week when I thought of fathers as a heavenly breed of ghost. Now I care more for snails, the brittle helices they haul over the dirt, the thin mucosal lines they trace in cursive on my windows late at night (like a pledge or curse, a blessing or a poem about sex). I get them as a sylph gets the air or a jester the errors of kings. Sometimes while getting nailed I think about them, how it’s not really their fault the sun can touch them to death, how instead of feathers to lift them into a great confusion of blue, their coat of spit fuses them to earth, refuses to let the tongue of them taste too much beyond the dirt. It occurs to me their horns are sightly when extended: sticky as anthers, tender as fingertips, they rise & fall in a private largo. Once, when the moon was glued high up in its vault

of indigo, I pressed my breasts against the pane the snails adhered to like a law. They traveled over me, not even noting the nothing that I donned. “Why not put me to use?” I asked them. “Make of me a public, tell your tales of falling so deep inside your cargo! Or how coolly you cure the rose bush of its blooms before you’re dipped in butter!” At this, one lifted its near translucent head, let spread the ruffles of its wet foot. Another flared its one lung, pressed a jelly eye against the glass. Any other time, I would have left the window latched, as drafts leave me uneasy, but I was woozy with a need that night to inch it open, watch that slick procession of recluses traverse my windowsill & then discharge themselves onto my unmade bed. They wanted to procure me. I knew that much. I knew by their failure to speak up. They slid gradual as dawn over my sheets, their paths marked out in droolish threads, then rose in spirals up my calves,

my trunk, my neck & narrow chin with its vague cleft. They climbed & climbed, conspired & grew terribly thirsty till they found the more obscure parts they sought out. First came the complication of the ear, too small a hall for grown-up shells to pass through. Then the mouth, its lips through which they slipped, pretty as sin. They clung to the roof, the budded tongue, the blushing crypts of tonsils, only to lose interest & go down the dark hatch to find a bed of leaves & overseasoned leftovers. The snails sit heavy on my stomach, I confess, mock me from within, but it’s not their fault. They still write me letters in my sleep, cursing any father who’d sing me past asleep. I think the world, & likely always will, of snails. They tell me to tell the rose bush how to die. They tell me they could never leave me as the daylight does.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michelle Chihara is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Karen Cheung is a writer from Hong Kong. She is the author of The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude and Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Lauren Collee is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Baffler, Real Life, The Rumpus, Another Gaze, Chicago Review, and elsewhere.

Kate Durbin is the author of four books, including Hoarders (Wave, 2021) and E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, and elsewhere.

Rosa Boshier González is a writer, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in Guernica, Catapult, The New York Times, and Artforum, among others.

Hervé Guibert (1955 – 1991) was a French photographer, critic, and author. He published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography.

Daisy Hildyard is the author of two novels Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in the north of England.

Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) spent his very early years in Zurich, then grew up in Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New York. He studied environmental design and architecture at MIT and received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975. While at MIT, Hsu studied film at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University. He moved to New York in 1979, where he currently resides. His first exhibition in New York was at Pat Hearn Gallery, and in 1987, he had a one-person show at Leo Castelli. Since the mid-1980s he has shown extensively in the United States, Europe, and Mexico.

Hsu’s survey exhibition, Liquid Circuit, was on view at SculptureCenter, New York from September 2020 to January 2021, following its first iteration at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. His work was recently included in the 59th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at the Arsenale. His first public outdoor sculptures are currently on view in the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet?, organized by Sohrab Mohebbi, in Pittsburgh.

Elaine Kahn is the author of Women in Public (City Lights, 2015) and Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020).

Max Lawton is a writer and musician, and translates Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish literature. He is the translator of 10 books by Vladimir Sorokin and two books by Jonathan Littell.

Joanne Leonard (b. 1940, Los Angeles, CA) is renowned for her trailblazing photographic practice, which largely intersects photo-collage and feminist ideology to recognize often overlooked intimate and deeply personal moments within women’s lives. Leonard’s work, which she describes as “intimate documentary,” has appeared in noted critical and feminist texts, including Lucy Lippard’s “From the Center”, and she is widely known for her visual memoir, Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008), which uniquely shares Leonard’s experiences as feminist, academic, single mom, identical twin, and daughter of an Alzheimer’s patient and their influence on her artistic practice.

Leonard’s photographs have been featured in exhibitions at major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), and are also held in the collections of such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), and the International Center of Photography (New York, NY).

Dana Lupo is a writer and the translator of Hervé Guibert’s novel Arthur’s Whims (Spurl Editions, 2021).

Maya Martinez is Florida-raised and a living poet.

Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945, Brooklyn, NY) was the author of over thirty books including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), and most recently Works and Days (2016) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer is remembered as an influential teacher and editor.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections, a collection of stories, and the novel Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection The Old Philosopher won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. She received the 2022 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.

Kenneth R. Rosen is a writer and foreign correspondent based in Central Europe. He is the author, most recently, of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs.

Helya Salarvand was born in Babolsar, Iran, in 1998. She is a recent graduate of UCLA with a BA in gender studies. Her current work spans acting, writing, and modeling, and aims to explore the nuances of Iranian American queer identities.

Kali Tambreé is a writer and PhD candidate living in Los Angeles. She is from Baltimore, Maryland.

Thao Thai is a writer living in Ohio with her husband and daughter. She received her MFA from Ohio State University and her MA from the University of Chicago. Her debut novel Banyan Moon is forthcoming in 2023.

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.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021). A 2023 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar, her writing has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Brian Whitener ’s recent projects include Face Down (2016) and The 90s (2022), as well as the critical volume Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (2019) and a translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero’s Thought, Practices, and Actions (2019).

Fi i and Drama

Someone Speaks Your Name

Luis García Montero

Translated by Katie King Set in 1963 in Franco’s Spain, Someone Speaks Your Name explores literature as a foundation for understanding human relationships, national character, discrete differences between right and wrong, and for pursuing the right path forward.

Paper $28.00

Entry Level

Wendy Wimmer

“The elements of magical realism are presented without fanfare in this collection, and Wimmer succeeds in creating a world where they are entirely plausible. Vivid, thought-provoking stories make an enjoyable and challenging book.”

Kirkus (starred review)

Paper $17.95

Zóbel Reads Lorca

Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplín in Love

Federico García Lorca

Translated and Illustrated by Fernando Zóbel

Essays by Felipe Pereda, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, and Christopher Maurer

Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca, as Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain’s most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca’s haunting play about the wounds of love.

Paper $40.00

The Ghost Trio

Clyde Derrick

“A fabulous literary page-turner, The Ghost Trio will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about identity, the human spirit, and the possibilities of love and partnership.”

—Karen Karbo, author of The Diamond Lane

Paper $7.95

Books to look out for this Winter

$29.95

$39.99

Examining

$39.99

This

studies the history and theory of the essay and its social, political, and aesthetic contexts.

$29.99

An intellectual history and aesthetic theory of democratic elections, this book offers a critical alternative to the ‘myth of rigging.’

$39.99

The fascinating story of how Americans tried to save enemy lives amidst wartime calls for revenge. $27.95

Examines how race, money, and institution-building shape fights over the Bible and Christianity in US public life. $27.95

The inspiring story of 162 US paratroopers, dropped hopelessly off target, and the French villagers who assisted and supported them. $24.95

A fundamental reassessment of German politics and strategy during the First World War and why it was that Germany lost.

A groundbreaking work of historical recovery which tells the story of the American people who sang their way through struggle.

the role of mystery in environmental history, this book is an intriguing new account of the enigmatic 1908 Tunguska disaster.

book