LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air by lareviewofbooks

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2023

51800>

AIR

$18.00 ISBN 978-1-940660-92-9

FALL

NO. 39

Li rary Deli ts New from Calon

Return to My Trees Notes from the Welsh Woodlands Matthew Yeomans “An enthusiastic, witty, and sobering travel account. It gives voice to the dying souls of abused forests and vivifies lands that are untouched by human hands.” —Foreword Reviews Cloth $24.00 Recently featured in the New York Times.

An Indigo Summer Ellie Evelyn Orrell “Both an insightful meditation on homecoming and a testament to art’s healing properties. Orrell’s dazzling debut is as rich as indigo itself. Fans of Krista Tippett and Katherine May will be enthralled.” —Publishers Weekly Cloth $19.00

From the University of Wales Press

Introducing the Medieval Fox Paul Wackers “Prepare to be outfoxed, as an expert tracker follows the fox in the circuitous twists of his medieval development. A fascinating hunt.”—Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University Paper $16.00

From the National University of Singapore Press

Tales of an Eastern Port The Singapore Novellas of Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad With an Introduction by Kevin Riordan This volume pairs for the first time two Conrad novellas that start in Singapore: The End of the Tether and The Shadow-Line. Singapore is the principal, if sometimes obscured, port of call in Conrad’s fiction; it is the center of overlapping networks, colonial and commercial, religious and literary. Paper $24.00

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

“A searingly intellectual cultural analysis that’s fun and dishy enough for the beach.”

“Refreshing perspectives on some of the toughest cultural conversations today.”

“Paints a rich picture of women’s sports as a microcosm of intersectional struggles.”

Guy Branum, author of My Life as a Goddess

Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep

Michael A. Messner, co-author of No Slam Dunk

“This highly original and beautiful book is something to be treasured.”

nyupress.org

Ferrer, author of Pulitzer-Prize Winner Cuba: an American History

“Convincingly illustrates how young children’s lives are structured in unequal ways.” Margaret A. Hagerman, author of White Kids

“Every chapter in this smart, accessible book is brimming with fascinating stories.” Brian Jones, author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising

“A fascinating portrait of an important voice in American sports history.” Kirkus Reviews

“Offers an exciting new take on wrongful convictions in the era of binge-watching.” Robert J. Norris, co-author of The Politics of Innocence

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 39 FALL 2023

Publisher: Tom Lutz Editor-In-Chief: Michelle Chihara Managing Editor: Chloe Watlington

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

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Senior Editor: Paul Thompson Poetry Editors: Elizabeth Metzger and Callie Siskel Art Director: Perwana Nazif Type Director: J. Dakota Brown Graphic Designer: Jacob Bilich 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

Cover Art: Francesc Tosquelles on the roof of Saint-Alban hospital with a boat by Auguste Forestier (1947). Original photography by Romain Vigouroux. Tosquelles family archive. Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz Cover Design: Ella Gold

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THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 39 FALL 2023

INTERVIEW

PILLOWS OF AIR

with Lawrence Weschler

FICTION

101

110 NONFICTION

PERMA-NOON

Lauren Collee 31

STATE EYES IN THE SKY

Nicholas Shapiro, Kate McInerny, Matyos

THERE, THERE

Evan Grillon THE PERFUME THIEVES

Susan Finlay 116

EVERYONE AT THE TABLE

Rae Canaan 125

SALUD, LA LUZ

Dashiel Carrera

Kidane, and Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco 36

HOLY BREATH

Matthew Mullins 55

CARNIVALESQUE

Tosten Burks 60

THE FUNNY THING ABOUT MISOGYNY

Katie Kadue 68

VILLAS FOR US ALL

Corina Zappia 90

MY BIRD TODAY PROMISES A STORY

Dan O'Brien PORTFOLIO

POETRY

CONTINUOUS DISAPPEARANCE

Meghan Racklin

TOSQUELLES. HOW WE CAN INHERIT

EXPERIENCES OF EMANCIPATION?

Introduced by Joana Máso

132

GUINEA HENS

Maya C. Popa 133

A LOVE POEM

D. S. Waldman 134

KEATS RIDES SHOTGUN

Joy Priest 135

THE INVENTOR

Emma Trelles 136

DEAR WORLD

Danusha Laméris 137

HOT AIR LOVE

F. Douglas Brown

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference

Philosopher Myisha Cherry teaches us the right ways to deal with wrongdoing in our lives and the world

The largely untold story of the great migration of white southerners to the industrial Midwest and its profound and enduring political and social consequences

An illustrated biography of the pioneering British artist and writer, tracing her life and work through the many places around the world where she lived

“A tour de force of media theory and history . . . reconnects cinema and media and mobilizes a fundamental rethinking of screen.”

“Crary describes anew an epoch of unrelenting, dissolute flows as if he were both its visionary poet and fiercest critic.”

“Seldom does a work of history force us to revisit an entire universe of evidence as if we had never seen it before.”

— Weihong Bao,

— George Baker,

— Nicolás Wey Gómez,

author of Fiery Cinema

University of California, Los Angeles

author of The Tropics of Empire

“So far reaching and fun-to-read, so synthetic and provocative, so careful in its concepts and creative in its pronouncements.”

“A timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction . . . Fuchs offers fresh insights on small forms.”

“In this deeply reflective and thorough study, Cascardi blows the lid off standard accounts of Goya’s extraordinary art.”

— Paul Kockelman, Yale University

— Eva Geulen, Humboldt University, Berlin

— Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Reader, When Michael Mann was preparing to shoot Heat (1995), his long-gestating Los Angeles crime epic, he took his director of photography and a handful of location scouts on a three-hour helicopter ride over the city. The flight, which cinematographer Dante Spinotti would later remember as “endless,” was only one aspect of a scouting process that would last four months and yield entire rooms full of photographic references for vanishingly small details — the chipped paint on crucifixes, the trim on laminated diner menus. Almost none of the locations themselves had appeared on film before: gray trainyards, coastal expanses full of rusting shipping containers, concrete crevices where rhizomatic freeway interchanges swirl overhead. The result is an L.A. entirely different from the innumerable versions seen in movies for 70 years, one that looks as inhospitable as the desert the thieves cross to buy designer explosives in Arizona. As severe and specific as Heat’s L.A. is, there’s one image that eluded Mann. When Robert De Niro’s career crook opens up (barely) to his love interest, he does so on the balcony of her home, which overlooks Sunset Plaza. The actors were shot on location, but in front of a green screen; the cityscape, added in during postproduction, was photographed in a very low framerate to maximize exposure. On initial home-video releases, the effect was passable. But as time went on and fidelity improved — and as Mann’s initially maligned 2000s experiments in digital video were becoming celebrated as strokes of auteurism — this scene

started to look faker and flimsier, unfit even for a cheaply produced commercial. Vidiots, the alternative video store that was founded in Santa Monica in 1985 and relaunched this year at the renovated site of the Eagle Theatre on Eagle Rock Blvd. recently held a screening where the balcony scene elicited laughs from an otherwise adoring crowd. And yet when Heat was reissued on Blu-ray in 2017, as a “Director’s Definitive Edition,” Mann eschewed the film’s famous poster, opting instead to make the cover a similar constellation of city lights. Los Angeles had proved impossible to take in as a whole, all at once, but it hadn’t stopped him from trying. For this issue of the LARB Quarterly, our 39th, we used the air itself as an imperfect lens on the world. This issue examines the environments we live in (and the political implications of the ways we talk about them), but also seeks out gaps in our knowledge, the invisible fissures in daily life, and the unbridgeable divides between people. In a survey of the new language and philosophy of basketball writing, Tosten Burks traces syntactical drift like the arc of a shot in the air; Susan Finlay spends her short story, “The Perfume Thieves,” wondering if what is invisible can be real, be quantified — be stolen. Through vibrant prose, poetry, and fiction (and with an eye on the same skies that captivated Mann, by way of the research team analyzing the history of police helicopters), Air zooms all the way out, then back in again, hovering around every vantage point imaginable. Yours, Paul 7

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PILLOWS OF AIR

A Conversation with Lawrence Weschler

The cover of Lawrence Weschler’s most recent book repro-

duces a sepia-toned old photograph of identical twins wearing vests and bowties. They are joined at the mustache. They’re sitting side-by-side and facing the camera, and from the left side of one man’s lips to the right side of the other’s, an unbroken handlebar of facial hair connects them. They’re staring intently at the camera, and the effect is both whimsical and uncanny.

INTERVIEW

This territory is well-traveled in Weschler’s work, which spans more than 20 books, 20 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, and time spent as a professor in the humanities. The breadth of his topics ranges from political coverage of Solidarity in Poland to profiles of artists of all types working in every medium, all presented through Weschler’s peculiar form of cultural criticism that traces correspondences across fields; in McSweeney’s, Rachel Cohen described him as “a proponent of conversation where others see cultural and political life breaking up into isolated fragments.” His most recent book, A Trove of Zohars, focuses on an iconoclastic man named Stephen Berkman, like many of his subjects a fellow traveler in curiosity and non-conformity. Berkman is fascinated with an archive of colloidal photographs from the 19th century that chronicled, it seems, the Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The twins appear in this archive — and in Weschler’s book — alongside a bearded lady, a merkin merchant, and a Prussian princess on a pony. Perhaps. A photograph of a knitted condom recurs throughout the book and, like the mustache connection, seems like it might be fake — has to be fake. But then, nothing has ever been as it seems in Weschler’s work. Berkman is a longtime student of photography and its history, and Weschler quotes him saying he has a pattern “of uncovering things, trying to popularize them, and nobody really caring.” He sports the long muttonchops known as dundrearies, and lives in Pasadena in a cluttered studio. He won’t quite say that he discovered the Zohar archive; he thinks of himself as a “facilitator” for an elusive historic figure

named Shimmel Zohar and his collection of wet colloidal images. These were made with a chemical process that renders glass plates sensitive to light before they’re inserted into a tripod camera. The long exposure times, with subjects often posed in a studio and immobilized for a few minutes, mean that they are carefully staged and can’t capture motion. The technique raises questions about how photographs relate to evidence — about how photographs do and don’t reliably preserve the past for perusal in the present. But these questions aren’t raised in the style of, say, Susan Sontag’s philosophical interrogation in On Photography. In Weschler’s hands, it’s more like what might happen if Eadweard Muybridge and Rebecca Solnit got together to play dice with a magician over absinthe and tea cakes. But I digress; I’m trying to describe Lawrence Weschler. Weschler was, for a long time, The New Yorker’s Los Angeles writer. Unlike the droves of New Yorkers who move here and decide they have “discovered” L.A., Weschler is a native, a polymath who has spent most of his 70-odd years in New York but who never dropped a nostalgic passion for the art and light and space of home. From the time he was, in his own way, discovered by the legendary editor William Shawn, Weschler has never stopped writing the city of his birth into being. I first encountered his work many years ago, when I read his seminal essay “L.A. Glows.” That piece opens with Weschler’s memory of watching the infamous 1994 Bronco chase on television in New York, and weeping. He was brought to tears not by O.J. Simpson but by the late afternoon light in Los Angeles, “golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm 9

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

fronds.” It was a masterful lens on an overexposed news event, using it as a trick to lure the reader into a deep dive on the science of L.A.’s visuals. Two decades after he had left for the East coast, Weschler still held Los Angeles at the center of his attention. He interviewed a CalTech scientist who has studied the area and describes the stillness behind the shadowless light and haze in the air. Particles floating in that stillness have about the same diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight, which they refract and block. The scientist tells Weschler, “It can get to be like having a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you’re trying to see.” A poet friend later corrects him: “You mean a billion tiny moons.” So much of the joy in Weschler’s writing comes from associative jumps like these. Familiar objects and concepts come to seem strange, granted a new sense of discovery and connection. Weschler finds lyricism in technical language, in electromagnetic radiation, and then finds the precision in poetry. Weschler has formed intellectual friendships with many of his subjects, including the painter David Hockney and the author and engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, in part because creative people enjoy the way his mind interacts with their work. It’s important, however, to distinguish between free association and Weschler’s method. He unfurls ideas in his own recursive, fractal, ecstatic way. When I spoke with Weschler, I had only just finished reading the final pages of A Trove of Zohars, which he dedicates to his friend Ricky Jay, whom he called a “wonder rabbi.” I formulated a single question about this idea, which had barely left my lips when Weschler began to 10

explain that “wonder rabbis are a thing,” or were, from the 17th to the 19th centuries. I didn’t even manage to turn on a recording device, so this is a reconstruction of a fluid and lively dialogue from my frantically typed notes — in other words, an artisanal interview. I have recreated the discursive path of a conversation with a master of the form, in an effort to show where Weschler interrupts himself and follows his own train of thought. As with all things Weschler, the pleasure is in the winding journey as much as the destination. Long before the era of “fake news” and AI, Weschler was thinking about aesthetics and science, how representation alters our perception, and the blurred line between fact and fiction. The sentences between Weschler’s thoughts and ideas here are not the questions that I asked. In fact, I said very little when I spoke with him. Instead, I’ve added summaries and material here in an attempt to bring the reader along for the ride. Lawrence Weschler: A few comments… When I became the head of humanities at NYU, I did so on condition that it would be understood that the division between the humanities and the sciences was artificial. The sciences are the crown jewel of the humanities. If you go back to the time before Descartes, there was no distinction, if you think of someone like Leonardo da Vinci… I’m a part of that, on my Jewish side, oh — but first, I have a funny story about Los Angeles. I’m very digressive. We’ll get there.

“One of the **Most Anticipated** Books of 2023.”

—The Millions

“A profoundly important story [that] has found an astute and sensitive author in Thorsson.”

“Revelatory . . . Book lovers curious about how the proverbial sausage gets made will want to check this out.”

—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of In Search of a Beautiful Freedom

“John Caputo is one of the foremost postmodern philosophers of our time. In this brilliant book, he offers a provocative new way to think about God and an invitation to awaken to a new reality: we are entangled with God. Playful, witty, and radically profound, this is a book to return to over and over.” —Ilia Delio, author of The NotYet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole

“Alain Badiou’s seminars are essential to understanding the evolution of his thought. This much-awaited collection of Badiou’s teachings enables the English-speaking world to experience the ‘true heart’ of his philosophy.”

—Publishers Weekly

—Sigi Jöttkandt, author of First “Sinykin’s Big Fiction is a book Love: A Phenomenology of the One of major ambition and many satisfactions. Come for the comprehensive reframing of a key phase in US literary history, stay for the parade of interesting people, the fascinating backstories of bestsellers, the electrically entertaining prose. The story of literary publishing in the postwar period has never been told with such verve.” —Mark McGurl, Stanford University

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“Compelling, compassionate, and comprehensive. ... Michel takes the reader on a journey of his career, what he has learned, the development of his innovative treatment but also his experiences of loss, including the devastating loss of his son to suicide.” —Rory O’Connor, author of When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

When I arrived in New York, I had this book about Robert Irwin. It was called Seeing is Forgetting. It was rejected by every New York publisher, with every one a rave rejection — it’s about an L.A. artist, it would never sell, no one would read such a thing. So, I sent it over the transom to The New Yorker. And they took it! When I arrived there, I went to the Algonquin with William Shawn. He had a regular table way in the corner. They called him the iron mouse, he was such a tiny man, his eyes barely came up over the edge of the table. So, he could hide out there, and just watch. I had this long, long menu in front of me, and the waiter came over to us. And Shawn said, “I’ll have the regular.” I was so flustered. I just said, “Oh, well, I’ll have the plat du jour.” Which was stuffed sole with lobster, that day. Eventually, these great silver tureens arrive. They lift the lid of mine, and a fragrant steam rises from this enormous lobster. And they lift the lid of his… and it’s cornflakes. At the time, he said, “Mr. Weschler, we’re hiring, but I’m confused. You live in… Los Angeles? You live there? And where were you born?” Van Nuys! Weschler’s book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, came out in 1982. Irwin was active in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and became famous for his work with site-specific and site-conditioned installations exploring structure, color, and perception. The book describes Irwin as a Los Angeles artist “who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it.” Weschler moves from his birthplace, Van Nuys, to his ancestry: 12

All four of my grandparents were Viennese Jews, but I had no Jewish education at all. I lived a completely secular life, and came to my Jewishness in college by way of Freud. This is interesting, I’m still going to come back to your question — but it’s striking that in Kafka and in The Interpretation of Dreams, from Freud, there’s the same double metaphor. Freud talks about the way that language stands as the censor at the gate to consciousness. All these thoughts are petitioning to get in, and they can’t — except when you’re asleep, then they can get past the guard, when your guard is down. The language for dreams going back down, and early basic drives, these are the same words as Kafka. In The Trial, it’s all the same — agencies, guards… did Kafka get it from Freud? And if you go down this rabbit hole, it’s possible they both got it from Jewish mysticism: from Sholem. There was a major trend in Jewish mysticism, formed around a dilemma. Once the temple is destroyed, you have two traditions that arise around how you keep the temple alive in exile. One is Talmudic — kosher, with rules about rules and about the people who keep the rules. And then there’s another tradition: a mystical one. The wonder rabbi is the devout person who through mystical exercise becomes the temple himself. Is this in keeping with the laws, or is this something other, and can you move back and forth? This segues into a verbal footnote about Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and how his idea of bad faith begins with a critique of Freud.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER

Because, how can there be a guard or a censor to the unconscious? The guard has to know what he’s keeping in! Our drives aren’t unconscious. The things we deny are things we know to be the case. And it’s exhausting to continually deny what we know. Denial is just bad faith. This is all very important in terms of Zohar, too, this situation. From here, we go deep into the history of the mystical tradition, via the father of the Kabbalah, Isaac Luria, and through the pogroms in Europe, the Jewish messianic heretic Jacob Frank, and Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob. This guy Frank, he was more outrageously atavistic, he was breaking all the rules. Many people who will become the French Revolution — they’re coming out of that. And the point of all this is that many of the people in Vienna, for example — the class of people who say, I’m Jewish, but I don’t keep kosher — they’re coming out of the mystical side rather than the Talmudic. Even Einstein, with his theories. In all of these theories, there’s a secular version of the tale of the fall and the redemption. In Freud, it’s the paradise of infancy, the fall into chaos of growing up, and a return to Eden. The same thing happens in all sorts of these discourses, interestingly. Shimmel Zohar comes from Isaac Luria, from that whole migration, even without knowing it particularly. In terms of my own writing, Trove of Zohars is the fourth volume in the Chronicles of Slippage. The first book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants,

Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, was all about the wonders of nature and the wonders of human accomplishment. Some people call my work in this vein magic-realist nonfiction. And they wonder whether any of this was true. The slippage is in there. People thought I was making up the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I had just called them from the phone book! The actual phone book. The question was, how do you write a book about the place without demystifying it? The second book, Boggs: A Comedy of Values, does for money what Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet did for the museum. In the 1980s, J.S.G. Boggs invited you out to dinner, and if it was fancy in those days, you might have built up a debt of $87, with tip. Boggs would take out his drawing of a $100 bill. He would say, “I’m glad you like it, I intend to use it to pay for this meal.” He would call over the maitre d’ and say, “I spent ten hours doing it…” And then he would ask for his $13 in change. The maître d’ would say, “I’m not going to give you $13 change…” But then you would wait 24 hours, and people who wanted to collect Boggs’s bills would pay $50,000 at auction for all of it together, the drawing, the bill, the $13, and the receipt. Boggs was constantly getting arrested and found not guilty. When he was put on trial in Old Bailey in London, he was accused of reproducing British currency, and he said, no, this is an original… So, it’s the same kind of slippage, and it gets really wild. The third book is Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists. Murch is known as the 13

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greatest film and sound editor, he did The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient. He was an acoustician, the acoustician of Dolby 5.1, and in his spare time he was the smartest person in America. When I taught a class called the Fiction of Nonfiction, about all the fictive elements of nonfiction, on the test, the answer to the question — who was the smartest person in America? It was Walter Murch. There was never a test. He had all kinds of hobbies, though. He wanted to craft an astrophysical puzzle that no one had figured out before, he had looked at the numbers and was convinced that he was right, and part of the book is me finding an astrophysicist who will talk to him. They all said, no, go write a peer-reviewed paper! There are ways that PhDs learn how not to believe anything that isn’t a peer-reviewed paper. Darwin didn’t write a peer-reviewed paper! It became a kind of comedy of the sociology of science. The fourth book is this book here, once again in the terrain of slippage. A Trove of Zohar’s is the one that’s closest to Mr. Wilson’s in a way. Knitting a condom, wait, what? The precision dueling team, what? After Mr. Wilson’s, people would come up to me and ask, are you David Wilson or Lawrence Weschler? They felt that one of them had to be made up. It’s that same sense of vertigo here. So if the first books explored journalism, and the museum, and value, this book explores photography and Judaism. And I would put the whole quartet in the context of that class I used to teach, The Fiction of Nonfiction. As a writer, I’m very interested in narrative, in storytelling, and in the intoxication of 14

getting lost in a story. In all of my work, I think a lot about fictional devices, which is to say tone, voice, form, irony, freedom, all those things that are part of novelistic concerns. You’re right that this was celebrated and cherished back in the day, not so much anymore. I’m trying to keep it alive in my Substack, Wondercabinet. It’s not that I’ve been canceled, it’s that I’ve been superannuated. The kind of writing I used to do at The New Yorker, there’s no place for it anymore, for writing as if the reading mattered and reading as if the writing mattered. The great New Yorker writers, Joseph Mitchell under William Shawn, and the people who spawned us — at the time they didn’t put the writer’s name at the beginning, and no dek. They weren’t telling you what you were reading, you didn’t read initially because of clickbait, you had no idea who it was who had written this as you started. The narrative velocity kept you going. And about halfway through, you realize, it’s about the most important thing in the world… what it was really about was the passion of narrative, the long form. At the heart of the whole AI conversation — there are three issues in the Substack on this topic, around my conversations with Blaise [Agüera y Arcas] and the mavens of AI at Google — I do think the Singularity is approaching, where AI and human nature collide. Because humans are becoming more robotic. We’re addressed as robots by editors, who say that people don’t have attention spans — but it’s not true, they do! They go to podcasts for it now. I used to do a whole class about voice. Shawn used to say, I can

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Reform Nation Dear California

The Golden State in Diaries and Letters Edited by David Kipen

The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration Colleen P. Eren

Why?

The Philosophy Behind the Question Philippe Huneman

Who Needs Gay Bars?

Bar-Hopping through America’s Endangered LGBTQ+ Places Greggor Mattson

 :     

The Kid Across the Hall

Free to Judge

The Fight for Opportunity in Our Schools Reid Saaris

The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections Michael S. Kang and Joanna M. Shepherd

Who Wrote This?

The Transition

Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas Daniel Kiel

How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing Naomi S. Baron

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always teach a voice to report, I can’t teach a reporter to have a voice. In those days, what was cherished was voice, a distinctive voice. From here we digress into Schoenberg, the German exile Thomas Mann in Los Angeles, and a joke about two dachshunds meeting on the Santa Monica palisade where one says, In the old country, I was a St. Bernard. Here’s a fantastic thing — there’s an issue of the Substack coming out tomorrow, and then in two weeks, a letter that my grandfather wrote to a composer, about organic form. Melody, harmony, counterpart, and form, voice is a musical aesthetic. I have no musical ability at all, I am catastrophically amusical. When I was speaking with Oliver Sacks [for his 2019 “biographical memoir,” And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?], he couldn’t get over that I, who had all this musical inheritance in the piano department, I can’t hear whether a note goes up or down. He was avisual — not just face blindness. But for me, whenever there was art involved, I was brought along. My grandfather’s chapter on form — I teach that in my class, I’m amusical, but I understand completely about joining the ending, about pacing, about voice. Changing register. And, by the way, when I teach writing, all of my metaphors are musical — I think you need a rest here, this is badly syncopated. Narrative is the musicality of experience in some way, you’re taking the chaos of experience and giving it a narrative form, the sequential exposition of material. My grandfather used to talk about the architectonics revealed in music. In the same 16

way that architecture is formfulness across space, music is formfulness across time; it’s constrictions across time, as in Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space. Narrative is more like music than it is like painting. The experience of painting is like music, but coming upon a painting in a museum is not. Music takes the time it takes. Writing takes the time it takes. Editors now don’t have attention spans because they don’t have the time to have them. AI doesn’t have attention spans. I have an argument with Blaise — we disagree about everything but we have wonderful arguments about it. My feeling is that a program, an algorithm, cannot experience the awe or perplexity or hankering that is at the heart of being human, or used to be. To experience awe or puzzlement or confoundment, you need to be able to experience yourself as contingent and puny and little. Those algorithms can’t do that. If I look back on my political reporting, covering Solidarity in Poland, they used to have this wonderful phrase: Solidarity was an expression of the subjectivity of the Polish nation. It was the capacity for acting as the subject of its own history, as opposed to the object of other people’s history. And martial law was an attempt to turn subjects back into good little objects. That in turn led me to writing about torture, about people who have acted like subjects, and they are trying to turn them back into good little objects. That first book was the passion of Poland, and the fire of that, the ongoing battle after that. The profiles are also passion pieces — Steven Berkman, all my characters who are kind of moseying

LAWRENCE WESCHLER

along in everydayness, when suddenly they caught fire. They end up somewhere completely different than they thought they were going to be. It’s a sprawling theme and a wonderfully comic theme. People just do wonderfully weird things. I do weird things. Nobody wants it, necessarily, but I insist on doing it. I don’t teach anymore. I had this wonderful gig at NYU for almost 15 years; I got fired in a wonderfully NYU way: they said, “your line has been eliminated.” I do have this community, artists I work with and write about (eight of the people I wrote about got MacArthurs the year after I wrote about them). What they all have in common is those “pillow of air” moments. It gets lodged in your mouth, and you realize you haven’t breathed for 10 seconds. The last footnote in the Zohars ends with saying — oh, look up willy warmer… hand-woven condoms is a real thing? Wait a moment, wait, if that’s real, what else is real?

Vermeer’s daughter and the art historian who believes that she may have painted some of the master’s works. Ten years from now, [the fact that Vermeer’s daughter painted some of the famous paintings], it’s going to be common knowledge. I interviewed the people putting together the show [in Amsterdam.] It’s a Thomas Kuhn kind of moment — the orthodoxy starts to have cracks, and then suddenly, it’s — how’d you go bankrupt? Gradually, and then all at once! Eventually, they’ll say they knew all along. I love difficult, annoying characters. People who you have kind of had it with them, but you keep writing. Printing a book is now like firing up a kiln and making earthenware pots, these days, it’s a hobby. The Substack is tactile, in a way. It’s very much prehensile. I’m taking things, and putting them side by side, to provoke pillows of air.

ChatGPT cannot have a moment of amazement that willy warmers exist. You have to have a belly if you’re going to have a belly laugh. So, my community, writers and artists and friends, I’m writing for them. My Substack is an important initiative, people on the Substack are excited that I’m doing what no one else is doing, around the visual and the musical. People are increasingly specializing in one subject, but I’m very consciously holding all of this together. Weschler has a number of projects in the works, including an article about 17

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PERMA-NOON

On light pollution and the way we talk about the natural world by Lauren Collee

In an episode of The Simpsons from 2003, Lisa, having dis-

covered a new passion for astronomy, embarks on a campaign to reduce Springfield’s levels of light pollution. When she collects enough signatures on her petition, Mayor Quimby agrees to switch off the town’s streetlights at night to unveil the starscape above. In the darkness, the townspeople revel in their newfound freedom: Moe and Selma kiss passionately on a park bench, Bart attempts to steal the hood ornament from Fat Tony’s car. The new 18

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arrangement doesn’t last long. The surge in crime forces Mayor Quimby to turn the lights on again, this time to the highest setting — “perma-noon.” Night is completely eliminated from Springfield, and the city’s rhythms go haywire. A sleepless Marge irons random objects, ecstatic at the new heights of productivity she has reached. Birds begin tunneling underground. Eventually, Lisa and Bart team up to shut off the power once again, and all of Springfield gathers to watch a meteor shower light up the sky above. Back in 2003, light pollution was still a niche subject, even for a show famous for the breadth of its coverage like The Simpsons. It had been almost two decades since the International Dark-Sky Association was established to advocate for greater night sky visibility, but beyond astronomy circles, “light pollution” was still a fairly unintelligible phrase. This was three years before An Inconvenient Truth, when the layman’s environmental concerns extended to clean rivers and the ozone layer. How could light be a pollutant? Despite our tendency to describe illumination with the language of liquidity (light leaks, seeps, trickles, and bathes), most people don’t really think about light as a physical substance, let alone something that might contaminate our environment. Around the turn of the century, though, mainstream discussions about artificial light were beginning to change. The dawn of the digital age led to new concerns about newly ubiquitous glowing screens. New research measured the capacity of bluer wavelengths in particular to disrupt our circadian rhythm — the internal clock that syncs itself to the outside world via external cues. (Such cues are known 20

as “zeitgebers,” a German word meaning “time-givers.” One, of course, is light.) This research linked artificial light at night (sometimes referred to as ALAN) to sleep disruption, mood disorders, and even some kinds of cancer. Meanwhile, the effects of ALAN on other organisms were becoming increasingly evident, particularly on nocturnal insects and other crucial nighttime pollinators such as bats, whose numbers had been steadily declining as electric light expanded into new frontiers of space and time. Today, scientists view the loss of the night as a kind of habitat loss, and a major driver of the current escalation in biodiversity loss that is sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction. When I started writing my PhD dissertation on light pollution in 2019, there were early signs of the concept beginning to travel in popular culture outside of the astronomy circles where it originated. But the last four years in particular have seen new shows and exhibitions on the subject of artificial light, from the major exhibition 24/7 at Somerset House in London (based on the book of the same name by media theorist Jonathan Crary) to Netflix’s new nature documentary show Night on Earth (2020). In 2022 alone, two new books came out on the topic: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us by Ed Yong, science writer for The Atlantic, and The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Swedish biologist Johan Eklöf. If ecological panic is something that tends to take on a slightly different emphasis every few years (“the greenhouse effect” in the early noughts, microplastics in the early 2010s, the wildfires of recent years in California

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and beyond), then it seems that “light pollution” might be about to have its moment as the environmental concern du jour. One thing that distinguishes light pollution from other environmental crises is the fact that, unlike climate change or microplastics, it could be eliminated overnight. Of course, its impacts on invertebrate populations and on the migratory patterns of birds and turtles could take a lot longer to reverse, but with the stroke of a pen or the flip of a switch, the sky could go pitch black. The fact that we could instantaneously recover the crucial habitat provided by darkness makes light pollution a particularly appealing topic, a likely candidate for the next environmental Good News Story. But this alone doesn’t fully account for light pollution’s growing popularity as subject matter. There is another, more subtle force at work, one that has to do with the deeply rooted myths and webs of symbolism in which light is entangled.

•

As both a metaphor and a set of technologies, light has always been bound up with humankind’s quest for knowledge, and in particular with the Promethean myth of conquest and catastrophe. Illumination seems to go hand in hand with what Chris Otter (writing about Victorian England) has called the “phenomenology of urban modernity,” a state characterized by distraction, spectacle, fragmentation, speed, and ultimately disconnection. Such meanings tally well with contemporary anxieties about contemporary life, in which we are inundated with light from all angles — phone screens, computer screens, giant LED advertising screens. In discussions of light pollution, clear

binaries emerge — between the natural state of things and the corrupted one, between urban areas and “wilderness,” between the bright noise of the digital age and the darkened silence of a lost interiority. In 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) opened with a short film called “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” The piece, which was directed by Owen Gaffney and Félix Pharand-Deschênes and runs just over three minutes, visualizes the expansion of humankind across the globe as networked webs of light, each of which signifies a different dataset of human activity: undersea fiber-optic cables, airplane and shipping routes, energy consumption. Five years later, NASA released its Black Marble image of Earth at night, which bore the subtitle Our Planet in Brilliant Darkness. By now, the Black Marble image is nearly as ubiquitous as the famous Blue Marble image from the 1970s was. It shows up in bank advertisements and white papers, on book covers and computer screensavers. Where the Blue Marble displayed an Earth apparently untouched by humankind, all blues and greens and white fluffy clouds, then the Black Marble image is something more sinister, its surface marred by malign-looking clusters whose primary visual echo is the agar plate. If the subtext of the Blue Marble image was the fragility of Earth, then the Black Marble’s is humankind’s dominance, anthropos creeping like a web of light over the darkened earth. It is a picture of a world in flux, caught in an unfinished process of transformation: each time the satellite does another rotation around the earth, it registers a few more pixels of light. 21

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Light is an incredibly effective visual is rapidly destroying the planet. Similarly, metaphor for cultural anxieties about the the notion of the “untouched wilderness” pace and freneticism of modern life (the reinforces the segregation of humankind erosion of sleep, the elusiveness of rest), as from nature, deepening the fallacy that well as for ecological anxieties about the such a separation is possible in the first loss of the wild and the planetary scale of place, and ignoring the fact that the most human influence. This makes the view of pressing threats to ecosystems won’t stop at Earth from above at night an almost per- the gate of a nature sanctuary. fect emblem for the Anthropocene era, • which is a cultural moment as much as a geologic one. Eklöf, the Swedish biologist, How do we talk about the ways that certain human practices are destroying worlds writes that “[s]atellite pictures [of Earth at night] show how concretely the urban- without lapsing into the generalizations of Anthropocene thinking? In the case of ized world spreads out, and this spread is light pollution, one way forward is to pay perhaps one of the strongest symbols of […] the Anthropocene”; likewise, Yong, close attention to the varied ways of life that darkness facilitates, and the precise the Atlantic writer, peering out of a plane window at an illuminated city below, mus- ways in which artificial light disrupts them. es that “[l]ight travels, metastasizing even Eklöf ’s work is most compelling when it gets into the weeds of the nocturnal into protected places that are otherwise life that awakens when most humans lie untouched by human influence.” There are the echoes here of a mis- down to sleep, from the ghost moths that anthropic environmentalism: human in- dance above the grass one night a year in the Swedish springtime to the giant squid, fluence, as symbolized by light, becomes perceiving with its plate-like eyes clouds of here a kind of cancer, “metastasizing” into darkened, undeveloped corners. The his- light around its predators in the darkened ocean. This nocturnal world is fascinating torian of technology Sara B. Pritchard has not only because of the associations that written extensively about this, pointing out have coalesced around nighttime (romance how the Black Marble images are edited in and terror, the ghost and the dream) but such a way that the Global North stands also because of the deep mystery of recout as much brighter than the Global ognizing, as Yong points out, that we can South, reinforcing a colonial ordering of the globe that separates darkened “nature” never really know what it is like to inhabit from illuminated “society.” Is it “human in- the world as these animals do. We are all, at the end of the day, trapped in our own fluence” we need to be wary of, or is it a particular economic system? As many have “sensory bubble.” And yet, studying the ecological effects pointed out, the dominant narratives we of light pollution does require the researchhave for the climate crisis are in dire need of revision. That of the “Anthropocene,” for er to attempt to get inside the mind of a bat, example, tends to implicate all of us equal- whether through instruments that render new sensory experiences visible or inferly: in thrall to the promises of technology and economic development, “humankind” ences drawn from studies of behavioral 22

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LAUREN COLLEE

patterns. Accounts of the impact of light pollution on animals are often steeped in the language of trickery and artifice, a nature duped by false dawns and false moons, sea turtles lured away from the ocean by the bright lights of the city, birds dazzled and confused by columns of light commemorating the fall of the twin towers. It is worth noting that such language maps quite neatly onto human associations with light as something that deceives, dazzles, and distracts. In the diagnosis of the animal, we can also discern fears about modern humanity for the human being, who — like the moth, or the bat — is overstimulated, seduced by the bright light of the iPhone screen or advertising billboard, tuned out of its natural behaviors and lured toward its death. In 2009, the legal philosopher John Nagle, in an essay called “The Idea of Pollution,” drew attention to the fact that the primary contemporary meaning of “pollution” as an environmental contaminant was a fairly recent development. Up until the late 1800s, pollution was a word that referred to moral taint. There is an echo of this original meaning in modern environmental understandings of pollution, which continue to see, in the grit and fog of the urban environment, a kind of moral corruption, or to suggest a connection between rural lifestyle and moral innocence (see Raymond Williams’s 1973 book The City and the Country, for example). In discussions of light pollution, similarly, “darkness” stands in for not only an ecological good but also a moral one, a “cure” for a contemporary humanity that has been corrupted by its addiction to light. “Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection,” writes Yong, concluding

that, “[i]n making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it.” He’s talking about animals here, but he might as well be talking about humankind. Eklöf, likewise, includes a statistic about smartphone addiction among teenagers alongside his discussion of moths seduced by streetlamps, suggesting that humans are no more immune to the pull of the light than the common invertebrate. Later in the book, he talks about darkness as a “balm for the soul,” arguing that conversations held in the dark are deeper and different in quality than those held in the day. Darkness, it seems, can heal the rift that digital light has torn in the fabric of society. If light is emblematic of the disconnection of the internet age, then darkness can facilitate both a morally pure, nearly spiritual interiority and a recovered sense of community that encompasses human and nonhuman forms of life. While there is nothing inherently wrong with ascribing these powers to darkness (these narratives would not be so popular if they did not contain a grain of truth), it bears remembering that, in the world as it is right now, where everything we value is sold back to us, the scarcity of darkness is an opportunity for profit.

•

As the “toxic” elements of light become more widely known, darkness becomes increasingly desirable in all facets of life. Digital devices advertise dark modes, which promise to bring technology into closer compatibility with natural rhythms. People now seek out sensory deprivation tanks in which to escape the modern condition of overstimulation; the “darkness retreat,” an experience derived from a form of Taoist meditation, touts the deprivation of 25

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all light and noise. Finally, National Parks seek to increase visitor numbers over winter by tapping into the rising demand for “darkness tourism,” in which people visit protected Dark Sky areas in order to experience a night under the stars. But darkness is not a commodity; it is a basic condition for life. What does it mean if darkness, with all its healing qualities, becomes something geographically as well as temporally siloed? Like most other forms of pollution, exposure to light pollution in energy-stable countries tends to be unevenly distributed, especially along lines of race and class. A 2016 study from the London School of Economics found that social housing estates in London were characterized by “substantial over-illumination in which lighting is a purely engineering solution to technical problems of order, policing and safety,” while more affluent areas enjoyed lower, atmospheric levels of nighttime lighting. In New York, housing projects that are deemed “high crime” are subject to the NYPD’s horrific “Omnipresence” project, which involves blasting the neighborhood via bright lighting towers, each of which emits a white light equivalent to 200 car headlights. Rolled out in 2014 by then-mayor Bill de Blasio, the lights were supposed to “help the NYPD do its job.” The threat of disproportionate light pollution assists and compounds the greater threat of disproportionate police presence in majority Black and Brown neighborhoods. Even when measures to reduce lighting levels are taken, there’s no guarantee that such measures will take the interests of communities into account. Municipalities in cities like New York and London are rolling out “smart” streetlamps, which can be dimmed and adjusted remotely 26

according to need. Introduced as an energy-saving option as well as a strategy for reducing unwanted light spillage, such lamps often come equipped with inbuilt CCTV cameras and other monitoring devices. They are first and foremost surveillance technologies, ushered in under the guise of an ecological strategy, and grafted onto an object that ordinarily connotes trust and safety: the lamppost. (In fact, an EU-wide initiative to introduce smart streetlamps with inbuilt CCTV is called the “Humble Lamppost” project, reflecting the fact that, unlike a camera, lampposts do not tend to be seen as antagonistic.) In San Diego, the deployment of 3,000 such lampposts faced such fierce opposition from community groups that the mayor was eventually forced to suspend the program. Whether through these means or others, “light will probably be soon as strictly regulated as noise,” muses Eklöf. But it is worth asking whose interests such regulations will serve. The comparison to noise pollution is an interesting one, given the frequently conservative spirit that has underpinned campaigns for quieter urban environments, which have often welcomed the involvement of city police forces. In the 1990s, “Operation Soundtrap” attempted to quiet the streets of New York by deploying squad cars full of police to stop the use of boom boxes and boom cars. “The sound of gentrification is silence,” reflects Xochitl Gonzalez, in an essay on noise pollution for The Atlantic. Without a reflection on light’s role as a tool for enforcing the segregation of urban space, the well-intentioned battle against light pollution may be easily brought into alignment with the aims of police departments and other violent institutions. If we

LAUREN COLLEE

are going to bring sensory pollution back to do, which is to really consider the power into public discourse, it needs to be done struggles that happen on the line where with a rigorous wariness of the ways such the natural is separated from the artificial, an idea can be co-opted to naturalize the the human from the nonhuman, the necessensory effluvia of certain groups and ac- sary from the toxic. tors, and denaturalize that of others. At • one point in An Immense World, Yong describes walking through a National Park A key contribution of Cronon’s work to when he reflects on the intrusion of hu- ecological theory was the idea that the National Park model — the strategy of foman-made noise: “Two men puncture the cusing the majority of environmental retranquility,” he writes. “I can’t see them, but they’re somewhere on the trail below, in- sources on remote sanctuaries that become tent on broadcasting their opinions to all of “showrooms” for the kind of nature that is deemed worth preserving — might not be Colorado. Further away, I can hear vehicles zooming along a highway beyond the trees.” the best way to guarantee the long-term While Yong’s book is for the most part nu- coexistence of diverse human and nonhuman worlds. Currently, the main strategy anced and granular, this passage is typical of a particularly unfortunate strain of contem- for reducing light pollution’s impact on the environment is the creation of “Dark Sky porary nature writing that the Scottish poet Parks,” areas that strictly regulate lightKathleen Jamie has summarized as the “lone ing in order to gain accreditation from enraptured male.” God forbid somebody the International Dark-Sky Association. other than this narrator also visits the park! Because high concentrations of light tend And God forbid they enjoy themselves and to accompany high concentrations of peohave a conversation! The ecological impact ple, these Dark Sky Parks often fall within of a loud human voice is not the same as that of a highway. The problem with blan- the borders of existing National Parks or wildlife sanctuaries. ket definitions of sensory pollution is that A year or so ago, I spoke to advocacy they force these kinds of false equivalences officer David Smith from Buglife, a UKin their attempt to schematize what does or based charity that aims to protect insect doesn’t belong in a given environment. and other invertebrate populations. Given Later in the same chapter, Yong invokes the vulnerability of invertebrates to ALAN, William Cronon’s work on “the trouble light pollution is high on Buglife’s agenda. with wilderness,” a still-powerful text from But Smith stressed to me that only pro1995 in which the author warns against an tecting siloed Dark Sky sanctuaries isn’t environmentalism that is predicated upon the preservation of “wilderness,” a colo- really a viable long-term ecological strategy. “These siloed dark sky places might nial idea that true nature is best enjoyed in work for things such as astronomy,” he said. solitude, and thus precludes the presence of other people. Yong’s use of this source “But if we’re effectively trapping species rang false for me because what Cronon de- within those dark sky places without the mands of us is something that the litera- ability to move, then other threats might come into it — things like climate change, ture on light pollution has not yet learned 27

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for example, might compress those spaces down.” Smith explained that the primary problem was the fragmentation of dark space, which led to species being immobile and vulnerable, confined to “only the darkest corners of our world.” This is the risk that comes with darkness being made a geographically specific quality. Johan Eklöf ’s work is most compelling where he emphasizes that our ways of understanding the relationship of light to darkness tend to be overly binaristic. He points out that there are, in fact, three phases of twilight, each marked by a shift of six degrees between the sun and the horizon, as the sun continues its revolution and day turns to night. Each of these phases is marked by its own color-world, and serves a discrete function to the various species whose sensory organs are far more attuned to these shifts than our own. He points out too that the distinction between light and dark doesn’t always map neatly onto the urban/rural divide: an unobstructed night sky can be chaotic, dazzling, and overwhelming in its light show, while a city alleyway can be profound in its gloom. Darkness is, as Eklöf rightly notes, not merely the absence of light (or of noise, of stimulation, of humanity). Darkness has its own variety of textures, habits, and moods. Sometimes it comes down thickly and violently; sometimes it falls softly as snow. Sometimes it brings terror, and sometimes it brings rest. It means something different for all the many species who depend on it. Having a single word for all these experiences is deceptive.

•

“Protecting the darkness” or “saving the night” from the encroaching threat of light pollution, then, is not as simple a task 28

as it may first seem. In some ways, that Simpsons episode from 2003 does as good a job as any subsequent text of capturing the complexity of the human relationship to light, which colors so many lines of demarcation — between the natural and the artificial, the rural and the urban, leisure and labor. As both a metaphor and a technology, illumination performs all kinds of boundary work for us without our really noticing, because its ubiquity as a metaphor hides it from view. At the beginning of Eklöf ’s book, there is a beautiful passage in which he finds himself in a darkened Swedish church where a population of bats roosts. Inside the church is a painting of a demon with bat wings. “The creature of darkness is dying,” Eklöf writes, describing the light that radiates from its mouth as though “it has tried to swallow the light, but can no longer resist its power.” Though light pollution remains — let’s be honest — a fringe environmental concern, it is one with profound philosophical stakes. In the Christian imagination, the light/dark binary has long stood in for the battle between good and evil, form and formlessness. We must be careful how we move through this terrain because a flipped binary is still a binary, and all binaries produce segregation.

Postcard from Saint-Alban Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

Francesc Tosquelles from the Tosquelles family albums (1970) Original photography by Romain Vigoroux Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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STATE EYES IN THE SKY

A brief history of policing the sky by Nicholas Shapiro, Kate McInerny, Matyos Kidane, and Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco

As clouds of smoke began to accumulate over the city in August

of 1965, the manager of fleet sales for the Aircraft Division of the Hughes Tool Company made yet another call to the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department. He had been trying for months to coax interest from law enforcement and saw the Watts Rebellion as the perfect opportunity for an eye-in-the-sky sales pitch. He was right. Over the next several days, a Hughes Helicopter served as an aerial observation and command post for the sheriff. As

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Richard C. Kirkland, a decorated Korean War helicopter pilot who later worked for Hughes as a salesman, described it in his 2002 book Tales of a Helicopter Pilot, those initial law enforcement flights were “primitive by today’s standards, but it opened eyes, and doors, to the potential.” It was here in Los Angeles where helicopters made their first showing as “flying patrol cars” alongside the high-intensity firepower of SWAT teams. Both emerged as tools for suppressing Black insurgency and spread to become standard forms of policing across the country. Both tactical practices have, through mission creep, moved from rarefied and specialized operations into daily policing usage. Yet the history of the police helicopter remains relatively unknown. In the years leading up to Watts, helicopters had come into increasingly heavy use for command-and-control operations in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Back in the states, helicopter salesmen — many of whom were veterans themselves — successfully tapped into the soldierlike desires of police to bring rotary aircraft into use for domestic surveillance. Militarized police dreams, combined with a density of aerospace defense contractors in Southern California and the era’s technological optimism, made Los Angeles the primary test bed for taking policing into what was then referred to as “the Space Age.” To justify the massive expenditure that establishing new fleets of aircraft required, law enforcement and the aircraft industry worked together to persuade the public that the helicopter was more than just an expensive new toy. Within a year of their first test flight, the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department and the city of 32

Lakewood — a suburban city in the southern part of the county — had secured what was then the largest ever federal grant issued to law enforcement to test the efficacy of whirlybird patrols using rented Hughes aircraft. Even before the findings from this initial study were published in 1968, the potential of helicopters for policing, specifically for “demonstrating a police presence,” was echoing through federal reports on the future of policing. Community members and abolitionist organizers have equated this logic to that of an occupying army flexing its sovereignty. In April 2023, a SWAT team landed their Super Puma helicopter on a West Hollywood street as a show of force, snarling Friday traffic for 11 hours, in a standoff with barricaded subjects that revealed themselves to be simply clamorous pets inside an empty apartment. The study that resulted from the sheriff ’s first field test did what it was designed to do and found a decrease in crime in a white bedroom community during the helicopter test phase, yet the exact mechanism of hypothesized crime prevention remained elusive. Not to be outdone by the sheriff, the LAPD commissioned its own study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL), which had been transferred to NASA from the army only a decade earlier. Paul Whitehead, an emeritus sociology professor who conducted a more robust study in 2002 — a study that found no relationship between helicopter surveillance and crime — has noted that the JPL study was designed “with the purpose of finding the evidence that helicopters improved policing. And everything was aimed at reaching that conclusion even before the first piece of data was collected.”

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Today, the more than 50-year-old study remains a key justification on the LAPD’s website for their helicopter arsenal, which it also proudly claims to be the world’s largest police fleet. To facilitate police sales, the aviation industry drew on both military salesmen and law enforcement consultants. For example, Hugh MacDonald, the division chief at LASD who first flew on a Hughes helicopter at the request of a persistent salesman, was later hired by the aircraft company to sculpt its national helicopter sales strategy aimed at law enforcement agencies. After the L.A. evaluation was published, a cadre of former-military-helicopter-pilots-turned-salesmen was quickly assembled across multiple helicopter manufacturers and armed with both the study and the insights of a once-skeptical cop-turned-advocate. Dividends for these law enforcement courtship efforts came quickly. By 1970, upwards of one in five new commercial helicopter purchases were made by police departments. By the following year, this technological, corporate, and policing vision had spread from Los Angeles to 24 municipalities that had acquired helicopters for police patrol. Police sales buoyed slumping corporate and charter sales and pushed design changes, such as increased onboard electrical capacity to power loudspeakers, high intensity lights, video recording, and night vision devices. The Hughes 300C model of helicopter was reportedly developed especially for law enforcement applications. Multiple tributaries of federal funding, culminating in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, helped make the initial purchase of these big-ticket items more

fiscally palatable for municipal and county budgets across the nation. Their reach extends well beyond the borders of the United States, with police helicopter use spanning six continents. Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, police helicopters even served as an olive branch between a US defense contractor, Bell, and the “emerging markets” of the former USSR aviation industry. In the early 1970s, the LAPD was logging over 62 full days of flight time per month. These aerial patrols focused on five police divisions, all but one working in predominantly Black or Chicano neighborhoods. As historian Max Felker-Kantor detailed in his 2018 book Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD, discontent with these helicopters — which would quickly, and widely, become known as “ghetto birds”— had already been coalescing for several years. A spokesman for the Greater Los Angeles Urban Coalition, Ralph M. Nutter, said in 1969, “We are of the opinion that exaggerated and unnecessary use of law enforcement helicopters is causing unnecessary tension in minority areas and stimulating resentment to such an extent that there will be provocation for acts or attitudes which could cause lasting harm to the community.” The proliferation of police helicopters coincided with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the mounting public demands for clean air, water, and soil that pushed the agency into existence. Today, the LAPD uses environmental arguments to support requests to the city council for new helicopters. Some 600 pages deep into their latest budget proposal, submitted in November 2022, the department notes that “a helicopter is equivalent to four Black & White 33

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vehicles […] which may contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” Yet the intensive energy needs of rotorcraft make the fuel consumption of a single LAPD helicopter roughly equivalent to 23 squad cars running at 36 mph. Beyond mystifying green math, the most persistent environmental concerns emerging from police helicopters are not related to their carbon footprint but rather the sonic consequences of what the engine and rotors do with all that energy. Noise has been a key community concern since the start of the Sheriff ’s Department’s experiments. Engineers at UCLA recorded police helicopter noise between 70 and 80 decibels in residential neighborhoods and 65 and 75 decibels inside classrooms, loud enough to obscure teacher-student communication. They also found that nighttime flights produced an Effective Perceived Noise Level, a measurement that takes into account the tonality and duration of the noise exposure, of 100–115 decibels and were “in violation of municipal noise codes and exceed the federal landing noise limits for new jet aircraft.” Beyond this one-paragraph abstract of a 12-minute presentation in 1973, little to no research has been conducted on these helicopters that have become, at the very least, the irritating background noise of life in Los Angeles. That is why we — researchers and community organizers — began collecting data on the more than 50 helicopters registered to law enforcement in Los Angeles. We started by submitting public records requests to the LAPD and LASD, owners of the two largest fleets in the county, to acquire accurate tail numbers. We then took to the FAA helicopter registration database 34

to fill in the other, smaller municipalities, like El Monte and Pasadena. Then, to understand their movements, we purchased the six most recent years of flight trajectory data available for all of these aircraft, dating back to 2017. We’ve released some preliminary results that indicate that Black and Latino neighborhoods are surveilled more often and at lower altitudes — even when controlling for race, income, and other variables. The LASD would not divulge simple public records that would enable our research, so we had to resort to suing them for these public documents. Our successful lawsuit yielded documents that revealed the LASD Aero Bureau budget increased by $11,265,140.89 from 2019 to 2020, an increase of more than 40 percent. In a cruel cycling of history from the Watts Rebellion to the uprisings spurred by the murder of George Floyd, protests over police brutality and structural racism have been countered by the thundering presence of law enforcement helicopters in Los Angeles and their ever-expanding budget lines. In line with its roots, a recent report from the L.A. County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission indicated that Aero Bureau had no Black staff and that leadership were members of multiple racially homogeneous deputy gangs including the Spartans and the Vikings, once described by a federal judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.” A 2021 lawsuit filed by a man who states that he is the only Black helicopter pilot to ever serve in the Long Beach Police Department, which patrols approximately the southernmost 10 miles of Los Angeles County, claims 436 incidents of racial discrimination or harassment. Racist imagery was allegedly

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baked into pilot continuing education exams, posted in the pilots’ office, used as computer screensavers, and placed in helicopter flight logs. Enumerating flight hours, altitudes, and budget lines can paint a crisp picture of the law enforcement use of helicopters in the sprawling, most populous county in the country while remaining abstract in their social and biological costs. The reality is that police helicopters have measurable effects on the physical world, even for those who never have an in-person interaction with a law enforcement officer. Thousands of times a second on every flight, the rotor blades slap the air, sending out small vortex trails that then interact with the next blade slicing through the air a tiny fraction of a second later. This phenomenon, known as blade vortex interaction, yields the pulsing, clapping sound of helicopters in addition to what is known as “thickness noise,” which is generated by the displacement of air with each passing rotor. Unlike the often constant din of a highway, the sounds of helicopters erupt into soundscapes intermittently. Chronic exposure to intermittent noise is associated with higher risk of death from cardiovascular diseases. At night, these slapping blades can cut into dreams. In addition to a more metaphorical deferral of Black and Brown dreaming, arousing people from sleep can increase diabetes and cancer risks, and exacerbate anxiety and other mental health symptoms. Disturbed sleep can also make it harder for students to learn new concepts or remember what they studied on tests. Even from our preliminary analyses of the flight trajectories, it is clear that there are racialized impacts of the noise pollution

generated by dubiously effective police helicopter patrolling. These sonic pulses and their many consequences are traces of airborne structural racism that can have lasting, generational impacts. For over 50 years, this large-scale experiment in policing has played out in the skies over Los Angeles in the name of public safety. We are working on determining the extent of these impacts, but even without all the numbers in hand just yet, we can confidently say that it’s time for a citywide conversation about how many public safety dollars are going into racialized harm.

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CONTINUOUS DISAPPEARANCE

Empress Elisabeth and the archives of anorexia by Meghan Racklin

At 28, the age when the most famous portrait of her was paint-

ed, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was the rare royal who looked in life like the fairytale version. Her portrait, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, is one half of a pair of portraits, the other depicting her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph. She is dressed in diaphanous white, her shoulders bare, her skirts voluminous; there is a fan in her hand and her famous diamond stars in her famous hair. When their portraits are hung side by side, Franz Joseph is looking at 36

NONFICTION

Elisabeth. Elisabeth is looking at the view- “becoming an obsession,” and her husband er. Empress Eugénie of France called her wrote to her often to express his concern “the loveliest crowned head in Europe,” and about “this terrible dieting,” his worry that Franz Liszt called her “a celestial vision.” she was becoming “too thin.” She was little loved among the palace laNo one knows, now, what she looked dies, but even one of her harshest critics like in middle age, or older. At 38, 10 years had to admit that she was “almost super- after her famous portrait was painted, and naturally lovely.” Biographies give the dis- at 48, at 58, for all intents and purposes, she tinct impression that every man she met was as beautiful as ever. Beginning in her fell instantly and irrevocably in love. thirties, she refused to be photographed, Elisabeth was fanatical about her beau- and later portraits of her are copied from ty, her crown jewel carefully guarded. She earlier ones. The last artistic rendering she was famous for her waist, a tight-laced sat for was a sculpture, when she was 42. 19 inches; her hair, which reached nearly She lived to age 60, but there is a strange to the floor; and her weight, which, until feeling almost as if she had died earlier. her death, fluctuated from just under 100 She created an image of herself as forevpounds to just over 110, always far too slight er young and forever beautiful, an image for a woman of her height. The tight lacing adored in Austria and enshrined on comof her corset took an hour, and washing her memorative cups and celluloid. hair in raw egg and brandy took up to three She left behind a kind of anorexic arhours once a month. She had a language chive. In his 2010 book So Much Wasted: teacher with her to occupy this time, and Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of she counted the hairs that had fallen from Resistance, Patrick Anderson writes that her head when it was done. anorexia is “an archival project of undoHer niece, Marie Larisch-Wallersee, ing and becoming,” a kind of Derridian wrote in her memoirs that her aunt’s “life’s archive fever. Just as Derrida, in his 1995 task was to keep young, and she was al- book Archive Fever, asserts that “[t]he arways thinking about the best methods by chive always works, a priori, against itself,” which she could preserve her beauty.” She Anderson argues that anorexia is “[l]ikeslept, sometimes, in a mask lined with raw wise oriented both as and against its own veal and her body wrapped in wet towels preservation.” “[A]norexia,” he writes, “arto keep her waist small. When they were chives its own compulsive rejections, even in season, she smeared her face with straw- as the anorexic body disappears.” The anberries. “The Empress,” Marie Wallersee orexic body archives its starvation even wrote, “took warm baths of olive oil, which as it disappears. So much wasted, so like she believed helped to preserve the sup- Elisabeth. One of her ladies-in-waiting, pleness of her figure, but on one occasion Marie Festetics, once wrote, the oil was nearly boiling and she narrowly escaped the horrible death associated with She seems to me like a child in a many Christian martyrs.” She was perpetfairytale. The good fairies came, and ually starving to maintain her famous waist. each of them laid a splendid gift in Her mother worried that starving was her cradle, beauty, sweetness, grace … 37

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dignity, intelligence and wit. But then came the bad fairy and said “I see that everything has been given you, but I will turn these qualities against you and they shall bring you no happiness. […] Even your beauty will bring you nothing but sorrow.” On the silver screen and the small one, Elisabeth still reigns — in a perennially popular film trilogy from the 1950s and, in the last few years alone, in two popular television shows and a much-lauded movie — always beautiful but always absent, her story more malleable for the space she left behind. Elisabeth, tied only loosely to historical memory, can be a Heimatfilm heroine or an anachronistic feminist. Count Egon Corti, one of Elisabeth’s earliest biographers, quoted another lady-in-waiting of Elisabeth’s as saying that she would “live on in legend, not in history.” She made sure of it, enshrining her image and erasing herself, leaving gaps in the archive that fiction rushed in to fill — leaving merely, to paraphrase Derrida, her lovely impression.

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Elisabeth, also called Sisi, became Empress at 16. Her husband, Franz Joseph, was supposed to marry her older sister, but — the story goes — he fell in love with Elisabeth at first sight. Whether she seduced him, or unknowingly charmed him, or fell for him too but felt awful about it, varies in the many tellings. She was unpopular at court and left Vienna often, spending her time and her country’s money on many trips abroad. The kitschy Sissi trilogy of films from Ernst Marischka cast a young Romy Schneider as the idealized romantic lead. Franz Joseph, played by Karlheinz Böhm, is dressed like 38

a Disney prince, and everything is all saturated Agfacolor. In Germany, the films play every year at Christmas — not Christmas movies, but movies with a Christmas feeling. And year-round, Sisi is everywhere in Austria; her face is on cups and postcards and chocolates. Her beauty is the core of her legend and in the fiction built out of the remnants of her history. In life, her beauty was politically powerful, even if her own role was limited. During a visit to Italy — anti-Habsburg, a wellspring of revolutionary feeling — early in their marriage, Elisabeth was greeted with applause. The British Consul said that “Her Majesty’s exquisite beauty, her grace and affability, have all contributed to win the sympathy and welcome of the masses,” and her husband reportedly said that her beauty “conquered Italy better than his soldiers and cannons had been able to do.” The deal to create a dual monarchy with Hungary, quelling long-simmering Hungarian resentment, is thought by many historians to be Elisabeth’s doing, as her fondness for the Hungarians was well known. This, her most significant and maybe only real political achievement, was a bargain built by her beauty: Gyula Andrássy, a central figure on the Hungarian side of the agreement long rumored to have been Elisabeth’s admirer or even lover, referred to her as “the beautiful Providence which watches over my country” and called her “the prize of all womanhood.” Franz, a reactionary who had only recently violently opposed greater autonomy for Hungary, could hardly say no to his wife’s beautiful face. Her beauty still has something of this ambassadorial quality. In nearly every place where she spent time — Madeira, Corfu,

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Vienna, Hungary — she is now a tourist attraction, with Sisi tours and events. In her Romy Schneider incarnation, she is immensely popular in China. Elisabeth’s later years and legacy are marked by her efforts both to destroy and to preserve her image. She spent countless hours of her life in the struggle to be beautiful; she wanted to make something ephemeral eternal, and, in the end, she sort of got it. She wanted, it seems, to be seen and known for her beauty and to disappear, for fear of being found wanting. As she aged, she hid herself from others’ eyes, retreating behind veils and fans. A police agent assigned to her for protection on one of her many trips abroad recalled that she made “a tremendous lot of work for us” because “no one was allowed to look at her.” Marie Festetics, her lady-in-waiting, wrote that “an aide-de-camp (let alone an adjutant general) in view is enough to unsheathe all her weapons; out come the blue veil, the large parasol, the fan, and the next path that turns off the road is taken.” She sometimes wore an “impenetrable silver-gray gauze veil,” and sometimes it wasn’t even her behind it all. She once had her hairdresser, a woman of similar stature, put on her clothes and greet the gathered crowds in a foreign port, and when she went swimming off the coast of England, she had a maid, dressed in a matching bathing costume, enter the water at the same time accompanied by a guard, so the crowds that gathered on the nearby cliffs with spyglasses to their eyes could never be sure that they were seeing her. Many of her letters were destroyed, at her request, by a loyal lady-in-waiting; more were removed from official archives by her daughter after

her death. Always, everywhere one looks for her, Elisabeth is slipping away.

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She is ubiquitous elsewhere but has been — until, perhaps, recently — relatively unknown in the United States, where we like our beauty queens homegrown and Marilyn-miserable. I first came across her, I think — my memory fails — on a pro-ana website, pink text on a white background, pretty. I only looked, I never commented. I starved myself for years; sometimes I refused to eat and sometimes threw up everything I ate. I was obsessed with famous anorexics, starving girls and Christian mystics. “Anorexia,” Anderson writes, “compels its own archival drive, beckons us to seek the vicissitudes of its histories, stimulates a desire to encounter the ghosts of its historical presence.” Elisabeth was an ancestor of sorts to anorexic girls on the internet, having assembled her own proto-pro-ana photo book. In 1862, she wrote to her brother, “I am creating a beauty album, and am now collecting photographs for it, only of women. Any pretty faces you can muster […] I ask you to send to me.” The same request went out, to some scandal, to Austrian diplomats in foreign countries. The albums remain, intact, in the archives. She left behind her, too, traces of her body, flesh made text. As Maud Ellman notes in her 1993 book The Hunger Artists, anorexics have an affinity for writing, record-keeping, as if “fat is to be transubstantiated into prose.” Elisabeth always had a scale at hand, and like many an anorexic, she kept careful, compulsive track of her weight and measurements, writing them down daily. A Count Wilczek 39

Francesc Tosquelles in the garden of the house of the doctor and director of the Saint-Alban hospital (1944-1945) Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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once recalled walking in on Elisabeth and Empress Eugénie of France, who, “with their backs turned to the door behind which [he] stood […] were busy with two tape measures, measuring surely the most handsome calves to be found in all of Europe at the time.” The specifics of her diet and her exercise regimen were recorded by those who knew her, and later by her biographers, with the same painstaking attention as those details were recirculated on the anorexic internet. She often refused to come to dinner, and when she did, she ate “alarmingly little,” as one member of her entourage, Count von Rechberg, noted. “We too,” he complained, “have to suffer for this, for the whole meal, consisting of four courses, four desserts, and coffee, does not last more than twenty-five minutes.” Her diet at times consisted of milk, orange juice, beef broth, or a mixture of egg whites and salt, and she sometimes ate violet-flavored ice. Marie Festetics once wrote that “[s]he is so obsessed with the idea that she is getting stout. I believe that if I did not insist so often, she would long since have died of starvation.” For a time, she alternated “milk days” and “orange days,” on which she would eat nothing else. Her life was a study in the constraints and freedoms available to the beautiful and wealthy; you can only escape to Madeira and Corfu if there’s someone footing the bill. Beauty is a kind of currency, and she was so beautiful that she could afford to be unreasonable. At the Hofburg, the primary residence of the royal family (though Elisabeth, whenever she could help it, was elsewhere), she had a large gymnasium installed and had gymnastic rings hanging from the ceiling in her dressing room. At her Hermesvilla, 42

a manor in Vienna far from the crowds at court, which Franz Joseph had built for her in the vain hope that she might stay more often close to home, the gymnasium was the finest room of all. When she traveled, which was often, her exercise routine traveled with her, as did her cows, to ensure she had the highest-quality milk. She would ride for hours, as good or better than any man, and she did gymnastics and exercised with weights each morning and evening. When she went to England to participate in the hunt, she rented Combermere Abbey in Cheshire; before she arrived, she had a gym installed. When she gave up riding, she took up fencing and long walks. She would hike for hours, in any weather. These habits were thought to make her modern — a match for her rumored insider’s anti-monarchism, her independent streak — but they mostly made her thin.

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These records of her, weighed and measured, and the recollections by those who knew of her routines, replace any visual record of her body in later years, when she effaced herself, erased herself from the archives and nearly from life. (Self-starvation, Anderson writes, enacts “the continuous disappearance of the live.”) I have my own starving archives; I still find, sometimes, in my bedroom at my parents’ house, notebooks with scribbled-down lists of calories eaten and burned, whole days when I know what I ate, what I weighed, how I moved, and what I measured. The first summer I starved myself, I ate only grapes and airpopped popcorn, women’s magazine snacks, descendants of Elisabeth’s oranges and milk. “One wonders,” Ellman writes, “what

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historians a hundred years from now will make of this new genre, these interminable inventories of the alimentary canal where dieters immortalize their every snack.” There is a kind of perverse pleasure in the genre, she suggests — in the way it ostensibly operationalizes writing as restraint when, at the same time, “one could also argue that they eat in order to keep writing, since every stolen morsel represents the pretext for a further composition. What is more, their words preserve their food for future delectation, deep-frozen or freezedried upon the page.” Anorexia, she writes, has “provoked this orgy of verbosity”— it creates an urge to archive. Derrida asserts that the archive begins right as memory starts to disintegrate. I starved myself for years, consuming coffee and carrots; any meal I couldn’t refuse I could refuse to keep down. I remember little of it — some bad decisions, some binges, some nights on the bathroom floor with a book. Every so often, I search “eating disorder memory loss” online and turn up studies on the many memory disturbances found in those with eating disorders, including, most severely, some in which researchers have identified Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome — a rare disorder characterized by extreme memory loss — in some cases of anorexia. Anderson writes that “[w]hat some clinicians summarize as a ‘disorientation in place and time,’ this disintegration of the function of memory enacts an almost literal incarnation of Derrida’s archive fever as simultaneous destruction and preservation.”

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The Sissi films, by far the most popular portrayal of Elisabeth, give her fairytale

face a fairytale story. She has a husband who loves her and subjects who adore her; she is always full of hope. They end with Elisabeth in her thirties. A fourth film was planned, but Schneider — as eager to distance herself from the image of Elisabeth as Elisabeth was herself — refused to participate, lending the movies a kind of metarealism. But while Schneider’s Sissi is the prototypical portrayal of Elisabeth, it is far from the only one. She has been the subject of novels and made-for-TV movies, and, in the last few years alone, the recent Netflix series The Empress, the German television channel RTL’s show Sisi, and the movie Corsage. The Empress and Sisi both wear history lightly: both protagonists are gorgeous girlbosses with hearts of gold. In the former, Franz Joseph is well intentioned and kind, and the plot centers on a (fictional) attempted coup by his brother; in the latter, Franz Joseph is probably evil but in a sexy way, and the plot centers around a rebel plot to kill him (fictional in the specifics, though a Hungarian nationalist did attempt to assassinate him before he married Elisabeth). In both, as in the Sissi movies, Elisabeth’s beauty is a given, a gift: her starving, if mentioned, is the brief result of her occasional grief, while her love of riding and walking are signs of her independence or her naturalness, not her obsessiveness. Corsage, however, is a rare depiction of Elisabeth in middle age, and takes her eating disorder as a primary concern. From the moment the movie starts, Elisabeth, played by Vicky Krieps — her face cold, the skin barely concealing the contemptuous muscles of her jaw — is being weighed and measured, surrounded by dumbbells and gymnastics equipment. At her birthday 43

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party, the guests sing a song with the re- not to stop, while she makes herself come. frain “Beautiful may she remain” when the What she cannot stand is any slight to her cake comes out. Elisabeth refuses to eat. beauty. The emperor, looking at a new porThe movie is not a historical drama so trait of her, one copied from earlier portraits much as an archival one, its purposeful since she refused to sit for this one, tells her anachronisms emblematic of the gaps in that the painting is lovely. He means it, but history. While she is in her brocaded rooms, he also means to hurt. “I wonder,” he muses, her husband stands waiting outside in a “how you managed to look so young.” bare concrete hallway lined with stacks of In the film’s final third, Elisabeth apchairs, looking less like a room in a castle pears heavily veiled at an event, looking than a staging area. ever so slightly stouter. The camera shifts; Krieps — who previously, in 2018’s Elisabeth is inside shooting up (the rePhantom Thread, acted out intense desire al-life Elisabeth’s cocaine needle is in an born of or enabled by unyielding hun- Austrian museum), and the woman in the ger, exacting standards, and disturbing ill- veil — her lady-in-waiting, Marie — runs ness — plays Elisabeth not as frigid, exactly, in, unable to breathe through the lacing of despite what so many biographers want to the corset she is wearing. The film’s ending insist. To be hungry all the time is, after all, is its most effusive, sweeping departure to be constantly wanting — and what she from history. Elisabeth cuts off her famous wants is to be wanted. The Sissi movies, of hair and has it made into a wig. She gorges course, are all romance and no sex, the re- on candies and instructs Marie, her nascent cent TV shows sexy, soap-soaked, and silly. body double: “Three orange days a week, In Corsage, it seems that Elisabeth gets off clear beef broth in the evening, lean meat on her beauty, or on the recognition of it. if you want. Nothing more. No potatoes, When she is in England, her riding com- no bread, no dumplings. And no pastry, for panion, Bay Middleton (a man as obvious- God’s sake.” Marie begins to be weighed ly in love with her in the movie as he was while Elisabeth begins to eat cake, and at rumored to be in life), comes to her, at her the end, like Edna Pontellier in petticoats, request. She is dressed in only a corset and she jumps into the sea, effacing and replacriding pants. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” ing herself completely. she asks him, with him on his knees in front Among on-screen depictions of the of her. The camera shifts from her face to his Empress, only Corsage’s relationship to eyes, and back. He tells her, “You’re sunshine. history is more melancholic than mythic, You’re the fucking sun.” He moves his hands interested in dwelling in the spaces left in up her thighs — we watch them watch each the archive instead of skipping over them. other, close — but then he realizes: “That Freud, for his part, considered anorexia a was all you wanted, wasn’t it?” She tilts her kind of melancholy, though the history of head, nodding slightly, and replies, “I love to the disease is also bound up with the histolook at you looking at me.” When he leaves, ry of hysteria. Melancholics and hysterics she makes herself come in the bath. both, in the words of Caryl Flinn, are “peoIn another scene, her husband sits on ple who remember too much. Specialists in the bed, and she tells him to look at her, the past, they are consummate historians.” 44

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Anorexics, consummate historians, chroniclers of their own disappearance — which is to say, archivists, writing everything down, memory laced tight through holes.

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Corsage is slow, circling; it repeats Elisabeth’s refusal to eat much at all, her compulsive exercise. It recognizes what so few accounts of anorexia do, that anorexia is less a plot than a pattern. Many narratives of anorexia follow a familiar narrative of recovery, tracing the onset of illness, the rock-bottom weight, the treatment, and finally recovery. These narratives forget that many never recover, and even those who do are recovering forever, another repetitive behavior. “[N]o repetition compulsion,” writes Derrida, “no ‘mal-de’ can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive”— there can be no sickness that is not, in some way, an illness of the archives. Towards the end of Elisabeth’s life, a doctor who examined her found that she was suffering from edema caused by starvation, a condition more commonly associated with soldiers in wartime than empresses at resorts by the sea, but she had been starving for so long. Hers was the diet of someone who would die to be beautiful, and just might. In the end, though, it wasn’t the starving that killed her; it was an anarchist, concerned not with her body but with her crown (he intended to kill a different royal, but didn’t time it right). While Elisabeth was out walking in Geneva, a man named Luigi Lucheni peered under her parasol, then stabbed her in the ribs with a needle. One version of the story has it that she didn’t die on the spot because of how closely her famous corset held the

knife in place, though it seems too neat a metaphor for the paradox of beauty’s privation and protection to be true. When he was asked about his motives, Lucheni kept repeating, “Only those who work are entitled to eat.” He can’t have known that his phrasing would scan almost as a joke. She died starving and worked hard at it. In Corsage, an early scene shows the Empress at a museum opening in Vienna. A man tells her they are fortunate that there are so many depictions of her in the city. She is absent so much that “we almost think of Majesty as a phantom,” he says, as if, even before death, she existed more as image than flesh. After she died, she was brought back to Vienna, her perpetual point of departure, to be buried. The Viennese were eager to gaze at her famous body. (At their darkest, the websites I used to read laid out the fantasy of being a beautiful corpse.) Her subjects waited in line for hours to see her. But her coffin, of course, was closed.

Hand programe (1968) Yves Baldran Collection, Saint-Alban sur Limagnole Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

NONFICTION

HOLY BREATH

Indie rock in evangelical America by Matthew Mullins

It’s December 2009, the week after Christmas. My friend Dan

and I have driven from Greensboro to Philadelphia for an academic conference. After checking out of our hotel on the last day, we decide to hang around to catch one more presentation. As a result, we’re still wearing our sorry suits as we walk through the cold convention center parking garage at the end of the day. We throw our bags into the trunk of my 1995 Honda Civic coupe and drive out of the city looking for a place to change and eat. That place turns out to be a truck stop with a couple of fast food options, and so here

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we come: two cheap-suited grad students together randomly throughout those years, walking into an I-95 gas station somewhere learning and playing each other’s favorite around the Pennsylvania–Delaware line. tunes. It was a kind of graduate school group Dan finishes his sandwich first and therapy. I had introduced the group to David heads off to change his clothes in the bath- Bazan that fall, at the risk of exposing my room. Before I can even crumple the remains religious anxiety through the doubt-plagued of my meal into a ball, he comes bursting lyrics and sonorous melodies of one of the back out with his head down and shaking. best Christian indie rockers of all time. In the He doesn’t even stop at the table, just breaks weak dome light, I ask Dan to find Bazan’s for the car, the word “nope” lobbed back over recently released album, Curse Your Branches. his shoulder like salt from a shaker. What should have taken a little over My curiosity is piqued. I toss my wrap- half an hour to listen to ends up taking a per in the trash and amble over to the door few hours. Between deep breaths, Bazan marked Men. As soon as I push it open, I sings the story of Christianity and his step into half an inch of water. painful experience of losing the plot. Dan, The sinks to my right are on full blast, who is not a Christian, pauses tracks to ask the basins overflowing and pouring water questions. A lifelong Christian, I rewind onto the floor at Niagra velocities. Over the key lines and play them again, as I attempt tiled floodplain between me and the nearest to answer Dan’s questions. A lyric about stalls, four teenagers move back and forth in “ancient autographs” leads to an inquiry ecstatic misdemeanor. They’ve stopped up about the Bible, which sparks a discussion the sinks with paper towels and are terror- of literal versus allegorical interpretation. izing the occupant of a stall by pelting him I am a tour guide pointing out naturally with these pulpy missiles. I can’t see him, overlooked points of interest, peeling back but I can hear him cursing them fervently, the layers of phrases that mean nothing to helplessly. I bolt out of there and have the Dan but everything to me. clutch on the floor with the key cranking Over the next hundred miles or so, the the ignition before the automatic doors of solidarity we felt as two schmucks in suits the gas station snick closed behind me. running out of a truck stop is replaced by a Back on I-95, we loosen our collars new kind of kinship. I become the local stoand laugh as we each tell our versions of ryteller trying to give the tourist a sense of what we saw. After the last repetition of what it was like to grow up in this strange “Unbelievable,” our conversation fades at the world of Sunday school, WWJD (What prospect of an all-night drive. I pull my CD Would Jesus Do) bracelets, daily devotions, wallet from between the seats and hand it to and worship services. I try to convey a sense Dan. What’s the appropriate soundtrack for of the world as I knew it, one in which truck surviving the pandemonium of teenagers, I stops were mere oases between church parkwonder, as he thumbs through the discs. ing lots and various youth group destinations. In the quiet, Dan asks about a musiLike Bazan, I grew up in the world cian he knows I like, one whose songs I had of American evangelical Christianity. brought to our small circle of friends with Though I should note that there are mulguitars. There were five or six of us who got tiple worlds, not a singular world, of 48

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American evangelicalism. After all, Bazan was raised mostly in a denomination called Assemblies of God and lived in the Southwest; I, on the other hand, grew up Southern Baptist in the Southeast. The kind of people who bring fast food to church potlucks probably brought In-NOut Burger to his and Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ’n Biscuits to ours. There are not only cultural, linguistic, and demographic differences between our respective evangelical ecosystems but theological differences as well. Historically, however, some central concepts have been used to group various Protestant traditions under the label evangelical, argues historian Thomas S. Kidd. A denomination or church or individual might be evangelical, for instance, if they self-identify as “Bible-believing” or “born again.” But Bazan and I both came of age in a period during which, as Kidd and other experts have claimed, American evangelicalism also drew much of its social coherence from an association with political conservatism. During the last half century, the alliance between American evangelical Christianity and conservative politics has driven a backlash identified variously as Ex-evangelicalism, Xvangelicalism, and Exvangelicalism. Bazan became something of a prophet to this movement, eventually leaving evangelicalism behind himself. Leaving is never easy. And while there is much to be said about how and why the politics of evangelicalism shapes the Exvangelical exodus, I want to focus here on the personal crisis of faith captured so honestly and vulnerably in Bazan’s music. He has left the faith, and I have stayed. But we have lived through the same cultural turmoil and voiced similar critiques of our people. I

want to examine the crux of what it means to stay or leave — which, from the vantage point of faith, can be traced to how we think about the very air we breathe. To understand why, we must go back to the beginning. In the beginning — and by beginning, I mean the very beginning — the Hebrew Scriptures say God created the cosmos by the power of speech. When everything is formless and empty and the Spirit of God hovers like a wind over the waters, God speaks, and light comes into being. God speaks again, and the water is separated from the sky. God speaks, and the oceans are gathered; dry land appears. God speaks and plants, stars, animals exist. But when God speaks for the first time about man, the act of creation is different. God says, “Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness.” This divine quorum then creates humans in God’s image. In the second version of the story, we are told that God “formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” This holy air, reminiscent of the wind hovering over the waters, forms a special bond between God and the man. With a different origin from the rest of creation, and with the breath of God in their lungs, our first parents are set apart in the story of God’s world. The Christian tradition builds on the Hebrew account to craft its own story about who God is, who we are, why the world is the way it is, and how we should live in it. In the Christian story, humans squander the holy breath. God then decides to become human, to breathe our desecrated air in the incarnate form of the virgin-born Jesus Christ, who sacrifices himself to save us from our own destruction. Christian hope lies in the fact that, unlike every other 49

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person who has ever drawn a breath, Jesus Christ conquered death. Three days after breathing his last, he inhales again, his asphyxiated chest cavity expanding. His lungs revive with the holy breath. He walks out of the grave. To be a Christian is to live rightly in the created world, loving God and loving your neighbor under the promise that the very air we breathe will be made holy once again, as it was when the Spirit hovered over the waters in the beginning. But what if the story isn’t true? I had to tell the story for Dan so that Bazan’s relentless cross-examination would make sense, and in the process, I put myself across the docket from my own doubts and passions. What if philosophers and naturalists from the ancient Epicureans to the New Atheists are right and the air has never been desecrated because it was never holy in the first place? The question of whether humans are animated by divine breath is a continental divide. You can’t answer, “Well, kinda.” For most Christians, at least, we’re either Godbreathed or we’re not, and if not, then everything is different from what was imaginable before, and worse. In “Heavy Breath,” the penultimate track on Curse Your Branches, Bazan has questioned his way to this most fundamental of Christian assumptions and pushed through with a pragmatic resolve: If no heavy breath Blew up these lungs While dirt and wet spit Hung a ghost in the air Well, we’re still here Many evangelical Christians would say that “if no heavy breath / blew up these lungs,” then nothing is at it seems: there is no true north, no cosmic order, no reason 50

for love or hate, good or bad, right or wrong. Humans would be no different from the other animals that occupy this planet. If the air is not holy because God made it holy, then there is no adequate meaning for the human condition. Somehow, some way, the story must be true. In this song, Bazan has crossed the continental divide and become someone for whom the story does not have to be true. His trek to this point of no return began years before. What first drew me to Bazan’s music in the late 1990s was the shocking honesty with which he addressed the kinds of doubts I suspect many young Christians believe are unique to them. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him live at Carrboro’s famous Cat’s Cradle in North Carolina. Like most musicians, he thanked the crowd after almost every song, but unlike anyone else, he would occasionally ask the crowd if we had any questions, and proceed to dialogue with us about anything from books to sex to the Holy Spirit. I didn’t work up the nerve to ask a question, but if I had, I would have asked about these lines from his early song with Pedro the Lion called “The Secret of the Easy Yoke”: The devoted were wearing bracelets To remind them why they came Some concrete motivation When the abstract could not do the same I myself had once donned a WWJD bracelet — a fad of the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were small cloth bracelets that came in various colors, with the letters “WWJD” embroidered in white, all-capital letters. I took it off when my earnest teenage radar began sounding the alarm

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that they were more of a trend than a genuine expression of faith. But to hear them mocked in this way unsettled and intrigued me. Even if I was tempted to sneer at the sellouts who still wore them, I was humbled by the song’s final lines, which could have been cribbed directly from my journal: If this is only a test I hope that I’m passing ’Cause I’m losing steam And I still want to trust you Nothing had ever been truer than these four lines. If all my doubts about this story — instigated mainly by its politicized appropriations in the world around me — are just a trial God is putting me through, then I hope I’m doing well enough so far because I can’t hold on much longer, and I don’t want to let go. I had wrestled with the meaning of those bracelets under a cloud of suspicion that I was making too much out of them. I couldn’t imagine that any real Christian would struggle with such a thing or that any non-Christian could care. Bazan sang these silent struggles into a microphone night after night for anyone to hear. I was not alone. The doubts get darker on Pedro the Lion’s 2002 concept album Control, where Bazan sings through the voices of various characters in an interconnected narrative of desire, deceit, and adultery. Although he was still a Christian at the time and the voice in the song is that of a character, I am gutted to this day by these lines from “Magazine”: I feel the darkness growing stronger As you cram light down my throat How does that work out for you In your holy quest to be above reproach?

There’s a defiance here, a sense that the character is speaking to some nebulous class of Christian figureheads whose attempts to be perfect and to impress perfection on their followers are doing more harm than good. It’s a good example of what I mean when I say that Bazan is a prophet. This skepticism becomes the dominant tone on the later albums, in which he turns his critical gaze on the political alliances of American evangelicalism. But Control, like all the earlier work, balances its darkness and doubt with a relentless, if beleaguered, hope. The final track contains only 21 words, 20 of them sardonic, but the last word is all the more hopeful and powerful for its loneliness: Wouldn’t it be so wonderful If everything were meaningless But everything is so meaningful And most everything turns to shit Rejoice In hindsight, these songs enabled me to accept a tension I couldn’t countenance before. They helped me see that doubt wasn’t something I was ever going to get over. It wasn’t a sign that my faith was fake. I could doubt and struggle and still say, “Rejoice.” And Bazan helped me to see that these very experiences were there in the Bible as well. Perhaps “Rejoice” was Bazan’s rendition of Job’s famous faithfulness in the face of unwarranted trials: “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” It was during the period from 2004 to 2009, when Bazan’s band Pedro the Lion released its last record for more than a decade (Achilles Heel, 2004) and Bazan released his first solo record (Fewer Moving Parts, 2007), that his doubts stopped leading him back invariably to faith. In a compelling review 51

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of Curse Your Branches, music critic Jessica Hopper wrote in the Chicago Reader: “It’s a harrowing breakup record — except he’s dumping God, Jesus, and the evangelical life.” Point by point, the album works its way through the story of Christianity, sliding the scale inexorably away from faith. He opens in the Garden of Eden sometime after God breathes his human creation to life: You’ve heard the story And you know how it goes Once upon a garden We were lovers with no clothes He recounts how we were done in by poison fruit, and how now, as a result, it’s “hard to be / a decent human being.” This is the story of how sin entered the world, how humans desecrated what God had breathed into being as holy. But after the first chorus, the instruments pause, and with reverb hanging in our ears, Bazan sings: “Wait just a minute”; the drums kick in as he continues, “You expect me to believe / that all this misbehaving / grew from one enchanted tree?” Each succeeding track interrogates some element of Christianity — its theology, history, philosophy, scripture, culture, church, politics. The final three songs on the album are arranged like a deep breath. “Bearing Witness” is the inhale. It’s a fast-paced rundown of the various parts of Christian life — like prophecies about the end of days and fear of hell — that Bazan must remind himself to let go of on a regular basis. “Heavy Breath” is the moment of full oxygenation between inhale and exhale in its proclamation that there is meaning apart from Christianity. “In Stitches” is the long exhale that leaves the body gasping as Bazan admits that “the 52

crew have killed the captain / but they still can hear his voice.” For me, though, the inflection point, the break-up itself, has never been the bracing lines of “Hard to Be” or the doctrinal critiques found throughout the record’s 10 tracks. It’s always been the final four words of the refrain in “Heavy Breath” when Bazan says that, even if God did not breathe life into us, “well, we’re still here.” He sings it flatly, as if to suggest that, where so much once depended upon the story of our God-breathed lives, nothing much depends on it now. If the whole story is untrue, well, here we still are. The air’s not holy, or at least not for the reasons we thought it was, and it’s really no big deal. Never have I heard something so paradoxically profound and mundane. There is no plot twist or surprise ending. Instead, after singing the chorus for a final time, Bazan repeats the line with a subtle melodic resolve in the last word: “Well, we’re still he-re.” When I first heard Curse Your Branches, I knew Bazan would no longer call himself a Christian. The lyrics to old songs had been changing in live performances for a while, as Bazan apparently became uncomfortable with lines such as, “I could tell you all about it […] and why I still believe it” near the end of “The Fleecing.” My friends and I would speculate about what these changes meant as we sat in grimy diner booths after late-night shows. Curse Your Branches removed the need for such speculations. Bazan was singing outright that the God who had plagued Job with trials “might have bit off / More than [he] could chew.” I cringe at these lines, and yet they articulate the very kind of doubt and anger voiced throughout the biblical psalms. I understand (better than most) why Bazan

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needed to walk away from Christianity and find another path, but even in my most trying moments, I can’t seem to follow him. In Brandon Vedder’s phenomenal documentary Strange Negotiations (2019), Bazan maintains that he didn’t set out to write Curse Your Branches as some kind of challenge to God. In fact, he says, it wasn’t until he started hearing from others about how the record resonated with them that he began to realize the widespread nature of his seemingly peculiar struggles: “There were a lot more people in that gray area than I thought were there. It was one of the 10 best records in Christianity Today, and I just, it blew my mind.” During his solo years, and sometimes for small tours since, Bazan mostly played house shows. He would post a call for volunteers to host shows in their homes, and then show up with a guitar and an amplifier and play for however many people could legally fit in your living room without causing a fire hazard. I attended one in Charlotte, North Carolina, with my friend Charles, and rarely have I ever felt that a group of total strangers were so in church together. At one house show in Vedder’s documentary, a woman tells Bazan that “there is a large generation for which you spoke to that kind of spiritual space that was hard for many of us to express really clearly and succinctly.” I belong to that generation. Bazan’s willingness to vocalize doubt, even disbelief, speaks to me. He has helped me see problems with the expression of Christianity in which I grew up, the one in which I continue to live and work. I wish more people, and more churchgoing people, would discover his catalog. As I trace Bazan’s journey alongside my own, I can see definitive moments when, like him, my politics changed and shifted

away from many of my fellow evangelical Christians — in the face of their rhetoric during the Obama campaigns and especially in the run-up to the 2016 election. It took me a while to figure out what faith could be apart from that very distinct American evangelical religiopolitical way of being; the two had been so deeply entangled throughout my entire life. But my faith remains very important to me. I still talk to God. I teach my kids to pray, and I pray with them. Church is important to our family. I read the Bible more now and with more pleasure than I did when my faith was seemingly less complicated. I try to sit still and listen every morning, even if, most days, I don’t expect to hear anything. But when I’m lying awake unable to sleep through a dark night of the soul, the shallow breaths I draw to keep from waking my wife still seem charged with the divine. The Spirit that hovered over the formless and empty world, the holy air that blew up the lungs of Jesus Christ, keeps me alive. I don’t have a foolproof answer as to why. I can’t offer an unassailable argument. Faith doesn’t work that way. It’s more like the resonance of lyrics and melody. The best I can offer are these lines from “The Fleecing,” first released on Pedro the Lion’s Achilles Heel. Bazan has changed the lyrics since leaving the faith. But when I listen to the song, I still take a deep breath and sing them this way: Who shall I blame for this sweet and heavy trouble For every stupid struggle I don’t know I could buy you a drink I could tell you all about it I could tell you why I doubt it And why I still believe it 53

Photos from the Tosquelles family albums, undated. Some original photographs by Romain Vigoroux. Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

NONFICTION

CARNIVALESQUE

On the ways we see basketball by Tosten Burks

After the eighth-seeded Miami Heat took a surprising series

lead over the Boston Celtics in May’s splendid NBA Conference Finals, Heat veteran Udonis Haslem joked on a podcast about projection models favoring his opponents. “I don’t listen to assalytics,” he smirked. Assalytics! Tortured but inspired. Haslem, 43, was the league’s oldest player before retiring in June. Once a key rebounder on championship squads, his role of late was more like a chaperone. His beard is gray. He entered the NBA the same year Michael Lewis published Moneyball.

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Basketball looked different when Haslem’s career began. Today’s teams play faster and score more, from a wider spread of locations on the court, stretching beyond the three-point line. Haslem’s Heat, his employer since 2003, averaged 19 more points and eight more possessions per game this past season than they did when he was a rookie and yours truly was a fifth grader. Players’ creative responses to rule changes and advancements in statistical analysis both changed the game’s shape and pace, according to a raft of recent books. A new professional class of math-minded basketball experts, who started advising teams around the time Haslem turned pro, stopped focusing on basic counting stats like points or assists. Savvy application of large databases of detailed historical data allows these analysts to more precisely quantify (and, at the negotiation table, price) the past and potential future impact of a player, lineup, or tactic on outcomes, adjusting for numerous variables, which are multiplying as new tools measure ever more granularly what happens during games. Still, part of the expert class finds new technical methods and their supposed dictates less useful. The great forward turned star commentator Charles Barkley once declared, “Analytics don’t work at all. It’s just some crap some people who are really smart made up.” Mild hating in the media is persistent and funny; after a made shot from an inefficient location during a trivial December game, my local L.A. Clippers broadcaster Brian Sieman exclaimed, “John Wall pulls down his shades and tells the stat geeks to deal with it!” Ironically the so-called “modern game” backed by dry math is spectacular to watch. 56

Miami’s tallest starter, Bam Adebayo, likes to dribble the ball up court after rebounds, expediting the start of the attack (analytics support speedy “transition” because offenses score more easily when defenses aren’t set) and reorienting our sight line away from the smaller guards who traditionally steer. Adebayo will pause as sprinting teammates curl up around or dart down past his body, or they’ll pretend to do one then do the other. He’ll quickly feed them for a drive or deep shot or fake a pass before driving to the hoop himself, opening paths for new passes, picks, and cuts. Movement, misdirection, depth, and touch at this tempo can make for a thrilling display that teases and overwhelms the eye. The Heat’s underdog run last season was ultimately stopped by a Denver Nuggets team that did it all even better, led by a six-foot-eleven passing savant, Nikola Jokić, around whom players slice to convenient delivery addresses in quick patterns of slants, screens, and feints. Like Sol LeWitt’s lines from corners to points on a grid, these offenses — my favorite kind — create a dense crisscross geometry that appears prescribed until a closer look reveals endless improvisation and surprise. The new styles spawned discourse and therefore a book market. There is an audience that likes to read about structural changes in sports, and if your contribution to those changes was maligned, I could see the appeal of receiving money to explain yourself. I was curious to see how the numbers guys (they’re all guys) write and whether their words add up to much. Basketball explaining is pretty saturated. I skipped the book that interviews magicians, the self-published one from a math professor, and the one with hand-painted

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infographics. What’s left are semi-closeted aesthetes, passionate about a game they find beautiful but whose passion they feel inclined and professionally obligated to rationalize. For most of us, looking is enough.

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The first credentialed media member to market was ESPN’s Kirk Goldsberry, whose Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA (2019) illustrates some of basketball’s formal evolution. Goldsberry, a former Harvard geographer, admits that he fits Barkley’s stereotype of nerds who “never got the girls.” Early he writes, “girls definitely didn’t talk to me,” but snipes back that certain analysts “treated these opportunities to study and learn about the game in exciting new ways the same way girls treated me in high school.” The shot charts Goldsberry invented and for which he’s best known fill his square book’s pages in the manner of a pitch deck. These charts, based on X–Y coordinate data that the NBA started tracking and sharing last decade, map representative players’ aggregated shot locations in colorful hexagons to illustrate Sprawlball’s argument that the majority of the game’s scoring takes place in an increasingly limited, and in his view boring, number of spots, near the rim and far from it, chosen for the sake of efficiency and scale. Goldsberry’s primary tone is irked. His writing addresses lingering skepticism of the discipline he helped popularize. (Later, he calls Barkley fat and elsewhere criticizes Barkley’s diet.) But he also seems frustrated with the “aesthetic upheaval” that analytics reinforced and attempts to defend more traditional styles of play. He dislikes how franchises value skills and players now.

In one short passage, he mentions threepoint specialist Ryan Anderson’s contract size eight times. “The Rockets were paying Anderson $20 million a year to loiter,” he writes. Loaded language helps Goldsberry make his point. Sprawl of the non-basketball variety has a touchy connotation, whatever your politics: a favorite of his analogies for stationing shooters deep to spread defenses is “suburban loitering.” (“Dumb sprawl and senile suburbanism,” a different geographer once wrote.) Goldsberry tells a cursory history of the three-point line and describes its introduction to the NBA in 1979 as “the most influential gerrymander in sports history.” In another fraught formulation, he calls the line the “Most Valuable Partition.” Goldsberry’s interest in market dynamics drives his work and exacerbates his dismay. Readers learn about shot selection in terms of “economic behavior,” “incentives,” and “subsidy.” How referees officiate the defending of ball handlers, made less physical by a rule change in 2004, is part of the game’s “regulatory landscape.” The framework leads him into a corner where he ends up protesting the “fundamental relationship between shot difficulty and shot value” as “deformed.” He imagines awarding points more fairly — a perfect market.

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Mike Prada’s Spaced Out: How the NBA’s Three-Point Revolution Changed Everything You Thought You Knew About Basketball (2022) tells a more complicated story. Basketball has always evolved in contested ways. The NBA’s adoption of the three-point shot followed its introduction first in an upstart competing league, and 57

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many stalwarts opposed the move, calling it a gimmick and “carnival basketball.” The vote for the addition by the organization of team owners was “the furthest thing from a (pardon the pun) slam dunk.” Prada often intends puns, I’m sorry to say. Basketball’s flux dates back to its earliest days. Inventor James Naismith’s 1891 version featured nine players per side and little dribbling, shooting, or contact; late in life, he complained about the game’s increasing physicality. Rules banning (and later unbanning) certain defensive formations, limiting the number of seconds an offense has to score, permitting dunks, reshaping the key, and, most recently, modifying the amount of contact to which perimeter players are subject have all emerged from debate about the game’s style and “freedom,” and all have produced unintended new styles in turn. In Spaced Out’s telling, this century’s developments are themselves misunderstood and unsettled. For one, the rapid rise in three-point volume, as pioneered by a mid-aughts Phoenix Suns team that I loved to watch on my great-uncle’s cold tile floor on hot Yuma nights, resulted from granting nontraditional shooters permission to take deep shots because the response this demanded from spaced out defenders created more room to attack the rim, not because of some shooting fetish. But defenses adapted with more coordinated approaches to court coverage, and yielding some perimeter shooting to better protect inside is once again in vogue. Prada excels at describing the formal characteristics of schemes and tactics, which strengthens his argument for more nuance in how we discuss what we see. The 58

expository approach requires a new vocabulary for what is in his words “an emerging field of study”— in other words, an avant-garde. This is a book about blitzes, shows, hedges, deep drops, levels; switches of the soft, contact, peel, scram, and veerback sort; snake dribbles, patient dribbles, yo-yo dribbles, crab dribbles; stepup screens, drag screens, flat screens, and ghost screens, the last of which is “really just a fake screen, but it’s a lot more fun to say ‘ghost screen.’” Beyond the savored jargon, Prada maintains a critic’s focus on language, even if his own sometimes flops. (Stephen Curry’s Warriors “flew around the court like a beautiful symphony.” Which symphony is that?) He traces the etymology of terms like “point forward” and “Eurostep,” coined by players themselves. He quotes rules to show how “creativity has outstripped” them. He’s interested in words failing. Most breaks are now “fast breaks.” Any step can be a “first step.” The most advanced and beautiful offenses evade taxonomy. One coach called this higher form “just playing.” Another called it “summertime.”

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Seth Partnow’s The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution in the Age of Analytics (2021) also explores how new basketball inspires new language. He specializes in the statistician dialect. Partnow was director of basketball research for the Milwaukee Bucks before joining The Athletic’s writing staff. (Goldsberry was the San Antonio Spurs’ vice president for strategic research. Prada, to be fair, is just an editor — Partnow’s, in fact.) This book, the cottage industry’s most revealing read, is about NBA technocrats.

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Basketball analytics is a collection of The workers who calculate and analyze distinct jobs. Teams employ data engineers them serve owners who increasingly share to create and maintain databases, product backgrounds in finance as franchise valudesigners to build interfaces, researchers ations grow by the billions. The most imto construct models, and analysts to com- portant number of all is the NBA’s salamunicate findings to coaches and execu- ry cap, to which Partnow attributes how tives. These individuals rely on quantitative “performance metrics serve to commodify observations recorded live during games players.” Assembling a team entails preby scorekeepers, and increasingly those dicting a player’s production, how many produced by computer vision software wins they are likely to produce, assignthat translates player and ball location and ing to these dollar values, and optimizing movement into “useful information.” available dollars, roster spots, and minThese latter duties raise epistemologi- utes. The Midrange Theory breaks down cal questions about words and their roles. the formula. What is a shot? When does one type beThroughout, Partnow welcomes skepcome another? Who decides? Computers ticism. He details how diffuse definitions, and humans alike require vocabulary to data input errors, and “allocative incentives” function as “units of measure” that make can dirty conclusions. But he doesn’t exsense because “numbers must take on the plore how that last bit, perverse incentives properties of conversational language” to like those that compel a player to stage a be worth anything. The words we choose rebound to earn a triple-double, might also “help shape the story as much as the reverse.” be noneconomic, like those that compel a Analytics is assalytics to the extent that player to attempt a more extravagant dunk practitioners fail to create meaning. and miss. He concedes early that aesthetics So Partnow tours the lexicon and its is “ultimately the thing,” but style as an end intellectual history. Readers meet a roster in itself does not occur to him or seem a of presenters at the MIT Sloan Sports consequential part of the game for him to Analytics Conference, the sector’s most deconstruct. important platform and hangout. A central Nor does Partnow explore how perverse chapter traces how player efficiency rating incentives might apply to observers. How (PER) developed into adjusted plus/mi- do professional constraints and ambitions nus (APM), then into regularized adjusted inflect an analyst’s (or critic’s) perspective? plus/minus (RAPM), then into statistical How do those perspectives spread among plus/minus (SPM), then into box plus/ fans, and for what purpose? Boardroom minus (BPM), then into real plus/minus influences can’t drain basketball’s beauty (RPM) as regression models grew more so- or the pleasure found therein, but they can phisticated. Such “impact” metrics obtain distort our appreciation. Winning and effithe properties of conversational-ish lan- ciency aren’t the only things. To these auguage through their wonky conversion into thors’ credit, writing is one way to combat “wins produced.” a managerial mind. A more expressive relaThese more abstract all-in-one mea- tionship to the game lies beyond the charts surements are key to the analytics project. and spreadsheets. 59

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THE FUNNY THING ABOUT MISOGYNY

by Katie Kadue

The funny thing about misogyny is it’s structured like a joke. Not

a very good joke — a groaner, a dad joke. Why are they called “women”? Because they’re a woe to men. Get it? Woman is a container for man; language engenders gender subordination. As Mike Myers recites on stage in his role as a moody slam poet in the thrillingly zany 1993 Hitchcockian send-up So I Married an Axe Murderer, “Woman! Whoa, man. Whoaaaaaa. Man!” 60

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Maybe that one’s a little dated. Jokes, like women, don’t age well. Misogynist jokes feel tired almost the moment they’re coined — much like flowers, often compared to women in old poems because both wilt as soon as they bloom into beauty. Still, even some of the oldest jokes in the book can manage to get off a laugh, or at least a faint smile of familiarity. Take my wife — is she still here? You get older, but these jokes stay timeless. As Milton’s postlapsarian Adam says in Paradise Lost, surveying the dim future of humanity that the angel Michael has laid out before him, watching man fall over and over again, “But still I see the tenor of Man’s woe / Holds on the same, from Woman to begin.” Whoa, man! Here’s another one: women are themselves a joke, not to be taken seriously. What makes them even funnier is that they’re humorless. “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” goes a classic; “That’s not funny,” is the nonanswer. The punch line to “Do you want to hear a misogynist joke?” is “No!” It beats actual punching, of course. Like all humor, misogynist jokes sublimate violence, in a way that’s so routine that it can be hard to see how precarious a sublimation it is. Sometimes violence is itself the joke, as in The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden’s shaking fist and catchphrase (“One of these days … Pow! Right in the kisser!”) or Cary Grant’s thinking better of socking Katharine Hepburn in the slapstick opening scene of The Philadelphia Story and instead letting her down gently with the soft part of his palm. Those examples, too, are as embarrassingly out of touch as a middle-aged Karen, clinging to relevance and showing up uninvited, like the outdated Overly Attached Girlfriend meme from the early 2010s. But

humor still provides misogyny a convincing alibi, in certain milieus, that it no longer seems to afford other offensive material aimed at marginalized groups. Sometimes misogynist jokes are even understood to be doing the reparative work of social justice, as when the tragedy of white women’s deadly complicity in the history of anti-Blackness gets happily converted into the comedy of white women’s utterly unserious femininity. It’s always wine o’clock somewhere! And really, who but a humorless scold would take such casually misogynist jokes seriously? They’re just jokes, often so obsolete as to be almost automatically ironic. Who are you, Freud? A sex-negative Gen-Zer on Twitter? Are you really going to conceptualize something this harmless as an assault on the female imagination, as Freud does in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where a male “assailant” functionally “exposes” the “assailed” woman through his sexually explicit speech? Why blow the cover of the dirty joke, that slightly more civilized form of “smut” that still aims to expose the implicit female listener but gives itself some prophylactic protection? “[A] tendentious joke”— by which Freud means a joke that has some purpose beyond itself — “calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.” What do you call a pleasure-producing three-way? A misogynist joke. The misogynist joke is offensive, but even more than most jokes, it’s also defensive. It protects the joker against criticism. It protects him against becoming a joke himself. 61

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When a woman laughs at a man, she’s often made to understand that she has made a category error: he is a man, not a joke. She is a joke. The joke’s on her, all over her.

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If you look at the YouTube comments under “White Woman’s Instagram,” a song from Bo Burnham’s 2021 comedy special Inside, you’ll learn that Burnham’s parade of pantomimed punch lines — his collection of poses, props, and lyrics that reproduce common images and captions posted to Instagram by white women — is not a misogynist joke: that would be a category error. Instead, it’s a painstaking work of art, “a masterclass in re-contextualization,” according to one fan. Because of the part in the video that comes after “an avocado,” “latte foam art,” and “tiny pumpkins,” where the app-specific rectangular aspect ratio widens and the generic White Woman opens up, in a generic, app-specific utterance, about her deceased mother, many viewers, including many white women, cry. Then we go back to “goat cheese salad” and “incredibly derivative political street art,” and many viewers, including many white women, start laughing again. I don’t disagree that this song mocking a White Woman who confuses quotes from Lord of the Rings with quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. is well done. I also think it’s a misogynist joke, because it’s only funny if you think it’s funny that white women process grief with selfies, consumerism, and superficial politics. When I’ve described “The Flea,” the famous poem by John Donne, as a rape joke, scholars of Renaissance literature have chuckled, shaken their heads, and patiently 62

explained that I’ve made a category error: it’s a poem. A clever poem, a witty poem, perhaps not meant to be taken seriously as an earnest attempt at seduction, but to be taken seriously as what it is: a poem. If anything, an erotic Donne poem might be, as Anahid Nersessian recently put it, a “panty dropper.” But not a rape joke. It’s true that “The Flea” is, in short, a short poem. The speaker evokes what we’d normally think of as an irritating insect, a flea that has bitten both him and his female addressee, to persuade her to give up her virginity to him: their bodily fluids have already mixed in the body of the flea, making sex a fait accompli. “Mark but this flea,” he begins — by which he might mean the black speck on white sheets or the black specks of ink, organized under the title “The Flea,” that mark the white sheet of paper — “and mark in this, / How little that which thou deniest me is.” These are instructions for reading: the lady is meant to understand an analogy between her chastity and the bloodsucking insect before her. But the interpretive payoff is very little, because she herself is worth very little. This is something like what we would today, or at least 10 years ago, call a “neg,” the go-to technique of the pick-up artist who lowers the woman’s self-esteem to the point where she thanks him for it. The neg, as the feminist scholar Madeline LaneMcKinley puts it, “absorbs the logic of ‘just joking’ as an explicit strategy of patriarchal control.” Tell a woman she’s nothing and she’ll be all yours. It’s hard to resist smiling at the way Donne turns sexual frustration into playful melodrama — “alas,” he cries at the thought that a flea is getting more action than he is — or the coy blasphemy of reconstructing

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the flea as the couple’s “marriage temple.” you apt to kill me,” Donne’s speaker pleads, And the whole conceit of an erotically ventriloquizing the flea that contains his charged flea is so wonderfully defamil- own blood, what if, instead, you considered iarizing, in a way that would please the this flea in a new light, estranging it from early 20th-century Russian critic Viktor its deadened ordinary sense of “pest” and Shklovsky, whose famous 1917 essay “Art as giving it new lifeblood? Technique” elaborates how the literary deWith all this estrangement, it’s easy vice of “defamiliarization” or “estrangement” to get distracted from Donne’s flea-rid(ostranenie) re-enchants a world deadened den lady’s explicit self-estrangement from by habit and automatization. The idea the speaker. The acknowledgment of her that art, by prolonging our process of per- lack of consent comes, in fact, as an afception of objects we think we know, can terthought. “Though parents grudge,” the “make a stone feel stony” again has become line begins, “and you”: what we at first read so familiar to literary types as to be petri- as a tale of star-crossed lovers is revealed fied in our imaginations, preserved from to be a case of a seducer whose target, in its context as if in amber. Shklovsky’s most his crosshairs as she is, is at cross-purposfamous examples of art’s denaturalizing es to his. It’s the opposite of ostranenie: capacities come from Tolstoy, but the way she’s so familiar as to pass beneath notice, that imagery can “allow us to perceive the her refusal relegated to a nagging add-on. object in a special way” is, he explains at the Literary scholar David Carroll Simon has close of the essay, over the course of sever- written about the similar role of the afteral pages I had completely forgotten about thought in Andrew Marvell’s famous carpe until I stumbled upon them recently, “most diem lyric “To His Coy Mistress,” a poem clearly followed in erotic art.” As a prime less of erotic obsession, he argues, than of example, Shklovsky offers up a misogynist casual disregard. (World enough and time? folktale whose resonances with Tolstoy, In this economy?!) Donne’s lines work like he says by way of interpretation, should this: Oh, I’m sorry — I didn’t realize you, the be “obvious,” and whose resonances with ostensible object of my affection and attention, Donne’s poem are perhaps more so. were still here. The tale recounts how a trio of abused There’s more than one way to tell a animals watch their human assailant beat woman she’s nothing. Shakespeare dehis wife and then try to make sense of this scribed the vagina in some scary terms: everyday event in terms of their own recent hell, darkness, a sulfurous pit. But more experiences at his hands: the bear thinks often in Shakespeare’s works, and in the he’s scalding her flesh; the magpie thinks English vernacular of his time, it was “a he’s breaking her leg; the horsefly, com- common thing,” or, more commonly, ing in at the tail end of the joke, thinks “nothing.” Nothing to see here, nothing “[h]e wants to shove his stick up her be- that couldn’t be diagnosed and dispensed hind!” Prosaic gendered violence at the hu- with using what critic Lili Loofbourow has man scale is made poetic through compari- called “the male glance,” which, unlike the son with the comic trauma of an insect, just penetrating “male gaze,” simply “looks, asas it is in “The Flea.” “Though use make sumes, and moves on,” unencumbered by 63

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any desire for deep cuts. “Maids’ nays are the next line the rapist becomes the rape nothing,” begins a barely existent two-line joke himself: “The rape joke it wore a goatee. poem by the 17th-century English poet A goatee. // Imagine the rape joke looking Robert Herrick, who ends another poem, in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back it“To Virgins,” with a jokey threat: virgins self, and grooming itself to look more like a can try to keep men away all they want, but rape joke. ‘Ahhhh,’ it thinks. ‘Yes. A goatee.’” no matter what they do, “love will win, / The fact that rape is so formulaic, so preOr else force a passage in: / And as coy be dictable, becomes its own joke: “This rape as you can, / Gifts will get ye, or the man.” joke is practically writing itself.” Here, rape — the “force[d]” entry, “the man” But of course, rape wouldn’t pack its who menacingly stands in for violent co- punch, and rape jokes wouldn’t land their ercion — is again, as in “The Flea,” down- punch lines, if it really were expected. A graded to an afterthought, the end-of-the- garden-path sentence is a kind of joke, line relation that failed romance defaults to, sometimes one that leads us out of Eden: metrically and naturally. “The rape joke is if you write a poem called I’m not saying these poems are equiv- Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become alent to rape. I’m saying they’re rape jokes. the only thing people remember about you.” Just jokes, like the “just so much hon- You’re asking for it, we think she’s saying, or” Donne’s addressee risks losing, just-so speaking for a moment in the voice of the stories about the infinite insignificance rape apologist, though“it” stands not, as it of women and the practical impossibility so often does, for rape but rather for the of their bodily autonomy. As scholars of rape joke, or, rather, for “Rape Joke,” the Donne and other carpe diem poets nev- poem that risks becoming the only thing er tire of pointing out, these poems make people remember about you, the joke that more sense if they’re read not as straight- you, you silly little flea, have been made forward overtures of seduction but as to understand you are. This didn’t happen metaphysical conceits, exercises in wit, to to Lockwood, who is now a writer well be exchanged with other men familiar with known for, among other things, her critthe genre, who will laugh in recognition. icism, her jokes on Twitter, and her autoThe fact that there’s no real woman here fictional novel about jokes on Twitter and makes it all more palatable. Indifference to the devastatingly brief life of her niece. You women, the reduction of women to nonex- can try not to be known for a poem called istence, means we don’t have to think about “Rape Joke” by writing something other them, or their humorlessness. than poems about something other than Another poem that’s a rape joke is rape; by, at least in writing, moving on. Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” (2012). • The rape joke, in Lockwood’s poem, is based in part on repetition: the poem con- I’m not saying anything original. Misogynist jokes, like all misogynist discourse, are usutinually restarts, reannouncing itself as a ally unoriginal and derivative, as derivative rape joke. “The rape joke is that you were as Eve from Adam’s rib, as unoriginal as sin. 19 years old. // The rape joke is that he was I like these jokes because there’s something your boyfriend,” the poem begins, and in 64

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comfortingly familiar, to the literary critic, in their structure, something that makes them work like 17th-century poems, or like 20th-century romantic comedies, or like certain generic personal experiences that only make sense to me as jokes. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you have a friendly drink with a male colleague; both of you have been struggling on the academic job market. Trying to show solidarity, you breezily bring up how bad you are at interviews, how you find yourself utterly unable to answer those formulaic questions, utterly unable to charm in that situation. (You try to say this in a charming way, to indicate that your grasp on irony is related to your failure to charm those who lack such a grasp.) His look darkens. Who do you think you are, he asks, that you don’t think you have to put up with stupid questions? Do you think you’re special? You’ve never had to make someone being aggressively thoughtless feel like they’re being perfectly reasonable, have you? You smile. You think, What do you think I’m doing right now? — ba-dum ching! But you pull your punch line, because you’re in fact quite used to putting up with stupid questions when it’s a question of being a woman putting up with a man, and putting up with a man means never letting him know you’re putting him on, because you never know if he can take a joke. How about this one: you have a friendly drink with a male colleague, someone who works in a related field but whom you haven’t met before. He has read your academic work; he admires it. As a matter of fact, he admires you. He knows you’re in a monogamous relationship, but isn’t monogamy a bit old-fashioned? Wouldn’t it be fun to do something even more

old-fashioned: have an affair? He’d really like to kiss you right now. You laugh, trying to be charming, worried about what will happen if you fail to charm. You keep drinking, since that might be part of your charm. He keeps bringing up “an affair,” a kiss. You keep saying no, but laughing, drinking more so the laughing will be easier. You could leave but you don’t; you don’t want to be rude. The next day you text to say you were feeling bad about the previous night and were uncomfortable about the affair references; you apologize for not saying so at the time. Oh that? he says. That was a joke. Completely a joke. In fact, he’s in love with someone else. In fact, he’s had a rather bad day himself; he doesn’t want to get into it, but it’s something quite awful, something more, presumably, than a question of hurt feelings. He’s sorry you’re upset, though. He’s sorry you couldn’t take the joke. You mention this sheepishly, in broad outlines, to a mutual friend. Oh — that’s just how he is, he says. He’s like that with all women. And you thought you were special.

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The rape joke, or the misogynist joke in general, protects the joker from becoming the joke himself. In other words, it protects him from being a woman. It’s a good thing the joke practically writes itself, with the preprogrammed regularity of cliché or AIgenerated text, because otherwise he might have to think about what it means that he’s so often just joking. There is, after all, something silly about telling jokes, the joke always threatening to contaminate even the most in-control comic with its unseriousness. As Freud 65

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manfully proclaims, we must “have the courage to admit that the economies made by the joke-technique do not greatly impress us,” going on to compare the joke’s linguistic economy to that of overthinking housewives. Have you heard the one about the housewife who travels a farther distance, at the expense of time and money, in order to buy slightly cheaper produce? That’s what the joke-technique is like, Freud explains: it takes two thoughts and then goes to great lengths to “transform one of the thoughts into an unusual form which will provide the basis for its combination with the second thought. Would it not have been simpler, easier, and, in fact, more economical to have expressed the two thoughts as they happened to come?” How embarrassing for you, to have put so much work into something that does so little. A similar threat has always faced lyric poets, who spend countless hours crafting tiny artifacts that are often no more marketable than fleas. Part of what makes love lyric written by men and addressed to women particularly and historically embarrassing is its frivolity, its femininity, its generic slightness, far from the battlefields of epic, where real forms of violence rather than smutty “assaults” are happening. No one ever says, “last night was lyric.” Lyric can make nothing out of something, can make nothing happen by making it a joke. “The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened,” Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” goes, “and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.” “[T]his cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,” Donne’s “The Flea” goes. Nothing to see here. Nothing to say. 66

Saint-Alban Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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VILLAS FOR US ALL

Transformative travel and the single woman by Corina Zappia

I didn’t study abroad in college because I didn’t want to miss out

on a minute of what my mother said would be the best years of my life. I feared that if I stepped off campus, I would miss something spectacular. My friends didn’t get the message. One studied abroad in Prague, where she ended up working in the office of some guy named Václav Havel. Another went to Korea, where she met her first husband. 68

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Back on campus, I switched from the Taco Bell Grande to the Double Decker Taco. My little sister, who never fell in love with her college, extended her study abroad to cover most of the four years. When she flew home from Europe, she seemed wiser and worldlier, knowledgeable about expensive lingerie and semi-fluent in Italian, which she still uses to speak to her friends abroad, their names floating off her tongue like languid rhymes. I kept wondering if I had missed out, so when my journalism career stalled in New York in my early thirties, I drained my savings and bought a one-way flight to Barcelona. The one-way ticket was intentional — I wasn’t sure where the trip would take me and wanted to be open to the possibility that anything could happen. I packed a single duffel bag, knowing my shirts would be in tatters by the end but hoping that traveling light would pay off with all the places I might see. I was aware that it was a great privilege to take off and escape for a while. It was also something I wished I didn’t have to do alone, but my old college friends couldn’t step away from their mid-career jobs or new-parent duties. As the plane lifted from the tarmac, I felt both excited and anxious. That was almost 15 years ago, and since then, there has been a massive growth in solo female travel, driven by women’s increased purchasing power, which has changed attitudes about women traveling alone — long affected by how travel is portrayed on the big and small screens. The genre of straight, single women having life-altering realizations abroad lives on. Out this year alone are the movies Faraway (unhappy woman escapes to Croatian island), A Tourist’s Guide to Love (unhappy

woman escapes to Vietnam), and Book Club: The Next Chapter (four older women, not unhappy but concerningly giddy, escape to Italy). Think Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Tanya McQuoid, in the first season of The White Lotus — and, as her husband pretty much abandons her immediately, let’s throw in the second season too. For every single, or virtually single, heterosexual woman over 30 whose friends have started to find partners and have children; for those who have emerged from divorces, unhappy relationships or the death of a partner and thus been rendered newly single; and for those battling personal inner demons that can only be vanquished with long hikes up mountains or visiting yogi in far-flung countries, the transformative power of travel has become the ostensible solution. Once a more niche operation, the number of female-focused travel options has moved fully into the mainstream, with tours that seem shockingly good at pushing the potential of self-improvement (“journeys of a lifetime that empower women,” claims Solo Female Travelers). Not all are female-only, but they’re always “female-friendly,” promising to be sensitive to the needs of the solo female traveler (“Feel safe anywhere in the world we visit,” boasts G Adventures). Most of them, like Explore! And JoinMyTrip, promise that you will be with other “like-minded” travelers. You may be traveling solo, but you will never be alone. A friend of mine called my trip to Barcelona my Eat Pray Love holiday. This was aggravating because, unlike the main character in that book/movie, I wasn’t trying to rediscover who I was post-relationship via a yoga retreat and a guru that was supposed to look wise but who really just looked like my Filipinx grandfather after 69

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he ate too many bananas. I was 32, had been single for a long time, and was aware of who I was at that point. While I sneered at the idea of self-transformation through travel, I was ashamed to be motivated by something far less noble and feminist. When I was about 10, I read Baby-sitters on Board! (Super Special #1) and marveled at how Babysitter Dawn still managed to meet a cute boy on a Bahamas cruise in between fulfilling her childcare duties. She put those kids down for a nap, maybe rounded the cruise deck a couple times, and boom, there he was: young Parker Harris with his deep brown eyes and tendrils of hair that curled around the back of his neck. Parker was stuck on the boat with his dad and new stepfamily, bored out of his mind and looking for some sweet PG from-the-neck-up action to get through the long days. This was far from the only babysitter romance that bloomed on-board, as this was the same cruise on which Claudia Kishi, lone token Asian Babysitter, discovered she had a “secret admirer.” For teenage girls who were supposed to keep children alive and fed all the time, these bitches saw a lot of action. What grown-ass 32-year-old-woman says to herself, “Well, if it happened to the Baby-Sitters Club, why shouldn’t it happen to me?” But, if it happened to the BabySitters Club, maybe it could happen to me? It wasn’t just about Baby-sitters on Board! (Super Special #1). It was about every book, every movie, every TV show selling women like me on romance abroad for decades. It was about Room with a View and Lost in Translation and How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Roman Holiday and To Catch a Thief and Before Sunrise and Sunset. And even if I told myself that I wasn’t living out a Wild story, even though I wasn’t lost and needing 70

to be found again, these stories came with the unsubtle undercurrent of transformative romance abroad. They preyed on my fear of being lonely as a single woman while indulging the idea that meeting someone abroad is the simplest, sexiest solution. I’ve often wondered how much transformative travel on the screen resembles the real experiences of single women, and because I’m incredibly self-centered, I mean me. In the most generic of ways, it does. Most of my old blog posts could be broken up into descriptions of cultural or culinary or romantic encounters, all of which would form a fairly unexceptional movie montage. There is a sameness about travel, isn’t there? Or, at least, how we describe it. And when you’re alone, it somehow becomes more important to narrativize your travels to someone, now or later. One of the weirdest parts about these transformative travel stories is how the women in them, mostly heterosexual white women, can afford to stay in uniformly gorgeous, private accommodations. Who’s swinging a Tuscan villa renovation like Frances in Under the Tuscan Sun, plucking fresh olives every morning from the grove? When I took that trip back in 2008, Airbnb didn’t exist and Couchsurfing. com was just getting off the ground. A house swap was off the table, as I shared a three-bedroom, single-toilet duplex in Brooklyn with two other people. There was only one choice: crashing at a hostel with college kids until I could find an apartment share off Craigslist with some rando who didn’t look like they would axe me to death in my sleep. And as with my blog — and as in the travel movies — my time abroad was split into discrete categories: the ease or

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difficulty of finding good accommodations; sightseeing and cultural experiences; eating (i.e., transcendent food experiences to brag about on social media); and, last but not least, romance. Our experiences abroad become units we consume and, when called upon, regurgitate.

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In their 2014 essay “Women, Travelling and Later Life,” Sarah Falcus and Katsuro Sako consider how this idea of the transformative holiday is expressed in films like Under the Tuscan Sun, Eat Pray Love, Sex and the City 2, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Shirley Valentine — all films in which the protagonists, ranging from their thirties to early fifties, travel to foreign locations to seek rebirth. One could celebrate this new cultural visibility of “older” women in film, as tracking the lives of single women over 30 has not historically been the bread and butter of the film industry. But Falcus and Sako argue that these films all embody the idea of “new ageing” within postfeminist discourse, the concept that, while youth remains fetishized, aging “without becoming old” is promised through rejuvenation and makeover of the self. “The new ageing and postfeminist cultures make it difficult to imagine aging ‘successfully’ without recourse to youthing and capitalist consumption,” they explain. Cue the fancy Italian villas and the pricey trips to ashrams in India. Travel is just another means of consumption to escape growing old. But in fighting against ageism, these women risk falling into age-inappropriate anachronism. Falcus and Sako point to a scene in Under the Tuscan Sun when the older female character (Lindsay Duncan), a Fellini-obsessed former actress named

Katherine, drunkenly acts out the scene in the Trevi fountain from La Dolce Vita after being abandoned by her young lover. Instead of seeming adventurous and independent, as depicted earlier in the film, she is treated by the villagers as foolish and ridiculous. Back at Katherine’s flat, Frances notices that Katherine’s younger lover from a few days ago is nowhere to be found. “There’s nothing like a fountain and a magnum of French champagne to put you right again,” Katherine replies sadly. These transformed women “walk a fine line between unacceptable excess and successful rejuvenation,” Falcus and Sako conclude. The White Lotus’s Tanya McQuoid takes Katherine and ratchets her up several notches, in line with actress Jennifer Coolidge’s brilliant brand of unsettling comic relief. Like Katherine, Tanya tries to relive scenes from classic Italian movies — in her case, to revive the romance in her still-new marriage. And, also like Katherine, she is regarded as delusional and desperate; it will only be a matter of time before she is punished for her excessive youthful indulgences with cocaine and men half her age. However, as White Lotus is a self-aware TV satire, largely at the expense of privileged folk trying to live out their romantic-travel fantasies, Tanya’s comes with cracks in it from the start. She cannot indulge in the palatial parties, the piles of drugs and hot young man wanting to bed her, without the niggling sense that her generous new gay best friend might be up to something in gifting her all of this. What happens when things fall into place like they do in the movies — can you really trust it? Is Tanya’s young paramour a little too good-looking, a little too complimentary, a little too convenient? Tanya’s 71

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suspicions are confirmed too late by her assistant, who tells her to abandon ship (or yacht, as it were). In an attempt to escape, Tanya kills everyone on the boat, hits her head, and drowns. How fitting that the writers chose “O mio babbino caro,” the same Puccini aria that plays at the end of the novel-turned-movie A Room with a View, to close out the scene. Only this time, we’re not watching as young Lucy Honeychurch passionately embraces her lover George in Florence, but rather witnessing Tanya’s middle-aged dead body as it floats off into the Mediterranean Sea. The single-woman travel fantasy comes monstrously undone — and after a certain age, the woman must pay. I’m no expert on aging in the context of postfeminist discourse, but I have wondered whether, if I could time-travel, I would in fact circle back and check off missed opportunities; whether this was maybe the impetus for that trip to Barcelona in the first place. Sometimes, as a single, childless woman now approaching 50, I begin to feel like I am floating through time and space, untethered to traditional adult milestones like marriage or childbirth. There are no guidelines for where I need to be or what I need to be doing, nothing expected from me any longer because I have been deemed irrelevant. I am an invisible, aging woman, and that is some of my power. I can throw out the old frameworks, regard marriage and motherhood not as necessary expectations but as reins. In breaking free of these expectations, I can redefine what it means to be an adult woman. I want to believe all of this, but the older I become, the more I fear being the Katherine or, worse, the Tanya. (In a way, the fear is to become a woman so haunted, so 72

unhinged by her own loneliness that no one can now bear to be around her, only compounding her isolation. Miss Havisham on a cruise ship is still Miss Havisham.)

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In Barcelona, I cherished the freedom of doing anything I wanted, whenever I wanted. But I hadn’t realized just how much time I would be by myself. I invited my friends to read my private travel blog, telling myself it was easier than sending postcards — but really it was because their comments on my posts made me feel less lonely. It wasn’t enough to have these experiences abroad on my own; they didn’t seem to be as valid without an audience. If a tree falls in a forest and only you hear it, are you enough? (It’s the same impetus behind posting one’s travel photos on social media today. You can’t just see a tree. You must photograph and film the tree, throw it through several filters, set it to contemporary music, and tag it with a location and at least two other people for it to be real.) When I started out on this trip, I somehow thought I would, fairly immediately, meet some cool new people at the hostel or through my immersive Spanish classes. I paid for the trip with money I had saved up from my last job, and yet I felt unworthy of it, as if it was wasted on me in a way that it wouldn’t be on other people who would be squeezing every minute of fun out of it. Why doesn’t anyone talk about the loneliness of traveling alone? Most transformative travel films portray it as a comfortable solitude, or a fleeting loneliness that is quickly jettisoned for inspirational montages of the main character sampling local delicacies in open markets. The montages are just brief interludes leading up to

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the climax of the main character running into an intriguing new friend or romantic stranger who alters the course of their life. The rare exception is the 1989 movie Shirley Valentine, in which an unhappily married, near-middle-aged English woman named Shirley travels to a Greek island with her friend but ends up spending most of the vacation by herself. As Shirley sits sipping wine and watching the sun set over the sea, she breaks the fourth wall and reflects on her vacation thus far: Funny, isn’t it? You know when you’ve pictured something, and you’ve imagined how something’s going to be — well, it never turns out like that, does it? I mean, for weeks, I’ve pictured myself sitting here … sitting here, drinking wine by the sea, and I knew exactly how I was going to feel. Now I’m here, it doesn’t feel a bit like that. I don’t feel at all lovely and serene. I feel … pretty daft, actually. And awfully, awfully old. Still, genre habits die hard, and in the style of the transformative travel movie, Shirley goes on to have a sexy romp with a Greek taverna owner, rediscovers her longlost younger rebellious self, dumps her ungrateful husband, and decides to live on the island for good. I like to remember this one moment at the beginning of the trip when Shirley realizes that travel can’t solve all her problems. There is another scene, early in Shirley Valentine, when Shirley enters the taverna, and all the diners go silent and stare at her, shocked that she is eating alone. I hadn’t even seen Shirley Valentine before my trip, but sometimes when I went to dinner by

myself in Barcelona, I couldn’t help playing a narrative in my head of what others around me must be thinking. “There she is again, the lonely girl, eating a bocadillo by herself.” “There she is, the lonely girl, buying the sad cortado.” “Why is that girl always ordering paella for two though she is but one?” (That they don’t make paella for one is among the greatest injustices of being single.) I was surprised at how self-conscious I was about the physical act of being alone, but I also hadn’t eaten dinner by myself in this many restaurants in my life. This was 2008, only a year after the first iPhone came out, so I had nothing to scroll through like we do today. I would bring a book to dinner and pretend that it was so fascinating I couldn’t bear to look up from it to notice others around me. In college, there was this one girl in my dorm who would occasionally eat and read by herself; she had friends, but on some days, you could tell that she chose to eat lunch alone and didn’t want to be disturbed. I admired that about her. As the days passed in Barcelona, I tried to channel her, and slowly — not all the time, but occasionally — I began to find moments when I was able to enjoy experiences by myself. There were times when the serene, clean white walls of the museums in Barcelona soothed me, much like the Met in New York did when I used to visit alone on lunch breaks — the works of Picasso and Miró reminding me that I was not alone, that I was in their company and we were having a conversation, and the presence of others would only disturb us. Eventually, I felt less self-conscious eating alone too. I started to force myself to talk to strangers sitting next to me at bars and stopped caring so much what they might possibly think of me. I’m 73

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a traveler passing through — what do I owe them anyway? The scenario with Shirley is exaggerated, of course — a woman dining alone will not scandalize a whole restaurant full of tourists. But there is a possibility that, like Shirley, she could get approached and asked to dine with others who assume she doesn’t want to be alone. A single woman makes people uncomfortable — or else why would she get so many questions about whether she was dating someone yet and how it would be nice if she could meet someone already? There is always a need to resolve her story with a partner. Single, childless women are a source of pity and envy. Our solitude is discomfiting, but our singleness and childlessness are also seen as a kind of freedom. I do not make it any easier when I myself wonder if my story could be, if not resolved, at least eased by a partner. Whether single or coupled, it’s still too easy to fall into this Noah’s Ark mindset of coupling off as a means to happiness, which is what we have been taught for so many years. To live outside of this structure threatens its foundation.

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So, why do I enjoy romantic travel movies so much? I’m usually not a fan of maxims, but “prick a pessimist and a romantic bleeds” captures my love for romantic travel movies. I make fun of these kinds of movies, but what I deride the most — the unrealistic ease at which the protagonist finds love — is what keeps me coming back. The formulaic pattern of initial hardship always giving way to romance or passion doesn’t dissuade me. If anything, I am secretly comforted by the predictability, like 74

knowing that after dinner there will always be a hot fudge sundae. You won’t be screwed over with a plate of after-dinner mints, as in real life. In the real world, the ephemerality of travel makes the possibility of romance abroad quite slim. Travelers rarely have the luxury of time, and what’s the point of expending all that effort when one is off on another train tomorrow? And yet, the impossibility of such an encounter, coupled with its urgency and ill-fated conclusion, makes it even more appealing. Because of its brief nature, the romance abroad exists in a world devoid of relationship tedium or drawn-out breakups; one is almost remembering it fondly while it’s still happening. In romantic travel movies like Before Sunrise (1995), the seducer always lands on the right words to say — out-of-left-field enough to be intriguing, an invitation to seize the day, not just a ploy to get a new lover into bed. The keys never dangle from their hands a second too early. When Jesse (Ethan Hawke) proposes to Celine ( Julie Delpy) that she impulsively leave her train in Vienna to see the city with him, he puts forth the idea that she’s missing out on an opportunity that she’ll regret later: Think of it like this. Jump ahead 10, 20 years, okay, and you’re married. Only your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have, you know? You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you’ve met in your life and what might have happened if you picked up with one of them, right? Well, I’m one of those guys. That’s me.

CORINA ZAPPIA

He doesn’t claim it will be good or bad — who is to say? It could shape her life for better or for worse, but that’s not the point. When it comes to travel, the fear of missing out is enough. My trip to Spain was curiously bereft of train propositions; I met few men. At one bar in Barrio Gótico, I did strike up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, who spoke French and Spanish but very little English. He told me his name was Francisco, and after a brief chat about paella, he invited me to join him at a restaurant nearby, Los Caracoles, where he said the paella was excellent. I learned that Francisco was Spanish but lived in Paris, in the 9th arrondissement, and worked at the IKEA near Versailles. He kept asking me questions about Sex and the City, I suppose because I lived in New York, and I answered him back in English, as much as I could understand what he was asking through his broken English and my nonexistent Spanish. I excused myself for a minute to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, discovered that he had paid the check. He was coy about it, like “Check? What check?” This has only happened to me about three times in my life, and all three times I was on a date. I offered Francisco money, but he refused. After leaving the restaurant, we ambled awkwardly down the street together, pretending to look at tchotchkes in gift shops but not really. In The Movie of the Free Paella of Corina Zappia, this would be where we returned to my flat for mad paella love. But at the time, I happened to be diseased, with two cold sores and a searing case of pink eye I had to soothe with eye

drops every two hours. (Who even gets pinkeye after fifth grade?) I cannot for the life of me now remember what Francisco looked like, although if I spent a few hours with him, I imagine I must have been attracted to him enough. Compared with the fantasy, though, “attracted to him enough” sounds like such a limp reality. When does desire turn into expectation? At some point in Barcelona, I had let my travel hopes evolve into a criterion I needed to fulfill, because when a single woman travels abroad on-screen or in books, she comes out rejuvenated and ready to change her life, loneliness a brief way station she passes through en route. I always knew that these movies and shows were fantasy, but the fantasy had to come from somewhere, right? Yet many of my experiences abroad as a single person were like what I’d encountered at home — staying in affordable accommodations that were far from a dream, spending a lot of time by myself, meeting men whom I was interested in but who weren’t interested in me, or vice versa. I needed to stop blaming myself for falling short or thinking that I should force a situation because it would make for a better script or postcard back home. Travel may hold the excitement of escape and surrendering to serendipity, but it’s still real life. It doesn’t promise any greater triumphs or any fewer disappointments — no matter how many tour groups and movies want to convince single women like me otherwise. And maybe this search for the extraordinary and once-in-a-lifetime can obscure what was gained in the meanwhile. I thanked Francisco for the dinner and went home to put in more eye drops. 75

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Tosquelles. How we can inherit experiences of emancipation? by Joana Masó In the last several years, I have published books and

Tosquelles began to experiment with such transforma-

curated exhibitions that reclaim the legacy of long-for-

tions in radically different political contexts, both in rev-

gotten psychiatrist François Tosquelles’s emancipatory

olutionary and anarcho-syndicalist Barcelona during the

experiments. In France during the Second World War,

Second Republic (1931–36) — where Catalan left-wing

the care of patients in his psychiatric hospital at Saint-

psychiatrists were strongly committed to the decentral-

Alban started with the cure of the institution itself.

ized reform of mental health care — and in Vichy France

Tosquelles used culture (amateur cinema, theater, litera-

(1940–1944) — where 40,000 patients died of cold and

ture, and popular festivals) as well as politics (self-man-

starvation in psychiatric hospitals, a tragedy called “the

agement, cooperatives, anti-Stalinist communism) to

soft extermination.”

transform this hospital into a true asylum: it became a shelter protecting patients — as well as political dissi-

Throughout these years, he developed a major distinc-

dents, members of the Resistance, and Jews — from the

tion between what he called “institutions” and “estab-

pathologies of society and their own families.

lishments.” While establishments are structured by administrative rules and social codes that reproduce

Tosquelles’s project of humanizing mental disorders

the order of things, institutions can be transformed

was shaped by his experience of the radical politics of

in their very material structures and hierarchies so as

Catalonia in the early 1930s and his own emancipatory

themselves to become transformative. But according to

practices during the Spanish Civil War against fascism:

Tosquelles, the state organizes establishments to pre-

that is when he resolved to treat the medical community

vent the advent of such institutions. In all the establish-

within the hospital more than the patients themselves.

ments that lay down the law, such as schools, church-

One of his early insights was to identify madness as

es, or police stations, the psychiatrist should strive

inherent to “normal men.” He kept denouncing the fear of

to disseminate psychoanalysis and other therapeutic

patients that characterized psychiatrists, which prompted

practices to give life to institutions. This collective

impeding their freedom of movement through restraint

effort came to be called “institutional psychotherapy” in

chairs and beds, straitjackets, and seclusion rooms.

the 1950s.

Both in Catalonia and in France, Tosquelles’s actions

Today, inheriting this transformative legacy implies

were twofold. On the one hand, within the hospital, he

that we should continue to explore the link between

promoted permanent training for psychiatrists, nurses,

psychiatry and social practices — social work, spe-

and nuns. He shared with all of them his reading of

cial education, cooperative economy — as well as the

Jacques Lacan’s medical dissertation, thus de-pathol-

involvement of culture in emancipatory experiences.

ogizing paranoia, since this text considered paranoid

Indeed, Tosquelles did engage with and criticize cultural

psychosis as a foundation of the “normal” personality.

representations of madness, from Romantic poetry

On the other hand, Tosquelles opened the therapeutic

(Gérard de Nerval) to Surrealist literature (Paul Éluard),

community by involving non-professional figures such

and from cinema (Luis Buñuel) to outsider art (Jean

as musicians, writers, lawyers, and even sex workers. His

Dubuffet). Tosquelles challenged the segregation of the

idea was that people who have not been trained as psy-

“pathological” from the “normal,” and his rejection of

chiatrists have not developed a fear of madness. From

the othering of patients remains an invitation to rethink

the war front to the concentration camp for Spanish

culture and the care of psychic suffering for “them” as

refugees, and then in a rural asylum in Lozère, he multi-

well as for “us.”

plied collaborations outside of the medical world.

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Page from photo album of August Forestier, Fauvel, Antinea, Arnal, Gustav, Hans F., Richard Oui, Guillaume Puj., Germaine Crohain, Waedemon, Paul End, Stanislas Lib., Mme Bataille made by Jean Dubuffet (circa 1948), in which appears the photograph (photo Nº 329) a sculpture by Auguste Forestier (h.c.) 33.5 x 24 centimeters Photo : Giuseppe Pocetti, Digitization workshop – City of Lausanne Archives of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

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facing page: Photomontage of Francesc Tosquelles, Le méthode hypocritique I (1941-1944) Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

Francesc Tosquelles on the roof of Saint-Alban hospital with a boat by Auguste Forestier (1948) Original photography by Romain Vigouroux Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Unknown artist ST ALBAN. 30 juin - 7 juillet. La Société Lózerienne d'Hygiène Mentale présente… (1968) Ink on paper, printed in CHS occupational therapy workshop 67 x 88 centimeters Yves Baldran Collection, Saint-Alban sur Limagnole Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

Francesc Tosquelles in Saint-Alban (1948) Photos from the Tosquelles family albums Original photography by Romain Vigoroux. Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Francesc Tosquelles (1970) Photos from the Tosquelles family albums Original photography by Romain Vigoroux. Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

facing page: Photo from the Tosquelles family albums Original photography by Romain Vigoroux. Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Postcard from Francesc Tosquelles to his wife, Elena Álvarez, sent on December 1940, before her arrival to Saint-Alban (1940) Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

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Page from photo album of August Forestier, Fauvel, Antinea, Arnal, Gustav, Hans F., Richard Oui, Guillaume Puj., Germaine Crohain, Waedemon, Paul End, Stanislas Lib., Mme Bataille made by Jean Dubuffet (circa 1948), in which appears the photographs (photo Nºs 780, 782 and 784) sculptures by Auguste Forestier (cab-281bis ; cab-302bis ; cab-298bis ; cab-387 ; cab-380bis ; cab-385bis ; cab-384bis ; cab-381bis) 24 x 33.5 centimeters Photo : Giuseppe Pocetti, Digitization workshop – City of Lausanne Archives of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Photo from the Tosquelles family album L O S A N G E L E S R E V I E W O F B O O K S Original photograph by Romain Vigoroux. Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

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Film stills from Història potencial de Francesc Tosquelles, Catalunya i la por (Potential history of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and fear) (2021) Film by Mireia Sallarès written with Joana Masó 135 minutes Images courtesy of the filmmaker

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MY BIRD TODAY PROMISES A STORY

Symbols of life and faith in the theater by Dan O'Brien

“Belief, however fantastic, begets its consequence in action.” — Marguerite Young, Angel in the Forest A symbol is real. My symbol as I write these words is a bird,

probably our first symbol. Birds were everywhere this morning as I walked the dog, swooping in and flitting out of my path, my past, my possible future; as I contemplated this essay, how to approach it; as I sit at my desk now and wonder, after so many years

NONFICTION

plying my so-called craft, whether I know something or not much: a bird hops onto the ledge. A dark-eyed junco (I searched for it online). Mundane. Close to the windowpane, it does not fly away — not right away. But what does it mean, this symbol of a bird? Freedom? Hope? Wisdom? Seemingly infinite interpretations exist for seemingly infinite birds: the dove, the hummingbird. The crow. But my bird today promises a story, or a story in the form of an essay that I have the privilege — because I am improbably alive — to attempt. The bird can be cliché, I know. Poems about birds. Angels, etc. And I know that my uncle, my mother’s brother, was schizophrenic. Maybe I am out of my mind to believe a bird has meaning. Maybe I am similarly delusional to write for the airy, insubstantial arena of the theater, where as playwrights we invite strangers to believe in the reality of our words, the meaning of our birds. Improbably, we do it anyway. Every play, then, is an act of faith. During my nine months of treatment for stage 4 cancer, I wore the same hat every day. Chemotherapy for colon cancer only thins the hair; I’d been assured I would never acquire that bone-chilling symbol of the cancer patient’s plight: the purely bald head. Still, I wanted to cover myself — out of shame? A protective measure, surely. Against daunting odds, a friend had survived esophageal cancer, and he gave me the hat he had worn during his treatment — for luck, he said: a white baseball cap with the red emblem of a Trojan warrior, the mascot of his alma mater, USC, where he’d studied film. Because I had studied theater, and had lived in New York City in my formative

young adulthood, I was used to wearing black (though never the black turtleneck: too on-the-nose). Why black, exactly, aside from peer pressure? Had I been, in the words of Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull, at such a young age already “in mourning for my life”? And for what aspects of it? A troubled childhood? The inevitability that I would never earn any kind of living as a playwright-poet-whatever? I had written about many “dark” subjects, and I found myself fearing that a morbid and pessimistic disposition had somehow caused the cancer. This was magical thinking, I was aware, but during treatment I found, unsurprisingly, that all I wanted now was lightness, optimism, survival. And survival equaled the white hat. The symbol stitched into the hat was apropos as well, and helpful: this warrior like a red splotch in the white fabric, like the blood and gruesomer fluids that stained my bandages as I recuperated from various surgeries and procedures; red like blood infused with the medicinal molecules galloping throughout my internal topography from follicle to capillary. When I finished treatment at Christmas with no evidence of disease, I threw the hat away because it reminded me of my trauma and felt like bad luck now.

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My first symbol was the cross. Suspended high above the altar in St. John’s Church in Larchmont, New York — it entranced me. What on earth could it possibly mean? Maybe the problem was mathematical: the cross looked like a plus sign, in a way. With a handle like a ladle. Was the priest somehow spooning us — our worries and our wishes — into the universal equation 91

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of faith? One Sunday after Morning Prayer, as we descended the church’s slick stone steps, I shared my theory with my mother: the cross’s horizontal line represented our brief mortal lives, and the long vertical line stretching high and low was symbolic of eternity in either heaven or hell. “My son,” my mother prophesied, as if impressed and dismayed at once, “you will be a poet.” But before I wrote anything, much less a poem, I believed. I pored over my Children’s Bible — dare I say it? — religiously. (I wouldn’t read the New Testament before bed, though; the Crucifixion was too gruesome, the Resurrection too eerie.) I reveled in the Good Book’s symbology: the bush that burns without consumption; the body as bread and blood as wine; the lamb, the locust, the dove. Now, with a name like mine, you might think I had been raised a Catholic, as my father had been, but he was outright hostile toward the Holy Roman Church by the time I arrived on the scene. His school had been IHM, initials that did not, in fact, stand for Immaculate Heart of Mary, he would helpfully explain to his children, but rather “Institute for Helpless Morons,” and we would titter in the backseat at such brazen sacrilege. There were the usual intimations of sadistic nuns and pedophilic priests, but really it was a ruthlessly antisocial mentality that had long ago extinguished any religious affinity in my father. I was raised in an Episcopal church (when we went to church, which was occasionally) that was comfortable with the reality of symbols. In Sunday school, I learned that the Virgin Birth might have been symbolic, and the Resurrection too. What mattered was what these symbols meant. 92

I don’t mean to imply that, as a child, I was in any way immune to literalism. I believed that a man named Jesus was the son of God and had been raised from the dead, and that an afterlife (and a beforelife — why not?) existed somewhere. Angels were real: late at night in my bed, listening through the wall to my parents fighting, I sometimes imagined — or felt, or believed I felt — an angel comforting me like God does in Psalm 91: “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.” For a while, I could see an angel, lurking in the crevice of a lightning-struck oak at the back of our backyard. The vision was unsettling: a murky face, but the angel’s pin-bright, unswerving eyes were trained always on me. When I developed obsessive-compulsive disorder at the age of 12, I realized that symbols were everywhere and potentially lethal. I avoided the edges of floor tiles, and cracks in the sidewalk. The fibers of a carpet on a staircase had to be left compressed by my tread in this direction and not the other. If I failed at these tasks (and many, many others), I knew with an inexplicable certainty that my loved ones and I would find ourselves in gravest danger. I didn’t know what form that danger might take: car crash, cancer, nuclear annihilation. And I had no idea why floor tiles and carpet fibers were so hazardous. These objects and actions were obviously symbolic, so my remedies were likewise. If I stepped on a crack, I could counteract my error by flipping a light switch nine times. If I traversed the carpeted staircase incorrectly, then there was nothing to do but turn around and start all over again. Moral scrupulosity was another facet of my OCD. I was perpetually sinning in

DAN O'BRIEN

behavior and/or thought, so I was perpetually praying, or aiming to do so, in these mostly rote run-on sentences of my own devising, in which I would beg forgiveness for this or that behavior and/or thought, for sins past and present and sins yet to come (for none of us can ever outrun our sin; the Bible taught me that). I knew the words and phrases of my prayers were themselves symbolic, supernaturally imbued verbiage meant to subtract threat from my world. Maybe symbols were mathematical after all. And hypochondria too, because viruses and bacteria are every bit as invisible as sinful thoughts. I washed my hands so frequently that the skin cracked like a dry riverbed, and the cracks bled. I scrubbed with the fastidiousness of the zealot: three lathers and three rinses, each rinse lasting three Mississippis. And I would feel clean and safe — until I touched anything, that is. Eventually, my mother noticed. She pulled my hands apart when she saw that I was praying. She told me I was washing because I was trying to cleanse the trauma of my older brother’s attempted suicide. I was incredulous. I could not for the life of me understand how these tormenting thoughts and toilsome behaviors had anything whatsoever to do with the recent Tuesday afternoon in February when I witnessed my brother, moments after he’d jumped from our attic window, stumbling around the side of our house covered in snow, trembling and confused, while the neighborhood crows cawed raucously in the bare branches of the dogwood and the deep shadows of the evergreens. My mother explained that my distress was manifesting itself symbolically and that these symbols contained, retained, and only fitfully revealed the hidden emotion — in a

sense, the meaning — of my trauma. She informed me that I felt guilty (guilty of what?), or — a slightly more believable assertion — that my subconscious mind (whatever that was) was trying to exert control over my body and my environment because I could not control what was happening to my brother and my family. She invoked Lady Macbeth and psychoanalysis and I was all the more perplexed, but I went to the library and sat down to read. By high school, I was a devout believer in psychology. I wasn’t undergoing any kind of psychoanalysis; my mother didn’t want her children burdened with the “stigma of mental illness,” as she often put it. But reading about psychology had a profound effect on me; it felt realer than religion — so real it was almost scientific. I still went to church now and then, here and there, with my Catholic girlfriend, for instance, but the symbols and rituals of worship had lost their reality. Church was cozy but boring, like a museum, or a musty revival of Shakespeare. All the while I was reading psychology, I was also reading literature (and the boundary between these genres seemed indistinct to me at best). The symbology of Freud and Jung and others was helping me come to grips with novels and poems and plays. I tried writing myself, thereby psychoanalyzing myself, and it worked somewhat: my obsessive-compulsive symptoms receded. I was relieved. I was decoding the meaning of my subconscious mind. But my writing wasn’t analytical; I found I had to write half-consciously — half-awake, if you will — in order to derive any therapeutic benefit. In this way, the process of writing remained otherworldly in terms of its source; the voice wasn’t mine entirely — I 93

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was its conduit. And poems especially felt inspired, like prayer: the symbolic language of metaphor and simile, repetition and incantatory music, the secret wisdom that sound and sense contained, retained, and only fitfully revealed. I saw symbolic meaning in just about every word and combination of words, and as a result, my juvenilia was almost as baroque and prolific (and impenetrable) as the word salad of a schizophrenic. My mother, whose brother had first exhibited symptoms of the disease at my age, must have been terrified. Literature was functioning for me in those days like the ichthys, the line drawing of the fish that early Christians etched into trees, doors, the stone walls of catacombs — a coded expression of their faith, and an invitation to other believers to gather. My writing was just this sort of fish: I sought to tell the truth about my brother, and my family, and myself; to write honestly without being caught, without the hook of parental persecution. I was seeking a community, a new family. “Why would you write this?” my mother would ask when she had read what I had written, when she’d cracked my code. “Why would you choose to put something this dark into words?” I believed I had no choice. And I had no choice because I believed: if I write this story or poem or play infallibly, then I will be safe. Those I love will be safe. All psychic pain — perhaps all physical pain — will be forestalled, cured, redeemed.

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But this is an essay about writing plays — at least it’s meant to be, at least in part. As we all know — instinctively, doubtlessly — a symbol is an object, an 94

image, an action that accommodates and communicates an idea, a belief, an emotion. Onstage, there are symbols of setting (the tangible, constructed set, but also the play’s matrix of culture and history), symbols of character (props, costumes, and behaviors), and symbols of action (conflicts and events). In every instance, a symbol isn’t — or shouldn’t be — the playwright’s literary ornament, an illustration of the play’s thematic subject; a living symbol onstage is personal, a character’s talisman, neurosis, or premonition. Symbols of setting make visible the external forces that impinge upon characters and shape their stories. For example, the polyurethane-upholstered chair in which I sat for many months receiving infusions through a needle clicked into a port embedded beneath the soft skin of my inner bicep. The chair was two chairs in one: the electric chair or, when severely reclined, a gurney for lethal injections; and an upper-class seat on some transoceanic flight to an exotic locale — maybe a destination as exotic as survival. The chemo chair was firstly furniture: something literal and in its way everyday was happening here. But the chair’s symbolic implications lingered, simultaneously unnerving and encouraging. The hangar-like space in which I received my infusions was full of these chairs, lining all four long walls, each chair framed with sliding curtains, and in each semi-discrete cubicle sat individuals of every age, race, gender, etc. The chemo chair in this context could be understood as a symbol of a culture in which cancer is an epidemic, the consequence of a natural environment poisoned by generations of rampant capitalism. Therefore, cancer as a rite of passage — a leveler.

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Costumes and props often symbolize “believe” in crystals per se, but I was more a character’s traits and values. We know than willing to give almost anything a try. this offstage: what we wear and the obRegarding the symbolism of behavjects we use are functional, of course, but ior, we have already touched upon Lady they may also indicate our identity and Macbeth. Any repetitive behavior may tell our potential for conflict — extrapersonal, the audience much of what they need to interpersonal, and inner conflict when the know about a character’s inner conflicts. symbol implies a divided self. In addition Actors are familiar with the difference beto my white hat, I invariably wore during tween revelatory and indicatory behavior, treatment the loose clothing that makes however; both are symbolic but the latter examinations and procedures easier to is usually hackwork. A woman waiting at negotiate. I left my sneakers loosely laced the hospital while her partner is undergoso that my hands, numb and fumbling ing surgery, checking and rechecking her from chemo-induced neuropathy, could phone for the time or for texts — this is a slide them on and off without too much gesture that indicates anxiety and impadifficulty. One degree removed from patience but doesn’t necessarily mean much jamas, this was a costume of the modern symbolically. In contrast, the revelatory invalid. And of course the symbolism of gesture is caused by conflict, is idiosynthe hospital gown: the emasculation of cratic and allusive. When I woke up from its likeness to a shift or nightgown, the my colon resection, and for many months embarrassing vulnerability of its flap- after, I discovered that I was rubbing my ping backside, the whitish fabric like a thigh over and over; self-soothing, I suppre-shroud, or like a sheet thrown over a pose, but I was also holding myself toghost-in-training. Makeup design is an gether, as it were, remolding the sundered element of costume design, and scars were clay. Psychology and mythology propose once common markers onstage for villains that the thigh is a symbol of sexual viand those with histories of moral injury. rility, or athleticism and vitality anyway, After my first surgery, after my lower ab- and I didn’t know if there would be any domen had been opened like a slasher film, of that in my future — if I would have a the livid scar left behind seemed to sym- future. The revelatory gesture in a play will bolize my horror, my sense of loss, the on- surprise the audience — will surprise the going threat to my life. I kept my shirt on character too — while conveying its subat the beach. As the years passed, the scar verbal meaning. grew paler, the nerves reconnecting; grass A character’s symbolic action is anothgrew over the bomb site. My scar is now er matter altogether. While behavior tends a symbol of tentative survival. I take my to be static or reactive, a character’s action shirt off at the beach. As for props, one of is motivated by desire and need. Early in my more New-Agey friends had given me my treatment, I went to see an acupunca rose quartz crystal — to aid in my heal- turist. I’d never been before. During our ining, she said — and I brought it with me take conversation, the acupuncturist comto the hospital, held it, handled its rough mented casually that, in her opinion, colon edges like the beads of a rosary. I didn’t cancer is caused by a person “holding onto 95

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anger.” For her, cancer was the symbolic feel as if they were complicit in an atrocity action of an unhappy body. My symbolic that was symbolically reminiscent of our action in response was to release my anger: nation’s worst sins. The symbol was frightI asked her to explain children with leuke- ening and guilt-inducing, and it resulted in mia; I told her she was peddling “medie- the US’s withdrawal from Somalia — and val bullshit” and stormed out of her office. a foreign policy that failed to engage preI didn’t pursue any non-evidence-based emptively with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan treatments after that. in the years leading up to 9/11. At the time, The action of a play — the braided ac- the interpretation of Watson’s photo as a tions of the disparate characters that com- racially reversed lynching was rarely articprise a play’s central conflict — may be ulated in the press. Like any living symsymbolic of archetypal conflicts: between bol, in the world and on the stage, its core doctor and patient, between illness and meaning is reticent, even taboo. wellness. And the climactic shifts in the A warning: playwrights can lose themcircumstances of these conflicts often take selves in symbols, caring too much about place as symbolic events. On the last day what their plays mean. One of my earliest of treatment, after a final dose of drugs or plays suffered from this form of exuberance. radiation, many patients partake in the tra- The artwork for its premier production was dition of ringing a brass bell on the wall of a collage of the play’s numerous symbols: a the infusion center. This action evokes the key, the sea, hands folded in prayer … I had maritime: the battered ship of the body unintentionally set an intellectual task for drifting into harbor. Also a bar or pub at my audience. But I had provided too many the ringing of last call. Also funeral bells, self-aware, unambiguous, and therefore and weddings. dishonest symbols, and in the end the play This is how a symbol lives: without was pretentious and confusing, a manifesexplanation, without a singular, simplistic tation of my artistic insecurity. interpretation. When I think of a particu• larly complex and consequential symbol, I think of Paul Watson, the Canadian war My adolescent self-education in psychology, not to mention the flagrantly reporter I’ve written about for more than religious features of my obsessive-coma decade now. He won the Pulitzer Prize pulsive disorder, taught me that faith can for a photograph of the desecrated body be, for many, a desperate flight from deof a US Army Ranger in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993. The photo was shock- spair. No atheists in foxholes, that sort of thing — or in the words of Robert Graves, ing in its display of rage and violence, and describing life in the corpse- and rat-ridshocking in that it made plain the reality of dled trenches of the Western Front: a faraway military intervention that most Americans knew nothing about. But the “Pessimism made everyone superstitious, photo was — and is — profoundly disturb- and I found myself believing in signs of the most trivial nature.” In chaos we seek ing for another reason: it is a lynching. The out signs and symbols — indeed, they soldier is white and the crowd is Black, and seem to seek us out; we wear our amulets, the photo no doubt made many Americans 96

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pocket our charms, perform our symbolic young charismatic pastor — shredded actions (hand-washing, churchgoing) in jeans, sleeves of tattoos, black gauges in order to feel that we have a hand in au- distended earlobes — sermonized like thoring our life’s story. As a young man, I a TED Talk. I too raised my hand and thought I had faith all figured out. I con- swayed with the rhythm of the Christian sidered myself an agnostic, maybe even rock band’s rollicking positivity. an atheist. I wondered if I might receive a visit But then, cancer. During treatment, I from an angel. I’d seen Angels in America, was surprised by a nagging suspicion that I after all — Parts One and Two — and I was undergoing a Pauline conversion. Saul, would have welcomed a spectacular, ceilas he was known then, was a persecutor of ing-shattering visitation (so long as the the early Christians, and traveling one day angel’s message was reassuring). But I on the road to Damascus, he was knocked would have been just as happy with a from his horse by the seismic voice of Jesus, more pedestrian drop-by. One of the lovequestioning him from inside the sun: “Saul, lier passages in the Old Testament, in the why do you persecute me?” From that day Book of Hebrews, exhorts us to freely “enon, Paul was a Christian — some would say tertain strangers” for the reason that any the Christian. stranger may, in actuality, be an angel in I thought: If I survive cancer, I will disguise. In other words, a human being become devout — a monk, maybe, or a is symbolic of the angelic if they deliver a personable proselytizer. I will relinquish message of insight and consolation, if they my artistic ego and seek to help oth- lend a hand. ers. (How I could help anybody with my A few weeks after my second surgery, in limited skills I wasn’t quite sure: creative which a portion of my liver had been rewriting workshops for orphans? Perhaps moved, many months into my treatment, I a change of vocation was required.) I sat in a waiting room at City of Hope, a thought also: Why bargain? Why not hospital in the foothills of the San Gabriel attend church now? How can it hurt? I Mountains, feeling feeble and stunned, noticed for the first time the near-nu- when an old woman shuffled over and sat minous glow of the cross like a beacon down beside me. She looked into my eyes: atop the steeple of a nearby Nazarene “I have been waiting to talk to this young Church, as I shuffled around the block in man.” I was charmed, gratified that, after the twilights after my infusions. We visit- so many months of bodily depredations, ed a local Catholic Church, in deference I could still look like a young man to this to my wife’s upbringing, and rejoiced at old woman. She took my hand; her hands the spectacle of our two-year-old daugh- were warm and wrinkled around me like a ter raiding the post-service donut table. net. She said: “You are going to have long Our babysitter invited us to an evangel- days on this earth. Long days. Keep trustical church in a nightclub downtown one ing.” Then, as if a mission had been accomfine Sunday morning, where she placed plished, an objective realized, she stood and her hand on my shoulder and swayed exited the waiting room, wishing everywith her other hand in the air, while the body within earshot a happy Thanksgiving. 97

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She was a tenderhearted person. She might have been a little touched. Was she a cancer patient herself ? She was religious; who else would have done what she had done, and in the manner she had done it? If her faith allowed her to take the action she took with me that day, then she had at least behaved angelically. I understood her words to mean that I would not die too soon, that I would enjoy a long(er) life. She may have meant instead that I would have to endure “long days” of hardship in the weeks and months of treatment ahead — no more, no less, than an expression of encouragement. The ambiguity of her words was a little frustrating, but as a Hollywood psychic once informed me, somewhat unhelpfully: “The language of the soul is ambiguity.” When the drama of our lives presents us with a symbol, or in this case a symbolic encounter, the meaning is slippery, open to interpretation. Faith is still required. Writing about faith is like writing about sex, and not unlike writing about the craft of writing: I fear the reader’s judgment, even their ridicule. If I write that I believe in God, I worry that I will come across as unintelligent (very possible), politically or socially conservative (I am neither). Some have read my work or seen my plays and detected my spiritual tendencies; some recoil, and some are intrigued. I have been asked for more or less God in what I write. A pious poet once told me: “You’re a believer, you just don’t know it yet.” And an actor responded to a play of mine that had baffled him: “I guess I just don’t have the God gene.” Dear reader, I confess: I guess I just do have the God gene. But I am not a “good” Christian. Many — most — Christians would not consider me a Christian at all. What I 98

believe is hazy (lazy?) and mystical: the Bible is a human and historical document, inspired and flawed like any art; there is no one true faith; I reject dogma and theology; I abhor and denounce the cloak of self-righteousness that enables the abuse of children and others within religious institutions. Since experiencing cancer, I have not rejoined the fold, any fold, probably because I was never a member of a religious community to begin with. I have written a lot in recent years about how trauma shatters identity, forcing us to reconfigure and recompose a new conception of ourselves. I still believe this, but I also believe that trauma can, in certain respects, remind us who we are, or reveal — perhaps for the first time — who we have always been. So I pray. And I know that my prayer is childish, but as an artist I hope I have not yet put away all childish things. I believe that prayer helps; like the psychotropic medication that lessens the severity of my obsessive-compulsive symptoms, prayer clarifies the choices I make and the actions I take. If prayer does not translate into action that is helpful, in ways large or small, then it is misguided, a self-indulgent cop-out. I agree wholeheartedly with the Epistle of James: “Faith without works is dead.” And for me, like many writers who lack the talents of the activist, or the dollars of the philanthropist, my “works” are foremost what I write. You have heard it said that the theater is like a house of worship. But I suggest that we do not suspend our disbelief as the curtain rises — we resume our belief in our capacity for compassion and progress (progress that may be psychological, spiritual, or political). We need the quasi-religious pageantry of the theater for this transference

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to occur: the pews of our mortifyingly uncomfortable seats, the chancel of the lighted playing space, the peace of intermission, and the recessional after the curtain has fallen and the applause died away. The actors in a play are symbols themselves, insofar as they transfigure themselves, becoming something more than who and what they believe themselves to be. Symbolism is woven into the medium itself because the theater is literally poor: what we see is never what is but what could be. The play contains symbols, yes, but the theater itself is a symbol of life. Writing a play these days requires faith in the value of writing a play. We live in a culture — including a theater culture — that does not care much about new plays. In the past, I wasn’t disheartened by this; maybe it’s a self-martyring instinct, or a defensive rationalization, but I used to embrace the theater’s relative inconsequence as an opportunity to write freely, boldly. But I don’t know anymore. I don’t know if what I’ve been writing lately will mean anything to a community so fractured by sociopolitical conflict, so muted and depleted by plague. My cancer-play languishes in the proverbial desk drawer. Maybe I’m old and out of fashion (if I was ever in fashion, if I was ever young). My platelet and white blood cell count has remained “borderline” since chemotherapy, and for this reason I have not seen the inside of a theater since March 2020. I write these words from deep in my cave or high in my tower (depending on my mood) in Southern California, awaiting the day when I might be able to return. I believe that day will come. The theater is reviving, and contracting; it’s damnably unclear if the revolutions and

reinventions we envisioned in the wilderness of the pandemic will lead to enduring change — dreams of diversity and inclusion; dreams of vibrant, transgressive, and pertinent new plays and musicals — but I’m more than willing to keep striving. And I pray that the practice of my writing will sustain me in my ambition.

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I’d like to conclude with one last example of the ambiguity and mutability of symbols, how one symbol — that of a specific bird — has changed over the years and inspired me to act. That long-ago afternoon in February when my older brother tried to kill himself I remember only impressionistically. The snow on my brother’s back and the back of his head, in his sandy mussed hair, after he’d dropped from the attic window, seemed to indicate a blessing of some kind, a bestowal of grace; and indeed my mother told me later that day that my brother survived unharmed because “an angel caught him, and laid him out gently in the snow.” But what I remember most vividly is the crows. They were everywhere, cawing in the bare branches of the dogwood and the deep shadows of the evergreens. At first, the crow was a symbol to me of mockery, of failure and madness and the gravity of catastrophe. But with time, I began to see the crow in another light: as a witness but also a truth-teller, indefatigably proclaiming what was seen, what was found out and now known. A boy falls from the sky and he is alive. The caw of the crow, then, is a song, a prayer, a poem, a play. And like the crow, I long to sing what I have seen, what I have found out and now know. Or what I believe I know. 99

100

FICTION

THERE, THERE

by Evan Grillon

The so-called friends who loosed their parrot upon us told us

they loved parrots. We are parrot lovers, they announced to my wife and me, and they’d loved their entire parrot journey; in fact, this parrot was the best pet they’ve ever had. I noticed the relief that flooded their faces when my wife handed over the cash, and when I pointed this relief out to my wife, when I said we have been played by these parrot-lovers, she accused me of being paranoid. Everyone is out to get you, she said, but don’t you remember, you agreed to the

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parrot? Later the taxi driver kicked us out halfway home because the bird would not shut up, and I carried the bird in his cage home through the snow in the streets of the dingy city she chose for the two of us. When we got home, we had to pick a place to put him in the combination kitchen/living room, because that is one of three rooms in our apartment, counting the bathroom. I found myself paralyzed, unable to choose between the kitchen counter and the kitchen/living room table. I saw my future laid out before me like a desert; I would never be able to escape him. I said to my wife, I will never be able to escape this parrot, and my wife began to cry. She begged me to at least give the parrot a go, and I acceded, pushover that I was, and she put Steve — my wife named him after our deceased dog (traffic, bus), who had in turn been named after her deceased ex-boyfriend (punk rocker, header off a motorcycle) — on the combination kitchen/living room table directly between the television and our couch. I knew why she named him Steve though she did not say so expressly, a further indignity. The bird’s incessant chattering was at first a paradoxical relief, as my wife and this bird were made perfectly happy by incessantly parroting each other. My wife said, isn’t it a crazy coincidence that parrots parrot? I nodded vigorously in rhythm with the parrot, just happy to see my wife smiling. Drunk on wife happiness (rather than parrot ownership), I said, isn’t it a crazy coincidence that we pet pets? On the other hand, privately, I thought that there were better things in life than parrot infatuation. On good behavior for a while, our parrot sang songs, he chirped, he moved his little head very fast. His facility with tones and toys endeared him to me. I 102

even found his air-humping occasionally funny. He flew to my windows and beat his wings against them. I remember my wife cooing, aw, he wants to go out, and isn’t it cute how he stares at his silhouette in the window and bobs up and down like that for hours on end? I agreed, and my wife even rewarded me. The parrot was mercifully quiet for the duration. This was the first sex we’d had in a while, and everyone tried their best. But soon the bird began to nip me. My wife was upset, insisting that the parrot hated me, and that I would never be able to have a human-parrot relationship. As my wife likes to read pop relationship psychology to me in bed, I was ready to point out that this was classic abusive behavior: why should I have to avoid getting bitten? We argued, and the parrot spent the entire day screaming. My frustration mounted, and I began to scream right back. My wife screeched that the parrot was particularly loud and nervous with me around. Our next-door neighbor, luckily, was an ancient, deaf, or even dead crone who had watched Dateline on full blast since we moved in two years ago, and therefore could not complain. Theories arose about why the parrot didn’t like me. My wife declared that I had a menacing way of walking, and that I made people nervous with the energy I give off. As any sensitive man would, I found this idea of me being menacing quite believable, even though my wife is taller than me. My wife logged on to a parrot website with a forum about parrot behavior to see if there was anything that could be done about the effect her husband was having on her parrot. She was told to “train the parrot” and even to “train the husband.” The phrase positive reinforcement, which sounded vaguely militaristic to me, was used. My

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wife said that parrot experts, meaning internet forum posters, invariably maintain that a parrot can be trained. They made distinctions between various breeds of parrots and cockatoos and whatever else, distinctions I found neither compelling nor convincing. These knights of the keyboard insisted that all parrot problems arise from a confusion on the part of the parrot owner about a parrot’s needs. Parrots want pleasure and to avoid pain, these posters will insist. Give them pleasure, and their behavior will improve. I looked at the parrot forum independently later that day and found many parrot owners asking worrying questions, like, is my parrot evil or just sexually mature?, questions I had not even admitted to myself I’d had. I read with my own eyes the sentence, there is no way to satisfy a gray parrot’s urges. Parrot owners said their parrot had attacked them in the middle of the night when they couldn’t sleep and just wanted a cookie and a little milk from the kitchen. They complained of other disturbing transferences of their parrots’ unsatisfied lust: while the parrot pulled out its own feathers, they twisted handkerchiefs and bit their nails and pulled out their hair until they appeared just as hysterical as their birds. My wife showed me a post on the parrot forum wherein a poster advanced the theory that in the presence of a male parrot, a male human must visibly humble himself. My wife became inordinately enamored with the idea of me crawling around on all fours in our combination kitchen/dining room. The so-called parrot expert postulated that some male birds prefer men to crawl because they are afraid of large confident bodies striding toward them, and my wife said, you are a large, confident body striding toward Steve. I declared that

it would be abuse to make me crawl around for a dirty, horny bird, while my wife said that I was being abusive toward her and the parrot by not crawling around on the ground. I asked her, if I asked you to crawl around on the floor in order to make me comfortable, would you? And she said no, because she was not a parrot. The bird would not be crawling, I told her, I would be crawling, and she pretended not to understand me. We reached the end of our first week of parrot ownership, and I felt I’d had my fill of it. The parrot kept us up all of Sunday night with its squawking, and on Monday I made serious mistakes at my job, where I put titanium rods in titanium tubes. I was so exhausted that sometimes I even tried to put the tube in the rod, instead of the rod in the tube, and of course it is totally impossible to insert a tube into a rod. And with each mistake I made, a siren squawked at me, and the entire line of rod-in-tube workers stared at me with contempt. When I got home, I yelled at the slightest provocation, and of course I did not want to yell. When the parrot yelled back, I wondered where he got the nerve to scream and sway so ungratefully. In fact, I said to the parrot, where do you get the nerve to scream and sway so ungratefully like that? My wife called this arguing with the parrot, and made an ultimatum. You must be kind to the bird, she told me. She believed it was best for me to give up on even trying to understand a parrot’s ways. She told me parrots are just pets, that they do not participate in arguments, that they are not the ones starting the arguments or even the ones shouting. That parrots, if anything, are only trying to relieve the atmosphere. Parrots are grateful creatures, she told me, and parrots only want love and affection. I 103

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felt the need to defend myself. My feelings and a parrot’s feelings are separate, I said to my wife. I am not responsible for a parrot’s feelings. I am not even responsible for my own feelings. They come upon me unawares, late at night, when I am alone. She ignored me, and posited that while the parrot was full of rage, all parrot rage has its source in sexual maturity. A horny parrot is invariably an angry parrot. My wife suggested getting another parrot as a mate. I had never had a panic attack before, but when my wife suggested a second parrot, I felt my breath catch in my chest, and I felt as if I was going to die. I begged her not to get a second parrot, in fact I told her I would rather crawl on my hands and knees to this parrot than get a second parrot, and in a private moment, I did in fact slowly crawl on my hands and knees to the parrot. I even tried to reason with him. If in fact I am arguing with you, I said to Steve, I was doing so for a reason, such as he was being unreasonable and ungrateful and was in fact ruining my life. I actually said this to my parrot, you are ruining my life. I actually crawled on my hands and knees to my parrot. I looked up at him and played the supplicant. I made human-parrot eye contact. I felt uncomfortably intimate, and he cocked his head at me, as if in respect. He even called me over to his cage in his sweetest voice: treat, treat, he said, just as my wife had trained him. Forgetting my former wariness, I put my finger into the cage to fondle him, cooing there, there. To make the hierarchy clear, he pinned my finger to the bottom of his cage with his talon and started stabbing me with his beak, over and over, right down to the bone. The motion reminded me of a hammer coming down on a nail. I sent the cage flying across the room and passed out. 104

My wife had questions for me when I regained consciousness, like Did you do something to upset Steve? My wife asked me just such questions as she drove me to the emergency room. I was astonished and bleeding on the gray carpet of my rusting Toyota Sienna. I remember gesturing madly with my mangled finger, saying, I did not do this, Steve did this, and when I returned from the hospital with my grotesquely bandaged finger, there was the very parrot that had mangled my finger, arrogantly swaying from his perch on the table in my combination living/dining room, saying treat treat treat. I had a sudden urge to yell a fellatio-related curse word. I asked myself: is my wife present, and will I therefore be found to have yelled at a parrot if I yell at this parrot? I yelled anyway, having asked myself this question. My wife dropped the bottle of wine she was in the middle of opening and the parrot said the fellatio-related curse word, and my wife said to me I don’t like that language in my house, and I said in your combination kitchen/living room, and the parrot said I don’t like that language in my house, and I walked with an abstract rage to the combination tool/silverware drawer, and there found my hammer, and when my wife asked what I was doing with it, I looked at the hammer, and wondered myself what I was doing with the hammer. I remembered a painting I was supposed to hang six months ago, and smiled stupidly at her and lied, and sulked, defeated, to my room, where I went about hanging the painting, a still life of a bowl of oranges that I bought from an artist friend because they asked me to, even though I hate oranges and paintings. The hanging was an excruciating affair, of course, because of my mangled finger. In the living room, the

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parrot was staring at himself in the window, or even at my wife, and humping the air. That night, in the wake of my finger-mangling, I was treated to a psychoanalysis of myself and my childhood by my wife. She posited that all of this went back to my being the youngest of three children, how I can’t stand to see another person (or creature) get attention, and that without that attention I become nasty and brutish toward other people (or creatures). Like a dog, I appreciate a good hierarchy. Humbled, or humiliated, I began to see a therapist that week. He recommended that I do fun things with the parrot. The therapist recommended positive reinforcement for everyone. I could not see it then, but in reality, parrots are like a black hole, a fait accompli from which there is no sufficient escape velocity. By day, I fumbled with tubes and rods and tried to not further mangle my finger, and by night, I had parrot-related dreams. I was chased through my nightmares by a hammer and a great wing’d shadow. I was informed by my therapist that I had a fear of parrots, among other things (parrot paranoia; a parrot-persecution complex). I accrued credit card debt to receive these so-called insights. I concluded I was the cleverer creature and thus it was up to me to set this parrot’s mind at ease. I resolved to set my parrot’s mind at ease together with my wife and my therapist. I accepted a tissue in their presence. No matter what emotional ejaculations my therapist was able to rub out of me, the problem was that I had to go on living my life. My wife became exasperated with my muttering, my moods, my frustration. I caught her confiding her dearest exasperations to the parrot, and I heard her making promises of beneficence

on my behalf. He has promised to be kinder to you, she reassured the parrot, and his beady eyes flashed across the room to the crack in the door from which I was watching the wife-parrot pity party. He held my eyes as she gently massaged his feathers between her fingers. I found myself jilted and wondering if my wife might be relieving the parrot of certain anxieties while I was out. My wife, who works remotely (or, as I tell her sometimes, doesn’t even remotely work), writes copy for so-called technical magazines. I even thought of asking, when you are supposed to be writing copy for technical magazines, are you relieving the parrot? But, I wondered, would that be clear enough? How to ask if my wife was pleasuring the parrot without asking if my wife was pleasuring the parrot? What if my wife was insulted by the implications, what if she accused me of going insane? I wondered and watched her pet his little feathered head. I tried to banish all thoughts of wives pleasuring birds, I even admonished myself for having such a ridiculous thought. In my reading, however, I came upon a wing of parrot aficionados who recommended pleasuring one’s bird. Cloaca_Chris in particular led the charge on the parrot forum. Defeated by his bird’s attacks of rage, Cloaca_Chris said that pleasuring his bird was a hugely humbling experience. He also reported that a parrot that has been pleasured three times a day is at least five times less likely to attack its owner or the furniture in the three hours after the bird has been pleasured. He actually wrote has been pleasured. I suppose he chose that phrase in order to avoid writing I give my parrot handjobs. Others, in fact all of the other posters, said that jacking your parrot off was a ridiculous 105

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idea, that of course no one should pleasure their bird, and even suggested that Cloaca_Chris was a so-called troll who was trolling, and I went down a rabbit hole, or perhaps more appropriately, up inside a cloaca, to suss out who was right and who was wrong. Rather than finding Cloaca_ Chris’s arguments ridiculous, I became hopeful. I already masturbate on my lunch break — what harm would it do to jack off my bird in private? And what a relief it would be to have a few hours of silence, I thought! Yes, I would have to carry my parrot-handjob secret to my grave, but this would be a small price to pay. I thought to myself that perhaps I and the parrot would even be able to be intimate — outside of the handjob I would theoretically have given him, which would have been totally platonic. I bought my wife a mani-pedi I could not afford in order to get myself some alone time with the parrot. I drank heavily to steel my nerves. I set the mood: turned down the lights, talked sweetly to the bird, offered the bird food. But he only turned away from me, no matter how I approached. In frustration I stood up from my all-fours position and started circling the bird’s cage, trying to get at him with my finger, just to give him a little massage. He splattered the wall with my blood. The emergency room doctor, who coincidentally had seen my finger before, suggested that I put my finger in the cage less and also warned that the finger was in danger of being irreparably mangled, whereas before it had only been mangled. This bird, he added, seeing my glum look, probably imagines it’s defending itself. What would you do if you were in a cage? I am in a cage, I replied in a rage, and he narrowed his eyes in a very doctorly manner. 106

Despite this second finger-mangling, my wife had friends over to meet the parrot. She even cheekily titled her invitation email “Meet the Parrot.” Mark and Martha, two former college friends, who are so happily married. When Mark and Martha came, they brought a couple of Bordellos, because Mark and Martha are rich and like to lord over other people the fact that they know what a Bordello is. They remarked on how cozy our apartment is, as if everyone and their mother did not know cozy was code for claustrophobic and pathetic. Of course, Mark and Martha were drawn directly to the parrot. My wife told them that they didn’t have to touch Steve if they didn’t want to, and I said that the parrot had mangled my finger, but Mark and Martha are so brave, that’s how they got rich, so they went right over and talked sweetly to Steve, and stroked Steve, plying him with syrupy voices, and Steve didn’t mind a bit, in fact he came right up to the edge of the cage. Watching this intently, I absentmindedly reached out to the counter to lean, forgetting my mangled finger. The rush of pain sent me to the floor. My wife tried to help me up, and Martha ran in her heels to the kitchen side of the combination kitchen/ living room to get me water, and asked where are the glasses kept as if there weren’t only two cupboards. When I was up again of my own volition, their attention went right back to the parrot. Martha even called Steve luxurious, and I said nothing luxurious about it and held up my bandaged finger, and no one laughed, and I realized I didn’t want them to, that in fact I was hoping to shake them out of their complacency. My wife, flushed with pride, ignored me and went on and on about the intelligence of the gray parrot and of the particular

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intelligence of Steve. She said several times that gray parrots are the Einsteins of the Bird World, and I remarked that, as monikers go, Einstein doesn’t even make sense: gray parrots are a species, and Einstein was one person. How could there be multiple Einstein birds? To which Mark tried to clumsily change the subject, asking how work was for me, and I held up my finger and said work is putting rods in tubes, Mark, you know that, and my wife, swilling wine, began to tell everyone about Arthur’s Parrot Adventures, as she liked to call them. What she in fact said was Arthur’s Parrot Adventures, as I like to call them. She told them of how he just keeps puttin’ that finger in that cage, and before she could try to embarrass me further, I shouted that my finger could be irreparably mangled. Meet the Parrot ended early. That night, my wife told me to sleep on the couch, inches from the parrot. I took a sheet and wrapped myself in it, as if I were one of my parrot’s silken larval prey, waiting to emerge from its chrysalis. In the morning it woke me with a squawk, and I met its beady, onyx eyes through the stitches of the blanket and the bars of its cage. I tried to talk calmly to my wife the next morning, but I was not able to help the yelling. You are hurting Steve’s feelings by talking that way, my wife said. That bird wants to hurt me, I said, pointing at the parrot. Why does he hate me? Why does he let everyone but me pet him? I felt myself at a crossroads, or as if I was standing over a precipice, when in fact I had passed the crossroads, approached the precipice, and been pushed into the abyss. I correctly wondered why I got a parrot in the first place. My wife, ignoring my plangency, insisted it was time to let him out of his cage,

that he needed room to roam. She said that there is a parrot paradox here, that though a loose parrot would seem a more dangerous parrot, in actuality the more room a parrot has to roam, the less likely he is to feel threatened by his owners. I did not even argue. So, my wife began letting the parrot out of his cage willy-nilly, and I began checking over my shoulder periodically to see if the parrot was there. He never was, or at least not when I expected him. Instead, he appeared behind me in the mirror in the depths of my insomnia. I began to engage in a parrot-husband cold war. The parrot found his food doused in soap. He found this or that beloved toy mangled. A plush dog no bigger than my hand with its eyes torn out, its throat slashed. A bear with no legs. A little man, now just a torso, his head in the sink and his appendages in four corners of the room. My wife asked me to go to therapy with her again, saying she was worried about me. She even suggested bringing Steve. I shouted, they don’t have couples therapy with birds. You want me to go to, what, bird-conversion therapy? I asked her. She insisted in a reassuring tone that frightened me that her therapist did this sort of thing all the time, and when I repeated that I would not go to bird-conversion therapy, she made an ultimatum, that indeed, I had to go to bird-conversion therapy or everything was over. Subsequent to this ultimatum, I imagined a lonely apartment, a basement with bars on the window. Meals of canned meat and ramen noodles. A full bed, growing emptier every day. A degrading job, probably the same one I already had. When someone finally came looking for me, it would be the super, because of the rancid must of rot. 107

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In order to ward off these nightmares, I began to fantasize about ending the parrot. I worried that I was going insane, imagining these things, but then I concluded correctly that people have murdered animals across centuries with few to any psychological repercussions. I imagined the humiliation of taking a bird to a therapy appointment, and then I imagined grabbing the bird by the talons and beating it on the edge of the counter. I imagined the questions I’d be asked by the therapist if I went to bird-conversion therapy, I imagined the parrot mockingly repeating the therapist’s questions, too, and then I imagined nailing the parrot to my wall. Before you judge me, imagine the following questions asked of yourself once by a balding middle-aged man with a mustache with a framed Home Goods italicized platitude like Love What You Are hanging over his head, and then a second time, by a parrot, and try not to imagine also decapitating the bird with a kitchen knife: Are you angry at the bird? Do you feel as if you must choose between a pet and your wife? Do you feel as if your wife has already chosen the parrot over you? Aren’t you just taking out a lifetime of rage at your own utter impotence and cowardice on a captive, confused animal? If you can’t handle disagreement with a parrot, how will you handle disagreement with other people? All of these questions, of course, would have been precisely engineered to hurt my feelings if I had ever gone to bird-conversion therapy, as an ashamed patient is a patient that comes back for more appointments, and more appointments means more money in the pockets of balding, middle-aged men. But I did not go to bird 108

conversion therapy. My instinct was to bash my parrot with a hammer or to strangle it, but I could not simply bash my parrot with a hammer or strangle it. If I bashed my parrot with a hammer or strangled it, blood and feathers might end up all over the room. There would be bruising on his parrot neck, and I am not a maniac, I have foresight. I could have smothered my parrot with a pillow, but parrots are exceptional shriekers even when they are not being chased. Besides, what if he got away? What if there were signs of a struggle? Parrot forums are of no help here, either, as no one is sane enough to openly discuss doing away with their parrot. People put their animals down, as the euphemism goes, all the time; in fact, every minute someone somewhere is putting down their animal, but to talk about putting down your parrot was somehow taboo. I elected to slip rat poison into the parrot’s food. I reasoned there would be no toxicology report in the offing on an offed bird. Besides, my wife could not afford a toxicologist, and no one ever performed an autopsy on a bird. With dead pets the veterinarian probably does not even need to formally pronounce the animal dead, he simply looks at it and listens to its heart and says, it’s dead. I even counseled myself that I was putting the bird out of its misery. Poisoning my parrot was the humane thing to do. I take humane here to mean good for humans, which is what it sounds like it means anyway. I even had bought rat poison weeks before, for reasons I didn’t quite understand, perhaps telling myself that winter was coming and rats would be moving inside. I put enough to kill several rats in his food. I even explained to him what I was doing, that I had seen how he was losing

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feathers and his mind, how he wanted my wife, something he could never have, how in reality he was not a pet but a captive in a cage in an apartment in a city that was so foreign to him he must have wanted to die by now. I used the sweetest voice I could muster, and when I was done putting the arsenic-laden food in his cage, which I noticed he allowed me to do without violence, I closed the little birdcage door quietly. As I went to the door to the bedroom, he said thank you, as my wife had trained him to. My wife found him dead the next morning. A Saturday in December, almost Christmas. She ran sobbing to the bedroom cradling him in her arms, then ran back into the combination kitchen/living room. She went back and forth sobbing while I put on a Hawaiian shirt. I followed my wife down to the car, and I drove us to the vet with my wife crying, crying, crying, cradling the dead bird in her arms. I arrived at the veterinarian’s office with a stupid smile pasted on my face, having struggled only a little to find parking on the busy streets of my dingy city. I went right ahead into the waiting room and looked upon the vibrant, docile fish in their aquarium without shame. I watched the local news on the wall-mounted flatscreen television, where a reporter remarked matter-of-factly that a city woman had murdered herself and her children in a bathtub. When my wife began to sob so hard she was nearly choking, I put my arm around her, and said, there, there. I saw that I had been saddled with a unique intelligence, and I let it ride me like a cowboy into the sunset. When I got home, of course she found the rat poison in the parrot’s food, and blamed me, and of course we are no longer together, but this was a small price to pay for my freedom. 109

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THE PERFUME THIEVES

by Susan Finlay

There was something in the air, specifically “the (re-)imagining

of a fragrance worn by homosexuals throughout the aesthetic period.” The rest of the installation consisted of Lalique-style bottles set atop jardiniere-style plinths set against a backdrop of Edwin Godwin–style murals: a combination that was less evocative of a 19th-century aesthete than the penchant for gilt-edged whimsey to which the Y2K art world had, albeit briefly, succumbed. I’d only met 110

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the perpetrator once before, when he had was reconfigured as a question designed attempted to explain his work to the in- to passive-aggressively cast doubt upon vigilators pre–tonight’s opening, but even my illness. then, his sneakers had implied an outdated But two could play that game. frame of reference — “Oh yeah?” I said, shoving my purse in“I hope you’ve recovered?” said Chloë side my locker. before I was even halfway through the door. Chloë’s cheeks turned scarlet. I tried She was carrying a bucket full of soapy wa- not to smirk. ter that splashed against her skirt whenevShe took a deep breath and continued. er she moved: the chink in her otherwise “Cornelia wanted to me to thank you, perpristine armor that indicated she was not sonally, for all your hard work, but unfortuthe gallery owner but the exhibition man- nately we won’t be needing your services — ” ager. An impromptu market selling knock“You can’t legally fire me,” I cut in. “My off perfume, electrical equipment, and, contract states that — ” occasionally, crack had sprung up along “But we can restructure.” She licked the not-yet-gentrified street outside, and her lips, and suddenly I realized that she gangs of teenage boys regularly “egged” the was red not because of embarrassment, but windows with Creed’s Wind Flowers that pleasure. “We’re offering you the full twoit was then Chloë’s job to wipe away. “The weeks’ notice but …” migraines appear to be worsening?” I had already stopped listening. I had to “Yes,” I said. think fast, and work out how best to rinse “Yes?” she repeated, and then: “I have a this shit — tonight. message from Cornelia?” An hour later and the opening was in I was as usual 45 minutes late, but I was full swing, Wind Flowers now but a sudsy also one of the only invigilators with an old memory among the synthetic mouths contract (so: entitled to sick pay), a fact I air-kissing the art world’s equally pumpedmade the most of. There had, admittedly, up ass circa spring 2023. My high school been one incident, a couple of months pre- biology teacher had said that every time vious, when Chloë had seen pictures of me we inhaled, we inhaled one molecule of partying hard on social media that coincid- Julius Caesar. Likewise, another dictator of ed with my claim to have a neurologist ap- Italian heritage, Cornelia, permeated the pointment but I’d handled it, bursting into air around her with twinky artists and bluehot, pretty, I-just-didn’t-want-anyone-to- chip collectors high on the stink of inherknow-how-ill-I-really-am floods of tears ited wealth. I watched her Roman profile in front of the technicians, the largely male nod along to something about “equality contingent from whom the audience for and diversity” that was clearly “borrowed” this particular exchange was comprised. from the website. Yet the only people of Fearing that an accusation of workplace color who entered the gallery were the sebullying would ensue, Chloë had eventual- curity guards: local dads paid to keep the ly backed down, which meant that the only local teenagers out. Plus, Cornelia was, outlet for her irritation now available was like all her kind, tight-fisted. The organic a rising inflection whereby every statement wine I served to guests cost more per glass 111

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than the guards earned per hour, but she’d screamed that they were trying to exploit her when they’d dared to request a raise. I poured a large wine, raised my glass, and said, “Et tu, Brute?” but no one heard me. “If you walked into a room and smelled this particular smell, you’d think ‘A-ha! He’s one of those,’” said the twinky artist-perpetrator, and Cornelia and the bluechip collectors laughed. The one nearest to me gestured at a Lalique-style bottle set atop a jardiniere-style plinth. “And err …?” “200K,” murmured Cornelia, and then in a louder voice: “Such an innovative installation!” The collector tapped something into his iPhone 14 and then put it back in his side pocket so that the brushed steel surround peeked out. I took a large gulp of wine and — “We have a problem?” said Chloë, sneaking up behind me. I took another gulp. “It helps with the migraines.” “Wha — no.” She was, I now saw, holding a toilet brush. “We have a problem that you need to fix?” And the problem most definitely stank. I managed to shift the worst of it, repurposing the brush as a makeshift plunger, before vigorously flushing and reflushing until only a small fragment of the original turd remained. Looking at it, I thought: Rinse this shit. Then: 200K. Then: Tight-fisted … I retrieved my purse and slung it over my shoulder, taking care to leave the top unzipped. Then, still holding the 112

brush, I headed back inside the exhibition. My glass of wine was where I’d left it. I chugged what remained and stumbled toward Chloë, jabbing the shitty brush at her with one arm while sweeping one of the bottles off one of the plinths and into my purse with the other. Chloë raised her eyebrows, but the brush had all of her attention, meaning that the message the eyebrows conveyed was merely Where do you think you’re going? “Where do you think — ” “I’m afraid the migraine has become unbearable,” I said before she could finish. She opened her mouth but I jabbed the brush at her again and, too disgusted to speak, she immediately shut it. The same collector was standing beside her and I glanced, furtively, in his direction. Obviously, he paid me no attention. Indeed, one of the few advantages of working in an arts-related service industry was that everyone you served ignored you (and people who ignored you were generally unable to remember what you looked like). “But I’ve unblocked the toilet.” Chloë wrinkled her nose. “Well, I suppose I should say good luck then?” “But I thought you were offering me the full two weeks’ notice?” I gave one last jab and, as her eye flitted over the brush, slipped my free hand into the collector’s pocket. “I thought that that was what Cordelia personally wanted?” “It’s a communication method, a sort of secret code,” said the twinky artist-perpetrator. “200K,” murmured the collector, and Cornelia nodded. “But if you’re very sick you may not be available?” said Chloë.

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“I …” and then once again embracI placed the Lalique-style bottle on ing an atmosphere that was both theat- the chipped Formica counter and said, rical and outdated as well as truly shitty, “Because I like you, 100K.” I said, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” And “Excuse me?” said the collector. then I left. “100K,” I repeated. “Normally, these go for 200 — ” • “No, the installation is 200. This is just The following morning, I paid a teenager a component. Like paint, or canvas.” He who smelled of Wind Flowers to unlock smiled again, but at the same time put his the collector’s cell phone. cell inside his coat. “You might as well be “A-ha! You’re one of those.” trying to sell me air.” For a moment, he appeared confused A stale scent filled my nostrils: old oil before asking if I’d like to trade the cell and old food made of chemicals and numfor crack. Now that I no longer had access bers. I clutched my pearls and, cowering in to free organic wine, it was a tempting of- the style of Vichy France, wished I’d played fer, but, eyes on the bigger prize, I refused. it safe and gone for crack. Instead, I entered the diner opposite and, “If I were you, I’d try and return it belooking at the chipped Formica counter, fore anyone notices,” said the collector as congratulated myself on choosing such a I grabbed the bottle. “If you want to keep place: shabby enough to put the rich on your job that is, and …” edge, yet “retro” enough for the shabbiness I was out the door, running down the to be considered chic. I checked my reflec- street that was also an impromptu martion. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be recog- ket, and weaving through the stalls of stonized but had lifted a string of pearls just in len things. My high school drama teacher, case. I rearranged them, then sat down and who I’d preferred to my high school biolcalled the collector. Fifteen minutes later ogy teacher, had said that Brutus was rephe arrived. resentative less of betrayal than freedom “Hi,” he said, as he walked towards from tyranny. I pushed past the teenagers me, the only white woman in there. “You and then, having reached my destination, must be …?” stopped. One of the guards looked up and “Yes?” I said, daring him to say how he waved. Chloë, who happened to be passing, knew I was the one who’d called. also saw me and raised her eyebrows. He smiled a smile made of porcelain, I paused to inhale the shitty, crackand spoke instead of the mutual friend filled air outside the gallery, then pulled out who had passed on his number but who, the bottle and threw it as hard as I could. in reality, I would most likely never meet. I handed the “lost” cell back to him and, mistaking my kind for his, he was keen to continue talking. Why yes, I told him, I am a dealer [meaning player]. Speaking of which, I have something that might be of interest … 113

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EVERYONE AT THE TABLE

by Rae Canaan

One night, when I am 36 and my baby daddy is 36, we arrive at the

card room the usual way, driving around a half dozen times in the free parking lot looking for a space in case we leave the card room with less money than we came in with and don’t want to feel like even bigger fools for paying to valet a car we can park well enough ourselves, and I’m behind the wheel and doing the usual preparations of getting my game face on and listening to the radio for a secret signal song that’ll tell me how the evening’s gonna go and 116

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keeping my eye out for the next sad-sack sucker walking slack-shouldered from the card room to his Honda Civic, which he will drive home and explain to the wife where his time and money went, and with my baby’s daddy sitting beside me (no wedding ring with this one because I tried marriage once in my twenties and it didn’t go so well) and me about eight months full of baby myself, I do, as it happens in these situations, find I really need to pee. We get lucky and spot one of the coveted spaces under a parking lot light and all three of us, myself, my baby’s daddy, and the baby, because she is already a smart little thing, can feel that the appearance of this parking spot under the light must be a good omen. If, when we walk into the casino, our favorite floor man is on shift and there are no more than five players on the wait board, it means the poker gods have smiled upon us and it will be an excellent night, indeed, and I need a good night. Myself, a struggling filmmaker with a daredevil streak, and my baby daddy, a college professor more competitive than any college professor should be, are nonetheless conservative players, never going in for more than $300 each, and the last two evenings we played I lost my buy-in within a few hours on hands where the percentages said I should’ve won. We walk into the card room and take in the scent of lilac carpet deodorizer and the cheers from the Pai Gow and Pan Nine room and the smell of curly fries passing on a food cart. We walk past the Big Room, a cave of ruby-red carpet and muted football games on mosaic wall screens and players hunched over stacks as high as their shoulders and quiet dealers flinging reverent cards for them in the low-ceilinged dark. We walk past the

squat ATM and we do not stop as we have brought our own cash with us, tucked safe in our pockets, because everyone knows standing at an ATM in the card room is a donkey move. We walk past the shiny gift shop and step down to the main floor where no-limit Texas hold ’em is being played on over 100 tables, nine players at each table and, indeed, our favorite floor man is on shift and the wait board is only four names deep. The room is the size of an ice hockey rink. Sunken and bound by brass rails. Chandeliers hang forlorn from the ceiling like the wedding is over and someone forgot to take the streamers off their crystal. Busboys, their vest pockets sagging with tips, weave carts of avocado bacon cheeseburger and pho dac biet between players, and the click of millions of dollars of chips being tossed and riffled and scooped, as they are any day of the week, Christmas and birthdays included, wash over us like a beautiful ocean wave. “How are you tonight, lady?” “Good, Armando. Good.” Armando, the floor man. He sets his fingers at the keyboard ceremoniously to type our names, “One hundred dollars this evening?” “Yes,” I say, “Two seats. Any chance for a new table?” “Ah, no, Miss. We’re short a few dealers tonight.” We all look up at the board as he speaks, watching our names appear behind the four others. “Okay, let us know,” says my baby’s daddy. “You got it, you got it. We’ll get you seated right away.” Frat boys with backwards baseball caps and real estate guys in skinny ties stand near us, thumbs scrolling through their phones, other hands in their pockets, giving glances 117

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to my baby belly and me because they are maybe new to the Commerce Casino and don’t know what being a regular means (it means you know Armando by name) and maybe didn’t know they should be nice to Armando (you definitely should be nice to Armando) and came here specifically to be away from things such as moms and babies, and here I am, like a creature in a horror movie, chasing their leased Mazdas down the I-5 and showing them up with Armando who didn’t give them a second glance when they told him what name to put on the board. Just wait until I take all your money, I think. Then you’ll really be terrified. It’s important, however, to keep focus at the card room and I tell myself to have only these truths in my head: I don’t ever go deeper than $300 a night. I have a small notebook with all winnings and losses and the hand I lost on. I have a pocket, the back left one, dedicated to my profits. I like to fill it. The women’s room in the Commerce Casino is usually a lonely place, the female dealers presumably having their own bathroom in their locker area and the cocktail waitresses probably hanging out there too, if only to keep company with the dealers and kvetch about their cheap bosses and handsy players. I’m trying to make sure my night’s buy-in doesn’t fall out of my pocket and onto the bathroom floor while I’m reattaching the suspenders on my Big Smith overalls, as I hear three ladies come in and they’re uncapping lipsticks and talking about a chip runner named Sandy in the flat voice ladies have when their lips are stretched over their teeth as they’re doing their gloss. 118

Sandy, who I know, used to be a good girl, in their opinion, until she got involved with the private games around town and accommodating the players of those games with entertainment in the form of these very ladies spray-teasing their hair now outside my stall. Money was owed. A brawl occurred. Management caught on, and now these ladies must find their clientele on the floor, which can get expensive if you’re pretending to be a player to catch another kind of fish altogether and not very good at the game you’re pretending to know how to play. I go to wash my hands at the sinks and all of a sudden they are silent and focused entirely on their bang-teasing and nothing but. “How many months are you?” the lady in a gold halter top asks. “Eight,” I say. “You at that part where it’s like right up there? Under your ribs and you can’t hardly breathe?” I nod and grab a paper towel, “Right? And where you gotta pee, like, all the time.” We laugh and all of us pretend I didn’t hear anything about anybody. “You playing?” the lady with the tiny heart tattoo on her wrist asks. “About to,” I say. “Ah, cool. Well, have a good night. Be careful out there,” they say. “You, too.” Some men play because they need to lose money to prove they’re losers. Some men play because they’re lonely and will give away chips for someone to talk to. Some men play because they want to dominate: a poker table, a woman, a smaller man. I play because managing risk feels like safety.

RAE CANAAN

Most of the gentlemen, when they saw “Right?” he said again. I shrugged and me at the stairs waiting with my baby’s tossed the cards into the muck. The table daddy, probably figured I was a “sweat- laughed, but now at this man who had er,” the girlfriends who think they’re be- folded to me. He’d been made a fool of. The ing taken to the movies or dinner and get virgin behaving like a whore. all dolled up for that event but then are I patted the table in front of me, “You brought to the Commerce Casino to sit in did the right thing. I had you beat.” a chair behind their man and flip through He tossed his blind in for the next hand. People and suck on milkshakes, occasional- “I knew it,” he said, “She’s not gonna lie.” ly looking over to “sweat” the hands their I don’t remember what I had, but I did dates are playing. So it’s a minute before take with me this lesson about reading: the table adjusts to my baby daddy taking suss out if the man you’re playing against a seat at a table across the room and me believes women are virgins or women are handing the chip runner at this table my whores. Then you know how to beat that own hundred-dollar bill and tipping him man. Every time. two dollars for extra seat cushions. Just like last night at the Commerce “There are two types of female players,” Casino, and the night before last, tonight a man explained to me when I first started I lose on hands the odds would’ve had me coming to the card room. As a rule, I never win, and by a lot, and it seems clear the speak to other players, but I’d just gotten streak that had lasted me a solid three years him to lay down pocket jacks and felt I from learning the game to having it pay a owed him a response. good portion of our mortgage, many bags “Oh, yeah? What are they?” of groceries, and the occasional spa mas“It’s like this in life and it’s like this in sage, seems to be coming to a sad end. I’m the card room. There are the virgins and reaching for my last buy-in and no sooner the whores. The virgins never lie, they do I get pocket aces than I lose to a guy in never bluff.” a silky white shirt with beautifully coiffed “’Kay,” I was stacking my chips into neat black hair who pulls a gut shot on the river $100 towers. and, though he is all the way across the ta“The whores, they always bluff. The trick ble in seat seven, I can see that this win has is to figure out what kind of female player very much upset him. you’re playing against.” “Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. “Gotcha.” Please,” he says and stands up and walks off The kid next to him started laughing, quickly to have a cigarette, I think. But I “And what is she?” don’t know why him smoking a cigarette The man looked at me and nodded, would mean I shouldn’t move, so I find an “Virgin. She’s not bluffing. She’s not gonna empty rack on a nearby food cart, and I’m be bluffing. Right?” packing up what remains of my chips to My hole cards were still face down in leave, when the man comes back carrying front of me and I could tell he wanted me a huge bag with pastel-colored tissue paper to turn them over to show him, and the ta- coming out the top and a giant brown tedble, his assessment was correct. dy bear sunk inside, his eyes peeking out at 119

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me like his life depended on getting out of this card room and fast. “For the baby,” the man says. “What?” “Yes, yes. You must take it. You must. That hand.” The game has stopped at this point. Everyone, even the dealer Tiffany (not her real name) from Bangkok and the other seven players have their hands on their chips mid-throw and their king-sized sodas mid-suck and are watching the man holding the giant bag to me as I’m bracing myself on the table and a nearby food cart trying to gracefully stand. “That’s okay. Really,” I say. He holds the food cart down for me so it won’t tip, “No. Not okay.” “Really, s’alright.” “Please. Please, take it.” The dealer smiles and the guy with the shake starts to laugh, the straw still stuck to his mouth and his mustache waggling. The bear is peaking out at me from the tissue paper like, “Just take me, damnit,” and so I take the bag. “Okay. Thank you,” I say. “Of course. I just, gut shot … it’s not even respectable and you …” He gestures to my belly like I’m the Virgin Mary, “with the …” “The baby?” “Yes. Every good wish to you both. Every good wish.” “Thanks so much. Have a great night, everyone.” The players, men I’ve taken thousands of dollars from over the years, all nod in unison and I waddle through the tables looking for my baby’s daddy and thinking, “Well, that was a fun three years of playing poker.” 120

Tips for girl players: Don’t gloat when you win. Don’t speak. Tip the female dealers. Look away when you’re waiting for a man to fold to you. They don’t want you to witness their weakness and they’ll read your watching them as a challenge and refuse to lay down. I meet my baby’s daddy at the empty overflow tables overlooking the main room near the gift shop where you’re not allowed to eat sandwiches in case you get mayonnaise on the felt and where some degennies take quick naps on a bad night, and he laughs at the bag with the tissue and the bear. “Guy got a gut shot.” “Yeesh,” he says. “On the river.” “Damn.” “Ninety-two percent to win, man!” “I hear ya.” He packs up his chips and his own table nods lightly and also in unison to let him know they understand. When your baby’s mom gets taken out by a gut shot, you don’t need an excuse to go home. So the baby is born and she’s a beauty and we exchange poker and the poker room for diapers and preschools. A few years later, my baby’s daddy and my relationship fizzles, and even though he was my life’s big love, maybe because he was my life’s big love, I find I am missing the will to bring it back. We switch from romance to co-parents, and while there is still the occasional home game, the poker room and its chip runners and drug dealers and prostitutes and loan sharks stay down in the City of Commerce and we stay in our lives in Silver Lake.

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I bake chocolate cupcakes. I kiss her forehead. She smiles brightly. She runs fast. She laughs loud. I am not my mother and this child is not me. But I wake thinking of words I wished I’d said to her and not said to her. I wake wondering if I’m hurting her or helping her. I wake with the knot in my belly where she once also used to live. I wake knowing this knot is telling me there is a past that could be a monster if I let it. We move into a duplex, I take the upper unit and my baby’s daddy takes the lower unit, and our baby, a little girl, five years old now, runs up and down the stairs in between. Some people think we’re crazy for living like this; some people think we’re geniuses. My baby’s daddy goes back to the Commerce Casino. He made as much as I did back in the day and he wants to have that scooping-up-the-chips feeling again. One night, we meet on the stairs that run between our apartments and he tells me about a girl named Alexi who went all-in on everything no matter what the hand. “She had disdain,” he says. “For what?” “For everyone at the table.” Alexi was in her mid-twenties and was sipping nips out of a bottle in her purse. She was maybe from Belarus, maybe from some other place Russia keeps trying to take, and she was pretty and petite and my baby’s daddy said it looked like she didn’t

want to be at that poker table playing poker about as much as she hadn’t wanted to be in whatever country she’d run from doing whatever they had her doing there. “They were scared of her at first,” my baby’s daddy said, “raising her for 25 and then folding at her all-in.” “She showed them her bluff.” “Yeah. And then she’d laugh.” My baby’s daddy said they’d shake their heads at her stupidity and the futility of playing poker with someone who doesn’t care. And then, like a dog whistle had been blown, the table started calling her bluffs one after the other, a $100 bill after $100 bill starts coming out of her purse, right next to the bottle she was sipping from, and being turned into chips and then being scooped up by the men around her. When my baby’s daddy called one of her all-ins, it turned out to be her last $100. He says she didn’t get up in a huff or say, “Save my seat” or laugh it off like most players do. She sat there and stared at the felt like she didn’t know where to go next. My baby’s daddy is a kind, gentle man and he told Alexi under his breath, so the other men wouldn’t hear, that he would give her back the chips he won if she would go home. She stood up from the table, because if you aren’t going to play you can’t sit at the table, and my baby’s daddy and Alexi walked to the overflow area near the gift shop where players call their wives to lie and say they’ll be home in an hour or pregnant ladies show the fathers of their children the giant teddy bear someone gave them the night they knew it was time to hang up this poker thing for a while, and they sat at one of the empty poker tables there and she told him, yes, she’d appreciate it if he could give her her chips back. 121

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“I will take them. Yes, thank you,” she said, “Thank you.” “But only if you’ll make me that promise, that you’ll go home,” my baby’s daddy said. The chips were stacked between them, but a little closer to him than her. “I was just having fun,” said Alexi. “Little fun. How much did I lose to you this last hand anyway?” “Two hundred and fifty-six dollars.” “That’s two more buy-ins.” “That’s true.” “I could do that. Buy in two more times.” Alexi was a pretty girl and wearing a low-cut tank top that showed off her pretty shoulders and big earrings that jangled a little behind her flat-ironed hair. She took another sip from the bottle in her bag and laughed again. “They don’t like me at the table,” she said. “I’ll go to the $200. Maybe they like me better there.” My baby’s daddy let his elbows rest on the table and kept his thumb and forefinger around the base of the stack of chips. She didn’t seem to be listening and he didn’t know how to get her to understand. “Look,” said Alexi, “are you going to give me the chips back or not?” “Yes.” “Okay, great.” And she let her hand rest on the felt, open and flat. “But only if you promise you’ll go home. That’s the point. That you take the chips now and go home.” My baby’s daddy said Alexi’s chin fell a little. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the sunken card room and then turned back to my baby’s daddy and spoke to him in the way women will speak sometimes to children who aren’t theirs, eyebrows raised and slowly. 122

“I cannot.” My baby’s daddy said he knew then what he hadn’t entirely known before: Alexi was for hire the way some women are for hire, and among the men sitting at the tables behind her, there might even be one whose job it was to watch her in this very conversation and be in charge of her money, and where she went, and when, and my baby’s daddy could not be her hero. And the broken fantasy of it, the split stone heart of it, sunk his belly. He slid the stack of chips across the felt to her and they both stood and she took him in a hug. Then she pushed her hair over her bare shoulder and walked away. “So you did, you gave her the money?” I asked. We’re sitting on the steps. Our daughter asleep in my apartment. “Yeah.” “You did?” “Of course.” We hadn’t been together for two years, but he was the person to gamble with. My baby’s daddy. You bet your life. Hands I have lost: Ace High Trips to Quads Full House to Four of a Kind Thirteen boyfriends One baby daddy One marriage “You’re a good guy,” I say. “Thanks,” he says and smiles sad. And I walk back up the stairs to my apartment and he walks back down to his. Our daughter sleeps soundly in her twin bed down the hall and dreams of climbing trees and her new bicycle. Our daughter has never dreamt of monsters under her bed. I sleep with mine. We curl

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up under the covers and I hug it tight. Reminded of those days playing poker, I tell it stories of the lessons I learned about odds and percentages and virgins and whores and rivers of money and the patience to fold bad hands and the “fuck it” all-in. I tell it how I thought of it, knowing it waited for me there, under all my beds, with the dust bunnies and the daddy longlegs, even while I was at the poker table or at dinner with friends or when I was young and falling in love with my baby’s daddy and even while, maybe mostly while, I was giving birth. “Don’t ever gamble what you can’t afford to lose,” I heard an old player say once. “Women at the table are bad luck,” I heard him say that too, just before he stood and grabbed his chips to leave the table where I had just sat down. I tell my monster this story again and he laughs and laughs in his throat-croak way, his muddy-leaf-feet way, his blue-orbed, shadow-faced way. He huddles deeper in my sheets where my baby’s daddy had once lain. He strokes my back, which had once been stroked by real-live men, and kisses my cheek and growls, “I would never leave your table.”

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Photo from the Tosquelles family album Original photograph by Romain Vigoroux. Tosquelles family archive Photographic reproduction by © Roberto Ruiz

124

FICTION

SALUD, LA LUZ

by Dashiel Carrera

1. Chestnuts

We carried chestnuts from the park, behind the trees and the smoke of our little houses. We tucked them in our pockets and hid them beyond the tips of our mittens, just past the fingers, and snuck them into our homes. We buried them beneath our beds, tucked them under our turtle’s tanks, and stowed them in our sock drawers until the next day, when our mother called from beyond the door. In the schoolyard they were currency. They could be bought and

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sold for Lunchables or toys or whatever we desired. We received them in outstretched palms, fingered the smooth of their bodies, and passed them to our friends so that they too could feel what it was to be full. But when winter came the chestnuts grew scarce, and what little was left of them was lost. We buried them in the ground and when the ground grew cold and hard with snow the chestnuts lay trapped beneath the soil. Then when Mamá got sick we went out to our yard and dug them all up with our fingernails, snow soaking the elbows of our jackets. We carried them overflowing in our arms and our pockets to her room and one by one we placed them on the sheets, first along her thighs and her arms and her stomach and her hands, then over her toes and her chin and her eyelids and her mouth, so she could die, as she’d always wanted, a wealthy woman. 2. Bats

Mamá loved our little house. She liked the way the scaffolds of the veranda crisscrossed with the vines. She liked the way the light poured in through the skylight and the sharp reeds poked up from the hammock. She liked the stones below the outdoor shower and the way they cut her feet. We made dinner in the evenings and burned fire in the stove. Smoke swept the porch. My brother Alejandro and I ate quietly. Cornbread, milanesa, a bit of red wine. Bats flashed between us as we ate, dropping from the eaves, lost to the dark beyond our yard. 3. Jewelry

Mamá bought pearls, bracelets, hair extensions. She put them on her body and 126

on ours. She held us in front of the vanity mirror and covered our noses and our hair and chins in glitter, and we smiled when she kissed our cheeks. She showed us the rubies and the sapphires she hid at the back of her closet, how they glittered and glowed on our little fingers as they did on hers. She showed us boa scarves and mascara and gloss for our lips. She rubbed our bellies and we laughed and she laughed as she held us tight against her silky blouse and purred. When Papi came home we hid everything. He eyed us suspiciously as he put away the groceries in the dim light of the refrigerator and Mamá wiped her lipstick off with a hand towel, erasing what we couldn’t afford. Sometimes I saw her go to the window, late at night, when Papi was working a graveyard shift. I would see her shadow stretch over our little backyard, and she would cast her hands up toward the sky, toward the moon and gray clouds in dissipation. The sparkle of her bracelet refracted little diamonds on my bedroom wall, and I smiled to myself, tucked the comforter over my nose to feel the heat of my own breath, panting until the glitter was gone. 4. Coming to America

Mamá came to America because her family had disappeared. Bisabuela, bisabuelo — one day she looked out her bedroom window and they were boarding a ship, waving goodbye to the fog, a sparkling sliver in their place, a dangling dreamcatcher swishing back and forth in the wind. Her heart was swallowed too. Her husband took her to the doctors and the doctors lifted her arms and tapped her shoulders and ran a tongue depressor along her

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legs and breasts and shook their heads. For two weeks they kept her under observation. She lay on tissue paper, coarse gown swishing about her knees as she woke with a start each night to the beeping of her own heart monitor and fell back again into the unyielding mattress. Her husband, not yet Papi, watched on from the guest chair in the corner of the room. When the prodding and swabbing and flipping back and forth of paper on clipboards had ceased, when the doctors, behind their surgical masks, had lost the energy to even shake their heads, they pulled my father into the other room and told him: You have to take her to America. 5. Dollar Tree

We went into the Dollar Tree on weekends, in the morning, when the staff was young and hungover. Mamá carried Alejandro on her shoulders and I followed close behind. We went to the freezer section first, with the large, frosted windows. Mamá knelt down and pressed her finger to her lips. She smiled. Are you feeling hot? I nodded and she slid the frozen peas under my shirt. The bumps rolled up and around my belly. We wandered through the aisles as she patted my matted black hair, slid Nutella in my pockets, half a baguette down the back of my pants. When we passed the checkout aisle she plucked a bouquet of purple carnations from the shelf and held them out for Alejandro to smell. He smelled and he sighed and I smelled and I sighed. Mamá paid for the flowers and shuffled me along toward the sliding glass doors, the jars and candy bars and frozen peas stuffed in my clothing rustling as I did, rustling when she pulled us out into the parking lot under the graying

plumes of the early spring sky, when she throttled the gas and placed the carnations on the dashboard, when the head popped off the bobbling Buddha hood ornament she’d stolen and tumbled on the floor. 6. Halloween

We carved pumpkins in the dark. Mamá lit the match between her fingers. The flame danced beneath her chin as we peeled the orange skin. Get the wick, she said, and I did, I took out the fibrous guts and planted them down into the pumpkin’s cavity. She ran her hand along its grooves, her finger lost between each bump. We forgot to give it a face, I said, and she told me to get the little knives. We sawed a smile into the pumpkin’s shell. The light peeked around the edges. Then the blocks of teeth fell one by one. Mamá tossed them into the woods, newspaper crinkling beneath her knees. When she turned back her face was covered by her hands. What is it? we asked, and we dove in closer. She wiped the tears from the corners of her face, asked for water. We fetched it from the house. She drank and drank. We asked again if there wasn’t something she needed but she said, No, nada chicos, de nada. We carried the leaves in clumps to the shed. They filled the walls in big double-layered trash bags, crumbly bits spilling from the top. One night I caught Mamá staring at the pumpkin we carved, pulling her lips back to make a smile. She stood there for half an hour, trying to make her lips as wide as the pumpkin. The next day I threw it off the roof. Pulp splattered on the driveway. It made such a pretty shape. 127

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7. Blueberries

We rose to the day and picked blueberries. It was still dark. Mamá turned to me, raised her finger to her lips. The blackbirds twittered in the trees. The day is ours, she said, and she opened her mouth, as if to lap it up, as if to soak it on her tongue. 8. Fairgrounds

Mamá carried us to the fairgrounds on her shoulders. When we got lost in the corn maze she knelt down and held us. Hush, she said, and we were silent. We stayed for hours. Until nightfall, when the smell of hot dogs and charcoal wafted from across the field. She woke with dirt and twigs in her hair and we pulled her toward the smoke and laughter, where tall men caressed their bright bellies under the moon. Papi threw another beer into the fire and laughed. Glass and charcoal burned under his feet. When he saw Mamá with her sickly eyes he swallowed and raised her wordless in his arms. Her fragile heart beat against his own. As he carried her down the moonlit road he nodded for us to stay back. Mamá fingered the scruff of his chin, said something I could not hear. We followed their outlines for a while, until their silhouettes blended with the night. 9. Collapse

Mamá had a fall. We were building an ant farm in the garage when we heard a cry, rushed up the steps. Mamá lay there on the ground. A steaming pool of water running under her leg. Her chin in a tremble. She 128

looked up at us and pressed her lips to gasp a vowel but she could not. She turned to the mess. Her hands bright red, the bubbling water slowly creeping toward her leg. I screamed for Alejandro to go get a towel and tried to lift Mamá but she was too heavy. I grabbed her around the arm and pulled and she started to fall onto me but it was not enough. Alejandro came back with a napkin. He said it was all he could find. Mamá leaned her head against my chest, wept as the water seared her skin. 10. Cancer of the Brain

The doctor showed us the MRI with the glowing ball in her head. There, he said, and he pointed to it with his oily finger. That’s it? Papi walked up to the screen, brought his nose right to the spot. That’s it. It’s so small, he said quietly. The doctor nodded and drifted out of the room. His shoes clicked on the linoleum. Papi turned. He stepped to me, pointed down at the MRI with a shaking finger. He receded. I popped it out and handed it to him. The film was slick. He recoiled, shook his head. As he stepped back the words bubbled from this throat: no, no, his shadow stretched against the back wall, taller than brother, taller than me, eclipsing us both, the weight of his own words falling as his jaw crumbled in his hands and Alejandro snatched the MRI and tried to shake the tumor out, like a Polaroid. 11. Saratoga

We walked to the shore. Mamá was in a wheelchair, then. We pushed her over the pavement. Alejandro handed her all

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the good seashells. The spokes of her chair squealed violently. We pretended not to notice. When we reached the end of the path we took up our chalk and drew all of us on the pavement. We drew ourselves big and tall, all grown up. We drew Papi with his high suspenders. And we drew Mamá with her longing and her flowing hair, with her curls that roll away like the tides. We stepped out onto the bridge and caught fireflies in our hands. The glow spilled out from the crevices. Mamá told us that we’re nothing but cracks now, nothing but bursting light. Luz? I asked her. La luz, she said. Salud, la luz. Salud, la luz! We cried and splashed and sweat. We were rapturous. Salud, la luz, salud! We threw back our heads, let fall our little red tongues, let come the sunlight on our pale skin. Salud, la luz, salud! We picked Mamá up by her armpits and carried her into the light. Salud, la luz, salud! She moved her lips slowly, as if gaining comprehension, as if she were saying the words for the first time. Saluddd, she breathed. Saluddd. The spittle rattled against her throat. 12. Ayúdame

At night I heard the long wails of his name. Federico, Federico. He growled. Her wheelchair squeaked shrill through the air vent. Alejandro opened his eyes and sat up, body crumpled and hunched. There was a thud and she cried out again. Her voice muffled through the walls. The sound of water running in the bathroom. The shower knobs turned and the pipes hissed and groaned. She sobbed. Alejandro stood up.

Where are you going? He pressed his ear to the wall. His shadow tangled with mine. The sound of metal against tile, and again the water running. Ayúdame, Federico, ayúdame. I pull the sheets down and look at Alejandro. His eyes are wide. What are they saying? He shook his head. Federicooooooo. She said it so long, like she was pleading from the bottom of a well. Alejandro stepped back. Mamí, no lo puedo, no puedo, necesito leventarte. No puedo, Federico, no tengo fuerza. What are they saying? No puedo leventarte, Mamí, es peligroso. Tengo miedo, Federico. Alejandro crouched in the corner and shook his head, the dim light of the rocket-ship night-light under his chin. 13. Lost Words

She had lost all her words by then. She sat by the river, watched the ducks flicker by in the light. I don’t know how much she understood, or how much she saw. Papi was the only one who could really talk to her by then. Each morning he rose from his bed, cheeks red, huffing, hairy back sparkling in the morning light, and held Mamá’s thumb. She looked at him and smiled as she woke. Her hand was so frail then — her knuckles as large as her fingers. Her eyes wandered the light of the room and her mind came again into this world that belonged only to them, these whispers of Spanish over the trees and the sparkling river, this rustling that rose and came, over and over, as the light leaked through the long glossy curtain of their bedroom and their tongues whirred once more into motion. 129

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14. Withdrawing Breath

16. Fumes

One day I came home from school with a backpack full of numbers and English words. Mamá asked to see it. Mi mochilla tiene números y ingles, Mamá, I said. No entiendes. Her mouth gaped, withdrawing her breath. No me entiendes? No, Mamá, no entiendes. You will leave me, she said. No, Mamá.

Strained the dock first, the pastor lifted his sandals from the boat, onto the riverbed where she lay. Papi held my hand so tight it lost feeling. My numb heart — Mamá’s hair tangled with seaweed. He laid the burning candle between her legs and the light consumed her. Her eyelids drooped; her jaw melted; her fingers twitched over the boat’s rim. The men pushed her gently into the waves, flames crackling over the sea. Mamá had always said she wanted to drift among the waves. She had picked me up and danced with me through our living room with the torn couch and the glowing fireplace as smoke spread between her eyes. Fumar, she said. Fumo. The sea still hums with her ash.

15. Hush

In the end Mamá lost her hearing too. She couldn’t understand anyone but Papi and his hushed voice. The rest was breeze, movements, rustling. The pouring of waves. The lights and mouths that came down to her face, placed their pinkies in her crumpled hands and twitched. We kissed her softly. She smiled as we spoke. When we were done she turned to father and he held her hand. How much longer? She said this with her eyes. He rubbed her hospital gown between his fingers. It was coarse and sighed like a curtain. When he brought his lips down to her ear she wrapped her arms around the back of his neck, plastic pulse monitor cold against her finger, wire tangling around my father’s ear. And then it was only them. The air barely made it past their lips. The conversation had so many times before it became a choreographed sequence of silent shivers. How much longer? she asked. Just wait, he said, and he kissed her veiny hand. 130

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GUINEA HENS Maya C. Popa

Left alone, the feathered trifecta will wander the property all afternoon returning to their pen at nightfall. Extraordinary, watching such ordinary peace, and orderly, their bodies keeping time each body sets. The urge to rush would only come from predators, of which there are none here, or mating, for which the season’s past. And so, they only move without hint of only to it — it is everything. This travel from one length of world and back takes all the light above them to achieve. A focused calm settles as they pass: no mood that I can think to reproduce. I can only speak of them to you and add their beaks are antique red, their bodies are like chambered vaults, and so consumed are they by seeing through this pilgrimage that song is exchanged for the courage of patience.

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POETRY

A LOVE POEM D. S. Waldman

As if there were a minor jealousy Birds settling on a wire. Forgive me, the Same as before the virus. I couldn’t I was at the airport, watching someone’s Sort of like that. If it’s a palimpsest To see rain clouds taxi through the blinds We mean when we say of the children, they Forced open the flower, or needed to He said. Sometimes the language we borrow The bell rings all the time but the bell is Crows fighting in the trees. And suddenly This is the one I was talking about If we had more time — it’s always like that Years later, to keep the frames on the wall

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KEATS RIDES SHOTGUN Joy Priest

O, great! In shambles in the party field, My Skylark motor quakes droplets of dew Done, this kush, hover-mist: — we’re so through. Cantankerous fights, make-ups, our dented feels, In thrall, sweetest windflower hungover, trill: — Say! You ole muck-mouth bopper, thirsty fool Retreat! Crusting my velvet seats with drool: — First to dip from the scene, titanium wheels. Land I leave defeated with vacancy, I list to furthest road, ooh I fishtail The bend: — O Hell! Wild, like the anemone! My bruise from last night’s fisticuffs now swells, Lost memories mad me, submerged under drink Those teetered hours, the endless assail: —

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POETRY

THE INVENTOR Emma Trelles

All summer the sky pleads Ash and lightning, a graphite horizon To nail feathers and schemes to the hourglass Now. Resistance gleams from the corners Where I linger, and the day buries My penciled intentions. Years ago, I imagined I might be more than someone to leave behind, and became A woman who mined memory into mineral, the dimming Star of childhood a slab of marcasite or a birthplace caked in gold. Look at me: I’m past the middle and still keep wanting — Sleep, salt, a well that’s always full. I work better at night, at dawn, and not at all. After it is done, I have nothing left for all the nights it takes To fly to the next shore. Every landfall has its price. Once, while hiding from the making, I counted Migrant birds by watching the moon, two hundred Silhouettes crossing that bucket of light might Mean millions more, unseen, and I know how that tastes. Each wingbeat called live, live, and what else but to answer? I am always starting over.

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LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

DEAR WORLD Danusha Laméris

Dear World, why am I allergic to the yellow acacia blooms frothing the street? To your sharp blades of grass welting my shins? Motes of dust that lift from the rug into the air when I sweep the floor or drop my bag of books? I want not to squirm at the rough fibers of sheep against my neck, or cough when black pepper cracked on Caesar salad hits my tongue. Everywhere I turn, so much pollen and sorrow. I read the news. I know the score. War and war and war. Microplastics poisoning the sea. Uranium dying slowly underground. And still, every day the light plays off the lilies on the back fence, and a hummingbird alights for no more than an instant on a skinny twig of sage. Small miracle. That and the nebulous shapes of nimbus clouds above my roof, making and unmaking themselves, magic from the world inside the world, the one we cannot see, but that gives rise to every blossom, to every tree. It’s lovely here. Impossibly. O filament, o spire, o little grain of grief. You itch, you sting my eyes. You scratch the back of my throat.

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POETRY

HOT AIR LOVE F. Douglas Brown

I grew up in a house where curse words were used as an art form. — bell hooks My mom loved her Annotated bible. She drew Spiritual notes — part prayer, Part plea mapped As righteous lyric, God-verse instructions Carried like a stare-down Over her holy text. She held her own tongue In check & never cursed. Never let words hit The air hot or uneasy Or even as joyful as her Kin. My grandma tucked “Goddamns” in her purse. Like butterscotch, like Band-Aids Her “shit” bright words As delights — I loved her Damnation. Loved her Untamed spew because Sometimes heat has flavor Wrapped as honor. When my father rattled Out a “fuck,” it replaced

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LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

All words. His “fucks” ruled, Bent flagrant fits Until they danced & spun, Then spit — vapor Since his teen years In Madison County, A husk still tangled In dad’s teeth, “Fuck I love you. Goddamnit, son. I love you.”

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CONTRIBUTORS

F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (2018) and Zero to Three (2014), selected for the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Brown currently teaches at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, where he serves as the director of the Office of Equity and Inclusion.

Danusha Laméris’s third book of poems, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of Bonfire Opera (2020), which won a 2021 Northern California Book Award, and is on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. www.danushalameris.com.

Tosten Burks is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.

Joana Masó is a literary critic whose work focuses

He’s currently editing his great-grandfather’s memoir.

Rae Canaan is a writer and director of film and television. She attended the USC School of CinemaTelevision’s Production Program and is an MFA candidate at the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born in London, she divides her time between Los Angeles and Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest. Dashiel Carrera is the author of the novel The Deer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022). His writing appears in LitHub, Fence, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. Also a musician, he has released five albums on the label 75orLess Records. “Salud, La Luz” is abridged from his novel-in-progress.

on the crossover between literature, thinking, and contemporary art. She is a senior lecturer at Barcelona University, a researcher at ADHUC–Research Centre for Theory, Gender and Sexuality, and the UNESCO chair, Women, Development and Cultures. Since 2017, she has coordinated the research project “The forgotten legacy of François Tosquelles”, which has resulted in the publication of the volume Tosquelles. Curing the Institutions, recognized with the City of Barcelona Essay, Humanities and History Prize 2021. She has also co-curated the international exhibition Tosquelles. Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field.

Review of Books.

Kate McInerny is a staff researcher with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA, where she recently earned her BA in public affairs. She also works as a digital historian for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

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

Matthew Mullins is the author of Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures (Baker Academic, 2021).

Susan Finlay is an artist and writer. Her latest book, The Lives of the Artists, is out now with JOAN.

Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, and nonfiction writer. In 2023, he published a poetry collection, Survivor’s Notebook (Acre Books); a memoir, From Scarsdale (Dalkey Archive Press); and a collection of plays, True Story: A Trilogy (Dalkey Archive Press).

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

Evan Grillon is a writer who lives in New York City. He has written for The Southampton Review, Triangle House Review, Salamander, and Wigleaf, among others. Katie Kadue was born and raised in Los Angeles. Matyos Kidane is a community organizer with the

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community-based abolitionist group working to dismantle the police surveillance state. He is a 2023 MediaJustice Network Fellow and a 2023 John W. Mack Movement Fellow.

Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco is a statistician and data

scientist working with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA. He received his statistical education at UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz, where he worked in various research groups, and outside of his prior academic institutions, he worked as a data scientist in San Francisco. Maya C. Popa is a poet, editor, and educator based in New York City. She is the poetry reviews editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches at NYU and elsewhere.

LOS A N G E LE S R E V I E W OF BOOK S

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023).

within World War II and the Nazi and Vichy regime’s genocidal practices of the cognitively differently abled as well as the Spanish Civil War and Tosquelle’s exile from Franco’s Spain.

Meghan Racklin is a writer and editor in Brooklyn. She writes about books and culture. She has written for The Baffler, Literary Hub, and other publications.

Emma Trelles is the ninth poet laureate of Santa Barbara and a poet laureate fellow at the

Mireia Sallarès (Barcelona, 1973) is a visual artist

graduated in Fine Arts at University of Barcelona and with film studies at New School University in New York. She is guest lecturer at ISDAT Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse, France. Her methodology generates trans-disciplinary artistic projects from situated feminisms concerned by nonfiction and political dimension that are formalized with films, books, installations and site specific interventions. She has received important grants and awards as the Leonardo Grant for Researchers of BBVA Foundation or the Barcelona 2019 City Award of visual arts. Las Muertes Chiquitas, a long research on female orgasm as a political problem carried out in Mexico is the project with which she has obtained the greatest international recognition. Her film, Potential history of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and fear, has been awarded in the Video Creation Award of the LOOP Barcelona festival. Nicholas Shapiro is an assistant professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. He directs Carceral Ecologies, a multidisciplinary research group that studies the intersection of environmental issues and policing.

Catalan revolutionary and psychiatrist Francesc

Tosquelles also known as François Tosquelles, is

credited as one of the major founders of institutional psychotherapy originating in the experimental institution Saint-Alban in France. Saint-Alban’s institutional psychotherapy practice of radically revolutionizing the institutional framework was distinct from the anti-psychiatry movement’s call to abolish institutions. Institutional psychotherapy sought to rethink the hospital in a horizontal framework, merge the political and psychic, and to recognize, rather than pathologize, madness as another form of life. The ethics of institutional psychotherapy emerged from a Marxian and Freudian framework contextualized

Academy of American Poets. She’s the author of Tropicalia (2011) — winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Priz — curates the Mission Poetry Series, and is the series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize. She recently received a 2023 Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. D.S. Waldman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and winner of Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award. He serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal. Corina Zappia is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and an MFA graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Salon, Catapult, The Rumpus, The Stranger, and Dazed and Confused, among others. She is working on a memoir-in-essays about life as a single, childless woman in a world that still hasn’t caught up with our increasingly single reality and growing army of fabulous hags.

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