LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth

Rock 'n Roll

From REAKTION

The Monkees Made in Hollywood

Tom Kemper

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Pin-Ups 1972

Third Generation Rock ’n‛ Roll

Peter Stanfield

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Now in Paperback Electric Wizards

A Tapestry of Heavy Music, 1968 to the Present

JR Moores

Heavy music has deserved its own tome but the only thing heavy about his book is its weight—its tone and style are illuminatingly light and wonderfully convivial throughout. Someone get Electric Wizards on the national music curriculum now.”—Wire Paper $22.50

From Rock Legends at Rockfield

Jeff Collins

“For a story begging to be told, Collins does a thorough job, recounting vividly Rockfield’s legacy and session antics from food fights to fisticuffs.”—Classic Rock Magazine Cloth $16.00

Kansas City Star

“[A] stimulating survey of the science of sexual desire… sheds light on a fundamental part of human life.”

Publishers Weekly

“Sex: who doesn’t want to know more about this primordial human drive? Simon LeVay tells all—its biology and the real science behind fantasies, porn, rape, and much more. It’s a fascinating read.”

—Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray

“With Storythinking [Fletcher] invites us on an extraordinary odyssey that enriches understanding of our deep, instinctive impulse to create stories as makers and transformers of our world. Storythinking is nothing less than a cosmological paradigm shift that puts story making and thinking at the center of all that we do.”

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism

This anniversary edition features a new preface in which Spivak reflects on the fortunes of comparative literature in the intervening years and its tasks today.

“Halpern has deftly created a dazzling series of windows into the world of Leibniz.”

—Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life

“The moments that happen pre- and post-band — stories of family, heartache, substance abuse and redemption — prove just as compelling as the backstage antics.”

Frederick Luis Aldama, award-winning author

“Death of a Discipline is a visionary text which can be considered one of the most cutting-edge theoretical works today.”

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 38 SUMMER 2023

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

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

Editorial Interns: Genevieve Nollinger and Kali Tambreé

Cover Art: The artist (Nobuo Sekine) photographing Phase of Nothingness, 1969, at the 1st Contemporary International Sculpture Exhibition, Hakone Open-Air Museum, Shizuoka, 1969. © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

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

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

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BEACH READS FOR THE BRAINY

Celebrate Juneteenth

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Learn Why Women Are Waiting to Be Mothers

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Booklist

Meet the Men Who Fought the Mafia

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Reconsider American Religion

“Examine the rise of secularization in this edifying entry... both ambitious and rewarding.”

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Dear Reader,

Kingdom of the damned. That’s what Romanian surrealist Max Blecher, in the title of his piece for this issue, called Berck. Berck is the French seaside sanatorium town where in the 1920s patients underwent treatments for spinal tuberculosis. While some were “encased in a cage of plaster,” the less lucky were left to wait out grim prognoses. Blecher knew this town and its treatments firsthand that’s how he understood the depths of despair it contained. Am I being too much of a pessimist when I say that the earth has started to feel like one big kingdom of the damned? A 3,900-mile-radius oblate spheroid rock covered in plastic and homicidal maniacs, barreling toward its own demise?

When the USSR dissolved, any utopian ideals had long ago been wrung out of the Soviet space program. But when the hammer-and-sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day, 1991, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was still stationed on the Mir space station. He was left up there, orbiting, essentially forgotten for nearly a year, while tensions built toward the Chechen War and shock therapy raged below. Ground control went on strike. Krikalev eventually hitched a ride back down with some Germans, but while he was there, Mir had a single small window looking out on the endless expanse outside. “Every spare moment, we tried to look at the earth,” he said.

For this issue of LARB Quarterly, we tried to do exactly that to look not at the ways we are stuck or damned on this planet but to imagine being sealed outside of earth, dreaming of coming home. What earth would that be? Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth under their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. It’s Salma Shamel who gave the issue and its omnibus of takes a tagline: “There is nothing redemptive or emancipatory in suffering.” Laura Nelson’s history of Antelope Valley’s communist backto-the-landers teaches us the challenges of building heaven in hell while editor-in-chief Michelle Chihara’s survey of illicit global finance systems tallies the true costs of capital flowing freely, in the dark, behind walled-off fiefdoms. Through vibrant prose, poetry, and fiction, Earth renders life here as alien as it often is.

Yours,

top: Nobuo Sekine

Phase — Mother Earth, 1968

earth, cement; cylinder: 220 x 270 (diameter) cm, hole: 220 x 270 (diameter) cm

installation view, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968

photographer: Osamu Murai

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

bottom: Nobuo Sekine Phase of Nothingness — Cut Stone, 1970 stone, stainless steel, dimensions variable production shot, Genoa, 1970 photographer unknown © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

THINKING IN RUINS

On the Llano del Rio commune

by Laura Nelson

In 1914, a group of young socialists drove their Ford Model Ts over the San Gabriel Mountains and into the desert of the Antelope Valley to escape “the unnatural and almost inhuman state of mind” caused by the pressures of industrial capitalism. Disillusioned with formal politics and abstract revolutionary theories, they set out to form a socialist community and to show that another way of living was possible. “Take your first automobile for the valley,” announced an advertisement for the nascent experiment. “There, on the upper table

of the grand mesa, will grow a co-operative city of marvelous beauty.” They called their project Llano del Rio, Spanish for “the plain of the river.” Over the next three years, thousands of people made the trek to Llano and down to the expanse of yucca trees their movements over the mountains a collective rejection of the “creed of capitalism” and a search for a new way of organizing society.

Last fall, I was sitting in my living room with a group of people who had been gathering as part of “L.A. Study Group,” an informal, ongoing space to learn and think about Los Angeles. Mike Davis, whose writing on the city has been formative for so many, had passed away a few weeks earlier; the room was filled with copies of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, his sprawling 1990 study of the competing dreams, visions, and speculations that have made Los Angeles what it is today. We found ourselves fixated on the opening pages of the book, where Davis turns to Llano del Rio. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was hardly a city, yet boosters and politicians were actively crafting the myths and speculative visions that would lay the groundwork for its future. For Davis, Llano was a “utopian antipode” in this polyphony of visions, the traces of its history evidence of a path not taken. Lingering with a revery on this short-lived experiment, he suggested that “[t]he best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future.”

For months after reading City of Quartz, I couldn’t stop thinking about Llano. What compelled people to give up their lives to join this socialist community? What did they find upon arrival? And what were the afterlives of this ephemeral experiment?

My attempt to work through these questions sent me on a journey through Los Angeles to archives across the city, up over the mountains, and to the arid edge of the Mojave Desert to collect the partial fragments of a dream, to dwell in ruins of past visions. •

When Llano del Rio was formed in 1914, there was no blueprint for capitalism’s counterpoint. “What we must know isn’t in any book,” founder Job Harriman recounted. “We’ve got to go out and discover it by trial and error from the ground up, and it’s going to be tough.” After losing a race to become the first Socialist mayor of Los Angeles in 1911, Harriman was frustrated by the futility of formal politics. Increasingly convinced that the only way to win the hearts and minds of the people was to demonstrate a viable alternative to capitalism, he decided to part ways with the Socialist Party, which was working on gradualist reform through the ballot box. Influenced by the writing of Karl Marx and novelists Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells, he dreamt of a community premised on the values of collectivity and cooperation. Yet he felt compelled to move beyond theory and fiction, to rally other disheartened radicals to join him in creating a socialist oasis in the here and now.

Harriman and his partners bought the defunct Mescal Water and Land Company for $80,000, procuring access to hundreds of acres of desert land about 75 miles north of Los Angeles. Part of this deal included access to local water rights, including the possibility of building a future dam. On a practical level, they set up their socialist venture as a stock-issuing corporation

and hoped to recruit 1,000 stockholders who would collectively own the company through $2,000 worth of stock, paying part up front and then slowly repaying the rest with a guaranteed wage of four dollars per day for contributing “useful work” to the community. The idea was that members would choose work farming, teaching, welding, building homes, cooking that aligned with their interests and abilities. In turn, they could take advantage of all aspects of Llano: schools, a hotel with regular meals, an assembly hall with ongoing lectures, a general store, a post office, doctor’s offices, a barber shop, and more. At Llano, people would have all the “necessaries of life.”

The earliest members of Llano called themselves “colonists,” “pioneers,” and “empire-builders” of a new socialist world. They

envisioned their colony as the “Plymouth Rock of the Cooperative Commonwealth.” Moving to the California desert, specifically the Antelope Valley, they joined a lineage of settlers equipped with ambitious visions and colonial dreams. The land on which Llano was founded had been stewarded for over 11,000 years by many communities, including the Shoshone-speaking Kitanemuk people. Since the 1700s, multiple waves of pioneers Spanish explorers, American ranchers, and gold-seekers moved to the valley in search of prosperity, minerals, and an escape from their former lives. Llano del Rio, a part of this history of displacement, land acquisition, and world-building dreams, fashioned itself a different kind of “outpost.”

In a campaign to recruit members, they framed their community as a moral war

LAURA NELSON

against capitalism and invited people to join their “Army of Co-operation.” Their main recruitment tool was the socialist publication The Western Comrade, which circulated editorials and advertisements extolling the virtues of the venture. Llano enticed people with a chance to escape the “maelstrom of the struggle for existence,” “multitudinous bills,” the never-ending “roar of fruitless promises,” and the ever-increasing traffic of the city (already a concern in 1910s Los Angeles). Away from greed and rampant individualism, members could “strike and remain struck” from industrial capitalism, becoming the shared owners of the land and the tools of their labor. “Are you tired of the struggle in the cut-through competitive system?” one advertisement asked. Another called upon people to enlist in the war for another way of living: “It is

the army of peace, and Llano the outpost of Progress. Will YOU volunteer?”

A haven from the ills of capitalism, Llano also presented itself as a literal paradise. “The climate is delightful,” boasted a piece in The Western Comrade. “Here one is surrounded by the most wondrous of bird, insect and flower life. Here one may sit and draw inspiration for dreams.” Articles and images that circulated in Los Angeles and around the country conjured an Edenic agricultural oasis, with acre upon acre of flourishing pears, apples, plums, apricots, olives, walnuts, and figs. Harriman believed that people had an innate desire to get “back to the land,” and promised prospective members that they would be able to live in an environment of “fruit and flowers, milk and honey.”

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advertisements, Llano employed a sales agent to go around Los Angeles selling its cooperative vision, recruiting members, and taking a cut for each person who signed up. According to one member, the agent was notorious for promising “everything under the sun and heaven on earth” to people who would “sign on the dotted line and give him $500.” At first, new members needed to fill out an application, providing answers to questions like “Do you believe in the profit system?” and “Will solving economic problems ultimately lead to solving the social problem?” This application was later abandoned to expedite getting new members’ down payments. Although people of many racial backgrounds applied, Llano only accepted white applicants. The leaders claimed that their exclusionary policies were “not due to race prejudice but because it is not deemed expedient to mix the races in these communities.”

These early efforts at recruitment were successful; within the first year, hundreds of workers, intellectuals, artists, and dreamers packed their Tin Lizzies and made their way across miles of winding mountain roads. “The people have been coming in faster than ever lately,” Mellie Calvert wrote in a letter in September 1915. “We are so many now we can hardly all get inside at our big meetings.” By the end of that year, there were 499 members.

•

As people arrived at the socialist experiment, their dreams of a postcapitalist oasis often collided with the harsh realities of life in the desert. Walter Millsap recalls driving over the mountains “dreaming about the marvelous things they were going to do at Llano” and being taken aback when

he glimpsed the community from afar:

“When I saw that little bunch of dirty tents strung out on the sand, after I had bumped over the boulders of Big Rock Wash, I said, ‘For God’s sake! Is this the place?’”

New members expecting quaint adobe homes and a beautiful climate instead found flimsy tents and tempestuous storms. “Housing was a sore problem,” one member recalled. Families often lived in makeshift shelters for weeks and months: “Mud, rain, wind, cold, and even heat made the tents inadequate and uncomfortable, particularly if they had no floors.” Meeting notes recounted “a maze of confusion, dissatisfaction, and discontent” and a daily torrent of community members complaining about living conditions. The winter of 1915 proved particularly tumultuous. “We had the awfullest wind + rain I have ever seen,” a young girl named Ruth wrote to her sister that December. “It blew the top to the hotel off + part of the dining room. It blew many of the tents down.” She described an old lady named Lona who was drying clothes as she watched her shelter blow away, carried with the tumbleweeds into the Mojave Desert. Tensions frequently erupted over shortages of food, including staples such as coffee, sugar, and potatoes. A letter recalls a woman from Pasadena “making a terrible howl” at the hotel when she couldn’t get a cup of coffee for a headache. And a couple weeks later, the cook, Mrs. Pickett (“a hot headed little body”), lost her temper and initiated a full-blown fight when a member asked “for the second help of potatoes.” Members who had seen brochures boasting a burgeoning agricultural haven with endless wagonloads of pears, watermelons, cantaloupes, and almonds found a much more monotonous menu. Tony Vacik, who

LAURA NELSON

grew up as a child at Llano, later recalled an interminable pasta dinner: “Too much spaghett’, I hope to tell ya.”

Those who vocalized dissent about life at Llano del Rio were known as “crabbers.”

A survey of the community from fall 1915 found that “a great deal of so-called ‘Porch Oratory’” was taking place during the day, bringing down the morale of the Llano people. Alongside their everyday frustrations about housing and food, the crabbers expressed concerns about the way the community was being run and wondered whether it was even a cooperative. A group calling themselves the “Brush Gang” began meeting in the creosote bushes and discussed overthrowing the leadership from within, or leaving to form their own commune. They adorned their clothing with small sprigs of sage to identify one another. A leader of the Brush Gang, Frank Miller, described Harriman as “the most unscrupulous person he had ever met” with a “mania power” bent on controlling all aspects of the community. In 1915, he wrote to his daughter about the mounting tensions the Brush Gang had grown to 83 in number and had set out to “create a true inside of things.”

As criticism swirled within, outsiders also cast aspersions on the community. The Los Angeles Times, a longtime nemesis of Harriman, was the most vocal critic. They published article after article on problems at Llano with titles like “New Wail from Reds’ Utopia” and “Hopes Blasted in New Colony” as evidence of the experiment’s inevitable demise. In 1915, the California commissioner of corporations wrote a report on the colony, calling Harriman a “czar,” expressing concerns about the power structures of the community, and

arguing that the corporation was defrauding stockholding members by luring them with inaccurate portrayals of the stock values. The L.A. Times quickly issued an article, “Blistering Report on Job Harriman Utopia,” that suggested Llano was on a swift path to implosion. •

Yet despite the drama and criticism, new residents continued to arrive from Los Angeles, and defenders argued that people were missing the point if they expected Llano to be a fully formed utopia from the outset. “[Y]ou cannot build heaven in hell,” John Dequer explained. Working within the confines of capitalism and the existing legal system, he argued that Llano needed to run as “a business enterprise, conducted on business principles, for practical results” before it could begin to operate as a socialist oasis. Another booster, R. K. Williams, described how people showed up at Llano “filled with idealism and notions of a weird form of democracy that are utterly out of place in an institution dealing with things and practicalities.” He stressed that Llano wasn’t a “Utopian phantasmagoria,” but was comprised of people “dealing with things of life” cutting wood, building homes, making food. In order to do anything more ambitious, they first needed to develop a sustainable way of meeting people’s material needs.

For these and other defenders of Llano, the project of cooperation was inevitably long and messy. As Walter Millsap reflected, “They had to start in with what they had and with who they had”; they had to “feel their way” towards utopia. Llano was an attempt to move beyond abstract philosophizing, an environment where people could get their

hands into the soil and join the process of making something with others. “Mankind in mass cares little for abstract doctrines,” Dequer wrote. “They would rather hoe a desert into bloom.” While people worked to build homes and plant hundreds of acres of fruits and vegetables to feed the community, they also began to devise and dream new social and institutional structures that they might eventually grow into.

•

Amidst all the chaos and the frustration, the people who came to Llano repeatedly expressed a shared sense of being in on something together. Harriman believed that the “germ of the new is always within the old,” and that when old institutions “begin to disintegrate, new combinations new institutions” will begin “to take their form,” moving “along new lines” to meet the needs of those who are constantly creating them.

Millsap recalls struggling to find community in Los Angeles, but when he “got into the social life of Llano,” he finally found people who shared his frustration with the conditions of the industrial world, people who wanted to reimagine social structures. Outside of work, members were “bubbling over with exuberance to have a good time,” participating in choruses, mandolin clubs, orchestras, theater groups, arts and crafts groups, baseball teams, football teams, and a constant program of literary discussions and film screenings. They responded to the most challenging moments the storms and interminable general assembly meetings with a defiant conviviality and sense of humor. Millsap recollects “music going on all the time, on every occasion” and people always ready to “go and have a dance.” Mellie Calvert, who was later involved with

the Brush Gang, wistfully remembers attending the first Festival and Dance and dreaming with others of what Llano might become: “Because of a shortage of accommodations many young people brought blankets along and after the dance we slept on mounds of new hay that had been piled in the fields. It was a clear moonlit night with wonderfully clear and bracing air, and with bright stars overhead. We felt happy, exhilarated, and confident that Llano del Rio Co-operative colony would, indeed, become a paradise on earth.”

Another way that people joined the collective imaginary of Llano was through debating its future architecture. Although the city was initially comprised of temporary tents and adobe structures, there was the hope that once they had the means, they would completely rebuild the community. Architects, including feminist Alice Constance Austin, put together elaborate models for what this new city might look like. In a series of essays called “The Socialist City,” Austin argued that a “Socialist City should be beautiful, of course,” and the people should be fashionably dressed. Shaped by Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 urban-planning book Garden Cities of To-morrow, Austin’s blueprint for Llano included radial streets with an underground conveyer to deliver food and clothing from a communal kitchen and laundry. She hoped these structures might alleviate the burden of domestic labor and enable female colonists to pursue whatever work was most compelling to them. Instead of following “the ordinary individualistic plan,” Austin’s ideal city was designed to reflect the community’s collective values with architectures “elastic” enough for members to continuously infuse their

ideas. Prompting lively discussion, Austin’s plans were an invitation to collaborate on dreaming the future structures of Llano.

Another site where people at Llano experimented with new structures was in the creation of their schools. Starting with the premise that “capitalist education” was a “mill” turning out young people “cut and polished to the same size and degree,” they aimed to design schools that would equip young people for cooperation. Prudence Stokes Brown, a disciple of Maria Montessori, led Llano in the formation of multiple schools a Montessori kindergarten, an elementary school, and an industrial high school all environments in which children could “learn by doing.” At the high school, students oversaw their own 65 acres of garden, built houses, cooked food, and looked after goats, horses, rabbits and (1,000) chickens. As one member, Scott Lewis, put it, “[F]or the average person a knowledge of chickens is more useful than the ability to conjugate amo,” and “it is better to know how to saw a board off straight than to read Homer.” Llano students also participated in self-governance, debating and shaping the structures of their education. Within all the Llano schools, there was a repeated emphasis on practical learning that could be applied to the work of communal life.

Like other structures at Llano, the schools were works in progress malleable and changeable institutions that were meant to grow and form alongside those who participated in them. As a community member put it, one should not expect to look at Llano’s schools and find “a finished project, an exhibit that can be expected without finding flaws.” Instead, they pointed to the Industrial School perpetually in

process: “It is not stabilized, even. It is not completed. It is crude and experimental.” The schools, like the social architectures at Llano, were dynamic, ever-shifting, and always-in-formation. They were meant to be inhabited by people, in this case students, who would in turn suffuse them with questions and interests that arose from living in a cooperative society.

In the broadest sense, Llano del Rio was an attempt to create a new social world. In a society where the values of capitalism “Take all you can and keep all you take” prevailed, Job Harriman wondered if it was possible to create the conditions for another social life to flourish: “Can [the creed of capitalism] be overcome by a group of people located in the very heart of such a system, even as it affects the people in that very group? Can a new order of things be established in such a community out of which will grow a new social spirit? Can the pathway to a higher social life be blazed through the thorns and thickets and swamps of capitalism?” Llano del Rio an imperfect, incomplete project was an attempt to live out and convene around these questions. Along the way, the thousands of people who moved through Llano gathering on the porch, sharing meals, dancing late at night, arguing about architectural plans, and helping shape the schools were all part of its social spirit. •

In 1917, as architectural plans for the city were still being debated, the people of Llano del Rio found out that they did not have access to the water they needed. A year before, 20 local ranchers had sued Llano over access to the Big Rock Creek, calling them “socialistic plunderers” who

were attempting to “cover the face of the earth.” After a complex and costly legal battle, which led to a curtailed plan to build a nearby dam, it became clear that water would be an insurmountable obstacle. The tensions around water collided with the United States’ entry into World War I. Many members were either drafted or drawn back to the city for higher-paying jobs. With this loss of labor, the numbers at the colony dwindled; leaders of the remaining community made the decision to relocate their venture to Louisiana, where a much smaller New Llano continued for another two decades. Within days of the socialists departing for Louisiana, Llano del Rio was looted by local ranchers. They smashed windows, demolished buildings, and carried off pieces of the hotels, schools, and workshops where people had danced, debated, and tried to enact a different kind of world.

Today, the ruins of Llano remain off of Pearblossom Highway in the Antelope Valley. For over 100 years, this site has been a destination for writers, artists, radicals, and others seeking to glimpse the remnants of an unfinished dream. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis describes returning to Llano del Rio in 1990 “to see if the walls would talk to me.” Instead, he came upon “two twenty-year-old building laborers from El Salvador,” who shared the hopes that brought them to Los Angeles and the realities they had actually found upon arrival.

In their book Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles (1992), Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon, and Lionel Rolfe write about how decades of writing on Llano has “piled distortion upon distortion until a recognizable picture” is

no longer a possibility. There is a wistfulness in the years of palimpsestic mythmaking about this community. Some read the failed utopia as proof that another way isn’t possible; others hold onto it as evidence that things indeed might have unfolded differently.

When I traveled out to the ruins of Llano del Rio earlier this spring, I was so carsick on the winding highway of State Route 2 that I felt dizzy when I eventually arrived. Wandering past the stone columns and chimneys of the hotel, I found a place to sit, out of the glaring sun, in the concrete foundation of a silo once built for alfalfa storage. Listening to the hum of the trucks whirling by, I thought of a line from a piece that Aldous Huxley wrote on Llano del Rio in 1953: “What pleasure, on a mild night in May or June, to sit out of doors under one’s privately owned cottonwood tree and listen, across a mile of intervening sagebrush, to the music of Socialists!” What music was I listening for now, following the movements of so many who had come out to this small piece of desert over the last hundred years?

After spending weeks looking through the Llano archives, I found it increasingly difficult to make sense of the dissonance between the projected visions of the community and the criticisms of it, from within and without. At first, I found myself seduced by the all-too-familiar narrative of the imploding utopia it was satisfying to see hubristic men, aiming to colonize land and establishing a segregated utopia, encounter the limits of their vision. Reading through letters, meeting notes, and memoirs, I saw clearly that the reality for many who came to Llano often lagged far behind expectations. Like the city of Los Angeles, which was built on speculation and booster

mythmaking, Llano was also a chimera a fantasy sold to prospective members as a refuge and escape from their current lives.

Yet, instead of tidily dismissing the project, I found that I wanted to linger in the space between the dream and the failure, to attend to the messy and ever-shifting memories of those who moved through and helped create it. Because at its heart, it seems that Llano was a social experiment shaped and reshaped by the many people workers, defectors, mothers, and children who came to the desert to practice into a different world. Even when they were buried in snow, or out of coffee, or embroiled in fights at hours-long general assembly meetings, they continued to try their hands at a society that valued cooperation over individualism. Did these people find what they were seeking in this expanse of desert? Was it worth it to participate in this ephemeral experiment? As I looked and listened, I found traces of their incomplete dreams and visions all around in letters to loved ones, in photographs, in the glinting shards of broken glass. As one member put it, there is no singular, composite story of Llano: “We must gather as many scraps as we can find.”

•

In a 1962 Los Angeles Times article, “Banker Has No Regrets Over Socialist Colony,” Gentry McCorkle reflects on giving all his money his bank interest, his home, $35,000 to Llano del Rio: “I have no regrets about underwriting the venture. I am sorry it failed. I would do it again if I knew it had a chance of success.” After leaving Llano, he returned to banking and “reaped other fortunes under the profit system [he] sought to defeat.”

In a memoir published the same year, Walter Millsap reflects on Job Harriman at the end of his life: “He died a broken-hearted man, bowed down with the tragedy of the human race, and knowing that there would be a long, weary struggle with the changing of habits before mankind would ever find happiness.”

During the summer of 1917, Mellie Calvert attended a picnic with 50 members of the Brush Gang. Despite being many of the colony’s most vocal critics, they expressed their continued “faith in those ideals of co-operation [which] had been strengthened by their experiences at Llano.” The picnic was a celebration of the life they had in the community, and “nobody said anything about being sorry they had participated.”

Trying to recall one of the colony’s May Day celebrations, Millsap laments not having a “phonograph record” memory of his time at Llano: “I am sorry that it is impossible to repeat what was said, or to convey to you the mannerisms, the tones used and the spirit that ebbed and flowed like a wave.”

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness — Earth Circle, 1975

bronze, 90 x 90 x 20 cm

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

Financial thrillers and global capital

by Michelle Chihara

On an unusually rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.

A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.

The reporters began their story with a blurry image of a “stick” flying through the air a tiny thumb drive packed with financial data. The stick, they said, was leaked to Felix Rohrbeck and Oliver Schröm when they were reporting for the newspaper Die Zeit: a heroic young woman at the tax authority blows the whistle, and then an editor at Die Zeit begins spying on the young reporter! The editor tips off his banker buddies that their scheme is about to be uncovered, but he can’t kill the story. The once-respectable Warburg Bank sends teams of lawyers to threaten the magazine. The international nature of the fraud brings together a team of journalists from across Europe usually bitter rivals for late-night sessions of data analysis and encrypted uploads over pizza. And now, after almost a decade, the facts of the abuse are known: cum-ex trades have robbed treasuries across the globe of upwards of $60 billion. One German banker is actually in jail.

In the United States and Germany, legal restrictions have tightened around the scam in question, and that banker, a senior executive at Warburg, was sentenced to more than five years in prison. This is mild progress, at least in comparison with the sketchy mortgage-backed derivatives that brought us 2008, for which few financiers faced any repercussions. But in the Palisades, the reporters ended their presentation with a caveat. They showed recent

footage of a dramatic undercover sting operation in which Schröm posed as a billionaire for a meeting in the City, London’s financial district, complete with a luxury watch on his wrist and shell companies on the books. Hidden cameras from an investigative TV show were filming as Schröm sat down with a man who promised more profits from the trick, still being played in Dubai and London. When Schröm-asbillionaire asked if this deal was still called cum-ex, the man in the footage said, “I’d call it event driven ” The fraud, it was clear, was still going down.

The technicalities of the cum-ex fraud are complex. The nickname comes from the Latin for with and without, as in with and without a dividend tax (and it’s pronounced, ahem, to rhyme with womb-X). It worked like this: banks and traders find stocks that pay dividends to shareholders. The way many tax authorities deal with tax on dividends is to refund money to shareholders after the tax was paid elsewhere. So, traders found ways, using short sales and stock loans, to make it appear briefly that there were two owners for a single stock. And then the banks, in that brief window, got governments to pay the tax rebate on a single dividend stock more than once. The first tax refund on the stock is legal. But there were never two owners; there was just fancy financial footwork to create the illusion of multiple owners. And the second time the rebate gets paid out, it’s just theft. At their worst, scammers can get tax authorities to pay the rebate three times, or five times.

So, while tax evasion can also be illegal, and the derivatives in 2008 existed in an ethical gray area, cum-ex is straight-up fraud.

The cum-ex technicalities present just

one example among many of the obscene fortunes available to those who exploit financial loopholes, in a global system riddled with mechanisms that allow for enormous secrecy. Call it “dark money” or “illicit financial flows,” “offshore finance” or “money laundering,” tax avoidance or tax evasion however you refer to it these things warp democracies. The dollar damage from cumex dwarfs California’s budget deficit this year. It’s not legal, and in the United States it’s even more outlawed than before, but in systems that reward and create vast flows of secret funds, the line between legal and illegal loopholes becomes not only blurry but somewhat meaningless. In many ways, loopholes define the lacy patterns of the entire fabric. Financial secrecy is woven so tightly into the texture of global capitalism today that pulling at any one thread tugs on every aspect of financial power.

The shenanigans needed to make cumex work involve using short sales and stock ownership certificates to make it appear as if multiple parties own a stock at the same time. It’s sneaky bookkeeping. When Rohrbeck and Schröm approached this situation, as storytellers, they knew that as soon as you start talking accounting details, especially to people who don’t stand to make millions from them, eyes glaze over. That’s why the Germans showed footage of Schröm posing in his ersatz billionaire’s sports jacket, with an ascot, in a bugged hotel room. It’s hard to give the victims of cross-border tax scams a face and a story. The numbers are mesmerizingly and disconcertingly large, so the Germans emphasized the thrill of the chase.

In France, Le Monde called cum-ex “the biggest robbery of the century.” But in the United States, there was little coverage.

That night in the Palisades, I tried to convince Rohrbeck and Schröm to consider making a podcast version of the story. They seemed ambivalent: they kind of wanted to move on.

Cum-ex isn’t the biggest or even the most spectacular example of financial malfeasance in Raymond Baker’s new book Invisible Trillions: How Financial Secrecy Is Imperiling Capitalism and Democracy and the Way to Renew Our Broken System. Not even close. In fact, it gets about a page, out of some 260 pages, in a chapter called “Broken Banks.”

Baker, founder and president of the think tank Global Financial Integrity, has spent decades pushing the world to address the issue of “illicit financial flows.”

He’s one of the foremost experts on these matters and has been able to move the needle in Washington, DC, with GFI, which he started after his first book on illicit finance. “We’ve got to elevate this issue,” he told me. “I read stories for 50 years about drug dealers who then laundered their money. Throughout those 50 years, the flow of drugs into the United States has never been curtailed and the price of drugs has never gone up. Fifty years of stories haven’t affected the reality. They never got to the bigger picture, which is that we are facilitating the money that keeps these guys in business.”

When Baker said this to me, he could only be described as upbeat. He is an energetic figure who has played a major role in the passage of crucial legislation around foreign assets and money laundering. His fluency in the details of the existential threat, combined with his somewhat

counterintuitive positivity, make him eminently persuasive.

For Baker, cum-ex is just another loophole in the lacework, more openly fraudulent perhaps but otherwise barely distinguishable from the rest of the porous mess. His final sentence about cum-ex in Invisible Trillions reads: “This stunning example of turpitude is likely to roll on through the courts for years to come.” On the next page, BNP Paribas gets a few paragraphs for violating US sanctions, and then Wells Fargo gets just shy of three pages for aggressive policies intended to abuse and cheat depositors. “A few more examples will illustrate the degree of depravity seen in recent years,” Baker writes, before devoting a few words to Goldman Sachs and the 1MDB scandal out of Malaysia. Invisible Trillions is a bird’s-eye view, in page by page snippets, of the planetary situation. But the challenge for all of these financial writers, whether they’re deep in a single scheme or high above at ten thousand feet, is how to delineate the inhuman scale of the problem while getting it to land in human terms. How do you make bookkeeping in Dubai seem important in Los Angeles? •

Baker doesn’t pause on the lurid details of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad kleptocratic boondoggle because he’s not writing a financial thriller. He does call it “one of the biggest financial scandals of all time,” and this one you may remember. In the island nation of Malaysia, a financier named Jho Low gained control of a sovereign wealth fund. Working with the prime minister, the mild-mannered Low, sometimes described as an Asian Great Gatsby, pilfered billions of dollars from the

Malaysian people. He squandered it on van Goghs and Monets and diamonds; on a see-through piano, a jet, and a white Ferrari he gave to Kim Kardashian; and on a yacht named Equanimity. Plus, in a supremely ironic move that seems too excessive to be real, Low funded Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a big-spending trader who’s indicted for money laundering and securities fraud, serves some country-clubbish prison time, and reinvents himself as a lavishly paid sales coach and motivational speaker. (A true story, of course.) After the case came to light, the Department of Justice repossessed some of Low’s paintings and yachts. DiCaprio returned a Picasso, a Basquiat, and Marlon Brando’s Oscar for On the Waterfront all gifts from Low. A very small handful of executives at Goldman Sachs had to step down. The stunning turpitude continues to roll through the courts.

Low made headlines for his debauched evenings spent buying bottle service for Paris Hilton’s entourage, for the seethrough piano that wouldn’t fit out the door of a model’s apartment in New York, and for the political donations funneled through one of the members of the Fugees. But Baker doesn’t have time for color reporting. He seeks to draw attention to the systemic distortion of which Low is only one small part.

Baker writes that 1MDB was a “hugely destructive scandal that took advantage of every particle of opacity available within financial secrecy structures.” He imagines that John C. Whitehead, Reagan’s secretary of state and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, is rolling over in his grave. Baker is sure, that is, that Whitehead stood for

something fundamentally better, that this bastion of the Washington Consensus would have disapproved.

(It’s possible. On its good-hair days, the Washington Consensus looked like coordination among US institutions, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, intended to help emerging or developing countries enter Cold War markets. On other days, its critics saw it as a means for the United States to keep everyone under the dollar’s thumb. Meanwhile, elements of the secrecy system were set up and strengthened by Reagan’s CIA during the Iran–Contra affair.)

Low flaunted his ill-gotten gains across Manhattan and Hollywood and had no problem finding friends at Goldman Sachs. But if you’re looking for the full picture of complicity and shamelessness, you have to pick up a financial thriller like Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World (2018). It’s by a pair of Wall Street Journal correspondents, Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, who paint a vivid picture of eager financiers shifting the shells around and helping Low create plausible deniability.

As with cum-ex, 1MDB was ultimately taken down by in-depth financial reporting from a number of intrepid journalists. The complexity of global finance today means that journalists must cooperate, often via secure online databases and across national boundaries. Before Wright and Hope, the environmentalist and anti-corruption advocate Clare Rewcastle Brown broke the 1MDB story on her blog Sarawak Report. For the journalists who do this kind of coverage, it takes more and more legwork to get these stories, with less and less glamor or payoff once you do. So, they work

together in ways they never used to. Every now and then, someone buys the rights for a TV show. Today the rights to Billion Dollar Whale are evidently owned by the playwright David Henry Hwang and actress Michelle Yeoh.

Financial journalists make a living from thrillers like these, which bring attention to individual cases. But especially when made into TV shows, thrillers have a tendency to wrap things up with some kind of happy ending. For example, while Billion Dollar Whale highlights many systemic problems, it ends with the Department of Justice going after the stolen loot. And the DOJ did eventually recover $700 million of all that was stolen by Low. But if audiences feel that this means that the Malaysian people were made whole, then we are not focused on the system of financial secrecy.

In Invisible Trillions, Baker concludes his discussion of 1MDB by writing about the American lawyers who made money with Goldman Sachs on the way up and then profited from protecting the thieves on the way down. A couple of Goldman Sachs execs got slapped on the wrist, and the crooked prime minister got sentenced to some jail time. Things happened, to other people, while the lawyers walked away as usual. Any sense of an ending focused on the DOJ suggests that some kind of moral order has been restored.

Today, Jho Low is still free and still has Equanimity. He was last seen floating somewhere near Macau.

Hope, the Billion Dollar Whale co-author, recently said in his Whale Hunting newsletter that Low has probably been working with the Chinese government, potentially spying, around their Belt and Road Initiative. China is one of the world’s

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness — Cut Stone, 1970 stone, stainless steel, dimensions variable production shot, Genoa, 1970

photographer unknown © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

largest sources of illicit money, and its “anti-corruption” campaigns can be hard to distinguish from moves to consolidate the Party’s authority. It has likely folded Low, the avatar of Malaysian kleptocracy, into its massive global infrastructural expansion. The Belt and Road Initiative is something like China’s version of the Washington Consensus, a push to place Chinese power and Chinese currency at the physical and financial center of international relations. Low is just a pawn in their game. But even if the Chinese eventually allow Low to be punished under US and Malaysian jurisdiction, Beijing is unlikely to take any broader bids for financial transparency kindly.

The United States is the biggest dog in the hunt for financial accountability, and at the same time, it’s the fastest growing sinkhole for invisible money. Even if, as Baker suggests, the US backs wider efforts to make finance more transparent, Beijing likely won’t take that as friendly good-government policymaking. Even if we elevate this issue, and especially if we shout it from the rooftops, any US actions against financial secrecy may well be perceived as international aggression.

Once it has metastasized through the whole structure, secrecy is just another form of financial power.

There are at least six or seven small sections of Invisible Trillions that summarize material other authors have laid out in entire books. The subjects of all three of David Enrich’s financial thrillers the manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, Deutsche Bank, and white-shoe law firms get a few pages in Trillions.

Glencore, the octopus-like giant in

mining and commodities, was the topic of veteran investigative reporter Ken Silverstein’s 2015 book The Secret World of Oil. Glencore remains in the news for its labor practices around the extraction of cobalt in the Congo.

Baker mentions the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, projects released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as part of an international effort that made troves of leaked documents from the systems of secrecy available to reporters. Hundreds of reporters cooperated to make the data in these papers accessible to their respective markets scores of teams like cum-ex’s in those late-night, pizza-fueled story sessions. Panama and Paradise were the focus of investigative reporter Jake Bernstein’s 2017 book Secrecy World, which was later made into a movie by Steven Soderbergh called The Laundromat (2019).

This epic trail of destruction or that greatest scam all become part of Baker’s larger list, illustrating that the Deutsches and the law firms and the laundromats of the world are still going strong.

By zooming in on particular people and cases, authors lure readers in and make the debauchery and the suffering real. By zooming out, Baker hopes to gesture towards solutions that might go beyond putting a lone trader in jail.

Underlying all of this is the fundamental question: how do you get people to care about something ubiquitous but invisible, something that’s everywhere and nowhere all at once?

•

The problem is hard to name. “Offshore” sounds like something peripheral and distant. It no longer captures the way that

South Dakota and Wyoming have become centers of secrecy. “Illicit financial flows” is precise but a bit Latinate. “Secrecy world” and “invisible trillions” are mysterious but, like “flows,” can make the thing seem diffuse, impossible to pin down.

Try Moneyland a place that exists outside of any one nation, outside of any one government’s ability to regulate a particular currency or market, but hovering wherever there’s great wealth. As long as you have enough funds to get Deutsche’s client services department on the phone, or to buy a passport from Malta, you can visit Moneyland. It exists between and above the laws, beyond any jurisdiction, but always within reach of a penthouse and a $22 cocktail.

The term comes from the British writer Oliver Bullough, whose approach to financial journalism combines fast-paced narrative with a metaphorical apprehension of the entire situation. “How do you get away from an inherently depressing and complicated story?” he said to me. “It’s spinach journalism, right? As in, it’s good for you, but no one actually likes it it’s not necessarily what you want to pick up at the airport. So how do you put some butter in it?”

Bullough’s subtitle to his 2019 book Moneyland, The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World or, in a different edition, Why Thieves & Crooks Now Rule the World & How to Take It Back summarizes the goal of his efforts to map this elusive global space. Bullough quotes UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman: “Our planet as a whole has a net debt, a net financial debt, which of course is not possible at a global level.” The inflows and outflows don’t match up. So, Bullough writes, “One more country is needed in the

spreadsheet to make the columns match: let’s put it between Monaco and Mongolia. That seems apt.”

Moneyland begins with Paul Manafort. Manafort, like Jho Low, worked with a kleptocratic president, channeling money out of Ukraine for himself and spending it on luxury goods and real estate. And once Manafort became Trump’s campaign chair, this story had direct consequences for American and Ukrainian, rather than Malaysian, democracy. Bullough includes more character development and color than Baker in his book, but he too works to distance himself from the lurid details. He visits the dumpy offices of one of Manafort’s shell companies in a nondescript part of London. Instead of focusing on the “ostrich-skin jackets and luxury condominiums,” he writes that he wants to understand what links Manafort to the pedestrian part of the city, hiding behind its lack of glitz. This approach will give “a glimpse behind the personalities, into the hidden workings of the financial system, into the secret country that I call Moneyland.”

Bullough’s next book, Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything (2022), turns its attention to the history and the role of London’s financial center. It has the most lucid account of the Eurodollar that I have ever read. The book describes England as a butler to the kleptocrats who stepped into the power vacuums created by the end of the Cold War. All of the City’s sophistication and expertise, at the center of global finance, now cater to the desires of a small handful of men sucking money out of the periphery. “It’s become an incredib-

ly competent well-spoken assistant,” he told me.

Butler’s account of the men and women whose actions created and consolidated the current system is itself exceedingly British, devastating in its wry understatement. “There is a saying,” Bullough writes in his account of “low white tax morale” in the colonies, “that if you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression, and that is how many Europeans responded to the changes sweeping across Africa and Asia.” The story of England’s transformation into a financial butler is also the story of the postcolonial world slipping away from the promise of self-governance and democracy, bit by bit, as the sticky fingers of financiers reached around the globe.

Bullough sometimes puts his sense of humor to work running bus tours in London. Modeled on the star tours that gawk at actors in Hollywood, his tours map the web of fancy homes that reporters have identified as belonging to kleptocrats. These mansions, which stud London’s posh neighborhoods, usually sit empty, driving up prices by parking illicit financial flows in shell-company-owned, money-laundering properties. In February, Bullough told me in an email that they had another tour coming up, but he seemed fatalistic about it. He said it would only highlight “the failure to do much about oligarchs.” He warned me of another wave of EB-5 visas about to hit Los Angeles. The program is another source of dark money, and he warned of serious issues. A group of investors who used the EB-5 visa program is already in court with unpaid contractors on a mega-development, now sitting stalled, in Downtown L.A.

In 2011, the former editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, reviewing Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, called it “a dismaying Big Bang of a book: a chronicle of capitalism’s frailty and foulness that digs far beyond its tax haven title and indicts the system that renders such crookedness not merely possible, but entirely predictable.” Preston admired the book, to some degree, but wrote: “Really, we’re talking about a universal way of business life here, about a system so entrenched, so formidable in the lobbying, so familiar in its assumptions, that even 2008 can’t blast it away.” He criticized Shaxson for making “the conspiracy seem too vast and all-encompassing.” Preston basically felt that Shaxson’s book on financial secrecy and malfeasance was too depressing.

In 2011, Shaxson wrote: “Offshore is how the world of power now works.”

•

Sometime in 2002, I was introduced to Stephen Pizzo, a one-time real estate broker turned investigative reporter. I was trying to write about the collapse of Enron, the energy company and financial boondoggle built on weather derivatives. I wasn’t in a newsroom, but I wanted Pizzo’s advice. How could I go deeper on this kind of story?

I had reason to imagine he might have some helpful tips. When Pizzo bought the small-town Russian River News, he almost stumbled onto one of the biggest financial scandals of the 1980s. Savings and loans were major players in the financial world at the time, and like the recently failed Silicon Valley Bank, they came up against an asset liability mismatch. Pizzo, along with one

of his staff and a reporter for the National Thrift News, co-authored the most important book about this early crisis, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans (1989).

On the dry outskirts of Sebastopol, Pizzo and his wife rode up on a motorcycle to meet me and my boss at the time, but he wasn’t much interested in talking. Inside Job had been a national bestseller, sure, but Pizzo felt that the book hadn’t done much good. The banks got bailed out and the same cycles of deregulation and bad financial behavior rolled on. I don’t remember Pizzo seeming bitter, but he basically wished me luck and cruised away.

In March, Silicon Valley Bank’s uninsured depositors were made whole. Venture capitalists on Twitter, who had been trumpeting Elon Musk’s libertarian ideas about “disruption” as long as they were making a killing, suddenly had remarkably little shame about demanding state help. They evidently felt that, as “innovators,” they deserved the private profits until it came time once again to socialize the losses. Most of the big tech companies have money parked in secrecy world, in which crypto plays a new and amplifying role.

As Pizzo might have pointed out, there are so many ways that we have been here before. •

I still think about Pizzo, but in a way, I’m not sure what I expected him to tell me. Nor am I sure what I hoped to hear from Baker or Bullough. They had written their books; what more can financial reporters do?

Many of the books mentioned here, and a slew of those unmentioned, focus on a specific aspect of the system, a single case

where justice might be served, or a specific fix, and each one mortgage-backed securities, student loans in higher ed, payday lending, inter-bank lending manipulation, cum-ex double-counted payments, misinvoiced trades seems necessary. Solving any one of these issues might get us closer to a saner financial system.

According to Americans for Financial Reform, closing the carried interest tax loophole on private equity executives alone could raise between $1.4 billion and $18 billion annually. This one tax loophole seems worth a fight.

But whose fight is it? Each book, each issue, returns me to the question of how you get people to care. Those three words carried interest tax — are eye-glazing by themselves. And with each loophole fixed, we know others will pop up, like Whac-aMole.

I hold Pizzo in my mind’s eye, riding off on his Harley.

The layers of secrecy created by anonymous shell companies permeate the global economy. Lobbyists from private equity, banking, oil, real estate anything that Goldman Sachs has ever touched would go to bat against any effort to peel these layers back. I put this to Raymond Baker as a question: If we try to shut down shell companies, won’t all of the rich and powerful rally against it? Because shell companies benefit all of the rich and powerful? He basically said sure, maybe. We gotta do it anyway. And the US, as the center of global finance, has to lead the way.

We can’t have both transparency and competition for incoming international flows. The race to a bottom lined with tax havens and economic development zones must be stopped.

It’s easy to call for doing everything everywhere all at once zoom in, zoom out, take small steps towards overall change! But with each financial investigation and economic critique that I read, I risk being overwhelmed. There’s no one villain at the wheel, the problem is deeply systemic, and even when we identify capitalism itself as the source of the problem, the conspiracy can seem too vast. It’s clear that I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed. When the sense of being powerless makes people feel too helpless, many turn to cult-like online communities, with violent solutions.

It seems pedantic to suggest that financial books and journalists should point to specific collective solutions, efforts being made to fight the issues raised. Pedantic but apt. Thus: A relatively large group of labor organizations and civil rights groups has rallied around the carried interest tax loophole, best represented by a group called the Hedge Clippers (in reference to hedge funds). The loophole almost got outlawed but was then kept open by politicians taking money from private equity PACs. This setback is disheartening, but the coalition behind the fight is not. And it has no reason to disband once that loophole is closed. The coalition itself elevates the issue.

Or maybe people should just start showing up at the registered address for shell companies in their neighborhoods. Even if the trillions are invisible, perhaps moneyland can be occupied.

Nobuo Sekine is a pivotal figure of the postwar Japanese arts movement Mono-ha (“school of things”). Sekine’s guerrilla earthwork Phase —  Mother Earth was central in the conceptualizing and subsequent naming of the movement, considered by many the predecessor to more site-specific and transient works of the period. The term designates a young group of artists in Japan from 1968–73 many of whom were art students graduating or pursuing postgraduate studies around the time of the student riots in that country. Sekine’s own artistic and philosophical interests included topology, being, and matter through his explorations of space, materiality, reflection, and phenomenality.

The works characteristic of Mono-ha arranged the natural and the constructed, often using materials like wax, earth, lead, and tar. Monoha’s key features were impermanence, an

Nobuo Sekine

Phase—Mother Earth, 1968 production shot, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968 photographer unknown from left: Susumu Koshimizu, Katsurō Yoshida, Nobuo Sekine © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

emphasis on nature that resisted the homogeny of Western modernism both in the sense of philosophical thought and industrialization, and a grounded contextualization of works as site-specificity and elemental and material properties whether it was nature or industrial. In this sense, Mono-ha referred not to a reductionism of the works nor form, but rather a resistance of the commodity of the art as a representative object or the artist as sovereign. Instead, these works emphasized the make up of the object and its process including eventual decomposition or undoing. Archival images of Sekine’s process of earthworks-making, therefore, seem necessary in presenting works indicative of Mono-ha. In Sekine’s work, and continued in the tradition of more Mono-ha works, we cannot isolate our impressions of and on nature from nature, but ultimately submit to its unseizable force / becoming.

facing page: Nobuo Sekine

Phase—Mother Earth, 1968 production shot, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968 photographer: Susumu Koshimizu © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

THE BATTLE FOR LOVE

by Camila Fabbri, translated by Robin Myers

The women show up sleepy. One rings the buzzer. I appreciate her courage. The door opens and we’re each assigned a manicurist. There are six of us at the service of nails: ours, theirs. We all want our cuticles reduced to their subtlest expression, and we want to make sure we choose the perfect color for two weeks of semipermanent polish. An assistant offers us some coffee; we thank her. The work begins

in silence because we’re still half-asleep. The three manicurists are beautiful, cateyed. Mine is fair-skinned and sleekhaired, a sort of Avril Lavigne on the lam in Argentina, with a Buenos Aires accent and hiking boots and her own nails painted black. She’s so shy and pale that she seems almost transparent, but she works with a tenderness I can feel in the fingers of my right hand. The woman beside me starts to recount her latest amorous disaster. The girl who shattered her heart into countless pieces. What’s her sign, her manicurist asks. Leo, the woman replies, and the rest of us glance down at our hands-in-progress. It’s a tough zodiac sign for an ensemble, we agree. Although, deep down, we know that this is true of all signs and none, that the timing of your birth doesn’t make you more or less difficult. The woman’s breakup, her spite, her parting wish to have her hands look good despite her grief unites us in some pointless way. We too fell in love once, and we know the rocky ground ahead. We could easily finish our aesthetic business here and make our way to the nearest bar, where we’d keep sharing stories about the endings that still undo us. About the moment when that man or that woman started glancing elsewhere, disinterest hovering around their eyes, their nose, their ears. Disinterest like a bowtie, an accessory donned and never removed. That’s when I fall silent, because I don’t have much else to contribute to the conversation. The meeting or parting of eyes and lips is too far off. Love is something that passed me by. Time goes on, and the shell against sensation gets thicker and tougher until it embeds itself, growing and growing. Now we’re all silent: we’re peering too deep inside, it turns out, and maybe we aren’t crazy about what we

see. But our nails look great. It’s as if we’d had a pair of new hands implanted. As if we could say, in unison: now we’re ready.

Romantic outcomes are things that happen to other people. I don’t necessarily just mean outcomes but also beginnings, coincidences, plot twists in faraway places. There’s a little bit of everything in their stories, a jumble of circumstances. The woman who met a man through a long-distance collaboration. How they looked at each other deeply for months on Zoom, as if, despite themselves, some great bolt of lightning had cracked through the screen. They break up with their current partners and she moves to a new city, a new country, into his apartment. Once they find themselves in the same place, they wander the streets lined with new buildings, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking in a state of sweet exaltation. Maybe they’d never even held hands before. But now they do, for the first time, even though they’ve already exchanged words more formidable than two pairs of hands. And they’re doing it, trying, wanting to try. And something is forged there. Or the guy who met another guy while walking their dogs. Forced into chatting about who they were, what they did for a living, as their dogs tussled and sprinted and lunged at a bicyclist’s legs. The guys who wound up kissing in the same park a few months later, their dogs nearby but largely forgotten, making promises of total devotion they’d keep only in part but even in part means a promise kept. Or the couple, for example, that’s been living together for three years, with lawn chairs on the balcony and a gray cat. The duo that no one ever thought would flourish, but there they are: marrying in elegant, loose-fitting clothes in a garden with tall trees, wishing

each other a whole list of things, cutting a white cake with a yellow center, feeding each other mouthfuls of it. Smiling for the camera, for what will instantaneously leap into the virtual realm and sail into the eyes of a stranger, who will let out a long sigh, longing for a similar experience. That’s where they’ll be, making promises, because promising is a stage of romance. If you don’t invoke a seemingly improbable future, then there’s no union.

In today’s world, which is very different from the newly technological world of the ’90s, forever-romances are those relationships or commitments that last six to 10 years. That’s forever. There’s nothing more forever than this accumulation of even-numbered years it’s rare for them to last seven or 11; they’re always even shared by two people in hopes of remaining stable, accompanied, and safe. But there are other people who miss the mark, who come unplugged. Who take in such stories from the jury box or the witness stand, drawing conclusions or adding nuance for the sake of vicarious fanaticization. These are usually the people who fall silent in conversation. While others clutch their glasses and flash their teeth in response to clever remarks, the quiet ones tuck the glimmers of these occasions into their pockets, discovering a bonus track in their absolute silence. It’s much harder for these people to fall in love.

That’s the group I’m in.

In your thirties, singlehood is still a flaw. Something to be cured. Something to be removed. Being alone is almost never a natural state, something to return to, something that can actually be chosen. Even the construction to be alone, to be on your own, is freighted with melancholy, with mournful affliction in any city or landscape. The

desire to solve solitude is shot through with a kind of urgent demand, and there we are, groping around, mired in the frenetic labor of finding someone. And in that halfhearted search, we go on dates in bars or restaurants. We expose our everyday lives, submit our resumes, in the instant zeal to recite who we are, what we’re looking for, why we’re doing what we’re doing. And the other person approves or disapproves and so do we. We chat with the waitress in a show of ease, trying to act as if this isn’t a first date, although everything screams that it is. That we’re two people in the throes of evaluating each other’s behavior and intentions. And we focus our attention on unusual things when we sit down with strangers for the first time. We order a drink, maybe something to eat, depending on the hour but nothing too abundant, so they won’t catch us with our mouth full, or so our face won’t twist into a first impression we wouldn’t want to make. If the conversation escalates, then that’s progress, but if there are more than three silences in a short span, we’d better make a run for it. No direct eye contact, because we don’t want to send signals we don’t mean, but we can’t look at the ground, either, or at our phones; to look is to emphasize and to not look is impolite. Then it’s time to pay and there we are, mirroring our smiles. We don’t really feel like getting involved, so we walk a few deserted blocks in the dark. We wait for the stoplights to change. We laugh at something. We share the joke. Falling in love is like cluttering your house. We’d rather keep everything in its place. We hug and thank each other. For sharing a kind of implicit search that isn’t our own but belongs to something larger than ourselves, a custom, a commandment of sorts. We walk to our

respective bus stops. We reach for our ear buds. I listen to Violeta Parra, the eternally besotted, the heartbroken, the heartbreaker. I don’t know what he’s listening to, but I can handle the intrigue. He must be listening to something. As the bus pulls up, I lift my hand to wave. There I am. The great middle-aged single citizen of Buenos Aires, cheerful, satisfied, boarding a bus in the middle of the night.

I WAS DETERMINED TO REMEMBER

Harriet

Jacobs

and the corporeality of slavery’s legacies

by Koritha Mitchell

“ I had my grandchildren with me. Trying to have a nice time. But that’s what we ended up talking about. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”

I met Mr. Griffin on a quiet road in Edenton, North Carolina, where he passed our group in his motorized wheelchair and changed direction to come ask what we were doing. I chuckled to myself as he approached. An older Black man in a baseball cap, he reminded me of the watchful elders from my youth whose presence usually kept me from trying to sneak around. What I took to be his nosiness quickly turned into a pleasant conversation about the town. Mr. Griffin had approached our group as a public historian was leading us to various sites related to Harriet Jacobs, who was born and enslaved in Edenton. At age 29, Jacobs escaped to the North. A decade later, she authored the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

Edenton resident Susan Inglis was with us on this tour. She descends from the town’s most prominent families those who benefited most from slavery and she knew everyone we encountered. Mr. Griffin was no exception. She nodded as he went from casual ease to intense frustration about the pillory that had been preserved as a historic relic, between the town’s courthouse and jail. The wooden structure is unmistakable. One immediately imagines a person bent over with their head and hands restrained. It is not surprising that Mr. Griffin’s grandchildren began asking questions as soon as they saw this contraption.

Susan kept nodding, acknowledging Mr. Griffin’s frustration. I nodded too. I thought that’s all any of us could do. Then, another woman from our group, Michelle Lanier, stepped forward to address him. There was palpably high regard in her demeanor as she leaned in to look directly

into his eyes. He reciprocated he was all attention. Not startled by her sudden proximity, not defensive. Simply beheld and beholding.

Michelle explained that she was responsible for the pillory he said he didn’t like. As director of the North Carolina Division of Historic Sites, she is responsible for preserving the state’s history. And she owned up, directly and with respect, to the fact that she is the reason the device is there to be confronted.

Michelle’s exchange with Mr. Griffin is one of many moments that lives with me after my first visit to Edenton, birthplace of Harriet Jacobs. I have long treasured Jacobs’s work, but it took witnessing and experiencing Michelle’s embodied intellectual rigor for me to truly commune with Jacobs’s dynamic legacy.

Michelle is a presence. She makes bold choices in self-presentation that somehow never seem over the top. That day, she wore a multicolored coat like nothing I’d ever seen, somewhere between plaid and a rainbow. She also wore a chunky white necklace that hung well past her chest. She told Mr. Griffin that she had left the pillory standing because its presence is a reminder of the torture that took place at the site. It is not enough, in her view, to encounter the town jail when Americans are so likely to think nothing of its cruelty. The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world, but Americans take an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to the brutality in our midst. Even worse, the brutality is in our name, supposedly motivated by a commitment to public safety when what makes citizens safer is ready access to food, clothing, and shelter exactly what so many Americans are convinced

only some people deserve.

Michelle and Mr. Griffin talked for several minutes. It was an intimate exchange. The sense that it was okay for me to listen came and went, so I didn’t catch everything that was said. But I was mesmerized by the energy. I witnessed and experienced even if from a slight distance the powerful understanding that intellectual engagement is most rigorous when it maximizes embodied connections.

By the time Mr. Griffin rode away, he was promising Michelle that he would have another conversation with his grandchildren. He now appreciated the importance of their understanding what Black and Brown people endured. It was unfair and unjust, but there is nothing to be ashamed of in acknowledging this injustice so boldly. Widely accepted American practices denied these people’s humanity, but when we remember their experiences and their human dignity, we can borrow inspiration as we encounter injustices today.

The group started walking again, following our guide to the cemetery designated for African Americans, and I watched Mr. Griffin roll away with a new perspective. As had already happened several times, I was in awe of the power of how Michelle moves in the world, a public historian whose foundation is folklore.

I’m a literary historian and a performance studies scholar, so long before meeting Michelle, I thought I understood the significance of storytelling and of embodiment. But that weekend in Edenton keeps unfolding for me because she guided me through a deeper appreciation for the insights that emerge from fleshly memory, fleshly intelligence.

Never taking embodied knowledge for

granted, I have long argued that it is intellectually lazy for scholars to operate as if they can float above material conditions and above the implications of how their bodies are read. That is why I address how common I know it is for white teachers to use racial slurs in their classes, to immeasurably harmful effect. My podcast episode The N-Word in the Classroom: Just Say NO has been made required listening by institutions throughout the United States and beyond because it encourages embodied self-reflection, which people considered white seldom undertake. Likewise, my appreciation for embodiment’s impact on intellectual rigor shapes my professional-development workshops, in which I insist that it is not enough to acknowledge other people’s disadvantages in the classroom, workplace, or nation; those who claim to care about addressing inequality must also confront their own unearned advantages such as those that come with being read as able-bodied in an ableist society.

My investment in bringing corporeality into intellectual work landed me in Michelle’s presence in Edenton. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I had signed a contract to produce a scholarly edition of Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography. Executing my vision was daunting, but I knew I had created a volume unlike any other because it requires the reader to consider the body they inhabit while they engage Jacobs’s life story. The very first line of my introduction is “Can you get pregnant?”

Month after month, I kept myself motivated to work through the mountain of scholarship on Jacobs and her remarkable text by posting on social media. When I submitted the manuscript on my birthday, July 11, 2022, I announced that I had done

so in time to make a radio show appearance before going out to dinner. A colleague of Michelle’s reached out to propose a book launch in Edenton in the summer of 2023. When the three of us met (virtually), Michelle ended the conversation by asking, “Don’t you want to visit Edenton before the launch?”

I agreed and we hung up, but afterwards, I realized that it never would’ve occurred to me to visit Edenton without this invitation. I wondered why, but I quickly shrugged and got on with my day. I later learned that Michelle is so familiar with this tendency to dwell with texts but never set foot in the place that produced them that she considers such invitations to be part of her work.

Equating the South with virulent racism creates a disconnect for many Black people, including scholars (like me) whose research revolves around African American experience in the region. Over the years, Michelle has noticed how mythic representations of the South as a place teeming with violence overshadow dynamic lived realities, and she works to loosen the grip those myths have on countless Americans.

As a graduate of Atlanta’s Spelman College who has lived in North Carolina for the most part ever since, Michelle encourages people to participate in a process of loosening imaginative chains. And so, for a weekend in November 2022, this Houston native encountered Michelle’s “womanist cartography.” After experiencing its signature combination of storytelling and self-reflective embodied practices, I will never be the same. •

I flew into Raleigh, North Carolina, and

spent the night, knowing Michelle would pick me up first thing in the morning, along with two other scholars. We all got acquainted on the two-hour drive from Raleigh to Edenton. We asked Michelle how and why she had created a career so equally entrenched in academia and public history. Michelle has taught at Duke University for more than 20 years, she has produced documentaries that reach beyond university walls, and she oversees 26 museums and historic sites throughout North Carolina. Michelle’s response began during that car ride but was interspersed throughout the weekend. She lives her answers.

Michelle is a folklorist and cultural preservationist, and she is intentional about how she encourages people to experience the past and present of a place. In a 2021 interview, she shared her guiding methodological question this way: “How can I connect my calling being a keeper of memory for myself and my communities to the people I welcome into these spaces?”

Just as she gently guided Mr. Griffin to appreciate what might be gained by engaging the pillory that still stands between the courthouse and jail, she held my hand physically and metaphorically throughout the weekend. Just as important, she pointed me in various directions and helped me point myself in a few others. What I mean might be explained by what happened on another part of our walking tour.

Harriet Jacobs hid for six years and 11 months in the crawlspace above her grandmother’s storage shed. She took desperate, ingenious action to avoid the devastation she believed would follow if her enslaver, Dr. James Norcom, succeeded in executing his plans. He had started building a cottage where Harriet, then 15 years old, would

Nobuo Sekine

Phase—Mother Earth, 1968

production shots, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968

photographer: Susumu Koshimizu

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

be sent to live, in order to be at a distance from his jealous wife and constantly available as his concubine. Anyone who has read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is familiar with how close to him Jacobs was while in hiding: she often saw him going to and from work. Our tour group walked the short distance between Jacobs’s hiding place and Norcom’s office.

For Jacobs, seeing Norcom moving about in such close proximity inspired stomach-turning terror. However, Jacobs eventually gained the confidence and resources to write Norcom letters that convinced him she was already in the North. As a result, Incidents describes not only the misery of being cramped and terrified for nearly seven years but also the feelings of triumph when Jacobs watches Norcom leave for New York because he is sure he’ll catch her there.

The building in which Norcom practiced medicine remains intact, but Jacobs’s hiding place is no longer as it was in the 1800s. A True Value hardware store now occupies that space. My heart dropped. We were standing where Jacobs endured crushing darkness, an infestation of bugs, frostbite, and hallucinations, but there was no indication of what transpired there. Before I could articulate my thoughts and the feelings that accompanied them, I heard Michelle’s voice again. She was always guiding us through story, through memory, through embodied practice. She was asking, “Do you remember how Jacobs begins her autobiography? In the very first paragraph, she highlights the fact that her father was a skilled carpenter. And now, at the site from which she orchestrated her freedom and kept her tormentor confused, there is a store where carpenters come for supplies.”

With this, Michelle reoriented me not only in that physical space but also in my mind and heart. I have taught Incidents for the past 18 years in nearly every class because it is such a crucial text for understanding American culture. Jacobs navigated state-sanctioned sexual vulnerability because the United States built its economy on treating people as chattels, as movable pieces of property. In that context, “chattels” who could become pregnant were treated as breeding animals that just happened to resemble human beings.

Crucially, Jacobs wrote Incidents in a way that emphasizes how fiction and nonfiction at once collide and collude. In telling her life story, she constantly highlights the law the real-world statutes that certainly have real-world impacts while at the same time exposing how much imaginative effort it took for legislators who were all white men to treat Black women as if they deserved no rights. White men’s authority was based on fictions preferred by people who could rely on the power of the armed state as they declared their human equals to be their natural inferiors. So, I have consistently taught Incidents because it sheds incomparable light on American culture, then and now.

Jacobs begins Incidents by honoring her father:

I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. My father was a carpenter, and considered so intelligent and skillful in his trade, that, when buildings out of the common line were to be erected, he was sent for from long distances, to be head workman.

Michelle encouraged my embodied engagement with Jacobs’s story by bringing my attention to an astonishing feature of the fence outside the True Value hardware store: the fence has a hole the size of the one that Jacobs created to bring air and light into her hiding place.

As a folklorist and cultural preservationist, Michelle has developed a methodology she calls “womanist cartography” that involves creating “restorative maps.” Dominant discourses and practices elevate straight white men’s perspectives at the expense of other citizens, so the built environment tells a story in which white men make contributions and never commit crimes. Engaging landscapes while telling Black women’s stories inevitably shifts one’s encounter with a location. This practice of restoring memories honors those whose humanity is denied whenever their experiences are disregarded. However, erasure weakens the connections that make us all human. Therefore, when we use our own storytelling capacity to engage those usually erased, our humanity is restored along with theirs.

In this case, the True Value hardware store and the fence lacking a marker to acknowledge what Harriet Jacobs experienced there tells the story preferred by dominant American culture. A society that built its wealth by treating the sexual exploitation of Black women as a necessary nonevent was never meant to acknowledge that Jacobs existed, never mind that she outwitted the man whom the nation empowered to dictate her fate. And yet, outwit him she did.

By calling my attention to the oneinch hole in the unmarked fence, Michelle used our physical proximity to tap into an

embodied intellectual and spiritual alliance with how, in her dungeon of a crawlspace, Jacobs preserved her soul and sanity. Standing at that site, I felt pride knowing what took place there but also anger that Jacobs was erased. I also felt honored to trace Jacobs’s steps in person, not simply as I had by reading and teaching Incidents. While I wrestled with a complicated mix of feelings, Michelle gave me tangible reasons to dwell with the sense of pride and inspiration. I had taught Incidents so many times. But looking at the smooth contours of the wood’s unexpected opening, I felt connected to the experience in a new way. I focused on the sounds and sensations of my body’s proximity to the place my imagination knew so well.

Even though nothing matched what I had imagined, I suddenly felt surrounded. Not only was Jacobs there, but so were her son, her daughter, her uncle. Jacobs had a hiding place above her grandmother’s storage shed because her uncle constructed it, complete with a trapdoor through which food could be passed. Incidents testifies:

My uncle had left [a gimlet] sticking there when he made the trap-door. I was as rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could have been at finding such a treasure. It put a lucky thought into my head. I said to myself, “Now I will have some light. Now I will see my children.” I did not dare to begin my work during the daytime, for fear of attracting attention. But I groped round; and having found the side next the street, where I could frequently see my children, I stuck the gimlet in and waited for evening. I bored three rows of holes, one above another; then I bored out

the interstices between. I thus succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch broad.

Michelle invited me to join her in placing a finger next to the hole in the fence, to appreciate the size of the opening that sustained Jacobs for almost seven years. I didn’t know I could be more in awe of Jacobs. Tears made my vision blurry, but also clearer than ever, as I looked at the women, equally moved, with whom I was sharing this experience.

Moments like this keep unfolding as that weekend continues to impact my mind and spirit. Fleshly memories and fleshly insights visit me often, sometimes enveloping me. I have never been so aware of the presence of ancestors, their wisdom, their emotion, their love and support.

Michelle’s womanist cartography insists that “paper and screen are not enough to hold these stories. The maps must be two-dimensional, yes, but they must also be performative, aural, visceral.” Because Michelle helped me feel the significance of that one-inch opening in the unmarked fence, I hear Jacobs speaking to and through me. For instance, I now see and feel that Jacobs did not simply use her father’s carpentry expertise as a frame for her life story by beginning her narrative with it. When she emphasized the gimlet that empowered her to carve the one-inch opening, she also testified to her uncle’s skill as a carpenter and his determination to make his love for her palpable through it.

Time and time again, Jacobs’s narrative highlights how in a nation economically addicted to her sexual exploitation by white men loving Black men and being loved by them is a sustaining force.

At age 15, she had fallen for a free man of color who wanted to purchase her freedom and marry her. Norcom not only refused; he also vowed violence against him: “[I]f I catch him lurking about my premises, I will shoot him as soon as I would a dog.” This becomes a turning point in the narrative because Jacobs changes her definition of womanly success by relinquishing her goal of becoming a respectable wife and mother. Incidents testifies: “[H]ard as it was to bring my feelings to it, I earnestly entreated [my beau] not to come back. I advised him to go to the Free States […] He left me, still hoping the day would come when I could be bought. With me the lamp of hope had gone out. The dream of my girlhood was over.” Alive with my embodied experience of Edenton, I hear another Southern ancestor, Zora Neale Hurston, adding her voice to Jacobs’s: “[Her] first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

Around the time of her sweetheart’s departure, Norcom told Jacobs that he would build the cottage for her. To thwart these plans, she encouraged the attentions of another white man of high social status, future congressman Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. The United States made her body available by default. She at least wanted to influence how it would happen.

Even as the Founding Fathers spoke of self-determination, they created a society in which only white men had a right to it. Jacobs left a record of sovereignty asserted in the narrowest of spaces and despite the most confining legal, social, and political conditions. In ways that preserved her dignity, she maneuvered through the sexual vulnerability she could not avoid. And yet, she crafted her narrative to emphasize how agency and free will were achieved in

community — a collective that includes African Americans of all genders and ages. Black men’s love is expressed in concrete ways and joins with that of her children and her risk-taking grandmother to make possible what the United States was designed to prevent: dignity for a Black woman, not just pleasure, power, and profit for white men. •

Michelle gave me a priceless gift by inviting me to Edenton and guiding me through a particular experience of its geography. I now see and hear and feel my ancestors communing with me on the page and off.

When I received the contract to produce an edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I did not know a pandemic would change my life. Finishing the project took longer than expected, and I have struggled throughout this time in ways I could not have imagined. However, as my Edenton experience lives with me, I feel in my flesh what I grew up calling “blessed assurance.” It helps me recognize what I managed to preserve despite the twists and turns of the past few years. When I proposed the edition, I wanted to highlight not only Jacobs’s sophisticated and relentless engagement with the law but also her laser-like focus on incarceration. Jacobs’s prose is so elegant that the reader can initially overlook how forcefully she indicts that which usually goes unquestioned. Audiences are primed to miss her critiques because no one has escaped the message that certain populations simply must be cordoned off and controlled.

Jacobs understood that imposing the fiction that certain people deserve no rights requires not merely lies; it takes lies

bolstered by, and reinforced with, violence. I therefore wanted my edition to help audiences notice how frequently Jacobs brings attention to patrollers, to sheriffs, and to jails. I link Jacobs’s clarity to the current historical moment, where the United States leads the world in placing people under surveillance and in bondage, and where women are the fastest-growing population behind bars.

I made and stood by an unconventional decision, and my communion with ancestors since that weekend in Edenton keeps convincing me that my resolve was significant. I created an appendix entry based on a short film by Lorna Ann Johnson called Freedom Road (2004). Representing a film on paper is impossible, but I wanted to include the voices showcased in it. The film features incarcerated women who participated in a class about memoir and autobiography. Incidents is one of the texts the students engaged, and it empowered them to value their own stories stories brutally erased by the normal workings of the United States. Freedom Road communicates on two registers, reverberating geographically and in embodied and emotional ways. The title refers to the street leading into and out of the prison. It also refers to the path created in the women’s minds, through their active reading and writing, long before they have access to the physical road.

I am convinced that representing the women’s voices will lead readers to connect to the lived experience of Jacobs as well as to the women who could better cope because they had encountered her story. In their words on the page even without images, moving or still I hear and see and feel Jacobs’s approval of the appendix

as a space where generations of readers will encounter these women’s testimonies from 2004, along with Jacobs’s own from 1861. My communion with the ancestors therefore reminds me of the power of communing with the living as well.

Michelle has said, “Every story my grandmother shared was a map and a monument.” After recognizing the gifts her grandmother gave through storytelling, Michelle could more fully appreciate the legacy left by so many other Black women of the South. She testifies, “I was determined to remember. And I did.”

I am also determined to remember. I trust Mr. Griffin is too.

Nobuo Sekine

Phase — Mother Earth, 1968

production shots, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968

photographer unknown © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

top image, from left: Susumu Koshimizu, Momoko

Yoriko Kushigemachi, Nobuo Sekine, Takako

Ōishi,

Uehara, Katsurō Yoshida

WITHERING GREEN RUSH

California cannabis-breeding at a crossroads

by Ali Bektaş

On a windy road off Route 101 in Santa Barbara County, just past the vineyards and bed-and-breakfasts, are some of the largest legal cannabis farms in the world. Nearly 100 acres of hoop houses as far as the eye can see. There is heavy traffic entering the fortified gates of these farms, close to 100 migrant farmworkers are shuttled in and out daily, and almost as many refrigerated trucks hauling off the

harvest for processing. One such farm might be guarded by white Rhodesian security contractors who claimed to be working in Iraq until recently, the workers might be overseen by a Dutch manager who up until recently ran a massive cut-flower farm, and the farm might be owned by a kid in his early twenties whose rich father bought it for him. The product is of pitiful quality one of the many signs that these new farms are a far cry from the sometimes idealized, but rapidly collapsing, family cannabis farms nestled in the hills of Northern California, where for decades alternative lifestyles were carved out while producing that dank weed. The consensus among farmers who have grown cannabis well before legalization is clear: legalized cannabis in California has been an epic failure.

There are similar stories across the patchwork states that have legalized across the United States, but California is a unique tragedy because modern cannabis is unquestionably a product of California. Yes, it is the most valuable cash crop (combining legal and illegal sales) that the state produces, fetching more than $11 billion annually, while the next runner up, almonds, is less than half that, with around $5 billion. But even further than its cash value, cannabis has been stewarded in the state for decades, and those who have committed themselves to the plant here have shaped what it has become on the global stage.

As a scientist working at the intersection of molecular biology and cannabis for the past eight years, I have had the opportunity to interact with all varieties of cannabis farmers around the world from Chilean hobbyists to Canadian licensed producers (LPs), from the Italian hash makers in Morocco to US multistate

operators (MSOs), from suppliers of cuttings in Austria to pharma-grade manufacturers in Portugal and Spain. What I have learned is that the world overwhelmingly wants California cannabis. This is because California has influenced the trajectory of breeding efforts and cultivar development of the plant in agriculture.

Let’s rewind about 50 years to the 1960s and ’70s. Some readers will have firsthand experience of the hippie counterculture that gripped the United States and how California and the San Francisco Bay Area were epicenters of “the movement.” Mindaltering psychedelics and cannabis were as much a part of this youth movement as were the protests against the Vietnam War and in support of the Black Panther Party. Breeding cannabis was still in its infant stages, however, and most of the flower smoked in California was either smuggled from across the border or grown from seeds found in the smuggled weed. The most common varieties were Mexican and Colombian, with occasional Jamaican, Thai, and Indian introductions.

At its core, breeding plants is ultimately a process of selection and reproduction. And to be able to select, you need diversity to select from. The desire to travel and connect with Eastern cultures brought a trail of young people to the centers of domestication of cannabis namely, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and also Nepal and Thailand. As these travelers returned home, they brought cannabis seeds they had collected and perhaps even actively selected at the source. Some even organized expeditions for this specific purpose. This period was the initial introduction of global germ plasm into California, which would jumpstart the breeding of modern

cannabis varieties that would eventually spread across the world.

The ’70s were also when sinsemilla, or seedless production, got going. Farmers diligently removed male plants to increase resin production. This technique also meant that breeding and the creation of new varieties became more and more a specialized activity since common farmers could no longer save seeds from the unpollinated and therefore seedless crop and replant them year after year.

The global germplasm collections led to the first serious breeding efforts, among the most well documented being the line breeding for the creation of “Skunk #1” in Santa Cruz, where Mexican, Afghan, and Columbian varieties were hybridized. This type of work was only able to be done within the relative permissiveness of the 1970s. All of that changed when Ronald Reagan took Richard Nixon’s drug war to a whole new level.

As the drug war went into full swing in the 1980s, the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s also started to lose steam and political focus. Its remnants fled the cities for isolated communes. For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, the destination was clear: the forests of Northern California. Eventually, the environmental movement contributed to the decline of the logging industry and property became even more affordable. Cannabis made sense as a way of supporting this new population. Hidden among the majestic redwoods, cannabis cultivation was back-to-the-land, it was lucrative, and it was rebellious. The NorCal cannabis tradition that would continue into the next millennium started to take shape.

In response, the state of California

launched programs such as the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), a multiagency law enforcement task force, starting in 1983, that terrorized communities with sweeps and raids by helicopters.

The mountains of Northern California weren’t the only place where cannabis farmers were hiding from the authorities. In the 1980s, indoor cultivation was really taking off. High-pressure sodium lamps had been commercially available since the mid-1960s from General Electric for the purpose of street lighting. In fact, some of the early indoor pioneers have told me stories of stealing these bulbs from street lamps for their grow rooms. These broad-spectrum lights were the first of a number of technical advancements to indoor cannabis farming, followed by hydroponic nutrient delivery, supplemental CO2, precision climate control to increase desirable traits while reducing pest pressures, and odor control. Within these indoor environments, the direction of plant breeders took a distinctive turn.

Afghan varieties in particular took off with the advent of clandestine indoor production. Their shorter stature and broader leaves, as opposed to the tall, narrow-leaf landraces, were perfect for the limited indoor space. Vegetative propagation via cuttings became more common, which ensured consistent uniformity. The plants were selected to mature faster, which benefited cultivators under pressure to pack up and move their operations frequently to avoid raids.

During the drug war, as some growers were retreating to the mountains of Northern California, others set up in basement grow rooms, while others left California, took their seeds, and moved to the

Netherlands. Amsterdam was becoming a safe haven for those from around the world looking for the freedom to work with the plant on a deeper level. A growing expat community helped create some of the first mail-order seed banks, sometimes in collaboration and sometimes in conflict with their Dutch counterparts. The movement of cannabis germplasm crisscrossed the Atlantic many times, parking itself in the Netherlands for a good decade or more in the ’80s and early ’90s, until ultimately redistributing itself back to the US West Coast and other centers of cannabis germplasm development such as Spain, where considerable breeding work was being done.

California was the first state to enact a medical regime for cannabis: Proposition 215, also known as the Compassionate Use Act, passed with 55.6 percent of the votes in 1996. This was the culmination of years of dedicated activism by the many heroes in California who risked a lot, including jail time, for the cause of legalization. The passing of Prop 215 opened the way for dispensaries to operate in California.

But the spirit of early dispensaries carried the ethos of the radical movements that gave birth to them. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the first versions of these dispensaries were true hubs of caregiving to patients, often victims of the AIDS epidemic, and not the profit-driven enterprises they would ultimately become. Cannabis was sold to some and gifted to others, a version of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Plants were traded, but the marketplace for cuttings had not fully developed. Unique plants were closely guarded within small groups of friends, and those who broke this code were scorned and ostracized. Some of the

famous, high-value, clone-only varieties such as OG Kush were among the most coveted cuttings.

In the hills of Northern California, in what is known as the Emerald Triangle (Mendocino, Trinity, and the infamous Humboldt County), farmers became more and more fearless. Plants stashed away, hidden in the forest canopy, became actual trees themselves, and these gigantic plants became the pride of Northern California.

The properly tended outdoor fields allowed for more successful selections to be conducted on populations, whether for developing cutting-only varieties or to select parents from which to make seeds. Those with the gift of recognizing such plants started to make a name for themselves. Many rural communities had local seed makers and producers of cuttings from whom farms would procure their germplasm.

Of course, there was still repression, but to a much lesser degree. The relative safety from persecution also meant that a space was created for the many amateur breeders. It would probably be more accurate to call them selectors, since rather than making crosses involving multiple generations, the main method involved selecting a few individuals from the progeny of a single cross and making cuttings.

The criteria for selection of these varieties were mainly aroma, taste, and appearance. Anthocyanin-rich purple cannabis provided market differentiation. And unlike today, people at dispensaries were still able to smell the flower before purchasing it. Yield wasn’t as important a factor for selection as one would imagine in that lower-risk, higher-margin situation. A pound of high-quality indoor cannabis could

easily fetch $4,500, especially as the gray medical market in California and the national black market were very much intertwined at the turn of the millennium. With five to 10 indoor lights, many growers were able to make small fortunes within the medical system.

Selecting for visually attractive cannabis (“bag appeal”) also meant selecting for the maximum number and size of trichomes (“frosty buds”), where secondary metabolites such as cannabinoids and terpenes are produced. These high-potency cannabis varieties were becoming necessary for hardcore stoners who were quickly building a THC tolerance. This sparked the journey of increasing THC percentages, reaching the notoriously dubious but still mind-boggling 35 percent THC lab results that are the market preference today.

The 2000s saw the explosion of the commercial clone market and the distinctive fruity, desert varieties that have since come to dominate. Selections such as Gelato a San Francisco creation from the Girl Scout Cookies lineage became some of the foundational parents of modern crosses. Gelato was one of many varieties that was vegetatively propagated and joined the roster of distinct, descriptive, and playful names such as Purple Urkle, Trainwreck, Kandy Kush, Romulan, and the like, often combining those of the parents and leaving aside any mention of the geographic area the germplasm originated from for example, Grape Ape crossed with Super Silver Haze became Silverback Gorilla.

The 2013 policy decision known as the “Cole Memorandum” was a decisive moment that followed legalization in Colorado and Washington states. The Cole

Memo effectively made federal enforcement of cannabis crimes the lowest priority. There was an explosion of brand-name varieties (with associated trademarks), the marketing of which is still a dominating force in California cannabis and modern cannabis culture in general. Despite all this activity, vegetative production of cuttings meant limiting genetic diversity, which is fundamentally increased through sexual reproduction where distinct genetic backgrounds are recombined to produce new combinations via the pollination of ovules.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Most people struggling through cannabis prohibition wanted legalization or at least decriminalization, and to empty the prisons. But the way legalization was implemented in California, it remained unclear if the crop was a drug or an agricultural product; stuck in limbo with the worst of both of options, proved in time to be the worst way to go. Overregulating certain aspects, treating cannabis as a drug, and under-regulating other aspects led to an economy-of-scale agricultural consolidation, as evidenced by the type of farm described in the opening paragraph. We are left in a situation where the rich history of California cannabis is being eliminated one farm at a time.

The price per pound was expected to plummet as legalization progressed. The writing was on the wall in late 2019 as the $1,200 per pound price for outdoor flower dropped by a third almost overnight. The pandemic came to the rescue at the right moment. Cannabis, deemed an essential agricultural business, was perfect for the locked-down population with some extra money to spend. But last year, the free fall resumed, and up until a few months ago,

I would hear wholesale outdoor cannabis going for around $200 per pound. Through all of it, the state of California has not done nearly enough to protect those who created California cannabis and are trying to survive such a predictable yet sudden crash. From where we stand today, it is clear that those who risked so much to make California’s most famous agricultural commodity take off are not going to reap the benefits.

At the onset of legalization in 2015, California cannabis started to experience what is known as the “green rush,” taking its name from the Gold Rush that was the defining moment in California’s history of capitalism: the influx of gold prospectors in the middle of the 19th century. The green rush brought a subset of Silicon Valleyanchored venture capital looking for the next best thing for quick returns. What they didn’t realize was that agriculture has different guiding forces than smartphone apps, web 2.0, and the so-called sharing economy, and is not necessarily a shortterm windfall. Beyond the intrinsic unpredictability that agriculture has climate, pests, downstream industries for processing this was also cannabis: a still illegal commodity.

The green rush capital fled. Investors moved on to blockchain, crypto, and now chatbots, as their diminishing attention span looks for the next best fad. Some even attempted to combine tech and weed into a cryptocurrency sharecropping scheme under a company called JuicyFields, which in classic crypto fashion vanished after juicing people’s savings.

But for a few years following California’s legalization, it seemed as if the future of cannabis breeding was clear-cut

and the startups well-funded for the undertaking. In my journey within cannabis agricultural science, I’ve had the opportunity to work at a few of these companies and have endured their pitch firsthand. The founder of one cannabis biotech startup where I was a staff scientist for two years would open every presentation by showing a conjured graph with a nearly vertical line representing increasing yields and pest resistance for corn in the second half of the 20th century, towering above a skimpy flatline for cannabis, claiming that the steep slope of the corn line was a mere product of “genetic gain.” This was the consensus narrative that emerged amidst numerous companies: cannabis, having been left behind in prohibition, was to be molded in the shape of corn, sugar beet, canola, and all the other species that went through the processes of modern breeding. The goals would be hybrids of inbred lines and genetic modification, today rebranded as gene editing.

What was left unsaid was that the true intervention and real defining characteristic of the “green revolution” that led to such a change were high inputs of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides coupled with mechanized monoculture production. Almost all such inputs are universally out of fashion today for anyone who imagines a future on this planet.

Inbred lines (IBLs) are truly useful in trying to suss out the genetic contribution to certain phenotypes, and hybridization between enough IBLs can sometimes lead to increased vigor. But it’s important to recognize that there are other strategies, such as mass selection, for achieving high-performing populations. In the context of the dawn of the agricultural and chemical

Nobuo Sekine

Phase — Mother Earth, 1968

earth, cement; cylinder: 220 x 270 (diameter) cm, hole: 220 x 270 (diameter) cm

installation view, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968

photographer: Osamu Murai

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

industry, the main innovation of hybridizing inbred lines was to eliminate the germplasm autonomy of farmers who saved their seed.

The company I worked for was not only stuck in a bankrupt agricultural paradigm but also a biological one. This biological paradigm imagines nucleic acid as genetic code and organisms as machines running said code. Following this, making a high-resolution, high-throughput platform to identify differences in the DNA sequence is assumed to be sufficient to launch a successful breeding program. The company ultimately did this by pulling a fast one on the hundreds of legacy cannabis farmers and breeders who had submitted samples for analysis. I wasn’t involved in their genotyping project, but the controversy led me to resign and led them to become the most despised company in cannabis.

Within the heat of this controversy, a more interesting question about the assumed predictive power of DNA analysis was mostly overlooked. Plants and living things in general are not their mere DNA sequences. While some simple traits can be tracked by genetic analysis and have Mendelian inheritance patterns, many other important ones, such as pest resistance and drought tolerance, require a more holistic approach. Even if there are claims of multiple sequence variations that contribute to a specific trait, which are called quantitative trait loci (QTL), the wholes in biology are greater than the sums of their parts. And Biology is not Physics.

Another hyped trend in modernizing cannabis is in-vitro propagation. What was done to fruit species and ornamentals is being done to cannabis. But even with the numerous new varieties that are released

each year to satisfy the demand for novelty, in-vitro multiplication rates will never be able to compete with producing cuttings in a greenhouse. On the one hand, in-vitro culturing of plants is a powerful technique on the path to developing new germplasm, but it is not a nimble production platform and requires long processes of optimization. More crucially the phenotypes of in-vitro plants will stray from the original cutting after each round of subculture, for reasons of somaclonal variation, epigenetic changes, and an altered microbiome. To service this trend, sterility and cleanliness are prioritized at the expense of forgetting that plants are not sterile isolates, and in fact are nothing without their relationship with microbes and fungi. They are a multitude of cells, tissues, organs, and indeed organisms with shifting dynamic boundaries. Today, the rude awakening of this realization is being whispered among the workers in the growth chambers of some of the first tissue-culture cannabis companies based in the US and Canada.

I started this essay at the scaled-up Santa Barbara farm and ended with this new approach towards germplasm development to show that the industry is at odds with the rebel cannabis culture that persisted for decades. The anti-authoritarian streak must be brought back in the face of these incursions.

During my early years of training as a plant molecular biologist, I conducted my fieldwork in Mexico. There I was part of a community of scientists providing technical support to inspirational Indigenous farmers, who were defending their local corn landraces varieties selected for generations in isolated regions, and which had therefore acquired distinct

characteristics from encroaching transgenic contamination by genetically modified crops. I participated in many workshops with my colleagues, but one that left a lasting impression was the Feria de la Milpa, or Festival of the Cornfield (although a milpa is much more than just a cornfield), during the winter of 2010, up in the Sierra Juarez mountains of Oaxaca. For three days, Indigenous members of the autonomous community of Santa Gertrudis came together to showcase both their material and their metaphysical link to the maize plant. Dozens of corn-based dishes were prepared from their recent harvest, and as we ate, our Zapotec hosts recounted the founding myths of their culture, such as that of Pitao Cozobi, the corn deity who influenced agricultural cycles and required an urn of blood to be sprinkled over the milpa at the beginning and end of each season for a bountiful harvest. The festival, and many others like it around Mesoamerica, were not just relegated to the realm of culture, and the biological diversity of the local landraces held center stage as cobs with kernels of distinct shades of purples, blues, reds, and yellows were displayed throughout the event space.

I’m not recounting all this just to paint a romantic picture of native peoples’ connections to a plant species. The central themes of the Festival of the Cornfield were political in nature. The main purpose was to discuss the global state of corn germplasm, the neoliberal monopoly over seeds, and the herbicides that were crucial to this monopoly. Genetic modification and the threat it posed to their corn was discussed in sessions lasting into the night. In classic autonomous Indigenous organizing fashion, after days of deliberation, decisions would

be reached for concrete actions and communication with allies across Mexico. As one of their community leaders explained to me and my friend at the time: “To be a campesino or campesina allows us to respect and understand the profound worth of our madre tierra [mother earth]. Corn is the basis for our expression of autonomy and central to our usos y costumbres [practices and customs], which represent our Zapotec culture and Indigenous way of life.”

It would be a stretch to draw too many parallels between those who domesticated corn 9,000 years ago, and who see themselves as “the people of corn,” and the relatively recent stewards of cannabis in California (although epic harvest parties have also existed in Northern California). Yet there are certainly lessons that we can learn from the persistent struggle and conviction of Indigenous campesinos in Mesoamerica.

Cannabis breeders and nurseries in California are caught between their passion and the market. Modern-day dealers (i.e., distributors/buyers) force the demand for trendy cultivars at the expense of longer-term breeding projects that require time and discipline. There is what the consumer wants versus what the farmer needs. If we were to name these often diverging wants and needs today, we would look no further than Runtz and Blue Dream. Runtz is the influencer of cannabis strains an Instagram-famous, candy-flavored variety that is notoriously finicky and difficult to grow but that can fetch top dollar. Blue Dream is a reliable mainstay that produces heavy yields and is strong and vigorous, which makes it still one of the bestselling varieties in California.

The balancing of conflicting breeding

imperatives is a constant. For example, extraction-optimized high-THC plants are necessary both for the luxury hash producers and for the production of cannabis products such as edibles and vapes. On the flip side, “the weed is too damn strong” has become a common refrain because many people desire chill weed. And ultimately, despite the dozens of branded cultivars and the talk of genetic diversity, the menus at dispensaries are mostly variations on the same theme. Some of the lost flavors and their accompanying effects need to be brought back into the fold.

For those undertaking this breeding work, there needs to be some kind of protection, but this should not be locked into the rigid IP landscape pervasive in agriculture, which would limit the creativity that has been so characteristic of California cannabis up until now. And more importantly, we should not overlook the places where the plant was first domesticated, where the real diversity was created and gathered. When we talk of Afghan indica, we need to also talk of Afghanistan.

Diversity of germplasm is especially crucial because, as cannabis becomes more and more folded into industrial agriculture, more and more pests will jump over from other cultivated or wild species and find susceptible populations. One of these pathogens was first identified by me and my colleagues in 2019: Hop Latent Viroid, a devastating circular RNA molecule that is rampant in the United States and that brings down the farms where it takes hold. The scale of the problem is a clear consequence of the explosion of the West Coast cuttings trade. It is also a growing problem around the world within emerging markets and should be taken seriously before

it is too late. But there are varieties that are resistant to the worst effects of this viroid, and these are invaluable for breeding resistance. Undoubtedly, there are sure to be more novel pathogens coming down the line as the scale of cultivation continues to increase. And without access to diverse germplasm to work with, we will be left helpless.

Although some microbes can wreak havoc, others should be incorporated into breeding programs. To do this, we need to have a better sense of the microbial community in and around the plant not just the rhizome and root communities but also the endophytes, microbes that live inside of plants. These are sure to have a massive impact on phenotypic expression since the evolutionary journey of trichome development involved the emergence of plant defenses.

As broadacre, field-grown cannabis increases, the industry needs to adopt agroecology practices. Pest resistance, drought tolerance, and plant nutritional needs should be approached from an ecological angle, with the interplay between different plant species complementing each other. This is another lesson we can learn from Indigenous farmers and their milpas in Mexico who developed the “three sisters” approach. Not just a cornfield, a milpa is where corn, beans and squash are cultivated together, fixing nitrogen, providing structural support, preventing pests and soil moisture evaporation.

We have a unique opportunity, not only in cannabis but in agriculture in general. This is a singular time when a species with industrial characteristics, ironically sheltered because of prohibition, is being subsumed into industrial agriculture after

nearly 70 years of hindsight. Instead of making cannabis into industrial corn, we can learn from the failures of the modern agricultural system, apply those lessons to cannabis, and help forge a new way forward for agriculture.

Nobuo Sekine

the artist (right) working on Phase of Nothingness, 1969 / 1972, with artist Kenji Misawa (left), Japan Pavilion, 35th Venice Biennale, June, 1970

photographer: Yoriko Kushigemachi © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A GHOST, PART TWO

by Salma Shamel

The doctor advised my parents to regularly jerk off my brother to reduce his screaming fits. My mother, who turned religious after his birth, strongly resisted. The barrier, the split, al-faraj, that which exists in between and separates the legs, is sacred. Inna le feroujehem la hafezoun, the Quran prohibited, my mother cited. “But faraj is not only the sacred split,” my father was frustrated, “it also means solace, relief, succor, and ease. Solace and ease for god’s sake.” He slammed

the door of our apartment. She slammed the door to her bedroom. In the corridor between divine devotion and primal relief, I had no door to slam and no belief to declare as they argued and departed.

This was in 2001 when the Egyptian government had recently installed the fatwa hotline, one of hundreds of 1-900 numbers. Callers phone those who have been called by God and when they leave a recorded question, they receive a code, and the next day, when they leave the code, they receive a recorded answer. Bureaucracy promised my mother morality and she liked the idea of receiving religious advice unmediated by human faces. Can one touch those who cannot consent? Where do the disabled get their ethics from? Four out of five questions were about sex and breastfeeding, studies stated. After September 11th, questions turned political. I regularly turned to another hotline, the horoscope line, to ask about the fate of a Sagittarius and Libra relationship. These 1-900 numbers produced appalling phone bills and led to a public outcry. The horoscope line was suspended, but the fatwa line remained.

My mother has a passive-aggressive relationship to language that only Wittgenstein can explain when he says that statements are not necessarily what they appear to be. She would say, “Isn’t the weather glorious today,” and when no one responded, she would get angry, insisting that this was a question when everyone knew it was a statement. “You will fail your exams” is not a prophecy, but a command. My mother was not proficient in verbal language because she was fluent in scream language.

She is a scream translator, a fluent interpreter of preverbal helplessness. This is the case with most mothers, though usual-

ly only briefly. Most mothers are scream translators, analysts of shrieks, wants, and pains from the imprints left by life on life-becoming bodies. “Ah, he must be hungry”; “Oh, it’s time to change your diaper.” Scream-solving is about prediction and uncertainty: Is it want x, or is it pain y? This is why screaming is a universal language. Not only because it’s the expression of emotions and feelings but also because it’s premised on a tension between the known and the unknown. One doesn’t run to a man screaming at the subway entrance to say, “Hey, I feel for you.” Rather, one runs to ask, “What’s going on? Are you okay? Is it pain x or suffering y?” One stops running to help a man who is screaming daily at the subway entrance. With an unchanging source of suffering, a buffer zone, a neutralized distance, is asserted between ourselves and our emotive capacity.

What are you going to do? our neighbors asked, which was actually a command; my parents had to do something about the screaming. First, we went to bed with earplugs and soon we stopped talking to each other. Interpretations of my brother’s screams hovered between the mind and the body. Doctors could not decide whether to reduce his screaming fits with anesthetics aimed at numbing the mind or to alleviate his body by releasing its piled-up tension. One prescribed sedation, another recommended masturbation, and all was equally rejected by my mother, whose practice of motherhood appeared sacrificial but was in fact a laissez-faire attitude based on the fantasy that my brother, like nature, might self-regulate. My father, on the other hand, was into most forms of numbing and deadening of the senses. This is how my parents found themselves in one of humanity’s

earliest dualities. One argued for the sacredness of the body and the other for its profane functionality. One said don’t dare touch it and the other said who fucking cares?

The sacred has its authority in withdrawing: from the Latin sacrare comes “to consecrate,” to remove from the sphere of human law and commerce, to set aside from the continuum of circulation. Perhaps my mother did not know that, in Roman law, homo sacer was a contradictory figure designated for those who, in response to some wrongdoing, were cast outside the city, abject, degraded, and negated. They cannot be sacrificed, yet they may be killed with impunity. She didn’t know that the sacred was both a curse and a relief.

The lack of sleep crept in between the moral, sexual, and medical worlds, changing the ways they were kept separate. Masturbation moved from being a sexual act to a medical one, and soon, my mother slowly approved. Harmony no sooner arose before it dissolved into disagreement, and in a moment, my parents were arguing about who was more appropriate to consecrate the act. My father claimed gendered similarity, that he and my brother had a penis in common and, therefore, he was more familiar with the male body. My mother disagreed, she was closer to my brother as a whole via the act of maternity, which does not differentiate gender. Do you think about bricks, mortar, and timber when you think about a house? Between part and whole, I anyway had no position in this masturbation triangle. I neither had a penis nor did I give birth to a being who possessed one.

Yet, I had a position in a different tripartite family structure. The first position,

which my parents fought over, was the position of the agent: Who will relieve the suffering? Who will operate on the body? The second position, occupied by my brother, was that of matter: the docile body, a fertile ground for contestation. The third position was that of the spectator: the observer, myself, who perceives the accomplished result. As Susan Buck-Morss argues in her 1992 essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” there were times when such separations did not exist, but our experience of suffering radically changed with this tripartite division. In fact, this division converged with another separation between cognitive and bodily experience. What would the world look like if we had a thinking body and a feeling mind? A world of agential docility, docile agency, and a spectator who keeps the tension between both.

In New York City, looking at the Dean Street soccer field, I sat on a bench next to a friend who studied programming and read a lot of Jewish theology. We compared our religious families like the rich compared their standalone villas. The villain who spilled his semen in the Bible, he told me, unlike in Islam, was a complicated figure. After Onan’s oldest brother Er died, Onan’s father, Judah, ordered him to procreate with his brother’s widow, Tamar, to give her offspring. This was a custom among the ancient Hebrews called levirate marriage, by which a man may be forced to marry his brother’s widow. This type of marriage had economic consequences. Anyone born to Tamar would be deemed the heir of the deceased Er and could claim the firstborn’s double share of inheritance. However, if Er had no sons or only had daughters, Onan

would have inherited everything as the oldest surviving son. The story goes that when Onan had sex with Tamar he withdrew as he was ejaculating and “spilled his seed on the ground.” Apparently, he spilled his seed because he did not want offspring that would not be his. The Bible says that this act of spilling seed was an evil act and so God slew him. Interpretations of the spill were split, my friend said, as I watched one of the soccer players spit on the plastic, green turf. Some claimed that spilling was a form of wasting because semen is the source of life and, thus, sacred. Others said this had nothing to do with semen or life, that this was, in fact, about his refusal to include Tamar in inheritance. Denied the right to be the mother of the inheritor, Tamar would then be excluded from the family. While my friend talked, I daydreamed of quitting my job and becoming an award-winning theologian who wrote a bestselling book entitled The Inseparability of Reproduction and Inheritance.

•

If my family had a compass, anesthesia would be its rose. Hold the compass horizontally close to your body and turn it until the magnetic needle aligns the north towards feeling, the south towards hills of unfeeling. My mother often tells me that, if she hadn’t been wrongly anesthetized, then our family would have lived a different life. If she had not been absent during my brother’s delivery, she would have been more present as a mother. My mother passed out 39 years ago, when her gynecologist, tipsy at a Christmas gathering, mistakenly directed the nurse over the phone to give her a general anesthetic instead of a local one. For around four

decades she cared for my brother, who did not walk, talk, or recognize her, or anyone. Perhaps this is why she wanted the scream to unfold indefinitely without repression or intervention to return and pierce through the original act of numbing. But what is the value of an individual scream in a world where screaming has, for decades, been repressed?

The value of a scream has changed as our world has gone through a sharp shift in the experience of suffering. In a book about anesthesia, I highlight a passage stating that doctors were “uniformly horrified” by the gruesome body count of the industrial revolution. In hospital reports, “machinery” was a category of disease. Injuries of factory workers made surgical wards look like field hospitals. There appeared the surgeon, the composer who put together the fragmented limbs of industrialism. And there was anesthesia, which not only relieved the patient but also relieved the surgeon from experiencing the suffering of the patient. There was no need to desensitize oneself against the experience of seeing another suffering; a surgeon can confront an insensate mass to be cut and manipulated without emotion.

Buck - Morss’s 1992 essay surveys the early history of surgical anesthesia:

In 1639, the British naval surgeon John Woodall advised prayer before the “lamentable” surgery of amputation:

“For it is no small presumption to Dismember the Image of God.” In 1806, the era of Charles Bell, the surgeon’s attitude evoked Enlightenment themes of Stoicism, the glorification of reason, and the sanctity of individual life. But with the introduction of general

Nobuo Sekine installation view of Phase of Nothingness, 1969 / 1972, Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, Italy, 1970

photographer unknown © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

anaesthesia, the American Journal of Medical Sciences could report in 1852 that it was “very gratifying to the operator and to the spectators that the patient lies a tranquil, passive subject, instead of struggling and perhaps uttering piteous cries and moans, while the knife is at work.”

At this point, the perception of suffering was transformed, and it happened both within and beyond the surgical room: to unfeel self-suffering, to unfeel another’s suffering.

Last November, I spent some nights smoking cigarettes outside the GeorgesPompidou hospital in Paris. I had never before experienced knocks at doors as the knocks of French nurses at the doors of end-stage cancer patients. They storm into the room so brave and confident, as if their optimism might reverse the effect of the opioid they administer. “Regarde tout cet amour,” they tell my friend while looking at his friends, who flew in from three continents to make him mint tea, peel a clementine, help him get dressed to smoke his last cigarettes. “You see, this thing, it’s important to learn its name: bolus,” my friend told me the first day I arrived, grabbing his analgesia control with the square blue button. Morphine, I read in the middle of the night in a sleeping bag next to my friend, did not have practical implications for surgery until mid-century. In fact, it was a “leading children’s drug” throughout the 19th century. Mothers working in factories drugged their children as a form of day care. I wanted to tell the working mothers of the 19th century that my mother, having been wrongly drugged during childbirth, ended up in eternal day care. That I can hear the

screams of their children in the screams of my brother. Morphine, I read in the middle of night, was originally named Morphium after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. Morpheus was able to shape, form, and morph the minds of dreamers, sending them human shapes and forms of every kind.

We come into life in different forms but leave in similar ones. I saw my friend morph into my brother as they started to resemble one another. Their stomachs swelled, their muscles disappeared, and care continued. The form was the same, but I felt a lot more pain toward my friend than I had ever felt toward my brother. What does language do to make us relate more to the suffering of a friend than the suffering of a brother?

“I need your help to find her a psychoanalyst,” a friend in Egypt texted me while I waited at the Rue Leblanc bus station. He said that his wife woke up in the middle of the night to pee but never returned to bed. She snapped at her kids when doors were slammed and gasped when they called her name. Her brother was sentenced to ten years in prison for a social media post he had not written. He said she was suffering but unfeeling, that someone had to convince her of her own suffering.

Can you relieve someone from unfelt suffering? [No.]

To suffer, for Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, is to be “corporeal, sensuous […], conditioned and limited […] like animals and plants.” In a way, to suffer is a condition of inescapability, a form of objective truth that weighs heavily upon us. Marx distinguished man from other living things such as animals and plants, in that man “feels that he suffers,” and because he feels that he suffers, he is

a passionate being. Suffering is an essential passage towards passion, a central category for any revolution. Animals and plants, on the other hand, are in a condition of oneness with their suffering. They may indeed defend themselves, but they do not feel that they suffer.

By historically relativizing the human, Marx argues that, despite workers’ daily experience of suffering and pain (exhaustion, boredom, depression, and anxiety), they do not feel suffering for what it is. The capacity to feel one’s own suffering is dulled by capital’s obsessive, objective tendencies. Strangely enough, one of the gravest mistranslations of Marx is in this realm of feeling. In the English version of Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes and published by Penguin Books, Selbstgefühl der Arbeiter is translated as the “class-consciousness” of the worker. But Selbstgefühl is not Klassenbewusstsein, as Robert Scott has brilliantly argued in his 2020 essay “Suffering and the Feeling of Suffering in Marx’s Capital”: it neither refers to class nor to consciousness. Selbstgefühl is Selbst [self] and Gefühl [feeling]; it is the “self-feeling” of the workers. Not the worker who is “conscious” of her place, but the one who radically feels her own self-suffering. The worker who has not been numbed, dulled, and anesthetized. The one who, in consciousness, feels and, in feeling, is conscious of herself. The much harder work is not exposing capitalist relations but making them felt.

There is nothing redemptive or emancipatory in suffering. Suffering, in and of itself, will not produce anything. To lend a voice to suffering is not to speak on behalf of the other, not to give bandwidth to those marginalized, or create platforms for those

unheard. To give voice to suffering is to create the psychological and material conditions whereby suffering itself can speak, can be felt by others. It is to make those numbed to their self-suffering feel their self-suffering.

Nobuo Sekine fabricating Phase of Nothingness, 1969 / 1972, in preparation for the 35th Venice Biennale, Italy, June 1970.

photographer: Yoriko Kushigemachi © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

WILD INFINITUDE

Listening to writing and Art Pepper in Los Angeles

by Chris Molnar

Los Angeles is the beautiful dead end of America, maybe of the whole world. It’s unlike any other cultural metropolis, with no pretension to or history of dense, huddled masses, chance encounters, or random, public happenings. It’s the land of John Fante and Malcolm Lowry squirreled away in downtown hotel rooms, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann in sunny exile, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in late-life luxury, Octavia Butler taking the bus from Pasadena, or John Rechy cruising Griffith Park. Unlike New York City, you can’t walk out the door and run into someone famous, even though

they all live here too. Everyone has their private worlds in private houses, private rooms, private scenes, inaccessible to the uninitiated and intimate for those in the know.

This makes it the prime literary city for the writer that values solitude. Nowhere else can you find a quorum of world-class authors and publishers, all accessible if you just show up at the right couple of places: Poetic Research Bureau in Historic Filipinotown, or the right night at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, or at a roving reading series like Casual Encountersz or Factory Made. All of them treasuring the opportunity to work quietly at home before emerging into a major metropolitan cultural milieu, with all the pent-up tension that leads the city to explode spectacularly from time to time. Stories Books and Café in Echo Park particularly has the exact dimensions of what makes Los Angeles so unique. The solitude begets a hunger for a communal space like the patio and alley behind Stories, purposeful malingering it’s hard to find anymore, the never-ending conversation and random introductions across cultures and classes, faces shifting and staying the same over years, the real-life growing-together supplanted by the air-conditioned nightmare of life facilitated by the internet. A community center, home away from home or work away from work, hub for the sober that sells beer and wine, relatively young but with a timeless feeling. Everything clearly, not in opposition, but in a continuing dynamic, events in the backyard for unknown, unpublished authors and notable ones too, Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus, Miranda July and Robert Glück. The warm chaos of the NDA reading series at Stories spilling into the alley,

with latecomers standing on dumpsters to peer at Ottessa Moshfegh over the fence; the packed heat of a hundred or more writers and artists cramming a Chinatown gallery and the interior courtyard to see Hedi El Kholti of Semiotext(e) at Casual Encountersz; Factory Made gathering hundreds of Zoomers in Koreatown apartments and parking lots to see each other read there’s a kind of sudden shift from semi-urban and functional to serious art happening that can only happen here.

Ours is the most American city, with these spiraling private worlds never intersecting, and perhaps there is some lesson in the fact that a secluded home here, beautifully shaded under unexpected trees, is the ultimate local expression and also perfect for getting really high, over and over again. Like addiction and sobriety, hedonic indulgence and New Age healthfulness are both expressions of the same thing, a search for solidity in a town too sprawling and beautiful to hold onto anything for long. Oblivion as perfection as oblivion, and holding it all together the performative therapy of Alcoholics Anonymous, which fits Los Angeles so well absorbing and cliquey, a perennial reality show that just happens to save lives, with permutations both helpful and insane, like the offshoot-turned-cult Synanon with round-the-clock “games” of attack therapy. Jazz saxophonist, unrepentant heroin addict, and erstwhile Synanon inductee Art Pepper’s memoir Straight Life (1979) is one of the first and perhaps the ultimate modern memoirs of art and addiction, and the straightforward extremity he recounts Los Angeles as is canon too: an Omega Man for the Omega City.

Born in Gardena in 1925 to impoverished, alcoholic parents, Pepper a prodigy on the saxophone escaped east to Central Avenue, then in the midst of one of the greatest explosions of jazz talent in history. He is a fine player, although his straightforward and melodic style can be difficult to really hear with modern ears. Straight Life takes this quality, an ascetic devotion to pleasure (which itself is very Los Angeles), and expands it both as method of writing and subject matter, in how he describes the music and drugs he loves. In the abstract, it is like any number of biographies or autobiographies about legendary American figures exploding out of poverty, reaching the heights of fame, grappling with their demons, surviving. What sets it apart is the purity, both of Pepper’s mindset and of the devastating places it takes him. In one of the most famous passages, he has just snorted his first line of heroin in 1950 and goes into a future reverie and manifesto:

I said, “This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I’m going to do, whatever dues I have to pay …” And then I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn’t be weak; I wouldn’t be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the nonreal, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world […]

But then, continuing specifically the end of the sentence that is excised in Lili Anolik’s 2014 Harper’s exhumation of the

book (after she discovered it on the path to writing Eve Babitz’s biography):

the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they’re black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feeling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don’t know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, never were intending to be anything.

It’s the surety of it, frustrated honor brimming into hatefulness, clearheaded in retrospect but convincingly in the moment as well. You can see both his blindness to cause and openness to effect, and by the end of the next paragraph he has “realized from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. […] That is what I became at that moment. That’s what I practiced; and that’s what I still am. And that’s what I will die as a junkie.” He has peaked in fame, second saxophonist only to Charlie Parker in the DownBeat reader’s poll, touring with big-band legend Stan Kenton, and without any excuse has decided that the only next step is true oblivion, as lucid as the perfect horn charts he pulls out of thin air, that his wife Laurie Pepper recalls him writing on command in her own memoir, Art: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman (2014), during his late1970s comeback. Art Pepper wrote Straight Life with Laurie, recording his responses to her prompts for years between relapses and

lapses in interest, and the 500-plus pages are stuffed with a chorus of fellow jazz musicians, drug buddies, relatives, friends, all corroborating or dismissing his memories. But what makes it powerful is the sense that, even when objectively incorrect, he has a code. It’s the code of the artist, of the junkie, of the criminal.

Strict yet with total abandon: what made Los Angeles the only place that could produce Pepper, and what makes it unique as a literary city. Clarity, things are as they are, tantalizingly accessible, dangerously accessible. Beautifully right there. In the short 1982 documentary Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor, Pepper, fiftysomething but with the ancient damage of junk visible on his body and in his movements, walks through Echo Park in the early 1980s, pointing out different alleys and storefronts where he used to cop heroin during his long stay in the neighborhood, which was cheap and close enough to both drugs and gigs downtown. As he walks, reminiscing about the 1950s and ’60s, everything is colorful and anarchic with the fresh decay of the ’80s, ungentrified, all Latino but still recognizably related to the Echo Park of today. He probably walked right by the future Stories Books. You can see why the neighborhood, and its alleyways, could hold appeal across the decades, just enough inner-city convenience to allow an indigent artist or drug addict (or both) into Los Angeles’s promised seclusion.

Jazz Survivor was filmed in the wake of the publication of Straight Life, and as co-author, Laurie is just as much of a focal point. She is an animated, restless presence in the documentary, around 40 but looking much younger, a bit like her cousin Eve Babitz, with close-cropped hair and

a powerful exuberant energy. As surely as music and heroin are the guiding lights for Art, Art is the guiding light for Laurie, unapologetically and intensely, a handsome, dying, beyond flawed artist she can use her own unique talents to corral and encourage. Part of the relentless thrust of Straight Life is watching Pepper, like Puyi in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor (1987), intensely aware yet powerless by chance and by choice, with the unique privilege not of being the last emperor of China but a gifted saxophone player in mid-century Los Angeles who has not just an addiction but an addiction so clearly seen that anyone can perceive their own failures as a microcosm of his conscious tragic fall, observing with pride and regret his rare achievements and unspeakable lows. As he guessed he would, Pepper goes to jail for heroin possession. His first wife leaves him for Remo Belli of Remo Drumhead fame, a rising star not for his talent as a drummer but for acumen in selling drums.

Like Puyi in the film, who learns to tie his shoes and brush his teeth in jail, Pepper’s prison experiences are portrayed in a bracingly calm manner, as is his bottomless addiction to heroin, his time in Synanon, and his impossible climb to recovery. What sets Straight Life apart from other artist /drug memoirs is how the clichés of the genre do not exist yet, and to the extent they do, Pepper pays them no mind. He and Laurie develop a proto-Knausgårdian eye for his minor exploits and fuckups, stripping away conceit and repetition until you just have a person describing how it is to be themselves the exact joys and limitations of a life lived for music and drugs and, in that way, shining a bright light on what it means to be human. What makes this one of the

greatest memoirs is the Angeleno way he avoids making a moral out of anything. He draws no conclusions from external forces or internal weaknesses. The drugs are good, Synanon (where they met) is good, music is good, snitches are bad, cops are bad, fake people are bad (other than of course his inability to deal with any of them and how they constantly interfere with each other). Beyond that lies the mystery of existence, where he has to feel and describe his way using only his gut and memory. And that’s where you get value and things of interest, and where very few works of art are willing to linger.

It’s a relentless sun-bleached clarity. Art Pepper reflects and is more than anything a child of the city, with his extreme and uncompromising life, his bracing, warm awareness and honesty, chasing a sordid utopia of half-true beliefs and impossible highs, yet somehow creating a true art life along the way. The conservative, all-toocertain way he regards women; how it expresses itself both in an actual recalled assault and an unusual deference to Laurie as the prime mover behind the book and his comeback. How he exists as a white man in a Black genre, close to and playing with Black musicians but with an outright racist defensiveness when confronted with hostility birthed from systemic oppression. And of course, the way heroin leads him to jail again and again, because he will not rat anyone out, or do anything to avoid the almost comically stringent drug laws of the 1950s and ’60s (while they all need to be struck down in favor of harm reduction, we have come a long way). In each case, he explains in an unnervingly clearheaded fashion why he did what he did, or thought what he thought, and as the

totality emerges, it’s difficult to come away without some respect for how willing he is for karma to destroy him. It’s the portrait of some kind of ultimate countercultural living in a mid-century America with little public counterculture, deeply troubled but with an utter dedication to his craft and the childlike helplessness of the true addict, and ready to accept any consequence in pursuit of beauty and dreams. •

I believe that is something anyone in Los Angeles has acquired, the letting go of any concern other than beauty and dreams, Jonathan Gold’s “fugue state, like the Aboriginal dreamtime, when you go on long, aimless walks in the outback. That’s how I feel driving on the endless streets of Los Angeles County.” Everything feels like an expedition to a half-remembered land. But Los Angeles is unlike any other city, without a real core, a wild infinitude of writers and other artists all hidden under trees and string-lights in the dusk, trading the visceral reality of an inner city for the heavy bliss of perfect weather, unexpectedly scenic vistas and groves. There is a plain insanity to the way you have to drive to go anywhere, if you don’t happen to live near a strip like East Sunset in Echo Park. An intimate epic, a suburban lawn always within sight, strip malls next to cultural iconography. Unlike New York City’s functioning alcoholism, in Los Angeles there is a hard cleanness to the sky, a different romance of clarity, knowing what’s a bender or what’s straight and narrow, cypress-shrouded apartments and succulent bungalows as true hideaways to indulge or abstain in.

When I moved from New York to an apartment on Los Feliz Boulevard, a

residential road with six lanes of traffic almost every hour of the day, it felt like more of a desert than Las Vegas, where I had lived for a few years in my twenties. The raw desolation of the Mojave trains your eyes to see the life. In Southern California, the lushness can make the relentless sun and quiet intensely ominous; you need an introduction. It was only when Alex Maslansky from Stories Books convinced me to start a literary events program there, after I applied to be a bookseller, that I could give a space to Caitlin Forst for the NDA reading series, who then introduced me to Sammy Loren of Casual Encountersz or Jasmine Johnson of Factory Made. That random chance beginning with one pillar of Angeleno society, Alex, leading to an interlinked universe of public readings, oriented towards the past and future of writing, that could only happen here. Alex’s tragic death this past January left an unfillable void in the city of calm, laconic industry, one that we can only meekly cover over with the next iteration of chaos and silence the city brings.

For the writer or reader with an affinity for Los Angeles’s geography, there’s a happy alignment with the essential building blocks of the literary life; hiding away to consume or create, emerging into one of the world’s great cities, and the only one that will let you dream so completely. The dead end is a series of trapdoors into other worlds. It’s the honesty, an almost psychedelic acceptance of the fate we tempt by pursuing our twisted, childlike dreams¾I believe this is a truth, a clarity best found and facilitated in Los Angeles. If you can see your fate here, you can see it anywhere.

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness Water, 1969

steel, lacquer, water; 30 x 220 x 160 cm; 120 x 120 x 120 cm installation view, 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, May 10 – 30, 1969

photographer unknown, courtesy Toshiaki Minemura Archive © Nobuo Sekine Estate, courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

BERCK, KINGDOM OF THE DAMNED

by Max Blecher, translated by Gabi Reigh

Translator’s Note: Like many early-20th-century Romanian writers and artists, Max Blecher revered France and its culture. As a burgeoning writer, he corresponded with André Breton, who published Blecher’s literary experiments in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and his dream of visiting Paris was finally fulfilled when he went to study medicine there in his late teens. While in Paris,

Blecher was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, and, through a cruel twist of fate, the rest of his time in France was spent receiving treatment in the Berck sanatorium rather than enjoying the delights of its capital city.

In the following pieces of short prose, Blecher reflects on the atmosphere of Berck, a town that became defined by its disabled community and found ways to accommodate their needs, enabling them to live a fulfilling existence. Blecher’s prose eschews surrealism in favor of naturalistic descriptions of the sanatorium town, revealing the seldom-explored daily life of the disabled. Blecher explains to us the hard-won freedom that a gurney can provide to immobile patients and illustrates the way that urban spaces can be reimagined to allow accessibility to all. Despite their poignancy, these vignettes insist on the resilience of the human spirit and its continual striving for happiness, even in the most difficult circumstances.

crutches and bodies ravaged by rickets cling desperately to the arms of their companions. They are here on a pilgrimage to Berck, the sanatorium town, the most astounding town in the world, the Mecca of spinal tuberculosis.

This entire crowd will be squeezed into a train as tiny as a toy, with a locomotive that resembles a camel and drags away slowly, noisily puffing out too much steam far too much steam given that it only travels five kilometers. It is the famous tortillard, the little Berck train, filled with Berck’s patients and their relatives. Naturally, the only topic of conversation on this train is illness, patients, cures, and treatments. I believe that there is more discussion of sickness on this little train than in all the Academies of Medicine in the world put together.

On the Paris–Boulogne line, there is a station where all the trains stop for a minute longer than usual. It is Rang-du-Fliers, the connecting station for Berck. When arriving here, the unsuspecting ordinary traveler, rubbing his sleepy eyes while gazing casually out of the train window, will momentarily imagine that he has drifted into a nightmare.

While in all other stations he would have encountered the ordinary babel of travellers hurriedly embarking and disembarking from the train, here he will see orderlies and porters hauling stretchers heavy with moribund patients out of the carriages with infinite care. Cripples hobble on

On the other hand, the traveler who has previously been informed that Berck is the destination of 5,000 patients immobilized in plaster will be primed from the very start of his journey for revelatory signs of its singular and melancholy character. When he disembarks, he will be bewildered to find only a banal little provincial town with an Avenue de Gare identical to any other that can be found in every little provincial French town, with a banal high street, with ordinary people idly shopping, with old-fashioned houses reeking of mold and stale air.

However, Berck’s true character will be suddenly revealed to this traveler the moment he turns a street corner and is faced with the first patient lying in a carriage. The vision is stupefying. Imagine a kind of rectangular pram with a swing at the back, a kind of crate, a kind of boat on wheels containing a sick person, swaddled in blankets, steering a horse. You are probably

imagining a person lying back in a carriage, in a comfortable and fairly normal position. No. The patient is completely supine in the wooden frame, gazing upwards, into the void. He does not turn his head to the right, to the left, doesn’t lift it, cannot move it: he is fixedly staring into a mirror suspended above him that can be maneuvered in different directions. The carriage passes, turns a corner, avoids a child, stops in front of a shop, and all the while its driver’s gaze remains fixed into the ether while his hands pull the reins this way and that, with the gestures of a blind man groping his way through darkness. There is something sad and surreal in this fixed stare, something that indeed resembles the faltering journey of the blind and the feverish tattoo of their sticks on pavements as their milky eyes gaze out with indefinable vagueness.

The patient in the carriage is impeccably dressed, with an open jacket, tie, white handkerchief peeking out of his top pocket, gloves. Who would ever guess that underneath his shirt he is encased in a cage of plaster, a white, rigid armor, which he might, perhaps, shed in three months’ time?

A note on plaster

…because Berck is the kingdom of immobility and plaster. Here gather all the broken, decayed bones from every corner of the world so that they might be straightened and mended. Deformed, crooked spines, loose joints, rotten vertebrae, misshapen elbows, crooked fingers, crooked legs, all gather here praying for the miracle of plaster. Plaster mends, straightens, seals. Plaster defines Berck just as steel defines Creusot, it is Liverpool’s steel and Baku’s oil. There are plaster casts that encase only fingers

and others that encase entire bodies. There are plaster casts like aqueducts from which the patient can escape whenever he wants and others that are hermetically sealed for entire months. The latter are the most terrible of all. Aside from the torture suffered while the plaster is drying, during which the patient feels as if he is lying in a cold, oppressive swamp, he must also endure the torment of not being able to wash for several months. Naturally, during this time his skin gathers a thick layer of dirt, becoming infernally itchy and sore. These kinds of plaster casts are becoming increasingly rare nowadays.

A horizontal town

At the first bookshop you come across in Berck, you can buy a visitor guide explaining that the town occupies a privileged position on the Channel as the Authie gulf directs favorable ocean currents towards it. The same guide will inform you that the air in Berck is incredibly clean, extraordinarily pure, in fact the purest air in the world, with only four bacteria per cubic meter, while in Paris the same volume would contain 900,000 bacteria. For the ailing visitors who have traveled here in the hope of restoring their health and who know that they are likely to spend several years in Berck, these statistics are not insignificant.

But I can confirm that not one of the 5,000 invalids in Berck have been attracted here by these boasts of ocean currents and clean air. There is another reason why they flock to this place: it is because in Berck all of these sick, disabled, paralyzed people, disinherited by life, who in other towns lived as pariahs, hidden by their families, shut away in stuffy rooms, profoundly

humiliated by the life that defiantly thrived all around them, can become normal again. The entire town is organized in such a way that they can live a perfectly ordinary life even as they are permanently horizontal and undergoing treatment. Still horizontal, they can go to the cinema, ride in a carriage, go to a nightclub, attend a conference, or visit one another. Their gurneys can pass through every door in Berck, they can enter any public place, any shop: in Berck, none of the buildings have doorsteps. Here, someone has reorganized life by rotating it 90 degrees and proved that a horizontal existence is perfectly feasible. In the grand hotels, sick men and women reside in rooms that are no different to any other hotel rooms, and they take their meals in dining rooms specially designed to accommodate them, where they are wheeled on gurneys to their tables. The spectacle of these dining rooms is simultaneously strange and sumptuous. Sumptuous because it resembles a Roman feast where all the guests lounge around on their backs, but strange because the sickly pallor of these revelers brings to mind some kind of hallucinatory novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

But even more surprising is the spectacle of the beach during the summer months, where the patients flirt with the beautiful women that flock around them. And these flirtations are not always innocent. I have already mentioned that sick people come to Berck to become normal again …

Of course, there is also drama, and unbearable heartbreak. But in Berck, these seldom lead to tragic conclusions. Last winter, a hysterical woman and her incurably ill lover committed suicide under a calvary cross. The incident caused a stir and the reporters in Paris embroidered some

wonderful tales about the tragic town of Berck. In truth, though, such cases are the exceptions. Caught up in the rhythm of an almost ordinary life, the sick wear their misery lightly. It is the psychological miracle of Berck.

What is a gurney?

For the sick, carriage rides are a real blessing. But it is an expensive, extravagant blessing. In Berck, patients might pay between 25 and 30 francs for a couple of hours’ ride. To their frustration, the town council has never attempted to regulate these prices. The patients, therefore, pay almost 15 lei for a 15-minute ride, about as much as it would cost to run the engine of a splendid car for that time. Because at Berck, you see, a horse-drawn carriage is the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce. Under these circumstances, the health benefits of the sea air and the pleasures of outings would be enjoyed only by the privileged few were it not for the gurney, a mode of transportation that is universally available. The gurney is an invention that transforms a sick person into a healthy one. It combines the functions of a bed, a carriage, and a healthy pair of legs into one. A gurney is a stretcher with four large rubber wheels, a frame that supports the supine body of the patient, and tough springs that prevent it from juddering on the bumpy road.

In the cheaper sanatoria, where patients of slender means lie side by side in communal wards, the gurneys are only used for seaside promenades. However, in certain hotels and guesthouses, the patients are permanently installed on their gurneys. They sleep on them, eat on them, lie on them during their outings. A patient can

navigate the whole of his room on his gurney, simply by letting his arms drop and maneuvering its wheels in any direction. For example, I have seen an invalid “walking” in this way to his bookshelf to pick up a novel or independently cruising the corridors. When a patient wants to buy something in town, he will immediately telephone a nearby sanatorium and a former patient or convalescent will be employed to push his gurney to the chosen destination. For this service, he will charge five lei. In Berck, a human being is cheaper than a horse and just as serviceable.

Hotels and sanatoria

The brochure advertising Berck explicitly claims: “Berck offers treatment facilities that cater to all patients, regardless of their financial situation.” This is perfectly true. However, the difference between a modern hotel and a sanatorium is as vast as that between a distinguished gentleman dressed in a gray tailored suit, with a boutonniere, and the beggar in rags who stretches his hand towards him in supplication. All of the grand hotels in Berck promise green lawns fringed with splendid flowers, elevators, and running water. All of the “budget” sanatoriums have dank walls, smelly corridors, and dirty floors. The difference between the clinical treatments and general morale in these places corresponds to their outward appearance. However, there are a couple of notable exceptions two Berck hospitals catering to the poor, both of them admirably organized along the principles of decency. They are “The Maritime Hospital,” belonging to Paris’s Public Assistance Institution and “The Franco-American Hospital,” a charitable institution.

The trouble is that the former only admits Parisian patients while the latter has very few spaces available. Therefore, a patient in reduced circumstances who cannot find a place at either of these institutions falls prey to the entrepreneurial owners of “budget” sanatoriums.

Berck, kingdom of the damned

In Berck, 5,000 spinal tuberculosis patients are lying immobilized in plaster, waiting to be healed. The dreadful illness discerningly targets the joints the vertebrae, the hips, the knees and the attacked area must be immobilized immediately. Five thousand patients lie on gurneys and beds, lost in their reveries, endlessly absorbed in their endless books, dematerialized by their infinite contemplation of the ocean’s immensity.

Healing is slow, unbearably slow, but it happens. Nowadays, we see miracles that no one could have ever dreamed of in the past. In the 50-year history of Berck, the mortality rates for spinal tuberculosis have fallen from 80 percent in the last century to five percent, as a result of constant progress in clinical practice, hard-won through logic and determination; it is a unique achievement in the chronicles of medicine.

What is more, in Berck the patients live a normal life and the horrendous curse of their physical limitations becomes more bearable to them in the midst of a community filled with others like themselves.

But one cannot help but be moved by Berck. From the drama of the sick being hoisted onto carriages like coffins onto hearses (just like the hearses, the carriages have rollers to help the patient slide into them) to the spectacle of perspiring

patients knitting in the sun and peddling their creations for a few coins to holidaymakers, Berck is filled with striking, heart-rending scenes.

But I have never seen anything so moving, so profoundly human and sad as the Christmas liturgy at Berck. The Catholics celebrate the birth of Christ in church at midnight. Nothing can be more affecting than the extraordinary emotion of the sick, their ecstatic pallor, during the quiet solemnity of the midnight Mass.

Scattered among the crowd, you could see mothers and relatives stifling their desperate sobs into handkerchiefs while the priest weaved among the ailing with the holy communion every diseased body suddenly transfigured, trembling as they received the divine grace.

During the moment of “elevation,” when all the faithful sink to their knees, the patients simply cover their eyes with their hands. At that moment the silence in the church deepens, swells, while outside the rain pummels the staves and the wind hollers its sinister chant as if beckoning all the world’s damned with its all-encompassing, ravaging wail.

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness, 1969 / 1972

natural stone, stainless steel, 520 x 450 x 150 cm

Shiki City Municipal Office, 1972– , Saitama

photographer unknown

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

by Juliana Spahr

A friend told me a story about her elderly mom whose partner had died. It was a complicated story. The mom’s boyfriend had died in the hospital, during the one moment the mom had gone home for a break. When she came back, he had died so recently that the nurse had not yet closed his eyes, and his eyes, the panic in them, now haunted her mom. The mom dealt with the haunting by going to the bar every night. This was something new for the mom, a new way

of being in the world that confused my friend. But also, the friend’s sister who lived with the mom was a part of this story and the sister’s many unemployed friends and there was a lot of coming and going. But as my friend told this story, a story with lots of chaos and anxiety, she kept returning to how there was cat shit all over the kitchen because no one would clean the cat box. When my friend was done with her story, I told her she had to read this new Hiromi Itō book, The Thorn Puller.

I did not tell her why, but I suggested this book because much of it is about taking care of one’s elderly parents from far away and flying back and forth and there is also a dog with a starring role. Itō (the book is written in first person but the chapter heads refer to this person as Itō) in the story gets her elderly parents a dog, but they are too old to care for it and the dog pees on the floor so many times the flooring has to be changed and then soon there are dried up pieces of dog shit in the corner, a sign of her mom’s decline. But what I did tell her was about how my mom was also not doing well, although in different ways. She had recently had another stroke and broken her hip and leg. The doctors had put in a rod and some nails to hold the bones together. The surgery was intense, and the recovery was difficult and would have been for anyone, but because my mom has dementia, she was constantly confused about why she could not walk. I had gone back to Ohio the first time to be there after the surgery and I was there when they moved her from the hospital and into rehab. And then I had returned a few weeks later to get her out of rehab and into assisted living as she was unable to return to her apartment. In between packing up boxes, moving

boxes, throwing her stuff out, buying a recliner, and scooping her cat’s shit at her old apartment, I would regularly leave and go to her new room in assisted living and help her get to the bathroom. My mom at the time was more or less incontinent, mainly because she could not remember to press the button she wore around her neck that would bring someone to help her get to the bathroom. The button had arrived after the latest stroke and she could not get the presence of the button into her memory. I was worried about my mom sliding into permanent incontinence, so for the week I was there I would leave her old apartment to go to her new room every two or so hours. When I got there, I would first help her up and into the wheelchair and then once in the bathroom, after I got her standing, I would pull her pants down, then her diaper down, and help her shuffle around so she could sit and then I would stand there while she went to the bathroom. When there she often pooped, a soft, slippery sort of poop with a strong smell. And when I handed her the toilet paper, she would wipe so vigorously that I kept having to say, “Mom, don’t wipe back and forth because of infections.” This is how The Thorn Puller begins, with Itō, her mother having just had a stroke, taking the mom to the bathroom, dealing with her “soft, slippery bowel movement,” getting it on her hands, and the stink never going away. Not in a bad way. “Yeah, we eat, we shit. And our shit stinks. Honestly, those are the most natural things in the world,” she thinks. But she is clear that she is dealing with shit: “Mom’s loose stools were shit. They had the same foul smell as the ones I make.” And yet as normal as it is, these sorts of moments are not part of the range of content that is often in-

cluded in literary narratives and Itō’s genius as a writer is in recognizing these moments and spending some uncomfortable time there with them, all the while insisting it is normal.

My friend had been flying back and forth to Las Vegas all year, dealing with the heavily drinking mom and the sister and the sister’s friends and the cat’s shit. She would often text me when she was there. The trip with all the bathroom visits was the second trip I had made back to Ohio in less than a month and I had texted her too. We would text about the weirdness of where we had arrived. A great deal of The Thorn Puller is about flying back and forth between Japan and California, dealing with two elderly parents in Japan, a much older and elderly husband in California, and a teenage daughter who traveled with her. My partner, while not much older than me as both of us are heading into elderly, was flying a lot to care for his two elderly parents who were in Florida. His mom had a stroke a few weeks after my mom. His dad was losing circulation in his feet and was at risk of amputation. A few weeks later, the mom was out of the hospital but the dad was in the hospital, fitted with a defibrillator vest. My partner would also text me stories about the weirdness of where he had arrived. In one story his mother on the way home from the hospital after her stroke insisted on getting a martini at a nearby bar because, she announced, it had been a hard week. I was also texting with another friend who was dealing with her mother who had a wound that would not heal and was constantly oozing after a minor surgery, and no one could get it to stop. She was dealing with a divorce and a teenager too and at one point she had her father-in-law

living with her and then her mother-in-law moved in too after she left the hospital and then her son returned to live with her. She lived, like everyone else in this story, in a small, modest house, so the mother-in-law stayed on the couch in the corner of the living room as she recovered. I texted her too that she should read The Thorn Puller.

And yet another friend. I also told her to read The Thorn Puller when she was trying to help her mother-in-law who had never worked in her life, and thus had no income, find a senior living apartment cheap enough that my friend, of fairly modest income, could pay for it. This search went on for many months and involved much filing of waivers, but whenever one of the places wrote to the mother-in-law to notify her of an opening, the mother-in-law threw the letter out, saying she did not need to move. But she did need to move, for many reasons. The main reason being that the landlord had said she had to move. So, the search continued. And while the search happened, life went on. The brother-in-law died after many years of drug use. Numerous people in the family got COVID-19. My friend’s partner switched jobs two times, stressfully and not for the usual reason of increased income or sense of purpose. And my friend, like myself and like the friend with the mother with the wound that would not heal, first lost her job and then unlost her job. We all taught at the same small liberal arts college, and it had briefly been shut down because it could not make payroll and then a few weeks later a big polytechnic university acquired the college and we all unlost our jobs. The unlost jobs, as relieved as we were to have paychecks, were also part of the problem. The jobs we unlost were in no way the same as the ones we

had lost. The jobs had become difficult and complicated, depressing too, as most of the people we respected had left in the first few years, and the new culture of the polytechnic university was very different than that of the small liberal arts college. The university tended to treat us less as faculty and more as ghosts and when they did notice us it was usually to tell us that they were not going to listen to us, although they did pay us regularly and that was a relief because we all needed money for elder care.

At some point, I texted my friend with the mother-in-law who needed housing about this moment where we were trying first to keep our jobs and then, once kept, trying to do our jobs, about family, about my teenage son who both needed and did not need me in the time-honored tradition of teenageness, about my partner who went around the house saying “I hate you; I hate you” to himself and it seemed to be about his job teaching math at an urban high school, about the cat box full of shit too, and about how I was going to have to move my mom from Ohio to live in the corner of our living room, the only room available in my modest house, because I could not afford to leave her in assisted living. The inability to leave her in assisted living was partially my fault. I had done funny things with her small amounts of savings that disqualified her from state assistance until I paid the money back, which I could not do because my salary was also modest because the small liberal arts college had frozen all salaries 10 years ago and the polytechnic university was refusing to pay us the going rate. In the middle of my self-involved inventorying of my woes, my friend texted me back, “Lol. I was reading the part in thorn puller last night before bed

where she’s heaving her body from surface to surface while bleeding too much after some kind of uterine surgery bc her elderly husband is too weak to help her stand up which neither of them say but both of them know and she has to get to the car to go to ER and it was oddly deeply very comforting.” I knew immediately what paragraph she meant. It was this one: “Incessant waves of nausea and dizziness washed over me. I tried to stand but couldn’t, I tried to walk but couldn’t. I threw myself toward the wall in front of me, and when I crashed into it, I stopped. I leaned on the wall with all my weight, then threw myself forward again toward the table a few steps away, and when I crashed into that, I stopped again. Using this method, I inched closer, step by step, toward the car outside.” On its own, this paragraph might not seem like much, but in context, it does a very good job of describing those moments when you have no other option than to pull yourself forward, despite being barely able to do it, while another person that you rely on for help and support is unable to help you and instead stands there watching.

At the same time I was reading The Thorn Puller, I was trying to write something. For a number of months, I had been reading The New York Times on my device for about half an hour in bed after I woke up. My partner would leave to go teach and I didn’t have to start work until later because I taught at night, so I luxuriated in the mumble freedom, although reading The New York Times seemed like a misuse of this precious mumble free time. So, in a halfhearted attempt at self-improvement, and also in an attempt to fulfill the obligations of my job because the rare moments when the polytechnic university

noticed us they usually were insulting our research output which they seemed to feel was not up to their standards, I decided I had to stop reading The New York Times on my device in bed. I made a rule that I was only allowed to stay in bed if I wrote something on that same device. I had decided I wanted to write something about crows. I am someone who loves crows, loves their loud squawks, the way they tilt their heads when looking at you. I love their eyes filled with what I imagine is a searching intelligence, an intelligence of connection. I also love their communal ways, the way they roost together, loudly exchanging information as they settle in for the night. I wanted to write though not just about any crow but about this specific crow called the ‘ alalā. The ‘ alalā had lived in Hawai ‘ i but were now extinct in the wild. The ‘ alalā is a beautiful and smart crow. Beautiful and smart basically describes all crows. But the beauty of the ‘ alalā is that they have wings that are a little more rounded and a bill that is a little bit thicker. And as for smartness, they know how to use sticks as tools. The ‘ alalā, to my disappointment, did not nest communally like the common crow. But still they shared. They often treated trees as pantries, caching ‘ oha kepau and ‘ ōlapa fruit clusters in the crotch of branches or twigs of trees near the nest so as to feed their partners when they were busy with incubating or brooding.

The ‘ alalā went extinct in the wild, but there were nine crows still alive in a lab. These nine were now being bred by a team of humans who wanted to reintroduce them to the wild. It sounded like it was not a great thing to be one of nine remaining ‘ alalā. ‘ Alalā are among those birds who are monogamous and form strong bonds

but when held captive were forced to breed not for compatibility but for genetic diversity and so they were provided only with one mate at a time. Frequently the two ‘ alalā did not want to mate. But for those that did, after they laid a clutch of eggs, someone from the team of humans would go in and pull the eggs away so the ‘ alalā would think the first clutch had died and produce a double clutch. But even when the ‘ alalā laid the double clutch, the eggs were still often taken away and the chicks were raised by humans. The humans did not trust the ‘ alalā to raise their own eggs. They felt the ‘ alalā were bad parents. In this way, at great expense and much trouble, the humans produced about 15 ‘ alalā each year. There it got complicated again for the ways it is not great to be one of the remaining ‘ alalā seem to be many. One year, at the beginning of the rewilding, enough birds had been produced that 30 were released. And very shortly 25 of those 30 were dead or disappeared. The humans then recaptured the five remaining birds. They decided that part of the problem was that the captive ‘ alalā no longer recognized the ‘ io as predatory and so were quickly eaten. The humans set about to train the ‘ alalā to recognize the ‘ io as a danger. This involved bringing in a glove-trained ‘ io and a taxidermied ‘ io. The humans would attach the taxidermied ‘ io to a pulley and have it mimic flying over the ‘ alalā’s cage and then another human would stand at the cage, body hidden, holding out an arm with the glove-trained, live ‘ io so that the ‘ alalā could see the ‘ io. Then another human would play prerecorded ‘ alalā alarm calls and as the calls continued, the human with the glove would put a dead ‘ alalā underneath the io’s feet, moving their arms up and down, the ‘ io balanced on the

Fields of Sight (published by Edition Patrick Fey) features a series of works made in collaboration between photographer Gauri Gill and acclaimed Warli artist Rajesh Vangad. The collaboration consists of photographs of landscapes in Ganjad, Dahanu, an Adivasi village in coastal Maharashtra in India with drawings by Vangad. Vangad’s inscriptions, rather than adding to the photographs, include and remember an important layer of myth, memory, and history — precisely what is lacking in the photographic

capture of the (exclusively) immediate for Gill. Their collaborative works offer a meditation on perception itself in witness of the destruction of the earth (by way of the immediate and industrial) and respect for the land. Alongside the exquisite inscription-laden images, the book includes annotations by both artists on their respective photographic and graphic languages.

above and facing page:

Gauri Gill, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

“Fields of Sight,” Edition Patrick Frey, 2023

glove, awkwardly. This was what I thought I wanted to write about.

I had convinced myself that I wanted to write a small book, one more idiosyncratic in form and content than encyclopedic. At first, I thought I wanted to write a book about emotions, about the emotions that I felt when I watched the videos of the captive ‘ alalā. About the odd look in the glove-trained ‘ io’s eyes as the dead crow was shoved underneath it to demonstrate the predator training protocol. About how in another video the woman who came to feed them would first put a black shroud over her head as if she were a druid, climb a ladder, and attach a food dispenser to a fence.

At the time I was partial to writing poems that had lists of animals in them. I had in the past used elegy to talk about endangered species, listed names of extinctions as if in real time, created fake ecosystems to suggest connections in the poems that I wrote. But now I wanted to deal not with the natural world but with humans trying to respond to ecological crisis of their own invention, not by stopping doing what they were doing that was causing birds like the ‘ alalā to become extinct but instead by pulling a taxidermied ‘ io over the cage of the ‘ alalā, playing ‘ alalā alarm calls, and holding a captured ‘ io out near a cage with a dead ‘ alalā shoved underneath it. It was the things that humans do in the name of care that are something other than care that I found so enticing in this ‘ alalā story.

I imagined this small book having this as its opening sentence: “There once were only nine ‘ alalā left and these nine were bred by humans to produce other ‘ alalā that were then trained by those same humans to be introduced back into the wild where they

were then eaten by the also endangered ‘ io.” I was not sure this was the right sentence. But at the same time, I thought this sort of sentence would exemplify my concerns with avoiding the romanticization that defines the writing about what some people call “endlings,” or the last known example of a species. I did not at all want to write something about taking care of my mother. But it did not occur to me that maybe I was interested in the story of the ‘ alalā because my mom was also a sort of endling, at least to me, and stuck in a version of a cage. But I did not let myself have this thought while flying back and forth to Ohio every few weeks and getting no writing done. The more likely explanation, despite my grand plan and my statements of intent, was that it was not really the ‘ alalā that I needed or wanted to write about, it was rather the absurdity of the caretaking. My mom had a million times said to me that I should never drop her off at a nursing home or an assisted living facility. If she ever got dementia and was in diapers, I was to let her die.

Itō does a good job in The Thorn Puller of explaining the constant feeling that there is not room for one more thing and then yet one more thing comes along all the time because life is a list of things that happen and is never still. For me, I felt the absurdity peak when I began the process of trying to move my mom out to California so she could live in the corner of my living room and began to try to figure out the California medical care system, a system that was much better but therefore much more complicated than the one in Ohio. For weeks before she moved, I got up and did my calls, as I called it, for at least an hour each day. Among the people I called were a lawyer who for a fee would help me

apply for Medi-Cal; someone who was basically a real estate agent for assisted living facilities who would be paid by the facilities if we found someplace although none of the places were affordable; a person who would help me find the right version of Medicare insurance for my mom in California who would be paid by the insurance company if I worked with her; some guy who kept calling me when I naïvely gave my phone number to some site so that I could see the rates for an assisted living facility and who seemed slightly bad at his job, which was also to be a sort real estate agent for the elderly; someone from a nonprofit whose website featured stirring patriotic music and lots of flags and who would for a fee help me apply for veteran’s benefits for my mom, a service I needed because the free versions of assistance with these forms that the veteran’s sites recommended never returned my calls or my emails and their website warned me not to come by their office; my own tax accountant who for years I had paid to do my taxes and who seemed annoyed by my questions; an elder lawyer in Ohio who had been helping me understand Ohio Medicaid who I also paid, and a social worker who I would pay if I wanted them to figure out where I might get medical help for my mom. There were, I learned, a whole range of other services that had unclear costs or unclear requirements, many of which my mom could never receive because she had a small pension from her years of being a schoolteacher, which meant that she made too much money to qualify for many things but not enough money to pay for the level of care she needed. Many of these people seemed as confused as I was and gave me contradictory advice and it was never clear to me what

was true. In the meantime, I kept paying more than I made in a month each month I kept my mom in assisted living in Ohio.

It was not surprising that my friend referenced The Thorn Puller when I complained to her. We are, my friend and me, part of the Hiromi Itō fan club. Or so we decided years ago when we brought Hiromi Itō to read at the MFA program that was offered by that small liberal arts college. Hiromi Itō read that night from Killing Kanoko, her book about motherhood and depression written after her daughter was born. While The Thorn Puller says a bunch of things that I have never seen anyone say in literary fiction about elder care and late-in-life partnerships and the difficulties of raising teenagers and dealing with one’s own bodily decline at the same time, Killing Kanoko said the same about caring for an infant. The poem “Killing Kanoko” is willing to go to the dark place: “congratulations on your destruction” is one of its refrains. But also passages like this: “After six months / Kanoko’s teeth come in / She bites my nipples, wants to bite my nipples off / She is always looking for just the right moment to do so / Kanoko eats my time / Kanoko pilfers my nutrients / Kanoko threatens my appetite / Kanoko pulls out my hair / Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit / I want to get rid of Kanoko / I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko / I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.” I had a young son at the time whose teeth had just come in and who was also biting my nipples regularly. When this happened, I would scream ouch loudly, then he too would begin to scream and there we were, my boob hanging out in public, him loudly causing a stir because I had loudly caused a stir. Every time, I felt

as if I was being a bad mother by reacting to the pain and not being able to gracefully pull my child’s mouth off the nipple and then just as gracefully reattach it and do it with such ease that he did not scream. I was convinced that all the good mothers, those who really enjoyed their babymoon, knew how to do this. This, as you might imagine, made reading Killing Kanoko feel as if someone had finally walked across the room to me when my baby screamed after I went “ouch” and told me that I wasn’t a bad mom because I went “ouch.” Something that never once happened.

The night that my friend and I created and then joined the Hiromi Itō fan club, Kanoko, the daughter whom Hiromi Itō had, of course, not killed and whom as far as I could understand she loved dearly, was there. Kanoko played some instrument she had made, and the music was the sort of experimental music that was made at the small liberal arts college. It was exciting and lovely and I remember thinking that night that poetry could do some work, something that I do not feel that often. And I also remember standing outside the reading on the porch of the building because my friend at that time still smoked and we were talking about how there needed to be a Hiromi Itō fan club. This was a very different time, a time when the small liberal arts college was somewhat functioning, and the room was packed with people to see Hiromi Itō, and my friend still smoked which meant we were younger and less worried versions of ourselves, a time when we had time to joke about a fan club. Now literature feels sort of like an afterthought.

I have this theory about poetry in this moment. I do not tell many people who write poetry about this theory because it

annoys them and then they complain about it all over the place and then I get annoyed and feel bad at the same time. My theory is that we are in a moment where all the poetry is a form of heroic confessionalism where people talk mainly about their lives, as many poets have over time, but unlike before so many of the poems right now feature the author as the hero of their stories, someone who triumphs or rights wrongs or scolds people who are wrong loudly and convincingly. Poetry has become self-hagiography. Sometimes when I read poetry, I think of it as telling the stories of these godlike figures who always know the right thing to do and then who get right on it and do it, helping everyone be better, fighting injustices in their various ways, some despite oppression and some righteous in their refusal to be the oppressor. This work can, like all poetry, be good or bad. But even when it is good and I admire its skillful turns and its beautiful metaphors and maybe I go ohh marveling at the narrator’s abilities to right wrongs or out of respect for their strong righteous anger, I find it little comfort.

Sometimes I just want someone to say something fucked up in their poem, to confess some fucked up things they thought or did, some moments when they realized not how they were triumphant but how they were on the wrong side or they did something disgusting or their body did something disgusting without their consent or someone did something disgusting to their body and they dealt with it or enjoyed it or maybe just did not mind it. Congratulations on your destruction, I want someone to say. And this is the reason why I am a member of the Hiromi Itō fan club, a club with no membership cards and

no dues and only a few other members who never hold meetings.

In each chapter of The Thorn Puller, Itō references a bunch of other writers and she is, she says, imitating their styles. I can’t hear these voices because most of these referenced works are not translated and I’m stupid in my monolingualism. But it is a nice way for a writer to be in the world. It is nice to think about how the stories we tell are created over time and are impossible for any single individual to own, something I believe so strongly that I sometimes end up on the wrong side of all the debates about appropriation. Itō’s stories tend to end mid-narrative, as if they were fables. In the one about the bleeding, it ends with Itō unable to get herself into the hospital, so while her husband goes to get a wheelchair, she lays down in the parking lot and as the winds blow over her she realizes that there is a wildfire nearby. Eventually she is picked up and taken into the hospital and it is unclear what is done to make her better because suddenly there is a story about the dog and then another call from her dad about her mother and the hospital has just disappeared. This chapter ends the book, and it ends with a moment where Itō and her husband and her teenage daughters have driven to the snow to go sledding. Itō has hurt her neck and so does not want to turn and feel the pain but her daughters call to her and she turns despite the pain: “I felt myself shake again. I shook until I felt myself. I exist. Here. Meanwhile, they were shouting themselves hoarse. I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive! I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive!”

On one of these many trips I made to care for my mom, I can’t remember if it was the time she was recovering from bladder

cancer or the time she had her gallbladder removed or the time she had her knee replaced, one by one my mom’s friends came by to check on her. I was at the dining room table working on her accounting as the friends came by. This was about five or so years ago and it was when the opioid crisis was at its peak and my mom lived in the center of the opioid crisis. As I worked, I listened to them tell my mom their stories, so many of them about their children and opiates. There was one about a son who had a drug problem and while his girlfriend, also with a drug problem, was in jail for theft, he took up with another much younger girl who also had a drug problem. Around the time the girlfriend got out of jail, the much younger girl overdosed. The son and the girlfriend did not tell anyone the girl had died, and they buried her in their backyard. Eventually, the girl’s body was dug up and that was what the story was about. It was about what her body looked like. It had become purplish black, the woman said, unrecognizable. And she said it several times. The story stopped there. There was no presumed ending. It was a story that could not accommodate an end and all it said was I’m alive.

JULIANA SPAHR

Gauri Gill, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad “Fields of Sight,” Edition Patrick Frey, 2023

by ML Kejera

Two years had passed since the revolution and Tunis was football mad, but I didn’t care, I was in love. Granted, the match was to start soon and I’d have to wax up my ears from the whole city, country, and galaxy breathing football. Granted, too, Esther wasn’t texting back my téléphone portable, but no matter, Maman smiled as she fixed my tie. Taking photo after photo, she palavered on about “my big man, mon Benedict, mon filston going to his senior prom. And with a date, at that!” Maman wasn’t sure what senior prom was, or

why an international school “is following a custom so American, or why I only heard about this Indian girl when you and the boys were buying tuxedos, or why you’ve never learnt to tie a tie yourself but one thing I am undoubtedly sure of is that a man brings a woman flowers. Tu m’entends, Benedict?”

Before I could ask whether Papa had bought her flowers on their first date, Maman’s footsteps were echoing down the stairway. I rifled through the pockets of my fifth grade Olive et Tom backpack for my box of unopened condoms, pack of Camels, wallet, and lighter.

My Nokia vibrated in my pocket; midstep, I reached for it and tripped in the staircase. It wasn’t Esther, but a text from Arabella, who’d slap you if you called her anything but Bella. She was at Café Mosaic and needed “2 talk bout Esther.” Bella was more in a series of laborious fights than a relationship with her girlfriend, so to my thinking, she wasn’t in a position to give romantic advice. That said, she’d known me since Cote D’Ivoire.

The blue veins on the marble stairway snaked down the steps and onto the living room floor until they reached Papa’s feet. He was sitting before the sharp green of the stadium pitch on the television. Our leather couch swallowing him, a voice emanated from the shiny baldness of the back of his head. “Maman says you’re off to this prom, Benedict? Was there a ticket? Do they make it more expensive for the ADB children? Combien ça m’a coûté?”

Yes. Yes. No. Ninety dinars.

The baldness shook as Papa laughed, wondering out loud if I had opted to attend a cheaper college in America. As the two teams walked out onto the pitch, Papa

went over the advice he always gave before casting me to the night. “No drugs and don’t get anyone pregnant.” My Muslim friends were told to avoid alcohol as well.

Tonight’s advice came with an additional warning. He had seen protestors clashing with police on his drive back from work. “Even with my ADB license plate, les flics” but before he could explain that they had given him some trouble, his voice trailed off when Mejbri, a star player, appeared on the television. Maman told Papa that I’d need taxi fare and spending money while Mejbri bounced the ball on his right shoulder, and Papa, torso now leaning into the television, pointed to the ebony table behind him, indicating that I was to pick up his crocodile-skin wallet and remove whatever Maman determined was enough (five twenty-dinar bills). Maman gave me boustines on both cheeks at the door and told me again about the flowers.

In the garden, the moonlight and streetlight cast a sickly yellow blend over the bougainvillea, roses, daffodils, almond and apple trees, and our pet turtle. Through the window, Papa loudly said he couldn’t understand why I’d miss the match of the century for some silly American dance. The boys in my class were of the same mind. They’d protested when the all-girl planning committee didn’t factor in the match, marching down the hall and chanting “la grève, la grève.” Even I joined in. A 75-inch flatscreen TV was placed in a room adjacent to the main dancing hall.

Walking the two blocks to Mosaic, football lunged at me from the dark. Two security guards, sitting with a radio, argued in French I could understand, and Arabic I could not. The older one kept insisting that the match was nothing more than an

exhibition between clubs in comparison to Maradona’s 1986 thrashing of England; his neighbor, “wallah,” he swore, had been the referee who’d allowed Diego’s head and God’s hand to win the Falklands War.

Seven minutes in, by the Monoprix that had been burnt down during the revolution, a shopper was rebutting Ali Bin Nasser’s neighbor: the match would be a clash between two of the world’s greatest rivals that would free the country from the dictator’s psychic clutches. He talked over the commentator who marveled at the footwork of “number 12, Dali. He’s past one defender, past two, oh!” When I walked through the doors of Mosaic, the ball was in the hands of the goalkeeper, Roble, on the television above the bar that served no alcohol. My friends were sitting at a circular table underneath a smoke-browned painting, but when I found them, not one of their eyes met mine.

Bella was bubbling away at a chicha next to a girl who was not her girlfriend, a girl with the same strawberry blonde hair and dull blue eyes as Amber, who was Bella’s girlfriend. Next to the girl who was not Bella’s girlfriend was Leopold, who kept a Jansport backpack by his feet. He was a white cousin who wasn’t really my cousin, but his diplomat parents had known mine back when they were in Dakar, and French was still his preference. By him, arms splayed out on the couch, fixated on the television, was Yonas, whom we called Yono, who couldn’t have turned away even if the icon of the Habesha Virgin Mary he kept in his wallet, “for protection,” stepped into the three-dimensional plane.

“Hang on, where’s Malick?” I asked, interrupting the sound of football devouring silence. Yono blinked but his eyes remained

locked on the television. “Benedict,” Leopold began, but Bella cut him off, though I knew whatever was coming next would be catastrophic as my friends never called me anything but Bando, a name that had stuck after a better-forgotten 9th grade rap career. Thirty seconds passed on the game clock as my brain registered what Bella, in her British-laced Ghanaian accent, was saying: “Right, then, mate, you’ve lost your date to prom. Simple as that. I’m sorry.” Before I could ask what in the actual fuck she was on about, she said that Lewis, who we called Lulu, had seen Esther and Makaveli pre-gaming, and touching, in Marsa.

“Makaveli the Gambian?” I asked. “Makaveli the Gambian, yes,” responded Bella. Makaveli whose name was Malick but insisted you call him Makaveli? Makaveli, who’d correct you if you spelled it Machiavelli in a text? Makaveli, whom we all assumed was in the closet? Makaveli, who smokes Gauloises? I mean, who the fuck smokes Gauloises?

“Bando, puff on this,” Bella said, taking the pipe from the girl who was not her girlfriend. The smoke went in smoothly, but I tasted ash on my tongue when Yono jumped to his feet and shook the coal in the chicha bowl. As the commentator commented, “Out of sheer frustration that every man was marked, Dali has taken a shot from outside the box and, oh God, it’s hit the post! A prelude of the drama to come.”

Over the crowd’s cheers made hollow by the television’s speakers, I could still hear myself saying that I just need to get her flowers, that Maman said to get her flowers. “And then what, Bando? She falls in love with you, just like that? Much love to Tantie but what the fuck are flowers going

to do?” Yes, I nodded, Esther and Makaveli had been close for ages. Yes, I barely knew her. No, I couldn’t actually list a single thing I loved about her. Maybe, being honest, I just wanted a date, to finally fuck.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said after Bella was done. “You don’t take another man’s girl.” “Another man’s what, sorry? Tu es mon pote, Benedict, depuis Abidjan, but you’re speaking rubbish. We’re not property.” “You know what the fuck I mean, Bella.” “Non, mec, I’m afraid I really fucking don’t.”

Amber, the girl who was Bella’s girlfriend, called but, before she even said hello, Bella was swearing to all the gods she could name “I’m not anywhere near Beatrix.” She had wholly forgotten about Beatrix. She was not sure she would recognize her if she saw her now. When Amber hung up, Bella turned to the girl who was not her girlfriend: “Beatrix, you ready to go then? Help me into my dress?” Turning back to me, she said, “You three still good to get hash and liquor for the afterparty?”

“And flowers,” I added, but Bella was already out the door, leaving me with Leopold and football and Yono’s cherubic face, which stayed fixed on the television while he told us we were close enough to Momo, our dealer, that we could stand to watch a few more minutes of the match, and that he could feel a goal coming. To Yono, the Kingdom of Heaven was not hidden in some field but manifested on the verdant pitch, in the beautiful game.

We cut past bruised chairs and tables, old men playing ancient card games, depressed waiters, cigarette smoke, all the mint chichas in existence, and flowed out into the street and the night and its cars. Yono whistled a car out of the streetlight-speckled dark whilst I monologued.

Malick, who really did insist on being called Makaveli, “must’ve thought this all up when we were buying tuxedos.” Yono, Lulu, Leopold, and I had opted for the Tony Montana look with black jackets and colored shirts. Malick Makaveli had reprimanded us all, in that affected British accent of his, because “black was only reserved for funerals.” He himself would go with “only the darkest of blues.” I hadn’t noticed it then, but when I told him I’d sent Esther a picture and she didn’t mind the color of my suit, his eyes had sunk into their pits.

“Samahni,” said the gap-toothed and jet-haired driver of the yellow taxi. “Je comprends pas bien ton Anglais,” but he communicated that he needed us to shut up so that he could hear the match. “Noah’s, number 22’s corner kick had too much power behind it and ended on the other side as a throw-in.” Reaching beneath him, the taxi driver pulled out a pack of Celtias and distributed them until everyone had a beer in hand. Our hyena canines painted streaks of reflected streetlight down the road.

We came to a sudden halt at a red light, a cuboid car next to us, and the woman’s grip tightened on her steering wheel as her eyes met ours. God himself must have fashioned her out of mud to be the quintessence of ugliness. I laughed but not the hardest, and Yono choked that he “bet no one’s ever bought her flowers” until the light went green, the taxi growled, and the radio shouted that “marauding down the left flank, it’s Mejbri, bearing apocalypse in his right foot. Goal! At the thirty-eighth minute! It’s Armageddon, it’s Meggido, it’s pure football!”

By the time the other commentator finished analyzing the angle Mejbri had

used to sink the ball into the back corner, our taxi had arrived at the abandoned construction site where we were to meet Momo. The face of the ugliest woman on Earth faded from memory. I descended with Yono, leaving Leopold and his Jansport backpack to beg patience of the driver who, as luck would have it, needed a cigarette and another Celtia before he was good to drive again.

Momo’s moped came revving out of the darkness. “Habibi, yallah, yallah, let’s go. It won’t be halftime forever.” He swore that the hash we were each paying twenty dinars for was the best shit, straight out of Morocco. Pointing at deep purple bruises around his eyes, he said, through wheezy laughter, that “mes amis, les flics” had booted some fans from the stadium earlier that evening, and that protest had spilled into a larger nearby one. Tensions were high, Momo explained, as it was the anniversary of the revolution. As he saw it, the police had robbed him, so he’d got one officer in the mouth, and received the bruises for his effort. “Tu sais” that he was the truest fan, having taken grainy selfies with every player, even those eternally on the bench. Yono said he was rooting for the other side, and they boustined goodbye.

We were back in the taxi as halftime reached its end, where Leopold and the driver were debating Maradona’s 1986 handball, which was not dishonest because God Himself had suspended the Argentine in the air, transmogrifying him into a Patagon muscles bellowing fee fi fo fum so his hand could reach the ball. Their argument continued until we reached the Carrefour. “Et n’oubliez pas, khouya,” the driver began after accepting some of our hash. Maradona, he reminded us, had

demonstrated the perfect separation of church and state, Ennahda be damned. He’d scored two goals that day, one for God, and the other for man. The second was pure, calculated skill: “Géométrie pure, science pure!” He continued even after Leopold exited the car.

Zipping through the Carrefour’s food court, we contemplated cordons bleus from Baguette & Baguette before stopping at the hard liquor for Absolut Vodka and Boukha. Yono’s eyes stole glances at every rectangular LCD in the supermarket, joining those of the workers and other shoppers in welcoming the players back onto the HDTV pitch. At checkout, our fake IDs weren’t checked: we were rich, international children whose parents clearly worked for the ADB or the American embassy, for how else would a kahloush have money in this country?

I didn’t notice anything on the walk back to the front because my eyes never left my phone’s pixelated screen, hoping that Esther would text me. As we got into another cab, Yono asked the driver if he could stop at the florist’s near the American embassy first. I thanked him. Before the driver could make the necessary U-turn, my phone vibrated. It wasn’t a text from Esther, nor Bella, but Lulu. “@ porto fino, they just walked in. his got his arm on her waist. lol lmao. he’s wearing a blue suit. its dark but u can tell its blue.”

After showing Leopold and Yono the text, I spoke to the driver. “Samahni, Berges du Lac, s’il vous plaît.” We became speed itself as we coursed through Tunis and the night once more towards the lakeside neighborhood, carried on by football. “If they keep attacking like this, they’re sure to receive,” said the commentator.

Gauri Gill, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad “Fields of Sight,” Edition Patrick Frey, 2023

Amidst the streetlights, dim stars, cars, the glow of my phone, sirocco, and the ever-present, dull roar of the crowd chanting “on va gagner, on va gagner” on the radio, we passed the remnants of a protest, tear gas still hanging in the air as a thinning throng limped by. Police batons had beaten back the human shapes that were once a swelling sea. At a stoplight, I gave up counting the number of bruised and battered bodies after fifteen. Some dragged dented signs commemorating the anniversary.

Sitting behind me, Yono played with fire. In the front mirror’s reflection, I saw the crafty bastard combining wrinkled rolling paper, tobacco loosened from a cigarette, and the hash we just bought. The stoplight went neon green, the wheels spun, and Yono finished the spliff as we were off. The joint was passed from left to right, including the appreciative taxi driver who blew smoke out his missing teeth. At the seventieth minute, the radio commentator was praise-singing Suleimane whose full goal dive stopped a freekick from being an equalizer. “He’s celestial. The natural laws of not only the game but the universe itself cannot account for him. He reorganizes space. Where he is, the ball will be.”

We bent space, shortening the way and turning the lake into a blur that was so blue it was black, and before we could finish the spliff, we were at the tall glass doors of Porto Fino. Leopold took two puffs and left the rest of it with the driver.

I walked in like my father owned the place, since this all used to be my stomping ground before we moved to Laouina. We pass the low pastel seats and circular tables, old men in love with their chichas, and the general bourgeoisie as Bella called them that frequented Porto. At

the corner we’d colonized years ago, I was met with the faces of my schoolmates, suspended above clothes and gleaming jewelry that told you they and, I suppose, I too lived in houses that’d make most homes feel like graves. Their eyes betrayed some great shock, like they’d met Death at a gala. Neither Esther nor Makaveli, whom we should all have stopped humoring and just called Malick, were present. Lulu’s tan, hairy arm came around my shoulder as his whispers entered my ear. “You just missed ‘em, Bando. They’re going straight to prom. Makaveli kept talking ‘bout how quickly she’d said yes, how it was really more her idea than anything.”

We were interrupted when one of our friends in the corner asked Lulu for “une clope.” He handed him a cigarette. I asked why the boy looked so monochrome. Through Lulu’s hushed voice, I learnt that they’d seen a dead body by the side of the road on their way here. I was about to ask whether it had been a hit and run victim or someone from the protests, if the body had looked like the exploded cat we’d seen in the middle of the road all those years ago right here in Lac, but the commentator’s voice ran electric through Porto’s overhead speakers and even the grim faces of our friends turned to football. “And it’s a perfect drop for Panahi but here’s Suleimane again, restructuring reality to bunt it away. And Bwalya takes it on the chest. Will he take the shot? No! It’s a cheeky pass to Ouédraogo who sneaks it into the left corner!”

A bodily scramble ensued towards the doors as the players danced by the corner flag. The match was clearly going to extra time, if not penalties. If we left for prom now, we’d get there before the doors closed.

I lost the four who had seen the face of death to the throng. In the street in front of Porto, Yono, Lulu, and Leopold tried to get me into a cab with them, but I told them, “I need to get flowers first. Maman told me to bring flowers.” Yono handed me a spliff, they all wished me “bonne chance,” and they sped down the road.

I waved my hand into the night and a yellow blur came to a halt in front of me. Our ultimate destination was the dance hall, I told the driver, but we’d take the backroad and stop by a florist’s first. He complained about how muddy that backroad got. I placed two Camels between my lips, lit them, and handed him one. He fiddled with the radio. Every station was blaring football. Space folded and we blazed through more and more remnants of protest until we were at the florist’s and it was the second half of extra time. I begged the driver to keep the engine running as I’d only be a few moments.

The florist, an old woman with a face of dried leather, was behind her stand. Before her in plastic crates were bouquets and arrangements of sea-lavenders, chrysanthemums, roses, and other flowers whose names I’d never overheard the gardener speak. After eyeing me and my suit, she offered me a jasmine blossom like I was some tourist hoping to take back a memento of the Jasmine Revolution. I settled on pink roses, as I didn’t know what color Esther preferred or, in fact, what her preference for flowers was.

Right as I was about to enter the taxi, a tank gigantic under the weak streetlight came into view. Like Gabriel’s horn, its cold, noiseless gun blasted sound out of existence. All the world became the metallic thundering of steel tracks over tarmac.

As it passed us, even the radio of the soldier in the hatch was nothing more than the whisper of football. Only his helmet was visible. We humans on the street watched this death’s head mechanism of war rumble into the distance. I returned to the florist’s shack and gave her an extra 15 dinars without saying a word.

Football was the first sound to come back after the tank destroyed the world. On the taxi’s radio, Dali was “past the defenders. He’s locomotive flesh deep, deep in the black heart of the keeper’s kingdom. And it’s a lob, but oh my Lord, it grazes the post! And with less than five minutes left on the clock, it’s sounding like mene, mene, tick tock, upharsin. Penalties will be had!”

I could see the dance hall at the end of a muddy road that bled into night. Reducing the volume of his radio, the driver eyed my bouquet and asked me if I remembered the flowers. I was about to ask him how he knew what Maman had tasked me with when he implored, “Rappelez-vous, khouya, rappelez-vous les fleurs.” He reminded me of the flowers that had been left on tanks and trucks after General Ammar refused the dictator’s order to shoot protestors. Ammar had recently resigned in disgrace.

“Je suis désolé,” said the driver, still smiling at the memory of flowers, before informing me that this was where he stopped. He refused to risk the mud that made up the rest of the back road and I didn’t have time for him to get back on the main one. I begged and begged, offering all my money, even mentioning that he could watch the remainder of the match on the LCD that had been set up.

“Mais, c’est toujours le football, le football, le football dans ce pays. Je m’en fou du football!”

I had never heard a man say he didn’t care for football before. His voice growing faint as the moonlit horizon swallowed the taxi, the commentator said, “And as we await penalties, it’s the long dark night before the victorious dawn.” Bouquet of roses in hand, I ran on earth that got damper with each step. Abandoned by all, and a thousand dragons slain, my quest was near its end. Like a ball in the air, the marigold moon hung heavy and low over my princess’ castle. For a moment, there was peace. For the first time in 120 minutes, I was free of the aural cage football made of Tunis. The wind, carrying the chirps of crickets, was behind me.

I tripped.

I tripped and the bouquet went flying. It joined me with Adam’s twenty-three ribs in the mud.

Suit and pants wholly soiled, I scraped the earth for flowers. All the night’s effort resulted in nothing but a solitary pink rose the least caked with mud for Esther who, for all I knew, might not have been fond of flowers. I knew, though, that she hadn’t responded to a single text, which should have been enough. It would have been enough if not for Malick, that bastard who insisted you call him Makaveli. Besides, “Maman said a man brings flowers.” And, though I had just the one, I intended to give it to Esther. The dance hall now a quarter mile away, rumblings of football pierced through lonely night. My schoolmates had the volume up so loud that football, dampened by walls into incomprehensibility, dribbled holes through my skull.

“And he’s taking his sweet time, this Benedict, this Bando, this pathetic boy whose girl has been pilfered. At the pace

he’s going, he’ll be lucky to get there before the doors close. And with but a single flower to win her back? They truly don’t make them like they used to, eh? Oh, Hannibal, if only you could see what has become of Carthage. Ecce homo saeculi viginti-unus!”

The voice that had colonized my mind and the voice of football from the flatscreen coalesced into one as I walked past the parking lot and its cars, past the slumped silver banners, leaving muddy footprints on the linoleum in the lobby, main dance hall, and adjacent television room. The winning team had their shirts off in celebration, nipples pixelated and enlarged by the TV. “With that miss, Delson has sealed his team’s fate. You can see him on his knees, face buried in the grass, wailing, ‘Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani?’”

Radiance rained down from the chandelier on my schoolmates, who wore dresses and suits they would never wear again. Bella, whom I hadn’t seen in a dress since sixth grade, sat next to a girl who could either have been Amber, who was her girlfriend, or Beatrix, who was not. Leopold, Jansport backpack at his feet, was talking to a Senegalese girl and Lulu. Yono, face of a trumpeting archangel, wept, his lamentation lost to the din of football.

Right underneath the television that encased the jubilant team were Esther, wearing a light blue dress, and Malick Makaveli who wore a blue suit so dark it looked black. She held a jasmine bouquet in her hand, and he had one of its blossoms tucked behind his ear. They kissed, eyes never wavering from the screen.

ML KEJERA

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness Two Mountains, 1977 Korean stone, 45 x 60 x 35 cm

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

MY GOAL IS TO MAKE YOU HAPPY

by Hallie Gayle

My brother wants to commit suicide. He is telling me how he wants to go. “There has to be blood,” he says as we circle around the Hooters on Throckmorton for the third time. “Only cowards die without blood.” He is struggling with the one-way streets, and then we are cruising by the courthouse and giant banks, men in white button-ups waiting at crossing lights. We pass the Cheesecake Factory and the big Christmas tree, the Bass Hall where the two angels blow trumpets over the street. We’re aimless, and my brother is talking about the demons in his head. “You feel it too? Like they’re building these nests? Like they’re having conversations all day without your permission? You feel that too?” I don’t answer

because I know I will cry and he hates it when I cry. By the movie theater, a man in a puffy coat is preaching into a megaphone. He is all alone and we can hear him even with the windows rolled up: “THE SON IS COMING BACK, WHO IS READY?! THE TIME IS NEAR WHEN THE RIGHTEOUS WILL PREVAIL AND THE WICKED WILL PERISH !” We hear his shouting even near Lancaster, going under the interstate bridge, getting back on the highway.

At Chicken Express, my brother orders the family meal even though I’m not hungry. We find Mike sitting in a booth at the very back, shoveling mashed potatoes in his mouth while he’s looking at his phone. “Yo, man,” he says when he sees my brother, and we slide into the hard red seat across from him. Mike begins telling a story about how some man on bath salts was trying to break into everyone’s apartment last night since he couldn’t figure which building was his. He was banging on everyone’s door and throwing his body against windows and he even took off all his clothes and started jerking off. “That shit messed up my REM cycle,” Mike says, and twitches his neck three times to the right, then to the left, puts a hand in the greasy box of chicken and, staring at me for the first time, says, “Do you mind?”

“I don’t care,” I shrug. Mike peels the fried skin off the meat with his fingers and flings the scraps into his mashed potatoes. When his phone goes off, he holds the naked chicken wing in midair, and my brother and I watch him for about ten minutes hang up and call, hang up and call, what seems to be several different people.

“Come on, man,” my brother says. When Mike finally puts his phone in his

pocket, we leave all the food on the table, get back in the car and follow him to an apartment behind the Spec’s on Bryant Irvin Road. A woman with bright orange hair and tired eyes is sitting at the kitchen table opening envelopes, one of her feet in a metal bowl of water. Two guys that I guess are her sons are on the couch in the living room, playing Halo. “Justin,” the woman says, closing her eyes. “Justin, help these people.”

“Nah dawg, nothing, nada,” Justin hollers to Mike, wiping his shaggy hair out of the way to show us his pale pimply face.

We’re back in the car again. Back past downtown. In a neighborhood by an elementary school. The house doesn’t have any furniture, and the windows don’t have blinds. There’s a refrigerator flipped over on its side in the dining room and it makes me think of a raft floating out in the sea all alone. A shirtless man with a ponytail down his back is lifting weights in the middle of the empty living room. My brother hits me on the shoulder, so I pull out four twenties from the wad of cash in my purse he had given me earlier that day for safekeeping. The sweaty man puts down a dumbbell and says to my brother, “Why are you bringing little girls here?” Like he didn’t want to take our money. Mike says, “Do you want the money or not?”

My brother and I snort the coke in a parking lot. He pours out the powder from a twisted-up Ziploc bag onto my World History textbook and shows me how to sweep up the neat thin lines with my nostril. Back on the highway, the sky around us is tinfoil, crackling with cold, and all I want is to reach my hand up and tear it away. Inside of me is a warm rush that I almost can’t stand. My brother keeps saying

“Are you happy?” and I have this feeling that I want to say everything, but all that comes out is “Uh-huh.” And my brother says, “Good, my goal is to make you happy before I go.”

We arrive at his girlfriend Amy’s apartment, right next to the La La Laundromat. She comes to the door wearing a Cowboys football jersey and these silver hoop earrings bent into the shape of stars. Her hand is flung out, palm up, a cigarette dangling between her fingers. “You’re late,” she says, and my brother takes the cigarette out of her hand and smacks her on the ass. She’s not wearing pants and I stare at her My Little Pony underwear. “Hey baby,” she says to me once we’re inside. “Don’t be shy. Do you want a beer? A beer might help, let me get you a beer.”

I don’t feel intense like I did before. My brother doesn’t tell her we did coke. He told me earlier, “Don’t tell Amy, she’s a greedy bitch.” I stand in the middle of the living room, my arms around me, as I take a sip of the silver can of Coors Light she gives me. It’s cold and sour. Amy lies back on the couch, and she’s letting us see her long legs that are all cut up with razor blade slashes.

My brother is sitting on the floor rolling a joint on top of a cardboard box that’s cluttered with a glass bong, shriveled up McDonald’s fries in their greasy red packet, a phone with a smashed screen plugged into a tangled-up charger. I take a seat in a fold-out chair and pretend to pay attention to the TV. Amy is massaging my brother’s head with her large foot while he licks the rolling paper. “Give me,” she says.

“Wait,” my brother says, and hands me the joint first. I take the neat packed paper, delicate like pinched butterfly wings between my fingers, and let my brother light

the end for me. I inhale hard, holding the smoke in my lungs just as he taught me, as the tiny cherry flame wavers between my eyes. He backs up and sits on his knees and says, “How do you feel?” I don’t feel anything special, but I say, “Great.”

Amy gets off the couch and comes to join us on the floor. I’m still in the chair, looking down at them. We pass the joint in a circle.

“What grade are you in again?” she asks.

“Seventh grade,” I say.

“Seventh grade,” Amy repeats and goes quiet. Then she says, “Seventh grade was when they cut off a chunk of my hair in Life Skills. Also, when I gave Mr. Trellis a blowjob during algebra tutoring, my very first.”

“Oh, come on, she doesn’t need to hear that,” my brother says.

“I don’t care. I’ve already done that,” I hear myself lie.

My brother pretends to be shot in the heart, using both hands to hold the imaginary wound as he falls backwards. “Y’all sluts are depressing me,” he says, and leans over to stab the joint out in a small ashtray.

Amy sticks out her tongue and gets on her hands and knees and starts humping the air. She crawls towards the TV and pushes the button at the bottom to turn up the volume. It’s Surf’s Up, and Amy gets back on the couch and starts laughing at everything the penguins do. My brother is laying on his back, scrolling through his phone.

“I’m hungry,” Amy says after a while, breaking the quiet. “I’m hungry,” she says again and hits my brother on the arm.

“Money?” He stands up and hovers over her. She has an arm behind her head and one leg bent up.

“I’ll suck your dick later, but no way am I giving you money. Unlike you, I pay for my rent and water and electricity and groceries,” she says.

My purse has been sitting in my lap the whole time like a pet. “Oh,” I say, when my brother turns to me, so I unzip the side pocket and pull out a twenty from the wad.

“What the fuck,” Amy says. “I’m not even going to ask.” My brother stands over his girlfriend and wags his finger at her, as if he’s channeling our father or just trying it out. My brother is not our father, though.

“You’re a quiet one,” Amy says when it’s just us two. She is leaning on her arm, giving me her full attention, which makes me want to fold inward and bloom at the same time. “But I can tell,” she says, studying me, tapping ash from another cigarette into her beer can. “You’re hardcore, aren’t you. You have what’s the word substance. I’m always good at feeling people’s energy.” I shrug and take a drink of my beer but the metal clunks against my teeth because the can’s empty.

“Here, hon, follow me.” I go with her into the kitchen. She opens the fridge and it looks like our fridge: a handful of soy sauce from Panda Express, a bowl of blue Jell-O, black bananas, a shelf of beer. “I have beer, tons of beer, cuz I get it free from the bar. I also have whiskey, and tequila. Want to do tequila shots? I’m feeling like a party.” I move my shoulders up and down and nod my head, and Amy claps her hands like a woman in a commercial and swings open the freezer as a roar of cold air hits her in the face. It’s like Antarctica in there, like ice has melted and reformed and melted and reformed, and the only space left is a frozen hole where she keeps her bottles of liquor. “Don’t tell your brother,” she says when she

unscrews the gold top and drinks it straight, her face not even flinching. “You know how he is with alcohol.”

We are on her balcony smoking cigarettes, passing the bottle back and forth, and I tell Amy I like being drunk better than high, and she tells me that’s because I’m naturally high. She says that creative people need alcohol because they live in their heads all day long and boring people need weed because they are blocked from all their good thoughts and need help opening them up. “What are you?” I ask, letting smoke tumble off my bottom lip like she does, making my mouth a little spout like a teapot, lifting my chin.

“Oh hell,” she says, spreading her legs out like a man, arms resting on bent knees. I can see her black pubes poking out of her panties. “I need it all.” That’s when we start laughing hysterically, laughing so hard it hurts, and I have this feeling that I want to kiss her, but not how my brother kisses her, and not even how people kiss in movies, all sexy and horny. I want to kiss her like I’m a bear. I feel like a bear. I want to bite her blistered bottom lip and scratch at her breasts and pull at her hair.

“Where’s your dumbass brother?” she says when our laughter comes to an abrupt stop and she stands up to look over the railing. There’s a car down there flashing its lights, and I can feel the low bass from the loud music. “Hey beautiful! Are you going to dance for us?” someone screams. Amy ignores this, climbs onto the second bar of the railing and searches the parking lot and beyond for my brother.

“Amy,” I say. But she doesn’t turn around. She is held by the night sky and cheap lemony light from the security lamps and I need her to look at me. I am smashing

little bugs and leaves that are piled up in the corner between my fingers. It feels as if it’s been hours. Maybe my brother was hit by a semi or maybe he slit his wrists once and for all in the parking lot of a Burger King. I run inside and empty out the contents of my purse to find my small Nokia phone my brother gave me earlier that year in case of emergency. I call the only contact listed, BROTHER, and it rings and rings and rings.

Amy sits crisscrossed in front of me now like a kid in kindergarten. “Why are you crying?” she asks, and she begins to cry, too. “What’s happening?” We are both sobbing, and that’s when my brother comes in the door with his arms full of Little Caesars boxes and a plastic bag of two-liter sodas hanging from his forearm. Amy throws a stuffed frog at his knees. “Jesus Christ, help me,” he calls out. I bend over and puke.

My brother says, “I was getting us coke.” He flings the little bag he got earlier at Amy who’s wiping all her tequila tears with the backs of her palms. “You got her drunk,” my brother says, side-stepping around my vomit to put the pizza boxes on the counter. “I didn’t get her drunk,” Amy slurs. “She’s an independent woman, duh.”

Amy makes the living room dark and plugs in Christmas lights that are strung on each wall with thumbtacks. She finds a Star Wars towel from a black trash bag and lays it over my vomit as if marking where a person has died. My brother prepares the coke with the edge of his driver’s license on an empty Blink-182 CD case he finds under the couch. We take turns snorting all of it. Once high, Amy and my brother begin to argue. They are arguing about whether or not Jesus can perform miracles because God gives him power or if Jesus can perform

miracles because he’s so in tune with the energy of good things and the miracles come from within him. The latter is what Amy argues. She is yelling, and my brother says, “Hush beautiful, no need to yell,” and puts his hand over her whole face like a giant paw. I’m red as a tomato and can’t unscrew my smile because I love them. I want to say it out loud, I love y’all, but the weight of it gets stuck in my mouth and I start grinding my teeth over the unspoken syllables. Amy is spitting at him and sticking out her tongue and swinging her arms at my brother’s chest. He’s laughing like he laughed when he was a boy, snorting and hiccupping in girly octaves. “We’re all capable of being Jesus,” Amy screams over that new Kid Cudi song. “And don’t you ever fucking tell me to shut up, bro.”

My brother stands and starts to dance like a male stripper, taking off his shirt and waving it between his legs, and Amy grabs me by the shoulders like a crazy person on the streets and says, “I swear, baby girl, it says in the New Testament, he says to his disciples, you too can perform miracles if you know how much you are loved. Do you know how much you are loved?” I can see green flakes in her blue eyes and the whole constellation of every single freckle on her pale face, like I’m seeing a new person, an original Amy I couldn’t see before. I grab at her wrists. I believe you, I say, or think I say, and she takes my hand.

The three of us are dancing dancing and I think, the whole world has a broken heart because they are chasing moments like this, and I think, my brother is a coward for wanting to die.

Nobuo Sekine

the artist with Phase of Nothingness — Black No. 36 (left) and No. 37 (right), 1977, at his studio, Yokohama, ca. 1978

photographer unknown © Nobuo Sekine Estate, courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

COTTON WOOL TWIST IN THE NECK OF THE SEASON

Sandra Lim

Then the snows melted, and all of it was green enough to blind you.

I forgot all about how we lost the old world and got the new one.

The birds sang so prettily to attract a mate, shivering in their nightdresses.

I thought, but I know this stuff.

I padded into the kitchen and started to bake a cake. Ash from my cigarette kept dropping

into the bowl. I was exhausted, like a leaf when it first comes out.

Already I missed being absorbed back into the cold lap of soil, where I could withstand the fret

of things unresolved, my face as tranquil as a lake.

OBEDIENCE TO THE FORCE OF GRAVITY

Meghan Maguire Dahn

— Simone Weil

Where I grew up, a hundred years before I was born, the women raised silkworms on pallets tucked into the walls. At night you could hear them chew on mulberry leaves until there was enough nothing to make something. In the dark wanting is a kind of erasure from which you recover less and less. When you wear silk remember the worm, remember that to relate one thing to another is how to let the light in through the meshes of death. If you can touch the next to the next you can wrap yourself in all the light you cannot know on your own in America, where to live anywhere is to promise you will die.

CHILD OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Bryan Byrdlong

Already the spectacle … Bent light rivering through  revealing my gender: Adorned / Adonai. No crown.

Hat stitched with sports,  heads of rubber, pigskin wreathed in red.  Brown eyes obscured with summer shades. Small temple to coolness.

My smile points to what might be  revealed. Already, my mother looks for  a universe in my mouth. Already, I will never  best this performance of “Him”. What I can’t

help but seem spills out peek-a-boo, shines through darkly … God … the man who thinks he’s my father  is trying so goddamn hard. His pointer finger fidget

-ing at the frame’s edge. He’s feening  for a fix, hand still sore from deployment, feuds in far off lands. He’s fixated  on the spectacle he still believes is his son,

trying so much to take it all in, mom and me in matching black  and yellow family reunion  t-shirts Looking from this angle

he’s already removed himself from the picture, trying to see himself into my likeness. The background of amber pine needles, brown and

aureate wife, a crib too cramped to live in Such desire. Such destiny which I bewilder with my own witness … Who knows what I’ve seen?

Small horrors. Wonders … I am still like an infant. When I speak, no one understands … Take the tree graphic on my shirt

it’s leaves dyed, same yellow as the rest  of the fabric In the brief moment I see it, every tree in the world is  gold.

COLLAPSING STAR

Jesse Nathan

Your amethyst earring on the edge of an earthly sink, I inhale your age of sage and pine, I inhale a particularity that could eat everything for a thousand years like a collapsing star, some angel of nervous light, our shape in a mirror, a forest, a garden … But nothing will stand in, nothing complete, not even the coast road we took until a rockslide halfway closed the way, and what else to do but pose with the ocean behind us in its currents and distant liners and a moon of pocked truths.

PEBBLES Kim Ok

translated by Ryan Choi

With so many complaints eighteen to be exact lodged in the heart of my soul, at the boathouse with no path that leads to it through the jungly meadow, I collect pebbles one by one, and slowly the summer day dwindles.

As I watch the rows of white sails hundreds to be exact bobbing in the heart of the distance, laughing aloud I ready the pebbles in my grip for war, and slowly I forget there are hundreds of sails and I am only one.

AMBITION

Anders Carlson-Wee

To suffer none of it. Money, work, or obligation.

To face the days free of roles. No title. No position.

To get by on found food, castoff clothes, scams and hustles and handouts.

To wonder about judgment less than about stealing the time it takes to wonder.

To have stolen time. And be lost on how best to squander it.

Ali Bektaş is a molecular biologist working on plants, microbes, and agriculture, and is developing distributed, affordable, and simple systems of detecting informative nucleic acids. He is from Istanbul and lives in Oakland, California. He can be reached at ali @ purplecitylabs.com.

Max Blecher (1909 – 1938) was treated for spinal tuberculosis in various European sanatoria, including Berck, and these experiences form the basis of his final two novels, Scarred Hearts (Old Street, 2008) and The Illuminated Burrow A Sanatorium Journal (Twisted Spoon Press, 2022). During his short yet productive life, Blecher was also an artist, translator, poet, and essayist. Hailed as “Romania’s Kafka,” his poignant yet often humorous descriptions of daily life reveal the influence of surrealism. Blecher formed connections within the surrealist movement with writers such as André Breton, Tristan Tzara, André Gide, Gherasim Luca, and Mihail Sebastian. He died at the age of 28.

Bryan Byrdlong is Chicago born and bred! Boulevard Magazine. Boundless. Bright. Bee-whisperer.

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings, forthcoming from W. W. Norton this fall, and The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection. He is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents and lives in Los Angeles.

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

Ryan Choi is the author of the forthcoming books In Dreams: The Very Short Works of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and “Three Demons”: A Study on Sanki Saitō’s Haiku. He is an editor at AGNI, whose work appears in Harper’s, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Meghan Maguire Dahn is the author of Domain (Burnside Review Press, 2022) and the chapbook

Lucid Animal (Harbor Review Editor’s Series, 2021). She grew up in the middle of the woods, but has settled in New York City with her family, where there Zis a surprising amount of wildlife.

Camila Fabbri is a writer, playwright, and actress from Buenos Aires. The author of two short story collections, a novel, and several plays, she was recently

included in Granta 155: The Best of Young SpanishLanguage Novelists 2.

Hallie Gayle is a writer from Texas. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and is a recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.

Gauri Gill (b. 1970 Chandigarh, India) is a NewDelhi based photographer. Various ongoing projects highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and “active listening,” and in using photography as a memory practice. Gill’s work addresses the Indian identity markers of caste, class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in it there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival. She has exhibited within India and internationally including the 58th Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, New York, Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, Kochi Biennale 2016 and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography. Gill published the following books with Edition Patrick Frey: Balika Mela (2012), Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023).

ML Kejera is an Illinois-based writer from The Gambia. He has been short-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and is a recipient of the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship for his in-progress novel The Dictator’s Eidolon, for which he is seeking representation. “Football, Football, Football” forms part of the novel. Kindly tweet him pictures of your favorite pizza @ KejeraL.

Sandra Lim is the author of three collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Curious Thing (W. W. Norton, 2021). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Koritha Mitchell is the author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture (2020) and Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (2011) and editor of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2023 edition) and Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy (2018 edition). She is also president-elect of the

Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF). She’s on Twitter @ ProfKori.

Chris Molnar is the founder and publisher of Archway Editions (literary imprint of powerHouse Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster) and co-founder of the Writer’s Block bookshop in Las Vegas. His fiction and nonfiction have recently appeared in Tiding House and BOMB, among others.

Robin Myers is a poet, translator, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent projects include In Vitro by Isabel Zapata (Coffee House Press, 2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books, 2023), and Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books, 2022).

Jesse Nathan grew up in Berkeley and rural Kansas. Lives now in Northern California and teaches literature at Cal. Poetry appears in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New Republic. First book due out in September, called Eggtooth.

Laura Nelson seeks to celebrate and co-organize spaces of study and gathering. She is currently a Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California.

Kim Ok, born in Jeongju, North P’yong’an, was a poet and translator who published some of the first modernist poems and translations of Western poetry and literary theory in Korean. Kidnapped by agents of the Kim (Il-sung) regime during the Korean War, he was last recorded alive in 1958 at a farm collective in North Korea.

Gabi Reigh moved to the UK from Romania at the age of 12. In 2017, she won the Stephen Spender Prize, which inspired her to translate more Romanian literature. As part of her Interbellum Series project, she has translated interwar novels, poetry, and drama by Lucian Blaga, Liviu Rebreanu, Mihail Sebastian, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, and Max Blecher. Her translation of Blecher’s final novel The Illuminated Burrow A Sanatorium Journal was published in 2022 by Twisted Spoon Press, and a collection of Blecher’s poetry, short prose, and letters will be published later this year.

Nobuo Sekine (b. 1942, Saitama, Japan; d. 2019, Los Angeles, CA) first gained renown for his work

in sculpture and installation art in late 1960s and 1970s Japan. He made an indelible impact on the course of Japanese art history, when he exhibited Phase Mother Earth at the 1st Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition at the Suma Rikyū Park in Kobe in late 1968. This iconic work inspired artist-theorist Lee Ufan to develop new theories. These theories provided a conceptual framework within which to understand the work of several artists working in the similarly ephemeral, site-specific modes who along with Sekine and Lee came to be referred to as Mono-ha (“school of things”). His work is represented in numerous institutional collections including Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, Japan; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Takamatsu, Japan.

Salma Shamel lives between Cairo and New York City. She is a PhD candidate at New York University. Her work focuses on critical theory, Marxism, disability, and intellectual history.

Juliana Spahr is sometimes a poet, sometimes an editor, sometimes a scholar, sometimes other things, too.

Rajesh Vangad (b. 1975, Ganjad, India) is a bearer of the Warli style of painting, a form of painting belonging to the indigenous Warli people. He learned the art at a young age from his mother, Ladhki Devi; and later from masters like Jivya Soma Mashe. He has painted notable murals at the Craft Museum, New Delhi, the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai and the T2 Terminal at the International Airport in Mumbai. Vangad has published three books: My Gandhi Story (Tulika Books), Kabir Saamagri (as part of the Kabir Project) and The Indian Crafts Journey, as well as a map of Maharashtra (Dastkaar Haat Samiti). His work has been exhibited across India as well as internationally, and the collaborative series made along with the photographer Gauri Gill called Fields of Sight has been included in exhibitions around the world, including Documenta 14, Kassel; the 7th Moscow Biennale, and Prospect 4, New Orleans.

New from

A Short History of Finland

Jonathan Clements

“Written in a lively and humorous style, including many personal anecdotes, this book would be a good introduction to Finland.”—Scandinavian Journal of History

“Highly entertaining.”—Nordic Reach

Paper $17.95

Now in Paperback

Black Earth

A Journey through Ukraine

Jens Mühling

Translated by Eugene H. Hayworth

“Mühling is a delightful travel companion but Black Earth is much more than just a travel book. It is a rich polyphonic portrait of Ukraine. Black Earth is essential reading on the country that is now one everyone’s mind.”

—Tom de Waal

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Troubled Water

A Journey Around the Black Sea

Jens Mühling

Translated by Simon Pare

“Far from a remote frontier, the war has made clear that the Black Sea plays a central role in the global economy and global security. It’s a place we should all be getting more familiar with.”—Washington Post

ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER

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Now in Paperback Land of Cockaigne

Jeffrey Lewis

“I can’t remember the last time a novel left me this helpless with emotion. . . . A riveting, insightful and timely story of best intentions gone awry. The prose is so exquisite, the story so fresh and humane.”—Portland Press Herald

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