LARB Quarterly, no. 37: Fire

Books to Think With From CHICAGO

States of Plague

Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic

“Camus argued that ‘The true work of art is one that says the least’. La Peste is such a work, and States of Plague is a moving, thoughtful, and scrupulous examination of both the novel and its readers, the book’s inheritors.”—Times Literary Supplement

CLOTH $20.00

Dangerous Children On Seven Novels and a Story

“In a series of startling insights and evocations, Dangerous Children reveals just how uncanny and enigmatic children can be. In eight really quite brilliantly subtle chapters Gross shows us, improbably, that we have never really been curious enough about childhood.”—Adam Phillips, author of On Getting Better

CLOTH $27.50

Atmospheres of Projection

Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

“To project is to throw forth, to transform, to draw, to plan, to move forward. Existing long before the cinematograph and surviving the transformations of this medium in the digital era, projection is too pervasive to be forgotten.”—BOMB Magazine

CLOTH $45.00

Now in Paperback The Modern Myths

Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination

“Their fecund capacity to produce new narratives is what allows these myths to do their ‘cultural work’: they ‘erect a rough-hewn framework on which to hang our anxieties, fears, and dreams.’”

Los Angeles Review of Books

PAPER $22.50

W.

Edited by Paul Buhle and Herb Boyd

Introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway Paul Peart-Smith (artist)

Deirdre Boyle

Edited by Andrew R. Spieldenner and Jeffrey Escoffier

Edited by Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 37 SPRING 2023

Publisher: Tom Lutz

Editor-In-Chief: Michelle Chihara

Managing Editor: Chloe Watlington

Senior Editor: Paul Thompson

Poetry Editors: Elizabeth Metzger and Callie Siskel

Art Director: Perwana Nazif

Type Director: J. Dakota Brown

Copy Desk Chief: AJ Urquidi

Executive Director: Irene Yoon

Social Media Director: Maya Chen

Publications Coordinator: Danielle Clough

Ad Sales: Bill Harper

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

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

Editorial Interns: Genevieve Nollinger and Kali Tambreé

Cover Art: Image from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions. Photography by Tom Warren, 1997. Courtesy Tom Warren.

Cover Design: Ella Gold

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.

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“Engaging and insightful ... each chapter reveals why, for many of us, music is as essential as breathing or eating.”

—Valerie Day, lead singer of Nu Shooz and Grammy nominee

“

The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales is a marvel in every sense of the word. Adam Kuplowsky’s translation is a masterful homage to a storyteller whose own journey holds all of the hope and despair the best fairy tales contain. Read this book!”

—Amanda Leduc, author of Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“A treasure trove of inventive and sometimes subversive fables that transcend borders.”

Tokyo Weekender

“The very best food journalism lifts the veil on everyday components of our diet, peeling away accumulated layers of hype, pseudoscience, and ingrained fallacies to reveal the truth. No writer today does this more deftly than Anne Mendelson. Spoiled is the result of scrupulous and unbiased research presented in delightfully readable prose. A masterpiece.”

Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland

“Vincent Figueredo helps us to understand the heart as a cultural symbol, biological miracle, and central theme in human history. A tour-de-force of scholarship and storytelling, The Curious History of the Heart is a great read and an important one.”

—Daniel Weiss, president and CEO, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“A thoughtful and thorough consideration of a global movement.”

Publishers Weekly

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 37

SPRING 2023

INTERVIEW

13 FIRE ROUND with Tongo Eisen-Martin

NONFICTION

25 WHAT NOT TO WEAR

Bharat Jayram Venkat

31 “SIR, YOU DO REALIZE I AM 9-1-1?”

Jaime Lowe

37 SOWING THE FUTURE

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

45 THIS NIVÔSE: THE DIARY OF A MONTH IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR

Sharon Kivland

59 TWO THINGS TOUCHING

Claressinka Anderson

PORTFOLIO

74 HERVÉ GUIBERT AND CURTIS CUFFIE

Introduced by Perwana Nazif

FICTION

69 ANOTHER MATTER: THE FIRE EXCERPTS

Alla Gorbunova, translated by Elina Alter

92 METAPHYSICS IN THE NUDE

Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Max Lawton

103 WITNESS STATEMENT

Bud Smith

109 OMISSIONS

Mike Jeffrey

122 BLACK SUN

Etel Adnan, translated by Laila Riazi

POETRY

131 THE WARRIOR IS A WOMAN

Tina Chang

133 HARVEST

Megan Pinto

135 THE NIGHT

Katie Peterson

138 PORCH POEM

Jessica Abughattas

139 [I HAD A BOUT]

Jane Huffman

141 THIS NATION

Shangyang Fang

“A revealing and original book about an understudied aspect of the Holocaust. Highly recommended.”

—Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors

“[A] superb biography. . . . Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women’s lives.”

—Gillian Kenny, The Spectator

“One of our most eminent historians of American art here joins impeccable scholarship with an abiding love of blues, rock, and punk to spin the tale of California artists’ surprisingly central role in a cultural revolution.”

—Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard University

“Written with Lavery’s precision and daring, Pleasure and E cacy is both a challenging theory of trans realism—developing the deep significance of DIY ethics and trans avowal over ontological approaches—and a lifeline of intellect and warmth in an era of transphobic violence.”

—Rei Terada, author of Metaracial

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear reader,

Near Sunset Junction, around the new year, an aspiring pop star or someone who works for her, or a sympathetic friend spray-painted a QR code onto the sidewalk, alongside a line from her recent release:

I don’t wanna die in L.A.

Her name is Hunter Daily. Her mother once starred in a Nic Cage rom-com called Valley Girl. Her father, the enfant terrible poker player Rick Salomon, produced movies and was married to Elizabeth Daily before marrying and divorcing a string of other actors.

Hunter sings, “There’s more to life than palm trees / And looking good at parties […] Take me, this city makes you crazy / And I won’t say I hate it / ’Cause I love it just the same / But I don’t want to die in L.A.”

For most people here, the glitzy palm-tree version of L.A. is a relic suspended in amber, maybe still glowing in Malibu or somewhere west of La Brea. But only as a remnant. I don’t live in Daily’s Los Angeles, and I don’t particularly want to die there. And yet, I like the song. It’s pleasurable to conjure that bubble and then to resent it a little.

Pop-star aspirations and an attachment to sunshine and noir Daily’s snuffing of those glamorous fumes are woven into the texture of the city. If you live here, you know the release that comes from speeding out the curve from the McClure Tunnel and turning up the volume. You know the incandescent rage of Bad Religion’s classic punk anthem “Los Angeles Is Burning” “palm trees are candles in the murder wind. ” Freedom and anger. It’s a heady mix that’s baked into the Pacific Coast Highway.

I’m a lifelong California girl with just two decades in Los Angeles. In the same way that only you get to criticize your family, I feel vaguely entitled to obsess over the noir history and the cults and the tech-bro California ideology. I get to resent the beautiful actors, the loony wellness trends, and yes, even the hours of my life spent on the 5. And I still get to love it and claim it all as my own private contradiction. Since I noticed it on the

pavement, I’ve had “Die in L.A.” on gentle rotation.

A darker soundtrack has always echoed through L.A. I’d rather dwell on how we live with it than try to drown it out. And a significant part of how I have lived with all of the challenges of this place has been by engaging it as an editor and a writer for the Los Angeles Review of Books. For almost a decade, as a member of the community of arts and letters that LARB brings together, I’ve participated in conversations and reflections on this city and how it opens out onto the world beyond. After the 2016 election, writers and artists and academics gathered at an independent bookstore in Los Feliz to share words that we then circulated and published, in a moment that felt lifesaving. I am incredibly grateful that the Los Angeles Review of Books is now my full-time gig.

Sometimes locals still joke that they’re surprised that Angelenos read. They get to make that joke. But the city, as the nation’s biggest midlist publishing market, has had a vibrant book culture for decades, ranging from the big-ticket L.A. Times Festival of Books to the indie Beyond Baroque to a dynamic public library system to independent presses like Tia Chucha and Kaya Press. Right now, though, media outlets and writing centers and arts organizations and schools are struggling and closing all around us. The book industry still publishes tens of thousands of books a year, and people still care about books. But as the polycrisis rolls on, nothing makes economic sense, and book supplements and literary magazines continue to fold. As an editor, I feel that I’ve been handed something fragile and precious, as I try to keep the conversation alive.

Like Hunter says, there’s more to life than palm trees, especially in the times and spaces where we pause to reflect and to reconnect. Books and stories can provide an escape from the harrowing news cycle; talking about books can be a dreamspace apart and outside that helps get us through. At the same time, sustained inquiry and indepth research the truth itself needs the ecosystems of knowledge that exist only through books. Talking about books is evanescent and fun, and it’s deadly serious. It’s leisure-class fluff, and it’s everything that holds meaning, all at the same time. Just like this crazy city.

As I step into this new role, our mission remains to bring the complexity and radiance of Los Angeles to the world and to bring the world to Los Angeles. The LARB Quarterly will be a magazine that puts this Pacific Rim megalopolis on the map, a magazine of Los Angeles but for the world, a magazine that finds the universal in the local.

Last year, the Quarterly asked questions, like: Do you love me? Isn’t it uncanny? Are you content? This year, we plan to cut through the increasingly fractured, atomized publishing landscape by cutting close to the bone, by writing into what is inarguable, essential what is elemental.

Throughout 2023, the Quarterly will explore how the elements that comprise everything fire, earth, air, and water shape us, and how we can harness them in turn. First is the Fire issue, a theme that in its literal incarnation has become all too present in the lives of Californians, whether those driven from their homes by the wildfires that seem to be ever-spreading, or the incarcerated people conscripted to fight those fires, or those who merely breathe

Pushing the boundaries of visual culture, science, technology, and society

White Sight

A new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations with everexpanding surveillance technologies to expose how white sight creates an oppressively racializing world.

#You Know You’re Black in France When…

What does it mean to be racialized-asblack in France on a daily basis? Tricia Keaton offers a groundbreaking study about everyday antiblackness and its refusal in an officially raceblind France.

The Language of the Face

For thousands of years, artists, philosophers, and scientists have explored the question of what our outer appearance might reveal about our inner selves. This broad and riveting cultural history of physiognomy explores how the desire to divine deeper meaning from our looks has compelled humans for millennia.

Sol LeWitt’s Studio Drawings in the Vecchia Torre

A visual archive of Sol LeWitt’s masterpiece of conceptual art, this book situates the artist’s provisional, material, bodily, and highly personal drawings in their historical, biographical, and theoretical contexts.

Gallup

A poignant artistic collaboration, showing how history and mythology converge in the Navajo communities in and around Gallup, New Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

in that detritus on their way to work or school. But fire is also personified in stories of grifting, gambling, urban despair, political assassination, everything that goes up in smoke and, of course, love, dreams, and more deepfakes.

I don’t want to die in Los Angeles, but I want to drive right out to the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway with “Die in L.A.” at full volume, and I want to invite the world along for the ride. Another Angeleno friend and writer likes to say that the future happens here first. You can love it from afar or hate it up close or remain committed to your deep and productive ambivalence about it, but you should definitely read about it.

An undergraduate student at UCLA sent us her self-produced, pitch-perfect spoof of The New Yorker called The Angeleno. Samia Saad, who included no social media handle or email, made the glossy deepfake “to satirize the ridiculous monopoly the East Coast has on ‘high-end’ literature and journalism.” It was accepted into her undergrad art show, but its circulation stopped in a manila envelope delivered to my desk. She thanked us “for all the phenomenal work you do proving that there is a vastly talented community of writers and a readership in Los Angeles and up and down the Pacific coastline. I only gripe that your existence takes a bit of the punch from my satire by rendering part of it untrue and obsolete.”

The editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books would like to invite Samia Saad of The Angeleno to make fun of us, any time, on her way to becoming a senior editor at The New Yorker and to pitch us, too. We hope Samia Saad continues to mock everyone in her way, and we want to reach all

the readers and writers who understand that the things that burn you up are also the things that keep you warm. Borrowing a metaphor from Sharon Kivland, from her French Revolutionary calendar diary in this issue, “Saltpeter is incendiary, Greek fire, but also preserving.”

Whatever you listen to on PCH, whatever dark romance you have with the places where you want to live and die, and however the elements inspire you, I hope you’ll spend time with the Los Angeles Review of Books and all of our programs, come hellfire or high water, this year.

Love,

Athena Unbound

An excerpt from Athena Unbound by Peter Baldwin: a clear-eyed examination of the open access (OA) movement—past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities.

Torrents have been written about open access, but little comes from those who supply or consume knowledge: the scholars who produce the works that are to be accessible and their potential readers, whether colleagues or the general public. Instead, the drum is beaten by librarians, information- and data-science scholars, media professors, and others who populate a kind of second-order stratum of academia, scholars of scholarship.

A vast quantity of work has billowed forth, professionalizing the field by making it a full-time job just to keep up. Countless conferences, workshops, networks, study groups, Twitter feeds, journals, and blogs keep up a tireless outpouring. The caravan moves on, but where is it going? Founding and running open-access journals and publishers, organizing boycotts of the worst-o ending academic presses, lobbying politicians to reform copyright laws, probing the boundaries of what counts as legal under current rules: such activities move us toward a freer exchange of information. What the theorizing and discussion contribute is less obvious. As so often in the academic world, noble intent does not necessarily produce tangible results. Process is often confused with progress.

Why, then, add another brick to the edifice? Because many participants come from a nimbus formed around the scholarly enterprise without being part of it, they often pay little attention to workaday academics’ concerns. Especially in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, the professoriate is surprisingly ignorant of—and, if aware, often hostile to—open access. Because the well-funded sciences have been the first to warm to the cause, open access has been tailored to their specifications, with publishing fees paid out of generous research budgets. Including less well-endowed fields remains a hurdle.

Athena Unbound seeks to flesh out debates that often remain focused on the sciences. It situates current discussions in a long history of information’s progress toward greater openness. Despite the mantra that “information wants to be free,” much does not. Corporate R&D makes up the majority of research and is not striving for release. Most writers of fiction and commercially viable nonfiction sell their wares in the marketplace, hope to live from the proceeds, and have no interest in opening up. That holds for most producers of visual and aural content, too. Nor are privacy and open access harmonious bunkmates. We naturally resist freeing up information about ourselves except as we choose.

The problem of too much information is a leitmotif. Even without copyright reform or open access, as the public domain inevitably expands, freely available content will eventually dwarf what any current cohort of creators issues.

Sponsored by the MIT Press

What e ect will this have on future cultural producers’ motivations to bring forth novel work? What does the common complaint that we disgorge too much information mean? Can more information ever be a bad thing, even if some is mediocre?

Enthused by the idea that openness must be an absolute, the debate often fails to situate the particular circumstances of academic knowledge in the broader domain of intellectual property. For most content, there is no moral case for accessibility. Yes, other arguments also speak for the virtues of opening up—the logic of knowledge as a commons and the turbocharging of its usefulness allowed by networks. These are claims of public utility. None packs an ethical punch. Most cultural producers do not (yet) want to make work freely available. Only for content that society has paid for can it also claim access. Work for hire is the logic of open access’s moral leverage. But when applied to scholarship, it is often dismissed as a neoliberal encroachment on academic freedom and the sanctity of the university. Perhaps it could just as well be seen as an element in democratizing access to the ivory tower’s knowledge.

The humanities and social sciences have been the stepchildren of these debates. For the hard sciences, existing funding only needs to be repurposed. The expense of disseminating results is a small fraction of research’s total cost. But more than money separates the humanities from the sciences. Humanists cannot be as indi erent to aesthetic and presentational issues as their scientific colleagues. They claim a continued stake in how others use their works. Their data are not just nature’s coalface, but often the copyrighted work of others to which they can lay no claims. Lack of funding has not only hamstrung their ability to adopt open access on the scientific model. The sciences’ ability to solve the problem for themselves has drained library budgets that once were more equitably shared, compounding the issue for other scholars.

FIRE ROUND

Tongo Eisen-Martin

I recently saw the San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin give a reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach. Tongo was not reading his poetry out of book or with any notes, instead he recited every line from memory. His parlance raised and lowered, the content and his real time reaction to it controlled his dictation and meter. The outcome was quite exceptional, like watching someone possessed by a spirit; the poetry had force and electricity. Thinking back on the reading, the most appropriate line of questioning I could imagine was a fire round, so here it is. Chloe

New and Forthcoming from The University of Texas Press

Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay

Why Tammy Wynette Matters by

Steacy Easton

Why Sinéad O’Connor

Matters by

Allyson McCabe

Pitching Democracy

Baseball and Politics in the Dominican Republic by

April Yoder

Resurrecting Tenochtitlan

Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City by

Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala

The Comitán Valley

Sculpture and Identity on the Maya Frontier

by Caitlin C. Earley

Channeling Knowledges

Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds by Rebeca

L. Hey-Colón

Shifting Sands

Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China’s Contemporary Borderlands by Xiaoxuan

Lu

We Are All Armenian

Voices from the Diaspora

Edited by Aram Mrjoian

The Thirty-first of March

An Intimate Portrait of Lyndon Johnson

by Horace Busby

Selling Science Fiction

Cinema

Making and Marketing a Genre by

J. P. Telotte

Poetry: June 19 - 25

Fiction, Nonfiction & Memoir: J uly 10 - 17

Application Deadline: March, 2023

For additional program details and to apply, visit: communityofwriters.org

Financial aid available

Director

John

What’s the best advice you ever got from your mom?

Unity is more important than speed.

What are you getting worse at?

Defeating my homebody tendency.

Better?

Dealing with pain.

Do you think about your own death?

Yes, maybe tri-hourly.

Have you ever dreamed about fire?

Fire is rarely a protagonist in my dreams. I can’t think of an instance, but I did semi-recently dream that my cousin (who had recently passed away) wanted us to drive to a strange sea level volcano.

Why do you write poetry?

It is what my mind coughs up when it is resting in the respect of interconnectedness.

Pretend you are someone else and answer: why do you write poetry?

My family enjoys it.

What do you want?

Liberation for all oppressed peoples.

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e Dual Diaries and Legacies of August Klipstein and Le Corbusier on their Eastern Journey, 1911

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In Klip and Corb on the Road, Ivan Žaknić brings the notebooks together for the rst time to explore the fruitful creative symbiosis of this friendship. Richly illustrated, the book includes copious previously unpublished material, including the complete text of Klipstein’s diary and the friends’ correspondence.

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“An important reflection on evolutionary theory, o ering a radically new perspective on the transition from biological to cultural evolution.”

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Bolla,

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

“A great book for our time: a moment when our own sense of good cheer has been challenged by political and social upheaval.”

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— Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

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Renn, Max Planck Institute

— Seth Lerer, University of California, San Diego

— Eva Geulen, Humboldt University, Berlin

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“For some four decades, John Greening has been a centering figure in the poetic landscape of Britain: a poet whose unbounded curiosity has taken him through the wide (and often conflicted) world with a passion for details that root his work in place. He finds, in a broad range of settings and circumstances, a language adequate to his emotions. Like Auden, he seeks out memorable language in a variety of poetic forms. I hope this marvelous selection brings a grateful audience to his splendid, moving, spiritually adept, and always provocative work.”

—Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015

Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection

Poems by KYLE DARGAN

A poet’s final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity

Synthetic Jungle

Poems by MICHAEL CHANG

“A bewildering collection of ache, awe, and rebuttal.”

—PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS, author of Mutiny

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Hervé Guibert

Thierry la grille, 1980

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

WHAT NOT TO WEAR

A manikin in a suit

by Bharat Jayram Venkat

In the fall of 2019, Fiona Hill strode into the Longworth Office Building in Washington, DC , sporting a white blouse and a subdued chain-link necklace peeking out from below a black blazer. Her outfit, in the words of a writer at the Washington Post, was “ferociously, unapologetically dull.”

The dictates of feminist reportage would suggest that there’s nothing so regressive as obsessing over a powerful woman’s clothing choices (see, for example, much of the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s tragically unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016).

That day, Hill had an important job to do: she was to testify before the House Intelligence Committee. Her testimony would be televised, as a fact witness preceding the Senate’s first impeachment trial for then-president Donald Trump. Hill was a Russia expert, and the former senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council; her words would undercut the right-wing narrative of Ukrainian meddling and point instead to the Kremlin’s investment in sowing discord in American politics, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

In the days leading up to her testimony, Hill met not only with her lawyers but also with a media consultant named Molly Levinson, known as a top crisis counselor, problem solver, and reputation manager. The stakes were high: everything Hill said (and didn’t say) would be dissected and analyzed. But Levinson’s concerns extended beyond what Hill said to what she wore.

“Molly knew the congressional hearing room well.” Hill wrote in her memoir. “The air conditioning was cranked up and the temperature set low to accommodate congressmen in their layers of undershirts, dress shirts, and suit jackets so there would be no risk of sweaty armpits and brows beaded with perspiration.” Levinson warned “that as a more lightly dressed woman, [Hill] risked freezing.”

To effectively transmit the seriousness of her message to the viewers at home, Hill could not appear cold. Levinson made Hill practice grinding the balls of her feet into the ground to prevent shivering. She also counseled Hill to wear pantyhose to hide the goose bumps that might emerge as her body responded to the chilled congressional hearing room (based on available

photos, it’s difficult to gauge whether she followed this particular piece of advice). What Levinson offered was something like a finishing school for women in politics; rather than learning to stay afloat atop their heels, women now had to learn how to push their feet into the floor.

To the American public witnessing Hill’s testimony from the comfort of their homes, an involuntary shiver, as easily as a perspiring brow, might read as a sign of dishonesty. It was not only Hill’s reputation that was under threat but also her message: according to her testimony, Hill wanted to communicate nothing less than the “peril that […] we were in as a democracy.”

The emergence of mechanical air conditioning in the early 20th century made it possible to control thermal conditions on a previously unfathomable scale, ensuring that vaccines preserved their potency, bananas ripened at just the right time, and congressmen avoided unsightly pit stains. As the world outside became hotter a reflection of our impending climate catastrophe our interior worlds became colder. But the creep of climate control technology into nearly every aspect of our lives is only part of the story. What was also needed was a whole series of developments in the measurement of heat and its effects. Why, for example, did the business suit become the standardized unit for measuring how heat infiltrated the clothed body? And how could you safely study the impact of extreme heat without killing your test subjects? •

These questions began to find answers at the height of the Second World War. About as far away from the front as you

could get, a physiologist named Harwood Belding Woody to his friends and colleagues sat in a basement at Harvard University. There, he grafted together his own contribution to the war effort out of sheet metal and stovepipes. Belding was employed as a civilian scientist working for the US Army as part of Harvard’s Fatigue Lab.

The Fatigue Lab was a critical site for the study of exercise physiology, labor, and adaptation to extreme conditions, including both temperature and altitude in other words, conditions that went far beyond what might be narrowly defined as fatigue. The Lab was established in 1927, in the basement of the newly constructed Morgan Hall (named after the financier J. P. Morgan) at Harvard Business School, and ran for two decades. Test subjects included not only soldiers but also sharecroppers, miners, workers at the Hoover Dam, Olympic athletes, and even the scientists themselves (self-experimentation was far more acceptable in those days).

At the Fatigue Lab, Belding tested clothing and equipment for both the military and industry on human volunteers. The army in particular had heavily financed Belding’s research, in the hopes that his findings could help fortify American soldiers against heat-related illnesses like stroke and fatigue as well as cold-related conditions like trench foot and frostbite. Soldiers were offered up to uncomfortable thermal conditions, had their vitals taken and their comfort levels questioned. But humans, it turned out, were unreliable narrators of their own experiences. The same soldier, subjected to the same conditions, might provide a different response the second time around. Moreover, the soldiers

kept passing out under extreme heat conditions, which was both inconvenient for researchers and undoubtedly unpleasant for the soldiers themselves.

Inspired by a mannequin that he saw in a department store window, Belding’s solution to these problems was to construct what he called a manikin: a headless and armless automaton complete with an internal heating unit and a fan to distribute heat throughout its metal body. Manikins were built to emulate specific physiological functions of the human body; in this case, to sense heat. Two years later, Belding refined his rudimentary design with engineers at General Electric to build an electroplated, copper-skinned manikin transected by a single electrical circuit. The various parts of the “Harvard Copper Man,” as he came to be called, were created using clay molds produced by the Connecticut-based sculptor Leopold Schmidt. The measurements for these manikins were based on anthropometric measurements taken of male army recruits.

Thermal manikins could also be fitted with clothing, which allowed researchers to test how the things we wear mediate thermal sensation and comfort. Given that most humans are nearly always wearing some kind of clothing (except for when we’re bathing or making love), the effect of various textiles and layers on how we experience heat was and has remained an important thing to study especially given that clothing (taking it off, putting it on, changing it) represents a straightforward way of adjusting our thermal conditions.

Though hardly fashionable as a group, thermal researchers nevertheless became highly sought out as clothing designers. The Yale-trained physicist Adolf Pharo

Gagge, for example, helped to redesign the outfits worn by Air Force pilots, initiating a shift from the use of natural fibers to artificial materials that better maintained thermal comfort as aviators navigated intense atmospheric conditions. Gagge’s expertise was in physics; he served as chief of biophysics at the Aeromedical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force, then at the Human Factors Division Directorate (also in the Air Force), and finally, as manager of what was rather sinisterly described as “cloud physics and weather modification” for the Secretary of Defense.

Around the same time that Belding was experimenting with his manikins, Gagge developed a unit for measuring thermal insulation that he called the clo. After acquiring his own manikin from General Electric, Gagge began to assess the insulative properties of a range of clothing ensembles. One clo was standardized as the insulation provided by a business suit and cotton underwear. By contrast, pantyhose only provided .01 clo, and a long-sleeved T-shirt and tie provided .29 clo.

Gagge’s use of the business suit as the standard measure for insulation was deliberate: to his mind, it was familiar to the general public and therefore a readily available reference. But while the figure of the suit-clad 1940s human might have been widely recognized similar to the way that we might all recognize a firefighter or police officer it only represented a very small portion of American society: one that was predominantly male, white, and white-collar.

So now we’re finally back to the business suit and the pantyhose. And we only have to think back to Fiona Hill’s description of preparing herself to testify before

the House Intelligence Committee to understand how Gagge’s research shaped the climate of Congress a climate built for a man in a suit, or more precisely, a manikin in a suit.

The clo was developed as a tool for better understanding thermal conditions and increasing comfort. Yet, the decision to take the business suit as the fundamental unit for insulation resulted in the standardization of thermal conditions that made certain kinds of bodies comfortable at the expense of others.

In the early 1960s, Cold War anxieties about chemical warfare provided a new stimulus to thermal manikin research. The Soviets and their allies, it was feared, had built large warehouses stockpiled with chemical munitions. During World War II, the US armed forces had developed certain forms of protective clothing. But the effectiveness of troops while wearing this complicated and heavy outfit which included a gas mask, long underwear, a buttoned-up combat uniform, cotton gauntlets, long socks, and a rubberized overboot on top of standard combat boots was questionable. Experiments conducted with soldiers in climate-controlled chambers revealed that at high temperatures, the thermal conditions produced by wearing this baroque outfit could actually kill troops more quickly than chemical exposure. Manikins were once again utilized in an effort to develop lightweight materials that might offer chemical protection while avoiding overheating.

I was reminded of this Cold War research in July of 2022. While doomscrolling through my social media feeds, I came

across a photograph of Chinese health workers encased in biohazard suits, delivering COVID-19 tests in the midst of a prolonged heatwave. The suits were meant to protect the health workers from infection. But they also caused them to overheat. A friend who worked in Sierra Leone during the recent Ebola epidemic described a similar dynamic, where suited-up doctors and nurses began to suffer from heatstroke in the midst of their long shifts. To avoid this fate, these Chinese health workers had taped popsicles (the ones that come in plastic wrappers) to their suits. They hoped that these frozen desserts would cool them down. A bit of cold comfort, indeed.

Hervé Guibert

Ombre chinoise, 1979

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

“SIR, YOU DO REALIZE I AM 9-1-1?”

On the lives and afterlives of California’s firefighters

by Jaime Lowe

Shawna Lynn Jones was 22 years old when she was dispatched to fight the roughly 10-acre Mulholland Fire from conservation camp

Malibu 13. It was February 25, 2016, and after serving eight months following a probation violation from a 2014 drug charge, Shawna was only three weeks shy of her release date. She and her incarcerated crew 13-3 were first to arrive on scene.

This was not like their usual assignments maintaining Malibu fire roads for multi-million-dollar estates and ranches. This was an actual fire. They hiked in, cut line, and worked through the night and early morning to put out the flames. By dawn, the catastrophic event was not the fire; it was that Shawna had been struck by a boulder and lay lifeless on a steep incline of the Santa Monica mountains.

In my book Breathing Fire, I investigated Shawna’s life and her death and the stories of the more than 200 women who worked on all-female crews as part of California’s incarcerated firefighting system. Since the book came out, I have given countless talks and lectures. What I repeat over and over is something I’ve learned from people in the field: firefighting is one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs. Doing it while incarcerated is nearly impossible. Incarcerated fire crews aren’t just responsible for fire. They respond to mudslides, floods, blizzards and, as recently as February, were tasked with shoveling and clearing snow in the San Bernardino mountains for stranded residents. They are on the front lines of the climate crisis. One of the many differences between civilian crews and incarcerated crews is that, after protecting California’s wildlands and neighborhoods built in high-risk fire zones, incarcerated crews return to the status of state prisoners: they’re confined to camp, monitored, and reprimanded by corrections officers. The women, and thousands of men, who make up incarcerated crews work for dollars a day. Upon release, they’re largely forgotten. What started as a portrait of Shawna Lynn Jones, whose death shocked me, grew into an investigation of California’s prison

system, its fire fighting brigades, and personal histories of the women who knew Shawna and the system that killed her. I wanted Shawna to be recognized by the community she served. I wanted people outside of the prison system and beyond her immediate family to know who she was and what she did: that she wanted to join the forestry service when she was released; that she had an absurdist sense of humor; that she skateboarded throughout the Antelope Valley; that she loved her mom; that she rescued puppies and stole food for them; that she was a whole person, more than just her sentence. I wanted to write about Shawna Lynn Jones because I wanted to give her an afterlife.

Books are fixed objects, but they, too, have an afterlife. Because of the book, I talk regularly with those who were in the incarcerated firefighting program and people who are imprisoned. They hear me on the radio or TV. If they’re incarcerated, it’s harder to get the book hardcovers aren’t allowed in prison because California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) believes that they can be used as weapons. But my book has continued to circulate through the firefighting community. Last year I got an email from a man named Jason Hodge who, for roughly 20 years, had worked for the Ventura County Fire Department and as management on largescale incidents as a Federal Wildlands Firefighter. The subject of his email was “Shawna Lynn Jones.”

When Hodge wrote to me, it had been six years since Jones died. There was still no official resolution about Jones’s death from the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Ventura County Fire, Cal Fire, or CDCR. Several women who were at the scene had

told me there was another crew above them and that, even though the fire was contained and relatively small, rocks and loose soil fell on them from above. A falling boulder fatally struck Jones in the head. Her mom, Diana Baez, received no compensation from the state because it didn’t consider Jones a firefighter.

“First off, I believe her death was our fault,” Hodge wrote in an email to me. He and his crew of civilian firefighters were “careless and arrogant” because it was a small fire in February with no drought conditions. From that day forward, Hodge continued, his “life’s been a bit of a nightmare. A lot of it is still very raw to me. I’ve also spent years trying to get basic help from my department and it’s failed me miserably.” He included his phone number and said he wanted to talk. I wanted to hear his perspective that of a civilian firefighter. Most aren’t willing to share details of deaths like Shawna’s. In searching for answers about her death and about why and how the incarcerated fire camps existed, I also found neglect and exploitation coursing through the civilian fire infrastructure. One of the women I profiled whose firefighting career started at Malibu 13 ended up on a Hotshot crew, and then on Helitack crew. As part of the federal brigades, her status was classified as seasonal. She had no job security, health insurance, or pension. Just last year, the Biden-Harris administration raised the minimum wage of federal wildland firefighters to $15 an hour.

Last June, CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on California, released a four-part investigation into Cal Fire and mental health. In it, they found that, “with too few firefighters to

cover all the fires, firefighters are on the front lines longer, with shorter respites at home. Some battle fires for months at a time.” The report included accounts from fire station leaders who are witnessing an unaddressed epidemic of PTSD and suicidal thoughts among their crews. Cal Fire does not collect any data on suicide or PTSD within its ranks and never has, despite having ample reason to. Firefighters are 40 percent more likely to take their own lives than the general population; in another study conducted in 2019, co-authored by former federal firefighter Patricia O’Brien, of more than 2,600 wildland firefighters surveyed, about a third reported experiencing suicidal thoughts; and nearly 40 percent said they had colleagues who had committed suicide.

When I called him, Hodge was forthcoming about his condition. He told me that he experienced suicidal ideation regularly. “They finally got me diagnosed with moderate to severe PTSD,” he said. “I started taking medication.” But, he explained, he has to pay out-of-pocket for psychiatric care.

He’d just gotten back from three weeks doing fire logistics in New Mexico and said that he was aware of the risks he was taking in talking on the record about his situation. He knew that he could have stayed silent, worked two more years, and retired. He feared losing relationships within the field and opportunities for advancement in his career. “You’re always afraid there will be repercussions,” Hodge said. He told me he wants to continue working fire long after he retires, but that he feared he wouldn’t be allowed to because of the stigma attached to mental health issues. Firefighters have long cultivated an air of stoicism. But a

combination of fatigue, intensifying fires, and increasing workloads have left many crews understaffed. “Then it would have been the same for everyone else, and I’m just sick of us failing ourselves,” Hodge said. “Our world has changed, and we have not changed with it. The stress is going to get higher, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Hodge needed someone to talk to about the day Jones died. He described the still-smoldering mountains stumps and roots glowing orange. He was standing a few feet above Shawna and three of the women on Shawna’s crew, joking with them. Hodge noticed another crew 20 feet up the mountain. “I had no idea who was up there. But they kept knocking rocks loose. And so, there were small rocks falling, and someone says on the radio to be careful because someone’s working up top. Well, first off, that’s fucking negligence,” Hodge said. He heard a crack, the sound of the boulder hitting Shawna’s helmet; then screaming, the sound of her crew’s reaction. “I ran down and Shawna had fallen somewhat down the hillside when it hit her. And then me and the other inmate, we both pulled her up and started cutting her gear off to do CPR. And as soon as I felt her head, I knew it was bad. I knew her skull was broken.”

Hodge told me that, after they had witnessed Jones’s death, the department “didn’t bother to put us out of service. For some firefighters, trauma is a result of a single incident; for others, it’s an accumulation of a lifetime of service. For Hodge, it seemed to be both. “I do see five or six big fires a year. And I like it. And I want to keep doing it for a long time, even after I retire. But the system itself prevents me from healing at

this point,” Hodge said. He told me about how he ignored symptoms of PTSD after Jones’s death he was claustrophobic, he couldn’t get an MRI because of the tight enclosure, and after a lifetime of surfing, he could no longer swim with his head underwater. “I just couldn’t find a lot of peace in my mind,” he said. Every now and then, he searched Jones’s name and didn’t see any lawsuits or follow-up. “It was a fire in February, which we weren’t expecting, and we weren’t taking it seriously.” He went on: “At least if it was me who got killed, my wife would get a quarter million dollars or something.”

Two years after Jones’s death, Hodge was on a similar emergency response in which he administered CPR to a woman who suffered similar injuries to Jones. She also died. “I grabbed her head, and as soon as I did, the back of my fingers just went into her skull. And it’s the same thing that happened with Shawna, I had the exact same feeling,” Hodge said. It instantly took him back to the Mulholland Fire and Jones’s death. He called in sick; drove six and a half hours home to his wife in San Francisco; canceled his next shift; tried to drive back to Ventura but couldn’t bring himself to start his truck. “I had a panic attack,” he said. Hodge called the Employee Assistance Program, a counseling hotline for county workers. According to Hodge, when he first called, no one answered. He left messages. No one returned his call. When he did get through, the person on the other end of the line told him that the first available appointment was in four to six weeks. When Hodge told the operator he was suicidal, the operator suggested he call 9 -1-1. “Sir, you do realize I am 9 -1-1?” Hodge said. “Those are the last people

I wanted to see.” That’s part of the problem, Hodge explained. The state’s strategy in dealing with the mental well-being of its firefighting brigade is to rely on peer counseling. “You don’t want to tell the guys that you work with that you’re going crazy,” Hodge said. “You feel so pathetic. You feel like you failed.”

Hodge knows that climate catastrophe means fires will only become more frequent, bigger, and more intense, and fire agencies municipal, state, and federal are unprepared. California’s worst fire season on record was 2020, with more than 8,600 blazes taking 33 lives and burning four percent of the state. Megafires have been replaced by million-acre “gigafires.” The United Nations estimated that highly devastating fires worldwide could increase by 57 percent by the end of the century. “We’re still putting Band-Aids on,” Hodge said. The department, according to Hodge, hands people in crisis stacks of paperwork and routinely denies Workers’ Comp claims, especially ones rooted in mental health. “The county told me to download a form for an injury which, when you read it, asks what caused the injury. For example, ‘struck against concrete.’ Then it asks you how you can avoid this injury which at that point…” He trailed off sounding frustrated all over again. Hodge recognizes that he works for one of the better fire departments in the country and yet he still can’t get the help he needs. He said that he likes being a firefighter friends and relatives call him a hero but in reality, he added, “I just have the best seats for the apocalypse.”

When Shawna was riding in the fire buggy to the Mulholland Fire, she had just started to train as a sawyer, the lead position on crew responsible for holding the

chainsaw and cutting branches and growth to create the containment line. She had asked her captain to train as a sawyer so that, when she was released, she could list the experience when applying for forestry jobs. Being a sawyer is the hardest position on crew because of the weight of the chainsaw and because each cut creates a path for the crew to hike. As the bus wound its way up the circuitous mountain roads, Shawna turned to her crewmate and said she was scared. She had never seen fire before.

Hervé Guibert

Thierry à la fenêtre de la Sacristie, Santa Catarina, 1983

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

SOWING THE FUTURE

A posthumous excerpt from Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties honoring the life of Mike Davis

with an introduction by his coauthor Jon Wiener

Mike Davis started talking about writing a movement history of L.A. in the sixties a long time ago, in 2007. In 2014, when he asked me to co-author the book, he said he didn’t want this to be a trip down memory lane for the aging activists of yesteryear; nor did he want to tell the young activists of today that they should follow the splendid example set by our generation. He did want to recover a history that had been mostly overlooked by the chroniclers of “the sixties,” and twisted beyond recognition by the forces of the right. He wanted to connect past and future. He also said that writing it together would be “a blast.” I immediately said “yes.”

Mike passed away on October 25, 2022. What follows is the Epilogue to the completed project that we wrote together, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties more than 600 pages about the movements of people of color, many of whom were surprisingly young, along with participants in the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, and gay liberation, as well as counterculture institutions, starting with the underground press. All faced the unending efforts of the LAPD to crush them. But as John Densmore of The Doors (whose song gave us our title) told us about today’s movements: “the seeds were planted in the sixties.” Herewith, some of the fruit of those seeds.

— Jon Wiener

The Yorty era ended with a whimper in the May 1973 general election. A year earlier the mayor, who had already run for more offices than any politician in American history, had astounded political observers by launching his twentieth campaign this time for the Democratic presidential nomination. Utterly unknown in most of the country, he campaigned on promises to stop school busing, continue the war in Vietnam, and make George Wallace his running mate. The L.A. Times disgustedly accused him of making L.A. “a national joke.” In the event, he won only 1.4 percent of California’s votes cast, coming in far behind Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to contest a presidential primary. Elsewhere, Yorty was almost invisible; in Rhode Island, for instance, he received exactly six primary votes. Despite his buffoonery and exorbitant malapropisms (in a national debate, he introduced himself as “mayor of the third largest city in Los

Angeles”), he still managed to win a majority of white votes in his mayoral rematch with Tom Bradley. But Bradley increased his own proportion of the white vote from 37 percent in 1969 to 46 percent in 1973 and won 51 percent of a Chicano vote, which had gone strongly for Yorty in 1969. The result was a four-point victory over Yorty.

In key respects, however, this was a different Bradley than the progressive candidate of 1969. Although the core cadre of the old coalition middle-class Blacks, Jews, and Japanese Americans from the Tenth Council District remained influential as allies and advisors, the conduct of the campaign itself was turned over to a clique of powerful white business leaders and political professionals. Nelson Rising, a corporate lawyer and future mega-developer who had managed John Tunney’s sensational 1970 Senate race, became campaign chair, while Max Palevsky, the fabulously rich founder of SDS (Scientific Data Systems), coordinated the finances, including his own series of large loans to the campaign. Together they convinced Bradley to hire David Garth, who had invented the modern television-based political campaign in 1965 on behalf of New York’s John Lindsay. Garth’s strategy, as Raphael Sonenshein later explained in Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (1993), inverted the key elements of the 1969 crusade. “It had become more professional and less ideological. The emphasis would be on mass media, backed by grassroots campaign, rather than the other way around.”

The ad blitz focused on Bradley’s police career and his political moderation. A very reserved and well-spoken man, Bradley radiated strength and conciliation while Yorty simply acted berserk.

His attempts to race- and red-bait Bradley gained less traction than in 1969, in part because the streets and campuses were tranquilized. The last big antiwar demonstration, protesting Nixon’s second inauguration, was held downtown on January 20th and a week later a ceasefire was called in Vietnam. At the same time, the Nixon administration suspended the draft. Robert Hahn, an education professor at Cal State L.A., announced that he was ending the silent vigil he had conducted weekly for seven years in protest of the war. Meanwhile, the L.A. Panthers, US, SNCC, SDS, the Berets, Che-Lumumba, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, and even the Peace Action Council were now either extinct or moribund. The threat of school busing, on the horizon as the federal court finally moved toward resolution of the ACLU’s 1963 “Crawford” lawsuit, roiled white voters, particularly in the Valley, but Barth ensured that the Bradley campaign steered clear of controversies about school integration. Likewise, when Bobby Seale in Oakland endorsed Bradley, the candidate publically rejected his support.

Bradley’s victory was unique and would remain so for many years: a Black mayor elected by a multi-racial coalition in a city whose Black population share was actually declining. The greatest rewards, however, did not go to the neighborhoods or jobless youth, as the 1969 campaign had promised, but to white men in office towers gathered around ambitious plans for downtown redevelopment and multi-billion-dollar expansions of LAX and the Port. Bradley’s election ended the organic crisis of elite governance that had arisen in the wake of Yorty’s surprise victory in 1961 and the schism between liberal Westside and

conservative Downtown power structures. With his electoral base stabilized by liberal rhetoric and patronage (mediated by his arch-supporter Rev. Brookins), his relationship with Westside moguls, big developers, major banks, and the Times’ Otis Chandler grew more intimate and eventually more corrupt over the course of twenty years in office. In historical retrospect, his greatest accomplishments were not attacking residential segregation or directing public investment to have-not neighborhoods but rather the rebirth of Downtown property values and the creation of a state-of-theart infrastructure for the globalization of the metropolitan economy in the 1990s. Despite public expectations, he was no more successful than the early Yorty in controlling the LAPD or changing its leadership, which continued to be passed on dynastically to proteges of Chief Parker such as Daryl Gates. Moreover the department continued to blackmail politicians and occasionally destroy their careers, as in the case of Maury Weiner, Bradley’s progressive conscience and deputy mayor, who was arrested in 1975 for supposedly groping an undercover vice officer in a Hollywood theater. Weiner’s real sin was not that he was gay but rather that he was still urging the mayor to tame the cops.

Although Bradley made a number of key Chicano hires at City Hall, he was soon accused of betraying his Eastside supporters by not endorsing Chicano candidates for the City Council, particularly for Edward Roybal’s old seat held by Gilbert Lindsay. (Only in 1985 and running in another, white-voter majority district would Richard Alatorre finally restore a Spanish surname to the Council roster.) Instead of fully integrating Chicanos into his

coalition, the new mayor gave priority to meshing his policies with the plans of the major power players in the business community who in turn guaranteed the campaign finances that made Bradley’s tenure unassailable. Otherwise, he might have been more vulnerable to political challenges within the Black community that arose from his “invasion” of the turf controlled by allies of Mervyn Dymally (now lieutenant governor) and Jesse Unruh. Their respective political bases in 1973 were roughly defined by Vermont Avenue. West of Vermont, Bradley support was rooted in stable Black working-class and middle-class neighborhoods whose relative prosperity was based on expanding public employment opportunities for which the mayor claimed much of the credit. East of Vermont, in the 1965 riot zone, Dymally loyalists represented a population was more likely to be badly housed, dependent on low-wage private employment, and served by the worst schools. Far from experiencing a community renaissance under the new regime, the riot zone neighborhoods in the 1970s lost the little ground they had gained through the War on Poverty and temporary youth employment schemes. Watts in particular, once a symbol of hope and Black pride, was now a pit of despair. In 1975, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the uprising, L.A. Times reporters surveyed the district and came to the grim conclusion that conditions were considerably worse than in 1965. “Unemployment is now higher in the Watts area, welfare rates are climbing, and housing continues to deteriorate.” Ron Karenga, interviewed in prison, told the L.A. Times that “people view the 60s as a failure when in fact the 60s were not a failure but a transitional period in our long

struggle.... We can’t look at the temporary disarray that we find ourselves in and be dispirited.” Yet most of the people who talked to the L.A. Times were dispirited and expressed little hope that the Bradley administration, particularly in the absence of federal support, would reverse the decline. As Walter Bremond, the former chair of the Black Congress, put it: “the system whipped the shit out of us.”

By the early 1980s, moreover, a wave of plant closures had shuttered the auto assembly plants, aluminum mills, steel plants, and tire factories that had symbolized greater L.A.’s prowess as the nation’s second largest manufacturing center. Although thousands of older white workers were victims of this industrial collapse, it hit especially hard at the young Blacks and Chicanos, many of them Vietnam veterans, who thanks to federal consent decrees had recently acquired access to more of these unionized high-wage jobs and in some cases risen to union leadership. Many leftists in the 1970s had envisioned the big plants as the new power bases for continuing the Black and Chicano liberation struggles. Deindustrialization, whether or not an inevitable response to global competition, was the asteroid that destroyed Marxist dreams. City Hall, so proactive on behalf of exporters, land developers, and the financial sector, did nothing to stanch the hemorrhage of good jobs. (Bradley and the Council, for instance, could have led a coalition of the region’s industrial cities and suburbs to pressure Sacramento and Washington.)

Meanwhile, gang violence, largely quelled in the wake of the ’65 rebellion, returned to the streets of South Central in a new and more deadly form. A few months

after Bradley’s inauguration, investigators were warning his office of the existence of 27 “chapters” of a new, heavily armed gang nation that called itself the Crips. Twelve additional gangs later to be known as Bloods had been formed in self-defense against the expanding Crip empire. Gang membership would steadily increase through the 1970s, then grow exponentially in 1980s as crack cocaine, imported from Colombia and retailed by neighborhood gangs, became the ghetto’s alternative economy. The connection between the decline of Black radicalism and rising gang violence may have escaped the notice of the white media but was widely acknowledged and mourned in the community. The Crips were indeed, as Cle Sloan titled his film made in the wake of the 1992 uprising, the “Bastards of the [Black Panther] Party.”

But it was LAUSD that remained ground zero in the struggle for equal opportunity. Waves of immigration from Mexico, as well as Central America and South Korea, reshaped the city’s demography and added their own baby boom to the school-age population. But new immigrants were typically years away from citizenship, so a chasm opened up between the active electorate and voteless immigrant parents. White voters, their children now grown, had little inclination to vote for school bonds but were enthusiastic for Proposition 13 in 1978, which ended the financing of schools through local property taxes and inaugurated an era of permanent fiscal stress and declining quality of education. The conservative Valley was the cradle of this statewide tax revolt and soon became the principal school desegregation battleground. The Valley-based New Right activists who in 1976 organized

Bustop, an anti-busing group that claimed 30,000 members, went on to win positions on the School Board and even a seat in Congress. They also helped lead the rebellion of local homeowners’ associations against apartment construction and, in the 1994 election, were catalysts in the passage of anti-immigrant Proposition 187 (“Save Our State”) ultimately ruled unconstitutional which among other provisions ordered school districts to expel undocumented children. Their underlying political raison d’être, reincarnated today in the Trump administration, was to deny immigrants and children of color the opportunities that high levels of public spending on education in 1950s California had provided for their own kids.

The fires of April 1992 that followed the not-guilty verdicts in the trial of the cops who beat Rodney King illuminated the city’s continuing landscape of inequality. South and East L.A. were still policed ruthlessly by the LAPD, but the uprising of angry Black youth and poor Latinos also presented a price tag for the failures of reform in the 1960s. From this perspective, one might conclude that all the dreaming, passion, and sacrifice of that era had been for naught. But the sixties in Los Angeles are best conceived of as a sowing whose seeds grew into living traditions of resistance. Movements rose and fell to be sure, but individual commitments to social change were enduring and inheritable. Thousands continued to lead activist lives as union organizers, progressive doctors, and lawyers, as school teachers, community advocates, and city employees, and, perhaps most profoundly, as parents. Memories of Black power, draft resistance, the highschool blowouts in South Central and the

Eastside, the grape boycott, the Artists’ Peace Protest Tower, Gidra and the Asian new left, the Free Angela movement, the mass arrests at Valley State in the struggle for Black studies, the Black Cat Tavern

“riot,” the women’s movement, the 1970 Teamster wildcat strike, the endless battles to free Venice and free the Strip all of this was transmitted intergenerationally, sometimes providing icons of protest during the massive renewal of labor activism and immigrant rights organizing in the 1990s.

The turning point came after California voters approved Prop 187 in 1994. It won almost 60 percent of the votes statewide and passed in L.A. County by a 12-point margin. But it spurred a massive Latino backlash. Miguel Contreras, a son of migrant farm workers who had picked grapes as a child, became the first Latino head of the County Federation of Labor. He set to work making unions a vehicle for mobilizing L.A.’s vast Latino community. A massive door-to-door registration drive was followed by a get-out-the-vote operation in support of progressive candidates allied with Latino labor. They reshaped the City Council and L.A.’s delegations to the state legislature and Congress, and soon California was solidly Democratic. In L.A., labor organized the Living Wage campaign, which in 1997 became one of the first in the nation to succeed at raising the incomes of workers on publicly funded projects. Next came the Latino-led Justice for Janitors campaign, which, after protracted struggle, mass arrests, and police beatings, won a huge citywide strike in 2000. And the LAPD was finally required to change its ways in 2001. After decades of litigation by the ACLU and protests

organized mostly by activists in South L.A., the federal courts forced dozens of major reforms on the department and imposed a court-appointed monitor to supervise compliance. The decree wasn’t lifted until 2013. And history was made in the streets: on May Day in 2006, half a million people marched down Wilshire Blvd demanding rights for undocumented immigrants. Most of them were Latino and most were young. The march had been called by labor unions and immigrant rights groups and endorsed by the pro-immigrant Cardinal Roger Mahony and the city’s first Latino mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. On January 21, 2017, the day after Trump was inaugurated, 750,000 protested downtown at the L.A. Women’s March perhaps the largest in L.A. history.

But the 2019 L.A. teachers’ strike was perhaps the most dramatic example of the renewal of activism. A coalition of the classroom and the community, it focused on the same issues of overcrowded schools and educational disinvestment (now aggravated by the drain of resources to charter schools) that had contributed to the student uprisings in 1967 – 69. Moreover, thousands of the Latino students who boycotted classes and joined teacher picket lines were proudly aware that they were following in the footsteps of Sal Castro, Gloria Arellanes, Bobby Elias, Carlos Muñoz and all the others who had made time stop in March 1968. The union then capped its victory by recalling L.A.’s most irrepressible sixties veteran, Echo Park’s Jackie Goldberg, from retirement and electing her to the School Board where she had fought so hard for integration and quality education thirty years earlier.

For more than a half century, the right

has waged a relentless campaign against the goals and achievements of the sixties’ movements for racial, social, and economic equality. From Reagan to Trump, there has been an endless hammering away at caricatures of dopey hippies, traitorous peace protestors, bra-burning feminists, dangerous Black radicals, and commissars of political correctness.

However, as this book’s two authors have discovered in myriad conversations with their students and other young comrades, this rewrite of history from the standpoint of wealthy white men has had minimal impact on the social consciousness of the young people of color who are Los Angeles’ future. If anything, their own experiences of nativism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and blocked mobility ensure that they will be genuine successors to grandmothers and grandfathers who raised their clenched fists and demanded power to people so long ago. To keep that circle unbroken, this book was written.

Excerpted from Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, Verso, 2020 © pp. 631–638

Hervé Guibert

Autoportrait, rue du Moulin-Vert, porte vitrée, c. 1986

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

by Sharon Kivland

It is the first day of the month of nivôse in the French revolutionary calendar. The year is CCXXXII. Nature converged with revolution to create this calendar. Time started again, anew, according to reason and nature and the intentions of history. It was Year I of a new order, one in which there was collective time, human time, no gods or masters, tyrants abolished, kings done away with and their queens too, no longer a divine order of the universe: our time, our space, a difference between temps voulu and temps veçu, with nothing but the changes of nature marking the changing of the hours, the days, the years. The short-lived calendar of the revolution was

formed of months of three weeks of ten days, of days with ten hours, of hours with a hundred minutes, of minutes with a hundred seconds; a calendar of natural and attractive names: the calendar of Jacobin history. Days that ended in zero were assigned to an agricultural implement. Days ending in five were assigned to an animal. All other days were assigned to a plant or a mineral.

Nivôse is the month of snow, though this year there has not been any snow yet. Mist and frost have passed, while rain and wind arrive, and then later, seed will be sown, and after there will be blossom, harvest, heat, and fruit leading to fine vintage. That is all attendant; for now, it is a matter of keeping warm and keeping the wolf from the door. Three stoves are lit daily, sometimes a fourth. The collection of firewood is endless. I sometimes hear nivôse, which comes from nivosus, abundant in snow, as névrose, a psychic trouble characterized by conflict, hysterical or obsessional, according to the psychic structure of the subject.

TOURBE (peat): Today is the day of peat. When the land is set on fire to clear for new growth, it is not the peat that burns but the blue grass or the heathers rooted in the peat. For hearth-fires it is cut by hand, left to dry in the sun, then stacked; burning, it smells like bacon and grass, sour and sweet at the same time. Today is the shortest day, the winter solstice, associated with Apollo, Dionysus, Mithra (the holly and the ivy, the mistletoe). The young sun was born on this day, the fire of the earth, the sun king, son of the goddess, and he brought with him all the promises of the year to come. Another calendar, here on my writing-table, measures the passing of time: the almanach du facteur. Now I buy this almanach du

facteur myself but my neighbor Marcelle, for whom I had both the pleasure and burden of being her “second daughter,” used to give one to me every Christmas Eve. She kept all her almanac calendars, each year marked with the weather, the sowing, and planting, or the gathering, as well the date of the deaths of the dogs and cats all buried in our gardens. When we did not live here all the time, Marcelle always laid a fire in our hearth, in time for our arrival in winter. The house was always cold.

HOUILLE (coal): Coal or coke, houille, is between lignite and anthracite, sometimes poisonous. The silicone death of miners. Germinal. Let them burn, those who oppose us, they said, and they cut down the trees of the grand canal at the palace of Versailles for firewood. Later, they said burn Paris, and later still, others lied, saying it was the women who had done it, the pétroleuses, with their canteens and guns, their bombs and their flames. Later still, cars were set on fire, businesses and public buildings blazed.

BITUMEN (bitumen): Bitumen is black and viscous. Bitumen binds asphalt. Exposure to its fumes is linked to respiratory effects, asthma, bronchitis, to cancer. Inhaling its vapor produces drowsiness and vertigo. The saints and martyrs, the dead, those who died for their devotion, their beliefs, the croyant /es, measured time in the Christian calendar with its distinction between sacred and profane days, indicating the way time should be spent according to the dictates of the church. Such a parade of saints and martyrs but sometimes, on certain days, they were replaced with “great men,” sunkings, for example (after Apollinaire: soleil

cou coupé, sun corpseless, sun cutthroat, the sun a severed neck, solar throat slashed, and let the sun beheaded be, and so on), or other illustrious figures, even with Voltaire, imagine!

SULPHURE (sulphur): The king was deposed, and the sovereign body, no longer sovereign, a body now in pieces, ceased to serve as any kind of measure. That sovereign body always was two bodies, a natural one that lives and dies, and an enduring symbolic body assumed by the successor to the throne. The real and symbolic body of the ruler expired, the head (the responsible part) of the body politic quite literally rolled in 1793, “forcibly undressed, his voice drowned out by the drums, trussed to a plank, still struggling, and receiving the heavy blade so badly that the cut does not go through his neck, but through the back of his head and his jaw, horribly” (by then, the king was Citizen Capet, and then, the principal personage was caput). The Romans burnt sulphur to protect the home against witchcraft, sulphurous flames with the odor of rotten eggs, brimstone. The beast and the false prophet were thrown into a lake of fire and sulphur in Revelations, along with the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, all the liars, the immoral, the murderers, the sorcerers, and so on and so on, and fire and sulphur and smoke came out of the mouths of horses of the Apocalypse. As for the wicked, well, fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.

CHIEN (dog): Dog day, dog days a period of stagnation and inactivity. I supposed that description of lassitude might apply to Christmas Day. One says un temps de chien,

and that has certainly been the case, rotten weather, execrable, one would not put a dog outside in it, or dogs were kept outside, miserable and wretched. It is an expression designated by an excess, the contemptible dog, dirty and impure, like the bitch of a life, or the life of a libertine, debauched, living like a dog. What is it like to be treated as a dog? The dogs lie close to the stoves, their fur is hot. Grumbling, when too warm, they slump away. Another calendar, one of lived experience, Sylvain Maréchal’s Almanach des honnêtes gens of 1788, undid the authoritarian measure of time, calling for a reestablishment of things for once and for all on their original footing, their original state, which is to say on the most perfect and most legitimate equality. It was all a story, he said, at the time he wrote it, but he was telling the truth, he said, and it would become history one day. Histoire and history and fable: once upon a time and there was and there was not.

LAVA (lava): Lava will not turn a body to stone no, it burns it to ash and the ash becomes a statue through ingenious means, a negative corpse, flesh and organs decomposed, a shell of hard material around absent form. In Pompeii, a dog straining at its tether to escape left its void. The animal is twisted, its forelegs raised, in the position assumed when the pyroclastic flow overwhelmed it. Its mouth is open, its teeth visible, barking or whining or trying to breathe, inhaling the poisonous gases. Poor old guard dog, tied to a post in the atrium of the house of Marcus Vesonius Primus. The atrium filled with ash and debris and the dog struggled to get free, but its chain, fixed to its collar with two bronze studs, kept it there. Cave canum. Gilles Deleuze could

SHARON

not breathe towards the end he decided for himself, the limit of his chain, tied like a dog to his oxygen tank, desiring an unleashing in the hard winter of his long suffocations. He felt he was treated like a dog by his doctors. It is, he said, not men but animals who know how to die. Saint Etienne, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death for pronouncing the name of God. His body was left unburied for the dogs, but the animals did not come for it. The disciple Paul moved the body to a secret cave near Jerusalem, and the location of the tomb appeared in a dream to Lucian four centuries later. When the entrance was opened, the earth trembled, and a gloriously sweet fragrance filled the air.

TERRE VEGÉTALE (topsoil): We all tell stories in our village, about our village of six houses, with four outliers (considered not as part of the village for reasons I do not always understand, even when the families that inhabit or inhabited the houses are interlinked, enlaced by name and marriage, Bonnier, for instance, or Béréchel or Lemoine, identified as la mère, le père, and so on, in endless family ties, intermarriages, multiple cousinages), though my stories come late to the telling of its history and in the end, they may play little part in what remains to be told when I am gone, and I will not figure at all, l’anglaise, as they call me. Every day I collect wood from the forest to burn in our stoves, the only way we have to heat our granite house. It is a constant struggle to keep warm; we are not as young as we used to be. I determined in October that I would not pay for cords of wood this winter. A corde is three stères, measured imprecisely by a length of string, three meters by one, a measure left over

from the Revolution, when all measures changed.

FUMIER (manure): The revolutionary calendar imagined a new time when the laborer would be held in higher esteem than all the kings of the world together and agriculture would be considered as the highest of the arts of a civil society. Time would be natural, as nature itself, most energetic, in all its fecundity in the month of July when the sun is at its zenith, and when the French people also reach their full height and force to harvest the precious seeds of reason and independence, when red is the color of the blood of kings and their henchmen, more livid, darker than the blood of other men. Like droplets of blood, the seeds fall or are scattered: a scrap here, a scrap there. Little bits. It is like the grit from the cat’s paws on a clean linen bedsheet. It is the day of the Holy Innocents: Childermas, the slain children, the first martyrs, the boys. It is also the Feast of Fools when parents abdicated their authority to the rule of their children. A heap of manure will generate heat for weeks; horse and cow dung can be burnt but the fumes produce arsenic.

SALPÊTRE (saltpeter): Saltpeter is incendiary, Greek fire, but also preserving. The salt of Peter is used for salaisons, salted, hams, sausages, retaining the rosiness of flesh, meaty pinkness. The salting-tub evokes blood in Burgundy they said that que ca tourne, c’est rapport a la salaison de la femme, and they meant menstrual blood, that salt and blood were equal. Salpeter has no effect on carnal urges, despite what was once thought; it does not dampen the heat of desire. It smolders when it burns. Mixed with charcoal and sulphur, it is gunpowder,

the explosions of fireworks, cannons, and guns. Black powder, white smoke, the color and temperature of flames. Light. The rockrose, cistus, is the rescue remedy against fear. It should be made in a crystal bowl in spring water when it flowers. When fire sweeps through the maquis, it consumes the rockrose: the plant in peril is the specific against terror, the terror of the rampaging blaze that takes everything.

FLÉAU (flail): The flail is a tool to beat the wheat, to separate grain from husk; but it is also a scourge and a curse, a calamity and a plague, a catastrophe and a disaster. Shelling continued in Ukraine; three strikes hit Semenivka, and one dead person was known, it was reported, but no name was given. Ukraine air defences shot down sixteen Russian kamikaze drones. Their sound is like a chainsaw in the sky. Thrushes warbled Greek words from the balustrades of Roman palaces (whose words? A prize might be offered to anyone reading this). Stéphane Mallarmé made a distinction of a double state of speech: here, brute and immediate; there, essential. What is the language of birds? It is mystical, or perhaps it is merely ordinary conversation. They will speak or sing the last human words, in any case. Ukrainians call their language nightingale speech.

GRANIT (granite): The walls of the house are so thick that they retain heat from the stoves in winter, while the house is cool in summer. It is the eve of an old year in the Gregorian calendar and the day of the new in the French revolutionary calendar, 11 primidi of the second decade, granite is in the place of that old Saint Sylvestre, who killed a fiery dragon and built some

basilicas, and chased away some evil spirits. Once on this eve, it was the custom that a little piece of lead was melted in a spoon over a flame, dropped in water, the shape it formed telling one’s fortune, a star for happiness, a ball for luck.

ARGILE (clay): A year ago I could not move easily or without pain, following an accident, fractured bones. I clad my leg in a poultice of green clay, leaving it to set. It is supposed to help healing, holding tissues together, ligaments, muscle, skin. The green clay comes from the dust of crystalline sedimentary rock where water has been washed away. The floor of our house once was terre battue, clay spread as thick mud and beaten down before the granite stones were laid in place around it, a house without foundations rising from damp ground. The fire dried the clay floor slowly, and each time it rained, the floor was moist. Once we had only the stone hearth, a fire of logs laid on firedogs, lifting the wood so that air might circulate. Behind the fire was a castiron plaque, showing the annunciation, angel’s mouth to virgin’s ear, reflecting heat into the room, though in truth, most of it went up the chimney.

ARDOISE (slate): The second day of the old, tridi of the new. Slate, a new slate, wiping the slate clean. Tabula rasa. Turning over a new leaf. Burying the hatchet (never). In French, to pass the sponge, absorbing, mopping, soaking up, blotting; to turn the page, put the counter back to zero. There was constant cooking, for the pumpkins were declining rapidly; cut into slices, trimmed of the bad parts, they must be cut up, frozen in pieces or purées, or roasted, made into soups, stews, curries (tonight)

Hervé Guibert

New York, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

all week. There can be too much pumpkin, to be honest. I thought about the action of Janine Antoni washing a floor with her hair, her ponytail dipped in dye, crouching, not cleaning, not at all, in the figure-eight swooshing movement, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles scrubbing the steps of a museum, moving to the marble floors inside, on her knees with a rag or mopping for nine hours. These actions were works of art and the acts were work. Endless labor: start, end, begin again. Infinite cycle. Year in, year out. Repeat. Perhaps one would prefer to clear away everything for once and for all. Burn it all down. Ashes to ashes. The wood ashes are sprinkled each day on the compost heaps or fed to the roses, or they are added to the dust baths of the chickens and to their food, the charred wood pecked and nibbled, or a palmful is rubbed into the fur of the dogs.

GRÈS (sandstone): Sandstone, composed of feldspar or quartz, silicates, is used in the production of television screens, but a play on screens and hearth-fires eluded me, though I remembered seeing the television screen proposed as vehicle for reverie replacing the flames, and mysterious signs appeared, ghost images, writing on the wall that the astrologers could not decipher: Belshazzar found wanting, and slain, a long story cut short. The glass doors of two stoves required cleaning; they were blackened and obscure, and the flames could not be seen. The wood was too damp, hard to catch alight, struggling to roar, smoking and sizzling a little.

LAPIN (rabbit): Though today’s date was marked by a rabbit, we seldom see them here now, though there have been many

hares. These are not the hares of myth, sacrificing themselves in flames to feed a god or warning of fire or stealing the sun or making the gift of fire. In Dol market there is a stall selling rabbit, from fresh meat to terrines and rillettes. Once I made a first course of these, with a salty radish butter, cold radishes, and good bread, but such delights are now prohibited the meat part anyway. The hunters no longer pass by the house to shoot rabbits and hares and roe deer in the forest. Sometimes their shotguns were unbroken, held readied to shoot over a shoulder as they walked by, calling in vain their rampaging dogs with their brass hunting horns: corne, pibole, trombone.

SILEX (flint): Also flintstone, also firestone. A kind of quartz. Tools, fires. Chips and breaks, sharp-edged pieces. Sparks struck. Smashed against iron. Flintlock. Tinder, a fungus that grows on trees, a dating app: coup de foudre: to get the sparks flying and love at first sight. I had difficulty in lighting the stove in my study. It resisted paper, firelighters, small kindling, sticks and small logs. Three failed attempts. How much time I spend in winter trying to light and keep alight the fires, how much energy dispensed in collecting wood, chainsawing and chopping. Fourth attempt, a spark no more, and I gave up hope. Children used to walk to school, wearing their wooden shoes, often walking as many as 10 kilometers, following the deep tracks there were no tarmacked roads until the 1960s, and then you could go on your bicycle, if you were lucky enough to have one. Sometimes there would be six or seven of you en route, you and your sisters and brothers. The stove in the classroom was lit but still it was cold, for the ceilings were high and the windows

large, to let in as much natural light as possible, for as yet there was no electricity, and also because of the prevalence of tuberculosis the air had to circulate, be renewed. On the walls, there were those large posters: geographic maps, human anatomy, steam engines; three blackboards, a new moral passage was chalked each day and you had to learn it by heart. The desktops were stained with blotches of violet ink, there were porcelain inkwells on the right because everyone had to be right-handed and if you were not, your left hand was tied behind your back until you learnt better, and if you spoke Breton, you were put in the corner with your wooden clogs hung around your neck until you spoke French. There was dictation, you copied letters and lines. You had a morning break and you played in the courtyard, skipping, hoop and stick, hopscotch, marbles. The girls pissed in the cubicles on the left, the boys in the pissoirs on the right. You went back to the classroom for arithmetic. At lunchtime some of you went home but if you came from a long way you went to the café in the village and had bread soup, made by the baker, with a little bit of bread and butter, and then you went back to school for history and geography or science, and then the day ended with recitation and singing, or manual work for the girls. Often you got a rap on the hand with a ruler, and sometimes a good point, but not often. But you know, when you lived in a dark little house with a beaten earth floor, it wasn’t so bad to come to school, with the stove, the wooden floor, the window on a world.

MARNE (marl): Marl, once used in agriculture to improve the soil, hardens into rock to become marlstone. Another story:

Augustin Meaulnes turned up at the village school where the father of François Seurel (who tells the story) was the director, teaching the older children, and his mother Millie taught the younger children. Meaulnes arrived as night fell, wearing the felt hat of a peasant tipped back on his head and a black shirt belted round the waist like a schoolchild. He took fireworks from his pocket. François had been ill. He was fearful and unhappy. The arrival of Meaulnes was the start of his new life. And then Meaulnes went missing for a few days, he disappeared into the forest … and found the enchantment of the hidden château, the mysterious domaine, the fête champêtre where the children ruled, which I imagined as a painting by Watteau, and Meaulnes met a girl and experienced wonderment. Green lanterns, red lanterns, extravagant scenes around a fire, a flickering candle: two days of grace and marvels, then the beginning of turmoil and devastation. This is a story that brought me to France. I continue to look for the château in the forest on fine days in winter when one can see through the trees.

PIERRE À CHAUX (limestone): In my study, there are ashes in a jar labeled “I am toxic.” The black ash was sent to me from LouisGeorges, at a time of suffering, along with a small bottle of homemade absinthe, labeled “Drink me” (we did). I sent him a jar of quince jelly in return, and later some black poppy seeds. The ash is for spells. Sorts. It is still with me. Sortir. There are different ways of cutting, digging, working the land. They are divided between men and women. Alain Testart, the anthropologist, brings the division, the differentiation, back to a matter of blood and an origin in prehistory.

Blooded thought. Sacrifice. Transfusion and transformation. Same old, same old. Limestone is the stuff of quicklime, which preserves corpses and eradicates the odor of their putrefaction, the stuff of tombs. Dust to dust.

MARBRE (marble): Marble is the stuff of monuments and I had nothing to say about it during nivôse. Let them burn, I thought, let all the vile statues and foul figures and malevolent markers of history burn, but marble is most resistant to fire and does not singe or crack. The endless recuperation of firewood. The woodpile is worrying low. I am unable to use the heavy chainsaw. The stove in my study refused to light again. Blowing on it, I singed my hair and gave myself vertigo. I found the pair of bellows Marcelle gave me many years ago and blasted away with them. At times I wondered if my collecting of firewood was theft, but after all, Karl Marx argues that, in the case of fallen wood, nothing has been separated from property, for the wood is already apart from property as the owner of the tree possesses only the tree and the tree no longer possesses the branches that have fallen from it: “The wood thief pronounces on his own authority a sentence on property.”

VAN (winnowing basket): Yes, an object used to separate grain from chaff after flailing, and from the woven basket the grain is tossed high in the air to allow the wind to blow away what cannot be eaten. Fabre d’Églantine said the calendar must show the people the richness of nature, to make them love the fields, and to methodically show them the order of the influences of the heavens and of the products

of the earth. A basket is a worthy object. Églantine went to the guillotine with Danton on 16 germinal year II, convicted of corruption and the destruction of national representation. One account said he cried on the way, for he had been unable to finish writing a poem; another said he hummed the song Il pleut, il pleut, bergère, as he mounted the scaffold. It was a song from his opéra comique, Laure et Petrache, of 1780, and poor Marie-Antoinette became the shepherdess, the storm from which she should bring in her sheep to shelter was the forthcoming revolution, the thunder approaching, the lightning cracking.

PIERRE À PLÂTRE (gypsum): It is a soft sulphate mineral, alabaster, satin spar, selenite, but I was heavy-hearted, brokenhearted, and in consequence, I did not write about gypsum, pure and translucent, soft and moist, preventing the spread of flames, strong against fire.

SEL (salt): In the kitchen: a small glass jar of fleur de sel from the Guérandes, fine light crystals, cultivated for several centuries, the flowers from the surface of the salt marsh harvested by the paludiers in the evening during the summer months, before the crystals are destroyed by rain, with a tool, a lousse, made of chestnut wood; a rectangular white lidded terrine dish with small handles of a lion’s head on each side, found at the recycling bins, containing Maldon sea salt, brought back monthly from London, harvested by hand by members of the same family for over a hundred years; smoked sea salt from the fish shop in Hastings, in an old Le Parfait jar; a German Weck preserving jar containing large salt crystals and lavender flowers, a

present, I think, from Kristen. Above the stove, an old blue enameled sheet-metal salt box with a wooden lid, sel in a black ornate script, a raised sunburst design on the back, holding gros sel, rough, gray, slightly damp. The salt of my tears. Pure salt has no odor. Tears have no odor. I am weighed down by sorrow. Sadness has no odor, but it fills the room, and when women weep, it is said, their tears undo desire, dampening its flames. Salt extinguishes fire.

FER (iron): On the news, from Ukraine, the report of a field of bodies, Russian infantry, the foot soldiers sent out in wave upon wave as if from the trenches of the First World War. It was the day of Saint Tatiana in Ukraine, patron saint of students. Her eyes were torn from their sockets with hooks, for she refused to offer sacrifice to an idol, but four angels surrounded her, protecting her and striking her tormentors. Her wounds healed by the following day, such miraculous healing, and then she was stripped and beaten, her body slashed with razors. A sweet fragrance from her bleeding wounds filled the air. Her torturers felt that they were being beaten with iron rods wielded by angels, and nine of them fell to the ground, dead as doornails. The next day she healed again, had no wounds, no bleeding, and she called down thunder and lightning in the temple, destroying the idol. She was hung up, lashed, her breast cut off, healed again, so this time she was thrown to a lion, but the creature just licked her feet. She was thrown into a fire, but the flames did not burn her. At last, as clearly this could not be allowed to continue, she was beheaded with a sword and that put an end to Saint Tatiana, for heads do not grow back but instead circulate as relics.

Allegedly, Maximilien Bourdaloue “dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation.” The handkerchief was stored in a calabash. Robespierre asked the legislators, who should be the organs and the interpreters of the eternal laws that the divinity dictated to men, to erase from the code of the French the blood laws that command judicial murders, and that their morals and their new constitution reject. But the king must die so the republic can live, and a people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss.

CUIVRE (copper): The 24th day of the revolutionary calendar and Friday the 13th of January in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, it appeared as 23010, which seemed more or less the same I did not understand the Julian measure of time, and time is always a great complication, as Eleonora and I found this morning in a confusion about where I was and where she was, and in which time zone (this was one of the reasons my Capital reading group in two continents stopped meeting we were either too early or too late). Copper smells like blood, dulled and old, or blood smells like copper. I inherited some of my father’s copper pans, but they are of poor quality, heating too quickly and tending to burn, their tin linings melting.

CHAT (cat): In Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two copyists attempted to adopt and educate a horrible boy and his nasty sister. Their own Émile, Victor, boils a cat, which bursts from the pot, howling terribly, its dilated eyes as white as milk, and it

dies as it rolls in agony in the ashes of the fireplace. It took a long time to clean up the kitchen; Bouvard quoted Rousseau, saying that a child has no responsibility, and cannot be moral or immoral, as if seeking an excuse for the child’s act. Pécuchet thought they might follow Bentham, that the punishment should be in proportion to the offense, a natural consequence, but none of the deprivations they considered would affect the odious Victor, whom they decided to treat as if he were ill, putting him to bed, but he was quite contented with that, lacking intellect and heart. They tried to cram his head with literary fragments, and following the advice of Madame Campan, selected the entire works of Rousseau. Victor and sly Victorine were left in the kitchen to become servants, and Flaubert’s manuscript broke off. Trying to get the stove to light in the dark of the early morning, I thought of all the cats who had passed through here, and especially Smudgelina, who would place her front paws neatly on the ledge beneath the doors of the stove and gaze dreamily into the flames.

ÉTAIN (tin): The day of the cat is snuggled between copper and tin, elements that, when mixed, form bronze. The bronze of bells and cymbals! The sounds of celebration! The commissioners serving the Directoire were instructed to note if the bells were still rung, in their observation of communal life. If the churches and chapels were shut, well, people could kneel in the village square, but sometimes the clappers were removed from the bells in the church towers, or the bell towers were demolished and the bells melted down. The days were no longer broken up by the bells. One can see how difficult it must have been, the

villages and small towns, in the provinces, to adhere to the new measure of time, now there was no longer any religious authority over its distribution. If the only day of rest was a décadi, a day that had to prevail over the Sunday of the past, that would make for a long working week and a rather exhausting rhythm of time, despite Rousseau’s ideas about a natural religion in which every day was a shared collective holiday and nice work if you could get it, in that neat circle of equality. Sunday and décadi had to meet on equal terms, or rather the first be subsumed into the latter, despite the arithmetic and the disruption of seven into 10, 10 into seven, and an hour being twice as long, a minute a little longer, and a second a little shorter. A bitter wind blew, and the fires did not warm the rooms.

PLOMB (lead): Lena sent me her book Memento Mori pour Ni Une Mas! In 2003, she made her first plomb, her first lead tube, in an old factory for the production of ochre in the Bourgogne. Each folded lead was in memory of a murdered woman in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. The site Casa Amiga, established by friends and families of the victims, published a list of the murders, the disappeared. The leads were sent or given to people to carry, to hold, and where Lena knew or could find the person, the keeper of the lead, the memory, she photographed them. On each page of her book there is a photograph, the lead held in a hand or hands or lap, the keeper anonymous. The image is preceded in each case by a short account, the name of the woman commemorated, and with whom, where, and how the photograph was taken. In 2004 I carried the lead in memory of Miriam de Los Angeles, holding it like

a baton in my right hand, resting the right wrist on my left hand on my knee.

ZINC (zinc): Zinc was burnt by alchemists to form philosophers’ wool, white snow, and of Saint Roseline. I signed an agreement for a crown of porcelain at the dentist this morning, fifty euros more than the composite. I should have called upon Saint Apollonia, saying the novena prayer: O Glorious Apollonia, Patron Saint of dentistry and refuge to all those suffering from diseases of the teeth, I consecrate myself to thee, beseeching thee to number me among thy clients.

MERCURE (mercury): Mercury or quicksilver is used in measurements of temperature and weather, and speed and mobility are the characteristics of the messenger to the gods. As Hermes, winged time, he also is the god of travelers and boundaries, of fertility, of sheep and shepherds. When mercury is found as cinnabar, it is ground to make vermilion pigment. Once it was used for tooth fillings, quicksilver crowns, an amalgam of mercury, silver, tin, and copper, but fear of mercury poisoning made people anxious. I found a small painting that had disappeared, a 24th or 25th birthday present to my son. It is a baroque gold mirror frame painted loosely on a dully reflective metal plate, like the tain of the mirror, the lusterless back, a surface without which no reflection is possible. Mirrors once had a tain of mercury and tin, the point of touch separate from its reflection, sparkling and crystalline. In Cocteau’s film Orphée, the Underworld is entered through a mirror, the molten effect produced by a bath of mercury which, unlike water, made no ripple, no concentric circles.

CRIBLE (sieve): I finished the final volume in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator ends Hearing Secret Harmonies as snow falls, quoting from Robert Burton’s An Anatomy of Melancholy: “I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged […]” The novel’s last line is “even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.” Samuel Beckett returned to Ireland six years after the death of his mother, that “divil,” “all this stopping and starting again … devilish, devilish.” It was, he wrote, a dangerous place to come back to for any other purpose. Land and sea. A buried wasteland. Ashbins. Ashes (phosphorus ashes of the ink). Derrida writes: “The spirit which keeps watch in returning [en revenant, as a ghost] will always do the rest. Through flame or ash, but as the entirely other, inevitably.” The evening draws in. Night is falling. The month is at its end. I continue to light the stoves each day, as I will until April and the clement weather.

Image from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Curtis Cuffie, black and white ca. 1990–99

TWO THINGS TOUCHING

On the erotics of poetry

by Claressinka Anderson

A space must be maintained or desire ends.

— Anne Carson

It’s London in the late 1990s. Somewhere in Dalston, the teenage, cyberpunk version of me togethered herself with strangers at an all-night, underground trance party, dozed on someone’s couch for a few hours, then walked most of her way across the city in the pink hours of the morning, to find herself here: in love, not with a person but a sculpture.

Two massive, concave, stainless-steel discs hang on opposing walls of a majestic corridor. She moves through them sentinels of space and air they are soundless birds, choiring with silence. She wonders if she’s still under the violet spell of last night’s dove, but that pill-induced version of love has long since worn off. The thrill she now feels is for the music between these two objects the way their mirrored bodies reflect each other, and her fleeting, warped mass between them the fact that they hold this thing they never touch.

It was during this early encounter with an Anish Kapoor sculpture that I first understood something about the charged nature of liminality, how most of the time the space between two objects is more important than the objects themselves. I didn’t understand why I felt what I did, but I did understand what I felt as desire, and from then on, along with everyone else who has ever loved something other than themselves, I’d be forever bridging the gap.

In Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” she called for an “erotics of art” in opposition to the prevailing hermeneutic modes of art criticism. Her argument centered around the importance of attention to form and sensory experience. “The function of criticism,” she wrote, “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” That is to say, how the form of a thing makes you feel. When it comes to critical thinking, “feeling” is, for some, a dirty word. Feeling, after all, is not “critical,” nor is it “thinking.” It is about the body.

I have long seen the poem as a bodily entity its form a type of musculature built from the sinews of line breaks and the bones of syntax. As readers, we

move through the language of a poem and around the edges of its form. In poetry, as in visual art, feeling is generated through an experience of form, the poem’s shape being a container for language and meaning. The teenage girl in love with Kapoor’s sculpture was already writing poems about love and longing, but what I didn’t understand then was just how much my obsession with poetry’s “shape” was rooted in it being literature’s liminal, erotic object.

A decade after Sontag, Audre Lorde, in her seminal 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” spoke of the erotic as a fundamental assertion of a woman’s agency and life force. For Lorde, as for Sontag, the erotic was a reminder of our “capacity for feeling.” She described the erotic space between two people as a bridge formed by “the sensual — those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.” If the erotic is a bridge, it is also an experience of crossing, of coming up against an edge. With its line breaks and silences, a poem is an object made of edges ideal home for the rhetorical and conceptual spaces of eros.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the function of a poem’s line break as metonymy for the erotic nature of liminal space. The line break acts as the space between two things words, ideas the metaphorical space between two things touching. Bodies and language. Writer and reader. It could be said to function as a type of sexual delay, heightening tension; a line break withholds, keeping the reader in a state of longing. In this way, reading a poem may be seen as an act of eros we experience it in a state of desire, each line or place where the poem breaks, a brief mystery.

The word liminal, like limbo, comes from the Latin term  limbus, meaning “border” or “edge.” An edge is a precipice, a decision; you can remain, or you can cross. My early experience with the Kapoor began a lifelong obsession with “the space between.” I sought out books, art, movies — even relationships — that embodied liminality in some way. Why are we fascinated with these purgatorial spaces? Are we, as humans, simply wired for longing?

The ancient Greeks most simply defined eros as “want” struck by the god Eros’s arrow, the wounded subject is stunned into an immediate state of lack and concomitant desire for the missing object. Eros then, by definition, is to be “in desire of.” Desire is an experience of longing. If we gave eros a “shape,” it would look a lot like a poem: a space between two points, and between those points, language’s play between intimacy and distance, withholding and giving. As Anne Carson so beautifully articulates in her book-length essay, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), eroticism lives in the space between two things; most fervently at its tensile edges:

What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges. The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move. And there is Eros, nervous realist in this sentimental domain, who acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.

Without imagination and distance, we are incapable of longing; once in possession, an object is no longer desired.

I’ve often wondered if my visceral encounter with the Kapoor sculpture was, in fact, a subconscious projection of the liminal shape my life would take, those suspended discs my fate’s winged harbingers. Only a few years later, I fell ill with a severe and mysterious illness. What began as a regular upper respiratory virus turned into an unexplained viral inflammation of my brain; what followed was a long period of living outside of the world and myself a purgatorial hell of which only Dante would be proud. Chronic illness sent me into a perpetual state of desire, not for anyone or anything (though I may have erroneously tried to make it so), but for my own body to return to me.

For years I was bedridden and homebound, plagued by an endless list of physical and neurological symptoms. Unable to tolerate bright light, my days were spent encircled by the purple walls of the old basement bedroom in my parent’s house, to which I had been forced to return. To watch TV or do anything that required even the smallest quotient of concentration was almost impossible. Words on the page swirled. With my head propped up by a pillow, I looked only at the ceiling or out the window. I existed in a netherworld between life and death, the light a muted messenger from above.

I remember thinking about Francesca Woodman at this time, an artist I also loved from a young age. When she was 22 the same age I was when I fell ill Woodman committed suicide, leaving behind a visionary body of work. Whether it was dissolving into the forest with tree trunks cuffed

around her wrists, or photographing herself behind wallpaper in an abandoned house, she was always in the act of disappearing. Her work explored gender, sexuality, and identity through self-portraiture, and in her images, she was always on the edge of the frame, a position both literal and metaphorical. Even when she was wholly “there,” she was receding into the background, ever in some state of in-betweenness. It’s hard not to surmise, whether she knew it at the time or not, that she was preparing for her death.

Georges Bataille called eroticism “a psychological quest not alien to death.” Desire wouldn’t exist if we didn’t know we were going to die; death is the ultimate edge on which all desire teeters. And the erotic, as Lorde surmised, is a fundamental assertion of living. In direct opposition to death, the erotic as embodiment of life force, as breath itself continually pushes up against and resists death. In the oblivion of sex, our bodies come up against an ending, and also an endlessness. In poetry, the line break, too, mirrors the trajectory of eros in its action of giving and withholding language. Orgasm as “petit mort,” as small death, is also a physical embodiment of silence the place beyond language. In that place, we are also reminded of the gap between the “you” and the “I,” a territory seemingly impossible to bridge. And yet.

It is no surprise that death and eroticism often meet in a poem. In Frank Bidart’s 1997 poem “The Yoke,” the poet attempts to close this impossible gap through entering the space of lyric time the literal “now” of the poem. It is the profound loss of a dead beloved’s body, now absent, that is called upon to return. The sleepless speaker tosses and turns in bed, pleading

with the beloved to turn his face, once more, towards the speaker. The poem begins:

don’t worry I know you’re dead but tonight

turn your face again toward me

Bidart immediately asserts that he knows the beloved is dead, but nevertheless asks for him to turn his face. In the lyric present, anything can happen; in Bidart’s poem, the fiction of lyric temporality is highlighted through a type of ritualistic address. The most obvious place where this happens in poetry is through elegy, but in love poems too, it occurs when an absent or dead beloved is summoned to return or live once more on the page.

As he does across his body of work, Bidart italicizes certain sections of the poem. Here, it appears the italicized parts are addressed specifically to the beloved, and the non-italicized parts are the places where reader, beloved, and the internal world of the poet are conflated. The middle of the poem has one long repetitive line: “I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and” followed by a stanza break, and then, “but tonight / turn your face again // toward me.” The long line describes, in the first person, what the speaker is doing. The temporality of it is unclear. The speaker could be sleeping and waking over a long period of time, and the length of the line syntactically suggests the discomfort with that ongoing action; but the word “tonight” brings us directly into the lyric now. The “tonight” of the poem is, of course, now past, but, much like the dead beloved, fully present for the reader as they read the poem.

“The Yoke” highlights the ways in which the language of a lyric poem affects narrative temporality or lyric time. Jonathan Culler, in his dense and marvelous book Theory of the Lyric (2015), states that direct address in a poem “resists narrative because its ‘now’ is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a special ‘now’ of discourse: of writing and of poetic enunciation. […] [I]t seems to be one of the things toward which lyric strives: that iterable time when language can say ‘now.’” And the place where language can say “now” is on the page the conceptual and rhetorical spaces of the page where anything can transpire.

Bidart writes, “see upon my shoulders is the yoke / that is not a yoke.” The speaker makes clear that he knows this is all a fiction, another trick of lyric time. This italicized stanza is the poem’s heart much like the imagined beloved coming back from the dead, the yoke exists, but of course, also doesn’t. Both entities live only in the imagination of the poem.

The last two stanzas of the poem reprise the first but are not italicized:

don’t worry I know you’re dead but tonight

turn your face again

Bidart’s speaker becomes an internal voice once more, the reader a witness to his inner thinking. The reader is an omniscient voyeur, witnessing not only the performative aspects of the speaker’s ritualistic requests to the beloved but also the internal worlds of the poet to which the dead beloved no longer has access. So much of what is also implied in this haunting poem from Bidart’s 1997 collection Desire lives off

of the page, in the bed of these two lovers that once were.

Through sex, whether with another person or with ourselves, we enter a liminal space, connect with our bodies as a possible site for altered consciousness. It’s sacred precisely because it’s marked by brevity. It’s temporal, a felt intimacy with the present moment. It’s a place we visit but never stay, and in it we can reclaim something of ourselves the lost parts, perhaps. Liminality is also a type of restlessness. It’s the no longer to the not yet; both an in-between and a force for movement. For me, sex was always a place where my healthy body returned to me for a time, however briefly. It continues to be a place my body can exist outside of illness: I’m here, now. I’m free. A poem acts in the same way for me. Each line pushes us up against an inevitable ending: I’m here, now. I’m free.

In Bernadette Mayer’s 1968 poem “First Turn to Me,” Mayer uses form to heighten the eroticism of an already sexually explicit poem, employing many bends and turns both syntactical and bodily. This poem about a “couple” appropriately takes the form of couplets. Mayer begins with a literal turn:

First turn to me after a shower, you come inside me sideways as always

in the morning you ask me to be on top of you, then we take a nap, we’re late for school

you arrive at night inspired and drunk there is no reason for our clothes

we take a bath and lie down facing each other, then later we turn over, finally you come

The turns and returns of the body mimic the rhythmic turns of the poem, the way the line breaks create turns of their own, the snaking of the bodily movements and their corresponding language down the page. The lengthy poem proceeds in this manner, describing various states of coupling, each couplet a different sexual position, scenario or “turn.” The paradox of eros the push / pull of it inhabits the poetic turns as well as the line breaks, which are interconnected. Towards the end, the speaker’s “exhaustion” from the endless couplings turns metapoetic when the couplets reference themselves:

we lie together one night, exhausted couplets and we don’t make love. does this mean we’ve had enough?

watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me

Here, reading, too, is made erotic through begging. In this scene, one can imagine the poem turning in on itself and being read aloud, its inhabitants reading it to themselves.

In her direct address to the beloved, the speaker in Mayer’s poem could be referring to a singular relationship as seen through different life stages (pre-children, afterchildren, affairs, old age), but it is likely many lovers and myriad relationships that are mirrored in the “one” beloved’s reflection. The nature of desire in the poem takes on a universal, mythic quality as prefaced in the following stanza:

you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary at last I remember my father’s anger and I come

In the first line of the couplet, the speaker

becomes all women, and through her focus on her father, the arresting second line is a wider commentary, too, on the centuries-long anger, pleasure, and violence exchanged within intimate relationships. In the final two stanzas of the poem, the singular beloved once again becomes a “they”:

I come three times before you do and then it seems you’re mad and never will

it’s only fair for a woman to come more think of all the times they didn’t care

Mayer ends the poem with an opening an invitation to the reader towards an expansive, if overwhelming thought. Shedding light on all that has gone before, it is the final turn of the poem and brings us back to the beginning of the proverbial merry-goround.

The poet Octavio Paz also touches on poetry’s circular nature in The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (1993): “Language is naturally linear; words follow one after the other like running water. In a poem, linearity twists back on itself, retraces its steps, meanders; the straight line ceases to be the archetype and is replaced by the circle and the spiral.” As a result, “we discover that the poem presents us with another sort of communication, one governed by laws different from those that rule the exchange of news and information.” When compared to other forms of writing, the lyric poem most often resists narrative or a direct progression from a to b. As readers, we come to rely on this type of resistance to closure, an ending that circles back to the beginning a kind of eternal return. In Mayer’s poem, that final line becomes yet another metaphor for the endless couplings and re-couplings of

romantic relationships. We end in a kind of emptiness or post-coital numbness. There is no punctuation, no full stop. The poem simply runs into silence.

Silence is fundamental to poetry’s form, not only in the sense that it is the place from which a poem begins and ends but also in the fact that, between that beginning and ending, every line break pushes against many small silences. Jorie Graham, in her 1984 essay “Some Notes on Silence,” writes about it as the place where language gives way to another expression: “Silence which is awe or astonishment, the speech ripped out of you. All forms of death and mystery, therefore working in each poem against the hurry of speech […] Its emissaries are white space, of course, the full stops. But, also, all acts of grammar, which are its inroads.” Syntax, lineation, punctuation they are all instructors in silence, in anticipation. “A poem,” Paz writes, “could be defined as a verbal organism that produces silence.” In the pauses and silences, we are allowed to feel, making silence an important part of a poem’s erotics an idea that circles back to Sontag’s belief that the experience of art belongs in the realm of feeling. In Mayer’s poem, making the reader think of all the times “they didn’t care” turns us back to sensation, asks us to consider how it feels. What this poet wants, ultimately, is to evoke something ineffable to transcend language and evoke an emotional response. The language of poetry also highlights the limits of language, and in this place where language fails, sensation, feeling, the body begins.

One of the most important things a poet can do is to make choices about silence — when and how we feel it. The written word makes us more aware of our edges

where I end and you begin the edges of speech and language as markers of silence. The line break makes us wait like a breath before lips touch. Carson writes, “we are finally led to suspect that what the reader wants from reading and the lover wants from love are experiences of very similar design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown.” She continues: “as you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges toward something else, something not yet grasped. […] It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so.”

Emily Dickinson was a poet who well understood eros’s relationship to the silence and its manifestations on the page. With all those em dashes reaching out into the great unknown, her approach to subject and form so often projected a shape of longing on the page. Her inventive punctuation and lineation could also be seen as a tactic to push against patriarchal modes of thinking. Dickinson’s early publishers and editors were threatened by her work, not only by her subject matter but also by her syntactical disruptions. In a 1975 essay about Dickinson, the poet Adrienne Rich writes about one of Dickinson’s publishers: “John Crowe Ransom, arguing for the editing and standardization of Dickinson’s punctuation and typography, calls her ‘a little home-keeping person’ who, ‘while she had a proper notion of the final destiny of her poems was not one of those poets who had advanced to that later stage of operations where manuscripts are prepared for the printer, and the poet’s diction has to make concessions to the publisher’s style book.’”

In “Wild Nights,” Dickinson uses lineation and the em dash in a flirtatious way, drawing the reader close and then pushing them away in a game of push/pull. We can see how the turns of her line are erotic and playful:

Wild nights Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a Heart in port

Done with the Compass

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor tonight

In thee!

Dickinson’s attention to form can be read as heightening the speaker’s longing, teasing the reader through their experience of the poem. In the first stanza, with the line break after “thee,” we are reminded of the distance between the speaker and her beloved. After the following line break, what will the wild nights be, we wonder? Ours. But we are made to wait for that answer. Lineation and punctuation (or lack thereof) are primary modes of controlling the pace of a poem and, of course, giving that important instruction in silence. The pauses and silences in Dickinson’s poem are key to our experience of it on the level of both sound and content. The em dash can be seen as an instruction in breath and delay. It stresses the succeeding empty space as formal metaphor for the unknown more actively than simply leaving the space blank.

In the third stanza, it is revealed that the “wild nights” in question are a storm, and we now understand that the speaker would welcome the storm were she together with her beloved. There are many interpretations possible, of course; the storm could also be seen as a distraction, or other lovers even, and while it may continue raging somewhere outside (and outside of the poem), the speaker’s desire remains steadfast and unaffected. The sexual metaphor of the boat mooring in the beloved is the climax of the longing set up earlier. Through the syntax of the line “Might I but moor ” the pause of the em dash, and then the “tonight ” we ask ourselves, where will the speaker moor and when? The em dashes give pause. Finally, we are given the relief of knowledge: “In thee.”

Throughout her work, Dickinson well understood the terms of desire as they pertain to eros. In her poem, “Hunger,” she wrote, “… so I found / That hunger was a way / Of persons outside windows, / The entering takes away.” As with Carson’s assertion that “a space must be maintained or desire ends,” we understand, through Dickinson’s window metaphor, that once we enter the desired space, our hunger is satiated. This desire dance is one of coming and going, concurrently joining through language and remaining separate. As Graham also proposed in “Some Notes on Silence,” “almost every poem illustrates one of the two impulses we experience: to be united with the unknown, to break out of this separateness, or to wrench a uniqueness, an identity, from the all-consuming whole.” This is the paradox of eros in life, and also in the process of writing and reading poetry.

All those years ago, when I stood before Kapoor’s opposing discs, I felt myself pierce

the silence between them. In their mirrored faces, I witnessed two distorted reflections of a girl myself and not myself. Was I meant to be here? I wasn’t sure. The discs, like twin flames, looked out at one another, reflecting each other, but remaining entirely separate. I wanted to understand this liminal space, give it shape. By entering it, I thought perhaps I could, but I was an intruder, a word inserted in the wrong place. As I shifted and moved, I watched my reflection progressively migrate to the edge of each satellite, until I was just a blip, then gone completely from their orbit.

It seemed to me that what these discs wanted most of all was to preserve the empty space between them to merely contain. Their pleasure, ours, is in holding the absence. We don’t come to poetry for answers, we come to it to live with our questions, our longings, our desires. We come to it to feel. In the experience of art, as Sontag suggested, what is felt is more important than what is understood. Our questions thrive in the absences, the silent places where our imaginations travel beyond the page, the spaces between language, body, and touch. In this way, poetry will always be the erotic, transgressive voice through it, we forever gnaw at our edges.

Image from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Carol Thompson, black and white ca. 1990–99

ANOTHER MATTER : THE FIRE EXCERPTS

by Alla Gorbunova

Translator’s note: The stories in Alla Gorbunova’s 2021 collection Another Matter resemble lightweight anecdotes but add up to a primer on everything that exists: a wisdom book. Throughout, illumination comes from experiences that are deeply quotidian or, even better, painfully embarrassing. The meaning of life can be derived from a run-in with a gang of teenagers in a stairwell. A tiny yapping dog is exactly as frightening as a charging yak. The desire to do a good deed is no guarantee of a good deed. And so on. In short, the narrator and mostly everyone she meets are misguided, well-intentioned

souls who briefly recognize each other, if they’re lucky. In a story about accidentally accusing a classmate she likes of stealing her ruler, Gorbunova writes that: “Children can be terrible, it’s true, because in children you can see clearly the matter that everyone, without exception, is made of: the capacity for love, kindness, virtue, as well as the capacity for cruelty, cowardice, betrayal.” As in her poetry, she’s concerned with the primary and primal, the elements. In the stories included here, real and figurative flames serve as signs of illness and insight, and bonfires are used to destroy bad poetry, roast freshly caught frogs, and launch the ongoing conversation of everyone with everything: a dream of unity or a shadow play.

— Elina Alter

The Guy Who Ate a Cat

My friend Masha and I, two schoolgirls, 11th-graders, decided to hitchhike to Veliky Novgorod. For some reason the drivers all asked us, “Aren’t you scared?” To which I replied, “You rarely meet bad truckers, and we don’t get into regular cars.” I had hitchhiked before, but it was Masha’s first time. We stayed a few nights with my Aunt Lida, and spent the days hanging out with a group of rebels and outcasts we met on our very first day near the Novgorod Kremlin. There was a guy in their group, really a full-grown man, whom I reminded of his first love. We started messing around. He was extremely good-looking, gentle and strong, dark, with black hair down to his shoulders and amazing blue-green eyes. His nickname was Monster. He was from Severodvinsk, and the others told me that

he had a wife back in his hometown, the only woman in the world he loved; she was a sex worker, and he slept with everyone, too. And they also said he’d been a volunteer soldier in Chechnya, and something terrible had happened to him there, but what it was exactly no one knew.

We spent one night at his “place” — a dormitory on the outskirts of Novgorod and there, on the floor, in front of Masha and everyone else, we fucked beneath a blanket. Before we started fucking, Monster took a signet ring from his finger and put it on mine, saying “You’re my woman for the night.” When we finished, he took the ring back. He had a lot of highbrow literature in his room, novels by good writers, and judging by our conversations, he had decent taste. “Have you read this guy? He’s not bad ” and he showed me a newly published translation of Bukowski.

One evening, when Masha and I showed up at our meeting spot, the others told us that Monster had eaten a cat. I’d heard him consider something of the sort before, whenever he’d seen a passing cat; he mentioned that he sometimes ate them. I had been appalled, but it was something that felt far from me. While now it turned out he ate a cat on the very day we were supposed to see each other. Caught it, killed it, roasted it. After that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I expressed all my rage and indignation, but in the end we made up — I remembered that he’d been to Chechnya and lived through something unfathomable to me. And I could also see that these people just didn’t have any money for food. Later, as we sat out on the riverbank at the edge of the city and built a bonfire, these guys caught frogs and cooked them on the flames. I started to rage again, but they said,

“The French eat frogs, what’s the big deal? Try a piece.” I felt very sorry for the frogs, but I still tried a leg, out of curiosity.

Then Masha and I left, and for a long time I felt I had committed a transgression that was particularly terrible for me sleeping with a guy who ate cats, and being present at the murder of frogs. After all, killing animals is one of the most powerful taboos I recognize; I usually even feel bad for mosquitos and try not to smash them, I move worms when I see them in the road, and now this.

As we were getting ready to hitchhike back, the gang walked us to the highway, and on the way Monster picked up a new girl. Later, people told me that this guy, Monster, borrowed money from everyone and disappeared, and no one knew where he had gone.

My First Love

My first love practiced magic. I was 13, and he was my “husband.” He told me that Jehovah was actually a usurper, and that in the beginning our world had been given as a gift to the one we now thought of as the Devil; this being called himself Asmodeus. My love was a god himself, of a much higher order that Jehovah or Asmodeus. Asmodeus was something like his kid brother. If everyone had to belong to either the Light or the Dark, he belonged to the Dark, but really he was Rainbow, because the Rainbow was the Law of all Worlds, and the highest god he knew was the Rainbow Dragon. He had a particular affinity for dragons and for fire. He wore a ruby earring in one ear and looked a lot like Kurt Cobain. He was quite short, much shorter than me, but I always found

him incredibly attractive. He worked as a plumber in the village where we spent the summers. And he was also a hired killer and said he was made for murder. He taught that it was right to act in accordance with your nature and to listen to your heart. He could interpret my dreams, control the flame of candles (I can do this too), appear in my mirror. When he tried to join the army, they wouldn’t believe that he could do magic, and gave him a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was 19 years old. He drank and smoked, at some point in the past he’d shot up; now he and all his friends just huffed benzine out in the swamp. I feel consumed by an unbearable, everlasting flame when I remember how much I loved him. He said that “There’s no such thing as love, only attachment,” but at the same time he was always telling me he loved me. When he was eight, he lost his virginity to some nurses at the hospital. He liked sex. He told everyone he was going to fuck them. And he did fuck everything that moved, he was particularly obsessed with virgins. He was bisexual, he made out with some other guy in front of me, behind my back he took the virginity of all my friends (I never slept with him). And in spite of all that he was incredibly jealous. Mostly we just played at assault in my barn one of my girlfriends and I called it “gangbanging.” He broke my heart and taught me a great deal.

Burning My Archive

By the time I turned 13, I was sitting on top of a trove of poems, novels, and private diaries. And then I finally understood that most of this stuff had to be destroyed right away, before anyone could find it and read it, and also that there was just too much of

it, in any case. So I locked the door to my room, gathered all my papers on a table I had cleared and covered in oilcloth, and lit a fire right on the tabletop. The flames rose merry and bright. Then I left the room and ran into my horrified grandparents, who had been racing up and down the stairs, trying to find the fire.

Scabies

I’ve had scabies twice.

The first time I was 16, and I caught it from my boyfriend, who’d gotten it from a friend of his, a guy home from the army who’d spent the night sharing a mattress with him. Really everyone who hung out with them got it. I noticed that I started itching, but I didn’t know why. My boyfriend made a date with me, brought some benzyl benzoate cream, and told me, “I’m so sorry, I think I gave you scabies.” “That’s all right,” I said, “it’s good when people have something in common.” He really liked this sentiment of mine, he later remembered it as the best and brightest thing that ever happened between us. Then I had to use the cream for a long time. The scabies would fade, then flare up again, like a bonfire in the rain. Over the course of those six months, I kept going to school, spending time with my family, and wearing my mother’s clothes. No one else caught scabies.

The second time I had scabies I was around 30. My grandfather was very ill, undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital. A man was put in his ward who looked deeply unkempt, but my grandfather shook his hand anyway. And then he developed scabies, and my grandmother did, too; then I got it, and my mother, and my

husband. We were preparing to celebrate my grandfather’s 80th birthday, and everyone understood that it would be his last. My grandfather waited impatiently for the day; he really wanted to live long enough to celebrate and gather all his loved ones around the table one last time. We went to the Together café, on the ground floor of my grandparents’ apartment building. My grandfather, barely breathing, sat at the head of the table. His sister Aunt Lida came, and cousin Tolya and his wife, a few old friends. I hardly need to mention that all of these people developed scabies and proceeded to pass it on. We had guests over, then they went to visit other friends, and these other friends soon began to complain of some strange allergy … So, all in all, the scabies spread like wildfire, taking over St. Petersburg, Moscow, Novgorod, and even other countries. We sprayed ourselves with Spregal Anti-Scabies Spray, sprayed all of the apartment surfaces with some other crap, washed our linens in hot water, used benzyl benzoate and other creams, but the scabies burned on and on. Finally, we went to see a dermatologist, and the dermatologist said that it wasn’t even scabies anymore, it was an allergic reaction to all the creams, which looked just like scabies, and also itched.

Everyone seemed to get better in the end, with the exception of my grandparents. They died without ever having totally beaten scabies. My grandfather could hardly walk before his death, and my grandmother had been bedridden for some time, so it was logistically difficult to apply the creams and wash them off, and though they did the best they could, a touch of scabies remained. Because of this, my mother and uncle avoided touching my grandparents,

and wore gloves when they did. Whereas I became incensed with all creation, that it had allowed such injustice and humiliation to occur that my grandparents, in their last months of life, would suffer from not just anything, but scabies! I remember a mean, traitorous thought flashing through my mind as I embraced my grandfather for the last time; I was thinking that he had scabies, and I had finally just gotten rid of it, but I immediately banished the thought and hugged him back. I spent two days at my grandparents’ apartment taking care of them while my uncle was at the dacha, and when I was heading out one evening, after my uncle had returned, my grandfather said, “Thank you,” and opened his arms to hug me. I held him, touched my cheek to his prickly cheek for the final time, inhaled the smell of his skin, his flannel shirt. In the morning he passed. I’m happy that we had this good farewell, that he thanked me after all, that’s the best thing you can say when parting. I’m glad we hugged. Meanwhile, the scabies … It was gone for a few months, and then came back we probably caught it from my grandmother, and then she too passed on. I began to think that at the end of the day, the mites just grew tired of me, and I of them, we really had nothing in common anymore, and so they went away. It’s no big deal, honestly, scabies.

Crossing

There was a time when I thought deep and long about the way of antinomy, a path at the end of which you arrive at a point where you must do something impossible, something that contains a contradiction — like going right and left at the same time. Or

saying yes and no at the same time. And when you did this thing, you would leave the Matrix, exit the zoo, break the chains of time and determinism and undergo some kind of indescribable transformation. And the way to this point led through complete psychosis, through some absolute double bind. A complex, schizophrenic path beyond all known borders. And so, I was coming home one night, pondering all of this, when I noticed that at the totally empty intersection of Leninsky and Zina Portnova Avenues the traffic light burned simultaneously red and green. There was no one else around this was obviously meant specifically for me. I simply had to cross the street beneath this light, which communicated both yes and no, stop and go. A simple crossing this was my impossible action at the conclusion of the path. It was clear that if I were to cross the street beneath this traffic light, there would be no going back. For a few seconds, I stood still. Then I stepped into the street. Everything was completely silent and it felt like time had stopped. I crossed.

The First Word

I know that it happened like this: once, a stone at the very bottom of a swamp in the cosmic night began to speak. It brought forth the first word, creaky and indistinct, mute and wild. A severed head responded. A bonfire was lit, and around it gathered the living and the dead, beasts and birds, grasses and people. This is how the conversation of everything with everyone began, a conversation-oath, directed toward the place where everything and everyone is alive.

On Curtis Cuffie (Blank Forms Editions, 2023) by Perwana Nazif

Light often presents truth in Western histories. Such “truth-seeking” spans histories of stained-glass chapels as solar projection rooms to ecstatic illuminations spawning scientific revolutions to the more recent holy exposure that produces the photograph followed by cinema-cathedrals. Tracing light back to some originary of the constructed truth-sight nexus, the illumination of these various “truths” could very well be a vatic proffering by fire.

In a 1998 text, artist Curtis Cuffie writes of a desire for his assemblages, made on and from the waste littering the streets of downtown New York, to be prophetlike. Cuffie’s refigured refuse is a sign of the divine, rather than the divine itself. His work, therefore, does not collapse truth and sight as does the history outlined above. In fact, his works are made up from the shattered remnants of such historical constructions, material and otherwise. They radiate in this fiery destruction of such reproduction of supposedly given truths, the crushed stained glass refracting holy truths elsewhere. The light bounces off the lustrous objects of Cuffie’s artworks, gleaming onto us and making shadows apparent of such violent undergirding of Western truths made universal. To know is not just to see.

Cuffie’s text, from a grant application that asks the artist to describe his work, is republished in Blank Forms Editions’ forthcoming book Curtis Cuffie. The first publication on Cuffie, the book includes republished and new essays by Alan W. Moore and Ciarán Finlayson alongside exquisite photographs of Cuffie’s works — many of which are presented here. The photographs by Katy Abel, Curtis Cuffie, Margaret Morton, Carol Thompson, and Tom Warren are largely what remains of Cuffie’s practice outside of stories and the few sculptures that survived the violent, relentless police raids of the houseless and, to a lesser extent, Cuffie’s disassembling of his works to sell smaller portions. The site which the

works were made from and produced on was also Cuffie’s home. Cuffie’s primarily unhoused status, while doubtlessly largely informing his practice and exhibition of his work, sutures him to the problematic outsiderart genre, a genre classed and racialized as outside to formal art production. The essays offered in the book self-reflexively complicate such classifications within the art world’s limited inclusion of Cuffie’s work historically and contemporarily.

In one of his works, on page 84 of this issue, a trumpet lies at the head of a bejeweled gold bracelet-like object held together by a paisley tie. This arrangement sits on a thin pole loosely wrapped with a silver streamer whose shimmer competes with the trumpet’s shine. An orange cloth patterned with white and green hibiscus envelops the beginning of the base, which may or may not have a white-painted traffic cone threaded through the pole. The assemblage is photographed by Katy Abel against parked cars in a lot, presumably somewhere around Cooper Square, the Bowery, or Astor Place where Cuffie was known to make his artwork. Cuffie’s amalgamation of clashing prints, dirtied by the dayto-day of New York streets, and competing luminescences collaborating with the sun and car mirrors that reflect it as they drive by are as close as we can get to revelations.

facing page: Image detail from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

above and facing page: Image and detail from  Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

Image details from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

above: Photography by Tom Warren, black and white, ca. 1993 facing page: Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

Images from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

left: Photography by Tom Warren, black and white, ca. 1993

right: Photography by Tom Warren, black and white, ca. 1992

facing page: Image detail from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

above and facing page: Image details from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

above and facing page: Image details from Curtis Cuffie published by Blank Forms Editions

Photography by Katy Abel, color, ca. 1994–96

Michel, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

Hervé Guibert

On Hervé Guibert

by Perwana Nazif

In Hervé Guibert’s photograph Autoportrait, devant la glace-Christ, we see the photographer, filmmaker, and writer’s mirrored image sitting on a bed. Laid against the mirror are four identical prints of Jesus Christ. Guibert’s own image emerges from between the last two images of Jesus. Guibert’s hand reflects the gesture of the punctured hand of Christ’s image. Without the hole, but holding, just the same. It’s unclear if Christ has risen from the dead yet. His eyes, like Guibert’s, seem closed. We wait for him to awake from mortality.

The black of Guibert’s suit merges with the blackness surrounding Christ, as if this recognition of transcendent knowledge is only seen against Guibert, the photographer and the photographic subject-object, as mirrored with Christ, the martyr. As if transcendence is only illuminated against this mirroring. As if Guibert’s reflection to us ordains martyrdom. The truly mirrored hand, the hand against and by which we receive knowledge, is the hand that snaps the photograph and materializes it. The hand in its latency or seemingly non-visible presence in the images presented throughout this issue of Tarkovsky or Foucault or Guibert’s great-aunts, much like the ghost images Guibert writes through, exists as both spectral and physical. Guibert sacrifices himself, his mortality immortalized and immortality mortalized, through becoming outside of the image of himself. He rises again and again even if we cannot see the bloodshed splashing across the developed image.

Guibert’s photography is like holding a flame to the photograph and not just as illumination qua knowledge production. To introduce fire, the subject of this issue, to the photograph both exposes the image, developing it, and manipulates, if not destroying, the image along with its self-contained truths. The process both creates and distorts the embalmed image French film theorist André Bazin so fervently writes of as collapsed with

reality as is — Bazin sacrificing spiritual aesthetics for a given realism. Bazin’s image that grows too heavy to be carried away with time, thus embalming time itself, is instead cremated by the flame, the subsequent dust gathering and dispersing over time. Think of sweeping in vain clouds of historical dust. Think of the moving image of Jean-Hugues Anglade as Henri in The Wounded Man ( L'Homme blessé ), his shoes loudly pacing, the taps boring holes in the train station floors. Think of Courbet’s painting of said blessed man punctured (punctumed) by the erect sword and think again of the ultimate blessed man Christ’s mirrored hole in Autoportrait, devant la glace-Christ. The dust of decay settles, weighs down, and sinks with frantic passion to the point of crucifying, only to emerge again.

Hervé Guibert

Louise les cheveux, 1978–1979

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

Hervé Guibert

Thierry dos penché, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

METAPHYSICS IN THE NUDE

by Vladimir Sorokin

Waking up early as usual plus a hangover, the writer filled a glass with water from the tap and drained it in a single thirsty gulp, looking himself over in the toothpaste-spattered mirror. He refilled his glass. And drank, looking himself over as he did. A veeeeery close friend might say “56.”

“Vodka …” he pronounced hoarsely, palpating the bags beneath his eyes. “Again, motherlover … But I did quit smoking. There you go!”

He flipped off his reflection.

In Hanover, where he’d fled from his lunatic homeland right after the war had begun, Russian vodka was sold in every supermarket. But he’d decided to no longer drink it on principle. Instead, he drank “Gorbachev,” a cheap and none too delicious German vodka. But its name, which called forth the wonderful years of Perestroika in the writer’s memory, compensated for its quality. During Perestroika, he’d been young, full of hope and energy. It’d been during Perestroika that he’d come into his own as a writer and dramatist. And gotten married. And it had been during Perestroika that he and Regina had brought a son into the world. His son had been in Tel Aviv for a long time now. And Regina had been in Budapest for a long time remarried to a Hungarian.

Perestroika …The word shimmered in his mind with an iridescent glow like a tropical butterfly. Back then, everything had gotten off to such a good start. The borders were opening up. New horizons were appearing.

“If only. Ach, if only, fuck your icy mother …” is what he’d muttered thousands upon thousands of times in various situations, at various times of day and night.

If only everything in his homeland had turned out differently back then! Normally. Humanly. If only the gigantic glacier that was Russia had floated West into the civilized world …

“We would live in another country,” he informed his swollen reflection. “And that bald ghoul from the KGB wouldn’t have

come to power.”

He remembered that his beloved Gorbachev was also bald.

“But that was an entirely different sort of baldness …”

Returning to his combined bedroom and office, the writer sat down at his desk and opened his laptop. He preferred reading the news, not with his iPhone, but with his very old computer. Going on Facebook, he immediately read all the reports there were to read from the Ukrainian front.

“Confrontations of mostly localized importance … Or, to put it more simply, not a fuckin’ thing …”

Nine months.

Each morning, he eagerly awaited the end of this war. And had imagined how he’d pack his bag and flee Hanover dozens of times, setting off for a new, normal Russia.

He opened his email inbox. And immediately:

“The Los Angeles Society of the Lovers of the Metaphysical Novel is honored to invite you to come and speak: to give a presentation on the topic of ‘The Metaphysics of the Russian Novel: Peaks and Valleys’...”

Well then! The morning begins none too shittily. They’re inviting a Russian … but who the hell wants to hear Russian assholes speak these days?! Kinda surprising!

I suppose, however, that I am an emigrant, a, so to speak, victim of the regime … OK, yeah, makes sense …The honorarium: 1,000 bucks. Sehr gut! And a ticket … oh baby! First class!!! ’Twould seem that lovers of metaphysics’ve got deep pockets in L.A.! A hotel … they’ll translate the lecture … the English text will be onscreen … ten pages nonsense, I’ll write answers to questions … a signing sesh … but only, like,

two of my books have been translated into English and 20 years ago! There’s a play in English too … OK, then … December 1st?! That’s super soon! Who did the matchmaking? A Slavicist, of course. Well done! Seryozhk, perhaps? Norman? Olga? Well, of course it was Olga! She thought up the topic too!”

“Darling Olga! Nicely done!” The writer slapped himself on his naked, hairy thigh.

And joyfully rubbed his palms together in front of the monitor:

“Los Angeles, huh? Fantastic! I’ve never been there, not even once, motherlover! We’ll just have to fly across the sea!”

In his whole life, the writer had only visited the States a couple of times. This had been a long time ago too, back in the ’90s back when his anti-totalitarian books had still been relevant. Two of his plays had been successfully put on in Europe and one had been put on by students at Berkeley. And the university had invited him to the opening. After the opening, he’d had a brief romance with a Slavicist. It’d been a wondrous time …

Arousedly scratching at his unshaved cheek, he looked around his smallish room, which truly did resemble a three-star hotel for bachelors. On the coffee table were the cores of two apples and an unfinished bottle of vodka. But there’d been no motherlovin’ ashtray for three months now! There you have it! The strength of the goddamn will! He was about to reach out for the bottle, but:

“No! We shan’t. We sha-a-a-an’t!!!”

He’d begun to drink regularly every night after the third month of his life here in Hanover. In this most boring of cities, renowned only for the fact that it

was the capital of Hochdeutsch, which was to say: the most exemplary iteration of the German language. And the park was kinda nice too, fair enough … Nice for little strolls … But to get to the park, you had to take a tram …

He sighed.

His friends were all back in Moscow. Actually, not all of them; some had set off for other countries. In Germany, he knew only Slavicists those who still remembered his Perestroika novels. It was Slavicists who’d set him up in Hanover. Back in Moscow, he still had his apartment and dacha. It wasn’t even his friends living in those now, but acquaintances of friends. His whole life remained back in Moscow. Where, over the last ten years, he’d made good money from TV shows. Now, everything was in the past. Other people were writing those same shows. Everything, absolutely everything remained back in Moscow … And he’d left.

Could he not have left? A difficult question. A really difficult fuckin’ question! When the war’d begun, he’d written a rather topical one-act play Botox, or the President’s Conversation with his Chosen People. In the play, the bald ghoul meets with specially selected and prepared individuals in order to, as always, feign a “lively conversation” before the TV cameras. In the play, the “people” suddenly and unexpectedly begin to ask the dictator truly topical questions. Like: Why the fuck did we invade Ukraine? How many Russians have died? Where’s my son? When are you gonna retire? The dictator, on the other hand, looking his face over in a woman’s makeup mirror, discourses on the subject of modern cosmetology, its prospects and possibilities, he praises Botox and anti-aging masks,

discusses his skin, also muttering his usual sickeningly crass jokes. The writer elected not to post the play on FB but sent it to friends and Slavicists in various countries. Naturally, there could be absolutely no discussion of staging it in Russia. Many liked the play the Poles and Czechs wanted to put it on immediately. But suddenly, it appeared on the internet, on a Ukrainian site. Of course, he wasn’t against this. The internet is the internet, after all; everyone posts everything everywhere these days … but. But. A buddy had called him, a famous journalist, and said:

“They’re gonna mark you down as a foreign agent for this one, old man. They’re gonna tear your balls off.”

The situation was serious. This guy knew what he was talking about. The Russian state had a whole system of marking famous critics of the regime down as foreign agents: bloggers, writers, journalists, musicians, actors … After which various criminal cases were revved up against them. And they all left immediately.

But he wasn’t marked down as a foreign agent.

And he still left.

Could he have stayed?

Now, after nine months in boring Hanover, he said to himself:

“I could have.”

•

In a large and comfortable plane flying from Berlin to Los Angeles, the writer indulged in a fine supper, ordered himself two double scotches, and for dessert cognac. Once everyone around him had fallen asleep, covered over as they were in thin blankets, he found The Northman on the seatback screen, put on headphones, and

was instantly immersed in the world of the Northern Middle Ages. He knew English pretty well, but had insurmountable problems with German. The film was long, cruel, and beautiful. And full of Northern Metaphysics. Just what he needed! But he still drifted off about halfway through and only woke up right as they were announcing the landing.

“They got me there just fine!” the writer informed himself hoarsely. “But you slept through breakfast, you dumbass … ”

He shot off of the plane and into the jetway, passed through it, then found himself inside the half-empty airport. Having made it through passport control, he continued on his way. Lone passengers wandered about here and there. A man drove up to him a black guy wearing a cap of rainbow-dyed wool, sitting on a small electric trolley, and holding a sign. Upon it was written the writer’s name.

“Hi!” his greeter pronounced loudly, then smiled wide with big, yellow teeth. “Nice to meet you!”

“Hello!” the writer replied.

His greeter took his duffel bag from him, put it onto his lap, and pressed a button on the armrest: a platform/running board shot out from behind the trolley.

“Please!” the smiling man made an inviting gesture with his hand in its torn glove.

“Thank you.”

The writer stood upon the running board, the greeter depressed a lever, and the electric trolley tore forth from its place in such a way that the writer, in order to hold on, wrapped his arms around the driver’s shoulders.

The guy laughed:

“Hold on, tight!”

Hervé Guibert

Autoportrait, devant la glace-Christ, n.d.

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

The trolley leapt out of the airport and into the fresh air and … the writer furrowed his brow: bright sun, frosty air, snow. Snow? In Los Angeles? I guess it probably falls sometimes … Real pretty!

The trolley hastily rushed down narrow access roads, forcing the writer to lean to one side or the other and grab onto the driver even more tightly. Pressing himself to him, the writer immediately sensed that the guy reeked like a bum.

“What a beautiful winter you have here!” the writer shouted into his ear.

“Winter, baby! Winter!” the driver shouted back.

They drove out onto the highway; the trolley was whizzing so quick that it took the writer’s breath away.

Motherfucker!

The electric trolley rushed into a stream of cars. The writer clutched onto the driver’s jacket. The dude maneuvered his highly local means of transport dashingly, overtaking even the cars. The writer was really getting shaken around.

Faster than Michael fuckin’ Schumacher!

He was going to shout something to the driver so that he would slow down, but the flow of oncoming air wouldn’t allow him to. Clutching the driver in a death grip, the writer looked off to the sides. A winter landscape of eucalyptus trees, palms, cypresses, and conifers swept past at the edges of the highway. Everything was piled over with snow glittering in the sun. The frosty air burned his face.

True winter. Not like in Hanover. And still, everyone jabbers on about global warming … what a con!

The highway made its way through the hills up and down and up and down.

The Hollywood Hills! A real sight to see …

Upon the hills, the roofs of single-story houses and villas peeked out from beneath snowdrifts.

A beauteous sight!

The trolley turned off of the highway and sped down what was arguably L.A.’s main artery.

“It’s Hollywood Boulevard!”

Despite the boulevard’s ample width, the trolley was making its way down a narrow track huge snowdrifts towered up on either side of them, the crowns of the palm trees just barely jabbing out. In the caves formed by the snowdrifts, people dressed for winter were selling some things and roasting others.

The snow really piled up on ‘em!

The writer saw two enormous advertisements for new blockbusters: a remake of Casablanca, with the immortal Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman looking no different than they had in the first one (they’ve been digitized, an openand-shut case), but they’re wearing winter clothes, holding glasses of champagne, and standing against the background of the ice house from Doctor Zhivago; and the other one, it must’ve been some kind of fairytale horror film, a palace made of ice out of which bolts a half-naked chick wearing animal furs. Amber Heard? Maybe Charlize Theron? And behind her shoots forth an octopus-like behemoth with the face of … Lavrov: the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

“He gets roles in blockbusters now? What in the name of fuck …”

The trolley turned and shot down a terribly narrow ice chute … for bobsledding! Writer clung to driver and driver sang out

merrily in a high voice:

“Now we’re really livin’, my ma-a-a-aa-an!”

Devil knows what this is! They’ve entirely lost their minds … !

The trolley whistled down the ice chute like a bullet and the writer was shaken around so much that he began to pray:

“Oh Lord, please have mercy …”

Never in his life had he ridden down a bobsled chute, even though, like many Russians, he was good at skating and skiing.

The trolley flew down the ice chute, zoomed out of it in a perfectly straight line, sped through enormous, snow-covered firs, then began to slow down, to sloo-o-o-ow down (THANK GOD!), then, finally, braked before a large, luxurious villa drowning in enormous snowdrifts. Three meters of snow lay atop the villa. The driver depressed a lever, and the footboard, upon which the writer had been cramped for the whole ride, tilted sharply in such a way that the writer rolled down, down, down underneath the earth, into some underground lair, accompanied by the driver’s hooligan-like laughter (and hadn’t the writer seen him somewhere before? Could that be the guy from the Rush Hour movies? Chris Tucker?).

They’re chattering into his ears from both sides. Dragging him across the marble floor. The two of them taken together look like the Blues Brothers. Real strong, devil take it … Fatsos in fancy suits. But they smell like bums too!

“Hold on just a sec, gents … ”

“The auditorium’s already full!”

“The people’re sick of waiting!”

“Gents, gents … allow me to catch my breath!”

“OK … we’ll take you to the green room and you’ll have, um, three minutes!”

The green room. They plop him down onto a chair in front of the dressing-room mirror. Bright light. One fatso pours him a glass of Jim Beam. Thrusts it into his hand. A slovenly dressed woman with a cigarette between her teeth begins to powder his face. Small, toothy people dressed in rags hustle and bustle around him. The thick reek of homelessness.

A swallow of bourbon. Another. In the mirror is THE WRITER. He looks kinda pretty now. Motherfuck! He’s getting sprayed over with cologne.

“Drink! Drink! You’ve had a long trip!”

The fatso practically dumps the bourbon down his throat.

Catching his breath after a big gulp:

“And do you do you always get so much snow?”

An enormous hall with Empire marble columns and a mosaic floor. The floor bore the Latin inscription: E Pluribus Funk. Arms enwrap him. Two people.

“Like … finally! Everyone’s gotten sick of waiting for you!”

“Have a nice flight?”

“It’s simply wondrous that you’re here!”

“We’re all so happy!”

The fatsos wrap their arms around him once more and tear him away from the make-up station:

“There’s no time! No time!”

They drag him over to a handsome ragamuffin wearing a pirate costume. A very, very familiar and rather cheeky face. But it’s grown chubbier.

“Allow me to introduce myself, Mr. Writer; I am the representative of the local

Society of the Lovers of the Metaphysical Novel!”

He bows old-fashionedly, waving a tattered top hat as he does.

“I thank you for the invitation.”

“We are glad beyond all measure!”

“’Twould seem that it’s especially beauteous here in the winter!”

“L.A. is always beauteous!”

“And so much snow! Like in Siberia.”

“A-a-a-ah the snow Well, to put it bluntly, snow fell for the first time in L.A.’s history only a month ago. For the first time! A mere three centimeters. After which the greater portion of the population opted to take their own lives. For the sake of convenience, a site for collective suicide was created, but it collapsed all too quickly from the volume of visitors came down like an avalanche! To put it generally, some people killed themselves, others fled, but we remained. Only the metaphysicians survive! As the great Einstein once said: the more I learn about physics, the more I’m drawn into the orbit of metaphysics!”

Chuckles and a painted grimace.

“Who exactly survived?”

“The homeless. And gen-u-ine lovers of high literature!”

“And the snow?”

“It’s been falling ceaselessly ever since.”

“But, what about … ”

“No more questions, Mr. Russian Writer!”

“But, I mean …”

“… you mean to say that all of this is just wonderful! In general terms, everything’s unbelievably wonderful! And they’re waiting for you — let’s go, let’s go! It’s a grand event!”

The fatsos grab hold of him. Pick him up. Carry him into the auditorium. It’s

enormous! Vaulted ceilings, stalactites, fog … wait … no, this is pot smoke! The hall roars and whistles. It’s entirely filled up with bums and strange, luxuriously dressed freaks.

“Lights !!! Camera !!!” the chairman screams, and a delightful, nude chick covered over in silver sequins — Sharon? Nicole? Margot? clacks a clapperboard.

“Action!!!”

Lectern. Hall fallen silent. Only the crackle of lit joints makes itself heard. Cameras. Shooting him. Plus a mic.

To first draw in a bit more air …

“Ladies and gentlemen! The metaphysics of the Russian novel are deeply rooted, not just in our history, geography, and state structure, but also unmediatedly in our Russian landscape, in our autumnal landscape, beauteous and without hope, sung about by poets, a native place desired most dearly, familiar to the point of pain since childhood, calling forth a poignant feeling of despair no exit! nakedness, existential abandonment in these endless savage spaces, forcing the heart to skip a beat, tears to well up in the eyes, and those of us standing in the autumnal wind beneath the gray sky to recollect tormentingly familiar verses: Oh, autumn season that delights the eyes, your farewell beauty captivates my spirit. I love the pomp of Nature’s fading dyes, the forests, garmented in gold and purple!”

The smoky hall is silent. Absolute quiet.

Then, suddenly, the chairman:

“Brava!!!”

A squall — thunderous applause. The hall stands. Cries. Whistles.

The chairman:

“The barest of metaphysics! Metaphysics in the nude!!! We were right to invite him, my dears! Just what we needed!”

Above the audience, a huge hologram lights up through the pot smoke: a monolithic “Mega Mac” burger.

“That which awaits all of us is a juicy, spectacular, appetizing, fuckin’ very fuckin’ big fuckin’ burger made from the barest of metaphysics! From metaphysics in the nude !!!”

They grab the writer. Drag the writer. Undress the writer. Wash the writer. Hurl the writer. Into a meat grinder!!!

BLADES BLADES BLADES BLADES BLADES BLADES BLADES

MIIIIIIINNNNNNCCCCCCEEEEEE

I’m mince. I’m mince. I, mince. Ground beef. Ground up. Mixed up. Molded. Molded. Molded. I, patty. I, patty. I, patty. Fried.

Fried. Fried. Salt. Salt. Salt. Pepper.

Pepper. Pepper. Half-a-bun. Half-a-bun. Half-a-bun. Sauce. Sauce. Sauce. Garnish. Garnish. Garnish. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Cucumbers. Cucumbers. Onion. Onion. Onion. Sauce. Sauce. Sauce. Half-a-bun. Half-a-bun. Half-a-bun.

Served upon a silver platter.

META MAC!!!

A DRY-AGED RUSSIAN WRITER!!!

Mouthsmouthsmouthsmouthsmouthsmou thsmouthsmouthsmouthsmouths

jawsjawsjaws jawsjawsjaws jawsjawsjawsjaw sjawsjawsjawsjawsjaws

“Good morning! Would you care for any breakfast?”

The writer’s eyelids peeled open.

Holding out a thin hand with bluepainted nails, the stewardess opened the window-shutter.

The light blinded him. Outside the window and down below: an ocean of sundrenched clouds.

The stewardess puts the seat-back monitor back into its cradle, extrudes the tray from the armrest, pulls it out, and covers it over with a starched napkin.

“Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea. Have you got any … green tea?” the writer began to speak hoarsely.

“Of course!”

The stewardess disappeared. The writer recalled his dream.

“Motherlover …”

“It’s true I really am dry-aged …”

“Nine months, huh?”

“Hung from a hook? Until the meat’s ready to go?”

He laughed. Furrowed his brow at the ocean of clouds. Tiny crystals of frost glittered upon the window-plastic.

“I wonder does it ever snow in Los Angeles?”

Hervé Guibert

Suzanne et Louise devant le miroir, salle de bain, 1978–1979

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

WITNESS STATEMENT

by Bud Smith

Last week two chairs broke. I was told to stay home today (Saturday) on what might be the coldest day of the year because I’d caused a rather serious incident at the plant where I’m employed. Now I’m sitting at my desk in one of the chairs that broke. I’ve fixed this one. It’s a wooden chair with green and white cushions and it’s pretty comfortable and it’s from the 1970s. It looks like the kind of chair somebody would put in an atrium or sunroom in Florida. I sit in it

and do my creative work here at a metal desk, but I'm not in an atrium or sunroom in Florida.

It’s six degrees today.

Eight o’clock this morning I put on a couple pairs of pants and a couple sweatshirts and a couple pairs of socks and my fuzzy slippers and I walked down the city block to the market on Bergen Avenue and bought two packs of Café Bustelo coffee and a pint of buttermilk. I need the coffee because I’ve been doing sixteen-hour fasts and I’m hungry as shit and the coffee helps that. The fasts have also been good for me because my allergies almost totally go away when I do them (and Jesus Christ did they used to be debilitating). I need the buttermilk because I am thawing out chicken thighs on the counter and plan to marinate them in pickle juice and buttermilk to fry up for a possible sandwich. I brought the coffee and the buttermilk up to the counter and the man said, “That’s buttermilk,” and I said, “Yes, thank you, I was happy you had it.” Some people in the history of the universe have accidentally poured buttermilk in their coffee or cereal but not me. I’ve done worse things. Unpredictable things. But I’ve never made that mistake. All last week I was in interrogation after interrogation about this other thing.

I think it was last Thursday, if I am representing myself accurately. I sat down in my green chair and the glue must have gotten weak because time does that and the chair fell apart and I was on the floor. I took a good look at my chair and saw nothing had snapped. Nothing had even cracked. The wooden pieces that had once fit so snugly together in mortise and tenon and biscuit joint had now just come undone as if running away from each other.

I got out my glue. I got out my screw gun. I got some steel brackets. Not only did I glue the chair back together like Geppetto would have but I also put in additional steel brackets. You know, this world is getting harder, this world is getting more complex and it’s all right to add a bracket or two if you think you can get away with it. I doubt I needed the brackets. I doubt I needed the screws. I’ve gone above and beyond and I think it might be okay. I hope it’s okay. This is my chair and I don’t want to ever throw it away. I’d like to be buried, sitting in this chair, someday.

Let me retrace.

Yes, it was Tuesday morning when I heard about the other broken chair. The safety man was sitting across from me at precisely six o’clock in the morning, in a trailer full of coordinators and managers and planners and the general foreman and he had news to be delivered but you could see it on his face that he was going to have to be brave about delivering this news in front of these people. Whatever humor he was usually faithful to he had to be an atheist toward before this particular grim audience of thirty. There had been an injury at the plant at the end of the previous shift. This incident was minor compared to the future incident I would soon cause. The safety man was babyfaced. He had a slight smirk but he was trying to fight the urge to let the slight smirk become a full grin. He said, “In the tent, a contractor fell out of a chair and had to receive medical treatment.” He went on to explain that the man had hit his head on the ground and had to be taken to a clinic to make sure he hadn’t gotten a concussion. The managers and the planner and even the coordinator began to make disparaging remarks about

the man who had fallen out of his chair and hit his head. Was he drunk? Was he fat and drunk? No, he was not drunk and no he was not fat. He was an average contractor and he had sat down in a metal folding chair and the chair broke. I had experience with this. I’d just broken my green chair two nights before. My head was fine though, I believed. The manager of the plant himself wanted to know if the broken metal chair the contractor had fallen out of had been rented or if the chair was the legal property of the facility. It was then reported that the chair had been rented by the facility. Okay, yes, so they could sue the rental company, great news. But beyond that, the injury was a recordable and they had to assign blame to someone or who knew how far it could all spiral out of control. Well, someone said, had the chair been inspected by the employee before he sat in the chair? No. The employee had not inspected the chair, he had just sat in the chair. There was the first mistake. They kept saying “contractor” and would kind of spit it out, this dirty word, and here I was a contractor, listening to the spitting. Which is what I do for a living. Work and listen to a kind of spitting. But what about the contractor’s foreman, had the foreman taken a look at the chair? No, the foreman had not. Okay but what about the contractor’s general foreman? No, not even the general foreman had taken a good look at the chair before the accident.

If you believe in God and you believe in the anamorphic version of God and you believe God sits on a throne somewhere, what do you think? Could God make a throne even God couldn’t break, say if They sat down in it at the wrong place at the wrong time?

None of my real problems have any-

thing to do with either broken chair. I am supposed to stay home from work on Monday, too. Unpaid. This is a disciplinary action. I had to sign some paperwork. I had to go into a corporate boardroom, two of them actually, and suffer questioning, hours long both times. When we got near the end of the questioning someone would say, “Wait, I’m not clear on something.” Then I’d tell the facts of the matter all over again. Top to bottom all while some other interrogator tried to trip me up. Hours later I’d be released, each time. Told the matter was closed. But the next morning there would be somebody else to talk to and another interrogation scheduled in another boardroom somewhere. They seemed to have endless boardrooms squirreled away in a place that you might otherwise think had no boardrooms. Deadly serious business. All of this. People can die. People do die. They die every second of the day. Nighttime too. We talked a lot about the imaginary people who did not die in my incident, who could have been sent away in an ambulance, or could have been carted off in a body bag. I’ll be the first to admit I failed to follow all the procedures which had previously been written in blood.

I’ve been interrogated on other occasions at this facility and it’s different than talking to the police. When you talk to the police you could wind up in jail even if you are innocent. It happens all the time. I wasn’t innocent at work and I told them all the ways I fucked up and they said I should start again from the top because there was something else they weren’t clear about. When I explain the situation to my friends who read, they say it all sounds like Kafka, when I talk about the situation to my friends at work who do not read, they

don’t know who Kafka is so they just say, “Shit dude.” But all my friends are all right. They’re at work today and still have all their fingers and toes but it’s the coldest day of the year and I am here on the sidelines and I just made a cheeseburger with bacon and I’m feeling like an eternal dipshit unsure what to do with the rest of my day and my evening. The sixteen fast is over. Jewish rye bread and ketchup and it’s almost time to soak the thighs in pickle juice and, following that, the buttermilk.

Last night I got a package in the mail from my editor. He sent me notes on what might be my next book. Eighty percent of it is good to go but I’ve got to do some heavy thinking on that last twenty percent. There are two stories I made worse in the last rounds of work and it would be wise to go back to the original drafts I sent in when I turned the book over in the summertime. I have never had this problem. I’m finally turning in drafts of things that are getting lousier the more I work on them. In life, it seems dangerous to believe you know what you’re doing. The goal posts shift and you’re playing the wrong game all a sudden on the wrong field. But that’s all right.

One time one of my friends at work dropped a crowbar into some vessel and it got embedded, a hundred feet below, into a mountain of pliable plastic and they didn’t know how to get the crowbar out of the plastic without sending someone down on a winch but you can’t just randomly send someone down on a winch, or even a Jacob’s ladder (like the kind you see thrown out of a helicopter). We confessed to the mistake and the coordinator of the job said he’d give us an hour to get the crowbar out of the plastic before he reported the problem to his boss, and we’d all lose our jobs

probably. The only caveat of this standing hour before the report being made was that of course we couldn’t rappel down there. So my friend and I got a hundred and twenty feet of manilla rope and made a lasso out of it, and after twenty minutes and about a hundred attempts, finally, blindly got the lasso around the crowbar, choked somehow with a snap of the wrist. When my friend gave a yank, the crowbar didn’t budge at all. He pulled as hard as he could and the rope came flying off and the crowbar stayed embedded.

Another time working in that part of the plant, someone from the plant shut the wrong valve or something and the unit came down in a terrible squealing and shaking and alarms sounding. Days later, when manways were opened at the bottom, the inspectors were amazed to see the reactor floor in good shape, only minimal plastic piled up inside. But as they looked up, they realized, a hundred feet above, in the bell of the vessel, there was a hunk of plastic stuck up there as big as a house. I was in the control house pulling a permit for something else when I first heard the coordinator speaking about the plan to get these thirty tons of stuck plastic loose. He said the plan was to go up on the deck where we had dropped the crowbar into the vessel all those years ago and drill into the house-sized thirty-ton ball of plastic and drop a stick of dynamite inside and blow it apart. I started laughing. It was the most ludicrous thing I’d ever heard. There were pipes all around the vessel painted orange because they had a pyrophoric gas, meaning when the gas came into contact with oxygen, it could erupt into a forty-foot-tall fireball. But the coordinator just looked at me like I was in the circus, which I was, and

he said, “No, really, that’s what we are going to do.” And they did do that. They drilled a hole and stuck in the explosives. That’s what they did.

They made a bomb.

We heard the blast and wondered if we were supposed to run or duck or what.

An avalanche of plastic rained down on the reactor floor, and in the distance the managers and planners cheered.

Another thing worked long ago, on that same unit, let me tell you with a straight face in a last-ditch effort the lasso was lowered again, and though you could not even see the crowbar it was so far down in the semidark below, the air roiling with white powder, the lasso somehow caught again, and with a violent snap of shoulder the crowbar popped loose, and slowly, with shaking hands and unrestrained smiles on our faces, we reeled the implement of destruction up to safety.

BUD SMITH

Hervé Guibert

Thierry lisant dans la sacristie, 1980

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

OMISSIONS

by Mike Jeffrey

Valentine’s Day weekend I ran my mouth to my cousin Alex. We were at Grandma’s house celebrating a pair of birthdays, fifteen to twenty people in the dining room, kitchen, and parlor, everybody jumping between conversations, plus the clatter of silverware, the loud eaters, the basketball game on full volume in the other room, and the animals. We’re a loud family, but that doesn’t mean you have to shout to be heard, although many people were, interrupting each other, barking arguments and lobbing gossip about cheating husbands from one end of the table to the other, yelling, “That’s not right!” from room to room and into the phone, and Grandma calling

down the hall for everybody to come eat. You can try to shove your voice in with the rest, which requires special timing and lung power, or you can speak quietly to the person next to you in a little bubble of privacy. There’s space for conversation under the crosstalk is what I’m saying. You can discuss delicate matters in a low voice while everyone else shouts about scandals, legends, weddings, and the Kennedys.

Alex was home from college for the weekend and a gambler like me. He looked just like his dad one of the birthdays we were celebrating that night except his swooped hair was all pepper and no salt and he wore glasses, with a slit in his left eyebrow, a scar dating back to his Little League days, a line drive to the face. Alex and I didn’t talk much outside of these functions, but it felt good and wholesome to get wine drunk with my little cousin at Grandma’s house and swap stories about bad beats and discuss the murder of Michael Jordan’s father, whether it was related to Jordan’s gambling debts or not. (Of course it was related, we agreed.)

Alex and I didn’t need to talk every day in order to trust each other we’re family and that was why he felt comfortable telling me about this friend of his, the campus bookie, who’d orchestrated a point-shaving scheme. The point guard on the basketball team at Alex’s school had run up a serious debt betting on football and buying weed and deadstock clothes on credit, and so Alex’s friend, this hustler bookie kid, figured he’d accumulated enough leverage to fix a game, thinking a one-and-done fix would pay out big without drawing attention from the corporate bookmakers or the FBI.

We’re talking small conference college

basketball here. Not a ton of action on those games except during tournament season, so I wondered how many people were in on the fix besides the bookie, the point guard, and my cousin Alex. Because that was the real danger “irregular betting patterns,” too many people running their mouths, too many people trying to cash in on a sure thing. That’s how you get into trouble.

“You can get away with anything if you only do it once,” I said. “And keep your mouth shut about it.”

“The kid was getting all dramatic about how he doesn’t want to throw the game and he’s afraid of losing his scholarship, so my buddy tells him, ‘Nobody said anything about throwing any games. You go out there and play hard and win. Just make sure you don’t win by more than 10 points. That’s all. Win by less than 10 against Quinnipiac on Tuesday and you and me are all squared away.’”

It’s possible, of course, that this “friend” of my cousin didn’t exist. In high school Alex dabbled in the sneaker resale market and took his earnings straight to the tables at Twin River the shitty local casino on his eighteenth birthday, and he’d always shared my enthusiasm for stories about the old lady bookmaker on Chapin Avenue, stories about the mob extorting mom and pop shops and donating baseball mitts to orphans, and stories about Buddy Cianci living large and slimy as the mayor of Providence, cracking wise, collecting kickbacks, and staying out all night in his toupee and cake makeup. Alex had already shown me the Excel sheet he used to identify vulnerabilities in over /under lines on NBA games, so I figured he had the technical skills to pull off a bookmaking

operation, if not the muscle, but you didn’t need much muscle to operate in the fantasyland environment of a college campus.

I didn’t confront Alex with my suspicions, and I don’t like to speculate too much. I was touched that he trusted me enough to tell me about that point-shaving scheme, even if he denied authorship of it, and I decided to reciprocate his openness by walking him through a scheme of my own, one I’d pulled off around Thanksgiving. I wanted to show him up too. I was running a bigger operation, managing more risk, and making more money, and in my mind, I could see my buddy /advisor Nnamdi shaking his head, furiously disapproving, because “Don’t run your mouth” was his number one rule for good OpSec, and he wouldn’t allow for exceptions in the family either. I hesitated, but only for a second, because I’d already started telling Alex the story.

This was on a Friday, a busy one. I was showing units in that new building in Davol Square in the morning, and then I had to pick up Dove from school, drop off a pack at Dante Orlando’s house, and pay my bookie his vig before I could set my scheme into motion.

Dove had changed out of her uniform, into faded leopard print leggings and a Hellboy hoodie, when she came down the front steps of the school, and she was wearing her big stupid sunglasses even though it was a dark gray afternoon deep into fall.

“How are the college applications coming along?” I asked, reaching back to hand her the aux cord.

“You’re worse than my mom,” she said, slamming the door. Then she lay across the backseat with her hood up, asked if we could stop at Starbucks, and queued up a

lot of glitchy despair rap from SoundCloud. Obviously, I didn’t say a thing about Dove to my cousin Alex. I left my teenage co-conspirator out of the story. I didn’t want to catch any looks, or field questions about the nature of our relationship, or talk about how I’d promise to drive Dove to L.A. and cosign on a lease if she didn’t get into RISD. I didn’t like to think about those things, never mind speak of them.

Dove waited in the car while I ran into Dante Orlando’s house, five minutes down the road from Grandma’s.

“Right around the corner,” I said to Alex, pouring more wine into his glass and mine.

Dante’s mom let me in, kissed my cheek, hugged me close, and called me handsome. She was fixing dinner and asked if I was hungry, said I should stay and eat, she was making raviolis and homemade gravy. I told her it smelled amazing, but I was running late for an appointment, and then I hustled upstairs.

I found Dante streaming Joe Rogan on the wall-mounted TV across from the bed as he ironed a T-shirt ripping a vape. Dante was older than me, thirty-three, and receiving unemployment benefits while he promoted clubs under the table, with flecks of gray in his fade, waxed brows, bags under his eyes, stubble on his chest and black satin sheets on his bed, a dab rig and blowtorch on the nightstand. He used to be a big time gym rat, but now he just looked puffy and tired, carrying a gut under a throwback Orlando Magic jersey, and dealing with back pain I could tell from the ginger way he moved, breaking down the ironing stand, and also because he said, “You got any Percocet in that bag of yours?” his voice all hoarse after a Thursday rave.

“Not at the moment,” I said, but I never sold percs. I left opiates off the menu. That was both an ethical concern and a matter of caution for me, if that’s not a contradiction.

“Have a C4,” Dante said, exaggerating a groan as he reached to grab two tall bright yellow cans from a case on the floor. “I think I got a handle of vodka in the closet if you wanna spike it.”

Spending time with Dante was always good for my self-esteem he made me feel like a grown-up by comparison. We touched our energy drink cans and then we took care of our business: I traded him a bunch of ketamine and generic mephedrone powder for a pint of narcotic cough syrup plus cash.

“Stay for dinner,” he said, “you’ll make my mother’s night,” fetching the cash from inside a Jordan sock in his dresser, and then he asked if I was coming by Festa later, because he’d already put my name on the list. This was right before that place got shut down by the fire marshal. I hear they’re converting the building into lofts soon.

I told Dante I had to run but maybe I’d see him at the club later, even though there was almost zero chance of that. Dante was always inviting me to ticketed parties and porn star appearances at local strip clubs, places with metal detectors and sticky floors, and I hated the way he introduced me to people as “one of his closest friends.” I did take up his offer of a quick game of Madden though blew him out 50-14 if you’re wondering and then Dove and I headed to Federal Hill to meet my bookie.

I parked over by Caserta’s Pizza on that back street overlooking the repairs on Route Six and the abandoned jewelry factories on the far side of the highway, red

brick and boarded up, and this time I was the one to wait in the car.

“Don’t let him talk your ear off for an hour, we got places to be,” I said, passing Dove the envelope.

“Where’s the rest?” she asked, Juul pod crackling on her inhale.

“Tell him I want La Salle parlayed with the under.”

“Don’t you owe him more?”

“La Salle. Parlayed. With the under. That’s what’s important. La Salle, parlay, the under. Say it back to me.”

“He’s gonna wanna know where the rest is.”

“What’re you, his secretary? You’re supposed to be on my side.”

She dropped the envelope into her RISD tote, hopped out and slammed the door closed behind her.

I rolled down my window and yelled, “La Salle and the under!” before she disappeared up the alley and around the corner to the oyster bar where my bookie hangs out.

My bookie adored Dove. Still does. She’d pass or receive an envelope under the table, and he’d treat her to a cup of gelato or a latte or a slice of cheesecake or an espresso martini, anything she wanted, and ask her a million questions, make jokes at my expense, and talk about his glory years rubbing elbows with stars she’d never heard of. To this day, he’s her biggest supporter. He’s always asking for her. “You ever hear from that girl anymore? How’s she making out in Hollywood, I wonder.”

Dove was back to the car in half an hour, and she slammed my friggin door again.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to slam my doors?” I said.

“I need Juul pods.”

“How’d it go?”

“Fine. He was all worked up. He just found out Sandy Hook was an inside job.”

“Did you tell him the right thing?”

“I just agree with everything he says and then he tells me how smart and beautiful I am.”

“I mean about the envelope, the bet.”

“Shhhhhh.”

We hit the liquor store next, a huge one next to a PetSmart in one of the plazas by the prison. I wheeled my cart to the walkin fridge in the back, loaded it up with thirty racks of the cheap beer, added hard seltzers and a couple handles of sweet liquor, asked the cashier for a pack of mint Juul pods, paid in cash, and saved the receipt.

You couldn’t get away from the smell of fallen leaves, and it was cold out, windy, overcast, and midnight-dark already, but I knew it wouldn’t rain. I had to really lean into the shopping cart and use my legs to rattle that big load across the parking lot, and I had to move things around to make room for it in the trunk. As I was doing that Tetrising the shit in the trunk I heard a quick blast of porn audio play from the speakers in my car.

I decided not to ask Dove about it. I wanted to know, but I didn’t want to ask, so I just flung the Juul pods into the backseat, clicked on my seat warmer and pretended like I hadn’t heard a thing. And maybe you won’t believe me, but I swear to God she leaned into the cockpit without any prompting and said, “Look at this,” and showed me the video, muted now, a deepfake of Olivia Culpo fucking some guy in a dumpy hotel room.

There I was, midway through my night’s journey, watching bleeding edge pornography in a parked car with a teenager. I could

smell her dry shampoo. I checked my mirrors for witnesses and laughed inside myself, feeling ecstatically degenerate. I was aware that I was living a secret as it happened. I would never speak of this moment to anybody I was certain of it and that was what made it precious.

“Highly disturbing content!” I said, holding Dove’s phone very close to my face, scrutinizing the footage and then scrolling down into the comments. “I wonder if Olivia’s team knows about this.”

“They must.”

“That poor girl! Her poor parents!”

“She’s fine,” Dove said, yanking her phone out of my hand. “She’s rich. And it’s not even real.”

I knew the video wasn’t real “deepfake” was in the title. That’s what made it disturbing. I’m assuming you’re at least a little familiar with the concept. To be clear, it wasn’t really Olivia Culpo in the video. This wasn’t a leaked sex tape; it was a deep-learning AI’s approximation of Olivia’s face superimposed over some anonymous amateur porn girl’s face. (Don’t ask me how the technology works, I’m not even confident with the vocabulary.) I’m not sure if it was the unsanctioned transposition of “Olivia” into a pornographic context, the erasure of the other girl, or the slight blurriness of “Olivia’s” face that disturbed me the most, that glitchy ghostly smoothness. It was such a sophisticated and rapey piece of content. The view count was in the millions.

“You shouldn’t watch porn,” I said to Dove. “It’ll give you the wrong idea about sex. It’s okay to make a living off it, but it’s not good to consume it.”

Then I asked for the address to our next stop.

Olivia Culpo’s not exactly a household name, but she’s a god around here. She won Miss Rhode Island, then Miss America, then Miss Universe, and one year she was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She’s gorgeous, famous, and rich, and people either talk shit because they’re jealous, or else they brag about their connections to her they know her parents, they used to be friends with Olivia’s childhood best friend, their younger brother played JV basketball with Olivia’s younger brother, or they ran into her in the waiting room at the gynecologist one time seven years ago. I’m in the connections camp. Me and my friend Nick used to see Olivia around back in high school. We played beer pong against her and her boyfriend once. I’ve told the story a hundred times, how we charmed Olivia and bullied her boyfriend and were asked to leave, and how Nick smashed in the face of a grandfather clock with his elbow on the way out. I told it again to Dove that afternoon as we waited to make a left out of the PetSmart parking lot, but she wasn’t paying attention, preoccupied by a thread dedicated to Olivia on a foot fetish forum.

“They have a lot of thoughts about her nail polish,” she said.

I asked her to read some posts aloud and reached my hand back, snapping my fingers until she passed her Juul, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, everybody rubbernecking a fender-bender on Route 95.

“‘She’s hot but her feet are sort of flat.’”

“Ha!”

“‘Absolutely gorgeous girl. Sadly, her feet are not. Her toes are mangled and crooked.’”

“I didn’t expect them to be so critical.”

“I was picking the mean ones. ‘Wonderful feet with pretty soles,’ says FootFreakFoot69.”

“You’ll get a thread of your own someday if things work out,” I said, because Dove wanted to be famous too.

“‘Size 8? Looks more like a size 9 fwiw.’”

“Probably end up in court against your parents. Your parents’ll sue you for royalties.”

“We should get pedicures later.”

“Some nerd perv will deepfake your face into his porn.”

“Stop manifesting!” she said, and then cranked her music to drown me out.

We stopped at Chik-fil-A, where Dove did her makeup in the bathroom while I ate a sandwich and fries, and then we continued to our final stop, and soon I felt the armpits of my shirt become soaked with sweat.

Dove had been invited to a party by some kid she’d never met, a captain on the Bishop Hendricken football team. And I happened to know that Hendricken was playing La Salle the next morning, and that they were 7.5-point favorites at home, with the over /under sitting at 36.5. I figured a poorly rested team was unlikely to find itself in a high-scoring affair and would probably fail to cover a big spread. That was my bet.

Dove had also promised to send me incriminating videos from the party via an encrypted text app, which I planned to forward to the BH coaching staff, headmaster, and school chaplain from a burner email. I’d looked up team statistics on MaxPreps to identify the star players, located their Instagrams and forwarded them to Dove so she could target the right kids, and hopefully they’d get benched for the first half or even the whole game.

Hervé Guibert

Isabelle Adjani, c. 1980

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

Hervé Guibert

Sienne, 1979

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

But when I was telling this story to my cousin Alex, I acted like the kid hosting the party had reached out to me directly. I played dumb. I acted like I had no idea how some high school football punk knew who I was, or why he thought it was a reasonable idea to hit me up on Instagram for alcohol, lean, weed, and Xanax, and I showed Alex the scandalous videos without explaining how they came into my possession.

I knew Alex wouldn’t get caught up on the details. We were both gamblers. He held his chin and nodded his head in approval, and cut into my story to tell me about a crooked local hockey ref who ran away to Arizona after getting his legs baseball-batted, and I tried not to appear spooked. Then Auntie Sharon yelled from the kitchen “Mikey, you want any coffee and graham crackers?”

“Sure, Auntie, thank you,” I said. “Alex will have some too.”

Once we had our coffee, I resumed my story in a low voice, telling Alex about how I sold that Hendricken kid half a zip and shatter from a weed lab, a pint of promethazine cough syrup, all the alcohol and some Xanax in the garage of his parents’ house with the voices and music of an underage party coming from the kitchen, depicting myself as coldblooded and clever, but really I felt like the lowest form of slime in the region and certain that a carful of student athletes would crash into a tree that night and die because of me, and that I would be held responsible and wallow under the weight of the guilt for the rest of my life.

Dove stood by while me and the babyfaced host of the party completed our transaction in an empty garage bay, and then she followed him into the house without a word of goodbye or anything, and I

got back in my car and watched the garage door seal her off in a high school night. I guessed she was nervous, walking into a party where she didn’t know anybody in the real-life sense, intentionally underdressed in her hoodie and leggings so it looked like she didn’t care, but I knew she cared, with all that foundation on her face, and I was nervous for her too. I texted her to have fun and be safe and to let me know if she needed a ride home from the party later, and then I headed back to Providence.

I also left out the part where I had a mini panic attack and pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, where I tried to comfort myself by thinking ahead to my Vegas trip, after I hit my savings goal and closed down my operation, when I’d ball out, touch bottom, and maybe even experience a moment of transcendence coming out of a blackout, lost in the slots at the wrong hotel at the end of a weekslong bender. Maybe Dove would come with me. We could spend a month in Vegas together en route to L.A. after RISD rejected her.

I like to think we all have these crisis moments alone in our cars from time to time, and I knew it’d be a bad idea to hide in my room and self-medicate for the rest of that night, so instead I met up with my roommate Sarah and her friends, a couple of pseudo-rustic hipster types from a local brewery, this curly-haired woo-woo girl who’d dropped out of medical school to study acupuncture and her partner, a mushroom forager who sold pipes made from crystals on Etsy. We sat under an outdoor heater drinking Blue Hawaiians on the back patio of a trailer park-themed bar, sharing tater tots and gossip, complaining about work, talking astrology and sports, and soon everything felt easy again and my jaw

unclenched for the first time in hours.

Not long after midnight, Dove texted to let me know she’d gotten home safe and sent me some videos from the party. I ran to the bathroom at the bar to review the footage and compose my email to the school after a key bump or two, and then I felt like celebrating my scheme, convinced again of both its profitability and ultimate harmlessness.

I left the bar without saying goodbye to Sarah or her friends and drove over to Festa, where Dante let me in through the back door, looking methed out in his club suit, all damp from body heat and smoke machine humidity. I expected him to be thrilled and honored by my surprise appearance in his sleazy domain, but he had a situation to deal with, phone pressed to his ear “Fucking fat fuck never picks up the fucking phone when you fucking need him” as he hustled me through the back of house bowels, kicking shit on our way to a table in VIP, right near the DJ booth, where he promptly summoned a bottle of Cîroc.

“I’m bugging the fuck out,” he said, barely audible over the ridiculous music, face blinking in the strobes and sparklers. It was just us at the table, and we had a condescending view of the dance floor, but it wasn’t crowded out there either. I was kind of glad the place was dead, just the last call creatures creeping about, and I mixed vodkacranberry-Red Bulls for the two of us while he hammered away at his phone, texting at a crisis clip.

“What’s going on?” I asked, shouting, to be polite. “Huh?”

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

“Tell you later!”

Some girl fainted in the bathroom and hit her head on the toilet, and it was this whole complicated ordeal getting her out of there without alerting fellow club-goers as well as the authorities, who’d already put the place on warning, one incident after another that summer and fall overserving an underage crowd, ignoring capacity limits, habitual fights and stabbings in the vicinity at closing time. But I heard from someone else that I must’ve been born yesterday if I believed Dante’s version, because actually the girl had been drugged and sexually assaulted in the bathroom and Dante tried to bribe her with drink tickets to keep quiet about it, but word got around even though she didn’t go to the cops in the end, and that was the real reason the city sicced the fire marshal on Festa and shut the place down for good a few weeks later.

This aside prompted Alex to tell me about the sucker punch festival he’d witnessed outside Festa one night during his fake ID summer when he was bussing tables at Massimo. Then someone turned out the lights in the dining room and my cousin Ari came in from the kitchen carrying the cake and the room broke into “Happy Birthday,” and we all yelled “Hey-oooo” after the candles had been blown out.

“So did you hit on that bet or what, Mikey?” Alex asked me a couple minutes later, with a mouthful of funfetti cake.

I’d planned to bundle up and watch the Hendricken –La Salle game from the top of the bleachers with a spiked coffee the next morning, but I woke up late with a headache and heartburn, with ringing ears and stripper perfume on my clothes, so I stayed in bed and waited for the final score to get posted online.

The first thing I did was check my burn-

er email’s inbox. No response to the videos I’d leaked from the party, so I couldn’t be sure that any key players had been benched /suspended. I checked Facebook next, hoping to catch wind of controversy, but all I found was a message from some girl I didn’t know.

“Hope you got to piss when you got off the train. We should hang out the next time we’re both trying to dodge our friends’ parties. Really fucking hope this is the right Mike Jeffrey...”

I was not the correct Mike Jeffrey — I hadn’t been on any trains — but I clicked through the girl’s profile anyway. She was pretty. She was from Virginia, studied marketing and sang a cappella at UNC, and now she lived in New York City, where she’d met someone who shared my name, apparently, riding the subway the night before.

“OMG, you found me!!!” I wrote back, and we went back and forth trading flirty messages for about fifteen minutes before she figured me out and stopped responding.

I didn’t think I was doing her any harm, roleplaying as meet-cute subway Mike for a minute, but I did feel bad after, so I searched my name, thinking maybe I could make up for it and help the girl track down the correct Mike Jeffrey, the New York version, same age as me but more mature and better informed. I imagined him: self-made and morally exact, wearing structured clothing instead of sweats on Saturday afternoon and making productive use of his time at all times, with a job in mutual aid or some other commendable or impressive field. But I ended up finding too many other Mike Jeffreys, all of them too real, normal beyond imagining, and not the perfect inversion of my insecurities that I

had imagined.

I told Alex the final score, 20–13 Hendricken, but they failed to cover the spread, so I won too.

Alex knew it was impolite to ask but couldn’t help himself after I’d made such a big deal about it with the long story. I’ll tell you what I told him: “Five figures.”

“You ever check your all-time record?” was his next question. “Your career batting average?”

I didn’t understand.

“With your bookie,” he said. “The lifetime balance.”

“Oh God, no. Absolutely not. Although now that I think about it, after that win, I think I might be up, all-time, or at least close to even. That’s what I like to think, anyway.”

We clinked glasses and then Alex went to go Juul in the bathroom.

I rested my elbow on the back of my chair and drank more wine, wondering seriously about my lifetime balance, thinking through some numbers, NFL Sundays in the red and black, and regretting my big mouth. I sat there watching everybody, eavesdropping. They were talking about the one who overdosed at the hotel in the ’80s, and how nobody ever went to visit Rosemary after the lobotomy, and did anybody really believe that Bobby Jr.’s wife killed herself, followed by a quick hot argument about the origins of autism. I heard Grandma bragging about all the books I read, and my cousin’s husband trying to explain blockchain technology to my idiot uncle by marriage. In the other room, I heard my Uncle Dave shout, “Nobody talks and everybody walks!” That was the line he’d whispered to my dad they were best friends long before they became

brothers-in-law before the principal questioned them about a prank they pulled in high school, a story everybody’d heard a thousand times. Then the dogs were all riled up and barking, and someone yelled, “Shut up, ya stupid mutts, or Uncle Bob’ll put yous to sleep,” and my cousin Ari yelled back, “I’ll put you to sleep!” and then there was a whole chorus of people shouting, “Niiiiiiit wiiiiiit!”

In the kitchen, I saw my mom looking at my cousin Ari’s friend’s phone, and from her expression I could tell she was looking at a picture of a baby. My dad’s cousin Richard was talking to my Auntie Sharon’s boss’s husband about a property line dispute that’d escalated to criminal complaints and letters from lawyers, and there were engagement rumors in the air too, Olivia Culpo gossip, and drama at work, and stories about Buddy Cianci, like when he sang Sinatra for Grandma at her birthday party in the ballroom at the Biltmore, back when Buddy was in office, hawking proprietary pasta sauce and facing federal charges, and the rude comment that Auntie Ida made to him at the party, and how Auntie Ida went to the cemetery every Sunday for years and years just to spit on Uncle Vinny’s grave, and then all the talk ran back to the house on Chapin Avenue and the feud between Uncle Vinny and Uncle Nico, Grandma’s brothers, who’d started a bakery together.

I kept my mouth shut and listened. I’d heard it all before, but the details of that feud were always changing. There were always new wrinkles, new context, new contradictions. I never picked sides. I knew there was always more to those stories than what could be remembered and shared. I kept my mouth shut, thinking about everything I’d left out of my own

story, everything that gets left out of every story. The truest parts, never spoken, never repeated, or incommunicable to begin with. And then I texted Dove to see if she’d heard back from RISD yet, and she didn’t respond, but I could see she’d read the message.

Hervé Guibert

Andreï Tarkovski, 1986

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

BLACK SUN

by Etel Adnan

Translator’s note: Published in 1973, L’Oeil Noir takes place in the Beirut of that same year, where Etel Adnan was working at the time as a newspaper editor. Adnan died in 2021 at the age of 96. Throughout her long career, she produced several books of experimental poetry and prose, essays and cultural criticism, as well as landscape paintings. One of the few short stories in her various and expansive oeuvre, L’Oeil Noir resists generic categorization. Featuring a well-known historical figure, the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, L’Oeil Noir follows an unnamed woman’s attempts to befriend a mysterious Palestinian émigré, Farid, who claims to have

been Dayan’s right-hand man. The story is animated by the competing political visions of its historical moment: Pan-Arab unity, Palestinian national liberation, and Zionist expansionism. It is, equally, a window onto the troubled relationship that unfolds between these two men, one a Palestinian raised by a Jewish Israeli family and the other a renowned Israeli politician. Disputes over contested land take on phantasmatic form as Dayan and Farid veer into hashish-induced delirium, with no signs of returning to the realm of reason. The story bespeaks its author’s prescient vision and unsettling attention to the political urgencies of her time and ours.

— Laila Riazi

The following day at the hotel, at around the same hour, I saw Farid again. This time alone, I approached him. He was much younger than me, which made it easier to strike up a conversation. At first, he tried to wriggle away, but soon enough we warmed to each other. I thought I should say something surprising, to hold his attention. So, I lied and told him I had just returned from America to launch a company in Beirut that would make me a fortune. “You, a woman, from Lebanon?” he cried, near-incredulous and amused. He had flinched at the word America, but eventually softened and showed himself to be quite friendly.

First of all, I will tell you that he was called Farid.

The wind carried his name to where I was sitting, on the terrace of the Saint-Georges hotel. He was with two women, both completely veiled. One of them, the one who called him by his name, had her face covered. The other revealed two eyes, and the hint of a nose that must have been quite large. All three were animated. I can’t say why, but I had a feeling that they the women, I mean were almost certainly wicked.

They made me want to know more about them. I called the waiter, who described them as clients of the hotel. “From Qatar,” he added. “What’s it to you?” It was getting late and still they were chatting between themselves, in hushed voices. It came time for me to leave. I went home to my small apartment, even though I wanted to stay, sipping lemonade on the terrace, talking with them.

When I asked about the two women, he explained that they were just acquaintances, and that he’d come with them from Qatar. “I work at a hospital there,” he added. “I brought them to Beirut so that they could have surgery at the American University Medical Center — it’s worldrenowned.” I wondered: “Are their families very rich?” He responded, “Very rich, yes. Very,” without elaborating. His face was dark and his gaze opaque, his air troubled. Yet, in a sense, I grew attached to him, and quite quickly. I made him promise to find me once more in the same place. He wouldn’t have to go out of his way if it was his hotel where I wanted to meet. But when I tried to call his room a day later, again at the Saint-Georges, the receptionist informed me they’d checked out all three of them without leaving an address.

•

One year later, seated at the Horse Shoe Cafe and sipping another lemonade, the kind that arrives at your table with its ice cubes already melted, I see Farid enter. He

is aged, and breathless — as if he has just eluded capture. I am pleased to see him. He recognizes me instantly, and probably feels like he should say something. I take pleasure in thinking he is happy to see me.

“Please, sit down,” I say. Though distant, the scene shines in my memory: certain things live on in my head, beneath a bulb constantly alight.

“Where are the two women the ones you were with?”

“They were discharged from the hospital and flew back to Qatar.”

“You disappeared.”

“No. We changed hotels. All of that was a while ago …”

“So, they returned without you?”

“Yes.”

“And your job in Qatar?”

“I didn’t want it anymore. I stayed here.”

“You’ve been in Beirut this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the two of them? Are they ok?”

“Yes, certainly!”

“And you, have you found work here?”

“No.”

I wanted to forestall his departure, but I didn’t know what else to ask him, resolved as he seemed to give nothing away. I wanted to make our conversation last, to never see him leave. That same night I had a dinner to attend at the home of a friend. She had invited a few journalists, her friend the Polish consul, the editor of the France-Press Agency, an indifferent theater director, and a Tunisian singer, rather well-known. This friend of mine is charming; at her house you will find plenty of people, whisky, and hashish. Even if the food is bad a rarity in Beirut — you always feel good there. I suggested to Farid that we go together,

sure he’d refuse. To my surprise, he didn’t. He accepted my invitation without question. I figured he must be very tired, and very lonely.

•

At around nine p.m., I met Farid at the Horse Shoe Cafe. He stepped into my red Mini Cooper, barely noticing it. On our way to the party, he took my arm and whispered, in a familiar vernacular Arabic, “You know, I should tell you. I’m not Lebanese. I’ll explain more later.”

The party was animated. Farid drank and drank. The hashish that evening was plentiful and fresh. It had come directly from Békaa, its fragrance like poison. I told Farid it was excellent. “Hashish is my best friend,” he muttered in response. “It liberated Palestine.” I was shocked to hear him say this, even though, in Beirut, nothing really surprises anyone.

No one overheard what he’d said. This confession rare as it was endeared him to me. Of course, the least mention of Palestine’s liberation always pulled me into a trance: tragedy can become euphoria for those who have long despaired of everything. In this case, however, something else was at work. There was Farid’s soft voice, and this aura he had, no closer to reason than to madness. •

On Saturday the sixth of October 1973, the Arab armies launched a war against Israel. I learned this around mid-morning. In the evening, from my balcony in the Patriarcat quarter, I watched Mount Sannine’s water-green glint turn fire-pink as a wing of flame embraced the sky. The light died slowly; the twin crests receded

into darkness. Night came, and with it, Farid. We were up to our necks in the news. A torrent of headlines, one after the other.

Farid turned down the radio. Against a low thrum, he began to speak:

“I’m Palestinian,” he said. “My family survived the war of 1948. Me, I was born in 1953. Twenty years ago, in winter, in Saint Jean D’Acre. I’m from Akko! Akko! Like an orange, yes.”

He turned down the radio once more. You could hardly hear it. And then he went on:

“My parents died in a bus explosion. Both of them. I was their first and their only child. They were farmhands whose families had stayed on the other side of the border, in Jenin. I was taken in and adopted by their Jewish neighbors, a couple who is still there, who I called papa and mama, who had no child but me. I must have been two years old or so, it’s all very vague in my mind. They did not lie to me, they told me when I was six who I was, what had happened. They sent me to school. I spoke Hebrew as well as I spoke Arabic, if not better.”

“And you, what side were you on?”

“You mean politically? Neither. The war of ’67 I watched with disinterest. It happened so quickly, and I was barely fourteen. My parents — my new parents — didn’t speak much of it. It resembled, this war I mean, the passing of a black cloud, a shower of rain. On our coast nothing changed, at least not for me. At the time I was preoccupied with making summer last for as long as possible, swimming from spring to the end of October, eating plentifully and sleeping.”

“And this war, do you believe it will last?”

“I don’t know. Let me finish my story.

One day, not long after the ’67 war, a masked man set off a bomb on a bus I happened to be in. The engine didn’t explode. Out of instinct, I’m not sure how or why perhaps I had thought of my parents I grabbed the grenade and defused it. The next day, there was a photograph of me in every newspaper. I was the little Arab boy who had saved all those Jews.

“A few days later, a military official appeared at our house. After a long discussion with my adoptive parents, he told me that Moshe Dayan had summoned me to his office in Tel Aviv. So, I went. When I saw him up close, with his covered eye, I shrank back in fear. A kind of black sun seemed to watch over me. You know how we fear such markings, us Arabs. We take them for signs. You know how superstitious we can be. Moshe applauded me: ‘Farid,’ he said, ‘we are very proud.’

“The following month, he summoned me again. ‘We propose to pay for your studies,’ he said. ‘Serious studies. You will go to the School for Intelligence Services. It’s complicated. They’ll explain to you what it’s about. It’s reserved for young minds like yours.’

“I was pleased.”

“Pleased?”

“Yes, I was pleased. I had been raised by Jews, was comfortable among them. My life and theirs it had become the same life. And then, I think, I was proud that they needed me, a young Arab man.

“I needed to please, to be loved, by whomever. I needed to occupy myself with something, to prove that I was just as clever as everyone else. To be less alone, too. I told myself there were unforeseen things on the horizon if I accepted, perhaps some trips, a house or a car, an end to all this … What

did I know? I said yes. I attended the school for two years. It was indeed a technical school. We learned everything there: how to repair tires and build ladders, how to tie knots and assemble radios … We also learned more difficult things, like how to decipher codes, how to be tough, how to anticipate anything. Above all, we learned how to hide what we were thinking.”

“But how did you feel during your training? Did you not feel you were on your way to becoming a traitor? Did it not disgust you?”

“No. You should know that something very curious happened at the school. I was one of three Arabs. We made up a cell of our own, they put us on a parallel track. They spoke to us of an inevitable friendship that would one day emerge between Jews and Arabs. They told us that Arabs were brave and nonviolent, that the fedayins had infiltrated our peaceful brotherhood. They made us believe that the fedayins were fighting for money, that all of them were mercenaries fanatical and dangerous. In the meantime, everything was fine, and nothing was fine. I was growing used to a drug. I understood later that I’d been tamed, like a dog. They had accustomed me to hashish. ‘You see this hashish?’ they’d say. ‘It comes from Lebanon. Its fragrance is one of a kind. Asli, asli it’s the real thing!’ This is how, between me and your country, there developed a kind of memory, a collusion and familiarity, the strongest link of all: that of the dream. Whenever I felt unhappy, or abandoned, I smoked some more. This is how hashish became my father.

“And then. Something else happened I still don’t understand. I grew attached to Moshe Dayan. The thought of him consumed me. I pitied him and admired him

at once. I said to myself: the one who triumphs is always great. No matter who he is. I mentioned to you that we traveled parallel paths. I saw this as true for the others as well. Arabs or Jews, we clung we cling to the past, as though it were Noah’s Ark, the last redoubt. And yet. We are feverish for tomorrow, lurching forward, hypnotized by it a future that offers itself to us as both guarantee and impossibility, all of this simultaneously, in a clash of ideals and images and aching hearts.”

“And Moshe Dayan? Did you see him often? When did you see him for the last time?”

“Well, yes, I saw him again … Listen, turn off the radio. There’s always so much noise in this city! Yes, I saw him again, many times. He ‘followed’ me, by which I mean, he followed my progress at the school. Asking for updates. He said that I was a good addition. I still ask myself if he ever felt a real fondness for me. I doubt it. Now, I no longer care.

“One time they nearly dismissed me, because of a scuffle where I came out on top, and it’s Dayan who let me stay. I should add that, shortly after that, towards the end of my second year, I was asked to stand by as they interrogated a Palestinian. He looked like me, was probably my age. I fixed my eyes on his shirt, which was stained through with blood. The stains multiplied he yelped. Then he began to moan like a child, and then like a newborn, but part human, part beast. I fainted.

“Moshe Dayan must have read in my dossier a report of what had happened. He called me into his office. I will never forget this. I didn’t look at him. I looked at the sea. Oh god, I thought. What will happen next? The school year will end soon. I

will return to my home. How is it the sea is so beautiful? Dayan had prepared for me a little speech. ‘I know you fainted,’ he told me. ‘But you must understand: all of what we do what you do is in order to save human lives. Precision is necessary for our security, and, indeed, for yours. And there is no security without precise information. We must know everything. Everything. Do you understand? It is preventative. So that we don’t punish the innocent. One day you will understand that this life is a laboratory, where each of us must discover the science of survival. In any case, you won’t have to do this dirty work anymore. I’ll soon be needing your services personally.’

“And yes how he needed me! It’s hot in here, look at us sweating! It’s worse than Tel Aviv. Listen, I have more to say, I won’t go on for much longer, leave the radio be, don’t interrupt me.”

“But I’m not interrupting you!”

“That has nothing to do with it. Listen, you never listen. Anyway as I was saying. I was again in his office, and he rushed to close the door behind me. As usual, I sat down facing the sea. The window appeared enormous, as if it had swallowed the wall. I heard his voice, lost sight of him in the light. With a startling abruptness, he emerged from the white shadows. He explained to me that we were going to Lebanon, by way of Cyprus, that it was already too late for me to stop by my house, that I was forbidden to speak to anyone, and that we would set off on our route in 24 hours.

“My knees were quaking. I did not have a voice with which to say yes. The fear of leaving the school, of taking on a mission so singular, with a person so impressive, pummeled my entire body. My gaze flickered across his. He was calm.

“There. Those two women you saw me with, last year, on the terrace at SaintGeorges? Those two women? One of them was him. He was hiding beneath loose clothes, the black robe. He was covering his face. The other person, also disguised, was his assistant.

“When we arrived in Beirut, at the hotel, Dayan specified the plan we had come there to execute. The American Secretary of State was visiting the capital to consult with the Lebanese government. I had to kill him, in an attack, and in such a manner that the crime could be blamed on a Palestinian. I had to be spotted but not captured. Our operation would revise the world map. This is what Dayan kept saying. And then, we had to disappear by night, on a raft that would be waiting for us in the south of Beirut. Every detail had been worked out, we had just to wait, for 48 hours.

“Dayan figured that he would put this time to good use for a reconnaissance mission. He decided to station himself in Békaa and from there to contact one of our agents. His assistant stayed in Beirut. It was me that accompanied him. When we descended upon that remarkable valley, I noticed that an irrepressible happiness had surged up in him. We marched towards a hut, tucked away behind some trees. We were still far from the hut when, in an instant, we found ourselves at the foot of a hill, in the middle of a field, which had a view of the valley as it stretched towards the Euphrates and Rakka. The valley swept Dayan into a trance. He saw himself as a Roman conquering Aleppo, and then Turkey. He compared himself to Field Marshal Rommel slicing through the Libyan desert. To King David, leading his troops to the gates of Babylon, laying the city waste.

“He began a long speech, a monologue. ‘Farid,’ he spat. ‘For too long, the History of Nations has galloped past the Jews without even a glance. Every people has had its triumphs, its empires, its art of cruelty. We, we have been I repeat for too long, the audience of a play to which no one invited us! Now, it is once more our turn. We will blow into this valley like the wind. We will puncture the beating heart of Asia. No longer will they say that the Turk fights better than us, or that the Persian is more powerful, or that only the Afghan can rattle Russia. We will gut the lands of our enemies, a pregnant woman whose water has burst. We will go so far as to thwart the designs of China and bring down its plans like so many stacked cards …!’

“My mind was elsewhere. We were amid hashish plants that reached up to our belts. The particular odor of this plant enveloped me in its bath. My hands skimmed a tablecloth, undulating and green, with a sense of endless recognition. The universe took on a new shape. I was struck by a counter-vertigo, my point of focus growing clearer, narrowing. This lucidity was hard for me to bear. I exist, I am, I am irreducible, I am other. This is what I heard myself saying to myself. I had been plucked from a long torpor. The light was dancing, the clay hills cast an Arab land against the blue sky. I understood that I had just abandoned an enclosure, that I was free, that I was living in a forever open space.”

“Were you hallucinating?”

“No. On the contrary. In these plantations of hashish, the drug abandoned me. I was not swallowed by it instead, I was swimming, drifting even, over the green and oily plants, the slender shrubs, real forests in miniature that would have sunk my

mind but which, in that instant, my mind had escaped. A fresh vision overtook me. Plunging into this meadow, into the heart of the Arab valley, I entered the home of my father that was the truth, the origin so that I could take possession of it and liberate myself of it. I became an adult. In the naked sun, I understood. In a terrible revelation, the sheer force of the unoccupied earth. On the path to Yammouneh, I saw Palestine from afar, bled of its poison, the city of the future. I thought aloud.

“Dayan heard me, and this stopped him in his tracks. He began to yell and, addressing himself to me, continued his speech: ‘Yes, I will go from victory to victory, and Palestinians like you, I’ll make them my workhands, the slaves of my empire!’ I still ask myself if the look I must have given him did not sting him. His look, the tip of a laser, scorched my forehead. He slapped me across my bare cheek. Just as he was drawing back his hand, I removed the weapon from inside his black robe and killed him.”

“I am turning up the radio, Farid. This is no moment for rambling. Listen! We are at war. They just said that the Egyptian troops have crossed the canal. Do you think it’s true? That they’ll stay put?”

“The Syrians are also advancing …”

“Do you think they will continue advancing?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How does it not matter anymore? It’s only just started. Everything is going to change. Shut up. Listen. They have been fighting for a while it’s a ferocious battle. Listen! The Egyptian army is going to reconquer the Sinai.” •

After a while, we grew exhausted, having

absorbed so much news, so much noise, the thundering reports, the military processions. Wide-eyed with longing, with doubt Hours passed without our knowing it, as if we were in a world that wasn’t our own. Suddenly, in a flash, the sky fell. The radio blared the news. It said: “Dayan has just made a declaration. The Israelis have stopped the advance of the Egyptian army, on the Sinai border, and are now on the offensive.”

War, always war. Defeat, always defeat. The radio, always the voice of misfortune. Farid on the balcony. I call him:

“Listen, Farid, listen, this will sober you up, this last piece of news. Dayan just announced that Sharon is advancing towards the Suez Canal. This is going to end badly, this story.”

“What will end badly? These are just words. You are dreaming, all of you, all of you are hallucinating. It’s not Moshe Dayan you just heard speak. They have hidden the news of his disappearance for a year now. He’s an alias, the one you heard speaking on the radio. The real Moshe Dayan me, Farid, the Palestinian I killed him and buried him gently in a garden of hemp.”

Hervé Guibert

Prague, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

THE WARRIOR IS A WOMAN

Tina Chang

After Yesenia Montilla

How does a woman become a heroine, a muse in her own story? How does she become a martyr by laying down her knives, alive, sleeping next to her own body?

Her body is beautiful but not in the mind of men. I am worn, scarred, I see an ending now. It is not finite, it has no edges. It is far off and close, a distant point with a dual face, one turned to the past and its wars and burning spears, another to the future, a target as red as an open furnace.

I look at paintings of heroines on horses. If I could summon such weapons, I’d wish for battle in the mornings when I arrange the cutlery at the kitchen table.

I cleaned it up last night in the light, I caught my reflection, a woman washing the dishes she just cleaned an hour ago. The battles again and again. The most significant are the smallest ones.

I am my best self when all the fires are out. Little flame, stay silent. I pray to you, spark under the pot. The alarm sounds in the house at the slightest hint of smoke.

Last night I thought I couldn’t go on. All the domesticity. I laid down my weapons, cut my hair, scythed my lowest needs along the grass. I left the field of horses to cook.  I lifted my head to smell burning.

HARVEST

Megan Pinto

All summer, I prayed  for clarity of sight (light falling  through the leaves, a flock of starlings  before rain …).

Of the psychic, who counseled repeatedly, that I must become familiar  with love, so as to see its opposite  when it rushed toward me,  those fragments, its song, linger, rising up, now  and again.

I was to let pain  drain from me like earth, after rain.

O, obsession, that closed fist.

(Though, here again is mist,  rising off the water just  after dawn …)

Now, autumn comes early. August leaves  brown in the heat. Detritus from the maple  covers the street where  a pearled wasps’ nest glistens  in the dew, while wasps drift  hazily in and out.

Like those figures, which cloud the edge  of memory, dissolving each time in a kind of rain.

How should love feel when we  receive it?

I think of those late summer walks  through the meadow and the neighboring  meadow, where I  was not longing but the one  who was longed for.

THE NIGHT

Katie Peterson

No one knows when the night begins. There must be a moment, no one has learned it yet, even the baby knows that it exists, she asks, is it getting dark, and we say yes, just before it becomes time to eat.

*

We all study the sunset, we look and tell each other to look. Our view through trees stays free and close, lucky, we do not have to pay or drive to keep ourselves aligned with time by looking at what looks like fire, staying a little longer without burning.

*

No one knows when the night begins if beginning means preparing for sleep first the fairies chase the children across the little plate. The baby’s left hand forks her bite of chicken, a gesture centered in the wrist, like a first letter, in this case, an “e” a bit like a weathervane. The fairies chase the children’s green wheelbarrow as bits of salt and fat get taken off the surface by the water in the washer and go into the ground, and they continue to chase the children’s faces in a story we cannot seem to find in any of our books.

*

Someone is always putting the baby to bed. The child loves the book about the storm and says so, loves the mother rocking the baby who resembles a bundle of clothes a runaway might put together and says so, says, I love that page, says, I want that page to be the ending.

* Everyone understands the moment the lights go off does not equal the moment sleep begins but has anyone discovered whether this could be the beginning of the night? Many have rearranged both comforter and pillow to deliberate the point. The raccoon mothers have never asked. Night persists in the noses of the deer.

*

The daughter goes to sleep in her room with one parent, and we call this going down with the ship. The other has moved on from poetry to news. This leads to commentary on events of the day, opinions. Children belong in school. People cannot agree on that. *

The one who does not read stays until the baby sleeps, until the child says Quiet Time, until the child turns her face to the wall and snores. Is this the moment the night begins? Is this moment the icy measure of the three of them entering into nature and the conditions of necessity together? *

Mother or father in the room with the child, mother or father sleeping under a book. Some nights a parent falls asleep with the child, some nights two parents fall asleep together. None of these is a final arrangement, simply the end of the beginning, tender as apology after anger. Moonlight turns the beds into glaciers.

PORCH POEM

Jessica Abughattas

Sitting with my secrets in the sun on the porch. The corridor of cacti yawns along the metal fence. Fragrant are the balms of desire and I’m burning. Fearsome years shed like hair from the trees. The past recedes. Inside, organs at work, pumping blood and ovulating. My unkempt yard, rocks and dirt. Earth, as luck would have it. Was it worth it to gather in your heat? Siren. Car door. Postal worker. The bumblebees, ravenous.

The meadow, cool enough to sleep. On Vermont Ave, city avocado trees crack concrete, their arms full without breaking. All life flickers. Old Mitsubishi, daytime moth. I leave my life on the lawn.

[I HAD A BOUT]

Jane Huffman

I had a bout Of something Undefined

Another rattle In the lung As if I stood

Under the ladder Of my childhood For years

Before I climbed A single rung /

I had a bout Of vertigo

Inside my chest

A clocking From within Was bested By the worst Of me again

As if my body Shook off All its walls And doors And reeled The outside in /

I had a bout Of something

Like a flame

A burning In the core

Like shame

An ache the size And color Of a thought

Aboutness

Like a cough I cannot shake

THIS NATION

Shangyang Fang

On November 24, 2022, a fire broke out in an apartment building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, during the three-year-long government sanctioned COVID-19 lockdown, killing ten, including three children; the youngest, according to some news sources, were three. The news, photos, and video clips of the incident were quickly censored. The next day, a vigil was held by people in Shanghai and was soon dispersed by the police. Later, the dissuaded vigil grew into protests across China, where people held blank sheets of white paper, symbolizing the long-forced silence among the public.

Tonight, we cannot be saved by imagination. The phone buzzes midnight friends texting clips of videos

of women and men, students, holding white papers on the streets, like a field of snow. Of children screaming

in fire, on fire on the sixteenth floor in Urumqi, who spent their whole lives in quarantine, swanlike, featherless, light. Children, for the officials, you are toads trapped in a smudged pond of glass and concrete, plastic and steel.

Even the moonlight tonight so beautiful is a bureaucrat minding his own business. Tonight,

with your bodies, what are you trying to light?

Tonight, against the police in this erasing November wind,

your brothers and sisters are singing. The emptied plazas, crossroads, bus stops, playgrounds, the waiting white

chrysanthemums of grief are real chrysanthemums. Blood percolates their translucent veins.

Tonight, on the phone screen, your brief, simulated lives, your mothers munch on dried celery for weeks…

her greenish milk cannot save you, and this nation you would have been taught to love is loving you back, silencing

mourners by cracking their legs and hands into countless flowers dripping red, dark red, in the People’s

Public Squares. Can you see this? Can you hear their blossoms opening, displacing the thunder?

Masticating radishes for the last month of your life, tonight you know helplessness more than any of us.

Children, you were never meant to live. Tonight, you cannot be saved by imagination.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip, which won the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara. She lives in Los Angeles, where she’s at work on a second poetry collection.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a Lebanese American poet, writer, and painter.

Elina Alter is the translator of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum), and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult). She’s an Oral History Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.

Claressinka Anderson’s poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, most recently the 2022 Best New Poets anthology. Through her ongoing collaborations with artists, her work engages the interstitial spaces of contemporary art, literature, and music.

Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida (W. W. Norton, 2019), Of Gods &Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011), and Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004). She is also the co-editor of the W. W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: ContemporaryPoetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). She served as Brooklyn Poet Laureate (2010–2022) and is currently a professor and the director of creative writing at her alma mater, Binghamton University.

Born in Hartsville, South Carolina, Curtis Cuffie (1955–2002), transformed discarded objects into collaged figures that speak to both the abject reality of urban surplus and the alchemy of artistic creation. Built outdoors, primarily on the sidewalks of downtown Manhattan in the 1990s and early 2000s, his sculptures were subject to the whims of weather, police interference, and the sanitation department; documented by photographers, and eventually presented in more traditional commercial and institutional venues. Solo exhibitions

include Recent Sculpture curated by Darrell Maupin and Kenny Schachter at Flamingo East (1992), Meet me at the Margin curated by Carol Thompson at A Gathering of the Tribes (1996). Group exhibitions include Assemblage: Reordering Chaos curated by Aarne Anton at American Primitive Gallery (1996), Treasures of the Soul: Who Is Rich? curated by Marcus Schubert at the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore (2000), Souls Grown Diaspora curated by Sam Gordon at Apex Art (2020), and Greater New York curated by Ruba Katrib at MoMA PS1 (2021).

Mike Davis (1946–2022) was an American writer, communist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in Los Angeles and beyond, with works such as City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), and, most recently, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020), co-authored by Jon Wiener.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is the current poet laureate of San Francisco, California.

Shangyang Fang is the author of Burying the Mountain (2021).

Alla Gorbunova is the author of Another Matter and It’s the End of the World, My Love, as well as two other books of prose and seven collections of poetry.

Hervé Guibert was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France toward AIDS Hervé Guibert, who wrote in the wake of Jean Genet, Hermann Ungar, and Thomas Bernhard, has also produced an important body of photographs, in the manner of a diary. Just as in his writings, he practices autofiction in his photographs, and his images are nourished by daily life and his intimacy.

Jane Huffman’s debut collection, Public Abstract, was the winner of the 2023 APR / Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The NewYorker, and elsewhere. Jane is a doctoral student at the University of Denver and is editor-inchief of Guesthouse.

Mike Jeffrey is a writer from Rhode Island. His work has appeared in The Idaho Review, Soft Punk Magazine, Boston Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Sharon Kivland is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher. She has just finished writing Almanach, the companion book to Abécédaire (Moist Books, 2022), and she is currently editing it ruthlessly.

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.

Jaime Lowe is the author of Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires (2021), Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind (2017), and Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB (2008). She is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine.

Katie Peterson’s next collection of poems, Fog and Smoke, is forthcoming from FSG in 2024.

Megan Pinto’s first poetry collection is forthcoming from Four Way Books in fall 2024. Recent work can be found in Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, 128 Lit, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn. Find her online at www.meganpinto.com.

Laila Riazi is a writer and doctoral student living in California.

Bud Smith writes stories and works heavy construction in New Jersey. His novel Teenager was published by Vintage in 2022.

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. In 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between Stalin and

Khrushchev clones, led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. He has written numerous plays and short stories, including two volumes of stories forthcoming from NYRB Classics and one forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. He lives in Berlin.

Bharat Jayram Venkat is an assistant professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics with joint appointments in the departments of history and anthropology. He is also the director of the UCLA Heat Lab, an interdisciplinary research team that studies thermal inequality. Venkat is the author of At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021)

Jon Wiener is a professor of history emeritus at UC Irvine. His most recent books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored with Mike Davis, and Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. He is a contributing editor to and member of the board of directors of Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing editor to The Nation, and host of The Nation’s weekly podcast, Start Making Sense.

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